The Fall of the Governor, Part 2 by Robert Kirkman

his breath.
    â€œNo … not … oh God no … no.” He fiddles with the focus knob and presses the binoculars to his eyes. “Oh Jesus Christ … don’t tell me.”
    â€œWhat?!” Lilly swallows her fear and hisses the words at him. “David, what is it?!”
    He hands the binoculars over to her. “To the left, by the deer,” he says. “The one wandering off by himself in the corner.”
    She gazes through the binoculars and finds the lone walker in the southeast corner of the meadow, and her entire body sags with despair as she identifies the frayed and torn figure shuffling along the cattails and weeds. A twinge of first-trimester cramps clenches her midsection for a moment, and her eyes burn. In the shaky blur of the binoculars’ narrow field of vision, she sees the trademark bandanna still wrapped around the tall male’s head, the sideburns apparent along the side of the once handsome face—now a nightmare of pallid flesh, cadmium eyes, and puckered, lipless mouth. “Fuck,” she utters breathlessly.
    Gabe and Austin are both dying to grab the binoculars, so Lilly hands them over.
    Each taking their turn, they gaze one at a time through the telescopic lenses at the sun-blanched meadow below them. Each man reveals through body language—a sudden anguished slump from Austin, an exhalation of air through gritted teeth from Gabe—that they have identified the lone walker.
    Austin speaks first, gazing at Lilly. “Whaddaya think happened?”
    Lilly looks through the binoculars, muttering as she carefully scans the meadow. “There’s no way of knowing for sure, but it looks like … I don’t know … see those deep ruts coming across the field from the east?”
    â€œYeah, I saw them.”
    David chimes in. “Yes, I noticed them, too—they look like tire marks from a large vehicle—a truck, a van, a camper, something like that.”
    Lilly peers through the lens and surveys the ragged circular divot in the ground where the truck or the RV either skidded out of control or came to an abrupt halt. For some reason, she thinks the tracks have something to do with Martinez’s demise.
    She swings the binocs back over to the lone walker in the corner of the meadow. The thing that was once Caesar Ramon Martinez—a former gym teacher from Augusta, Georgia, a loner with natural leadership skills—now trundles awkwardly back and forth through the dust motes of cottonwood and pale rays of sun with no direction, no purpose, no goal other than to feed. His arms and torso—even from this distance, in the blur of the binoculars—appear completely scourged, eviscerated to shreds by many sets of rotting teeth. Cords of bloody gristle and sinew dangle from his gashed midsection. A slimy white bone fragment pokes through his tattered pant leg, giving his shuffling gate a pronounced limp.
    The sight of this man reduced to such a monstrous shell takes Lilly by surprise, the sorrow coursing down her marrow, gripping her insides. She never got to know this man very well—nobody did—he wasn’t the sociable type. But over the course of that last year, in quiet moments, Martinez did talk about his pre-plague days. Lilly remembers the details of his modest life. The man never married, never had any kids, was estranged from his parents, but he loved teaching, loved coaching his football and basketball teams at Pope John Middle School. When the plague broke out, the school was overrun. First responders moved in to protect the children, fighting off the early waves of undead, and Martinez tried to save an entire class by locking them in the gymnasium, but that proved futile. Nightmares of that day haunted the man for the rest of his life—the sounds of screaming students calling out for their mothers as the skylights shattered and monsters tumbled into the gym like ragged