Rise of the Governor (43 page)

Bethany continues keening and caterwauling, and Lilly sees that the walker's hand is still clutched—rigor mortis seizing up its tendons—around a hank of the torn gingham dress. The little girl writhes and gasps air as if unable to summon tears after so many months of horror, and Lilly goes to her. “It's okay, honey, don't look.” Lilly drops the pistol and cradles the girl's head. The others gather around them, Meredith kneeling, Lilly slamming her boot down on the dead hand. “Don't look.” She tears the dress away. “Don't look, honey.” The girl finally finds her tears.

“Don't look,” Lilly repeats under her breath, almost as though speaking to herself.

Meredith pulls her daughter into a desperate embrace and whispers softly in the child's ear. “It's all right, Bethany, sweetie, I got you … I got you.”

“It's over.” Lilly's voice has lowered, as though she's talking herself into something. She lets out an agonizing sigh. “Don't look,” she utters once more to herself.

Lilly looks.

She should probably stop looking at the walkers after destroying them, but she can't help it. When the brains finally succumb and the dark compulsion goes out of their faces, and the empty slumber of death returns, Lilly sees the people they were. She sees a farmhand with big dreams who got maybe an eighth-grade education but had to take over an ailing father's farm. She sees cops, nurses, postal carriers, shop clerks, and mechanics. She sees her father, Everett Caul, tucked into the silk convolutions of his casket, awaiting burial, peaceful and serene. She sees all the friends and loved ones who have passed since the outbreak swept across the land—Alice Warren, Doc Stevens, Scott Moon, Megan Lafferty, and Josh Hamilton. She's thinking about one other victim when a gravelly voice breaks the spell.

“Lilly-girl?” Bob's voice. Faint. Sounding as though it's coming from a great distance. “You okay?”

For one last fleeting instant, staring at the dead face of that farmhand, Lilly thinks of Austin Ballard, the androgynous, long-lashed, rock-star-handsome young man whom she saw sacrificed on a battlefield in order to save Lilly and half the people in Woodbury. Was Austin Ballard the only man Lilly had ever truly loved?

“Lilly?” Bob's voice rises slightly behind her, tinged with worry. “You all right?”

Lilly lets out a pained breath. “I'm good … I'm fine.” Suddenly, without warning, she lifts herself to her feet. She gives Bob a nod and then picks up her handgun, shoving it back into her holster. She licks her lips and looks around the group. “Everybody okay? Kids?”

The other two children slowly nod, looking at Lilly as though she has just lassoed the moon. Calvin sheathes his knife and kneels and strokes his daughter's hair. “She okay?” he asks his wife.

Meredith gives him a terse nod, doesn't say anything. The woman's eyes look glassy.

Calvin lets out a sigh and stands. He comes over to Lilly. She is busy helping Bob drag the corpse under an overhang for later retrieval. She stands up, wiping her hands on her jeans and turning to face the newcomer. “I'm sorry you folks had to see that,” she says to him. “How's the girl?”

“She'll be okay, she's a strong one,” Calvin says. He holds Lilly's gaze. “How about you?”

“Me?” Lilly sighs. “I'm fine.” She lets out another pained breath. “Just tired of it.”

“I hear ya.” He cocks his head a bit. “You're pretty handy with that firearm.”

Lilly shrugs. “I don't know about
that.
” Then she looks around the center of town. “Gotta keep our eyes open. Place saw a lot of upheaval over the last few weeks. Lost an entire section of the wall. Still a few stragglers. But we're getting it back under control.”

Calvin manages a weary smile. “I believe you.”

Lilly notices something dangling on a chain around the man's neck—a large silver cross. “So what do you think?” she asks.

“About what?”

“Staying on. Making a home here for your family. What do you think?”

Calvin Dupree takes a deep breath and turns to gaze at his wife and daughter. “I won't lie … it's not a bad idea.” He licks his lips pensively. “Been on the move for a long time, been putting the kids through the mill.”

Lilly looks at him. “This is a place they can be safe, happy, lead a normal life … more or less.”

“I ain't saying no.” Calvin looks at her. “All I'm asking is … you give us time to think about it, pray on it.”

