The Walking Dead Collection (106 page)

At one point, Austin pauses in his shoveling and glances over at Lilly, who stands nearby, wrapped in a blanket, watching. She holds it tightly around her neck, and she lets the tears build until they run down her cheeks and soak the edge of the blanket.

Austin hands her a shovelful of dirt, and she drops it on the pit.

Neither one of them says it aloud, but the sense passing between them is one of letting go.

They are letting go of their grief, their fear, their past. They have a future now. They have each other, and they have a tiny ember of new life growing inside Lilly like a silent promise. Lilly smiles sadly, wiping her face. Austin smiles back at her. They finish filling up the hole, and Austin puts down the spade.

Then they go back over to the tree stumps and rest their weary bodies in the dark silence.

*   *   *

“Oh, you’re awake again … good.”

The light has gone all gauzy and dreamy in the terrible living room as her voice floats like a beautiful moth hovering in the air behind him. He can’t see her anymore—only her shadow rippling across the floor beside him—but he can hear her back there near his ass. He realizes he’s been repositioned, and is now lying prone, his face pressed flat on the platform, his rear-end elevated. All his sensory organs now absorb the environment slowly, blearily—a camera whose lens has been knocked askew.

The cold hard edge of the spoon enters his rectum hard and deep.

He nudges forward with a jerk as the implement sinks as far as his sacrum. For a fleeting moment, the horrors of having the one prostate exam he ever had come flooding back to him, the doctor in Jacksonville—what was his name? Kenton? Kenner?—chatting idly about the Falcons’ draft picks the whole time. He imagines himself laughing at that private little joke but instead he gasps.

She shoves the spoon all the way down to his sacral vertebra and turns it with a vengeance—as though she’s trying to scoop out his entire coccyx and intestines—and he screams. Naturally the tape muffles his scream, and all he hears with his own ears is a series of infantile moaning noises. The fire in his abdomen blazes out of control as she starts to struggle a little bit, the spoon caught on some part of his internal anatomy.

He is about to once again sink into the quicksand of unconsciousness when she yanks the bent spoon from his anus with a wet smacking noise. “There,” she says. “Gonna be sore for a while down there.”

She rises and strolls around the front of him so that he can glimpse her in his feverish peripheral vision. She holds the bloody spoon up.

“And I thought getting it
in
was hard,” she comments wryly as the blinds close down, once again, ever so mercifully, on the Governor’s vision, taking him back to that blessed, empty, cold darkness.

*   *   *

The experts know how to keep a person awake and conscious during “enhanced interrogation”—CIA spooks, third world goons, KGB ghosts, drug cartels, et cetera—but this amazon with the Medusa dreadlocks has no questions in mind and has no apparent experience in the art of keeping a person conscious during this kind of slapdash, improvised torture. All she has, as far as the Governor can tell, is her innate sense of justice and a little street sass to keep her going and keep the Governor awake. The Governor realizes all this every time he snaps back awake and finds his level of comprehension corrupted and distorted even further through the surreal lens of his hellish pain.

This time, he awakes to the feeling that a piano has fallen on his head. He feels the massive impact, cracking the side of his skull, concussing him, sending particle-bombs of agony down the bridge of his noise. He hears the atonal clang of all eighty-eight keys of the piano, all at once, inside his head, and his ears sing an off-key aria, the ringing so loud he can’t even breathe.

Michonne stands over him. She slams the sole of her boot down on his head a second time.

The heel cracks his jaw, and all at once, the Governor is only half awake … not wholly conscious, and not really unconscious.

He lolls and moans and giggles behind the tape in a sort of neurological fog, the higher functions of his brain shutting down and going to the default program:
his primal self
. He feels as though he’s a little boy in Waynesboro, and he’s sitting on his dad’s lap at the carnival. He smells the popcorn and horseshit and cotton candy. He hears the calliope playing a comical little tune, and the star of the show—the Dark Warrior Woman from Borneo—slowly circles him, slowly circles his seat on his dad’s lap in the front row.

