The Walking Dead Collection (128 page)

Another horrible moment of silence transpires as the sword sticks rigidly out of the rotten timber like a flag planted on a summit.

“Bring him over to my private office,” the Governor finally says, gesturing at the wounded man in body armor. “We’ll have a little talk.”

*   *   *

“We’re on the same side, you and me,” the Governor says to the huge man sitting on the bench in the rear of the cargo vehicle. The airless enclosure reeks of sweat and the coppery stench of blood. A single flyspecked dome light shines down on the steel tread-plate floor as the Governor paces, his boots ringing on the iron. “You realize that, don’t ya?”

The black man slumps against the wall in his battered black Kevlar, his hands bound behind his back, his swollen face drooping forward and from side to side. He spits bloody saliva on the floor and manages to look up, his grizzled ebony visage screwed up with pain and rage. “Really?—What side is that?”

“The side of
survival,
homie!” The Governor flings his words at the man, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to provoke him. “We’re all in the same boat—fighting for our lives—am I wrong, homes?”

The black man swallows and looks into the Governor’s eyes, replying in a very low, taut voice, as though on the verge of a scream. “The name’s Tyreese.”

“Tyreese!
Ty-rreeeeeese
 … I like that.” The Governor paces. “Okay, Tyreese, let me ask you a question. And be honest.”

The black man spits again. “Whatever … I got nothing to hide.”

“We could torture the shit outta you, make your last moments a living hell, all that good stuff, but c’mon … do we really need to go through that dance again? I hurt you real bad, take you to the point of passing out, but not quite, and when you refuse to talk, I break you, flay the skin off you or something, blah-blah-blah … do we really need to go through that ridiculous shit again?”

The big man looks up and fixes his gaze on the Governor and says, “Have at it.”

The Governor slaps him. Hard. A sharp, forceful backhand slap from his gloved left hand—violent and abrupt enough to slam the back of the man’s skull against the wall behind him—making Tyreese gasp and blink as though snorting smelling salts. “Wake up, man!” The Governor maintains a cheerful, helpful, benevolent tone. “You’re not thinking this through—I’m just sayin’!”

Tyreese takes heaving breaths, trying to control his rage and blink away the pain. His enormous shoulders tremble under the battered armor. “Fuck you.”

“Tyreese, c’mon.” Now the Governor sounds disappointed, crestfallen. “Don’t make this one of those annoying situations where I gotta hurt you real bad—worse than you’ve ever been hurt. A few simple questions is all.”

Tyreese sniffs away the pain. “What do you want to know?”

“Weak spots in the prison, for instance.”

Tyreese chuckles then, a wry, weary, amused chuckle that lasts for several moments. Then he looks up. “There ain’t no weak spots—it’s a fucking prison, Sherlock!”

“How about you tell me how many people you got up in there? What kind of arsenal you got, ammunition, supplies, what kind of power you runnin’?”

The black man looks at him. “How about you eat shit and die?”

The Governor stares at the man for a moment, then winds up to hit him again—this time with a balled-up fist—but right before he swings, the sound of knocking interrupts. Somebody is tapping on the doorframe outside the truck’s tarp-covered rear hatch.

“Governor?”

It’s Lilly’s voice, and the sound of it sends a warning alarm like icy water trickling down the Governor’s spine. He chews on the inside of his cheek for a brief instant before answering, thinking it over. Maybe this is a good thing—maybe she should see this—see the brutality in the man’s dark eyes, see who they’re fighting. “Come in here, Lilly,” Philip says at last. “You can be a witness.”

The tarp folds inward, and Lilly Caul climbs up into the enclosure. She wears a tattered denim jacket, her hair pulled back from her suntanned face, which is shiny with sweat and bright with nervous tension. She keeps her distance, watching from the rear.

The big man on the bench glances up at her, breathing hard, trying to control his emotions. He looks as though he’s on the verge of exploding.

The Governor sees that the man is about to lose it, and leans down close to him, staring into his eyes. Tyreese looks up at him. The Governor smiles and speaks softly, as if to a child: “Lilly, meet Tyreese. Nice enough fella, good head on his shoulders. I was just trying to talk some sense into him, seeing if there was a way he could talk to this Rick fella, get him to wise up and surrender, so we could all avoid more bloodshed and—”

The big man lunges suddenly—putting all of his 275 pounds into the move—slamming his forehead into the Governor’s face. The head-butt, instantaneous and brutal, sounds like a board snapping, taking the Governor completely by surprise, knocking him momentarily insensate and sending him flinging backward against the wall. He slams into the struts with a gasp and then topples to the floor.

