The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,65
is backing away in horror. All at once the sound of a voice rings out from the street in front of the shed, a familiar voice, calm and collected, despite its volume—“GET DOWN, FOLKS!! GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR”—and somewhere in the back of Josh’s brain he recognizes the voice of Martinez, and Josh also remembers, simultaneously, that the other three walkers are closing in from the front of the shed.
Josh jumps off the panel, spins around, and sees the three walkers approaching Lilly, reaching out for her with spastic lifeless arms. Lilly screams. Josh lurches toward her, scrambling for a weapon. Only scrap metal and sawdust litter the floor.
Lilly backs away screaming, and the din of her shriek blends with a booming, authoritative voice coming from outside the entrance: “GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR, FOLKS! DOWN ON THE FLOOR NOW!!”
Josh instantly gets it, and he grabs Lilly and yanks her to the cinders.
The three dead things loom over them, mouths gaping and drooling, so close now Josh can smell the hideous stench of their fetid breath.
The front wall lights up—a fusillade of automatic gunfire punching a pearl necklace of holes along the drywall, each hole blooming a pinpoint of daylight. The volley strafes the midsections of the three upright cadavers, making them dance a macabre Watusi in the darkness.
The noise is tremendous. Wood shards and plaster shrapnel and bits of rotting flesh rain down on Josh and Lilly, who cover their heads.
Josh catches glimpses of the macabre dancing out of the corner of his eye, the walkers jerking and spasming to some arrhythmic drumbeat, as threads of brilliant light crisscross the darkness.
Skulls erupt. Particles fly. The dead figures deflate and collapse one at a time. The barrage continues. Thin shafts of daylight fill the shed with a cat’s cradle of deadly luminous sunlight.
* * *
Silence descends. Outside the shed, the muffled noise of spent shells ringing off the pavement reaches Josh’s ears. He hears the faint clanging of bolts reloading, breeches refilling, collective breaths of exertion drowned by the wind.
A moment passes
He turns to Lilly, who lies next to him, clinging to him, clutching handfuls of his shirt. She looks almost catatonic for a moment, her face pressed against the cinders. Josh hugs her close, strokes her back.
“You okay?”
“Fabulous … just peachy.” She seems to awaken from the terror, looking down at the spreading puddle of cranial fluid. The bodies lie riddled and eviscerated only inches away. Lilly sits up.
Josh rises and helps her to her feet and starts to say something else when the creak of old wood draws his attention to the entrance. What remains of the door, its top half perforated with bullet holes, squeaks open.
Martinez peers in. He speaks hurriedly, purposefully: “You two good?”
“We’re good,” Josh tells him, and then hears a noise in the distance. Voices rising in anger, echoing on the wind. A muffled crash.
“We got another fire to put out,” Martinez says, “if you folks are okay.”
“We’re okay.”
With a terse nod, Martinez wheels away from the door and vanishes into the overcast daylight.
* * *
Two blocks east of the railroad tracks, near the barricade, a fight has ensued. Fights are commonplace in the new Woodbury. Two weeks ago a couple of the butcher’s guards came to blows over the rightful ownership of a well-thumbed issue of Barely Legal magazine. Doc Stevens had to set one fighter’s dislocated jaw and patch the other boy’s hemorrhaging left eye socket before that day was out.
Most of the time these brawls occur in semiprivate—either indoors or late at night—and break out over the most trivial matters imaginable: somebody looks at somebody else the wrong way, somebody tells a joke that offends somebody else, somebody just irritates somebody else. For weeks now, the Governor has been concerned about the growing frequency of serious brawls.
But until today, most of these little rumbles have been private affairs.
Today, the latest melee breaks out in broad daylight, right outside the food center, in front of at least twenty onlookers … and the crowd seems to fuel the intensity of the fight. At first the onlookers watch with revulsion as the two young combatants pummel each other with bare fists in the freezing wind, their inelegant blows full of spit and fury, their eyes ablaze with unfocused rage.
But soon something changes in the crowd. Angry shouts turn to whoops and hollers. Bloodlust sparks behind the eyes of the gallery. The stress of the plague comes out in angry hyena yells, psychotic cheers,