“GABE!”
The Governor’s voice sounds muffled and garbled to his own damaged ears. He manages to dart across the gap between the tank and the flatbed. By this point, Gabe is hauling himself back to his feet, blinking away the shock and pain. The Governor reaches the fat man and grabs the nape of his turtleneck as though lifting a runt from a litter. “GET THE FUCK OVER HERE!”
Philip drags Gabe across the wasted ground to the rear of the Abrams.
“C’MERE!” The Governor slams the portly Gabriel Harris against the back of the tank, knocking the wind out of Gabe’s lungs as more high-velocity blasts ping and spark off the armored Abrams.
“Wh-what the—!!” Gabe convulses with agony, jerking at the buzz-saw grind of the .50 cal twenty yards away. Bullets blaze around them for a moment, distracting them, making each of them duck and twitch with nervous tension, giving each man a weird sort of tunnel vision.
Neither man sees the giant, battered, road-worn Winnebago camper roaring out of the trees directly to the west, skirting the edges of the battlefront in a fogbank of dust. In fact, at first, nobody in the attack force notices the new addition to the war zone.
* * *
“We have got to rethink this fucking thing,” Gabe proclaims a few seconds later in a strangled, exhausted voice, standing with the Governor behind the armored tank while bullets whiz over their heads like wasps. Burning his gaze into the Governor’s solitary eye, speaking loudly enough to be heard above the noise of intermittent gunfire, Gabe deploys a tone of voice he has never used with the Governor—a tone dripping with recrimination and anger. “Our people are scared shitless! They’re getting the shit beat out of them—dropping like flies—you gotta do something, man, you gotta fucking take charge!”
The Governor’s left hand thrusts out and grabs Gabe by the throat, slamming the heavyset man against the riveted hull of the Abrams. “Shut your fucking mouth, Gabe! We’re not gonna pussy out this time—we’re taking this place down—it’s now or never!!”
In that tense millisecond of a pause, Gabe stares wide-eyed at his boss—his mentor, his father figure—and a spark of shame kindles in Gabe’s gaze. Neither man is aware of the Winnebago circling around the far western edge of the battlefield, far enough back to go unseen by most of the combatants—even those within the confines of the prison. The camper skids to a stop in a whirlwind of dust, and a figure appears like a specter on the roof, a solitary woman holding a sniper rifle.
“Okay, okay, I’m s-sorry, sorry,” Gabe babbles, both his gloved hands on the Governor’s wrist, trying to wrench it off the ample girth of his bullish neck. Philip releases his grip. Gabe hyperventilates as he goes on raving over the noise of the firefight. “I’m just saying, we’re getting beat up and we need a plan! We can’t just keep hammering away at these cocksuckers without a—”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Philip Blake trains his blazing eye on the burly man and hears voices in his head bubbling up from the dark catacombs of his brain—Philip’s dead, gone, Philip is dead and buried, he’s dust—and Philip flinches suddenly at the unexpected banshee shrieking in his head—Shut up, shut up! Guns roar behind him, the crackle making him twitch, distracting him from the sight of the lone sniper standing on the roof of a rust-pocked camper hundreds of yards away, ghostly in the mirage of heat rays on the edge of the forest.
“Listen, listen to me, you chicken-shit fat body—we’re not gonna fucking pull back again!” Philip manages to bellow in a strangled voice, shoving Gabe across the slimy iron bulwark of the tank. “You understand?! You got that?! We’re gonna end this thing NOW!—NOW!!”
Gabe backs away, rubbing his neck, blinking back tears of dread, looking suddenly like a little boy who would say or do anything to appease his abusive father, who would lie and steal and kill and rape and pillage, anything to please his angry parent and squelch the taunts of schoolkids who once called him a big tub-o-lard.
The single shot that rings out from the west, a large-caliber bullet fired with the precision of a beesting from the roof of a mobile home 350 yards away, hits the exposed part of Gabriel Harris’s skull.
The Governor jerks back as Gabe’s head erupts, washing the tank with a splash of gelatinous pink brain matter, forming a giant fuchsia blot on the iron. The Governor’s breath freezes in his lungs as Gabe teeters on wobbly legs for a moment, his glassy eyes fixed on Philip, a death stare reminiscent of a computer crashing, locked onto Philip’s face, endlessly looking for a parent’s approval that will never come. And then the big man collapses as if swooning.
