“Un-fucking-believable,” the Governor marvels as he approaches the circle of eighteen-wheelers. Full darkness has fallen, and light from a torch illuminates the side of a Piggly Wiggly truck on which a grinning pig leers down at them in the dim light. “Hold that thought a second, Bob.” The Governor pounds his fist on the trailer. “Travis! You in there? Hey! Anybody home?”
In a cloud of cigar smoke, the rear door springs up on rusty hinges. A heavyset black man sticks his head out of the cargo hold. “Hey, boss … what can I do you for?”
“Take one of the empty trailers down to the north wall, on the double. We’ll meet you there with further instructions. Got that?”
“Got it, boss.”
The black man hops off the rear rail and vanishes around the side of the truck. The Governor takes a deep breath and then leads Bob around the circle of trucks, and then north along a side road toward the barricade. “Pretty goddamn amazing what a man will do for nookie,” the Governor muses as they stride along the dirt road.
“Ain’t it?”
“These girls you came in with, Bob, Lilly and … what’s-her-name?”
“Megan?”
“That’s the one. That little thing’s a firecracker. Am I right?”
Bob wipes his mouth. “Yeah, she’s a cute little gal.”
“Kinda flirty … but hey. Who am I to judge?” Another lascivious grin. “We do what we do to get by. Am I right, Bob?”
“Right as rain.” Bob walks along for a moment. “Just between you and me … I’m kinda sweet on her.”
The Governor looks at the older man with an odd mixture of surprise and pity. “This Megan gal? Well, that’s great, Bob. No shame in that.”
Bob looks down as he walks. “Love to spend the night with her just once.” Bob’s voice goes soft. “Just once.” He looks up at the Governor. “But, hell … I know that’s just a pipe dream.”
Philip cocks his head at the older man. “Maybe not, Bob … maybe not.”
Before Bob can muster a response a series of explosive clanging noises go off ahead of them. Brilliant sunbursts from the klieg lights suddenly tear open seams in the distant darkness from opposite corners of the wall, the silver beams sweeping out across the adjacent fields and tree lines, illuminating the oncoming horde of walking corpses.
The Governor leads Bob across the post office lot to the crane gantry, on which Martinez now prepares to give the order to open fire.
“Hold your fire, Martinez!” The Governor’s booming voice gets everybody’s attention.
Martinez gazes nervously down at the two men. “You sure about this, chief?”
The rumble of a Kenworth cab rises up behind the Governor, accompanied by the telltale beeping noises of a semi moving in reverse. Bob glances over his shoulder and sees an eighteen-wheeler backing into position by the north gate. Exhaust vapors pulse from the truck’s vertical stack, and Travis leans out the driver’s side window, chewing a cigar and wrestling the steering wheel.
“Gimme your walkie!” The Governor gestures at Martinez, who is already descending the metal ladder affixed to the side of the crane. Bob watches all this from a respectable distance behind the Governor. Something about all this mysterious business makes the older man uneasy.
Outside the wall the meandering mass of zombies closes the distance to two hundred yards.
Martinez reaches the bottom of the ladder and hands over the two-way. The Governor thumbs the switch and barks into the mouthpiece. “Stevens! Can you hear me? You got your radio on?”
After a beat of crackling static the doctor’s voice replies, “Yes, I hear you and I don’t appreciate—”
“Shut up for a second. I want you to bring that tub-of-lard guardsman, Stinson, to the north wall.”
The voice crackles: “Stinson is still recovering, the man has lost a lot of blood in your little—”
“Don’t fucking argue with me, Stevens … JUST FUCKING DO IT NOW!”
The Governor clicks the radio off and throws it back to Martinez.
“Open the gate!” the Governor shouts at two workmen, who stand nearby with pickaxes and anxious expressions, awaiting orders.
The two workmen look at each other.
“You heard me!” the Governor bellows. “Open the goddamn gate!”
The workmen follow orders, throwing the bolt at one end of the gate. The gate swings open, letting in a gust of cold, rancid wind.
