The other woman sips her tea thoughtfully. Clad in a dull-white lab coat under her parka, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she’s the town nurse—an earnest, soft-spoken girl named Alice—who has taken a keen interest in Lilly’s tenuous place in the town’s hierarchy. “It’s none of my business,” Alice says finally, speaking softly enough to go unheard by any nearby revelers, “but if I were you, I would keep my feelings to myself.”
Lilly looks at her. “What are you talking about?”
“For the time being, at least.”
“I’m not following.”
Alice seems vaguely uncomfortable talking about this in broad daylight, in plain sight of the others. “He’s watching us, you know.”
“What?”
“Right now, he’s keeping tabs.”
“You gotta be—”
Lilly stops herself. She realizes that Alice is referring to the shadowy figure standing in the mouth of the vaulted stone passageway directly to the north, about thirty yards away, under the defunct scoreboard. Draped in shadow, silhouetted by the cage lights behind him, the man stands with hands on his hips, watching the action on the infield with a satisfied gleam in his eyes.
Of average height and build, clad in black, he has a large-caliber pistol holstered on his hip. At first glance, he appears almost harmless, benign, like a proud land baron or medieval noble surveying his manor. But even at this distance, Lilly can sense his serpentine gaze—as cunning as a cobra’s—scanning every corner of the stands. And every few seconds, that electric gaze falls on the spot at which Lilly and Alice now sit shivering in the spring winds.
“Better if he believes everything is just fine,” Alice murmurs into her tea.
“Jesus Christ,” Lilly mutters, staring down at the littered cement floor beneath the bleacher seats. Another surge of cheers and applause rises up around her as the gladiators go at it some more on the infield, Bruce going postal with his ax, Gabe getting boxed in by a cluster of chained biters. Lilly pays little attention to it.
“Smile, Lilly.”
“You smile.… I don’t have the stomach for it.” Lilly looks up at the grisly action on the field for a moment, the mace tearing through the rotten craniums of the living dead. “I just don’t get it.” She shakes her head and looks away.
“Don’t get what?”
Lilly takes a deep breath and looks at Alice. “What about Stevens?”
Alice gives her a shrug. Dr. Stevens has been Alice’s lifeline for almost a year now, keeping her sane, teaching her the nursing trade, and showing her how to patch up battered gladiators with the dwindling storehouse of medical supplies stored in the network of catacombs beneath the arena. “What about him?”
“I don’t see him playing along with this hideous shit.” Lilly rubs her face. “What makes him so special—that he doesn’t have to play nice with the Governor? Especially after what happened in January.”
“Lilly—”
“C’mon, Alice.” Lilly looks at her. “Admit it. The good doctor never shows up at these things, and he’s constantly grumbling about the Governor’s bloodthirsty freak shows to anyone who’ll listen.”
Alice licks her lips, turns, and puts a warning hand on Lilly’s arm. “Listen to me. Don’t kid yourself. The only reason Dr. Stevens is tolerated is because of his medical skills.”
“So?”
“So he’s not exactly a welcome part of the Governor’s little kingdom.”
“What are you saying, Alice?”
The younger woman takes another deep breath, and then lowers her voice even further. “All I’m saying is, nobody’s immune. Nobody’s got job security around here.” She tightens her grip on Lilly’s arm. “What if they find another doctor, one who’s a little more gung ho? Stevens could very easily end up out there.”
Lilly pulls herself away from the nurse, rises to her feet, and glances out at the ghastly action on the infield. “I’m so done with this, I can’t take it anymore.” She shoots a glance at the figure silhouetted in the shadow-bound cloister to the north. “I don’t care if he’s watching.”
Lilly starts toward the exit.
Alice grabs her. “Lilly, just promise me … you’ll be careful. Okay? Keep your head down? As a favor to me?”
Lilly gives her a cold, enigmatic little smile. “I know what I’m doing, Alice.”
Then, Lilly turns, descends the stairs, and vanishes out the exit.
* * *
It’s been over two years since the first of the dead reanimated and made themselves known to the living. In that time, the larger world outside the rural backwaters of Georgia gradually winked out with the slow certainty of metastasizing cells, the pockets of survivors groping for purchase in abandoned office parks, deserted retail outlets, and derelict communities. As the walker population incubated and multiplied, and the dangers increased, tribal alliances among humans formed themselves in earnest.
