Rise of the Governor

TEN

Philip approaches cautiously from the opposite side of the street, the .22 at his side, cocked and ready, but not exactly raised. The others follow along behind him in a single file, all of their hackles up, their eyes wide open and prepared for anything.

The young woman across the street calls to them in a low, hissing whisper: “Hurry up already!”

She appears to be in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, with long dishwater-blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She wears jeans and a loose-fitting cable-knit sweater that’s severely stained, the red smudges and spatters visible even from this distance as she waves them over with a small-caliber revolver, maybe a police .38, swinging it like it’s an air traffic control baton.

Philip wipes his mouth, thinking, catching his breath, trying to get a bead on the woman.

“C’mon!” she yells. “Before they smell us!” She’s obviously anxious for them to follow her inside, and it’s very likely she means them no harm; the way she’s swinging the gun, it would not surprise Philip if it wasn’t even loaded. She calls out: “And don’t let any of those Biters see you come inside!”

Philip is wary, guarded, and he pauses on the curb before crossing the street. “How many of you are there?” he calls out to her.

Across the street, the blond woman lets out an exasperated sigh. “For God’s sake, we’re offering you food and shelter, come on!”

“How many?”

“Jesus, do you want help or not?”

Philip tightens his grip on the Ruger. “You’re gonna answer my question first.”

Another nervous sigh. “Three! Okay? There’s three of us. You happy now? This is your last opportunity because if y’all don’t come now, I’m going to go back inside, and then you’re gonna be shit outta luck.” She speaks with the faint drawl of a native Georgian, but has some big city in her voice, too. Maybe even a little bit of the North.

Philip and Nick exchange glances. The distant choir of rusty moaning drifts closer on the wind like a coming storm. Brian nervously readjusts Penny’s weight on his back, and then shoots a jittery glance over his shoulder at the end of the block. He looks at Philip. “What other options do we have, Philip?”

“I agree, Philly,” Nick whispers under his breath, swallowing his fear.

Philip looks at the young lady across the street. “How many men, how many women?”

She hollers back at him, “You want me to fill out a questionnaire? I’m going back inside. Good luck with everything—you’re gonna need it!”

“Wait!”

Philip nods at the others, and then cautiously leads them across the street.

“You got any cigarettes?” the young woman asks, leading the group into the building’s outer vestibule, securing the door behind her with a makeshift cross-brace. “We’re down to our last bent butts.”

She’s a little beat-up, with scars on her chin, bruises on the side of her face, and one eye that’s so bloodshot it looks like a mild hemorrhage. Beyond those rough edges, though, she strikes Philip as a fine-looking woman, with cornflower-blue eyes, and the kind of sun-kissed skin you might see on a farm girl—a sort of easy, low-maintenance beauty. But from the defiant tilt of her head, and the zaftig curves hidden under her bulky clothes, she gives off the air of an earth mother, and one does not fuck with earth mothers.

“Sorry, no smokers,” Philip says, holding the door for Brian.

“Y’all look like you got banged up out there,” the woman says, leading them across a reeking, littered chamber lined on one side with eighteen pairs of mailboxes and buzzers. Brian gently puts Penny down. The little girl staggers for a moment, getting her bearings. The air smells of must and zombie. The building does not feel safe.

The young woman kneels down by Penny. “Aren’t you a sweet one.”

Penny doesn’t say anything, just looks down.

The woman looks up at Brian. “She yours?”

“She’s mine,” Philip says.

The woman brushes a strand of matted black hair from Penny’s face. “My name’s April, honey, what’s yours?”

“Penny.”

The voice that comes out of the child is so meek and nerve-racked it sounds like the mewl of a kitten. The woman named April smiles and strokes the girl’s shoulder, then rises and looks at the men. “Let’s get inside before we draw more of those things.” She goes over to one of the intercoms and thumbs the button. “Dad, let us in.”

Through a burst of static, a voice replies, “Not so fast, little girl.”

Philip grabs her arm. “You got power in there? You got electricity?”

She shakes her head. “Afraid not … intercom’s on a battery.” She pokes the button. “Dad, come on.”

Through the crackling static: “How do we know we can trust these yahoos?”

Click: “You gonna let us in or what?”

Crackle: “You tell ’em to give up their guns.”

She lets out another anguished sigh and turns to Philip, who is shaking his head, giving her a no-way-in-hell kind of look.

Click: “They got a little girl, for chrissake. I’ll vouch for ’em.”

Crackle: “And Hitler painted roses … we don’t know these folks from Adam.”

Click: “Dad, open the damn lock!”

Crackle: “You saw what happened up to Druid Hills.”

April slams her hand down on the intercom: “This ain’t Druid Hills! Now let us in, goddamnit, before we grow moss on our asses!”

