The first blow of the sword’s blunt-ended handle strikes his skull above the bridge of his nose. It makes a loud clapping noise in his ears—the brunt of a Louisville Slugger hitting the sweet spot of a hardball—and pins him to the floor.
Ears ringing, vision blurring, pain strangling him, he makes one last attempt to grab her ankles when the iron-hard handle comes down again.
Eighty-three seconds into the confrontation, he collapses, a dark shade coming down over his vision. The final blow to his skull comes eighty-six seconds in, but he barely feels it.
One second later, everything goes completely black and he’s floating in space.
* * *
In the moonlit darkness of the clearing, in the rushing silence of night, Lilly carefully unwraps the last object to be tossed into the mouth of the fire pit. The size of a peach pit, it lies nestled in a handkerchief. She looks down at it, a single tear tracking down her cheek. She remembers all that the little nodule means to her. Josh Hamilton saved her life. Josh was a good man who didn’t deserve to die the way he did, a bullet in the back of his head, fired by one of Woodbury’s thugs, the man they called the butcher.
Lilly and Josh journeyed many miles together, learned to survive together, dreamt of a better time together. A gourmet cook, an executive chef by trade, Josh Hamilton had to be the only man who traveled the roads of the apocalypse with an Italian black truffle in his pocket. He would shave flakes off the thing to flavor oils and soups and meat dishes. The nutty, earthy flavor was indescribable.
The thing in Lilly’s lap still gives off a pungent aroma, and she leans down and takes a big whiff. The odor fills her senses with memories of Josh, memories of first coming to Woodbury, memories of life and death. Tears well up in her eyes. She has a little grape juice left in her cup and she now raises it.
“Here’s to an old friend of mine,” she says. “He saved my life more than once.”
Next to her, Austin bows his head, sensing the importance of the moment, the sorrow being exorcised. He holds his cup tightly to his chest.
“Hope we meet again someday,” she says and goes over to the pit.
She tosses the little black node into the hole with the other symbolic objects.
“Amen,” Austin says softly, taking a sip. He goes over to Lilly and puts his arm around her, and for a moment, they both stand there in the darkness, staring down at the jumble of artifacts in the hole.
The ambient drone of crickets and wind accompanies their silent thoughts.
“Lilly?”
“Yeah?”
Austin looks at her. “Have I mentioned that I love you?”
She smiles and keeps looking at the ground. “Shut up and start shoveling, pretty boy.”
* * *
Out of the void of absolute night—the darkness at the bottom of the Marianas Trench—a nonsensical phrase floats in the opaque blackness like a ghostly sign, a message meaning nothing, a blip of coded electrical energy crackling across a wounded man’s mind-screen with neon intensity:
WAY UP AND SOLD!
The wounded man doesn’t understand. He can’t move. He can’t breathe. He’s fused to the dark. He’s an amorphous blob of carbon floating in space … and yet … and yet … he keeps sensing the presence of this message meant only for him, an urgent command that makes no sense whatsoever:
WAIT UP AND ROLL!
All at once he feels the physical laws of the universe returning very slowly, as though he’s a vessel in the deepest part of the ocean righting itself, feeling the weight of gravity through the mists of paralyzing pain, acting on him—first on his midsection, and then on his extremities—a tugging sensation from below and from each side of him, as though the moorings holding him prisoner in this black sensory deprivation tank are tightening.
He senses the existence of his own face, sticky with blood, hot with infection, a pressure on his mouth, and a stinging sensation in his eyes, which are still sightless but are beginning to absorb a glowing, nebulous light from somewhere above him.
In his midbrain, the neon message being transmitted to him slowly becomes clear, either through sound or some other inchoate telepathic means, and as the message jerkily comes into focus—a crude imperative clicking into place like tiles on a puzzle box—his fractured psyche begins to compute the deeper meaning of it.
The angry command currently being directed at him triggers a warning alarm that shatters his courage and weakens his resolve. All his defenses crumble. All the blockades in his brain—all the heavy-duty walls and partitions and compartments—come tumbling down … until he is nothing … nothing but a shattered human being groping in the dark, horrified, tiny, fetal … as the coded words are slowly decrypted in his mind:
WAKE UP, ASSHOLE!
