chewing a cigar and wrestling the steering wheel.
“Gimme your walkie!” The Governor gestures at Martinez, who is already descending the metal ladder affixed to the side of the crane. Bob watches all this from a respectable distance behind the Governor. Something about all this mysterious business makes the older man uneasy.
Outside the wall the meandering mass of zombies closes the distance to two hundred yards.
Martinez reaches the bottom of the ladder and hands over the two-way. The Governor thumbs the switch and barks into the mouthpiece. “Stevens! Can you hear me? You got your radio on?”
After a beat of crackling static the doctor’s voice replies, “Yes, I hear you and I don’t appreciate—”
“Shut up for a second. I want you to bring that tub-of-lard guardsman, Stinson, to the north wall.”
The voice crackles: “Stinson is still recovering, the man has lost a lot of blood in your little—”
“Don’t fucking argue with me, Stevens …
The Governor clicks the radio off and throws it back to Martinez.
“Open the gate!” the Governor shouts at two workmen, who stand nearby with pickaxes and anxious expressions, awaiting orders.
The two workmen look at each other.
“You heard me!” the Governor bellows. “Open the goddamn gate!”
The workmen follow orders, throwing the bolt at one end of the gate. The gate swings open, letting in a gust of cold, rancid wind.
“You ask me, we’re pushing our luck with this routine,” Martinez mutters under his breath, slamming an ammo magazine into his assault rifle.
The Governor ignores the comment and hollers, “Travis! Back it into position!”
The truck shudders and beeps and rattles backward into the opening.
“Now put the ramp down!”
Bob watches, completely vexed by the proceedings, as Eugene hops out of his cab with a grunt and marches around behind the truck. He throws open the vertical door and lowers the ramp to the pavement.
In the glare of spotlights the zombie contingent approaches to within a hundred yards.
Shuffling footsteps draw Bob’s attention back over his shoulder.
From the shadowy center of town, in the flicker of burning trash barrels, Dr. Stevens emerges with his arm around the wounded guardsman, who hobbles along with the lethargic gait of a stroke victim.
“Watch this, Bob,” the Governor says, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the older man, and then, with a wink, adds, “Beats the hell outta the Middle East.”
FOURTEEN
The screams inside the empty trailer, amplified by the corrugated metal floor and steel walls, build and build, an aria of agony, which compels Bob, standing behind the crane, to look away, as the moving cadavers shamble toward the opening, drawn to the noise and smell of fear. Bob needs a drink more than ever now. He needs a lot of drinks. He needs to soak in the booze until he’s blind.
At least ninety percent of the herd—all shapes and sizes, in varying degrees of disintegration, faces contorted with scowling bloodlust—press toward the rear of the trailer. The first one trips on the foot of the ramp, falling face-first with a wet splat on the tread. Others follow closely, pushing their way up the incline, as Stinson shrieks inside the enclosure, his sanity torn to shreds.
The portly guardsman, bound to the front wall of the trailer with packing straps and chains, pisses himself, as the first walkers shuffle in for the feeding.
Outside the trailer, Martinez and his men keep an eye on the stragglers along the barricade, most of them milling about aimlessly in the glare of tungsten spotlights, cocking their gray faces and glazed eyes up at the night sky as though the screaming noises might be coming from the heavens. Only about a dozen of the dead miss this opportunity to feed. The men on the 50-calibers take aim, awaiting orders to blow the stragglers away.
The trailer fills up with specimens—the Governor’s growing collection of lab rats—until nearly three dozen walkers have swarmed Stinson. The unseen feeding frenzy ensues, and the screaming corrupts into watery, gagging death cries, as the last zombie staggers up the ramp and vanishes inside the mobile abattoir. The noises issuing out the back of the trailer now become almost feral, Stinson reduced to a mewling, squealing head of stock in a slaughterhouse, rendered by the ragged teeth and nails of the dead.
Out in the cold darkness Bob feels his soul contracting inward like an iris closing down. He needs a drink so badly his skull throbs. He barely hears the booming voice of the Governor.
“All right, Travis! Go ahead and pull trap now! Go ahead and close it down!”
The truck driver cautiously creeps around behind the vibrating death trailer and grabs for the rope hanging down from the lip of the door. He yanks it hard and fast, and the vertical gate slams down with a rusty squeak. Travis quickly latches the lock, and then backs away from the trailer as if from a time bomb.
“Take it back to the track, Travis! I’ll meet you there in a minute!”
The Governor turns and walks over to Martinez, who stands waiting on the lower rails of the crane. “All right, you can have your fun now,” the Governor says.
Martinez thumbs the radio send button. “Okay, guys—take the rest of them out.”
Bob jumps at the sudden roar of heavy artillery, the noise and sparks from the .50-calibers lighting up the night. Tracer bullets streak hot pink in the dark, crisscrossing the beams of magnesium-bright klieg lights, engaging their targets in plumes of black, oily blood mist. Bob turns away once again, not interested in seeing the walkers taken apart. The Governor, however, feels differently.
He climbs halfway up the crane ladder so he can see the festivities.
In short order the armor-piercing tracers eviscerate the stragglers. Skulls blossom, florets of brain matter spitting up into the night air, teeth and hair and cartilage and bone chips shattering. Some of the zombies remain upright for many moments, as the rounds spin them in macabre death jigs, arms flailing in the stage light. Bellies burst. Glistening tissue ejaculates in the glare.
The salvo ceases as abruptly as it had begun, the silence slamming hard in Bob’s ears.
For a moment the Governor savors the aftermath, the dripping sounds fading on the distant echoes of gunfire dying in the trees. The last few walkers still standing sink to the earth in heaps of bloody pulp and dead flesh, some of them now unrecognizable masses of vaguely human meat. Some of these mounds exude vapors in the chill air, mostly from the friction of the bullets and not from any kind of body heat. The Governor climbs down from his perch.
As the Piggly Wiggly truck pulls away with its load of moving cadavers, Bob swallows the urge to vomit. The ghastly noises from inside the trailer have diminished somewhat, Stinson reduced to a hollowed-out trough of flesh and bone. Now only the muffled smacking sounds of zombies feeding inside the enclosure fade away as the truck rattles toward the racetrack lot.
The Governor comes over to Bob. “Looks like you could use a drink.”
Bob cannot muster a reply.
“C’mon, let’s go have a cool one,” the Governor suggests, slapping the man on the back. “I’m buying.”
* * *
By the next morning, the north lots have been cleaned up and all evidence of the massacre has been erased. People go about their business as though nothing ever happened, and the rest of that week passes uneventfully.
Over the next five days a few walkers drift into the range of the .50-calibers—drawn by the commotion of the hordes—but mostly things remain quiet. Christmas comes and goes with very little ceremony. Most of the inhabitants of Woodbury have given up on following the calendar.
A few feeble attempts at holiday cheer seem to exacerbate the grim proceedings. Martinez and his men decorate a tree in the courthouse lobby, and they put some tinsel on the gazebo in the square, but that’s about it. The Governor pipes Christmas music through the racetrack PA system, but it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. The weather stays fairly mild—no snow to speak of, with temperatures remaining in the upper forties.
On Christmas Eve, Lilly goes to the infirmary to have some of her injuries checked out by Dr. Stevens, and after the examination, the doctor invites Lilly to stick around for a little impromptu holiday party. Alice joins them,
