“I’ll be back soon, honey—don’t you worry,” the Governor says, kneeling in front of her. He smiles at her with the strangest look on his face. If asked to describe the look, Bob would have to say it resembles a death mask, a clown’s rictus planted on the face of a corpse. “You won’t even miss me, I’ll be back so fast. You be good for Uncle Bob, okay? You be a good girl.” The Penny-thing moans and gums at the air. The Governor puts his arms around her and gives her a hug. “I know—I love you, too.”
Bob looks away, filled with a strange and overwhelming surge of emotions—disgust, sadness, fear, pity—all of them jumbled up in his guts like a ball of flame. He is one of only three human beings whom the Governor has trusted with the knowledge of Penny’s existence, and right now Bob isn’t so sure he wants to be one of those confidantes. He stares at the carpet and swallows back the nausea.
“Bob?”
The Governor must have seen the sour look on the man’s face because he now speaks firmly to him as though gently chastising a child. “You sure you’re going to be able to do this? I’m serious—she means a lot to me.”
Bob braces himself against the wall and takes a deep breath. “I can watch her just fine, Governor. I’m sober as a judge. I’ll keep an eye on her. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
The Governor lets out a sigh, gazing back at the drooling creature in front of him. “You can let her walk around if you want … but I won’t judge you if you leave her tied up.” The Governor stares at the undulating black lips of the little girl-thing. “She can’t bite anymore, but she can still be a handful—and we don’t have anything to feed her right now, so she’s gonna get a little cranky.”
Bob gives a nod from across the foyer. Beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead, his eyes burning, he realizes right then that he’s standing about as close to the thing as he ever wants to get.
The Governor looks at Bob. “Anyone dies, though—and I mean anyone—you make sure she gets fed. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.” Bob tries not to stare at the thing. “You got it.”
The Governor gives the girl-thing one last embrace, a delicate little stringer of bile clinging to his shoulder as he finally pulls away.
* * *
A little over an hour later—at 5:14 A.M.—the Governor stands beside Gabe on the north end of the Woodbury town square. A single security lamp canted off an adjacent telephone pole shines a beam of light down at them through tiny clouds of moths fluttering haphazardly in the glare. Both men now wear the heavy Kevlar body armor procured from the Guard station, the chest pieces and vests giving the two of them a fierce, martial gravitas in the shimmering darkness. The predawn chill shows in faint puffs of vapor pluming from their mouths as they survey the twenty-three members of the makeshift militia standing at attention in front of them.
Nearly two dozen men and women laden with ammo bandoliers and gun belts heavy with firearms and extra rounds stand shoulder to shoulder across the curb, facing their leader, awaiting final orders. Behind them, the single-file row of vehicles—all fueled and idling—stretches down half the block, headlamps shining toward the exit gate.
They are about to leave twenty-five of their fellow villagers behind with nary a firearm or a bullet—the sum total of their arsenal now sitting on the flatbeds, in trunks, and piled into cargo holds. The Governor asked the Sterns to stay behind and watch the town, and when Barbara objected—after all, she and David are among the best shooters in Woodbury—the Governor told her he wasn’t asking her to do this, he was fucking ordering her to do it.
“We have them in our sights, my friends!” Philip Blake now announces to the brigade, his booming voice echoing across the dark square.
Each and every face present that morning reflects the gravity of the moment. Underneath the brims of baseball caps and headbands, their eyes glint with sullen purpose and thinly veiled fear. Fingers brush nervously against trigger guards and along the stocks of assault rifles. These are not professional soldiers by any means, but Philip can see the cold slap of survival instinct waking them up now, girding them, galvanizing them.
