As the dusk presses in and the air cools, Lilly finally decides to head back home. She’s flagging from the pain that lingers in her lower back, and the intermittent cramps that still torment her, but she’s as clear-headed and grounded as she’s ever been.
Exhausted but oddly tranquil, she walks along the deserted sidewalk toward her apartment building, thinking about Austin, thinking about Josh, and thinking about her father, when she sees a familiar figure trundling along on the opposite side of the street with a dark gunnysack dripping black droplets on the boardwalk.
“Bob?” She crosses the street and approaches him warily, gazing at the blood-sodden sack. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
He pauses in the shadows, a distant sodium vapor light barely illuminating his weathered features. “Nothing much … um, you know … takin’ care of business.” He looks strangely nervous and embarrassed. Since he managed to stop drinking, his grooming has improved, his greasy hair now pomaded neatly back away from his deeply creased forehead, accentuating the crow’s-feet around his droopy eyes.
“I don’t mean to be nosy, Bob.” She nods at the sack. “But this is the second time I’ve seen you hauling something disgusting across town. It’s none of my business, but is that by any chance—?”
“It ain’t human, Lilly,” he blurts. “Got it down by the switchyard. It’s just meat.”
“Meat?”
“Pieces of a rabbit I found in one of my traps, just a carcass.”
Lilly looks at him. “Bob, I don’t—”
“I promised him, Lilly.” All the pretense goes out of him then, his shoulders slumping with despair, maybe even a little shame. “This thing … it’s still in there … poor wretched creature … was once his daughter, and I promised him. I had to keep that promise.”
“Jesus Christ, you’re not talking about—”
“You could make the argument that he saved my life,” Bob says, looking down at the ground. The sack drips. Bob sniffs miserably.
Lilly thinks about it for a moment, and then says very softly yet very evenly, “Show me.”
TWENTY-TWO
Bob turns the key and pushes the door open, and Lilly follows him inside the apartment, crossing the threshold of the Governor’s inner sanctum.
She pauses in the foul-smelling foyer. Bob still clutches the sack of meat in his gnarled hand as he scuttles around the corner, vanishing into the living room, but Lilly lingers in that cramped vestibule, taking in the sad remnants of the Governor’s private life.
Since arriving in Woodbury, Lilly Caul has been in the Governor’s lair only a couple of times, each visit brief and accompanied by a flesh-crawling uneasiness. She remembers hearing those inexplicable noises coming from other rooms—the thick breathing, the faint metallic jangling sounds, and that weird percolating drone of bubbles, as though a meth lab were chugging away in the kitchen—but right now, standing with her arms crossed defensively against her chest, hearing those same noises, she feels very little of the repulsion or aversion she had experienced earlier.
The heartrending sadness of the place calls out to her, and weighs down on her. The scarred hardwood floor, the faded wallpaper, the windows masked with black muslin and threadbare blankets, the single bare lightbulb hanging from the cracked plaster ceiling, the odors of mold and disinfectant thick in the stagnant air—all of it squeezes Lilly’s midsection with tremendous sorrow. She takes a girding breath and tries to push the sadness out of her mind. Bob calls out to her from the living room.
“Lilly, come on in here … I’d like you to meet somebody,” his voice beckons, wavering slightly as he tries to keep things light and easy. Lilly takes another breath, a strange thought passing through her mind: The man who lived here lost everything, and that drove him over the edge, and he ended up here, a castaway in this tawdry, lonely limbo of masked windows and bare lightbulbs and no life.
Lilly walks into the living room, and the tiny figure shackled to the opposite wall stops Lilly cold in her tracks. The sight of Penny Blake sends an icy trickle of terror—most of it involuntary—down through Lilly’s bowels. The flesh on the back of her neck prickles. But accompanying these innate responses come stronger and stronger waves of despair, sadness, and even empathy.
