“Doc!” The muffled voice outside his door gets him up and moving.
Woozy from the wine and lack of sleep, he trundles across the nominal living room of his Spartan apartment. A warren of cardboard boxes and stacks of found reading material, dimly lit by kerosene lanterns, his place is an end-of-the-world refuge for a lifelong intellectual. For a while, Stevens followed sporadic dispatches on the plague coming out of the CDC and Washington—often arriving with survivor groups, published on quickie print-on-demand circulars—but now the data sits collecting dust on his windowsill, all but forgotten in the doctor’s radioactive grief for his lost family.
“Need to have a little chat,” the man in the hallway says when Stevens opens the door.
The Governor stands outside, in the darkness of the corridor, with Gabe and Bruce hovering on his flanks, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. The Governor’s dark, hirsute face is aglow with fake cheer. “Don’t bother with the cookies and milk, we won’t be staying long.”
Stevens shrugs and leads the three men into the living room. Still woozy, the doctor motions at a ratty sofa stacked with newspapers. “If you can find a place to sit in this pigsty, you’re welcome to take a load off.”
“We’ll stand,” the Governor says flatly, looking around the hovel. Gabe and Bruce move around behind Stevens, predators circling for the kill.
“So … to what do I owe this unexpected—?” the doctor starts to say when the barrel of an APC pistol swings up and kisses the back of his skull. He realizes Gabe is pressing the muzzle of the semiautomatic against his neck cords, the mechanism cocked and ready to fire.
“You’re a student of history, Doc.” The Governor circles, jackal-like. “I’m sure you remember, back in the Cold War days, when the Ruskies were still swinging their nuclear dicks at us … they had an expression. Mutually assured destruction … M-A-D, they called it.”
Stevens’s heart races, his mouth drying. “I’m aware of the expression.”
“That’s what we got going on here.” The Governor comes around in front of him. “I go down, and you go down with me. And vice versa. You following me?”
Stevens swallows. “In all honesty, I have no inkling as to what you’re talking about.”
“This gal Christina, she got the impression that I was a bad guy.” The Governor keeps circling. “You don’t have any idea where she would have gotten such an impression, do ya?”
Stevens starts to say, “Look, I don’t—”
“Shut the fuck up!” The Governor draws a black 9 mm pistol, thumbs the hammer, and sticks the muzzle under the doctor’s chin. “You got blood on your hands, Doc. This girl’s demise is on you.”
“Demise?” Stevens’s head is upturned now, from the pressure of the gun’s barrel. “What did you do?”
“I did my duty.”
“What did you do to her?”
The Governor hisses at him through clenched teeth. “I removed her from the equation. She was a security risk. You know why?”
“What does that—?”
“You know why she was a security risk, Doc?” He increases the pressure on his chin. “She was a security risk because of you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re a smart man, Doc. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.” He releases the pressure, pulls the gun back, and continues circling. “Gabe, stand down. Let him be, now.”
Gabe pulls his weapon away, stands back. The doctor lets out a thin breath, his hands shaking. He looks at the Governor. “What do you want, Philip?”
“I WANT YOUR LOYALTY, GODDAMNIT!!”
The sudden roar of the Governor’s booming voice seems to change the air pressure in the room. The other three men stand deathly still. The doctor stares at the floor, fists clenched, heart thumping.
The Governor continues pacing around the doctor. “You know what happens when you damage my image in this town? People get nervous. And when they get nervous, they get careless.”
The doctor keeps gazing at the floor. “Philip, I don’t know what this woman told you—”
“Lives hang in the balance here, Doc, and you’re fucking with that balance.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t want you to say anything, I want you to listen for once. I want you to shut that smartass trap of yours, and listen and think about something.”
The doctor emits a faint sigh of exasperation, but says nothing.
“I want you to consider what happened to this gal before you poison anyone else against me.” The Governor comes closer to him. “I want you to focus your big brain on that. Can you do that for me?”
“Whatever you want, Philip.”
