All at once, another part of the Governor bubbles up to the surface—a deeply buried part of him—on a wave of sentimental longing, which almost makes him dizzy as he remembers big Ed Blake in happier times, a simple hillbilly laborer who tried to fight his demons long enough to be a loving father. “You remind me of somebody I used to know a long time ago,” the Governor says finally, his tone softening as he looks Bob Stookey in the eyes. “C’mon, let’s go get a drink.”
For the rest of their journey across the safe zone, the two men talk quietly, openly, like old friends.
At one point the Governor asks Bob what happened to his wife.
“Place we lived, this mobile home park…” Bob says slowly, heavily, as he hobbles along, remembering dark days. “We got overrun one day with walkers. I was out trying to scrounge up some supplies when it happened … by the time I got back they had gotten into our place.”
He pauses and the Governor says nothing, just walks in silence, waiting.
“They were tearing into her, and I fought ’em off best I could … and … I guess they only ate enough of her that she came back.”
Another agonizing pause. Bob licks his dry lips. The Governor can see that the man needs a drink badly, needs his medicine to stanch the memories.
“I couldn’t bring myself to finish her off.” This comes out of Bob on a choked wheeze. His rheumy eyes well up. “I ain’t proud of the fact that I left her. Pretty sure she got some folks after that. Her arm and her lower body was pretty mangled but she could still get around. Them people she got, their deaths are my fault.”
A pause.
“It’s hard to let go sometimes,” the Governor ventures at last, glancing down at his ghastly little bundle. The dripping has diminished somewhat, the blood thickening to the consistency of blackstrap molasses. Right then the Governor notices Bob pondering the blood droplets, his brow furrowed in thought. He looks almost sober.
Bob gestures at the gruesome bundle. “You got somebody turned on ya, don’t ya?”
“You’re not so dumb … are ya, Bob?”
Bob wipes his mouth pensively. “Never thought about feeding Brenda.”
“C’mon, Bob, I want to show you something.”
They reach the two-story brick edifice at the end of the block, and Bob follows the Governor inside.
* * *
“Stand behind me for a second, Bob.” The Governor fiddles a key into a dead bolt, the door at the end of a second-floor hallway. The door clicks, and the sound of a low growl seeps out. “I would appreciate it, Bob, if you kept what you’re about to see to yourself.”
“No problem … lips are sealed.”
Bob follows the Governor into a two-bedroom unit with spartan furnishings that reeks of spoiled meat and disinfectant, the windows painted over with black Rust-Oleum. A floor-length mirror near the front vestibule is covered with newspaper and masking tape. The mirror in the bathroom—visible through an open doorway—is missing, its absence evident in the pale oval outline above the sink. All the mirrors in this place have been removed.
“She’s everything to me,” the Governor says. Bob follows the man across the living room, down a short hallway, and through a doorway into a cramped laundry room, where the upright corpse of a little girl is chained to a U-bolt drilled into the wall.
“Oh, Lord.” Bob keeps his distance. The dead girl—still in pigtails and pinafore dress, as if dressed for church—snarls and spits and flails, her chain straining at its mooring. Bob takes a step back. “Oh, Lord.”
“Calm down, Bob.”
The Governor kneels in front of the pint-sized zombie and lays the bundle on the floor. The girl bites at the air, blackened teeth clacking. The Governor unwraps a human head, its cranial cavity gaping on one side from a close-range gunshot.
“Oh, my.” Bob notices that the human head—its pulpy concavity on one side already hectic with maggots—sports a bristly, jarhead haircut, as if it once belonged to a soldier or marine.
“This here’s Penny … she’s an only child,” the Governor explains as he shoves the dripping severed head within range of the chained cadaver. “We came from a small town called Waynesboro. Penny’s mother—my sweet wife, Sarah—was killed in a car crash before the Turn.”
The child feeds.
Bob watches from the doorway, at once appalled and riveted, as the diminutive zombie slurps and chews the soft matter of the cranial passage as though ferreting out the meat of a lobster.
