The Walking Dead Collection (89 page)

Martinez takes a step closer to the trio and starts to say something else, when the sound of a familiar voice rings out from behind him.

“I can take it from here, Martinez!”

Martinez whirls to see the Governor walking up, with Gabe and Bruce on his heels.

As he approaches, the Governor plays the role of town host to the hilt, looking all hail-fellow-well-met, except for the clenching and unclenching of his fists. “I’d like to escort our guests myself.”

Martinez gives a nod, steps back, and says nothing. The Governor pauses, gazing out at the gap left by the missing semitrailer.

“I need you at the wall,” the Governor explains under his breath to Martinez, motioning at all the carnage on the ground, “cleaning off all the biters they no doubt drug with them.”

Martinez keeps nodding. “Yes, sir, Governor. I didn’t know you’d be coming out to get them when we gave word of their arrival. They’re all yours.”

The Governor turns to the strangers—a big smile here. “Follow me, folks. I’ll give you the nickel tour.”

EIGHT

Austin gets to the arena early that night—around eight forty-five—and sits alone, down front, behind the rusted cyclone-fence barrier, on the end of the second row, thinking about Lilly. He wonders if he should have pushed harder to get her to come along with him tonight. He thinks about that look she gave him earlier that evening—the softness that crossed her hazel eyes right before she kissed him—and he feels a strange mixture of excitement and panic burning in his gut.

The great xenon arc lamps boom to life around the stadium, illuminating the dirt strip and littered infield, and the stands slowly fill up around Austin with noisy townspeople hungry for blood and catharsis. The air has the snap of a chill in it and reeks of fuel oil and walker rot, and Austin feels weirdly
removed
from it all.

Clad in a hoodie, jeans, and motorcycle boots, his long hair pulled back in a leather stay, he fidgets on the cold hard seat, his muscles sore from the afternoon’s adventures in the hinterlands. He can’t get comfortable. He gazes out across the infield at the far side of the arena and sees the dark portals filling with clusters of upright corpses, each leashed to a handler by thick chains. The handlers start leading the biters out into the jarring light of the infield, the silver follow-spots making the dead faces look almost Kabuki-like, painted, like morbid clowns.

The crowd simmers with noise and catcalls and clapping. The phlegmy growling and moaning of the walkers as they take their places on the gravel warning track blends with the rising voices of the spectators to create an unearthly din. Austin stares at the spectacle. He can’t get Lilly out of his head. The roar that’s building all around him begins to fade … and fade … and fade away … until all he can hear in his head is Lilly’s voice softly making a promise.

I’ll show you some things … the only way we’re going to survive … helping each other
.

Something pokes Austin in the ribs, and yanks him back to reality.

He jerks around and realizes an old man has taken a seat right next to him.

Sporting a nicotine-yellowed beard, an ancient face as wrinkled as wadded parchment, and a tattered black overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, he’s a feisty old Hasidic Jew who somehow managed to survive the streets of Atlanta after the Turn. His name is Saul, and he shows Austin his stained, rotting teeth as he says with a smile, “Gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight … am I right?”

“Yeah, absolutely.” Austin feels dizzy, light-headed. “Can’t wait.”

Austin turns back to the gathering of dead on the track’s periphery, and the sight of it makes him feel sick to his stomach. One of the biters, an obese male in bile-spattered painter’s overalls, sprouts a knot of small intestines from a sucking wound in his porcine belly. Another one is missing the side of her face, her upper teeth gleaming in the spotlights as she moans and tugs on her chain. Austin is quickly losing his enthusiasm for the fights. Lilly has a point. He looks down at the sticky tread beneath the bench, the cigarette butts and puddles of soft drinks and stale beer. He closes his eyes and thinks of Lilly’s sweet face, the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the slender curve of her neck.

“Excuse me,” he says, standing up and pushing himself past the old man.

“Better hurry back,” the geezer mumbles, blinking fitfully. “Show’s gonna start lickety-split!”

Austin is already halfway down the aisle. He doesn’t look back.

*   *   *

On his way across town, moving past the shadows of storefronts and the dark, boarded buildings of the main drag, Austin sees a half-dozen people coming toward him on the opposite side of the street.

