The Governor lands on top of her like a lover, the sword flying across the floor. The impact knocks the wind out of her. He can smell her musky scent—sweat and cloves and the copper-tang of dried blood—as she writhes beneath him, the sword only about eighteen inches away on the carpet. The gleam of the blade catches his eye.
At second number sixty-five, he makes a play for the sword, reaching for the hilt. But before he has a chance to get ahold of it, her teeth sink into the meat of his shoulder where it meets his neck, and she bites him so hard, her teeth penetrate flesh and layers of subcutaneous tissue, and finally down into muscle.
The searing pain is so sudden and enormous and sharp that he shrieks like a little girl. He rolls away from her—moving on instinct now—clutching at his neck and feeling the wetness seeping through his fingers. Michonne rears back and spits a mouthful of tissue, the blood running down the front of her in thick rivulets.
“Fuh—FUH-KING!—BITCH!” He manages to sit up, stanching the flow of blood with his hand. It doesn’t occur to him that she might have very well breached his jugular and he’s already a dead man. It doesn’t occur to him that she’s going for the sword. It doesn’t even occur to him that she’s rising up over him again.
All he can think about right then—at seventy-three seconds into the fight—is stopping all the blood from leaking out of his neck.
Seventy-five seconds.
He swallows the metallic taste in his mouth and tries to see through his watery eyes as his blood soaks the ancient carpet.
At seventy-six seconds, he hears inhaling sounds as his opponent takes a deep breath and rises up over him again and mutters something that sounds a little like, “Got a better idea.”
The first blow of the sword’s blunt-ended handle strikes his skull above the bridge of his nose. It makes a loud clapping noise in his ears—the brunt of a Louisville Slugger hitting the sweet spot of a hardball—and pins him to the floor.
Ears ringing, vision blurring, pain strangling him, he makes one last attempt to grab her ankles when the iron-hard handle comes down again.
Eighty-three seconds into the confrontation, he collapses, a dark shade coming down over his vision. The final blow to his skull comes eighty-six seconds in, but he barely feels it.
One second later, everything goes completely black and he’s floating in space.
*
In the moonlit darkness of the clearing, in the rushing silence of night, Lilly carefully unwraps the last object to be tossed into the mouth of the fire pit. The size of a peach pit, it lies nestled in a handkerchief. She looks down at it, a single tear tracking down her cheek. She remembers all that the little nodule means to her. Josh Hamilton saved her life. Josh was a good man who didn’t deserve to die the way he did, a bullet in the back of his head, fired by one of Woodbury’s thugs, the man they called the butcher.
Lilly and Josh journeyed many miles together, learned to survive together, dreamt of a better time together. A gourmet cook, an executive chef by trade, Josh Hamilton had to be the only man who traveled the roads of the apocalypse with an Italian black truffle in his pocket. He would shave flakes off the thing to flavor oils and soups and meat dishes. The nutty, earthy flavor was indescribable.
The thing in Lilly’s lap still gives off a pungent aroma, and she leans down and takes a big whiff. The odor fills her senses with memories of Josh, memories of first coming to Woodbury, memories of life and death. Tears well up in her eyes. She has a little grape juice left in her cup and she now raises it.
“Here’s to an old friend of mine,” she says. “He saved my life more than once.”
Next to her, Austin bows his head, sensing the importance of the moment, the sorrow being exorcised. He holds his cup tightly to his chest.
“Hope we meet again someday,” she says and goes over to the pit.
She tosses the little black node into the hole with the other symbolic objects.
“Amen,” Austin says softly, taking a sip. He goes over to Lilly and puts his arm around her, and for a moment, they both stand there in the darkness, staring down at the jumble of artifacts in the hole.
The ambient drone of crickets and wind accompanies their silent thoughts.
“Lilly?”
“Yeah?”
Austin looks at her. “Have I mentioned that I love you?”
She smiles and keeps looking at the ground. “Shut up and start shoveling, pretty boy.”
*
Out of the void of absolute night—the darkness at the bottom of the Marianas Trench—a nonsensical phrase floats in the opaque blackness like a ghostly sign, a message meaning nothing, a blip of coded electrical energy crackling across a wounded man’s mind-screen with neon intensity:
WAY UP AND SOLD!
The wounded man doesn’t understand. He can’t move. He can’t breathe. He’s fused to the dark. He’s an amorphous blob of carbon floating in space … and yet … and yet … he keeps sensing the presence of this message meant only for him, an urgent command that makes no sense whatsoever:
WAIT UP AND ROLL!
All at once he feels the physical laws of the universe returning very slowly, as though he’s a vessel in the deepest part of the ocean righting itself, feeling the weight of gravity through the mists of paralyzing pain, acting on him—first on his midsection, and then on his extremities—a tugging sensation from below and from each side of him, as though the moorings holding him prisoner in this black sensory deprivation tank are tightening.
He senses the existence of his own face, sticky with blood, hot with infection, a pressure on his mouth, and a stinging sensation in his eyes, which are still sightless but are beginning to absorb a glowing, nebulous light from somewhere above him.