Semitrucks retrofitted with fifty-caliber machine gun placements have been canted across the outer corners. Old railroad cars have been wrapped in concertina wire and positioned to block points of egress. Down through the center of town, walled ramparts surround the central business district—some of the barricades just recently completed—within which people live their forlorn lives clinging to memories of church socials and outdoor barbeques.
Making her way across the central walled area, striding purposefully down the cracked paving stones of Main Street, Lilly Caul tries to ignore the feeling that she gets whenever she sees the Governor’s goons strolling the storefronts with AR-15s cradled high across their chests. They’re not just keeping the walkers out … they’re also keeping us in.
Lilly has been persona non grata in Woodbury for months now, ever since her ill-fated coup in January. It was obvious to Lilly, even back then, that the Governor had gotten out of control, his violent regime turning Woodbury into a death carnival. Lilly had managed to recruit a few of the town’s saner denizens—including Stevens, Alice, and Martinez, one of the Governor’s right-hand men—to snatch the Governor one night and take him for a ride out into walker country for a little tough love. The plan was to accidentally-on-purpose get the Governor eaten. But walkers have a way of gumming up the works of the best-laid plans, and in the midst of the mission, a herd had formed out of nowhere. The whole enterprise reverted to a survival struggle … and the Governor lived to rule another day.
Oddly, in some kind of Darwinian twist, the assassination attempt only served to solidify and strengthen the Governor’s power base. To the residents already under his spell, he became Alexander the Great returning to Macedonia … Stonewall Jackson coming back to Richmond, bloodied but unbowed, a badass pit bull born to lead. Nobody seemed to care that their leader was obviously—at least in Lilly’s mind—a pure sociopath. These are brutal times, and brutal times call for brutal leadership. And for the conspirators, the Governor had become an abusive parental figure—teaching “lessons” and meting out his petty punishments with relish.
Lilly approaches a row of little redbrick two-story edifices lined up along the edge of the commercial district. Once quaint little landscaped condo complexes, the buildings now bear the marks of plague shelters. The picket fences have been wrapped in razor wire, the flowerbeds fallow and stony and littered with shotgun shells, the bougainvillea vines over the lintels as dead and brown as frayed cables.
Gazing up at all the boarded windows, Lilly wonders once again, for the millionth time, why she stays in this horrible, desolate, dysfunctional family known as Woodbury. The truth is, she stays because she has nowhere else to go. Nobody has anywhere else to go. The land outside these walls is rife with walking dead, the byways clogged with death and ruin. Lilly stays because she’s afraid, and fear is the one great common denominator in this new world. The fear drives people into themselves, it triggers base impulses, and leeches out the worst of the feral instincts and behavior lying dormant in the human soul.
But for Lilly Caul, the caged-animal experience has drawn out something else that has lurked deep within her for most of her life, something that has haunted her dreams and lurked in her marrow like a recessive gene: loneliness.
An only child growing up in middle-class Marietta, she usually ended up alone: playing alone, sitting alone in the back of the cafeteria or the school bus … always alone. In high school, her brittle intelligence, stubbornness, and sharp wit set her apart from the pom-pom-girl social scene. She grew up lonely, and the latent weight of this loneliness has dogged her in the post-plague world. She has lost everything that has meant anything to her—her father; her boyfriend, Josh; her friend, Megan.
She has lost everything.
Her apartment sits at the east end of Main Street, one of the shabbier redbricks in the complex. Dead kudzu clings to the west wall like mold, the windows veined in black, shriveled vines. The rooftop sprouts bent antennas and ancient satellite dishes that most likely won’t be receiving any signal ever again. As Lilly approaches, the low ceiling of clouds has burned off and the midday sun, as pale and cold as a fluorescent light, blazes down on her, making perspiration break out on the back of her neck.
She steps up to the outer door, fishing for her keys. But she pauses suddenly, something catching her attention out of the corner of her eye. She turns and sees a tattered figure slumped on the ground across the street, a man hunkered against a storefront. The sight of him sends a jolt of sadness down her midsection.
She puts her keys away and crosses the street. The closer she gets to him, the more clearly she can hear his ragged breathing—clogged with phlegm and misery—and his low, wheezing voice, mumbling incomprehensible exhalations in his drunken stupor.
Bob Stookey, one of Lilly’s last true friends, lies curled in a fetal position, shivering, passed out in his threadbare, reeking, navy pea coat, pushed up against the door of a derelict hardware store. The window above him bears the ironic, sun-faded advertisement in cheerful multicolored letters: SPRING CLEAN-UP SALE. The pain etched on the army medic’s deeply lined, leathery face—which is pressed against the pavement like wet trash—breaks Lilly’s heart.
The man has spiraled since the events of the past winter, and now he may be the only other resident of Woodbury who is more lost than Lilly Caul.
“Poor sweet thing.” Lilly speaks softly as she reaches over to a ratty woolen blanket bunched at his feet. The stench of body odor, stale smoke, and cheap whiskey wafts toward her. She pulls the blanket over him, an empty booze bottle rolling out of the fabric and cracking against the breakfront beside the door.
Bob gurgles. “… gotta tell her…”
Lilly kneels beside him, stroking his shoulder, wondering if she should clean him up, get him off the street. She also wonders if the “her” he’s babbling about is Megan. He was sweet on the girl—poor guy—and Megan’s suicide pulverized him. Now Lilly pulls the blanket up to his wattled neck and pats him softly, “It’s okay, Bob … she’s … she’s in a better—”