The Walking Dead Collection (133 page)

The man named Smitty wipes his face with the back of his arm. “Y-yessir.”

“How many of our people did that so-called ‘boy’ kill with his fucking rifle? Huh? HOW MANY?!”

Smitty looks down. “Okay … I get it.”

The Governor puts his gloved hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezes. “You should be proud that you killed him!” Then a gentle shove. “C’mon! Get your ass in gear—this isn’t over yet!”

“Okay,” Smitty says with a terse nod. “Okay.” He looks down at his rifle and slams another shell in the breach with a grunt, his voice barely a whisper now. “Whatever.”

The Governor has another thought and starts to say something else when a streak of movement off to his left crosses his peripheral vision. He snaps his head toward the nearest building and sees four figures darting out of a side exit. At first, the Governor just points and starts to say, “There!—THERE—HERE COMES—!”

But his words stick in his throat when the identity of two of these figures suddenly registers over the space of a heartbeat.

He recognizes the big, handsome man named Rick—the self-proclaimed leader—limping furiously across the grounds, his tattered prison coveralls now bunched in the midsection with heavy bandages where he was shot. He trundles along with a woman on one flank, a little boy of about nine on the other. Rick helps the woman leap over a pile of wreckage as though she’s sick. Plunging through the fogbank of dust, wide-eyed and frantic, they look as if they’re making a break for the far gate on the northwest corner of the yards. Following closely on their heels, the fourth figure—a younger woman in a stained white lab coat—carries a lever-action Winchester and already has the weapon raised to her eye.

The Governor recognizes Alice and suddenly cries out to his minions. “TAKE THAT BACKSTABBING BITCH DOWN!”

*   *   *

Thirty yards to the east, under the overhang of Cellblock D, Lilly Caul sees the encounter developing across the wasted grounds, the first bark of automatic fire shattering the temporary lull in the assault, raising hackles on her neck—and she swings her gun up—forgetting, just for a moment, the oncoming horde of undead.

Already the battalion of walking corpses, as densely packed as a stockyard full of cattle, have made their way down the far slopes of the meadow and have begun shuffling and trundling as one great undulating mob of rotting paralytics across the tall grass of the adjacent pasture. They look from this great distance like an invasion force, an army of dead centurions hailing from some hellish necropolis—arms outstretched, banging into each other, heads lolling, eyes like yellow reflectors catching the pale sunlight—coming into clearer and clearer focus as they approach the outer fences. From Lilly’s vantage point, their myriad varieties of age, shape, size, gender, and degree of decomposition are all still a blur, but they’re getting close enough to smell and hear. The rancid aroma of gaseous decay and incessant choruses of toneless moaning rise on the gentle breezes of the afternoon.

Distracted by the appearance of Rick Grimes, his family, and Alice, her adrenaline spiking with equal parts panic and rage, Lilly has lost track of the terrible onslaught of the dead and now grabs Austin with her free arm. “Look!” She pulls him toward the skirmish across the grounds. “Look who it is! Jesus Christ, Austin—COME ON!”

They dash across the leprous cement of a defunct basketball court, their weapons raised and ready to fire. Dead ahead, about twenty yards away, half a dozen militiamen fire on the fleeing family.

“Go!—Keep going!—RUN!!” Alice cries out at Rick, and then fires off a series of wild shots.

Lilly bounds headlong toward the fracas, her teeth cracking with tension. She sees Alice making a feeble attempt to keep firing long enough to give the Grimes family a chance to flee. But the nurse is quickly overcome. One of the rounds chews through her leg, knocking her feet out from under her, another one grazing her shoulder and sending her to the ground.

Lilly gets close enough to see the Governor marching toward the nurse.

Alice looks up with blood on her face, seeing three separate men approaching her commando-style with muzzles raised, and she spits. “FUCK YOU!”

She fires one last time, hitting one of the men next to the Governor in the gut.

“FUCKING BITCH!” The Governor lunges at her and kicks her rifle from her hands.

Lilly approaches from the opposite direction with her Remington ready to fire, and she aims it down at the fallen nurse. She makes eye contact with Alice, and Alice holds her gaze, and for the briefest moment, the two women stare silently at each other. Lilly can barely recognize the woman who was once her friend and confidante. Alice spits blood at Lilly, and Lilly feels a twinge of rage like a match tip igniting in her guts.

