The Walking Dead Collection (66 page)

A synapse fires, a memory of an older sister fading away in his traumatized brain like a dying ember.

“Alicia, close the…”

His face grows still, eyes freezing and hardening in their sockets like marbles.

“Josh, Josh…” Lilly shakes him as though trying to kick-start an engine back to life. He’s gone. She cannot see through her tears, everything going milky. She feels the wetness on her wrists from his breached skull, and she feels something tightening around the nape of her neck.

“Leave him be,” a gravelly voice intones from behind her, thick with rage.

Lilly realizes someone is pulling her away from the body, a large male hand, fingers clutching a hank of her collar, tugging her back.

Something deep within her snaps.

*   *   *

The passage of time seems to elongate and corrupt, like that of a dream, as the butcher yanks the girl away from the body. He drags her back against the curb and she flops against the barrier, banging the back of her head, lying still now, staring up at the lanky man in the apron. The butcher stands over her, breathing hard, shaking with adrenaline. Behind him, the old geezers stand back against the storefront, shrinking into their baggy, ragged clothes, their rheumy eyes pinned wide.

Down the block, others materialize in the twilight, peering out of doorways and around corners.

“Look what you two have gone and done now!” the butcher accuses Lilly, shoving the pistol in her face. “I tried to be reasonable!”

“Get it over with.” She closes her eyes. “Get it over with … go ahead.”

“You stupid bitch, I ain’t gonna kill ya!” He slaps her with his free hand. “Are you listening? Do I have your attention?”

Footsteps echo in the distance—someone running this way—which goes unheard at first. Lilly opens her eyes. “You’re a murderer.” She utters this over bloody teeth. Her nose is bleeding. “You’re worse than a fucking walker.”

“That’s your opinion.” He slaps her again. “Now I want you to listen to me.”

The sting is bracing to Lilly. It wakes her up. “What do you want?”

Voices call out a block away, the charging footsteps closing in, but the butcher doesn’t hear anything but his own voice. “Gonna take the rest of Green Mile’s debt from you, little sister.”

“Fuck you.”

The butcher leans down and grabs her by the scruff of her jacket collar. “You’re gonna work that skinny little ass until you’re—”

Lilly’s knee comes up hard enough to drive the man’s testicles up into his pelvic bone. The butcher staggers and lets out a startled gasp that sounds like steam escaping from a broken vent.

Lilly springs to her feet, and she claws at the butcher’s face. Her nails are chewed to the quicks, so they don’t do much damage, but it drives the man back farther. He swings at her. She flinches away from the blow, which grazes her shoulder. She kicks him in the balls again.

The butcher staggers, reaching for his pistol.

*   *   *

By this point, Martinez is half a block away, running toward the scene, followed by two of his guards. He calls out, “WHAT THE FUCK?”

The butcher has gotten his Glock out of his belt and spins toward the oncoming men.

The burly, coiled Martinez pounces immediately, slamming the butt end of his M1 down on the butcher’s right wrist, the sound of delicate bones crunching audible above the wind. The Glock flies out of the butcher’s hand and the butcher lets out a mucusy howl.

One of the other guards—a black kid in an oversized hoodie—arrives in time to grab Lilly, pulling her away from the action. She writhes and squirms in the young man’s arms as the guard holds her at bay.

“Stand down, asshole!” Martinez booms, pointing the assault rifle at the staggering butcher, but almost instantly, before Martinez can react, the butcher gets his hands around the shaft of the carbine.

The two men grapple for the gun, their inertia driving them back into the flaming barrel. The barrel spills its contents, a swirl of sparks going up, as the twosome careens toward the storefront. The butcher slams Martinez into the glass door, glass cracking in hairline fractures as Martinez slams the gun up into the butcher’s face.

The butcher rears back in pain, clawing the M1 out of Martinez’s grip. The assault rifle flies off across the sidewalk. The old men scatter in terror, while other townspeople arrive from all directions, some of them already sending up a frenzy of angry shouts. The second guard—an older man in aviator glasses and ratty down vest—holds the crowd back.

Martinez delivers a hard right to the butcher’s jaw and sends the man in the apron crashing through the broken glass pane of the door.

The butcher lands inside the store’s vestibule, sprawling to the tile floor, which is littered with glass shards now. Martinez climbs in after him.