The voice comes from inches away, a familiar breathy feminine voice.
“Wake up, asshole!”
He opens his encrusted eyes. Oh God, oh God, no-no-no—NO! A voice deep in his subconscious registers the horror and the true nature of his situation: He is tied to the walls of his own foul-smelling living room, which now serves as a perfect doppelganger for the torture chamber under the speedway in which he kept Michonne.
A single overhead safety lamp in a tin shade shines down on him. Michonne must have brought it in. The upper half of the Governor’s body is battered and bruised, torqued so severely by the ropes that his shoulders are nearly dislocated. The rest of him—which he now realizes with no small measure of horror is completely nude—rests with his legs bent at the knees and awkwardly splayed outward against a wooden panel hastily nailed to the carpet beneath him. His cock stings, stretched at an odd angle beneath him, as though glued to the floor in a puddle of coagulating blood. A strand of thick, viscous, bloody drool dangles off his lower lip.
The weak, mewling voice deep inside him pierces the noise in his head: I’m scared … oh God I’m scared—
—SHUT UP!
He tries to push back the voice. His mouth is as dry as a lime pit. He tastes bitter copper, as if he’s been sucking on pennies. His head weighs a thousand pounds. He blinks and blinks, trying to focus on the shadowy face right in front of him.
Gradually, in bleary, miragelike waves, the narrow face of a dark-skinned woman comes into focus—she crouches right in front of him, only inches away—burning her gaze into him. “Finally!” she says with an intensity that makes him jerk backward with a start. “I thought you were never going to wake up.”
Dressed in her dungarees and headband and braids and boots, she rests her arms on her haunches directly in front of him like a repairwoman inspecting a faulty appliance. How the fuck did she do this? Why didn’t anyone see this bitch skulking around his place? Where the fuck are Gabe and Bruce? Where the fuck is Penny? He tries to maintain eye contact with the woman but has trouble keeping his half-ton head aloft. He wants to close his eyes and go to sleep. His head droops, and he hears that awful voice.
“You passed out a second time when I nailed your prick to the board you’re on. You remember that?” She tilts her head curiously at him. “No? Memory a little messed up? You with me?”
The Governor starts to hyperventilate, his heart kicking in his chest. He senses his inner voice—usually buried deep within the remotest cavities of his brain—bubbling to the surface and taking over and dominating his stream of consciousness: Oh God I’m so scared … I’m scared … what have I done? This is God paying me back. I never should have done those things I did … to this woman … to the others … to Penny … I’m so damn scared … I can’t breathe … I don’t want to die … please God I don’t want to die please don’t make me die I don’t want to die oh God-oh-God—
—SHUT THE FUCK UP!!—
Philip Blake silently howls at the voice in his head, the voice of Brian Blake—his weaker, softer self—as he stiffens and cringes against the ropes. A sharp dagger of pain knifes up his midsection from the mutilated penis, and he lets out an inaudible gasp behind the tape clamped over his mouth.
“Whoa there, cowboy!” The woman smiles at him. “I wouldn’t do much moving if I were you.”
The Governor lets his head droop, and closes his eyes, and lets out a thin breath through his nostrils. The gag holds tight on his mouth, a four-by-four-inch hank of duct tape. He tries to moan but he can’t even do that—his vocal cords strangled by the pain and the war going on inside him.
The “Brian” part of him is pushing its way back up through the layers … until it insinuates itself again in the Governor’s forebrain: God please … please … I did bad things I know I know but I don’t deserve this … I don’t want to die like this … I don’t want to die like an animal … in this dark place … I’m so scared I don’t want to die … please … I beg you … have mercy … I will plead with this woman … I will plead for my life for mercy for my life please please-please-please-please-please-please-OH-GOD-please-GOD-please—
Philip Blake winces, his body convulsing, the rope digging into his wrists.
“Easy there, sport,” the woman says to him, her glistening brown face almost sanguine in the shifting light of the gently swaying lamp. “I don’t want you to pass out again before I get a chance to begin.”
