The Walking Dead Collection (104 page)

Second number four finds the Governor snapping his gaze back up to Michonne’s smoldering glare. In that time, she has also glanced back at the Governor.

Over the duration of the next one and a half seconds—number four and a portion of number five—the two enemies read each other’s look.

The Governor knows now that she knows what he’s thinking, and she knows he knows, and the next half second—the rest of number five—recalls the end of a countdown. The engines fire and the thing explodes.

It takes six seconds for the next phase of the encounter to unfold.

The Governor dives for the sword, and Michonne lets out a booming cry—“NO!”—and by the time the Governor’s shoulder hits the carpet three feet from the blade, and his outstretched hand has approached the general vicinity of that magnificent handle with its scaly serpentine pattern, Michonne has also moved in with the suddenness of a thunderclap.

She instinctively delivers the first blow of the conflict at second number eleven. Her leg comes up and she kicks out at him. The hard edge of her boot strikes the side of his face below the temple just as he is grasping the sword’s handle.

The sickly crack of hard leather fracturing a human mandible fills the room—a sound not unlike a celery stalk snapping—and the Governor winces backward in agony, a thread of blood flinging from his mouth. He falls onto his back, the sword unmoved.

The next eight seconds are a mishmash of explosive movement and sudden stillness. Michonne takes advantage of the Governor’s punch-drunken stupor—he has managed to roll over onto elbows and knees now, his face leaking blood all over the place, his lungs heaving—by darting quickly toward the fallen sword. She snatches it up and whirls back around in less than three seconds, and then spends the next four seconds marshalling her breath and preparing to deliver the killing blow.

By this point, exactly nineteen seconds have elapsed, and it looks as though Michonne has the advantage. Penny has glanced up from her feeding trough and softly growls and sputters at the two adversaries. The Governor manages to rise on his wobbly knees.

His face, without him even being aware of it, takes on an expression of pure unadulterated bloodlust, his mind a TV screen at the end of a programming day—a blank wall of humming white noise—blocking out all extraneous thought other than killing this fucking bitch right this instant. He instinctively lowers his center of gravity as a cobra might coil itself before striking.

He can see the sword in her hand like a divining rod absorbing all the energy in the room. He drips blood and drool from his mouth. Michonne stands only five feet away from him now, with the sword raised. Twenty-seven seconds have transpired. One well-placed strike with that beveled razor’s edge and it will all be over but that doesn’t even faze the Governor now.

At thirty seconds, he lunges.

The next maneuver on her part covers a total of three seconds. One, she lets him get within inches of her, and two, she unleashes one of her patented groin kicks, and three, the blow immobilizes him. At this proximity, the steel-reinforced toe of her work boot connects with such extreme results that the Governor literally folds in half, all the breath forced out of him, the mixture of blood, snot, and saliva in his mouth spewing out in a spray across the floor. He lets out a garbled grunt and falls to his knees before her, gasping for breath, the pain like a battering ram smashing through his guts. He flails his arms for a moment as though trying to hold on to something, and then falls to his hands and knees.

Bloody vomit roars out of him, splashing the carpet at her feet.

At forty seconds, things settle down. The Governor wretches and coughs and tries to get himself together on the floor. He can feel her standing over him, gazing down at him with that eerie calm on her face. He can sense her raising the blade. He swallows the bitter taste of bile in his throat and closes his eyes and waits for the whisper of hand-forged steel to kiss the back of his neck and end it all. This is it. He waits to die on his floor like a whipped dog. He opens his eyes.

She hesitates. He hears her voice, as smooth and tranquil and cold as a cat purring: “I didn’t want it to be this quick.”

Fifty seconds.

“I don’t want it to be over,” she says, standing over him, the blade wavering.

Fifty-five seconds.

Deep in the recesses of the Governor’s brain, a spark kindles. He has one chance. One last shot at her. He feigns another cough and doesn’t look up, coughs again, but ever so subtly he blinks and peers at her feet—those steel-toed boots spread shoulder-width in front of him—only inches away from his hands.

One last chance.

At the sixtieth second, he pounces at her lower region. Taken by surprise, the woman tumbles backward.

The Governor lands on top of her like a lover, the sword flying across the floor. The impact knocks the wind out of her. He can smell her musky scent—sweat and cloves and the copper-tang of dried blood—as she writhes beneath him, the sword only about eighteen inches away on the carpet. The gleam of the blade catches his eye.

At second number sixty-five, he makes a play for the sword, reaching for the hilt. But before he has a chance to get ahold of it, her teeth sink into the meat of his shoulder where it meets his neck, and she bites him so hard, her teeth penetrate flesh and layers of subcutaneous tissue, and finally down into muscle.

The searing pain is so sudden and enormous and sharp that he shrieks like a little girl. He rolls away from her—moving on instinct now—clutching at his neck and feeling the wetness seeping through his fingers. Michonne rears back and spits a mouthful of tissue, the blood running down the front of her in thick rivulets.

“Fuh—FUH-KING!—BITCH!” He manages to sit up, stanching the flow of blood with his hand. It doesn’t occur to him that she might have very well breached his jugular and he’s already a dead man. It doesn’t occur to him that she’s going for the sword. It doesn’t even occur to him that she’s rising up over him again.

All he can think about right then—at seventy-three seconds into the fight—is stopping all the blood from leaking out of his neck.

Seventy-five seconds.

He swallows the metallic taste in his mouth and tries to see through his watery eyes as his blood soaks the ancient carpet.

At seventy-six seconds, he hears inhaling sounds as his opponent takes a deep breath and rises up over him again and mutters something that sounds a little like, “Got a
better
idea.”

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—