Bruce looks at her. His expression taut, his eyes narrowing, he looks as though he’s wondering just exactly how much she knows. “Whaddaya mean?”
She shrugs. “It just seems like things are getting crazier by the minute.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know—these assholes trying to raid us—people acting crazy and stuff.”
He looks relieved. “Yeah … right … it’s some crazy shit. I gotta go.”
He brushes past them and hurries on down the hall toward the walker pens.
Lilly furrows her brow, watching him.
Something isn’t adding up.
NINE
When they get to the infirmary, Lilly and Austin find Dr. Stevens preoccupied, hunched over the partially nude form of an unconscious adult male sprawled on a gurney in the corner. The man—thirtyish, fit, sandy-haired, a grizzle of a beard—has a towel thrown across his privates, and a blood-sodden bandage on his right stump of a wrist. The doctor is carefully removing battered, blood-stippled body armor from the man’s shoulders.
“Doc? Got another patient for ya,” Lilly says as she crosses the room with Austin shuffling alongside her. The unconscious man on the gurney is unknown to Lilly, but Austin seems to recognize the sandy-haired man immediately and gives Lilly a poke in the ribs.
Austin whispers, “It’s him … the dude the Governor tangled with.”
“What now?” the doctor says, glancing up from the gurney and looking at them over the tops of his wire-rimmed glasses. He sees Austin’s fingers stained in blood, pressing against his ribs. “Put him over there, I’ll be right with you.” The doctor glances over his shoulder. “Alice, give us a hand with Austin, will you?”
The nurse comes out of an adjacent storage room with an armful of cotton bandages, medical tape, and gauze. Dressed in her lab coat, hair pulled back from her youthful face, she looks frazzled. She makes eye contact with Lilly but says nothing as she hurries across the room.
Lilly helps Austin over to an examination table in the opposite corner.
“Who’s the patient, Doc?” Lilly asks, playing dumb, gently helping Austin hop onto the edge of the table. Austin cringes slightly at a twinge of pain but seems more fascinated by the man lying out cold on the gurney across the room. Alice comes over and begins to gingerly unzip Austin’s sweatshirt, inspecting the wound.
Across the room, the doctor carefully pulls a threadbare hospital smock over the grizzled man’s lolling head, guiding his limp arms into sleeves. “I think I heard somebody say his name is Rick, but I’m not positive about that.”
Lilly walks over to the gurney and gazes distastefully down at the unconscious man. “What I heard is that he attacked the Governor.”
The doctor doesn’t look at her, he simply purses his lips skeptically as he gently ties the back of the gown. “And where, pray tell, did you hear this?”
“From the man himself.”
The doctor smiles ruefully. “That’s what I thought.” He shoots her a glance. “You think he’s giving you the straight scoop, do you?”
“What do you mean?” Lilly comes closer. She looks down at the man on the gurney. In the blank-faced stupor of sleep, his mouth slightly parted and emitting shallow breaths, the sandy-haired man could be anybody. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker … serial killer, saint … anybody. “Why would the Governor lie about this? What good would it do?”
The doctor finishes tying off the back of the smock, and then gently pulls a sheet over the patient. “You seem to have forgotten, your fearless leader is a congenital liar.” Stevens says this in a casual tone, as though imparting the time and temperature. He stands and faces Lilly. “It’s old news, Lilly. Look up the word ‘sociopath’ and see if you don’t find his picture.”
“Look … I know he’s no Mother Teresa … but what if he’s exactly what we need now?”
The doctor looks at her. “What we need? Really? He’s what we need?” Stevens shakes his head, turns away from her, and goes over to the pulse-ox monitor on a table next to the gurney. The machine is off, its screen blank. Hooked to a twelve-volt car battery, it looks as though it’s fallen off the back of a truck. Stevens fiddles with it for a moment, readjusts the terminals. “You know what we really need? We need a monitor down here that actually works.”
“We have to stick together,” Lilly persists. “These people are a threat.”
