The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 (15 page)

The sight of the big man lying in the moonlight—now as ruined and butchered as a flensed piece of meat—reaches down to some inner reserve deep within Gabe. A wave of contrary emotions wells up in him—sorrow, rage, and fear—and he bites down hard on the feelings. He orders the other two men to follow him.

They ransack what's left of the merchandise rotting inside the defunct Walmart. In the shadowy nooks and crannies, under fallen displays and on the floors behind counters, they find a couple of useable backpacks, a flashlight, a pair of binoculars, a box of crackers, a jar of peanut butter, some notebook paper, pens, batteries, and two boxes of .45 caliber slugs.

They stow the supplies into the backpacks and then set out to the east, at first following tire tracks, wending their way down a dusty adjacent access road, and then making a sharp turn to the south. They follow the tracks down dirt roads all night, until the tracks take a turn onto a stretch of blacktop and instantly vanish.

Gabe refuses to give up. He decides they should fan out. He sends Gus to the east and Rudy off to the west, and they make plans to hook back up at the intersection of Highway 80 and 267.

The men go their separate ways, the thin beams of their flashlights receding into the predawn fog. Gabe uses his eleven-inch buck knife to slice through a stretch of thick foliage, cutting a swath straight south as the sky begins to lighten with the first hints of dawn.

An hour later, he runs into a few errant walkers weaving through the trees, drawn to his scent, and he manages to dodge most of them. At one point, a small one—either a child or a midget, its moldering face blackened beyond recognition—darts out of the brush at him. He takes it down with a single knife thrust to the skull. Sweat breaks out on the back of Gabe's thick neck and drips down the small of his back as he picks up his pace, carving a path through the overgrown, neglected farm fields.

By midday, Gabe reaches the junction of two weather-beaten blacktop roads. He sees Rudy and Gus about twenty-five yards to the north, sitting side by side like owls on a split-rail fence, waiting for him, and judging by the sheepish, morose expressions on their faces, it's obvious that they have each come up empty.

“Lemme guess,” Gabe says, approaching them from the south. “You didn't find shit.”

Gus gives him a shrug. “Passed a bunch of little farm towns, all deserted … no prison.”

“Same,” Rudy grumbles. “Nothin' but wrecked cars and empty buildings. Ran into a few walkers, was able to put them down without making much of a racket.”

Gabe lets out a sigh, pulls a handkerchief, and wipes the moisture from the back of his neck. “Gotta keep trying, goddamnit.”

Rudy starts to say, “Why don't we try following—”

A sudden clap of gunfire echoes to the west, cutting off his words. It sounds like a small-caliber pistol. The sharp report reverberates across the sky, and Gabe jerks toward the sound, which comes from behind the tree line.

The other two men look up. Then they look at Gabe, who stares out at the rolling hills beyond the fence. For a moment, nobody says anything.

Then Gabe turns to the others and says, “Okay, follow me … and stay down. I got a feeling we just hit pay dirt.”

 

NINE

Lilly spends most of that day holed up in her apartment, chewing aspirin, prowling around her living room in her sweatpants and Georgia Tech football jersey, taking inventory of her storehouse of firearms and weaponry. The overcast daylight filters through the blinds, making her skull throb, but she ignores the aches and pains, operating now on the adrenal charge of pure hatred coursing through her like an electric current.

After a sleepless night and a series of tense exchanges with Austin, she is galvanized now, buzzing with contempt for these bastards who barged into Woodbury and made her lose her baby. After nearly two years of living amid the plague, Lilly has developed a unified theory of proper behavior among survivors. You either help one another—if you can—or leave each other the fuck alone. But these intruders have trampled over all decent modes of interaction and ruined everything, and the outrage burns brightly in Lilly. Thankfully, the tenderness in her midsection has faded slightly—along with the shock of all her dreams going up in smoke—which now only serves to make room for the white-hot loathing for these people that blazes within her as she paces the cluttered apartment.

