“I should have stopped it,” Lilly utters in a bloodless, sapped voice that sounds like a pull-string doll on its last legs. She has burned out her tear ducts. “I could have, Bob, I could have stopped it.”
The silence stretches, the wind rattling in the eaves and high-tension wires. Practically the entire population of Woodbury has gathered along Main Street to gawk at the aftermath.
Josh lies supine under a sheet next to Lilly. Someone covered the body with the makeshift shroud only minutes earlier, the folds of which now soak with red blotches of blood from Josh’s head wounds. Lilly tenderly strokes his leg, compulsively squeezing and massaging as though she might wake him up. Tendrils of hair are knocked loose from Lilly’s ponytail, blowing across her scarred, crestfallen features.
“Hush now, honey,” Bob says, placing the bottle of Betadine back into the kit. “There was nothing y’all could do, nothing at all.” Bob shoots a worried glance up at the jagged, broken glass of the food center entrance. He can barely see the Governor and his men inside the vestibule, talking with Martinez. The butcher’s unconscious body lies in the shadows. The Governor gestures expansively toward the body, explaining something to Martinez. “Goddamn shame is what it is,” Bob says, looking away. “Goddamn crying shame.”
“He didn’t have a mean bone in his body,” Lilly says softly, looking at the bloodstain soaking the head end of the sheet. “I wouldn’t be alive, wasn’t for him … he saved my life, Bob, all he wanted was—”
“Miss…?”
Lilly looks up at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, and sees an older man in eyeglasses and white lab coat standing behind Bob. A fourth person, a twenty-something girl with blond braids, stands behind the man. She also wears a tattered lab coat and has a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff dangling around her neck.
“Lilly, this is Doc Stevens,” Bob says with a nod toward the man. “And that there is Alice, his nurse.”
The girl gives Lilly a respectful nod while unwinding the cuff.
“Lilly, you mind if I take a quick peek at those facial bruises?” the doctor says, kneeling next to her, putting the earbuds of his stethoscope in his ears. Lilly says nothing, just turns her gaze back to the ground. The doctor gently touches the scope to her neck, her sternum, her pulse points. He inspects her wounds, softly palpates her ribs. “Very sorry for your loss, Lilly,” the doctor murmurs.
Lilly says nothing.
“Some of them wounds are old,” Bob comments, rising to his feet, backing away.
“Looks like hairline fractures to number eight and nine, also to the clavicle,” he says, gently nudging his fingers through her fleece jacket. “All of them pretty much healed up. Lungs sound clear.” He takes the scope out of his ears, winds it around his neck. “Lilly, if you need anything you let us know.”
She manages a nod.
The doctor measures his words. “Lilly, I just want you to know…” He pauses for a moment, groping for the right words. “Not everybody in this town is … like this. I know it’s not much in the way of consolation right now.” He looks up at Bob, then gazes at the ruined food center window, than back at Lilly. “I guess what I’m saying is, if you ever need somebody to talk to, if something is bothering you, if you need anything whatsoever … don’t hesitate to come down to the clinic.”
Seeing no reaction from Lilly, the doctor lets out a sigh and rises to his feet. He exchanges nervous glances with Bob and Alice.
Bob moves back to Lilly’s side, kneels down, and says very softly, “Lilly, honey, we’re gonna have to go ahead and move the body now.”
At first she barely hears him, in fact doesn’t even register what he’s saying.
She simply continues staring at the pavement and stroking the dead man’s leg and feeling empty. In anthropology class at Georgia Tech she learned about the Algonquin Indians and their belief that the spirit of the dead must be appeased. After a hunt they would literally breathe in the last breaths of a dying bear in order to honor it and accept it into their own bodies and pay homage to it. But Lilly feels only desolation and loss coming into her now from the cooling corpse of Josh Lee Hamilton.
“Lilly?” Bob’s voice sounds as though it’s coming from a distant solar system. “Is it okay, honey, if we go ahead and move the body?”
Lilly is silent.
