“ATC … what’s that?”
His voice goes even lower. “Atlanta Technical College.”
“Really?” She gives him a look. “What’s that, Austin? Some fucking Internet Web site where you pay nineteen ninety-five for a paper diploma and they send you coupons for an oil change and a résumé service?”
Austin swallows hard. “It’s a real school.” He looks down. “There’s a campus out by the airport.” His voice drops an octave. “I was studying to be a paralegal.”
“That’s just perfect.”
He looks at her. “What the hell, Lilly? Where are you going with this?”
She turns away from him for a moment and gazes out across the empty street. The noise of the crowd revving up for the fights a block and a half away echoes across the sky. She slowly shakes her head. “Truck pulls and strip clubs,” she mutters to herself.
Austin stares at the back of her head, listening intently, getting more and more worried. “What was that?”
She turns and looks at him. “It’s a man’s world, pretty boy.” Her face is a mask of pain. Her eyes have already started to well up. “You guys think everything is just a quick pop, and then it’s ‘sayonara.’ Well, it’s not. It’s not, Austin. Actions have consequences. The simplest choices can get your ass killed.”
“Lilly—”
“It’s true more than ever right now.” She holds herself as though she’s freezing. She gazes off again. “This world of shit we’re in, it isn’t very forgiving. You get yourself in a jam, and you’re dead … or worse.”
He reaches out and gently strokes her shoulder. “Lilly, whatever it is … we can deal with it. Together. Isn’t that what you told me? Gotta stick together? Tell me what’s going on. What happened?”
She pulls away from him and starts down the steps. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says in a voice crackling with disdain.
“Wait!” he calls to her. “Lilly, I can fix it … whatever it is.”
She pauses at the bottom of the steps. She turns and looks at him. “Is that right? You can fix it?” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small plastic instrument. It looks like a digital thermometer. “Fix this!” She tosses it to him.
He catches it and looks down at it. “What the hell is this?” Upon closer scrutiny, he sees the little window on the digital test vial and the words stamped next to it:
not pregnant:|
pregnant:||
The display shows two vertical lines, indicating a positive test result.
PART 2
Showtime
For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, nor ever shall be.
—Matthew 24:21
THIRTEEN
The huge tungsten spotlight on the north end of the track snaps on with a pistol-shot sound, sparking like a giant match tip igniting, the silver beam hitting the infield of the arena formerly known as the Woodbury Veterans Speedway. The advent of the artificial light gooses the crowd of more than fifty spectators strewn across the bench seats on the west side of the field. Whoops and hollers and catcalls from all ages and dispositions tumble up into the dusky, yellow sky and mingle with the smell of wood smoke and gasoline on the chill air. The shadows are lengthening.
“Quite the turnout, eh?” The Governor surveys the meager yet boisterous crowd as he leads Gabe and Bruce up the press stairs to the crow’s nest, where local reporters and NASCAR scouts once passed bottles of Jack and chewed Red Man as they watched the controlled chaos down in the dust.
Gabe and Bruce follow the Governor toward the glass-encased box seats, giving him a “yes-sir,” and a “you-got-that-right” … and just as they are about to seal themselves inside their little clubhouse, a voice rings out from below.
“Hey, boss!” It’s a grizzled, former peanut farmer in a CAT hat, sitting in the back row, glancing over his shoulder as the Governor passes. “Better be a good one today!”
The Governor gives him the kind of look one gives a child who’s about to ride a roller coaster for the first time. “Don’t worry, pal. It will be. I promise.”
* * *
Underneath the arena, minutes before the evening’s festivities get under way, the door to the infirmary unexpectedly swings open, and a tall, handsome man with a bandanna tied around the crown of his head walks in with an expectant look on his face. “Doc? Dr. Stevens?”
Across the room, Rick Grimes, the ill-fated stranger, shuffles along the back wall, which is lined in second-hand medical gear. Hardly noticing the visitor, he moves almost robotically, his mind a million miles away. He holds his mutilated arm like a dead baby, the missing hand now apparent in a bulbous, stained bandage in the shape of a giant peg.