“I think I kicked you too hard,” she says in her funny little voice. The audience claps and laughs. “It looks like something ripped.”

He wants to laugh at her funny joke but somebody—his daddy, maybe?—holds a hand over his mouth. Which makes everything seem even funnier. The Dark Warrior Woman from Borneo kneels down really close to his face. He looks up at her. She looks down at him and grins a funny grin. What is she going to do with that spoon? Maybe she’ll do her greatest trick yet!

She holds the spoon near his left eye and murmurs, “Don’t pass out on me—we’re not done yet.”

The edge of the spoon is cold as she begins to shovel out his eyeball. It reminds him of the time the dentist had to drill into a cavity way in the back of his mouth—it hurt so, so, so, so,
sooooooooooo
bad—and he got a lollipop afterward, which made him feel a little better, but
this
time there’s no lollipop, and it hurts worse than he thought possible. He even hears the yucky sounds—like when his mama pulls a chicken apart for dinner—the snotty, wet smacking noises. As the Lady from Borneo digs out his eyeball, the thing eventually uncorks from its socket.

He feels like clapping for this amazing dark lady who manages to leave the eyeball lying halfway down his face, hanging on strands of nerves and icky red stuff like wet party streamers.

His vision now goes completely haywire and it’s like he’s on a thrill ride—like when his daddy took him and his brother Brian to the Heart of Georgia State Fair and they rode the Zipper—and everything is spinning. He can still see—kind of—out of the hanging eyeball. And he can still see out of his other eye. And what he sees right then makes him feel bad for the Great Wild Warrior Woman from Borneo.

She’s crying.

Tears roll down her brown, shiny face as she crouches in front of Philip, and Philip feels sad
himself
all of a sudden for this poor lady. Why is she crying? She’s staring at him like a lost child, like a little girl who has just done something very bad.

Then something else happens that gets Philip Blake’s attention.

A loud knocking on the door brings him back to the here and now. He blinks his one good eye, and the lady blinks away her tears, and they both hear the deep, angry, male voice outside the door.

“GOVERNOR! YOU IN THERE?!”

All at once, the calliope music stops and little Philip Blake is no longer at the carnival.

*   *   *

Michonne grabs her sword, stands, and faces the doorway—paralyzed with indecision. She hasn’t completed her masterpiece, the most important piece of the puzzle about to be put in place, but now the whole thing may have to be—on many levels—
cut short
.

She turns to the grotesque remains on the floor—the man barely clinging to life—and starts to say something to him when the voice booms outside the door.

“YO!—PHIL! OPEN UP! THE CRAZY BITCH IS GONE, MAN! THE DOCTOR AND ALICE—AND THE OTHER TWO AS WELL!” The creak of wood, a snapping noise.

Michonne looks down at the Governor as an enormous thud reverberates. She extends the tip of the katana sword toward his groin.

Gabe’s voice—unmistakable in its gravelly, heavily accented bark—rises an octave outside the door: “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO YOUR DOOR, MAN?! WHAT’S GOING ON?! SAY SOMETHING, SIR! WE’RE COMING IN!”

Another massive thud—perhaps both Gabe and Bruce putting their shoulders into it, or perhaps a makeshift battering ram out there—the hinges already cracking, raining down dust, threatening to burst where Michonne had hastily nailed them back up.

Michonne holds the sword centimeters from the Governor’s flaccid penis.

“Looks like what’s left of that thing could possibly heal if you survive this,” she says softly to him, her voice so low now she could be talking to a lover. She has no idea whether he can even hear her, or comprehend her. “And we wouldn’t want that.”

With a single flick of her wrist, she expertly severs the man’s penis at its base, the blood bubbling and percolating as the organ flops lifelessly to the wooden flooring next to the man.

Michonne turns and darts out of the room, and she has already traversed the length of the apartment, thrown open a window, climbed out, and made it halfway down the fire escape when the door finally gives way.

*   *   *

Bruce lurches into the apartment first. Bald head glistening, eyes wide and hot, he nearly stumbles to the floor. Gabe lunges in behind him, fists clenched, eyes quickly scanning.

