Austin lets out a thin, mortified breath. “One of them was having her period, I assume.”
“You got it,” Lilly says, lifting her collar and pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Turns out the walkers can smell menstrual blood like sharks … it’s like a fucking homing beacon.”
“Jesus.”
“Lucky for me, I’ve always been as regular as clockwork.” She shakes her head with a shiver. “The twenty-eighth day rolls around after my last period and I make sure I’m indoors or at least somewhere safe. Since the Turn started, I’ve tried to keep meticulous track of it. That’s one reason I knew. I was late and I just knew. I was getting sore and swollen … and I was late.”
Austin nods. “Lilly, I just want you to—”
“I don’t know … I don’t know,” she murmurs as though not even hearing him. “It would be a big deal any other time but now in this crazy shit we’re in…”
Austin lets her trail off, and then he says very softly, very gently, “Lilly, I just want you to know something.” He looks at her through moistening eyes. “I want to have this baby with you.”
She looks at him. A long beat of silence hangs in the chill air. She looks down. The pause is killing Austin. He wants to say so much more, he wants to prove to her that he’s sincere, wants her to trust him, but the words escape him. He’s not good with words.
At last she looks up at him, her eyes filling up. “Me too.” She utters this in barely a whisper. Then she laughs. It’s a cleansing laugh, a little giddy and hysterical, but cleansing nonetheless. “God help me … I do too … I want to have it.”
They wrap their arms around each other in a bear hug, embracing like that for a long moment on that cold, windy precipice outside Austin’s back window. Their tears come freely.
After a while, Austin reaches up to her face, brushes her hair from her eyes, wipes the tears off her cheeks, and smiles. “We’ll make it work,” he murmurs to her. “We have to. It’s a big fuck-you to the end of the world.”
She nods, caressing his cheek. “You’re right, pretty boy. When you’re right, you’re right.”
“Besides,” he says then, “the Governor’s got this place under control now. He’s made this place safe for us … a home for our baby.” He tenderly kisses her forehead, feeling a certainty he’s never felt before in his life. “You were right all along about him,” Austin says softly, holding her. “The man knows what he’s doing.”
FOURTEEN
Footsteps echo down the lower corridor under the sublevels. They close in hard and fast, coming down the stairs two at a time, moving at an angry clip, getting Gabe’s and Bruce’s attention in the darkness. The two men stand outside the last stall, in the shadows thrown by bare bulbs, trying to catch their collective breaths from the struggle to put the black gal back on ice.
For such a skinny little thing, she puts up quite a fight. Welts are rising on Gabe’s ham-hock arms where the lady scratched him, and Bruce nurses a sore spot just below his right eye where the bitch caught him with an elbow. But none of it compares with the whirlwind presently coming down the narrow corridor toward them.
The figure throws a long shadow as it approaches, back-lit by the cage lights, pausing with fists balled up tight. “Well?” the thin man says, standing thirty feet away, voice echoing, his narrow face veiled in shadow. “She in there?” His voice sounds wrong—twisted and strangled with emotion. “Did you get her back in there? Is she tied up? WELL?!”
Gabe swallows hard. “We got her back in there, man—but it wasn’t easy.”
Bruce still breathes hard from the exertion, holding the delicate sword in his huge hand like a child holding a broken toy. “Bitch is crazy,” he murmurs.
The Governor pauses in front of them, all blazing eyes and stiff-armed bluster. “Whatever—just—I just—GIVE ME THAT FUCKING THING!”
He snatches the sword away from Bruce, who instinctively jerks with a start. “Sir?” he says in a low and uncertain voice.
The Governor huffs and grits his teeth, pacing, with the sword clenched white-knuckle tight in his hand. “Where does that bitch get off?! I told her—told her I’d go easy on her—just needed her to do me a fucking favor—just this one fucking favor! ONE FAVOR!” His booming voice practically pins the two other men to the wall. “She agreed to help me! SHE AGREED!!” Temples pulsing, jaw clenching, neck cords prominent, lips curling away from his teeth, Philip Blake looks like a caged animal. “Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!” He turns to the two men. He snarls with spittle flying. “We. Had. An agreement!”
Gabe speaks up. “Boss, maybe if we—”
“Shut up! SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
The corridor echoes. The silence that follows could freeze a lake over.
The Governor gets his breath back. He settles down, inhaling and exhaling, holding the sword up in a strange display that looks, at first, just for a moment, as if he’s about to attack his men. Then he murmurs to them, “Talk me out of walking in there right now and slicing her open from cunt to collar with this thing.”
The two other men have no reply for him. They are out of ideas.
The silence is glacial.
*
At that moment, another pair of footsteps—heavy, urgent, and furtive—move through the warren of underground service bays and leprous corridors beneath the racetrack. In the musty stillness of the infirmary, these footsteps—which are approaching from the south end of the arena—are still far enough away to go unheard.