Making her way across the central walled area, striding purposefully down the cracked paving stones of Main Street, Lilly Caul tries to ignore the feeling that she gets whenever she sees the Governor’s goons strolling the storefronts with AR-15s cradled high across their chests. They’re not just keeping the walkers out … they’re also keeping us in.
Lilly has been persona non grata in Woodbury for months now, ever since her ill-fated coup in January. It was obvious to Lilly, even back then, that the Governor had gotten out of control, his violent regime turning Woodbury into a death carnival. Lilly had managed to recruit a few of the town’s saner denizens—including Stevens, Alice, and Martinez, one of the Governor’s right-hand men—to snatch the Governor one night and take him for a ride out into walker country for a little tough love. The plan was to accidentally-on-purpose get the Governor eaten. But walkers have a way of gumming up the works of the best-laid plans, and in the midst of the mission, a herd had formed out of nowhere. The whole enterprise reverted to a survival struggle … and the Governor lived to rule another day.
Oddly, in some kind of Darwinian twist, the assassination attempt only served to solidify and strengthen the Governor’s power base. To the residents already under his spell, he became Alexander the Great returning to Macedonia … Stonewall Jackson coming back to Richmond, bloodied but unbowed, a badass pit bull born to lead. Nobody seemed to care that their leader was obviously—at least in Lilly’s mind—a pure sociopath. These are brutal times, and brutal times call for brutal leadership. And for the conspirators, the Governor had become an abusive parental figure—teaching “lessons” and meting out his petty punishments with relish.
Lilly approaches a row of little redbrick two-story edifices lined up along the edge of the commercial district. Once quaint little landscaped condo complexes, the buildings now bear the marks of plague shelters. The picket fences have been wrapped in razor wire, the flowerbeds fallow and stony and littered with shotgun shells, the bougainvillea vines over the lintels as dead and brown as frayed cables.
Gazing up at all the boarded windows, Lilly wonders once again, for the millionth time, why she stays in this horrible, desolate, dysfunctional family known as Woodbury. The truth is, she stays because she has nowhere else to go. Nobody has anywhere else to go. The land outside these walls is rife with walking dead, the byways clogged with death and ruin. Lilly stays because she’s afraid, and fear is the one great common denominator in this new world. The fear drives people into themselves, it triggers base impulses, and leeches out the worst of the feral instincts and behavior lying dormant in the human soul.
But for Lilly Caul, the caged-animal experience has drawn out something else that has lurked deep within her for most of her life, something that has haunted her dreams and lurked in her marrow like a recessive gene: loneliness.
An only child growing up in middle-class Marietta, she usually ended up alone: playing alone, sitting alone in the back of the cafeteria or the school bus … always alone. In high school, her brittle intelligence, stubbornness, and sharp wit set her apart from the pom-pom-girl social scene. She grew up lonely, and the latent weight of this loneliness has dogged her in the post-plague world. She has lost everything that has meant anything to her—her father; her boyfriend, Josh; her friend, Megan.
She has lost everything.
Her apartment sits at the east end of Main Street, one of the shabbier redbricks in the complex. Dead kudzu clings to the west wall like mold, the windows veined in black, shriveled vines. The rooftop sprouts bent antennas and ancient satellite dishes that most likely won’t be receiving any signal ever again. As Lilly approaches, the low ceiling of clouds has burned off and the midday sun, as pale and cold as a fluorescent light, blazes down on her, making perspiration break out on the back of her neck.
She steps up to the outer door, fishing for her keys. But she pauses suddenly, something catching her attention out of the corner of her eye. She turns and sees a tattered figure slumped on the ground across the street, a man hunkered against a storefront. The sight of him sends a jolt of sadness down her midsection.
She puts her keys away and crosses the street. The closer she gets to him, the more clearly she can hear his ragged breathing—clogged with phlegm and misery—and his low, wheezing voice, mumbling incomprehensible exhalations in his drunken stupor.
Bob Stookey, one of Lilly’s last true friends, lies curled in a fetal position, shivering, passed out in his threadbare, reeking, navy pea coat, pushed up against the door of a derelict hardware store. The window above him bears the ironic, sun-faded advertisement in cheerful multicolored letters: SPRING CLEAN-UP SALE. The pain etched on the army medic’s deeply lined, leathery face—which is pressed against the pavement like wet trash—breaks Lilly’s heart.
