The tide of the battle has turned, the denizens of the prison now scattering for cover and the most expedient ways to escape.
* * *
Lilly and Austin follow the last contingent over the fallen fence and into the prison yard, their heavy boot-steps making the chain link jangle. They move quickly with their guns cocked and ready, hot on the heels of two other men, the sun in their eyes. Lilly has a pistol in each hand, her Remington strapped and bouncing on her shoulder. Austin hyperventilates as he runs, a combination of fear, exhaustion, and rage.
The passage of time seems to slow, now moving in milky, syrupy impressions, as Lilly and Austin reach the closest building—thirty feet away from the Governor’s tank—and slam their backs against the stone wall. Lilly’s heart races. Even amid the adrenaline rush of storming the grounds, she feels a surreal kind of claustrophobia inside the massive compound. Three-story cellblocks press down on them from all sides, throwing long shadows on the yards. The air has the acrid smell of overloading circuits and burning rubber. Muffled voices and the sound of running emanate from within the walls.
A moment later, Lilly jerks at a flash of movement between two buildings, raises one of the Rugers, fires a single shot at the blur, and hits nothing but stucco wall. She sees the puff of plaster dust atomizing in the shadows twenty yards away. She glances across the yard at the tank. She sees the Governor climbing out of the iron beast with a Tec-9 pistol gripped in his gloved hand. Then she sees something else in the distance behind the Governor that makes her spine go cold and her throat go as dry as sawdust.
Way out across the adjacent meadow—the earth now scarred and rutted with tire tracks, scorched and cratered from the grenade blast, and littered with the carnage of the undead—Lilly can see the distant forest. Up along the ridge, behind colonnades of ancient oaks and dense curtains of foliage, the woods teem with innumerable ragged figures birthing themselves from the shadows, pushing their way out of the undergrowth—hundreds of them—emerging stiff-legged and ravenous into the daylight. There are so many of them now that they resemble, from this distance, a black tide—a putrefied dark wave the width of a soccer field—slowly unfurling and rolling down the hill toward the noise and confusion of the prison. In that horrible instant, over the course of a single electrical impulse firing in her brain, Lilly makes a spontaneous calculation. Within a matter of minutes—ten, perhaps, maybe fifteen at the most—the prison will be overrun.
* * *
The Governor climbs down the tank’s steel hull and takes a supervisory position behind the stern of the Abrams. Most of the surviving inhabitants of the prison have now vanished inside cellblocks and outbuildings, but a few of the sturdier souls have remained outdoors, putting up halfhearted resistance, the intermittent crackle of suppressing fire and panicky shouts making Philip Blake twitch and flinch as he points at one of his soldiers.
“HEY! YOU!” The Governor signals to a tall, rangy man with a shaved head who is busily firing his assault rifle at the barred windows of the nearest building, a man Philip has seen on Martinez’s crew before, a man whose name Philip never bothered to learn. “C’mere!”
The man ceases firing and trots over to the Governor. “Yessir?”
The Governor speaks with jaws clenched, his wounds tingling, the voices in his head plaguing him now like static crackling on a shortwave radio, distant signals from a ghostly transmission interfering with his thoughts. “There ain’t many of them left!” he shouts at the bald man. “I want you to gather a few of your men—are you fucking listening to me?”
A manic nod from the bald man. “Y-yessir—yes.”
“I want you to take your men inside—understand?—you’re looking for anyone hiding or trying to hold out inside—you follow me?”
“Yessir … and you want us to … what?”
The Governor snarls at him. “I want you to fucking read them a fucking bedtime story.… YOU FUCKING IDIOT, I WANT YOU TO WASTE THEM!”
With a nod, the man with the shaved head whirls and runs off in the direction of the other gunman. The Governor watches him for a moment, twitching, his blood-spattered face prickling hotly, his wounded jaw throbbing and feverish. He shakes off the voice reverberating behind his thoughts and murmurs to himself, “Only a matter of time now … so shut the fuck up … leave me alone.”
