*
On the other side of town, under the stars, as the ubiquitous droning of crickets and other rustling night sounds continue unabated, the first spadeful of earth gets dumped on top of the fire pit. The sandy, dark-brown Georgia dirt lands on the photograph of Megan with a soft thump. Austin scoops another shovelful and dumps it. And another. And another. And the dirt begins to cover the pile of precious objects with the finality of a graveside burial.
At one point, Austin pauses in his shoveling and glances over at Lilly, who stands nearby, wrapped in a blanket, watching. She holds it tightly around her neck, and she lets the tears build until they run down her cheeks and soak the edge of the blanket.
Austin hands her a shovelful of dirt, and she drops it on the pit.
Neither one of them says it aloud, but the sense passing between them is one of letting go.
They are letting go of their grief, their fear, their past. They have a future now. They have each other, and they have a tiny ember of new life growing inside Lilly like a silent promise. Lilly smiles sadly, wiping her face. Austin smiles back at her. They finish filling up the hole, and Austin puts down the spade.
Then they go back over to the tree stumps and rest their weary bodies in the dark silence.
*
“Oh, you’re awake again … good.”
The light has gone all gauzy and dreamy in the terrible living room as her voice floats like a beautiful moth hovering in the air behind him. He can’t see her anymore—only her shadow rippling across the floor beside him—but he can hear her back there near his ass. He realizes he’s been repositioned, and is now lying prone, his face pressed flat on the platform, his rear-end elevated. All his sensory organs now absorb the environment slowly, blearily—a camera whose lens has been knocked askew.
The cold hard edge of the spoon enters his rectum hard and deep.
He nudges forward with a jerk as the implement sinks as far as his sacrum. For a fleeting moment, the horrors of having the one prostate exam he ever had come flooding back to him, the doctor in Jacksonville—what was his name? Kenton? Kenner?—chatting idly about the Falcons’ draft picks the whole time. He imagines himself laughing at that private little joke but instead he gasps.
She shoves the spoon all the way down to his sacral vertebra and turns it with a vengeance—as though she’s trying to scoop out his entire coccyx and intestines—and he screams. Naturally the tape muffles his scream, and all he hears with his own ears is a series of infantile moaning noises. The fire in his abdomen blazes out of control as she starts to struggle a little bit, the spoon caught on some part of his internal anatomy.
He is about to once again sink into the quicksand of unconsciousness when she yanks the bent spoon from his anus with a wet smacking noise. “There,” she says. “Gonna be sore for a while down there.”
She rises and strolls around the front of him so that he can glimpse her in his feverish peripheral vision. She holds the bloody spoon up.
“And I thought getting it in was hard,” she comments wryly as the blinds close down, once again, ever so mercifully, on the Governor’s vision, taking him back to that blessed, empty, cold darkness.
*
The experts know how to keep a person awake and conscious during “enhanced interrogation”—CIA spooks, third world goons, KGB ghosts, drug cartels, et cetera—but this amazon with the Medusa dreadlocks has no questions in mind and has no apparent experience in the art of keeping a person conscious during this kind of slapdash, improvised torture. All she has, as far as the Governor can tell, is her innate sense of justice and a little street sass to keep her going and keep the Governor awake. The Governor realizes all this every time he snaps back awake and finds his level of comprehension corrupted and distorted even further through the surreal lens of his hellish pain.
This time, he awakes to the feeling that a piano has fallen on his head. He feels the massive impact, cracking the side of his skull, concussing him, sending particle-bombs of agony down the bridge of his noise. He hears the atonal clang of all eighty-eight keys of the piano, all at once, inside his head, and his ears sing an off-key aria, the ringing so loud he can’t even breathe.
Michonne stands over him. She slams the sole of her boot down on his head a second time.
The heel cracks his jaw, and all at once, the Governor is only half awake … not wholly conscious, and not really unconscious.
He lolls and moans and giggles behind the tape in a sort of neurological fog, the higher functions of his brain shutting down and going to the default program: his primal self. He feels as though he’s a little boy in Waynesboro, and he’s sitting on his dad’s lap at the carnival. He smells the popcorn and horseshit and cotton candy. He hears the calliope playing a comical little tune, and the star of the show—the Dark Warrior Woman from Borneo—slowly circles him, slowly circles his seat on his dad’s lap in the front row.
“I think I kicked you too hard,” she says in her funny little voice. The audience claps and laughs. “It looks like something ripped.”
He wants to laugh at her funny joke but somebody—his daddy, maybe?—holds a hand over his mouth. Which makes everything seem even funnier. The Dark Warrior Woman from Borneo kneels down really close to his face. He looks up at her. She looks down at him and grins a funny grin. What is she going to do with that spoon? Maybe she’ll do her greatest trick yet!