The man has spiraled since the events of the past winter, and now he may be the only other resident of Woodbury who is more lost than Lilly Caul.
“Poor sweet thing.” Lilly speaks softly as she reaches over to a ratty woolen blanket bunched at his feet. The stench of body odor, stale smoke, and cheap whiskey wafts toward her. She pulls the blanket over him, an empty booze bottle rolling out of the fabric and cracking against the breakfront beside the door.
Bob gurgles. “… gotta tell her…”
Lilly kneels beside him, stroking his shoulder, wondering if she should clean him up, get him off the street. She also wonders if the “her” he’s babbling about is Megan. He was sweet on the girl—poor guy—and Megan’s suicide pulverized him. Now Lilly pulls the blanket up to his wattled neck and pats him softly, “It’s okay, Bob … she’s … she’s in a better—”
“… gotta tell…”
For the briefest instant, Lilly jerks at the sight of his fluttering eyes, revealing the bloodshot whites underneath. Has he turned? Her heart races. “Bob? It’s Lilly. You’re having a nightmare.”
Lilly swallows the fear, realizing that he’s still alive—if one could call this alive—and he’s simply writhing in a drunken fever dream, probably reliving the endless rerun of stumbling upon Megan Lafferty dangling at the end of a rope coiled off a broken-down apartment deck.
“Bob…?”
His eyes flutter open, just for an instant, unfocused but glazed with anguish and pain. “Gotta—tell her—what he said,” he wheezes.
“It’s Lilly, Bob,” she says, softly stroking his arm. “It’s okay. It’s me.”
Then the old medic meets her gaze, and he says something else in that halting mucous wheeze that makes Lilly’s spine go cold. She hears it clearly this time, and she realizes the “her” is not Megan.
The “her” is Lilly.
And the thing that Bob Stookey has to tell her will haunt Lilly for a lifetime.
TWO
That day, in the arena, Gabe delivers the final blow that ends the contest at just after three o’clock Eastern standard time, a full hour into the fight. The nail-studded head of the mace slams into Bruce’s ribs—his midsection protected with body armor concealed under his army fatigues—and Bruce goes down for the count. Exhausted from the rough-and-tumble charade, the black man stays down, veiled by a dust cloud, breathing hard into the dirt.
“WE GOT A WINNER!”
The amplified voice startles many in the stands, the crackling noise issuing forth from giant horns positioned around the arena, powered by generators rumbling underneath the grounds. Gabe does his strut, waving the mace in his best William Wallace impersonation. The jeers and applause mask the low communal growling of living dead chained to posts all around Gabe, many of them still reaching for a morsel of human flesh, their putrid mouths working and pulsing and drooling with robotic hunger.
“STICK AROUND, FOLKS, FOR AN AFTER-SHOW MESSAGE FROM THE GOVERNOR!!”
On cue the speakers crackle and thump with the downbeat of a heavy metal tune, a buzz-saw electric guitar filling the air, as a battalion of stagehands floods the infield. Most are young men in hoodies and leather jackets, carrying long iron pike
s with hooked ends.
They circle around the walkers. Chains are detached, collars hooked, voices raised, orders given by foremen, and one by one—in a thunderhead of dust—the workers begin leading the monsters across the infield toward the closest portal. Some of the creatures bite at the air as they are ushered back down into the shadows beneath the arena, others snarling and flinging gouts of black drool like reluctant actors being dragged offstage.
Alice watches this from the stands with silent distaste. The other spectators are on their feet now, clapping along with the headbanger tune, hollering at the horde of undead being led away. Alice reaches down to the floor beneath her and finds her black medical bag under the bench. She grabs it, quickly struggles out of her section, and then hurries down the steps toward the infield.
By the time Alice makes it to track level, the two gladiators—Gabe and Bruce—are walking away, heading toward the south exit. She hurries after them. Out of the corner of her eye, she senses a ghostly figure emerging from the shadows of the north portal behind her, making a dramatic entrance that would rival King Lear treading the boards at Stratford-Upon-Avon.
He comes across the infield in his leathers and studs, his stovepipe boots raising dust, his long coat flapping in the breeze behind him. He looks like a grizzled bounty hunter from the nineteenth century, his pistol banging on his hip as he lopes along. The crowd surges with excitement as they see him, a wave of applause and cheers. One of the workmen, an older man in a Harley T-shirt and ZZ Top beard, scuttles toward him with a hard-wired microphone.
