He fires at the cluster of walkers on the other side of the fence.
“FUCK!” The bullet grazes the skull of a female in a tattered, bloodstained sundress. The female staggers and stays upright and keeps banging against the fence. The Governor spits angrily. “Ain’t worth shit left-handed!” He fires again and again, until the fourth blast shatters the female’s skull in a fountain of brain matter that sends her sliding down the fence in a greasy leech trail of gore. “This ain’t gonna be easy,” Philip grumbles. “Relearning every goddamn thing in the book.” He glances at Lilly. “You come to spank me a little bit?”
Lilly looks at him. “Excuse me?”
“I could tell you weren’t exactly thrilled with my little presentation.”
“I never said—”
“I could tell by your body language, the expression on your face … you didn’t seem all that crazy about my oratory skills.”
The way he says this in his Georgia twang—putting exaggerated enunciation on the word “orrrr-a-tory”—puts her hackles up. Is he toying with her? Is he challenging her? She licks her lips and carefully chooses her words. “Okay, look … I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’m not trying to tell you how to run this town. It’s just that … there were children in that audience.”
“And you think I crossed the line when I showed them what was left of Martinez.”
Lilly takes a deep breath. “All right, yes … to be honest with you … yeah … I thought it was a bit much.”
He puts the 9 mm back in the wheelbarrow and selects a nickel-plated .357. He checks the cylinder and lines up another shot. “There’s a war coming, Lilly,” he says softly, drawing a bead on another walker out in the shade of an ancient, twisted live oak. “And I promise you one thing.” His left arm is as steady as a steel girder now. “If these people are not ready to defend our town at all costs, we will lose … everything.” His left index finger caresses the trigger pad. He’s getting the hang of it now. “Everything you love … everything that is dear to you, Lilly. You will—I guarantee it—lose it.”
He closes his right eye and peers down the barrel with his left and fires.
Lilly doesn’t jerk at the noise—not even the slightest flinch, despite the volume of the .357’s report—but instead just stands there staring at the man, thinking, feeling the cold sensation of dread turning into certainty within her. The man has a point.
On the other side of the fence, a large male biter folds to the ground in a baptism of blood and fluids. Lilly bites down hard. She senses the tiny ember of life within her, struggling, a seedling starving for sunlight.
At last Lilly says very softly, “You’re right. I’m with you—we all are—no matter what happens. We’re ready. No matter how bad it gets.”
* * *
That afternoon, the cramps worsen until Lilly can’t even stand up straight anymore. She lies in a fetal position on the futon in her bedroom with packing blankets over the windows to block out the harsh light of the spring sun. She spikes a mild fever—a hundred and one by dinnertime—and she starts seeing streaks of light across her field of vision like sunspots, flaring brightly with each stabbing pain in her midsection and dull throb above the bridge of her nose.
By six o’clock the chills have begun quaking through her, making her shiver convulsively under the ratty thermal blanket that Austin has brought over from his place. She feels as though she’s about to vomit but can’t quite bring anything up. She’s miserable.
Eventually she manages to climb out of bed to go to the bathroom. Her lower back twinges painfully, stiffly, as she shuffles barefoot across her hardwood floors, staggering into the john and closing herself into the reeking chamber of cracked tile and ancient linoleum flooring. She slumps down on the toilet and tries to pee but can’t even do that.
Austin has been forcing fluids into her, trying to guard against dehydration, but Lilly’s system is so out of whack she can’t bear to drink more than a few ounces of water at a time. Now she sits in the darkness of the bathroom and tries to breathe through the cramps, which send hot tremors of agony up her bowels and through her guts. She feels weak. Wrung out. Limp. Like a piano just fell on her. Is it just the stress? She looks down and blinks.
She sees the blood, as bright as strawberry jam, stippling the crotch of her panties, which now dangle down around her ankles. Her entire body goes icy cold. She has been diligent about checking her underwear for spotting, and up until now has been clean. She tries to keep calm, tries to breathe deeply, tries to think.
