The Walking Dead Collection (103 page)

Martinez catches the hundred-and-eighty-pound man with a grunt, easing him to the ground. Rick exhales a pained breath and looks around.

Across the dirt clearing, Dr. Stevens stands in the shadows of an abandoned storefront, a weather-beaten sign hanging by a thread, with the words
MCCALLUM FEED AND SEED
. He lets out a sigh of relief and checks his satchel for any damage. The glass vials of antibiotics and painkillers remain intact, the instruments in good order. “I just can’t believe we made it out of there so easily,” he mumbles, checking the last of the bag’s contents. “I mean, the walls aren’t exactly meant to keep people in … but…”

Behind the doctor, a shadow moves in the depths of the ramshackle doorway of McCallum’s. Nobody notices it. Nor does anybody hear the clumsy, shuffling footsteps faintly crackling over detritus and packing straps, moving toward their voices.

“I’m just so damn relieved,” Stevens is saying, snapping the satchel shut.

The figure lurches out of the doorway—just a blur of teeth, ragged clothing, and mottled fish-belly skin in the darkness—and clamps its jaws down on the closest human flesh in its path.

*   *   *

Sometimes the victim doesn’t even see it coming until it’s too late, which is maybe, on some fundamental level, the most merciful way for things to go down.

The creature that sinks its teeth into the nape of Dr. Stevens’s exposed neck is enormous—probably a former field hand or stock clerk accustomed to loading sixty-pound bales of fertilizer or cattle feed into truck beds all day, day in and day out—and it latches down on the doctor’s jugular so firmly, a crowbar couldn’t loosen its jaws. Clad in moldy bib overalls, its thinning hair reduced to spidery wisps on its veined white skull, it has eyes like yellow pilot lamps and makes a watery, garbled coughing sound as it roots its rotten incisors into live tissue.

Dr. Stevens stiffens immediately, arms going up, eyeglasses knocked off his face, satchel flying, a horrid shriek bursting out of him in complete involuntary shock. He can’t see or detect the agent of his demise—only the Day-Glo red shade of hot agony snapping down over his gaze.

The suddenness of the attack catches everybody by surprise, the group bristling in unison, reaching for weapons, scrambling backward.

Alice lets out a scream—“DR. STEVENS!!”—and she sees the weight of the massive biter, combined with the doctor’s involuntary writhing and staggering, pull Stevens backward, off balance, and onto the ground.

Stevens lands on top of his assailant with a wet grunt, the blood washing over and baptizing the giant biter underneath him in a torrent of fluid as black and oily as molasses in the darkness. In a strangled, insensate voice, the doctor jabbers,
“What—? What is it? Is it—? Is it one of them? Is it—? Is it a biter?”

The others lunge toward him, but Alice has already reached for the sentry’s AK, which dangles on its strap over Martinez’s shoulder, her voice booming, “GIVE ME THAT!”

“Hey!” Martinez can’t tell what’s happening, the tug on his shoulder accompanied by voices yelling all around him, and the other men pushing past him.

Alice already has the AK up and aimed, and then she’s pulling the trigger—thank God the kid on the wall keeps his weapon locked and loaded, the safety off at all times—and the gun barks.

A bouquet of fire sparks and flickers out of the short muzzle as the shell casings fly, and the tracers burst a chain of holes in the biter’s temple, cheek, jaw, shoulder, and half its torso. The thing twitches and wriggles in its death throes beneath the wounded doctor, and Alice keeps firing, and firing, and firing, until the magazine clicks empty, and the slide snaps open—and she keeps firing.

“It’s okay … it’s okay, Alice.”

The faint sound of a male voice is the first thing that penetrates her ringing ears and her traumatized brain. She lowers the gun and realizes that Dr. Stevens is addressing her from the blood-soaked heap of a funeral bier on which he lies.

“Oh-God-Doctor—DR. STEVENS!” She tosses the assault rifle to the ground with a clatter and goes to him. She drops to her knees, and reaches for his neck, getting her fingertips wet with his arterial blood as she feels for a pulse, trying to remember the CPR lessons he provided her, the trauma unit protocols, when she realizes he is tugging at her lab coat with his blood-spattered fingers.

