The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 (6 page)

A noise outside the boarded windows cuts her off. All heads snap toward the sound of yelling, glass breaking, wood splitting apart.

“Oh shit,” Lilly utters, frozen at the front of the room with her fists clenched.

Barbara Stern springs to her feet, her eyes suddenly wide with terror. “Maybe it's just a fight, somebody drunk or pissed off or something.”

“I don't think so,” David Stern murmurs, standing up and reaching around for the pistol wedged into the back of his belt. He draws his gun.

Austin jumps out of his chair and darts across the room to where Lilly stands staring. “Let's let Gabe and Bruce check it out first.”

Across the room, Bruce is already on his feet, pulling the .45 from its holster, snapping off the safety, and shooting a look at Gabe. “You got the other MIG?”

Gabe has already whirled toward the far corner of the room, where two assault rifles are leaning against the wall. He grabs one, and then the other, and then turns to Bruce and tosses one of the rifles as he yells, “C'mon!—Let's go!—Before all hell breaks loose!”

Bruce catches the weapon, chambers a round, and follows Gabe out the door, down the hall, and toward the exit.

The others stand frozen in the community room, looking at each other and listening to the pandemonium rising out on the street.

 

FOUR

In the darkness, an empty bottle of Jack rolls across the street half a block north of the courthouse, and Gabe kicks it aside as he barrels toward the southwest corner of town, Bruce right on his heels. In the night winds, Gabe can see the intermittent muzzle flashes behind the grove of trees along the town square, sparks as bright as arc welders bouncing off the sky, the cool night air alive with screams. One of the guards is already down on the ground by the curb, his drinking buddies scattering now, their silhouettes receding into the distance. Three walkers have piled up on the fallen guard, tearing into him, the blood tide spreading in all directions as they feed, burrowing down into flesh, ripping strings of tendons and cartilage in the flickering shadows. Gabe gets to within twenty yards of the feeding orgy and snaps the selector lever on the rifle. His barrel comes up as he charges in and pulls the trigger.

Hellfire blazes out of the MIG, strafing the top halves of the biters, punching holes through cranial bones in fountains of tissue and bursts of blood mist. The walkers fold. Bruce roars past Gabe with his own rifle up and braced on his big shoulder, his booming voice coming out in one spontaneous cry: “GET THAT FUCKING WALL BACK UP NOW!!”

Gabe glances back up and sees what Bruce is shouting about in the darkness twenty-five yards away: A weak spot in the corner of the barricade—a conglomeration of drywall panels, sheet metal, and roofing nails—has collapsed under the weight of a dozen or more walkers pushing in from the adjacent woods. The men must have been shirking their watch, fucking around, not paying attention, drinking or some such shit. Now one of the young guards on a gun turret frantically sweeps his arc lamp down on the scene—the silver beam crisscrossing the fogbound street—painting luminous halos around the silhouettes of twenty-plus biters staggering over fallen timbers.

Bruce unleashes a barrage of armor-piercing rounds at the onslaught.

He gets most of them—the casings flinging, one by one, up into the air—a row of reanimated corpses doing involuntary jigs in the swirling spray of fluids, ragged bodies collapsing in a synchronized line dance of death. But Bruce doesn't notice Gabe fanning out to the right, going after an errant biter who is dragging toward an alley. If the dead infiltrate the shadowy nooks and crannies of the town before they are all dispatched, there will be hell to pay. In all the commotion—the guards returning with heavy artillery, the shouts, the sweeping beams of arc light, the two machine-gun placements starting to spit fire—Gabe gets separated.

He follows a biter into a dark alley and immediately loses track of the thing.

“FUCK-FUCK! FUCK!—FUCK!!” Gabe hisses loudly, spinning around, scanning the darkness, his rifle raised and ready, the shadows engulfing him. He can hardly see his hand in front of his face. He has two extra magazines in sheaths on his belt, a Glock tucked against his left pant leg, and a Randall knife thrust down the inside of his right boot. He's loaded for bear, but right now he can't see shit. He smells the thing—that rancid meat and toe-cheese odor—infecting the dark. He hears a crunch and jerks the muzzle toward the sound.

Nothing.

