The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,99

and puts her in a firm shoulder lock. Lilly wriggles furiously. “LET GO OF ME, GODDAMMIT!”

Ten feet away, on the seared brown grass of the parkway, Bruce, the tall black man with the shaved head, kneels by the sheet-draped body, loading a .45 caliber semiautomatic with a fresh magazine. His face grim and set, he breathes deeply, preparing to complete some distasteful task. He ignores the commotion behind him.

“LET GO!” Lilly keeps writhing in the portly man’s grip, her gaze locked on the body.

“Calm down,” Gabe hisses. “You’re making this harder than it has to—”

“Let her go!”

The deep, cigarette-cured voice comes from behind Gabe, and both Lilly and the heavyset man freeze as though startled by an ultrasonic whistle.

They glance over their shoulders and see the Governor standing inside the circle of onlookers with his hands on his hips, his twin pearl-handled army .45s thrust into either side of his belt, gunslinger-style, his long rock-star hair—as black as India ink—bound in a ponytail and tossing in the wind. The crow’s-feet around his eyes, and the lines chiseling his sunken jowls, deepen and crease and grow more prominent as his expression darkens. “It’s okay, Gabe … let the lady say good-bye to her friend.”

Lilly rushes over to the corpse on the ground, kneels, and stares at the shrouded heap, putting her hand to her mouth as though holding in the tide of emotions rising in her. Bruce thumbs the safety down on his semiauto, and awkwardly backs away, standing, gazing down at Lilly as the crowd around them quiets down.

The Governor comes over and stands a respectful five feet away.

Lilly peels back the sheet and clenches her teeth, as she looks at the purplish-gray face of the woman that used to be Megan Lafferty. Eyes swollen shut, jaw set with rigor mortis, the bloodless china-doll face looks as though it has shattered into a million hairline fractures, the dark capillaries apparent now in the early stages of decomposition. The face is ghastly but also excruciatingly poignant to Lilly, wrenching her memories back to those crazy days at Sprayberry High School when the two girls would get high in the restroom and climb up on the school’s roof and throw pebbles at the jocks running drills behind the basketball courts. Megan had been Lilly’s best gal-pal for years, and despite the girl’s faults—and there had been many—Lilly still thinks of her as a best friend. Now Lilly cannot stop staring at this unrecognizable vestige of her feisty friend.

Lilly gasps as Megan’s swollen, purple-lidded eyes suddenly pop open, revealing milk-glass pupils.

Lilly does not move as the black man with the shaved head crowds in, the .45 poised to fire a direct blast into the cadaver’s head. But before the hammer has a chance to fall, the sound of the Governor’s voice calls out: “Hold your fire, Bruce!”

Bruce glances over his shoulder, as the Governor takes a step closer, and then says very softly, “Let her do it.”

Lilly looks up at the man in the long coat, blinks, and says nothing. Her heart feels like ash, her blood running cold in her veins. Way off in the distance the sky rumbles with thunder.

The Governor steps closer. “Go ahead, Bruce. Give her the gun.”

An endless moment passes, and somehow the gun ends up in Lilly’s hand. Beneath her, the thing that was once Megan Lafferty convulses and tenses on the ground, its nervous system dieseling, its mouth peeling away from moldering gray teeth. Lilly can barely see through her tears.

“Put your friend down, Lilly,” the Governor urges softly from behind her.

Lilly raises the gun. Megan’s neck cranes upward toward her like a fetus emerging from its embryonic fluid, teeth clacking hungrily. Lilly puts the muzzle against the monster’s brow.

“Do it, Lilly. Put her out of her misery.”

Lilly closes her eyes. The trigger pad burns her finger like an icicle. When she opens her eyes again the thing on the ground lunges at her, the rancid teeth going for Lilly’s jugular.

It happens so quickly it almost fails to register in Lilly’s brain.

The blast rings out.

Lilly topples backward, falling on her ass, the .45 slipping out of her hand as the top of Megan’s cranium erupts in dark red mist, painting the sidewalk adjacent to the parkway in a spray of brain matter. The reanimated corpse sags and lies still on the tangled shroud—its sharklike eyes fixed on the dark sky.

For a moment Lilly lies supine on the ground, staring at the clouds, gripped in a state