“I’m not … dying … Alice … think of it …
scientifically,
” he utters around a mouth filling up with blood. In the darkness, his face looks almost serene. The others press in behind Alice and look on and listen closely. “I’m just … evolving … into a different … a
worse …
life form.”

The horror spreads from person to person hovering over him, from face to face, as Alice fights her tears and strokes his cheek. “Doctor—”

“I’ll still exist, Alice … in some way,” he utters in barely a whisper. “Take the supplies, Alice … you’ll need them … to take care of these people. Use what I taught you. Now go … go … go on.”

Alice stares as the doctor’s life drains out of him, his intelligent eyes going glassy, and then empty, gaping at the nothingness. She lets her head loll forward but no tears will come. The desolation in her core won’t allow tears to come now.

Martinez stands over her, watching all this with nervous intensity. A fist of contradictory emotions grips his insides. He likes these people—the doctor and Alice—regardless of their hatred of the Governor, their petty betrayals, their scheming and gossiping and sarcasm and disrespect. God help Martinez—
he likes them
. He feels a weird kinship with them, and now he’s groping for purchase in the dark.

Alice rises to her feet, picking up the satchel of medical supplies.

Martinez touches her shoulder, and softly says, “We gotta move.”

Alice nods, says nothing, stares at the bodies.

“People in town will think the shots were just the guard taking out biters that got too close to the fence,” Martinez goes on, his voice hurried and taut with tension. He glances over his shoulder at the other two men, who stand by, looking rattled. Martinez turns back to Alice. “But the sound will attract more biters—and we need to be gone before they get here.”

He looks at the doctor’s slack face, stippled with blood, frozen in death.

“I—He was a good friend,” Martinez adds finally. “I’ll miss him too.”

Alice gives one last nod, and then turns away. She nods at Martinez.

Without another word, Martinez grabs the AK and gives a hand gesture to the others, and then leads the three survivors down a side road—and on toward the town limits—their silhouettes swallowed within moments by absolute, unforgiving, implacable darkness.

*   *   *

“Damn it, honey—
eat it!
” The Governor lowers himself to his hands and knees on the foul-smelling carpet of his living room, holding a severed human foot by its big toe in front of the dead little girl. The Japanese sword lies on the floor close by—a treasure, a talisman, a spoil of war that the Governor hasn’t let out of his sight since the debacle at the racetrack—its implications now the furthest thing from his mind. “It’s not completely fresh,” he says, indicating the gray appendage, “but I swear this thing was walking not two hours ago.”

The tiny cadaver jerks against its chain eighteen inches from his hand. It emits another little growl—a broken Chatty Cathy doll—and turns its frosted-glass eyes away from the tidbit.

“C’mon, Penny, it’s not that bad.” He inches closer and waves the dripping, severed foot in front of her. It’s pretty big, hard to tell if it’s male or female—the toes are small but all natural, no remnants of polish—and it has already begun to turn blue-green and stiffen up with rigor mortis. “And it’s only going to get worse, you don’t eat it now. C’mon, sweetie, do it for—”

An enormous thud makes the Governor jerk with a start on the floor.

“What the fuck!” He turns toward the front door, across the room.

Another massive thud rings out. The Governor rises to his feet.

A third impact on the door results in drywall dust sifting down from the lintel, and a faint cracking noise along the seams of the deadbolt.

“What the hell do you want?!” he calls out. “And don’t beat on my goddamn door so hard!”

The fourth impact snaps the deadbolt and chain, the door swinging open so hard it bangs into the adjacent wall in a burst of wood shards and dust, the knob embedding itself into the wood like a dowel.

The inertia drives the intruder into the room on a whirlwind.

The Governor tenses in the center of the living room—fists balling up, teeth clamping down in a tableau of fight-or-flight instinct. He looks as though he’s seeing a ghost materialize next to his secondhand sofa.

Michonne tumbles into the apartment, nearly falling on her face from all the forward momentum.

She skids to a halt three feet away from the subject of her quest.

Getting her balance back, she squares her shoulders, fists also clenching, feet planted firmly now, head tilted forward in an offensive posture.

