The Walking Dead Collection (61 page)

“Gotcha,” Josh says with a nod and starts off-loading the four-by-six sheets of particleboard onto the ground. He sheds his lumberjack coat—the sweat has broken out on his neck and back, the winter sun high in the sky today—and he finishes the stacking in mere minutes.

Martinez comes over. “Why don’t you go ahead and grab one more load before lunch.”

“Roger that,” Josh says, and pulls the empty dolly free of the stack, then turns and heads back down the walk, leaving his jacket—as well as his snub-nosed .38 police special—hanging on a fence post.

Josh sometimes forgets that the gun is tucked into his jacket pocket. He has yet to use the thing since coming to Woodbury; the guards have the place pretty much covered.

Over the last week, in fact, only a few attacks have occurred along the edges of the woods, or on the side roads, which have been easily and promptly quelled by the well-armed band of weekend warriors. According to Martinez, the powers that be in Woodbury have discovered a cache of weapons at a National Guard station within walking distance of the town—an entire arsenal of military-grade weaponry—which the Governor has put to good use.

The truth is, walker attacks are the least of the Governor’s problems. The human population of Woodbury seems to be curdling under the pressure of postplague life. Tempers are stretched thin. People are starting to lash out at each other.

Josh crosses the two-block distance between the construction site and the warehouse in less than five minutes, thinking about Lilly and his future with her. Lost in his thoughts, he does not notice the odor wafting around him as he approaches the wood-frame building on the edge of the railroad tracks.

The warehouse once stood as a storage shed for the southern terminus of the Chattooga and Chickamauga Railway. Throughout the twentieth century tobacco farmers would ship their bundles of raw leaves up north on this line to Fayetteville for processing.

Josh trudges up to the long narrow building and parks the dolly outside the door. The edifice rises up at least thirty-five feet at the highest pitch of its weathered, gabled roof. The siding is ancient, chipped, and scarred with neglect. The single tall window by the door is broken out and boarded. The place looks like a ruined museum, a relic of the old South. Workmen have been using the building to keep the lumber dry and stash building materials.

“Josh!”

Josh pauses at the entrance when he hears the familiar voice drifting on the breeze behind him. He turns just in time to see Lilly scurrying up in her trademark funky attire—floppy hat, multicolored scarves, and a coyote coat she acquired in trade from an older woman in town—a weary smile on her slender face.

“Babygirl, you are a sight for sore eyes,” Josh says, grabbing her and gently pulling her into a bear hug. She hugs him back—not exactly with unbridled abandon, more of a platonic hug—and once again Josh wonders if he has come on too strong with her. Or perhaps their lovemaking has changed some complex dynamic between them. Or maybe he has not lived up to her expectations. She seems to be holding back her affection slightly. Just slightly. But Josh puts it out of his mind. Maybe it’s just the stress.

“Can we talk?” she says, looking up into his eyes with a heavy, somber gaze.

“Sure … you want to give me a hand?”

“After you,” she says, gesturing toward the entrance. Josh turns and pries the door open.

The smell of dead flesh—mingling with the moldy, airless dark inside the storage shed—does not register at first. Nor do they notice the gap between two petrified sections of drywall in the rear of the shed, or the fact that the backside of the building is perilously exposed to a wild section of forest. The building stretches at least a hundred feet back in the darkness, draped in cobwebs and cast-off rail sections so rusted and corroded they are the color of the earth.

“What’s on your mind, babydoll?” Josh crosses the cinder floor to a pile of wooden siding. The four-by-six panels look as though they came from a barn, their grooves of deep red paint chipped and scabrous with mud.

“We gotta move on, Josh, we gotta get outta this town … before something terrible happens.”

“Soon, Lilly.”

“No, Josh. Seriously. Listen to me.” She tugs his arm and pulls him around so they are face-to-face. “I don’t care if Megan and Scott and Bob stay … we gotta ditch this place. It looks all cozy and Mayberry RFD on the surface but it’s rotting underneath.”

“I know … I just have to—”

He stops when a shadow blurs outside the slats of the boarded window in his peripheral vision.

“Oh, my God, Josh, did you—”

“Get behind me,” he says, realizing several things all at once. He smells the odor permeating the musk of the moldy shed, he hears the low guttural vibrations of growls coming from the rear of the building, and he sees a slice of daylight blooming through a gap in the corner.

