Lilly jerks backward, raising the gun and knocking over a display of dog food.
She falls on her ass, cans clattering to the floor all around her, the air knocked out of her lungs, and she starts firing. The clap of silenced gunfire sparks and flares and reverberates through the tight space, half the rounds going high, shattering fluorescent tubes. But half the slugs go into the balding head of the pharmacist.
Cranial bones shatter and fly, blood and tissue spattering the empty shelves. The giant biter falls like an old oak, landing directly on Lilly. She screams and writhes beneath the reeking dead weight of the corpse, the stench unbearable. Finally she rolls free.
For several frenzied, silent moments, she crouches there on the floor next to the fallen biter. She swallows back the repulsion, the urge to flee this hideous dark store, the voice in the back of her head telling her she’s crazy, she’s insane to be risking her life for this ridiculous little bit of personal reconnaissance.
She drives the thoughts away and manages to get her bearings back.
The pharmacy counter lies in darkness twenty feet away. Lilly cautiously negotiates the rear aisle, her eyes adjusting slowly to the gloom. She sees the counter, swamped with sticky, drying fluids, wadded documents, and mold so thick it looks like a coat of fur over everything.
She squeezes through the pass gate, and starts rifling through the meager contents of the pharmacy shelves. Nothing but useless drugs and tinctures remain unscathed by the looters—acne medicines, hemorrhoid treatments, and cryptically named medicines nobody bothered to identify—all the valuable central nervous system drugs and opiates and painkillers long gone. But she doesn’t care.
She’s not looking to get high or knock herself out or block pain.
After a seemingly endless, agonizing search, she finally finds what she’s looking for on the floor under the computer terminal, in a pile of discarded boxes and plastic pill vials. There’s only one box left, and it looks as though someone stepped on it at some point. Smashed flat, its top broken open, the container still holds its contents in a sealed, intact blister pack.
Lilly stuffs it into her pocket, rises to her feet, and gets the hell out of there.
Fifteen minutes later, she has returned to her apartment with the kit.
Five minutes after that, she waits to see if her life is about to change.
* * *
“He was a good man,” a muffled voice is saying on the other side of the closed infirmary door—unmistakable in its sardonic tone, its faint accent, its weary sarcasm—clearly the voice of the estimable Dr. Stevens. “Emphasis on was.”
The Governor stands outside the door to the infirmary with Gabe and Bruce. The three men pause before going in, listening to the low murmuring on the other side of the door with great interest.
“We found this town pretty early on,” the doctor’s voice continues. “The National Guard station, the narrow alleys—we decided we could defend this place. So we staked our claim.” There’s a brief beat of silence, the faint sound of water running. “Started out he was tough,” the voice goes on, “but he got the job done.”
The Governor balls his fists as he listens, the anger stiffening his spine, mixing with the sheer adrenaline of discovery.
“Philip emerged as the leader of our group very quickly,” the voice is saying. “He did what had to be done, what needed to be done to keep people safe. But after a while—”
The rage jolts up the Governor’s spinal cord, tingles in his fingers, fills his mouth with bitter, flinty bile. He leans toward the door to listen more closely.
“—it was clear to some of us that he was doing this more out of enjoyment than the need to protect us. It was clear he was little more than an evil bastard. I can’t even talk about his daughter.”
The Governor has heard enough. He reaches for the doorknob but something stops him.
On the other side of the door, a deeper, huskier voice with a thicker working-class Kentucky accent is speaking: “Why do you allow it to go on? The fights? Feeding the zombies?”
The doctor’s voice: “What do you think he’d do to anyone who opposed him? I hate the son of a bitch but I can’t do anything. Whatever else he does … he keeps these people safe. That’s enough for most people.”
The Governor swallows back the urge to break the door down with a battering ram and kill them all.
The doctor: “As long as there’s a wall between them and the biters they’re not too concerned with who’s with them on their side of the wall.”
Philip Blake kicks the door in, the lock-bolt snapping off and flying across the room, skipping across the tile floor like a spent shell casing. The door bangs against the adjacent wall, making everybody in the room jump.
