The Walking Dead Collection (118 page)

“WE’VE WORKED TOO HARD TO BUILD WHAT WE HAVE HERE—AND I’LL BE GODDAMNED IF I’M GOING TO LET ANYONE TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME!”

The crowd roars, and Lilly has had enough. She rises to her feet and gives Austin a look. Nodding, Austin gets up and follows her out of the bleachers and around the corner of the stands.

“I’M GLAD TO SEE YOU FEEL THE SAME WAY,”
the Governor is telling the crowd now, his tone calming, his voice becoming almost hypnotic.
“FIRST WE NEED TO FIND THEM. I KNOW MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED IN THIS AREA MIGRATED TO ATLANTA WHEN THE GOVERNMENT ORDERED US ALL INTO THE CITIES … BUT THERE HAS TO BE SOMEONE HERE WHO HAS AT LEAST A PASSING FAMILIARITY WITH THE AREA. IF YOU DO—PLEASE LET ME KNOW.”

On their way out of the arena, marching through the noxious darkness of a litter-strewn exit tunnel, Lilly hears the amplified voice like a ghostly revenant echoing and reverberating through the passageway.

“THE PRISON THEY LIVE IN COULD BE FIVE MILES AWAY OR IT COULD BE FIFTEEN … AND WE’RE NOT EVEN SURE OF WHICH DIRECTION IT’S IN. THIS IS
NOT
GOING TO BE EASY.”

Lilly and Austin emerge from the tunnel and walk away from the edifice, the sound of the crackling voice fading in their ears.

“BUT IT WILL GET DONE—THEY WILL BE PUNISHED—OF THAT YOU CAN BE SURE.”

*   *   *

Lilly gets very little sleep that night. She writhes in a tangle of bedsheets next to Austin, feeling heavy and lethargic and nauseous. She’s been taking prenatal vitamins for the last week and drinking as much water as possible, and her bladder has been on high alert. At least half a dozen times through the night, she gets up and goes to the bathroom, and while sitting on the toilet she hears the eerie, unsettling, distant voices of the dead drifting on the winds out in the vast fields of scabrous pastureland west of town. The Governor had correctly noted that the biters weren’t the true source of evil in this new world, and he was right. But now Lilly stews in a jumble of contrary emotions and festering doubt. She wants to believe in the Governor—she has to—but she can’t ignore the fears kindling in her. Her skin tingles and rashes with goose bumps as she wanders her apartment, getting in and out of bed, trying not to awaken Austin.

By the time the gray light of dawn has pushed the shadows away, she has formulated a course of action. She will talk to the man—try to reason with him—he’ll listen to her if she approaches it the right way. After all, they all want the same thing: to keep Woodbury safe. But stirring up the people this way—all this gruesome saber rattling—is insane. Lilly has to talk some sense into the man. He’ll listen to her. She has to try.

She waits until midmorning—suffering through a tense breakfast with Austin—before setting out to find the Governor. Austin wants to go with her, but for some reason, she wants to do this by herself.

She tries his apartment building first but finds no one home. She goes to the infirmary and asks Bob if he’s seen the man, but Bob has no idea where Philip is at the moment. She wanders the streets for a while until she hears the sound of gunfire coming from the fences out behind the racetrack. She follows the sound.

The day has already heated up, the pale sky heavy with humidity. The high sun bakes the cracked asphalt parking lots, and the air smells of tar and manure. Lilly has already sweated through her sleeveless Georgia Tech T-shirt and ripped denim shorts, and the cramps have returned. She has no appetite, and she can’t tell which is playing havoc with her system more—the pregnancy or the fear.

On the south side of the arena, she finds Gabe and Bruce standing near a gate, smoking cigarettes, their rifles slung over their shoulders paramilitary-style. The intermittent bark of small-caliber gunfire comes from behind them, from somewhere along the big cyclone fence barricade separating the town from the walker-infested outskirts.

“Is Philip around?” Lilly asks Gabe as she approaches the two bodyguards.

“Whaddaya want?” Bruce Cooper speaks up before Gabe has a chance to say anything. “He’s busy right now.”

“Hey, lighten up,” Gabe says to the big, barrel-chested black man in sweat-damp camo fatigues. “She’s on our side.” Gabe turns to Lilly. “He’s down at the fence doing a little target practice, Lilly. Whaddaya need?”

“Just wanted to talk to him for a second,” she says. “Any luck with the search for the prison?”

