Rise of the Governor

ELEVEN

For a millisecond, they stand there with hearts beating like trip-hammers. Other than a few scattered candy wrappers and empty, broken pop bottles, and one hell of a lot of dust, the second-floor hall—identical to the ground-floor corridor—is empty. Dim daylight shines through the far windows and laces through streaks of dust motes, which cant down across the closed doors: 2A, 2C, and 2E along one side, 2B, 2D, and 2F along the other.

Nick whispers, “They’re all locked inside their places.”

Philip nods. “Gonna be like shooting fish in a damn barrel.”

“Come on, let’s do it,” Brian says unconvincingly. “Let’s get it done.”

Philip glances at his brother, then glances at Nick. “John Rambo here.”

They go over to the first door on the right—2F—and raise the business ends of their guns. Philip snaps the slide on the Ruger.

Then he kicks the door in.

A giant ball of stink punches them in their faces. It is the first thing that registers: a hideous stew of human degradation, urine and feces—and zombie stench—vying for dominance over the sharper odors of rancid food and moldy bathrooms and mildewed clothes. It is so overwhelming and unbearable that it literally drives the men back a half step each.

“Jesus wept,” Nick says in a choked utterance, involuntarily averting his face, as if the stench is a wind blowing at him.

“Still think my fart stinks?” Philip says as he takes a careful step into the reeking shadows of the apartment. He raises the .22.

Nick and Brian follow with shotguns at the ready, eyes wide and shiny with tension.

A moment later, they find four of them in repose, on the floor of a ransacked living room, each one slumped in a corner, slack jawed and catatonic, growling languidly at the sight of intruders, but too stupid or sick or demented to move, as though they have grown weary of their hellish fate and now have forgotten how to use furniture. It’s hard to tell in the gloomy light, especially with their faces all bloated and blackened with mortified flesh, but it looks as though it’s another family: mom and dad and two grown kids. The walls have weird patches of scratch marks, like a giant abstract painting, showing evidence that the things were following some flickering instinct to claw their way out.

Philip goes over to the first one, its shark eyes glimmering as the Ruger looms. The blast sends its brains across the Jackson Pollock of scratch marks behind it. The thing sinks to the floor. Meanwhile, Nick is across the room putting another one out of its misery, the boom of the Marlin like a great dry paper sack popping. Brain matter paints the walls. Philip takes the third one down as it is slowly rising, Nick moving toward the fourth—BOOM!—and the sounds of fluids spattering surfaces are buffered by the ringing in their ears.

Brian is standing ten paces behind them, his gun poised, his spirit drowning inside him on a rising tide of repulsion and nausea. “This is—this is not—” he starts to say, but a flash of movement to his left cuts off his words.

The errant zombie comes at Brian from the depths of a side hallway, plunging out of the shadows like a monstrous clown with a black fright wig and candy eyes. Before Brian even has a chance to identify it as a daughter or girlfriend, dressed in a torn robe with one shriveled breast exposed like a flap of chewed meat, the thing pounces on him with the force of a defensive back making a tackle.

Brian sprawls backward to the floor, and it all happens so fast that Philip and Nick have no time to intercede. They are too far away.

The moving cadaver lands on top of Brian, the thing snarling with black, slimy teeth and—in that split instant before Brian realizes that he is still holding the shotgun—the zombie opens its jaws so wide it looks as though its skull is about to unhinge.

Brian gets one horrible glimpse down the recesses of the thing’s throat—an endless black well straight down into hell—before he instinctively jerks the shotgun up. Almost by accident, the muzzle lodges itself in the gaping hole of the thing’s mouth, and Brian screams out a garbled cry as he squeezes off a single blast.

The back of the thing’s skull explodes, sending up a cloud of blood mist and tissue. The backwash hits the ceiling in deep purple arterial matter, and Brian is thunderstruck for a moment, his back pinned to the floor. The thing’s head is still skewered on the shaft of the shotgun. He blinks. The silver eyes of the girlfriend or daughter, or whoever she was, are frozen now and fixed on Brian.