The township of Woodbury, Georgia, in the county of Meriwether, situated in the western part of the state, about seventy miles south of Atlanta, has become a virtual anomaly in the realm of survivor settlements. Originally a small farming village of about a thousand people, spanning a six-block stretch of main drag and railroad crossings, the town has been completely fortified and buttressed by the makeshift matériel of war.
Semitrucks retrofitted with fifty-caliber machine gun placements have been canted across the outer corners. Old railroad cars have been wrapped in concertina wire and positioned to block points of egress. Down through the center of town, walled ramparts surround the central business district—some of the barricades just recently completed—within which people live their forlorn lives clinging to memories of church socials and outdoor barbeques.
Making her way across the central walled area, striding purposefully down the cracked paving stones of Main Street, Lilly Caul tries to ignore the feeling that she gets whenever she sees the Governor’s goons strolling the storefronts with AR-15s cradled high across their chests. They’re not just keeping the walkers out … they’re also keeping us in.
Lilly has been persona non grata in Woodbury for months now, ever since her ill-fated coup in January. It was obvious to Lilly, even back then, that the Governor had gotten out of control, his violent regime turning Woodbury into a death carnival. Lilly had managed to recruit a few of the town’s saner denizens—including Stevens, Alice, and Martinez, one of the Governor’s right-hand men—to snatch the Governor one night and take him for a ride out into walker country for a little tough love. The plan was to accidentally-on-purpose get the Governor eaten. But walkers have a way of gumming up the works of the best-laid plans, and in the midst of the mission, a herd had formed out of nowhere. The whole enterprise reverted to a survival struggle … and the Governor lived to rule another day.
Oddly, in some kind of Darwinian twist, the assassination attempt only served to solidify and strengthen the Governor’s power base. To the residents already under his spell, he became Alexander the Great returning to Macedonia … Stonewall Jackson coming back to Richmond, bloodied but unbowed, a badass pit bull born to lead. Nobody seemed to care that their leader was obviously—at least in Lilly’s mind—a pure sociopath. These are brutal times, and brutal times call for brutal leadership. And for the conspirators, the Governor had become an abusive parental figure—teaching “lessons” and meting out his petty punishments with relish.
Lilly approaches a row of little redbrick two-story edifices lined up along the edge of the commercial district. Once quaint little landscaped condo complexes, the buildings now bear the marks of plague shelters. The picket fences have been wrapped in razor wire, the flowerbeds fallow and stony and littered with shotgun shells, the bougainvillea vines over the lintels as dead and brown as frayed cables.
Gazing up at all the boarded windows, Lilly wonders once again, for the millionth time, why she stays in this horrible, desolate, dysfunctional family known as Woodbury. The truth is, she stays because she has nowhere else
to go. Nobody has anywhere else to go. The land outside these walls is rife with walking dead, the byways clogged with death and ruin. Lilly stays because she’s afraid, and fear is the one great common denominator in this new world. The fear drives people into themselves, it triggers base impulses, and leeches out the worst of the feral instincts and behavior lying dormant in the human soul.
But for Lilly Caul, the caged-animal experience has drawn out something else that has lurked deep within her for most of her life, something that has haunted her dreams and lurked in her marrow like a recessive gene: loneliness.
An only child growing up in middle-class Marietta, she usually ended up alone: playing alone, sitting alone in the back of the cafeteria or the school bus … always alone. In high school, her brittle intelligence, stubbornness, and sharp wit set her apart from the pom-pom-girl social scene. She grew up lonely, and the latent weight of this loneliness has dogged her in the post-plague world. She has lost everything that has meant anything to her—her father; her boyfriend, Josh; her friend, Megan.
She has lost everything.
Her apartment sits at the east end of Main Street, one of the shabbier redbricks in the complex. Dead kudzu clings to the west wall like mold, the windows veined in black, shriveled vines. The rooftop sprouts bent antennas and ancient satellite dishes that most likely won’t be receiving any signal ever again. As Lilly approaches, the low ceiling of clouds has burned off and the midday sun, as pale and cold as a fluorescent light, blazes down on her, making perspiration break out on the back of her neck.