The Governor watches the feeding. The slurping noises fill the air. “My brother Brian and I—along with a few friends of mine—we set out to find greener pastures with Penny here. Made our way west, crashed in Atlanta for a spell, hooked up with some people, lost some people. Kept moving west.”
The little corpse settles down, leaning against the wall with tiny, greasy, scarlet-stained fingers burrowing deep into the hollowed-out skull for morsels.
The Governor’s voice drops an octave. “Had a run-in with some dirtbags at an orchard not far from here.” His words falter for a moment. No tears but his voice crumbles a little. “Put my brother in charge of Penny while I fended ’em off … and one thing led to another.”
Bob cannot move. He cannot speak in this airless chamber of stained tiles, exposed plumbing, and mold-darkened grout. He watches the tiny abomination, her ghastly face content now, stringers of brain matter hanging from her little tulip lips, her fish-belly eyes rolling back in her head as she leans back.
“My brother fucked up big-time, got my baby killed,” the Governor explains now, his head down, his chin on his chest. His voice gets thick with emotion. “Brian was weak and that’s all there is to it. I could not let it go, though.” He looks at Bob through raw, wet eyes. “I know you can relate, Bob. I could not let go of my baby girl.”
Bob can relate. His chest seizes up with sorrow for Brenda.
“I blame myself for Penny getting killed and comin’ back.” The Governor stares at the floor. “I kept her going with scraps and we kept headin’ west. By the time we got to Woodbury my brother Brian was ape-shit crazy with guilt.”
The thing that was once a little girl drops the skull as though discarding an oyster shell. She gazes around the room through her milky eyes as if awakening from a dream.
“I had to put Brian down like a sick dog,” the Governor utters, almost to himself. He takes a step closer to the little thing that used to be a child. His voice becomes almost toneless. “I still see my Penny in there sometimes … when she’s calm like this.”
Bob swallows hard. Contrary emotions swirl and eddy inside him—repulsion, sadness, fear, bone-deep longing, even sympathy for this deranged individual—and he hangs his head. “You been through a lot.”
“Look at that, Bob.” The Governor nods toward the little zombie. The child-thing cocks its head, staring at the Governor with a vexed expression. The thing blinks its eyes. A faint trace of Penny Blake glimmers behind its eyes. “My baby’s still in there. Aren’t ya, honey?”
The Governor goes over to the chained creature, kneels and strokes its livid cheek.
Bob stiffens, starts to say, “Be careful, you don’t want to be—”
“Here’s my beautiful baby girl.” The Governor strokes the thing’s matted hair. The tiny zombie blinks. The pallid face changes, eyes narrowing, blackened lips peeling away from rotten baby teeth.
Bob steps forward. “Look out—”
The Penny-thing snaps its jaws at the exposed flesh of the Governor’s wrist, but the Governor pulls away just in time. “Whoopsy!”
The little zombie strains at its chain, scuttling to its feet and reaching at the air … as the Governor backs away. He speaks in baby talk. “Wascally Wabbit … almost got Daddy that time!”
Bob gets woozy. He can feel his gorge rising, the bile threatening to come up.
“Bob, do me a favor and reach into that loose bundle the head came out of.”
“Huh?”
“Do me a favor and grab that
last little goodie in that bag over there.”
Bob holds his vomit in and turns and finds the bundle on the floor and looks inside. A pale human finger, apparently male, lies at the bottom of the bag in a clot of drying blood. Hair sprouts from the knuckles, and from the ragged end protrudes a small nodule of white bone.
Something loosens inside Bob—as sudden as a rubber band snapping—as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, bends down, and retrieves the finger.
“Why don’t you do the honors, my friend,” the Governor suggests, standing proudly over the snapping zombie-child, his hands on his hips.
Bob feels as though his body has begun to move on its own, with a mind of its own. “Yeah … sure.”
“Go ahead.”