Pulling his hoodie tighter, thrusting his hands in his pockets, he keeps moving, his head down. Avoiding eye contact with the oncoming group, he recognizes the Governor, who walks out in front of three strangers like a tour guide, his chest all puffed up with pride. Bruce and Gabe bring up the rear with assault rifles cradled and ready.

“—Guard station about a mile away—completely abandoned,” the Governor is saying to the strangers. Austin has never seen these people before. The Governor is treating them like VIPs. “All kinda supplies left inside,” the Governor is saying. “Been making good use of it. Night-vision goggles, sniper rifles, ammo, you seen it in action. This place wouldn’t be shit without it.”

As Austin passes on the opposite sidewalk, he gets a better glimpse of the newcomers.

The two men and one woman look battle-scarred, somber, and maybe even a little nervous. Of the two men—each of whom is clad in riot gear—the older one looks tougher, meaner, more cunning. Sandy-haired, with a grizzle of a beard, the older man walks alongside the Governor, and Austin hears him say, “You sound lucky. Where is it you’re taking us? We’re walking toward the light. What is that? A baseball game?”

Before they vanish around the corner, Austin glances over his shoulder and gets a better look at the other two strangers. The younger man wears a riot helmet and looks maybe Asian, his age hard to tell at this distance and in this light.

The woman is far more interesting to look at. Her lean, sculpted face barely visible within the shadow of her hooded garment, she looks to Austin to be in her mid-thirties, African American, and exotically beautiful.

Just for an instant, Austin has a bad feeling about these people.

“Well, stranger,” he hears the Governor saying, as they pass out of view, “it looks like we’re not the only ones lucky around here. You showed up on the perfect night. There’s a fight tonight.…”

The wind and the shadows drown the rest of the conversation as the group rounds the corner. Austin lets out a sigh, shakes off the inexplicable feeling of dread, and continues on toward Lilly’s place.

A minute later, he finds himself standing in front of Lilly’s building. The wind has picked up, and litter swirls across the threshold. Austin pauses, lowers his hood, brushes a strand of curly hair from his eyes, and silently rehearses what he wants to say.

He goes up to her door and takes a deep breath.

*   *   *

Lilly sits by her window in a cast-off armchair, a candle flickering on a side table next to her, a paperback cookbook open to the chapter on great Southern side dishes, when the sound of knocking interrupts her reverie.

She had been thinking about Josh Hamilton, and all the great meals he would have prepared had he survived, and the mixture of sorrow and regret drove away Lilly’s hunger for something better than canned meat and instant rice. She had also been thinking a lot that night about the Governor.

Lately, Lilly’s fear of the man has been morphing into something else. She can’t get the memory out of her head of the Governor sentencing Josh’s killer—the town butcher—to a horrible death at the hands of hungry walkers. With a combination of shame and satisfaction, Lilly keeps reliving the act of vengeance in her darkest thoughts. The man got what he deserved. And perhaps—just perhaps—the Governor is the only redress they have to these kinds of injustices. An eye for an eye.

“Who the hell…?” she grumbles, levering herself out of her chair.

She crosses the room on bare feet, her ripped bell-bottom jeans dragging on the filthy hardwood. She wears an olive green thermal underwear top deftly ripped at the neck in a perfect V, a sports bra underneath, rawhide necklaces and beads around her slender neck. Her flaxen locks are pulled back in a loose Brigitte Bardot parfait on the top of her head. Her funky sense of fashion—first developed in the thrift shops and Salvation Army stores of Marietta—has died hard in the post-plague world. In a way, her sense of style is her armor, her defense mechanism.

She opens the door and looks out at Austin standing in the dark.

“Sorry to keep bothering you,” he says sheepishly, one arm holding the other as though he’s about to break apart at the seams. He has his hoodie drawn tight around his narrow face, and for the briefest instant he looks like a different person to Lilly. His eyes have lost the arrogant swagger that perpetually gleams there. His expression has softened, and the real person underneath the hard shell has emerged. He levels his gaze at her. “Are you in the middle of something?”

She proffers a smile. “Yeah, you caught me on the phone with my stockbroker, moving my millions around all my off-shore hedge funds.”

“Should I come back?”

