The crowd simmers with noise and catcalls and clapping. The phlegmy growling and moaning of the walkers as they take their places on the gravel warning track blends with the rising voices of the spectators to create an unearthly din. Austin stares at the spectacle. He can’t get Lilly out of his head. The roar that’s building all around him begins to fade … and fade … and fade away … until all he can hear in his head is Lilly’s voice softly making a promise.
I’ll show you some things … the only way we’re going to survive … helping each other.
Something pokes Austin in the ribs, and yanks him back to reality.
He jerks around and realizes an old man has taken a seat right next to him.
Sporting a nicotine-yellowed beard, an ancient face as wrinkled as wadded parchment, and a tattered black overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, he’s a feisty old Hasidic Jew who somehow managed to survive the streets of Atlanta after the Turn. His name is Saul, and he shows Austin his stained, rotting teeth as he says with a smile, “Gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight … am I right?”
“Yeah, absolutely.” Austin feels dizzy, light-headed. “Can’t wait.”
Austin turns back to the gathering of dead on the track’s periphery, and the sight of it makes him feel sick to his stomach. One of the biters, an obese male in bile-spattered painter’s overalls, sprouts a knot of small intestines from a sucking wound in his porcine belly. Another one is missing the side of her face, her upper teeth gleaming in the spotlights as she moans and tugs on her chain. Austin is quickly losing his enthusiasm for the fights. Lilly has a point. He looks down at the sticky tread beneath the bench, the cigarette butts and puddles of soft drinks and stale beer. He closes his eyes and thinks of Lilly’s sweet face, the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the slender curve of her neck.
“Excuse me,” he says, standing up and pushing himself past the old man.
“Better hurry back,” the geezer mumbles, blinking fitfully. “Show’s gonna start lickety-split!”
Austin is already halfway down the aisle. He doesn’t look back.
* * *
On his way across town, moving past the shadows of storefronts and the dark, boarded buildings of the main drag, Austin sees a half-dozen people coming toward him on the opposite side of the street.
Pulling his hoodie tighter, thrusting his hands in his pockets, he keeps moving, his head down. Avoiding eye contact with the oncoming group, he recognizes the Governor, who walks out in front of three strangers like a tour guide, his chest all puffed up with pride. Bruce and Gabe bring up the rear with assault rifles cradled and ready.
“—Guard station about a mile away—completely abandoned,” the Governor is saying to the strangers. Austin has never seen these people before. The Governor is treating them like VIPs. “All kinda supplies left inside,” the Governor is saying. “Been making good use of it. Night-vision goggles, sniper rifles, ammo, you seen it in action. This place wouldn’t be shit without it.”
As Austin passes on the opposite sidewalk, he gets a better glimpse of the newcomers.
The two men and one woman look battle-scarred, somber, and maybe even a little nervous. Of the two men—each of whom is clad in riot gear—the older one looks tougher, meaner, more cunning. Sandy-haired, with a grizzle of a beard, the older man walks alongside the Governor, and Austin hears him say, “You sound lucky. Where is it you’re taking us? We’re walking toward the light. What is that? A baseball game?”
Before they vanish around the corner, Austin glances over his shoulder and gets a better look at the other two strangers. The younger man wears a riot helmet and looks maybe Asian, his age hard to tell at this distance and in this light.
The woman is far more interesting to look at. Her lean, sculpted face barely visible within the shadow of her hooded garment, she looks to Austin to be in her mid-thirties, African American, and exotically beautiful.
Just for an instant, Austin has a bad feeling about these people.
“Well, stranger,” he hears the Governor saying, as they pass out of view, “it looks like we’re not the only ones lucky around here. You showed up on the perfect night. There’s a fight tonight.…”
The wind and the shadows drown the rest of the conversation as the group rounds the corner. Austin lets out a sigh, shakes off the inexplicable feeling of dread, and continues on toward Lilly’s place.
A minute later, he finds himself standing in front of Lilly’s building. The wind has picked up, and litter swirls across the threshold. Austin pauses, lowers his hood, brushes a strand of curly hair from his eyes, and silently rehearses what he wants to say.
He goes up to her door and takes a deep breath.
* * *
Lilly sits by her window in a cast-off armchair, a candle flickering on a side table next to her, a paperback cookbook open to the chapter on great Southern side dishes, when the sound of knocking interrupts her reverie.
She had been thinking about Josh Hamilton, and all the great meals he would have prepared had he survived, and the mixture of sorrow and regret drove away Lilly’s hunger for something better than canned meat and instant rice. She had also been thinking a lot that night about the Governor.
Lately, Lilly’s fear of the man has been morphing into something else. She can’t get the memory out of her head of the Governor sentencing Josh’s killer—the town butcher—to a horrible death at the hands of hungry walkers. With a combination of shame and satisfaction, Lilly keeps reliving the act of vengeance in her darkest thoughts. The man got what he deserved. And perhaps—just perhaps—the Governor is the only redress they have to these kinds of injustices. An eye for an eye.
“Who the hell…?” she grumbles, levering herself out of her chair.