“And I want you to consider something else. I want you to consider how lucky you are … you got skills that keep you around.”
The doctor looks up at him. “Meaning what?”
The Governor bores his gaze into him. “Lemme put it this way. You better fucking pray we don’t run across another doctor. You follow me?”
The doctor looks down. “I follow you, Philip. You don’t have to threaten me.”
Now the Governor cocks his head at him and smiles. “Doc … c’mon … it’s me.” The old Fuller Brush salesman charm is back. “Why would I threaten my old sawbones?” He pats the doctor on the back. “We’re just a couple of neighbors flapping our jaws around the pickle barrel.” Philip looks at his watch. “In fact, we would love nothing more than to play a game of checkers with you, but we got—”
Out of nowhere, a sound outside cuts off his words and gets everybody’s attention.
Faint at first, carrying on the wind, the unmistakable crackle of .50 caliber gunfire comes from the east. The duration and fury of it—more than one gun placement barks for several moments—speaks to a serious firefight.
“Hold on!” The Governor raises his hand and cocks his head toward the window. It sounds as though it’s coming from the northeast corner of the barricade, but at this distance, it’s hard to tell for sure. “Something major’s going down,” the Governor says to Gabe.
Both Gabe and Bruce swing their Bushmaster machine guns around in front of them, safeties going off.
“C’mon!” The Governor charges out of the room, Gabe and Bruce on his heels.
* * *
They burst out of Stevens’s building with machine guns at the ready, the Governor in the lead, his 9 mm in hand, locked and cocked.
The wind skitters trash around their feet as they head east. The echoes of automatic gunfire have already faded on the breeze, but they can see a pair of tungsten searchlights—about three hundred yards away—the twin beams bouncing up across the silhouettes of rooftops.
“BOB!” The Governor sees the old medic huddled against a storefront half a block away. Shrouded in a ratty blanket, the drunkard crouches, shivering, his eyes popping wide toward the commotion. He looks as though the gunfire awakened him only moments ago, his expression bloodless and agitated, a man awakened from one nightmare by another. The Governor hurries up to him. “You see anything, buddy? We under attack? What’s going on?”
The medic sputters for a moment, hacking and wheezing. “Don’t know for sure … heard a guy … he was coming from the wall just a second ago…” He doubles over then with a coughing attack.
“What did he say, Bob?” The Governor touches the old man’s shoulder, gives him a little shake.
“He said … it’s a new arrival … something like that … new people.”
The Governor lets out a breath of relief. “You’re sure now, Bob?”
The old man nods. “Said something about new folks coming in with a pack of walkers right on their tail. They got ’em all, though—the walkers, that is.”
The Governor pats the old man. “That’s a relief, Bob. You stay put while we check it out.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”
The Governor turns to his men, speaking under his breath now. “Unti
l we get a handle on this situation, you boys keep them guns handy.”
“Will do, boss,” Gabe says, lowering the Bushmaster’s muzzle, but keeping the weapon cradled in his beefy arms. With his gloved hand, he releases the trigger pad, but keeps his index finger against the stock. Bruce does the same, sniffing nervously.
The Governor glances at his reflection in the hardware store window. He smooths his mustache, brushes a lock of raven-black hair from his eyes, and mutters, “C’mon, boys, let’s go roll out the welcome wagon.”
* * *
At first, standing in a halo of magnesium light and cloud of cordite, Martinez doesn’t hear the heavy footsteps coming toward him from a dark stretch of adjacent street. He’s too distracted by the mess that has tumbled into town in the newcomers’ wake.
“I’m taking them to the big man,” Martinez says to Gus, who stands near a gap in the wall, holding an armful of confiscated weapons—a couple of riot batons, an ax, a pair of .45 caliber pistols, and some kind of fancy Japanese sword still in its ornate scabbard. The air smells of flesh-rot and hot steel, and the night sky has clouded over.
