“What are you talking about? You’re not a pussy. Young guy your age, going on runs … kicking ass outside the safe zone.” She takes the bottle and slugs down another gulp. “You’re gonna be fine.”
He gives her a look. “‘Young guy’? What are you, a senior citizen? I’m almost twenty-three years old, Lilly.” He grins. “Gimme that thing.” He takes the bottle and swallows another gulp, shuddering at the burn. He coughs, and holds his side. “Fuck!”
She stifles a giggle. “You all right? You need some water? No?” She takes the bottle from him and takes another sip. “Truth is, I’m old enough to be your … older sister.” She belches. Then she giggles, covering her mouth. “Jesus Christ, excuse me.”
He laughs. The pain surges up his rib cage again and he flinches.
They drink and talk for a while, until Austin starts coughing again, holding his side.
“You okay?” She reaches over and moves a lock of his curly hair out of his eyes. “You want some Tylenol?”
“I’m fine!” he snaps at her. Then he lets out a pained sigh. “I’m sorry … thank you for the offer, but I’m good.” He reaches up and touches her hand. “I’m sorry I’m being so … cranky. I feel like an idiot … like a fucking invalid. How could I be so fucking clumsy?”
She looks at him. “Would you shut up? You’re not clumsy, and you’re not an invalid.”
He looks at her. “Thanks.” He touches her hand. “I appreciate it.”
For a moment, Lilly feels the darkness around her shifting and spinning. She feels a loosening in her midsection, a warmth flowing down through her from her tummy all the way to her toes. She wants to kiss him. She might as well face it. She wants to kiss him a lot. She wants to prove to him he’s not a pussy … he’s a good, strong, virile, decent man. But something holds her back. She’s not good at this. She’s no prude—she’s had plenty of men—but she can’t bring herself to do it. Instead she just looks at him, and the look on her face apparently sends a signal to him that something interesting is going on. His smile fades. He touches her face. She licks her lips, pondering the situation, wanting so badly to grab him and suck his face.
At last, breaking the tension, he says, “You gonna hog that bottle the rest of the night?”
She grins and hands it over, and he downs a huge series of gulps, polishing off a major portion of the remaining booze. This time, he doesn’t cringe. He doesn’t flinch. He just looks at her and says, “I think I should warn you about something.” His big brown eyes fill with embarrassment, regret, and maybe even a little shame. “I don’t have a condom.”
* * *
It starts with drunken laughter. Lilly roars with belly-deep guffaws—she hasn’t laughed this hard since the outbreak of the plague—and she doubles over with chortling, honking laughter until her sides ache and her eyes begin to glaze over with tears. Austin can’t help joining in, and he laughs and laughs, until he realizes Lilly has grabbed him by the front of his hoodie, and she says something about not giving a flying fuck about condoms, and before they even know what’s happening, she has yanked his face toward hers, and their lips have locked onto each other.
The liquor-fueled passion erupts. They wrap themselves around each other, and they start making out so vigorously they knock over the bottle and the lamp next to the couch and the stack of books that Lilly was meaning to read at some point. Austin slips off the edge of the sofa and slams onto the floor, and Lilly tackles him, sticking her tongue into his mouth. She tastes the sweet liquor on his breath and spicy musk of his scent and she burrows between his legs.
They bathe in the heat flowing off each other—the latent desire repressed for so many months—and they go at it for many minutes there on the floor. She feels Austin caressing the curve of her breasts under her top and the softness of her hips and the sweet spot between her legs, and she moistens and begins breathing hard and fast, flushed with excitement. At last she realizes that he’s cringing from the pain in his side again, and she sees the bandage where his hoodie has been wrenched up toward his chest, and she pulls back. The sight of it breaks her heart—she feels responsible for it—and now she wants so badly to make it all better.
“C’mere,” she says, taking his hand and lifting him back onto the couch. “Watch me,” she whispers to him as he flops down on the sofa, out of breath. “Just watch.”
