The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 (14 page)

She looks away.

Bob begins the exam. He remembers the way a healthy uterus is supposed to feel during the early weeks of a viable pregnancy—according to the field surgeon—versus the way it feels in the aftermath of a miscarriage. It takes only a few seconds for Bob to find the end of the cervix. Lilly lets out an anguished mewling sound that breaks Bob's heart. He palpates the uterus and finds it completely dilated, heavy with blood and slough. This is all he needs to know. He gently pulls back, removing his hand from her.

“Lilly, I want you to remember something,” he says then, removing his gloves. “There's no reason—”

“Oh no.” She's already softly crying, her head still turned away, her tears soaking the pillow. “I knew it … I knew it.”

“Oh Jesus.” Austin puts his head down on the gurney's side rail. “Oh God.”

“What was I thinking?…” She softly, silently weeps into the gurney's pillow. “What the fuck was I thinking?…”

Bob is crestfallen. “Now, honey, let's not start kicking ourselves in the ass, okay? The good news is, you can try again … you're a young gal, you're healthy, you can definitely try again.”

Lilly stops crying. “Enough, Bob.”

Bob looks down. “I'm sorry, honey.”

Austin looks up, wipes his eyes, and gazes at the wall. He lets out a long pained breath. “Fuck.”

“Gimme a towel, Bob.” Lilly sits up on the gurney. She has a strange expression on her face, impossible to read, but one glance at it and Bob knows to shut the fuck up and get the woman a towel. He grabs a cloth and hands it to her. “Unhook me from this shit,” she says flatly, wiping herself off. “I gotta get outta here.”

Bob removes the stick, wipes her wrist, and puts a bandage on the site.

She shoves herself off the gurney. For a moment, she looks as if she might fall over. Austin steadies her, gently holding her by the shoulder. She pushes him away and finds her jeans draped over a chair back. “I'm fine.” She gets dressed. “I'm perfectly fine.”

“Honey … take it easy.” Bob circles around her as though blocking her path to the door. “You probably oughtta just stay off your feet for a while.”

“Get outta my way, Bob,” she says with fists clenched now, jaw set with determination.

“Lilly, why don't we—” Austin falls silent when she shoots him a look. The expression on her face—the teeth gritted tightly, the smoldering cinders of rage in her eyes—takes Austin aback.

Bob wants to say something but figures maybe it's better if he just lets her go. He steps aside, and then looks at Austin, gesturing for him to back off. Lilly is already halfway across the room.

The door slams behind her, the residual tension crackling in her slipstream.

*   *   *

For an endless, agonizing moment, Philip Blake kneels before his monstrous offspring in the dusty gloom of that apartment foyer. Penny looks strangely hobbled by the slipshod dental procedure. She wobbles on her spindly little legs for a moment, moving her blackened lips around rotten, bloody gums, her empty gaze riveted on the man in front of her.

Philip leans down toward the dead girl, his mind filled with false memories of tucking his daughter into bed at night, reading storybooks to her, stroking her lustrous goldenrod curls, and planting kisses on her fragrant little forehead. “All better,” he murmurs to the creature chained to the wall. “Now, come here.”

He puts his arms around her and gives her a hug. She feels like a brittle husk in his arms, like a tiny scarecrow. He cradles her cold, mottled jawline in his gloved left hand. “Give Daddy a kiss.”

He kisses her rancid divot of a mouth, seeking warmth and love, but tasting only the bitter rot of spoiled meat and flyspecked feces. He rears back, an involuntary jerk, repulsed by the string of slimy tissue adhering to his lips. He gasps and frantically wipes away the black drool, his stomach heaving suddenly.

She lurches toward him, eyes narrowing, trying to bite him with her pulpy black gums.

He doubles over, holding her head back with one arm. The nausea within him turns to a column of hot bile rising up his gorge. He vomits on the hardwood floor, the yellow viscous stew of stomach acids spattering across the floorboards. He wretches and convulses until there's nothing left to expel.

