Lilly swallows her nerves and manages to rise on sore legs. She picks up her rifle and creeps around the back of the M35. She finds Austin diligently reloading his Garand rifle, sliding the rounds into the breach with trembling, sweat-slick fingers. Tendrils of his hair have come loose from his ponytail and hang in his face, some of the curls matted to his sweat-damp forehead. “You okay?” she asks, coming up behind him and putting a hand on his shoulder.
He jumps. “Yeah—I mean—yeah, I’m fine. I’m good. Why do you ask?”
“Just wanted to make sure.”
“What about you?”
“Fit as a fiddle, ready to rock.” She gazes over at the plume of exhaust suddenly issuing out of the tank, the turbine engine growling. “What the hell are they doing?”
Austin watches the tank begin to lurch toward the fence, and he stares, momentarily rapt by the strange contraption rumbling like a corsair toward the shuffling cluster of upright cadavers.
* * *
Moments later, the Abrams M1 plunges into the disorderly regiment of walkers milling along the fence. A dozen or more of the undead are pulled under the iron treads, the sound of their flesh and bones being ground to pulp like the hacksaw groan of a gigantic trash compactor. Lilly looks away. Nausea threatens to bring up her breakfast. The tank makes an abrupt ninety-degree turn in the greasy swamp of human carnage, and then starts chugging along parallel to the fence, bowling over walker after walker with the gruesome efficiency of a harvester gobbling stalks of wheat. Skulls are smashed, and organs pop like blood-filled blisters, and the collective hemorrhaging of literally hundreds of putrid bodies begins to send up a virtual fogbank of reeking, foul, hideous stench.
By this point, the Governor’s troops—most of them now hiding behind the cover of vehicles, their weapons at the ready—have become highly aware of movement inside the fences, along the shadows of passageways, in the gaps between distant cellblocks, and amid the dark alcoves on the edges of the yards. With the herd of biters being cleared now, the prison grounds are more exposed, more visible to the invaders. Figures dart here and there, running for cover or crawling on their bellies toward safety inside the nearest edifice. Lilly sees an older man wearing a floppy hat frantically crawling across the exercise area for cover. But it isn’t until the tank reaches the terminus point of the east fence and comes to a noisy stop, that Lilly realizes there are still dozens of walkers—maybe thirty or more—lurking beyond the outer corners of the property, stepping over the grisly remains of their fellow creatures.
The tank sits idling at the end of the fence for a moment as the Governor comes around behind one of the trucks, his eye bright and shiny with rage. He walks past Lilly’s cargo truck, pauses, and surveys the fence line, which is littered with rotting remains now. Gabe joins him, and Lilly listens to their conversation.
“I got an idea,” Gabe says to Philip. “The sight of the tank ain’t enough to scare them out—but what if we tried to fire that fucking cannon at them? That could get their attention, right?”
The Governor doesn’t even look at the man, just continues staring at the fences, stroking his whiskered chin and thinking. The tank rumbles back to the front gates, swinging awkwardly back around into its original position. The Governor watches it skeptically. “It took Jared five months to learn how to drive that fucking thing, but he never got around to figuring out how to load and shoot it. The truth is, it’s more or less just for show.”
Now the Governor glances at Gabe, and a glint of something disturbing—Gabe can’t identify exactly what it is—kindles in Philip’s eye. “The thing is, it’s really just there to thin the herd to a manageable level for the Pied Piper.”
Gabe looks at him. “The what?”
* * *
It begins with an engine revving behind the cargo trucks, and a blur of movement as one of the smaller vehicles—a gray, rust-speckled Chevy S-10—backs up toward the fence. Lilly and Austin stay behind their truck’s doors as the dynamic of the battlefield suddenly changes. They see two Woodbury men in body armor sitting on the pickup’s rear gate, waving their hands and hollering inarticulate taunts at the reanimated corpses still milling about the fences. This gets the attention of most—if not all—of the monsters.
The truck slowly pulls away, and the walkers begin lumbering instinctively after it.
While all this is going on, the Governor decides the area is clear enough, and it’s time to fucking end this, so he gives the order to shoot them all. Fucking shoot them all. Now. NOW!—
—SHOOT TO FUCKING KILL!