A barrage of punishing blows from Martinez keeps the butcher pinned to the floor, his spittle and blood flinging off in pink threads. Frantically shielding his face, flailing impotently, the butcher tries to fight back but Martinez overpowers the man.

The final blow—a roundhouse punch to the butcher’s jaw—knocks the man unconscious.

An awkward moment of silence follows, as Martinez catches his breath. He stands over the man in the apron, rubbing his knuckles, trying to get his bearings. The noise of the crowd outside the food center has grown to a dull roar—most of them cheering for Martinez—like a demented pep rally.

Martinez cannot figure out what just happened. He never much cared for Sam the Butcher, but on the other hand he cannot imagine what would have gotten into this prick to make him draw on Hamilton.

“What the fuck got into you?” Martinez asks the man on the floor, speaking somewhat rhetorically, not really expecting an answer.

“The man obviously wants to be a star.”

The voice comes from the gaping, jagged entrance behind Martinez.

Martinez whirls and sees the Governor standing in the doorway. Sinewy arms crossed against his chest, the long tails of his duster flapping in the breeze, the man has an enigmatic expression on his face, a mixture of bemusement and contempt and baleful curiosity. Gabe and Bruce stand behind the man like sullen totems.

Martinez is more confused than ever. “He wants to be a what?”

The Governor’s expression transforms—his dark eyes glittering with inspiration, his handlebar mustache fully grown in now and twitching around the corners of a frown—which tells Martinez to step lightly. “First,” the Governor says in a flat, impassive tone, “tell me exactly what happened.”

*   *   *

“He didn’t suffer, Lilly … remember that … no pain … he just went out like a light.” Bob crouches near the curb next to Lilly, who is slumped with her head down, the tears dripping onto her lap. Bob has his first-aid kit open on the sidewalk next to her, and he is dabbing a swab of iodine on her cut face. “That’s more than most of us can hope for in this shithole of a world.”

“I should have stopped it,” Lilly utters in a bloodless, sapped voice that sounds like a pull-string doll on its last legs. She has burned out her tear ducts. “I could have, Bob, I could have stopped it.”

The silence stretches, the wind rattling in the eaves and high-tension wires. Practically the entire population of Woodbury has gathered along Main Street to gawk at the aftermath.

Josh lies supine under a sheet next to Lilly. Someone covered the body with the makeshift shroud only minutes earlier, the folds of which now soak with red blotches of blood from Josh’s head wounds. Lilly tenderly strokes his leg, compulsively squeezing and massaging as though she might wake him up. Tendrils of hair are knocked loose from Lilly’s ponytail, blowing across her scarred, crestfallen features.

“Hush now, honey,” Bob says, placing the bottle of Betadine back into the kit. “There was nothing y’all could do, nothing at all.” Bob shoots a worried glance up at the jagged, broken glass of the food center entrance. He can barely see the Governor and his men inside the vestibule, talking with Martinez. The butcher’s unconscious body lies in the shadows. The Governor gestures expansively toward the body, explaining something to Martinez. “Goddamn shame is what it is,” Bob says, looking away. “Goddamn crying shame.”

“He didn’t have a mean bone in his body,” Lilly says softly, looking at the bloodstain soaking the head end of the sheet. “I wouldn’t be alive, wasn’t for him … he saved my life, Bob, all he wanted was—”

“Miss…?”

Lilly looks up at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, and sees an older man in eyeglasses and white lab coat standing behind Bob. A fourth person, a twenty-something girl with blond braids, stands behind the man. She also wears a tattered lab coat and has a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff dangling around her neck.

“Lilly, this is Doc Stevens,” Bob says with a nod toward the man. “And that there is Alice, his nurse.”

The girl gives Lilly a respectful nod while unwinding the cuff.

“Lilly, you mind if I take a quick peek at those facial bruises?” the doctor says, kneeling next to her, putting the earbuds of his stethoscope in his ears. Lilly says nothing, just turns her gaze back to the ground. The doctor gently touches the scope to her neck, her sternum, her pulse points. He inspects her wounds, softly palpates her ribs. “Very sorry for your loss, Lilly,” the doctor murmurs.

Lilly says nothing.

“Some of them wounds are old,” Bob comments, rising to his feet, backing away.

