Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short(5)

The blast dissipates within seconds, but the light and noise are so intense that the shock wave seems to go on for many minutes. Martinez covers his head as debris rains down from the overhang. Car alarms go off. The very foundation of the building seems to shiver and quake in aftershocks.

Then the roar ceases, and Martinez inhales a deep breath. He stretches his sore neck in the ensuing stillness. Now there are only scattered car alarms chirping and a few stray gunshots as the stragglers are dispatched.



At length Martinez gets his bearings. He picks up his M4 and climbs down the ladder to ground level. Dizziness washes over him as he starts north. The sky hangs low with a haze of noxious smoke.

The streets are relatively quiet. Burning debris lies here and there. A few of the armed residents patrol, some them dragging bodies into a giant funeral pyre near the courthouse. Others take out the last of the errant dead with easy head shots.

Martinez makes his way north toward the construction site. He can see men already starting to gather at the fence, the sound of the bulldozer firing up somewhere. They will have to get the barricade back up soon. The explosions will surely draw more biters to the area.

At the end of the main road, as he makes the turn, Martinez sees a ragged figure emerging from the fog of smoke beyond the fence.

The figure limps along with a .45 in his hand, and the closer he gets the more familiar he looks. His raven black hair is frosted with ash, his face covered in soot. His clothes are scorched and torn. But he walks with a hell-bent purpose, like a repairman who has just grappled with a stubborn job and emerged victorious. Some of the townspeople see him and rush over to him to slap him on the back and congratulate him and thank him.

The figure sees Martinez and comes over, coughing lungs full of smoke.

Martinez puts hand on the man’s shoulder. “That was…f*cking good.”

Philip Blake looks at him though parboiled eyes. Something resembling a smile appears on Philip’s face. “Just another day at the office.”

Martinez shrugs. “You okay? You might want to see the doc….”

Philip rubs his eyes. “I’ll live.”

Martinez cannot put his emotions into words so he just nods.

An overwhelming certainty is washing over him that he is looking at the new leader of the little community called Woodbury.





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Copyright ? 2012 by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga





THE WALKING DEAD

THE ROAD TO WOODBURY

ROBERT KIRKMAN

AND

JAY BONANSINGA



Thomas Dunne Books

St. Martin’s Press

New York





PART 1




Red Day Rising


Life hurts a lot more than death.

—Jim Morrison





One




No one in the clearing hears the biters coming through the high trees.

The metallic ringing noises of tent stakes going into the cold, stubborn Georgia clay drown the distant footsteps—the intruders still a good five hundred yards off in the shadows of neighboring pines. No one hears the twigs snapping under the north wind, or the telltale guttural moaning noises, as faint as loons behind the treetops. No one detects the trace odors of putrid meat and black mold marinating in feces. The tang of autumn wood smoke and rotting fruit on the midafternoon breeze masks the smell of the walking dead.

In fact, for quite a while, not a single one of the settlers in the burgeoning encampment registers any imminent danger whatsoever—most of the survivors now busily heaving up support beams hewn from found objects such as railroad ties, telephone poles, and rusty lengths of rebar.

“Pathetic…look at me,” the slender young woman in the pony-tail comments with an exasperated groan, crouching awkwardly by a square of paint-spattered tent canvas folded on the ground over by the northwest corner of the lot. She shivers in her bulky Georgia Tech sweatshirt, antique jewelry, and ripped jeans. Ruddy and freckled, with long, deep-brown hair that dangles in tendrils wound with delicate little feathers, Lilly Caul is a bundle of nervous tics, from the constant yanking of stray wisps of hair back behind her ears to the compulsive gnawing of fingernails. Now, with her small hand she clutches the hammer tighter and repeatedly whacks at the metal stake, grazing the head as if the thing is greased.