The Walking Dead Collection (119 page)

But something intrudes on the scene—a strange tapping noise—a dull, metallic clacking. In the dream, he looks up at the ceiling and sees cracks forming, each tapping noise spreading another hairline fracture in the plaster overhead, a sifting of dust motes filtering down through rays of sunlight. The tapping noise rises and quickens, and he sees more cracks forming, until the ceiling begins to rend apart. He screams as the room collapses in on itself.

The cataclysm wakes him up.

He jerks forward in the chair with a start, his wounds panging with sharp stabs of agony from the hammer blows and gashes and puncture sores that are still tight with sutures under his clothes. He is damp with cold sweat, and his phantom arm throbs. He swallows stomach acid and looks around the room—the dull glow and bubbling of the aquariums bringing him back to reality—and he realizes he still hears the infernal clacking noise.

The sound of Penny’s chattering teeth in the other room.

He has to do something about it.

The last stage of his housecleaning.

*   *   *

“Don’t you worry, Lilly-girl, I happen to have quite a bit of practice catching babies,” Bob Stookey says, blatantly lying to the couple in the magnesium-silver brightness of the underground infirmary. It’s the middle of the night and the cavernous room is as silent as a morgue. Bob has rolled a pulse-ox unit over to the bed on which Lilly now lies covered in a sheet, with Austin nearby, fidgeting, chewing his fingernails, and shooting glances back and forth from Lilly’s ashen face to Bob’s weathered, smiling visage.

“I ain’t no O-B-G-Y-N,” Bob adds, “but I had to watch over my share of pregnant gals during my stint in the army. You and your baby are gonna be fine … shipshape … four by four, little lady.”

The truth is, Bob had only dealt with a single pregnant woman during his tour in Afghanistan—a translator—a local girl who had been only seventeen when one of the guys from the PX had knocked her up. Bob had kept her condition under wraps until the day she miscarried. It was Bob who had to give the woman the news—although he was convinced back then, and still is today, that she already knew. A woman knows. That’s all there is to it …
a woman knows
.

“What about the spotting?” Lilly asks. She lies on the same gurney on which the Governor floated in the balance between life and death for so many days. Bob has inserted an IV stick into her arm just above the wrist—the last bag of glucose in the storage pantry—in order to stave off dehydration and keep her stable.

Now Bob tries to maintain the reassuring tone in his voice as he hovers over her. “It ain’t that uncommon during the first trimester,” he says, not really knowing what he’s talking about, turning to wash his hands in the steel sink behind them. The drumming of the water on the basin is excruciatingly loud in the stillness of the infirmary. The room is a pressure cooker of emotion. “I’m sure everything is right as rain,” Bob says with his back turned to them.

“Whatever you need, Bob, just let me know,” Austin says then. Dressed in his hoodie and ponytail, he looks like a lost child who could break down into sobs at any moment. He puts a hand on Lilly’s bare shoulder.

Bob dries his hands on a towel. “Lilly Caul’s gonna be a mom … I still can’t get over it.” He turns and comes back over to the bed. He smiles down at her as he slips on surgical gloves. “This is just what we need around this place,” he says with false cheer. “Some good news for once.” He reaches under the sheet and gently palpates her tummy, trying to remember how to diagnose a miscarriage. “You’re gonna be great at it, too.” He turns to a tray of instruments, and finds a flat stainless steel probe. “Some people are just cut out for it. Know what I mean? I was never cut out for it—God knows.”

Lilly turns her head to the side and closes her eyes, and Bob can tell she’s trying not to cry. “It doesn’t feel right,” she murmurs. “Something’s wrong, Bob. I can tell. I can feel it.”

Bob looks at Austin. “Son, I’m gonna have to do a pelvic exam on her.”

Austin has tears in his eyes. He knows. Bob can see it in the young man’s glazed expression. “Whatever you need to do, Bob.”

“Honey, I’m gonna have to go in there and have a look-see,” he says. “It ain’t gonna be too comfortable, and it’s a gonna be a little cold.”

Her eyes still closed, Lilly barely emits a whisper. “It’s okay.”

“All right, here we go.”

*   *   *

“Dammit—hold still.” Philip Blake crouches in the darkness of his foyer, working with the needle-nosed pliers, his left hand gloved and protected with a layer of duct tape. “I know you’re not enjoying this, but I hope you understand how much better this will make things.”

