The Walking Dead Collection (131 page)

Lilly screams and kicks and scrambles for the magazine in her belt when a third figure fills the narrow space under the M35—just a dark blur at first—and then the gleaming blue steel of Austin’s Glock.

A flare of a spark and the flat blast puts the male biter down in a gushing stream of oily fluid from its freshly breached skull, spreading across the matted grass under the truck, the stench of the dead now engulfing Lilly as she lets out a pained, shocked sigh of relief. Austin crawls over to her.

“You okay, did he get you, did he nick you?—You all right?!” Austin babbles, putting his arm around her, tenderly wiping away the damp tendrils of hair loosened from her ponytail.

Lilly manages a nod, swallowing back the coppery taste of acid in her throat. The noise of another volley from all around them makes it impossible to be heard. She twists back around and reaches for her rifle, crawling out from underneath the truck.

The air has gotten so thick with cordite and crisscrossing gunfire, it looks as though night has rolled in, and it chokes the breath out of Lilly, numbing her senses, making her eyes water. She positions herself against the cab. She tries to get her bearings back, slamming another clip into the Ruger pistol, shoving it into her belt, and then swinging the Remington around into shooting position. Austin huddles behind her, aiming the Garand at the sparking, flaring gunfire coming from inside the fences.

Lilly is lifting the scope to her eye when all at once she sees a tiny object floating up through space above the razor-wire fence tops and everything slows down.

A momentary lull in the firefight ensues unexpectedly, and the fast-forward motion of the skirmish slams on its brakes. In her mind’s eye, Lilly sees the projectile arcing over their heads in extreme slow motion until it lands on the ground in front of a big Buick sedan, bouncing once and clattering under the car’s dented front grillwork.

The explosion that follows rocks the earth and sucks the air pressure out of the landscape, turning the pasture—just for an instant—into the surface of the sun.

*   *   *

The grenade propels the two-thousand-pound vehicle into the air, tearing shrapnel from its front half and sending every man and woman within a fifty-yard radius falling to their feet. The boom shatters eardrums and rattles the trees and throws the Governor and Gabe into different directions, each man sprawling to the ground and rolling.

The Governor slams into the undercarriage of the tank, his breath squeezed from his lungs as he catches a bleary glimpse from his one working eye of the projectile-spray blooming in the sun—razor-sharp particles of the Buick’s front end—ripping through the closest, unsuspecting combatants. Jagged pieces of metal punch through portly old Charlie Banes, tearing a chunk out of his chest, lifting him four feet off the ground and sending him hurling backward, arms pinwheeling, the gush of lifeblood enrobing him in liquid scarlet as he lands in the weeds, his heart shutting down and his life draining out of him before he even stops rolling.

At the same exact moment, on the other side of the lot, a constellation of shards like tiny missiles have passed through Rudy Warburton’s upper body, causing him to momentarily jitterbug in a gruesome death dance, his gun flying off, his deep, whiskey-cured voice—the same ringside announcer’s voice that proudly introduced the Governor to crowds at the racetrack arena—now bellowing a death wail that sets the Governor’s teeth on edge.

“F-FUCK!” The Governor rolls out from under the tank, gasping for breath and seeing double through his lone eye. He tries to focus on the ground. His eye patch has come askew. Blades of crabgrass are in his hair, the stench of burning fuel in his nostrils. His body screams with pain. His bandaged face feels wet and hot, his phantom arm twisting and clawing at the air on its ghostly stump. “F-FFF-FUCK!—
F-FFFF-FUCK!!
”

He rises to his hands and knees, his ears ringing, his brain blazing with rage. He barely hears the return fire screaming over his head. Most of the surviving militia have ducked behind cover and have started firing wildly at the guard towers and the nooks across the prison grounds. The air ignites with tracers and ricochets. A total of six men lie in heaps around the blackened, scorched earth cratered by the grenade blast.

Charlie is gone. Rudy, Teddy Grainger, Bart, Daniel, and even big Don Horgan, the wrestler—all gone—mutilated to shreds by either gunfire or the deadly shrapnel.

The Governor sees Gabe on his back about thirty feet away, next to the flatbed, his head drooping, the concussion blast knocking him silly. Magnesium-hot rage courses through Philip as he struggles to his feet, wincing painfully as .50 cal bursts zing over his head. On top of a nearby flatbed truck cab, the machine gunner, Ben Buchholz, sprays the prison grounds furiously, without strategy or purpose. A quick glance at the southeast guard tower reveals puffs of white flame as a lone sniper rains pinpoint shots down on the convoy, the bullets ringing off fenders, shattering windshields, and nipping at the heels of surviving militiamen.

