For a moment, the mass chaos that ensues—the strobelike effect of all the muzzle flashes, the collective tumult of gunfire and yelling and flashing steel and bullets whizzing and two armor-clad ambushers diving out of the line of fire in different directions—turns the narrow clearing into bedlam.
THIRTEEN
The skirmish lasts for mere seconds, not even a full minute, but when the dust clears—the last gunshots echoing and fading over the far hollows of the forest—one of the younger scouts—Eric—lies on the ground, dead, his neck opened by the katana blade. One of the two assailants also lies facedown on the cold ground, wounded. The other has vanished, her katana sword lying in the weeds.
Gabe hyperventilates as he quickly scans the tree line around the edges of the clearing. “WHERE THE FUCK DID SHE GO?!!”
He hears a noise, and he realizes that in all the excitement the woman has slipped their grasp, careening down an adjacent embankment into the deeper woods. He lurches over to the edge of the slope and sees a shadowy figure down in the darkness to the east, now struggling to escape through thickets of deadfall and undergrowth. He can hear her heavy breathing and panting as she flees.
“STAY HERE!” Gabe roars at the others, pointing at the big black man on the ground. “KEEP HIM ALIVE!”
The man named Tyreese lets out an involuntary moan. One of Gabe’s rounds has penetrated the armor of the giant’s right thigh, passing through the fleshy part of his leg and disabling him. Now Daniel and Raymond hold the man down, shoving their muzzles against the nape of his thick neck, pressing their knees into the small of his back.
Gabe slams another speed-loader into his .357 and lurches down the embankment.
The darkness and chill air of the forest engulf Gabe as he hurtles headlong through the trees, two-handing the Magnum, flipping on the FastFire tactical light. The red dot dances on the leaves ahead of him. The woman has a head start, but the woods are so thick to the east, Gabe gains on her quickly, his girth bulldozing through the foliage. He can see her shadow maybe fifty yards ahead of him now, darting toward another clearing. She reaches the clearing and bursts out of the trees in one great paroxysm of churning arms and pumping legs—her stride gazelle-like as she races for the far barrens.
Gabe reaches the clearing and realizes he’ll never catch up to her—not in a full-on footrace across open land—so he cobbles to a stop on the soft ground and drops to one knee. He aims the laser sight at the fleeing bitch—now a blur of black Kevlar receding into the distance.
The slender thread of crimson light arcs out across the darkness and teases around her heels.
Gabe fires off half a dozen successive blasts, each booming report echoing up into the starry heavens, the recoil making his arms shudder. Through the scope, he can see the near misses—one goes high, a few puff off the dirt at her feet, and the rest go wide. She keeps running until he can’t see her anymore.
“FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK-FUCK-FUCK!” Gabe spits angrily into the dirt and lets out an inarticulate growl of rage. The woman is long gone now—a swirl of night wind tossing leaves across the deserted meadow in her wake.
A noise to Gabe’s immediate left draws his attention to a new shadow moving out of the trees.
The stray walker lumbers into the moonlight, drawn to the commotion—a male in ragged bib overalls and a long, wrinkled face the color of earthworms—the dead arms reaching for Gabe, the rotting dentures snapping like castanets. Gabe calmly reaches down to his boot and draws an eleven-inch Randall knife. “Bite this, motherfucker!”
Gabe drives the knife blade up through the biter’s jaw and into the sinus cavity. The creature sags immediately, the luminous fight in the thing’s yellow eyes going out like pilot lights. Gabe lets go of the hilt and the thing collapses in a heap, the Randall knife still sticking out of the creature’s double chins.
For a moment, Gabe just stares at the rotten remains lying in the tall grass at his feet. The sight of it gives him an idea. He gazes back out at the far reaches of the meadow, surveying the dark trees into which the woman has just vanished. Inspiration strikes.
“Fuck her,” he says to himself as he pulls his knife out of the walker. He has her sword. He knows what he’s going to do. He turns and starts back toward the others, formulating his story.
* * *
The Governor stands in the circle of vehicles—a single Coleman camp lantern glowing on a stump providing the only illumination in the dusty clearing at the top of the ridge, throwing a dim circle of pale yellow light on the other members of the militia tending to their wounds and taking stock of their supplies—when the sound of footsteps interrupts his thoughts.
