He turns and sees that Lilly Caul has moved across the yard, and now stands over the Grimes woman, who lies frozen in death on top of the pale remains of her baby. Austin Ballard stands twenty feet away from her, looking horror-struck and confused, spinning toward the oncoming biters. The herd has progressed across the grounds, closing the distance to about thirty yards or so. The stink and noise have risen to unbearable levels, and now some of the Governor’s men have begun firing at the front line, picking off the closest ones—one after another—the escaping fluids painting the weathered cement Day-Glo red and squid-ink black.
“What the fuck is her problem?” the Governor says to no one in particular as he strides over to where Lilly stands, slowly shaking her head, her Remington still gripped in one hand, tendrils of glistening auburn hair unmoored from her ponytail and dangling in her face.
The Governor yells at her, “What the fuck is wrong with you?—We gotta get our asses inside!—WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING DEAL?!—ANSWER ME!!!”
Very slowly she turns and scorches him with such a contemptuous look that it nearly takes his breath away. She utters something that he doesn’t hear at first, his one-eyed gaze held rapt by her blazing stare.
“What was that?” he demands of her, his single gloved hand balling into a fist.
“You monster,” she says again, louder this time, through clenched teeth.
The Governor goes very still, serpentine-still, a boa coiling itself in the presence of a threat—all this in spite of the looming threat of the horde filling the general vicinity with the odor of rotten meat and the sound of broken gears grinding and groaning. Very carefully, enunciating every word, the Governor says, “What. The. Fuck. Did. You. Just. Say to me?”
Austin whirls toward the Governor and raises his gun as though trying to decide whom to shoot.
“I said,” Lilly Caul barks at him, her words like darts now, projectiles aimed at his face, fueled by scalding tears tracking down her face, “you are a fucking monster! LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO?!” Without tearing her gaze from him, she gestures down at the murdered woman and baby, the pathetic carnage joined in the eternal bond of mother clutching child to her bosom. “JUST FUCKING LOOK!!”
He does look now, and he does see, and maybe for the first time since he took control of Woodbury, Georgia—since he became the Governor—the man who calls himself Philip Blake does sees the consequences of his actions. “F-fuck,” he utters to himself, his voice drowned by the clamor of gunfire staving off the pitiless, rotting, hellish onslaught now bearing down on them.
“A baby!” Lilly roars at him. “A BABY!” She turns her gun around and slams the butt into the Governor’s face. The pain shoots up the bridge of his noise, the impact making a wet thud that momentarily blinds him and drives him to the ground. “YOU MADE ME KILL A FUCKING BABY!”
The Governor flops onto his back and tries to sit up, but his head is ringing like an alarm, the dizziness washing over him and stealing his breath. “W-what are you—?”
Lilly Caul turns the barrel of her Remington around and lunges at him. She rams the blue-steel muzzle into his mouth hard enough to crack two of his front teeth. The barrel lodges itself so deep in his throat that it forces a strangled gag out of him.
Lilly’s finger starts to tighten on the trigger. Philip Blake’s single eye finds her eyes.
The entire world seems to stop—time standing still—as if hell has at last frozen over.
PART 3
The Fall
The call of death is a call of love.
—Hermann Hesse
SEVENTEEN
“LILLY, DON’T!!” The voice blurts out of the closest militia member—Hap Abernathy, the retired bus driver, in his soiled Atlanta Braves cap and gray eyes, now bugging as big as silver dollars—as the other men press in toward the horrible tableau. Some of them involuntarily raise their hands. Others aim their guns at Lilly’s head. She barely notices her fellow combatants as she stares down intensely at the kneeling Governor, the barrel of her Remington still thrust into the man’s mouth.
Why isn’t she firing? Inside her brain, a clock ticks … impassive, cold, cruel, undeniable … counting off the moments until she finally decides to yank the trigger the rest of the way and bring this terrible era to a conclusion. But she doesn’t pull the lever. She just stares … into the face of the poster boy for all that is base and feral and brutal in the human animal.
