The Walking Dead Collection (117 page)

Due to a short in the generator’s circuits, or perhaps an imperfection in the spotlight’s xenon filament, the radiant beam that shines down on the arena begins to flicker. Other arc lights bang to life, also flickering intermittently. The effect has the dreamlike, nerve-jangling quality of a film projector that is out of registration, the resulting flashes creating slow-motion nitrate ghosts of dust devils and litter swirling across the abandoned track and empty walker pens on the night breezes.

Something epochal is about to happen, and each and every last one of the fifty or so spectators, which constitutes about 80 percent of the town’s population—Woodbury is now approaching sixty souls—fidgets in a state of jittery awe. Word has spread to every quarter that the evening’s festivities will feature a special address from the beleaguered Governor, and nobody wants to miss it. Some entered the arena that night with high hopes for the proverbial shot in the arm, a dose of reassurance from the man who gets things done and keeps the wheels greased and watches their backs. But as the minutes tick toward the appointed hour, the mood has spontaneously darkened. It’s as though the collective dread of living during the Great Tribulation has become a microbe itself, infectious as tuberculosis, contractible through the air, through the furtive glances of the downtrodden.

After a few more minutes—it is now 9:05—the loud crackle of the public address system reverberates across the amphitheater.
“GOOD PEOPLE OF WOODBURY,”
echoes the whiskey-cured pipes of Rudy Warburton, the good old boy from Savannah who has turned his expertise in tuck-pointing into the building of barricades. His words have the stilted quality of a script that was just handed to him—probably by the Governor himself.
“LET’S WARMLY WELCOME BACK OUR LEADER, OUR GUIDING LIGHT … THE GOVERNOR!”

For a moment, nothing happens other than a tepid round of applause and a few halfhearted cheers ringing out from the stands.

Way off in the corner, in the first row, near the cyclone fence barrier, sitting next to Austin, Lilly Caul watches and waits and bites her fingernails. She has a blanket draped over the shoulders of her denim jacket, and she keeps her gaze on the far portal, the Governor’s preferred mode of egress on and off the field.

As the awkward pause lengthens, and the collective murmuring kicks in again, Lilly chews her cuticles. She had managed to stop biting her nails a few weeks ago—oddly right around the time she learned she was pregnant—but now the habit has returned with a vengeance. Her fingertips are already looking atrocious, stubby and flaked with tiny fissures. She sits on her hands. She takes a deep breath to ward off another twinge of cramps, a tendril of auburn hair blowing down across her eyes.

Austin turns to her, reaching up and brushing the hair from her eyes. “You okay?” he asks.

“Just ducky,” she replies with a wry little smile. They have talked a lot about her morning sickness, her first-trimester woes, the cramps and the soreness. But their unspoken fears lie at the base of everything they talk about now. Are these symptoms normal? Is she in jeopardy of losing the baby? How is she going to get the nutrition and prenatal care she needs? Is Bob capable of caring for her? And the granddaddy of all their concerns: Is the old army medic up to delivering a baby when the time comes? “I just wish he would come out already,” she mutters, giving a little tip of the head toward the shadowy vestibule on the north end of the arena. “The suspense is killing these people.”

Almost on cue, as if her words have conjured the man himself, the crowd goes silent—and the silence is as unsettling as a fuse being lit—as a gaunt figure appears in the mouth of the portal.

All heads turn toward the north, and scores of anxious faces gape in complete consternation as the man of the hour slowly ambles toward the center of the infield. He wears his trademark hunting vest, camo pants, and jackboots, but he moves gingerly, with the careful tenterhooks of a stroke victim, one step at a time. Rudy, the ersatz announcer, walks beside the Governor with a small grease-spotted cardboard box and a wireless microphone. The thing that transfixes the audience is not the black leather eye patch. Nor is it the profusion of scars and fading wounds visible even at a great distance across the Governor’s exposed flesh. The thing that bothers everybody is the missing arm.

Philip Blake pauses in front of them, grabbing the hand mike from Rudy, thumbing the On switch, and looking at the crowd. His face looks as pale as porcelain in the faltering silver arc light, the flicker effect making him look spectral and nightmarish—a character in a forgotten silent film moving in jump cuts.

His voice crackles through high loudspeakers as Rudy trots off the field:
“I APOLOGIZE FOR BEING UNAVAILABLE TO YOU ALL RECENTLY.”
He pauses and surveys the silent faces.
“I KNOW SOME COMMUNITY MATTERS HAVE ARISEN THAT I’VE BEEN UNABLE TO HANDLE … AND FOR THAT I APOLOGIZE.”

