“What do you want?” the doctor finally manages in a taut tone.
“You said to come in today, Doc,” the Governor replies with the casual congeniality of just another patient arriving for a checkup. “You wanted to change my bandage?” He points helpfully at his wounded ear. “Remember?” The Governor then shoots a glance at the intruder, now frozen in a sitting position on the bed across the room. “Bruce, point a gun at Lefty over there.”
The big black man calmly draws a silver-plated .45 and trains it on the man named Rick.
“Sit down, Philip,” the doctor says. “I’ll make it quick.” His voice dips into a lower register, dripping with contempt. “I’m sure you have more important things to do.”
The Governor flops down on an examination gurney flooded with halogen light.
The man named Rick cannot take his eyes off the Governor, and the Governor returns his gaze—two natural predators in the wild, backs arched, sizing each other up—and the Governor smiles. “You’re looking well, stranger. Healing up nicely?” He waits for the stranger to reply but the man does not say a word.
“Well,” the Governor mutters to himself, as Stevens moves in and bends down to take a closer look at the bandaged ear, “as nice as you can.”
At last, the sandy-haired man across the room manages a retort: “So … when do you start torturing me?”
“You? Never.” The Governor’s eyes positively twinkle with derision. “I pegged you from the start, you’re not going to say shit. You’ve got family back wherever you’re from. You’re not about to sell them out.”
Stevens carefully folds back the bandage and shines a penlight on the mangled ear.
“No, I was going to torture the others in front of you,” the Governor explains. “I didn’t think you’d crack but I was pretty sure one of them would.” Now he winks. “But plans changed.”
The man on the bed glances at the muzzle of Bruce’s long-barrel Magnum, and then says, “To what?”
“You’re going into the arena,” the Governor tells him cheerfully. “I want to at least get some entertainment out of you.” He looks away with a faint grin. “I’m currently planning on raping the dogshit out of that bitch who took off my ear until she finds a way to kill herself.”
The room—almost as a whole organism—absorbs this in thunderstruck silence. The strange tableau stretches, the only sound being Stevens tearing a piece off a roll of medical tape, and the rustle of gauze.
“And the young Asian boy with the overacting tear ducts?” the Governor adds, his smile spreading practically from ear to injured ear. “I let him go.”
A moment of stunned silence. The man named Rick, taken aback, stares at him. “You let him go? Why?”
By this point, Stevens has finished examining and replacing the old bandage on the Governor’s ear.
The doctor steps back as the Governor lets out a satisfied breath, slaps his thighs jovially, and rises off the table. “Why?” He grins at the stranger. “Because he sang like a parakeet. Told me exactly what I needed to hear.”
The Governor nods at his men, and then heads for the door with a smile. “I know everything I need to know about your prison,” he murmurs on the way out. “And if he’s stupid enough to go there, he’ll lead us right to it.”
The three men slip out of the room, slamming the broken door behind them.
In their slipstream, the infirmary festers in horrible silence.
*
At first light that next day, the .50 caliber gunner on the northeast corner of the barricade starts shooting at a cluster of walkers skulking around the edge of the woods, sending fountains of brain matter and dead tissue up into the crisp morning air.
The noise wakes up the town. The bark of high-caliber clapping reaches a narrow alley behind the apartment blocks at the end of Main Street, echoing down the passageway, penetrating the inebriated slumber of a filthy, tattered figure huddling under a fire escape platform.
Bob stirs, coughs, and tries to figure out where he is and what year it is and what the fuck his name is. Rainwater still rings off the gutters and downspouts all around him. His pants are wet. Floundering in his alcohol-fueled stupor, soaked to the bone from the rain, he rubs his grizzled face and notices tears on his sunken, deeply lined cheeks.
Was he dreaming of Megan again? Was he having another nightmare where he can’t reach her as she hangs by the neck from her suicide perch? He can’t even remember. He feels like crawling into the garbage Dumpster next to him and dying but instead he struggles to his feet and staggers down the alley toward daylight.
He decides to have his breakfast—the last few fingers of cheap whiskey in the pint bottle in his jacket pocket—on the sidewalk, against the brick facade of the Governor’s building, Bob’s lucky spot, his home away from home. He collapses against the wall, digs in his pocket with greasy blackened fingers, and pulls out his “medicine.”
He takes a healthy swig, finishing up the last of the bottle, and then sinks against the wall. He can’t cry anymore. His grief and despair have burned out his tear ducts. Instead, he just lets out a phlegm-clogged sigh of noxious breath and lies back and dozes for an indeterminate amount of time before hearing the voice.
“Bob!”
He blinks and blinks, and through his rheumy eyes he sees the blurry figure of a young woman approaching from across the street. At first, he can’t even remember her name, but the look on her face as she draws near—frustration, anxiety, even a trace of anger—reaches down into some inner chamber of Bob’s soul and kindles memories.
“Howdy, Lilly,” he says, lifting the empty bottle to his lips. Good to the last drop. He wipes his mouth and tries to focus on her. “Top of the morning.”