The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor - Part One (The G(8)
“It’s okay, Penny, it’s just your daddy.” He offers her his hand as though she might hold it. “Give me your hand, honey. Remember? Remember when we used to hold hands and take long walks up to Lake Rice?”
She fumbles at his hand, tries to pull it to her mouth, her tiny piranha-like teeth clamping down.
He jerks his arm back. “Penny, no!” He tries again, attempts to gently take her hand. But she tries to take another bite out of it. “Penny, stop it!” He struggles to control his anger. “Don’t do this. It’s me … it’s your daddy … don’t you recognize me?”
She grabs at his hand, her blackened, decomposed mouth chewing at the air, noxious, fetid breath puffing out on a watery snarl.
Philip pulls away. He stands. He runs his hands through his hair, his stomach clenching with anguish. “Try to remember, sweetie.” He pleads with her with a catch in his throat, his voice wavering as though verging on a sob. “You can do it. I know you can. Try to remember who I am.”
The girl-thing strains against her chain, her mouth working involuntarily. She cocks her ruined head at him—her lifeless eyes registering nothing so much as hunger, and maybe even a trace of confusion—the confusion of a sleepwalker seeing something that doesn’t belong.
“Goddamnit, child, you know who I am!” Philip clenches his fists, towering over her. “Look at me!—I’m your father!—Can’t you see that?!—I’m your daddy, goddamnit!—Look at me!!”
The dead child growls. Philip lets out a roar of anger, raising his hand instinctively to give her a slap, when all at once the sound of knocking breaks the spell. Philip blinks at the noise, his right hand still poised to deliver a blow to the child.
Someone is knocking on the back door. He looks over his shoulder. The sound is coming from out in the kitchen, where the rear storm door opens out over a ramshackle back deck overlooking a narrow alley.
Letting out a breath, Philip flexes his hands and sniffs back the rage. He turns away from the child, and takes slow, deep breaths as he heads across the apartment. He goes to the back door and yanks it open.
Gabe stands in the shadows, holding a cardboard box spotted with oily wet-stains. “Hey, boss. Here’s that stuff that you said you—”
Philip reaches for the box, grabs it, says nothing, and goes back inside.
Gabe stands there in the darkness, vexed by the brusque reception, as the door slams in his face.
*
That night, Lilly has a horrible time falling asleep. Clad in a damp Georgia Tech T-shirt and panties, she lies on the bare mattress of her futon, trying to find a comfortable position, staring at the cracks in the plaster ceiling of her squalid garden apartment.
The tension in the back of her neck, her lower spine, and her joints grips her like electric current jolting intermittently through her. This must be what electro-convulsive treatments feel like. She had a therapist once who suggested ECT for her alleged anxiety disorder. She had declined. But she always wondered if the treatments would have helped.
Now all the shrinks are gone, the couches overturned, the office buildings decimated and scoured out, the pharmacies ransacked, the entire field of psychotherapy gone the way of health spas and waterparks. Now Lilly Caul is on her own, alone with her excoriating insomnia and circular thoughts haunted by memories of the late Josh Lee Hamilton.
Mostly Lilly is thinking about what Bob Stookey uttered to her earlier that day in his inebriated catatonia on the sidewalk. Lilly had to bend down close to hear his strangled wheeze, the words coming out with laborious urgency.
“Gotta tell her what he said,” Bob had muttered into her ear. “Before he died … he told me … Josh told me … it was Lilly … Lilly Caul … it was her … the only one he had ever loved.”
Lilly had never believed it. Ever. Not then. Not when big Josh Hamilton was alive. Not even after Josh had been murdered in cold blood by one of Woodbury’s thugs. Was there a wall around Lilly’s heart because of guilt? Was it because she had led Josh on, had used him mostly for protection?
Or was it because Lilly simply didn’t love herself enough to love someone else?
After hearing it being blurted out by a catatonic drunk on the sidewalk that day, Lilly had stiffened with horror. She had backed away from the old man as though he were radioactive, and then made a mad dash all the way back to her apartment, locking herself inside.
Now, in the eternal darkness of her lonely apartment, the restlessness and angst making her flesh crawl, she longs for the medication she routinely popped like candy during the old days. She would give her left ovary for a tab of Valium, a Xanax, maybe some Ambien … hell, she would even settle for a stiff drink. She stares at the ceiling some more and finally gets an idea.
She climbs out of bed and fishes through a peach crate of dwindling supplies. Amid the two tins of Spam, the bar of Ivory soap, and the half-used roll of toilet paper—in Woodbury, toilet paper is now acquired and distributed with the ruthlessness of gold bullion being traded on the New York Stock Exchange—she finds a nearly empty bottle of NyQuil.
She chugs the rest of it and gets back into bed. Rubbing her eyes, she takes shallow breaths and tries to clear her mind and listen to the white noise of the generators across the street, their ubiquitous, droning rumble becoming like a heartbeat in her ears.
A little less than an hour later, she sinks through the sweaty mattress and into the clutches of a vivid, terrifying nightmare.