“Hey, man!” Martinez pauses inside the door, hands on his hips. “Have you seen—?” He stops himself. “Oh, hey—you’re—What was your name?”
The injured man slowly whirls, the bloody stump catching the light. His voice comes out of him in a heavy, hoarse, stringy garble. “Rick.”
“Oh my God.” Martinez stares, taken aback by the grisly sight of the severed wrist. “What happened to—? Jesus, what happened to you?”
Rick looks down. “An accident.”
“What?! How?!” Martinez comes over to him, places a hand on his shoulder. Rick pulls away. Martinez musters up as much outrage and sympathy as he can. It’s a fairly decent performance. “Did someone do this to you?”
The man named Rick lunges at him, grabs his shirt with the one good hand. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” The man’s blue eyes flare with rage as hot as cinders. “You handed me to that psycho! You fucking did this!”
“Whoa—hey!” Martinez rears back, mortified, playing dumb.
“STOP IT!”
The sound of Dr. Stevens’s voice is like a splash of cold water on the two men. The doctor steps into the fray, holding each man at bay with an open palm. “Stop it, stop it right fucking now!” He sears his gaze into each of them. Then he puts an arm around Martinez. “Come on, Martinez. You need to leave.”
Rick deflates, staring at the floor, holding his stump, as Martinez walks away.
“What’s with that guy?” Martinez asks the doctor under his breath as he passes out of earshot on the other side of the room, satisfied with the ruse. The seeds have been planted. “Is he okay?”
The doctor pauses in the doorway, speaking softly, confidentially. “Don’t worry about him. What did you want? You were looking for me?”
Martinez rubs his eyes. “Our fine Governor asked me to talk to you—said you didn’t seem too happy here. He knows we’re pals. He wanted me to just—” Martinez pauses here, genuinely at a loss. He does feel a certain fondness for the cynical, wisecracking Stevens. Secretly, deep down, Martinez admires the man—an educated man, a man of substance.
For the briefest instant, Martinez glances over his shoulder at the man across the room. The stranger named Rick leans against the wall, holding his bandaged wrist, a faraway look on his face. He seems to be staring into the void, looking into the abyss, struggling to understand the cold reality of his situation. But at the same time, at least in Martinez’s eyes, the man somehow looks as solid as a rock, ready to kill if necessary. The jut of his whiskered chin, the crow’s-feet crimping the edges of his eyes from years of either laughter or bemusement or suspicion, or maybe all three—all of it seems to comprise a man of a different kind of substance. Maybe not advanced degrees and private practices, but definitely a man to be reckoned with.
“I don’t know,” Martinez mutters at last, turning back to the doctor. “I guess he wanted me to just … make sure you weren’t going to cause any trouble or something.” Another pause. “He just wants to make sure you’re happy.”
Now it’s the doctor’s turn to gaze back across the room and ponder things.
Finally Stevens aims one of those patented smirks at Martinez and says, “Does he now?”
* * *
The arena
comes alive with a fanfare of thunderous heavy metal thrash-music and a fusillade of hyena yelps from the stands—and on cue, the crusty, scabrous, subliterate tank known as Eugene Cooney emerges from the shadows of the north vestibule like some thrift shop Spartacus. He wears secondhand football pads over his iron-girder shoulders, and carries a bloodstained bat wound with reams of tape.
The crowd eggs him on as he passes the gauntlet of walking dead chained to the gateposts on the edge of the infield. The creatures reach for him—rotting mouths working, blackened teeth gnashing, delicate stringers of black bile looping through motes of dusty light. Eugene gives them a middle-finger salute. The crowd loves the man, and roars their approval as Eugene takes his place out in the center of the infield, brandishing the bat with a kind of pumped-up majesty that would shame a marine color guard. The stench of ripe body organs and stewing offal mingles with the breeze.
Eugene twirls his bat and waits. The spectators wait. The entire arena seems to go quiet in a strange tableau as everybody awaits the challenger.
* * *
Way up in the press box, standing behind the Governor, looking on, Gabe wonders aloud, raising his voice enough to be heard, “You sure about this, boss?”
