Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short

“The fence stays down! You understand?! It stays down until I say different!” Philip yells from inside the raised tailgate of Martinez’s battered SUV, which is parked up against the corner of the fallen fence. The carryall—filled with weaponry and ordnance from the National Guard station—is split down the middle, and Philip is rooting out assault rifles for the townspeople. He turns and tosses another gun to a middle-aged father standing behind the vehicle.

“What’s gonna keep more of them from gettin’ in?” the father wants to know. The roar of automatic gunfire bounces off the sides of buildings behind them, punctuating their conversation. The father jerks at the noise.

A line of heavily armed men circle the SUV, keeping the biters at bay. The town is closed up now, as tight as a miser’s purse.

Philip comes over to the dad and gives the man a pat. “Just keep the biters away from your barracks…and let me worry about the wall.”

Martinez comes over, slamming a magazine into his M4. His dark-skinned face gleams with stress sweat under his bandanna. “What do you have in mind?”

Philip looks at him. “Is the south side still secure?”

“Yeah, I guess…. The buses and trucks are still there, blocking ’em from getting in…but they’re also blocking them from getting out.”

“Good. You know the gas station up on the hill? Just beyond the fence?”

“The one by the radio tower?”

“That’s the one.”

“What about it?”

“I need five minutes.”

“Five minutes for what?”

Philip nods at the commotion in the streets. “Just keep the biters occupied—keep ’em bunched in the center of town—in five minutes, everybody ditches inside. It’s duck-and-cover time, you understand what I’m saying?”

Martinez stares at Philip for a moment. “We’ll give it our best shot.”

Philip gives him a nod, goes around to the SUV’s driver’s side door, and climbs in.

The engine fires, the rear wheels dig in, and the vehicle roars away.



Over the course of those next five minutes—most of which Martinez keeps close track of on his watch—the heartier souls of Woodbury go through fifteen hundred rounds of metal-jacketed, armor-piercing shells. The makeshift militia consists of eleven men and two women, most of them parents, most at the end of their tethers—former middle-class working people with equal parts fear and madness in their eyes.

Thirty magazines’ worth of 5.5-millimeter slugs taken from the National Guard station are sprayed across the boundaries of vacant lots, into alleys, through tangled knots of zombies that have clustered together near the racetrack, and across rows of storefronts in order to shake the biters out of hiding and ultimately herd them into the center of town. Side roads are blocked with cars. Gates are swung shut. The zombies change course like sheep.

Martinez calculates that four and a half minutes have passed when they finally see the shift in the tide of walking dead. The main road that runs through the heart of Woodbury becomes clogged with a virtual traffic jam of upright corpses. They crowd intersections and mill about in their slow, retarded manner, craning their necks up at the rooftops, where the echoes of automatic gunfire slap back against the clouds.

At almost precisely the five-minute mark, as Martinez is climbing a fire escape ladder, he begins wondering if the stranger with the dark hair has up and vanished. Maybe it was all a scam. Maybe the guy just wanted to steal the SUV with all the goodies from the Guard station.

Right then Martinez hears the amplified voice reverberating in the distance.