The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury

winding backhand slap, a surreal echo of the slap delivered moments ago to Lilly—which sends Chad Bingham hurling sideways.

Chad sprawls to the ground fifteen feet away from the tree trunk.

Josh can’t hear Lilly stumbling across the clearing. He can’t hear her strangled voice, “Josh, NO! NO! JOSH, STOP, YOU’RE GOING TO KILL HIM!!”

All at once, Josh Lee Hamilton wakes up, and blinks as though discovering that he’s been sleepwalking and has found himself naked and wandering down Peachtree Boulevard during rush hour. He feels Lilly’s hands on his back, clawing at his coat, trying to yank him back and away from the man lying in a heap on the ground.

“You’re gonna kill him!”

Josh whirls. He sees Lilly—bruised and battered, her mouth full of blood, barely able to stand or breathe or speak—directly behind him, her watery gaze locked on to his. He pulls her into an embrace, his eyes welling with tears. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine … please, Josh … you have to stop before you kill him.”

Josh starts to say something else but stops himself. He turns and looks down at the man on the ground. Over the course of that terrible, silent pause—as Josh moves his lips but is unable to make a sound or put a thought into words—he sees the deflated body on the ground, lying in a pool of its own fluids, as still and lifeless as a bundle of rags.

FOUR

“Hold still, honey.” Bob Stookey gently turns Lilly’s head so he can get a better angle on her fat lip. He carefully dabs a pea-sized amount of antibiotic on the split, scabbed flesh. “Almost done.”

Lilly jerks at the pain. Bob kneels next to her, his first-aid kit open on the edge of the cot on which Lilly lies prone, staring up at the canvas ceiling. The tent glows with the pale rays of late-afternoon sun, which shine through the stained fabric walls. The air is cold and smells of disinfectant and stale liquor. Lilly has a blanket draped across her bare midriff and bra.

Bob needs a drink. He needs one badly. His hands are shaking again. Lately, he’s been flashing back to his days in the U.S. Marine Hospital Corps. One tour in Afghanistan eleven years ago, emptying bedpans at Camp Dwyer—it seems like a million light years away—could never have prepared him for this. He was on the sauce back then as well, barely made it out of Medical Education and Training in San Antonio due to the drinking, and now the war has come home for Bob. The shrapnel-riddled bodies he patched in the Middle East were nothing compared to the battlefields left behind in the wake of this war. Bob has dreams of Afghanistan sometimes—the walking dead mingling and infecting the ranks of the Taliban in Grand Guignol fashion—the cold, dead, gray arms sprouting from the walls of mobile surgical suites.

But patching Lilly Caul is an altogether different proposition for Bob—far worse than being a battlefield medic or cleaning up the aftermath of a walker attack. Bingham did a number on her. Best Bob can tell, she has at least three busted ribs, a major contusion to her left eye—which may or may not involve a vitreous hemorrhage or even retinal detachment—as well as a nasty series of bruises and lacerations to her face. Bob feels ill-equipped—both in technique and medical supplies—to even pretend to treat her. But Bob is the only game in town around here, and so he has now jury-rigged a splint of bedsheets, hardback book covers, and elastic bandages around Lilly’s midsection and has applied his dwindling supply of antibiotic cream to her superficial wounds. The eye worries him the most. He needs to watch it, make sure it heals properly.

“There we go,” he says, applying the last daub of the cream to her lip.

“Thanks, Bob.” Lilly’s speech is impeded by the swelling, a slight lisp on the s. “You can send your bill to my insurance company.”

Bob lets out a humorless chuckle and helps her pull her coat back over her bandaged midsection and bruised shoulders. “What the hell happened out there?”

Lilly sighs, sitting up on the cot, gingerly zipping the coat and cringing at the stabbing pains. “Things got a little … carried away.”

Bob finds his dented flask of cheap hooch, sits back on his folding chair, and takes a long medicinal swig. “At the risk of stating the obvious … this ain’t good for anybody.”

Lilly swallows as though trying to digest broken glass. Tendrils of her auburn hair dangle in her face. “You’re telling me.”

“They’re meeting right now in the big top about it.”

“Who is?”

“Simmons, Hennessey, some of the older guys, Alice Burnside … you know … sons and daughters of the revolution. Josh is … well, I’ve never seen him like this. He’s pretty messed up. Just sitting on the ground outside his tent like a sphinx … ain’t saying a word … just staring into space. Says he’ll go along with whatever they decide.”

“What does that mean?”

Bob takes another healthy sip of his medicine. “Lilly, this is all new. Somebody murdered a living person. These people ain’t dealt with anything like this before.”

“‘Murdered’?”

“Lilly—”

“That’s what they’re calling it now?”

“I’m just saying—”

“I gotta go talk to them.” Lilly tries to stand but the pain drives her back to the edge of the cot.

“Whoa there, Kemo sabe. Take it easy.” Bob leans over and gently steadies her. “I just gave you enough codeine to calm a Clydesdale.”

“Goddammit, Bob, they’re not going to lynch Josh for this, I’m not gonna let that happen.”

“Let’s just take it one step at a time. You ain’t goin’ nowhere right now.”

Lilly lowers her head. A single tear wells up and drips from her good eye. “It was an accident, Bob.”

Bob looks at her. “Maybe let’s just focus on healing right now, huh?”

Lilly looks up at him. Her busted lip is swollen to three times its normal size, her left eye shot with red, the socket already blackened and bruised. She pulls the collar of her thrift shop overcoat tighter and shivers against the cold. She wears a number of oddball accessories that catch Bob’s eye: macrame bracelets and beads and tiny feathers woven into the tendrils of amber locks falling across her devastated face. It’s curious to Bob Stookey how a girl can still pay attention to fashion in this world. But that is part of Lilly Caul’s charm, part of the fiber of her being. From the little fleur-de-lis tattoo on the back of her neck to the meticulous rips and patches in her jeans, she is one of those girls who can make ten dollars and an afternoon at a secondhand store stretch into an entire wardrobe. “This is all my fault, Bob,” she says in a hoarse, somnolent voice.

“That’s a load of crap,” Bob Stookey counters after taking another pull off the tarnished flask. Maybe the liquor has begun to loosen Bob’s lips, because he feels a twinge of bitterness. “My guess is, knowin’ that Chad character, he’d been asking for this for a while now.”

“Bob, that’s not—”

Lilly stops herself when she hears the crunch of footsteps outside the tent. The shadow of a leviathan falls across the canvas. The familiar silhouette pauses for a moment, lurking awkwardly outside the zippered front flap of Bob’s tent. Lilly recognizes the figure but says nothing.

A huge hand gently folds back the tent flap and a large, deeply lined brown face peers in. “They said I could —they gave me three minutes,” Josh Lee Hamilton says in a choked, sheepish baritone.

“What are you talking about?” Lilly sits up and stares at her friend. “Three minutes for what?”

Josh kneels in front of the tent flap, looking at the ground, struggling to tamp down his emotions. “Three minutes to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean, ‘good-bye’? What happened?”

Josh lets out a pained sigh. “They took a vote … decided the best way to deal with what happened was to send me packing, kick me outta the group.”