She steps up to the outer door, fishing for her keys. But she pauses suddenly, something catching her attention out of the corner of her eye. She turns and sees a tattered figure slumped on the ground across the street, a man hunkered against a storefront. The sight of him sends a jolt of sadness down her midsection.
She puts her keys away and crosses the street. The closer she gets to him, the more clearly she can hear his ragged breathing—clogged with phlegm and misery—and his low, wheezing voice, mumbling incomprehensible exhalations in his drunken stupor.
Bob Stookey, one of Lilly’s last true friends, lies curled in a fetal position, shivering, passed out in his threadbare, reeking, navy pea coat, pushed up against the door of a derelict hardware store. The window above him bears the ironic, sun-faded advertisement in cheerful multicolored letters: SPRING CLEAN-UP SALE. The pain etched on the army medic’s deeply lined, leathery face—which is pressed against the pavement like wet trash—breaks Lilly’s heart.
The man has spiraled since the events of the past winter, and now he may be the only other resident of Woodbury who is more lost than Lilly Caul.
“Poor sweet thing.” Lilly speaks softly as she reaches over to a ratty woolen blanket bunched at his feet. The stench of body odor, stale smoke, and cheap whiskey wafts toward her. She pulls the blanket over him, an empty booze bottle rolling out of the fabric and cracking against the breakfront beside the door.
Bob gurgles. “… gotta tell her…”
Lilly kneels beside him, stroking his shoulder, wondering if she should clean him up, get him off the street. She also wonders if the “her” he’s babbling about is Megan. He was sweet on the girl—poor guy—and Megan’s suicide pulverized him. Now Lilly pulls the blanket up to his wattled neck and pats him softly, “It’s okay, Bob … she’s … she’s in a better—”
“… gotta tell…”
For the briefest instant, Lilly jerks at the sight of his fluttering eyes, revealing the bloodshot whites underneath. Has he turned? Her heart races. “Bob? It’s Lilly. You’re having a nightmare.”
Lilly swallows the fear, realizing that he’s still alive—if one could call this alive—and he’s simply writhing in a drunken fever dream, probably reliving the endless rerun of stumbling upon Megan Lafferty dangling at the end of a rope coiled off a broken-down apartment deck.
“Bob…?”
His eyes flutter open, just for an instant, unfocused but glazed with anguish and pain. “Gotta—tell her—what he said,” he wheezes.
“It’s Lilly, Bob,” she says, softly stroking his arm. “It’s okay. It’s me.”
Then the old medic meets her gaze, and he says something else in that halting mucous wheeze that makes Lilly’s spine go cold. She hears it clearly this time, and she realizes the “her” is not Megan.
The “her” is Lilly.
And the thing that Bob Stookey has to tell her will haunt Lilly for a lifetime.
TWO
That day, in the arena, Gabe delivers the final blow that ends the contest at just after three o’clock Eastern standard time, a full hour into the fight. The nail-studded head of the mace slams into Bruce’s ribs—his midsection protected with body armor concealed under his army fatigues—and Bruce goes down for the count. Exhausted from the rough-and-tumble charade, the black man stays down, veiled by a dust cloud, breathing hard into the dirt.
“WE GOT A WINNER!”
The amplified voice startles many in the stands, the crackling noise issuing forth from giant horns positioned around the arena, powered by generators rumbling underneath the grounds. Gabe does his strut, waving the mace in his best William Wallace impersonation. The jeers and applause mask the low communal growling of living dead chained to posts all around Gabe, many of them still reaching for a morsel of human flesh, their putrid mouths working and pulsing and drooling with robotic hunger.
“STICK AROUND, FOLKS, FOR AN AFTER-SHOW MESSAGE FROM THE GOVERNOR!!”
On cue the speakers crackle and thump with the downbeat of a heavy metal tune, a buzz-saw electric guitar filling the air, as a battalion of stagehands floods the infield. Most are young men in hoodies and leather jackets, carrying long iron pikes with hooked ends.
