The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,75

toward the window in a single leap.

Outside the beautifully etched and leaded-glass panorama, framed in delicate ruffled curtains, a gigantic old oak stands over the roof pitches, its twisting limbs, bare in the winter light, reaching up past the weather vane at the crest of the roof. One of the gnarled limbs reaches across the second-floor window, coming within inches of the bedroom.

Josh muscles open the center window on wrought-iron hinges. “C’mon, girlfriend, time to abandon ship!” He kicks out the screen, reaches for Lilly, pulls her up and over the sill, shoves her through the gap, and out into the freezing winds. “Climb across the limb!”

Lilly awkwardly reaches out for the spiraling limb, which is the width of a ham hock, with bark as rough as cement stucco, and she holds on with a desperate vise grip. She starts shimmying her way out across the limb. The wind whistles. The twenty-foot drop seems to stretch away as though glimpsed through a backward telescope. The coach house roof wavers in and out of focus below—barely within jumping distance—as Lilly inches toward the center of the tree.

Behind her, Josh ducks back into the bedroom just as the door collapses.

Zombies pour into the room. Many of them tumble over each other, drunkenly reaching and snarling. One of them—a male missing an arm, with one eye socket cratered out as black and empty as cancer—trundles quickly toward the big black man, who stands by the window, digging frantically in his pocket. The air fills with a groaning cacophony. Josh finds his Zippo cigar lighter.

Just as the eyeless walker pounces, Josh sparks the butane and flings the lighter at the alcohol-dampened skirt around the bed. Flames blossom immediately, as Josh kicks out at the attacking zombie, sending the cadaver stumbling back across the floor.

The walker bounces across the burning bed and sprawls to the alcohol-sodden carpet as the fire licks up the pilasters. More corpses move in, agitated by the flaring light and heat and noise.

Josh wastes no time spinning around and vaulting back toward the window.

* * *

It takes less than fifteen minutes for the second floor of the glass house to go up, another five minutes for the infrastructure to collapse into itself on a tidal wave of sparks and smoke, the second floor plunging down onto the first, catching the staircase and gobbling through the warren of antiques and expensive floor coverings. The throngs of walkers inside the home are immolated by geysers of flames, the conflagration fueled by the methane of decay oozing off all the reanimated corpses. Within twenty minutes, more than eighty percent of the swarm from the ravine is vanquished in the firestorm, reduced to charred crisps inside the smoking ruins of the stately home.

Oddly, over the course of those twenty minutes, the nature of the house—with its spectacular enclosure of wraparound windows—acts as a chimney, accelerating the blaze but also burning it out quickly. The hottest part of the fire goes straight up, singeing the tops of the trees but containing the damage. The other homes in the area are spared. No sparks are carried on the winds, and the telltale cloud of smoke remains obscured behind the wooded hills, unseen by the citizens of Woodbury.

In the time it takes for the house to burn itself out, Lilly finds enough nerve to vault from the lowest limb of the oak to the roof of the coach house and then climb down the back wall to the rear door of the garage. Josh follows. By that point only a few walkers remain outside the home, and Josh easily dispatches them with the remaining three slugs in the .38’s cylinder.

They get into the garage and find the duffel bag, in which they had stashed some of their previous day’s take for safekeeping. The heavy canvas carryall contains a five-gallon jug of gasoline, a sleeping bag, a drip coffee machine, two pounds of French Roast, winter scarves, a box of pancake mix, writing tablets, two bottles of kosher wine, batteries, ballpoint pens, expensive red current jam, a box of matzo, and a coil of mountain-climbing rope.

Josh reloads the police special with the last six slugs in his speed loader. Then they sneak out the back door with the duffel bag over Josh’s shoulder, and they creep along the outer wall. Crouching in the weeds near the corner of the garage, they wait until the last moving corpse has drifted toward the light and noise of the fire before darting