For the last twenty-four hours Martinez has been marshaling forces in order to suppress the imminent attack. Guards posted on crow’s nests at the northwest and northeast corners of the wall have been keeping tabs on the progress of the flock, which first began to morph into a herd about a mile away. The guards have been sending word down the chain of command that the size of the herd has grown from a dozen or so to nearly fifty, and the pack has been moving in a lumbering zigzag through the trees along Jones Mill Road, covering the distance between the deep woods and the outskirts of town at a speed of about two hundred yards an hour, growing in number as they come. Apparently the herds move even slower, collectively, than individual walkers. It has taken this herd fifteen hours to close the distance to four hundred yards.
Now some of them begin to emerge from the leading edge of the forest, shambling out into the open fields bordering the woods and the town. They look like broken toys in the hazy, distant twilight, like windup soldiers bumping into each other, running on the fumes of malfunctioning engines, their blackened mouths contracting and expanding like irises. Even at this distance the rising moon reflects off their milky eyes in shimmering coins of light.
Martinez has three Browning .50 caliber machine guns—courtesy of the ransacked National Guard depot—placed at key junctures along the wall. One sits on the bonnet of a backhoe at the west corner of the wall. Another one is situated on top of a cherry picker at the east corner. The third is positioned on the roof of a semitrailer on the edge of the construction site. Each of the three machine guns already has an operator in place, each man equipped with a headset.
Long gleaming bandoliers of incendiary armor-piercing tracer bullets dangle from the stock of each weapon, with extras in steel boxes sitting nearby.
Other guards take positions along the wall—on ladders and bulldozer scoops—armed with semiautomatics and long-range sniper rifles loaded with 7.62-millimeter slugs that will penetrate drywall or sheet metal. These men do not wear headsets, but each know to watch for hand signals from Martinez, who positions himself at the top of a crane gantry in the center of the post office parking lot with a two-way. Two enormous klieg lights—scavenged from the town theater—are wired up to the generator chugging in the shadows of the post office loading dock.
A voice crackles on Martinez’s radio: “Martinez, you there?”
Martinez thumbs the talk button. “Copy that, chief, go ahead.”
“Bob and I are on our way up there, gonna need to harvest some fresh meat.”
Martinez frowns, his brow furrowing under his bandanna. “Fresh meat?”
The voice sizzles through the tiny speaker: “How much time we got before all the fun and games start?”
Martinez gazes out at the darkening horizon, the closest zombies still about three hundred and fifty yards away. He thumbs the switch. “Probably won’t be within head-shot range for another hour, maybe a little less than that.”
“Good,” says the voice. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”
* * *
Bob follows the Governor down Main Street toward a wagon train of semi trucks parked in a semicircle outside the looted Menards home and garden center. The Governor walks briskly through the wintry evening air, a bounce to his step, his boot heels clicking on the paving stones. “Times like these,” the Governor comments to Bob as they march along, “must feel like you’re back in the shit in Afghanistan.”
“Yes, sir, I have to admit it does sometimes. I remember one time I got a call to drive down to the front, pick up some marines coming off their watch. It was nighttime, cold as a well digger’s ass, just like this. Air raid sirens screaming, everybody hopped up for a firefight. Drove the APC down to this godforsaken trench in the sand, and what do I find? Bunch of whores from the local village giving out blow jobs to the grunts.”
“No shit.”
“I shit you not.” Bob shakes his head in dismay as he walks alongside the Governor. “Right in the middle of an air raid. So I tell them to can it and get in before I leave them there. One of the whores gets in the APC with the men, and I’m like, what the hell. Whatever. Just get me out of this fucking place.”
“Understandable.”
“So I take off with the gal still going at it in the back of the APC. But you’ll never guess what happened then.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Bob,” the Governor says with a grin.
“All of a sudden I hear a crash in the back, and I realize that bitch is an insurgent, and she brought an IED in with her, set it off in the cargo bay.” Bob shakes his head again. “Firewall protected me, but it was a mess. Took off one of the boys’ legs.”