They circle around the walkers. Chains are detached, collars hooked, voices raised, orders given by foremen, and one by one—in a thunderhead of dust—the workers begin leading the monsters across the infield toward the closest portal. Some of the creatures bite at the air as they are ushered back down into the shadows beneath the arena, others snarling and flinging gouts of black drool like reluctant actors being dragged offstage.
Alice watches this from the stands with silent distaste. The other spectators are on their feet now, clapping along with the headbanger tune, hollering at the horde of undead being led away. Alice reaches down to the floor beneath her and finds her black medical bag under the bench. She grabs it, quickly struggles out of her section, and then hurries down the steps toward the infield.
By the time Alice makes it to track level, the two gladiators—Gabe and Bruce—are walking away, heading toward the south exit. She hurries after them. Out of the corner of her eye, she senses a ghostly figure emerging from the shadows of the north portal behind her, making a dramatic entrance that would rival King Lear treading the boards at Stratford-Upon-Avon.
He comes across the infield in his leathers and studs, his stovepipe boots raising dust, his long coat flapping in the breeze behind him. He looks like a grizzled bounty hunter from the nineteenth century, his pistol banging on his hip as he lopes along. The crowd surges with excitement as they see him, a wave of applause and cheers. One of the workmen, an older man in a Harley T-shirt and ZZ Top beard, scuttles toward him with a hard-wired microphone.
Alice turns and catches up with the two exhausted warriors. “Bruce, hold up!”
Walking with a pronounced limp, the big black man reaches the edge of the south archway, pauses, and turns. His left eye is completely swollen shut, his teeth stained in blood. “Whaddaya want?”
“Let me see that eye,” she says, coming up to him, kneeling down, and opening the medical bag.
“I’m fine.”
Gabe joins them with a smirk on his face. “What’s wrong, Brucie got a boo-boo?”
Alice takes a closer look, dabbing the bridge of his nose with gauze. “Jesus, Bruce … why don’t you let me take you down to see Dr. Stevens.”
“It’s just a busted nose,”
Bruce says, pushing her away. “I said I’m fine!”
He kicks the medical bag over, the instruments and supplies spilling across the dirt. Alice lets out an exasperated groan and bends down to pick up the pieces, when the music cuts off and the sound of a low, velvety, amplified voice rings out over the winds and noise of the crowd.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN … FRIENDS AND FELLOW RESIDENTS OF WOODBURY … I WANT TO THANK ALL OF YOU FOR ATTENDING THE SHOW TODAY. IT WAS A BARN BURNER!”
Alice glances over her shoulder and sees the Governor standing center field.
The man knows how to work a room. Sizing up the crowd with fire in his gaze, grasping the hand mike with the puffed-up sincerity of a megachurch minister, he has a weird, charismatic aura about him. Not a huge man, not especially handsome—in fact, upon close scrutiny one might even call him a bit scruffy and malnourished—Philip Blake still gives off an air of preternatural confidence. He has dark eyes that reflect the light like geodes, and his gaunt face is festooned with the handlebar whiskers of a third-world bandit.
He turns and nods toward the south exit, stiffening Alice’s spine as she feels his cold gaze on her. The amplified voice crackles and echoes: “AND I WANT TO SEND A SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO OUR FEARLESS GLADIATORS, BRUCE AND GABE! SHOW ’EM SOME LOVE, Y’ALL—GIVE ’EM A HAND!”
The cheers and whooping and hollering climb several registers, ringing off the metal stanchions and far awnings like a hungry pack of barking dogs. The Governor lets it play out, a conductor patiently prodding a symphony. Alice closes her medical bag and stands.
Bruce waves heroically to the crowd, and then follows Gabe into the shadows of the cloister, vanishing down the exit ramp with the formality of a religious ritual.
Across the infield, Philip Blake lowers his head, waiting for the wave of cheers to wash back out to sea.
In the gathering silence, he lowers his voice slightly, speaking softly, his velvety voice carrying over the wind: “NOW … GETTING SERIOUS FOR A MINUTE … I KNOW OUR SUPPLIES HAVE BEEN GETTING A LITTLE LOW. MANY OF YOU HAVE BEEN SCRIMPIN’ AND RATIONING. MAKING SACRIFICES.”
The Walking Dead Collection Page 62