* * *
“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 a
mused 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?”
She goes over to a cluttered desk, which is pushed up against the wall. She writes something in a log. “Actually, I was going to college to become an interior designer when the biters—walkers, whatever—made other plans for me. I didn’t really know any of this stuff a few months ago.”
“But now? How did you learn this stuff?” The injured man seems genuinely interested, if only in an idle-chatting-around-the-coffee-urn kind of way. “Did Dr. Stevens teach you?”
“Mostly, yeah,” she says with a nod, still writing notes on inventory, medicine dispensed, supply levels. In Woodbury, every commodity is limited—especially medicine—so Stevens has instituted a meticulous record system, with which Alice religiously keeps up.
In the pause that follows, the oncoming footsteps have reached the corridor outside the infirmary. Still distant enough to be inaudible to Rick and Alice, they approach quickly, purposefully, urgently.
“I’ve always been a quick learner,” Alice is saying. “Ever since I was a little girl. To be honest, I really just have to watch him do something once—maybe twice—and I can pretty much do it.”
Rick smiles. “Well, I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be.” She gives him a flinty look. “I don’t consider paying attention to be something special just because most other people don’t do it.” She pauses and lets out a sigh. “Did that sound mean? Did it make me sound like a bitch? I do that a lot. Sorry about that.”
“Think nothing of it,” Rick says, his smile lingering. “I didn’t take it that way. And you’re right, by the way.” He looks down at his thickly bandaged stump. “Most people don’t pay attention … to anything.” He looks at her. “They just cruise through life worrying so much about their own bullshit they don’t even notice the things that are happening around them.” He glances back down at his injury and lets out a dry little grunt.
She looks at him. “What is it?”
“I miss my wife,” he says softly, gazing down. “I just … I can’t stop thinking about her.” A long pause … and then: “She’s pregnant.”
Alice stares. “Really?”
Rick nods. “Yeah. She’s due in a couple months. Last time I saw her … she was … she was doing fine.” He swallows hard. “Thing about the baby, though … I don’t know if—”
Across the room, the door bursts open, cutting off his words. “Rick—get up! NOW!”
* * *
The man barging into the infirmary wears a faded bandanna, carries a high-powered rifle, and has muscular arms protruding from his sleeveless shirt, which is stained under the arms with flop-sweat. “Come on—we’ve got to go!” the man urges as he hurries over to Rick, grabbing him by the arm. “RIGHT NOW!”
“Wha—? What the fuck are you doing?!” Rick rears back, pulling himself away from this crazy person. Alice backs away, too, wide-eyed.
Martinez drills his gaze into Rick’s eyes. “I’m saving your life.”
Rick blinks. “What do you mean? How are you saving my life?!”
“I’m getting you out of here! I’m helping you escape! C’mon!”
“Let go of me, goddamnit!” Rick yanks his arm away, heart racing.
Martinez raises his hand in a gesture of contrition. “Okay. Look, I’m sorry. Okay. It’s just that we need to hurry. It’s not going to be easy getting you out of here without anyone noticing. Listen to what I’m saying. I’m gonna get you outta here but I can’t steal a vehicle—we only keep a couple gassed up and they’re too hard to get without being detected.”
Rick and Alice shoot panicked glances at each other, and then Rick looks back at Martinez. “Why are you—?”
“If they notice you’re gone before we’re far enough away, they’ll be able to run us down. We gotta get out of here without anyone knowing it for a long time.” Martinez looks at Alice, then back at Rick. “Now c’mon—let’s go!”
Rick takes a deep breath—a barrage of contrary emotions slamming through him—before giving the man a terse, reluctant nod. He looks at Alice, and then back at Martinez, who turns and starts toward the door.
“Wait!” Rick grabs Martinez on the way out of the room. “They told me there are guards posted at the door! How are we gonna get past them?”
Martinez almost smiles in spite of the adrenaline. “We already took care of them.”
“We?!” Rick follows him out the door at a fast trot, plunging into the corridor.
Left alone inside the room, Alice gapes at the open doorway.