He hits the earth with a thud that wakes Philip up with the force of a cold slap.
“MOTHERFUCK!”
Philip Blake lurches behind the tank and peers around the other side.
“FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!!” In quick stages, he sees the distant Winnebago and glimpses the female figure standing boldly on the roof like some mythical creature, some Valkyrie swooping down from the heavens to aid and assist the inhabitants of the prison, and finally he notices the pickup truck parked fifty feet off his left flank in the weeds. He sees Gus crouched behind the rear gate, firing an AR-15 at will, cursing and firing and cursing.
“GUS!” Philip roars. “GET IN YOUR TRUCK AND DRIVE IT UP THAT WOMAN’S ASS—RIGHT NOW!!”
It takes only a moment for Gus to see what the Governor is talking about. With a terse nod, Gus gets moving, staying low and duckwalking around the other side of the Chevy S-10 to the cab. He climbs behind the wheel, the windshield already cracked into a million diamond-bright shards of broken glass from all the gunfire.
The tailpipe coughs vapor as Gus slams it into drive and blasts off toward the camper.
The Governor goes over to Gabe’s body and untangles the Bushmaster rifle from the dead man’s shoulder, and by the time Philip has straightened back up and taken stock of the battlefront, things have begun to go from bad to worse.
* * *
From behind the tail gate of the M35, Lilly Caul watches the chain of events unravel and implode like a nuclear reaction, her lungs heaving for air, her heart banging as loudly as a timpani drum against her rib cage. She grips her Remington with sweat-sticky hands and jerks at the concussive blast of metal on metal thundering on the horizon to the west. She peers around the edge of the hatch just in time to see Gus ramming his pickup into the Winnebago, nearly breaking the massive camper in two.
The impact sends particles of broken glass and shards of trim and metal fittings into the air and throws the sniper—a fair-haired woman in a ponytail and prison dungarees—cartwheeling off the roof and into the weeds on the edge of the woods. It’s hard to tell at this distance, but it looks as though Gus has been hit—his door springing open on impact, his squat body flopping out of the cab, a swirl of black smoke obscuring the crash site.
Lilly hears a strangled, maniacal laugh and glances to her left and sees the Governor crouched behind the tank watching Gus’s pickup and what’s left of the Winnebago go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke and flame. “TAKE THAT, BITCH—YOU FUCK WITH US!—YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT!” He sounds to Lilly like he’s finally slipped his tether.
“Jesus … Jesus … this is insane!” Lilly ducks behind the hatch and jumps at a booming series of blasts that nearly pop her eardrums, the gunfire coming from inches away. She wrenches around and sees Austin, crouched behind the opposite end of the hatch, firing his Garand at the guard tower, the .308 shells booming and ringing. He’s yelling something. Lilly tries to get his attention. “Austin!—AUSTIN!”
“—fuckers are picking us off like flies!” He shoots some more, glancing at Lilly, shooting, then glancing at her again with eyes blazing. “C’mon!—Lilly, what’s wrong?!—Whaddaya doing?!”
“Save your ammo, pretty boy!”
“Whaddaya talking about?!”
“You’re gonna—!”
Lilly starts to explain that they have a finite amount of rounds and they need to get better positions and these bastards could lo
b another grenade at any second when the sound of the Governor’s voice rings out above the gunfire. She twists back around and sees him limping across the battlefield, his face filled with psychotic glee.
“Only a matter of time now!” He walks toward a pair of shooters huddled behind a pile of fallen supply crates, firing blindly at the towers. “We got ’em pinned down! Motherfuckers can’t last!”
One of the shooters behind the crates—an older man with thinning hair and yellow aviator sunglasses—looks up from his scope when a round hits him in the left eye.
The blast shatters the aviator lens and bursts out the back of his skull. He convulses backward, his rifle flying out of his hands—his brain matter spraying the weeds behind him—as he collapses less than ten feet from where the Governor is shuffling along.
“We got them right where we want them!” Philip strides along behind the row of vehicles and shooters like a black-clad General MacArthur. “Don’t let them take a fucking breath! Keep the pressure on!”
“Hey—Governor!” Lilly tries to get his attention from behind the M35. “HEY!”
