The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,74
greets him.
He flinches and Lilly shrieks, jerking back with a start, as the battery of dead arms and pincerlike fingers reach for them. Behind the arms, a mosaic of dead faces snarl and sputter, some of them drooling blood as black as motor oil, others flayed open and glistening with the pink sinew and musculature of their damaged facial tissue. One of the curled hands hooks a gob of Lilly’s jacket, and Josh tears it away while letting out a booming howl—“FUCKERS!!”—and then on a jolt of adrenaline Josh gets his free hand around the edge of the door.
He slams the door on half a dozen flailing arms, and the impact—combined with Josh’s strength, as well as the deluxe quality of the heavy-duty door—severs each of the six appendages.
Flopping limbs of varying lengths splatter and quiver across the rich Italian tile.
Josh grabs Lilly and starts back toward the center of the house, but pauses at the foot of the spiral staircase when he sees the place is flooding with moving corpses. They have entered through the screen door in the mudroom on the east side of the house, and they’ve climbed in through the dog door on the west side, and they’ve wriggled in through cracks in the solarium on the north side of the kitchen. Now they surround Josh and Lilly at the base of the stairs.
Grabbing Lilly by the nape of her jacket, Josh pulls her up the steps.
On their way up the circular staircase, Josh draws his .38 and starts shooting. The first shot flashes and misses its mark entirely, chipping a divot out of the lintel along the archway. Josh’s aim is off because he is dragging Lilly up the stairs one riser at a time, as the growling, gnashing, flailing horde awkwardly follows.
Some of the walkers cannot negotiate the stairs and slide back down, while others topple to their hands and knees and manage to keep crawling. Halfway up the spiral, Josh fires again and hits a dead skull, sending wet matter across the newel posts and chandelier. Some of the zombies tumble back down the steps like bowling pins. But now, so many of them are on the risers that they begin to clamber over each other, inching up the stairs with the frenzied hunger of salmon spawning. Josh fires again and again. Black fluids bloom in the thunder cracks, but it’s futile, there are too many, far too many to fight off, and Josh knows it, and Lilly knows it.
“THIS WAY!”
Josh hollers at her the moment they reach the landing on the second floor.
The idea occurs to Josh fully formed, all at once, as he drags Lilly down the hallway toward the last door at the end of the corridor. Josh remembers checking the master bedroom the previous day, finding some useful pharmaceuticals in the medicine cabinet, and admiring the view from the second-floor bay window. He also remembers the enormous live oak standing sentry next to the window.
“IN HERE!”
The walkers reach the top of the stairs. One of them bumps the banister and stumbles backward, bowling over half a dozen other zombies, sending three of them toppling. The threesome skids down the curvature of the stairs, leaving slime trails of oily blood.
Meanwhile, at the far end of the hall, Josh reaches the bedroom door, throws it open, and pulls Lilly inside the spacious room. The door slams behind them. The silence and calm of the bedroom—with its Louis XIV furnishings, immense four-poster bed, luxurious Laura Ashley duvet, and mountain of frilly, ruffled pillows—provide surreal contrasts to the reeking, noisy menace coming down the hall outside the door. The shuffling footsteps loom. The stench grips the air.
“Get over by the window, babydoll! Be right back!!” Josh whirls and makes a beeline for the bathroom, while Lilly goes over by the huge bay window with its velveteen window treatments. She crouches down, breathlessly waiting.
Josh tears the bathroom door open and lurches into the deluxe, soapy-smelling chamber of Italian tile, chrome, and glass. There amid the Swedish sauna and enormous Jacuzzi tub he throws open the vanity cabinet under the sink. He finds the economy-sized brown bottle of rubbing alcohol.
Within seconds he has the bottle open and is back in the main room, dousing everything, flinging the clear liquid on the curtains and bedding and antique mahogany furniture. The pressure of dead weight making wooden seams creak—the noise of moving corpses piling up against the bedroom door—spurs Josh on.