Rise of the Governor (44 page)

Meredith looks at him. “Yes, it is, Cal … it
is
the Middle Ages.”

“Honey, please.”

“They drilled holes in the heads of the mentally ill back then—it's worse than that now.”

“These people aren't gonna persecute you. They're just like us, they're just as scared. All they want is to protect what they got, make a safe place to live.”

Meredith shivers. “Exactly, Cal … and that's why they're gonna do exactly what
I
would do if I was them and I learned somebody in their midst was a mental defect.”

“Now stop it! Stop talking that way. You ain't no defect. The Good Lord has helped us get this far, and He's gonna see us through—”

“Calvin, please.”

“Pray with me, Mer.” He takes her hand, cups it in his weathered fingers, bows his head. His voice softens. “Dear Lord, we ask for your guidance in this diffi cult time. Lord, we trust in you … you are our rock and protection. Lead us and guide us.”

Meredith looks down, her brow furrowed with pain, her eyes welling up again.

Her lips are moving, but Calvin is not sure whether she's mouthing a prayer or mumbling something far more cryptic and personal.

*   *   *

Speed Wilkins sits up with a start, stirred awake by the overwhelming stench of walkers. He rubs his bloodshot eyes and tries to get his bearings—racking his brain to remember how he had managed to drift off out in the open, without a lookout, alone in such a deserted rural area. The sun is hotter than a blast furnace. He's been asleep for hours. He is soaked in sweat. A gnat hums around his ear. He shivers and bats it away.

He looks around the immediate vicinity and sees that he apparently drifted off on the edge of the overgrown tobacco field. His joints ache. Especially his knees, still weak and brittle from old football injuries. He never was a great athlete. His first year of playing Division III football for the Piedmont College Lions in Athens had been a bust, but he had high hopes for his sophomore year—and then the Turn happened, and it all went up in smoke.

Smoke!

All at once it comes back to him—what he was doing here earlier when he nodded off in the wild grass—and he feels the simultaneous yet contrary waves of shame, embarrassment, and hilarity that often grip him when coming down off a major high. He remembers discovering the clandestine marijuana field just to the north, a treasure trove of sticky, fragrant heaven hidden within the larger acreage of tobacco—a botanical nesting doll—ingeniously concealed from the outside world by some enterprising stoner farmer (just before the Turn harshed everybody's buzz).

He looks down and sees the makeshift pipe that was once a fountain pen, and the matchbook and dark crumbs of ashes lying around it.

Speed lets out a burst of dry laughter—a pothead's nervous chuckle—and immediately regrets making the noise. He can smell the stench of multiple biters lurking somewhere nearby. Where the fuck is Matthew? Scanning the clearing, Speed cringes at the throbbing headache now threatening to split his skull open.

He struggles to his feet, dizziness and paranoia washing over him in equal mea sures, his Bushmaster assault rifle still slung over his shoulder. The walkers have yet to reveal themselves, but the smell is everywhere, as though it's coming from all directions.

The terrible black odor of the undead has become a bellwether of imminent attacks—the stronger the reek, the greater the number. A faint hint of spoiled meat and feces usually indicates only a single creature, certainly no more than two or three, but the infinite variations that herald larger groups have become as cataloged and articulated as an elaborate wine list. A truckload of cow manure marinated in pond scum and ammonia indicates dozens. An ocean of spoiled Limburger cheese, maggot-infested garbage, black mold, and pus suggests hundreds, maybe a thousand. Right now, judging by the intensity of the stench, Speed is guessing at least fifty or sixty roaming nearby.

He raises his gun, walks along the edge of the tobacco field, and calls out in a loud whisper, “Matt! Hey, Hennesey—where you at?”

No reply. Only the faintest of rustling noises to his immediate left—behind the wall of green—where the untended crop rises at least five or six feet high, consisting of old tobacco, ironweed, and wild bush. The enormous wrinkled leaves make a ghostly noise in the breeze, the whisper of papery friction, like match heads striking. Something moves sharklike out in the sea of khaki green.