Alice turns and catches up with the two exhausted warriors. “Bruce, hold up!”
Walking with a pronounced limp, the big black man reaches the edge of the south archway, pauses, and turns. His left eye is completely swollen shut, his teeth stained in blood. “Whaddaya want?”
“Let me see that eye,” she says, coming up to him, kneeling down, and opening the medical bag.
“I’m fine.”
Gabe joins them with a smirk on his face. “What’s wrong, Brucie got a boo-boo?”
Alice takes a closer look, dabbing the bridge of his nose with gauze. “Jesus, Bruce … why don’t you let me take you down to see Dr. Stevens.”
“It’s just a busted nose,” Bruce says, pushing her away. “I said I’m fine!”
He kicks the medical bag over, the instruments and supplies spilling across the dirt. Alice lets out an exasperated groan and bends down to pick up the pieces, when the music cuts off and the sound of a low, velvety, amplified voice rings out over the winds and noise of the crowd.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN … FRIENDS AND FELLOW RESIDENTS OF WOODBURY … I WANT TO THANK ALL OF YOU FOR ATTENDING THE SHOW TODAY. IT WAS A BARN BURNER!”
Alice glances over her shoulder and sees the Governor standing center field.
The man knows how to work a room. Sizing up the crowd with fire in his gaze, grasping the hand mike with the puffed-up sincerity of a megachurch minister, he has a weird, charismatic aura about him. Not a huge man, not especially handsome—in fact, upon close scrutiny one might even call him a bit scruffy and malnourished—Philip Blake still gives off an air of preternatural confidence. He has dark eyes that reflect the light like geodes, and his gaunt face is festooned with the handlebar whiskers of a third-world bandit.
He turns and nods toward the south exit, stiffening Alice’s spine as she feels his cold gaze on her. The amplified voice crackles and echoes: “AND I WANT TO SEND A SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO OUR FEARLESS GLADIATORS, BRUCE AND GABE! SHOW ’EM SOME LOVE, Y’ALL—GIVE ’EM A HAND!”
The cheers and whooping and hollering climb several registers, ringing off the metal stanchions and far awnings like a hungry pack of barking dogs. The Governor lets it play out, a conductor patiently prodding a symphony. Alice closes her medical bag and stands.
Bruce waves heroically to the crowd, and then follows Gabe into the shadows of the cloister, vanishing down the exit ramp with the formality of a religious ritual.
Across the infield, Philip Blake lowers his head, waiting for the wave of cheers to wash back out to sea.
In the gathering silence, he lowers his voice slightly, speaking softly, his velvety voice carrying over the wind: “NOW … GETTING SERIOUS FOR A MINUTE … I KNOW OUR SUPPLIES HAVE BEEN GETTING A LITTLE LOW. MANY OF YOU HAVE BEEN SCRIMPIN’ AND RATIONING. MAKING SACRIFICES.”
He looks up at his flock, making eye contact as he continues.
“I FEEL THE CONCERN GROWING. BUT I WANT Y’ALL TO KNOW … RELIEF IS ON ITS WAY. GONNA BE MAKING A SERIES OF RUNS … FIRST ONE TOMORROW … AND THESE RUNS ARE GONNA YIELD ENOUGH PROVISIONS TO KEEP US GOING. AND THAT IS THE KEY, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. WE WILL KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON! WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP! EVER!”
A few spectators applaud, but the majority of them remain silent, skeptical, ambivalent in their hard, cold seats. They have lived off the sour, metallic well water and rotting fruit of the untended orchards for weeks. They have given their children the last of the canned meats and the moldy remains of smoked game birds.
From the center of the infield, the Governor holds them in his gaze.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, A NEW COMMUNITY IS BEING BUILT HERE IN WOODBURY … AND IT IS MY SACRED MISSION TO PROTECT THIS COMMUNITY. AND I WILL DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. I WILL SACRIFICE WHAT HAS TO BE SACRIFICED. THAT’S WHAT COMMUNITY IS ALL ABOUT! WHEN YOU SACRIFICE YOUR OWN NEEDS FOR THE NEEDS OF THE COMMUNITY, YOU WALK WITH YOUR HEAD HELD HIGH!”
