The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury tgt-2

by Robert Kirkman

  Through the static Stevie’s voice intermittently sizzles through the noise: “Stop, Taggert.… Stop!… What the fuck! WHAT THE FUCK!”

  In back, Lilly wipes her eyes and latches her gaze on the eyes of the Governor. “Sex for food? Really? Seriously? That’s your great society—”

  “Lilly!” Martinez barks at her. “Stop it! We got a situation!” He thumbs the send button. “Broyles, stop the van!”

  By this point the Governor’s eyes have found Lilly’s, and the man is fully awake, staring at her with a silent fury that burns holes in her soul, and she doesn’t care, she doesn’t even notice it.

  “All the fighting and the suicides and the fear driving everyone into catatonic stupors…?” She feels like spitting at him. “This is your idea of a fucking COMMUNITY—”

  “Lily! Goddammit!” Martinez turns and faces her. “Would you please—”

  The truck screeches to a stop, throwing Martinez backward against the firewall and tossing Lilly forward across the Governor and into a stack of ammo boxes. The cartons topple as Lilly sprawls across the floor. The walkie-talkie spins against a duffel bag. The Governor rolls from one side to the other, the duct tape coming loose from his mouth.

  The crackle of Broyles’s voice squawks out of the speaker. “Got a visual on a walker!”

  Martinez crawls toward the two-way, snatching it up and thumbing the button. “What the hell’s going on, Broyles? What’s the idea of slamming on the—”

  “Got another one!” the voice squawks out of the tiny speaker. “Got a couple, coming out of the … Oh, fuck … oh, fuck … OH, FUCK!”

  Martinez thumbs the switch. “Broyles, what the hell is going on?”

  Through the radio: “There’s more than we—”

  Static washes over the voice for a moment, and then Stevie’s voice cuts through the noise: “Jesus Christ, there’s a whole bunch of them coming out of the—” Static crackles for a moment. “They’re coming out of the woods, man, they keep coming—”

  Martinez yells into the mike, “Stevie, talk to me! Should we dump them and come back?”

  More static.

  Martinez screams, “Stevie! Do you copy? Should we turn around?”

  Broyles’s voice now: “Too many, boss! Never seen this many in one—”

  A burst of static and the sound of a gunshot and glass breaking—echoing outside the walls of the van—all of it gets Lilly to her feet. She realizes what’s happening, and she reaches behind her belt for the Ruger. She pulls it out and cocks the slide, glancing over her shoulder. “Martinez, call your men back, get ’em outta here!”

  Martinez thumbs the button: “Stevie! Can you hear me?! Get outta here, pull back! Turn around! We’ll find another place! Can you hear me? STEVIE!”

  The sound of Stevie’s anguished cry spurts out of the speaker, right before another barrage of automatic gunfire rattles the air … followed by a terrific wrenching of metal … and then an enormous crash.

  Broyles’s voice: “Hold on! They turned it over! There’s too goddamn many! Hold on! We’re fucked, y’all! WE ARE TOTALLY FUCKED!!”

  The van shudders as the engine revs into reverse, rocketing backward, the centripetal force throwing everybody forward against the firewall. Lilly slams her shoulder against the gun rack, knocking half a dozen carbines to the floor like kindling. Gabe and Bruce roll, slamming into each other. Unbeknownst to the others, Gabe has his fingers under Bruce’s shackle now and he starts wrenching at it. Bruce’s gag has come loose and he booms a garbled cry: “YOU MOTHERFUCKERS, NOW WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!”

  The van bumps over an object, and then another, and another—the wet, muffled thumps rocking the chassis—and Lilly holds on to the side brace with her free hand, scanning the cargo hold.

  Martinez scrambles on hands and knees toward the fallen walkie-talkie while the black man spits and curses, and Swede aims the muzzle of his .45 at the bald black man. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

  “YOU MOTHERFUCKERS DON’T EVEN—”

  The rear of the van slams into an unknown object and bogs down, the rear wheels spinning on something slick and gooey on the road, the g-forces flinging everybody into the corner. Guns fly off across the hold, and the Governor rolls against a stack of cartons that fall on him. He lets out an angry cry—the duct tape hanging from his chin now—and then he gets quiet.

  Everybody gets quiet as the van sits there for a moment, very still.

