Stevens lands on top of his assailant with a wet grunt, the blood washing over and baptizing the giant biter underneath him in a torrent of fluid as black and oily as molasses in the darkness. In a strangled, insensate voice, the doctor jabbers, “What—? What is it? Is it—? Is it one of them? Is it—? Is it a biter?”
The others lunge toward him, but Alice has already reached for the sentry’s AK, which dangles on its strap over Martinez’s shoulder, her voice booming, “GIVE ME THAT!”
“Hey!” Martinez can’t tell what’s happening, the tug on his shoulder accompanied by voices yelling all around him, and the other men pushing past him.
Alice already has the AK up and aimed, and then she’s pulling the trigger—thank God the kid on the wall keeps his weapon locked and loaded, the safety off at all times—and the gun barks.
A bouquet of fire sparks and flickers out of the short muzzle as the shell casings fly, and the tracers burst a chain of holes in the biter’s temple, cheek, jaw, shoulder, and half its torso. The thing twitches and wriggles in its death throes beneath the wounded doctor, and Alice keeps firing, and firing, and firing, until the magazine clicks empty, and the slide snaps open—and she keeps firing.
“It’s okay … it’s okay, Alice.”
The faint sound of a male voice is the first thing that penetrates her ringing ears and her traumatized brain. She lowers the gun and realizes that Dr. Stevens is addressing her from the blood-soaked heap of a funeral bier on which he lies.
“Oh-God-Doctor—DR. STEVENS!” She tosses the assault rifle to the ground with a clatter and goes to him. She drops to her knees, and reaches for his neck, getting her fingertips wet with his arterial blood as she feels for a pulse, trying to remember the CPR lessons he provided her, the trauma unit protocols, when she realizes he is tugging at her lab coat with his blood-spattered fingers.
“I’m not … dying … Alice … think of it … scientifically,” he utters around a mouth filling up with blood. In the darkness, his face looks almost serene. The others press in behind Alice and look on and listen closely. “I’m just … evolving … into a different … a worse … life form.”
The horror spreads from person to person hovering over him, from face to face, as Alice fights her tears and strokes his cheek. “Doctor—”
“I’ll still exist, Alice … in some way,” he utters in barely a whisper. “Take the supplies, Alice … you’ll need them … to take care of these people. Use what I taught you. Now go … go … go on.”
Alice stares as the doctor’s life drains out of him, his intelligent eyes going glassy, and then empty, gaping at the nothingness. She lets her head loll forward but no tears will come. The desolation in her core won’t allow tears to come now.
Martinez stands over her, watching all this with nervous intensity. A fist of contradictory emotions grips his insides. He likes these people—the doctor and Alice—regardless of their hatred of the Governor, their petty betrayals, their scheming and gossiping and sarcasm and disrespect. God help Martinez—he likes them. He feels a weird kinship with them, and now he’s groping for purchase in the dark.
Alice rises to her feet, picking up the satchel of medical supplies.
Martinez touches her shoulder, and softly says, “We gotta move.”
Alice nods, says nothing, stares at the bodies.
“People in town will think the shots were just the guard taking out biters that got too close to the fence,” Martinez goes on, his voice hurried and taut with tension. He glances over his shoulder at the other two men, who stand by, looking rattled. Martinez turns back to Alice. “But the sound will attract more biters—and we need to be gone before they get here.”
He looks at the doctor’s slack face, stippled with blood, frozen in death.
“I—He was a good friend,” Martinez adds finally. “I’ll miss him too.”
Alice gives one last nod, and then turns away. She nods at Martinez.
Without another word, Martinez grabs the AK and gives a hand gesture to the others, and then leads the three survivors down a side road—and on toward the town limits—their silhouettes swallowed within moments by absolute, unforgiving, implacable darkness.
