Bob sees all the blood running down the nude torso, forming sticky, maplike stains already drying and darkening in the dim light of the living room. He looks at the scorched stump of a right arm, and then surveys the breached eye socket all welled up with blood, the eyeball, as shiny and gelatinous as a soft-boiled egg, dangling off the side of the man’s face on tendrils of tissue. He makes note of the swamp of rich arterial blood gathered down around the man’s privates. And finally Bob notices the shallow, labored breathing—the man’s chest barely rising and falling.
Something snaps inside Bob Stookey—sobering him with the speed and intensity of smelling salts. Maybe it’s the old war footing coming back. There’s no time for hesitation on the battlefield—no room for repulsion or fear or paralysis—one just has to move. Fast. Imperfectly. Just move. Triage is everything. Stop the bleeding first, keep the air passages clear, maintain a pulse, and then figure out how to move the victim. But more than that, Bob seizes up right then with a wave of emotion.
He never had kids, but the surge of empathy he suddenly feels for this man recalls the adrenaline that flows through a parent at the scene of a car wreck, the ability to lift a thousand pounds of Detroit steel off a child pinned beneath the wreckage. This man cared about Bob. The Governor treated Bob with kindness, even tenderness—always making a point to check in with Bob, make sure Bob had enough food and water and blankets and a place to stay. The revelation steadies Bob, girds him, clears his vision and focuses his thoughts. His heart stops racing, and he reaches down to depress a fingertip against the Governor’s blood-soaked jugular. The pulse is so weak it could be mistaken for a fluttering pupa inside a fleshy cocoon.
Bob’s voice comes out of him in a low, steady, authoritative tone. “I’m going to need clean bandages, tape—and some peroxide.” Nobody sees Bob’s face changing. He wipes strands of his greasy, pomaded hair back over his pate. His eyes narrow, nested in deep crow’s-feet and wrinkles. His brow furrows with the intensity of a master gambler getting ready to play his hand. “Then, we’ll need to get him to the infirmary.” At last he looks up at the other men, his voice taking on an even deeper gravity. “I’ll do what I can.”
TWO
Rumors bounce around town that day with the haphazard trajectory of a pinball game. While Bruce and Gabe keep the Governor’s condition under wraps, the glaring absence of Woodbury’s leadership causes much speculation and whispering. At first, the prevailing wisdom is that the Governor, Dr. Stevens, Martinez, and Alice all stole away before dawn the previous day on an emergency mission—the purpose of which remains shrouded in mystery. The men on the wall each have a different version. One kid swears he saw Martinez taking a group of unidentified helpers out in a cargo truck on a predawn supply run. But this story loses much of its credence by midmorning when all the vehicles are accounted for. Another guard—the young wannabe gangbanger named Curtis, the kid whom Martinez unexpectedly relieved at the end of the east alley the previous night—claims that Martinez lit out on foot by himself. This rumor also loses steam when most of those left behind realize that the doctor and Alice are also missing, along with the Governor himself, as well as the wounded stranger who was being treated in the infirmary. The stoic man stationed outside the Governor’s apartment building with the assault rifle has nothing to say on the matter and won’t let anyone pass, nor will the guard at the top of the staircase leading down to the infirmary—both situations doing nothing to quell the rumor mill.
By late afternoon, Austin pieces together the real story. He’s been hearing rumblings that an escape has occurred—most likely the strangers he saw with the Governor a week and a half ago—and it all makes a lot more sense when he runs into Marianne Dolan, the matronly woman whose boy has been spiking a fever for twenty-four hours now. The woman tells Austin how she saw Stevens very early that morning, before dawn, hurrying across town with his doctor’s bag. She can’t remember for sure if he was with a group of people. She has a vague memory of seeing a cluster of folks waiting for him under an awning at the end of the street (near the corner where she stopped him), but she’s not positive about that. She remembers asking the doctor if he could possibly take a look at her boy later, and he said sure, but he seemed jittery, like he was in a hurry. With a little prodding, Marianne does suddenly remember seeing Martinez and Alice a few minutes later, hurrying down the street with the doctor, and then she remembers wondering who the others were—the strangers accompanying them—the big guy, the kid, the black lady.
