“Who the hell…?” she grumbles, levering herself out of her chair.
She crosses the room on bare feet, her ripped bell-bottom jeans dragging on the filthy hardwood. She wears an olive green thermal underwear top deftly ripped at the neck in a perfect V, a sports bra underneath, rawhide necklaces and beads around her slender neck. Her flaxen locks are pulled back in a loose Brigitte Bardot parfait on the top of her head. Her funky sense of fashion—first developed in the thrift shops and Salvation Army stores of Marietta—has died hard in the post-plague world. In a way, her sense of style is her armor, her defense mechanism.
She opens the door and looks out at Austin standing in the dark.
“Sorry to keep bothering you,” he says sheepishly, one arm holding the other as though he’s about to break apart at the seams. He has his hoodie drawn tight around his narrow face, and for the briefest instant he looks like a different person to Lilly. His eyes have lost the arrogant swagger that perpetually gleams there. His expression has softened, and the real person underneath the hard shell has emerged. He levels his gaze at her. “Are you in the middle of something?”
She proffers a smile. “Yeah, you caught me on the phone with my stockbroker, moving my millions around all my off-shore hedge funds.”
“Should I come back?”
Lilly sighs. “It’s called a joke, Austin. Remember humor?”
He nods sadly. “Oh … right.” He manages a smile. “I’m a little slow tonight.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Okay … um.” He looks around the dark street. Practically the entire town has relocated to the arena for the night’s festivities. Now the wind scrapes trash along the deserted sidewalks and rustles in the defunct power lines, making an eerie humming noise. Only a few of Martinez’s men remain at the corners of the barricades, patrolling with their AR-15s and binoculars. Every now and then a searchlight sweeps its silver beam across the neighboring woods. “I was wondering, um, you know, if you’re not too busy,” he stammers, avoiding eye contact with her, “if you might be willing to, like, do a little training tonight?”
She looks askance at him. “Training?”
He clears his throat awkwardly, looks down. “What I mean is, you said you might consider showing me some things … giving me some pointers on how to … you know … deal with the biters, protect myself.”
She looks at him, and she takes a deep breath. Then she smiles. “Give me a second—I’ll get my guns.”
* * *
They go down by the train station on the eastern edge of town, as far away from the lights and noise of the arena as they can get. By the time they get there, Lilly has turned the collar up on her denim jacket to ward off the gathering chill. The air smells of methane and swamp gas—a mélange of rot—and the odor braces them in the moonlit shadows of the train yard. Lilly runs Austin through a few scenarios, quizzes him, challenges him. Austin has his 9 mm Glock with him, as well as a buck knife sheathed on his right thigh, tied with rawhide.
“C’mon, keep moving,” she says to him at one point, as he slowly inches his way along the threshold of the woods, his pistol at his side, gripped in his right hand, his finger outside the trigger pad. They’ve been at it for almost an hour now and Austin is getting restless. The forest pulses and drones with night noises—crickets, rustling branches—and the constant threat of shadows moving behind the trees. Lilly walks alongside him with the quiet authority of a drill instructor. “You always want to keep moving, but not too fast, and not too slow … just keep your eyes open.”
“Lemme guess—like this, right?” he says, a trace of exasperation in his voice. His gun has one of Lilly’s silencers attached to the muzzle. His hoodie is pulled tight around his face. A high chain-link fence runs along the woods, once serving as security for the railroad depot. A cinder-strewn trail runs along a row of derelict railroad tracks overgrown with prairie grass.
“I told you to pull your hood down,” she says. “You’re cutting off your peripheral vision.”
He does so, and keeps moving along the tree line. “How’s this?”
“Better. You always want to know your surroundings. That’s the key. It’s more important than what weapon you’re using, or how you’re holding your gun or your ax or whatever. Always be aware of what’s on either side of you. And what’s behind you. So you can make a fast getaway if necessary.”
“I get it.”
