The Walking Dead Collection (62 page)

“Stop worrying, grandma,” the Governor murmurs, watching intently with those hollowed-out eyes.

Right then Martinez realizes the Governor is not watching the fight per se. Eyes shifting all around the semicircle of shouting spectators, the Governor is
watching the watchers
. He seems to be absorbing every face, every jackal-like howl, every hoot and holler.

Meantime, Dean Gorman starts to fade on the ground, in the stranglehold of Johnny Pruitt’s sausage fingers. Gorman’s face turns the color of dry cement. His eyes roll back in his head and he stops struggling.

“Okay, that’s enough … pull him off,” the Governor tells Martinez.

“EVERYBODY BACK OFF!”

Martinez forces his way into the huddle with his gun in both hands.

Big fat Johnny Pruitt finally lets go at the urging of the M1’s muzzle, and Gorman lies there convulsing. “Go get Stevens,” Martinez orders one of his guards.

The crowd, still agitated by all the excitement, lets out a collective groan. Some of them grumble, and some launch a few boos, frustrated by the anticlimax.

Standing off to the side, the Governor takes it all in. When the onlookers begin to disperse—wandering away, shaking their heads—the Governor goes over to Martinez, who still stands over the writhing Gorman.

Martinez looks up at the Governor. “He’ll live.”

“Good.” The Governor glances down at the young man on the ground. “I think I know what to do with the guardsmen.”

*   *   *

At that same moment, under the sublevels of the racetrack complex, in the darkness of a makeshift holding cell, four men whisper to each other.

“It’ll never work,” the first man utters skeptically, sitting in the corner in his piss-sodden boxer shorts, gazing at the shadows of his fellow prisoners gathered around him on the floor.

“Shut the fuck up, Manning,” hisses the second man, Barker, a rail-thin twenty-five-year-old, who glowers at his fellow detainees through long strands of greasy hair. Barker had once been Major Gene Gavin’s star pupil at Camp Ellenwood, Georgia, bound for special ops duty with the 221
st
Military Intelligence Battalion. Now, thanks to that psycho Philip Blake, Gavin is gone and Barker has been reduced to a ragged, seminude, groveling lump in the basement of some godforsaken catacomb, left to subsist on cold oatmeal and wormy bread.

The four guardsmen have been under “house arrest” down here for over three weeks, ever since Philip Blake had shot and killed their commanding officer, Gavin, in cold blood, right in front of dozens of townspeople. Now the only things they have going for them are hunger, pure rage, and the fact that Barker is chained to the cinder-block wall to the immediate left of the locked entrance door, a spot from which one could conceivably get a jump on somebody entering the cell … like Blake, for example, who has been regularly coming down here to drag prisoners out, one by one, to meet some hellish fate.

“He’s not stupid, Barker,” a third man named Stinson wheezes from the opposite corner. This man is older, more heavyset, a good old boy with bad teeth who once ran a requisition desk at the National Guard station.

“I agree with Stinson,” Tommy Zorn says from the back wall where he slumps in his underwear, his malnourished body covered with a significant skin rash. Zorn once worked as a delivery clerk at the Guard station. “He’s gonna see right through this stunt.”

“Not if we’re careful,” Barker counters.

“Who the hell is gonna be the one plays dead?”

“Doesn’t matter, I’ll be the one kicks his ass when he opens the door.”

“Barker, I think this place has put a zap on your head. Seriously. You want to end up like Gavin? Like Greely and Johnson and—”

“YOU COCK-SUCKING COWARD!! WE’RE ALL GONNA END UP LIKE THEM YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!”

The volume of Barker’s voice—stretched as thin as high-tension wire—cuts off the conversation like a switch. For a long stretch, the four guardsmen sit in the dark without saying a word.

At last Barker says, “All we need is one of you faggots to play dead. That’s all I’m asking. I’ll coldcock him when he comes in.”

“Making it convincing is the trouble,” Manning says.

“Rub shit on yourself.”

“Hardy-har-har.”

“Cut yourself and rub blood on your face, and then let it dry, I don’t know. Rub your eyes until they bleed. You want to get out of here?”

Long silence now.

“You’re fucking guardsmen, for Chrissake. You want to rot in here like maggots?”