Bob stands within inches of the chain’s limit, as the Penny-thing snarls and sputters noisily at him, clanging against the U-bolt. “Yeah … why not?”
Holding the finger out at arm’s length, Bob feeds it to the creature.
The little corpse gobbles the thing, falling to its knees, two-handing the finger into her ravenous little pit of a mouth. The nauseating wet noises fill the laundry room.
The two men stand side by side, watching now. The Governor puts his arm around his new friend.
* * *
By the end of that week the men on the wall have reached the edge of the third block, along Jones Mill Road, where the U.S. Post Office sits boarded and defaced with graffiti. Along the brick wall adjacent to the parking lot some joker with a few years of college lit classes has spray-painted the words THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WALKER, a constant reminder of the end of society and government services as we know them.
On Saturday Josh Lee Hamilton ends up on a work crew, hauling dollies loaded with scrap lumber from one end of the sidewalk to the other, bartering his muscles for food so that he and Lilly can continue to eat. He has run out of valuables to trade, and for the last couple of days Josh has been doing menial tasks such as emptying latrines and cleaning animal carcasses in the smokehouse. But he gladly does the work for Lilly.
Josh has fallen so deeply for the woman that he secretly lets the tears come at night, in the desolate darkness of the walk-up apartment, after Lilly has drifted off in his arms. Josh finds himself beset with the ironies of finding love among the wreckage of this plague. Filled with a kind of reckless hope, as well as the dreamy side effects of the first true intimate relationship of his life, Josh barely notices the absence of the other members of his group.
The little clique seems to have scattered to the winds. Occasionally Josh will get a glimpse of Megan at night, creeping along the balustrades of residential buildings, scantily clad and stoned. Josh has no idea whether she is still with Scott. In fact, Scott has vanished. No one seems to know where he is, and the sad truth is, nobody seems to care. Business seems to be brisk for Megan. Out of the fifty or so residents of Woodbury, less than a dozen are women, and out of those only about four are premenopausal.
Far more troubling is Bob’s apparent ascendancy to town mascot. Evidently the Governor—Josh trusts this sociopath as a leader about as much as he trusts one of the walkers to coach a Little League team—has taken an interest in old Bob, and has been plying the man with good whiskey, barbiturates, and social status.
On Saturday afternoon, however, Josh puts all this out of his mind as he unloads a pallet of siding at the end of the temporary wall. Other workmen move along the flanks of the barricade, nailing planks into place. Some use hammers, others nail guns connected to gas-powered generators. The noise is troublesome if not unmanageable.
“Just stack it over there by the sandbags, cousin,” Martinez says with a neighborly nod, an M1 assault rifle on his hip.
Clad in his trademark do-rag and sleeveless camo shirt, Martinez continues to be the hail-fellow-well-met. Josh cannot quite figure the man out. He seems to be the most even-tempered of the Woodbury bunch, but the bar here is not that high. Charged with supervising the ever-changing shift of guards on the walls, Martinez rarely fraternizes with the Governor, although the two of them seem to be joined at the hip. “Just try and keep the noise down to a minimum, bro,” he adds with a wink, “if at all possible.”
“Gotcha,” Josh says with a nod and starts off-loading the four-by-six sheets of particleboard onto the ground. He sheds his lumberjack coat—the sweat has broken out on his neck and back, the winter sun high in the sky today—and he finishes the stacking in mere minutes.
Martinez comes over. “Why don’t you go ahead and grab one more load before lunch.”
“Roger that,” Josh says, and pulls the empty dolly free of the stack, then turns and heads back down the walk, leaving his jacket—as well as his snub-nosed .38 police special—hanging on a fence post.
Josh sometimes forgets that the gun is tucked into his jacket pocket. He has yet to use the thing since coming to Woodbury; the guards have the place pretty much covered.
Over the last week, in fact, only a few attacks have occurred along the edges of the woods, or on the side roads, which have been easily and promptly quelled by the well-armed band of weekend warriors. According to Martinez, the powers that be in Woodbury have discovered a cache of weapons at a National Guard station within walking distance of the town—an entire arsenal of military-grade weaponry—which the Governor has put to good use.
