The Walking Dead Collection (110 page)

“Huh?”

“Look at me, Gabe.”

He looks at her, his eyes narrowing with anger. “What the fuck is your problem, lady—you think you can talk to me like that?”

“I care about this town, Gabe.” She stands her ground, nose to nose with this nervous, snorting bull. “Listen to what I’m telling you. I need this town to work. Do you understand? Now tell me what’s going on. If there’s nothing wrong, you got no reason to hide anything.”

“Goddamnit, Lilly—”

“Talk to me, Gabe.” She arc-welds her gaze into him. “If there’s a problem, you need me on your side. I can help. Ask the Governor. I’m on his side. I need him on that wall. I need him keeping people sharp.”

At last, the portly man in the turtleneck deflates. He looks at the ground. His voice comes out paper-thin, reedy and defeated, like a little boy admitting to being naughty. “If I show you what’s going on … you gotta promise to keep it on the down-low.”

Lilly just stares at him, wondering how bad it could be.

THREE

“Jesus
Christ
.”

The words blurt out of her on a gasp, unbidden and involuntary, as she takes in the entirety of the tile-lined subterranean chamber all at once. Gabe stands behind her, in the doorway, still holding the water containers, frozen there as if held in suspended animation.

For a brief instant, all the information assaulting her senses floods Lilly’s brain in one great heaving gulp. The most prominent thing registering with her—overriding every other initial impression—is the pungent mélange of suffering, the coppery tang of blood, the black stench of infection and bile, and the ubiquitous scent of ammonia. But underneath it all, providing an odd counterpoint, is the smell of burnt coffee, an ancient percolator in the corner brewing a pot of bitter Maxwell House. This incongruous odor—a good reason for it, she will soon learn—mingles with other smells of the infirmary in a strangely disturbing way. Lilly takes a step closer to the gurney resting in the center of the room under the big light.

“Is he—?” She can barely speak. She stares at the body lying in the blazing silver light. In its current state, highlighted in that harsh light, the body brings to mind world leaders lying in state, beloved dictators pickled in death and exhibited in glass sarcophagi for the viewing pleasure of endless queues of mourners. It takes several moments for Lilly to realize that the patient is still breathing—albeit shallow, feeble breathing—his lungs rising and falling slowly under the blanket pulled up to his nude, iodine-stained rib cage. His head lolls to one side on a yellowed pillow, his face almost completely obscured by blood-soaked bandages.

“Hello, Lilly-girl,” a voice says from just behind her right flank, a blur of movement in her peripheral vision that interrupts her stupor. She turns and sees Bob Stookey standing beside her. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “It’s good to see you.”

Now Lilly stands paralyzed by another inconsistency—adding to the surreal sights and smells and sounds in that horrible tile room—another weird detail, which also strikes her as incomprehensible. Standing before her with a towel draped over his shoulder, his bloodstained lab coat buttoned at the collar like that of a competent barber, Bob has completely transformed. He holds a Styrofoam cup of coffee, his hands as steady as cornerstones. His greasy black hair is now combed neatly back off his weathered face, his eyes alert and clear and lucid. He is the picture of sobriety. “Bob, wh—what happened? Who did this?”

“Fucking bitch with the sword,” Bruce Cooper’s voice pipes in. From the corner of the room, the big man rises off a folding chair and comes over to the gurney. The man shoots a glare at Gabe. “What the fuck, Gabe? I thought we were supposed to keep this under wraps!”

“She ain’t gonna tell anybody,” Gabe mumbles, finally putting the water down. “Right, Lilly?”

Before Lilly can answer, Bruce throws a ballpoint pen at Gabe. The pen barely misses impaling itself in his eye, grazing off the top of his head. Bruce roars at him. “YOU STUPID FUCK!—WHOLE TOWN’S GONNA KNOW ABOUT IT NOW!!”

Gabe makes a move toward Bruce when Lilly steps in between them. “STOP IT!” She shoves them back, away from the gurney. “CALM THE FUCK DOWN!”

“Tell
him
!” Gabe stands nose to nose with Bruce, fists clenched and working. Bob hovers over the patient, feeling the Governor’s pulse. In all the excitement, the man’s head has lolled slightly, but that’s about the only change. Gabe takes shallow breaths, glaring at Bruce. “
He’s
the one gettin’ his panties in a bunch!”