Something about the way the accouterments of childhood still cling to this creature sends Lilly’s mind reeling—the shriveled, blackened face crowned with ratty pigtails and filthy ribbons tied in bows, the little pinafore dress so inundated with drool and bile and gore that its original cornflower-blue color has now turned earthworm gray. Bob kneels near the creature, close enough to stroke her shoulder but far enough away to be just beyond the reach of her snapping, gnashing, rasping jaws.
“Lilly, meet Penny,” Bob says with a tenderness that’s almost jarring as he reaches into the gunnysack and pulls out a morsel of purplish-red tissue. The girl-thing gnaws at the air and moans an excruciating moan. Bob feeds her the organ. Her milky-white eyes fill with agitation and something that almost looks like agony as she masticates the offal, fluids leaking through her tiny, puckered, toothless gums and running down her chin.
Lilly comes closer, the sorrow weighing down on her, forcing her to fall to her knees a few feet away from the child-thing. “Oh my God … Bob … Jesus Christ … is this his…? Oh Jesus, Jesus.”
Bob gently strokes the child’s waxy hair as the thing devours the entrails. “Penny, meet Lilly,” Bob says very softly to the creature.
Lilly bows her head and stares at the floor. “Bob, this is … Jesus.”
“I promised him, Lilly.”
“Bob … Bob.” Lilly shakes her head and continues staring at the floor as the watery smacking noises fill the air. She can’t bear to look at the tiny monster. In her peripheral vision, Lilly can see nail marks on the worn carpet, an outline of bloodstains where a panel was hastily driven into the floor. She can also see smudges of stubborn bloodstains on the walls that refused to come out with Comet and elbow grease. The air smells of sour rot and copper.
Bob says something else but Lilly doesn’t hear it. Her mind swims with sadness now, marinating in the misery and madness baked into the fabric of this place, festering in the drapes and the grain of the floorboards and the black mold in the seams of the baseboards. It takes her breath away and burns her eyes. The tears come then, and Lilly tries to get breath back in her lungs and stanch the welling of her eyes and the urge to sob. She stuffs it back down her gorge. She clenches her fists and looks back up at the girl.
A long time ago, Penny Blake sat on her father’s lap and listened to bedtime stories and sucked her thumb and nuzzled a security blanket. Now she gazes out through eyes the color of a fish belly, insensate as a mole, catatonic with a black hunger that will never fade. She is the living embodiment of the plague’s toll.
For an unbearable eternity, Lilly Caul slumps on her knees in front of the girl-thing, shaking her head, staring at the floor while Bob feeds the rest of the chum to the creature, saying nothing, softly whistling as though merely braiding a little girl’s hair.
Lilly gropes for the right words. She knows what has to be done.
At last, after endless minutes, Lilly finally manages to look up at Bob. “You know what we have to do, right?” She holds Bob’s droopy, red-rimmed, crestfallen gaze. “You know there’s no other way to go.”
Bob lets out a miserable sigh, levers himself to his feet, shuffles over to the sofa, and plops down as though the stone of Sisyphus rests on his shoulders. He slumps and wipes his eyes, his lips trembling as he says, “I know … I know.” He looks at Lilly through his tears. “You’re gonna have to do it, Lilly-girl … I ain’t got the heart for it.”
* * *
They find an ice pick in the kitchen drawer and a relatively clean sheet on the bed, and Lilly tells Bob to wait outside. But Bob Stookey—a man who has ministered to dying soldiers and taken in stray dogs all his life—refuses to dishonor the memory of a little girl. He tells Lilly that he will assi
st her.
They sneak up behind the girl-thing while she’s feeding, and Lilly throws the sheet over her, covering her head and face, trying not to disturb the creature any more than necessary. The tiny monster writhes and struggles in the cocoon of fabric for a moment, as Lilly gently forces the wriggling body to the floor. Pressing her weight down on the shuddering form, Lilly grips the ice pick in her right hand.