“You ask me, we’re pushing our luck with this routine,” Martinez mutters under his breath, slamming an ammo magazine into his assault rifle.
The Governor ignores the comment and hollers, “Travis! Back it into position!”
The truck shudders and beeps and rattles backward into the opening.
“Now put the ramp down!”
Bob watches, completely vexed by the proceedings, as Eugene hops out of his cab with a grunt and marches around behind the truck. He throws open the vertical door and lowers the ramp to the pavement.
In the glare of spotlights the zombie contingent approaches to within a hundred yards.
Shuffling footsteps draw Bob’s attention back over his shoulder.
From the shadowy center of town, in the flicker of burning trash barrels, Dr. Stevens emerges with his arm around the wounded guardsman, who hobbles along with the lethargic gait of a stroke victim.
“Watch this, Bob,” the Governor says, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the older man, and then, with a wink, adds, “Beats the hell outta the Middle East.”
FOURTEEN
The screams inside the empty trailer, amplified by the corrugated metal floor and steel walls, build and build, an aria of agony, which compels Bob, standing behind the crane, to look away, as the moving cadavers shamble toward the opening, drawn to the noise and smell of fear. Bob needs a drink more than ever now. He needs a lot of drinks. He needs to soak in the booze until he’s blind.
At least ninety percent of the herd—all shapes and sizes, in varying degrees of disintegration, faces contorted with scowling bloodlust—press toward the rear of the trailer. The first one trips on the foot of the ramp, falling face-first with a wet splat on the tread. Others follow closely, pushing their way up the incline, as Stinson shrieks inside the enclosure, his sanity torn to shreds.
The portly guardsman, bound to the front wall of the trailer with packing straps and chains, pisses himself, as the first walkers shuffle in for the feeding.
Outside the trailer, Martinez and his men keep an eye on the stragglers along the barricade, most of them milling about aimlessly in the glare of tungsten spotlights, cocking their gray faces and glazed eyes up at the night sky as though the screaming noises might be coming from the heavens. Only about a dozen of the dead miss this opportunity to feed. The men on the 50-calibers take aim, awaiting orders to blow the stragglers away.
The trailer fills up with specimens—the Governor’s growing collection of lab rats—until nearly three dozen walkers have swarmed Stinson. The unseen feeding frenzy ensues, and the screaming corrupts into watery, gagging death cries, as the last zombie staggers up the ramp and vanishes inside the mobile abattoir. The noises issuing out the back of the trailer now become almost feral, Stinson reduced to a mewling, squealing head of stock in a slaughterhouse, rendered by the ragged teeth and nails of the dead.
Out in the cold darkness Bob feels his soul contracting inward like an iris closing down. He needs a drink so badly his skull throbs. He barely hears the booming voice of the Governor.
“All right, Travis! Go ahead and pull trap now! Go ahead and close it down!”
The truck driver cautiously creeps around behind the vibrating death trailer and grabs for the rope hanging down from the lip of the door. He yanks it hard and fast, and the vertical gate slams down with a rusty squeak. Travis quickly latches the lock, and then backs away from the trailer as if from a time bomb.
“Take it back to the track, Travis! I’ll meet you there in a minute!”
The Governor turns and
walks over to Martinez, who stands waiting on the lower rails of the crane. “All right, you can have your fun now,” the Governor says.
Martinez thumbs the radio send button. “Okay, guys—take the rest of them out.”
Bob jumps at the sudden roar of heavy artillery, the noise and sparks from the .50-calibers lighting up the night. Tracer bullets streak hot pink in the dark, crisscrossing the beams of magnesium-bright klieg lights, engaging their targets in plumes of black, oily blood mist. Bob turns away once again, not interested in seeing the walkers taken apart. The Governor, however, feels differently.
He climbs halfway up the crane ladder so he can see the festivities.
In short order the armor-piercing tracers eviscerate the stragglers. Skulls blossom, florets of brain matter spitting up into the night air, teeth and hair and cartilage and bone chips shattering. Some of the zombies remain upright for many moments, as the rounds spin them in macabre death jigs, arms flailing in the stage light. Bellies burst. Glistening tissue ejaculates in the glare.
