The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,62
eddy inside him—repulsion, sadness, fear, bone-deep longing, even sympathy for this deranged individual—and he hangs his head. “You been through a lot.”
“Look at that, Bob.” The Governor nods toward the little zombie. The child-thing cocks its head, staring at the Governor with a vexed expression. The thing blinks its eyes. A faint trace of Penny Blake glimmers behind its eyes. “My baby’s still in there. Aren’t ya, honey?”
The Governor goes over to the chained creature, kneels and strokes its livid cheek.
Bob stiffens, starts to say, “Be careful, you don’t want to be—”
“Here’s my beautiful baby girl.” The Governor strokes the thing’s matted hair. The tiny zombie blinks. The pallid face changes, eyes narrowing, blackened lips peeling away from rotten baby teeth.
Bob steps forward. “Look out—”
The Penny-thing snaps its jaws at the exposed flesh of the Governor’s wrist, but the Governor pulls away just in time. “Whoopsy!”
The little zombie strains at its chain, scuttling to its feet and reaching at the air … as the Governor backs away. He speaks in baby talk. “Wascally Wabbit … almost got Daddy that time!”
Bob gets woozy. He can feel his gorge rising, the bile threatening to come up.
“Bob, do me a favor and reach into that loose bundle the head came out of.”
“Huh?”
“Do me a favor and grab that last little goodie in that bag over there.”
Bob holds his vomit in and turns and finds the bundle on the floor and looks inside. A pale human finger, apparently male, lies at the bottom of the bag in a clot of drying blood. Hair sprouts from the knuckles, and from the ragged end protrudes a small nodule of white bone.
Something loosens inside Bob—as sudden as a rubber band snapping—as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, bends down, and retrieves the finger.
“Why don’t you do the honors, my friend,” the Governor suggests, standing proudly over the snapping zombie-child, his hands on his hips.
Bob feels as though his body has begun to move on its own, with a mind of its own. “Yeah … sure.”
“Go ahead.”
Bob stands within inches of the chain’s limit, as the Penny-thing snarls and sputters noisily at him, clanging against the U-bolt. “Yeah … why not?”
Holding the finger out at arm’s length, Bob feeds it to the creature.
The little corpse gobbles the thing, falling to its knees, two-handing the finger into her ravenous little pit of a mouth. The nauseating wet noises fill the laundry room.
The two men stand side by side, watching now. The Governor puts his arm around his new friend.
* * *
By the end of that week the men on the wall have reached the edge of the third block, along Jones Mill Road, where the U.S. Post Office sits boarded and defaced with graffiti. Along the brick wall adjacent to the parking lot some joker with a few years of college lit classes has spray-painted the words THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WALKER, a constant reminder of the end of society and government services as we know them.
On Saturday Josh Lee Hamilton ends up on a work crew, hauling dollies loaded with scrap lumber from one end of the sidewalk to the other, bartering his muscles for food so that he and Lilly can continue to eat. He has run out of valuables to trade, and for the last couple of days Josh has been doing menial tasks such as emptying latrines and cleaning animal carcasses in the smokehouse. But he gladly does the work for Lilly.
Josh has fallen so deeply for the woman that he secretly lets the tears come at night, in the desolate darkness of the walk-up apartment, after Lilly has drifted off in his arms. Josh finds himself beset with the ironies of finding love among the wreckage of this plague. Filled with a kind of reckless hope, as well as the dreamy side effects of the first true intimate relationship of his life, Josh barely notices the absence of the other members of his group.
The little clique seems to have scattered to the winds. Occasionally Josh will get a glimpse of Megan at night, creeping along the balustrades of residential buildings, scantily clad and stoned. Josh has no idea whether she is still with Scott. In fact, Scott has vanished. No one seems to know where he is, and the sad truth is, nobody seems to care. Business seems to be brisk for Megan. Out of the fifty or so residents of Woodbury, less than