The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,78

faces—begin to instinctively back away. The tension ratchets up. The silence only adds to the latent violence brewing—the soft snapping of the fire the only sound beneath the wind.

“Josh, it’s okay.” Lilly steps forward and attempts to intercede. “We don’t need any—”

“No!” Josh jerks the duffel away from her, his gaze never leaving the dark, bloodshot eyes of the butcher. “Nobody’s taking this bag!”

The butcher’s voice drops an octave, going all slippery and dark. “You better think long and hard about fucking with me, big boy.”

“The thing is, I’m not fucking with you,” Josh says to the man in the bloody apron. “Just stating a fact. The stuff in this bag is ours fair and square. And nobody’s taking it from us.”

“Finders keepers?”

“That’s right.”

The old men back away farther until it feels to Lilly like she’s standing in some flickering, ice-cold fighting ring with two cornered animals. She gropes for some way to ease back the tension but her words get stuck in her throat. She reaches for Josh’s shoulder but he pulls away from her as though shocked. The butcher flicks his gaze at Lilly. “You better tell your beau here he’s making the mistake of his life.”

“Leave her out of this,” Josh tells him. “This is between you and me.”

The butcher sucks the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “Tell you what … I’m a fair man … I’ll give you one more chance. Hand over the goodies and I’ll wipe the debt clean. We’ll pretend this little tiff never happened.” Something approximating a smile creases the lines around the butcher’s weathered face. “Life’s too short. Know what I mean? Especially around here.”

“C’mon, Lilly,” Josh says without moving his gaze from the butcher’s lifeless eyes. “We got better things to do, stand around here flapping our jaws.”

Josh turns away from the storefront and starts down the street.

The butcher goes after the duffel. “GIVE ME THAT GODDAMN BAG!”

Lilly jerks forward as the two men come together in the middle of the street.

“JOSH, NO!”

The big man spins and drives the brunt of his shoulder into the butcher’s chest. The move is sudden and violent, and harkens back to Josh’s gridiron years when he would clear the field for a running back. The man in the blood-stippled apron flings backward, his breath gasping out of him. He trips over his own feet and goes down hard on his ass, blinking with shock and outrage.

Josh turns and continues on down the street, calling over his shoulder. “Lilly, I said c’mon, let’s go!”

Lilly doesn’t see the butcher suddenly contorting his body against the ground, struggling to dig something out of the back of his belt under his apron. Lilly doesn’t see the glint of blue steel filling the butcher’s hand, nor does she hear the telltale snap of a safety being thumbed off a semiautomatic, nor does she see the madness in the butcher’s eyes, until it’s too late.

“Josh, wait!”

Lilly gets halfway down the sidewalk—coming to within ten feet of Josh—when the blast cracks open the sky, the roar of the 9-millimeter so tremendous it seems to rattle the windows half a block down the street. Lilly instinctively dives for cover, hitting the macadam hard, the impact knocking the breath out of her.

She finds her voice then, and she shrieks as a flock of pigeons erupts off the roof of the food center—the swarm of carrion birds spreading across the darkening sky like black needlepoint.

TWELVE

Lilly Caul would remember things about that day for the rest of her life. She would remember seeing the red rosette of blood and tissue—like a tuft in upholstery—blooming from the back of Josh Lee Hamilton’s head, the wound appearing a nanosecond before the booming report of the 9-millimeter Glock fully registered in Lilly’s ears. She would remember tripping and falling to the pavement six feet behind Josh, one of her molars cracking, another incisor biting through her tongue. She would remember her ears ringing then, a fine spangle of blood droplets on the backs of her hands and lower arms.

But most of all, Lilly would remember the sight of Josh Lee Hamilton folding to the street as though he were swooning, his enormous legs going soft and wobbly like those of a rag doll. That was perhaps the strangest part: The way the giant man seemed to instantly lose his substance. One would expect such a person to not easily give up the ghost, to fall like a great redwood or old landmark building under the wrecking ball, literally