The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 (27 page)

A plume of dense smoke suddenly spews from the back of the tank as the treads engage. The engine roars, and the beast begins to move.

Lilly freezes on the ground, gaping at the bizarre sight of the armored monolith rolling toward the fence. Her irises dilate involuntarily, her breath stalling in her throat, as she sees the course of the battle suddenly take an unexpected turn.

*   *   *

The tank rattles toward the chain-link barrier, mowing over the last few walkers that still stand in its way, the massive treads pulverizing rotten bones and flesh. The front of the tank slams into the fence, the chain link and concertina wire heaving, the reverberations traveling a city block in each direction. The noise is like a metallic rainstorm.

The outer fence gives way in a paroxysm of steel ripping apart.

The Abrams grinds over the first barrier with the ease of a giant trash compactor, smoke billowing from its turbine, treads smashing the chain link into spaghetti. A hundred yards of cyclone fence in each direction collapses as the beast crosses the gap to the next fence. The second barrier goes down as easily as the first.

While all this is transpiring, Lilly observes the eerie cease-fire inside the prison grounds. The only sounds now—barely audible above the creaking, complaining, ringing chain-link fences—are footsteps running in all directions, as the folks inside scatter for cover.

In a dust cloud of haze and crisscrossing sniper fire pinging off the tank's iron carapace, the Abrams devours the last barrier—the innermost fence—as sparks snap and crackle in the air. Most of the walkers in the general vicinity have been vanquished either in the cross fire or beneath the treads of the tank.

Now the ricochets echo eerily across the passageways between cellblocks.

Soon, even the towers go silent and still as the armored monolith comes to rest twenty feet inside the gate, trailing shreds of metal linkage in its treads like particles of food stuck in the teeth of a ravenous monster. The engine revs for a moment, almost like an overture to the next movement of this terrible symphony. Exhaust huffs from the ass-end of the tank. The pause that follows—the duration of which is mere seconds—seems to Lilly to last for hours.

“Lilly?! You all right?! Talk to me!” Austin's voice, barely audible to Lilly, cuts through the white noise of her racing thoughts. She turns and sees him huddled next to her behind the M35's rear gate, his M1 Garand gripped white-knuckle tight. “Whaddaya think?” he asks her with fear shimmering in his eyes. “What now?”

She starts to mumble something in response when the sound of another voice cuts through her daze.

“C'mon, we got them outnumbered!” It comes from behind her. She twists around and sees the remaining members of the militia coming out from behind the vehicles with their guns raised and ready. Tom Blanchford, a big mechanic from Macon, has his back pressed against the side of his flatbed. “C'mon!—Let's put these evil bastards out of their misery once and for all!—COME ON!!”

One by one, creeping low and quick, weaving between the vehicles, the surviving men and women of the Woodbury militia make their way across the battlefield, over the smashed remnants of mangled chain link, and into the prison.

“Let's do this,” Austin says, rising to his feet, and then reaching down to help Lilly up.

For the briefest instant, she pauses. She stares at Austin's hand. She feels the pulse of acid throbbing in her spine, down her arms and legs, tasting of copper and blood in her mouth.

Then, in a hoarse, faint whisper, she says, “Yeah, let's finish it.”

She takes his hand, springs to her feet, swings the Remington around into shooting position, gives a quick nod, and charges into the fray.

 

SIXTEEN

Inside the prison yard, in a fogbank of dust, the tank's top hatch bursts open and a dark, cadaverous, blood-caked face surfaces like a shark emerging from the oceanic darkness. “OPEN FIRE!—KILL THEM ALL!!—WE GOT THEM PINNED DOWN!!”

On either side of the tank, a total of seven members of the Woodbury militia fan out in different directions, most of them leading with the barrels of their assault rifles, shooting at anything that moves. The exercise yard crawls with chaos for a moment. The prison's inhabitants flee for cover, retreating into the convolutions of the buildings—cockroaches vanishing into cracks.

Bursts of automatic gunfire crackle and echo back and forth. Movement blurs. The Governor shouts orders from the tank's hatch that get drowned in the noise. Gunners on either side dart behind the corners of buildings or under shadowy overhangs, searching for cover and purchase in the onslaught. One of the Governor's men takes the initiative to climb the southeast guard tower, his buck knife clenched between his teeth, his M4 strapped to his shoulder.

The tide of the battle has turned, the denizens of the prison now scattering for cover and the most expedient ways to escape.

*   *   *

Lilly and Austin follow the last contingent over the fallen fence and into the prison yard, their heavy boot-steps making the chain link jangle. They move quickly with their guns cocked and ready, hot on the heels of two other men, the sun in their eyes. Lilly has a pistol in each hand, her Remington strapped and bouncing on her shoulder. Austin hyperventilates as he runs, a combination of fear, exhaustion, and rage.

The passage of time seems to slow, now moving in milky, syrupy impressions, as Lilly and Austin reach the closest building—thirty feet away from the Governor's tank—and slam their backs against the stone wall. Lilly's heart races. Even amid the adrenaline rush of storming the grounds, she feels a surreal kind of claustrophobia inside the massive compound. Three-story cellblocks press down on them from all sides, throwing long shadows on the yards. The air has the acrid smell of overloading circuits and burning rubber. Muffled voices and the sound of running emanate from within the walls.

A moment later, Lilly jerks at a flash of movement between two buildings, raises one of the Rugers, fires a single shot at the blur, and hits nothing but stucco wall. She sees the puff of plaster dust atomizing in the shadows twenty yards away. She glances across the yard at the tank. She sees the Governor climbing out of the iron beast with a Tec-9 pistol gripped in his gloved hand. Then she sees something else in the distance behind the Governor that makes her spine go cold and her throat go as dry as sawdust.

Way out across the adjacent meadow—the earth now scarred and rutted with tire tracks, scorched and cratered from the grenade blast, and littered with the carnage of the undead—Lilly can see the distant forest. Up along the ridge, behind colonnades of ancient oaks and dense curtains of foliage, the woods teem with innumerable ragged figures birthing themselves from the shadows, pushing their way out of the undergrowth—hundreds of them—emerging stiff-legged and ravenous into the daylight. There are so many of them now that they resemble, from this distance, a black tide—a putrefied dark wave the width of a soccer field—slowly unfurling and rolling down the hill toward the noise and confusion of the prison. In that horrible instant, over the course of a single electrical impulse firing in her brain, Lilly makes a spontaneous calculation. Within a matter of minutes—ten, perhaps, maybe fifteen at the most—the prison will be overrun.

*   *   *

The Governor climbs down the tank's steel hull and takes a supervisory position behind the stern of the Abrams. Most of the surviving inhabitants of the prison have now vanished inside cellblocks and outbuildings, but a few of the sturdier souls have remained outdoors, putting up halfhearted resistance, the intermittent crackle of suppressing fire and panicky shouts making Philip Blake twitch and flinch as he points at one of his soldiers.

“HEY! YOU!” The Governor signals to a tall, rangy man with a shaved head who is busily firing his assault rifle at the barred windows of the nearest building, a man Philip has seen on Martinez's crew before, a man whose name Philip never bothered to learn. “C'mere!”

The man ceases firing and trots over to the Governor. “Yessir?”

The Governor speaks with jaws clenched, his wounds tingling, the voices in his head plaguing him now like static crackling on a shortwave radio, distant signals from a ghostly transmission interfering with his thoughts. “There ain't many of them left!” he shouts at the bald man. “I want you to gather a few of your men—are you fucking listening to me?”

A manic nod from the bald man. “Y-yessir—yes.”

“I want you to take your men inside—understand?—you're looking for anyone hiding or trying to hold out inside—you follow me?”

“Yessir … and you want us to … what?”

The Governor snarls at him. “I want you to fucking read them a fucking bedtime story.… YOU FUCKING IDIOT, I WANT YOU TO WASTE THEM!”

With a nod, the man with the shaved head whirls and runs off in the direction of the other gunman. The Governor watches him for a moment, twitching, his blood-spattered face prickling hotly, his wounded jaw throbbing and feverish. He shakes off the voice reverberating behind his thoughts and murmurs to himself, “Only a matter of time now … so shut the fuck up … leave me alone.”

He sees a shadow flit between two buildings dead ahead, fifty yards away, a small group of survivors huddled in an alcove, arguing, two men and a woman … and he ducks down behind the tank, raising Jared's Tec-9 and taking aim. He gets the woman in his front sight and squeezes off three quick blasts—the recoil nearly dislocating his shoulder—the distant puff of blood mist across the alcove invigorating to him, the sight of the woman dropping to the ground like a blast of smack in his veins.