The salvo ceases as abruptly as it had begun, the silence slamming hard in Bob’s ears.
For a moment the Governor savors the aftermath, the dripping sounds fading on the distant echoes of gunfire dying in the trees. The last few walkers still standing sink to the earth in heaps of bloody pulp and dead flesh, some of them now unrecognizable masses of vaguely human meat. Some of these mounds exude vapors in the chill air, mostly from the friction of the bullets and not from any kind of body heat. The Governor climbs down from his perch.
As the Piggly Wiggly truck pulls away with its load of moving cadavers, Bob swallows the urge to vomit. The ghastly noises from inside the trailer have diminished somewhat, Stinson reduced to a hollowed-out trough of flesh and bone. Now only the muffled smacking sounds of zombies feeding inside the enclosure fade away as the truck rattles toward the racetrack lot.
The Governor comes over to Bob. “Looks like you could use a drink.”
Bob cannot muster a reply.
“C’mon, let’s go have a cool one,” the Governor suggests, slapping the man on the back. “I’m buying.”
* * *
By the next morning, the north lots have been cleaned up and all evidence of the massacre has been erased. People go about their business as though nothing ever happened, and the rest of that week passes uneventfully.
Over the next five days a few walkers drift into the range of the .50-calibers—drawn by the commotion of the hordes—but mostly things remain quiet. Christmas comes and goes with very little ceremony. Most of the inhabitants of Woodbury have given up on following the calendar.
A few feeble attempts at holiday cheer seem to exacerbate the grim proceedings. Martinez and his men decorate a tree in the courthouse lobby, and they put some tinsel on the gazebo in the square, but that’s about it. The Governor pipes Christmas music through the racetrack PA system, but it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. The weather stays fairly mild—no snow to speak of, with temperatures remaining in the upper forties.
On Christmas Eve, Lilly goes to the infirmary to have some of her injuries checked out by Dr. Stevens, and after the examination, the doctor invites Lilly to stick around for a little impromptu holiday party. Alice joins them, and they open cans of ham and sweet potatoes—and they even break out a case of Cabernet, which Stevens has been hiding in the storage closet—and they toast things like the old days, better times, and Josh Lee Hamilton.
Lilly senses that the doctor is watching her closely for signs of post-traumatic stress, maybe depression or some other kind of mental disturbance. But ironically, Lilly has never felt more focused and grounded in her life. She knows what she has to do. She knows that she cannot live like this much longer, and she is biding her time until an opportunity to escape presents itself. But maybe on some deeper level it is Lilly who is doing the observing.
Maybe she is subconsciously looking for allies, accomplices, collaborators.
Halfway through the evening, Martinez shows up—Stevens invited the young man earlier that day to stop by for a drink—and Lilly learns that she is not the only one here who wants out. After a few cocktails, Martinez gets talkative, and reveals that he fears the Governor will eventually lead them off a cliff. They argue about which is the lesser of two evils—tolerating the Governor’s madness or drifting out in the world without a safety net—and they come to zero conclusions. They drink some more.
At length, the evening deteriorates into a drunken bacchanal of off-key caroling and reminiscences of holidays past—all of which depresses everyone even further. The more they drink, the worse they feel. But amid all the lubricating Lilly learns new things—both trivial and important—about these three lost souls. She notices that Dr. Stevens has the worst singing voice she has ever heard, and that Alice has a major crush on Martinez, and that Martinez pines for an ex-wife in Arkansas.
Most importantly, though, Lilly gets a sense that the four of them are bonding in their collective misery, and that bond might serve them well.
* * *
The next day, at first light—after spending the night passed out on a gurney in the infirmary—Lilly Caul drags herself outside, blinking at the harsh winter sunshine hammering down on the deserted town. It’s Christmas morning, and the pale blue sky seems to punctuate Lilly’s sense of being trapped in purgatory. Lilly’s skull throbs painfully as she buttons her fleece jacket up to her chin and then makes her way eastward down the sidewalk.