He moves deeper into the alley, the sounds of pandemonium out on the street fading in his ringing ears. His heart bangs in his chest. His mouth goes dry. He swings the gun's barrel to the right, blinks away the sweat dripping in his eyes, and then swings the muzzle to the left. Where the fuck did that shit-bird go? He plunges deeper into the passageway. The darkness thickens.

A sudden noise to his immediate right straightens his spine—the clatter of a tin can rolling across pavement—and he pulls the trigger. Half a dozen high-velocity slugs trace through the dark like Roman candles, ricocheting off the adjacent brick in a necklace of dust puffs.

Gabe stops and listens, the blasts echoing in his ears. Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound. Maybe he has the wrong alley. He could have sworn the thing lumbered into this one, but the darkness works on Gabe now, steals his confidence, sends tremors of panic down his bones.

What the fuck?

He approaches the end of the alley, a dead end crowded with garbage Dumpsters and strewn with trash. He reaches for his Zippo with his free hand, his other hand propping the rifle on his ample hip. He can hear the low putter of a generator nearby—probably inside the wall—as he pulls the lighter out and thumbs the little flywheel, sparking a minuscule yellow flame.

The flickering cone of light illuminates a huge figure with milk-glass eyes in a tattered burial coat standing three feet away.

Gabe lets out a yelp and drops the lighter, jerking back and fumbling for the trigger as the biter lunges at him, chewing at the air. Gabe loses his balance. He falls on his ass hard, hitting the pavement with a grunt. The biter pounces—this one hungry and twitchy and full of fight—and Gabe flails impotently at the thing with the short barrel of the rifle, unable to get a good shot.

The gun discharges once, the muzzle flash capturing a snapshot of the monster going for Gabe's throat with green, mossy incisors. Gabe manages to dodge the snapping teeth but loses his grip on the gun in the process, the MIG clattering to the pavement beside him. He squirms and writhes and lets out a throttled cry of rage and finally gets his hand around the grip of the Randall knife in his boot.

With one violent jerk he thrusts the blade up at the biter's head.

At first the knife merely lands a glancing blow to the monster's jaw, ripping open a flap of mortified flesh. Gabe's eyes have adjusted to the dark enough now to see shapes—wet, fleshy blurs—and he slashes madly at the top of the creature until the knife impales the monster through the left nostril. The point penetrates the nasal cavity and the rotten skull fissures down the middle with the adrenaline-fueled force of Gabe's stabbing blow.

The biter gushes fluids all over him as the cranium splits in half.

Gabe gasps and rolls away, the dead thing deflating and going still in a puddle of its own fluids, which spread on the paving stones like black oil. Gabe manages to roll toward his rifle. But before he can get to the gun—his heart racing now, his adrenaline sparking in his eyes like sunspots—he senses a change in the alley behind him. Movement as black as bat wings floods his peripheral vision as the noise of inhuman growling—a chorus of guttural, rusty gears grinding—rumbles slowly toward him. He smells the telltale stench of rancid proteins and black rot flooding the alley. Dizziness courses over him as he rises up on shaky legs and slowly turns. His eyes suddenly dilate—an involuntary shudder traveling down his spine—as he takes in the horror.

At least ten biters—maybe more—shuffle toward him with implacable dead stares—an entire pack blotting out any hope of escape, an insatiable regiment of monsters moving as one, closing in on him, silhouetted like deadly marionettes by the light spilling across the mouth of the alley behind them. Gabe lets out another garbled, defiant scream, and darts toward his gun.

It's too late. Before he can scoop the weapon up, the lead walker goes for his beefy shoulder. He kicks at its midsection with his jackboot, reaching for his Glock, when another monster moves in from his other flank, clawing at his neck. Gabe puts his head down and raises the pistol and tries to steamroll his way through the center of the pack—firing wildly—the muzzle barking and flashing with the surreal, intermittent flicker of a nickelodeon.