He sees a shadow flit between two buildings dead ahead, fifty yards away, a small group of survivors huddled in an alcove, arguing, two men and a woman … and he ducks down behind the tank, raising Jared’s Tec-9 and taking aim. He gets the woman in his front sight and squeezes off three quick blasts—the recoil nearly dislocating his shoulder—the distant puff of blood mist across the alcove invigorating to him, the sight of the woman dropping to the ground like a blast of smack in his veins.
The Governor nods with satisfaction, but before he can draw another breath, he sees the other two figures—an older man and a younger man, both clad in body armor, maybe father and son—suddenly dart out of the hiding place and make a run for it. They pass out of range quickly, charging toward the motorcade of battered prison vehicles parked along the west side of the grounds. The Governor notices three of his gunmen milling around the base of the guard tower to his left, and he calls out to them. “TAKE THEM BASTARDS DOWN RIGHT NOW!”
Within seconds, the men by the tower open up on the twosome, a barrage of automatic fire bursting like a drumroll—plumes of silver sparks flickering in the daylight—filling the air with ugly noise.
The Governor sees the cross fire engulf the two fleeing men, and a direct headshot knocks the younger man off his feet. The kid in the armor sprawls to the concrete in a swath of blood as dark as crude oil. The older man screeches to a halt and goes back to the younger man.
The gunmen hold their fire now as the older one tries to help the younger one up—it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on out there in the haze of blue smoke and dust, but it appears to the Governor that the older one is sobbing—a father stroking a dying son—cradling the younger man’s ruined skull in his lap, and then letting the wave of agony come out in sobs.
The older man weeps and weeps now on the ground, holding the boy, oblivious to the dangers around him, presumably beyond caring about his own life. The whole thing makes the Governor want to puke.
Philip marches over to the militia members standing sheepishly by the tower, their guns lowered, their stricken gazes locked on the death scene across the yard. “What the fuck is your problem?” the Governor demands as he approaches the first gunman.
“Oh God … I … Oh God.” The man in the Massey Ferguson hat and long sideburns—he goes by the moniker Smitty—once chatted with the Governor at Woodbury’s Main Street Tavern about shooting turkeys for Thanksgiving. Now the man’s grizzled, wind-chapped face has fallen, his red-rimmed eyes welling with tears. “I just … I killed a boy.” He fixes his anguished gaze on the Governor. “I just killed that man’s boy like he was some kinda sick animal.”
The Governor throws a glance across the dusty yard and sees the older man—grizzled, graying temples, late fifties, maybe early sixties—on his knees, slumped over the boy, tears streaming down the geezer’s face. From the jut of the man’s jaw, his pomaded iron-gray hair, and the wind-burned lines around his eyes, he looks like a laborer or farmer, but with a certain gravitas, which makes the crying all the more incongruous. The sight does nothing for the Governor, makes no impression other than a slight tremor of alarm that nobody’s blowing this wrinkled fuck away. The Governor turns back to Smitty and says, “Listen to me, listen, this is important—you listening?”
The man named Smitty wipes his face with the back of his arm. “Y-yessir.”
“How many of our people did that so-called ‘boy’ kill with his fucking rifle? Huh? HOW MANY?!”
Smitty looks down. “Okay … I get it.”
The Governor puts his gloved hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezes. “You should be proud that you killed him!” Then a gentle shove. “C’m
on! Get your ass in gear—this isn’t over yet!”
“Okay,” Smitty says with a terse nod. “Okay.” He looks down at his rifle and slams another shell in the breach with a grunt, his voice barely a whisper now. “Whatever.”
The Governor has another thought and starts to say something else when a streak of movement off to his left crosses his peripheral vision. He snaps his head toward the nearest building and sees four figures darting out of a side exit. At first, the Governor just points and starts to say, “There!—THERE—HERE COMES—!”
But his words stick in his throat when the identity of two of these figures suddenly registers over the space of a heartbeat.
He recognizes the big, handsome man named Rick—the self-proclaimed leader—limping furiously across the grounds, his tattered prison coveralls now bunched in the midsection with heavy bandages where he was shot. He trundles along with a woman on one flank, a little boy of about nine on the other. Rick helps the woman leap over a pile of wreckage as though she’s sick. Plunging through the fogbank of dust, wide-eyed and frantic, they look as if they’re making a break for the far gate on the northwest corner of the yards. Following closely on their heels, the fourth figure—a younger woman in a stained white lab coat—carries a lever-action Winchester and already has the weapon raised to her eye.