He probes the black maw of his dead daughter’s mouth with the pliers, trying to latch on to her upper incisors. Penny keeps trying to chew on his hand, but he keeps her immobilized with his jackboot on her lower half. Her reek engulfs him as he works, but he ignores it.

“It really is for the good of our relationship,” he says, finally latching on to one of her upper teeth with the pincers. “Here it comes!”

He extracts a tooth—the sound like a tiny cork popping—and pulls the bloody pellet free, trailing delicate threads of pulp. Penny rears back for a moment, her demonic features puckering, her wide, milky eyes fixed on some empty void beyond this world.

“Here comes another one,” Philip mutters softly, as though speaking to a pet. “I can feel it loosening.” He grunts as another tooth pops free. “There. See? This isn’t so bad, is it?” He tosses the second tooth into a wastebasket behind him, and then turns back to the girl-thing. “You’re almost getting used to the feeling, aren’t you?”

She drools a black, oily substance as he removes one tooth after another, her face now going as blank as the dark side of the moon. “Just a few more, and we’ll be done,” he comments with fake cheer, working on her lower teeth. “Sound good?” He pulls the last few jagged lower teeth with minimum effort, the tiny threads of tissue looping across the front of her filthy sundress.

Thanks to advanced decomposition, the teeth come out easily on their dead roots.

“There,” Philip says reassuringly, “all done.”

*   *   *

For a brief instant, standing in that silent infirmary at the foot of Lilly’s gurney, Bob remembers that one time in Afghanistan when he assisted the field surgeon in the performance of a D&C on the translator—the removal of any remaining fetal or placental tissue after a pregnancy has been lost—and now he searches his memory for the lessons of that day. He gently reaches under the sheet covering Lilly’s lower half. He doesn’t look at Lilly’s face.

She looks away.

Bob begins the exam. He remembers the way a healthy uterus is supposed to feel during the early weeks of a viable pregnancy—according to the field surgeon—versus the way it feels in the aftermath of a miscarriage. It takes only a few seconds for Bob to find the end of the cervix. Lilly lets out an anguished mewling sound that breaks Bob’s heart. He palpates the uterus and finds it completely dilated, heavy with blood and slough. This is all he needs to know. He gently pulls back, removing his hand from her.

“Lilly, I want you to remember something,” he says then, removing his gloves. “There’s no reason—”

“Oh no.” She’s already softly crying, her head still turned away, her tears soaking the pillow. “I knew it … I knew it.”

“Oh Jesus.” Austin puts his head down on the gurney’s side rail. “Oh God.”

“What was I thinking?…” She softly, silently weeps into the gurney’s pillow. “What the fuck was I thinking?…”

Bob is crestfallen. “Now, honey, let’s not start kicking ourselves in the ass, okay? The good news is, you can try again … you’re a young gal, you’re healthy, you can definitely try again.”

Lilly stops crying. “Enough, Bob.”

Bob looks down. “I’m sorry, honey.”

Austin looks up, wipes his eyes, and gazes at the wall. He lets out a long pained breath. “Fuck.”

“Gimme a towel, Bob.” Lilly sits up on the gurney. She has a strange expression on her face, impossible to read, but one glance at it and Bob knows to shut the fuck up and get the woman a towel. He grabs a cloth and hands it to her. “Unhook me from this shit,” she says flatly, wiping herself off. “I gotta get outta here.”

Bob removes the stick, wipes her wrist, and puts a bandage on the site.

She shoves herself off the gurney. For a moment, she looks as if she might fall over. Austin steadies her, gently holding her by the shoulder. She pushes him away and finds her jeans draped over a chair back. “I’m fine.” She gets dressed. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“Honey … take it easy.” Bob circles around her as though blocking her path to the door. “You probably oughtta just stay off your feet for a while.”

“Get outta my way, Bob,” she says with fists clenched now, jaw set with determination.

“Lilly, why don’t we—” Austin falls silent when she shoots him a look. The expression on her face—the teeth gritted tightly, the smoldering cinders of rage in her eyes—takes Austin aback.

Bob wants to say something but figures maybe it’s better if he just lets her go. He steps aside, and then looks at Austin, gesturing for him to back off. Lilly is already halfway across the room.

The door slams behind her, the residual tension crackling in her slipstream.