Austin thanks her and immediately goes over to Lilly’s and tells her the whole story. Through process of elimination, they deduce that the whole group slipped out of town, unseen, at the end of the east alley—the gangbanger’s story lines up with this conclusion—and they decide to go over there. Austin brings his binoculars. He also brings his gun for some reason. The tension in the little town is running high by this time. When they arrive at the makeshift wall at the end of the alley, there’s nobody there. All the guards have congregated on the other side of town near the main barricades, to continue spreading gossip and smoke and pass around flasks of cheap booze.
“I can’t believe they would go with them,” Lilly says to Austin, holding a moth-eaten shawl around her shoulders to ward off the chill as she stands on top of the semitrailer blocking the alley from the outer world. A hastily constructed wall of hammered steel plates lines one side of the trailer. On the other side stretches the danger zone of dark side streets, rickety fire escapes, shadowy vestibules, and abandoned buildings given over to the walkers, all of it extending into the lonely outskirts of Woodbury. “Just bail on us without a word?” Lilly marvels softly, shaking her head, staring out at the opaque, black shadows of the pine barrens. The trees sway and flag menacingly in the breeze. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Austin stands next to her in his denim jacket, his long hair loose and tossing in the wind. By this point, dusk is setting in, the wind has cooled, and intermittent gusts swirl trash across the alley behind them, only adding to the desolate feeling of the place. “If you think about it, the whole thing makes a crazy kind of sense,” he says.
Lilly shivers and looks at him. “How do you mean?”
“Well, for one thing, Stevens hates the Governor’s guts—right? I mean that’s obvious.”
Lilly gazes out at the wasted landscape draped in gathering shadows. “The doctor’s a good man but he never understood the situation we’re in.”
“Really?” Austin sniffs. “I don’t know.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Didn’t you guys try to take over last year? Stage a coup or whatever?”
Lilly looks at him. “That was a mistake.” She looks out at the woods again. “We didn’t see the … practical reasons for the things he does.”
“The Governor?” Austin gives her a noncommittal glance, his hair blowing across his narrow face. “Seriously? You call the shit he does ‘practical’?”
Lilly gives him another look. “This is our home now, Austin. It’s secure. It’s a place where we can raise our child.”
Austin doesn’t say anything. Neither of them notices the dark figure weaving out of the trees a hundred and fifty yards away.
“People have enough to eat,” Lilly goes on. “They have resources. They have a future here in Woodbury. All because of the Governor.”
Lilly shivers in the chill, and Austin takes off his denim jacket. He drapes it over her shoulders. Lilly gives him a glance.
At first she considers objecting, handing it back to him, but then she just smiles. She finds his constant mothering kind of adorable. Since learning that she’s pregnant with his child, Austin Ballard has transformed. He has stopped talking about finding more weed to smoke and has stopped acting like a slacker and most importantly has stopped hitting on any available woman who crosses his path. He genuinely adores Lilly Caul, and he sincerely loves the whole concept of being a father, of raising a new generation as a hedge against the end of the world. He has—at least in Lilly’s e
yes—instantly grown up right in front of her.
While Lilly is thinking all this, the shambling figure approaches from the distance. It’s a hundred yards away now, and coming into view. An adult male clad in a blood-spattered white coat, its dead face upturned and rotating like a satellite dish, it lumbers back and forth across the gravel road, making a winding path toward the barricade as though homing in on some olfactory beacon, some predatory scent drawing it toward the town. Neither Lilly nor Austin notices the figure yet, their thoughts consumed by the exodus of their friends.
“Alice I can understand,” Austin says at last. “She would follow Doc Stevens into hell if he wanted her to. But Martinez is the one I can’t figure out. He always seemed so … I don’t know … gung ho or something.”
