The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 (35 page)

“Philip Blake.”

The name has its own echo—ghostly, profane—as it reverberates on the breeze. She glances up at the beleaguered crowd gathered against the chain-link barrier, most of the bowed heads turning upward to look at her. Silence greets the exchange of glances. Lilly lets out a long exhalation of breath and then nods. “May God have mercy on their souls,” she says.

A smattering of whispered responses and amens drifts across the arena.

Lilly invites everybody onto the field for the final phase of the ritual. Slowly, one by one, the elders and children and surviving members of the militia file through the gate and onto the dirt infield. Lilly supervises the dismantling.

They take down the post and shackles that once bound walkers to the periphery of the fighting ring. They clean up the vestibules and cloisters, removing the forlorn remnants of torn clothing and spent shells and broken bats and mangled blades that litter the passageways. They clean up the congealed puddles of blood. They sweep the ramps, wipe down the walls, and toss all evidence of the fights into huge garbage bins. A few of the younger men even go down into the catacombs beneath the stadium and destroy the walkers still enclosed in their hellish purgatory, and Lilly begins to feel their housekeeping project is a cleansing of a deeper sort.

The Roman Circus officially closes today—no more gladiators, no more fights other than the collective one for survival.

While they work, Lilly notices something else that surprises her. Very subtly at first, but gathering momentum as the infield transforms, moods begin to lighten. People start talking to each other in positive tones, cracking jokes, reminiscing about the old days, and hinting at better times to come. Barbara Stern suggests that they turn the grounds of the infield into a vegetable garden—the feed store still has viable seeds in it—and Lilly thinks that's a damn fine idea.

And for one brief stretch of time, in the warming sun of a Georgia spring morning—however fleeting it might be—people almost seem happy.

Almost.

*   *   *

By sunset that evening, things have settled down in the new Woodbury.

The barricade has been reinforced on the southeast and north corners of town, a new patrol schedule established—the surrounding woodlands remaining relatively quiet—and the town's supply of fuel, drinking water, and dried goods is accounted for and distributed evenly among the residents. No more bartering, no more politics, no more questions asked. They have enough provisions and sources of energy to keep them going for months—and Lilly sets up a town meeting room in the courthouse, where she begins the process of establishing a sort of steering committee among the elders and heads of families to vote on critical matters.

As the dusk presses in and the air cools, Lilly finally decides to head back home. She's flagging from the pain that lingers in her lower back, and the intermittent cramps that still torment her, but she's as clear-headed and grounded as she's ever been.

Exhausted but oddly tranquil, she walks along the deserted sidewalk toward her apartment building, thinking about Austin, thinking about Josh, and thinking about her father, when she sees a familiar figure trundling along on the opposite side of the street with a dark gunnysack dripping black droplets on the boardwalk.

“Bob?” She crosses the street and approaches him warily, gazing at the blood-sodden sack. “What's going on? What are you doing?”

He pauses in the shadows, a distant sodium vapor light barely illuminating his weathered features. “Nothing much … um, you know … takin' care of business.” He looks strangely nervous and embarrassed. Since he managed to stop drinking, his grooming has improved, his greasy hair now pomaded neatly back away from his deeply creased forehead, accentuating the crow's-feet around his droopy eyes.

“I don't mean to be nosy, Bob.” She nods at the sack. “But this is the second time I've seen you hauling something disgusting across town. It's none of my business, but is that by any chance—?”

“It ain't human, Lilly,” he blurts. “Got it down by the switchyard. It's just meat.”

“Meat?”

“Pieces of a rabbit I found in one of my traps, just a carcass.”

Lilly looks at him. “Bob, I don't—”

“I promised him, Lilly.” All the pretense goes out of him then, his shoulders slumping with despair, maybe even a little shame. “This thing … it's still in there … poor wretched creature … was once his daughter, and I promised him. I had to keep that promise.”

“Jesus Christ, you're not talking about—”

“You could make the argument that he saved my life,” Bob says, looking down at the ground. The sack drips. Bob sniffs miserably.

Lilly thinks about it for a moment, and then says very softly yet very evenly, “Show me.”