What Lilly doesn’t realize, though—at that moment—is that the gunmen have momentarily lost track of the oncoming horde. The first walkers—now shuffling a few paces ahead of the herd—have closed the distance across the weather-beaten grounds to about twenty-five yards. Now they lock their glassy doll eyes on the humans and trundle awkwardly toward the sweet scent of living tissue, their dead arms rising, their fingers curled into talons and innately reaching, clawing the air, eager to rip into the living.
“Lilly, listen to me,” Austin Ballard says as he pushes his way through the other gunmen, pressing in next to her, speaking softly yet urgently into her ear. “You don’t have to do this … listen to me … there are other ways to handle this … you don’t need to do this.”
A single tear traces down from the corner of Lilly’s eye and drips off the edge of her jawline. “A baby, Austin … it was a baby.”
Austin fights his own tears. “I know, sweetie, but listen, listen to me. This is not the way to—”
He doesn’t get a chance to finish his thought because a long shadow suddenly blots out the sun. His Glock still gripped in his right hand, Austin jerks around a split second before the first slimy, molting, clawlike fingers take a swipe at him with feral bloodlust.
Lilly twists around and screams. Austin jerks back and squeezes off four quick blasts—number one going high, numbers two and three going into the head of the closest biter, number four hitting a second one in the jugular. The first biter convulses, a flood of brain fluid and blood showering down over its body before it collapses to the pavement. The second biter rears back, its neck gushing, but it doesn’t go down. It merely backs into its brethren, stupidly knocking over a couple of smaller creatures.
Meanwhile, the rest of the militiamen scatter, furiously blasting away at the army of reanimated corpses engulfing the area. The dusty haze flickers with gunfire, sparking ricochets, and plumes of muzzle flares percolating out of the assault rifles on full auto. Some of the men make mad dashes for the closest ingress—a door partially visible in the shadows of a nearby alcove—while others fire frantically into the heart of the encroaching herd, sending fragments of rotten flesh flying off in all directions.
Lilly turns back to the Governor at the exact moment he makes his move.
Grabbing the barrel of the Remington, Philip slams the butt of the rifle as hard as he can into Lilly’s face. The stock hits her chin, the impact splitting her lower lip, chipping a tooth, sending Roman candles of stars across her field of vision, and knocking her momentarily senseless. She jolts back with a start. The gun slips from her hands and clatters to the pavement as the Governor springs to his feet.
A biter lunges at Lilly, and she smashes a boot into its midsection at the last possible moment. The dead teenager in gouged black leather doubles over and staggers backward but doesn’t go down. Lilly manages to dart away, and while she runs, she reaches around to the back of her belt and grabs her .22, despite her double vision and throbbing, wet, bleeding lip.
“LILLY, THIS WAY!” Austin stands twenty feet north of her now, firing into another wave of biters coming from the opposite direction. He frantically indicates the alcove about thirty-five feet away.
Lilly hesitates. She glances over her shoulder. She sees the Governor whirling around with the Remington rifle in his hands. He blows away a female biter at point-blank range, practically vaporizing the crone’s gray head in an eruption of moldering scalp and particles of rotting brain tissue. The blowback sprays across his face and makes him flinch and stagger backward, coughing and spitting.
A scream rings out in the opposite direction, and Lilly spins around in time to see a Woodbury man—a squat, heavyset pipe-fitter from Augusta named Clint Mansell—succumb to the black teeth of a huge male walker. The corpse latches onto the portly man’s neck, burrowing into the hemorrhaging nerve bundle underneath the fat, while another biter pounces on the man’s back. Clint Mansell’s watery, choked death cry as he goes down gets the rest of the men moving.
“THERE’S TOO MANY OF THEM!” cries one of the older men as he backs toward the alcove, firing bursts from his AK at the gathering horde.
Lilly gets off a series of controlled blasts at a cluster of biters that are closing in on her. Each shot slams through a rotten cranium, sending plumes of black matter out the back of every skull, when she hears the psychotic jabber of the Governor behind her.
“DON’T PANIC! THEY CAN’T—THEY CAN’T OUTRUN—WHERE THE FUCK IS—? SHUT UP! LISTEN TO ME, WE CAN—WE CAN—SHUT THE FUCK UP!!—WE CAN—GET INSIDE THE—CLEAR OUT THE—WE CAN REBUILD THE—WE’VE GOTTA STICK TOGETHER, PEOPLE—FUCK! FUCK!—WE CAN MAKE THIS WORK—!!”