Falling back on his knees, he wipes his mouth, hyperventilating. “Oh, honey … I'm sorry.” He swallows hard and tries to get his bearings back, tries to push back the shame and disgust. “Don't think anything of it.” He gets his breath back. He swallows again. “I'm sure … with time … I'll … I'll…” He wipes his face. “Please don't let this—”

All at once the bang of somebody knocking loudly on the apartment door interrupts. The Governor sniffs back his revulsion. He blinks at the noise. “Fuck!” He rises on weak knees. “FUCK!”

*   *   *

Over the course of the next thirty seconds—the time it takes Philip Blake to get himself together, cross the foyer, unsnap the dead bolt, and throw the door open—he transforms from a trembling, weak, unrequited father to a diamond-hard leader of men. “Did I or did I not say I was
not
to be
disturbed
?” he snarls coldly at the shadowy figure standing in the dim light of the corridor.

Gabe clears his throat instinctively. Clad in an army surplus jacket cinched at the waist with a gun belt and bandolier, he measures his words. “Sorry, boss—some shit's going down.”

“What shit?”

Gabe takes a deep breath. “Okay, there was an explosion. We think at the National Guard station—huge cloud of smoke going into the air. Bruce took some men to investigate. They were gone a few minutes, and then we heard gunfire nearby.”

“Nearby?!”

“Yeah, same direction.”

The Governor sears his gaze into the man's eyes. “Then why don't you just grab a car and—FUCK!” He turns back to the apartment. “Never mind!—Forget it!—Follow me!”

*   *   *

They take one of the armored trucks. The Governor rides in the cab on the passenger side, holding an AR-15 on his lap, as Gabe drives. Gabe hardly says a word the whole trip out—down Flat Shoals Road, past miles of walker-riddled forest, up Highway 85, and down a long farm road toward the smudge of black smoke visible against the night sky—while the Governor silently broods in the shotgun seat. A pair of Gabe's men, Rudy and Gus, ride outside the cab, one on each flank, standing on a footrail in the wind, cradling assault rifles.

As they rumble eastward through the night, the Governor feels his phantom arm twinge with needles of pain at every bump, every jerk—a bizarre sensation that keeps tugging at his peripheral vision in the green glowing darkness of the cab, making him think there's a tingling ghost-arm protruding from his stump—and it makes him angrier by the minute. He ruminates silently in the rattling dark, thinking about going to war, thinking about twisting off the head of that bitch who attacked him.

The great military leaders of yore, the men Philip has read about in history books—everybody from MacArthur to Robert E. Lee—stayed away from the front, huddled in tents with their commanders, planning, strategizing, looking at maps. Not Philip Blake. He fancies himself as Attila the Hun, or maybe Alexander the Great, roaring into Egypt with revenge on his mind and death dripping off the bloody tip of his sword. His eye patch itches as the adrenaline courses through him. He wears a leather driving glove on his left hand that creaks as he clenches his fist.

They approach a familiar turnoff snaking off the main two-lane. The wind has blown a letter off the tall roadside sign, which now says:

Wal art

Save money. Live better.

In the middle distance, the Governor can see the vast leprous cement of the Walmart parking lot gleaming like a gray ocean in the moonlight. Near the west edge of the lot, a few dark, ragged objects lie on the pavement near a familiar-looking cargo truck. The Governor recognizes the truck—it's from Woodbury's fleet.

“Fuck!” The Governor points. “Over there, Gabe—near the garbage Dumpsters!”

Gabe guns the truck and it booms across the parking lot, raising a cloud of dust into the night sky. The air brakes come on as they approach the battlefield. Gabe skids to a stop thirty feet away with a jerk.

“FUCK!” The Governor shoves his door open and stands on the skid, gazing at the carnage strewn across the lot like discarded rag dolls. “FUCK!”