Another long silence, and then Stinson’s voice in the darkness says, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

*   *   *

Bob follows the Governor through a secure door at one end of the racetrack, then down a narrow flight of iron stairs, and then across a narrow cinder-block corridor, their footsteps ringing and echoing in the dim light. Emergency cage lights—powered by generators—burn overhead.

“Finally it hit me, Bob,” the Governor is saying, fiddling with a ring of skeleton keys clipped to his belt on a long chain. “Thing this place needs … is entertainment.”

“Entertainment?”

“The Greeks had their theater, Bob … Romans had their circuses.”

Bob has no idea what the man is talking about but he follows along obediently, wiping his dry mouth. He needs a drink badly. He unbuttons his olive-drab jacket, pearls of sweat breaking out on his weathered brow due to the airless, fusty dampness of the cavernous cement underground beneath the racetrack.

They pass a locked door, and Bob can swear he hears the muffled, telltale noises of reanimated dead. The trace odors of rotting flesh mingle with the mildewy stench of the corridor. Bob’s stomach lurches.

The Governor leads him over to a metal door with a narrow window at the end of the corridor. A shade is pulled down over the meshed safety glass.

“Gotta keep the citizens happy,” the Governor mutters as he pauses by the door, searching for the proper key. “Keep folks docile, manageable … pliable.”

Bob waits as the Governor inserts a thick metal key into the door’s bolt. But just as he is about to jack open the lock, the Governor turns and looks at Bob. “Had some trouble a while back with the National Guard in town, thought they could lord it over the people, push people around … thought they could carve out a little kingdom for themselves.”

Confused, dizzy, nauseous, Bob gives a nod and doesn’t say anything.

“Been keeping a bunch of them on ice down here.” The Governor winks as though discussing the location of a cookie jar with a child. “Used to be seven of them.” The Governor sighs. “Only four of them left now … been going through them like Grant went through Richmond.”

“Going through them?”

The Governor sniffs, suddenly looking guiltily at the floor. “They’ve been serving a higher purpose, Bob. For my baby … for Penny.”

Bob realizes with a sudden rush of queasiness what the Governor is talking about.

“Anyway…” The Governor turns to the door. “I knew they would come in handy for all sorts of things … but now I realize their true destiny.” The Governor smiles. “Gladiators, Bob. For the common good.”

Right then several things happen at once: The Governor turns and snaps up the shade, while simultaneously flipping a light switch … and through the safety glass a row of overhead fluorescent tubes suddenly flicker on, illuminating the inside of a three-hundred-square-foot cinder-block cell. A huge man clad only in tattered skivvies lies on the floor, twitching, covered with blood, his mouth black and peeled away from his teeth in a hideous grimace.

“That’s a shame.” The Governor frowns. “Looks like one of ’em turned.”

Inside the cell—the noises muffled by the sealed door—the other prisoners are screaming, yanking at their chains, begging to be rescued from this freshly turned biter. The Governor reaches inside the folds of his duster and draws his pearl-handled .45 caliber Colt. He checks the clip and mumbles, “Stay out here, Bob. This’ll just take a second.”

He snaps the lock open, and he steps inside the cell, when the man behind the door pounces.

Barker lets out a garbled cry as he tackles the Governor from behind, the chain attached to Barker’s ankle giving slightly, reaching its limit, tearing its anchor bolt from the wall. Taken by surprise, the Governor stumbles, drops the .45, topples to the deck, gasping, the gun clattering to the floor, spinning several feet.

Bob fills the doorway, yelling, as Barker crabs toward the Governor’s ankles, latching on to them, digging his filthy untrimmed fingernails into the Governor’s flesh. Barker tries to snag the skeleton keys, but the ring is wedged under the Governor’s legs.

The Governor bellows as he madly crawls toward the fallen pistol.

The other men cry out as Barker loses what is left of his sanity and goes for the Governor’s ankles and growls with feral white-hot killing rage and opens his mouth and bites down on the tender area around the Governor’s Achilles’ heel, and the Governor howls.

Bob stands paralyzed behind the half-ajar door, watching, thunderstruck.

Barker draws blood. The Governor kicks at the prisoner and claws for the pistol. The other men try to tear themselves free, hollering inarticulate warnings, while Barker rips into the Governor’s legs. The Governor reaches for the gun, which lies only centimeters out of his reach … until finally the Governor’s long, sinewy fingers get themselves around the Colt’s grip.

In one quick continuous motion the Governor spins and aims the single-action semiautomatic pistol at Barker’s face and empties the clip.

