The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor (The Walking Dead Series) by Jay Bonansinga, Robert Kirkman Read Free Book Online Page A

and ironweed, boarded up tight, and littered with cast-off belongings across the roadway—moldy mattresses, loose drawers, and filthy clothing clogging every gutter. A few stray walkers as ragged as scarecrows wander aimlessly in the alleys and empty parking lots.
    Martinez applies the brakes and slows the truck to a steady twenty miles an hour. He sees a street sign and consults a page torn out of an old phone book, which he has taped to the dashboard. The location of the Hogansville Piggly Wiggly seems to be on the west side of town, about a half mile away. The tires crunch over broken glass and detritus, the noise drawing the attention of nearby walkers.
    From the passenger seat, Gus pumps a shell into the breech of his 12-gauge. “I got this, boss,” he says, rolling down his window.
    “Gus, wait!” Martinez reaches down to a duffel bag stuffed between the seats. He finds a short-barrel .357 Magnum with a silencer attached, and hands it to the portly bald man. “Use this, I don’t want the noise drawing more of ’em.”
    Gus puts the scattergun down, takes the revolver, opens the cylinder, checks the rounds, and then clicks it shut. “Fair enough.”
    The bald man aims the revolver out the window and picks off three corpses with the ease of a man playing a carnival game. The blasts—muffled by the noise suppressor—sound like kindling snapping. The walkers fold one by one, the tops of their crania erupting in bubbles of black fluid and tissue, their bodies sagging to the pavement with satisfying wet thuds. Martinez proceeds west.
    Martinez makes a turn at an intersection blocked by the wreckage of a three-car collision, the burned-out husks of metal and glass tangled in a crumpled mess. The cargo truck skirts the sidewalk, and Gus takes down another pair of walkers in tattered paramedic uniforms. The cargo truck continues down a side street.
    Just past a boarded strip mall, the Piggly Wiggly sign comes into view on the south side of the street, the mouth of the deserted parking lot crowded with half a dozen walkers. Gus puts them out of their misery with little fuss—pausing once to reload—as the truck creeps slowly into the lot.
    One of the walkers topples against the side of the truck, a fountain of oily blood washing across the hood before the body slides under the wheels.
    “Fuck!” Martinez blurts as he pulls up to the front of the store.
    Through the blood-smeared windshield, he can see the disaster area that is the former Piggly Wiggly. Broken paving stones and overturned flowerpots spray across the storefront, the windows all broken out and gaping jaggedly, rows of rusted-out carts lying either on their sides or smashed by fallen timbers. Inside the shadowy interior of the store, the aisles are ransacked, the shelves empty, the fixtures hanging by threads and slowly turning in the wind. “Fuck! Fuck!—Fuck!—Fuck-fuck-fuck!”
    Martinez rubs his face, leaning back against the driver’s seat.
    Gus looks at him. “So what now, boss?”
    *   *   *
    The tarp snaps open, the harsh light of day flooding the cargo hold. The glare makes Lilly blink and squint as her eyes adjust.
    She rises to her feet and gazes down at Martinez standing outside the rear of the truck, holding the tarp open with a dour expression on his dark features. Gus stands behind him, wringing his hands. “Good news and bad news,” Martinez grumbles.
    The Sterns stand up, Austin also slowly rising and stretching like a sleepy cat.
    “Grocery store’s been trashed, cleaned out,” Martinez announces. “We’re S-O-L.”
    Lilly looks at him. “What’s the good news?”
    “There’s a warehouse out behind the store, no windows, locked up tight. Looks like people have left it alone. Could be a gold mine.”
    “What are we waiting for?”
    Martinez levels his gaze at Lilly. “Not sure how safe it is in there. I want everybody locked and loaded, and on their toes. Bring all the flashlights, too … looks like it’s