  Then the entire vehicle shudders. The sideways jerk gets everybody’s attention. Broyles’s voice crackles from the fallen two-way, something about “too many” or “getting out,” when all at once the roar of Broyles’s AK-47 from the cab pierces the silence, followed by an eruption of broken glass and a human shriek.

  Then things get quiet again. And still. Except for the low, droning, mucusy moans of hundreds of dead voices, which, coming through the walls of the windowless van, sound like a giant turbine engine rumbling outside the van. Something bumps the vehicle again, jerking it sideways with a violent convulsion.

  Martinez grabs an assault rifle off the wall, jacks the lever back, lurches toward the rear hatch, and grasps the handle, when he hears a deep, whiskey-cured voice come from behind him.

  “Wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  Lilly glances down at the floor and sees the Governor—his gag loose—struggling into a sitting position against the wall, his dark eyes smoldering. Lilly holds her Ruger on him. “You’re not giving orders anymore,” she informs him through clenched teeth.

  The van jerks sideways again. The rumbling silence stretches.

  “Your little plan’s gone all to hell,” the Governor says with sadistic glee. His facial features tic with residual trauma.

  “Shut up!”

  “Thought you’d leave us out here, feed us to the biters, and nobody would be the wiser.”

  Lilly puts the muzzle of the .22 against his forehead. “I said shut the fuck up!”

  The van shudders again. Martinez stands frozen with indecision. He turns, and he starts to say something to Lilly, when a sharp blur of movement near the front takes everybody by surprise.

  Bruce has managed to free his hands and suddenly lashes out at the Swede, knocking the gun out of the older man’s grip. The .45 goes off as it clatters to the floor, the boom so loud it ruptures eardrums, the blast chinking metal out of the floor and grazing the Swede’s left boot, making the older man cry out and slam against the back wall.

  In one smooth movement, before Martinez or Lilly can fire, the big black man scoops up the hot .45 and empties three rounds into the Swede’s chest. Blood sprays across the corrugated side wall behind the older man as he gasps and writhes and slides to the floor.

  From the rear, Martinez spins toward the black man and fires two quick, controlled bursts in his general direction, but by that point Bruce is already diving for cover behind piles of cartons, and the bullets are chewing through cardboard, metal, and fiberglass, setting off a series of muffled blasts inside the boxes, which send puffs of wood shards, sparks, and paper into the air like meteors—

  —and everybody dives to the floor—and Bruce gets his hands on his bowie knife—a weapon he had hidden on his ankle—and he’s going for Gabe’s shackles—and things are happening very quickly now all around the cargo bay—as Lilly swings her Ruger toward the two thugs near the front—while Martinez leaps toward Bruce—and the Governor screams something like “DON’T KILL THEM!—and Gabe is loose now and scrambling for one of the fallen carbines—and Bruce slashes the knife at Martinez, who dodges the blow, and then stumbles against Lilly, sending her slamming against the rear doors—

  —and the impact of Lilly’s body against the double-doors springs the latch.

  The doors suddenly and unexpectedly burst open, letting a swarm of moving corpses into the van.

  EIGHTEEN

  A large, putrefied biter in a shredded medical smock goes for Lilly, and it nearly gets its rotten teeth into her neck, when Martinez manages to ge
t off a burst that takes off the top of the thing’s skull.

  Rancid, black blood fountains up across the ceiling, spitting across Lilly’s face, as she backs away from the open doorway. More biters scuttle in through the gaping hatch. Lilly’s ears go deaf—ringing from the noise—as she backs toward the front wall.

  The Governor, still shackled, scoots backward, away from the onslaught, as Gabe gets a loaded carbine rifle up and barking, the barrage punching through dead tissue and rotting skulls. Brain matter blossoms like black chrysanthemums, as the interior of the van smokes and teeters and floods with death stench. More and more biters swarm the opening, despite the blazing gunfire.

  “BRUCE, CUT ME LOOSE!”

  The Governor’s voice—nearly drowned by the din, barely audible to Lilly’s ringing eardrums—gets Bruce moving with the knife. Meanwhile Martinez and Lilly unleash a salvo of gunfire, muzzles flashing, the noise enormous, entire clips being emptied, the successive blasts hitting eye sockets and mandibles and slimy bald pates and putrid foreheads, sending black tissue and blood and fluids spurting and flinging across the open hatch.

