The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor (The Walking Dead Series) (22 page)

From a crouch, she spins and simultaneously swings the sword at the first walker. The sharp edge whispers through mortified neck cords and gristle, effortlessly taking off the first head.

Blood and tissue bloom in the artificial light as the head falls and rolls in the dust, and the body collapses. The woman spins. Another head jettisons. Fluids fountain into the air. The woman spins again, zinging through another putrefied neck, another cranium flying off its ragged, bloody mooring. Another spin, another decapitation … another, and another, and another … until the dust is running black with cerebrospinal fluids, and the woman gets winded.

By this point—unbeknownst to the crowd or the woman in the center of the infield—Gabe and Bruce have reached the bottom of the stairs and are racing around the corner of the gate toward the track.

The crowd starts braying—odd donkeylike barking sounds mingling with boos—and to an undiscerning ear it would be hard to tell whether they are angry, scared, or excited. The clamor seems to fuel the woman on the infield. She finishes off the last three reanimated corpses with a graceful combination of grand plié, jeté, and deadly pas de pirouette, the sword detaching crania silently, the dance a baptismal bloodbath, the earth flooding with deep scarlet-black fluids.

Right then, Gabe has crossed the warning track, followed closely by Bruce, and the two men charge toward the woman, who has her back turned. Gabe reaches her first, and he literally dives at her, as though he’s got one chance to tackle an errant running back before the player scores.

The woman goes down hard, the sword flying out of her hands. She eats dust as the two men pile up on her. A gasp forces its way out of her lungs—she has said maybe ten words since she arrived in Woodbury—and she writhes on the ground under their weight, letting out huffs of anguished breath as they shove her face against the dirt. Little plumes of dust puff off the ground, kicked up by her angry breath. Her eyes glaze over with rage and pain.

The audience is struck dumb by all this—absorbing it on a deeper level by now—and the onlookers react again in stunned silence. The hush returns to the arena and presses in on the place until the only sound is the huffing and gasping of the woman on the ground, and a faint click coming from the crow’s nest above the stands.

The Governor emerges, drunk with rage, fists clenching so hard that his fingernails begin to draw blood.

“HEY!”

A deep female voice—tobacco cured and coarsened by hardship—calls out to him from below. He pauses on the parapet.

“You son of a bitch!” The owner of the voice is a woman in a threadbare smock, sitting in a middle row between two waiflike boys in tattered clothes. She gazes up angrily at the Governor. “What the hell was
that
shit?! I don’t bring my boys out here for that! I bring them to the fights for good clean fun—that was a goddamn massacre! I don’t want my boys watching fucking
murder
!”

The crowd reacts, as Gabe and Bruce wrestle with the amazon, dragging her off the infield. The audience voices its disapproval. Mutterings rise and meld into angry shouts. Most of the people concur with the woman but something deeper drives the gathering now. Almost a year and a half of hell and starvation and boredom and intermittent terror come pouring out of some of them in a volley of shrieks and howls.

“You’ve traumatized them!” the woman cries out between the shrieking noises. “I came here looking for some broken bones, a few missing teeth—not
this
! This was way too much! ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!”

Up on the parapet, the Governor pauses and gazes down at the crowd, the rage flowing through him like a brush fire gobbling every last cell, making his eyes water and his spine run cold, and deep in the folds of his brain, a part of him breaks apart …
control
 …
control the situation … burn the cancer out … burn it out now.

From the bleachers, the woman sees him walking away. “Hey, goddamnit! I’m talking to you! Don’t walk away from me! Get back here!”

The Governor descends the stairs, oblivious to the catcalls and boos, making his departure with hellfire and vengeance on his mind.

