The Walking Dead Collection (70 page)

Very few residents are up at this hour, the advent of Christmas morning keeping everybody hunkered inside. Lilly feels compelled to visit the playground on the east edge of the town. The desolate patch of bare ground lies behind a grove of denuded crab apples.

Lilly finds Josh’s grave, the sandy dirt still freshly packed in a large mound next to his cairn. She kneels on the edge of the grave and lowers her head. “Merry Christmas, Josh,” she utters into the wind, her voice hungover, thick and rusty with sleep.

Only the rustle of branches serves as a response. She takes a deep breath. “Some of the things I’ve done … the way I treated you … I’m not proud of.” She swallows the urge to cry, the sorrow rising up in her. She bites off her tears. “I just wanted you to know … you didn’t die in vain, Josh.… You taught me something important … you made a difference in my life.”

Lilly looks down at the dirty white sand beneath her knees and she refuses to cry. “You taught me not to be scared anymore.” She mutters this to herself, to the ground, to the cold wind. “We don’t have that luxury these days … so from now on … I’m ready.”

Her voice trails off, and she kneels there for the longest time, unaware that her right hand has been digging into the side of her leg through her jeans, hard enough to break the skin and draw blood.

“
I’m ready
…”

*   *   *

The turning of the New Year closes in.

Late one night, beset with the melancholy mood of the season, the man known as the Governor locks himself into the back room of his second-floor apartment with a bottle of expensive French champagne and a galvanized pail brimming with an assortment of human bodily organs.

The tiny zombie chained to the wall across the laundry room sputters and snarls at the sight of him. Her once cherubic face now chiseled with rigor mortis, her flesh as yellow as rotten Stilton, she peels her lips back away from rows of blackened baby teeth. The laundry room with its bare bulbs hanging down and exposed fiberglass insulation—impregnated now with her stench—reeks of foul, infected oils and molds.

“Calm down, sweetheart,” the man with several names murmurs softly as he sits down on the floor in front of her, setting the bottle down on one side of him and the bucket on the other. He pulls a latex surgical glove from his pocket and works his right hand into it. “Daddy’s got some more goodies for you, keep your tummy full.”

He fishes a slimy, purplish-brown lobe from the bucket of entrails and tosses it to her.

Little Penny Blake pounces on the human kidney that has landed with a wet splat on the floor in front of her, her chain stretching to its limit with a clank. She clutches the organ with both of her little hands and gobbles the human tissue with feral abandon until the bloody bile runs between her tiny fingers and paints her face with a stain the consistency of chocolate sauce.

“Happy New Year, sweetheart,” the Governor says and pries at the champagne cork. The cork resists. He worries at it with his thumbs until the thing pops, and a stream of golden bubbly percolates over the rim and onto the worn tiles. The Governor has no idea if it is actually New Year’s Eve. He knows it’s imminent … might as well be tonight.

He stares at the puddle of champagne spreading on the floor, the tiny foam of carbonation vanishing into the seams of grout. He finds himself casting his thoughts back to New Year’s celebrations of his childhood.

In the old days he looked forward to New Year’s Eve for months. Back in Waynesboro he and his buddies would get a whole pig delivered on the thirtieth and start it slow-roasting in the ground behind his parents’ place, lining the hole with bricks—Hawaiian luau style—and they would have a two-day feast. The local bluegrass band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, would play all night long, and Philip would get really good weed, and they would party through the first and Philip would get laid and have a grand old time with—

The Governor blinks. He cannot remember if
Philip
Blake used to do this on New Year’s Eve or if it was
Brian
Blake who did this. He cannot remember where one brother ends and the other begins. He stares at the floor, blinking, the champagne reflecting a dull, milky, distorted reflection of his own face, the handlebar mustache as dark as lampblack now, the eyes deep set and glinting with cinders of something like madness. He looks at himself and sees Philip Blake staring back. But something is wrong. Philip can also see a ghostly overlay superimposed across his face, an ashen, frightened simulacrum called “Brian.”

