The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 (31 page)

Lilly takes a deep breath and tries to appear semi-calm. “It's nothing, Gloria, it's just—”

“What's wrong with Austin?” She notices the bloody bandanna. Two other figures—Hap and Ben—appear behind her, gazing through the glass. “Is that a bite?” Gloria stares at the blood-soaked cloth around his wrist. “Did he get bit out there?”

“No, goddamnit, he just—”

“Lilly, come here for a second.” Austin speaks softly to her. He puts his good arm around her and gives her a gentle squeeze. He looks into her eyes and smiles sadly. “It's too late.”

“What?!—NO!—What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It's too late, kiddo.”

“No!—No!—Fuck no!—Don't say that!” She gazes across the dusty vestibule and sees the entire group now gathered outside the glass, the moonbeams slanting down through the high lintels, silhouetting their tense stares. They're all gaping at Austin.

“Lilly—” Austin starts to say, but she cuts him off with a raised hand. She turns toward the others. “Go back to sleep, goddamnit, all of you—GO ON! GO BACK! GIVE US SOME FUCKING PRIVACY!!”

Slowly, one by one, they turn away from the glass and slip back into the shadows of the foyer. In the silence that ensues, Lilly turns and searches for the right words. She will
not
allow him to give up.

Austin touches her face. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?!” She blinks away the tears. She can't afford to cry right now. Maybe someday she'll be able to cry again. But not now. Now she has to think of something. Fast. “Okay … look. I'm gonna have to do something radical here.”

He shakes his head calmly. “I know what you're thinking. Unfortunately, the thing has already gone way beyond amputation, Lilly. I can feel the fever. The thing has already spread. There's nothing you can do. It's too late.”

“Goddamnit, would you stop saying that!” She pulls away from him. “I'm not gonna lose you!”

“Lilly—”

“No, no … this is unacceptable!” She licks her lips, gazing around the enclosure, thinking, searching for some answer. She looks back at Austin, and she sees the expression on his face, and all at once the fight goes out of her, and she realizes there is, indeed, nothing she can do for him. Like a balloon deflating, she sags, letting out an anguished sigh. “When did it happen? Was it that big lady walker, jumped you before we came inside?”

He nods. His expression remains tranquil, almost beatific, like a person who's had a religious conversion. He strokes her shoulder. “You're gonna survive this thing. I just know it. If anybody can do it, you can.”

“Austin—”

“The time I got left … I don't want to, like, dwell on it. You know what I mean?”

Lilly wipes the tears from her eyes. “There's so much we don't know. I heard about this one victim, up near Macon, who never turned. They got a fucking
finger
chewed off, and they never fucking turned.”

Austin lets out a sigh, smiling to himself. “And unicorns exist.”

She takes him by the shoulders, and burns her gaze into his eyes. “You're not gonna die.”

He shrugs. “Yeah. I am. We all are. Sooner or later. But you got a good shot at avoiding it for a long time. You're gonna get outta here.”

She wipes her face, the sorrow and horror rising up her gorge and threatening to break her into a million pieces. But she stamps it down, shoves it back, swallows it … hard. “We're all gonna get out of here, pretty boy.”

He gives her another weary nod, and then he sits back down on the tarp, leaning back against the wall. “If I'm not mistaken, I think I saw a flask in one of those drawers you were banging around in.” He gives her one of his patented rock-star smiles, brushing wisps of curly hair from his ashen face. “If there's a God, there'll be liquor left in there.”

*   *   *

They stay wide awake the rest of the night, sharing the last few fingers of stale hooch in the flask left behind by some overworked intake guard. Throughout the wee hours, they talk softly, careful not to be heard by the others out in the foyer, discussing everything
but
Austin's bite wound. They talk about how they're going to get out of this place, whether they might find any supplies in other parts of the prison, and how they might avoid the infestation of walkers currently skulking around the corridors of the building.