Worst of all, Josh realizes he left his pistol in his jacket.

TEN

Right then, a burst of automatic gunfire echoes outside the storage shed.

Lilly jerks in the darkness of the shed, and Josh whirls toward the pile of lumber, when the boarded window near the front door bursts inward.

Three snarling zombies—the pressure of their collective weight forcing the ancient lumber to give way—start climbing into the shed. Two males and a female, each with deep wounds in their faces, their cheeks torn away from exposed gums and teeth like rows of dull ivory, tumble into the darkness. A chorus of snarls fills the building.

Josh barely has time to register this fact when he hears shuffling coming toward him from the rear of the dark shed. He spins and sees the enormous walker in dungarees, most likely a former farmer, his lower intestines hanging out like slimy prayer beads, shambling toward him through the shafts of dust motes, bumping drunkenly into stacks of crates and piles of old railroad ties.

“LILLY, GET BEHIND ME!”

Josh lurches toward the stack of lumber and lifts a huge panel of wood up and in front of them like a shield. Lilly presses against his back, her lungs heaving now, hyperventilating with terror. Josh raises the panel and starts toward the big walker with the inertia of a middle linebacker going into the backfield to sack a quarterback.

The walker lets out a drooling groan as Josh slams the panel into it.

The force of the blow drives the huge corpse backward and to the cinder floor. Josh slams the lumber down on top of the thing. Lilly tumbles onto the pileup. The weight of their bodies pins the giant to the cinders, its dead limbs squirming beneath the panel, its blackened fingers sticking out the sides of the wood, clawing at the air.

Outside, in the wind, the sound of an emergency bell clangs.

“MOTHERFUCK!”

Josh loses control for a moment and starts slamming the panel down on top of the enormous dead farmer. Lilly is thrown off Josh’s back, as Josh rises up and starts stomping his work boot down on the panel, which is crushing the zombie’s skull. Josh starts jumping up and down on the panel, letting out a series of garbled, bellowing cries, the rage contorting his face.

Brain matter gushes and spurts out from under the top of the panel, as the sick crunch of dead cranial bones gives way, the farmer going still. Huge rivulets of black fluid spread from under the wood.

All this transpires within a matter of seconds, as Lilly is backing away in horror. All at once the sound of a voice rings out from the street in front of the shed, a familiar voice, calm and collected, despite its volume—“GET DOWN, FOLKS!! GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR”—and somewhere in the back of Josh’s brain he recognizes the voice of Martinez, and Josh also remembers, simultaneously, that the other three walkers are closing in from the front of the shed.

Josh jumps off the panel, spins around, and sees the three walkers approaching Lilly, reaching out for her with spastic lifeless arms. Lilly screams. Josh lurches toward her, scrambling for a weapon. Only scrap metal and sawdust litter the floor.

Lilly backs away screaming, and the din of her shriek blends with a booming, authoritative voice coming from outside the entrance: “GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR, FOLKS! DOWN ON THE FLOOR NOW!!”

Josh instantly gets it, and he grabs Lilly and yanks her to the cinders.

The three dead things loom over them, mouths gaping and drooling, so close now Josh can smell the hideous stench of their fetid breath.

The front wall lights up—a fusillade of automatic gunfire punching a pearl necklace of holes along the drywall, each hole blooming a pinpoint of daylight. The volley strafes the midsections of the three upright cadavers, making them dance a macabre Watusi in the darkness.

The noise is tremendous. Wood shards and plaster shrapnel and bits of rotting flesh rain down on Josh and Lilly, who cover their heads.

Josh catches glimpses of the macabre dancing out of the corner of his eye, the walkers jerking and spasming to some arrhythmic drumbeat, as threads of brilliant light crisscross the darkness.

Skulls erupt. Particles fly. The dead figures deflate and collapse one at a time. The barrage continues. Thin shafts of daylight fill the shed with a cat’s cradle of deadly luminous sunlight.

*   *   *

Silence descends. Outside the shed, the muffled noise of spent shells ringing off the pavement reaches Josh’s ears. He hears the faint clanging of bolts reloading, breeches refilling, collective breaths of exertion drowned by the wind.

A moment passes

He turns to Lilly, who lies next to him, clinging to him, clutching handfuls of his shirt. She looks almost catatonic for a moment, her face pressed against the cinders. Josh hugs her close, strokes her back.

“You okay?”