A harsh, metallic buzz is followed by a loud clunk as the autolatch on the inner security door springs open. April leads them through the doorway, and then down a shopworn, sour-smelling hallway with three apartment doors on either side. At the far end of the corridor stands a metal door marked STAIRS, with criss-crossing boards nailed over it.

April knocks on the last door on the right—Apartment 1C—and within moments, a heavier, older, coarser version of April opens the door. “Oh my God, what an adorable little girl,” the big gal says, seeing Penny, who is now holding Brian’s hand. “Come on in, folks … can’t tell ya how good it is to finally see people who can keep their drool in their mouths.”

April’s sister, who introduces herself as Tara, is plump and rough around the edges. She smells of smoke and cheap shampoo, and is dressed in a faded floral-print muumuu to hide her excess flesh. Her cleavage rises like bread dough out of the top of her dress, a little Woody Woodpecker tattoo on the crest of one bosom. She has the same striking blue eyes as her younger sister, but keeps them heavily lined and decorated with steel-blue eye shadow. Her long Lee press-on nails look like they could open a tin can.

Philip enters the apartment first, the Ruger still in his hand at his side.

The others follow.

At first, Philip barely notices the cluttered living room, the chairs draped with clothing, the battered luggage along one wall, and the oddly shaped musical instrument cases leaning against the boarded sliding door. He hardly notices the small kitchenette off to the left, the peach crates of provisions and the sink full of dirty dishes. The smell of cigarette smoke and stale fabric and dried sweat hanging in the air barely registers in Philip’s nostrils.

Right now, all he can focus on is the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun pointed directly at him from a rocking chair across the room.

“That’s far enough,” says the old man with the shotgun. A lanky, weathered old duffer, he has the farmer-tanned face of a cigar-store Indian, with an iron-gray flattop haircut and ice-chip blue eyes. The slender tube of an oxygen rig is clipped under his buzzard’s beak of a nose, the tank sitting next to him like a faithful pet. He barely fits into his stovepipe jeans and flannel shirt, his white, hairy ankles showing above the tops of his shit-kickers.

Philip instinctively raises the .22, instantly going into Mexican showdown mode. He aims it at the old man and says, “Sir, we got enough trouble out there, we don’t need any in here.”

The others freeze.

April pushes her way past the men. “For God’s sake, Dad, put that thing down.”

The old man waves the girl aside with the barrel. “You hush now, little girl.”

April stands there with her hands on her hips, a disgusted look on her face.

Across the room, Tara says, “Can we all just dial it down a little bit?”

“Where’d you folks come from?” the old man asks Philip, the shotgun still raised and ready.

“Waynesboro, Georgia.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s in Burke County.”

“Hell, that’s almost South Carolina.”

“Yessir.”

“You on drugs? Speed, crack … something like that?”

“No, sir. Why the hell would you think that?”

“Something going on behind them eyes, they look all jacked up on speed.”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“How’d you end up on our doorstep?”

“Heard there was some kinda refugee center set up here, but it ain’t lookin’ too good.”

“You got that right,” says the old man.

April chimes in, “Sounds like we all got something in common.”

Philip keeps his eyes on the old man, but says to the girl, “How’s that?”

“That’s the same reason we ended up in this godforsaken place,” she says. “Looking for that damned refugee center everybody was talking about.”

Philip stares at the shotgun. “‘Best laid plans,’ I guess.”

“Damn straight,” says the old man, the faint whistle of oxygen seeping from the tank. “I don’t suppose you realize what you done to us.”

“I’m listening.”

“You got them Biters all stirred up. By sundown, there’s gonna be a goddamn convention of them things outside our door.”

Philip sniffs. “I’m sorry about that but it ain’t like we had a choice.”

The old man sighs. “Well now … I suppose that’s true.”

“Your daughter’s the one pulled us off the street … we had no bad intentions. Hell, we had no intentions at all … other than keepin’ from getting bit.”

“Yeah, well … I can see your point there.”

A long beat of silence follows. Everybody waits. The two firearms begin to lower.

“What are them cases for?” Philip finally asks, nodding toward the row of tattered instrument cases across the rear of the living room. His gun is still raised but the fight-or-flight juice has drained from him. “You got tommy guns in them things?”

The old man finally lets out a flinty laugh. He lays his gun on his lap, crosswise, letting up on the hammers, all the tension draining out of his gaunt face. The oxygen tank pings. “My friend, you’re lookin’ at what’s left of the World Famous Chalmers Family Band, stars of stage, screen, and state fairs across the South.” The old man sets the gun down on the floor with a grunt. He looks up at Philip. “I apologize for the ornery reception.” He struggles to his feet, rising to his full height until he looks like a withered Abe Lincoln. “Name’s David Chalmers, mandolin, vocals, and father of these two ragamuffins.”