“Well said, Doctor,” the Governor says as he calmly saunters into the infirmary, followed closely by his associates. “Well said.”
* * *
If it’s possible for an entire room to bristle with static electricity, that’s exactly what happens in that ensuing instant in which the eyes of everyone—Stevens, the stranger sitting on the bed, Alice over by the sink—snap toward the thin man strolling into the infirmary with hands on his hips like he owns the place. The coolly amused expression on the Governor’s face is belied by the sullen, baleful expressions on the faces of Bruce and Gabe, who enter like attack dogs on the heels of their master.
“What do you want?” the doctor finally manages in a taut tone.
“You said to come in today, Doc,” the Governor replies with the casual congeniality of just another patient arriving for a checkup. “You wanted to change my bandage?” He points helpfully at his wounded ear. “Remember?” The Governor then shoots a glance at the intruder, now frozen in a sitting position on the bed across the room. “Bruce, point a gun at Lefty over there.”
The big black man calmly draws a silver-plated .45 and trains it on the man named Rick.
“Sit down, Philip,” the doctor says. “I’ll make it quick.” His voice dips into a lower register, dripping with contempt. “I’m sure you have more important things to do.”
The Governor flops down on an examination gurney flooded with halogen light.
The man named Rick cannot take his eyes off the Governor, and the Governor returns his gaze—two natural predators in the wild, backs arched, sizing each other up—and the Governor smiles. “You’re looking well, stranger. Healing up nicely?” He waits for the stranger to reply but the man does not say a word.
“Well,” the Governor mutters to himself, as Stevens moves in and bends down to take a closer look at the bandaged ear, “as nice as you can.”
At last, the sandy-haired man across the room manages a retort: “So … when do you start torturing me?”
“You? Never.” The Governor’s eyes positively twinkle with derision. “I pegged you from the start, you’re not going to say shit. You’ve got family back wherever you’re from. You’re not about to sell them out.”
Stevens carefully folds back the bandage and shines a penlight on the mangled ear.
“No, I was going to torture the others in front of you,” the Governor explains. “I didn’t think you’d crack but I was pretty sure one of them would.” Now he winks. “But plans changed.”
The man on the bed glances at the muzzle of Bruce’s long-barrel Magnum, and then says, “To what?”
“You’re going into the arena,” the Governor tells him cheerfully. “I want to at least get some entertainment out of you.” He looks away with a faint grin. “I’m currently planning on raping the dogshit out of that bitch who took off my ear until she finds a way to kill herself.”
The room—almost as a whole organism—absorbs this in thunderstruck silence. The strange tableau stretches, the only sound being Stevens tearing a piece off a roll of medical tape, and the rustle of gauze.
“And the young Asian boy with the overacting tear ducts?” the Governor adds, his smile spreading practically from ear to injured ear. “I let him go.”
<
br /> A moment of stunned silence. The man named Rick, taken aback, stares at him. “You let him go? Why?”
By this point, Stevens has finished examining and replacing the old bandage on the Governor’s ear.
The doctor steps back as the Governor lets out a satisfied breath, slaps his thighs jovially, and rises off the table. “Why?” He grins at the stranger. “Because he sang like a parakeet. Told me exactly what I needed to hear.”
The Governor nods at his men, and then heads for the door with a smile. “I know everything I need to know about your prison,” he murmurs on the way out. “And if he’s stupid enough to go there, he’ll lead us right to it.”
The three men slip out of the room, slamming the broken door behind them.
In their slipstream, the infirmary festers in horrible silence.
* * *
At first light that next day, the .50 caliber gunner on the northeast corner of the barricade starts shooting at a cluster of walkers skulking around the edge of the woods, sending fountains of brain matter and dead tissue up into the crisp morning air.
The noise wakes up the town. The bark of high-caliber clapping reaches a narrow alley behind the apartment blocks at the end of Main Street, echoing down the passageway, penetrating the inebriated slumber of a filthy, tattered figure huddling under a fire escape platform.
