The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 (10 page)

They move as one, each of them ducking down behind a row of mossy boulders embedded in the humus. Guns raised, eyes wide and alert, they all look at Lilly, who gazes over the top of the crags.

In the distance, about fifty yards away, she sees a break in the trees, revealing another clearing—this one a vast, overgrown meadow—crawling with ragged, dark figures. Lilly's pulse quickens. She glances to her right and notices a narrow footpath snaking up an embankment into the higher trees. She looks at the others and points to the path, and then silently gestures at a ridge of deadfall logs higher up.

They follow her up the path—staying low, moving as silently as they can, their breaths stuck in their throats—and Lilly leads them across the top of the ridge. They duck down next to each other behind the massive timbers. From this vantage point—through the cover of trees—they each get a clear view of the huge meadow below.

“Good God … it's a fucking convention,” Lilly utters through clenched teeth as she takes in the enormity of the primordial pasture.

*   *   *

The size of five football fields laid end to end, the rain-sodden ground riotous with windblown wild grasses and daubs of color from yellow dandelions and red columbine, the immense meadow teems with walkers of every description. Some of them circle a festering carcass of a dead deer, hectic with flies, while others wander aimlessly along the periphery like drunken sentinels. Some can barely move due to missing limbs or mangled appendages, while others look as though their tattered garb has been shredded and spray-painted with gore. The sun beats down on the pasture, the far corners wavering in skeins of heat rays and cottonwood floating in the air like ghostly snow. A faint burr of growling thrums on the breeze from the collective vocalization of at least fifty or more walkers.

“Lilly, honey,” David Stern finally murmurs very softly, “would you mind handing me those binoculars?”

Lilly shrugs off her backpack, unzips it, pulls out the small field glasses, and hands them over to David. The older man puts the lenses to his eyes and surveys the breadth and length of the meadow below them. The others gape. Austin huddles next to Lilly, his breathing audible in her ears, his nervousness palpable. Gabe fingers the trigger guard on his MIG, just itching to waste the entire field with a few well-placed bursts.

Lilly starts to whisper something when she hears David mumbling under his breath.

“No … not … oh God no … no.” He fiddles with the focus knob and presses the binoculars to his eyes. “Oh Jesus Christ … don't tell me.”

“What?!” Lilly swallows her fear and hisses the words at him. “David, what is it?!”

He hands the binoculars over to her. “To the left, by the deer,” he says. “The one wandering off by himself in the corner.”

She gazes through the binoculars and finds the lone walker in the southeast corner of the meadow, and her entire body sags with despair as she identifies the frayed and torn figure shuffling along the cattails and weeds. A twinge of first-trimester cramps clenches her midsection for a moment, and her eyes burn. In the shaky blur of the binoculars' narrow field of vision, she sees the trademark bandanna still wrapped around the tall male's head, the sideburns apparent along the side of the once handsome face—now a nightmare of pallid flesh, cadmium eyes, and puckered, lipless mouth. “Fuck,” she utters breathlessly.

Gabe and Austin are both dying to grab the binoculars, so Lilly hands them over.

Each taking their turn, they gaze one at a time through the telescopic lenses at the sun-blanched meadow below them. Each man reveals through body language—a sudden anguished slump from Austin, an exhalation of air through gritted teeth from Gabe—that they have identified the lone walker.

Austin speaks first, gazing at Lilly. “Whaddaya think happened?”

Lilly looks through the binoculars, muttering as she carefully scans the meadow. “There's no way of knowing for sure, but it looks like … I don't know … see those deep ruts coming across the field from the east?”

“Yeah, I saw them.”

David chimes in. “Yes, I noticed them, too—they look like tire marks from a large vehicle—a truck, a van, a camper, something like that.”

Lilly peers through the lens and surveys the ragged circular divot in the ground where the truck or the RV either skidded out of control or came to an abrupt halt. For some reason, she thinks the tracks have something to do with Martinez's demise.

