Rise of the Governor

NINE

Very few production cars on the road—in the U.S., at least—are capable of attaining any kind of speed in reverse. First of all, there’s the gear problem. Most cars, vans, pickups, and sport-utility vehicles that come off the line have five or six forward gears but only one for reverse. Second of all, most vehicles have front suspensions designed to go forward not backward. This prevents drivers from getting up a head of steam in reverse. Third of all, in reverse you’re usually steering by looking over your shoulder, and pushing cars to top speeds in this fashion usually terminates in spectacular spinouts.

On the other hand, the vehicle that Philip Blake is currently commandeering is a 2011 Platinum Cadillac Escalade with all-wheel drive and tricked-out torsion bars for any off-road applications that ace mechanic Calvin R. Donlevy of Greencove Lane might have endeavored to undertake in the backwaters of Central Georgia (in happier times). The vehicle weighs in at nearly four tons, and is close to seventeen feet long, with a StabiliTrak electronic stability control system (standard on all Platinum models). Best of all, it’s equipped with a rearview camera that displays on a generous seven-inch navigation screen built into the dash.

Without hesitation, his nervous system wired to his right hand, Philip slams the lever into reverse, and keeps his gaze riveted to that flickering yellow image materializing on the navigation screen. The image shows the partly cloudy sky over the horizon line of pavement behind them: the top of the overpass.

Before the oncoming regiment of zombies have a chance to get within fifty yards, the Escalade rockets backward.

The g-forces suck everybody forward—Brian and Nick each twisting around to gaze out the tinted rear window at the overpass rushing toward them—as the tail end of the Escalade shimmies slightly, the vehicle building speed. Philip pushes it hard. The engine screams. Philip doesn’t turn around. He keeps his gaze locked onto that screen, the little glowing yellow picture showing the top of the overpass growing larger and larger.

One slight miscalculation—a single foot-pound of pressure on the steering wheel in either direction—and the Escalade goes into a spin. But Philip keeps the wheel steady, and his foot on the gas, and his eyes on the screen, as the vehicle tears backward faster and faster—the engine now singing high opera, somewhere in the vicinity of C sharp. On the monitor Philip sees something change.

“Aw shit … look!”

Brian’s voice pierces the noise of the engine but Philip doesn’t have to look. In the little yellow square of video he sees a series of dark figures appearing a couple hundred feet away, directly in their path, at the top of the overpass, like the pickets of a fence. They’re moving slowly, in a haphazard formation, their arms opening to receive the vehicle now hurtling directly at them. Philip lets out an angry grunt.

He slams both work boots down on the brake pad, and the Escalade skids and smokes to a sudden stop on the sloping pavement.

At this point Philip realizes—along with everybody else—that they have one chance, and the window of that opportunity is going to close very quickly. The dead things coming at them from the front are still a hundred yards off, but the hordes behind them, shambling over the crest of the viaduct from the projects and vacant lots around Turner Field, are closing in with alarming speed, considering their ponderous, leaden movements. Philip can see in a side mirror that an adjoining street called Memorial Drive is accessible between two overturned trailers, but the army of zombies that are looming close and closer in his rearview will be reaching that cross street very soon themselves.

He makes an instantaneous decision, and bangs down on the accelerator.

The Escalade roars backward. Everybody holds on. Philip backs it straight toward the crowd of shuffling corpses. On the video monitor the image shows the columns of zombies excitedly reaching out, mouths gaping, as they grow larger and larger on the screen.

Memorial Drive comes into view on the camera, and Philip stomps on the brake.

The rear of the Escalade bowls over a row of the undead with a nauseating, muffled drumming noise, as Philip rips the shift lever back into drive, his logger boot already pushing the pedal to the floor. They all sink into the upholstery as the SUV lunges forward, Philip taking a sharp left, threading the needle between two ruined trailers.

Sparks jump in the air as the SUV swipes a side rail, and then it’s through the gap and fleeing down the relatively clear and blessedly zombie-free lanes of Memorial Drive.