Bob stirs, coughs, and tries to figure out where he is and what year it is and what the fuck his name is. Rainwater still rings off the gutters and downspouts all around him. His pants are wet. Floundering in his alcohol-fueled stupor, soaked to the bone from the rain, he rubs his grizzled face and notices tears on his sunken, deeply lined cheeks.
Was he dreaming of Megan again? Was he having another nightmare where he can’t reach her as she hangs by the neck from her suicide perch? He can’t even remember. He feels like crawling into the garbage Dumpster next to him and dying but instead he struggles to his feet and staggers down the alley toward daylight.
He decides to have his breakfast—the last few fingers of cheap whiskey in the pint bottle in his jacket pocket—on the sidewalk, against the brick facade of the Governor’s building, Bob’s lucky spot, his home away from home. He collapses against the wall, digs in his pocket with greasy blackened fingers, and pulls out his “medicine.”
He takes a healthy swig, finishing up the last of the bottle, and then sinks against the wall. He can’t cry anymore. His grief and despair have burned out his tear ducts. Instead, he just lets out a phlegm-clogged sigh of noxious breath and lies back and dozes for an indeterminate amount of time before hearing the voice.
“Bob!”
He blinks and blinks, and through his rheumy eyes he sees the blurry figure of a young woman approaching from across the street. At first, he can’t even remember her name, but the look on her face as she draws near—frustration, anxiety, even a trace of anger—reaches down into some inner chamber of Bob’s soul and kindles memories.
“Howdy, Lilly,” he says, lifting the empty bottle to his lips. Good to the last drop. He wipes his mouth and tries to focus on her. “Top of the morning.”
She comes over, kneels, and gently snatches the bottle away from him. “Bob, what are you doing? Trying to kill yourself in slow motion?”
He breathes in, and then exhales a sigh so foul and flammable it could light a barbecue. “I’ve been … weighing my options.”
“Don’t say that.” She looks into his eyes. “It’s not funny.”
“Ain’t trying to be funny.”
“Okay … whatever.” She wipes her mouth, glances over her shoulder, nervously scanning the street. “You haven’t seen Austin, have you?”
“Who?”
She looks at him. “Austin Ballard? You know. Young guy, kinda scruffy.”
“The kid with the hair?”
“That’s him.”
Bob lets out another chorus of hacking, wheezing coughs. He doubles over for a moment, trying to cough it out. He blinks it back. “No, ma’am. Ain’t seen that rascal in days.” Finally he gets his coughing under control and then fixes his yellow eyes on her. “You’re sweet on him, ain’t ya?”
Lilly gazes out at the far reaches of the town, chewing a fingernail. “Huh?”
Bob manages a cockeyed grin. “You two an item?”
She just shakes her head, letting out a weary chuckle. “An item? I wouldn’t say that. Not exactly.”
Bob keeps looking at her. “Saw you two heading into your place together last week.” Another crooked grin. “I may be a juicer but I ain’t blind. The way you two was walking, talking to each other.”
She rubs her eyes. “Bob, it’s complicated … but right now I have to find him.” She looks at him. “Think hard. When was the last time you saw him?”
“Lilly, I ain’t too good with particulars. My memory ain’t exactly—”
She grabs him, shakes him. “Bob, wake up! This is important! I have to find Austin—it’s super important! Do you understand?” She gives him a little slap. “Now concentrate, try to get those booze-addled brain cells working and THINK!”
Bob shudders in her grip, his droopy eyes wide and wet. His liver-colored lips tremble, and he tries to form the words but the tears are coming. “I-I don’t—It’s been—I ain’t real clear on—”
“Bob, I’m sorry.” All the anger, urgency, and frustration drain out of her face, and she releases her hold on him, and her expression softens. “I’m so sorry.” She puts an arm around him. “I’m a little—I’m not—I’m dealing with a bit of a—”
“It’s okay, darlin’,” he says and hangs his head. “I ain’t been myself lately, ain’t exactly on top of the world right now.”