The head squirms and flails under the sheet, and Lilly struggles for a moment to position it properly for a clean and decisive thrust. Bob crouches next to her, next to the shivering lump, and begins softly singing to it—an old Christian hymn—and Lilly pauses for a moment, just before plunging the ice pick into the head under the sheet, taken aback by the sound of Bob’s voice.
“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,” Bob croons softly to the thing that was once a child—his gravelly drawl suddenly transformed, turning soft and warm and as sweet as honey. “It’s the emblem of suffering and shame, and I love that old cross where the dearest and best, for a world of lost sinners was slain.”
Lilly freezes, feeling something extraordinary develop inside the damp sheet beneath her. The writhing and shuddering and growling subside, the creature suddenly and inexplicably growing calm, as though listening to the sound of Bob’s voice. Lilly stares at the sheet. It doesn’t seem possible, but the thing remains still.
Bob softly sings, “Then He’ll call me someday to my home far away … Where His glory forever I’ll share.”
Lilly thrusts the point deep into the cranium under the sheet.
And the thing named Penny goes to her home far away.
* * *
They decide to have a burial ceremony for the child. Lilly comes up with the idea, and Bob thinks it’s a pretty good thing to do.
So Lilly sends Bob out to gather the others, find a wheelbarrow, some tarp, a suitable container, and a proper location for the gravesite.
After Bob leaves, Lilly lingers in the apartment, one piece of unfinished business left to address.
TWENTY-THREE
Lilly finds a box of shells in Philip’s bedroom closet, which fit the 12-gauge pigeon gun leaning against the wall behind a stack of peach crates. She loads the gun and carries it into the side room.
All it took was a single glance through the doorway into that shadowy chamber where the ghastly aquariums are still lined along the wall, bubbling and thumping in the darkness, for the mystery of Philip Blake to forever be burned into Lilly’s memory.
Now Lilly positions herself in front of the glass containers and pumps the shotgun. She levels the barrel on the first aquarium and fires. The blast nearly blows her eardrums out as the container explodes, sending glass shards through the air and a gush of fluid across the floor. The bloated head tumbles out.
She pumps another shell into the chamber and fires, and she does it again and again, hitting each aquarium dead center, spewing waves of water across the floor at her feet and sending the heads to oblivion. She goes through twenty-five shells, until the room swims with cleansing water, broken glass, and the remains of the Governor’s trophies.
She tosses the shotgun to the floor and wades out of the flooded room, her ears ringing and the last traces of Philip Blake’s madness exorcised from the earth.
* * *
That evening, as the sun begins its descent behind the high treetops on the western horizon and the air turns cool and luminous in the lengthening shadows, the twenty-eight surviving inhabitants of Woodbury, Georgia, stand in a semicircle around a freshly turned mound of earth, finishing up their tribute to a lost child … and closing a violent chapter in the town’s post-plague history.
The spot Bob picked out for Penny’s final resting place is outside the wall, shaded by massive live oaks, dappled in wildflowers, and relatively free of the detritus of past skirmishes and attacks.
Everybody stands in respectful silence, heads bowed, mouthing their final whispered prayers. Even the children present stop fidgeting for a moment and look down into the dirt and clasp their little hands together in prayer. Lilly closes the small, dog-eared Bible that Bob loaned her for the occasion, and she gazes at the ground for a beat, waiting for the moment to run its course. She has just finished reciting a brief eulogy for a child no one knew, a child who seems a fitting symbol for the loss of many others, as well as the sanctity of those lives still being lived, and now Lilly feels a profound sort of closure.
“Rest in peace, little Penny,” she says at last, breaking the spell and bringing the moment to an end. “Thanks, everybody. Probably ought to be getting back now … before darkness rolls in.”
Bob stands next to Lilly with a wadded handkerchief in his huge hands, the cloth soaked with his tears. Lilly can tell by the sanguine look behind his rheumy, hound-dog eyes that this little impromptu ceremony has been good for him. It’s been good for all of them.
One by one, they turn away from the grave and start making their way across the vacant lot outside the northeast corner of town. Lilly walks in the lead, Bob ambling along next to her, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. Behind Bob, Matthew and Speed carry rifles on their hips in case they encounter any stray walkers.