Lilly nods. “Of course.” For a brief instant, she thinks about the phrase “pray on it” and wonders what it would be like to have a Holy Roller in their midst. A couple of the Governor's men used to pay lip service to having God on their side, and what would Jesus do, and all that 700 Club nonsense. Lilly has never had much time for religion. Sure, she's prayed silently on a few occasions since the plague broke out, but in her mind that doesn't count. What's that saying? “There are no atheists in the foxhole.” She looks into Calvin's gray-green eyes. “You take all the time you need.” She smiles. “Look around, get to know the place—”

“That won't be necessary,” a voice interrupts, and all heads turn to the mousy woman kneeling by her trembling child. Meredith Dupree strokes the girl's hair and doesn't make eye contact as she speaks. “We appreciate your hospitality, but we'll be on our way this afternoon.”

Calvin looks at the ground. “Now, honey, we haven't even discussed what we're going to—”

“There's nothing to discuss.” The woman looks up, her eyes glittering with emotion. Her chapped lips tremble, her pale flesh blushing. She looks like a delicate porcelain doll with an unseen crack down its middle. “We'll be on our way.”

“Honey—”

“There's nothing more to talk about.”

The silence that ensues makes the awkward moment turn almost surreal, as the wind buffets the tops of the trees, whistling through the gantries and trestles of the adjacent stadium, and the dead farmhand festers silently on the ground only a few feet away. Everybody in close proximity of Meredith, including Bob and Lilly, looks down with mute embarrassment. And the silence stretches until Lilly mumbles something like, “Well, if you change your mind, you can always stay on.” Nobody says anything. Lilly manages a cockeyed smile. “In other words, the offer stands.”

For a brief instant Lilly and Calvin share a furtive glance, and a tremendous amount of information is exchanged between them—some of it intentional, some of it unintentional—without a single word spoken. Lilly remains silent out of respect, aware that this issue between these two newcomers is far from resolved. Calvin glances over at his jittery wife as she tends to the child.

Meredith Dupree looks like a phantom, her anguished face so ashen and drawn and haunted she looks as though she's gradually disappearing.

Nobody realizes it then, but this frumpy, diminutive hausfrau—completely unremarkable in almost every conceivable way—will prove to be the second and far more profound issue with which Lilly and the people of Woodbury will sooner or later have to deal.

 

TWO

By midday, the mercury rises into the seventies, and the high, harsh sun blanches the color out of the West Central Georgia farmland. The tobacco and bean fields south of Atlanta have all gone to seed or have grown into jungles of switchgrass and cattails, the fossilized remains of farm machinery sunken into the foliage, rusted out and stripped, as desiccated as the skeletons of dinosaurs. Which is why Speed Wilkins and Matthew Hennesey do not notice the secret crop circle east of Woodbury until well into the afternoon.

The two young men—sent out that morning by Bob, ostensibly to find fuel from wrecked cars or abandoned gas stations—had started their journey in Bob's pickup truck but now have gone off-road after getting stuck in the mud and lighting out on foot.

They cross nearly three miles of wagon-rutted access roads before pausing on a ridge overlooking a vast meadow riotous with wild sedges, deadfalls, and a profusion of prairie grass. Matthew is the first to see the deeper circle of green in the far distance, nestled amid the leathery jungle of untended tobacco plants.

“Hold the phone,” he mutters, shooting a hand up and becoming very still on the edge of the precipice. He gazes out at the distant tobacco fields wavering in the heat rays, shielding his deep-set eyes, squinting against the glare of the sun. A lanky laborer from Valdosta, with an anchor tattoo on his sinewy forearm, Matthew wears the garb of a bricklayer—sweat-stained wife-beater T-shirt, gray work pants, clodhopper boots pasty with mortar dust. “You got them binocs handy?”

“Here ya go.” Speed digs in his rucksack, pulls out the binoculars, and hands them over. “What is it? Whaddaya lookin' at?”

“Not sure,” Matthew murmurs, fiddling at the focus knob, scanning the distance.

Speed waits, scratching his muscular arm, the row of mosquito bites a new development, his REM T-shirt sweat-plastered to his broad chest. The stocky twenty-year-old has withered slightly from his playing weight of two hundred and ten pounds—most likely due to a plague diet of foraged canned goods and scrawny rabbit stew—but his neck still has that steel-belted thickness of a lifelong defensive end.