Bob nods at Stevens. The doctor nods at Alice, and Alice turns and signals to two men standing their distance with a collapsible stretcher. The two men—both middle-aged cronies of Bob’s from the tavern crowd—move in. Unfolding the stretcher, they come within inches of Lilly and kneel down by the body. The first man starts to gently lever the massive body onto the stretcher, when Lilly snaps her gaze up at them, blinking back tears.
“Leave him alone,” she mutters, the words coming out in barely a whisper.
Bob puts a hand on her shoulder. “Lilly, honey—”
“I SAID LEAVE HIM ALONE! DON’T TOUCH HIM!! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HIM!!!”
Her anguished cry pierces the windswept stillness of the street, getting everyone’s attention. Onlookers halfway down the block pause in their conversations and look up. People in doorways peer around corners to see what’s going on. Bob waves off the two cronies, and Stevens and Alice back away in awkward silence.
The commotion has drawn several figures out of the food center. They now stand in the jagged opening of the entrance, staring at the sad state of affairs.
Bob gazes up and sees the Governor standing there, arms crossed against his chest on the glass-littered threshold, assessing the situation with his cunning, dark eyes. Bob walks sheepishly over to the entrance.
“She’ll be okay,” Bob says confidentially to the Governor. “She’s just a little torn up right now.”
“Who can blame her?” the Governor muses. “Lose your meal ticket like that.” He chews the inside of his cheek for a moment, thinking. “Leave her alone for a while. We’ll clean up the mess later.” He thinks some more, not taking his gaze off the dead body lying next to the curb. At last he calls over his shoulder, “Gabe—c’mere!”
The stocky man in the turtleneck and flattop haircut comes over.
The Governor speaks softly. “I want you to wake up that piece-of-shit butcher, take him down to the holding cells, and throw him in with the Guard.”
Gabe gives a nod, whirls, and slips back inside the food center.
“Bruce!” the Governor calls to his second in command. The black man with the shaved head and Kevlar vest comes over with an AK-47 on his hip.
“Yeah, boss.”
“I want you to round everybody up, take them over to the square.”
The black man cocks his head incredulously. “Everybody?”
“You heard me—everybody.” The Governor gives him a wink. “Gonna have a little town hall meeting.”
* * *
“We live in violent times. We’re all under tremendous pressure. Every day of our lives.”
The Governor barks into a megaphone that Martinez found in the defunct firehouse, the gravelly, smoky voice carrying up over the bare trees and torches. The sun has set on the town, and now the entire population mills about the darkness on the edge of the gazebo in the center of the square. The Governor stands on the stone steps of the structure, addressing his subjects with the stentorian authority of a politician crossed with a wild-eyed motivational speaker.
“I understand the pressures,” he goes on, pacing across the steps, milking the moment for all it’s worth. His voice echoes across the square, slapping back against the boarded-up storefronts across the street. “We’ve all dealt with the grief, last few months … losing somebody close to us.”
He pauses for effect, and he sees many of the faces turning downward, eyes shimmering in the light of torches. He senses the weight of pain pressing down. He smiles inwardly, waiting patiently for the moment to pass.
“What happened at the store today didn’t have to happen. You live by the sword … I get that. But it didn’t have to
happen. It was a symptom of a greater sickness. And we’re gonna treat that sickness.”
For a brief instant he glances back to the east, and he sees the slumped figures gathered over the shrouded body of the black man. Bob kneels behind the girl named Lilly, stroking her back, as he stares trancelike at the fallen giant under the bloody sheet.
The Governor turns back to his audience. “Starting tonight we’re gonna inoculate ourselves. From now on, things are gonna be different around here. I promise you … things are gonna be different. Gonna be some new rules.”
He paces some more, burning his gaze into each and every onlooker.
“The thing that separates us from these monsters out there is civilization!” He punches the word “civilization” so hard it bounces off the rooftops. “Order! Laws! The ancient Greeks had this shit down. They knew about tough love. ‘Catharsis’ they used to call it.”
Some of the faces gaze up at him with jittery, expectant expressions.
“You see that racetrack up yonder?” he says into the bullhorn. “Take a good look!”