  Bruce’s knife slices down on the Governor’s shackles, and within seconds the Governor is free and has a carbine in his hands.

  The air blazes with gunfire, and soon the five surviving human occupants of the van are clustered together against the cab’s firewall, each of them blasting away at will, spraying a hell storm across the rear hatch. The sound is gargantuan, ear-piercing, amplified by the metal fuselage of the van. Some of the rounds miss their targets, ricocheting off the door frame in daisy chains of sparks.

  Mangled zombies drop to the floor of the van, dominoes falling, some of them slipping off the slimy back edge of the hatch, others caught in the pile. The barrage continues another ten seconds, during which time the back spray of blood and bodily matter cover the humans in layers of gore. A splinter of steel strikes Lilly’s thigh, embedding itself, a wasp sting of pain waking her up.

  Over the course of a single minute—an interminable sixty seconds of elapsed time that feels to Lilly like a lifetime—each and every last ammo magazine is emptied into dead flesh, and every last zombie crowding the doorway drops and slides to the pavement outside the van, leaving leech trails of blood on the corrugated ledge.

  The last remaining bodies get stuck in the hatchway, and in the horrible, ear-ringing silence that ensues, as Gabe and Martinez and the Governor reload, Bruce lunges toward the hatch. He kicks the stragglers off the rear parapet, the bodies falling to the asphalt with a splat. Lilly thumbs her spent magazine out of her Ruger, the clip clattering to the floor, the metallic clunk unheard by her deafened ears. Her face and arms and clothing are covered in blood and bile. She reloads, her pulse throbbing in her traumatized ears.

  In the meantime Bruce wrenches the double doors shut, the damaged hinges making a loud squeak that barely penetrates the ringing in Lilly’s ears.

  The latch clicks, sealing them back inside the blood-drenched death chamber, but the worst part, the part that has everybody’s attention now, is the half-glimpsed landscape beyond the van, the forest on either side of the road, and the switchback way up on the plateau in the distance, draped in darkness and crawling with moving shadows.

  * * *

  What they glimpse before the doors bang shut challenges comprehension. They’ve all seen herds before, some of them huge, but this one defies description—a mass of dead the likes of which no one has seen since the plague broke out months ago. Nearly a thousand moving corpses in every imaginable state of decomposition stretch as far as the eye can see. Throngs of snarling zombies, so thick one could walk across their shoulders, line the edges of the hill on either side of Highway 85. Moving slowly and lethargically, their sheer number threatening mass destruction, they bring to mind a black glacier aimlessly cutting through the trees and slicing across the fields and roads. Some of them barely have flesh left on their bones, their ragged burial clothing hanging mosslike in the darkness. Others snap at the air with the involuntary twitching of snakes stirred from their nests. The length and breadth of the multitude, each face as pale white as mother-of-pearl, gives the impression of a vast, moving flood tide of infected pus.

  Inside the van, the primordial terror touched off by this sight stiffens the spines of everyone present. Gabe raises his carbine at Martinez. “You stupid fucking son of a bitch! Look at what you’ve done! Look at what you’ve gotten us into!!”

  Before anybody can react Lilly swings her Ruger up and trains it on Gabe. Ears ringing, she cannot hear exactly what he says in reply but she knows he means business. “I will fucking blow you away if you don’t back off, asshole!”

  Bruce pounces on Lilly with his buck knife, putting it around her neck. “Bitch, you got about three seconds to drop that motherfucking—”

  “BRUCE!” The Governor aims his carbine at Bruce. “Back off!”

  Bruce doesn’t move. The blade stays pressed against Lilly’s throat, and Lilly keeps her gun leveled on Gabe, and Martinez trains his assault rifle on the Governor. “Philip, listen to me,” Martinez says softly, “I promise you I will drop you first before I go down.”

  “Everybody just calm the fuck down!” The Governor’s knuckles are white on the carbine’s hilt. “Only way we’re gonna get outta this mess is together!”

  The van shudders again as more zombies close in, making everybody jerk.

  “What are you thinking?” Lilly says.

  “First of all, get those fucking guns out of everybody’s face.”

  Martinez burns his gaze into Bruce. “Bruce, get away from her.”