“GABE!”

The Governor’s voice sounds muffled and garbled to his own damaged ears. He manages to dart across the gap between the tank and the flatbed. By this point, Gabe is hauling himself back to his feet, blinking away the shock and pain. The Governor reaches the fat man and grabs the nape of his turtleneck as though lifting a runt from a litter. “GET THE FUCK OVER HERE!”

Philip drags Gabe across the wasted ground to the rear of the Abrams.

“C’MERE!” The Governor slams the portly Gabriel Harris against the back of the tank, knocking the wind out of Gabe’s lungs as more high-velocity blasts ping and spark off the armored Abrams.

“Wh-what the—!!” Gabe convulses with agony, jerking at the buzz-saw grind of the .50 cal twenty yards away. Bullets blaze around them for a moment, distracting them, making each of them duck and twitch with nervous tension, giving each man a weird sort of tunnel vision.

Neither man sees the giant, battered, road-worn Winnebago camper roaring out of the trees directly to the west, skirting the edges of the battlefront in a fogbank of dust. In fact, at first,
nobody
in the attack force notices the new addition to the war zone.

*   *   *

“We have
got
to rethink this fucking thing,” Gabe proclaims a few seconds later in a strangled, exhausted voice, standing with the Governor behind the armored tank while bullets whiz over their heads like wasps. Burning his gaze into the Governor’s solitary eye, speaking loudly enough to be heard above the noise of intermittent gunfire, Gabe deploys a tone of voice he has never used with the Governor—a tone dripping with recrimination and anger. “Our people are scared shitless! They’re getting the shit beat out of them—dropping like flies—you gotta do something, man, you gotta fucking take charge!”

The Governor’s left hand thrusts out and grabs Gabe by the throat, slamming the heavyset man against the riveted hull of the Abrams. “Shut your fucking mouth, Gabe! We’re not gonna pussy out this time—we’re taking this place down—it’s now or never!!”

In that tense millisecond of a pause, Gabe stares wide-eyed at his boss—his mentor, his father figure—and a spark of shame kindles in Gabe’s gaze. Neither man is aware of the Winnebago circling around the far western edge of the battlefield, far enough back to go unseen by most of the combatants—even those within the confines of the prison. The camper skids to a stop in a whirlwind of dust, and a figure appears like a specter on the roof, a solitary woman holding a sniper rifle.

“Okay, okay, I’m s-sorry, sorry,” Gabe babbles, both his gloved hands on the Governor’s wrist, trying to wrench it off the ample girth of his bullish neck. Philip releases his grip. Gabe hyperventilates as he goes on raving over the noise of the firefight. “I’m just saying, we’re getting beat up and we need a plan! We can’t just keep hammering away at these cocksuckers without a—”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Philip Blake trains his blazing eye on the burly man and hears voices in his head bubbling up from the dark catacombs of his brain—
Philip’s dead, gone, Philip is dead and buried, he’s dust
—and Philip flinches suddenly at the unexpected banshee shrieking in his head—
Shut up, shut up!
Guns roar behind him, the crackle making him twitch, distracting him from the sight of the lone sniper standing on the roof of a rust-pocked camper hundreds of yards away, ghostly in the mirage of heat rays on the edge of the forest.

“Listen, listen to me, you chicken-shit fat body—we’re not gonna fucking pull back again!” Philip manages to bellow in a strangled voice, shoving Gabe across the slimy iron bulwark of the tank. “You understand?! You got that?! We’re gonna end this thing NOW!—
NOW!!
”

Gabe backs away, rubbing his neck, blinking back tears of dread, looking suddenly like a little boy who would say or do anything to appease his abusive father, who would lie and steal and kill and rape and pillage,
anything
to please his angry parent and squelch the taunts of schoolkids who once called him a big tub-o-lard.

The single shot that rings out from the west, a large-caliber bullet fired with the precision of a beesting from the roof of a mobile home 350 yards away, hits the exposed part of Gabriel Harris’s skull.