* * *
“Damn it, honey—eat it!” The Governor lowers himself to his hands and knees on the foul-smelling carpet of his living room, holding a severed human foot by its big toe in front of the dead little girl. The Japanese sword lies on the floor close by—a treasure, a talisman, a spoil of war that the Governor hasn’t let out of his sight since the debacle at the racetrack—its implications now the furthest thing from his mind. “It’s not completely fresh,” he says, indicating the gray appendage, “but I swear this thing was walking not two hours ago.”
The tiny cadaver jerks against its chain eighteen inches from his hand. It emits another little growl—a broken Chatty Cathy doll—and turns its frosted-glass eyes away from the tidbit.
“C’mon, Penny, it’s not that bad.” He inches closer and waves the dripping, severed foot in front of her. It’s pretty big, hard to tell if it’s male or female—the toes are small but all natural, no remnants of polish—and it has already begun to turn blue-green and stiffen up with rigor mortis. “And it’s only going to get worse, you don’t eat it now. C’mon, sweetie, do it for—”
An enormous thud makes the Governor jerk with a start on the floor.
“What the fuck!” He turns toward the front door, across the room.
Another massive thud rings out. The Governor rises to his feet.
A third impact on the door results in drywall dust sifting down from the lintel, and a faint cracking noise along the seams of the deadbolt.
“What the hell do you want?!” he calls out. “And don’t beat on my goddamn door so hard!”
The fourth impact snaps the deadbolt and chain, the door swinging open so hard it bangs into the adjacent wall in a burst of wood shards and dust, the knob embedding itself into the wood like a dowel.
The inertia drives the intruder into the room on a whirlwind.
The Governor tenses in the center of the living room—fists balling up, teeth clamping down in a tableau of fight-or-flight instinct. He looks as though he’s seeing a ghost materialize next to his secondhand sofa.
Michonne tumbles into the apartment, nearly falling on her face from all the forward momentum.
She skids to a halt three feet away from the subject of her quest.
Getting her balance back, she squares her shoulders, fists also clenching, feet planted firmly now, head tilted forward in an offensive posture.
For the briefest of moments, they stand facing each other. Michonne has put herself together on the way over—her jumpsuit straightened, her top tucked in, headband tightened around her lush braids—to the point where she looks as if she’s ready to begin a workday or possibly go to a funeral. After an unbearable pause—the two combatants staring each other down in an almost pathologically intense manner—the first sound emitted comes out of the Governor.
“Well, well.” His voice is low, flat, cold, with zero affect or emotion. “This should be interesting.”
SEVENTEEN
“My turn,” Lilly says, her voice barely audible above the din of crickets and the breeze that is rattling the branches around the dark clearing. She finds a snapshot taken on a disposable camera of her and Megan at a bar in Myrtle Beach, both of them completely baked, their eyes glazed over and red as cinders. She stands and goes over to the hole in the ground. “Here’s to my BFF, my gal pal, my old friend Megan, may she rest in peace.”
The photograph flutters and falls like a dead leaf into the fire pit.
“To Megan,” Austin says, and takes another sip of the sugary juice. “Okay … next up … my bros.” He pulls a small, rusty harmonica from his pocket. “I’d like to drink to my brothers, John and Tommy Ballard, who got killed by walkers in Atlanta last year.”
He tosses the harmonica in the pit. The little metal apparatus clunks and bounces o
ff the hard ground. Austin gazes down at it, his eyes growing distant and shiny. “Great musicians, good dudes … I hope they’re in a better place right now.”
Austin wipes his eyes as Lilly raises her cup and says softly, “To John and Tommy.”
They each drink another sip.
“My next one’s a little strange,” Lilly says, finding the little .22 caliber slug and holding it up between her thumb and index finger. The brass gleams in the moonlight. “We’re surrounded by death, every day; death is everywhere,” she says. “I’d like to fucking bury it … I know it doesn’t change anything but I just want to do it. For the baby. For Woodbury.”
She tosses the bullet in the hole.
Austin stares at the little metal round for a moment, then mutters, “For our baby.”
Lilly raises her cup. “For our baby … and for the future.” She thinks for a moment. “And for the human race.”