The truth is, walker attacks are the least of the Governor’s problems. The human population of Woodbury seems to be curdling under the pressure of postplague life. Tempers are stretched thin. People are starting to lash out at each other.
Josh crosses the two-block distance between the construction site and the warehouse in less than five minutes, thinking about Lilly and his future with her. Lost in his thoughts, he does not notice the odor wafting around him as he approaches the wood-frame building on the edge of the railroad tracks.
The warehouse once stood as a storage shed for the southern terminus of the Chattooga and Chickamauga Railway. Throughout the twentieth century tobacco farmers would ship their bundles of raw leaves up north on this line to Fayetteville for processing.
Josh trudges up to the long narrow building and parks the dolly outside the door. The edifice rises up at least thirty-five feet at the highest pitch of its weathered, gabled roof. The siding is ancient, chipped, and scarred with neglect. The single tall window by the door is broken out and boarded. The place looks like a ruined museum, a relic of the old South. Workmen have been using the building to keep the lumber dry and stash building materials.
“Josh!”
Josh pauses at the entrance when he hears the familiar voice drifting on the breeze behind him. He turns just in time to see Lilly scurrying up in her trademark funky attire—floppy hat, multicolored scarves, and a coyote coat she acquired in trade from an older woman in town—a weary smile on her slender face.
“Babygirl, you are a sight for sore eyes,” Josh says, grabbing her and gently pulling her into a bear hug. She hugs him back—not exactly with unbridled abandon, more of a platonic hug—and once again Josh wonders if he has come on too strong with her. Or perhaps their lovemaking has changed some complex dynamic between them. Or maybe he has not lived up to her expectations. She seems to be holding back her affection slightly. Just slightly. But Josh puts it out of his mind. Maybe it’s just the stress.
“Can we talk?” she says, looking up into his eyes with a heavy, somber gaze.
“Sure … you want to give me a hand?”
“After you,” she says, gesturing toward the entrance. Josh turns and pries the door open.
The smell of dead flesh—mingling with the moldy, airless dark inside the storage shed—does not register at first. Nor do they notice the gap between two petrified sections of drywall in the rear of the shed, or the fact that the backside of the building is perilously exposed to a wild section of forest. The building stretches at least a hundred feet back in the darkness, draped in cobwebs and cast-off rail sections so rusted and corroded they are
the color of the earth.
“What’s on your mind, babydoll?” Josh crosses the cinder floor to a pile of wooden siding. The four-by-six panels look as though they came from a barn, their grooves of deep red paint chipped and scabrous with mud.
“We gotta move on, Josh, we gotta get outta this town … before something terrible happens.”
“Soon, Lilly.”
“No, Josh. Seriously. Listen to me.” She tugs his arm and pulls him around so they are face-to-face. “I don’t care if Megan and Scott and Bob stay … we gotta ditch this place. It looks all cozy and Mayberry RFD on the surface but it’s rotting underneath.”
“I know … I just have to—”
He stops when a shadow blurs outside the slats of the boarded window in his peripheral vision.
“Oh, my God, Josh, did you—”
“Get behind me,” he says, realizing several things all at once. He smells the odor permeating the musk of the moldy shed, he hears the low guttural vibrations of growls coming from the rear of the building, and he sees a slice of daylight blooming through a gap in the corner.
Worst of all, Josh realizes he left his pistol in his jacket.
TEN
Right then, a burst of automatic gunfire echoes outside the storage shed.
Lilly jerks in the darkness of the shed, and Josh whirls toward the pile of lumber, when the boarded window near the front door bursts inward.
Three snarling zombies—the pressure of their collective weight forcing the ancient lumber to give way—start climbing into the shed. Two males and a female, each with deep wounds in their faces, their cheeks torn away from exposed gums and teeth like rows of dull ivory, tumble into the darkness. A chorus of snarls fills the building.
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