Very few residents are up at this hour, the advent of Christmas morning keeping everybody hunkered inside. Lilly feels compelled to visit the playground on the east edge of the town. The desolate patch of bare ground lies behind a grove of denuded crab apples.
Lilly finds Josh’s grave, the sandy dirt still freshly packed in a large mound next to his cairn. She kneels on the edge of the grave and lowers her head. “Merry Christmas, Josh,” she utters into the wind, her voice hungover, thick and rusty with sleep.
Only the rustle of branches serves as a response. She takes a deep breath. “Some of the things I’ve done … the way I treated you … I’m not proud of.” She swallows the urge to cry, the sorrow rising up in her. She bites off her tears. “I just wanted you to know … you didn’t die in vain, Josh.… You taught me something important … you made a difference in my life.”
Lilly looks down at the dirty white sand beneath her knees and she refuses to cry. “You taught me not to be scared anymore.” She mutters this to herself, to the ground, to the cold wind. “We don’t have that luxury these days … so from now on … I’m ready.”
Her voice trails off, and she kneels there for the longest time, unaware that her right hand has been digging into the side of her leg through her jeans, hard enough to break the skin and draw blood.
“I’m ready…”
* * *
The turning of the New Year closes in.
Late one night, beset with the melancholy mood of the season, the man known as the Governor locks himself into the back room of his second-floor apartment with a bottle of expensive French champagne and a galvanized pail brimming with an assortment of human bodily organs.
The tiny zombie chained to the wall across the laundry room sputters and snarls at the sight of him. Her once cherubic face now chiseled with rigor mortis, her flesh as yellow as rotten Stilton, she peels her lips back away from rows of blackened baby teeth. The laundry room with its bare bulbs hanging down and exposed fiberglass insulation—impregnated now with her stench—reeks of foul, infected oils and molds.
“Calm down, sweetheart,” the man with several names murmurs softly as he sits down on the floor in front of her, setting the bottle down on one side of him and the bucket on the other. He pulls a latex surgical glove from his pocket and works his right hand into it. “Daddy’s got some more goodies for you, keep your tummy full.”
He fishes a slimy, purplish-brown lobe from the bucket of entrails and tosses it to her.
Little Penny Blake pounces on
the human kidney that has landed with a wet splat on the floor in front of her, her chain stretching to its limit with a clank. She clutches the organ with both of her little hands and gobbles the human tissue with feral abandon until the bloody bile runs between her tiny fingers and paints her face with a stain the consistency of chocolate sauce.
“Happy New Year, sweetheart,” the Governor says and pries at the champagne cork. The cork resists. He worries at it with his thumbs until the thing pops, and a stream of golden bubbly percolates over the rim and onto the worn tiles. The Governor has no idea if it is actually New Year’s Eve. He knows it’s imminent … might as well be tonight.
He stares at the puddle of champagne spreading on the floor, the tiny foam of carbonation vanishing into the seams of grout. He finds himself casting his thoughts back to New Year’s celebrations of his childhood.
In the old days he looked forward to New Year’s Eve for months. Back in Waynesboro he and his buddies would get a whole pig delivered on the thirtieth and start it slow-roasting in the ground behind his parents’ place, lining the hole with bricks—Hawaiian luau style—and they would have a two-day feast. The local bluegrass band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, would play all night long, and Philip would get really good weed, and they would party through the first and Philip would get laid and have a grand old time with—
The Governor blinks. He cannot remember if Philip Blake used to do this on New Year’s Eve or if it was Brian Blake who did this. He cannot remember where one brother ends and the other begins. He stares at the floor, blinking, the champagne reflecting a dull, milky, distorted reflection of his own face, the handlebar mustache as dark as lampblack now, the eyes deep set and glinting with cinders of something like madness. He looks at himself and sees Philip Blake staring back. But something is wrong. Philip can also see a ghostly overlay superimposed across his face, an ashen, frightened simulacrum called “Brian.”
The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury Page 23
