The man named Rick lunges at him, grabs his shirt with the one good hand. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” The man’s blue eyes flare with rage as hot as cinders. “You handed me to that psycho! You fucking did this!”
“Whoa—hey!” Martinez rears back, mortified, playing dumb.
“STOP IT!”
The sound of Dr. Stevens’s voice is like a splash of cold water on the two men. The doctor steps into the fray, holding each man at bay with an open palm. “Stop it, stop it right fucking now!” He sears his gaze into each of them. Then he puts an arm around Martinez. “Come on, Martinez. You need to leave.”
Rick deflates, staring at the floor, holding his stump, as Martinez walks away.
“What’s with that guy?” Martinez asks the doctor under his breath as he passes out of earshot on the other side of the room, satisfied with the ruse. The seeds have been planted. “Is he okay?”
The doctor pauses in the doorway, speaking softly, confidentially. “Don’t worry about him. What did you want? You were looking for me?”
Martinez rubs his eyes. “Our fine Governor asked me to talk to you—said you didn’t seem too happy here. He knows we’re pals. He wanted me to just—” Martinez pauses here, genuinely at a loss. He does feel a certain fondness for the cynical, wisecracking Stevens. Secretly, deep down, Martinez admires the man—an educated man, a man of substance.
For the briefest instant, Martinez glances over his shoulder at the man across the room. The stranger named Rick leans against the wall, holding his bandaged wrist, a faraway look on his face. He seems to be staring into the void, looking into the abyss, struggling to understand the cold reality of his situation. But at the same time, at least in Martinez’s eyes, the man somehow looks as solid as a rock, ready to kill if necessary. The jut of his whiskered chin, the crow’s-feet crimping the edges of his eyes from years of either laughter or bemusement or suspicion, or maybe all three—all of it seems to comprise a man of a different kind of substance. Maybe not advanced degrees and private practices, but definitely a man to be reckoned with.
“I don’t know,” Martinez mutters at last, turning back to the doctor. “I guess he wanted me to just … make sure you weren’t going to cause any trouble or something.” Another pause. “He just wants to make sure you’re happy.”
Now it’s the doctor’s turn to gaze back across the room and ponder things.
Finally Stevens aims one of those patented smirks at Martinez and says, “Does he now?”
* * *
The arena comes alive with a fanfare of thunderous heavy metal thrash-music and a fusillade of hyena yelps from the stands—and on cue, the crusty, scabrous, subliterate tank known as Eugene Cooney emerges from the shadows of the north vestibule like some thrift shop Spartacus. He wears secondhand football pads over his iron-girder shoulders, and carries a bloodstained bat wound with reams of tape.
The crowd eggs him on as he passes the gauntlet of walking dead chained to the gateposts on the edge of the infield. The creatures reach for him—rotting mouths working, blackened teeth gnashing, delicate stringers of black bile looping through motes of dusty light. Eugene gives them a middle-finger salute. The crowd loves the man, and roars their approval as Eugene takes his place out in the center of the infield, brandishing the bat with a kind of pumped-up majesty that would shame a marine color guard. The stench of ripe body organs and stewing offal mingles with the breeze.
Eugene twirls his bat and waits. The spectators wait. The entire arena seems to go quiet in a strange tableau as everybody awaits the challenger.
* * *
Way up in the press box, standing behind the Governor, looking on, Gabe wonders aloud, raising his voice enough to be heard, “You sure about this, boss?”
The Governor doesn’t even look at him. “The chance to see this bitch take a beating without me breaking a sweat? Yeah—I think it’s a good move.”
A noise down on the field wrenches their attention to the pool of light around the south portal.
The Governor smiles. “This is going to be good.”
* * *
She enters the showground from the darkness of the vestibule with a brusque, almost curt rhythm to her stride. Head down, shoulders square under her monastic cloak, dreadlocks flagging in the wind, she moves quickly and decisively despite her wounds and exhaustion, as though she’s about to simply grab a stray rabbit by the nape of the neck. Her long, curved saber, gripped firmly in her right hand, points downward at a forty-five-degree angle.