Speed jerks toward the shadow. Something is moving slowly this way, the dry stalks and husks snapping in an arrhythmic tattoo as the clumsy footsteps approach. Raising the muzzle, Speed puts the crosshair on the dark mound skimming over the tops of the plants. He sucks in a breath. The figure is twenty-five yards away.

He begins squeezing the trigger when the sound of a voice makes him freeze.

“Yo!”

Speed jerks toward the voice and sees Matthew standing in front of him, out of breath, holding his Glock 23 with its silencer attached. Only a few years older than Speed, Matthew is taller and lankier and so weathered, wind-burned, and tan in his faded denims he looks like a walking piece of beef jerky.

“Jesus,” Speed utters, lowering the rifle. “Don't fucking sneak up on me like that—just about shit my pants.”

“Get down,” Matthew orders softly yet firmly. “Now, Speed, do it.”

“Huh?” Still slightly woozy from the weed, Speed stares at his friend. “Do what?”

“Duck, man!
Duck!
”

Blinking, swallowing hard, Speed crouches down, realizing there's a figure directly behind him.

He glances over his shoulder, and for a single instant, right before the dry pop of the Glock, he sees a blur of putrid flesh lunging at him. The female walker is an old woman in tatters with blue-rinse hair like a fright wig, breath that smells of the crypt, and hacksaw teeth. Speed jerks down. The muffled blast snaps, and the old woman's head erupts in a fountain of black spinal fluid and brain matter, the flaccid body sagging to the ground in a heap. “Fuck!” Speed springs to his feet. “
Fuck!
” He scans the adjacent tobacco field and sees at least half a dozen more ragged heads moving convulsively over the tops of the weeds and tassels, coming toward him. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

“C'mon, homey!” Matthew grabs a hunk of Speed's T-shirt and pulls him toward the trail. “Something else I want to show you before we head back.”

*   *   *

The highest point in Meriwether County is located in the rural hinterlands, not far from the intersection of Highway 85 and Millard Drive, just outside a deserted farm town called Yarlsburg. Millard winds up a steep hill, cutting through a thick copse of pine, and then skirts the edge of a mile-long plateau that overlooks a patchwork of farm fields.

At one point along this scabrous road, near a wide spot used for blowouts and piss stops, a rust-pocked, bullet-riddled sign proclaims, without a trace of irony,
SCENIC VISTA
, as though this impoverished hillbilly farmland were an exotic national park (and not some backwater barrens smack-dab in the middle of nowhere).

It takes Matthew and Speed about half an hour to reach this turnoff.

First, they have to circle back to where Bob's pickup is stuck in the mire along Highway 85 and then maneuver discarded cardboard boxes under the massive tires to provide traction. Once they get the vehicle moving, they have to cross five miles of wreckage-strewn blacktop macadam in order to reach Millard. They see small phalanxes of walkers along the way, some of them shambling out into their path. Matthew has no qualms swerving toward the creatures and knocking them to kingdom come like so many blood-filled bowling pins. This slows them down a bit, but they finally see Millard looming in the dusty heat waves ahead of them.

Then it's a quick shot north into the hills above Yarlsburg.

Speed keeps quizzing Matthew about what the hell is so important that they have to go twenty or thirty miles out of their way. Matthew plays it coy, explaining that it'll all make sense soon enough. Speed gets angry. Why the fuck can't Matthew just tell him why they're going on this wild-goose chase? What the hell is it that he wants Speed to see? Is it some fuel source they didn't think of? Is it an untapped retail outlet? Another Walmart they missed? Why all the mystery? Matthew just keeps nervously chewing the inside of his cheek, driving north and not saying much.

As they approach the overlook, Speed realizes all at once, in a sick, stomach-churning bolt of recognition, that this is the same place the Governor staged all the military vehicles in the moments before the battle for the prison. Gazing out across the woods, Speed realizes then that they are within a mile or two of the vast gray-brick complex known as the Meriwether County Correctional Facility, and an unexpected jolt of dread travels down his spine.