“FUCK!” Bruce whirls when he hears the tiny snarling voice of the dead child. “FUCK!” He sees Penny chained up for safekeeping across the foyer. “FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!” He smells the heavy stench of bodily fluids and the blood of an abattoir in the air. He looks around. “FUCK!-FUCK!-FUCK!-FUCK!-FUCK!—
FUCK!!”

“Look out!” Gabe shoves Bruce aside when the little dead girl reaches for them, stretching her chains, snapping her tiny black teeth at the air near Bruce’s torso. Gabe hollers, “Get away from her!”

“Oh fuck … fuck,” Bruce utters suddenly when he turns toward the archway into the living room. He sees the gruesome remains of Penny’s meal. “Governor! Oh—fuck!”

*   *   *

In the calm, pristine darkness of the clearing, under the vast rural sky, Austin Ballard finally breaks the silence. “You know what? I just realized … I can build a little nursery in that sun room in the back of my apartment.”

Lilly nods. “That would be nice.” She thinks about it. “I saw a cradle in the warehouse nobody’s using.” She thinks some more. “Call me crazy but I think this is going to work out.”

Austin reaches over to her, and pulls her into a soft embrace. They sit on the same stump now, holding each other. Lilly kisses his hair. He smiles and pulls her tighter. “Woodbury’s the safest place we could be right now,” he says softly.

She nods. “I know … I get the sense the Governor’s got things under control.”

Austin squeezes her tenderly. “And Stevens and Alice can deliver the baby.”

“Good point.” She smiles to herself. “I think we’re in good hands.”

“Yep.” Austin stares at the night. “The Governor’s gonna keep us safe.” He smiles. “This is the best situation in the world to start a new life.”

Lilly gives him another nod. Her smile could power an entire city. “I like the sound of that—a new life—it has a nice ring to it.”

For the first time in her life, she actually feels like everything’s going to be okay.

*   *   *

Gabe and Bruce plunge into the torture chamber of a living room and all at once they see the evidence of Michonne’s handiwork—the bloody tools, the duffel bag, the severed arm, the tissues and blood smudges fanned out across the wooden platform like hellish demonic wings sprouting from the body. They take another few steps toward the remains.

Their minds swimming with panic, they try to stay calm and talk to each other.

Gazing down at the body, Gabe says, “What about the black chick?”

Bruce gapes. “Fuck her. She’s probably outside the safe zone by now—she ain’t got a chance.”

“Jesus,” Gabe mutters, looking at what’s left of his boss, the remains eviscerated, scorched, scourged, and contorted, one eye dangling by strings of tissue on the side of the man’s face. The body twitches. “Is he—Is he dead?”

Bruce takes a shallow breath and goes over to kneel by the Governor.

A faint sound whistles from the man’s nostrils.

Bruce can’t even find a place to feel for a pulse, the body is so mangled. He carefully peels the tape from the man’s lips.

Then Bruce leans down and brings his ear close to the man’s bloody mouth.

Signs of a faint breath reach Bruce’s ear but he can’t tell if it’s a death throe—

—or if the man is clinging to a twilight world on the cusp of death.

*   *   *

Under a canopy of twinkling stars, Austin touches Lilly’s face as though caressing the beads of a holy rosary. “I promise you, Lilly, everything is definitely going to take care of itself.” He kisses her. “Everything’s gonna be great.” He kisses her again. “You’ll see.”

She smiles. God help her, she believes him … she believes in the Governor … she believes in Woodbury. Everything
is
going to be okay.

Her smile lingering on her lips, she puts her head on Austin’s shoulder and listens to the eternal night continue to churn and drone its ancient cycle of destruction and regeneration.

Thank you, God.

Thank you.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

THE WALKING DEAD: THE FALL OF THE GOVERNOR, PART ONE.
Copyright © 2013 by Robert Kirkman, LLC. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-312-54817-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-02064-2 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781250020642

First Edition: October 2013