The Walking Dead Collection (122 page)

“Absolutely.” She gives him a nod, her guts going cold, her brain swimming with anticipation. “We’re ready, Governor. We’re with you a hundred and ten percent.”

“Yeah? Good.” He rubs his chin some more. “How about that hunka-hunka burning love of yours? He finally master that scope?”

“Austin? He’s good. He’s ready. We’re all ready. You want me to drive the lead truck?”

“You take the transport wagon. I’ll have Gabe take the lead in the armored rig on the way out. We’re gonna take it nice and slow.”

“Right.”

“The tank is fast—it tops out at fifty-some miles per hour—but we’re gonna take it nice and easy.”

“Got it.” She looks at him. “Where are you gonna ride?”

“On the way out? I’m gonna be in the back of your transport truck with the boys.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be on the bitch box the whole way, staying in close contact with you and Gabe and Gus and Rudy. But when we get close, I want to pull everybody over, say a few words, get everybody ready to rock.”

“Makes sense.”

“When we’re ready to launch, I’m going to want to be riding on the tank.”

“Good.” Lilly licks her lips. “Something I’ve been wondering about, though.”

“What’s that?”

“What about the people in the prison?”

He looks at her. “What about them?”

She shrugs. “What if they … you know …
surrender
? Wave the white flag or whatever?”

The Governor gazes out at the night. He pulls another cigarette from his vest and sparks it with his Zippo, a wreath of smoke curling around his head. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he murmurs in a low, smoke-cured drawl. He looks at her. “You sure you’re ready?”

“Yeah … whaddaya mean? Yes, absolutely. Yes.”

“You’re feeling okay?”

“Yes. I want to take these bastards down as bad as you. Why do you ask?”

He takes a deep breath, looking at her. “I know about what happened.”

“You know about—?”

“With the baby.”

“What?” Gooseflesh rashes down her arms and legs, her midsection clenching. “How did you—?”

“Bob told me.” He looks down. “I’m sorry you had to go through all that. It’s hard on a woman, that kind of thing. That’s all I’m saying.”

Lilly swallows hard. “I’m ready, Governor. I told you I’m ready and I meant it.”

He studies her in the wan, yellow security light. It makes her very uneasy—the way he’s looking at her, with a trace of pity in his eyes—almost makes her ashamed. She wants to fight alongside this man now—this imperfect, vicious, coarse, blunt instrument of a man—more than anything else she has ever wanted.

He takes another drag off his smoke. “I need you, girlfriend.”

“You got me,” she tells him.

“I got plenty of muscle.” He burns that Cyclopean gaze into her. “But you’re a thinking person, a natural leader. Plus, you’re damn handy with a gun. I need you on that front line, Lilly.”

She gives him a nod. “I understand.”

He takes another drag. “What happened to you … it just goes to show what a dangerous world this is with these motherfuckers out there. They need to be taken care of before something worse happens, and we’re gonna be the ones to do it. No matter what—no matter what it takes. You follow me?”

She looks at him for a long moment before responding. Her voice comes out cold and flat. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she says.

And then she turns and walks away with fists clenched at her sides.

*   *   *

The Governor stands in the shadows of that exit portal, watching Lilly Caul walk away into the night. He can tell by the way she’s walking that she’s ready. She’s ready to kill for the cause.

She vanishes around the corner of Main Street, the night breeze blowing litter in her wake.

Philip takes a deep breath, tosses the cigarette, and snubs it out with his boot. He has one last thing to tend to before the next day dawns—one last member of the tribe to square away before the glorious blood can flow.

He walks down the portico toward the street, whistling now, feeling more alive than he’s ever felt in his life—his brain scoured clean of all doubt.

The war has begun.

PART 2

Doomsday Clock

The ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, with their households and all Korah’s men and all their possessions. They went down alive into the grave, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them.

—Numbers 16:23

TEN

Bob Stookey stands wringing his gnarled hands in the airless, fetid-smelling foyer of the Governor’s apartment. Woozy from being dragged out of bed at three in the morning, he tries to get his bearings and not stare at the dead child straining against her chain on the wall ten feet away. The thing that was once a little girl wears a tiny blue pinafore dress with flowers on it—the fabric so stained and tattered and soaked with filth now that it looks as though someone fed it through a meat grinder—her pigtails still flagging off her monstrous head like a cruel joke. Her eyes pop wide—a fish with a hook stuck in its mouth—the toothless black lips gumming at the air as she reaches for the closest human.