Post-traumatic stress comes in many flavors. It can steal sleep and spark hallucinations. It can sublimate itself sneakily into destructive behaviors, drug abuse, alcoholism, or sex addiction. It can be subtly debilitating—chronic panic attacks, an intermittent pinch of the nerves of the solar plexus at odd, inexplicable times. Speed feels this vague, inchoate dread right now in his bowels as Matthew pulls the truck over onto the dusty apron of weed-whiskered gravel and kills the engine.

This area was the sight of profound mayhem—many deaths, some of them Speed's close friends from Woodbury—and the miserable vibrations still strum at the air. The prison was where the Governor made his last stand—Custer-like, psychotic, megalomaniacal to the bitter end. It also was where Speed Wilkins first registered the natural leadership capabilities of Lilly Caul.

Now Matthew climbs out of the truck with the binoculars already in his hands.

Speed kicks his door open with a rusty shriek of hinges and hops out. The first thing he notices is the overpowering scent of dead flesh hanging in the air, mingling with the acrid tang of smoke. He follows Matthew across the wide spot in the road toward the woods. The tire tracks from the Governor's massive convoy still scar the dirt—even the waffle-shaped imprint of the Abrams tank can be seen—and Speed tries to avoid looking at the tracks as he joins Matthew at the edge of the forest.

“Here, take a look down in the meadow.” Matthew points toward a clearing in the thick veil of pine boughs and wild scrub and hands over the binoculars. “And tell me what you see.”

Speed steps across the clearing to the edge of the precipice and gets his first good glimpse of the prison in the distance.

The two-hundred-acre lot is still bound in a faint fog of smoke. Some of the caved-in cell blocks still smolder, and will probably continue to do so for weeks. The complex looks like the ruins of some strange Maya temple. The odor is stronger now, and Speed's stomach flips with nausea.

With his naked eye he can see the collapsed cyclone fence wreathing the property like torn ribbons, the scorched husks of guard towers, and the blackened craters punched into the cement from grenade blasts. Abandoned vehicles litter the surrounding lots, and broken glass glitters everywhere. Like ragged phantoms wandering a ghost town, walkers lumber here and there without purpose or direction. Speed puts the binoculars to his eyes. “What am I looking for?” he asks while scanning the outer lots.

“You see the woods to the south?”

Speed swings the binoculars over to the left and sees the hazy green edge of the pine forest lining the property. He sucks in a breath. The incredible stench of maggot-infested meat and human shit makes his gorge rise and his mouth water sourly. “Jesus H. Christ,” he utters, gaping at the multitudes of undead. “What the fuck?”

“Exactly.” Matthew lets out a sigh. “All the commotion of the battle must have drawn more of them out of the woodwork than we ever knew. This is just the tail end. Who knows how fucking many of them there are.”

“I remember the herd,” Speed says, licking his lips. “But I don't remember anything like
this.
”

Speed realizes the implications of what he is seeing just as the rancid air gets the better of him, and he doubles over, falling to his knees. It dawns on him—exactly what this means—right as the hot, burning bile stirred by the stench rises up his esophagus. Still slightly high from all the dope, he roars vomit across the coarse, gravelly earth of the precipice. He hasn't eaten much that day, and most of it is yellowish bile, but it sluices out of him with gusto.

Matthew watches solemnly from a few feet away, staring down at his upchucking pal with mild interest. After a few minutes it becomes clear that Speed has spewed every last ounce of stomach acid within him, his right hand still clutching the binoculars, and he sits back with a gasp, wiping the cold sweat from his brow. Matthew waits for the younger man to get his bearings. At last Matthew lets out a sigh and says, “You finished?”

Speed nods and tries to take deep breaths. He doesn't say anything.

“Good.” Matthew leans down and snatches the binoculars away from him. “Because we gotta get back ASAP and do something about this.”

 

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