The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 by Robert Kirkman Read Free Book Online Page B

has coffee in the square every morning, hang out with them. Keep tabs on what they’re saying. Austin … you and I will take regular walks around the barricade. We’ll make sure everything’s secure. This is critical, people. With the Governor on his back, we are totally vulnerable. We have to remember—”
    A noise outside the boarded windows cuts her off. All heads snap toward the sound of yelling, glass breaking, wood splitting apart.
    â€œOh shit,” Lilly utters, frozen at the front of the room with her fists clenched.
    Barbara Stern springs to her feet, her eyes suddenly wide with terror. “Maybe it’s just a fight, somebody drunk or pissed off or something.”
    â€œI don’t think so,” David Stern murmurs, standing up and reaching around for the pistol wedged into the back of his belt. He draws his gun.
    Austin jumps out of his chair and darts across the room to where Lilly stands staring. “Let’s let Gabe and Bruce check it out first.”
    Across the room, Bruce is already on his feet, pulling the .45 from its holster, snapping off the safety, and shooting a look at Gabe. “You got the other MIG?”
    Gabe has already whirled toward the far corner of the room, where two assault rifles are leaning against the wall. He grabs one, and then the other, and then turns to Bruce and tosses one of the rifles as he yells, “C’mon!—Let’s go!—Before all hell breaks loose!”
    Bruce catches the weapon, chambers a round, and follows Gabe out the door, down the hall, and toward the exit.
    The others stand frozen in the community room, looking at each other and listening to the pandemonium rising out on the street.

 
    FOUR
    In the darkness, an empty bottle of Jack rolls across the street half a block north of the courthouse, and Gabe kicks it aside as he barrels toward the southwest corner of town, Bruce right on his heels. In the night winds, Gabe can see the intermittent muzzle flashes behind the grove of trees along the town square, sparks as bright as arc welders bouncing off the sky, the cool night air alive with screams. One of the guards is already down on the ground by the curb, his drinking buddies scattering now, their silhouettes receding into the distance. Three walkers have piled up on the fallen guard, tearing into him, the blood tide spreading in all directions as they feed, burrowing down into flesh, ripping strings of tendons and cartilage in the flickering shadows. Gabe gets to within twenty yards of the feeding orgy and snaps the selector lever on the rifle. His barrel comes up as he charges in and pulls the trigger.
    Hellfire blazes out of the MIG, strafing the top halves of the biters, punching holes through cranial bones in fountains of tissue and bursts of blood mist. The walkers fold. Bruce roars past Gabe with his own rifle up and braced on his big shoulder, his booming voice coming out in one spontaneous cry: “GET THAT FUCKING WALL BACK UP NOW!!”
    Gabe glances back up and sees what Bruce is shouting about in the darkness twenty-five yards away: A weak spot in the corner of the barricade—a conglomeration of drywall panels, sheet metal, and roofing nails—has collapsed under the weight of a dozen or more walkers pushing in from the adjacent woods. The men must have been shirking their watch, fucking around, not paying attention, drinking or some such shit. Now one of the young guards on a gun turret frantically sweeps his arc lamp down on the scene—the silver beam crisscrossing the fogbound street—painting luminous halos around the silhouettes of twenty-plus biters staggering over fallen timbers.
    Bruce unleashes a barrage of armor-piercing rounds at the onslaught.
    He gets most of them—the casings flinging, one by one, up into the air—a row of reanimated corpses doing involuntary jigs in the swirling spray of fluids, ragged bodies collapsing in a synchronized line dance of