“I’ll be back soon, honey—don’t you worry,” the Governor says, kneeling in front of her. He smiles at her with the strangest look on his face. If asked to describe the look, Bob would have to say it resembles a death mask, a clown’s rictus planted on the face of a corpse. “You won’t even miss me, I’ll be back so fast. You be good for Uncle Bob, okay? You be a good girl.” The Penny-thing moans and gums at the air. The Governor puts his arms around her and gives her a hug. “I know—I love you, too.”

Bob looks away, filled with a strange and overwhelming surge of emotions—disgust, sadness, fear, pity—all of them jumbled up in his guts like a ball of flame. He is one of only three human beings whom the Governor has trusted with the knowledge of Penny’s existence, and right now Bob isn’t so sure he wants to be one of those confidantes. He stares at the carpet and swallows back the nausea.

“Bob?”

The Governor must have seen the sour look on the man’s face because he now speaks firmly to him as though gently chastising a child. “You sure you’re going to be able to do this? I’m serious—she means a lot to me.”

Bob braces himself against the wall and takes a deep breath. “I can watch her just fine, Governor. I’m sober as a judge. I’ll keep an eye on her. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

The Governor lets out a sigh, gazing back at the drooling creature in front of him. “You can let her walk around if you want … but I won’t judge you if you leave her tied up.” The Governor stares at the undulating black lips of the little girl-thing. “She can’t bite anymore, but she can still be a handful—and we don’t have anything to feed her right now, so she’s gonna get a little cranky.”

Bob gives a nod from across the foyer. Beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead, his eyes burning, he realizes right then that he’s standing about as close to the thing as he ever wants to get.

The Governor looks at Bob. “Anyone dies, though—and I mean
anyone
—you make sure she gets fed. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.” Bob tries not to stare at the thing. “You got it.”

The Governor gives the girl-thing one last embrace, a delicate little stringer of bile clinging to his shoulder as he finally pulls away.

*   *   *

A little over an hour later—at 5:14
A.M
.—the Governor stands beside Gabe on the north end of the Woodbury town square. A single security lamp canted off an adjacent telephone pole shines a beam of light down at them through tiny clouds of moths fluttering haphazardly in the glare. Both men now wear the heavy Kevlar body armor procured from the Guard station, the chest pieces and vests giving the two of them a fierce, martial gravitas in the shimmering darkness. The predawn chill shows in faint puffs of vapor pluming from their mouths as they survey the twenty-three members of the makeshift militia standing at attention in front of them.

Nearly two dozen men and women laden with ammo bandoliers and gun belts heavy with firearms and extra rounds stand shoulder to shoulder across the curb, facing their leader, awaiting final orders. Behind them, the single-file row of vehicles—all fueled and idling—stretches down half the block, headlamps shining toward the exit gate.

They are about to leave twenty-five of their fellow villagers behind with nary a firearm or a bullet—the sum total of their arsenal now sitting on the flatbeds, in trunks, and piled into cargo holds. The Governor asked the Sterns to stay behind and watch the town, and when Barbara objected—after all, she and David are among the best shooters in Woodbury—the Governor told her he wasn’t asking her to do this, he was fucking ordering her to do it.

“We have them in our sights, my friends!” Philip Blake now announces to the brigade, his booming voice echoing across the dark square.

Each and every face present that morning reflects the gravity of the moment. Underneath the brims of baseball caps and headbands, their eyes glint with sullen purpose and thinly veiled fear. Fingers brush nervously against trigger guards and along the stocks of assault rifles. These are not professional soldiers by any means, but Philip can see the cold slap of survival instinct waking them up now, girding them, galvanizing them.

He applies more of the stimulant to the group with his stentorian voice. “These motherfuckers killed Doc Stevens! They murdered Bruce Cooper!” He scans the row of somber faces and finally sees Lilly standing at the far end of the group. Austin stands next to her with his sniper rifle on his shoulder, his head cocked with grave resolve. Her hair pulled back in a tight, businesslike ponytail, Lilly has her hands on her hips, palming the handles of her twin Rugers, her Remington MSR rifle shouldered behind her. For the briefest instant, something about the look in her eyes bothers Philip. Maybe he’s imagining it, but she looks as though she’s deep in thought—ruminating about something—when she should be humming like a tuning fork with kill-lust. Philip holds her gaze as he booms, “They mutilated me—and it’s time for them to pay!!”