A loud knocking shakes her out of her daze. “Lilly?” Austin’s voice comes from outside the door, tinged with alarm. “You okay?”
She leans over and grasps the doorknob, nearly falling off the porcelain stool. She manages to crack the door open and then looks up into Austin’s glassy, terrified eyes. “I think maybe we should go see Bob,” she utters softly, her voice brittle with fear.
EIGHT
That night, Philip Blake cleans house—metaphorically and literally—a man on the cusp of a revolution, a warrior on the precipice of war. He wants his environment to reflect the clean, austere, sterile organization of his brain. No more disembodied voices, no more ambivalence brought on by his symbiotic second self. In the autoclave of his mind—cauterized and cleansed by his ordeal—any vestige of Brian Blake has been burned away, sandblasted from the dark crevices of his thoughts. He is a clockwork mechanism now—calibrated for one thing and one thing only: vengeance.
So he begins the process with the rooms of his apartment, the scene of the crime. There are still faded signs of the abomination; he is compelled to clean deeper.
Bruce brings him cleaning supplies from the warehouse, and he spends hours eradicating any remaining evidence of his torture at the hands of that lunatic bitch with the sword. He wipes down the walls of his living room with Dutch cleanser, working awkwardly with his left hand, and he carefully runs a battery-powered Dirt Devil over the matted carpet, which still bears the faded stains of his own blood. He uses a cleaning solvent on the more stubborn stains, scrubbing with a soft brush until the rug begins to shred apart. He straightens the rooms, makes the bed, bags the dirty laundry, mops the hardwood floors with Murphy’s Oil Soap, and wipes the mossy grime from the glass panels of his matrix of aquariums, paying little attention to the twitching severed heads within them.
He keeps Penny chained to the eye-bolt in the foyer while he works, every few moments making note of her presence in the other room—the soft burr of her perpetual growling, the dull rattling of her chain as she strains to escape, the faint clack of her piranha-like teeth snapping at the air with blind hunger. As he cleans around her, he finds himself being more and more bothered by that soft clacking noise.
It takes him hours to sanitize the place to his satisfaction. Working with one arm makes some of the tasks, such as opening a garbage bag or pushing a broom around corners, a little tricky. To make matters worse, he keeps seeing corners that he missed, nooks and crannies still bearing signs of his torment—sticky patches of dried blood, a discarded roll of tape, a drill bit still crusted with his tissue under a chair, a fingernail in the nap of the carpet. He cleans well into the night, until he has nearly erased every last remnant of his suffering. He even rearranges the sparse furniture to cover or hide the scars he cannot expunge—the scorch marks from the acetylene torch, the nail holes in the rug from the plywood panel.
At length, he obliterates any visible proof that torture ever occurred here.
Satisfied with the job, he collapses into his recliner in the side room. The soft percolating of the aquariums calms him, the muffled thudding and tapping of the reanimated faces bumping against the inside of the glass almost soothing to him. He stares at the bloated, sodden faces undulating behind their veils of water. He imagines the glorious moment when he takes that dreadlock-wearing bitch apart piece by piece … and eventually he drifts off.
He dreams of the old days, and he sees himself at home in Wayne
sboro with his wife and child—a mythology his brain has now chiseled into itself with the permanence of a stone tablet—and he is happy, truly happy, maybe the only time he felt such happiness in his life. He holds Penny on his lap in the cozy little sunroom off the kitchen in the rear of the clapboard house on Pilson Street, with Sarah Blake curled up on the sofa next to them, her head on Philip’s shoulder, as Philip reads a Dr. Seuss book aloud to Penny.
But something intrudes on the scene—a strange tapping noise—a dull, metallic clacking. In the dream, he looks up at the ceiling and sees cracks forming, each tapping noise spreading another hairline fracture in the plaster overhead, a sifting of dust motes filtering down through rays of sunlight. The tapping noise rises and quickens, and he sees more cracks forming, until the ceiling begins to rend apart. He screams as the room collapses in on itself.
The cataclysm wakes him up.