The Governor recognizes Alice and suddenly cries out to his minions. “TAKE THAT BACKSTABBING BITCH DOWN!”
* * *
Thirty yards to the east, under the overhang of Cellblock D, Lilly Caul sees the encounter developing across the wasted grounds, the first bark of automatic fire shattering the temporary lull in the assault, raising hackles on her neck—and she swings her gun up—forgetting, just for a moment, the oncoming horde of undead.
Already the battalion of walking corpses, as densely packed as a stockyard full of cattle, have made their way down the far slopes of the meadow and have begun shuffling and trundling as one great undulating mob of rotting paralytics across the tall grass of the adjacent pasture. They look from this great distance like an invasion force, an army of dead centurions hailing from some hellish necropolis—arms outstretched, banging into each other, heads lolling, eyes like yellow reflectors catching the pale sunlight—coming into clearer and clearer focus as they approach the outer fences. From Lilly’s vantage point, their myriad varieties of age, shape, size, gender, and degree of decomposition are all still a blur, but they’re getting close enough to smell and hear. The rancid aroma of gaseous decay and incessant choruses of toneless moaning rise on the gentle breezes of the afternoon.
Distracted by the appearance of Rick Grimes, his family, and Alice, her adrenaline spiking with equal parts panic and rage, Lilly has lost track of the terrible onslaught of the dead and now grabs Austin with her free arm. “Look!” She pulls him toward the skirmish across the grounds. “Look who it is! Jesus Christ, Austin—COME ON!”
They dash across the leprous cement of a defunct basketball court, their weapons raised and ready to fire. Dead ahead, about twenty yards away, half a dozen militiamen fire on the fleeing family.
“Go!—Keep going!—RUN!!” Alice cries out at Rick, and then fires off a series of wild shots.
Lilly bounds headlong toward the fracas, her teeth cracking with tension. She sees Alice making a feeble attempt to keep firing long enough to give the Grimes family a chance to flee. But the nurse is quickly overcome. One of the rounds chews through her leg, knocking her feet out from under her, another one grazing her shoulder and sending her to the ground.
Lilly gets close enough to see the Governor marching toward the nurse.
Alice looks up with blood on her face, seeing three separate men approaching her commando-style with muzzles raised, and she spits. “FUCK YOU!”
She fires one last time, hitting one of the men next to the Governor in the gut.
“FUCKING BITCH!” The Governor lunges at her and kicks her rifle from her hands.
Lilly approaches from the opposite direction with her Remington ready to fire, and she aims it down at the fallen nurse. She makes eye contact with Alice, and Alice holds her gaze, and for the briefest moment, the two women stare silently at each other. Lilly can barely recognize the woman who was once her friend and confidante. Alice spits blood at Lilly, and Lilly feels a twinge of rage like a match tip igniting in her guts.
In her peripheral vision, she can see the Grimes family fleeing toward the far gates. A shot rings out—a near miss—sparking off the concrete at Rick’s heels.
The one-armed Governor looms over the fallen nurse and jacks the cocking mechanism on his Tec-9 by yanking it down against his belt with a loud metallic click. His teeth are showing. He breathes thickly through his nostrils as Alice closes her eyes and looks away. She’s ready to die. The Governor aims the Tec-9 at her face and growls softly at her, “… traitor…”
The single burst from the Tec-9 makes Lilly jump as the back of Alice’s head erupts in a wet red particle bomb across the concrete.
“Take them out,” the Governor says softly to Lilly, but Lilly doesn’t hear him at first.
“What?” She looks up from the murdered nurse. “What was that?”
The Governor scowls at Lilly. “I said take those motherfuckers out.” He points the pistol’s muzzle at the fleeing family. “NOW!”
Lilly assumes a shooting stance and squares her shoulders and sucks in a breath, raising the weapon toward the three figures fleeing in the distance. They are twenty-five yards away from freedom.