All at once, Lilly feels a tingling sensation at the base of her spine and a strange kind of stillness coursing over her, the noise and chaos fading in her ears to a low drone. She ejects the spent magazine from the Ruger, draws another one from her belt, slams it into the hilt, and racks the slide. Then she turns toward the Governor, who is gibbering at the voices in his head, his back turned to her.
She has about sixty seconds before the next cluster of biters reaches her.
She blocks out everything, the pain, the sound of Austin’s voice calling out to her, the fear, the pandemonium—everything.
Thirty seconds now before the Governor spins around and sees her.
She aims the Ruger at the back of his head and she sucks in a breath.
Fifteen seconds.
She aims.
Ten seconds.
She fires.
* * *
Considering the fact that the .22 caliber long-rifle 40-grain round strikes the Governor in the back of his head—plowing through his brain and exiting out his eye socket—he feels surprisingly little pain. His one good eyeball jettisons into the air on the wake of a bloody thread, and the cold wind slams through the trough in his head.
For one horrible instant, like a brain surgery patient remaining lucid and semiconscious during his procedure, he remains upright, standing on faltering knees, his back to his assailant, only semi-aware of his mortality rushing toward him with the unstoppable inertia and brilliant white light of a freight train.
A mere fraction of a second passes before his frontal lobe and the rest of his brain shut down and stop sending involuntary signals to his central nervous system, but it’s enough time for his condition to register to the deepest chasms of his brain, the bad news spreading throughout his cerebral lobes and hemispheres, his memory centers, and the mysterious fissures and convolutions of his secret disorder. The voice in his head returns with renewed strength, giving him even worse news that will carry him into oblivion: Philip Blake has been gone for nearly a year. Philip Blake is dust. Gone. The Governor’s reign has been a sham … a lie.
“NNNGGHHUH—!!” A garbled yowl comes out of the Governor as he blindly staggers for a brief instant, trying to argue one last time with the voice in his head, his body now as heavy as an elephant, a dying elephant gripped in the paralysis of its own dead weight.
The oncoming swarm of biters closes in, their talonlike fingers reaching en masse for the Governor’s warm, nourishing flesh. Their cumulative jet-engine drone of rancid breath and watery groans makes one last impression on the Governor’s auditory nerves, the noise of the biter stampede engulfing him and drowning the inner voice needling the Governor with the savage truth: He’s gone … he’s been gone for ages … he’s in the ground … dead … gone … he no longer exists!
The Governor barely feels the sensation of being kicked in the small of the back by Lilly.
Her final nudge sends him reeling forward blindly, his one good arm pinwheeling futilely, almost comically, like the fin of a fish, as he plunges into the rotting, desiccated bosom of the reanimated cadavers. The biters practically catch him with their flailing arms and snapping jaws, and he collapses into the throng, writhing in the awful darkness, finding his voice one last time.
“PHILIP BLAKE LIVES!!”
His death cry, albeit hoarse and bloodless and papery thin, is shockingly audible and clear to all those within a hundred-foot radius.
“PHILIP BLAKE LIVES!!” he shrieks as the blackened, slimy teeth descend upon him, driving him to the ground, incisors tearing great mouthfuls of his clothes, burrowing into the soft spots in the seams of his body armor. They go for his exposed neck. They go for his extremities. They go for the concavities of his wounds, chewing through his eye patch, ferreting down into the pulsing meat of his hollowed-out eye socket. They tear through his nose and suck the tissue from his nasal cavity with the vigor of truffle hogs rooting for delicacies. The last warm remnants of the Governor’s life flow out of him in one great hemorrhage that inundates his attackers in a baptismal bath until the feeding frenzy begins to disconnect flesh and sinew from bone, drawing and quartering the body into more manageable pieces … the last ghostly blips of brain activity like a vinyl record stuck on the same incessant skipping phrase over and over again … PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES …
Within moments, there’s nothing left but the feeding and the blood …
… and the eternal white noise of Brian Blake’s mind-screen at the end of its programming day.