Lilly draws her Ruger and aims it at the big man. “GET BACK!” She thumbs the safety off. “GET BACK, GODDAMNIT—NOW!
SIT DOWN!!
”

Tyreese sits back down, his wrists still bound, and he exhales angrily, his face twitching with rage. His thigh drips blood from the gunshot wound, but he barely seems to notice it. A former NFL linebacker, as well as a bouncer for some of the toughest bars in Atlanta, he looks like he could snap Lilly in two. His grizzled face remains stoic as he spits blood from a split lip, looking down and shaking his head. He mumbles something inaudible.

Lilly goes over to the Governor, kneels, and helps him sit up. “You okay?”

The Governor blinks and tries to get his bearings, tries to draw breath into his lungs. His forehead is bleeding, and he coughs convulsively, but the pain braces him, galvanizes him, energizes him. “See?—See what I’m talking about?” he utters thickly. “You can’t reason with these people … you can’t …
bargain
with them … they’re fucking animals.”

Across the enclosure, the big man mutters something else, his head down.

Lilly and the Governor look up. Tyreese speaks under his breath as though talking to himself, “And the nations were angry…”

“What was that, asshole?” the Governor snarls at him. “You want to share it with the rest of the class?”

Tyreese looks up at them, his dark face filling with sullen, baleful hate. “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and it shall be the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and to them that fear my name, small and great, thou shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth … and there will be war in heaven.” He pauses and looks at them. “It’s from Revelation … not that you would know shit about the Bible. It’s what’s happening. You can’t turn back the tide; you’ve opened the door. Kiss your asses good-bye. You’ll die by your own fucking swords and you don’t even—”

“SHUT UP!” Lilly springs to her feet, lunges toward Tyreese, and presses the Ruger’s muzzle against his forehead. “JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

The Governor lifts himself to his feet, moving in between Lilly and Tyreese. “Okay, let’s dial it down now. Back off, Lilly. I got this.” He gently ushers Lilly away from the prisoner toward the rear hatch. “It’s okay. I got this. I’ll take care of it.”

Lilly, breathing hard, stands in the hatchway, re-engaging the safety and shoving the gun back into its sheath on her hip. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the Governor says, giving her a reassuring pat on the arm. He wipes the blood from his forehead. “I’ll handle this. You go and try and get some sleep.”

Lilly looks at him. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m good. I got this. Don’t worry.”

After a long pause, she glances back at the prisoner, who now sits staring at the floor. She lets out a pained sigh and makes her exit.

The Governor turns and looks at Tyreese. Very softly, under his breath, Philip Blake murmurs, “I got this.” He goes over to the bench facing the prisoner on the opposite side of the enclosure. Under the bench, in the cobwebs and litter, Philip finds a baseball bat lying next to a pile of rags. “I got this,” he says in barely a whisper as he picks up the bat, then goes over to the rear hatch and pulls down the metal door. The door clangs shut, giving them privacy. The Governor turns to the prisoner.

Philip smiles at the man. “I got this.”

*   *   *

Very few surviving members of the Woodbury militia get any sleep that night—least of all Gabe. Tossing and turning on a hard pallet in the back of his cargo truck, his rotund, barrel-shaped belly wedged between the wall and a row of supply crates, he tries to clear his mind, but his brain revs and chugs and circles back around to his lies. How many times has he lied since the plague broke out? He’s lost track. But this latest lie could truly bite him on the ass—the bitch with the hair braids is still out there. What will the Governor do when he finds out? Gabe wonders if he should bail out of this whole fracas with the prison people. He tosses and turns some more. The drone of crickets and frogs and loons outside the truck rises and swells in the dark until it sounds positively thunderous to Gabe, like a rainstorm, and he puts his hands over his ears and tries to drive the thoughts away. His stomach burns and seethes with nervous indigestion. He’s been having upper GI problems for months now—a combination of the shitty diet he’s been on and the constant stress—and now he feels stickpins stabbing him in the guts, piercing his innards. He tries to breathe evenly, deeply, and eventually the breathing exercise sends him into a half-comatose doze in which he dreams snippets of night terrors such as the black lady with the dreadlocks sneaking up on him and driving her katana sword into his abdomen just above the belly button and then swizzling it around as though trying to open a doorway in his guts, and he tries to scream in the dream but nothing but silent air will come out of him, and he wakes up right around dawn with a gasp.