“Shut up!” Lilly pushes each man aside, staying in between them. “This is not the time to lose your shit. We gotta keep our fucking wits about us—now more than ever.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” Bruce grumbles, meeting Gabe’s glare.

“Okay, let’s take a deep breath. I’m not gonna tell anybody. Okay? Calm down.”

She looks at both men, and Gabe looks down and says nothing. Bruce wipes his face, breathing hard, looking around the room as if the answer to their problems is hidden inside the walls.

“We gotta take this one step at a time.” She looks at Gabe. “Just answer one question. What they’re saying about Martinez … is it true?” Gabe doesn’t respond. “Gabe? Did Martinez go with those assholes from the other camp?” She turns to Bruce. “Did he?”

Bruce looks down and lets out a pained sigh. He nods. “The motherfucker helped them escape.”

“And we know this how?”

Bruce looks at her. “We got eyewitnesses, saw that cocksucker helping them over the wall at the end of the Durand Street alley.”

“What eyewitnesses?”

Bruce shrugs. “The lady with the sick kid, what’s-her-name, and also Curtis, the kid guarding the alley that night. Said Martinez relieved him, but the kid hung around and saw them going over … saw the black chick splitting off from the group. Bitch jumped the Governor minutes later.”

“Where?”

“In the Governor’s place—right in his fucking
home
—the fucking bitch bushwhacked him.”

“Okay … let’s just stick to the facts for a second.” Lilly starts to nervously pace the room, every few moments throwing a glance at the patient. The Governor’s face looks swollen and misshapen under his bandages, the gauze bulging where his left eye socket should be. “How do we know these douche bags didn’t have a gun on Martinez the whole time?”

Bruce shoots a look at Gabe, who stares at Lilly skeptically and says, “I wouldn’t bet on it, Lilly.”

“Why?”

Gabe glares at her. “Well … let’s see. How about the fact that Martinez is a lying son of a bitch with no loyalty to the Governor?”

“Why do you say that?”

Gabe snorts disdainfully, almost laughs. “Lemme think.” He points to an oblong bruise spanning his Adam’s apple. “For starters, he waylaid me outside the chick’s holding cell, pretty near cracked my skull open.” He glares at Lilly. “On top of that, wasn’t he part of your little hole-in-the-wall gang last year when you tried to take out the Governor?”

Lilly meets his gaze, doesn’t even flinch, just stares at him and says, “Things change—we made some bad choices.” She looks at Bruce, then back at Gabe. “I don’t know about Martinez but I’m with the Governor a hundred percent now—a
thousand
percent.”

Neither man says anything. Both just stare at the floor like children in detention.

Lilly gazes at the patient. “I guess it comes as no surprise that Stevens and Alice went along with the strangers; there was never any love lost there.”

Gabe lets out another snort. “That’s a fucking understatement.”

Lilly paces, thinking. “I think that’s what bothers me the most.”

Bruce speaks up: “Whaddaya mean? Because we ain’t gotta doc now?”

Lilly looks at him. “No. That’s not what I’m talking about.” She gestures toward Bob. “I think we’re covered in that department.” She glances back at Bruce. “What I’m worried about is the fact that these assholes have people from our town with them.”

Bruce and Gabe exchange another heated glance. Gabe looks at Lilly. “So what?”

“So
what
?” She walks over to the gurney and looks down at the Governor. The man clings to life—one lidded eye visible through an opening in the head dressing, the eyeball shifting slightly under the lid. Is he dreaming? Is he brain-damaged? Is he ever going to fight his way out of this vegetative state? Lilly stares at the slow rise and fall of the man’s chest and thinks some more. “Martinez, Alice, and the doctor know this town better than anyone,” she murmurs, not taking her gaze off the patient. “They know the weak spots; they know where we’re vulnerable.”

This sends a paralyzing silence through the reeking tile chamber. Everybody stares at Lilly as though waiting for her to provide an answer. She stares at the Governor’s ravaged body for another moment.

At last she turns to Bob and says with a newfound air of authority, “Bob, gimme a prognosis here.”

*   *   *

The first twenty-four hours had been anybody’s guess. Once they brought the Governor’s decimated body back to the infirmary, the main issue was keeping his heart beating, followed closely by stanching the blood loss. Despite the fact that he had a crudely cauterized stump halfway up his right arm at the point of dismemberment—slowing the bleeding from the amputation, which was mercifully clean thanks to the sharpness of the katana sword—there had been massive bleeding at other wound sites, especially the detached penis. Bob had done a lot of hasty battlefield stitching with the storehouse of dissolving catgut Doc Stevens kept on the shelf—reattaching the severed penis at one point with shaking hands. When he ran out of sutures, he used a needle and thread procured from the general store on Main Street.

