The Walking Dead Collection (78 page)

The voice in her head—firing across the synapses in her brain—reaches her lips on barely a whisper, directed at the Governor.

“Soon … when you’re not needed … this will be
you
.”

She brings the axe down again and again.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

THE WALKING DEAD: THE ROAD TO WOODBURY
. Copyright © 2012 by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contect Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to
[email protected]
.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Kirkman, Robert.

     The road to Woodbury / Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. — 1st ed.

           p. cm. — (The walking dead series; no. 2 of 3)

     ISBN 978-0-312-54774-5 (hardcover)

     ISBN 978-1-250-01344-6 (e-book)

   1.  Zombies—Fiction.   2.  Atlanta Region (Ga.)—Fiction.   I.  Bonansinga, Jay R.   II.  Title.

     PS3611.I7555R63 2012

     813'.6—dc23

2012028306

E-ISBN 9781250013446

First Edition: October 2012

To Sheri Stearn, my constant reader and other mother, and to Diego for the mechanics of death and destruction

—Jay Bonansinga

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A very special thank-you to the man, Robert Kirkman, who never fails to pull magic out of his hat; to Andy Cohen, my career compass; to Brendan Deneen, my editor and best dude; to Christina MacDonald for the best line editing ever; and to David Alpert, who holds it all together. Also a huge thanks to Kemper Donovan, Nicole Sohl, Stephanie Hargadon, Denise Dorman, Tom Leavens, Jeff Siegel, and my boys, Joey and Bill Bonansinga. Last but not least, my undying love and gratitude to the woman who changed my life and made me a better writer and man, Jill Norton Brazel.

—Jay Bonansinga

PART 1

The Gathering

So when the last and dreadful hour

This crumbling pageant shall devour,

The trumpet shall be heard on high,

The dead shall live, the living die,

And Music shall untune the sky.

—John Dryden

ONE

Writhing in pain on the ground, Bruce Allan Cooper gasps and blinks and tries to catch his breath. He can hear the gurgling, feral growls of a half-dozen biters coming for him, moving in for a feeding. A voice in his brain screams at him:
Move, you fucking idiot! You pussy! What are you doing?!

A big African American with an NBA forward’s physique, a shaved, missile-shaped head, and a grizzle of a goatee, he rolls across the scabrous earth, barely avoiding the clawing gray fingers and snapping jaws of an adult female biter with half a face.

He covers maybe five or six feet until a dagger of pain shoots down his side, radiating fire across his ribs, seizing him up in paralyzing agony. He lands on his back, still gripping his rusty fire ax. The pick head is caked in blood and human hair and the black, viscous bile that has come to be known among survivors as walker-droppings.

Momentarily thunderstruck, his ears ringing, one eye already closing up from the swelling of a broken nose, Bruce wears the tattered army fatigues and mud-caked jackboots of the unofficial Woodbury militia. He can see the Georgia sky above him—a low canopy of filthy dishwater-gray clouds, inclement and nasty for April—and it taunts him:
You’re nothing but a bug down there, Brucey-boy, a maggot on the carcass of a dying earth, a parasite feeding off the scraps and ruins of a vanishing human race
.

All at once the panorama of the sky above him is eclipsed by three alien faces—dark planets slowly blocking out the heavens—each one snarling stupidly, drunkenly, each pair of milky eyes geeked perpetually open. One of them, an obese adult male in a soiled hospital smock, drools black mucus-gunk that drips on Bruce’s cheek.

“GOD-
DAMMMMMM
!”

Bruce snaps out of his stupor, finding an unexpected reserve of strength. He lashes out with his ax. The pointed end arcs upward and impales the fat biter in the soft tissue under the jaw. The lower half of the thing’s face detaches and jettisons, a gristly phalanx of dead flesh and glistening cartilage pinwheeling upwards of twenty feet in the air before coming back down to earth with a splat.

Rolling again, scrambling to his feet, Bruce executes a one-eighty spin—fairly graceful for a big man in excruciating pain—and hacks through the putrid neck muscles of another female biter coming at him. The head falls to the side, wobbling for a moment on threads of desiccated tissue before breaking free and tumbling to the ground.

The head rolls for a few feet, leaving a leech trail of black spoor, while the body remains upright for an agonizing moment, twitching with insensate arms outstretched in horrible blind instinct. Something metallic lies coiled at the thing’s feet as it finally sinks to the ground.

Bruce then hears the strangest thing that can be heard—muffled in his traumatized ears—following in the wake of the carnage:
cymbals crashing
. At least, that’s what it sounds like to Bruce’s ringing ears—a throbbing, metallic crashing noise in his brain—coming from the near distance. Backing away with his weapon at his side, spurred on by the sound, Bruce blinks and tries to focus on other biters shambling toward him. There are too many of them to engage with the pickax.

Bruce turns to flee, and without warning runs directly into another figure blocking his path.

“WHOA!”

The other figure—a thick-necked white man built like a fireplug, his sandy hair cut in an old-school flattop—lets out a war cry and swings a mace the size of a horse leg at Bruce. The spiked club whizzes past Bruce’s face, passing within centimeters of his broken nose. Bruce instinctively rears backward, tripping over his own feet.

He topples to the ground in an awkward display that sends up a cloud of dust and elicits another series of cymbal crashes from the hazy middle distance. The ax goes flying. The sandy-haired man takes advantage of the confusion and roars toward Bruce, the mace poised for action. Bruce grunts and rolls out of range at the last minute.

The mace head slams down hard, stick-pinning into the earth mere inches from Bruce’s head.

