Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short by Robert Kirkman, Jay Bonansinga Page B

softly, handing the thermos over. With a nod, he indicates the three trucks idling along the road across the clearing. His breath shows in puffs of vapor as he talks. “Bunch of us heading up into the woods, gathering as much firewood as we can load.”
    “I’ll come with.”
    Josh shakes his head. “Talked to Chad a minute ago, I guess he needs you to watch his kids.”
    “Okay. Sure. Whatever.”
    “You keep that,” Josh says, gesturing toward the thermos. He grabs the axe that sits canted against his tent and gives her a grin. “Should be back by lunchtime.”
    “Josh,” she says, grabbing his sleeve before he can turn away. “Just be careful in the woods.”
    His grin widens. “Always, babydoll…always.”
    He turns and marches off toward the clouds of visible exhaust along the gravel road.
    Lilly watches the contingent hopping into cabs, jumping up onto running boards, climbing into cargo bays. She doesn’t realize at this point the amount of noise they’re making, the commotion caused by three large trucks embarking all at once, the voices calling to each other, doors slamming, the fog bank of carbon monoxide.
    In all the excitement, neither Lilly, nor anyone else for that matter, realizes how far the racket of their departure is carrying out over the treetops.
     
    Lilly senses danger first.
    The Binghams have left her inside the circus tent, in charge of the four girls, who now frolic across the floor of matted grass, scampering amid the folding tables, stacks of peach crates, and tanks of butane. The interior of the circus tent is illuminated by makeshift skylights—flaps in the ceiling pulled back to let in the daylight—and the air in there smells of must and decades of moldy hay impregnated into the canvas walls. The girls are playing musical chairs with three broken-down lawn chairs scattered across the cold earthen floor.
    Lilly is supposed to be the music.
    “Duh-do-do-do…duh-da-da-da,” Lilly croons halfheartedly, murmuring an old Top 40 hit by the Police, her voice thin and weak, as the girls giggle and circle the chairs. Lilly is distracted. She keeps glancing through the loading entrance at one end of the pavilion, a large swath of the tent city visible in the gray daylight. The grounds are mostly deserted, those who are not away scavenging now hiding in their tents.
    Lilly swallows her terror, the cold sun slanting down through the far trees, the wind whispering through the big-top tent. Up on the rise, shadows dance in the pale light. Lilly thinks she hears shuffling sounds up there somewhere, behind the trees maybe; she’s not sure. It might be her imagination. Sounds inside the fluttering, empty tent play tricks on the ears.
    She turns away from the opening and scans the pavilion for weapons. She sees a shovel leaning against a wheelbarrow filled with potting soil. She sees a few garden implements in a dirty bucket. She sees the remains of the breakfast dishes in a plastic garbage can—paper plates crusted with beans and Egg Beaters, wadded burrito wrappers, empty juice boxes—and next to it a plastic storage container with dirty silverware. The silverware came from one of the retrofitted camper/pickups, and Lilly makes note of a few sharp knives in the container but mostly she sees plastic “sporks” sticky with food gunk. She wonders how effective a spork would be against a monstrous drooling cannibal.
    She silently curses the camp leaders for not leaving firearms.
    Those who remain on the property include the older settlers—Mr. Rhimes, a couple of spinsters from Stockbridge, an eighty-year-old retired teacher named O’Toole, a pair of geriatric brothers from an abandoned nursing home in Macon—as well as a couple dozen adult women, a good portion of them too busy now with laundry duty and philosophical chatter along the back fence to notice anything amiss.
    The only other souls currently present in the tent city are children—ten sets of them—some still huddling