It happens so quickly, so casually, so authoritatively, that the exotic nature of this person—the strange officiousness of her demeanor—seems to momentarily hold the audience rapt, as though the entire gathering has inhaled and held its collective breath. The moving corpses reach for this woman as she passes—this odd specimen with the fancy sword—almost like supplicants, surrounding her, converging on her as she approaches Eugene with no expression, no pleasure, no emotion.
Eugene cocks the bat, and he growls some inane threat at her and then lashes out.
The man’s movements might as well be in slow motion as the woman simply and swiftly delivers a perfectly placed kick to the big brute’s genitals. The blow lands in the soft spot between his legs and elicits an almost girlish squeal from the behemoth, doubling him over as though he’s suddenly intoxicated with agony. The spectators howl.
The next part transpires with the swift and certain arc of a chef’s knife.
The woman in the cloak simply does a quick turn, a sort of low pirouette, the sword gripped in both hands now—a movement so natural, so practiced, so precise, so inevitable, as to be almost innate—and then brings the sword down on the big man’s neck. The hand-forged blade, tooled by artisans in the tradition of ancestors down through millennia, severs Eugene Cooney’s head with barely a whisper.
At first, up in the bleachers, the sight of steel flashing, a glimmer of tungsten on the blade—and the entire cranium of this giant man being lopped off with the ease of a band saw cutting through Brie—is so surreal that the crowd reacts awkwardly: a coughing sound among many, a chorus of nervous laughter … and then a tsunami of silence.
The sudden hush that grips the dusty stadium is so inappropriate and out of place that it takes the subsequent geyser of blood frothing out of Eugene Cooney’s cleanly dismembered neck, as the headless body drops puppetlike—first to its knees, then to its belly, landing in a heap as lifeless as a pile of shed skin—to suddenly elicit shouts of outrage.
Up in the crow’s nest, behind panes of grimy glass, a wiry figure springs to his feet. The Governor gapes down at the infield, teeth clenched, hissing: “What. The. Fuck?!”
For a long, dreamlike moment, it seems as though a strange paralysis grips each and every person within the confines of the press box and across the stands. Gabe and Bruce move in toward the glass, clenching and unclenching their fists. The Governor kicks his folding chair behind him, the metal contraption banging against the back wall.
“Get down there!” The Governor points at the tableau on the field—the dark amazon with her sword poised, the circle of cadavers reaching for her—and he screams at Gabe and Bruce: “Rein those biters in and GET HER THE FUCK OUTTA MY SIGHT!” Liquid rage courses through him. “I swear I’m going to kill that bitch!”
Gabe and Bruce stumble toward the door, tripping over each other to get out.
Down on the field, the woman in the cloak—nobody has yet bothered to even learn her name—unleashes her controlled fury on the ring of walking dead circling her. It begins almost as a dance.
From a crouch, she spins and simultaneously swings the sword at the first walker. The sharp edge whispers through mortified neck cords and gristle, effortlessly taking off the first head.
Blood and tissue bloom in the artificial light as the head falls and rolls in the dust, and the body collapses. The woman spins. Another head jettisons. Fluids fountain into the air. The woman spins again, zinging through another putrefied neck, anoth
er cranium flying off its ragged, bloody mooring. Another spin, another decapitation … another, and another, and another … until the dust is running black with cerebrospinal fluids, and the woman gets winded.
By this point—unbeknownst to the crowd or the woman in the center of the infield—Gabe and Bruce have reached the bottom of the stairs and are racing around the corner of the gate toward the track.
The crowd starts braying—odd donkeylike barking sounds mingling with boos—and to an undiscerning ear it would be hard to tell whether they are angry, scared, or excited. The clamor seems to fuel the woman on the infield. She finishes off the last three reanimated corpses with a graceful combination of grand plié, jeté, and deadly pas de pirouette, the sword detaching crania silently, the dance a baptismal bloodbath, the earth flooding with deep scarlet-black fluids.
Right then, Gabe has crossed the warning track, followed closely by Bruce, and the two men charge toward the woman, who has her back turned. Gabe reaches her first, and he literally dives at her, as though he’s got one chance to tackle an errant running back before the player scores.
