The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor (The Walking Dead Series)
Kirkman, Robert & Bonansinga, Jay
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To Sheri Stearn, my constant reader and other mother, and to Diego for the mechanics of death and destruction
—Jay Bonansinga
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A very special thank-you to the man, Robert Kirkman, who never fails to pull magic out of his hat; to Andy Cohen, my career compass; to Brendan Deneen, my editor and best dude; to Christina MacDonald for the best line editing ever; and to David Alpert, who holds it all together. Also a huge thanks to Kemper Donovan, Nicole Sohl, Stephanie Hargadon, Denise Dorman, Tom Leavens, Jeff Siegel, and my boys, Joey and Bill Bonansinga. Last but not least, my undying love and gratitude to the woman who changed my life and made me a better writer and man, Jill Norton Brazel.
—Jay Bonansinga
PART 1
The Gathering
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.
—John Dryden
ONE
Writhing in pain on the ground, Bruce Allan Cooper gasps and blinks and tries to catch his breath. He can hear the gurgling, feral growls of a half-dozen biters coming for him, moving in for a feeding. A voice in his brain screams at him: Move, you fucking idiot! You *! What are you doing?!
A big African American with an NBA forward’s physique, a shaved, missile-shaped head, and a grizzle of a goatee, he rolls across the scabrous earth, barely avoiding the clawing gray fingers and snapping jaws of an adult female biter with half a face.
He covers maybe five or six feet until a dagger of pain shoots down his side, radiating fire across his ribs, seizing him up in paralyzing agony. He lands on his back, still gripping his rusty fire ax. The pick head is caked in blood and human hair and the black, viscous bile that has come to be known among survivors as walker-droppings.
Momentarily thunderstruck, his ears ringing, one eye already closing up from the swelling of a broken nose, Bruce wears the tattered army fatigues and mud-caked jackboots of the unofficial Woodbury militia. He can see the Georgia sky above him—a low canopy of filthy dishwater-gray clouds, inclement and nasty for April—and it taunts him: You’re nothing but a bug down there, Brucey-boy, a maggot on the carcass of a dying earth, a parasite feeding off the scraps and ruins of a vanishing human race.
All at once the panorama of the sky above him is eclipsed by three alien faces—dark planets slowly blocking out the heavens—each one snarling stupidly, drunkenly, each pair of milky eyes geeked perpetually open. One of them, an obese adult male in a soiled hospital smock, drools black mucus-gunk that drips on Bruce’s cheek.
“GOD-DAMMMMMM!”
Bruce snaps out of his stupor, finding an unexpected reserve of strength. He lashes out with his ax. The pointed end arcs upward and impales the fat biter in the soft tissue under the jaw. The lower half of the thing’s face detaches and jettisons, a gristly phalanx of dead flesh and glistening cartilage pinwheeling upwards of twenty feet in the air before coming back down to earth with a splat.
Rolling again, scrambling to his feet, Bruce executes a one-eighty spin—fairly graceful for a big man in excruciating pain—and hacks through the putrid neck muscles of another female biter coming at him. The head falls to the side, wobbling for a moment on threads of desiccated tissue before breaking free and tumbling to the ground.
The head rolls for a few feet, leaving a leech trail of black spoor, while the body remains upright for an agonizing moment, twitching with insensate arms outstretched in horrible blind instinct. Something metallic lies coiled at the thing’s feet as it finally sinks to the ground.
Bruce then hears the strangest thing that can be heard—muffled in his traumatized ears—following in the wake of the carnage: cymbals crashing. At least, that’s what it sounds like to Bruce’s ringing ears—a throbbing, metallic crashing noise in his brain—coming from the near distance. Backing away with his weapon at his side, spurred on by the sound, Bruce blinks and tries to focus on other biters shambling toward him. There are too many of them to engage with the pickax.
Bruce turns to flee, and without warning runs directly into another figure blocking his path.
“WHOA!”
The other figure—a thick-necked white man built like a fireplug, his sandy hair cut in an old-school flattop—lets out a war cry and swings a mace the size of a horse leg at Bruce. The spiked club whizzes past Bruce’s face, passing within centimeters of his broken nose. Bruce instinctively rears backward, tripping over his own feet.
He topples to the ground in an awkward display that sends up a cloud of dust and elicits another series of cymbal crashes from the hazy middle distance. The ax goes flying. The sandy-haired man takes advantage of the confusion and roars toward Bruce, the mace poised for action. Bruce grunts and rolls out of range at the last minute.
The mace head slams down hard, stick-pinning into the earth mere inches from Bruce’s head.