Behind Gus, in a haze of gun smoke, ragged bodies are visible on the ground outside the barricade, and scattered across the pavement inside the gap. The freshly vanquished corpses steam in the night chill, their glistening black spoor spattered across the pavers.
“If I hear about a biter getting so much as twenty feet close to the wall,” Martinez barks, making eye contact with every one of the twelve men who stand sheepishly around Gus, “you’re going to hear about it! Clean house!”
Then Martinez turns to the newcomers. “You guys can follow me.”
The three strangers pause for a moment, leery and hesitant against the wall—two men and a woman—squinting in the tungsten radiance, their backs against the barricade like prisoners caught in mid-escape. Disarmed and disoriented, filthy from their hard travels, the men wear riot gear, the woman clad in a hooded garment that at first glance appears almost displaced in time, like a cloak from a monastery or some secret order.
Martinez takes a step closer to the trio and starts to say something else, when the sound of a familiar voice rings out from behind him.
“I can take it from here, Martinez!”
Martinez whirls to see the Governor walking up, with Gabe and Bruce on his heels.
As he approaches, the Governor plays the role of town host to the hilt, looking all hail-fellow-well-met, except for the clenching and unclenching of his fists. “I’d like to escort our guests myself.”
Martinez gives a nod, steps back, and says nothing. The Governor pauses, gazing out at the gap left by the missing semitrailer.
“I need you at the wall,” the Governor explains under his breath to Martinez, motioning at all the carnage on the ground, “cleaning off all the biters they no doubt drug with them.”
Martinez keeps nodding. “Yes, sir, Governor. I didn’t know you’d be coming out to get them when we gave word of their arrival. They’re all yours.”
The Governor turns to the strangers—a big smile here. “Follow me, folks. I’ll give you the nickel tour.”
EIGHT
Austin gets to the arena early that night—around eight forty-five—and sits alone, down front, behind the rusted cyclone-fence barrier, on the end of the second row, thinking about Lilly. He wonders if he should have pushed harder to get her to come along with him tonight. He thinks about that look she gave him earlier that evening—the softness that crossed her hazel eyes right before she kissed him—and he feels a strange mixture of excitement and panic burning in his gut.
The great xenon arc lamps boom to life around the stadium, illuminating the dirt strip and littered infield, and the stands slowly fill up around Austin with noisy townspeople hungry for blood and catharsis. The air has the snap of a chill in it and reeks of fuel oil and walker rot, and Austin feels weirdly removed from it all.
Clad in a hoodie, jeans, and motorcycle boots, his long hair pulled back in a leather stay, he fidgets on the cold hard seat, his muscles sore from the afternoon’s adventures in the hinterlands. He can’t get comfortable. He gazes out across the infield at the far side of the arena and sees the dark portals filling with clusters of upright corpses, each leashed to a handler by thick chains. The handlers start leading the biters out into the jarring light of the infield, the silver follow-spots making the dead faces look almost Kabuki-like, painted, like morbid clowns.
The crowd simmers with noise and catcalls and clapping. The phlegmy growling and moaning of the walkers as they take their places on the gravel warning track blends with the rising voices of the spectators to create an unearthly din. Austin stares at the spectacle. He can’t get Lilly out of his head. The roar that’s building all around him begins to fade … and fade … and fade away … until all he can hear in his head is Lilly’s voice softly making a promise.
I’ll show you some things … the only way we’re going to survive … helping each other.
Something pokes Austin in the ribs, and yanks him back to reality.
He jerks around and realizes an old man has taken a seat right next to him.
Sporting a nicotine-yellowed beard, an ancient face as wrinkled as wadded parchment, and a tattered black overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, he’s a feisty old Hasidic Jew who somehow managed to survive the streets of Atlanta after the Turn. His name is Saul, and he shows Austin his stained, rotting teeth as he says with a smile, “Gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight … am I right?”
“Yeah, absolutely.” Austin feels dizzy, light-headed. “Can’t wait.”