“Un-fucking-believable,” the Governor marvels as he approaches the circle of eighteen-wheelers. Full darkness has fallen, and light from a torch illuminates the side of a Piggly Wiggly truck on which a grinning pig leers down at them in the dim light. “Hold that thought a second, Bob.” The Governor pounds his fist on the trailer. “Travis! You in there? Hey! Anybody home?”
In a cloud of cigar smoke, the rear door springs up on rusty hinges. A heavyset black man sticks his head out of the cargo hold. “Hey, boss … what can I do you for?”
“Take one of the empty trailers down to the north wall, on the double. We’ll meet you there with further instructions. Got that?”
“Got it, boss.”
The black man hops off the rear rail and vanishes around the side of the truck. The Governor takes a deep breath and then leads Bob around the circle of trucks, and then north along a side road toward the barricade. “Pretty goddamn amazing what a man will do for nookie,” the Governor muses as they stride along the dirt road.
“Ain’t it?”
“These girls you came in with, Bob, Lilly and … what’s-her-name?”
“Megan?”
“That’s the one. That little thing’s a firecracker. Am I right?”
Bob wipes his mouth. “Yeah, she’s a cute little gal.”
“Kinda flirty … but hey. Who am I to judge?” Another lascivious grin. “We do what we do to get by. Am I right, Bob?”
“Right as rain.” Bob walks along for a moment. “Just between you and me … I’m kinda sweet on her.”
The Governor looks at the older man with an odd mixture of surprise and pity. “This Megan gal? Well, that’s great, Bob. No shame in that.”
Bob looks down as he walks. “Love to spend the night with her just once.” Bob’s voice goes soft. “Just once.” He looks up at the Governor. “But, hell … I know that’s just a pipe dream.”
Philip cocks his head at the older man. “Maybe not, Bob … maybe not.”
Before Bob can muster a response a series of explosive clanging noises go off ahead of them. Brilliant sunbursts from the klieg lights suddenly tear open seams in the distant darkness from opposite corners of the wall, the silver beams sweeping out across the adjacent fields and tree lines, illuminating the oncoming horde of walking corpses.
The Governor leads Bob across the post office lot to the crane gantry, on which Martinez now prepares to give the order to open fire.
“Hold your fire, Martinez!” The Governor’s booming voice gets everybody’s attention.
Martinez gazes nervously down at the two men. “You sure about this, chief?”
The rumble of a Kenworth cab rises up behind the Governor, accompanied by the telltale beeping noises of a semi moving in reverse. Bob glances over his shoulder and sees an eighteen-wheeler backing into position by the north gate. Exhaust vapors pulse from the truck’s vertical stack, and Travis leans out the driver’s side window, chewing a cigar and wrestling the steering wheel.
“Gimme your walkie!” The Governor gestures at Martinez, who is already descending the metal ladder affixed to the side of the crane. Bob watches all this from a respectable distance behind the Governor. Something about all this mysterious business makes the older man uneasy.
Outside the wall the meandering mass of zombies closes the distance to two
hundred yards.
Martinez reaches the bottom of the ladder and hands over the two-way. The Governor thumbs the switch and barks into the mouthpiece. “Stevens! Can you hear me? You got your radio on?”
After a beat of crackling static the doctor’s voice replies, “Yes, I hear you and I don’t appreciate—”
“Shut up for a second. I want you to bring that tub-of-lard guardsman, Stinson, to the north wall.”
The voice crackles: “Stinson is still recovering, the man has lost a lot of blood in your little—”
“Don’t fucking argue with me, Stevens … JUST FUCKING DO IT NOW!”
The Governor clicks the radio off and throws it back to Martinez.
“Open the gate!” the Governor shouts at two workmen, who stand nearby with pickaxes and anxious expressions, awaiting orders.
The two workmen look at each other.
“You heard me!” the Governor bellows. “Open the goddamn gate!”
