Lilly lets out a thin breath of relief, turns back toward the pharmacy counter … and she suddenly screams.
The old pharmacist lumbers out of the shadows next to her with reaching arms and blackened, gnarled hands curling into claws—his gigantic rotting mouth working like a wood chipper. His long, jowly face is the consistency of bread pudding, filmed in mildew the color of old rust, his milk-pod eyes as huge as hard-boiled eggs. He wears a white coat desecrated by blood and bile.
Lilly jerks backward, raising the gun and knocking over a display of dog food.
She falls on her ass, cans clattering to the floor all around her, the air knocked out of her lungs, and she starts firing. The clap of silenced gunfire sparks and flares and reverberates through the tight space, half the rounds going high, shattering fluorescent tubes. But half the slugs go into the balding head of the pharmacist.
Cranial bones shatter and fly, blood and tissue spattering the empty shelves. The giant biter falls like an old oak, landing directly on Lilly. She screams and writhes beneath the reeking dead weight of the corpse, the stench unbearable. Finally she rolls free.
For several frenzied, silent moments, she crouches there on the floor next to the fallen biter. She swallows back the repulsion, the urge to flee this hideous dark store, the voice in the back of her head telling her she’s crazy, she’s insane to be risking her life for this ridiculous little bit of personal reconnaissance.
She drives the thoughts away and manages to get her bearings back.
The pharmacy counter lies in darkness twenty feet away. Lilly cautiously negotiates the rear aisle, her eyes adjusting slowly to the gloom. She sees the counter, swamped with sticky, drying fluids, wadded documents, and mold so thick it looks like a coat of fur over everything.
She squeezes through the pass gate, and starts rifling through the meager contents of the pharmacy shelves. Nothing but useless drugs and tinctures remain unscathed by the looters—acne medicines, hemorrhoid treatments, and cryptically named medicines nobody bothered to identify—all the valuable central nervous system drugs and opiates and painkillers long gone. But she doesn’t care.
She’s not looking to get high or knock herself out or block pain.
After a seemingly endless, agonizing search, she finally finds what she’s looking for on the floor under the computer terminal, in a pile of discarded boxes and plastic pill vials. There’s only one box left, and it looks as though someone stepped on it at some point. Smashed flat, its top broken open, the container still holds its contents in a sealed, intact blister pack.
Lilly stuffs it into her pocket, rises to her feet, and gets the hell out of there.
Fifteen minutes later, she has returned to her apartment with the kit.
Five minutes after that, she waits to see if her life is about to change.
*
“He was a good man,” a muffled voice is saying on the other side of the closed infirmary door—unmistakable in its sardonic tone, its faint accent, its weary sarcasm—clearly the voice of the estimable Dr. Stevens. “Emphasis on was.”
The Governor stands outside the door to the infirmary with Gabe and Bruce. The three men pause before going in, listening to the low murmuring on the other side of the door with great interest.
“We found this town pretty early on,” the doctor’s voice continues. “The National Guard station, the narrow alleys—we decided we could defend this place. So we staked our claim.” There’s a brief beat of silence, the faint sound of water running. “Started out he was tough,” the voice goes on, “but he got the job done.”
The Governor balls his fists as he listens, the anger stiffening his spine, mixing with the sheer adrenaline of discovery.
“Philip emerged as the leader of our group very quickly,” the voice is saying. “He did what had to be done, what needed to be done to keep people safe. But after a while—”
The rage jolts up the Governor’s spinal cord, tingles in his fingers, fills his mouth with bitter, flinty bile. He leans toward the door to listen more closely.
“—it was clear to some of us that he was doing this more out of enjoyment than the need to protect us. It was clear he was little more than an evil bastard. I can’t even talk about his daughter.”
The Governor has heard enough. He reaches for the doorknob but something stops him.
On the other side of the door, a deeper, huskier voice with a thicker working-class Kentucky accent is speaking: “Why do you allow it to go on? The fights? Feeding the zombies?”
The doctor’s voice: “What do you think he’d do to anyone who opposed him? I hate the son of a bitch but I can’t do anything. Whatever else he does … he keeps these people safe. That’s enough for most people.”
The Governor swallows back the urge to break the door down with a battering ram and kill them all.
The doctor: “As long as there’s a wall between them and the biters they’re not too concerned with who’s with them on their side of the wall.”
Philip Blake kicks the door in, the lock-bolt snapping off and flying across the room, skipping across the tile floor like a spent shell casing. The door bangs against the adjacent wall, making everybody in the room jump.
“Well said, Doctor,” the Governor says as he calmly saunters into the infirmary, followed closely by his associates. “Well said.”
*
If it’s possible for an entire room to bristle with static electricity, that’s exactly what happens in that ensuing instant in which the eyes of everyone—Stevens, the stranger sitting on the bed, Alice over by the sink—snap toward the thin man strolling into the infirmary with hands on his hips like he owns the place. The coolly amused expression on the Governor’s face is belied by the sullen, baleful expressions on the faces of Bruce and Gabe, who enter like attack dogs on the heels of their master.