Lilly meets his gaze from twenty feet away and holds it for an endless moment.

Then she nods.

The Governor roars: “PILE IN AND LET’S MOVE!!”

*   *   *

At 5:30
A.M.
on the nose, in a flurry of revving engines, creaking chassis, and chaotic shouting, the heavily armed convoy finally embarks.

In the middle of the pack, Lilly follows the red taillights in front of her as best she can, both hands riveted to the gigantic steering wheel of the rumbling two-and-a-half-ton M35 cargo truck. She can’t see shit. The drought of recent days has left the road out of Woodbury as dusty and granular as a sandbox, and now the procession kicks up a fogbank of haze in the predawn darkness as it thunders out the south gate. Lilly can barely see the truck’s fifteen-foot-long rear payload bay through the back window, enclosed by guard railing and filled with passengers.

She feels like a midget in the enormous cab, her foot barely reaching the accelerator pedal on the floor, the air reeking of the flop-sweat of generations of nervous National Guardsmen. Austin sits next to her in the passenger seat, cradling the two-way radio in his lap. Every few moments, the voice of the Governor crackles out of the speaker, admonishing Gabe to keep it under forty miles per hour to keep the formation tight and to make sure he takes 85 South—NOT NORTH GODDAMNIT!!—and to turn his fucking headlights off before he wakes up the entire county!

Years ago, Lilly spent a lot of couch time at a Marietta mental health clinic working on her panic attacks. The shrink was a kindly, middle-aged woman named Dr. Cara Leone, who preferred talk therapy to medication and devoted a lot of time to parsing the reasons for Lilly’s racing thoughts. Partly hormonal, partly growing pangs, partly neurochemical, and partly grief over her mother’s lost battle with breast cancer, Lilly’s anxiety attacks always came upon her in a public place, in a crowd, accompanied by a pandemonium of thoughts tumbling around her brain. She was ugly, she was a loser, she was overweight, she had cancer in her genes, people were staring at her, she was going to faint, she couldn’t breathe, she felt the world spinning, she had a brain tumor, she was going to die right here in this grocery store. Happily, she either outgrew these spells or worked her way through them … until now.

Following the cargo truck in front of her, its glowing red taillights veiled behind a miasma of exhaust and dust, she feels the stirrings of a panic attack coming on. She hasn’t felt these sensations for at least ten years, but, sure enough, she feels them now; she senses her thoughts slipping off their spindle, making her dizzy as the fears slide around her brain, sending gooseflesh across the back of her neck. She stares at those glowing red orbs in front of her. She stares and stares until they become two red-dwarf planets floating in space … and she concentrates on her training. She thinks of the lessons Bob taught her from his days in basic training: the zen of the sniper.

The bullet will travel with a curved trajectory. The sniper must compensate for this by aiming higher at longer distances. If the distance to the target is unknown, the shooter can calculate muzzle height by using some sort of landmark close to the target, a utility pole or fence post, and then extrapolating the adjustment for a nearby target. She thinks about this as she drives, stuffing the fear back down her throat through sheer concentration. The headshot is the preferred goal. The average head is six inches wide, and average human shoulders are twenty inches apart, and the average distance from a person’s pelvis to the top of their head is forty inches. In front of her, the cargo truck makes a ninety-degree turn onto Millard Drive, and she calmly follows, turning the wheel and gently commandeering the M35 through the dust and down the two-lane.

She feels better. She feels her racing thoughts settling into the cobra-calm of the sniper’s mind-set, a state that Bob once rhapsodized about while in his cups. The bullet type will determine the drop rate. The Remington shoots a .308 caliber, 175-grain projectile at 2,685 feet per second. At six hundred yards, a seventeen-degree-of-elevation adjustment would have to be made to hit the target. She feels the convoy speeding up in front of her, the speedometer edging past forty miles per hour. She follows. Austin says something next to her. “Huh?” She shoots a glance over at him, feeling as though she’s just awakened from a deep sleep. “Did you say something?”