This gooses the applause meter a tad, some of the spectators finding Jesus and letting out yelps. The Governor pours on the sermonizing.
“YOU FOLKS HAVE HAD TO SUFFER IMMENSELY DUE TO THE PLAGUE. YOU HAVE BEEN ROBBED OF EVERYTHING YOU HAVE WORKED SO HARD FOR YOUR ENTIRE LIVES. MANY OF YOU HAVE LOST LOVED ONES. BUT HERE … IN WOODBURY … YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT CANNOT BE TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU BY MAN NOR BEAST: YOU HAVE EACH OTHER!”
Now some of the residents spring to their feet and put their hands together, while others pump their fists. The noise builds.
“LET ME BOTTOM-LINE IT FOR Y’ALL: THE MOST PRECIOUS POSSESSION WE HAVE IN THE WORLD IS OUR OWN PEOPLE. AND FOR THE SAKE OF OUR PEOPLE … WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP … NEVER FALTER … NEVER LOSE OUR NERVE … AND NEVER LOSE FAITH!”
More spectators stand. The cheering and applause rises up into the sky.
“YOU HAVE A COMMUNITY! AND IF YOU HOLD ON TO THIS, THEN THERE IS NO FORCE IN THE WORLD THAT CAN TAKE IT FROM YOU! WE WILL SURVIVE. I PROMISE YOU. WOODBURY WILL SURVIVE! GOD BLESS Y’ALL … AND GOD BLESS WOODBURY!”
Across the arena, Alice carries her medical bag out the south entrance without even looking back.
She’s seen this movie before.
* * *
After the post-game show, Philip Blake makes a stop in the men’s room at the end of the arena’s litter-strewn portico. The narrow enclosure reeks of dried urine, black mold, and rat turds.
Philip relieves himself, splashes water on his face, and then gazes for a moment at his cubist reflection in the cracked mirror. Way in the back of his mind, in some far-flung corner of his memories, the sound of a little girl crying echoes faintly.
He finishes up, and then bangs out the door, his metal-tipped boots and long belt-chain jangling. Down one long cinder-block corridor, down a flight of stone steps, down another hallway, and finally down one last flight of stairs, and he finds the “pens”—a row of rolling garage doors riddled with dents and ancient graffiti.
Gabe stands in front of the last door on the left, reaching into a metal oil drum and tossing something wet through a broken-out window. The Governor approaches without a word, pausing in front of one of the windows. “Nice work out there today, sport.”
“Thanks, boss.” Gabe reaches down into the drum and pulls out another morsel, a human foot severed raggedly at the ankle, glistening with gore. He casually tosses it through the jagged aperture.
Philip gazes through the dirty glass at the blood-speckled tile enclosure. He sees the sw
arming mass of undead—a small orgy of pale-blue faces and blackened mouths, the two dozen surviving walkers from the day’s event gobbling at body parts on the tile floor like a drove of wild pigs fighting over truffles—and he stares and stares, enthralled for a moment, fascinated by the spectacle.
At length, Philip tears his gaze away from the abomination and nods at the bin full of fresh remains. “Who is it this time?”
Gabe looks up, his tattered black turtleneck torn over one pectoral, bulging at the belly with body armor, his underarms stained with the telltale sweat-spots of exertion. He wears rubber surgical gloves that drip with fresh blood. “Whaddaya mean?”
“The chum you’re tossing in, who is it?”
Gabe nods. “Oh … this is that old codger, used to live by the post office.”
“Natural causes, I hope?”
“Yeah.” Gabe nods, and tosses another piece through the opening. “Asthma attack last night, poor dude. Somebody said he had emphysema.”
The Governor lets out a sigh. “He’s gone to Glory now. Gimme an arm. From the elbow down. And maybe one of the smaller organs … a kidney, the heart.”
Gabe pauses, the ghastly wet noises of the feeding frenzy echoing down the corridor. Gabe gives the Governor an odd look, a mixture of sympathy, affection, and maybe even duty, like a Boy Scout about to help his troop leader. “Tell you what,” Gabe says, his husky voice softening. “Why don’t you go home, and I’ll bring ’em to ya.”
The Governor looks at him. “Why?”
Gabe shrugs. “People see me carrying something, they don’t even give it a second thought. You carry something, they’ll want to help … maybe ask you what it is, wonder what you’re doing.”