* * *
Now it occurs to Lilly Caul—as she backs away from the horrible scene, bristling with terror, both her Rugers drawn, one in each hand—that the unintended effect of the Governor being devoured by the very creatures he once used as entertainment is a slim opportunity opening up for the survivors—a momentary diversion—as scores of biters engulf the heaping pile of fresh meat. The onslaught has stalled, drawn to the commotion of the feeding frenzy, more and more of the creatures pressing in to get a taste of the still-warm human remains.
The lull in the stampede has left the remaining members of the Woodbury militia standing paralyzed between the herd and the closest building, stricken dumb, staring, watching their leader being reduced to slimy, wet shreds of tissue and clothing before their eyes. Moving on pure adrenaline now, Lilly quickly assesses the situation. In all the excitement, she has momentarily lost track of Austin. But right then, before she has a chance to figure out what happened to him, she sees a clear path to the closest alcove-entrance.
“HEY!” She tries to get the other combatants’ attention, gazing across the grounds at the horrified remnant of four men and one woman—Matthew, Hap, Ben, Speed, and Gloria Pyne—as they back toward the building. “LOOK AT ME! ALL OF YOU LOOK AT ME!”
For a single instant, amidst the adrenaline-soaked horrors of that swarming, smoke-bound prison yard, a subtle yet instant shift in power occurs. Lilly finds a voice that she didn’t know she had, a strange baritone shout from deep within her—her father’s voice, firm but fair, steadfast but humble, and strong enough to shout a coyote off a porch—and she aims it at the group of survivors.
“THAT’S GONNA SLOW A FEW OF THEM DOWN BUT NOT FOR LONG!” She indicates the feeding frenzy in progress across the grounds, and then jerks a thumb at the nearest alcove draped in shadows. “C’MON!—EVERYBODY FOLLOW ME!”
Lilly starts toward the building, the others following her, some of them snapping out of their dazes and firing shots into the swarm. Some of the horde has separated from the feeding frenzy and are lumbering toward the humans, and a series of shots-on-the-fly takes them down in puffs of brain fluid and pieces of rotting skull flying up into the haze. “KEEP MOVING AND KEEP SHOOTIN
G!” Lilly hollers. “I’M ALMOST OUT OF AMMO—WE’VE GOT TO GET—!”
A loud booming blast from behind her cuts off her words, and she whirls in time to see Austin—careening backward to the ground, a pair of biters clawing at his legs—his Glock emptying the last rounds of its last magazine across the tops of the creatures’ heads. Unfortunately, the rounds take the male down but just graze the skull of the female. Austin screams a curse and kicks and flails at her. The big-bellied former housewife—still dressed in her filthy terry-cloth robe, curlers in her slimy hair—snaps her rotten teeth at Austin’s wrists and flailing legs.
“AUSTIN!!”
Lilly charges toward him, closing the gap between them in mere seconds—maybe thirty feet or so—raising both .22s as she runs, sending surgically precise blasts across the distance at the dead housewife. Direct headshots drive the monstrous woman off Austin in a series of skull-shattering eruptions of meat and glistening gray matter, until half her head is gone. She lands beside Austin, her cranium trepanned open like a hollowed-out gourd, showing a cross-section of her infected cerebrum with the scientific precision of a high school biology class. Gas expels from the depths of her malodorous brain cavity, and Austin rolls over, coughing and gagging.
Lilly reaches him, shoves her pistols into her belt, and latches onto one of Austin’s hands with the strength of an iron vise. She yanks him to his feet. “C’mon, pretty boy … we’re outta here.”
“Fine with me,” he utters in a strangled voice, levering himself up.
The two of them race toward the alcove, leading the others out of harm’s way, through a breached metal door and into the unknown chambers of Cellblock D.
* * *
Fueled by the eating frenzy, bolstered by the growing number of walkers hauling themselves through the gaps in the fences, the herd engulfs the prison grounds in short order, until multitudes of ragged, molting figures are clumsily crowding every corner, every square foot of every yard and basketball court and walkway. Some of them find entry into buildings through gaping doorways, left open by the exodus of inhabitants. The incredible noise and stink floods the passageways and echoes up into the impassive gunmetal sky.
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