 

TWENTY-TWO

Bob turns the key and pushes the door open, and Lilly follows him inside the apartment, crossing the threshold of the Governor's inner sanctum.

She pauses in the foul-smelling foyer. Bob still clutches the sack of meat in his gnarled hand as he scuttles around the corner, vanishing into the living room, but Lilly lingers in that cramped vestibule, taking in the sad remnants of the Governor's private life.

Since arriving in Woodbury, Lilly Caul has been in the Governor's lair only a couple of times, each visit brief and accompanied by a flesh-crawling uneasiness. She remembers hearing those inexplicable noises coming from other rooms—the thick breathing, the faint metallic jangling sounds, and that weird percolating drone of bubbles, as though a meth lab were chugging away in the kitchen—but right now, standing with her arms crossed defensively against her chest, hearing those same noises, she feels very little of the repulsion or aversion she had experienced earlier.

The heartrending sadness of the place calls out to her, and weighs down on her. The scarred hardwood floor, the faded wallpaper, the windows masked with black muslin and threadbare blankets, the single bare lightbulb hanging from the cracked plaster ceiling, the odors of mold and disinfectant thick in the stagnant air—all of it squeezes Lilly's midsection with tremendous sorrow. She takes a girding breath and tries to push the sadness out of her mind. Bob calls out to her from the living room.

“Lilly, come on in here … I'd like you to meet somebody,” his voice beckons, wavering slightly as he tries to keep things light and easy. Lilly takes another breath, a strange thought passing through her mind:
The man who lived here lost everything, and that drove him over the edge, and he ended up here, a castaway in this tawdry, lonely limbo of masked windows and bare lightbulbs and no life
.

Lilly walks into the living room, and the tiny figure shackled to the opposite wall stops Lilly cold in her tracks. The sight of Penny Blake sends an icy trickle of terror—most of it involuntary—down through Lilly's bowels. The flesh on the back of her neck prickles. But accompanying these innate responses come stronger and stronger waves of despair, sadness, and even empathy.

Something about the way the accouterments of childhood still cling to this creature sends Lilly's mind reeling—the shriveled, blackened face crowned with ratty pigtails and filthy ribbons tied in bows, the little pinafore dress so inundated with drool and bile and gore that its original cornflower-blue color has now turned earthworm gray. Bob kneels near the creature, close enough to stroke her shoulder but far enough away to be just beyond the reach of her snapping, gnashing, rasping jaws.

“Lilly, meet Penny,” Bob says with a tenderness that's almost jarring as he reaches into the gunnysack and pulls out a morsel of purplish-red tissue. The girl-thing gnaws at the air and moans an excruciating moan. Bob feeds her the organ. Her milky-white eyes fill with agitation and something that almost looks like agony as she masticates the offal, fluids leaking through her tiny, puckered, toothless gums and running down her chin.

Lilly comes closer, the sorrow weighing down on her, forcing her to fall to her knees a few feet away from the child-thing. “Oh my God … Bob … Jesus Christ … is this his…? Oh Jesus, Jesus.”

Bob gently strokes the child's waxy hair as the thing devours the entrails. “Penny, meet Lilly,” Bob says very softly to the creature.

Lilly bows her head and stares at the floor. “Bob, this is … Jesus.”

“I promised him, Lilly.”

“Bob … Bob.” Lilly shakes her head and continues staring at the floor as the watery smacking noises fill the air. She can't bear to look at the tiny monster. In her peripheral vision, Lilly can see nail marks on the worn carpet, an outline of bloodstains where a panel was hastily driven into the floor. She can also see smudges of stubborn bloodstains on the walls that refused to come out with Comet and elbow grease. The air smells of sour rot and copper.

Bob says something else but Lilly doesn't hear it. Her mind swims with sadness now, marinating in the misery and madness baked into the fabric of this place, festering in the drapes and the grain of the floorboards and the black mold in the seams of the baseboards. It takes her breath away and burns her eyes. The tears come then, and Lilly tries to get breath back in her lungs and stanch the welling of her eyes and the urge to sob. She stuffs it back down her gorge. She clenches her fists and looks back up at the girl.