Gabe shrugs. “We got guys looking up and down Macauster Lane but nothing yet. There something I can help you with?”

Lilly sighs. “Just thought I might have a little chat with the Governor, no big deal … just had a few ideas.”

Gabe and Bruce share a fleeting glance. “I don’t know. He said he didn’t want to be—”

Right then, the sound of a gravelly voice rings out from around the corner. “It’s okay—let her come on down!”

They let Lilly pass, and she strides through the gate and down a narrow sidewalk, past rows of empty handicapped parking places, until she sees a gaunt, one-armed man in an olive drab army surplus jacket standing in the middle distance near a chain-link barricade.

“An amazing organ, the human brain,” he says without looking at her. He stands next to a wheelbarrow brimming with weapons—guns of all size and caliber—and it quickly becomes obvious that he’s been shooting at walkers on the other side of the fence as though trying his hand at a grotesque shooting gallery. A dozen or so ragged bodies lie on the ground outside the chain-link barrier, the air almost blue with gun smoke. “It’s like a computer that can reboot itself,” he mumbles, selecting a small 9 mm pistol from the wheelbarrow with his left hand, raising the gun, thumbing the hammer, and aiming it. “Yet so goddamn fragile … it can crash at any moment.”

He fires at the cluster of walkers on the other side of the fence.

“FUCK!” The bullet grazes the skull of a female in a tattered, bloodstained sundress. The female staggers and stays upright and keeps banging against the fence. The Governor spits angrily. “Ain’t worth shit left-handed!” He fires again and again, until the fourth blast shatters the female’s skull in a fountain of brain matter that sends her sliding down the fence in a greasy leech trail of gore. “This ain’t gonna be easy,” Philip grumbles. “Relearning every goddamn thing in the book.” He glances at Lilly. “You come to spank me a little bit?”

Lilly looks at him. “Excuse me?”

“I could tell you weren’t exactly thrilled with my little presentation.”

“I never said—”

“I could tell by your body language, the expression on your face … you didn’t seem all that crazy about my oratory skills.”

The way he says this in his Georgia twang—putting exaggerated enunciation on the word “orrrr-a-tory”—puts her hackles up. Is he toying with her? Is he challenging her? She licks her lips and carefully chooses her words. “Okay, look … I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’m not trying to tell you how to run this town. It’s just that … there were children in that audience.”

“And you think I crossed the line when I showed them what was left of Martinez.”

Lilly takes a deep breath. “All right, yes … to be honest with you … yeah … I thought it was a bit much.”

He puts the 9 mm back in the wheelbarrow and selects a nickel-plated .357. He checks the cylinder and lines up another shot. “There’s a war coming, Lilly,” he says softly, drawing a bead on another walker out in the shade of an ancient, twisted live oak. “And I promise you one thing.” His left arm is as steady as a steel girder now. “If these people are not ready to defend our town at all costs, we will lose …
everything
.” His left index finger caresses the trigger pad. He’s getting the hang of it now. “Everything you love … everything that is dear to you, Lilly. You will—I guarantee it—
lose it
.”

He closes his right eye and peers down the barrel with his left and fires.

Lilly doesn’t jerk at the noise—not even the slightest flinch, despite the volume of the .357’s report—but instead just stands there staring at the man, thinking, feeling the cold sensation of dread turning into certainty within her. The man has a point.

On the other side of the fence, a large male biter folds to the ground in a baptism of blood and fluids. Lilly bites down hard. She senses the tiny ember of life within her, struggling, a seedling starving for sunlight.

At last Lilly says very softly, “You’re right. I’m with you—we all are—no matter what happens. We’re ready. No matter how bad it gets.”

*   *   *

That afternoon, the cramps worsen until Lilly can’t even stand up straight anymore. She lies in a fetal position on the futon in her bedroom with packing blankets over the windows to block out the harsh light of the spring sun. She spikes a mild fever—a hundred and one by dinnertime—and she starts seeing streaks of light across her field of vision like sunspots, flaring brightly with each stabbing pain in her midsection and dull throb above the bridge of her nose.

By six o’clock the chills have begun quaking through her, making her shiver convulsively under the ratty thermal blanket that Austin has brought over from his place. She feels as though she’s about to vomit but can’t quite bring anything up. She’s miserable.

