Walking Dead: Fall of The Governor: Book Two Part 16

"A baby!" Lilly roars at him. "A baby!" She turns her gun around and slams the b.u.t.t into the Governor's face. The pain shoots up the bridge of his nose, the impact making a wet thud that momentarily blinds him and drives him to the ground. "You made me kill a f.u.c.king 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 h.e.l.l 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 ... impa.s.sive, 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 gla.s.sy 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 bloodl.u.s.t.

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 a.s.sault 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 b.u.t.t 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-succ.u.mb 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 f.u.c.k is-? Shut up! Listen to me, we can-we can-shut the f.u.c.k up!!-We can-get inside the-clear out the-we can rebuild the-we've gotta stick together, people-f.u.c.k! f.u.c.k!-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 cl.u.s.ter 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 a.s.sailant, 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 pa.s.ses 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 ma.s.se for the Governor's warm, nourishing flesh. Their c.u.mulative 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sesses 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 shooting!" 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 cla.s.s. 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 mult.i.tudes 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 pa.s.sageways and echoes up into the impa.s.sive gunmetal sky.

From high on the ridges overlooking the property, the last of the fleeing inhabitants pauses to gaze back at their temporary home being overrun by the walking dead.

If there is a more indelible portrait of the world's end, no single soul gazing back at that derelict prison property that day can think of what it would be. The vast compound stretching across several hundred acres of pastureland virtually swims with upright corpses. From such a distant vantage point, it resembles so many black dots in a h.e.l.lish pointillist painting, the shambling horde filling every nook and cranny, thousands of them, many c.o.c.king their dead faces toward the uncaring heavens and letting out yawps and groans as if being consumed from the inside by their overwhelming, cancerous, inescapable hunger. The sight of it brings tears to the eyes of those who lived there in relative safety for many months. The image will live in their minds for the rest of their lives. The prison has become a bellwether of doom.

The last few souls slipping away that day into the adjacent woods stare down at the swarm only briefly, unable to bear looking at it for long before turning away and beginning the next phase of their arduous search for shelter.

A ma.s.sive thud reverberates the bones of the receiving room, making everybody jump. The prison is collapsing under the weight of the onslaught, the troubling din of thousands of shuffling feet and mortified vocal cords moaning incessantly inside and out, filling the air, as the surviving members of the Woodbury militia huddle in the middle of a desolate, flyspecked, littered foyer, trying to catch their breaths and figure out their next move.

"Austin!" Lilly points at a rack along the room's back wall, upon which are stacked signposts and flagpoles and implements. "Do me a favor and grab one of those sign poles and reinforce that side door!"

Shuffling with a limp, Austin hurries across the room and grabs one of the iron stands. He turns to a side exit situated under a powerless Corridor D-1 sign and slams the object down across the middle of the door, wedging it under the broken bolt plate and a side hinge at the precise moment another m.u.f.fled thud strikes outside the door.

Austin jerks with a start as plaster dust rains down and metal creaks, the force of multiple walkers outside the door pressing to get in, trying to get to the source of the human smells that are taunting them.

"They're gonna break that f.u.c.king door in!" Matthew Hennesey cries out from the front of the room. "There's too f.u.c.king many of them!"

"No, there's not!" Lilly rushes over to the front entrance and starts pushing a metal credenza br.i.m.m.i.n.g with heavy file folders and directories across the boarded gla.s.s of the front door. "C'mon, gimme a hand with this-Matthew and Ben-get your a.s.ses over here!"

They heave and push the immense shelving unit across the door.

The room is a little less than five hundred square feet of shopworn tile flooring and painted cinder-block walls scarred with illegible graffiti and the wear and tear of generations of intake procedures. The air smells chalky and sour, like the inside of an old refrigerator. One wall houses the grimy gla.s.s-fronted guard desk, elevated to shoulder height, where newcomers became official wards of the state of Georgia. Another wall is gouged with bullet holes and the cracked, dangling, framed portraits of former wardens and state officials. A lack of power has plunged the room into cold darkness, but the ambient daylight from outside the high, barred windows provides enough illumination for Lilly to see the owlish, terrified faces of her contingent.

In addition to Lilly and Austin, the ragtag group of surviving Woodbury militia consists of the following four men and one woman, now huddled in a tight group in the middle of the receiving room: Matthew Hennesey, the twentysomething bricklayer from Valdosta, now draped in half-empty mag pouches and a sweat-soaked camo jacket; Hap Abernathy, the gaunt, graying, retired school bus driver from Atlanta who currently looks like a candidate for a hip replacement with his p.r.o.nounced limp and bandaged ribs; Ben Buchholz, a pouchy-eyed man from Pine Mountain who lost his entire family last year in a swarm outside F.D. Roosevelt State Park and now appears to be flashing back to that earlier trauma; Speed Wilkins, a c.o.c.ky nineteen-year-old high school football star from Athens who, at the moment, looks punch-drunk and dazed by the struggle, all his big-man-on-campus swagger long gone; and Gloria Pyne, her wounded leg wrapped in a crude bandage, her deeply creased, world-weary eyes still glowering out from underneath her I'm with stupid visor, the headgear frayed and spattered with blood and soot.