The others follow closely, chatting softly, talking idly about matters great and small, when the faint sound of an engine in the distance gets everybody’s attention. Most of them stop and crane their necks to see what in God’s name might be coming this way.
“If I didn’t know better,” Bob says to Lilly, reaching for the Smith & Wesson lodged behind his belt, “I’d say that was a car coming down 109.”
“Okay, just take it easy—everybody—take it easy,” Lilly says to the group, glancing over her shoulder at the column of people behind her and seeing some of them pulling weapons, some of the kids pushing in closer to the adults. “Let’s just see what it is before we get all bent outta shape.”
For a moment, other than the sputtering sound of a dying engine, all Lilly can make out in the distance is a wisp of black exhaust rising above the tree line and then diffusing in the wind. She keeps her eyes on the bend in the road a couple hundred yards away when a battered station wagon comes into view.
Lilly can tell instantly that the car poses no threat. It appears to be an old, battered, rust-flecked Ford LTD, a late 1990s model, burning oil, with half the wood panels shaved off in side-swipe mishaps, the wheels wobbling as though they might fall off at any moment. “Lower your weapons,” Lilly says to Matthew and Speed. “C’mon … it’s okay.”
As the vehicle rattles closer and closer, the people inside come into view—a tattered couple in the front, three small urchins in the back—apparently a family, their engine running on fumes. They pull up to within a safe distance—about twenty-five yards down the road—and cobble to a stop in a cloud of noxious haze.
Lilly raises her empty hands to show the people in the car she’s not a threat.
The driver’s-side door squeaks open and the father climbs out. Dressed in layers of Salvation Army rags, as malnourished as a prisoner of war, the man is skin and bones. He looks as though he might collapse at any moment. He responds to Lilly’s gesture by raising his own hands to show that he, too, means no harm.
“Evening!” Lilly calls out to the man.
“Hello.” The man’s voice sounds hollow, like that of a terminal cancer patient. “Mind if I ask if y’all got any spare drinking water ya might part with?”
Lilly recognizes the faint, urbanized drawl of a Southern city—Birmingham, Oxford, Jacksonville maybe—and she glances over her shoulder at the others. “You folks stay put for a second; I’ll be right back.” She turns again to the stranger. “I’m gonna stroll a little closer, sir, if that’s all right?”
The man turns and looks worriedly at his family huddling nervously in the car. He turns back to Lilly. “Sure … I guess so … c’mon over.”
Lilly walks calmly toward the station wagon, her hands still raised. The closer she gets, the more she can see how badly these p
eople are hurting. The man and his wife look like they have one foot in the grave, their sallow, ashen faces so thin they look cadaverous. In the cluttered backseat, the children are caked with grit and scantily dressed. The wagon is filled with empty wrappers and moth-eaten blankets. It’s a miracle these people are still upright. Lilly approaches and stands a few feet away from the father. “My name’s Lilly, and yours is…?”
“Calvin … and that’s Meredith.” He points at his wife, and then at his kids. “And that’s Tommy, Bethany, and Lucas.” He looks at Lilly. “Ma’am, I would be forever grateful if you could maybe part with some food, and maybe any weapons you might be able to spare?”
Lilly looks at the man and proffers a warm, guileless, genuine smile. “I’ve got a better idea, Calvin. How about I show you around?”
Also by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga
The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor
The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury
The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor: Part One
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Robert Kirkman is the creator of many popular comic books, including The Walking Dead, Invincible, and Super Dinosaur. In addition to being a partner at Image Comics, Kirkman is an executive producer and writer on The Walking Dead television show. In 2010, Kirkman opened Skybound, his own imprint at Image, which publishes his titles as well as other original work.
Jay Bonansinga is a New York Times bestselling novelist whose works include Perfect Victim, Shattered, Twisted, and Frozen. His debut novel, The Black Mariah, was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award.
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