You?—
He ignores the voice inside him and gets sleepy staring at those moving mouths, bubbling and twitching and screaming their silent watery screams.—How?— He sinks into the darkness of sleep. Staring. Absorbing. He begins to dream—the nightmare world seeping into the real world—and he is running through a dark forest. He tries to scream but his voice won’t make a sound. He opens his mouth and lets out a silent cry. No sound comes out of him—only bubbles, which spew up into the darkness and vanish. The woods close in on him. He stands still, fists clenched, white-hot rage flowing out of him, pouring out of his mouth. Burn it all down. Burn it all. Destroy it. Destroy everything. Now. Now! NOW!
*
The Governor jerks awake sometime later. He can’t tell at first if it’s day or night. His legs have fallen asleep, and his neck aches from lolling at an odd angle on the armchair’s headrest.
He gets up and goes into the bathroom and gets himself together. Standing at the mirror, he can hear the low snoring groans of his little girl chained to the wall in the other room. The windup alarm clock on the commode tells him it’s almost noon.
He feels refreshed. Strong. He has a busy day ahead of him. He uses pumice soap to wash away the black lady’s blood from under his fingernails. He cleans up, changes into fresh clothes, and has a quick breakfast—powdered milk for his Post Toasties, instant coffee heated on a Sterno can—and he gives Penny another fresh morsel from the steel container.
“Daddy’s gotta go to work,” he says cheerfully to the tiny corpse as he heads for the door. He grabs his gun and the walkie-talkie charging by the door. “I love you, honey. Stay outta trouble while I’m gone.”
On his way out of the building, he gets Bruce on the two-way. “Meet me at the track,” he says into the mouthpiece, “at the top of the service entrance.” He thumbs the walkie off without waiting for an answer.
Ten minutes later, the Governor stands at the apex of a greasy staircase, which leads down into the cavernous, dark, underground maze. The sky over the racetrack looks threatening, the day turning dark and blustery.
“Hey, boss,” the big bald man says as he lopes up from the parking lot.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I came right over, I’m sorry.”
The Governor glances over his shoulder, a few passersby catching his eye. He lowers his voice. “What’s the situation with the woman?”
“Still talking to herself. Bitch is bug-fuck crazy, you ask me.”
“Is she cleaned up?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Albert paid her a visit, looked her over, gave her some food … which she didn’t touch. I guess she had some water, that’s about it.”
“She still awake?”
“Yep. Far as I can tell. I looked in on her about an hour ago.”
“What was her … demeanor?”
“Her what?”
The Governor sighs. “Demeanor, Bruce. Her mood. What the fuck was she doing?”
Bruce shrugs. “I don’t know, just staring at the floor, talking to the voices in her head.” He licks his lips. “Can I ask you a question?”
“What?”
“Is she telling you anything? Giving you any information?”
The Governor runs his fingers through his long hair. “I’m not asking her anything … so there’s nothing for her to tell me, is there?”
Bruce furrows his brow, looks at him. “You’re not asking her anything?”
“That’s right.”
“Mind if I ask why?”
The Governor glances off into the distance at the plumes of exhaust puffing out of a bulldozer moving earth against the barricade, the workmen securing the last sections, the buzz of engines and hammers filling the air. “That’s coming,” he says, thinking about it. “Speaking of that … I want you to do something for me. Where’s the young one being kept?”
“The Asian kid? He’s on B-level, in the warehouse room next to the infirmary.”
“I want you to move him to the stall right next to the woman’s.”
Bruce’s brow furrows deeper, the folds and creases spreading up across his bald head. “Okay, but … you want him to hear what’s going on in that room?”
The Governor gives him a cold smile. “You ain’t so dumb, Brucey. I want that kid to hear everything I do to that bitch tonight. Then one of them’ll talk. Trust me.”
Bruce starts to say something else when the Governor turns and walks away without another word.
*
In the dusty stillness of her apartment, Lilly and Austin each manage to grab a few hours of restless sleep that morning, and when they finally awaken around one o’clock, the convivial atmosphere of the previous night has transformed into a series of awkward negotiations.
“Oh … sorry,” Austin says when he pushes the door to the bathroom open and finds Lilly on the toilet in her Georgia Tech T-shirt with her panties around her ankles. Austin turns away immediately.
“No problem,” she says. “Can you just give me a minute or two? Then it’s all yours.”
“Absolutely,” he says, thrusting his hands in his pockets and pacing the hallway. Earlier that morning, he had dozed off on the floor of the living room, covered in a packing blanket from the truck, while Lilly slept in the bedroom on her broken-down futon. From the hallway, Austin calls to her, “You got time to give me another lesson today?”
“You’re really a glutton for punishment,” she says inside the bathroom, flushing the toilet and getting herself together at the mirror. She comes out and gives him a good-natured punch in the arm. “Whaddaya say we give that side a chance to heal up first?”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Tonight?”