He applies more of the stimulant to the group with his stentorian voice. “These motherfuckers killed Doc Stevens! They murdered Bruce Cooper!” He scans the row of somber faces and finally sees Lilly standing at the far end of the group. Austin stands next to her with his sniper rifle on his shoulder, his head cocked with grave resolve. Her hair pulled back in a tight, businesslike ponytail, Lilly has her hands on her hips, palming the handles of her twin Rugers, her Remington MSR rifle shouldered behind her. For the briefest instant, something about the look in her eyes bothers Philip. Maybe he’s imagining it, but she looks as though she’s deep in thought—ruminating about something—when she should be humming like a tuning fork with kill-lust. Philip holds her gaze as he booms, “They mutilated me—and it’s time for them to pay!!”
Lilly meets his gaze from twenty feet away and holds it for an endless moment.
Then she nods.
The Governor roars: “PILE IN AND LET’S MOVE!!”
* * *
At 5:30 A.M. on the nose, in a flurry of revving engines, creaking chassis, and chaotic shouting, the heavily armed convoy finally embarks.
In the middle of the pack, Lilly follows the red taillights in front of her as best she can, both hands riveted to the gigantic steering wheel of the rumbling two-and-a-half-ton M35 cargo truck. She can’t see shit. The drought of recent days has left the road out of Woodbury as dusty and granular as a sandbox, and now the procession kicks up a fogbank of haze in the predawn darkness as it thunders out the south gate. Lilly can barely see the truck’s fifteen-foot-long rear payload bay through the back window, enclosed by guard railing and filled with passengers.
She feels like a midget in the enormous cab, her foot barely reaching the accelerator pedal on the floor, the air reeking of the flop-sweat of generations of nervous National Guardsmen. Austin sits next to her in the passenger seat, cradling the two-way radio in his lap. Every few moments, the voice of the Governor crackles out of the speaker, admonishing Gabe to keep it under forty miles per hour to keep the formation tight and to make sure he takes 85 South—NOT NORTH GODDAMNIT!!—and to turn his fucking headlights off before he wakes up the entire county!
Years ago, Lilly spent a lot of couch time at a Marietta mental health clinic working on her panic attacks. The shrink was a kindly, middle-aged woman named Dr. Cara Leone, who preferred talk therapy to medication and devoted a lot of time to parsing the reasons for Lilly’s racing thoughts. Partly hormonal, partly growing pangs, partly neurochemical, and partly grief over her mother’s lost battle with breast cancer, Lilly’s anxiety attacks always came upon her in a public place, in a crowd, accompanied by a pandemonium of thoughts tumbling around her brain. She was ugly, she was a loser, she was overweight, she had cancer in her genes, people were staring at her, she was going to faint, she couldn’t breathe, she felt the world spinning, she had a brain tumor, she was going to die right here in this grocery store. Happily, she either outgrew these spells or worked her way through them … until now.
Following the cargo truck in front of her, its glowing red taillights veiled behind a miasma of exhaust and dust, she feels the stirrings of a panic attack coming on. She hasn’t felt these sensations for at least ten years, but, sure enough, she feels them now; she senses her thoughts slipping off their spindle, making her dizzy as the fears slide around her brain, sending gooseflesh across the back of her neck. She stares at those glowing red orbs in front of her. She stares and stares until they become two red-dwarf planets floating in space … and she concentrates on her training. She thinks of the lessons Bob taught her from his days in basic training: the zen of the sniper.
The bullet will travel with a curved trajectory. The sniper must compensate for this by aiming higher at longer distances. If the distance to the target is unknown, the shooter can calculate muzzle height by using some sort of landmark close to the
target, a utility pole or fence post, and then extrapolating the adjustment for a nearby target. She thinks about this as she drives, stuffing the fear back down her throat through sheer concentration. The headshot is the preferred goal. The average head is six inches wide, and average human shoulders are twenty inches apart, and the average distance from a person’s pelvis to the top of their head is forty inches. In front of her, the cargo truck makes a ninety-degree turn onto Millard Drive, and she calmly follows, turning the wheel and gently commandeering the M35 through the dust and down the two-lane.