Penny’s watery, garbled feeding noises fade in his ears, drifting far away, and Philip takes his first hit of champagne. The gulp burns his throat as it goes down cold and astringent. The taste of it reminds him of better times. It reminds him of holiday celebrations, family reunions, loved ones coming together after a long estrangement. It tears him apart inside. He knows who he is: He’s
the Governor,
he’s Philip Blake,
the man who gets things done
.

But.

But …

Brian starts to cry. He drops the bottle, and more champagne spills across the tiles, seeping under Penny, who is oblivious to the invisible war going on at the moment within the mind of her caretaker. Brian shuts his eyes, the tears seeping out the corners of his eyelids and tracking down his face in snotty runnels.

He cries for those New Year’s Eves gone by, those happy moments between friends … and brothers. He cries for Penny, and he cries for her woeful condition, for which he blames himself. He cannot block out the flash-frame image burned into the retina of his mind’s eye:
Philip Blake lying in a cold, bloody heap next to a girl on the edge of the woods north of Woodbury
.

While Penny feeds, slurping and smacking her dead lips, and Brian softly sobs, an unexpected noise comes from across the room.

Somebody is knocking on the Governor’s door.

*   *   *

It takes a while for the noise to register, the sound of knocking coming in a series of small bursts—hesitant, tentative—and it goes on for quite a while before Philip Blake realizes somebody is out there in the hallway banging on his door.

The identity crisis ceases immediately, the curtain in the Governor’s brain sweeping back in place with the abruptness of a power blackout.

It is, in fact,
Philip
who stands, removes his surgical gloves, brushes himself off, wipes his mucusy chin with the sleeve of his sweater, pulls on his stovepipe boots, brushes his long obsidian locks from his eyes, sniffs back his emotion, and exits the laundry room, locking the door behind him.

It is Philip who crosses the living room with his trademark strut. Heart rate slowing, lungs filling with oxygen, his consciousness fully transformed back into the Governor—his eyes clear and sharp—he answers the door on the fifth series of knocks. “What the hell is so goddamn important at this hour that you can’t—”

Not fully recognizing the woman standing outside the door, he stops himself. He had expected one of his men—Gabe or Bruce or Martinez—coming to bother him with some minor fire to be put out or some horseshit drama to be settled among the restless townspeople.

“Is this a bad time?” Megan Lafferty purrs with a dreamy tilt of her head, leaning against the doorjamb, the blouse under her denim jacket unbuttoned and showing generous amounts of cleavage.

The Governor pins her with his unwavering gaze. “Honey, I don’t know what game you’re running down right now but I’m in the middle of something.”

“Just thought you might need a little company,” she says with faux innocence. She looks like a caricature of a tart, her wine-colored curls mussed and hanging down in suggestive tendrils across her drugged features. She wears too much makeup and appears almost clownlike. “But I totally understand if you’re busy.”

The Governor lets out a sigh. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Something tells me you ain’t here to borrow a cup of sugar.”

Megan throws a glance over her shoulder. The jitters show on her face, in the way her gaze shifts back and forth from the shadows of the empty corridor to the doorway, in the way she holds one of her arms against her side, compulsively stroking the Chinese character tattooed on her elbow. Nobody ever comes up here. The Governor’s private quarters are off-limits to even Gabe and Bruce.

“I just—I thought—I—” she stutters.

“No reason to be afraid, darlin’,” the Governor says at last.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Might as well c’mon inside,” he says and takes her by the arm. “Before you catch your death.”

He pulls her inside and secures the door with a click. The sound of the bolt clanking home makes her jump. Her breathing quickens, and the Governor cannot help but notice the rise and fall of her surprisingly fulsome breasts underneath her décolletage, her hourglass figure, her generous hips. This little gal is ripe for breeding. The Governor searches the back of his mind for the last time he used a condom. Did he stock up? Did he have any left in his medicine cabinet? “Get you a drink?”

“Sure.” Megan gazes around the spartan furnishings of the living room—the carpet remnants, the mismatched chairs and sofa pulled off the back of a Salvation Army truck. For the briefest instant she frowns, turning up her nose, probably registering the odors permeating the place from the laundry room. “Y’all got any vodka?”

The Governor gives her a grin. “I think we might be able to come up with some.” He goes over to the cabinet next to the shuttered front window. He digs out a bottle, pours a few fingers in a couple of paper cups. “Got some orange juice around here somewhere,” he murmurs, finding a half-empty can of juice.