She looks at him. “You’re still hurting, aren’t you? Hurting bad.”
He sighs again. He feels almost normal when he’s around this woman.
For a moment, he considers telling her about his Megan dreams. He considers telling her about the enormous black hole in his heart that is sucking every last ounce of his life into it. He considers explaining to Lilly how he was never really that good at grief. He lost dozens of close friends in the Middle East. As an army medic, he saw so much death and heartache that he thought it would rip his insides out. But none of it even compared to losing Megan the way he lost her. He considers all this over the course of an agonizing instant and then looks up at Lilly and simply murmurs, “Yeah, honey, I’m still hurting.”
They sit there in the overcast morning light for a long while, saying nothing, both of them drowning in their thoughts, both of them ruminating over dark and uncertain futures, when finally Lilly looks at him. “Bob, is there anything I can get you?”
He lifts his empty bottle, and taps it. “Got another one of these stashed back at the fire escape. That’s all I need.”
She sighs.
Another long moment of silence passes. Bob feels himself drifting again, his eyelids getting heavy. He looks up at her. “You seem a little outta sorts, darlin’,” he says. “Is there anything I can get you?”
Yeah, she thinks to herself, the weight of the world pressing down on her. How about a gun and two bullets so Austin and I can finish each other off?
TWELVE
Martinez paces along the catwalk that crowns a semitrailer parked along the north corner of the wall when he hears somebody calling out to him.
“Hey, Martinez!” the voice cuts through the wind and distant thunder scraping the sky to the east. Martinez looks down and sees Rudy, the bearded former tuck-pointer from Savannah, coming across the construction site. Rudy is built like a redwood and keeps his dark hair pomaded back in a Dracula widow’s peak.
“What do you want?” Martinez calls down. Dressed in his trademark sleeveless shirt, bandanna, and fingerless racing gloves, the lantern-jawed Martinez carries a Kalashnikov with a banana clip and a sawed-off stock. From the rusty steel roof of the Kenworth, he can see for over a mile in any direction, and he can easily pick off half a dozen undead in one controlled burst if necess
ary. Nobody fucks with Martinez—neither man nor biter—and this unexpected visitor is already getting on his nerves. “My shift ain’t over for another couple hours.”
Squinting up into the sun, Rudy delivers a stoic shrug. “Well, I’m here to relieve you so I guess you’re getting an early break. Boss man wants to see you.”
“Shit,” Martinez mutters under his breath, in no mood to go to the principal’s office this morning. He starts climbing down the side of the cab, grumbling softly, “What the hell does he want?”
Martinez hops off the running board.
Rudy gives him a look. “Like he’s gonna tell me.”
“Stay alert up there,” Martinez orders, gazing out through the narrow gap in front of the truck, surveying the flooded fields to the north. The farmland is deserted but Martinez has a bad feeling about what lies out there behind the distant, dark pillars of pine. “It’s been quiet so far today … but that usually never lasts.”
Rudy gives him a nod and starts climbing up the side of the cab.
Martinez strides away as Rudy’s voice trails after him. “You going to watch the fight today?”
“Let’s see what the Governor wants to see me about first,” Martinez mumbles, passing out of Rudy’s earshot. “One fucking thing at a time.”
* * *
It takes Martinez precisely eleven minutes to cross town on foot, pausing a couple of times to kick the asses of workmen loitering in the nooks and crannies of merchant’s row, some of them already passing flasks at two o’clock in the afternoon. By the time Martinez reaches the Governor’s building, the sun has broken through the clouds and turned the day as humid as a steam room.
Sweat breaks out on the big Latino as he slips around back and climbs the wooden decking to the Governor’s back door. He knocks hard on the jamb.
“Get your ass in here,” the Governor greets him, pushing open the storm door.
Martinez feels the flesh on his neck crawling as he enters the sour atmosphere of the kitchen. The place smells of grease and black mold, and something putrid underneath. A pine-scented car deodorizer hangs over the sink. “What’s going on, boss?” Martinez says, putting his assault rifle down, leaning it against a lower cabinet.
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