Lilly puts Austin's condition out of her mind. She has a job to do—get these people home safely—and she has assumed the mantle of leadership as readily as slipping into a new wardrobe, as easily as pulling a trigger, as quickly as a shot to the head. They talk about how the people in Woodbury will react to Philip Blake's death. And for a while, Lilly fantasizes about a new Woodbury, a place where people can breathe and live in peace and take care of each other. She wants this badly, but neither she nor Austin can admit to themselves how farfetched it all sounds—how slim their odds are of even escaping this godforsaken prison with their skins intact.

Around dawn, as the high windows turn a luminous gray and begin to cast pale light into the receiving room, Lilly shakes herself out of her reverie. She looks at Austin. He shivers with a worsening fever. His dark eyes—once perpetually alive with mischief—now look like those of an eighty-year-old man. Dark circles rim the lower eyelids, and burst capillaries have turned the whites to a sickly pink. His breathing seems labored, rough and clogged with phlegm, but he manages to smile back at her. “What's wrong? What are you thinking?”

“Listen to that,” she whispers. “You hear that?”

“What? I don't hear a thing.”

She tilts her head toward the side door leading into the cellblock corridor. “Exactly.” She stands and brushes herself off, then checks her pistols. “Sounds like the stragglers have drifted away, gotten bored with the empty hallways.” She flicks the safety on her Ruger. “I'm gonna check out the cellblock, see if we can't find anything useful.”

Austin stands up and nearly falls over from the rush of dizziness. He swallows the nausea rising inside him. “I'll go with you.”

“No, no way.” She shoves the gun in her belt, checks the second pistol, shoves it down the back of her jeans. “You're in no shape to go. I'll take the others with me. You stay here and hold down the fort.”

He looks at her. “I'm going with you, girlfriend.”

She sighs. “Okay … whatever. I don't have the energy to argue with you.” She goes over to the glass door, pushes it open, and gazes out at the dreary light of the foyer. “Ben? Matthew?”

Out in the reception area, the others are huddled together on the floor. They sit on a blanket after a sleepless night, their eyes red and drawn with fatigue. At first, they appear to be playing some kind of game, the contents of their pockets in a pile on the blanket in front of them as though wagers are being made. But very quickly Lilly realizes that they're pooling the meager resources from their pockets: candy bars, keys, cigarettes, a flashlight, chewing gum, a couple of hunting knives, a scope, a walkie-talkie, handkerchiefs, a canteen, and a roll of electrical tape.

“What's going on?” Matthew springs to his feet, reaching for his ammo belts. “What's happening with junior?”

“I'm right as rain,” Austin replies sternly from behind Lilly, his voice sounding as though he's about as right as a whipped dog. “Thank you for asking.”

“I need some of you to give me a hand with a quick search of the corridor,” Lilly tells them. “Matthew, you come along with the AK … just in case … and Ben, you too … bring those knives.” She looks at Gloria. “The rest of you hold down the fort. Something goes awry, fire off a single warning shot. You understand?”

They all nod.

“C'mon,” she says to the others, “let's do this quickly and quietly.”

The three men follow Lilly over to the side door. Lilly draws her .22, takes a breath, and yanks the iron stand off its temporary mooring. She carefully turns the knob, the door squeaking softly as she cracks it open a few inches. Through the gap she peers out, craning her neck to see down the hundred-foot length of main corridor.

The hallway sits in silent darkness, a few cells along the walls sitting open.

At the far end of the corridor, so far away that they look like indistinct jumbles of clothing strewn across the floor, Lilly sees the remains of the three men sent into the prison by the Governor the previous afternoon. They now lie torn to shreds on the tiles, their torsos and extremities so mutilated that they're unrecognizable as men. Their drying blood coats the floor and walls.

Fortunately, as far as Lilly can tell, the walkers have moved on, despite the fact that their putrid odors still cling to the air.

Lilly gives everybody a nod, and one by one they slip into the corridor.

*   *   *

They get halfway down the hallway, passing empty cell after empty cell, finding nothing but litter and discarded clothing on the floors—people obviously left in a hurry—when Austin suddenly hears a noise behind him. He wheels around and comes face-to-face with a figure bursting out of one of the darker, windowless cells.

