The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,8
exhaust—sending a wave of relief through Lilly. She smiles in spite of her nerves and starts toward the bare ground on the west edge of the field, which serves as a loading area. The rust-bucket truck clatters across the grass and shudders to a stop, the three teenagers riding in the back with the roped-down crates nearly tumbling forward against the pockmarked cab.
“Lilly Marlene!” the driver calls out the open cab window as Lilly comes around the front of the truck. Bob Stookey has big greasy hands—the hands of a laborer—wrapped around the wheel.
“What’s on the menu today, Bob?” Lilly says with a wan smile. “More Twinkies?”
“Oh, we got a full gourmet spread with all the trimmings today, little sis.” Bob cocks his deeply lined face toward the crew in back. “Found a deserted Target, only a couple of walkers to deal with … made out like bandits.”
“Do tell.”
“Let’s see…” Bob jerks the shift lever into park and kills the rumbling engine. His skin the color of tanned cowhide, his droopy eyes rimmed red, Bob Stookey is one of the last men in the New South still using pomade to grease his dark hair back over his weathered head. “Got lumber, sleeping bags, tools, canned fruit, lanterns, cereal, weather radios, shovels, charcoal—what else? Also got a bunch of pots and pans, some tomato plants—still with a few warty little tomaters on the vines—some tanks of butane, ten gallons of milk that expired only a couple of weeks ago, some hand sanitizer, Sterno, laundry soap, candy bars, toilet paper, a Chia Pet, a book on organic farming, a singing fish for my tent, and a partridge in a pear tree.”
“Bob, Bob, Bob … no AK-47s? No dynamite?”
“Got something better than that, smarty pants.” Bob reaches over to a peach crate sitting on the passenger seat next to him. He hands it through the window to Lilly. “Be a darlin’ and put this in my tent while I help these three stooges in back with the heavy stuff.”
“What is it?” Lilly looks down at the crate full of plastic vials and bottles.
“Medical supplies.” Bob opens his door and climbs out. “Need to keep ’em safe.”
Lilly notices half a dozen pint bottles of liquor wedged in between the antihistamines and codeine. She gazes up at Bob and gives him a look. “Medical supplies?”
He grins. “I’m a very sick man.”
“I’ll say,” Lilly comments. She knows enough about Bob’s background by now to know that aside from being a sweet, genial, somewhat lost soul, as well as being a former army medic—which makes him the only inhabitant of the tent city with any medical training—he is also an inveterate drunk.
In the early stages of their friendship, back when Lilly and Megan were still on the road, and Bob had helped them out of a jam at a rest stop crawling with zombies, Bob had made feckless attempts to hide his alcoholism. But by the time the group had settled here in this deserted pastureland five days ago, Lilly had begun regularly helping Bob stagger safely back to his tent at night, making sure nobody robbed him—which was a real threat in a group this large and varied and filled with so much tension. She liked Bob, and she didn’t mind babysitting him as well as the little ones. But it also added an additional layer of stress that Lilly needed as much as she needed a high colonic.
Right now, in fact, she can tell he needs something else from her. She can tell by the way he’s wiping his mouth thoughtfully with his dirty hand.
“Lilly, there’s something else I wanted to—” He stops and swallows awkwardly.
She lets out a sigh. “Spit it out, Bob.”
“It’s none of my business … all right. I just wanted to say … aw, hell.” He takes a deep breath. “Josh Lee, he’s a good man. I visit with him now and again.”
“Yeah … and?”
“And I’m just saying.”
“Go on.”
“I’m just … look … he ain’t doing too good right about now, all right? He thinks you’re sore at him.”
“He thinks I’m what?”
“He thinks you’re mad at him for some reason, and he ain’t sure why.”
“What did he say?”
Bob gives her a shrug. “It’s none of my beeswax. I ain’t exactly privy to … I don’t know, Lilly. He just wishes you wasn’t ignoring him.”
“I’m not.”
Bob looks at her. “You sure?”
“Bob, I’m telling you—”
“All right, look.” Bob waves his hand nervously. “I ain’t telling you what to do. I just think two