Bruce rolls toward the fallen weapon that lies in the red dirt about ten feet away. He gets his hand around the wooden shank, when suddenly, without warning, a figure lurches out of the haze to Bruce’s immediate left. Bruce jerks away from the biter, which is crawling toward him with the languid twitches of a giant lizard. Black ooze issues from the female’s slack mouth—its sharp little teeth visible—its jaw snapping with reptilian vigor.

Then something else happens that brings Bruce back to reality.

The chain holding the female in place suddenly clangs, the monster reaching the limits of its bondage. Bruce lets out an instinctive gasp of relief, the dead thing only inches away, flailing impotently at him. The biter growls with inchoate frustration, the chain holding fast. Bruce feels like digging the thing’s eyeballs out with his bare hands, like chewing through the neck of this useless piece of rotting shit-flesh.

Again, Bruce hears that weird cymbal-crashing noise, as well as the voice of the other man, barely audible under the noise: “C’mon, man, get up … get up.”

Bruce gets moving. He grabs the ax and struggles to his feet. More cymbal-crashing noises … as Bruce spins, and then swings the ax hard at the other man.

The blade barely misses Flattop’s throat, slicing through the collar of the man’s turtleneck sweater, leaving a six-inch gouge.

“How’s that?” Bruce mutters under his breath, circling the man. “That entertaining enough for ya?”

“That’s the spirit,” the stocky man murmurs—his name is Gabriel Harris, Gabe to his cronies—as he swings the club again, the nail-studded head whispering past Bruce’s swollen face.

“That all you got?” Bruce mumbles, jerking away just in time, and then circling around the other way. He lashes out with the ax. Gabe parries with the club, and all around the two combatants, the monsters keep growling and gurgling their watery ululations, straining against their chains, hungry for human flesh, stirred into a feeding frenzy.

As the dusty haze on the periphery of the battlefield clears, the remnants of an outdoor dirt-track arena come into focus.

*   *   *

The size of a football field, the outer edges lined with cyclone fencing, the Woodbury Veterans Speedway is surrounded by the relics of old pit areas and dark cavernous passageways. Behind the chain link rise latticed bench seats, sloping up to huge, rusted-out light stanchions. The stands are now filled with scores of cheering Woodbury residents. The cymbal-crashing sounds are, in fact, the wild applause and jeering voices of the crowd.

Out in the miasma of dust swirling around the infield, the gladiator known as Gabe mutters under his breath so only his adversary can hear, “You’re fighting like a goddamn girl today, Brucey”—the wisecrack punctuated by a roundhouse swing of the club at the black man’s legs.

Bruce vaults into the air, executing a dodge that would be the envy of a World Wrestling Entertainment star. Gabe swings again and the club goes wide and strikes the head of a young male biter in ragged, greasy dungarees, a former mechanic perhaps.

The nails embed themselves in the thing’s cadaverous skull, sending ropy strands of dark fluid into the air, before Gabe has a chance to dig the mace out and mumble, “Governor’s gonna be pissed with your bullshit performance.”

“Oh yeah?” Bruce counterstrikes with the handle of the ax, slamming it into Gabe’s solar plexus, driving the stocky man to the ground. The ax arcs through the air and comes down within centimeters of Gabe’s cheek.

Gabe rolls away and springs to his feet, still muttering under his breath. “Shouldn’t have had that extra serving of cornbread last night.”

Bruce moves in for another swing of the ax, whizzing the blade past Gabe’s neck. “You should talk, fat boy.”

Gabe swings the mace again and again, driving Bruce back toward the chained biters. “How many times have I told ya? Governor wants it to look
real
.”

Bruce blocks the onslaught of mace blows with the ax handle. “You broke my fucking nose, motherfucker.”

“Stop your bellyaching, dickweed.” Gabe slams the mace down again and again until the nails stick into the ax handle. Gabe pulls the mace back and wrenches the ax out of Bruce’s grip. The ax goes flying. The crowd cheers. Bruce dives away. Gabe goes after him. Bruce cuts and runs the other way, and Gabe lunges while simultaneously swinging the mace under the black man’s legs.

The nails catch Bruce’s fatigue pants, tearing a swath and superficially lacerating flesh. Bruce stumbles and goes down hard. Thin tendrils of blood loop across the pale, dusty daylight as Bruce rolls.

Gabe soaks up the frenzied, frantic applause—the clapping is almost hysterical—and he turns toward the bleachers, which are filled with the bulk of Woodbury’s post-plague population. He raises his mace
Braveheart
-style. The cheers swell and rise. Gabe milks it. He turns slowly with the mace over his head, an almost comical look of macho victory on his face.

The place erupts into pandemonium … and up in the stands, amid the waving arms and whooping voices, all but one onlooker seems transported by the spectacle.

*   *   *

Sitting in the fifth row, way off on the north end of the bleachers, Lilly Caul turns away in disgust. A faded linen scarf wound tightly around her swanlike neck to ward off the April chill, she is dressed in her customary ripped jeans, thrift-shop sweater, and hand-me-down beads. As she shakes her head and lets out an exasperated sigh, the wind blows tendrils of her toffee-brown hair around her once-youthful face, which now bears the lines of trauma—the wrinkles nested around her aquamarine eyes and along the edges of her mouth—as deep as the grain in burnished cowhide. She isn’t even aware that she’s mumbling under her breath, “Fucking Roman circuses…”

“What was that?” The woman next to her glances up from an insulated cup of tepid green tea. “Did you say something?”

Lilly shakes her head. “No.”

“You okay?”

“Fine … just peachy.” Lilly keeps gazing off into the distance as the rest of the crowd yelps and hollers and emits hyena howls. Still only in her early thirties, Lilly Caul looks at least ten years older than that now, her brow perpetually furrowed in consternation. “You want to know the truth, I don’t know how much more of this shit I can take.”