“And never ever-ever-ever let yourself get surrounded. They’re slow but they can horde in on you if there are enough of them.”
“You said that already.”
“The point is, you always know which way to run if you have to. Remember, you’re always going to be faster than they are … but that doesn’t mean you can’t get penned in.”
Austin nods and gazes intermittently over his shoulder, keeping track of the darkness on all sides of the trail. He turns and slowly backs along the trail for a moment, searching the shadows.
Lilly watches him. “Put your gun away for a second,” she says. “Grab your knife.” She watches him switch weapons. “Okay, now let’s say you’re out of ammo, you’re isolated, maybe lost.”
He gives her a sidelong glance. “Lilly, we’ve been through this part … like twice already.”
“That’s good, you can count.”
“C’mon—”
“And we’re going to go through it again, a third time, so answer the question. How do you hold your knife?”
He sighs, backing along the trees, his boots crunching in the cinders. “You hold it blade-down, a tight grip on the hilt.… I’m not stupid, Lilly.”
“I never said you were stupid. Tell me why you hold your knife like that.”
He keeps backing along the edge of the woods, moving absently now, shaking his head. “You hold it like that because you got one chance to bring it down hard on their skull, and you want to do it decisively.”
Lilly notices a stray timber—a piece of creosote-soaked railroad tie—lying beside the trail, about twenty feet away. She silently moves toward it. “Go on,” she says. With one quick, discreet movement, she kicks the timber across Austin’s path. “Why do you do it decisively?”
He lets out another weary sigh, blithely backing along. “You do it decisively because you got one chance to destroy the brain.” He keeps backing slowly toward the timber, gripping the knife, unaware of the obstruction lying across his path. “I’m not an idiot, Lilly.”
She grins. “Oh, no, you’re a regular ninja, the way you were clearing the woods for us today at the crash site. You got it all going on.”
“I’m not afraid, Lilly, I’ve told you a million times, I’ve been around—”
He trips on the railroad tie. “Ouch!—FUCK!” he blurts when he hits the ground, raising a puff of cinder dust.
At first Lilly lets out a blurt of laughter as Austin sits there for a second, looking defeated, embarrassed, humiliated. In the darkness, his eyes shimmer with emotion and his curls dangle in his face. He looks like a whipped dog. Lilly’s laughter dies, and guilt twinges in her gut. “I’m sorry, sorry,” she murmurs, kneeling by him. “I didn’t mean to—” She strokes his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m being an asshole.”
“It’s okay,” he says softly, taking deep breaths, looking down. “I deserve it.”
“No. No.” She sits down next to him. “You don’t deserve any of this.”
He looks at her. “Don’t worry about it. You’re just trying to help me and I appreciate it.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.” She rubs her face. “All I know is … we gotta be ready. We gotta be … I hate to say it … but we gotta be as fucking bloodthirsty as the biters.” She looks at him. “It’s the only way we’re gonna get through this.”
His gaze locks on to hers. The ambient drone deepens around them, the roar of night sounds rising. In the distance, barely audible, come the hyena howls of the dirt track spectators cheering for blood.
A
t last Austin says, “You’re starting to sound like the Governor.”
Lilly gazes into the distance and says nothing, just listens to the sounds drifting on the breeze.
Austin licks his lips and looks at her. “Lilly, I’ve been thinking … what if there’s no other side to get through to? What if this is it? What if this is all there is for us?”
Lilly thinks about it. “It doesn’t matter. As long as we have each other … and we’re willing to do what it takes … we’ll survive.”
The words hang in the night air for a moment. Almost imperceptibly they have come closer together, Lilly’s hand lingering on his shoulder, his hand finding the small of her back.
Lilly realizes—all at once—that she might have originally been thinking about the whole community sticking together but now she’s thinking only about Austin and her. She finds herself leaning in closer to him, and he responds by leaning toward her. She senses something unraveling, a letting go, and their lips coming together, and the kiss about to happen, when suddenly Lilly draws back. “What’s this? Jesus, what’s this?”