*   *   *

Running … hurtling headlong … lost in the darkness, night-blind … they plunge through the woods, frantically searching for the safety of their camp. Three women … one in her fifties, one pushing sixty, and one in her twenties … they flail at the foliage and tangled branches, desperately trying to get back to the circle of campers and mobile homes that lie in the darkness less than a mile to the north. All these poor women wanted to do was pick some wild blackberries and now they’re surrounded. Pinned down. Trapped. What went wrong? They were so quiet, so stealthy, so nimble, carrying the berries in the hems of their skirts, careful not to speak to each other, communicating only in hand gestures … and now the walkers are closing in on them from all directions, the stench rising around them, the chorus of watery snarling noises like a threshing machine behind the trees. One woman screams when a dead arm bursts out of a thicket, grabbing at her, tearing her skirt. How did this happen so quickly? The walkers came out of nowhere. How did the monsters detect them? All at once the moving corpses block their path, cutting off their escape, surrounding them, the women panicking, their piercing shrieks rising up now as they struggle against the onslaught … their blood mingling with the dark purple juice of the berries … until it’s too late … and the woods run red with their blood … and their screams are drowned by the unstoppable thresher.

*   *   *

“They came to be known as the Valdosta Women,” Lilly says with a shiver, sitting on Austin’s fire escape with a blanket wrapped around her as she tells her cautionary tale.

It’s late, and the two of them have been sitting there for almost an hour, lingering on the platform long after the lights of the arena had begun to sequentially wink out and the disgruntled townspeople had started the long trudge back to their hovels. Now Austin sits next to her, smoking a home-rolled cigarette and listening intently to her strange story. His gut clenches with huge emotions that he can’t quite parse, can’t quite understand, but he needs to process it all before he makes his case, so he says nothing and just listens.

“When I was with Josh and the others,” Lilly goes on in a voice drained of emotion, stretched thin with exhaustion, “they used to say, ‘Be careful … and wear a sanitary napkin at all times during your cycle, and dip it in vinegar to mask the smell … or you’ll end up like the Valdosta Women.’”

Austin lets out a thin, mortified breath. “One of them was having her period, I assume.”

“You got it,” Lilly says, lifting her collar and pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Turns out the walkers can smell menstrual blood like sharks … it’s like a fucking homing beacon.”

“Jesus.”

“Lucky for me, I’ve always been as regular as clockwork.” She shakes her head with a shiver. “The twenty-eighth day rolls around after my last period and I make sure I’m indoors or at least somewhere safe. Since the Turn started, I’ve tried to keep meticulous track of it. That’s one reason I knew. I was late and I just knew. I was getting sore and swollen … and I was late.”

Austin nods. “Lilly, I just want you to—”

“I don’t know … I don’t know,” she murmurs as though not even hearing him. “It would be a big deal any other time but now in this crazy shit we’re in…”

Austin lets her trail off, and then he says very softly, very gently, “Lilly, I just want you to know something.” He looks at her through moistening eyes. “I want to have this baby with you.”

She looks at him. A long beat of silence hangs in the chill air. She looks down. The pause is killing Austin. He wants to say so much more, he wants to prove to her that he’s sincere, wants her to trust him, but the words escape him. He’s not good with words.

At last she looks up at him, her eyes filling up. “Me too.” She utters this in barely a whisper. Then she laughs. It’s a cleansing laugh, a little giddy and hysterical, but cleansing nonetheless. “God help me … I do too … I want to have it.”

They wrap their arms around each other in a bear hug, embracing like that for a long moment on that cold, windy precipice outside Austin’s back window. Their tears come freely.

After a while, Austin reaches up to her face, brushes her hair from her eyes, wipes the tears off her cheeks, and smiles. “We’ll make it work,” he murmurs to her. “We have to. It’s a big fuck-you to the end of the world.”

She nods, caressing his cheek. “You’re right, pretty boy. When you’re right, you’re right.”

“Besides,” he says then, “the Governor’s got this place under control now. He’s made this place safe for us … a home for our baby.” He tenderly kisses her forehead, feeling a certainty he’s never felt before in his life. “You were right all along about him,” Austin says softly, holding her. “The man knows what he’s doing.”

FOURTEEN

Footsteps echo down the lower corridor under the sublevels. They close in hard and fast, coming down the stairs two at a time, moving at an angry clip, getting Gabe’s and Bruce’s attention in the darkness. The two men stand outside the last stall, in the shadows thrown by bare bulbs, trying to catch their collective breaths from the struggle to put the black gal back on ice.

For such a skinny little thing, she puts up quite a fight. Welts are rising on Gabe’s ham-hock arms where the lady scratched him, and Bruce nurses a sore spot just below his right eye where the bitch caught him with an elbow. But none of it compares with the whirlwind presently coming down the narrow corridor toward them.