She feels better. She feels her racing thoughts settling into the cobra-calm of the sniper’s mind-set, a state that Bob once rhapsodized about while in his cups. The bullet type will determine the drop rate. The Remington shoots a .308 caliber, 175-grain projectile at 2,685 feet per second. At six hundred yards, a seventeen-degree-of-elevation adjustment would have to be made to hit the target. She feels the convoy speeding up in front of her, the speedometer edging past forty miles per hour. She follows. Austin says something next to her. “Huh?” She shoots a glance over at him, feeling as though she’s just awakened from a deep sleep. “Did you say something?”
He looks at her, the tension like a mask over his boyish features. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Good.” Austin nods and gazes out the side window at the horizon. Lilly notices the sky has changed color behind the trees, lightening from a deep black to a washed-out gray. Dawn is just around the corner. She grips the wheel tighter and follows the procession down a dirt exit road, the storm cloud of dust kicking up higher. Every few moments, she glances out at the side mirror and sees the Governor standing in back amid the silent men and women squeezed like silverware in a drawer.
He looks like he’s crossing the fucking Delaware, she thinks, and over the space of that instant, she experiences a wave of contrary emotions. She’s a little embarrassed for him, the way he’s standing back there with his rakish eye patch and body armor—his head upturned in defiance, his one good hand holding on to the cab in order to steady himself against the bumps—looking like a wounded Spartan general out for revenge. All of which, she realizes, is true. But another part of her drinks in the sight of the Governor’s Stonewall Jackson routine. He is the baddest of the badasses, and she feels confidence coursing through her now, knowing that she’s going into battle with this man. Who better to remove this cancer?
Fifteen minutes later, the sun has begun to blaze bright orange behind the palisades, and the road begins to wind up a gentle grade.
The forest on either side of the convoy thickens, the smell of pine and humus and walker droppings wafting through the cab’s interior. Another glance out at the side mirror reveals the Governor in the cargo bay in back, peering into the distance, and fumbling, one-handed, with his map, which flutters in the breeze. He grabs the walkie-talkie off his belt. The other passengers, seated in rows on either side of him, lift their rifles and check their chambers, their jaws tensing in anticipation.
The Governor thumbs the Talk button. The sound of his voice crackles in the truck’s cab: “We’re closing in on the hill that overlooks the prison … right, Gabe?”
Gabe’s voice sizzles and sputters: “We are, boss—prison’s about five hundred yards away, down in the flatlands, on the edge of the county line.”
“Okay,” the Governor’s voice replies. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Find a wide spot to pull off, preferably within eyeshot of the place.”
“Copy that!”
* * *
The morning sun hammers down on the forest, filtering in gossamer ribbons through the boughs, the ghostly cottonwood tufts floating through the beams, giving off an almost primordial air. It is now exactly 6:15 A.M. Gabe finds a narrow clearing to pull off, and the rest of the convoy follows—moving slowly, keeping engine noise as quiet as possible—one after another gently coming to a stop.
Lilly pulls the M35 over behind the cargo truck, shoves the shifter into neutral and yanks on the parking brake.
For a long moment, everybody sits in silence. Lilly can hear her bloodstream pulsing in her ears. Then, one by one, the sound of doors gently clicking open signals the point of no return. Lilly and Austin climb out of the cab, their joints sore from the tension, their stomachs queasy with nerves. Lilly hears rifle bolts clang softly in the cool, blue shadows of the trees. Rounds are fed into chambers. Straps are tightened on ammo harnesses. Kevlar vests are adjusted, sunglasses go on, and everybody stands by the front grilles of their softly idling vehicles.
“Here we are,” the Governor announces from his perch on the back of Lilly’s cargo truck. The sound of his voice makes everybody go still. He makes a grand gesture toward a break in the trees to the east, a dirt path leading down a gentle rise into the valley. The prison is visible in the heat waves about four hundred yards away. “So close we can smell their evil.”