Lilly sighs. “It’s called a joke, Austin. Remember humor?”

He nods sadly. “Oh … right.” He manages a smile. “I’m a little slow tonight.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Okay … um.” He looks around the dark street. Practically the entire town has relocated to the arena for the night’s festivities. Now the wind scrapes trash along the deserted sidewalks and rustles in the defunct power lines, making an eerie humming noise. Only a few of Martinez’s men remain at the corners of the barricades, patrolling with their AR-15s and binoculars. Every now and then a searchlight sweeps its silver beam across the neighboring woods. “I was wondering, um, you know, if you’re not too busy,” he stammers, avoiding eye contact with her, “if you might be willing to, like, do a little training tonight?”

She looks askance at him. “Training?”

He clears his throat awkwardly, looks down. “What I mean is, you said you might consider showing me some things … giving me some pointers on how to … you know … deal with the biters, protect myself.”

She looks at him, and she takes a deep breath. Then she smiles. “Give me a second—I’ll get my guns.”

*   *   *

They go down by the train station on the eastern edge of town, as far away from the lights and noise of the arena as they can get. By the time they get there, Lilly has turned the collar up on her denim jacket to ward off the gathering chill. The air smells of methane and swamp gas—a mélange of rot—and the odor braces them in the moonlit shadows of the train yard. Lilly runs Austin through a few scenarios, quizzes him, challenges him. Austin has his 9 mm Glock with him, as well as a buck knife sheathed on his right thigh, tied with rawhide.

“C’mon, keep moving,” she says to him at one point, as he slowly inches his way along the threshold of the woods, his pistol at his side, gripped in his right hand, his finger outside the trigger pad. They’ve been at it for almost an hour now and Austin is getting restless. The forest pulses and drones with night noises—crickets, rustling branches—and the constant threat of shadows moving behind the trees. Lilly walks alongside him with the quiet authority of a drill instructor. “You always want to keep moving, but not too fast, and not too slow … just keep your eyes open.”

“Lemme guess—like
this,
right?” he says, a trace of exasperation in his voice. His gun has one of Lilly’s silencers attached to the muzzle. His hoodie is pulled tight around his face. A high chain-link fence runs along the woods, once serving as security for the railroad depot. A cinder-strewn trail runs along a row of derelict railroad tracks overgrown with prairie grass.

“I told you to pull your hood down,” she says. “You’re cutting off your peripheral vision.”

He does so, and keeps moving along the tree line. “How’s this?”

“Better. You always want to know your surroundings. That’s the key. It’s more important than what weapon you’re using, or how you’re holding your gun or your ax or whatever. Always be aware of what’s on either side of you. And what’s behind you. So you can make a fast getaway if necessary.”

“I get it.”

“And never ever-ever-
ever
let yourself get surrounded. They’re slow but they can horde in on you if there are enough of them.”

“You said that already.”

“The point is, you always know which way to run if you have to. Remember, you’re always going to be faster than they are … but that doesn’t mean you can’t get penned in.”

Austin nods and gazes intermittently over his shoulder, keeping track of the darkness on all sides of the trail. He turns and slowly backs along the trail for a moment, searching the shadows.

Lilly watches him. “Put your gun away for a second,” she says. “Grab your knife.” She watches him switch weapons. “Okay, now let’s say you’re out of ammo, you’re isolated, maybe lost.”

He gives her a sidelong glance. “Lilly, we’ve been through this part … like twice already.”

“That’s good, you can count.”

“C’mon—”

“And we’re going to go through it again, a third time, so answer the question. How do you hold your knife?”

He sighs, backing along the trees, his boots crunching in the cinders. “You hold it blade-down, a tight grip on the hilt.… I’m not stupid, Lilly.”

“I never said you were stupid. Tell me why you hold your knife like that.”

He keeps backing along the edge of the woods, moving absently now, shaking his head. “You hold it like that because you got one chance to bring it down hard on their skull, and you want to do it decisively.”

Lilly notices a stray timber—a piece of creosote-soaked railroad tie—lying beside the trail, about twenty feet away. She silently moves toward it. “Go on,” she says. With one quick, discreet movement, she kicks the timber across Austin’s path. “Why do you do it decisively?”