For the briefest of moments, they stand facing each other. Michonne has put herself together on the way over—her jumpsuit straightened, her top tucked in, headband tightened around her lush braids—to the point where she looks as if she’s ready to begin a workday or possibly go to a funeral. After an unbearable pause—the two combatants staring each other down in an almost pathologically intense manner—the first sound emitted comes out of the Governor.

“Well, well.” His voice is low, flat, cold, with zero affect or emotion. “This should be interesting.”

SEVENTEEN

“My turn,” Lilly says, her voice barely audible above the din of crickets and the breeze that is rattling the branches around the dark clearing. She finds a snapshot taken on a disposable camera of her and Megan at a bar in Myrtle Beach, both of them completely baked, their eyes glazed over and red as cinders. She stands and goes over to the hole in the ground. “Here’s to my BFF, my gal pal, my old friend Megan, may she rest in peace.”

The photograph flutters and falls like a dead leaf into the fire pit.

“To Megan,” Austin says, and takes another sip of the sugary juice. “Okay … next up … my
bros
.” He pulls a small, rusty harmonica from his pocket. “I’d like to drink to my brothers, John and Tommy Ballard, who got killed by walkers in Atlanta last year.”

He tosses the harmonica in the pit. The little metal apparatus clunks and bounces off the hard ground. Austin gazes down at it, his eyes growing distant and shiny. “Great musicians, good dudes … I hope they’re in a better place right now.”

Austin wipes his eyes as Lilly raises her cup and says softly, “To John and Tommy.”

They each drink another sip.

“My next one’s a little strange,” Lilly says, finding the little .22 caliber slug and holding it up between her thumb and index finger. The brass gleams in the moonlight. “We’re surrounded by death, every day; death is everywhere,” she says. “I’d like to fucking bury it … I know it doesn’t change anything but I just want to do it. For the baby. For Woodbury.”

She tosses the bullet in the hole.

Austin stares at the little metal round for a moment, then mutters, “For our baby.”

Lilly raises her cup. “For our baby … and for the future.” She thinks for a moment. “And for the human race.”

They both stare at the bullet.

“In the name of the Holy Spirit,” Lilly says very softly, staring down at the hole in the ground.

*   *   *

A fight—the spontaneous hand-to-hand kind—comes in many varieties. In the East, the business of fighting is Zenlike, studied, controlled, academic—the opponents often coming at each other with years of training behind them, and a sort of mathematical precision. In Asia, the weaker opponent learns to use the adversary’s strengths against them, the mêlées settled promptly. On the other end of the spectrum, in competitive rings around the world, freestyle battles can last for hours, with many rounds, the final outcome resting upon the physical stamina of each pugilist.

A third kind of fistfight occurs in the dark back alleys of American cities, during which opponents engage in a wholly different kind of battle. Fast and brutal and unpredictable—sometimes awkward—the common street fight is usually over within seconds. Street fighters have a tendency to shotgun their blows at each other, willy-nilly, driven by rage, and the whole fracas usually ends in a draw … or worse, with somebody finally pulling a knife or a firearm to bring things to a quick and mortal conclusion.

The battle that ensues in the Governor’s foul-smelling, dimly lit living room that night encompasses all three styles, and spans a grand total of eighty-seven seconds—the first five of which involve very little fighting at all. It begins with the two opponents planted where they stand, staring into each other’s eyes.

Quite a lot of nonverbal information is exchanged during those first five seconds. Michonne keeps her gaze welded to the Governor’s, and the Governor stares back at her—neither adversary giving the other so much as a blink—and the room seems to crystallize like a diorama seized up in ice.

Then, right around second number three, the Governor averts his gaze for a scintilla of a moment to the floor on his right flank.

He makes note of both the child and the sword, each of which lie within his grasp. Penny seems oblivious to the human drama unfolding around her, her livid, pasty face buried in the bucket of entrails. The sword gleams in the dull light of an incandescent bulb.

The Governor tries his hardest, over the course of that split instant,
not
to register any panic, or any outwardly visual concern for his little dead girl’s safety, or the idea forming in his mind—the human brain can formulate complex notions in the smallest soupçon of time, in less time than it takes a synapse to fire—that he just might be able to grab the sword and conclude matters quickly.

In the space of that single second—the third in a series of eighty-seven—Michonne also flicks her own gaze toward the girl and the katana saber.