“—I put her in the front room, just inside the door, where you had all this junk. What are you doing? Building a cage for your little sex slave? Why do you have her here, anyway?” The woman purses her lips thoughtfully. “You know what … don’t even answer that. I don’t even want to know.”
She rises up, and stands over him for a moment and takes a deep breath. “I’m anxious to get started.”
Now the storm raging in Philip’s brain suddenly ceases as though a fuse has blown. He gazes up at the woman through tunneling vision—she has his undivided attention now—and he gapes at her as she turns and ambles across the room, moving with a kind of casual authority, as if she has all the time in the world.
For a single instant, he thinks he hears her whistling softly as she goes over to a large, grease-spotted duffel bag on the floor in the far corner of the room. She bends down and rummages through a phalanx of tools. “I’ll begin with some show-and-tell,” she mutters, pulling a pair of pliers from the duffel. She stands, turns, and displays the pliers to him as though asking for a bid at an auction. What can I get as an opening bid on these fine Craftsman titanium pliers? She glares at him. “Show-and-tell,” she reiterates. “I’m going to use everything here on you before you die. First up—these excellent pliers.”
Philip Blake swallows acid and looks down at the blood-soaked wooden platform.
Michonne puts the pliers back into the duffel, then grabs another tool and shows it to him. “Next up, a hammer.” She waves the hammer cheerfully. “Already used this puppy on you a little bit.”
She puts the hammer back and digs some more through the bag’s contents, while Philip stares at the stained platform and tries to get air into his lungs.
“LOOK AT ME, MOTHERFUCKER!” Her roaring voice yanks his attention back across the room. She holds a small cylindrical device with a copper nozzle. “Acetylene torch,” she says with a sort of righteous expression, her voice suddenly calm again. “Feels almost full, too. And that’s good. You used this for cooking.” She manages another icy smile. “I will too.”
Philip Blake’s head droops again, the white noise in his brain crackling.
The woman across the room finds another implement and pulls it out of the bag. “You’re really going to like what I do with this,” she says, holding a bent spoon up into the light so that he can get a good look at it. The concavity of the spoon gleams in the dim room.
Dizziness courses through the Governor, his wrists blazing with pain.
Michonne rifles through the duffel for another object and finally finds it.
She holds the apparatus up for him to see. “Electric power drill,” she says. “Must have just charged it recently … the battery’s full.”
She walks toward him, pulling the drill’s trigger, revving its motor. The noise recalls the whirr of a dental instrument. “I think we’ll start with this.”
It takes every last shred of strength for Philip Blake to look up into her eyes as the drill bit whirs and slowly comes toward the sinewy part of his left shoulder where the arm meets the torso—the place where all the nerves live.
EIGHTEEN
During the normal course of a small town’s ebb and flow of daily life, a muffled scream in the wee-hour dark of night would raise not only suspicion but also sheer terror among those minding their own businesses slumbering with their windows open to let in the pleasant breeze of a spring evening or dozing at their third-shift cash registers at all-night convenience stores. But right then, at exactly 1:33 A.M. Eastern standard time, in Woodbury, Georgia, as the keening emanates from the second floor of the Governor’s building, the noise dampened and muffled by layers of mortar, concrete, and glass—as well as the duct tape suppressing the screams—the course of daily life is anything but normal.
The men working the late shift on the north, west, and south walls have started abandoning their posts, flummoxed by their supervisor’s absence. Martinez hasn’t checked in for hours—a bizarre development that has most of the guards scratching their heads. Bruce and Gabe have already discovered the deserted infirmary—the doctor and Alice nowhere to be found—and now the two men are discussing whether or not to bother the Governor with the news.
The strange calm in town has also roused Bob from a restless sleep, and caused him to struggle to his feet and take a drunken walk in the night air to try to clear his mind and figure out why things seem so strangely still and quiet. In fact, Bob Stookey may be the only resident who actually hears the faint sounds of screaming at that moment. He is staggering past the front fa?ade of the Governor’s building when the high-pitched shrieking—masked by the duct tape gag, as faint and yet unmistakable as a loon calling out over the dark reaches of a still lake—echoes behind one of the boarded windows. The sound is so eerie and unexpected that Bob thinks he’s imagining it—the hooch will sometimes play tricks on him—so he continues weaving down the sidewalk, oblivious to the import of the strange noises.
But right then, inside said building, at the end of the second-floor corridor, inside the airless living room of the largest apartment, in the jaundiced light of a hanging work lamp, which now sways gently in the air currents, there is nothing imaginary about the pain being inflicted upon Philip Blake. The pain is a living, breathing thing—a predator—chewing through him with the ferocity of a wild boar rooting for bloody nuggets in the nerve bundle between his left pectoral and deltoid muscles.
The drill sings as the bit digs deeper and deeper into his nerve tissue, throwing a wake of blood and human particulate into the air.