The Governor comes closer to her. He starts to unbuckle his belt. “Don’t struggle too much just yet, girl.” He undoes his belt and unsnaps his camo pants. “You’re going to want to save your energy.”
The girl on the floor glares with the intensity of a black hole swallowing all matter. Every particle in the room, every molecule, every atom, is being drawn toward the black void of her eyes. The Governor comes closer. He feeds off her hate like a lightning rod.
“After you’re done there, Bruce … leave us to it,” the Governor says, his gaze clamped down on the woman. “We need the privacy.” He smiles at her. “And shut the door on the way out.” His smile widens. “Tell me something, girl. How long do you think it would take for me to ruin your life—shatter your sense of security—really fuck you up?”
No answer comes from the woman, only that ancient, hunched-back gaze of an animal bristling right before a fight to the death.
“I think half an hour could probably do it.” That smile. That heavy-lidded, serpentine stare. He stands only inches away from her. “But really, I plan on doing this every day as often as I can.…” His pants are down around his ankles now. Bruce moves off toward the door as the Governor steps out of his trousers. His spine tingles.
The outer door comes down as Bruce exits. The reverberation of the bang makes the woman jerk again, just slightly.
The Governor’s voice fills the vacuum of space as the underwear comes off. “This is going to be fun.”
*
Above ground. In the night air. In the stillness of the dark town. Late. Two figures walk side by side along the ramshackle storefronts.
“I can’t wrap my head around all this shit,” Austin Ballard is saying with his hands in his pockets as he strolls along the forlorn promenade. He shudders in the chill. His hood is drawn up and over his curls, the lingering dread of what he has just seen showing on his face in brief flashes as the intermittent light spills across their path.
“The feeding room?” Lilly ambles alongside him with her denim coat buttoned up to her neck. She holds herself, her arms around her midsection in some unconscious gesture of self-preservation.
“Yeah … that and the dude with his hand chopped off. What the fuck is going on, Lilly?”
She starts to answer when the distant pop of large-caliber gunfire echoes. The noise makes both of them jump. Martinez and his boys are still out there, burning the midnight oil, cleaning up any stray biters drawn to the wall by the earlier commotion of the racetrack arena.
“Business as usual,” Lilly says, not really believing it. “You’ll get used to it.”
“Sometimes it seems like the biters are the least of our problems.” Austin shivers. “You think these people really are planning a raid?”
“Who knows?”
“How many more of them do you think there are?”
She shrugs. She can’t shake the woozy feeling in her gut that something dangerous and inexorable has already started. Like a foreboding black glacier moving undetectably beneath their feet, the course of events seems to be slipping now toward some undefined horizon. And for the first time since she stumbled upon this ragtag little community … Lilly Caul feels a bone-deep fear that she can’t even identify. “I don’t know,” she says at last, “but I feel like we can kiss any restful night’s sleep good-bye for a while.”
“To be honest, I haven’t slept that great since the Turn broke out.” A twinge of pain from his injury makes him flinch, and he holds his side as he walks. “Matter of fact, I haven’t slept the night through since the beginning.”
“Now that you mention it, I haven’t either.”
They walk a little farther in silence … until Austin says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you really on board with the Governor now?”
Lilly has been asking herself the same thing. Was it a case of Stockholm syndrome—that weird psychological phenomenon where hostages start to feel empathy and positive feelings toward their captors? Or was she projecting all her rage and pent-up emotions through the man as though he were some kind of attack dog hard-wired to her id? All she knew was that she was scared. “I know he’s a psycho,” she says finally, measuring her words. “Believe me … if circumstances were different … I would cross the street and walk on the other side if I saw him coming toward me.”
Austin looks unsatisfied, anxious, tongue-tied. “So you’re saying … it’s like … the whole … when-the-going-gets-tough thing? Or something like that?”
She looks at him. “What I’m saying is this. Knowing what’s out there, we could be in serious danger again. Maybe the worst danger we’ve been in since the town was established.” She thinks about it. “I guess I see the Governor as … I don’t know … like fighting fire with fire?” Then she adds, a little softer, a little less sure of herself, “As long as he’s on our side.”
Another distant crackling volley of gunfire makes both of them twitch.
They come to the end of the main drag, where two streets intersect in the darkness with a petrified railroad crossing. In the dark of night, the broken-down street sign and shoulder-high weeds look like the end of the world. Lilly pauses, preparing to go her separate way to her apartment building to the north.
“Okay, well, anyway…” Austin looks as though he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “Here’s to another sleepless night.”
She gives him a weary grin. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come over to my place and you can bore me some more with your tales of surfing off the coast of Panama City Beach. Hell, maybe you’ll be boring enough to put me to sleep.”
For a moment, Austin Ballard looks like a thorn has just been removed from his paw.