In her peripheral vision, she can see the Grimes family fleeing toward the far gates. A shot rings out—a near miss—sparking off the concrete at Rick’s heels.

The one-armed Governor looms over the fallen nurse and jacks the cocking mechanism on his Tec-9 by yanking it down against his belt with a loud metallic click. His teeth are showing. He breathes thickly through his nostrils as Alice closes her eyes and looks away. She’s ready to die. The Governor aims the Tec-9 at her face and growls softly at her, “… traitor…”

The single burst from the Tec-9 makes Lilly jump as the back of Alice’s head erupts in a wet red particle bomb across the concrete.

“Take them out,” the Governor says softly to Lilly, but Lilly doesn’t hear him at first.

“What?” She looks up from the murdered nurse. “What was that?”

The Governor scowls at Lilly. “I said take those motherfuckers out.” He points the pistol’s muzzle at the fleeing family. “NOW!”

Lilly assumes a shooting stance and squares her shoulders and sucks in a breath, raising the weapon toward the three figures fleeing in the distance. They are twenty-five yards away from freedom.

Over the course of that next second and a half, before she puts the scope to her eye, Lilly glimpses several things out of the corner of her eye that register like screaming warning alarms in her brain. She sees the other members of the Governor’s army whirling toward the devastated cyclone fence, some of them backing away, wide-eyed and jittery. Outside the mangled remnants of chain-link barricade, the tsunami of walking dead rolls toward the prison.

Closing the distance to about fifty yards now, the leading edge of the herd looks like a nightmarish chorus line of encephalitic monsters dressed in ragged civvies—moldering suits, tattered dresses dark with bile, and denim overalls hanging in shreds—their autonomic yellow stares fixed on the fresh meat scurrying across the grounds. The stench engulfs the general area, mingling with the dust devils, forming a fogbank of death scent. The dissonant symphony of mortified vocal cords rises to the level of a psychotic marching band, now throbbing and droning with the off-key music of their insatiable moaning.

Lilly focuses on the task at hand, and puts the scope to her eye.

For a single, frenzied instant she calculates the distance and the drop rate, and all at once she registers the fleeing woman, now running one half step behind Rick Grimes and holding something close to her chest.

Through the cross hairs, the woman’s cargo looks like ordnance of some kind—a bomb, a bundle of grenades, a short-barreled automatic weapon wrapped in cloth—so Lilly puts the woman in her sights.

She holds her breath, puts the center hairs on the woman, and quickly, decisively yanks the trigger.

The recoil punches Lilly’s shoulder, and one nanosecond later she sees the woman come apart in the scope’s telescopic lens.

In the narrow, magnified field of vision it looks like a silent movie death, the woman’s back opening up in a bloom of scarlet, her body thrown off stride, the impact of the .308 round tearing through her body as well as her mystery package—sending fragments of bone, tissue, blood mist, and fabric into the air.

The woman sprawls to the ground on top of the bundle, a tiny object flopping out of a blanket, visible now in the scope’s tunnel vision. Lilly freezes. The scope adheres to her eye socket as though dipped in liquid nitrogen. She stares at the object.

Lilly’s midsection goes cold as she stares and stares at that pink, smooth object visible in the upper right quadrant of the scope.

The distant howl of anguish from the man named Rick reaches Lilly’s ears. The man scuttles to a stop, gazing over his shoulder in absolute horror at his fallen wife. He stands paralyzed for a moment, staring at the fatally wounded woman and the object sticking out from under her chest. The boy reaches the fence and turns to see what happened, and the man waves him on. “Don’t look back, Carl! JUST KEEP RUNNING!!”

The boy darts toward a flatbed truck parked near the northwest gate, as more shots ring out from some of the other militiamen, but now the man named Rick lunges toward the boy, grabs him. “NO, CARL! WE WON’T MAKE IT TO THE TRUCK—!” The man spins the child in the other direction. “WE’VE GOTTA GO THIS WAY!—KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN AND, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T STOP RUNNING!”

Lilly barely notices the man and boy changing course and heading back along the fence toward the opposite gate, which is now crowded with the first wave of walking dead, the leading edge of the herd shambling over the chain-link wreckage and pouring into the prison with mouths working and dead arms reaching and flailing. They come one by one through the massive gap in the fence, fanning out across the yards in their slow-motion stampede, hungry yellow eyes scanning, but Lilly is beyond caring.

