The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,2

your backs into it!” he barks, hollering over the din of clanging metal filling the chilled air.

The teens grapple with a massive wooden beam, which serves as the center mast of what is essentially a large circus tent. They found the tent back on I-85, strewn in a ditch next to an overturned flatbed truck, a faded insignia of a giant paint-chipped clown on the vehicle’s bulwark. Measuring over a hundred meters in circumference, the stained, tattered canvas big top—which smells of mildew and animal dung—struck the man in the John Deere hat as a perfect canopy for a common area, a place to keep supplies, a place to keep order, a place to keep some semblance of civilization.

“Dude … this ain’t gonna hold the weight of it,” complains one of the teens, a slacker kid in an army fatigue coat named Scott Moon. His long blond hair hangs in his face and his breath shows as he huffs and struggles with the other tattooed, pierced goth kids from his high school.

“Stop your pissin’ and moanin’—it’ll hold the thing,” the man in the cap retorts with a grunt. Chad Bingham is his name—one of the family men of the settlement—the father of four girls: a seven-year-old, nine-year-old-twins, and a teenager. Unhappily married to a meek little gal from Valdosta, Chad fancies himself a strict disciplinarian, just like his daddy. But his daddy had boys and never had to deal with the nonsense perpetrated by females. For that matter, Chad’s daddy never had to deal with rotting pus pockets of dead flesh coming after the living. So now Chad Bingham is taking charge, taking on the role of alpha male … because, just as his daddy used to say, Somebody’s gotta do it. He glares at the kids. “Hold it steady!”

“That’s as high as it’s gonna go,” one of the goth boys groans through clenched teeth.

“You’re high,” Scott Moon quips through a stifled little giggle.

“Keep it steady!” Chad orders.

“What?”

“I said, hold the dad-blamed thing STEADY!” Chad snaps a metal cotter pin through a slot in the timber. The outer walls of the massive canvas pavilion shudder in the autumn wind, making a rumbling noise, as other teens scurry toward the far corners with smaller support beams.

As the big top takes shape, and the panorama of the clearing becomes visible to Chad through the tent’s wide opening at one end, he gazes out across the flattened brown weeds of the pasture, past the cars with their hoods up, past the clusters of mothers and children on the ground counting their meager caches of berries and vending-machine detritus, past the half-dozen or so pickups brimming with worldly possessions.

For a moment, Chad locks gazes with the big colored dude thirty yards away, near the north corner of the property, standing guard over Lilly Caul like a gigantic bouncer at some outdoor social club. Chad knows Lilly by name, but that’s about it. He doesn’t know much else about the girl—other than the fact that she’s “some chick friend of Megan’s”—and he knows less about the big man. Chad has been in proximity with the giant for weeks and can’t even remember his name. Jim? John? Jack? As a matter of fact, Chad doesn’t know anything about any of these people, other than the fact that they’re all pretty goddamn desperate and scared and crying out for discipline.

But for a while now, Chad and the big black dude have been sharing loaded glances. Sizing each other up. Taking the measure of each other. Not a single word has been exchanged but Chad feels challenges being issued. The big man could probably take Chad in a hand-to-hand situation but Chad would never let it come to that. Size doesn’t matter to a .38 caliber bullet, which is conveniently chambered in the steel-plated Smith & Wesson Model 52 tucked down the back of Chad’s wide Sam Browne belt.

Right now, though, an unexpected current of recognition arcs across the fifty yards between the two men like a lightning bolt. Lilly continues to kneel in front of the black man, angrily beating the crap out of tent stakes, but something dark and troubling glints in the black dude’s gaze suddenly as he stares at Chad. The realization comes quickly, in stages, like an electrical circuit firing.

Later, the two men will conclude, independently, that they—along with everybody else—missed two very important phenomena occurring at this moment. First, the noise of the tent construction in the clearing has been drawing walkers