All the crates and boxes and secondhand furniture have been pushed aside, stacked along the walls to make room for the arsenal of small arms, bladed weapons, and excess ammunition spread out across the floor. It hadn't even occurred to her how much of this stuff she had been stockpiling over the months—perhaps out of paranoia, or maybe via some kind of dark intuition—but now she sees it all laid out in orderly rows. Her two .22 caliber Ruger MK IIs lay side by side at the top of the heap like crests on a coat of arms. An extra pair of 10-round magazines are lined up next to the pistols, and a web belt is coiled directly below the mags. Under this is a row of cartons filled with 40-caliber rounds, a machete, a row of assorted suppressors, Austin's Glock on a stock of spare magazines, a Remington .308 bolt-action MSR rifle, three long-blade knives with varying degrees of sharpness, a long-handled pickax, and an odd assortment of holsters, sheaths, and pouches lined up in a neat little row.

Austin's voice rings out from the adjacent kitchen. “Soup's on!” He announces this with as much vigor and cheer as he can muster, but the sadness is apparent in his voice, a constant weight now dragging him down. “Whaddaya say we eat together in the back room?”

“Not hungry,” she calls to him.

“Lilly, c'mon … don't do this to me,” he says, coming into the room wringing his hands on a towel. He wears a shopworn REM T-shirt, his long curls undone and spilling down his back. He looks nervous. “You need your nourishment.”

“What for?”

“Lilly, please.”

“Look … I appreciate the thought.” She doesn't even look at him, just keeps studying the arsenal at her feet. “You go ahead and eat—I'm fine.”

He licks his lips, thinking, choosing his words carefully. “You do realize that we may never see these people again.”

“Oh, we'll see them … I promise you … we'll see them again.”

“What does that mean?”

She stares at the weapons. “It means we're not going to stop until we find them.”

“Why? What good is it going to do?”

She looks at him. “Did the IQ level just drop in here to, like, room temperature?”

“Lilly—”

“Have you not been paying attention to anything that's been going on?”

“That's the problem!” He throws the towel on the floor. “I've been with you every step of the way, I've been paying fucking close attention to
everything
.” He swallows hard, takes a breath, and then tries to calm down and measure his words. “I can see you're hurting, Lilly, but I'm hurting, too.”

Lilly looks back down at the firearms and says very softly, “I know that.”

He comes over to her and touches her shoulder. “This is insane.”

She doesn't move her gaze from the weapons. “It is what it is.”

“And what is that?”

She looks at him. “It's fucking war.”

“War? Really? That sounds more like the Governor talking.”

“It's us or them, Austin.”

Austin lets out an exasperated sigh. “I'm not worried about
them,
Lilly … I'm worried about
us
.”

She scorches him with her gaze. “You better pull your head out of your ass and start worrying about
them,
or there's not going to
be
an us … there's not going to be a Woodbury, there's not going to be fucking
anything
.”

Austin looks down, and says nothing.

Lilly starts to say something else when she stops herself. She sees something in Austin's expression change, his eyes welling up, and a single tear tracking down his face. The tear drips off his chin and falls to the floor. All the fight goes out of Lilly, and her guts tighten with sadness. She goes to him and puts her arms around him. He hugs her back, and then she hears Austin's voice in her ear, barely a whisper, all strangled with sorrow. “I feel helpless,” he utters breathlessly. “Losing the baby … and now … I feel like you're pulling away … and I can't lose you … I can't … I just can't.”

She holds him and strokes his long hair and murmurs softly in his ear, “You're not going to lose me. You're my man. Do you understand? It's you and me—end of story. You understand?”

“Yes…” His voice is barely audible. “I understand … thank you … thank you.”

For a long moment they hold each other in the ashen light of that cluttered living room, saying nothing, just holding each other as though bracing themselves. She can hear Austin's heavy breaths in her ear, can feel his heart beating against her chest.

“I know what it's like to feel helpless,” she says at last, looking into his eyes, their faces nearly touching, their breath mingling. “Not long ago I was the poster girl for helplessness. I was a train wreck. But somebody helped me, gave me confidence, taught me how to survive.”