All heads turn toward the conglomeration of stone buildings in the distance, the complex looking like some kind of exotic Bedouin compound plopped down in the middle of nowhere. The low-slung dormitories are tucked behind layers of chain link and razor wire, the guard towers unmanned, empty, and impotent. The place calls out to Lilly—a haunted house, doomed and desecrated by ghosts, its warrens once filled with the dregs of society. It now looks as though it’s asleep—a network of dirt roads surrounding the outer perimeter—the only movement at present a mob of walkers, as thick as a subway platform at rush hour, wandering the edges of the fencing. They look so small and dark at this distance, they resemble bugs.
“Try and keep pace with the tank as we close in,” the Governor orders from his platform, speaking loudly enough to be heard, but not so loud as to announce their presence to anybody, at least not just yet. “I want to seem like an unrelenting wave on the horizon. We want to intimidate them right away—make them sloppy!”
Lilly pulls her rifle off her shoulder and checks the breach—it’s locked and loaded—her spine tingling with anticipation.
“When it begins, when the killing starts,” the Governor goes on, surveying with his single eye each and every one of his warriors, “don’t let their appearance deceive you. You will see women—children, even—but I assure you, these people are monsters—no different than the biters we kill without a second thought!”
Lilly shares a tense glance with Austin, who stands next to her with his fists clenched. He nods at her. His expression is heartbreaking—a once boyish face now aged many years in the harsh light of dawn.
“Life out here,” the Governor tells them, “it has changed these people, twisted them into creatures who will kill without mercy, without thought—with no regard for human life. They do not deserve to live.”
Now the Governor climbs over the side rail and hops down to the ground. Lilly watches him, her pulse quickening. She knows exactly where he’s going. He strides over to the lead vehicle, his boots crunching in the gravel, his gloved hand creaking as it makes a fist.
Gabe sits behind the wheel of the head truck, leaning out the open window with a puzzled expression. “Everything okay, boss?”
The Governor looks up at him. “Get in line with the others. I want the whole fleet spread across the width of the valley. And send a scout around the back of the place to keep an eye on any of them trying to slip away.”
Gabe nods, and then looks at him. “You’re not coming?”
The Governor gazes out at the distant prison. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” He gazes back up at Gabe. “I’m riding on the tank.”
* * *
They come out of the east, with the sun at their backs, raising a dust storm.
As they roar down the grade and across the valley, the Governor rides on the nose of the tank, his gloved hand welded to the turret as though he’s mounted on a bucking bronco. The massive treads of the tank, as well as the enormous wheels of all the military vehicles, kick up the drought-wasted earth as they close in, engines singing high oper
a—an army of Valkyries swooping down upon the damned—the dust cloud so profuse now it practically engulfs the entire fleet.
By the time they approach the outer access road—about fifty yards from the fence—a number of things have changed. All the walkers in the general vicinity, drawn to the noise and clamor, have now crowded in toward the east edge of the prison, the dead numbering a hundred or more—an added layer of protection, either planned or coincidental, for those inside the prison. At the same time, frenzied voices have begun to echo across the cement lots behind the fence—the inhabitants caught off guard and now scrambling for cover.
Adding to the pandemonium is the vast storm front of dust, now as big and thick as a sirocco, completely swallowing the convoy. Blinded by the dust cloud, Lilly slams on the brakes, nearly throwing her entire cargo bay of armed men and women through the cab’s rear window. Austin slams against the dash, smacking his forehead on the windshield. Lilly catches her breath and turns to Austin. “You all right?”
“I’m good,” he mutters, scrambling to get his gun up and ready.
The dust cloud begins to clear. The harsh morning sun shines down through the nimbus like firelight through gauze, turning everything luminous and dreamlike. Lilly’s heart hammers in her chest. Her head throbs with nervous tension. Through the dirt-filmed windshield, she can see the prison’s outer fence with its barbed crowns—thousands of feet long—teeming with walking dead.
They swarm and burrow in toward the fence like wasps engulfing a nest—hundreds of them, all shapes and sizes and genders, snarling and drooling, moving as one great organism—driven mad by some innate demonic hunger, whipped into a frenzy by the noise of the convoy, the frantic movement inside the compound, and the smell of human flesh.
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