He turns and gives a signal to Martinez, who stands in the shadows at the base of the gazebo. Martinez thumbs a button on a two-way, and he whispers something to somebody on the other end. This is the part that the Governor insisted be carefully timed.
“Starting tonight,” the Governor goes on, watching many of the heads turn toward the big, dark flying saucer planted in the clay west of town, its huge bowl-like rim rising in silhouette against the stars. “Starting right now! That’s gonna be our new Greek theater!”
With the pomp and circumstance of a fireworks display, the great xenon spots above the track suddenly flare to life in sequence—making audible metallic snapping noises—sending giant blooms of silver light down on the arena. The gag gets an audible, collective sigh from many of those gathered around the gazebo, some spontaneously applauding.
“Admission is free!” The Governor feels the energy rising, crackling like static electricity, and he bears down on them. “Auditions are ongoing, folks. You want to fight in the ring? All you gotta do is break the rules. That’s all you gotta do. Break the law.”
He looks at them as he paces, daring them to respond. Some of them look at each other, some of them nod, while others look as though they’re about to give him a “Hallelujah.”
“Anyone breaks the law is gonna fight! That simple. You don’t know what the laws are, all you gotta do is ask. Read the fucking Constitution. Check the Bible. Do unto others. Golden rule. All that. But hear what I’m saying. You do unto somebody a little too much … you’re gonna fight.”
A few voices holler out their consent, and the Governor feeds off the energy, stoking the flames. “From now on, you fuck with somebody—you break the law—you’re gonna fight!”
A few more voices add to the din, the noise carrying up into the sky.
“You steal from somebody, you’re gonna fight!”
Now the crowd hollers its approval, a chorus of righteous howls.
“You bang somebody’s old lady, you’re gonna fight!”
More voices join in, all the fear and frustration boiling over now.
“You kill somebody, you’re gonna fight!”
The cheering starts to corrupt into a cacophony of angry shouts.
“You mess with somebody in any way—especially, you get somebody killed—you’re gonna fight. In the arena. In front of God. To the death.”
The clamor deteriorates into a mishmash of applause and whooping and hollering. The Governor waits for it to subside like a wave rolling away.
“It starts tonight,” he says in barely a whisper, the megaphone crackling. “It starts with this nutcase, guy that runs the general store—Sam the Butcher. Thinks he’s judge, jury, and executioner.”
All at once the Governor points at the arena and calls out suddenly in a voice that would not be out of place at a charismatic church service: “Who’s ready for some payback? WHO’S READY FOR SOME LAW AND ORDER?”
The voices erupt.
* * *
Lilly gazes up and sees the abrupt exodus of nearly forty people half a block away. The crowd disperses in a noisy mass, moving almost as one—a giant human amoeba of excited fist pumping and inarticulate, angry cheering—charging across the street toward the racetrack arena, which sits in a vast penumbra of silver light two hundred yards to the west. The sight of it turns Lilly’s stomach.
She looks away and mutters, “You can take the body away now, Bob.”
Standing over her, Bob leans down and tenderly strokes her shoulder. “We’ll take good care of him, honey.”
She gazes into the distance. “Tell Stevens I want to make the arrangements.”
“You got it.”
“We’ll bury him tomorrow.”
“That sounds fine, honey.”
Lilly watches the mob of citizens in the distance filing into the arena. For one terrible instant she recalls scenes from old horror movies, angry throngs of townspeople with torches and primitive weapons, closing in on Frankenstein’s castle, lusting for the monster’s blood.
She shudders. She realizes they are all monsters now—all of them—Lilly and Bob included. Woodbury is the monster now.
THIRTEEN
Curiosity gets the better of Bob Stookey. After escorting Lilly back to her apartment above the dry cleaner, and giving her ten milligrams of alprazolam for sleep, he checks in with Stevens. Arrangements are made to move Josh’s body to its temporary resting place in the makeshift morgue under the racetrack. Afterward Bob makes his way back to his camper and grabs a fresh bottle of whiskey from the back. Then he returns to the arena.