Austin jerks back with a start, instinctively raising his Glock at the precise same moment a huge male biter with a wild gray Rasputin beard unhinges its creaking jaws and pounces at him. Jowls hanging in bloody shreds from a recent gunshot wound, milk-pod eyes flashing with bloodlust, the dead old man tries to gobble Austin's face as the Glock's muzzle almost accidentally lodges itself inside the creature's throat. Austin starts to squeeze the trigger.

“Austin, don't fire it!” Ben Buchholz hisses at him from the shadows off his right flank. “The noise!—Austin, don't!”

Blinking with shock, his fever spiking with streaks of painful light across his field of vision, Austin shoves the creature's huge head against the closest wall. The impact cracks the thing's skull, but it keeps chewing furiously on the barrel in its mouth as though trying to masticate the gun.

Austin grunts and slams the skull again and again against the wall when a flash of steel streaks across his peripheral vision and a knife blade embeds itself in the thing's forehead with a watery crunch.

Rotten blood and black fluids gush around the knife's hilt as Ben Buchholz pulls the blade free, and then he stabs it a second time, and a third, until the thing with the beard collapses to the floor in a bloody mass of blubber and escaping gases.

A moment of edgy silence follows as everybody gets their bearings.

They move on. Austin brings up the rear, moving slowly, the nausea twisting his insides into knots, the fever sending clammy gooseflesh down his back. They creep toward the end of the corridor. Ben and Matthew take the lead, each with a buck knife at the ready. Austin sees Lilly pausing in front of an open cell about twenty-five feet ahead of him. She stares at something inside the cell. The two other men pause and look over her shoulder.

Something's wrong. Austin can see it in Lilly's body language, the way she lowers herself to one knee and picks something up off the floor. The other two men wait impatiently for her, saying nothing. Austin approaches and looks over her shoulder.

He sees what has Lilly so transfixed and turns to the other men. “Give us a second, guys,” Austin says to them. “See if you can go secure the door at the end of the hall.”

The two men pad away, scanning the depths of the hallway ahead of them with knives poised and ready. Troubling scratching noises echo. The distant, omnipresent drone of the herd vibrates in the air. The yards are still rife with the dead, the horde surrounding the cellblocks. At the moment, though, the corridor remains still and silent. Austin crouches next to Lilly and puts an arm around her.

A single tear drops off her chin. Her shoulders tremble as she takes in the former sleeping quarters of a child, its former inhabitant evidently abandoning it in a hurry. Across the cinder-block wall over the cot someone has hung a small banner of letters from the alphabet spelling out the name S-O-P-H-I-A. Lilly cradles a small teddy bear in her arms as if it's a wounded bird—the stuffed animal is missing an eye and its fur is worn down to the nubs from compulsive fondling. On a makeshift dresser of crates in one corner is an old music box.

“Lilly…?”

Austin feels a tremor of fear as Lilly pulls herself away from him and crosses the cell to the dresser. She opens the lid of the music box, and a tinkling melody rattles out of the thing for a moment.
Hush, little baby, don't you cry … Mama's gonna sing you a lullaby
. Lilly collapses into a sitting position in front of the music box, her expression crumbling with grief. She sobs. Softly. Uncontrollably. Her body shudders and convulses as she lowers her head. Tears stream down her face, falling to the grubby tile floor. Austin joins her, kneeling next to her, searching for the right thing to say. No words come to him.

He turns away from her, partly out of respect and partly because he can't bear to see her weep like this. He studies the contents of the cell, patiently trying to give her the space and time to let this horrible grief work its way through her. He sees the child's things strewn across the floor, on the bed, and on a meager little shelf nailed into the rotted cinder-block wall. He sees Kewpie dolls, arrowheads, leaves pressed onto construction paper, and books—dozens of them—lined along the shelf and shoved under the bed. He studies the titles:
The Wizard of Oz
,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
,
Eloise
,
The Phantom Tollbooth
, and
Matilda
.

His gaze lingers on one of the books. His head throbs. His eyes moisten and his stomach clenches with fever chills as he stares and stares at the book's title. An idea strikes him right then, a way out of this place—Austin's destiny written on the cracked gold-leaf spine of a dog-eared Little Golden Books classic—all of it coalescing in his mind in one great paroxysm of inspiration.