The Governor doesn’t even look at him. “The chance to see this bitch take a beating without me breaking a sweat? Yeah—I think it’s a good move.”
A noise down on the field wrenches their attention to the pool of light around the south portal.
The Governor smiles. “This is going to be good.”
* * *
She enters the showground from the darkness of the vestibule with a brusque, almost curt rhythm to her stride. Head down, shoulders square under her monastic cloak, dreadlocks flagging in the wind, she moves quickly and decisively despite her wounds and exhaustion, as though she’s about to simply grab a stray rabbit by the nape of the neck. Her long, curved saber, gripped firmly in her right hand, points downward at a forty-five-degree angle.
It happens so quickly, so casually, so authoritatively, that the exotic nature of this person—the strange officiousness of her demeanor—seems to momentarily hold the audience rapt, as though the entire gathering has inhaled and held its collective breath. The moving corpses reach for this woman as she passes—this odd specimen with the fancy sword—almost like supplicants, surrounding her, converging on her as she approaches Eugene with no expression, no pleasure, no emotion.
Eugene cocks the bat, and he growls some inane threat at her and then lashes out.
The man’s movements might as well be in slow motion as the woman simply and swiftly delivers a perfectly placed kick to the big brute’s genitals. The blow lands in the soft spot between his legs and elicits an almost girlish squeal from the behemoth, doubling him over as though he’s suddenly intoxicated with agony. The spectators howl.
The next part transpires with the swift and certain arc of a chef’s knife.
The woman in the cloak simply does a quick turn, a sort of low pirouette, the sword gripped in both hands now—a movement so natural, so practiced, so precise, so inevitable, as to be almost innate—and then brings the sword down on the big man’s neck. The hand-forged blade, tooled by artisans in the tradition of ancestors down through millennia, severs Eugene Cooney’s head with barely a whisper.
At first, up in the bleachers, the sight of steel flashing, a glimmer of tungsten on the blade—and the entire cranium of this giant man being lopped off with the ease of a band saw cutting through Brie—is so surreal that the crowd reacts awkwardly: a coughing sound among many, a chorus of nervous laughter … and then a tsunami of silence.
The sudden hush that grips the dusty stadium is so inappropriate and out of place that it takes the subsequent geyser of blood frothing out of Eugene Cooney’s cleanly dismembered neck, as the headless body drops puppetlike—first to its knees, then to its belly, landing in a heap as lifeless as a pile of shed skin—to suddenly elicit shouts of outrage.
Up in the crow’s nest, behind panes of grimy glass, a wiry figure springs to his feet. The Governor gapes down at the infield, teeth clenched, hissing: “What. The. Fuck?!”
For a long, dreamlike moment, it seems as though a strange paralysis grips each and every person within the confines of the press box and across the stands. Gabe and Bruce move in toward the glass, clenching and unclenching their fists. The Governor kicks his folding chair behind him, the metal contraption banging against the back wall.
“Get down there!” The Governor points at the tableau on the field—the dark amazon with her sword poised, the circle of cadavers reaching for her—and he screams at Gabe and Bruce: “Rein those biters in and GET HER THE FUCK OUTTA MY SIGHT!” Liquid rage courses through him. “I swear I’m going to kill that bitch!”
Gabe and Bruce stumble toward the door, tripping over each other to get out.
Down on the field, the woman in the cloak—nobody has yet bothered to even learn her name—unleashes her controlled fury on the ring of walking dead circling her. It begins almost as a dance.
From a crouch, she spins and simultaneously swings the sword at the first walker. The sharp edge whispers through mortified neck cords and gristle, effortlessly taking off the first head.
Blood and tissue bloom in the artificial light as the head falls and rolls in the dust, and the body collapses. The woman spins. Another head jettisons. Fluids fountain into the air. The woman spins again, zinging through another putrefied neck, another cranium flying off its ragged, bloody mooring. Another spin, another decapitation … another, and another, and another … until the dust is running black with cerebrospinal fluids, and the woman gets winded.
By this point—unbeknownst to the crowd or the woman in the center of the infield—Gabe and Bruce have reached the bottom of the stairs and are racing around the corner of the gate toward the track.