The doctor whirls angrily toward her. “When did you drink the Kool-Aid, Lilly? You once told me it’s the Governor who’s the biggest threat to our safety. You remember? What happened to the freedom fighter?”
Lilly narrows her eyes at him. The room goes still, Alice and Austin feeling the tension, their silence fueling the awkward edge to the atmosphere. Lilly says, “He could have killed us back then and he didn’t. I just want to survive. What is this thing you have for him?”
“This thing I have is lying right here,” the doctor says, indicating the unconscious man. “I believe the Governor attacked him.”
“What are you talking about?”
The doctor nods. “Without provocation, I’m talking about. The Governor mutilated this man.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
The doctor ponders her. His tone of voice changes, lowers, goes cold. “What happened to you?”
“Like I said, Doc, I’m just trying to survive.”
“Use your head, Lilly. Why would these people traipse in here with bad intentions? They’re just groping around like the rest of us.”
He looks down at the man on the gurney. The man’s eyes jerk slightly under his lids, a desperate fever dream unfolding. His breathing gets a little frenzied for a moment, then calms again.
The silence stretches. At last, Austin speaks up from the other side of the room. “Doc, there were two others—a younger guy and a woman with him. Do you know where they are? Where they went?”
Stevens just shakes his head, looking at the floor now. His voice comes out in barely a whisper. “I don’t know.” Then he looks up at Lilly. “But I’ll tell you this much … I wouldn’t want to be them right now.”
* * *
A muffled voice can be heard coming from behind a sealed garage door at the end of a lonely corridor in the arena’s subbasement. Hoarse with exhaustion, stretched thin with nervous tension, the voice is feminine, low, and indecipherable to the two men standing outside the door.
“She’s been at it ever since I put her in there,” Bruce says to the Governor, who stands facing the door with arms folded judiciously across his chest. “Talking to herself like that.”
“Interesting,” the Governor comments, his senses sharpened by the latent violence in the air. He can feel the rumble of generators in his bones. He can detect the odors of decay and plaster rotting.
“These people are fucking crazy,” Bruce adds, shaking his glistening bald head, his hand instinctively resting on the grip of the .45 holstered on his hip.
“Yeah … crazy like foxes,” the Governor murmurs. His ear throbs. His skin tingles with anticipation. Control. The refrain bubbles up from the voice that lives in the lowest compartment of his brain: Women are meant to be controlled … managed … broken.
For one fleeting instant, it feels to Philip Blake as though part of him is outside his body, watching all this transpire, fascinated by the voice within him that is second nature now, a second skin: You have to find out what these people know, where they come from—what they have—and most importantly how dangerous they are.
“That lady in there is tough as shit,” Bruce says. “She ain’t gonna give anything up.”
“I know how to break her,” the Governor mutters. “Leave it to me.”
He breathes deeply, inhaling slowly, preparing himself. He senses danger here. These people could very easily hurt him—they could tear apart his community—and so he must call on that part of him that knows how to hurt others, knows how to break people, knows how to control women. He doesn’t even blink.
&nb
sp; He simply turns to Bruce and says, “Open it.”
* * *
The garage door rolls up on rusty, shrieking casters, banging against the top rail. At the rear of the enclosure, the woman in the darkness jerks against her ropes with a start, her long dreadlocks matted to her face.
“I’m sorry,” the Governor says to her. “Don’t let me interrupt.”
In the slice of light coming from the corridor, the woman’s left eye shimmers through a gap in her braids, just that one eye, balefully taking in the visitors standing like giants in the doorway, silhouetted by the bare bulbs in cages along the hallway ceiling behind them.
The Governor takes a step closer. Bruce comes in behind him. “You seemed to be having a nice, spirited conversation with—I’m sorry, who exactly was it you were talking to? Actually—never mind—I don’t even care. Let’s get this under way.”