Hardly a minute goes by before Brian hears the scraping noise. It’s a coarse, wet, keening sound coming from under the chassis. The others hear it, too. Nick looks over his shoulder. “What the hell is that noise?”

“Something’s caught under the wheels,” Brian says, trying to see the side of the car out his window. He can’t see anything.

Philip is silent, his hands welded to the steering wheel, his jaw set and tense.

Nick is looking out at the side mirror. “One of those things is stuck under the wheel!”

“Oh great,” Brian says, twisting in his seat. He notices a tiny fan of blood droplets across the back window. “What are we gonna—”

“Let it ride along,” Philip says flatly, not taking his eyes off the street. “It’ll be pulp in a few minutes.”

They get about six blocks, bumping across a set of railroad tracks—getting deeper into the city—before encountering much more than a few isolated wrecks and roaming dead. The grid of streets threading between the buildings is choked with debris, the remnants of explosions, burned cars filled with charred skeletons, windows blown out, and piles of trash and detritus drifted up against storefronts. Somewhere along the way, the scraping noises cease, although nobody sees what has happened to the hanger-on.

Philip decides to take a north-south street into the heart of the city, but when he turns right—swerving around a mangled delivery truck on its side in the center of the intersection—he hits the brakes. The Escalade jerks to a stop.

They sit there for a moment, the engine idling. Philip doesn’t move, his hands still white-knuckling the wheel, his eyes squinting as he gazes into the distant shadows of tall buildings straight ahead.

At first, Brian can’t see what the problem is. He cranes his neck to glimpse the litter-strewn city street stretching many blocks before them. Through the tinted glass, he sees high-rises on either side of the four-lane avenue. Trash swirls in the September wind.

Nick is also puzzled by the sudden stop. “What’s wrong, Philip?”

Philip doesn’t respond. He keeps staring straight ahead with that uneasy stillness, his teeth clenching, his jaws working.

“Philip?”

No response.

Nick turns back to the windshield and stares out at the street. His expression tightens. He sees now what Philip sees. He gets very still.

“Will somebody tell me what’s going on?” Brian says, leaning forward to see better. For a moment, all he can make out is the distant canyon of high-rises, and many blocks of debris-littered pavement. But he realizes soon enough that he’s seeing a still life of a desolate city beginning to rapidly change like a giant organism reacting to the intrusion of foreign bacteria. What Brian sees through that shaded window glass is so horrible that he begins moving his mouth without saying anything.

In that single instant of brain-numbing awe, Brian Blake flashes back to a ridiculous memory from his childhood, the madness of the moment gripping his mind. One time, his mom took him and Philip to the Barnum and Bailey Circus in Athens. The boys were maybe thirteen and ten respectively, and they reveled in the high-wire acts, the tigers jumping through flaming rings, the men shooting out of cannons, the acrobats, the cotton candy, the elephants, the sideshows, the sword swallower, the human dart board, the fire-eaters, the bearded ladies, and the snake charmer. But the memory that sticks with Brian the most—and what he thinks of right at this moment—is the clown car. That day in Athens, at the height of the show, a little goofy car pulled out across the center ring. It was a cartoonish sedan with painted windows, about the size of a station wagon, built low to the ground and painted in a patchwork of Day-Glo colors. Brian remembers it so vividly—how he laughed his head off at the clowns piling out of the car, one after another, and how at first it was just funny, and then it became kind of amazing, and finally it was just downright bizarre, because the clowns kept coming: six, eight, ten, twenty—big ones, little ones—they kept climbing out of that car as though it was a magic container of freeze-dried clowns. Even as a thirteen-year-old, Brian was transfixed by the gag, knowing full well there had to be a trick to it, maybe a trapdoor embedded in the sawdust beneath the car, but it didn’t matter because the very sight of it was mesmerizing.

That exact phenomenon—or at least a perverted facsimile of it—is now unfolding right before Brian’s eyes along an urban thoroughfare in the lower bowels of midtown Atlanta. He gapes silently at it for a moment, trying to put the gruesome spectacle into words.