“Looks like hairline fractures to number eight and nine, also to the clavicle,” he says, gently nudging his fingers through her fleece jacket. “All of them pretty much healed up. Lungs sound clear.” He takes the scope out of his ears, winds it around his neck. “Lilly, if you need anything you let us know.”

She manages a nod.

The doctor measures his words. “Lilly, I just want you to know…” He pauses for a moment, groping for the right words. “Not everybody in this town is … like this. I know it’s not much in the way of consolation right now.” He looks up at Bob, then gazes at the ruined food center window, than back at Lilly. “I guess what I’m saying is, if you ever need somebody to talk to, if something is bothering you, if you need anything whatsoever … don’t hesitate to come down to the clinic.”

Seeing no reaction from Lilly, the doctor lets out a sigh and rises to his feet. He exchanges nervous glances with Bob and Alice.

Bob moves back to Lilly’s side, kneels down, and says very softly, “Lilly, honey, we’re gonna have to go ahead and move the body now.”

At first she barely hears him, in fact doesn’t even register what he’s saying.

She simply continues staring at the pavement and stroking the dead man’s leg and feeling empty. In anthropology class at Georgia Tech she learned about the Algonquin Indians and their belief that the spirit of the dead must be appeased. After a hunt they would literally breathe in the last breaths of a dying bear in order to honor it and accept it into their own bodies and pay homage to it. But Lilly feels only desolation and loss coming into her now from the cooling corpse of Josh Lee Hamilton.

“Lilly?” Bob’s voice sounds as though it’s coming from a distant solar system. “Is it okay, honey, if we go ahead and move the body?”

Lilly is silent.

Bob nods at Stevens. The doctor nods at Alice, and Alice turns and signals to two men standing their distance with a collapsible stretcher. The two men—both middle-aged cronies of Bob’s from the tavern crowd—move in. Unfolding the stretcher, they come within inches of Lilly and kneel down by the body. The first man starts to gently lever the massive body onto the stretcher, when Lilly snaps her gaze up at them, blinking back tears.

“Leave him alone,” she mutters, the words coming out in barely a whisper.

Bob puts a hand on her shoulder. “Lilly, honey—”

“
I SAID LEAVE HIM ALONE! DON’T TOUCH HIM!! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HIM!!!”

Her anguished cry pierces the windswept stillness of the street, getting everyone’s attention. Onlookers halfway down the block pause in their conversations and look up. People in doorways peer around corners to see what’s going on. Bob waves off the two cronies, and Stevens and Alice back away in awkward silence.

The commotion has drawn several figures out of the food center. They now stand in the jagged opening of the entrance, staring at the sad state of affairs.

Bob gazes up and sees the Governor standing there, arms crossed against his chest on the glass-littered threshold, assessing the situation with his cunning, dark eyes. Bob walks sheepishly over to the entrance.

“She’ll be okay,” Bob says confidentially to the Governor. “She’s just a little torn up right now.”

“Who can blame her?” the Governor muses. “Lose your meal ticket like that.” He chews the inside of his cheek for a moment, thinking. “Leave her alone for a while. We’ll clean up the mess later.” He thinks some more, not taking his gaze off the dead body lying next to the curb. At last he calls over his shoulder, “Gabe—c’mere!”

The stocky man in the turtleneck and flattop haircut comes over.

The Governor speaks softly. “I want you to wake up that piece-of-shit butcher, take him down to the holding cells, and throw him in with the Guard.”

Gabe gives a nod, whirls, and slips back inside the food center.

“Bruce!” the Governor calls to his second in command. The black man with the shaved head and Kevlar vest comes over with an AK-47 on his hip.

“Yeah, boss.”

“I want you to round everybody up, take them over to the square.”

The black man cocks his head incredulously. “Everybody?”

“You heard me—everybody.” The Governor gives him a wink. “Gonna have a little town hall meeting.”

*   *   *

“We live in violent times. We’re all under tremendous pressure. Every day of our lives.”

The Governor barks into a megaphone that Martinez found in the defunct firehouse, the gravelly, smoky voice carrying up over the bare trees and torches. The sun has set on the town, and now the entire population mills about the darkness on the edge of the gazebo in the center of the square. The Governor stands on the stone steps of the structure, addressing his subjects with the stentorian authority of a politician crossed with a wild-eyed motivational speaker.