They both stare at the bullet.
“In the name of the Holy Spirit,” Lilly says very softly, staring down at the hole in the ground.
* * *
A fight—the spontaneous hand-to-hand kind—comes in many varieties. In the East, the business of fighting is Zenlike, studied, controlled, academic—the opponents often coming at each other with years of training behind them, and a sort of mathematical precision. In Asia, the weaker opponent learns to use the adversary’s strengths against them, the mêlées settled promptly. On the other end of the spectrum, in competitive rings around the world, freestyle battles can last for hours, with many rounds, the final outcome resting upon the physical stamina of each pugilist.
A third kind of fistfight occurs in the dark back alleys of American cities, during which opponents engage in a wholly different kind of battle. Fast and brutal and unpredictable—sometimes awkward—the common street fight is usually over within seconds. Street fighters have a tendency to shotgun their blows at each other, willy-nilly, driven by rage, and the whole fracas usually ends in a draw … or worse, with somebody finally pulling a knife or a firearm to bring things to a quick and mortal conclusion.
The battle that ensues in the Governor’s foul-smelling, dimly lit living room that night encompasses all three styles, and spans a grand total of eighty-seven seconds—the first five of which involve very little fighting at all. It begins with the two opponents planted where they stand, staring into each other’s eyes.
Quite a lot of nonverbal information is exchanged during those first five seconds. Michonne keeps her gaze welded to the Governor’s, and the Governor stares back at her—neither adversary giving the other so much as a blink—and the room seems to crystallize like a diorama seized up in ice.
Then, right around second number three, the Governor averts his gaze for a scintilla of a moment to the floor on his right flank.
He makes note of both the child and the sword, each of which lie within his grasp. Penny seems oblivious to the human drama unfolding around her, her livid, pasty face buried in the bucket of entrails. The sword gleams in the dull light of an incandescent bulb.
The Governor tries his hardest, over the course of that split instant, not to register any panic, or any outwardly visual concern for his little dead girl’s safety, or the idea forming in his mind—the human brain can formulate complex notions in the smallest soupçon of time, in less time than it takes a synapse to fire—that he just might be able to grab the sword and conclude matters quickly.
In the space of that single second—the third in a series of eighty-seven—Michonne also flicks her own gaze toward the girl and the katana saber.
Second number four finds the Governor snapping his gaze back up to Michonne’s smoldering glare. In that time, she has also glanced back at the Governor.
Over the duration of the next one and a half seconds—number four and a portion of number five—the two enemies read each other’s look.
The Governor knows now that she knows what he’s thinking, and she knows he knows, and the next half second—the rest of number five—recalls the end of a countdown. The engines fire and the thing explodes.
It takes six seconds for the next phase of the encounter to unfold.
The Governor dives for the sword, and Michonne lets out a booming cry—“NO!”—and by the time the Governor’s shoulder hits the carpet three feet from the blade, and his outstretched hand has approached the general vicinity of that magnificent handle with its scaly serpentine pattern, Michonne has also moved in with the suddenness of a thunderclap.
She instinctively delivers the first blow of the conflict at second number eleven. Her leg comes up and she kicks out at him. The hard edge of her boot strikes the side of his face below the temple just as he is grasping the sword’s handle.
The sickly crack of hard leather fracturing a human mandible fills the room—a sound not unlike a celery stalk snapping—and the Governor winces backward in agony, a thread of blood flinging from his mouth. He falls onto his back, the sword unmoved.
The next eight seconds are a mishmash of explosive movement and sudden stillness. Michonne takes advantage of the Governor’s punch-drunken stupor—he has managed to roll over onto elbows and knees now, his face leaking blood all over the place, his lungs heaving—by darting quickly toward the fallen sword. She snatches it up and whirls back around in less than three seconds, and then spends the next four seconds marshalling her breath and preparing to deliver the killing blow.