“Fabulous … just peachy.” She seems to awaken from the terror, looking down at the spreading puddle of cranial fluid. The bodies lie riddled and eviscerated only inches away. Lilly sits up.

Josh rises and helps her to her feet and starts to say something else when the creak of old wood draws his attention to the entrance. What remains of the door, its top half perforated with bullet holes, squeaks open.

Martinez peers in. He speaks hurriedly, purposefully: “You two good?”

“We’re good,” Josh tells him, and then hears a noise in the distance. Voices rising in anger, echoing on the wind. A muffled crash.

“We got another fire to put out,” Martinez says, “if you folks are okay.”

“We’re okay.”

With a terse nod, Martinez wheels away from the door and vanishes into the overcast daylight.

*   *   *

Two blocks east of the railroad tracks, near the barricade, a fight has ensued. Fights are commonplace in the new Woodbury. Two weeks ago a couple of the butcher’s guards came to blows over the rightful ownership of a well-thumbed issue of
Barely Legal
magazine. Doc Stevens had to set one fighter’s dislocated jaw and patch the other boy’s hemorrhaging left eye socket before that day was out.

Most of the time these brawls occur in semiprivate—either indoors or late at night—and break out over the most trivial matters imaginable: somebody looks at somebody else the wrong way, somebody tells a joke that offends somebody else, somebody just irritates somebody else. For weeks now, the Governor has been concerned about the growing frequency of serious brawls.

But until today, most of these little rumbles have been private affairs.

Today, the latest melee breaks out in broad daylight, right outside the food center, in front of at least twenty onlookers … and the crowd seems to fuel the intensity of the fight. At first the onlookers watch with revulsion as the two young combatants pummel each other with bare fists in the freezing wind, their inelegant blows full of spit and fury, their eyes ablaze with unfocused rage.

But soon something changes in the crowd. Angry shouts turn to whoops and hollers. Bloodlust sparks behind the eyes of the gallery. The stress of the plague comes out in angry hyena yells, psychotic cheers, and vicarious fist pumping from some of the younger men.

Martinez and his guards arrive right at the height of the fight.

Dean Gorman, a redneck farm kid from Augusta dressed in torn denim and heavy-metal tattoos, kicks the legs out from under Johnny Pruitt, a fat, doughy pothead from Jonesboro. Pruitt—who had the temerity to criticize the Augusta State Jaguars football team—now tumbles to the sandy ground with a gasp.

“Hey! Dial it down!” Martinez approaches from the north side of the street, his M1 on his hip, still warm from the fracas at the railroad shed. Three guards follow on his heels, their guns also braced against their midsections. As he crosses the street it’s hard for Martinez to see the fighters behind the semicircle of cheering onlookers.

All that’s visible is a cloud of dust, flailing fists, and milling onlookers.

“HEY!!”

Inside the circle of spectators Dean Gorman slams a steel-toed work boot into Johnny Pruitt’s ribs, and the fat man keens with agony, rolling away. The crowd jeers. Gorman jumps on the kid but Pruitt counters by slamming a knee up into Gorman’s groin. The witnesses howl. Gorman tumbles to his side holding his privates and Pruitt lashes out with a series of sidelong blows to Gorman’s face. Blood flings across the sand in dark stringers from Gorman’s nose.

Martinez starts pushing bystanders aside, forcing his way into the fray.

“Martinez! Hold up!”

Martinez feels a vise grip tighten on his arm and he whirls around to see the Governor.

“Hold up a second,” the wiry man says under his breath with a spark of interest glittering in his deep-set eyes. His handlebar mustache has come in dark and thick, giving his face a predatory cast. He wears a long, black duster over his chambray shirt, jeans, and stovepipe engineer boots, the tails flapping majestically in the wind. He looks like a degenerate paladin from the nineteenth century, a self-styled gunslinger-pimp. “I want to see something.”

Martinez lowers his weapon, tilts his head toward the action. “Just worried somebody’s gonna go and get his ass killed.”

By this point Big Johnny Pruitt has his pudgy fingers around Dean Gorman’s throat, and Gorman begins to gasp and blanch. The fight goes from savage to deadly in a matter of seconds. Pruitt will not let go. The crowd erupts in ugly, garbled cheers. Gorman flails and convulses. He runs out of air, his face turning the color of eggplant. His eyes bulge, bloody saliva spraying.