“Turn around, Philip.” Brian’s voice sounds hollow and reedy in his own ears as he stares at the countless throngs of undead awakening in every corner of the city before them. If the horde they encountered only moments ago on their way into town was a regiment of a Roman army, this—this—is the whole empire.

As far as the eye can see, down the narrow channel of the four-lane street, the undead emerge from buildings, from behind cars, from within wreckage, from the shadows of alleys, from busted-out display windows, from the marble porticos of government buildings, from the spindly planters of decorative trees, and from the tattered remains of sidewalk cafés. They are even visible in the far distance, where the vanishing point of the street blurs into the shadows of skyscrapers, their ragged silhouettes appearing like a myriad of slow-moving bugs roused from the darkness of an overturned rock. Their number defies logic.

“We gotta get outta here,” Nick says in a rusty squeak of a voice.

Philip, still stoic and silent, works his clenched fingers on the steering wheel.

Nick nervously shoots a glance over his shoulder. “We gotta go back.”

“He’s right, Philip,” Brian says, putting a hand gently on Penny’s shoulder.

“What’s the matter, what are you doing?” Nick looks at Philip. “Why aren’t you turning around?”

Brian looks at the back of his brother’s head. “There’s too many of them, Philip. There’s too many of them. There’s too many.”

“Oh my God, we’re fucked … we’re fucked,” Nick says, transfixed by the ghastly miracle building across their path. The closest ones are maybe half a block away, like the leading edge of a tsunami—they look like office dwellers of both genders, still clad in corporate attire that appears shredded and chewed up and dipped in axle grease—and they stagger this way like snarling sleepwalkers.

Behind them, for blocks and blocks, countless others stumble along the sidewalks and down the center of the street. If there is a “rush hour” in hell, it most certainly can’t hold a candle to this. Through the Escalade’s air vents and windows, the tuneless symphony of a hundred thousand moans raises the hackles on the back of Brian’s neck, and he reaches over and taps his brother on the shoulder. “The city’s gone, Philip.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s right, the place is toast, we gotta turn around,” Nick babbles.

“One second.” Philip’s voice is ice cold. “Hold on.”

“Philip, come on,” Brian says. “This place belongs to them now.”

“I said hold on.”

Brian stares at the back of his brother’s head and a cold sensation trickles down Brian’s spine. He realizes that what Philip means by the phrase hold on is not “hold on a second while I think this over” or “hold on for a minute while I figure this thing out.”

What Philip Blake means by hold on is—

“Y’all got your seat belts on?” he asks rhetorically, making Brian’s skin turn cold.

“Philip, don’t—”

Philip kicks the foot feed. The Escalade erupts into motion. He steers the vehicle straight into the teeming mob, cutting off Brian’s thoughts and pressing everybody into their seats.

“PHILLY, NO!”

Nick’s warning cry dissolves into a salvo of muffled thumps, like the beating of a giant tom-tom drum, as the Escalade jumps the sidewalk and mows down at least three dozen zombies.

Tissue and fluids rain across the car.

Brian is so unnerved that he ducks down against the floor and joins Penny in that place called away.

The smaller ones go down like ducks in a shooting gallery, bursting apart under the wheels and leaving a trail of rotting innards. The larger ones bounce off the quarter panels and hurtle through the air, smacking the sides of buildings and coming apart like overripe fruit.

The dead seem to have no capacity to learn. Even a moth will flitter away once it flies too close to a flame. But this vast society of walking corpses in Atlanta apparently have no clue as to why they can’t eat the shiny black thing roaring at them—the same thundering piece of metal that just an instant ago turned their fellow zombies into blood pudding—so they just keep coming.

Hunched over the wheel, teeth gnashing, knuckles white, Philip uses the wipers, with periodic sprays of cleaning solution, to keep the windshield clean enough to see through as he chews his way north, plowing the 8,300 pounds of Detroit iron through the moving sea of zombies. Varying his speed between thirty and fifty miles an hour, he carves a path toward the center of town.