* * *
Creeping cautiously down the central corridor, avoiding pools of light from hanging work lamps, descending stairs to the next level down, and making two quick turns, Martinez silently prays nobody sees them. Only he and the Governor know about this whole scam, and people like Gabe and Bruce are partial to shooting first and asking questions … well … never. Martinez silently raises his hand in a warning gesture as they approach one of the stalls. The two men pause in front of a security door.
“I think you’ve met my associate,” Martinez whispers to Rick, quickly opening the metal door.
Inside the dim enclosure, a pair of bodies lie sprawled unconscious on the cement floor. They are a couple of the Governor’s men—Denny and Lou—both of them bruised and battered but still breathing shallow breaths. A third figure, in riot gear, stands over them, fists balled, breathing hard, a nightstick in one hand.
“GLENN!”
Rick lurches suddenly into the room, and goes to the younger man.
“Rick, Jesus, you are alive!” The young Asian in the black SWAT-style body armor gives the other man a hug. With his round and boyish face, dark almond eyes, and short-cropped haircut, the young man could pass for a buck private in the army just out of basic training. Or maybe a Boy Scout, Martinez thinks to himself from the doorway, as the two men have their little tearful reunion.
“I thought you were dead, man,” the younger one says to the older one. “Martinez told me he saw you but I don’t know—I guess I didn’t believe it until now.” The kid looks at Rick’s stump. “Jesus, Rick, there was so much blood—”
“I’m okay,” Rick says, looking down, holding the bloody streaked bandage against his midsection. “I guess I’m lucky this is the only thing that freak took from me. What about you?” He pats the kid’s Kevlar shoulder pad. “They told me they let you go—that you told them everything about the prison, and they were going to follow you there.”
The kid lets out a burst of nervous laughter, which sounds more like a hyperventilating dog to Martinez. “Man—they never even asked me any questions.” Something changes in his face. Eyes narrowing, jaws clamped tightly, he looks down. “Rick, I spent a day locked in a garage next to another garage with Michonne in it.” Another pause here, the boy’s eyes watering with repulsion. “Rick—”
The young man pauses again, looking like he can hardly draw a breath, let alone explain what’s been going on. From across the room, Martinez soaks it all in. This is the first time he has heard the black woman’s name, and for some reason the sound of it—Mee Shaun? Meeshone?—makes him nervous. He can’t understand why exactly.
Rick pats the young man’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Glenn, we’re gonna get her and us outta here.”
“Rick, I love Maggie,” the kid finally says, looking up at the older man through wet eyes. “I don’t want to put anyone in danger—but the things I heard—the things they must have done to Michonne.” He stops again. He looks at Rick and says in a quavering voice, “I think I might have told them anything to make them stop.” He sniffs back the shame. “But they never even asked.” Pause, anger flaring. “It’s like they did it all just to fuck with me.”
It’s time for Martinez to step in and get this fucking show on the road. “That sounds about right,” he says, his voice going low and grave. He gives both men a sullen look as he continues, “Philip—the Governor—whatever you want to call him—he’s been slowly going over the edge for a while now. I’ve been hearing about the shit he’s been doing, whispers, rumors … didn’t want to believe it was true.” Martinez takes a deep breath. “You kinda choose to ignore that stuff—keeps you from having to do anything. After seeing you”—he gives Rick a nod—“I suspected the ‘accident’ that took your hand was related to him.”
Across the room, Rick and Glenn give each other a look. Something unspoken passes between them, and Martinez notices it but doesn’t react.
“He asked me to fill in for his guards,” Martinez goes on in a lower voice, “watch the garage he was keeping Glenn in. I didn’t know he was keeping prisoners in here. I mostly work security—all my time was spent on the fences.” Another breath. He looks at the two men across the room. “I couldn’t let it go on—I had to help put a stop to this fucking insanity.” He looks at the floor. “We’re still human, goddamn it!”
Rick is thinking about it, licking his lips pensively, the lines on his face deepening. He looks at Glenn. “My goddamn clothes.” He looks at Martinez. “My clothes!” He shakes his head. “We were wearing riot gear and when the doctor was working on me … someone had to see what I was wearing underneath.” He shakes his head slowly, looking at the crumbling mortar walls, the arteries of rust or blood veining the corners. “Christ,” he utters.
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