He braces himself for what he’s about to see, leans down, unsnaps the lock, grasps the release, and yanks the door up on its congealed rollers. The door shrieks. The opening reveals a dark cement enclosure once used to store greasy chassis and spare parts—now a place of degradation and pain—and the Governor standing in the gloom, breathless from all the hard work.
“That’s entertainment,” he mutters, his face shiny with sweat, the dark wet spots under his armpits and the blood on his hands worse than they were after the last session two days ago. He worked on the woman all night—the third round of torture this week—and now the fatigue and the toll it’s taking on the man show in his sunken gaze.
For a brief instant, Bruce glimpses the ragged figure on the floor behind the Governor. Her torso hangs inches above the floor, the ropes barely keeping her aloft, her braids dangling, fluids dripping off her swollen face. Her narrow shoulders heave rhythmically, lungs gasping for air, her nude lower half crumpled like a broken doll. She is barely alive—at least at first glance—although on closer inspection, one might note a furnace burning behind her hemorrhaged eyes, a nuclear reactor of rage keeping her awake, keeping her clinging to a thin hope of vengeance.
“Close it,” the Governor says, grabbing a towel draped over Bruce’s shoulder.
Bruce obliges, slamming the rolling door to the deck with a metallic clang.
The Governor towels off his face. “She ain’t ever gonna talk. How many times we been at it now—three, four—I lost count.” He tosses the towel. “What about the kid? He break yet?”
Bruce shakes his head. “Gabe says he’s been hearing everything through the wall, says he’s been blubbering like a baby, day in and day out, and hasn’t let up since you started in on her.”
The Governor sniffs, stretching his overworked neck muscles, cracking his bloody knuckles. “But he didn’t give anything up, did he?”
Bruce shrugs. “According to Gabe, he just bawled and bawled and that’s about it. Wouldn’t talk.”
“That tears it.” The Governor takes deep breaths, thinking, turning things over in his mind. “These people are tighter than I thought, tough fucking nuts to crack.”
Bruce considers it. “Can I make a suggestion?”
“What’s that?”
Bruce shrugs again. “In the joint, they break people in solitary.”
The Governor looks at him. “So?”
“So what I’m thinking, we just keep ’em locked up, separated, you know, like solitary fucking confinement. Might be the easiest way to do it.”
“This ain’t no prison, Bruce, I got a town to—” The Governor blinks, cocking his head at a sudden revelation. “Wait a minute.”
Bruce looks at him. “What is it, boss?”
“Wait … hold on a second.”
“What?”
The Governor stares at the big black man. “Didn’t Gabe say those riot suits they came dressed in was the kind of shit they use in prisons?”
Bruce silently nods, looking around the corridor, thinking about it.
The Governor starts toward the stairs, muttering as he goes. “Now that I think of it, that Rick dude was wearing a prison jumpsuit under his gear.”
Bruce hurries after him. “Where you going, boss?”
The Governor is already climbing the steps, calling over his shoulder. “Clean that bitch up … and then get Gabe … and meet me at the infirmary. I think I got a better way to do this!”
*
Lilly pauses next to the wall, heart racing, the sun now fully risen, the early morning rays of light hammering down on the back of her neck. Fifty yards away, one of Martinez’s men—his husky form silhouetted against the dawning sky—strolls along a makeshift catwalk.
Lilly waits until the guard passes behind a vent stack, and then makes her move.
She quickly scuttles up and over the wall, landing hard on a parkway of gravel on the other side. The impact of her boots on the rocks makes a loud crunch, and she crouches down for a moment—her pulse quickening—waiting to see whether or not the guard notices her.
After a moment of breathless silence, she silently duck walks across the gravel road and slips behind a burned-out building. She checks her gun, jacking the slide. She keeps it at her side as she moves on, plodding down a side road strewn with wreckage and heaps of decomposing, headless walkers. The stench is extraordinary.
The cold wind blows the smell around her like a net as she passes the post office—staying low, creeping silently past old torn posters of happy postmen handing colorful packages to children, and graffiti-splashed placards of smiling retirees collecting stamps. She hears shuffling noises behind her—leaves on wind, maybe—and doesn’t look back.
She keeps heading south.
The bombed-out remains of Gold Star Sundries and Drugs sits at the end of the road, a tiny box of crumbling red brick with a bullet-riddled, boarded front window. The old R/X sign—a big mortar and pestle—hangs by frayed cables, twisting in the breeze. She hurries up to the entrance. The door is jammed shut, and she has to plow through it with one shoulder.
She bursts into the store’s dark interior, the glass from the broken door raining down on the floor. Her heart thrums in her chest as she surveys the disaster area that once offered cough medicine, denture creams, and cotton balls to farm wives and sniffling locals.
The aisles have been completely ransacked—the shelves scoured clean, only a few empty cartons and puddles of unidentified fluids lying here and there. She weaves through the detritus and heads toward the pharmacy counter in the shadowy rear aisles.
A noise gets her attention to her immediate right—a hiss of air, a bottle overturning—and her gun immediately goes up. She sees a blur of yellow fur. She lets up on the hammer when she realizes it’s a feral cat—the ragged creature darting between fallen displays of mouthwash and teeth whitener with a mouse in its jaws.