The woman on the floor brings to mind an exotic animal leashed inside a pen—dark and lithe and supple, like a panther, even in her ratty work clothes—her slender neck strapped and roped to the back wall. Each arm is tied to an opposite corner of the chamber, and her espresso-colored skin gleams with perspiration, her Medusa braids shiny and flowing off her shoulders and back. She glares through her hair at the wiry man, who approaches her with menacing calm.
“Bruce, do me a favor.” The Governor speaks with the absent, businesslike tone of a workman approaching a faulty pipe or a pothole to be filled. “Take her pants off and tie one leg to that wall over there.”
Bruce moves in and does what he’s told. The woman tenses as her pants are yanked down. Bruce does this with the brisk certainty of someone ripping a Band-Aid off a sore. The big man steps back, and then pulls a coil of rope off his belt. He starts hog-tying one leg.
“And tie her other leg to that wall over there,” the Governor instructs.
The woman doesn’t take her gaze off the Governor. She glowers through that hair, eyes so filled with hate they could spot-weld steel.
The Governor comes closer to her. He starts to unbuckle his belt. “Don’t struggle too much just yet, girl.” He undoes his belt and unsnaps his camo pants. “You’re going to want to save your energy.”
The girl on the floor glares with the intensity of a black hole swallowing all matter. Every particle in the room, every molecule, every atom, is being drawn toward the black void of her eyes. The Governor comes closer. He feeds off her hate like a lightning rod.
“After you’re done there, Bruce … leave us to it,” the Governor says, his gaze clamped down on the woman. “We need the privacy.” He smiles at her. “And shut the door on the way out.” His smile widens. “Tell me something, girl. How long do you think it would take for me to ruin your life—shatter your sense of security—really fuck you up?”
No answer comes from the woman, only that ancient, hunched-back gaze of an animal bristling right before a fight to the death.
“I think half an hour could probably do it.” That smile. That heavy-lidded, serpentine stare. He stands only inches away from her. “But really, I plan on doing this every day as often as I can.…” His pants are down around his ankles now. Bruce moves off toward the door as the Governor steps out of his trousers. His spine tingles.
The outer door comes down as Bruce exits. The reverberation of the bang makes the woman jerk again, just slightly.
The Governor’s voice fills the vacuum of space as the underwear comes off. “This is going to be fun.”
* * *
Above ground. In the night air. In the stillness of the dark town. Late. Two figures walk side by side along the ramshackle storefronts.
“I can’t wrap my head around all this shit,” Austin Ballard is saying with his hands in his pockets as he strolls along the forlorn promenade. He shudders in the chill. His hood is drawn up and over his curls, the lingering dread of what he has just seen showing on his face in brief flashes as the intermittent light spills across their path.
“The feeding room?” Lilly ambles alongside him with her denim coat buttoned up to her neck. She holds herself, her arms around her midsection in some unconscious gesture of self-preservation.
“Yeah … that and the dude with his hand chopped off. What the fuck is going on, Lilly?”
She starts to answer when the distant pop of large-caliber gunfire echoes. The noise makes both of them jump. Martinez and his boys are still out there, burning the midnight oil, cleaning up any stray biters drawn to the wall by the earlier commotion of the racetrack arena.
“Business as usual,” Lilly says, not really believing it. “You’ll get used to it.”
“Sometimes it seems like the biters are the least of our problems.” Austin shivers. “You think these people really are planning a raid?”
“Who knows?”
“How many more of them do you think there are?”
She shrugs. She can’t shake the woozy feeling in her gut that something dangerous and inexorable has already started. Like a foreboding black glacier moving undetectably beneath their feet, the course of events seems to be slipping now toward some undefined horizon. And for the first time since she stumbled upon this ragtag little community … Lilly Caul feels a bone-deep fear that she can’t even identify. “I don’t know,” she says at last, “but I feel like we can kiss any restful night’s sleep good-bye for a while.”
“To be honest, I haven’t slept that great since the Turn broke out.” A twinge of pain from his injury makes him flinch, and he holds his side as he walks. “Matter of fact, I haven’t slept the night through since the beginning.”
