The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 (23 page)

“How about you tell me how many people you got up in there? What kind of arsenal you got, ammunition, supplies, what kind of power you runnin'?”

The black man looks at him. “How about you eat shit and die?”

The Governor stares at the man for a moment, then winds up to hit him again—this time with a balled-up fist—but right before he swings, the sound of knocking interrupts. Somebody is tapping on the doorframe outside the truck's tarp-covered rear hatch.

“Governor?”

It's Lilly's voice, and the sound of it sends a warning alarm like icy water trickling down the Governor's spine. He chews on the inside of his cheek for a brief instant before answering, thinking it over. Maybe this is a good thing—maybe she should see this—see the brutality in the man's dark eyes, see who they're fighting. “Come in here, Lilly,” Philip says at last. “You can be a witness.”

The tarp folds inward, and Lilly Caul climbs up into the enclosure. She wears a tattered denim jacket, her hair pulled back from her suntanned face, which is shiny with sweat and bright with nervous tension. She keeps her distance, watching from the rear.

The big man on the bench glances up at her, breathing hard, trying to control his emotions. He looks as though he's on the verge of exploding.

The Governor sees that the man is about to lose it, and leans down close to him, staring into his eyes. Tyreese looks up at him. The Governor smiles and speaks softly, as if to a child: “Lilly, meet Tyreese. Nice enough fella, good head on his shoulders. I was just trying to talk some sense into him, seeing if there was a way he could talk to this Rick fella, get him to wise up and surrender, so we could all avoid more bloodshed and—”

The big man lunges suddenly—putting all of his 275 pounds into the move—slamming his forehead into the Governor's face. The head-butt, instantaneous and brutal, sounds like a board snapping, taking the Governor completely by surprise, knocking him momentarily insensate and sending him flinging backward against the wall. He slams into the struts with a gasp and then topples to the floor.

Lilly draws her Ruger and aims it at the big man. “GET BACK!” She thumbs the safety off. “GET BACK, GODDAMNIT—NOW!
SIT DOWN!!
”

Tyreese sits back down, his wrists still bound, and he exhales angrily, his face twitching with rage. His thigh drips blood from the gunshot wound, but he barely seems to notice it. A former NFL linebacker, as well as a bouncer for some of the toughest bars in Atlanta, he looks like he could snap Lilly in two. His grizzled face remains stoic as he spits blood from a split lip, looking down and shaking his head. He mumbles something inaudible.

Lilly goes over to the Governor, kneels, and helps him sit up. “You okay?”

The Governor blinks and tries to get his bearings, tries to draw breath into his lungs. His forehead is bleeding, and he coughs convulsively, but the pain braces him, galvanizes him, energizes him. “See?—See what I'm talking about?” he utters thickly. “You can't reason with these people … you can't …
bargain
with them … they're fucking animals.”

Across the enclosure, the big man mutters something else, his head down.

Lilly and the Governor look up. Tyreese speaks under his breath as though talking to himself, “And the nations were angry…”

“What was that, asshole?” the Governor snarls at him. “You want to share it with the rest of the class?”

Tyreese looks up at them, his dark face filling with sullen, baleful hate. “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and it shall be the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and to them that fear my name, small and great, thou shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth … and there will be war in heaven.” He pauses and looks at them. “It's from Revelation … not that you would know shit about the Bible. It's what's happening. You can't turn back the tide; you've opened the door. Kiss your asses good-bye. You'll die by your own fucking swords and you don't even—”

“SHUT UP!” Lilly springs to her feet, lunges toward Tyreese, and presses the Ruger's muzzle against his forehead. “JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

The Governor lifts himself to his feet, moving in between Lilly and Tyreese. “Okay, let's dial it down now. Back off, Lilly. I got this.” He gently ushers Lilly away from the prisoner toward the rear hatch. “It's okay. I got this. I'll take care of it.”

Lilly, breathing hard, stands in the hatchway, re-engaging the safety and shoving the gun back into its sheath on her hip. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't worry about it,” the Governor says, giving her a reassuring pat on the arm. He wipes the blood from his forehead. “I'll handle this. You go and try and get some sleep.”

Lilly looks at him. “You sure you're okay?”

“I'm good. I got this. Don't worry.”