The Governor jerks back as Gabe’s head erupts, washing the tank with a splash of gelatinous pink brain matter, forming a giant fuchsia blot on the iron. The Governor’s breath freezes in his lungs as Gabe teeters on wobbly legs for a moment, his glassy eyes fixed on Philip, a death stare reminiscent of a computer crashing, locked onto Philip’s face, endlessly looking for a parent’s approval that will never come. And then the big man collapses as if swooning.

He hits the earth with a thud that wakes Philip up with the force of a cold slap.

“MOTHERFUCK!”

Philip Blake lurches behind the tank and peers around the other side.

“FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!!” In quick stages, he sees the distant Winnebago and glimpses the female figure standing boldly on the roof like some mythical creature, some Valkyrie swooping down from the heavens to aid and assist the inhabitants of the prison, and finally he notices the pickup truck parked fifty feet off his left flank in the weeds. He sees Gus crouched behind the rear gate, firing an AR-15 at will, cursing and firing and cursing.

“GUS!” Philip roars. “GET IN YOUR TRUCK AND DRIVE IT UP THAT WOMAN’S ASS—RIGHT NOW!!”

It takes only a moment for Gus to see what the Governor is talking about. With a terse nod, Gus gets moving, staying low and duckwalking around the other side of the Chevy S-10 to the cab. He climbs behind the wheel, the windshield already cracked into a million diamond-bright shards of broken glass from all the gunfire.

The tailpipe coughs vapor as Gus slams it into drive and blasts off toward the camper.

The Governor goes over to Gabe’s body and untangles the Bushmaster rifle from the dead man’s shoulder, and by the time Philip has straightened back up and taken stock of the battlefront, things have begun to go from bad to worse.

*   *   *

From behind the tail gate of the M35, Lilly Caul watches the chain of events unravel and implode like a nuclear reaction, her lungs heaving for air, her heart banging as loudly as a timpani drum against her rib cage. She grips her Remington with sweat-sticky hands and jerks at the concussive blast of metal on metal thundering on the horizon to the west. She peers around the edge of the hatch just in time to see Gus ramming his pickup into the Winnebago, nearly breaking the massive camper in two.

The impact sends particles of broken glass and shards of trim and metal fittings into the air and throws the sniper—a fair-haired woman in a ponytail and prison dungarees—cartwheeling off the roof and into the weeds on the edge of the woods. It’s hard to tell at this distance, but it looks as though Gus has been hit—his door springing open on impact, his squat body flopping out of the cab, a swirl of black smoke obscuring the crash site.

Lilly hears a strangled, maniacal laugh and glances to her left and sees the Governor crouched behind the tank watching Gus’s pickup and what’s left of the Winnebago go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke and flame. “TAKE THAT, BITCH—YOU FUCK WITH US!—YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT!” He sounds to Lilly like he’s finally slipped his tether.

“Jesus … Jesus … this is insane!” Lilly ducks behind the hatch and jumps at a booming series of blasts that nearly pop her eardrums, the gunfire coming from inches away. She wrenches around and sees Austin, crouched behind the opposite end of the hatch, firing his Garand at the guard tower, the .308 shells booming and ringing. He’s yelling something. Lilly tries to get his attention. “Austin!—AUSTIN!”

“—fuckers are picking us off like flies!” He shoots some more, glancing at Lilly, shooting, then glancing at her again with eyes blazing. “C’mon!—Lilly, what’s wrong?!—Whaddaya doing?!”

“Save your ammo, pretty boy!”

“Whaddaya talking about?!”

“You’re gonna—!”

Lilly starts to explain that they have a finite amount of rounds and they need to get better positions and these bastards could lob another grenade at any second when the sound of the Governor’s voice rings out above the gunfire. She twists back around and sees him limping across the battlefield, his face filled with psychotic glee.

“Only a matter of time now!” He walks toward a pair of shooters huddled behind a pile of fallen supply crates, firing blindly at the towers. “We got ’em pinned down! Motherfuckers can’t last!”

One of the shooters behind the crates—an older man with thinning hair and yellow aviator sunglasses—looks up from his scope when a round hits him in the left eye.

The blast shatters the aviator lens and bursts out the back of his skull. He convulses backward, his rifle flying out of his hands—his brain matter spraying the weeds behind him—as he collapses less than ten feet from where the Governor is shuffling along.

“We got them right where we want them!” Philip strides along behind the row of vehicles and shooters like a black-clad General MacArthur. “Don’t let them take a fucking breath! Keep the pressure on!”