Eyes slamming shut, lungs erupting with fire, the Governor tamps down the voice, swallows it back, shoves it back into the dark convolutions of his brain. He silently roars at his other self: STOP YOUR FUCKING WHINING YOU LITTLE WEAK-WILLED FUCKING BABY AND LISTEN TO ME, LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN—YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BEG AND YOU’RE NOT GOING TO FUCKING CRY LIKE A LITTLE FUCKING BABY YOU LITTLE BABY!!!
The woman interrupts the clamor: “Calm down for a second … and stop jerking around … and listen to me. You don’t have to worry about the little girl—”
Philip Blake’s eyes pop open at the mention of Penny, and he looks at the woman.
“—I put her in the front room, just inside the door, where you had all this junk. What are you doing? Building a cage for your little sex slave? Why do you have her here, anyway?” The woman purses her lips thoughtfully. “You know what … don’t even answer that. I don’t even want to know.”
She rises up, and stands over him for a moment and takes a deep breath. “I’m anxious to get started.”
Now the storm raging in Philip’s brain suddenly ceases as though a fuse has blown. He gazes up at the woman through tunneling vision—she has his undivided attention now—and he gapes at her as she turns and ambles across the room, moving with a kind of casual authority, as if she has all the time in the world.
For a single instant, he thinks he hears her whistling softly as she goes over to a large, grease-spotted duffel bag on the floor in the far corner of the room. She bends down and rummages through a phalanx of tools. “I’ll begin with some show-and-tell,” she mutters, pulling a pair of pliers from the duffel. She stands, turns, and displays the pliers to him as though asking for a bid at an auction. What can I get as an opening bid on these fine Craftsman titanium pliers? She glares at him. “Show-and-tell,” she reiterates. “I’m going to use everything here on you before you die. First up—these excellent pliers.”
Philip Blake swallows acid and looks down at the blood-soaked wooden platform.
Michonne puts the pliers back into the duffel, then grabs another tool and shows it to him. “Next up, a hammer.” She waves the hammer cheerfully. “Already used this puppy on you a little bit.”
She puts the hammer back and digs some more through the bag’s contents, while Philip stares at the stained platform and tries to get air into his lungs.
“LOOK AT ME, MOTHERFUCKER!” Her roaring voice yanks his attention back across the room. She holds a small cylindrical device with a copper nozzle. “Acetylene torch,” she says with a sort of righteous expression, her voice suddenly calm again. “Feels almost full, too. And that’s good. You used this for cooking.” She manages another icy smile. “I will too.”
Philip Blake’s head droops again, the white noise in his brain crackling.
The woman across the room finds another implement and pulls it out of the bag. “You’re really going to like what I do with this,” she says, holding a bent spoon up into the light so that he can get a good look at it. The concavity of the spoon gleams in the dim room.
Dizziness courses through the Governor, his wrists blazing with pain.
Michonne rifles through the duffel for another object and finally finds it.
She holds the apparatus up for him to see. “Electric power drill,” she says. “Must have just charged it recently … the battery’s full.”
She walks toward him, pulling the drill’s trigger, revving its motor. The noise recalls the whirr of a dental instrument. “I think we’ll start with this.”
It takes every last shred of strength for Philip Blake to look up into her eyes as the drill bit whirs and slowly comes toward the sinewy part of his left shoulder where the arm meets the torso—the place where all the nerves live.
EIGHTEEN
During the normal course of a small town’s ebb and flow of daily life, a muffled scream in the wee-hour dark of night would raise not only suspicion but also sheer terror among those minding their own businesses slumbering with their windows open to let in the pleasant breeze of a spring evening or dozing at their third-shift cash registers at all-night convenience stores. But right then, at exactly 1:33 A.M. Eastern standard time, in Woodbury, Georgia, as the keening emanates from the second floor of the Governor’s building, the noise dampened and muffled by layers of mortar, concrete, and glass—as well as the duct tape suppressing the screams—the course of daily life is anything but normal.