She takes off her clothes, one piece at a time, not taking her eyes off him. He already has his hands on his belt, unbuckling it. She slips out of her top, gazing at him with twinkling eyes. She takes her time. She folds each article of clothing as it comes off—her jeans, her bra, her panties—transfixing him, holding him rapt, until she is standing completely nude in the slice of moonlight in front of him, her hair in her face now, her head spinning, tipsy from booze and desire. Goose bumps rash down her arms.
She goes to him without another word. Not taking her eyes off him, she sits on him. He lets out a breathy, lusty sigh as she guides him into her. The feeling is extraordinary. She sees artifacts of light and sparks in her vision as she rhythmically rocks up and down. He arches his back and thrusts up into her. He is no longer injured. He is no longer just a young dude trying to be cool.
Austin comes first, his orgasm shaking both of them. She shudders then, the tingling sensation starting at the tips of her toes, and then coursing up through her until it converges on her solar plexus and explodes. The orgasm rocks her, and nearly knocks her off him, but she holds on to his long, lustrous, curly hair, landing in a heap of sweaty satisfaction in his arms. They collapse onto each other, holding each other, letting the calm return like a tide rolling back in.
* * *
For the longest time, they lie there in each other’s arms, listening to a silence broken only by the soft syncopated symphony of their breathing. Lilly pulls a blanket over herself and comes down hard to reality. A stabbing pain starts at her temples and travels down the bridge of her nose. What has she done? As the buzz fades, a vague sense of regret knots itself in her gut, and she gazes out the window. Finally, she starts to say, “Austin, listen—”
“No.” He strokes her shoulder, and then begins to pull on his pants. “You don’t have to say it.”
“Say what?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know … something about this being just one of those things … and we shouldn’t make too much of it … and it’s just the alcohol or whatever.”
She smiles sadly. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
He looks at her and grins. “I just want to do the right thing by you, Lilly … I don’t want to pressure you or anything.”
She kisses him on the forehead.
And then they start cleaning up their mess—picking up the spilled contents of the side table, propping lamps back in place, stacking books, and putting clothes back on. Neither of them has much more to say, although both are dying to talk about it.
* * *
Sometime later, near dawn, Austin says, “You know … something’s been bothering me about that feeding room down there in those garages underneath the track.”
She looks at him, flopping back down on the couch, exhausted. “What’s that?”
He swallows air. “I don’t mean to be gross but it’s bothering me.”
“What.”
He looks at her. “Okay … so … the Governor supposedly fed the dead pilot and the girl from the helicopter to those walkers. Right?”
Lilly nods, not wanting to think about it. “Yeah. I guess so. Alas.”
He chews his lip. “Again, I don’t mean to be disgusting but I just can’t shake this feeling there was something missing.”
“And that would be?”
He looks at her. “The heads. There were no heads. Where were the fucking heads?”
TEN
Bruce Allan Cooper stands outside the garage door in the subbasement beneath the arena, a single tungsten bulb in a cage above him providing the only illumination flickering in the narrow corridor. He puts the sounds com
ing from behind the door out of his mind—how the hell does a man go at this for so long? The angry shrieks from the black girl have now deteriorated into garbled, choked, sobbing sounds.
Bruce has his big arms—as thick as stovepipes—crossed against his broad chest, and his mind keeps wandering to those pre-plague days when he ran the gas station with his dad. He would lose track of time back then as well—buried in a 427 Camaro with overhead shafts and hemispherical combustion chambers. Now he’s lost track of time again. He thinks about his old girlfriend, Shauna, and how long they used to go at it—a memory that makes him happy in a vaguely melancholy way. But this. This is different.
He’s been standing there so long his legs are starting to cramp, and he keeps shifting his weight from one leg to the other. He weighs over two hundred and fifty pounds and has the hard muscle of a stevedore, but this is ridiculous. He can only stand for so long.
For the last twenty minutes or so, Bruce has heard the low mutterings of the Governor’s voice egging on the woman, taunting her, needling at her. God only knows what he’s doing to her now.