The workmen follow orders, throwing the bolt at one end of the gate. The gate swings open, letting in a gust of cold, rancid wind.
“You ask me, we’re pushing our luck with this routine,” Martinez mutters under his breath, slamming an ammo magazine into his assault rifle.
The Governor ignores the comment and hollers, “Travis! Back it into position!”
The truck shudders and beeps and rattles backward into the opening.
“Now put the ramp down!”
Bob watches, completely vexed by the proceedings, as Eugene hops out of his cab with a grunt and marches around behind the truck. He throws open the vertical door and lowers the ramp to the pavement.
In the glare of spotlights the zombie contingent approaches to within a hundred yards.
Shuffling footsteps draw Bob’s attention back over his shoulder.
From the shadowy center of town, in the flicker of burning trash barrels, Dr. Stevens emerges with his arm around the wounded guardsman, who hobbles along with the lethargic gait of a stroke victim.
“Watch this, Bob,” the Governor says, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the older man, and then, with a wink, adds, “Beats the hell outta the Middle East.”
FOURTEEN
The screams inside the empty trailer, amplified by the corrugated metal floor and steel walls, build and build, an aria of agony, which compels Bob, standing behind the crane, to look away, as the moving cadavers shamble toward the opening, drawn to the noise and smell of fear. Bob needs a drink more than ever now. He needs a lot of drinks. He needs to soak in the booze until he’s blind.
At least ninety percent of the herd—all shapes and sizes, in varying degrees of disintegration, faces contorted with scowling bloodlust—press toward the rear of the trailer. The first one trips on the foot of the ramp, falling face-first with a wet splat on the tread. Others follow closely, pushing their way up the incline, as Stinson shrieks inside the enclosure, his sanity torn to shreds.
The portly guardsman, bound to the front wall of the trailer with packing straps and chains, pisses himself, as the first walkers shuffle in for the feeding.
Outside the trailer, Martinez and his men keep an eye on the stragglers along the barricade, most of them milling about aimlessly in the glare of tungsten spotlights, cocking their gray faces and glazed eyes up at the night sky as though the screaming noises might be coming from the heavens. Only about a dozen of the dead miss this opportunity to feed. The men on the 50-calibers take aim, awaiting orders to blow the stragglers away.
The trailer fills up with specimens—the Governor’s growing collection of lab rats—until nearly three dozen walkers have swarmed Stinson. The unseen feeding frenzy ensues, and the screaming corrupts into watery, gagging death cries, as the last zombie staggers up the ramp and vanishes inside the mobile abattoir. The noises issuing out the back of the trailer now become almost feral, Stinson reduced to a mewling, squealing head of stock in a slaughterhouse, rendered by the ragged teeth and nails of the dead.
Out in the cold darkness Bob feels his soul contracting inward like an iris closing down. He needs a drink so badly his skull throbs. He barely hears the booming voice of the Governor.
“All right, Travis! Go ahead and pull trap now! Go ahead and close it down!”
The truck driver cautiously creeps around behind the vibrating death trailer and grabs for the rope hanging down from the lip of the door. He yanks it hard and fast, and the vertical gate slams down with a rusty squeak. Travis quickly latches the lock, and then backs away from the trailer as if from a time bomb.
“Take it back to the track, Travis! I’ll meet you there in a minute!”
The Governor turns and walks over to Martinez, who stands waiting on the lower rails of the crane. “All right, you can have your fun now,” the Governor says.
Martinez thumbs the radio send button. “Okay, guys—take the rest of them out.”
Bob jumps at the sudden roar of heavy artillery, the noise and sparks from the .50-calibers lighting up the night. Tracer bullets streak hot pink in the dark, crisscrossing the beams of magnesium-bright klieg lights, engaging their targets in plumes of black, oily blood mist. Bob turns away once again, not interested in seeing the walkers taken apart. The Governor, however, feels differently.
He climbs halfway up the crane ladder so he can see the festivities.