Eventually she manages to climb out of bed to go to the bathroom. Her lower back twinges painfully, stiffly, as she shuffles barefoot across her hardwood floors, staggering into the john and closing herself into the reeking chamber of cracked tile and ancient linoleum flooring. She slumps down on the toilet and tries to pee but can’t even do that.

Austin has been forcing fluids into her, trying to guard against dehydration, but Lilly’s system is so out of whack she can’t bear to drink more than a few ounces of water at a time. Now she sits in the darkness of the bathroom and tries to breathe through the cramps, which send hot tremors of agony up her bowels and through her guts. She feels weak. Wrung out. Limp. Like a piano just fell on her. Is it just the stress? She looks down and blinks.

She sees the blood, as bright as strawberry jam, stippling the crotch of her panties, which now dangle down around her ankles. Her entire body goes icy cold. She has been diligent about checking her underwear for spotting, and up until now has been clean. She tries to keep calm, tries to breathe deeply, tries to think.

A loud knocking shakes her out of her daze. “Lilly?” Austin’s voice comes from outside the door, tinged with alarm. “You okay?”

She leans over and grasps the doorknob, nearly falling off the porcelain stool. She manages to crack the door open and then looks up into Austin’s glassy, terrified eyes. “I think maybe we should go see Bob,” she utters softly, her voice brittle with fear.

EIGHT

That night, Philip Blake cleans house—metaphorically
and
literally—a man on the cusp of a revolution, a warrior on the precipice of war. He wants his environment to reflect the clean, austere, sterile organization of his brain. No more disembodied voices, no more ambivalence brought on by his symbiotic second self. In the autoclave of his mind—cauterized and cleansed by his ordeal—any vestige of Brian Blake has been burned away, sandblasted from the dark crevices of his thoughts. He is a clockwork mechanism now—calibrated for one thing and one thing only:
vengeance
.

So he begins the process with the rooms of his apartment, the scene of the crime. There are still faded signs of the abomination; he is compelled to clean deeper.

Bruce brings him cleaning supplies from the warehouse, and he spends hours eradicating any remaining evidence of his torture at the hands of that lunatic bitch with the sword. He wipes down the walls of his living room with Dutch cleanser, working awkwardly with his left hand, and he carefully runs a battery-powered Dirt Devil over the matted carpet, which still bears the faded stains of his own blood. He uses a cleaning solvent on the more stubborn stains, scrubbing with a soft brush until the rug begins to shred apart. He straightens the rooms, makes the bed, bags the dirty laundry, mops the hardwood floors with Murphy’s Oil Soap, and wipes the mossy grime from the glass panels of his matrix of aquariums, paying little attention to the twitching severed heads within them.

He keeps Penny chained to the eye-bolt in the foyer while he works, every few moments making note of her presence in the other room—the soft burr of her perpetual growling, the dull rattling of her chain as she strains to escape, the faint clack of her piranha-like teeth snapping at the air with blind hunger. As he cleans around her, he finds himself being more and more bothered by that soft clacking noise.

It takes him hours to sanitize the place to his satisfaction. Working with one arm makes some of the tasks, such as opening a garbage bag or pushing a broom around corners, a little tricky. To make matters worse, he keeps seeing corners that he missed, nooks and crannies still bearing signs of his torment—sticky patches of dried blood, a discarded roll of tape, a drill bit still crusted with his tissue under a chair, a fingernail in the nap of the carpet. He cleans well into the night, until he has nearly erased every last remnant of his suffering. He even rearranges the sparse furniture to cover or hide the scars he cannot expunge—the scorch marks from the acetylene torch, the nail holes in the rug from the plywood panel.

At length, he obliterates any visible proof that torture ever occurred here.

Satisfied with the job, he collapses into his recliner in the side room. The soft percolating of the aquariums calms him, the muffled thudding and tapping of the reanimated faces bumping against the inside of the glass almost soothing to him. He stares at the bloated, sodden faces undulating behind their veils of water. He imagines the glorious moment when he takes that dreadlock-wearing bitch apart piece by piece … and eventually he drifts off.

He dreams of the old days, and he sees himself at home in Waynesboro with his wife and child—a mythology his brain has now chiseled into itself with the permanence of a stone tablet—and he is happy, truly happy, maybe the only time he felt such happiness in his life. He holds Penny on his lap in the cozy little sunroom off the kitchen in the rear of the clapboard house on Pilson Street, with Sarah Blake curled up on the sofa next to them, her head on Philip’s shoulder, as Philip reads a Dr. Seuss book aloud to Penny.