The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 Read Online Free

yards or so.
    â€œWhat is it?” Lilly sees the walker shuffling toward them but at first doesn’t make much of it. The sighting of an errant corpse weaving out of the trees has become commonplace around here, and Austin has his Glock, so there’s really nothing to worry about. “What’s the matter?”
    â€œIs that—?” Austin fiddles with the dial on his field glasses and takes a closer look. “It couldn’t be. Holy shit, I think it is .”
    â€œWhat?” Lilly reaches for the binoculars. “Let me have a look.”
    Austin says nothing, just hands her the binoculars and stares at the approaching figure.
    Lilly raises the binoculars to her eyes and focuses the lenses, and all at once she gets very still and lets out a soft, hissing exhalation of air: “Oh my God.”
    *   *   *
    With awkward, lurching strides, the recently deceased man approaches the alley barricade as though he’s a dog being drawn there by a subsonic whistle. Lilly and Austin hurriedly climb down the stepladder and then circle around the trailer to a spot where a narrow gap between the semi and the adjacent building is fenced off with rusty chain link and a crown of barbed wire. Lilly stares through the cyclone fence at the creature lumbering toward her.
    At this close proximity—the walker is now about ten feet away—Lilly can just make out the tall, thin physique; the patrician nose; the thinning, sandy hair. The man’s eyeglasses are missing, but the drab-white lab coat is unmistakable. Torn and gouged in tufts, soaked in blood now as black as crude oil, the coat hangs in shreds.
    â€œOh my God, no … no, no, no,” Lilly utters in absolute despair.
    The creature suddenly fixes its nickel-plated gaze on Lilly and Austin, and it lunges at them, arms reaching instinctively, fingers curling into claws, blackened lips peeling away from a mouth full of slimy-black teeth—a horrible breathy snarl vibrating out of its maw.
    Lilly jerks back with a start when the thing that was once Dr. Stevens bangs into the fence.
    â€œJesus … Jesus Christ,” Austin mutters, reaching for his Glock.
    The chain link rattles as the former physician claws and bumps ineffectually against the barrier. His previously intelligent face is now reduced to a road map of livid veins and marble-white flesh, his neck and shoulders mangled to a bloody pulp as if they had passed through a garbage disposal. His eyes, which once perpetually gleamed with irony and sarcasm, are now an opaque white, refracting the twilight like geodes. His jaws gape as he tries to bite Lilly through the fence.
    Lilly senses the muzzle of Austin’s Glock rising up in her peripheral vision. “No, wait!” She waves Austin back and stares at the walker. “God … no. Just wait. Wait. I need to—we can’t just—God damn it.”
    Austin’s voice lowers an octave, goes cold and hoarse with revulsion. “They must have—”
    â€œHe must have turned back,” Lilly interrupts. “Maybe he had second thoughts, decided to come back.”
    â€œOr maybe they killed him,” Austin ventures. “Fucking evil dicks.”
    The creature in the lab coat hasn’t taken its shoe-button eyes off Lilly as it gnashes its teeth and works its blackened lips around snapping teeth, as though trying to bite the air or perhaps to speak. It cocks its head for a moment as though recognizing something through the fence, something important in its prey, something like muscle memory. Lilly meets its gaze for a moment.
    The strange tableau—walker and human only inches away from each other, staring into each other’s eyes—doesn’t last more than a moment. But in that horrible instant, Lilly feels the weight of the whole plague, the enormity of it, the terrible emptiness of the world’s end pressing down on her. Here is a man who once