* * *
Inside the barriers, the settlers dive for cover as the air around them ignites, some of the weaker ones covering their heads and staying on the ground, others crawling madly for safety, some of the older ones trying to help the younger ones. The tremendous barrage from the east, from every corner of the pasture, sends tiny explosive dust puffs across the cracked macadam, crisscrossing the lots, sparking off Dumpsters and basketball backboards and gutters and downspouts and vent fans and air-conditioning compressors. Howling voices reach Lilly’s ears as she picks out moving targets and holds her breath and fires pinpoint blasts. “DOWN!” yells one figure, wrestling a woman to the concrete. “EVERYBODY DOWN!” shouts another, tackling another woman trying to flee the assault. The grounds become a blur of chaotic movement. Few of the figures—if any—appear to be armed. This bothers Lilly, to the point of making her pause and lift the scope from her eye. For a moment, she just watches as an older man—shirtless, portly, bearded, with long, wild hair—makes a mad dash for a doorway. A sudden burst riddles his shoulder with bloody bullet holes, tearing chunks from his hairy arms and belly. The old codger careens to the ground in a scarlet spray, and Lilly lets out a tense breath.
She sees another fleeing figure—for a brief instant, she recognizes the man.
She adjusts her scope, and in the telescopic field she sees the square-jawed man named Rick Grimes—the son of a bitch who led the escape from Woodbury, the leader of these animals, the one who tangled with the Governor and probably killed Martinez and God only knows what else—now grabbing a woman and shouting at her. “GOTTA GET INSIDE!—NO PLACE FOR COVER OUT HERE!—YOU HEAR ME?!!” He drags the woman toward the closest building—twenty yards between him and the building—a hundred and fifty between him and Lilly.
The litany of Bob’s sniper school steadies her, calms her down—breathe in, acquire the target, figure the distance, adjust your point of aim—and now she has the man named Rick centered in the scope. She slowly releases her breath. She begins to squeeze the trigger … but stops herself. Wait. Something flicks brightly, deep in the folds of her brain, something she can’t identify, something inchoate and almost electrical—like a synapse misfiring—causing a series of flashes in her mind’s eye, the images too fast to register.
She jerks at the sound of the Governor’s voice, coming from behind the tank, twenty feet away: “We’ve got them pinned down now! Only a matter of time before they—!”
The metallic ping of a ricochet zinging off the apex of the tank’s steel turret cuts off his words. He ducks. He looks across the prison grounds at the northeast guard tower on the opposite end of the property. The others whirl around, and all at once everybody sees the glint of another gun barrel up there against the sun—a second sniper. The Governor crouches behind the tank. He grabs the walkie off his belt, thumbs the switch, and issues a snarling, enraged order: “Take that fucker out!”
A pair of .50 caliber machine guns on the rooftops of adjacent cargo trucks swing to the north, and Lilly grits her teeth as the clattering roar of full-auto gunfire sends a world of hurt up at the tower. The high windows erupt against the pale blue sky. Waves of broken glass convulse into the air, a chorus of atonal crashes, sparkling tendrils issuing in all directions.
In her peripheral vision, from her position low on the ground, Lilly senses more movement inside the prison barricades. Many of those pinned down now take advantage of the dist
raction and make mad dashes for the cellblock entrances. The Governor sees this as well. He turns and shouts at the gunman: “HEY!” He points at the prison yards. “They’re making a break for the goddamn buildings!” He points at the tower. “We only need a few of you to be shooting up there to kill that prick! C’mon, goddamnit—use your heads!!”
A number of shooters now turn and spray the yards indiscriminately. Across the grounds, those who are fleeing once again dive for cover in the hail of gunfire. Lilly looks through her scope and sees several souls now scrambling for weapons. She sees a teenage girl with short black hair crawling toward a rifle, and she sees a big African American man digging in a satchel, and she sees the dreadlock-wearing woman—Michonne—snatching a small black pistol off a man’s belt that looks from this distance like a 9 mil. Dreadlock-lady spins and starts shooting. Her actions embolden another man to fire, and another, and another.
“FIND COVER!” The Governor’s voice raises up an octave. “EVERYBODY—FIND COVER NOW!”
Within moments, more members of the Woodbury militia begin to fall.
