The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,69

got here, Bob, is a learning opportunity.”

Across the room, on the floor, Stinson has pissed himself, mortified and yet unharmed. He buries his face in his hands and weeps softly.

The Governor limps toward the big man, leaving a thin trail of blood droplets. “You see, Bob … the very thing that burns inside these boys—makes ’em try stupid shit like this—is gonna make them superstars in the arena.”

Stinson looks up with snot on his face now as the Governor looms over him.

“They don’t realize it, Bob.” The Governor aims the muzzle at Stinson’s face. “But they just passed the first test of gladiatorial school.” The Governor gives Stinson a hard look. “Open your mouth.”

Stinson hiccups with sobs and terror, squeezing out a breathless, “C’mon, pleeease…”

“Open your mouth.”

Stinson manages to open his mouth. Across the room, in the doorway, Bob Stookey looks away.

“See, Bob,” the Governor says, slowly penetrating the big man’s mouth with the barrel. The room falls stone silent as the other men watch, horrified and rapt. “Obedience … courage … stupidity. Isn’t that the Boy Scout motto?”

Without warning the Governor lets up on the trigger, pulls the muzzle free of the weeping man’s mouth, whirls around, and limps toward the exit. “What did Ed Sullivan used to say…? Gonna be a really big sssshooooow!”

The tension goes out of the room like a bladder deflating, replaced by a ringing silence.

“Bob, do me a favor … will ya?” the Governor mutters as he passes the bullet-riddled body of Master Gunnery Sergeant Trey Barker on his way out. “Clean this place up … but don’t take this cocksucker’s remains over to the crematorium. Bring him over to the infirmary.” He winks at Bob. “I’ll take care of him from there.”

* * *

The next day, early in the morning, before dawn, Megan Lafferty lies nude and cold and supine on a broken-down cot in the darkness of a squalid studio apartment—the private quarters of some guard whose name she can’t remember. Denny? Daniel? Megan was too stoned last night to file the name away. Now the skinny young man with the cobra tattoo between his shoulder blades thrusts himself into her with rhythmic abandon, making the cot groan and squeak.

Megan places her thoughts elsewhere, staring at the ceiling, focusing on the dead flies collected in the bowl of an overhead light fixture, trying to withstand the horrible, painful, sticky friction of the man’s erection pumping in and out of her.

The room consists of the cot, a ramshackle dresser, flea-bitten curtains drawn over the open window—through which a December wind whistles sporadically—and piles and piles of crates filled with supplies. Some of these supplies have been promised to Megan in return for sex. She notices a stringer of ragged fleshy objects hanging off a hook on the door, which she first misidentifies as dried flowers.

Upon closer scrutiny, though, the flowers reveal themselves in the darkness to be human ears, most likely trophies severed off walkers.

Megan tries to block out thoughts of Lilly’s last words to her, spoken just last night around the flaming light of a burning oil drum. “It’s my body, girlfriend, these are fucking desperate times,” Megan had rationalized, trying to justify her behavior. Lilly had responded with disgust. “I’d rather starve than do tricks for food.” And then Lilly had officially ended their friendship right then, once and for all. “I don’t care anymore, Megan, I’m done, it’s over, I don’t want anything to do with you.”

Now the words echo in the huge, empty chasm in Megan’s soul. The hole inside her has been there for years, a gigantic vacuum of sorrow, a bottomless pit of self-loathing carved out when she was young. She has never been able to fill this well of pain, and now the Plague World has opened it up like a festering, sucking wound.

She closes her eyes and thinks about drowning in a deep, dark ocean, when she hears a noise.

Her eyes pop open. The sound is unmistakable, coming from just outside the window. Faint and yet clearly audible in the windy hush of the predawn December air, it echoes up over the rooftops: two pairs of furtive footsteps, a couple of citizens sneaking through the darkness.

By this point, Cobra Boy has grown weary of his druggy copulation and has slipped off Megan’s body. He smells of dried semen and bad breath and urine-impregnated sheets, and he starts snoring the moment the back of his head hits the pillow. Megan levers herself out of bed, careful