After a long pause, she glances back at the prisoner, who now sits staring at the floor. She lets out a pained sigh and makes her exit.

The Governor turns and looks at Tyreese. Very softly, under his breath, Philip Blake murmurs, “I got this.” He goes over to the bench facing the prisoner on the opposite side of the enclosure. Under the bench, in the cobwebs and litter, Philip finds a baseball bat lying next to a pile of rags. “I got this,” he says in barely a whisper as he picks up the bat, then goes over to the rear hatch and pulls down the metal door. The door clangs shut, giving them privacy. The Governor turns to the prisoner.

Philip smiles at the man. “I got this.”

*   *   *

Very few surviving members of the Woodbury militia get any sleep that night—least of all Gabe. Tossing and turning on a hard pallet in the back of his cargo truck, his rotund, barrel-shaped belly wedged between the wall and a row of supply crates, he tries to clear his mind, but his brain revs and chugs and circles back around to his lies. How many times has he lied since the plague broke out? He's lost track. But this latest lie could truly bite him on the ass—the bitch with the hair braids is still out there. What will the Governor do when he finds out? Gabe wonders if he should bail out of this whole fracas with the prison people. He tosses and turns some more. The drone of crickets and frogs and loons outside the truck rises and swells in the dark until it sounds positively thunderous to Gabe, like a rainstorm, and he puts his hands over his ears and tries to drive the thoughts away. His stomach burns and seethes with nervous indigestion. He's been having upper GI problems for months now—a combination of the shitty diet he's been on and the constant stress—and now he feels stickpins stabbing him in the guts, piercing his innards. He tries to breathe evenly, deeply, and eventually the breathing exercise sends him into a half-comatose doze in which he dreams snippets of night terrors such as the black lady with the dreadlocks sneaking up on him and driving her katana sword into his abdomen just above the belly button and then swizzling it around as though trying to open a doorway in his guts, and he tries to scream in the dream but nothing but silent air will come out of him, and he wakes up right around dawn with a gasp.

Somebody is knocking on the rear hatch, and Gabe blinks at the pale light filtering through the tarp, and the sound of a deep, smoky baritone voice. “Hey! Gabe, get your fat ass up. I need you right now!”

The Governor appears in the back hatch of the cargo truck as Gabe is struggling off the pallet, clutching for his wadded turtleneck shirt, and starting to get dressed. “I'm up, boss. Whaddaya need?”

“I'll tell you on the way. Grab your AR-15 and give me a hand with the big dude.”

*   *   *

Gabe follows the Governor across the clearing to a transport truck. Inside the passenger hold, the man named Tyreese is barely alive, curled into a fetal position on the floor of the payload bay, his body armor gone, his wrists still bound by rope and wire, his flesh battered and scourged by the Governor's constant assault throughout the night with the baseball bat. Now the man barely draws a breath, both his eyes swollen shut, his lips cracked and bleeding, mouthing silent litanies, prayers, apocalyptic Bible quotes that nobody can hear.

The Governor and Gabe lift the man onto a bench—not an easy task, considering the 275 pounds of nearly dead weight—then they tie his wrists to the wall. The Governor covers the man with a tarp and mutters, “We'll unwrap the present when we get there.”

Gabe looks at Philip. “Get where?”

Philip lets out a sigh. “You are one stupid motherfucker, Gabe.”

They hop out of the rear hatch and go around to the cab, Gabe climbing behind the wheel, Philip taking the passenger seat. Philip orders Gabe to take it nice and slow—no headlights—and they pull out of the clearing unnoticed by everyone but Lilly.

She appears in their path in the predawn glow like a ghost, waving them to a stop.

Gabe pulls up to her and rolls down his window. “What do you want, Lilly?”

“What are you doing? Where the hell are you going?” Lilly peers into the cab and sees the Governor. “Let me come with you. I'll get my guns, just give me a second.”

“No!” From the passenger seat, the Governor leans forward and makes eye contact with her. “You stay here and keep an eye on things. We're going to go and try and negotiate with them, use the big boy as leverage.”

Lilly nods slowly, reluctantly. “Okay, but be careful, you're gonna be outnumbered.”

“You let us worry about that.” The Governor gives her a wink. “You hold down the fort.”