He comes back over to her with the drinks. She slugs hers down in one frantic gulp. She looks as though she’s been lost in the desert for days and this is her first taste of liquid. She wipes her mouth and lets loose a little belch. “Excuse me … sorry.”

“You are just the cutest little thing,” the Governor says to her with a grin. “You know something, Bonnie Raitt ain’t got nothing on you.”

She looks at the floor. “Reason I dropped by, I was just wondering…”

“Yeah?”

“Guy at the food center told me you might have some weed, Demerol maybe?”

“Duane?”

She nods. “Said you might have some good shit.”

The Governor sips his drink. “Now I wonder how Duane would know such a thing.”

Megan shrugs. “Anyway, the thing is—”

“Why come to me?” The Governor fixes her with that dark stare. “Why not go to your buddy Bob? He’s got a whole medicine chest in that truck of his.”

Another shrug. “I don’t know, I was just thinking, you and me, we could like … make a trade.”

Now she looks up at him and bites her lower lip, and the Governor feels the blood rushing to his loins.

*   *   *

Megan rides him in the moonlight darkness of an adjacent room. Completely nude, filmed in a cold sweat, her hair matted to her face, she pistons up and down on his erection with the empty fury of a hobbyhorse on a carousel. She feels nothing other than the painful thrusting. She feels no fear, no emotion, no regret, no shame. Nothing. Just the mechanical gymnastics of sex.

All the lights are off in the room, the only illumination coming from the transom above the drapes, through which the silver light of a wintry moon shines down across the dust motes and dapples the bare wall behind the Governor’s secondhand La-Z-Boy recliner.

The man sits sprawled on the armchair, his naked, lanky body writhing beneath Megan, his head tossing backward, the veins in his neck pulsing. But he makes very little sound, shows very little pleasure in the act. Megan can only hear the regular thrumming of his breath, as he thrusts angrily into her again and again.

The La-Z-Boy chair is positioned in a way that draws Megan’s peripheral attention to the wall behind her, even as she feels the man’s orgasm building, the climax imminent. No pictures hang in the room, no coffee tables, no shaded lamps—only the faint shimmer of rectangular objects lining the wall. At first Megan misidentifies these objects as TV sets, a configuration reminiscent of an electronics-store display. But what would this guy be doing with two dozen TV sets? Soon Megan realizes she’s hearing a low burble of white noise issuing from the objects.

“What the hell’s the matter?” the Governor grunts beneath her.

Megan has twisted around, her eyes adjusting to the moon shadows. She sees things moving inside the rectangular enclosures. The ghostly movement makes her stiffen, tightening up on his genitals. “Nothing … nothing … sorry … I just … I couldn’t help but—”

“Goddammit, woman!” He reaches over and flips on a battery-operated camp lantern, which sits on a crate next to the chair.

The light reveals rows of aquariums filled with severed human heads.

Megan lets out a gasp and slips off his cock, tumbling to the floor. She struggles to breathe. Lying prone on the damp carpet, her body rashing with gooseflesh, she gapes at the glass enclosures. In neatly stacked containers of fluid the zombified faces twitch and tic on ragged stumps, mouths palpitating like oxygen-starved fish, their milky eyes rolling around sightlessly in the watery capsules.

“I haven’t finished!” The Governor pounces on her, rolls her over, yanks her legs open. He’s still hard and enters her violently, the painful friction sending bolts of agony up her spine. “Hold still, goddammit!”

Megan sees a familiar face within the confines of the last tank on the left, and the sight of it turns her to stone. She lies supine on the floor, thunderstruck, her head turned sideways as she gapes in horror at that narrow face engulfed in bubbles in that last aquarium, as the Governor mercilessly plunges into her. She recognizes the peroxide-blond hair suspended in the fluid, forming a seaweedlike corona around the boyish features, the slack mouth, the long lashes, and the pointy button nose.

The recognition of Scott Moon’s severed head coincides with the hot gush inside her as the Governor finally finishes his business.

Something deep inside Megan Lafferty crumbles apart as permanently and irreparably as a sand castle collapsing under the weight of a wave.