He jerks forward in the chair with a start, his wounds panging with sharp stabs of agony from the hammer blows and gashes and puncture sores that are still tight with sutures under his clothes. He is damp with cold sweat, and his phantom arm throbs. He swallows stomach acid and looks around the room—the dull glow and bubbling of the aquariums bringing him back to reality—and he realizes he still hears the infernal clacking noise.
The sound of Penny’s chattering teeth in the other room.
He has to do something about it.
The last stage of his housecleaning.
* * *
“Don’t you worry, Lilly-girl, I happen to have quite a bit of practice catching babies,” Bob Stookey says, blatantly lying to the couple in the magnesium-silver brightness of the underground infirmary. It’s the middle of the night and the cavernous room is as silent as a morgue. Bob has rolled a pulse-ox unit over to the bed on which Lilly now lies covered in a sheet, with Austin nearby, fidgeting, chewing his fingernails, and shooting glances back and forth from Lilly’s ashen face to Bob’s weathered, smiling visage.
“I ain’t no O-B-G-Y-N,” Bob adds, “but I had to watch over my share of pregnant gals during my stint in the army. You and your baby are gonna be fine … shipshape … four by four, little lady.”
The truth is, Bob had only dealt with a single pregnant woman during his tour in Afghanistan—a translator—a local girl who had been only seventeen when one of the guys from the PX had knocked her up. Bob had kept her condition under wraps until the day she miscarried. It was Bob who had to give the woman the news—although he was convinced back then, and still is today, that she already knew. A woman knows. That’s all there is to it … a woman knows.
“What about the spotting?” Lilly asks. She lies on the same gurney on which the Governor floated in the balance between life and death for so many days. Bob has inserted an IV stick into her arm just above the wrist—the last bag of glucose in the storage pantry—in order to stave off dehydration and keep her stable.
Now Bob tries to maintain the reassuring tone in his voice as he hovers over her. “It ain’t that uncommon during the first trimester,” he says, not really knowing what he’s talking about, turning to wash his hands in the steel sink behind them. The drumming of the water on the basin is excruciatingly loud in the stillness of the infirmary. The room is a pressure cooker of emotion. “I’m sure everything is right as rain,” Bob says with his back turned to them.
“Whatever you need, Bob, just let me know,” Austin says then. Dressed in his hoodie and ponytail, he looks like a lost child who could break down into sobs at any moment. He puts a hand on Lilly’s bare shoulder.
Bob dries his hands on a towel. “Lilly Caul’s gonna be a mom … I still can’t get over it.” He turns and comes back over to the bed. He smiles down at her as he slips on surgical gloves. “This is just what we need around this place,” he says with false cheer. “Some good news for once.” He reaches under the sheet and gently palpates her tummy, trying to remember how to diagnose a miscarriage. “You’re gonna be great at it, too.” He turns to a tray of instruments, and finds a flat stainless steel probe. “Some people are just cut out for it. Know what I mean? I was never cut out for it—God knows.”
Lilly turns her head to the side and closes her eyes, and Bob can tell she’s trying not to cry. “It doesn’t feel right,” she murmurs. “Something’s wrong, Bob. I can tell. I can feel it.”
Bob looks at Austin. “Son, I’m gonna have to do a pelvic exam on her.”
Austin has tears in his eyes. He knows. Bob can see it in the young man’s glazed expression. “Whatever you need to do, Bob.”
“Honey, I’m gonna have to go in there and have a look-see,” he says. “It ain’t gonna be too comfortable, and it’s a gonna be a little cold.”
Her eyes still closed, Lilly barely emits a whisper. “It’s okay.”
“All right, here we go.”
* * *
“Dammit—hold still.” Philip Blake crouches in the darkness of his foyer, working with the needle-nosed pliers, his left hand gloved and protected with a layer of duct tape. “I know you’re not enjoying this, but I hope you understand how much better this will make things.”
He probes the black maw of his dead daughter’s mouth with the pliers, trying to latch on to her upper incisors. Penny keeps trying to chew on his hand, but he keeps her immobilized with his jackboot on her lower half. Her reek engulfs him as he works, but he ignores it.