She feels something wet down around his waist, and she looks down.
The bottom hem of his sweatshirt is soaked in blood. Some of it drips in runnels onto the leafy ground, as black and shiny as axle oil. The knife blade sticks out of a tear in his denims where it sliced through the flesh of his hip in the fall. Austin puts his hand over it. “Shit,” he utters through gritted teeth, the blood seeping through his fingers. “I thought I felt something bite me.”
“C’mon!” Lilly springs to her feet and gives him a hand, carefully hoisting him to his feet. “We gotta get you to Dr. Stevens.”
* * *
Her full name was Christina Meredith Haben, and she grew up in Kirkwood, Georgia, and she went away to college in the 1980s to study telecommunications at Oberlin. She had a child out of wedlock that she carried to term and then gave up for adoption on the day after 9/11. She had suffered through a series of romantic misadventures in her life, never found Mr. Right, never married, and always considered herself wed to her job as the senior segment producer at one of the biggest stations in the South. She had won three Emmys, a Clio, and a couple of Cable Ace awards—all of which made her justifiably proud—and she never felt her superiors respected her or provided her with the remuneration that she deserved.
But at the present moment—on this filthy tile floor, in the glare of fluorescent lights—all of Christina Haben’s regrets, fears, frustrations, hopes, and desires are long gone, vanquished by death, her remains lying scattered across the gore-spattered parquet, while seventeen captive walkers tear into her organs and tissues.
The watery, orgiastic eating noises bounce around the cinder-block walls, as the dead feast on mostly unidentifiable body parts that used to comprise Christina Haben. Blood and spinal fluid and bile mingle in the corners of the room like multicolored cordials, sluicing through the seams in the tile, splashing the walls in blooms of deep scarlet, and drenching the frenzied biters. Selected for their physical integrity, earmarked for the gladiatorial arena, most of these creatures appear to be former adult males, some of them now crouching apelike in the bright light, gnawing on gristly nodules that used to belong to Christina Haben’s lower skeleton.
Across the room, a pair of rectangular portal windows are embedded in a garage door that encloses the room. Within the frame of the window on the left, a gaunt, weathered, mustachioed face peers in at the action.
Standing in the silent corridor outside the enclosure, gazing intently through the window glass, the Governor registers little emotion on his face other than stern satisfaction with what he is seeing. His left ear is bandaged from a recent encounter with the newcomers, and the pain braces him. It makes him clench his fists. It courses down his marrow like electricity, girding him, crystallizing his mission. All his doubt, all his second-guessing—in fact, all his remaining humanity—are being pushed aside by the rage and the vengeance and the voice deep within him that serves as a compass. He knows now the only way to keep this tinderbox from going up in flames. He knows what he must do now in order to—
The shuffling of footsteps from the opposite end of the corridor interrupts his thoughts.
* * *
Lilly has her arm around Austin as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, turns a corner, and hurries down the main corridor that cuts through the foul-smelling, cinder-block catacombs of garages and service bays beneath the arena.
At first she doesn’t see the dark figure standing alone at the far end of the corridor, gazing through the portal window. She’s too preoccupied with Austin’s injury, and the effort required just to keep pressure on the wound with her right hand as she shuffles along toward the infirmary.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” the figure says as Lilly and Austin approach.
“Oh … hey,” Lilly says awkwardly as she shuffles up with Austin dripping a few blood droplets on the floor, nothing life-threatening, but enough to be worrisome. “Gotta get this one to the doctor.”
“Hope the other guy looks worse,” the Governor jokes as Lilly and Austin pause outside the battered garage door.
Austin manages a smirk, his long, damp curls hanging in his face. “It’s nothing … just a flesh wound … fell on my knife like an idiot.” He holds his side. “Bleeding’s basically stopped, totally okay now.”