The old lessons from the war zone came back to him in waves. He remembered the four stages of hypovolemic shock—battlefield medics call it the “tennis match,” since the stages of blood loss mimic tennis scores—15 percent loss is minor; 15 to 30 percent is serious, resulting in plummeting blood pressure and tachycardia; 30 to 40 percent is life-threatening, bringing on cardiac arrest; and 40 percent plus is deadly.

For hours, the Governor wavered in between stage two and three, and Bob had to resort to CPR twice to keep the man’s heart beating. Luckily, Stevens kept enough electrolytes in the storeroom to maintain the IV drip, and Bob even found half a dozen units of whole blood. He couldn’t figure out how to type the Governor—that was beyond Bob’s skill set—but he did know enough to get plasma into the man as soon as possible. The transfusions weren’t rejected, and after six hours the Governor had stabilized somewhat. Bob even found an old oxygen tank that was half-full, and administered it in dribs and drabs, until the Governor seemed to be holding his own. His breathing steadied and his sinus rhythm returned to normal, he settled into a semi-comatose state.

Later, in the fashion of an insurance investigator piecing together the chronology of a fatal accident, Bob Stookey had drawn crude sketches in a spiral-bound notebook of the instruments of torture left in the Governor’s living room (as well as the assumed points of entry). The puncture wound from the drill was especially problematic, in spite of the fact that it had apparently not severed any major arteries. It had come within two centimeters of a branching vein of the carotid, and Bob had worked for nearly an hour cleaning out the site. He ran out of gauze, ran out of tape, ran out of hydrogen peroxide, ran out of Betadine, and ran out of glucose. Another issue was internal bleeding—the treatment of which was, again, just out of Bob’s reach—but by the second day, Bob was convinced that the assault on the Governor’s rectum, as well as the profusion of blunt-instrument trauma to 75 percent of his body, had not resulted in any internal hemorrhaging.

Once the man was stabilized, Bob turned his attention to infection. He knew from front-line experience that infection is the silent partner in most battlefield fatalities—the number one tool of the grim reaper once a soldier is out of immediate danger—so he rifled through the supplies and ransacked the infirmary cupboards looking for antibiotics. He worried that the Governor was a perfect candidate for sepsis—considering all the rusty, filthy, oxidized tools used on him—so Bob used up every last cc of Moxifloxacin in the IV and administered hypodermically the last drops of Netromycin left in Woodbury. By the morning of the third day, the wounds had begun to close over and heal.

“I wouldn’t say he’s out of the woods yet,” Bob now reports, summing up the whole situation as he walks across the infirmary to the trash bin, into which he tosses a wad of used cotton swabs. It’s taken him nearly ten minutes to recap the whole timeline, and now he goes over to the coffee urn and pours himself another few fingers of the muddy stuff. “Put it this way, he’s on the edge of the woods, holding steady.” He turns to Lilly and holds up the coffee cup. “You want a cup o’ joe?”

Lilly shrugs. “Sure … why not?” She turns to Bruce and Gabe, who stand fidgeting by the door. “I’m not telling you guys what to do … but if it were me, I would go check the wall on the north end.”

“What are you, the Queen of Sheba now?” Bruce grumbles.

“With Martinez gone and the Governor out of commission, those guys have been deserting their posts left and right. We can’t afford to be careless right now.”

Bruce and Gabe look at each other, each one gauging the other’s reaction to being bossed around by some chick from the suburbs. “She’s got a point,” Gabe says.

“Jesus Christ …
whatever,
” Bruce grouses under his breath, then turns and storms out the door.

Gabe follows him out.

Bob comes over to Lilly and hands her a paper cup of coffee. Lilly notices again how Bob’s hands have stopped shaking. She takes a sip. “Holy crap, this is bad,” she says with a slight cringe.

“It’s wet and it’s got caffeine in it,” Bob comments as he turns back to his patient. Pulling the spiral-bound notebook from his back pocket, he nudges a chair next to the gurney, sits down, and makes a few notes. “We’re at a critical stage now,” he murmurs while he writes. “Got to keep track of how much Vicodin I’ve given him—not sure if all the drugs have ganged up on him, maybe induced the coma he’s in.”