Another hail of bullets streaks down from the tower—the Governor doesn’t even flinch, the blasts puffing at his feet—and all at once another militia member goes down in a burst of blood mist from the back of his skull, the man’s Caterpillar cap flying off as he drops to the ground.
“GOVERNOR!!” Lilly screams at the man. “THEY’RE KILLING US!—WE CAN’T DO THIS!”
Some of the men are backing away from the line of fire now, searching for cover, running this way and that, diving under truck chassis.
“The fuck are you doing?!” the Governor booms at the retreating troops. “WE CAN’T GIVE UP NOW!! WE CAN’T LET THEM WIN!!”
Another volley of sniper fire drives Lilly back to the ground behind the M35—Austin on his belly inches away from her—gouts of turf kicking up with each blast, dirt spitting in their faces. Dizziness washes over Lilly and threatens to steal her eyesight, her ears ringing so badly now the gunfire sounds as if it’s underwater—PLING! PLING!—PLINK-PLINK-PLINK!!—and she hears the Governor bellowing something and tries to see through the growing haze of dust and gun smoke engulfing the meadow.
“FUCK IT!” The Governor marches toward the tank like a wooden soldier, his single arm flexing stiffly, his solitary gloved hand balled into a tight fist. “FUCK IT!—FUCK IT!!—FUCK IT!!—IT’S TIME TO END THIS!!”
He reaches the Abrams and then climbs up the steel side ladder.
In Lilly’s compromised vision, as watery and bleary as runny ink, she can barely take in the surreal sight of the Governor pounding on the tank’s hatch, as though he has a parcel to deliver to the crew. He howls at Jared to let him in, and the hatch unscrews suddenly, springing open like a jack-in-the-box. The Governor plunges down into the darkness of the enclosure, the hatch slamming shut just as his booming cry reaches Lilly’s ringing ears: “—JUST DRIVE!”
A plume of dense smoke suddenly spews from the back of the tank as the treads engage. The engine roars, and the beast begins to move.
Lilly freezes on the ground, gaping at the bizarre sight of the armored monolith rolling toward the fence. Her irises dilate involuntarily, her breath stalling in her throat, as she sees the course of the battle suddenly take an unexpected turn.
* * *
The tank rattles toward the chain-link barrier, mowing over the last few walkers that still stand in its way, the massive treads pulverizing rotten bones and flesh. The front of the tank slams into the fence, the chain link and concertina wire heaving, the reverberations traveling a city block in each direction. The noise is like a metallic rainstorm.
The outer fence gives way in a paroxysm of steel ripping apart.
The Abrams grinds over the first barrier with the ease of a giant trash compactor, smoke billowing from its turbine, treads smashing the chain link into spaghetti. A hundred yards of cyclone fence in each direction collapses as the beast crosses the gap to the next fence. The second barrier goes down as easily as the first.
While all this is transpiring, Lilly observes the eerie cease-fire inside the prison grounds. The only sounds now—barely audible above the creaking, complaining, ringing chain-link fences—are footsteps running in all directions, as the folks inside scatter for cover.
In a dust cloud of haze and crisscrossing sniper fire pinging off the tank’s iron carapace, the Abrams devours the last barrier—the innermost fence—as sparks snap and crackle in the air. Most of the walkers in the general vicinity have been vanquished either in the cross fire or beneath the treads of the tank.
Now the ricochets echo eerily across the passageways between cellblocks.
Soon, even the towers go silent and still as the armored monolith comes to rest twenty feet inside the gate, trailing shreds of metal linkage in its treads like particles of food stuck in the teeth of a ravenous monster. The engine revs for a moment, almost like an overture to the next movement of this terrible symphony. Exhaust huffs from the ass-end of the tank. The pause that follows—the duration of which is mere seconds—seems to Lilly to last for hours.
“Lilly?! You all right?! Talk to me!” Austin’s voice, barely audible to Lilly, cuts through the white noise of her racing thoughts. She turns and sees him huddled next to her behind the M35’s rear gate, his M1 Garand gripped white-knuckle tight. “Whaddaya think?” he asks her with fear shimmering in his eyes. “What now?”
She starts to mumble something in response when the sound of another voice cuts through her daze.