She can’t tear her gaze from the scope, or stop staring at the tiny, fleshy object sticking out from under the fallen wife, an object that reveals itself to be an arm.

A baby’s arm
.

*   *   *

At first, the Governor doesn’t notice Lilly’s catatonic stupor. He’s preoccupied with the quickly shifting dangers coming at them—the first wave of corpses now less than fifty yards away, shuffling awkwardly across the cracked cement toward the surviving militia—spreading their stench and noise like a pox on the barren grounds.

The Governor can see Rick Grimes and his boy reach the gap between the two demolished fences and weave through the oncoming horde, the man firing into the heads of the closest creatures, making an opening through which they can escape, creating quite a racket. “Crazy fucks,” Philip grumbles to his men. “Don’t waste any more bullets—the biters will get them before we can.”

Sure enough, Rick and his son’s frenzied flight begins to draw the attention of the leading edge of the herd, giving the Governor and his men time to clean up and take possession of the prison.

“What the fuck?” The Governor notices the older man in body armor twenty-five yards away, slumped on his knees next to the body of his son. “Why the fuck is that old bastard still breathing?”

Next to Philip, a gangly former high school math teacher nicknamed Red gives a nervous shrug, fingering the trigger pad of his AR-15, glancing over his shoulder at the herd bearing down on them, then glancing back at the old man in body armor. “Wasn’t moving—dropped his gun, looked like he was surrendering.”

The Governor walks over to the old man. The buzzing drone of the walkers fills the air. Philip feels as though ants are crawling on his skin. He can see the encroaching horde out of the corner of his one good eye. His phantom arm itches as he trains his Cyclopean gaze down at the sobbing man with gray slicked-back hair.

The old man slowly looks up as though seized up in a bad dream, still struggling to wake up. The two men make eye contact. “Dear God,” he mutters softly, almost as if reciting a litany. “Please … just kill me.”

The Governor puts the muzzle of the Tec-9 against the furrowed brow of the old man. But he doesn’t pull the trigger—not at first—he just presses it against the man’s forehead for an endless moment, staring, hearing the incessant crackle of radio interference in his head:…
dust to dust, dead and gone, he’s gone, Philip Blake is gone
.

The blast of the Tec-9 cuts off the voice and sends the old man into the void.

For a moment, Philip Blake stares down at the old man now lying in a fresh pool of deep-crimson blood next to his son, the puddle spreading, forming wings on the cement, like a Rorschach inkblot test, two angels lying in state, one next to the other—martyrs, sacrificial lambs. Philip starts to turn away when he hears another voice, anguished and grief-stricken, coming from somewhere nearby.

He turns and sees that Lilly Caul has moved across the yard, and now stands over the Grimes woman, who lies frozen in death on top of the pale remains of her baby. Austin Ballard stands twenty feet away from her, looking horror-struck and confused, spinning toward the oncoming biters. The herd has progressed across the grounds, closing the distance to about thirty yards or so. The stink and noise have risen to unbearable levels, and now some of the Governor’s men have begun firing at the front line, picking off the closest ones—one after another—the escaping fluids painting the weathered cement Day-Glo red and squid-ink black.

“What the fuck is
her
problem?” the Governor says to no one in particular as he strides over to where Lilly stands, slowly shaking her head, her Remington still gripped in one hand, tendrils of glistening auburn hair unmoored from her ponytail and dangling in her face.

The Governor yells at her, “What the fuck is
wrong
with you?—We gotta get our asses inside!—WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING DEAL?!—ANSWER ME!!!”

Very slowly she turns and scorches him with such a contemptuous look that it nearly takes his breath away. She utters something that he doesn’t hear at first, his one-eyed gaze held rapt by her blazing stare.

“What was that?” he demands of her, his single gloved hand balling into a fist.

“You monster,” she says again, louder this time, through clenched teeth.

The Governor goes very still, serpentine-still, a boa coiling itself in the presence of a threat—all this in spite of the looming threat of the horde filling the general vicinity with the odor of rotten meat and the sound of broken gears grinding and groaning. Very carefully, enunciating every word, the Governor says, “What. The. Fuck. Did. You. Just.
Say to me?
”