The figure throws a long shadow as it approaches, back-lit by the cage lights, pausing with fists balled up tight. “Well?” the thin man says, standing thirty feet away, voice echoing, his narrow face veiled in shadow. “She in there?” His voice sounds wrong—twisted and strangled with emotion. “Did you get her back in there? Is she tied up? WELL?!”

Gabe swallows hard. “We got her back in there, man—but it wasn’t easy.”

Bruce still breathes hard from the exertion, holding the delicate sword in his huge hand like a child holding a broken toy. “Bitch is crazy,” he murmurs.

The Governor pauses in front of them, all blazing eyes and stiff-armed bluster. “Whatever—just—I just—
GIVE ME THAT FUCKING THING!
”

He snatches the sword away from Bruce, who instinctively jerks with a start. “Sir?” he says in a low and uncertain voice.

The Governor huffs and grits his teeth, pacing, with the sword clenched white-knuckle tight in his hand. “Where does that bitch get off?! I
told
her—told her I’d go easy on her—just needed her to do me a fucking favor—just this one fucking favor! ONE FAVOR!” His booming voice practically pins the two other men to the wall. “She agreed to help me! SHE AGREED!!” Temples pulsing, jaw clenching, neck cords prominent, lips curling away from his teeth, Philip Blake looks like a caged animal. “Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!” He turns to the two men. He snarls with spittle flying. “We. Had. An agreement!”

Gabe speaks up. “Boss, maybe if we—”

“Shut up! SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

The corridor echoes. The silence that follows could freeze a lake over.

The Governor gets his breath back. He settles down, inhaling and exhaling, holding the sword up in a strange display that looks, at first, just for a moment, as if he’s about to attack his men. Then he murmurs to them, “Talk me out of walking in there right now and slicing her open from cunt to collar with this thing.”

The two other men have no reply for him. They are out of ideas.

The silence is glacial.

*   *   *

At that moment, another pair of footsteps—heavy, urgent, and furtive—move through the warren of underground service bays and leprous corridors beneath the racetrack. In the musty stillness of the infirmary, these footsteps—which are approaching from the south end of the arena—are still far enough away to go unheard.

In fact, right then, in the makeshift clinic, in the moments before the troubling turn of events becomes known, the overhead fluorescents pulse and waver with faltering current from the generators on the upper level. The waxing and waning of the light, as well as the incessant droning noises, are beginning to make the man named Rick nervous.

He sits on a gurney in the corner, watching Dr. Stevens wash up at the sink. The frazzled physician takes a deep breath and stretches his weary back muscles. “Okay,” the doctor says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “I’m going home to take a nap, or at least try to. Haven’t really slept much in days.”

Across the room, Alice comes out of a pantry with a hypodermic needle in one hand, a vial of Netromycin—a strong antibiotic—in the other. She preps the needle and gives the doctor a look. “You okay?”

“Yeah, fine … fine and dandy … nothing a fifth of Stolichnaya won’t fix. Alice, can you just come and get me if something big comes up?” He gives it more thought. “If you need me, that is.”

“No problem,” she says, nudging Rick’s sleeve up and rubbing alcohol on the site. She injects another fifty cc’s into him, still absently talking to the doctor. “You go get some rest.”

“Thanks,” the doctor says, walking out and shutting the door behind him.

“So…” Rick looks at her as she holds gauze on his upper arm, sealing the injection site. “What’s with you two? Are you guys…?”

“Together?” She smiles wistfully, as though amused by a private joke. “No. I think he wishes we were, and honestly, he’s a nice man. Very nice, actually. And I do like him.” She shrugs, dumping the used vial into a waste receptacle, lowering Rick’s sleeve. “But I don’t care if it
is
the end of the world … he’s too old for me.”

The man’s face softens. “So you’re…?”

“Single?” Alice pauses, giving him a look. “Yes, but I’m not looking for anyone and you’ve got a ring on your finger, so…” She stops herself. “Is your wife still alive? I’m so sorry that I—”

“She is.” He sighs. “It’s okay. And don’t worry, I’m just trying to make conversation. I’m sorry if I sounded like I was…” Another sigh. “So you’re a doctor, too? A nurse? Paramedic? Something like that?”