She swings the binocs back over to the lone walker in the corner of the meadow. The thing that was once Caesar Ramon Martinez—a former gym teacher from Augusta, Georgia, a loner with natural leadership skills—now trundles awkwardly back and forth through the dust motes of cottonwood and pale rays of sun with no direction, no purpose, no goal other than to feed. His arms and torso—even from this distance, in the blur of the binoculars—appear completely scourged, eviscerated to shreds by many sets of rotting teeth. Cords of bloody gristle and sinew dangle from his gashed midsection. A slimy white bone fragment pokes through his tattered pant leg, giving his shuffling gate a pronounced limp.

The sight of this man reduced to such a monstrous shell takes Lilly by surprise, the sorrow coursing down her marrow, gripping her insides. She never got to know this man very well—nobody did—he wasn't the sociable type. But over the course of that last year, in quiet moments, Martinez did talk about his pre-plague days. Lilly remembers the details of his modest life. The man never married, never had any kids, was estranged from his parents, but he loved teaching, loved coaching his football and basketball teams at Pope John Middle School. When the plague broke out, the school was overrun. First responders moved in to protect the children, fighting off the early waves of undead, and Martinez tried to save an entire class by locking them in the gymnasium, but that proved futile. Nightmares of that day haunted the man for the rest of his life—the sounds of screaming students calling out for their mothers as the skylights shattered and monsters tumbled into the gym like ragged paratroopers—but the worst part was the guilt. Martinez barely escaped, pushing his way out the loading dock … but he would never forget the sounds of the children shrieking behind him as he fled, the biters devouring the class in a ghastly feeding frenzy.

“By the looks of those tire tracks,” Lilly utters finally under her breath, “I'm guessing they found him out, took him down, maybe with the vehicle.” She looks down. “He wasn't perfect, but he was one of us—he was a decent man. He didn't deserve this.”

Austin reaches over and puts an arm around her. “There's nothing you could have done, Lilly. He knew what he was getting into.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she murmurs, all the confidence draining out of her voice.

Austin lets out a weary sigh. “Can we get outta here now? I mean … mission accomplished, right?”

Gabe grumbles at him. “What are you talking about, mission accomplished? Nothing's been accomplished here but Martinez getting wasted.”

Austin looks at him. “We found him, right? We found out why he didn't show up. There's nothing else we can do, man. File closed.”

David pipes in. “I have to say I agree with pretty boy. For all we know, the entire group of escapees may be dead. Besides, the sun's gonna be setting fairly soon.”

Lilly glances over her shoulder, surveys the path and the route back—no biters in sight. “Okay, it's settled then,” she says. “Stay low, and keep quiet … we don't want any of these biters on our tail.”

They start edging their way back down the hillside toward the riverbed, but all at once Gabe springs to his feet and circles around in front of Lilly, blocking her path with fire in his eyes. “Hold up!” He shoves her back. “We're not going anywhere!”

Austin steps in, getting protective. But Lilly waves everybody back down into crouching positions. “Keep it down, goddamnit!” She turns and looks at Gabe. “What the fuck is
your
problem?”

Gabe burns his gaze into her. “We need to bring back proof.”

“Excuse me?”

“Governor's gonna want to see proof this happened.”

“Proof?!” She stares at him. “You got four witnesses. What do you want, Gabe—a lock of his hair? C'mon, you want to risk more lives?”

Gabe reaches down to his pant leg. He pulls his Randall knife from a sheath, the blade glistening in the beams of late-afternoon sun. “Do whatever you want, Lilly … but I'm not coming back without proof.”

Lilly crouches there, dumbstruck, watching Gabe turn and creep down the embankment. She turns to the others. “Goddamnit-to-hell, c'mon … we gotta cover him.”

*   *   *

By the time they reach the bottom of the wooded path, all available firearms have been drawn, cocked, readied, and aimed. Gabe moves toward the clearing, ducking behind an ancient, gnarled live oak. Lilly crouches down twenty feet behind him, staying low, eyes taking in everything, both her Ruger semiautomatics gripped tightly in her sweaty palms. Austin hovers close behind her, his Glock at his side, while David brings up the rear, scanning the woods behind them for fear of having their escape route cut off.

