The Walking Dead Collection (90 page)

He lets out another weary sigh, blithely backing along. “You do it decisively because you got one chance to destroy the brain.” He keeps backing slowly toward the timber, gripping the knife, unaware of the obstruction lying across his path. “I’m not an idiot, Lilly.”

She grins. “Oh, no, you’re a regular ninja, the way you were clearing the woods for us today at the crash site. You got it all going on.”

“I’m not afraid, Lilly, I’ve told you a million times, I’ve been around—”

He trips on the railroad tie. “Ouch!—FUCK!” he blurts when he hits the ground, raising a puff of cinder dust.

At first Lilly lets out a blurt of laughter as Austin sits there for a second, looking defeated, embarrassed, humiliated. In the darkness, his eyes shimmer with emotion and his curls dangle in his face. He looks like a whipped dog. Lilly’s laughter dies, and guilt twinges in her gut. “I’m sorry, sorry,” she murmurs, kneeling by him. “I didn’t mean to—” She strokes his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m being an asshole.”

“It’s okay,” he says softly, taking deep breaths, looking down. “I deserve it.”

“No. No.” She sits down next to him. “You don’t deserve any of this.”

He looks at her. “Don’t worry about it. You’re just trying to help me and I appreciate it.”

“I don’t know
what
I’m doing half the time.” She rubs her face. “All I know is … we gotta be ready. We gotta be … I hate to say it … but we gotta be as fucking bloodthirsty as the biters.” She looks at him. “It’s the only way we’re gonna get through this.”

His gaze locks on to hers. The ambient drone deepens around them, the roar of night sounds rising. In the distance, barely audible, come the hyena howls of the dirt track spectators cheering for blood.

At last Austin says, “You’re starting to sound like the Governor.”

Lilly gazes into the distance and says nothing, just listens to the sounds drifting on the breeze.

Austin licks his lips and looks at her. “Lilly, I’ve been thinking … what if there’s no other side to get through to? What if this is it? What if this is all there is for us?”

Lilly thinks about it. “It doesn’t matter. As long as we have each other … and we’re willing to do what it takes … we’ll survive.”

The words hang in the night air for a moment. Almost imperceptibly they have come closer together, Lilly’s hand lingering on his shoulder, his hand finding the small of her back.

Lilly realizes—all at once—that she might have originally been thinking about the whole community sticking together but now she’s thinking only about Austin and her. She finds herself leaning in closer to him, and he responds by leaning toward her. She senses something unraveling, a letting go, and their lips coming together, and the kiss about to happen, when suddenly Lilly draws back. “What’s this? Jesus, what’s this?”

She feels something wet down around his waist, and she looks down.

The bottom hem of his sweatshirt is soaked in blood. Some of it drips in runnels onto the leafy ground, as black and shiny as axle oil. The knife blade sticks out of a tear in his denims where it sliced through the flesh of his hip in the fall. Austin puts his hand over it. “
Shit,
” he utters through gritted teeth, the blood seeping through his fingers. “I thought I felt something bite me.”

“C’mon!” Lilly springs to her feet and gives him a hand, carefully hoisting him to his feet. “We gotta get you to Dr. Stevens.”

*   *   *

Her full name was Christina Meredith Haben, and she grew up in Kirkwood, Georgia, and she went away to college in the 1980s to study telecommunications at Oberlin. She had a child out of wedlock that she carried to term and then gave up for adoption on the day after 9/11. She had suffered through a series of romantic misadventures in her life, never found Mr. Right, never married, and always considered herself wed to her job as the senior segment producer at one of the biggest stations in the South. She had won three Emmys, a Clio, and a couple of Cable Ace awards—all of which made her justifiably proud—and she never felt her superiors respected her or provided her with the remuneration that she deserved.

But at the present moment—on this filthy tile floor, in the glare of fluorescent lights—all of Christina Haben’s regrets, fears, frustrations, hopes, and desires are long gone, vanquished by death, her remains lying scattered across the gore-spattered parquet, while seventeen captive walkers tear into her organs and tissues.