The woman goes down hard, the sword flying out of her hands. She eats dust as the two men pile up on her. A gasp forces its way out of her lungs—she has said maybe ten words since she arrived in Woodbury—and she writhes on the ground under their weight, letting out huffs of anguished breath as they shove her face against the dirt. Little plumes of dust puff off the ground, kicked up by her angry breath. Her eyes glaze over with rage and pain.
The audience is struck dumb by all this—absorbing it on a deeper level by now—and the onlookers react again in stunned silence. The hush returns to the arena and presses in on the place until the only sound is the huffing and gasping of the woman on the ground, and a faint click coming from the crow’s nest above the stands.
The Governor emerges, drunk with rage, fists clenching so hard that his fingernails begin to draw blood.
“HEY!”
A deep female voice—tobacco cured and coarsened by hardship—calls out to him from below. He pauses on the parapet.
“You son of a bitch!” The owner of the voice is a woman in a threadbare smock, sitting in a middle row between two waiflike boys in tattered clothes. She gazes up angrily at the Governor. “What the hell was that shit?! I don’t bring my boys out here for that! I bring them to the fights for good clean fun—that was a goddamn massacre! I don’t want my boys watching fucking murder!”
The crowd reacts, as Gabe and Bruce wrestle with the amazon, dragging her off the infield. The audience voices its disapproval. Mutterings rise and meld into angry shouts. Most of the people concur with the woman but something deeper drives the gathering now. Almost a year and a half of hell and starvation and boredom and intermittent terror come pouring out of some of them in a volley of shrieks and howls.
“You’ve traumatized them!” the woman cries out between the shrieking noises. “I came here looking for some broken bones, a few missing teeth—not this! This was way too much! ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!”
Up on the parapet, the Governor pauses and gazes down at the crowd, the rage flowing through him like a brush fire gobbling every last cell, making his eyes water and his spine run cold, and deep in the folds of his brain, a part of him breaks apart … control … control the situation … burn the cancer out … burn it out now.
From the bleachers, the woman sees him walking away. “Hey, goddamnit! I’m talking to you! Don’t walk away from me! Get back here!”
The Governor descends the stairs, oblivious to the catcalls and boos, making his departure with hellfire and vengeance on his mind.
* * *
Running … hurtling headlong … lost in the darkness, night-blind … they plunge through the woods, frantically searching for the safety of their camp. Three women … one in her fifties, one pushing sixty, and one in her twenties … they flail at the foliage and tangled branches, desperately trying to get back to the circle of campers and mobile homes that lie in the darkness less than a mile to the north. All these poor women wanted to do was pick some wild blackberries and now they’re surrounded. Pinned down. Trapped. What went wrong? They were so quiet, so stealthy, so nimble, carrying the berries in the hems of their skirts, careful not to speak to each other, communicating only in hand gestures … and now the walkers are closing in on them from all directions, the stench rising around them, the chorus of watery snarling noises like a threshing machine behind the trees. One woman screams when a dead arm bursts out of a thicket, grabbing at her, tearing her skirt. How did this happen so quickly? The walkers came out of nowhere. How did the monsters detect them? All at once the moving corpses block their path, cutting off their escape, surrounding them, the women panicking, their piercing shrieks rising up now as they struggle against the onslaught … their blood mingling with the dark purple juice of the berries … until it’s too late … and the woods run red with their blood … and their screams are drowned by the unstoppable thresher.
* * *
“They came to be known as the Valdosta Women,” Lilly says with a shiver, sitting on Austin’s fire escape with a blanket wrapped around her as she tells her cautionary tale.
It’s late, and the two of them have been sitting there for almost an hour, lingering on the platform long after the lights of the arena had begun to sequentially wink out and the disgruntled townspeople had started the long trudge back to their hovels. Now Austin sits next to her, smoking a home-rolled cigarette and listening intently to her strange story. His gut clenches with huge emotions that he can’t quite parse, can’t quite understand, but he needs to process it all before he makes his case, so he says nothing and just listens.
“When I was with Josh and the others,” Lilly goes on in a voice drained of emotion, stretched thin with exhaustion, “they used to say, ‘Be careful … and wear a sanitary napkin at all times during your cycle, and dip it in vinegar to mask the smell … or you’ll end up like the Valdosta Women.’”