* * *
Johnny Aldridge was a forty-year-old drifter who ended up on Martinez’s crew, a gentle soul who could name every member of every heavy metal band who ever toured the South in the 1990s. Now he lies in the high grass next to Lilly, close enough for her to smell stale cigarette smoke on him, the man’s glassy eyes propped open in death, his Adam’s apple pulsing its death throes in a rhythmic gushing of arterial blood. Lilly looks away and closes her eyes. Cauterizing horror and anguish course down her spine.
She turns to Austin, who lies on his belly in the grass next to her. He swallows hard and doesn’t say anything, but the look on his face says it all. His eyes simmer with terror. She starts to say something when she hears the firestorm from the prison yard fading slightly, the last crackle of gunfire echoing up into the morning sky. Are they reloading? Have they managed to make it back to the buildings? Then she hears the Governor’s voice again, drenched in madness and fury: “FALL BACK! FALL BACK, GODDAMNIT!”
Lilly hears the harsh noise of gears grinding all around her, engines revving, exhaust pipes backfiring. The Governor’s voice is nearly drowned by the collective clamor of all the vehicles firing back up. “We need to regroup, goddamnit—need to get our shit together!”
Climbing out of her hiding place, she cautiously struggles back into the cab, keeping her head down, pushing open the passenger door for Austin. He climbs back into the shotgun seat, head down, breathing hard, flinching at the intermittent pop of handguns still firing through the fences. Out of the corner of her eye, Lilly sees Gabe hurrying around the back of the tank.
The portly man, still huffing and puffing, crouches next to the Governor. “Whaddaya think?”
“This isn’t working,” the Governor says, speaking more to himself than to Gabe. Clenching his one gloved hand so tightly it creaks, he bites down on the words, hissing psychotically, “THIS FUCKING ISN’T WORKING!”
Gabe starts to reply when the Governor rears back and punches Gabe in the jaw, hitting him so hard that the impact whiplashes his head back and busts his lip open. Stringers of bloody drool fling off Gabe’s mouth, and Gabe flinches against the tank’s hull with a start, blinking, pressing his hand down on his lip. He stares at the Governor with fire in his eyes. “WHAT THE HELL?!”
The Governor fixes his blazing eyes on the stocky man. “Just get in the fucking truck.”
Lilly watches all this from twenty-five feet away, from inside the M35’s cab, and she only hears about 80 percent of it, but she’s seen enough. Her stomach has gone cold, her throat filling with acid. She shoots a glance at Austin, who says nothing. She revs up the engine and puts the truck into gear, grinding the shift lever into reverse. But just for that split instant, before backing away, she glances at the prison yard.
Through the layers of ancient cyclone fencing, she sees a solitary figure lying on the edge of the exercise yard, soaking in a spreading pool of blood. Clad in a prison jumpsuit, male, late thirties maybe, sandy hair, grizzled, rugged looking, a stump where his right arm should be, he slowly tries to drag himself back toward the buildings, but he’s been mortally wounded—a gut shot—and all he can do is crawl, inch by inch, leaving a leech trail of blood. Even from this distance, Lilly can tell it’s the man named Rick, and from the looks of his wounds, his chances of survival are minimal at best.
She turns away as the convoy of vehicles begins to withdraw, one by one, the trucks doing U-turns and rumbling away toward the eastern horizon. Lilly follows the tank on its retreat, plunging into the fogbank of dust being kicked up by all the massive wheels, feeling nothing for the man named Rick … neither sympathy nor satisfaction … only emptiness.
TWELVE
“I feel like we should say something,” Austin ventures an hour later, speaking in a hoarse, exhausted voice, standing on the bank of a dry riverbed, three miles east of the prison, shivering, gazing down at a mass grave. Down in the trench, the bodies lie on top of each other, arms and legs akimbo, bloodstains turning black in the dusky light. The stagnant air swims with gnats and particulate floating through the beams of sunlight canting through the pines.
“I don’t know … yeah, probably we should.” Lilly stands next to him, chewing her fingernails, tendrils of her auburn hair that have come loose from her ponytail hanging down across her sullen face. Her guns are holstered on her hips, and her elbows are scuffed and bloody. Her lower back throbs with pain, her joints twinge with the dull ache of exhaustion, and daggers slice through her gut—the latest wave of cramps taking their toll on her. She sniffs back the agony and stares at the casualties.