A long time ago, Penny Blake sat on her father's lap and listened to bedtime stories and sucked her thumb and nuzzled a security blanket. Now she gazes out through eyes the color of a fish belly, insensate as a mole, catatonic with a black hunger that will never fade. She is the living embodiment of the plague's toll.

For an unbearable eternity, Lilly Caul slumps on her knees in front of the girl-thing, shaking her head, staring at the floor while Bob feeds the rest of the chum to the creature, saying nothing, softly whistling as though merely braiding a little girl's hair.

Lilly gropes for the right words. She knows what has to be done.

At last, after endless minutes, Lilly finally manages to look up at Bob. “You know what we have to do, right?” She holds Bob's droopy, red-rimmed, crestfallen gaze. “You know there's no other way to go.”

Bob lets out a miserable sigh, levers himself to his feet, shuffles over to the sofa, and plops down as though the stone of Sisyphus rests on his shoulders. He slumps and wipes his eyes, his lips trembling as he says, “I know … I know.” He looks at Lilly through his tears. “You're gonna have to do it, Lilly-girl … I ain't got the heart for it.”

*   *   *

They find an ice pick in the kitchen drawer and a relatively clean sheet on the bed, and Lilly tells Bob to wait outside. But Bob Stookey—a man who has ministered to dying soldiers and taken in stray dogs all his life—refuses to dishonor the memory of a little girl. He tells Lilly that he will assist her.

They sneak up behind the girl-thing while she's feeding, and Lilly throws the sheet over her, covering her head and face, trying not to disturb the creature any more than necessary. The tiny monster writhes and struggles in the cocoon of fabric for a moment, as Lilly gently forces the wriggling body to the floor. Pressing her weight down on the shuddering form, Lilly grips the ice pick in her right hand.

The head squirms and flails under the sheet, and Lilly struggles for a moment to position it properly for a clean and decisive thrust. Bob crouches next to her, next to the shivering lump, and begins softly singing to it—an old Christian hymn—and Lilly pauses for a moment, just before plunging the ice pick into the head under the sheet, taken aback by the sound of Bob's voice.

“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,” Bob croons softly to the thing that was once a child—his gravelly drawl suddenly transformed, turning soft and warm and as sweet as honey. “It's the emblem of suffering and shame, and I love that old cross where the dearest and best, for a world of lost sinners was slain.”

Lilly freezes, feeling something extraordinary develop inside the damp sheet beneath her. The writhing and shuddering and growling subside, the creature suddenly and inexplicably growing calm, as though listening to the sound of Bob's voice. Lilly stares at the sheet. It doesn't seem possible, but the thing remains still.

Bob softly sings, “Then He'll call me someday to my home far away … Where His glory forever I'll share.”

Lilly thrusts the point deep into the cranium under the sheet.

And the thing named Penny goes to her home far away.

*   *   *

They decide to have a burial ceremony for the child. Lilly comes up with the idea, and Bob thinks it's a pretty good thing to do.

So Lilly sends Bob out to gather the others, find a wheelbarrow, some tarp, a suitable container, and a proper location for the gravesite.

After Bob leaves, Lilly lingers in the apartment, one piece of unfinished business left to address.

 

TWENTY-THREE

Lilly finds a box of shells in Philip's bedroom closet, which fit the 12-gauge pigeon gun leaning against the wall behind a stack of peach crates. She loads the gun and carries it into the side room.

All it took was a single glance through the doorway into that shadowy chamber where the ghastly aquariums are still lined along the wall, bubbling and thumping in the darkness, for the mystery of Philip Blake to forever be burned into Lilly's memory.

Now Lilly positions herself in front of the glass containers and pumps the shotgun. She levels the barrel on the first aquarium and fires. The blast nearly blows her eardrums out as the container explodes, sending glass shards through the air and a gush of fluid across the floor. The bloated head tumbles out.

She pumps another shell into the chamber and fires, and she does it again and again, hitting each aquarium dead center, spewing waves of water across the floor at her feet and sending the heads to oblivion. She goes through twenty-five shells, until the room swims with cleansing water, broken glass, and the remains of the Governor's trophies.