*   *   *

For an endless, agonizing moment, Philip Blake kneels before his monstrous offspring in the dusty gloom of that apartment foyer. Penny looks strangely hobbled by the slipshod dental procedure. She wobbles on her spindly little legs for a moment, moving her blackened lips around rotten, bloody gums, her empty gaze riveted on the man in front of her.

Philip leans down toward the dead girl, his mind filled with false memories of tucking his daughter into bed at night, reading storybooks to her, stroking her lustrous goldenrod curls, and planting kisses on her fragrant little forehead. “All better,” he murmurs to the creature chained to the wall. “Now, come here.”

He puts his arms around her and gives her a hug. She feels like a brittle husk in his arms, like a tiny scarecrow. He cradles her cold, mottled jawline in his gloved left hand. “Give Daddy a kiss.”

He kisses her rancid divot of a mouth, seeking warmth and love, but tasting only the bitter rot of spoiled meat and flyspecked feces. He rears back, an involuntary jerk, repulsed by the string of slimy tissue adhering to his lips. He gasps and frantically wipes away the black drool, his stomach heaving suddenly.

She lurches toward him, eyes narrowing, trying to bite him with her pulpy black gums.

He doubles over, holding her head back with one arm. The nausea within him turns to a column of hot bile rising up his gorge. He vomits on the hardwood floor, the yellow viscous stew of stomach acids spattering across the floorboards. He wretches and convulses until there’s nothing left to expel.

Falling back on his knees, he wipes his mouth, hyperventilating. “Oh, honey … I’m sorry.” He swallows hard and tries to get his bearings back, tries to push back the shame and disgust. “Don’t think anything of it.” He gets his breath back. He swallows again. “I’m sure … with time … I’ll … I’ll…” He wipes his face. “Please don’t let this—”

All at once the bang of somebody knocking loudly on the apartment door interrupts. The Governor sniffs back his revulsion. He blinks at the noise. “Fuck!” He rises on weak knees. “FUCK!”

*   *   *

Over the course of the next thirty seconds—the time it takes Philip Blake to get himself together, cross the foyer, unsnap the dead bolt, and throw the door open—he transforms from a trembling, weak, unrequited father to a diamond-hard leader of men. “Did I or did I not say I was
not
to be
disturbed
?” he snarls coldly at the shadowy figure standing in the dim light of the corridor.

Gabe clears his throat instinctively. Clad in an army surplus jacket cinched at the waist with a gun belt and bandolier, he measures his words. “Sorry, boss—some shit’s going down.”

“What shit?”

Gabe takes a deep breath. “Okay, there was an explosion. We think at the National Guard station—huge cloud of smoke going into the air. Bruce took some men to investigate. They were gone a few minutes, and then we heard gunfire nearby.”

“Nearby?!”

“Yeah, same direction.”

The Governor sears his gaze into the man’s eyes. “Then why don’t you just grab a car and—FUCK!” He turns back to the apartment. “Never mind!—Forget it!—Follow me!”

*   *   *

They take one of the armored trucks. The Governor rides in the cab on the passenger side, holding an AR-15 on his lap, as Gabe drives. Gabe hardly says a word the whole trip out—down Flat Shoals Road, past miles of walker-riddled forest, up Highway 85, and down a long farm road toward the smudge of black smoke visible against the night sky—while the Governor silently broods in the shotgun seat. A pair of Gabe’s men, Rudy and Gus, ride outside the cab, one on each flank, standing on a footrail in the wind, cradling assault rifles.

As they rumble eastward through the night, the Governor feels his phantom arm twinge with needles of pain at every bump, every jerk—a bizarre sensation that keeps tugging at his peripheral vision in the green glowing darkness of the cab, making him think there’s a tingling ghost-arm protruding from his stump—and it makes him angrier by the minute. He ruminates silently in the rattling dark, thinking about going to war, thinking about twisting off the head of that bitch who attacked him.

The great military leaders of yore, the men Philip has read about in history books—everybody from MacArthur to Robert E. Lee—stayed away from the front, huddled in tents with their commanders, planning, strategizing, looking at maps. Not Philip Blake. He fancies himself as Attila the Hun, or maybe Alexander the Great, roaring into Egypt with revenge on his mind and death dripping off the bloody tip of his sword. His eye patch itches as the adrenaline courses through him. He wears a leather driving glove on his left hand that creaks as he clenches his fist.

They approach a familiar turnoff snaking off the main two-lane. The wind has blown a letter off the tall roadside sign, which now says: