The doctor looks at her. “What we need? Really? He’s what we need?” Stevens shakes his head, turns away from her, and goes over to the pulse-ox monitor on a table next to the gurney. The machine is off, its screen blank. Hooked to a twelve-volt car battery, it looks as though it’s fallen off the back of a truck. Stevens fiddles with it for a moment, readjusts the terminals. “You know what we really need? We need a monitor down here that actually works.”
“We have to stick together,” Lilly persists. “These people are a threat.”
The doctor whirls angrily toward her. “When did you drink the Kool-Aid, Lilly? You once told me it’s the Governor who’s the biggest threat to our safety. You remember? What happened to the freedom fighter?”
Lilly narrows her eyes at him. The room goes still, Alice and Austin feeling the tension, their silence fueling the awkward edge to the atmosphere. Lilly says, “He could have killed us back then and he didn’t. I just want to survive. What is this thing you have for him?”
“This thing I have is lying right here,” the doctor says, indicating the unconscious man. “I believe the Governor attacked him.”
“What are you talking about?”
The doctor nods. “Without provocation, I’m talking about. The Governor mutilated this man.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
The doctor ponders her. His tone of voice changes, lowers, goes cold. “What happened to you?”
“Like I said, Doc, I’m just trying to survive.”
“Use your head, Lilly. Why would these people traipse in here with bad intentions? They’re just groping around like the rest of us.”
He looks down at the man on the gurney. The man’s eyes jerk slightly under his lids, a desperate fever dream unfolding. His breathing gets a little frenzied for a moment, then calms again.
The silence stretches. At last, Austin speaks up from the other side of the room. “Doc, there were two others—a younger guy and a woman with him. Do you know where they are? Where they went?”
Stevens just shakes his head, looking at the floor now. His voice comes out in barely a whisper. “I don’t know.” Then he looks up at Lilly. “But I’ll tell you this much … I wouldn’t want to be them right now.”
*
A muffled voice can be heard coming from behind a sealed garage door at the end of a lonely corridor in the arena’s subbasement. Hoarse with exhaustion, stretched thin with nervous tension, the voice is feminine, low, and indecipherable to the two men standing outside the door.
“She’s been at it ever since I put her in there,” Bruce says to the Governor, who stands facing the door with arms folded judiciously across his chest. “Talking to herself like that.”
“Interesting,” the Governor comments, his senses sharpened by the latent violence in the air. He can feel the rumble of generators in his bones. He can detect the odors of decay and plaster rotting.
“These people are fucking crazy,” Bruce adds, shaking his glistening bald head, his hand instinctively resting on the grip of the .45 holstered on his hip.
“Yeah … crazy like foxes,” the Governor murmurs. His ear throbs. His skin tingles with anticipation. Control. The refrain bubbles up from the voice that lives in the lowest compartment of his brain: Women are meant to be controlled … managed … broken.
For one fleeting instant, it feels to Philip Blake as though part of him is outside his body, watching all this transpire, fascinated by the voice within him that is second nature now, a second skin: You have to find out what these people know, where they come from—what they have—and most importantly how dangerous they are.
“That lady in there is tough as shit,” Bruce says. “She ain’t gonna give anything up.”
“I know how to break her,” the Governor mutters. “Leave it to me.”
He breathes deeply, inhaling slowly, preparing himself. He senses danger here. These people could very easily hurt him—they could tear apart his community—and so he must call on that part of him that knows how to hurt others, knows how to break people, knows how to control women. He doesn’t even blink.
He simply turns to Bruce and says, “Open it.”
*
The garage door rolls up on rusty, shrieking casters, banging against the top rail. At the rear of the enclosure, the woman in the darkness jerks against her ropes with a start, her long dreadlocks matted to her face.
“I’m sorry,” the Governor says to her. “Don’t let me interrupt.”
In the slice of light coming from the corridor, the woman’s left eye shimmers through a gap in her braids, just that one eye, balefully taking in the visitors standing like giants in the doorway, silhouetted by the bare bulbs in cages along the hallway ceiling behind them.
The Governor takes a step closer. Bruce comes in behind him. “You seemed to be having a nice, spirited conversation with—I’m sorry, who exactly was it you were talking to? Actually—never mind—I don’t even care. Let’s get this under way.”
The woman on the floor brings to mind an exotic animal leashed inside a pen—dark and lithe and supple, like a panther, even in her ratty work clothes—her slender neck strapped and roped to the back wall. Each arm is tied to an opposite corner of the chamber, and her espresso-colored skin gleams with perspiration, her Medusa braids shiny and flowing off her shoulders and back. She glares through her hair at the wiry man, who approaches her with menacing calm.
“Bruce, do me a favor.” The Governor speaks with the absent, businesslike tone of a workman approaching a faulty pipe or a pothole to be filled. “Take her pants off and tie one leg to that wall over there.”
Bruce moves in and does what he’s told. The woman tenses as her pants are yanked down. Bruce does this with the brisk certainty of someone ripping a Band-Aid off a sore. The big man steps back, and then pulls a coil of rope off his belt. He starts hog-tying one leg.
“And tie her other leg to that wall over there,” the Governor instructs.
The woman doesn’t take her gaze off the Governor. She glowers through that hair, eyes so filled with hate they could spot-weld steel.