“What the fuck?” he mutters as he turns and sees the group of battle-weary figures trudging out of the woods directly behind him. Many heads turn—nerves are frayed from an increase in walker activity in the area—and many breathe a sigh of relief at the sight of humans.
A stout man built like a Mack truck leads the ragtag brigade. Behind Gabe, two members of the scouting party—Raymond and Daniel—drag a fourth man, clad in black body armor and apparently wounded, between them. The ailing prisoner—the woman called him Tyreese—drips blood from his lolling face and barely shuffles along with his huge arms over the shoulders of the two other men. Gloria Pyne brings up the rear, carrying an armful of rifles and weapons.
“Yeah—we found him in the woods,” Gabe reports as he walks up to the Governor. “He and the woman attacked us. They killed Eric and Jim.”
The Governor’s expression hardens in the gloomy light of the lantern. “The woman? You talking about the hell-bitch that tortured me?”
Gabe gives him a nod. “Yep—the very same. We followed them into the woods. They put up a fight, but they couldn’t hold us off for long.”
The other men drag the big black man around the stump and hold him up for the Governor’s inspection. Barely conscious, his visor gone, his face starting to swell from the beating, Tyreese tries to raise his head but it’s a losing battle. He lets out a pained breath through clenched teeth.
“Thought you might like a chance to sit down with this one,” Gabe ventures, jerking a thumb at Tyreese, “maybe have a little chat with him?”
The Governor stares at the wounded giant. “The girl, Gabe. What happened with the girl?”
“She broke away from us—took off for the woods—so I did you a favor.”
The Governor cocks his head. “A favor? What the fuck are you talking about?”
Gabe gives the Governor a look. Neither a smile nor a grimace, the expression on the stocky man’s face is hard to read. Finally he says, “I ran her down and blew her fucking brains out.”
A brief instant of silence follows, during which time Philip Blake braces himself against an unexpected storm of contradictory emotions smashing down on him—relief, anger, morbid curiosity, disappointment, and more than anything else, suspicion. “You shot her in the head?” he asks at last. “You killed her?”
“Yeah.” Gabe looks into the Governor’s eyes—a prodigal son returning with the elixir—and the pause stretches. “She’s fucking dead, boss.”
The Governor thinks about it some more. “You saw her die?” He wants to know every detail, wants to know the look on her face in her last moments—wants to know that she suffered. Instead of asking about all these things, he simply says, “You witnessed it?”
Gabe turns and looks over his shoulder. “Gloria!” The woman in the I’M WITH STUPID visor comes forward, fumbling with her cache of weapons. Gabe explains: “The bitch ran away. She got pretty far. I saw her run. I shot her. I saw her fall down. I saw her stop moving.” Gabe licks his lips, measuring his words carefully. “I’m sure it wasn’t as slow and painful as you would have liked—but she’s dead, boss.” Gloria hands him something wrapped in a chamois-like cloth. “But before she got away from us—”
Gabe takes the object, carefully unwraps it, and reveals it to the Governor.
“—we took this.” Gabe holds it
up so that it gleams dully in the jaundice-yellow light. “Figured you would want a trophy.”
Gabe brandishes the katana sword with a flourish, holding it over his head at a parallel angle to the ground, looking somewhat foolish to the Governor. Gaping at the thing, taking in all the implications, he breathes in a long breath. Then all at once he snatches the thing away from Gabe, and the rest of the scouts step back with a jerk. Gabe goes stone-still, staring at the Governor.
Latent violence glitters in Philip’s gaze as he squares his shoulders, raising the gleaming blade over his head. For a moment, Gabe’s spine goes cold with terror. Then, with a decisive one-handed swing, Philip slams the tip of the sword down into the center of a tree stump, making a loud thwack!
Another horrible moment of silence transpires as the sword sticks rigidly out of the rotten timber like a flag planted on a summit.
“Bring him over to my private office,” the Governor finally says, gesturing at the wounded man in body armor. “We’ll have a little talk.”
* * *
“We’re on the same side, you and me,” the Governor says to the huge man sitting on the bench in the rear of the cargo vehicle. The airless enclosure reeks of sweat and the coppery stench of blood. A single flyspecked dome light shines down on the steel tread-plate floor as the Governor paces, his boots ringing on the iron. “You realize that, don’t ya?”