They take off in a cloud of dust as Lilly watches from the shadows.

She realizes right then—for some reason, with mounting dread—that Michonne's sword was leaning against the Governor's hip as they drove off.

*   *   *

They arrive at the prison at 6:53
A.M.,
according to the clock on the truck's dash, barreling through a cluster of walkers wandering the tall grass east of the grounds. The truck's grille smashes through groups of reanimated cadavers with a series of watery thuds and brittle bones cracking beneath the massive wheels. On Philip's orders, Gabe blows the air horn once, waking anybody who might still be slumbering inside the gray stone cellblocks behind the razor wire. Gabe pulls up close to the east fence and then makes a huge U-turn. He rolls his window down and grabs the .38 Special lodged under the dash, firing out the side of the truck at a few stray biters. Heads snap back in mists of blood and brain tissue—at least a half-dozen more going down in sequence like bowling pins.

“Now back it up to the fence,” the Governor orders, peering out his side mirror.

Gabe slams on the brakes, then wrestles the stick into reverse and makes a big show of revving the engine and backing toward the chain link as if they have a pizza to deliver. A blur of movement catches the corner of Gabe's eye in his mirror as he navigates the truck closer and closer to the fence—the inhabitants of the prison dashing across gaps between the buildings, waking each other up, scurrying for their weapons. Over the noise of the diesel engine, Gabe can hear the faint shouts of alarm.

The truck clatters to a stop less than ten feet from the outer fence.

“Let's do this,” the Governor murmurs as he kicks open his door and climbs out.

The two men calmly step off the running boards, and then stride around to the rear of the truck. The katana sword, tucked into its scabbard, bounces off the Governor's hip as he reaches up and pulls open the hatch. Gabe feels the eyes of both walkers and humans on the back of their necks. Before climbing up into the cargo bay, the Governor mutters under his breath, “Keep the fucking biters off us long enough for me to finish, okay?”

“Will do,” Gabe says, and slams a magazine into the AR's receiving port. He thumbs the safety as the Governor climbs up into the cargo enclosure.

The tarp comes off the dazed black man with the abruptness of a Band-Aid being torn off a wound. Tyreese still breathes shallow breaths, his eyes swollen to slits. He tries to see, and makes a feeble attempt to move, but the pain keeps him docile. He makes a choking noise deep in his throat as the Governor yanks him to his feet.

“It's showtime, homes,” Philip whispers, with the tenderness one might proffer to a sick animal on the way to the veterinarian.

 

FOURTEEN

Inside the barricade of razor wire and tall cyclone fencing, many shadowy figures suddenly stop in their tracks, many pairs of eyes fixing themselves on the unexpected sight of their comrade being displayed in the back of a truck, in full view of the prison. The Governor has positioned the dazed black man on the edge of the truck's rear hatch, on his knees, facing the prison complex, head drooping, the strange tableau almost reminiscent of some obscure Asian death-cleansing ritual. The rear hatch and the truck's cargo area have momentarily become a theatrical stage. The big man's wrists are still bound, his head drooping as though it weighs a ton. The silence spreads across the grounds like a black tide. The wind tosses the Governor's hair across his eye patch as he dramatically draws the gleaming sword from its sheath.

“BEFORE ANYONE GETS TRIGGER HAPPY,” he calls out to those inside the ramparts, holding the sword over the hunched figure of Tyreese, “KNOW THAT I'VE GOT THE WOMAN, TOO!” He takes in the stillness, the silence. “MY FAT FRIEND AND I DON'T GET BACK TO OUR CAMP IN ONE PIECE, SHE DIES!”

He pauses for a moment to allow this prefatory matter to settle in.

“SO NO SUDDEN MOVES—OKAY?”

Again he pauses, hearing his voice echo across the warrens of passageways and cellblocks. He interprets the overwhelming silence as cooperation and nods.

“FROM THAT I THINK YOU CAN SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING. OPEN THE GATES. GET IN THIS TRUCK AND COME BACK WITH US—OR I DO SOMETHING HORRIBLE TO YOUR FRIEND.”

The Governor lets this sink in and then starts to say something else when a sharp movement inches away from him yanks his attention down to the prisoner. Tyreese jerks his head up with great effort and peers through swollen eyes out the rear hatch at the prison grounds.