No reaction emanates from the crowd other than a few throats clearing. From her front-row position on the north corner of the stands, Lilly feels a jolt of apprehension. The Governor’s condition somehow looks graver in this terrible flickering light.

“THE GAMES WILL BE UP AND RUNNING AGAIN SOON,”
he goes on, undaunted by the eerie silence and the tension so thick it seems to weigh down on the stadium like a fog.
“BUT AS YOU’VE PROBABLY NOTICED BY LOOKING AT ME—I’VE HAD OTHER, MORE PRESSING MATTERS TO DEAL WITH.”

Another pause here, as the Governor gazes across the rows of somber-faced residents.

Lilly shivers—despite the humid night air, which smells of burning rubber—an inexplicable wave of dread washing over her.
I hope he can pull this one out; we need him back, we need leadership, we need him to be the Governor.
Holding her collar tight with one hand, she feels conflicting emotions crashing within her. She feels sympathy for the man, shame, smoldering anger for the motherfuckers who did this, and swimming underneath the surface of it all—incessant, primal—a debilitating wave of doubt.

“AS YOU KNOW, IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE’VE HAD NEW PEOPLE ARRIVE IN TOWN.”
He takes a deep breath as though girding himself against a surge of pain.
“SO … RECENTLY, WHEN A SMALL BAND OF SURVIVORS SHOWED UP, I WAS THRILLED. I FIGURED THEY WERE LIKE US … HAPPY TO BE ALIVE … THANKFUL TO SEE OTHER SURVIVORS … BUT THAT WAS NOT THE CASE.”
In the pause that follows, his words echo up into the sky and slap back at the crowd against the far storefronts.
“THERE IS EVIL IN THIS WORLD … AND NOT ALL OF IT IS IN THE FORM OF THOSE UNDEAD MONSTERS CLAWING AT OUR FENCES.”

Just for an instant, he glances down at the cardboard box next to him. Lilly wonders what’s in the thing—a visual aid of some sort, perhaps—and the feeling it gives her isn’t exactly comforting. She wonders if anybody else in the stands is as bothered by that damp, moldering, blood-spotted box as she. Does it occur to anybody that whatever is in that box may change the course of their destinies?

“AT FIRST I HAD NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE CAPABLE OF,”
Philip Blake continues, gazing back up at the gallery.
“I TRUSTED THEM—IT WAS A GRAVE MISTAKE. THEY NEEDED SUPPLIES, SOME THINGS WE SEEMED TO HAVE PLENTY OF. THEY LIVE IN A NEARBY PRISON. THEY TOOK OUR HEAD OF SECURITY—MARTINEZ—BACK WITH THEM. I GUESS THERE WAS TALK OF COMBINING THE CAMPS—ONE GROUP MOVING TO THE SAFEST PLACE TO LIVE.”

Now he kneels down by the box, and his voice goes low and thick with contempt. The microphone picks up every nuance, every smack of his lips, every click and crackle in the back of his throat.

“SOME OF THEM STAYED BEHIND—AND ONE NIGHT WHILE MY GUARD WAS DOWN, THEY JUMPED ME AND TORTURED ME—MUTILATED ME—AND THEN LEFT ME FOR DEAD.”

From the corner of the stands, Lilly listens closely, her stomach going cold. She detects a slight embellishment of the truth. “They” jumped him? “They” tortured him? It was a woman with a katana sword, right? What is he up to? The suspicion starts to gnaw at Lilly as the man out in the dusty, flickering pantomime of light continues, his voice getting lower and thicker by the minute.

“THEY ESCAPED,”
he goes on, kneeling by that mysterious box as though a paper clown is about to pop out.
“BUT YOU ALL NEED TO KNOW THIS.”
He pauses and scans the crowd as though taking their measure.
“ALONG THE WAY THEY KILLED DR. STEVENS. THESE PEOPLE ARE RUTHLESS, INHUMAN SAVAGES.”

He pauses again, as though the exertion of his rage has already exhausted him.

Lilly watches the man kneeling in the flickering pool of phosphorous light. Something is very, very wrong about this. How does he know they killed Dr. Stevens? He was in a coma at the time, and all the witnesses are long gone. How does he know Stevens didn’t simply stumble into a nest of biters? Lilly clenches her fists.

“I FEARED FOR MARTINEZ’S LIFE,”
the man goes on.
“NOT KNOWING IF THEY’D TAKEN HIM PRISONER OR WORSE. BEFORE WE COULD SEND OUT A SEARCH PARTY, SOMETHING WAS LEFT AT THE MAIN GATE OVERNIGHT.”
He flips open the flaps on the top of the box. He pulls out a dark, glistening object about the size of a deflated basketball.