Austin turns back to the gathering of dead on the track’s periphery, and the sight of it makes him feel sick to his stomach. One of the biters, an obese male in bile-spattered painter’s overalls, sprouts a knot of small intestines from a sucking wound in his porcine belly. Another one is missing the side of her face, her upper teeth gleaming in the spotlights as she moans and tugs on her chain. Austin is quickly losing his enthusiasm for the fights. Lilly has a point. He looks down at the sticky tread beneath the bench, the cigarette butts and puddles of soft drinks and stale beer. He closes his eyes and thinks of Lilly’s sweet face, the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the slender curve of her neck.
“Excuse me,” he says, standing up and pushing himself past the old man.
“Better hurry back,” the geezer mumbles, blinking fitfully. “Show’s gonna start lickety-split!”
Austin is already halfway down the aisle. He doesn’t look back.
* * *
On his way across town, moving past the shadows of storefronts and the dark, boarded buildings of the main drag, Austin sees a half-dozen people coming toward him on the opposite side of the street.
Pulling his hoodie tighter, thrusting his hands in his pockets, he keeps moving, his head down. Avoiding eye contact with the oncoming group, he recognizes the Governor, who walks out in front of three strangers like a tour guide, his chest all puffed up with pride. Bruce and Gabe bring up the rear with assault rifles cradled and ready.
“—Guard station about a mile away—completely abandoned,” the Governor is saying to the strangers. Austin has never seen these people before. The Governor is treating them like VIPs. “All kinda supplies left inside,” the Governor is saying. “Been making good use of it. Night-vision goggles, sniper rifles, ammo, you seen it in action. This place wouldn’t be shit without it.”
As Austin passes on the opposite sidewalk, he gets a better glimpse of the newcomers.
The two men and one woman look battle-scarred, somber, and maybe even a little nervous. Of the two men—each of whom is clad in riot gear—the older one looks tougher, meaner, more cunning. Sandy-haired, with a grizzle of a beard, the older man walks alongside the Governor, and Austin hears him say, “You sound lucky. Where is it you’re taking us? We’re walking toward the light. What is that? A baseball game?”
Before they vanish around the corner, Austin glances over
his shoulder and gets a better look at the other two strangers. The younger man wears a riot helmet and looks maybe Asian, his age hard to tell at this distance and in this light.
The woman is far more interesting to look at. Her lean, sculpted face barely visible within the shadow of her hooded garment, she looks to Austin to be in her mid-thirties, African American, and exotically beautiful.
Just for an instant, Austin has a bad feeling about these people.
“Well, stranger,” he hears the Governor saying, as they pass out of view, “it looks like we’re not the only ones lucky around here. You showed up on the perfect night. There’s a fight tonight.…”
The wind and the shadows drown the rest of the conversation as the group rounds the corner. Austin lets out a sigh, shakes off the inexplicable feeling of dread, and continues on toward Lilly’s place.
A minute later, he finds himself standing in front of Lilly’s building. The wind has picked up, and litter swirls across the threshold. Austin pauses, lowers his hood, brushes a strand of curly hair from his eyes, and silently rehearses what he wants to say.
He goes up to her door and takes a deep breath.
* * *
Lilly sits by her window in a cast-off armchair, a candle flickering on a side table next to her, a paperback cookbook open to the chapter on great Southern side dishes, when the sound of knocking interrupts her reverie.
She had been thinking about Josh Hamilton, and all the great meals he would have prepared had he survived, and the mixture of sorrow and regret drove away Lilly’s hunger for something better than canned meat and instant rice. She had also been thinking a lot that night about the Governor.
Lately, Lilly’s fear of the man has been morphing into something else. She can’t get the memory out of her head of the Governor sentencing Josh’s killer—the town butcher—to a horrible death at the hands of hungry walkers. With a combination of shame and satisfaction, Lilly keeps reliving the act of vengeance in her darkest thoughts. The man got what he deserved. And perhaps—just perhaps—the Governor is the only redress they have to these kinds of injustices. An eye for an eye.