Lilly knew all of these men—if not by name, certainly by sight—now stacked like cordwood down in the ditch to avoid adding to the walker population or having one of them end up as lunch for the swarm. These men who passed Lilly on the street in Woodbury from time to time, said hello, tipped their Caterpillar caps at her, winked at her a few times—they weren’t perfect by any means but they were decent, simple men. Some of them—Arlo and Johnny, for example—were sweethearts who shared their rations with Lilly on more than one occasion. Now Lilly feels a vacuum in her soul as she gazes down at them. Darkness presses in on her organs and chokes her as she tries to muster up a eulogy.
“Johnny, Arlo … Ronnie, Alex, and Jake … Evan and … um.” She can’t remember the last young man’s name. She looks helplessly at Austin.
His eyes shimmer with sadness. “Andy.”
Lilly nods. “Andy … right.” She bows her head and tries not to look at the bloodless forms piled in a grisly heap down in the leaves. As her Grandma Pearl would say, “They are just the shells left on the beach … their spirits have flown, dear.” Lilly finds herself wishing she believed in God. How could anybody believe in a loving deity in times like these? But it would be nice. Lilly swallows back the bitter anguish and softly says, “Each and every one of you gave your lives for a higher purpose … to protect your community … you gave your all.” Her voice weakens slightly, the weight of exhaustion dragging on her body. “Here’s hoping you’re in a better place now. May you all rest in peace.”
A long moment of silence follows, broken only by the distant, lonely call of a heron. Lilly senses the presence of others standing downstream, and she gazes to the south.
About fifty yards away lurks a dark figure standing on the edge of the trees—eye patch, missing arm, coal-black body armor—grimacing as he stares into the trees across the creek bed. Gabe stands next to him, not saying a word as he screws a silencer onto the muzzle of a stainless steel short-barrel .357 revolver. Two other men stand at a respectful distance downstream with shovels. The sixteen other surviving members of the makeshift militia—a dozen men and four women—can be seen through the trees, attending to the wounded and skulking around the circle of vehicles parked in a dusty clearing, the machine gunners keeping watch. Nobody seems too interested in graveside memorials right now.
Gabe hands the gun to the Governor, who gives him a terse nod. Then Philip Blake turns and strides along the embankment toward Lilly. “You finished?” he asks as he approaches with a dour look on his face.
Lilly nods. “Yeah … go ahead.”
The Governor steps in front of her, looming over the mass grave. “My uncle Bud fought in World War Two in the Pacific.” Philip doesn’t even look up as he speaks. He thumbs the hammer on the .45 and stoically fires the first round into the blood-caked cranium of Arlo Simmons.
Lilly barely reacts to the dry snap of the silencer—her nerves deadened now. The Governor aims at the skull of another victim and fires again into the open grave. This time Lilly flinches slightly at the horrible snapping noise of the bullet punching through bone.
The Governor glances over his shoulder at the others gathered across the clearing. “I want everybody to hear this! Come on over!”
Slowly, reluctantly, the others put down their canteens, ammo mags, and first-aid kits, snub out their cigarettes, and make their way across the clearing to the edge of the trees. The sun is dipping behind the western horizon and the deepening shadows add to the tension.
“My uncle Bud lost his life on the USS Sonoma, October of 1944,” Philip says in a cold, flat voice as he aims at another skull and fires a slug into dead tissue. Lilly jumps. Now the Governor speaks loudly enough for the whole group to hear. “Ship got hit by the Jap kamikazes … sunk … destroyed by savages with no respect for the conventions of warfare or life in general.” He fires again and again into the cairn of bodies, demolishing skull after skull. He pauses and turns to the onlookers, their ashen faces peering out through breaks in the foliage. “That’s what we’re dealing with here, and I don’t want any of you to ever forget it.”
He pauses to let this register, and then he glances over his shoulder and gives a nod to the pair of men with the shovels. “Go ahead, boys, cover ’em up now.” He looks at the others. “These men did not die in vain.”
The Fall of the Governor: Part Two Page 15