“
Whoa.
” Matthew stares through the lenses. “What the fuck is—?”

“What is it?”

Matthew keeps the binoculars pressed to his eyes, licking his lip judiciously. “If I'm not mistaken, we just hit the jackpot.”

“Fuel?”

“Not exactly.” He hands the binoculars back, then grins at his comrade. “I've heard it called many things but never ‘fuel.' ”

They make their way down the gravel slope, across a dry creek bed, and into a sea of tobacco. The odor of manure and humus engulfs them, as thick and redolent as the inside of a green house. The air is so humid it lies heavy on their skin and in their nostrils. The crops are mostly in their flowering stage, rising up at least five feet tall among the tufts of wild grass, so each man has to crane his neck and walk on the balls of his feet in order to navigate. They pull their pistols and thumb the safeties off—just in case—although Matthew saw little or no movement other than waves of khaki green blowing in the breeze.

The secret crop lies about two hundred yards beyond a gnarled grove of live oaks sticking out of the tobacco like palsied sentries. Through the jungle of stalks, Matthew can see the security fence surrounding the contraband plants. He lets out a little giddy giggle and says, “You believe this? I don't fucking believe this …”

“Is that what I think it is?” Speed marvels as they approach the fence.

They emerge into the clearing and stand there gaping at the long, lush tines of leaves spiraling up rows of mossy support timbers and rusty chicken wire. A narrow path has been dug out beyond the east corner of the clearing, now overgrown with weeds, no wider than a laundry chute—probably once the province of minibikes or off-road ATVs. “Fuck me,” Matthew comments reverently.

“Holy shit, we are going to have a hot time in the old town to night.” Speed paces along the row of plants, looking them up and down. “There's enough here to keep us going until the next fucking ice age.”

“Amazing stuff, too,” Matthew says, pausing to smell a leaf. He rubs a piece between his thumb and forefinger and breathes in the musky scent of citrusy-sage. “Look at that hairy fucking bud up there.”

“Fucking a, Bubba—we just won the lottery.”

“Got that right.” Matthew pats his pockets, shrugs off his pack. His heart races with anticipation. “Help me rig something we can use as a pipe.”

*   *   *

Calvin Dupree holds the tiny sterling silver crucifi x with the coiled chain nestled in his palm as he paces the cluttered storage room in the rear of the Woodbury court house. He walks with a slight limp, and he's so gaunt he looks like a scarecrow in his baggy chinos. He feels light-headed with nerves. Through the grimy glass of a single window he can see his three children playing in a little community play lot, taking turns pushing each other on a rusty swing set. “I'm just saying”—he rubs his mouth and lets out a sigh—“we gotta think of the kids, what's best for them.”

“I
am
thinking of the kids, Cal,” Meredith Dupree counters from across the room in a voice taut with nervous tension. She sits on a folding chair, sipping bottled water and staring at the floor.

They each had a can of Ensure the night before in Bob's infirmary to treat their malnutrition, and this morning they had a full breakfast with cereal, powdered milk, peanut butter, and crackers. The food has helped them physically, but they're still grappling with the trauma of near starvation on the road. Lilly gave them the private room a few minutes ago, as well as all the additional food, water, and time they might need to get their bearings. “Best thing for
us,
” Meredith mutters into her lap, “is the best thing for
them.
”

“How do you figure that?”

She looks up at him, her eyes red rimmed and wet, her lips so chapped they look to be on the verge of bleeding. “You know when you fly, how they show you that safety film?”

“Yeah, and … ?”

“In the unlikely event the cabin loses air pressure, you should put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help your kids?”

“I don't understand. What is it you're afraid of if we stay here?”

She shoots him a hard look. “C'mon, Cal … you know very well what happens if they find out about my … my
condition.
Remember the KOA camp?”

“Those people were paranoid and ignorant.” He walks over to her, kneels by her chair, puts a tender hand on her knee. “God brought us here, Mer.”

“Calvin—”

“Seriously. Listen. This place is a gift. God has brought us here and He wants us to stay. Maybe that older man—Bob, I think his name is—maybe he's got medication you can use. This is not the Middle Ages.”