At times, he is literally cutting a swath through a crowd so dense that it’s like blazing a trail through a thick forest of blood fruit, the flailing arms and curled fingers like tree limbs, clawing at the side windows as the Escalade digs through the walking excrement. At other times, the SUV crosses short sections of clear street, with only a few zombies trundling along on a sidewalk or at the edges of the pavement, and this gives Philip a chance to get his speed up, and to swerve to the right to a pick a few off, and then to the left for a few more, and then he’ll hit another wall-to-wall mob, and that’s probably the most fun, because that’s when the shit really flies.

It’s almost as though the viscera is raining down from above, from the sky, rather than from under the wheels or along the frame or over the top of the big front grill as the Escalade shears through the bodies. The wet matter streaks across the glass, again and again, with the rhythm of a giant pinwheel, a kaleidoscope of color, the palette like a rainbow of human tissue—oxblood red, pond-scum green, burnt-ocher yellow, and pine-tar black—and it’s almost kind of beautiful to Philip.

He roars around a corner and plunges into another mass of zombies coming down the street.

The strangest part is the continual repetitive flashes of similar tissues and organs—some of them recognizable, some of them not so recognizable. Entrails fly in all directions, splashing the windshield and sliding across the hood. Little kernels of teeth periodically gather in the wiper blades, and something else, something pink, like little pearls of fish roe, keeps collecting in the seams of the hood.

Philip glimpses dead face after dead face, each one flashing in his window—visible one moment, gone the next—and he’s in a zone now, he’s somewhere else, not in the SUV, not behind the wheel, but inside the mob, inside the city of undead, chewing through their ranks, devouring the motherfuckers. Philip is the baddest monster of them all, and he’s going to make it through this ocean of shit if he has to tear down the entire universe.

Brian realizes what is happening before he even looks. Ten excruciating minutes after they started mowing through the sea of zombies—after making it across nearly twenty-three city blocks—the Escalade goes into a spin.

The centripetal force tugs Brian against the floor, and he pops his head up—peering over the seat—as the SUV slides sideways on the grease of fifty thousand corpses. He has no time to yell or do anything about what is happening. He can only brace himself and Penny against the seat backs for the inevitable impact.

Wheels slick with gore, the SUV does a three-sixty, the rear end windmilling through the last few stray cadavers. The city blurs outside the windows, and Philip fights the wheel, tries to straighten it, but the tires are hydroplaning on a sheet of intestines and blood and spoor.

Brian lets out a strangled yelp—part warning and part inarticulate cry—as the vehicle spins toward a row of storefronts.

In the frenzied moments before the crash, Brian glimpses a row of derelict shop windows: hatless busts of bald mannequins, empty jewelry displays, frayed wires growing out of vacant floorboards, all of it blurred behind the wire-meshed display windows. But it’s just a vague impression of these things, Brian’s vision distorted by the violent spinning of the SUV.

And that’s when the right side of the Escalade collides with the display window.

The crash has that suspension-of-time feeling for Brian, the store window turning to stardust, the noise of shattering glass like a wave slamming a breakwater as the Escalade punctures the burglar bars and plunges sideways into the dark shadows of the Goldberg Fine Jewelry Center of Atlanta.

Counters and display cases explode in all directions, a sparkling, silver sleet of debris as the gravitational forces yank all passengers to the right. The Escalade’s airbags deploy in tiny explosions—great heaving balloons of white nylon filling the interior before it has a chance to collapse—and Nick is thrown sideways into the white fabric. Philip is flung sideways into Nick, and Penny is thrown across the rear floor into Brian.

The SUV skids sideways for an eternity through the empty store.

The vehicle finally comes to rest after slamming hard into a weight-bearing pillar in the center of the store, shoving everybody hard against the padded lining of the airbags, and for a moment, nobody moves.

White, feathery debris snows down through the dark, dusty air of the jewelry store, and the sounds of something collapsing behind them creaks in the sudden silence. Brian glances through the cracked rear window and sees the front of the store, a pile of fallen girders blocking the hole in the window, a cloud of dust obscuring the street.