Lilly shrugs. “Martinez is a tough nut to crack. He helped us last winter. I always thought he was kind of ambivalent about the whole thing.” Lilly thinks about it some more. “I don’t know if I ever trusted him completely. I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“Yeah, but—” Austin falls silent. “Hold on a second.” He sees the figure approaching. “Hold on.” He reaches for the binoculars hanging around his neck. He peers through the lenses at the figure, now closing the distance to fifty yards or so.
“What is it?” Lilly sees the walker shuffling toward them but at first doesn’t make much of it. The sighting of an errant corpse weaving out of the trees has become commonplace around here, and Austin has his Glock, so there’s really nothing to worry about. “What’s the matter?”
“Is that—?” Austin fiddles with the dial on his field glasses and takes a closer look. “It couldn’t be. Holy shit, I think it is.”
“What?” Lilly reaches for the binoculars. “Let me have a look.”
Austin says nothing, just hands her the binoculars and stares at the approaching figure.
Lilly raises the binoculars to her eyes and focuses the lenses, and all at once she gets very still and lets out a soft, hissing exhalation of air: “Oh my God.”
* * *
With awkward, lurching strides, the recently deceased man approaches the alley barricade as though he’s a dog being drawn there by a subsonic whistle. Lilly and Austin hurriedly climb down the stepladder and then circle around the trailer to a spot where a narrow gap between the semi and the adjacent building is fenced off with rusty chain link and a crown of barbed wire. Lilly stares through the cyclone fence at the creature lumbering toward her.
At this close proximity—the walker is now about ten feet away—Lilly can just make out the tall, thin physique; the patrician nose; the thinning, sandy hair. The man’s eyeglasses are missing, but the drab-white lab coat is unmistakable. Torn and gouged in tufts, soaked in blood now as black as crude oil, the coat hangs in shreds.
“Oh my God, no … no, no, no,” Lilly utters in absolute despair.
The creature suddenly fixes its nickel-plated gaze on Lilly and Austin, and it lunges at them, arms reaching instinctively, fingers curling into claws, blackened lips peeling away from a mouth full of slimy-black teeth—a horrible breathy snarl vibrating out of its maw.
Lilly jerks back with a start when the thing that was once Dr. Stevens bangs into the fence.
“Jesus … Jesus Christ,” Austin mutters, reaching for his Glock.
The chain link rattles as the former physician claws and bumps ineffectually against the barrier. His previously intelligent face is now reduced to a road map of livid veins and marble-white flesh, his neck and shoulders mangled to a bloody pulp as if they had passed through a garbage disposal. His eyes, which once perpetually gleamed with irony and sarcasm, are now an opaque white, refracting the twilight like geodes. His jaws gape as he tries to bite Lilly through the fence.
Lilly senses the muzzle of Austin’s Glock rising up in her peripheral vision. “No, wait!” She waves Austin back and stares at the walker. “God … no. Just wait. Wait. I need to—we can’t just—God damn it.”
Austin’s voice lowers an octave, goes cold and hoarse with revulsion. “They must have—”
“He must have turned back,” Lilly interrupts. “Maybe he had second thoughts, decided to come back.”
“Or maybe they killed him,” Austin ventures. “Fucking evil dicks.”
The creature in the lab coat hasn’t taken its shoe-button eyes off Lilly as it gnashes its teeth and works its blackened lips around snapping teeth, as though trying to bite the air or perhaps to speak. It cocks its head for a moment as though recognizing something through the fence, something important in its prey, something like muscle memory. Lilly meets its gaze for a moment.
The strange tableau—walker and human only inches away from each other, staring into each other’s eyes—doesn’t last more than a moment. But in that horrible instant, Lilly feels the weight of the whole plague, the enormity of it, the terrible emptiness of the world’s end pressing down on her. Here is a man who once ministered to the sick, advised all walks of life, cracked wise and slung witticisms—a man of integrity and humor and audacity and empathy for the weak. Here is the pinnacle of mankind—the highest-functioning member of the human race—stripped of everything that could be called human, diminished to a drooling, feral, neurological bundle of tics. The tears well up in Lilly’s eyes without her even being aware of them—the only sign of her anguish the blurring of that livid face in front of her.