Silence crashes down.
Bruce puts his ear to the door: What the fuck is he doing to her?
* * *
In the dark holding cell, the Governor stands over the limp figure of the woman, buckling his pants, zipping up. The tethers on the woman’s bleeding wrists are the only things holding her ravaged body off the floor. Her labored breathing fills the silence, her dreadlocks hanging across her battered face. Tears, snot, and blood mingle and drip off her swollen lips.
Catching his breath, the Governor feels good and spent and flushed with exertion as he gazes down at her. His hands are sore, his knuckles skinned from working her over, repeatedly catching his fists on her teeth. He got pretty good at strangling her to the point of putting her under, but always bringing her back at the last moment with a well-timed slap or gut-punch. He stayed away from her mouth as much as possible but lavished her other orifices with a great deal of attention. The engine inside him kept him going strong, kept him sharp and hard.
“Okay … I’ll admit it,” he says calmly to her. “I got a little carried away.”
She huffs and sniffs and holds on to consciousness by a slender thread. She can’t lift her head, but it’s obvious she wants to do so. She really wants to say something to him. The floor beneath her is puddled with fluids and blood, her long braids dangling in the mess. Her spandex shirt is riddled with gouges, torn open at her breasts. Her nude lower half—still splayed apart by the rope tethers—shimmers with sweat and shows the darker welts and abrasions of the Governor’s handiwork on her caramel-colored flesh.
The Governor stares at her. “But I don’t regret a thing. I enjoyed every minute of it. What about you?” He waits to see if she says anything. She pants and heaves and lets out a garbled combination of cough, sob, and moan. He smiles. “No? I wouldn’t think so.”
He walks over to the door and bangs on it. Then he smoothes his long hair back. “We’re through here!” he calls out to Bruce. “Let me out!”
The door squeals up on ancient rollers, letting in the harsh light of the corridor.
Bruce stands there as silent and stoic as a cigar store Indian. The Governor doesn’t even make eye contact with the man. Turning back to the woman on the floor, the Governor cocks his head and studies her a moment. She’s a tough one, no doubt about that. Bruce was right. There is no way in hell this bitch is going to talk. But now—now—the Governor notices something about her that gives him an unexpected shiver of pleasure. He has to look closely to see it—with all that hair hanging down, masking her features—but the noise it makes is very distinct. He notices it then and grins.
She’s crying.
The Governor revels in it. “You go ahead and cry it out, honey. Just get it all out. You earned it. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of. Cry your little head off.” He turns to leave.
And then he pauses when he hears something else. He turns back to her, and cocks his head again. For the briefest instant, he thinks he hears her say something. He listens closely, and it comes out of her between huffs of agony.
“I’m—not—crying for me,” she says to the floor, her head lolling heavily with pain. She has to suck in shallow breaths of air in order to get the words out. “I’m—crying—for you.”
He stares at her.
She lifts her head enough to make eye contact through the curtain of wet braids. Her tawny brown face covered with mucus and blood, the tears tracking down her swollen cheeks, she stabs her gaze into him. And all the pain and despair and anguish and loss and hopelessness of this brutal plague world is displayed there for a moment, just for an instant—on her sculpted, desecrated face—until all of it is cauterized away in the space of a breath by the woman’s pure white-hot hatred … and what is left is a mask of feral kill-instinct. “I think about all the things I’m going to do to you,” she says very evenly, almost calmly, “and it makes me cry. It scares me.”
The Governor smiles. “That’s cute. Get some rest—as much as you can, at least. A guy’s going to be in here later to clean you up, maybe give you some bandages. Maybe have a little fun himself. But mostly he’ll be getting you ready for when I come back.” He winks at her. “Just want to give you something to look forward to.” He turns and gives her a wave over his shoulder. “Later.”
He walks out.
The rolling door comes down with a metallic thud.
* * *
The sun comes up while the Governor is walking back to his place.