Philip is twisting around in his seat, his face ashen and wild with panic. “Punkin? Punkin? You okay? Talk to me, little girl! You all right?”

Brian turns to the child, who is still on the floor, looking woozy and maybe in some kind of shock, but otherwise unharmed. “She’s good, Philip, she’s good,” Brian says, feeling the back of the child’s head for any blood, any sign of injury. She seems fine.

“Everybody else okay?” Philip looks around the dust motes of the dark interior. A thin ray of daylight filtering across the store is the only illumination. In the gloom, Brian can see the other men’s faces: sweaty, stone-still with terror, eyes glinting.

Nick raises a thumb. “I’m good.”

Brian says he is, too.

Philip already has his door open, and is struggling out from behind the airbag. “Get everything you can carry,” he tells them, “but make sure you get the shotguns and all the shells. You hear me?”

Yes, they hear him, and now Brian and Nick are climbing out of the SUV. Over the course of a mere minute, Brian makes a series of observations—most of them, apparently, already calculated by Philip—beginning with the front of the store.

From the chorus of moaning noises and thousands of shuffling feet, it is clear to Brian that the zombie horde is closing in on the accident scene. The Escalade is finished, its front end nearly totaled, its tires blown, its entire length shellacked with gore.

The rear of the store leads toward a hallway. Dark, narrow, lined with drywall, the corridor may or may not lead to an exit. There’s no time to investigate. All they have time to do is grab their packs, their duffels, and their weapons. Dazed from the collision, dizzy with panic, bruised and battered, ears ringing, Brian and Nick each grab a goose gun, and Philip takes as many bladed tools as he can stow on his body, a bad-axe in each side of his belt, the Ruger and three extra magazines.

“Come on, kiddo, we gotta skeedaddle,” Brian says to Penny, but the child looks lethargic and confused. He tries to pull her from the mangled interior, but she hangs on to the back of the seat.

“Carry her,” Philip says, coming around the front of the SUV.

“Come on, sweetie, you can ride piggyback,” Brian tells the girl.

Penny reluctantly climbs out, and Brian lifts her onto his back.

The four of them quickly creep through the jewelry store’s back hall.

They get lucky. Just past the glass doorway of a back office, they find an unmarked metal door. Philip throws the bolt, and he cracks the door open a few inches, peering out. The smell is incredible—a black, greasy stench that reminds Brian of the time his sixth-grade class took a field trip to the Turner stockyards outside Ashburn. The smell on the abattoir floor was like this. Philip raises a hand, motioning for everybody to stop.

Over Philip’s shoulder, Brian can see a long, narrow, dark alley lined with overflowing garbage Dumpsters. But it’s the actual content of the receptacles that registers most sharply in Brian’s brain: pale human arms dangling over the sides, ragged, ulcerated legs, matted hair hanging down, and pools of old blackened blood dried beneath them.

Philip motions to the others. “Y’all follow me, and do exactly what I say,” he says, snapping the cocking mechanism on the Ruger—eight rounds of .22-caliber bullets ready to rock—and then he’s moving.

They follow him out.

As quietly and quickly as possible, they make their way through the stench and shadows of the deserted slaughterhouse of an alley toward a side street visible at one end. Weighed down by the duffel bag over one shoulder, and the child clinging to his back, Brian limps along in between Philip and Nick—Penny’s sixty-five pounds never feeling as heavy as they do now. Nick, who is bringing up the rear, walks with his Marlin 20-gauge cradled in his arms. Brian has his own shotgun wedged underneath his backpack—not that he has any idea how to use the damn thing.

They reach the end of the alley, and they are about to slip out and make their way down the deserted side street, when Philip accidentally steps on a human hand protruding from under a garbage Dumpster.

The hand—connected to a zombie with some fight still in it—instantly recoils under the container. Philip jerks backward with a start.

“DUDE!” Nick cries out, and the hand shoots back out and grabs Philip’s ankle.

Philip sprawls to the ground, his Ruger spinning off across the pavement.

The dead man—an ashy-skinned, bearded homeless person in bloodstained rags—crabs toward Philip with the speed of a giant spider.