He coughs and turns away as the girl’s head slowly slides down the length of the barrel, a giant shish kebob, the dead eyes still locked on Brian. He feels the moist slime of her face on his hands. He closes his eyes. He can’t move. His right hand still glued to the trigger, his left still welded to the stock, he grimaces with horror.

Cold laughter brings him back around. “Look who just scored his first touchdown,” Philip Blake says, standing over his brother in a cloud of cordite smoke, grinning from ear to ear with mirthless delight.

Nick is the one who finds the egress to the roof, and Philip is the one who gets the idea to deposit all the rotting carcasses up there so they don’t stink up the place any further (or make the scavenger hunt through the upper floors any more unpleasant than it has to be).

It takes them a little over an hour to drag all the inhuman remains up the stairwell to the third floor, and then up through a narrow stairwell to the fire door. They have to shoot the lock off, and have to work in a sort of modified bucket brigade, dragging the smelly flesh sacks down the hallways and up two flights of stairs to the roof, leaving leech trails of gore on the cabbage-rose carpet runners.

They manage to get every last one of them—they terminated fourteen of them altogether, going through two entire clips of .22-caliber rounds, as well as half a box of shells—up the passageway and onto the roof.

“Look at this place,” Nick marvels as he puts the last carcass down on the tarpaper warning track along the east side of the roof, the wind whipping his pant legs and tossing his hair. The corpses lie in a row like cordwood lined up for the winter. Brian stands at the opposite end of the file, gazing down at the dead things with a strange, implacable expression on his face.

“Pretty cool,” Philip says, walking over to the edge of the roof.

At this height, he can see the distant buildings of the exclusive Buckhead area, Peachtree Plaza, and the glass cathedral of skyscrapers to the west. The frozen spires of the city rise in pristine summits, impassive, stoic in the sunlight, untouched by the apocalypse. Down below, Philip sees the scattered wandering dead moving in and out of shadows like broken toy soldiers come to life.

“Cool place to hang out,” Philip says, turning and surveying the rest of the roof. Around a giant conglomeration of antennae, rent stracks, and heating and air-conditioning machinery, now cold and powerless, an apron of pea gravel offers enough space to play a touch football game. A forgotten tangle of lawn furniture leans against an air duct. “Grab a chair and take a load off.”

They drag tattered chaise lounges over to the edge of the roof.

“I could get used to this place,” Nick says, settling down on a lounger facing the skyline.

Philip sits down next to him. “You mean the roof or this place in general?”

“All of it.”

“Copy that.”

“How do you do it?” Brian says, standing behind them, fidgeting with nerves. He refuses to sit down, refuses to relax. He’s still wired from his encounter with the impaled head.

“Do what?” Philip says.

“I don’t know, like, the killing and stuff, and then the next minute you’re—”

Brian stops himself, unable to put it into words, and Philip turns and looks at his brother. He sees the man’s hands shaking. “Sit down, Bri, you did good down there.”

Brian pulls a chair over, sits down, wrings his hands, ruminating. “I’m just saying—”

Again, he can’t articulate what he’s “just saying” and he falters.

“It ain’t killing, sport,” Philip says. “Soon as you get that straight, you’re gonna be fine.”

“What is it then?”

Philip shrugs. “Nicky, what would you call it?”

Nick is staring out at the skyline. “God’s work?”

Philip has a big laugh at that one, and then says, “I got an idea.”

He gets up and goes over to the closest corpse, one of the smaller ones.

“Check this out,” he says, and drags the thing over to the edge of the roof.

The other two join Philip at the ledge. The rancid wind tosses their hair as they gaze over the ledge at the street thirty-five feet below them.

Philip shoves the cadaver with the toe of his boot until it slips over the side.

The thing seems to fall in slow motion, its limp appendages flopping like broken wings. It strikes the cement parkway down below, in front of the building, and comes apart with the sound, color, and texture of a very ripe watermelon erupting in a starburst of pink tissue.