Somebody is knocking on the rear hatch, and Gabe blinks at the pale light filtering through the tarp, and the sound of a deep, smoky baritone voice. “Hey! Gabe, get your fat ass up. I need you right now!”

The Governor appears in the back hatch of the cargo truck as Gabe is struggling off the pallet, clutching for his wadded turtleneck shirt, and starting to get dressed. “I’m up, boss. Whaddaya need?”

“I’ll tell you on the way. Grab your AR-15 and give me a hand with the big dude.”

*   *   *

Gabe follows the Governor across the clearing to a transport truck. Inside the passenger hold, the man named Tyreese is barely alive, curled into a fetal position on the floor of the payload bay, his body armor gone, his wrists still bound by rope and wire, his flesh battered and scourged by the Governor’s constant assault throughout the night with the baseball bat. Now the man barely draws a breath, both his eyes swollen shut, his lips cracked and bleeding, mouthing silent litanies, prayers, apocalyptic Bible quotes that nobody can hear.

The Governor and Gabe lift the man onto a bench—not an easy task, considering the 275 pounds of nearly dead weight—then they tie his wrists to the wall. The Governor covers the man with a tarp and mutters, “We’ll unwrap the present when we get there.”

Gabe looks at Philip. “Get where?”

Philip lets out a sigh. “You are one stupid motherfucker, Gabe.”

They hop out of the rear hatch and go around to the cab, Gabe climbing behind the wheel, Philip taking the passenger seat. Philip orders Gabe to take it nice and slow—no headlights—and they pull out of the clearing unnoticed by everyone but Lilly.

She appears in their path in the predawn glow like a ghost, waving them to a stop.

Gabe pulls up to her and rolls down his window. “What do you want, Lilly?”

“What are you doing? Where the hell are you going?” Lilly peers into the cab and sees the Governor. “Let me come with you. I’ll get my guns, just give me a second.”

“No!” From the passenger seat, the Governor leans forward and makes eye contact with her. “You stay here and keep an eye on things. We’re going to go and try and negotiate with them, use the big boy as leverage.”

Lilly nods slowly, reluctantly. “Okay, but be careful, you’re gonna be outnumbered.”

“You let us worry about that.” The Governor gives her a wink. “You hold down the fort.”

They take off in a cloud of dust as Lilly watches from the shadows.

She realizes right then—for some reason, with mounting dread—that Michonne’s sword was leaning against the Governor’s hip as they drove off.

*   *   *

They arrive at the prison at 6:53
A.M.,
according to the clock on the truck’s dash, barreling through a cluster of walkers wandering the tall grass east of the grounds. The truck’s grille smashes through groups of reanimated cadavers with a series of watery thuds and brittle bones cracking beneath the massive wheels. On Philip’s orders, Gabe blows the air horn once, waking anybody who might still be slumbering inside the gray stone cellblocks behind the razor wire. Gabe pulls up close to the east fence and then makes a huge U-turn. He rolls his window down and grabs the .38 Special lodged under the dash, firing out the side of the truck at a few stray biters. Heads snap back in mists of blood and brain tissue—at least a half-dozen more going down in sequence like bowling pins.

“Now back it up to the fence,” the Governor orders, peering out his side mirror.

Gabe slams on the brakes, then wrestles the stick into reverse and makes a big show of revving the engine and backing toward the chain link as if they have a pizza to deliver. A blur of movement catches the corner of Gabe’s eye in his mirror as he navigates the truck closer and closer to the fence—the inhabitants of the prison dashing across gaps between the buildings, waking each other up, scurrying for their weapons. Over the noise of the diesel engine, Gabe can hear the faint shouts of alarm.

The truck clatters to a stop less than ten feet from the outer fence.

“Let’s do this,” the Governor murmurs as he kicks open his door and climbs out.