A series of dry, hot booms flash in the cell. Barker flings backward like a puppet yanked by a cable, the slugs perforating his face, exiting out the back of his skull in a plume of blood mist. The dark crimson matter sprays the cinder-block wall beside the door, some of it getting on Bob, who jerks back with a start.

Across the cell the other men call out—a garble of nonsense words, a frenzy of begging—as the Governor rises to his feet.

“Please, please, I ain’t turned—I AIN’T TURNED!” Across the room, Stinson, the big man, sits up, shielding his bloodstained face as he cries out. His quivering lips have been made up with mildew from the wall and grease from the door hinges. “It was a trick! A trick!”

The Governor thumbs the empty clip out of the Colt, the magazine dropping to the floor. Breathing hard and fast, he pulls another clip from his back pocket and palms it into the hilt. He cocks the slide and calmly aims the muzzle at Stinson, while informing the big man, “You look like a fucking biter to me.”

Stinson shields his face. “It was Barker’s idea, it was stupid, please, I didn’t want to go along with it, Barker was nuts, please … PLEASE!”

The Governor squeezes off half a dozen successive shots, the blasts making everybody jump.

The far wall erupts in a fireworks display just above Stinson’s head, the puffs of cinder-block plaster exploding in sequence, the noise a tremendous, earsplitting barrage, the sparks blossoming and some of the bullets ricocheting up into the ceiling.

The single cage light explodes in a torrent of glass particles that drives everybody to the floor.

At last the Governor lets up and stands there, catching his breath, blinking, and addressing Bob in the doorway. “What we got here, Bob, is a learning opportunity.”

Across the room, on the floor, Stinson has pissed himself, mortified and yet unharmed. He buries his face in his hands and weeps softly.

The Governor limps toward the big man, leaving a thin trail of blood droplets. “You see, Bob … the very thing that burns inside these boys—makes ’em try stupid shit like this—is gonna make them superstars in the arena.”

Stinson looks up with snot on his face now as the Governor looms over him.

“They don’t realize it, Bob.” The Governor aims the muzzle at Stinson’s face. “But they just passed the first test of gladiatorial school.” The Governor gives Stinson a hard look. “Open your mouth.”

Stinson hiccups with sobs and terror, squeezing out a breathless, “C’mon,
pleeease
…”

“Open your mouth.”

Stinson manages to open his mouth. Across the room, in the doorway, Bob Stookey looks away.

“See, Bob,” the Governor says, slowly penetrating the big man’s mouth with the barrel. The room falls stone silent as the other men watch, horrified and rapt. “Obedience … courage … stupidity. Isn’t that the Boy Scout motto?”

Without warning the Governor lets up on the trigger, pulls the muzzle free of the weeping man’s mouth, whirls around, and limps toward the exit. “What did Ed Sullivan used to say…? Gonna be a really big sssshooooow!”

The tension goes out of the room like a bladder deflating, replaced by a ringing silence.

“Bob, do me a favor … will ya?” the Governor mutters as he passes the bullet-riddled body of Master Gunnery Sergeant Trey Barker on his way out. “Clean this place up … but don’t take this cocksucker’s remains over to the crematorium. Bring him over to the infirmary.” He winks at Bob. “I’ll take care of him from there.”

*   *   *

The next day, early in the morning, before dawn, Megan Lafferty lies nude and cold and supine on a broken-down cot in the darkness of a squalid studio apartment—the private quarters of some guard whose name she can’t remember. Denny? Daniel? Megan was too stoned last night to file the name away. Now the skinny young man with the cobra tattoo between his shoulder blades thrusts himself into her with rhythmic abandon, making the cot groan and squeak.

Megan places her thoughts elsewhere, staring at the ceiling, focusing on the dead flies collected in the bowl of an overhead light fixture, trying to withstand the horrible, painful, sticky friction of the man’s erection pumping in and out of her.

The room consists of the cot, a ramshackle dresser, flea-bitten curtains drawn over the open window—through which a December wind whistles sporadically—and piles and piles of crates filled with supplies. Some of these supplies have been promised to Megan in return for sex. She notices a stringer of ragged fleshy objects hanging off a hook on the door, which she first misidentifies as dried flowers.

Upon closer scrutiny, though, the flowers reveal themselves in the darkness to be human ears, most likely trophies severed off walkers.