The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,66
and vicarious fist pumping from some of the younger men.
Martinez and his guards arrive right at the height of the fight.
Dean Gorman, a redneck farm kid from Augusta dressed in torn denim and heavy-metal tattoos, kicks the legs out from under Johnny Pruitt, a fat, doughy pothead from Jonesboro. Pruitt—who had the temerity to criticize the Augusta State Jaguars football team—now tumbles to the sandy ground with a gasp.
“Hey! Dial it down!” Martinez approaches from the north side of the street, his M1 on his hip, still warm from the fracas at the railroad shed. Three guards follow on his heels, their guns also braced against their midsections. As he crosses the street it’s hard for Martinez to see the fighters behind the semicircle of cheering onlookers.
All that’s visible is a cloud of dust, flailing fists, and milling onlookers.
“HEY!!”
Inside the circle of spectators Dean Gorman slams a steel-toed work boot into Johnny Pruitt’s ribs, and the fat man keens with agony, rolling away. The crowd jeers. Gorman jumps on the kid but Pruitt counters by slamming a knee up into Gorman’s groin. The witnesses howl. Gorman tumbles to his side holding his privates and Pruitt lashes out with a series of sidelong blows to Gorman’s face. Blood flings across the sand in dark stringers from Gorman’s nose.
Martinez starts pushing bystanders aside, forcing his way into the fray.
“Martinez! Hold up!”
Martinez feels a vise grip tighten on his arm and he whirls around to see the Governor.
“Hold up a second,” the wiry man says under his breath with a spark of interest glittering in his deep-set eyes. His handlebar mustache has come in dark and thick, giving his face a predatory cast. He wears a long, black duster over his chambray shirt, jeans, and stovepipe engineer boots, the tails flapping majestically in the wind. He looks like a degenerate paladin from the nineteenth century, a self-styled gunslinger-pimp. “I want to see something.”
Martinez lowers his weapon, tilts his head toward the action. “Just worried somebody’s gonna go and get his ass killed.”
By this point Big Johnny Pruitt has his pudgy fingers around Dean Gorman’s throat, and Gorman begins to gasp and blanch. The fight goes from savage to deadly in a matter of seconds. Pruitt will not let go. The crowd erupts in ugly, garbled cheers. Gorman flails and convulses. He runs out of air, his face turning the color of eggplant. His eyes bulge, bloody saliva spraying.
“Stop worrying, grandma,” the Governor murmurs, watching intently with those hollowed-out eyes.
Right then Martinez realizes the Governor is not watching the fight per se. Eyes shifting all around the semicircle of shouting spectators, the Governor is watching the watchers. He seems to be absorbing every face, every jackal-like howl, every hoot and holler.
Meantime, Dean Gorman starts to fade on the ground, in the stranglehold of Johnny Pruitt’s sausage fingers. Gorman’s face turns the color of dry cement. His eyes roll back in his head and he stops struggling.
“Okay, that’s enough … pull him off,” the Governor tells Martinez.
“EVERYBODY BACK OFF!”
Martinez forces his way into the huddle with his gun in both hands.
Big fat Johnny Pruitt finally lets go at the urging of the M1’s muzzle, and Gorman lies there convulsing. “Go get Stevens,” Martinez orders one of his guards.
The crowd, still agitated by all the excitement, lets out a collective groan. Some of them grumble, and some launch a few boos, frustrated by the anticlimax.
Standing off to the side, the Governor takes it all in. When the onlookers begin to disperse—wandering away, shaking their heads—the Governor goes over to Martinez, who still stands over the writhing Gorman.
Martinez looks up at the Governor. “He’ll live.”
“Good.” The Governor glances down at the young man on the ground. “I think I know what to do with the guardsmen.”
* * *
At that same moment, under the sublevels of the racetrack complex, in the darkness of a makeshift holding cell, four men whisper to each other.
“It’ll never work,” the first man utters skeptically, sitting in the corner in his piss-sodden boxer shorts, gazing at the shadows of his fellow prisoners gathered around him on the floor.
“Shut the fuck up, Manning,” hisses the second man, Barker, a rail-thin twenty-five-year-old, who glowers at his fellow detainees through long strands of greasy hair. Barker had once been Major Gene Gavin’s star pupil at Camp Ellenwood, Georgia, bound for special ops duty with the 221st Military Intelligence Battalion. Now, thanks to that psycho Philip Blake, Gavin is gone and Barker has been reduced to a