At last, Austin’s strangled voice wrenches her out of this terrible reverie. “We gotta do it,” he says. He has his silencer out now, and he’s screwing it on the gun’s barrel. “We owe it to Stevens, right?”
Lilly bows her head. She can’t look at the thing anymore. “You’re right.”
“Stand back, Lilly.”
“Wait.”
Austin looks at her. “What is it?”
“Just … gimme a second, okay?”
“Sure.”
Lilly stares at the ground, taking deep breaths, clenching her fists. Austin waits. The thing on the other side of the fence sputters and snarls. With a sudden jerk, Lilly spins toward Austin and grabs the gun.
She sticks the muzzle through an opening in the fence and shoots the walker point-blank in the head—the dry clap of the slide echoing off the sky—the single blast slamming through the top of Dr. Stevens’s skull, taking off the back of his head.
The monster folds unceremoniously to the ground in a fountain of blood. Lilly lowers the gun and stares at the remains. A pool of black cerebrospinal fluid gathers under the body.
A moment of stillness passes, the thumping of Lilly’s pulse the only sound in her ears now. Austin stands beside her, waiting.
At last she turns to him and says, “You think you could find a shovel?”
* * *
They bury the body inside the barricade, in the hard earth of a vacant lot along the fence. By the time they get the hole dug, which isn’t easy, full darkness has set in, the stars coming out in profusion, a full moon rising. The air turns cold and clammy, the sweat on the back of Austin’s neck chilling him to the bone. He climbs out of the trench and helps Lilly lower the doctor’s remains into the grave.
Then Austin backs away and lets Lilly have her moment standing over the gravesite, gazing down at the body, before he fills in the crater.
“Dr. Stevens,” she says so softly that Austin has to cock his head to hear her, “you were … a true character. In some ways you were the voice of reason. I didn’t always agree with you, but I always respected you. This town will miss you desperately—not just because of the service you provided but because it won’t be the same around here without you.”
A pause follows, and Austin glances up, wondering if she’s done.
“I would have been proud to have you deliver my baby,” she says then, her voice breaking. She sniffs back the tears. “As it is … we have a lot of challenges ahead of us. I hope you’re in a better place now. I hope we all will be someday. I hope this craziness ends soon. I’m sorry you didn’t make it long enough to see that day. G
od bless you, Dr. Stevens … and may your soul rest in peace.”
She lowers her head then, and Austin waits for Lilly’s tears to pass before he starts filling in the hole.
* * *
The next morning, Lilly awakens early, her mind going in many directions all at once.
She lies in bed—the room just beginning to lighten in the predawn glow—Austin slumbering next to her. The two of them have been sleeping together since Lilly broke the news to Austin two days ago that she’s carrying his baby. So far, in the wake of the revelation, they have been inseparable, and their rapport is easy and natural. For now, they’re keeping the news to themselves, but Lilly is dying to tell others about it—maybe the Sterns, maybe Bob, perhaps even the Governor. She’s riding a wave of euphoria and feels for the first time since she arrived in Woodbury that she has a fighting chance to be happy, to survive this insanity. Austin has a lot to do with that, but so does the Governor.
And therein lies the problem. She hasn’t seen a trace of the missing leader for forty-eight hours, and she doesn’t buy the rumors that the Governor went out on a scouting party to find the escapees. If Woodbury is under the threat of attack—which, Lilly worries, is a real possibility—then it seems to her that the Governor would be needed right here, fortifying the town, preparing to defend it. Where the hell is he? There are other rumors flying around, but she’s not buying any of them. She needs to find out what the deal is herself; she needs to see the Governor with her own eyes.
She gently untangles herself from the blankets and climbs out of bed, careful not to waken Austin. He’s been a sweetheart to her these last couple of days, and the sound of his low, deep breathing gives her a good feeling. He deserves a good night’s rest—especially in the wake of recent events. But Lilly is as restless as a caged animal and has to find out what’s going on with the Governor. She walks across the room feeling dizzy and nauseous.