The Governor nods with satisfaction, but before he can draw another breath, he sees the other two figures—an older man and a younger man, both clad in body armor, maybe father and son—suddenly dart out of the hiding place and make a run for it. They pass out of range quickly, charging toward the motorcade of battered prison vehicles parked along the west side of the grounds. The Governor notices three of his gunmen milling around the base of the guard tower to his left, and he calls out to them. “TAKE THEM BASTARDS DOWN RIGHT NOW!”

Within seconds, the men by the tower open up on the twosome, a barrage of automatic fire bursting like a drumroll—plumes of silver sparks flickering in the daylight—filling the air with ugly noise.

The Governor sees the cross fire engulf the two fleeing men, and a direct headshot knocks the younger man off his feet. The kid in the armor sprawls to the concrete in a swath of blood as dark as crude oil. The older man screeches to a halt and goes back to the younger man.

The gunmen hold their fire now as the older one tries to help the younger one up—it's hard to see exactly what's going on out there in the haze of blue smoke and dust, but it appears to the Governor that the older one is sobbing—a father stroking a dying son—cradling the younger man's ruined skull in his lap, and then letting the wave of agony come out in sobs.

The older man weeps and weeps now on the ground, holding the boy, oblivious to the dangers around him, presumably beyond caring about his own life. The whole thing makes the Governor want to puke.

Philip marches over to the militia members standing sheepishly by the tower, their guns lowered, their stricken gazes locked on the death scene across the yard. “What the fuck is your problem?” the Governor demands as he approaches the first gunman.

“Oh God … I … Oh God.” The man in the Massey Ferguson hat and long sideburns—he goes by the moniker Smitty—once chatted with the Governor at Woodbury's Main Street Tavern about shooting turkeys for Thanksgiving. Now the man's grizzled, wind-chapped face has fallen, his red-rimmed eyes welling with tears. “I just … I killed a boy.” He fixes his anguished gaze on the Governor. “I just killed that man's boy like he was some kinda sick animal.”

The Governor throws a glance across the dusty yard and sees the older man—grizzled, graying temples, late fifties, maybe early sixties—on his knees, slumped over the boy, tears streaming down the geezer's face. From the jut of the man's jaw, his pomaded iron-gray hair, and the wind-burned lines around his eyes, he looks like a laborer or farmer, but with a certain gravitas, which makes the crying all the more incongruous. The sight does nothing for the Governor, makes no impression other than a slight tremor of alarm that nobody's blowing this wrinkled fuck away. The Governor turns back to Smitty and says, “Listen to me, listen, this is important—you listening?”

The man named Smitty wipes his face with the back of his arm. “Y-yessir.”

“How many of our people did that so-called ‘boy' kill with his fucking rifle? Huh? HOW MANY?!”

Smitty looks down. “Okay … I get it.”

The Governor puts his gloved hand on the man's shoulder and squeezes. “You should be proud that you killed him!” Then a gentle shove. “C'mon! Get your ass in gear—this isn't over yet!”

“Okay,” Smitty says with a terse nod. “Okay.” He looks down at his rifle and slams another shell in the breach with a grunt, his voice barely a whisper now. “Whatever.”

The Governor has another thought and starts to say something else when a streak of movement off to his left crosses his peripheral vision. He snaps his head toward the nearest building and sees four figures darting out of a side exit. At first, the Governor just points and starts to say, “There!—THERE—HERE COMES—!”

But his words stick in his throat when the identity of two of these figures suddenly registers over the space of a heartbeat.

He recognizes the big, handsome man named Rick—the self-proclaimed leader—limping furiously across the grounds, his tattered prison coveralls now bunched in the midsection with heavy bandages where he was shot. He trundles along with a woman on one flank, a little boy of about nine on the other. Rick helps the woman leap over a pile of wreckage as though she's sick. Plunging through the fogbank of dust, wide-eyed and frantic, they look as if they're making a break for the far gate on the northwest corner of the yards. Following closely on their heels, the fourth figure—a younger woman in a stained white lab coat—carries a lever-action Winchester and already has the weapon raised to her eye.