“C’mon, we got them outnumbered!” It comes from behind her. She twists around and sees the remaining members of the militia coming out from behind the vehicles with their guns raised and ready. Tom Blanchford, a big mechanic from Macon, has his back pressed against the side of his flatbed. “C’mon!—Let’s put these evil bastards out of their misery once and for all!—COME ON!!”
One by one, creeping low and quick, weaving between the vehicles, the surviving men and women of the Woodbury militia make their way across the battlefield, over the smashed remnants of mangled chain link, and into the prison.
“Let’s do this,” Austin says, rising to his feet, and then reaching down to help Lilly up.
For the briefest instant, she pauses. She stares at Austin’s hand. She feels the pulse of acid throbbing in her spine, down her arms and legs, tasting of copper and blood in her mouth.
Then, in a hoarse, faint whisper, she says, “Yeah, let’s finish it.”
She takes his hand, springs to her feet, swings the Remington around into shooting position, gives a quick nod, and charges into the fray.
SIXTEEN
Inside the prison yard, in a fogbank of dust, the tank’s top hatch bursts open and a dark, cadaverous, blood-caked face surfaces like a shark emerging from the oceanic darkness. “OPEN FIRE!—KILL THEM ALL!!—WE GOT THEM PINNED DOWN!!”
On either side of the tank, a total of seven members of the Woodbury militia fan out in different directions, most of them leading with the barrels of their assault rifles, shooting at anything that moves. The exercise yard crawls with chaos for a moment. The prison’s inhabitants flee for cover, retreating into the convolutions of the buildings—cockroaches vanishing into cracks.
Bursts of automatic gunfire crackle and echo back and forth. Movement blurs. The Governor shouts orders from the tank’s hatch that get drowned in the noise. Gunners on either side dart behind the corners of buildings or under shadowy overhangs, searching for cover and purchase in the onslaught. One of the Governor’s men takes the initiative to climb the southeast guard tower, his buck knife clenched between his teeth, his M4 strapped to his shoulder.
The tide of the battle has turned, the denizens of the prison now scattering for cover and the most expedient ways to escape.
* * *
Lilly and Austin follow the last contingent over the fallen fence and into the prison yard, their heavy boot-steps making the chain link jangle. They move quickly with their g
uns cocked and ready, hot on the heels of two other men, the sun in their eyes. Lilly has a pistol in each hand, her Remington strapped and bouncing on her shoulder. Austin hyperventilates as he runs, a combination of fear, exhaustion, and rage.
The passage of time seems to slow, now moving in milky, syrupy impressions, as Lilly and Austin reach the closest building—thirty feet away from the Governor’s tank—and slam their backs against the stone wall. Lilly’s heart races. Even amid the adrenaline rush of storming the grounds, she feels a surreal kind of claustrophobia inside the massive compound. Three-story cellblocks press down on them from all sides, throwing long shadows on the yards. The air has the acrid smell of overloading circuits and burning rubber. Muffled voices and the sound of running emanate from within the walls.
A moment later, Lilly jerks at a flash of movement between two buildings, raises one of the Rugers, fires a single shot at the blur, and hits nothing but stucco wall. She sees the puff of plaster dust atomizing in the shadows twenty yards away. She glances across the yard at the tank. She sees the Governor climbing out of the iron beast with a Tec-9 pistol gripped in his gloved hand. Then she sees something else in the distance behind the Governor that makes her spine go cold and her throat go as dry as sawdust.
Way out across the adjacent meadow—the earth now scarred and rutted with tire tracks, scorched and cratered from the grenade blast, and littered with the carnage of the undead—Lilly can see the distant forest. Up along the ridge, behind colonnades of ancient oaks and dense curtains of foliage, the woods teem with innumerable ragged figures birthing themselves from the shadows, pushing their way out of the undergrowth—hundreds of them—emerging stiff-legged and ravenous into the daylight. There are so many of them now that they resemble, from this distance, a black tide—a putrefied dark wave the width of a soccer field—slowly unfurling and rolling down the hill toward the noise and confusion of the prison. In that horrible instant, over the course of a single electrical impulse firing in her brain, Lilly makes a spontaneous calculation. Within a matter of minutes—ten, perhaps, maybe fifteen at the most—the prison will be overrun.
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