The men working the late shift on the north, west, and south walls have started abandoning their posts, flummoxed by their supervisor’s absence. Martinez hasn’t checked in for hours—a bizarre development that has most of the guards scratching their heads. Bruce and Gabe have already discovered the deserted infirmary—the doctor and Alice nowhere to be found—and now the two men are discussing whether or not to bother the Governor with the news.
The strange calm in town has also roused Bob from a restless sleep, and caused him to struggle to his feet and take a drunken walk in the night air to try to clear his mind and figure out why things seem so strangely still and quiet. In fact, Bob Stookey may be the only resident who actually hears the faint sounds of screaming at that moment. He is staggering past the front façade of the Governor’s building when the high-pitched shrieking—masked by the duct tape gag, as faint and yet unmistakable as a loon calling out over the dark reaches of a still lake—echoes behind one of the boarded windows. The sound is so eerie and unexpected that Bob thinks he’s imagining it—the hooch will sometimes play tricks on him—so he continues weaving down the sidewalk, oblivious to the import of the strange noises.
But right then, inside said building, at the end of the second-floor corridor, inside the airless living room of the largest apartment, in the jaundiced light of a hanging work lamp, which now sways gently in the air currents, there is nothing imaginary about the pain being inflicted upon Philip Blake. The pain is a living, breathing thing—a predator—chewing through him with the ferocity of a wild boar rooting for bloody nuggets in the nerve bundle between his left pectoral and deltoid muscles.
The drill sings as the bit digs deeper and deeper into his nerve tissue, throwing a wake of blood and human particulate into the air.
Philip’s scream—filtered behind the duct tape, almost to the point of sounding like a warbling car alarm—is constant now. Michonne pushes the spinning bit down to the hilt, the delicate mist of blood blowing back into her face. Philip lets out a feral moan—which sounds something like “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMGGGHHHHH!!!”—as the drill buzzes and whirs. Michonne finally lets up on the trigger and unceremoniously yanks the bit out of the pulp of Philip’s shoulder with a violent jerk.
The Governor shudders in agony between the two ropes that creak noisily with every twitch.
Michonne drops the drill on the floor with litt
le concern for its well-being, cracking the housing. Tendrils of gristle and matter cling to its bit in a bloody tangle. Michonne gives it a nod.
“Okay,” she says, speaking more to herself than to her subject. “Let’s take care of that bleeding and make sure we keep you awake.”
She finds the roll of duct tape, snatches it up, pulls a strip clear, bites it off with her teeth, and wraps it around the bloody, wounded shoulder with very little tenderness. She would practice more care if she were dressing a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. She closes off the wound as though securing a leaky pipe.
Meanwhile, Philip Blake feels the curtain of darkness closing down over his line of vision. He feels the world separating like two panes of glass sliding apart underwater, forming a double image, which fades and fades, until his head lolls forward and the cold spreads through him, and he mercifully starts to pass out again.
The slap comes out of nowhere, hard and fast, to the side of his face. “WAKE UP!”
He heaves back against the ropes, eyes fluttering back open to the horrifying sight of the black woman’s steadfast, baleful expression. Still bearing the scars and the purple scourge marks of her own torture, the woman’s face furrows with contempt and fixes its unyielding glower on the Governor. Her smile is a clown’s grin of madness and hate. “The last thing you want to do is pass out again,” she says calmly, “you’ll miss all the fun.”
Next come the needle-nosed pliers. She procures them from the duffel, and comes back whistling that maddening tune that makes the Governor’s flesh crawl. It feels like a hive of wasps humming in his ears. He fixes his hot gaze on the pointed tips of those pliers as Michonne reaches down and grabs his right hand, which dangles loosely from its bound wrist. Whistling absently, she carefully holds his index finger up between her thumb and forefinger as though she’s about to give him a manicure.
It takes some effort, but she wrenches off his fingernail quickly, like ripping a Band-Aid off a sore. The searing pain corkscrews down his arm, strangles him, ignites his tendons with molten lava. His ferocious groan—suppressed by the gag of tape—sounds like a cow being slaughtered. She moves to the middle finger and tears off the nail. Blood drips and bubbles. Philip hyperventilates with agony. She does the third finger and then the pinkie for good measure.
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