By this point, exactly nineteen seconds have elapsed, and it looks as though Michonne has the advantage. Penny has glanced up from her feeding trough and softly growls and sputters at the two adversaries. The Governor manages to rise on his wobbly knees.
His face, without him even being aware of it, takes on an expression of pure unadulterated bloodlust, his mind a TV screen at the end of a programming day—a blank wall of humming white noise—blocking out all extraneous thought other than killing this fucking bitch right this instant. He instinctively lowers his center of gravity as a cobra might coil itself before striking.
He can see the sword in her hand like a divining rod absorbing all the energy in the room. He drips blood and drool from his mouth. Michonne stands only five feet away from him now, with the sword raised. Twenty-seven seconds have transpired. One well-placed strike with that beveled razor’s edge and it will all be over but that doesn’t even faze the Governor now.
At thirty seconds, he lunges.
The next maneuver on her part covers a total of three seconds. One, she lets him get within inches of her, and two, she unleashes one of her patented groin kicks, and three, the blow immobilizes him. At this proximity, the steel-reinforced toe of her work boot connects with such extreme results that the Governor literally folds in half, all the breath forced out of him, the mixture of blood, snot, and saliva in his mouth spewing out in a spray across the floor. He lets out a garbled grunt and falls to his knees before her, gasping for breath, the pain like a battering ram smashing through his guts. He flails his arms for a moment as though trying to hold on to something, and then falls to his hands and knees.
Bloody vomit roars out of him, splashing the carpet at her feet.
At forty seconds, things settle down. The Governor wretches and coughs and tries to get himself together on the floor. He can feel her standing over him, gazing down at him with that eerie calm on her face. He can sense her raising the blade. He swallows the bitter taste of bile in his throat and closes his eyes and waits for the whisper of hand-forged steel to kiss the back of his neck and end it all. This is it. He waits to die on his floor like a whipped dog. He opens his eyes.
She hesitates. He hears her voice, as smooth and tranquil and cold as a cat purring: “I didn’t want it to be this quick.”
Fifty seconds.
“I don’t want it to be over,” she says, standing over him, the blade wavering.
Fifty-five seconds.
Deep in the recesses of the Governor’s brain, a spark kindles. He has one chance. One last shot at her. He feigns anot
her cough and doesn’t look up, coughs again, but ever so subtly he blinks and peers at her feet—those steel-toed boots spread shoulder-width in front of him—only inches away from his hands.
One last chance.
At the sixtieth second, he pounces at her lower region. Taken by surprise, the woman tumbles backward.
The Governor lands on top of her like a lover, the sword flying across the floor. The impact knocks the wind out of her. He can smell her musky scent—sweat and cloves and the copper-tang of dried blood—as she writhes beneath him, the sword only about eighteen inches away on the carpet. The gleam of the blade catches his eye.
At second number sixty-five, he makes a play for the sword, reaching for the hilt. But before he has a chance to get ahold of it, her teeth sink into the meat of his shoulder where it meets his neck, and she bites him so hard, her teeth penetrate flesh and layers of subcutaneous tissue, and finally down into muscle.
The searing pain is so sudden and enormous and sharp that he shrieks like a little girl. He rolls away from her—moving on instinct now—clutching at his neck and feeling the wetness seeping through his fingers. Michonne rears back and spits a mouthful of tissue, the blood running down the front of her in thick rivulets.
“Fuh—FUH-KING!—BITCH!” He manages to sit up, stanching the flow of blood with his hand. It doesn’t occur to him that she might have very well breached his jugular and he’s already a dead man. It doesn’t occur to him that she’s going for the sword. It doesn’t even occur to him that she’s rising up over him again.
All he can think about right then—at seventy-three seconds into the fight—is stopping all the blood from leaking out of his neck.
Seventy-five seconds.
He swallows the metallic taste in his mouth and tries to see through his watery eyes as his blood soaks the ancient carpet.
At seventy-six seconds, he hears inhaling sounds as his opponent takes a deep breath and rises up over him again and mutters something that sounds a little like, “Got a better idea.”
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