In short order the armor-piercing tracers eviscerate the stragglers. Skulls blossom, florets of brain matter spitting up into the night air, teeth and hair and cartilage and bone chips shattering. Some of the zombies remain upright for many moments, as the rounds spin them in macabre death jigs, arms flailing in the stage light. Bellies burst. Glistening tissue ejaculates in the glare.
The salvo ceases as abruptly as it had begun, the silence slamming hard in Bob’s ears.
For a moment the Governor savors the aftermath, the dripping sounds fading on the distant echoes of gunfire dying in the trees. The last few walkers still standing sink to the earth in heaps of bloody pulp and dead flesh, some of them now unrecognizable masses of vaguely human meat. Some of these mounds exude vapors in the chill air, mostly from the friction of the bullets and not from any kind of body heat. The Governor climbs down from his perch.
As the Piggly Wiggly truck pulls away with its load of moving cadavers, Bob swallows the urge to vomit. The ghastly noises from inside the trailer have diminished somewhat, Stinson reduced to a hollowed-out trough of flesh and bone. Now only the muffled smacking sounds of zombies feeding inside the enclosure fade away as the truck rattles toward the racetrack lot.
The Governor comes over to Bob. “Looks like you could use a drink.”
Bob cannot muster a reply.
“C’mon, let’s go have a cool one,” the Governor suggests, slapping the man on the back. “I’m buying.”
* * *
By the next morning, the north lots have been cleaned up and all evidence of the massacre has been erased. People go about their business as though nothing ever happened, and the rest of that week passes uneventfully.
Over the next five days a few walkers drift into the range of the .50-calibers—drawn by the commotion of the hordes—but mostly things remain quiet. Christmas comes and goes with very little ceremony. Most of the inhabitants of Woodbury have given up on following the calendar.
A few feeble attempts at holiday cheer seem to exacerbate the grim proceedings. Martinez and his men decorate a tree in the courthouse lobby, and they put some tinsel on the gazebo in the square, but that’s about it. The Governor pipes Christmas music through the racetrack PA system, but it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. The weather stays fairly mild—no snow to speak of, with temperatures remaining in the upper forties.
On Christmas Eve, Lilly goes to the infirmary to have some of her injuries checked out by Dr. Stevens, and after the examination, the doctor invites Lilly to stick around for a little impromptu holiday party. Alice joins them, and they open cans of ham and sweet potatoes—and they even break out a case of Cabernet, which
Stevens has been hiding in the storage closet—and they toast things like the old days, better times, and Josh Lee Hamilton.
Lilly senses that the doctor is watching her closely for signs of post-traumatic stress, maybe depression or some other kind of mental disturbance. But ironically, Lilly has never felt more focused and grounded in her life. She knows what she has to do. She knows that she cannot live like this much longer, and she is biding her time until an opportunity to escape presents itself. But maybe on some deeper level it is Lilly who is doing the observing.
Maybe she is subconsciously looking for allies, accomplices, collaborators.
Halfway through the evening, Martinez shows up—Stevens invited the young man earlier that day to stop by for a drink—and Lilly learns that she is not the only one here who wants out. After a few cocktails, Martinez gets talkative, and reveals that he fears the Governor will eventually lead them off a cliff. They argue about which is the lesser of two evils—tolerating the Governor’s madness or drifting out in the world without a safety net—and they come to zero conclusions. They drink some more.
At length, the evening deteriorates into a drunken bacchanal of off-key caroling and reminiscences of holidays past—all of which depresses everyone even further. The more they drink, the worse they feel. But amid all the lubricating Lilly learns new things—both trivial and important—about these three lost souls. She notices that Dr. Stevens has the worst singing voice she has ever heard, and that Alice has a major crush on Martinez, and that Martinez pines for an ex-wife in Arkansas.
Most importantly, though, Lilly gets a sense that the four of them are bonding in their collective misery, and that bond might serve them well.
The Walking Dead Collection Page 54