Austin lets out a thin, mortified breath. “One of them was having her period, I assume.”
“You got it,” Lilly says, lifting her collar and pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Turns out the walkers can smell menstrual blood like sharks … it’s like a fucking homing beacon.”
“Jesus.”
“Lucky for me, I’ve always been as regular as clockwork.” She shakes her head with a shiver. “The twenty-eighth day rolls around after my last period and I make sure I’m indoors or at least somewhere safe. Since the Turn started, I’ve tried to keep meticulous track of it. That’s one reason I knew. I was late and I just knew. I was getting sore and swollen … and I was late.”
Austin nods. “Lilly, I just want you to—”
“I don’t know … I don’t know,” she murmurs as though not even hearing him. “It would be a big deal any other time but now in this crazy shit we’re in…”
Austin lets her trail off, and then he says very softly, very gently, “Lilly, I just want you to know something.” He looks at her through moistening eyes. “I want to have this baby with you.”
She looks at him. A long beat of silence hangs in the chill air. She looks down. The pause is killing Austin. He wants to say so much more, he wants to prove to her that he’s sincere, wants her to trust him, but the words escape him. He’s not good with words.
At last she looks up at him, her eyes filling up. “Me too.” She utters this in barely a whisper. Then she laughs. It’s a cleansing laugh, a little giddy and hysterical, but cleansing nonetheless. “God help me … I do too … I want to have it.”
They wrap their arms around each other in a bear hug, embracing like that for a long moment on that cold, windy precipice outside Austin’s back window. Their tears come freely.
After a while, Austin reaches up to her face, brushes her hair from her eyes, wipes the tears off her cheeks, and smiles. “We’ll make it work,” he murmurs to her. “We have to. It’s a big fuck-you to the end of the world.”
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She nods, caressing his cheek. “You’re right, pretty boy. When you’re right, you’re right.”
“Besides,” he says then, “the Governor’s got this place under control now. He’s made this place safe for us … a home for our baby.” He tenderly kisses her forehead, feeling a certainty he’s never felt before in his life. “You were right all along about him,” Austin says softly, holding her. “The man knows what he’s doing.”
FOURTEEN
Footsteps echo down the lower corridor under the sublevels. They close in hard and fast, coming down the stairs two at a time, moving at an angry clip, getting Gabe’s and Bruce’s attention in the darkness. The two men stand outside the last stall, in the shadows thrown by bare bulbs, trying to catch their collective breaths from the struggle to put the black gal back on ice.
For such a skinny little thing, she puts up quite a fight. Welts are rising on Gabe’s ham-hock arms where the lady scratched him, and Bruce nurses a sore spot just below his right eye where the bitch caught him with an elbow. But none of it compares with the whirlwind presently coming down the narrow corridor toward them.
The figure throws a long shadow as it approaches, back-lit by the cage lights, pausing with fists balled up tight. “Well?” the thin man says, standing thirty feet away, voice echoing, his narrow face veiled in shadow. “She in there?” His voice sounds wrong—twisted and strangled with emotion. “Did you get her back in there? Is she tied up? WELL?!”
Gabe swallows hard. “We got her back in there, man—but it wasn’t easy.”
Bruce still breathes hard from the exertion, holding the delicate sword in his huge hand like a child holding a broken toy. “Bitch is crazy,” he murmurs.
The Governor pauses in front of them, all blazing eyes and stiff-armed bluster. “Whatever—just—I just—GIVE ME THAT FUCKING THING!”
He snatches the sword away from Bruce, who instinctively jerks with a start. “Sir?” he says in a low and uncertain voice.
The Governor huffs and grits his teeth, pacing, with the sword clenched white-knuckle tight in his hand. “Where does that bitch get off?! I told her—told her I’d go easy on her—just needed her to do me a fucking favor—just this one fucking favor! ONE FAVOR!” His booming voice practically pins the two other men to the wall. “She agreed to help me! SHE AGREED!!” Temples pulsing, jaw clenching, neck cords prominent, lips curling away from his teeth, Philip Blake looks like a caged animal. “Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!” He turns to the two men. He snarls with spittle flying. “We. Had. An agreement!”