Philip claws for his gun. The others fumble for their weapons, Brian going for his shotgun while trying to balance the child on his back. Nick thumbs back the hammers on his Marlin.

The dead thing clutches Philip’s leg and opens its jaws with the rigor-mortis creak of rusty hinges as Philip fumbles for his axe.

The zombie is about to take a chunk out of Philip’s lower calf when the barrel of Nick’s goose gun presses down on the back of the thing’s skull.

The blast rips through the zombie’s brain, sending half its face through the air on a geyser of blood and matter, the booming echo of the shotgun reverberating through the canyons of steel and glass.

“Now we’re screwed,” Philip says, struggling to his feet, scooping up the Ruger.

“What’s the matter?” Brian says, adjusting the weight of the little girl on his back.

“Listen,” Philip says.

In the brittle silence, they hear the ocean-wave sound of moaning suddenly change, altering its course as though on a shifting wind, the masses of undead drawn by the boom of the shotgun.

“So, we’ll go back inside,” Nick says in a strident, tense voice. “Back inside the jewelry store—there’s gotta be a second floor.”

“Too late,” Philip says, checking the Ruger, looking down into its breech. He’s got four rounds of hollow tips left in the hilt, and three mags of eight each in his back pockets. “I’m bettin’ they’re already flooding in the front of the place.”

“What do you suggest?”

Philip looks at Nick, and then at his brother. “How fast you think you can run with all that weight?”

They take off at a moderate clip, Philip in the lead, Brian hobbling along after him, Nick bringing up the rear, past caved-in storefronts and petrified, charred funeral pyres of bodies burned by enterprising survivors.

Brian can’t tell for sure but it seems like Philip is madly looking for a safe exit off the streets—a clean doorway, a fire escape ladder, something—but he’s distracted now by an increasing number of moving corpses appearing around every corner.

Philip blasts the first one at fifty paces, sending a slug through its forehead, dropping it like a bad habit. The second one surprises him at closer range, lurching out of a shadowy doorway, and Philip puts it down with his second shot. More of them are materializing from porches and gaping store windows. Nick puts the goose gun and two decades of boar hunting to good use, taking down at least a dozen of them in the space of two blocks.

The blasts echo up over the skyline like sonic booms in the stratosphere.

They turn a corner and hurry down a narrower side road of herringbone brick, perhaps a landmark antebellum street that once rang with buckboards and horses, now bordered on either side by boarded condominiums and office buildings. The good news is that they seem to be moving away from the congested area, encountering fewer and fewer walking dead with each passing block.

The bad news is that they feel trapped now. They sense the city closing in around them, swallowing them whole in its glass-and-steel gullet. By this point, the sun has begun its afternoon descent, and the shadows thrown by the massive skyline have begun to lengthen.

Philip sees something in the distance—maybe a block and a half away—and instinctively ducks under the canopy of a torn awning.

The others hunker down with him against the boarded window of a former dry cleaner, and they crouch in the shadows to catch their breaths.

Brian is panting with exertion, little Penny still clinging soporifically to his back, like some kind of sleepy, traumatized monkey. “What is it, what’s the matter?” Brian asks, realizing that Philip is craning his neck to see something in the distance.

“Tell me I’m seeing things,” Philip says.

“What is it?”

“Gray building up there on the right,” Philip says, nodding to the north. “See it? ’Bout two blocks away? See the doorway?”

In the distance, a three-story apartment building rises out of a row of dilapidated two-story condominiums. A massive postwar pile of chalk-colored brick and jutting balconies, it’s the largest building on the block, the top of it reaching out of the shadows and reflecting the cold, pale sunlight off its array of antennas and exhaust stacks.

“Oh my God, I see it,” Brian utters, still balancing Penny on his sore back as he kneels. The child clutches at his shoulders with a desperate grip.

“That ain’t no mirage, Philly,” Nick comments, a trace of awe coloring his voice.

They all stare at the human figure in the distance, too far away to identify as a man or a woman, adult or child, but there it is … waving at them.