Very faintly the muffled noises of the feeding frenzy can be heard through the sealed glass. It sounds like an immense stomach growling. Lilly gets a glimpse through the nearest window of the gruesome orgy going on in the pen, and she glances at Austin, who sees it too. They say nothing. The sight of it barely registers to Lilly. Once upon a time she would have been repulsed. She glances back at the Governor. “They’re getting their vitamins and minerals, I see.”
“Nothing is wasted around here,” the Governor says with a shrug, nodding toward the window. “Poor gal from the helicopter up and died on us … internal injuries from the crash, I guess … poor thing.” He turns toward the glass and looks in. “She and the pilot are serving a larger purpose now.”
Lilly sees the bandaged ear. She shoots another glance at Austin, who also stares at the Governor’s blood-spotted bandage and the mangled ear underneath.
“It’s none of my business,” Austin says finally, pointing at the ear. “But are you okay? Looks like you got a nasty wound yourself.”
“Them new people, came in tonight,” the Governor murmurs, not taking his gaze off the window. “Turned out to be more of a liability than I first thought.”
“Yeah, I saw you with them earlier.” Austin perks up. “You were kinda taking them on a tour of the place, right? What happened?”
The Governor turns and looks directly at Lilly as though she asked the question. “I try to extend every courtesy to people, show them hospitality. We’re all in the same boat these days, am I right?”
Lilly gives him a nod. “Absolutely, yeah. So what was their problem?”
“Turns out they were a scouting party from another settlement somewhere nearby, and their intentions were not exactly neighborly.”
“What did they do?”
The Governor stares at her. “My guess is, they were going to try and raid us.”
“Raid us?”
“It’s happening all over the place now. Scouts slip in, secure a place, they take everything. Food. Water. The shirt off your back.”
“So what happened?”
“Got into a major tussle with them. I wasn’t gonna let them fuck with us. Not in a million years. One of them—the colored girl—tried to chew my ear off.”
Lilly shares another tense glance with Austin. She looks at the Governor. “Jesus … what is going on? These people are fucking savages.”
“We’re all savages, Lilly-girl. We just gotta be the biggest savages on the block.” He takes a deep breath. “Got into it pretty bad with the main guy. Fella fought back hard. Ended up cutting his hand off.”
Lilly can’
t move. She feels contrary emotions flowing through her, pinching her insides, triggering sparks of trauma in the back of her mind—memories of a bullet destroying the back of Josh Hamilton’s head. “Jesus Christ,” she utters, almost to herself.
The Governor takes another deep breath, then lets out an exasperated sigh. “Stevens is keeping him alive. Maybe we’ll learn something from him. Maybe not. We’re safe now, though. And that’s what counts.”
Lilly nods and starts to say something when the Governor cuts her off.
“I am not going to let anyone fuck with our town,” he says, making eye contact with both of them. A single pearl of blood tracks down his neck from the bandaged ear. He wipes it away and sighs again. “You people are my number-one priority, and that’s all there is to it.”
Lilly swallows hard. For the first time since she came to this place, she feels something other than contempt for this man … if not trust, then maybe a scintilla of sympathy. “Anyway,” she says, “I better get Austin to the infirmary.”
“Go on,” the Governor says with a weary smile. “Get Gorgeous George here a Band-Aid.”
Lilly puts her arm around Austin and helps the young man shuffle down the corridor. But before they turn the far corner, Lilly pauses and looks back at Philip. “Hey, Governor,” she says softly. “Thank you.”
* * *
On their way through the maze of corridors leading to the infirmary, they run into Bruce. The big African American is coming in the opposite direction, striding along with purpose, his jackboots echoing, his .45 bouncing on his big muscular thigh, his face burning with urgency. He glances up when he sees Lilly and Austin. “Hey, guys,” he says in his tense baritone. “You two seen the Governor around here?”
Lilly tells him where the man is, and then adds, “Must be a full moon tonight, huh?”