She crosses the room on bare feet, her ripped bell-bottom jeans dragging on the filthy hardwood. She wears an olive green thermal underwear top deftly ripped at the neck in a perfect V, a sports bra underneath, rawhide necklaces and beads around her slender neck. Her flaxen locks are pulled back in a loose Brigitte Bardot parfait on the top of her head. Her funky sense of fashion—first developed in the thrift shops and Salvation Army stores of Marietta—has died hard in the post-plague world. In a way, her sense of style is her armor, her defense mechanism.
She opens the door and looks out at Austin standing in the dark.
“Sorry to keep bothering you,” he says sheepishly, one arm holding the other as though he’s about to break apart at the seams. He has his hoodie drawn tight around his narrow face, and for the briefest instant he looks like a different person to Lilly. His eyes have lost the arrogant swagger that perpetually gleams there. His expression has softened, and the real person underneath the hard shell has emerged. He levels his gaze at her. “Are you in the middle of something?”
She proffers a smile. “Yeah, you caught me on the phone with my stockbroker, moving my millions around all my off-shore hedge funds.”
“Should I come back?”
Lilly sighs. “It’s called a joke, Austin. Remember humor?”
He nods sadly. “Oh … right.” He manages a smile. “I’m a little slow tonight.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Okay … um.” He looks around the dark street. Practically the entire town has relocated to the arena for the night’s festivities. Now the wind scrapes trash along the deserted sidewalks and rustles in the defunct power lines, making an eerie humming noise. Only a few of Martinez’s men remain at the corners of the barricades, patrolling with their AR-15s and binoculars. Every now and then a searchlight sweeps its silver beam across the neighboring woods. “I was wondering, um, you know, if you’re not too busy,” he stammers, avoiding eye contact with her, “if you might be willing to, like, do a little training tonight?”
She looks askance at him. “Training?”
He clears his throat awkwardly, looks down. “What I mean is, you said you might consider showing me some things … giving me some pointers on how to … you know
… deal with the biters, protect myself.”
She looks at him, and she takes a deep breath. Then she smiles. “Give me a second—I’ll get my guns.”
* * *
They go down by the train station on the eastern edge of town, as far away from the lights and noise of the arena as they can get. By the time they get there, Lilly has turned the collar up on her denim jacket to ward off the gathering chill. The air smells of methane and swamp gas—a mélange of rot—and the odor braces them in the moonlit shadows of the train yard. Lilly runs Austin through a few scenarios, quizzes him, challenges him. Austin has his 9 mm Glock with him, as well as a buck knife sheathed on his right thigh, tied with rawhide.
“C’mon, keep moving,” she says to him at one point, as he slowly inches his way along the threshold of the woods, his pistol at his side, gripped in his right hand, his finger outside the trigger pad. They’ve been at it for almost an hour now and Austin is getting restless. The forest pulses and drones with night noises—crickets, rustling branches—and the constant threat of shadows moving behind the trees. Lilly walks alongside him with the quiet authority of a drill instructor. “You always want to keep moving, but not too fast, and not too slow … just keep your eyes open.”
“Lemme guess—like this, right?” he says, a trace of exasperation in his voice. His gun has one of Lilly’s silencers attached to the muzzle. His hoodie is pulled tight around his face. A high chain-link fence runs along the woods, once serving as security for the railroad depot. A cinder-strewn trail runs along a row of derelict railroad tracks overgrown with prairie grass.
“I told you to pull your hood down,” she says. “You’re cutting off your peripheral vision.”
He does so, and keeps moving along the tree line. “How’s this?”
“Better. You always want to know your surroundings. That’s the key. It’s more important than what weapon you’re using, or how you’re holding your gun or your ax or whatever. Always be aware of what’s on either side of you. And what’s behind you. So you can make a fast getaway if necessary.”
“I get it.”
“And never ever-ever-ever let yourself get surrounded. They’re slow but they can horde in on you if there are enough of them.”
“You said that already.”
“The point is, you always know which way to run if you have to. Remember, you’re always going to be faster than they are … but that doesn’t mean you can’t get penned in.”
Austin nods and gazes intermittently over his shoulder, keeping track of the darkness on all sides of the trail. He turns and slowly backs along the trail for a moment, searching the shadows.
Lilly watches him. “Put your gun away for a second,” she says. “Grab your knife.” She watches him switch weapons. “Okay, now let’s say you’re out of ammo, you’re isolated, maybe lost.”
He gives her a sidelong glance. “Lilly, we’ve been through this part … like twice already.”
“That’s good, you can count.”
“C’mon—”
“And we’re going to go through it again, a third time, so answer the question. How do you hold your knife?”
He sighs, backing along the trees, his boots crunching in the cinders. “You hold it blade-down, a tight grip on the hilt.… I’m not stupid, Lilly.”
“I never said you were stupid. Tell me why you hold your knife like that.”
He keeps backing along the edge of the woods, moving absently now, shaking his head. “You hold it like that because you got one chance to bring it down hard on their skull, and you want to do it decisively.”
Lilly notices a stray timber—a piece of creosote-soaked railroad tie—lying beside the trail, about twenty feet away. She silently moves toward it. “Go on,” she says. With one quick, discreet movement, she kicks the timber across Austin’s path. “Why do you do it decisively?”
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 remunera
tion 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.
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