“Now that you mention it, I haven’t either.”
They walk a little farther in silence … until Austin says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you really on board with the Governor now?”
Lilly has been asking herself the same thing. Was it a case of Stockholm syndrome—that weird psychological phenomenon where hostages start to feel empathy and positive feelings toward their captors? Or was she projecting all her rage and pent-up emotions through the man as though he were some kind of attack dog hard-wired to her id? All she knew was that she was scared. “I know he’s a psycho,” she says finally, measuring her words. “Believe me … if circumstances were different … I would cross the street and walk on the other side if I saw him coming toward me.”
Austin looks unsatisfied, anxious, tongue-tied. “So you’re saying … it’s like … the whole … when-the-going-gets-tough thing? Or something like that?”
She looks at him. “What I’m saying is this. Knowing what’s out there, we could be in serious danger again. Maybe the worst danger we’ve been in since the town was established.” She thinks about it. “I guess I see the Governor as … I don’t know … like fighting fire with fire?” Then she adds, a little softer, a little less sure of herself, “As long as he’s on our side.”
Another distant crackling volley of gunfire makes both of them twitch.
They come to the end of the main drag, where two streets intersect in the darkness with a petrified railroad crossing. In the dark of night, the broken-down street sign and shoulder-high weeds look like the end of the world. Lilly pauses, preparing to go her separate way to her apartment building to the north.
“Okay, well, anyway…” Austin looks as though he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “Here’s to another sleepless night.”
She gives him a weary grin. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come over to my place and you can bore me some more with your tales of surfing off the coast of Panama City Beach. Hell, maybe you’ll be boring enough to put me to sleep.”
For a moment, Austin Ballard looks like a thorn has just been removed from his paw.
* * *
They settle down for the night in Lilly’s makeshift living room amid the cardboard boxes and carpet remnants and useless things left behind by nameless former residents. Lilly makes them some instant coffee on a chafing dish, and they sit in the lant
ern light and just talk. They talk about their childhoods—how they share similar innocuous suburban backgrounds full of cul-de-sacs and Scout troops and weenie roasts—and then they have that patented post-Turn discussion of what they’ll do if and when the cure comes and the Troubles go away. Austin says he’ll probably look to move somewhere warm and find a good woman and settle down and build surfboards or something. Lilly tells him about her dreams of being a clothing designer, of going to New York—as though New York still exists—and making a name for herself. Lilly finds herself growing more and more fond of this shaggy, good-natured young man. She marvels that he is such a decent, gentle person underneath the swagger. She wonders if the playboy routine wasn’t some kind of messed-up defense mechanism. Or maybe he’s just dealing with the same thing every other survivor is dealing with right now—the thing nobody can put a name to but feels like some kind of virulent stress disorder. Regardless of her epiphanies about Austin, however, Lilly is glad for the company that night, and they talk into the wee hours.
At one point, very late that night, after a long moment of awkward silence, Lilly looks around her dark apartment, thinking, trying to remember where she put her little stash of hooch. “You know what,” she says at last. “If memory serves, I think I have half a bottle of Southern Comfort hidden away for emergencies.”
Austin gives her a loaded glance. “You sure you want to part with it?”
She shrugs, getting up off the couch and padding across the room to a stack of crates. “No time like the present,” she mutters, rifling through the extra blankets, bottled water, ammunition, Band-Aids, and disinfectant. “Hello, gorgeous,” she says finally, locating the beautifully etched bottle of tea-colored liquid.
She comes back and thumbs off the cap. “Here’s to a good night’s sleep,” she toasts, and then knocks back a healthy swig, wiping her lips.
She sits down on the sofa next to him and hands the bottle over. Austin, who cringes again from the pain in his side, takes a pull off the bottle and then grimaces from the burn in his throat as well as the stitch in his rib cage. “Jesus, I’m such a goddamn pussy.”