Austin holds her tighter, and he whispers, “That's what you've done for me, Lilly.”

She plants a soft, tender kiss on his forehead and pulls him into a tighter embrace. God help her, she loves him. She will fight for him, she will fight for their future, she will fight to the death. She cradles the back of his head, stroking his long hair, but all she can think about now is getting into the shit and exterminating each and every one of these fucking monsters who remain a threat.

*   *   *

At dusk that night, the Governor sits by himself in the empty bleachers of the speedway, the wind tossing litter across the deserted infield. The sky, heavy with toxic particulates, streaks with ribbons of gold and fuchsia as the sun dips below the clouds and dust devils swirl across the track on the bluster of the day's end—all of it reflecting Philip Blake's pensive mood.

A great military leader once called this time “the great inhalation before the storm,” and Philip feels a similar weight in the air. Sitting in the waning light, he marshals his energy and fantasizes about the glory of battle and the satisfaction of seeing that bitch who crippled him come apart at the seams like a blood-filled piñata. Philip's mind percolates with the dark energy of war like an atomic particle accelerator—humming with rage—turning this magic-hour light into an unholy rite, a sacred invocation.

Then, almost as if conjured by his thoughts, a harbinger appears—a stocky figure in camo pants, boots, and army surplus jacket—materializing in the shadows of the speedway's far portal.

Philip looks up.

Gabe trots across the infield, breathless from running, his portly face filled with urgency, eyes blazing with excitement. He sees Philip. He circles around the end of the stands, hopping over the iron cordons and climbing the bench seats until he approaches the Governor. “They said I'd find you here,” he says, hyperventilating, leaning over and putting his hands on his knees.

“Take it easy, Kemosabe,” the Governor says. “I hope you got good news for me.”

Gabe looks at him and nods. “We found it.”

The words seem to hang in the air for a moment, the expression on Philip's face unreadable in the fading blue light. He stares. “Start talking.”

*   *   *

According to Gabe, when they heard the shots that day, they crept through the thick woods adjacent to the two-lane until they snuck up on a couple of chicks and some older dude in a clearing doing some target practice. Gabe and his men stayed out of sight, huddling behind the trees, watching from a distance, as the three unidentified folks took down a few biters, and then started dragging one of the bodies back toward a high fence in the distance.

At first, none of it made any sense, but when Gabe and the boys finally followed a path up a hill to get a better view from higher land—and they got a good glimpse of what lay beyond the fence, spreading across the neighboring patchwork of farm fields like a vast housing block that had simply dropped out of space—all the pieces fell together.

The place once known as the Meriwether County Correctional Facility stretches almost as far as the eye can see across the pastureland on the eastern edge of the county, a zigzagging network of gray-brick postwar buildings situated behind three layers of security fencing. Gabe realized instantly that the reason nobody in Woodbury had thought of this place is probably due to the fact that it had been defunded by the state of Georgia in the crash of '87, and for years it had been off the radar, sitting out here in the rural hinterlands like a ghost ship. The only reason that Gabe's memory was jogged by the sight of the place was the fact that Gabe's cousin, Eddie, a drug dealer from Jacksonville, had been held here in the late '90s pending his appeal. The state had taken to using the place as a glorified waiting room—technically, a jail for convicted felons—running it on a skeleton crew but essentially keeping it stocked and armed and locked and loaded.

For the most part, the property seemed fairly secure to Gabe—but not by any stretch of the imagination
invulnerable
. Inside the perimeter of razor wire and guard towers, the exercise yards and run-down basketball courts lay deserted, cleared long ago of any biters. And although the outer edges of the fences swarmed here and there with stray walkers—clusters of them drawn to the scent of the human inhabitants like bees drawn to honey—the soot-stained buildings looked relatively solid, with good bones, and stacks on the roof pitches pluming puffs of exhaust. Somebody must have gotten the generators and emergency apparatus up and running. The condition of the place suggested the potential for refrigeration, showers, air-conditioning, cafeterias stocked with food and supplies, amenities such as gyms and weight-training rooms and arcades—all of it just begging to be taken.