“It really is for the good of our relationship,” he says, finally latching on to one of her upper teeth with the pincers. “Here it comes!”
He extracts a tooth—the sound like a tiny cork popping—and pulls the bloody pellet free, trailing delicate threads of pulp. Penny rears back for a moment, her demonic features puckering, her wide, milky eyes fixed on some empty void beyond this world.
“Here comes another one,” Philip mutters softly, as though speaking to a pet. “I can feel it loosening.” He grunts as another tooth pops free. “There. See? This isn’t so bad, is it?” He tosses the second tooth into a wastebasket behind him, and then turns back to the girl-thing. “You’re almost getting used to the feeling, aren’t you?”
She drools a black, oily substance as he removes one tooth after another, her face now going as blank as the dark side of the moon. “Just a few more, and we’ll be done,” he comments with fake cheer, working on her lower teeth. “Sound good?” He pulls the last few jagged lower teeth with minimum effort, the tiny threads of tissue looping across the front of her filthy sundress.
Thanks to advanced decomposition, the teeth come out easily on their dead roots.
“There,” Philip says reassuringly, “all done.”
* * *
For a brief instant, standing in that silent infirmary at the foot of Lilly’s gurney, Bob remembers that one time in Afghanistan when he assisted the field surgeon in the performance of a D&C on the translator—the removal of any remaining fetal or placental tissue after a pregnancy has been lost—and now he searches his memory for the lessons of that day. He gently reaches under the sheet covering Lilly’s lower half. He doesn’t look at Lilly’s face.
She looks away.
Bob begins the exam. He remembers the way a healthy uterus is supposed to feel during the early weeks of a viable pregnancy—according to the field surgeon—versus the way it feels in the aftermath of a miscarriage. It takes only a few seconds for Bob to find the end of the cervix. Lilly lets out an anguished mewling sound that breaks Bob’s heart. He palpates the uterus and finds it completely dilated, heavy with blood and slough. This is all he needs to know. He gently pulls back, removing his hand from her.
“Lilly, I want you to remember something,” he says then, removing his gloves. “There’s no reason—”
“Oh no.” She’s already softly crying, her head still turned away, her tears soaking the pillow. “I knew it … I knew it.”
“Oh Jesus.” Austin puts his head down on the gurney’s side rail. “Oh God.”
“What was I thinking?…” She softly, silently weeps into the
gurney’s pillow. “What the fuck was I thinking?…”
Bob is crestfallen. “Now, honey, let’s not start kicking ourselves in the ass, okay? The good news is, you can try again … you’re a young gal, you’re healthy, you can definitely try again.”
Lilly stops crying. “Enough, Bob.”
Bob looks down. “I’m sorry, honey.”
Austin looks up, wipes his eyes, and gazes at the wall. He lets out a long pained breath. “Fuck.”
“Gimme a towel, Bob.” Lilly sits up on the gurney. She has a strange expression on her face, impossible to read, but one glance at it and Bob knows to shut the fuck up and get the woman a towel. He grabs a cloth and hands it to her. “Unhook me from this shit,” she says flatly, wiping herself off. “I gotta get outta here.”
Bob removes the stick, wipes her wrist, and puts a bandage on the site.
She shoves herself off the gurney. For a moment, she looks as if she might fall over. Austin steadies her, gently holding her by the shoulder. She pushes him away and finds her jeans draped over a chair back. “I’m fine.” She gets dressed. “I’m perfectly fine.”
“Honey … take it easy.” Bob circles around her as though blocking her path to the door. “You probably oughtta just stay off your feet for a while.”
“Get outta my way, Bob,” she says with fists clenched now, jaw set with determination.
“Lilly, why don’t we—” Austin falls silent when she shoots him a look. The expression on her face—the teeth gritted tightly, the smoldering cinders of rage in her eyes—takes Austin aback.
Bob wants to say something but figures maybe it’s better if he just lets her go. He steps aside, and then looks at Austin, gesturing for him to back off. Lilly is already halfway across the room.
The door slams behind her, the residual tension crackling in her slipstream.