“THEY LEFT THIS!”

He stands and displays the object for the perusal of all in attendance.

*   *   *

Despite the collective inhaling of breaths, faint gasps, and averting of gazes among some of the spectators, a strange transference occurs in the audience. The sight of a severed head when grasped by the hair and allowed to dangle in space provokes an innate reaction in humans formed not only by natural revulsion but also by hundreds of thousands of years of genetic programming.

Off to the side of the bleachers, her hands folded in her lap, Lilly just looks down and shakes her head. She expected something like this. All the lying has taken her by surprise, though, and the sight of the exsanguinated head of Caesar Martinez provokes more repulsion than she would have expected. She glimpsed it once or twice in the woods during their tempestuous retreat from the meadow, but
this
—this ghastly thing suspended by the hair in the Governor’s hand—looks
different
somehow in the context of the flickering arc light. A human head detached from its moorings registers to the mind in stages, first as artificial and then almost comically macabre—the pale rubbery face of the once handsome Latino now a mere
simulacrum
of a face—a fleshy Halloween effigy with a look of blank hunger frozen on its features.

Then the true horror quickly makes itself known, and the reality of the spectacle sets in.

For a brief instant, as the Governor silently holds the object for all to absorb, the head turns lazily on its pendulum of hair. To Lilly, the movement looks languid and dreamy in the flashing light. Tendrils of bloody tendons and nerves dangle from its ragged bottom like roots. Black fluid drips from its gaping mouth, and if it weren’t for the milky film over the eyes it would be hard to tell that Martinez had already turned at the point of decapitation. A tattered bandanna still clings to the skull, matted and soaked with blood.

The people in the back rows, gazing down upon the abomination at a distance of more than twenty-five yards, can’t see that the bloodless face is still twitching with the hectic rigor mortis of the undead—the tics and shudders, the rusty hinges of the jaw still pulsing—as it will for eternity until the thing is incinerated or the brain is destroyed. Lilly is among the few close enough to see this. She recognizes the dreadful signs of eternal damnation. “Jesus Christ,” she utters to no one in particular, barely sensing Austin’s presence next to her or the gentle reassurance of his hand on her arm.

The man out in the flickering infield comments:
“I KNEW NONE OF YOU WOULD WANT TO SEE THIS, AND I APOLOGIZE FOR SHOCKING YOU. I JUST WANT TO MAKE YOU ALL COMPLETELY AWARE OF THE KIND OF PEOPLE WE’RE DEALING WITH HERE”
—another dramatic pause from the Governor—
“
MONSTERS
!”

Lilly swallows her disgust. Shooting a quick glance over her shoulder, she sees the insidious transaction rippling through the crowd. Some of the men present clench their fists, their expressions visibly changing from shock to anger, their eyes narrowing with rage. Some of the women clutch their children tighter, turning their faces inward against their breasts, averting young gazes away from the horror on the infield. Others grit their teeth in a pique of hatred and bloodlust. Lilly is mortified by the manipulation under way, the mob mentality emerging in the throng.

The voice from the loudspeakers continues:
“THESE SAVAGES KNOW WHERE WE LIVE! THEY KNOW WHAT WE HAVE! THEY KNOW OUR STRENGTHS AND THEY KNOW OUR WEAKNESSES!”
He scans the anguished faces.
“I SAY WE STRIKE AT
THEM
BEFORE THEY HAVE A CHANCE TO COME AT
US
!”

Now Lilly jerks at the unexpected chorus of shouts and howls from the stands behind her. It’s not only men. The voices represent all ages, genders, and sensibilities—sending up a dark hallelujah of cries into the sputtering silver radiance of the sky. Some of the onlookers pump their fists. Others bellow garbled cries of rage that sound almost feral. The Governor feeds off it. Still holding the head like some deranged Shakespearean character in a play, moving in the surreal slow motion of the flickering lamps, he is pouring on the call to action as he speaks into the mike.

“I REFUSE TO STAND DOWN AND ALLOW THEM TO DESTROY US—NOT AFTER EVERYTHING WE’VE LOST—NOT AFTER EVERYTHING WE’VE SACRIFICED!”

Some of the spectators begin to holler encouragement as though in a religious call-and-response, which makes Lilly shudder with dread and coaxes another reassuring pat of the arm from Austin, who continually whispers to her now, “It’s okay … it’ll be okay … it’s okay, Lilly.…” Behind them, one man booms, “FUCK YEAH!” Another one yells, “DAMN STRAIGHT!” And the voices rise and swell as the Governor drowns the noise with his amplified growl.