The black man slumps against the wall in his battered black Kevlar, his hands bound behind his back, his swollen face drooping forward and from side to side. He spits bloody saliva on the floor and manages to look up, his grizzled ebony visage screwed up with pain and rage. “Really?—What side is that?”
“The side of survival, homie!” The Governor flings his words at the man, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to provoke him. “We’re all in the same boat—fighting for our lives—am I wrong, homes?”
The black man swallows and looks into the Governor’s eyes, replying in a very low, taut voice, as though on the verge of a scream. “The name’s Tyreese.”
“Tyreese! Ty-rreeeeeese … I like that.” The Governor paces. “Okay, Tyreese, let me ask you a question. And be honest.”
The black man spits again. “Whatever … I got nothing to hide.”
“We could torture the shit outta you, make your last moments a living hell, all that good stuff, but c’mon … do we really need to go through that dance again? I hurt you real bad, take you to the point of passing out, but not quite, and when you refuse to talk, I break you, flay the skin off you or something, blah-blah-blah … do we really need to go through that ridiculous shit again?”
The big man looks up and fixes his gaze on the Governor and says, “Have at it.”
The Governor slaps him. Hard. A sharp, forceful backhand slap from his gloved left hand—violent and abrupt enough to slam the back of the man’s skull against the wall behind him—making Tyreese gasp and blink as though snorting smelling salts. “Wake up, man!” The Governor maintains a cheerful, helpful, benevolent tone. “You’re not thinking this through—I’m just sayin’!”
Tyreese takes heaving breaths, trying to control his rage and blink away the pain. His enormous shoulders tremble under the battered armor. “Fuck you.”
“Tyreese, c’mon.” Now the Governor sounds disappointed, crestfallen. “Don’t make this one of those annoying situations where I gotta hurt you real bad—worse than you’ve ever been hurt. A few simple questions is all.”
Tyreese sniffs away the pain. “What do you want to know?”
“Weak spots in the prison, for instance.”
Tyreese chuckles then, a wry, weary, amused chuckle that lasts for several moments. Then he looks up. “There ain’t no weak spots—it’s a fucking prison, Sherlock!”
“How about you tell me how many people you got up in there? What kind of arsenal you got, ammunition, supplies, what kind of power you runnin’?”
The black man looks at him. “How about you eat shit and die?”
The Governor stares at the man for a moment, then winds up to hit him again—this time with a balled-up fist—but right before he swings, the sound of knocking interrupts. Somebody is tapping on the doorframe outside the truck’s tarp-covered rear hatch.
“Governor?”
It’s Lilly’s voice, and the sound of it sends a warning alarm like icy water trickling down the Governor’s spine. He chews on the inside of his cheek for a brief instant before answering, thinking it over. Maybe this is a good thing—maybe she should see this—see the brutality in the man’s dark eyes, see who they’re fighting. “Come in here, Lilly,” Philip says at last. “You can be a witness.”
The tarp folds inward, and Lilly Caul climbs up into the enclosure. She wears a tattered denim jacket, her hair pulled back from her suntanned face, which is shiny with sweat and bright with nervous tension. She keeps her distance, watching from the rear.
The big man on the bench glances up at her, breathing hard, trying to control his emotions. He looks as though he’s on the verge of exploding.
The Governor sees that the man is about to lose it, and leans down close to him, staring into his eyes. Tyreese looks up at him. The Governor smiles and speaks softly, as if to a child: “Lilly, meet Tyreese. Nice enough fella, good head on his shoulders. I was just trying to talk some sense into him, seeing if there was a way he could talk to this Rick fella, get him to wise up and surrender, so we could all avoid more bloodshed and—”
The big man lunges suddenly—putting all of his 275 pounds into the move—slamming his forehead into the Governor’s face. The head-butt, instantaneous and brutal, sounds like a board snapping, taking the Governor completely by surprise, knocking him momentarily insensate and sending him flinging backward against the wall. He slams into the struts with a gasp and then topples to the floor.
Lilly draws her Ruger and aims it at the big man. “GET BACK!” She thumbs the safety off. “GET BACK, GODDAMNIT—NOW! SIT DOWN!!”