The silence is excruciating—a ten-ton weight pressing down on them—the only audible sounds now their breathing and their pulses racing in their ears. Lilly sees Gabe bend down and pick up a stone. She aims her Rugers at the distant swarm of walkers milling across the far meadow. So far, none of the creatures have taken notice.

The monster that once belonged to their inner circle—the former football coach who, less than a year ago, shared a New Year's bottle of brandy with Dr. Stevens, Alice, and Lilly—now shuffles directionlessly through the weeds less than twenty-five feet away from Gabe. The creature's opaque-white doll's eyes scan the surrounding trees, his blackened mouth working and chewing involuntarily.

Gabe tosses a small stone across the clearing toward Martinez.

In a frozen tableau of hair-trigger tension, the four humans watch the lone biter become still, cocking its head at the faint sound of the stone clattering across the weeds in front of it. The monster slowly turns toward the noise, and then starts shuffling closer to the clearing.

Gabe pounces.

What happens next occurs with the speed of a nightmare, everything transpiring all at once. Gabe rushes the thing that was once in charge of security in Woodbury, and without hesitation—without even allowing the biter a chance to react—he slashes the eleven-inch blade with all his might at the monster's neck. The knife slices through epidermis, cartilage, arteries, muscles, and cervical vertebrae with the force of a guillotine.

From Lilly's vantage point, it looks as though Gabe has opened up a hydrant of blood. The head detaches and falls, and the body staggers and fountains for a moment before collapsing. Gabe grabs the fallen cranium, and then turns and rushes back toward the path. Unfortunately, the minimal noise generated by the assault—a negligible series of footsteps, grunts, and twigs snapping—proves to be enough of a commotion to rouse the attention of the other walkers. Lilly realizes this one moment before the shooting starts.

She whirls around in time to see Austin and David in the middle of the path with their guns up now, the muzzles flaring brilliant plumes of light—each blast emitting a silenced clap—the rounds chewing through foliage and taking down a half-dozen walkers in quick succession across the southeast corner of the meadow.

Gabe now stands beside her with the dripping head, fumbling for his assault rifle.

In one continuous movement, he gets his free hand around the trigger guard and swings the weapon up and fires off a volley. The short muzzle flares and sends hellfire through the upper bodies of approaching walkers, punching holes through a dozen skulls, sending tissue and bone fragments and a red fog across the foliage, dropping reanimated cadavers of all sizes, genders, and ages into the high grass in gruesome heaps. Gabe's Bushmaster clicks empty.

More creatures stir from their stupors—drawn by the noise of the firefight and the smell of living tissue—and the dynamic changes dramatically out in the meadow. Like a school of fish shifting directions in one great undulating organism, scores of wandering dead turn in drunken choreography and start dragging themselves toward the humans. Lilly stands and begins backing away, mumbling, “There's too many of them, Gabe … too many … Jesus fucking Christ,
there's too many
!”

Standing beside her, Gabe lets out an angry grunt in response and quickly thumbs the rifle's release, ejecting the clip. He fumbles with the greasy severed head for a moment, swinging his satchel around and stuffing the gruesome artifact into the carrier, and then he yanks another magazine from his belt and slams it into the gun's receiver. He spins and sees another cluster of dead pushing through the foliage on their immediate right—deadly black mouths working like piranhas—and Gabe slaps the bolt release and lets loose another fusillade.

Lilly ducks down into a crouch as Gabe's wild volley zings through the leaves.

The opposite wall of foliage shreds apart as a half-dozen more walkers go down in bursts of blood and tissue. Meanwhile, Austin and David send another half-dozen rounds across the opposite corner of the clearing, putting another three corpses out of their misery in a cloud of blood mist. Lilly keeps backing away, seeing no options, no purpose to the fight, no hope of stanching the swarm. The entire population of the meadow is now converging on them in one great mass of ragged moving corpses.

The guns click empty again, and for one frenzied instant, the other three men glance over their shoulders at Lilly, who freezes. The volume of gunfire and the fury of the counterassault have engulfed the clearing in a haze of cordite and floating particulate, the fog so thick that Lilly can barely see the others as the horde closes in. The only viable course of action is written across her petrified features. There's only one thing left for them to do.