The crowd starts braying—odd donkeylike barking sounds mingling with boos—and to an undiscerning ear it would be hard to tell whether they are angry, scared, or excited. The clamor seems to fuel the woman on the infield. She finishes off the last three reanimated corpses with a graceful combination of grand plié, jeté, and deadly pas de pirouette, the sword detaching crania silently, the dance a baptismal bloodbath, the earth flooding with deep scarlet-black fluids.
Right then, Gabe has crossed the warning track, followed closely by Bruce, and the two men charge toward the woman, who has her back turned. Gabe reaches her first, and he literally dives at her, as though he’s got one chance to tackle an errant running back before the player scores.
The woman goes down hard, the sword flying out of her hands. She eats dust as the two men pile up on her. A gasp forces its way out of her lungs—she has said maybe ten words since she arrived in Woodbury—and she writhes on the ground under their weight, letting out huffs of anguished breath as they shove her face against the dirt. Little plumes of dust puff off the ground, kicked up by her angry breath. Her eyes glaze over with rage and pain.
The audience is struck dumb by all this—absorbing it on a deeper level by now—and the onlookers react again in stunned silence. The hush returns to the arena and presses in on the place until the only sound is the huffing and gasping of the woman on the ground, and a faint click coming from the crow’s nest above the stands.
The Governor emerges, drunk with rage, fists clenching so hard that his fingernails begin to draw blood.
“HEY!”
A deep female voice—tobacco cured and coarsened by hardship—calls out to him from below. He pauses on the parapet.
“You son of a bitch!” The owner of the voice is a woman in a threadbare smock, sitting in a middle row between two waiflike boys in tattered clothes. She gazes up angrily at the Governor. “What the hell was that shit?! I don’t bring my boys out here for that! I bring them to the fights for good clean fun—that was a goddamn massacre! I don’t want my boys watching fucking murder!”
The crowd reacts, as Gabe and Bruce wrestle with the amazon, dragging her
off the infield. The audience voices its disapproval. Mutterings rise and meld into angry shouts. Most of the people concur with the woman but something deeper drives the gathering now. Almost a year and a half of hell and starvation and boredom and intermittent terror come pouring out of some of them in a volley of shrieks and howls.
“You’ve traumatized them!” the woman cries out between the shrieking noises. “I came here looking for some broken bones, a few missing teeth—not this! This was way too much! ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!”
Up on the parapet, the Governor pauses and gazes down at the crowd, the rage flowing through him like a brush fire gobbling every last cell, making his eyes water and his spine run cold, and deep in the folds of his brain, a part of him breaks apart … control … control the situation … burn the cancer out … burn it out now.
From the bleachers, the woman sees him walking away. “Hey, goddamnit! I’m talking to you! Don’t walk away from me! Get back here!”
The Governor descends the stairs, oblivious to the catcalls and boos, making his departure with hellfire and vengeance on his mind.
* * *
Running … hurtling headlong … lost in the darkness, night-blind … they plunge through the woods, frantically searching for the safety of their camp. Three women … one in her fifties, one pushing sixty, and one in her twenties … they flail at the foliage and tangled branches, desperately trying to get back to the circle of campers and mobile homes that lie in the darkness less than a mile to the north. All these poor women wanted to do was pick some wild blackberries and now they’re surrounded. Pinned down. Trapped. What went wrong? They were so quiet, so stealthy, so nimble, carrying the berries in the hems of their skirts, careful not to speak to each other, communicating only in hand gestures … and now the walkers are closing in on them from all directions, the stench rising around them, the chorus of watery snarling noises like a threshing machine behind the trees. One woman screams when a dead arm bursts out of a thicket, grabbing at her, tearing her skirt. How did this happen so quickly? The walkers came out of nowhere. How did the monsters detect them? All at once the moving corpses block their path, cutting off their escape, surrounding them, the women panicking, their piercing shrieks rising up now as they struggle against the onslaught … their blood mingling with the dark purple juice of the berries … until it’s too late … and the woods run red with their blood … and their screams are drowned by the unstoppable thresher.
The Walking Dead Collection Page 77