Another thud makes them all jump. "Take it easy, everybody." Lilly stands before them with her back to the front entrance door. Each of her Rugers is shoved behind her belt on an opposing hip for easy access, but the problem is, she only has about six rounds left in one magazine, and one round in another, with an extra bullet in each chamber. The sound of sc.r.a.ping sets her teeth on edge and the pressure makes the credenza tremble and creak as the swarm shoves against the door. "This is hugely important-that we stay calm and don't panic."

"Are you s.h.i.tting me?!" Hap Abernathy trains his ancient, gray eyes on her. "Stay calm? Did you happen to notice how many of them things are out there? It's only a matter of time before-"

"Shut up!" Austin booms at the man with fire in his eyes, his outburst uncharacteristic enough to raise even Lilly's eyebrows. "Just shut the f.u.c.k up and let the lady talk or maybe you want to just-!"

"Austin!" Lilly gives him a gentle warning-wave of her gloved hand. She still wears the fingerless driving gloves that Austin gave her the previous night. "It's okay. He's just expressing what everybody's thinking." Lilly looks at all of them, one at a time, that voice of her father coming through. "I'm asking all of you to trust me, and I will get you out of here."

She waits for everybody to get their breath back, get their bearings. Hap Abernathy stares at the floor, cradling his AR-15 as though it were a security blanket. Another thud makes them jerk. A cracking noise comes from the depths of the prison; something falls and shatters above them.

The walkers have gotten inside Cellblock D-one of the back entrances had been left open-but n.o.body knows how many of them have infiltrated the building or what parts of the prison are still secure.

"Hap?" Lilly speaks softly to him. "You okay? You with me on this?"

He nods slowly, staring at the floor. "Yes, ma'am ... I'm with you."

A beat of noisy silence follows as the creaking noises and low, ubiquitous drone of walking dead pressing in on them grips the air with unbearable tension. The thing that n.o.body expresses at that moment-the gorilla in the room that they all try desperately to ignore-is Lilly's a.s.sa.s.sination of the Governor in plain view of everybody only moments earlier. Deep down inside all of them, they expected it to happen in some form sooner or later. They are all children of an abusive father trying to recover from the inevitable yet logical outcome of situations such as these-and like abused children everywhere, they have already begun to repress their unresolved feelings. They look at Lilly now with new eyes. They wait for her to lead.

"We're safe here in this room," she says at last. "For the time being at least. We'll keep close watch on the high windows, and keep the doors as secure as possible. How much ammunition does everybody have?"

It takes a moment for them to figure this out. In all the excitement, they have lost track. Matthew has the deepest reserve-a couple dozen 7.62 mm slugs in his cargo pocket, and seven more in the AK's magazine-but the rest of them have paltry supplies. Ben's got eleven 115-grain 9 mm rounds left for his Glock 19. Gloria's got a full mag of 305.56 mm slugs for her AR-15, and Hap's got a revolver with six rounds left. Speed's got a Bushmaster with five rounds still in the clip. And Austin has a single round remaining in his M1 Garand-Gloria loans him her spare Glock 17-which makes Lilly wonder how many bullets she has left in two separate magazines for her .22 caliber pistols. She checks them and confirms that she only has four rounds remaining.

"Okay, so we're not exactly loaded to the teeth, but we're safe here," Gloria finally speaks up, taking off her visor and running her fingers through her dyed red hair. "Then what? What's the plan? We can't just stay in this f.u.c.king room indefinitely."

Lilly nods. "I'm thinking we wait out the swarm, give them a chance to clear a little bit." She looks at them, giving each of them a respectful look as though offering them an option when they really have none. "We'll stay the night, and then we'll rea.s.sess in the morning."

A long silence follows, but n.o.body argues with her.

Late that night, after each of the six survivors have staked out private little corners and recesses within the confines of the intake room (mostly for the purpose of trying to get some semblance of rest), Lilly and Austin find themselves ensconced in the shadows behind the gla.s.s-fronted receiving counter. They spread a tarpaulin from the room's storage locker across the floor for a modic.u.m of comfort, and now they sit slumped on the tarp, their guns on the shelf behind them, their backs resting against the file cabinets along the back wall ... as the relentless drone of walkers continues unabated outside the barricaded doors and windows.

For the longest time, neither Lilly nor Austin says a word. They merely pa.s.s the time holding each other, stroking each other's arms and hair. After all, what is there to say? The world has spiraled out of control and they're just trying to hold on. But Lilly can't turn her mind off. She keeps dabbing the pearls of blood oozing from her split lip with a Kleenex and noticing little things around them that don't add up, such as the pine tree deodorizer hanging from the desk lamp above her, or the unexplained bloodstain on the ceiling, or the lump under Austin's sleeve.

"Wait a minute," she says at one point very late that night, her stomach growling from nerves and the empty feeling of not having eaten anything for almost twenty-four hours. She looks at the sleeve of Austin's leather jacket and realizes there are two puncture holes directly over the lump. "What is that?"