  “Do what he says, Bruce.” The Governor keeps the muzzle on Bruce. A single pearl of sweat rolls down the bridge of the Governor’s nose. “PUT THE FUCKING KNIFE DOWN OR I WILL PUT YOUR BRAINS ON THAT WALL!”

  Reluctantly, the rage blazing in his dark almond eyes, Bruce lowers the knife.

  The van trembles again, as the guns slowly tilt down, one at a time, away from their targets.

  Martinez is the last to lower his rifle. “If we can get to the cab, we can plough our way outta here.”

  “Negative!” The Governor looks at him. “We’ll lead this fucking stampede back to Woodbury!”

  “What do you suggest?” Lilly asks the Governor with cold acid running through her veins. She feels the horrible sensation of giving over to the madman again, her soul shrinking into a tiny black hole inside her. “We can’t just sit here on our thumbs.”

  “How far are we from town? Like less than mile?” The Governor asks this almost rhetorically as he gazes around the van’s blood-sodden interior, glancing from carton to carton. He sees the spare parts of gun mounts, shell casings, military-grade ammunition. “Lemme ask you something,” he says, turning to Martinez. “You seem to have thought through this big coup d’état like a real military man. You got any RPGs in this crate? Anything with a little more punch than a simple grenade?”

  * * *

  It takes them less than five minutes to find the ordnance and load the RPG and lay out the strategy and get into position, and throughout that time the Governor gives most of the orders, keeping everybody moving, as the horde surrounds the van like bees swarming a hive. By the time the survivors are ready to launch their countermeasure, the number of dead pressing in on the vehicle is so high the van nearly tips over.

  The muffled sound of the Governor’s voice, coming from inside the van, counting down … “three, two, one” … is incomprehensible to the dead, their putrid ears brushing the outer shell of the vehicle.

  The first blast blows the rear doors off the van as if they were on explosive bolts.

  The eruption catapults half a dozen walkers into the air, the rocket-propelled grenade punching through the dense crowd of corpses clustered outside the hatch like a hot poker ramming through butter. The projectile goes off ten yards away from the van.

  The explosion immolates at least a hundred—maybe more—in the general vicinity of the vehicle. The s
ound of it rivals a sonic boom from a passing jet, the report shaking the ground, arcing up into the heavens, and echoing out across the tops of trees.

  The back draft shoots up and out—a convection of flame the size of a basketball court—turning night to day and transforming the closest zombies into flaming human debris, some of them practically vaporized, others becoming dancing columns of fire. The inferno razes an area of fifty square yards around the van.

  Gabe leaps out of the van first, a scarf around his mouth and nose to filter the acrid fumes of dead flesh cooking in the napalmlike maelstrom. He is followed closely by Lilly, who covers her mouth with one hand, and fires off three quick shots with her Ruger in the other hand, taking down a few stray zombies in their path.

  They make it to the cab, throw the door open, and climb in—pushing Broyles’s contorted, bloody remains aside—and within seconds the rear wheels are digging in, and the vehicle is launching out of there.

  The van bulldozes through files of zombies, turning the upright cadavers into putrefied jelly on the pavement, cutting a swath toward a hairpin turn that looms ahead of them. And when they reach the tight curve, Gabe executes the last phase of the escape.

  He yanks the wheel, and the van careens off the road and up the side of a wooded hill.

  The rough terrain taxes the tires and suspension, but Gabe keeps the foot feed pinned, and the rear-wheel drive churns through the soft muddy floor of the hill, fishtailing wildly, nearly dumping the other three men out the gaping, jagged opening in the rear.

  When they reach the crest of the hill, Gabe slams on the brakes and the van skids to a stop.

  It takes a minute to aim the mortar launcher, a squat iron cylinder that Martinez hastily jury-rigged to a machine-gun mount. The muzzle is pointed upward at a forty-five-degree angle. By the time they’re ready to fire, at least two hundred zombies have started shambling up the hill toward the van, drawn to the noise and headlights.

  Martinez primes the launcher and touches off the ignition button.

  The mortar booms, the projectile rocketing skyward, arcing out over the valley, the tracery of its tail like a glowing neon contrail. The explosive shell lands smack-dab in the middle of the sea of walking dead. At least four hundred yards from the van, the mini mushroom cloud of flame is seen a few milliseconds before the FFOOOMP of its impact is heard, and the flash that follows turns the underbelly of the night sky a deep, hot DayGlo orange.