The air smells clean—rich earth and clover—the dark mood of the catacombs washing away in the golden light and breeze of a Georgia spring morning. The Governor sheds his hard demeanor along the way, and steps into the skin of the benevolent town leader. He sees a few early risers, and gives them neighborly waves, bidding them a good morning with the jovial smile of a town constable.
He walks along with a bounce in his step now, the master of his little fiefdom, thoughts of breaking women and controlling outsiders evaporating, stuffed back down into the lower compartments of his brain. The sounds of truck engines and nails going into new timber already fill the air—Martinez and his crew fortifying the new sections of the barricade.
Approaching his building, the Governor runs into a woman and her two children, the little boys scampering across the street.
The Governor chuckles at the kids, stepping out of their way. “Morning,” he says to the mother with a nod.
Preoccupied with her brood, the woman—a matronly gal from Augusta—shouts at the boys, “Kids, please! I told you to stop running!” She turns to Philip and gives him a demure little smile. “Morning, Governor.”
The man walks on, and he sees Bob hunched on the sidewalk near his steps.
“Bob, please,” he says as he walks over to the ragged wreck of a human being hunkered down under an awning next to the Governor’s entrance. “Get some food. I hate to see you wasting away like this. We got rid of the barter system, they’ll just give you something.”
Bob gurgles and lets out a belch. “Fine … okay … if it’ll get ‘Mother Hen’ off my back.”
“Thanks, Bob,” the Governor says, heading for his foyer. “I worry about you.”
Bob mumbles something that sounds like “Whatever…”
The Governor goes inside his building. A fly—a huge bluebottle—buzzes over the staircase. The hallways are as silent as empty crypts.
Inside his apartment, he finds his dead baby girl crouching on the floor of the living room, staring emptily down at the stained carpet, making little noises that sound almost like snores. The stench wafts around her. The Governor goes to her, filled with affection. “I know, I know,” he says to her lovingly. “Sorry I was out so late … or early, depending on how you look at it.”
She roars suddenly—a screechy growl that comes out of her like the squeal of a tortured cat—and she springs to her feet and lunges at him.
He slap
s her—hard—backhanding her, sending her slamming against the wall. “Behave yourself, goddamnit!”
She staggers and gazes up at him through milk-glass eyes. An expression like fear flutters across her livid blue face, twitches at her lipless rictus of a mouth, and makes her look oddly sheepish and docile. The sight of it makes the Governor deflate.
“I’m sorry, honey.” He wonders if she’s hungry. “What’s got you so riled lately?” He notices her bucket has overturned. “No food, huh?”
He goes over and picks up the bucket, shoving a severed foot back into it. “You need to be more careful. If you knock your bucket over, it’ll roll outta your reach. I raised you better than this.”
He looks inside the bucket. The contents have decomposed severely. The severed foot looks so bloated and livid it resembles a balloon. Furry with mold, radiating an indescribable stench that literally leeches tears from the eyes, the body parts stew in a thick, viscous substance with which pathologists are all too familiar: the yellow, bilelike goo that is essentially the signal that advanced decomposition has started—that all the maggots and blowflies have departed and left behind a mass of drying proteins.
“You don’t want that, do you?” the Governor asks the dead girl, plucking the swollen, blackened foot distastefully from the bin. He holds it with thumb and index finger, forming a pincerlike tong, and tosses it to the creature. “Here … go ahead.”
She gobbles the morsel on her hands and knees, her back arched with simian fervor. She seems to stiffen suddenly at the taste of it. “PFUH!” she grunts as she spits out the chewed particles.
The Governor just sadly shakes his head as he turns away and heads for the dining room, chastising her over his shoulder. “See … you knocked your bucket over and now your food has spoiled. That’s what you get.” He lowers his voice, adding under his breath, “Even fresh, I don’t see how you eat that stuff … really.”
He collapses into his Barcalounger, the chair creaking as it reclines. Eyelids heavy, joints aching, his genitals sore from all the exertion, he lies back and thinks about the time he actually tasted Penny’s food.
The Fall of the Governor: Part One Page 12