Tyreese sits back down, his wrists still bound, and he exhales angrily, his face twitching with rage. His thigh drips blood from the gunshot wound, but he barely seems to notice it. A former NFL linebacker, as well as a bouncer for some of the toughest bars in Atlanta, he looks like he could snap Lilly in two. His grizzled face remains stoic as he spits blood from a split lip, looking down and shaking his head. He mumbles something inaudible.
Lilly goes over to the Governor, kneels, and helps him sit up. “You okay?”
The Governor blinks and tries to get his bearings, tries to draw breath into his lungs. His forehead is bleeding, and he coughs convulsively, but the pain braces him, galvanizes him, energizes him. “See?—See what I’m talking about?” he utters thickly. “You can’t reason with these people … you can’t … bargain with them … they’re fucking animals.”
Across the enclosure, the big man mutters something else, his head down.
Lilly and the Governor look up. Tyreese speaks under his breath as though talking to himself, “And the nations were angry…”
“What was that, asshole?” the Governor snarls at him. “You want to share it with the rest of the class?”
Tyreese looks up at them, his dark face filling with sullen, baleful hate. “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and it shall be the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and to them that fear my name, small and great, thou shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth … and there will be war in heaven.” He pauses and looks at them. “It’s from Revelation … not that you would know shit about the Bible. It’s what’s happening. You can’t turn back the tide; you’ve opened the door. Kiss your asses good-bye. You’ll die by your own fucking swords and you don’t even—”
“SHUT UP!” Lilly springs to her feet, lunges toward Tyreese, and presses the Ruger’s muzzle against his forehead. “JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
The Governor lifts himself to his feet, moving in between Lilly and Tyreese. “Okay, let’s dial it down now. Back off, Lilly. I got this.�
� He gently ushers Lilly away from the prisoner toward the rear hatch. “It’s okay. I got this. I’ll take care of it.”
Lilly, breathing hard, stands in the hatchway, re-engaging the safety and shoving the gun back into its sheath on her hip. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the Governor says, giving her a reassuring pat on the arm. He wipes the blood from his forehead. “I’ll handle this. You go and try and get some sleep.”
Lilly looks at him. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m good. I got this. Don’t worry.”
After a long pause, she glances back at the prisoner, who now sits staring at the floor. She lets out a pained sigh and makes her exit.
The Governor turns and looks at Tyreese. Very softly, under his breath, Philip Blake murmurs, “I got this.” He goes over to the bench facing the prisoner on the opposite side of the enclosure. Under the bench, in the cobwebs and litter, Philip finds a baseball bat lying next to a pile of rags. “I got this,” he says in barely a whisper as he picks up the bat, then goes over to the rear hatch and pulls down the metal door. The door clangs shut, giving them privacy. The Governor turns to the prisoner.
Philip smiles at the man. “I got this.”
* * *
Very few surviving members of the Woodbury militia get any sleep that night—least of all Gabe. Tossing and turning on a hard pallet in the back of his cargo truck, his rotund, barrel-shaped belly wedged between the wall and a row of supply crates, he tries to clear his mind, but his brain revs and chugs and circles back around to his lies. How many times has he lied since the plague broke out? He’s lost track. But this latest lie could truly bite him on the ass—the bitch with the hair braids is still out there. What will the Governor do when he finds out? Gabe wonders if he should bail out of this whole fracas with the prison people. He tosses and turns some more. The drone of crickets and frogs and loons outside the truck rises and swells in the dark until it sounds positively thunderous to Gabe, like a rainstorm, and he puts his hands over his ears and tries to drive the thoughts away. His stomach burns and seethes with nervous indigestion. He’s been having upper GI problems for months now—a combination of the shitty diet he’s been on and the constant stress—and now he feels stickpins stabbing him in the guts, piercing his innards. He tries to breathe evenly, deeply, and eventually the breathing exercise sends him into a half-comatose doze in which he dreams snippets of night terrors such as the black lady with the dreadlocks sneaking up on him and driving her katana sword into his abdomen just above the belly button and then swizzling it around as though trying to open a doorway in his guts, and he tries to scream in the dream but nothing but silent air will come out of him, and he wakes up right around dawn with a gasp.
The Fall of the Governor: Part Two Page 17