Philip shoves his gun back behind his belt. “Philip Blake. This is my brother Brian. And that wallflower over there is Nick Parsons … and I thank you kindly for saving our asses out there.”

The two patriarchs shake hands, and the tension goes out of the room with the suddenness of an off switch being thrown.

It turns out there was a fourth member of the Chalmers Family Band—Mrs. Chalmers—a portly little matron from Chattanooga who sang high soprano on the group’s bluegrass and old-timey numbers. According to April, it was a blessing in disguise that the matriarch of the family succumbed to pneumonia five years earlier. If she had lived to see this horrible shit inflicting the human race, she would have been crushed, would have seen it as the end-time, and probably would have walked right off the pier at Clark’s Hill Lake.

So it was that the Chalmers Family Band became a trio, and went on with the act, playing the carny circuit across the tristate area, with Tara on bass, April on guitar, and Daddy on mandolin. As a single father, the sixty-six-year-old David had his hands full. Tara was a pothead, and April had her mother’s temper and single-mindedness.

When the plague broke out, they were in Tennessee at a bluegrass festival, and they made their way back home in the band’s camper. They got as far as the Georgia border before the camper broke down. From there, they got lucky enough to find an Amtrak train that was still running between Dalton and Atlanta. Unfortunately, the train deposited them smack-dab in the middle of the southeast side, at King Memorial Station, which was now lousy with the dead. Somehow, they managed to work their way north without getting attacked, traveling at night in stolen cars, searching for the mythical refugee center.

“And that’s how we ended up here in our little low-rent paradise,” April tells Philip in a soft voice late that night. She sits on the end of a tattered sofa, while Penny dozes restlessly next to her in a wad of blankets. Philip sits nearby.

Candles are lit on the coffee table. Nick and Brian are asleep on the floor across the room, while David and Tara are each snoring in a different musical key in their respective rooms.

“We’re too petrified to go upstairs, though,” April adds with a trace of regret in her voice. “Even though we could use whatever supplies are still up there. Batteries, canned goods, whatever. Jesus, I’d give my left tit for some toilet paper.”

“Never give that up for a little toilet paper,” Philip says with a grin, sitting barefoot in his stained T-shirt and jeans at the other end of the sofa, his belly full of rice and beans. The Chalmerses’ supplies are running low, but they still had half of the ten-pound bag of rice that they pilfered from a broken shop window a week ago, and enough beans to make dinner for everyone. April cooked. The grub wasn’t bad, either. After dinner, Tara rolled cigarettes with the last of her Red Man tobacco and a few buds of skunkweed. Philip partook in a few puffs, even though he had sworn off pot years ago—it usually made him hear things in his head that he didn’t want to hear. Now his brain feels woolly and thick in the strange afterglow.

April manages a sad smile. “Yeah, well … so close and yet so far.”

“What do you mean?” Philip looks at her, and then slowly looks up at the ceiling. “Oh … right.” He remembers hearing the noise earlier, and making note of it. They’ve quieted down now, but the shuffling, creaking noises from the higher floors have intermittently been crossing the ceiling all evening, moving with the insidious, invisible presence of termites. The fact that Philip almost forgot about these noises is a testament to how desensitized he’s becoming to the prospects of such proximity to the dead. “What about the other ground-floor apartments?” he asks her.

“We picked them clean, got every last bit of usable stuff out of them.”

“What happened in Druid Hills?” he asks after a moment of silence.

April lets out a sigh. “Folks told us there was a refugee center up there. There wasn’t.”

Philip looks at her. “And?”

April shrugs. “We got there and found a whole bunch of people hiding out behind the gates of this big scrap-metal place. People just like us. Scared, confused. We tried to talk some of them into leaving with us. Strength in numbers, all that gung-ho shit.”

“So, what happened?”

“I guess they were too scared to leave and too scared to stay.” April looks down, her face reflecting the candlelight. “Tara and Dad and I found a car that would run, and we gathered up some supplies and took off. But we heard the motorcycles coming when we were pulling away.”

“Motorcycles?”

She nods, rubs her eyes. “We got about a quarter of a mile down the road—maybe not even that far—and we round this hill and all of a sudden we hear, way in the distance behind us, these screams. And we look back across the valley, where this dusty old salvage yard is, and it’s like … I don’t know. Fucking Road Warrior or something.”

“It’s what?”

“This motorcycle gang is tearing the place apart, running people down, entire families, God knows what else. It was pretty damn ugly. And the weird thing is, it wasn’t the near-miss that got to us. It wasn’t the bullet we dodged. I think it was the guilt. We all wanted to go back and help, and be good upstanding citizens and all that, but we didn’t.” She looks at him. “Because we ain’t good upstanding citizens; there ain’t any of those left.”