There's too many of them. Dead arms reach for him before he clears the jumble, cold fingers curled into grappling hooks, latching onto him, driving him to the pavement. He lands on the stones, wrenching his back, gasping for breath, his clip already empty, the air knocked out of his lungs. He tries to roll away, but the creatures descend on him—a pack of wolves going for his jugular—and he ends up on his back, wedged against the wall, trapped, staring at the inscrutable starry night sky looking down at him with impassive silence. He can't breathe. He can't move. The shock sets in, seizing up his stocky limbs, and he realizes with an odd measure of chagrin that this is it. This is all she wrote. Fuck. The monsters converge on him. They hover over him, their putrid maws dripping the drool of bloodlust, their eyes as shiny as Buffalo nickels. Everything slows down, as if Gabe is dreaming, as they close in for the feeding. The end … the end …

*   *   *

He always wondered if the end would be like they say it is in the movies—your life passing before you, or some bullshit woowoo thing like that—but it isn't. Gabriel Harris learns in that horrible moment before the first set of rotten teeth clamp down on him that the end doesn't come in gossamer wings and angelic visions. It comes in a loud pop—like a balloon exploding—and a final image steeped in wish fulfillment. He sees the closest walker whiplash suddenly in a gruesome eruption of tissue and blood, its head coming apart at the seams and raining blood on him in a slow-motion ritual baptism. He stares as the popping sounds continue—the dry, muffled snapping noises recalling a string of wet firecrackers—and more heads erupt.

The monsters collapse around him in a gruesome sequential massacre.

He comes back to his senses in time to see his savior out of the corner of his eye. She stands silhouetted in the center of the alley—thirty feet away—a matching .22 caliber Ruger rimfire pistol blazing in each hand, the muzzles silenced by noise suppressors. The last biter goes down, and the dry clapping noises cease as quickly as they started. The woman with the guns lets up on the triggers. Without any emotion or ceremony, she thumbs the magazine release on one gun, then the other, the empty mags dropping to the pavement with a clatter. The guns lower, dangling at her side now, as she scans the scene with the casual authority of a surveyor taking the measure of a building site.

Gabe tries to sit up, but his back complains, the nerves pinched, his sacrum sprained. “Holy fucking shit,” he mutters, kicking away a wet corpse that had fallen on his legs. He rises to a sitting position and cringes at the pain.

Lilly walks up to him. “You okay? Did you get nipped? Did they break the skin?”

Gabe takes in a series of deep breaths, glancing around the alley at the carnage. The dozen or so biters now lie in contorted bundles of morbid flesh across the width of the alley, their heads blossoming with the red jelly of breached brain matter, the paving stones around them running red with their diseased blood. “No … I'm … no,” Gabe stammers, trying to get his bearings. “I'm good.”

At the mouth of the alley, an arc light sweeps across the gap and penetrates the darkness. Lilly kneels by Gabe, and she shoves her pistols down the back of her jeans. The light puts a silver halo around her head, highlighting wisps of her chestnut-brown hair. “Lemme give you a hand,” she says and helps him to his feet.

Gabe groans slightly as he levers his bullish body to its full height. “Where's my gun?”

“We'll get it,” she says.

Gabe stretches his sore neck. “That was about as close as I ever want to come.”

“I hear ya.” She glances over her shoulder. The sounds of voices raised over the din of gunfire begin to fade. Lilly lets out a breath. “There's no excuse for this,” she says. “We need all hands on deck from now on.”

“Copy that,” Gabe says.

“C'mon, let's get you checked out and clean up this fucking mess.”

She starts toward the mouth of the alley when he grabs her and gently stops her.

“Lilly, wait,” he says, and licks his lips. He's not good with words, but he needs to say something to her. He looks into her eyes. “Thanks for … you know … I'm just saying … I appreciate it.”

She shrugs and gives him a smirk. “I need you in one piece.”

He starts to say something else when he notices Lilly suddenly flinching, doubling over slightly. She holds her tummy.

“You okay?”

“Yeah … just a little cramp.” She breathes through her mouth, blowing breaths over her lips for a moment. “Girl stuff. Don't worry about it.” The pain passes. “C'mon … let's go kick some ass.”

She turns and walks away, stepping over the corpses of the dead.

*   *   *

That night, Lilly and her inner circle stay up late, working behind the scenes to shore up the town's defenses. Bruce marshals every last able-bodied man on Martinez's crew to reinforce the barricades. They repair the north wall, strengthening the ramparts with extra sheet metal and timbers, and they move more trailers across the weak spots. They keep a close watch on the surrounding wetlands.