The watery, orgiastic eating noises bounce around the cinder-block walls, as the dead feast on mostly unidentifiable body parts that used to comprise Christina Haben. Blood and spinal fluid and bile mingle in the corners of the room like multicolored cordials, sluicing through the seams in the tile, splashing the walls in blooms of deep scarlet, and drenching the frenzied biters. Selected for their physical integrity, earmarked for the gladiatorial arena, most of these creatures appear to be former adult males, some of them now crouching apelike in the bright light, gnawing on gristly nodules that used to belong to Christina Haben’s lower skeleton.

Across the room, a pair of rectangular portal windows are embedded in a garage door that encloses the room. Within the frame of the window on the left, a gaunt, weathered, mustachioed face peers in at the action.

Standing in the silent corridor outside the enclosure, gazing intently through the window glass, the Governor registers little emotion on his face other than stern satisfaction with what he is seeing. His left ear is bandaged from a recent encounter with the newcomers, and the pain braces him. It makes him clench his fists. It courses down his marrow like electricity, girding him, crystallizing his mission. All his doubt, all his second-guessing—in fact, all his remaining humanity—are being pushed aside by the rage and the vengeance and the voice deep within him that serves as a compass. He knows now the only way to keep this tinderbox from going up in flames. He knows what he must do now in order to—

The shuffling of footsteps from the opposite end of the corridor interrupts his thoughts.

*   *   *

Lilly has her arm around Austin as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, turns a corner, and hurries down the main corridor that cuts through the foul-smelling, cinder-block catacombs of garages and service bays beneath the arena.

At first she doesn’t see the dark figure standing alone at the far end of the corridor, gazing through the portal window. She’s too preoccupied with Austin’s injury, and the effort required just to keep pressure on the wound with her right hand as she shuffles along toward the infirmary.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” the figure says as Lilly and Austin approach.

“Oh … hey,” Lilly says awkwardly as she shuffles up with Austin dripping a few blood droplets on the floor, nothing life-threatening, but enough to be worrisome. “Gotta get this one to the doctor.”

“Hope the other guy looks worse,” the Governor jokes as Lilly and Austin pause outside the battered garage door.

Austin manages a smirk, his long, damp curls hanging in his face. “It’s nothing … just a flesh wound … fell on my knife like an idiot.” He holds his side. “Bleeding’s basically stopped, totally okay now.”

Very faintly the muffled noises of the feeding frenzy can be heard through the sealed glass. It sounds like an immense stomach growling. Lilly gets a glimpse through the nearest window of the gruesome orgy going on in the pen, and she glances at Austin, who sees it too. They say nothing. The sight of it barely registers to Lilly. Once upon a time she would have been repulsed. She glances back at the Governor. “They’re getting their vitamins and minerals, I see.”

“Nothing is wasted around here,” the Governor says with a shrug, nodding toward the window. “Poor gal from the helicopter up and died on us … internal injuries from the crash, I guess … poor thing.” He turns toward the glass and looks in. “She and the pilot are serving a larger purpose now.”

Lilly sees the bandaged ear. She shoots another glance at Austin, who also stares at the Governor’s blood-spotted bandage and the mangled ear underneath.

“It’s none of my business,” Austin says finally, pointing at the ear. “But are
you
okay? Looks like you got a nasty wound yourself.”

“Them new people, came in tonight,” the Governor murmurs, not taking his gaze off the window. “Turned out to be more of a liability than I first thought.”

“Yeah, I saw you with them earlier.” Austin perks up. “You were kinda taking them on a tour of the place, right? What happened?”

The Governor turns and looks directly at Lilly as though
she
asked the question. “I try to extend every courtesy to people, show them hospitality. We’re all in the same boat these days, am I right?”

Lilly gives him a nod. “Absolutely, yeah. So what was
their
problem?”

“Turns out they were a scouting party from another settlement somewhere nearby, and their intentions were not exactly neighborly.”

“What did they do?”

The Governor stares at her. “My guess is, they were going to try and raid us.”

“
Raid
us?”

“It’s happening all over the place now. Scouts slip in, secure a place, they take everything. Food. Water. The shirt off your back.”

“So what happened?”

“Got into a major tussle with them. I wasn’t gonna let them fuck with us. Not in a million years. One of them—the colored girl—tried to chew my ear off.”

Lilly shares another tense glance with Austin. She looks at the Governor. “Jesus … what is going on? These people are fucking
savages
.”