Philip looks at Penny. “I can see why your daddy wasn’t crazy about the idea of taking in boarders.”

“Ever since that scrap-yard fiasco, he’s been real paranoid about running across any survivors—maybe more paranoid than he is about the Biters.”

“Biters … I heard you say that before. Who came up with that one?”

“That’s my dad’s term; it kinda stuck.”

“I like it.” Philip smiles at her again. “And I like your daddy. He takes care of business, and I don’t blame him for not trusting us. He seems like a tough old nut, and I respect that. We need more like him.”

She sighs. “He’s not as tough as he used to be, I’ll tell you that.”

“What’s he got? Lung cancer?”

“Emphysema.”

“That’s not good,” Philip says, and then he sees something that stops him cold.

April Chalmers has her hand on Penny’s shoulder and is almost absently stroking the little girl as she sleeps. It’s such a tender, unexpected gesture—so natural—that it reaches down into Philip and awakens something inside him that’s long been dormant. He can’t understand the feeling at first, and his confusion must be showing on his face because April looks up at him.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m … I’m good.” He touches the Band-Aid on his temple where he smacked himself in the collision earlier that day. The Chalmerses dug out their first-aid kit and patched everybody up before dinner. “Tell you what,” Philip says. “You go get some sleep, and in the morning, the boys and I will clear out the upstairs.”

She looks at him for a moment like she’s wondering whether or not to trust him.

The next morning, after breakfast, Philip shows April that his word is good. He enlists Nick, and he grabs extra magazines for the Ruger and a box of shells for one of the Marlins. He shoves the bad-axes down either side of his belt, and gives a small pickaxe to Nick for close encounters.

Pausing by the door, Philip crouches down to tighten the laces of his logger boots, which are so spattered with mud and gore that they look like they’re embroidered with black and purple thread.

“Y’all be careful up there,” old David Chalmers says, standing in the doorway of the kitchenette. He looks gray and washed out in the morning light, leaning on the metal caddy in which his oxygen tank is mounted. The tube under his nose softly whistles with each breath. “Y’all don’t know what you’re gonna find.”

“Always,” Philip says, tucking his denim shirt inside his jeans, checking the axes for quick and easy access. Nick stands over him, waiting with the goose gun on his shoulder. There’s a taut expression on Nick’s face, a combination of grim determination and excitement.

“Most of ’em will be on the second floor,” the old man adds.

“We’ll clear ’em on out.”

“Just watch yer backs.”

“Will do,” Philip says, rising to his feet and checking the axes.

“I’m coming.”

Philip whirls around to see Brian standing there with a clean T-shirt on—an REM logo on the front, the pride of Athens—and a dour, purposeful expression on his face. He’s cradling one of the shotguns in his arms like it’s a living thing.

“You sure?”

“Hell yeah.”

“What about Penny?”

“The gals will watch her.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on,” Brian says. “You need an extra pair of eyes up there. I’m up for it.”

Philip thinks it over. He glances across the living room and sees his daughter sitting Indian-style on the floor between the two Chalmers women. The ladies are playing crazy eights with a tattered deck of cards, making Penny periodically smile and slap down a card. It’s been a long time since the little girl has smiled. Philip turns to his brother and offers a grin. “That’s the spirit.”

They get up there via the stairs at the end of the first-floor corridor—the elevators at the other end as dead as the zombies—but first they have to tear the wooden bracings off the door. The noise of axe blows and nails squeaking out seems to stimulate movement above them, in the dark chambers behind apartment doors. At one point, Philip passes gas with all the exertion, a reminder of April’s bean dinner from the night before.

“That fart’s gonna wipe out more zombies than any twenty-gauge shell,” Nick comments.

“Hardy-har-har,” Philip says and tears off the last of the bracing planks

On their way up the dark stairwell, Philip says, “Remember, y’all—be quick. They are slippery motherfuckers but they’re slow as shit, and dumber than Nick here.”

“Hardy-har, back atcha,” Nick says, expertly injecting a pair of .20-gauge shells into his goose gun.

They reach the top landing, and find the fire door to the second floor shut tightly. They pause. Brian is shaking.

“Calm down, sport,” Philip tells his brother, noticing the barrel of the shotgun is wavering, trembling slightly. Philip gently pushes the muzzle away from the general vicinity of his ribs. “And try not to accidentally send a ball of that bird shot into one of us.”

“I got it under control,” Brian retorts in a shaky, tense voice, revealing that he obviously has nothing under control.

“Here we go,” Philip says. “And remember, go at them hard and quick.”

A single, fierce kick with the shank of his boot heel sends the door lurching open.