By the time he arrives at the south entrance, the crowd noises are swelling and ringing inside the structure like waves crashing against a shore, magnified by the metallic baffles of the arena. Bob creeps through the dark, fetid tunnel toward the light. He pauses just inside the south gate and takes a healthy pull off the bottle of hooch, girding himself, buffering his nerves. The whiskey burns and makes his eyes water.
He steps into the light.
At first all he sees are blurry, indistinct shapes down on the infield, obscured behind massive cyclone fences rising up in front of the spectators. The bleachers on either side of him are mostly empty. The citizens sit above him, scattered across the upper decks, clapping and whooping and craning their necks to see the action. The harsh brilliance of the arc light shining down makes Bob blink. The air smells of old burned rubber and gasoline, and Bob has to squint to identify what’s going on down on the track.
He takes a step closer, leans toward the fence, and peers through the chain link.
Two large men grapple with each other in the center of the muddy infield. Sam the Butcher, seminude in his blood-spattered athletic trunks, his bare chest sagging, and his belly hanging over his belt, swings a jury-rigged wooden club at Stinson, the big, lumpy middle-aged guardsman. Stinson, his camo pants dark with bodily fluids, staggers and jerks back, trying to dodge the onslaught, an eighteen-inch machete in his greasy hand. The end of the butcher’s club—sprouting rusty nails on one side—catches the side of Stinson’s doughy face, gouging flesh.
Stinson rears backward, throwing spittle and strands of thick blood.
The crowd issues a salvo of yelps and angry cheers as Stinson topples over his own feet. Dust rises up into the sodium light as the portly guardsman hits the ground, the machete flying out of his grip and landing in the dirt. The butcher pounces with the club. Nails puncture Stinson’s jugular and left pectoral before the man has a chance to roll away. The audience yowls.
Bob turns away for a moment, feeling nauseous and dizzy. He takes another huge gulp of whiskey and lets the burn soothe his terror. He takes another, and another, and finally works up enough nerve to gaze back at the action. The butcher is pummeling Stinson, sending gouts of blood—as black as tar in the sodium lights—spraying across the matted brown turf of the infield.
The wide dirt track circling
the infield has armed guards at each gate, intently watching the fracas, their assault rifles cradled at the ready. Bob swallows more whiskey and averts his gaze from the grisly slaughter, focusing on the upper regions of the racetrack. The diamond-vision screen is blank, powerless, probably inoperable. The glass enclosures of VIP boxes lining one side of the arena are mostly deserted and dark … all except for one.
The Governor and Martinez stand behind the window of the center box, looking down on the spectacle with unreadable expressions on their faces.
Bob chugs another few fingers of whiskey—he’s already halfway through the bottle—and finds himself avoiding eye contact with the crowd. In his peripheral vision he can see the faces of young and old, male and female, all riveted to the bloody skirmish. Many faces contort with a kind of manic delight. Some of the onlookers rise to their feet, hands waving as though they are finding Jesus.
Down on the field the butcher delivers one last savage blow to Stinson’s kidney, the nails sinking into the guardsman’s fleshy lower back. Blood bubbles and gushes, and then Stinson sags in the dirt, convulsing, twitching in his death throes. Breathing hard, drooling with psychotic glee, the butcher raises the club and faces the crowd. The spectators respond with a surge of howls.
Repulsed, woozy, going numb with horror, Bob Stookey chugs more whiskey and looks down.
“I THINK WE HAVE A WINNER!”
The amplified voice coming through the public address system echoes and feeds back with harsh, electronic squealing noises. Bob gazes up and sees the Governor behind the center box window casually speaking into a microphone. Even from this great distance, Bob can see the weird pleasure glimmering behind the Governor’s eyes like two pinpoints of starlight. Bob looks back down.
“HOLD ON! HOLD ON!! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I THINK WE HAVE A COMEBACK!!”
Bob looks up.
On the infield, the big lump on the ground has come back to life. Lurching toward the machete, Stinson gets his blood-slick hand around the hilt and twists back toward the butcher, who has his back turned. Stinson pounces with every last ounce of strength. The butcher turns and tries to shield his face as the machete slashes.
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