“We’re all savages, Lilly-girl. We just gotta be the biggest savages on the block.” He takes a deep breath. “Got into it pretty bad with the main guy. Fella fought back hard. Ended up cutting his hand off.”

Lilly can’t move. She feels contrary emotions flowing through her, pinching her insides, triggering sparks of trauma in the back of her mind—memories of a bullet destroying the back of Josh Hamilton’s head. “
Jesus Christ,
” she utters, almost to herself.

The Governor takes another deep breath, then lets out an exasperated sigh. “Stevens is keeping him alive. Maybe we’ll learn something from him. Maybe not. We’re safe now, though. And that’s what counts.”

Lilly nods and starts to say something when the Governor cuts her off.

“I am not going to let
anyone
fuck with our town,” he says, making eye contact with both of them. A single pearl of blood tracks down his neck from the bandaged ear. He wipes it away and sighs again. “You people are my number-one priority, and that’s all there is to it.”

Lilly swallows hard. For the first time since she came to this place, she feels something other than contempt for this man … if not trust, then maybe a scintilla of sympathy. “Anyway,” she says, “I better get Austin to the infirmary.”

“Go on,” the Governor says with a weary smile. “Get Gorgeous George here a Band-Aid.”

Lilly puts her arm around Austin and helps the young man shuffle down the corridor. But before they turn the far corner, Lilly pauses and looks back at Philip. “Hey, Governor,” she says softly. “Thank you.”

*   *   *

On their way through the maze of corridors leading to the infirmary, they run into Bruce. The big African American is coming in the opposite direction, striding along with purpose, his jackboots echoing, his .45 bouncing on his big muscular thigh, his face burning with urgency. He glances up when he sees Lilly and Austin. “Hey, guys,” he says in his tense baritone. “You two seen the Governor around here?”

Lilly tells him where the man is, and then adds, “Must be a full moon tonight, huh?”

Bruce looks at her. His expression taut, his eyes narrowing, he looks as though he’s wondering just exactly how much she knows. “Whaddaya mean?”

She shrugs. “It just seems like things are getting crazier by the minute.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know—these assholes trying to raid us—people acting crazy and stuff.”

He looks relieved. “Yeah … right … it’s some crazy shit. I gotta go.”

He brushes past them and hurries on down the hall toward the walker pens.

Lilly furrows her brow, watching him.

Something isn’t adding up.

NINE

When they get to the infirmary, Lilly and Austin find Dr. Stevens preoccupied, hunched over the partially nude form of an unconscious adult male sprawled on a gurney in the corner. The man—thirtyish, fit, sandy-haired, a grizzle of a beard—has a towel thrown across his privates, and a blood-sodden bandage on his right stump of a wrist. The doctor is carefully removing battered, blood-stippled body armor from the man’s shoulders.

“Doc? Got another patient for ya,” Lilly says as she crosses the room with Austin shuffling alongside her. The unconscious man on the gurney is unknown to Lilly, but Austin seems to recognize the sandy-haired man immediately and gives Lilly a poke in the ribs.

Austin whispers, “It’s
him
 … the dude the Governor tangled with.”

“What now?” the doctor says, glancing up from the gurney and looking at them over the tops of his wire-rimmed glasses. He sees Austin’s fingers stained in blood, pressing against his ribs. “Put him over there, I’ll be right with you.” The doctor glances over his shoulder. “Alice, give us a hand with Austin, will you?”

The nurse comes out of an adjacent storage room with an armful of cotton bandages, medical tape, and gauze. Dressed in her lab coat, hair pulled back from her youthful face, she looks frazzled. She makes eye contact with Lilly but says nothing as she hurries across the room.

Lilly helps Austin over to an examination table in the opposite corner.

“Who’s the patient, Doc?” Lilly asks, playing dumb, gently helping Austin hop onto the edge of the table. Austin cringes slightly at a twinge of pain but seems more fascinated by the man lying out cold on the gurney across the room. Alice comes over and begins to gingerly unzip Austin’s sweatshirt, inspecting the wound.

Across the room, the doctor carefully pulls a threadbare hospital smock over the grizzled man’s lolling head, guiding his limp arms into sleeves. “I think I heard somebody say his name is Rick, but I’m not positive about that.”