Over the course of that next second and a half, before she puts the scope to her eye, Lilly glimpses several things out of the corner of her eye that register like screaming warning alarms in her brain. She sees the other members of the Governor’s army whirling toward the devastated cyclone fence, some of them backing away, wide-eyed and jittery. Outside the mangled remnants of chain-link barricade, the tsunami of walking dead rolls toward the prison.
Closing the distance to about fifty yards now, the leading edge of the herd looks like a nightmarish chorus line of encephalitic monsters dressed in ragged civvies—moldering suits, tattered dresses dark with bile, and denim overalls hanging in shreds—their autonomic yellow stares fixed on the fresh meat scurrying across the grounds. The stench engulfs the general area, mingling with the dust devils, forming a fogbank of death scent. The dissonant symphony of mortified vocal cords rises to the level of a psychotic marching band, now throbbing and droning with the off-key music of their insatiable moaning.
Lilly focuses on the task at hand, and puts the scope to her eye.
For a single, frenzied instant she calculates the distance and the drop rate, and all at once she registers the fleeing woman, now running one half step behind Rick Grimes and holding something close to her chest.
Through the cross hairs, the woman’s cargo looks like ordnance of some kind—a bomb, a bundle of grenades, a short-barreled automatic weapon wrapped in cloth—so Lilly puts the woman in her sights.
She holds her breath, puts the center hairs on the woman, and quickly, decisively yanks the trigger.
The recoil punches Lilly’s shoulder, and one nanosecond later she sees the woman come apart in the scope’s telescopic lens.
In the narrow, magnified field of vision it looks like a silent movie death, the woman’s back opening up in a bloom of scarlet, her body thrown off stride, the impact of the .308 round tearing through her body as well as her mystery package—sending fragments of bone, tissue, blood mist, and fabric into the air.
The woman sprawls to the ground on top of the bundle, a tiny object flopping out of a blanket, visible now in the scope’s tunnel vision. Lilly freezes. The scope adheres to her eye socket as though dipped in liquid nitrogen. She stares at the object.
Lilly’s midsection goes cold as she stares and stares at that pink, smooth object visible in the upper right quadrant of the scope.
The distant howl of anguish from the man named Rick reaches Lilly’s ears. The man scuttles to a stop, gazing o
ver his shoulder in absolute horror at his fallen wife. He stands paralyzed for a moment, staring at the fatally wounded woman and the object sticking out from under her chest. The boy reaches the fence and turns to see what happened, and the man waves him on. “Don’t look back, Carl! JUST KEEP RUNNING!!”
The boy darts toward a flatbed truck parked near the northwest gate, as more shots ring out from some of the other militiamen, but now the man named Rick lunges toward the boy, grabs him. “NO, CARL! WE WON’T MAKE IT TO THE TRUCK—!” The man spins the child in the other direction. “WE’VE GOTTA GO THIS WAY!—KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN AND, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T STOP RUNNING!”
Lilly barely notices the man and boy changing course and heading back along the fence toward the opposite gate, which is now crowded with the first wave of walking dead, the leading edge of the herd shambling over the chain-link wreckage and pouring into the prison with mouths working and dead arms reaching and flailing. They come one by one through the massive gap in the fence, fanning out across the yards in their slow-motion stampede, hungry yellow eyes scanning, but Lilly is beyond caring.
She can’t tear her gaze from the scope, or stop staring at the tiny, fleshy object sticking out from under the fallen wife, an object that reveals itself to be an arm.
A baby’s arm.
* * *
At first, the Governor doesn’t notice Lilly’s catatonic stupor. He’s preoccupied with the quickly shifting dangers coming at them—the first wave of corpses now less than fifty yards away, shuffling awkwardly across the cracked cement toward the surviving militia—spreading their stench and noise like a pox on the barren grounds.
The Governor can see Rick Grimes and his boy reach the gap between the two demolished fences and weave through the oncoming horde, the man firing into the heads of the closest creatures, making an opening through which they can escape, creating quite a racket. “Crazy fucks,” Philip grumbles to his men. “Don’t waste any more bullets—the biters will get them before we can.”
The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor: Part Two Page 21