The Governor hops off the skid and leads the three other men across the lot to the dead bodies. For a moment, nobody says anything. The Governor surveys the scene, makes note of the evidence. The cargo truck still idles, the carbon monoxide and cordite still hanging in the air like a thick blue shroud over the scene.

“Jesus,” Gabe utters, looking down at the four bodies lying in pools of blood across the concrete. One of them is headless, the body also missing hands, the severed cranium lying in a puddle of gore fifteen feet away. Another one—the kid named Curtis—lies supine with arms akimbo and dead eyes still open and staring up at the stars. A third one lies dead in a swamp of blood and tissue, his guts blooming out of a large gash in his belly. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the long, clean cuts—the neatly severed appendages—are the result of a Japanese katana sword.

Gabe walks over to the largest body, a black man still clinging to life but quickly bleeding out, his neck ravaged by multiple high-caliber blasts. His face sticky with his own blood, his eyes showing mostly whites, Bruce Cooper tries to speak with his last breaths.

Nobody can understand him.

The Governor moves over to the fallen man and gazes down at the body with very little emotion other than simmering rage. “His head is still intact,” Philip says to Gabe. “He'll probably be turning soon.”

Gabe starts to say something in response when the faint sound of Bruce Cooper's baritone voice—now breathless and choked with agony—can be heard under the wind. The Governor kneels and listens closely.

“S-ssaw the bald f-fuck, the k-kid,” Bruce utters, his throat filling with blood. “They … came b-back … they…”

“Bruce!” The Governor leans closer. His angry bark lacks any compassion. “BRUCE!”

The big man on the ground has nothing left. His big shaved head—now stippled with blood as black as pitch—begins to loll one last time. His eyes flutter once, and then go still, fixed, lifeless as marbles. The Governor stares at the man for a moment.

Then the Governor looks down at the cement and closes his eyes.

He doesn't see the others bowing their heads with grudging respect for the iron-fisted enforcer who dutifully did the Governor's bidding, who stood by the Governor without question, without recompense, without hesitation. Now Philip Blake fights the anguish seeping into his thoughts like a volatile chemical clouding his resolve. Bruce Cooper is just one man—a single cog in the Woodbury machine—but he secretly meant the world to Philip. Other than Gabe, Bruce was the closest thing to a friend Philip had in this world. Philip confided in Bruce, let him see the aquariums, let him see Penny. Bruce was unconditional in his respect—if not love—for Philip Blake. In fact, as far as Philip can tell, it was Bruce who saved his life, who forced Bob to get his shit together and treat the injuries.

The Governor looks up. He sees Gabe turning away, bowing his head as though offering deference and privacy to his boss in this excruciating moment, the 9 mm Glock still holstered on Gabe's hip. There is only one thing left to do—one loose end to be tied up.

The Governor grabs the pistol from Gabe's holster, making Gabe jerk with a start.

Aiming the muzzle down at Bruce's head, he squeezes off a single shot—point-blank—sending a hollow-point slug into Bruce's skull. The discharge makes everybody else jump, everybody except the Governor.

He turns to Gabe. “They were just
here
.” The Governor speaks now in a low, thick voice—a voice charged with latent rage and mayhem. “Find their fucking tracks. Find their fucking prison.” He fixes his fiery gaze from one good eye into Gabe's eyes and roars suddenly: “FIND IT NOW!!”

Then he walks away toward the armored truck without another word.

*   *   *

For a long time, standing amid the dead bodies scattered like broken mannequins across the desolate, moonlit parking lot, Gabriel Harris is paralyzed with indecision. Watching the Governor storm away, climb behind the wheel of the armored truck, and rumble off into the night leaves Gabe speechless and bewildered. How the hell is he supposed to find this fucking prison on foot, with no supplies, very little ammunition, and just a couple of men? For that matter, how the fuck are they supposed to get back home? Fucking hitchhike? Then, over the space of an instant, Gabe's state of complete and utter vexation changes to pure, unadulterated resolve when he glances back at the remains of Bruce Cooper, his friend, his comrade-in-arms.