In the master bedroom of the first-floor apartment, David Chalmers is sitting in his wifebeater T-shirt and boxer shorts, sucking on an inhaler, trying to get enough Atrovent into his lungs to quell the wheezing, when he hears the commotion outside the boarded sliding-glass doors of the rear portion of the apartment.

The sound instantly raises the hairs on his neck, and he quickly fumbles himself into his clothes, including the breathing tube, which he gets halfway on, one side dangling under a hairy nostril.

He storms across the room on creaking knees, yanking the oxygen tank along on its castors like a stubborn child being pulled by an impatient nanny.

Crossing the living room, he catches a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of three figures standing rapt and terrified at the threshold of the kitchen. April and Tara had been making cookies with the little girl—using up the last of their flour and sugar—and now the three females stand there, gaping in the direction of the noise.

David hobbles over to the boarded, meshed, burglar-barred sliding doors.

Through a narrow gap in the plywood planks, in between the branches of skeletal trees, he can just barely see the far end of the courtyard, and beyond that a slice of the street running parallel to the front of the apartment building.

Another body rains down as if dropped by God himself, hitting the pavement, making a wet, lurid, smacking sound not unlike a giant water balloon popping. But that’s not the noise that’s getting to David Chalmers right now. That’s not the noise that’s penetrating the apartment, coming in waves, a vast, distant, tuneless symphony.

“Sweet jumpin’ Jesus,” he mutters in a breathy wheeze, whirling around so fast he nearly tips over the tank in its caddy.

He drags the thing toward the door.

On the roof, Philip and Nick pause after heaving the fifth body off the ledge.

Panting from the effort and a sort of morbid giddiness, Philip comments: “They blow up good, don’t they?”

Nick is trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. “This is ten kinds of wrong but I gotta admit it feels good.”

“You got that right.”

“What’s the point, guys?” Brian wants to know, standing behind them.

“The point is, there is no point,” Philip says without looking at his brother.

“What is that, like a Zen saying?”

“It is what it is.”

“Okay, now you lost me. I mean, I don’t see how throwing these things off the roof is accomplishing anything.”

Philip turns and gives his brother a look. “Lighten up, sport. You bagged your first trophy today. It wasn’t pretty but it got the job done. We’re just blowing off a little steam.”

Nick sees something in the distance that he hadn’t noticed until now. “Hey, check out—”

“I’m just saying,” Brian interrupts. “We gotta keep our wits about us and shit.” He has his hands in his pockets, nervously kneading the change and the penknife that he has stashed in there. “April and her family are good people, Philip, we gotta behave ourselves.”

“Yes, Mom,” Philip says with a cold smile.

“Hey, you guys, check out that building down there on the corner.”

Nick is pointing at a squat, ugly brick edifice on the northeast corner of the closest intersection. Blackened around the edges with the fumes of the city, the faded letters painted above the first-floor display windows say DILLARD’S HOME FURNISHINGS.

Philip sees it. “What about it?”

“Look at the front corner of the building, there’s a pedestrian thing.”

“A what?”

“A walkway or a breezeway or whatever you call it. See it?”

Sure enough, Philip sees a grimy glass bridge spanning the adjacent street, connecting the office building catty-corner to them to Dillard’s second floor. The glass-encased footbridge is empty and sealed at either end. “What are you thinking, Nicky?”

“I don’t know.” Nick stares at the pedestrian bridge, pondering. “Could be—”

“Gentlemen!” The husky boom of the old man’s voice interrupts.

Brian turns and sees David Chalmers trundling toward them from the open stairwell door. Urgency burns in the old man’s eyes, and he drags his oxygen tank along with a practiced limp. Brian takes a step toward him. “Mr. Chalmers, did you get all the way up here by yourself?”

The old man is breathing hard as he approaches. Through his wheezing, rattling breaths, he says, “I may be old and sick, but I ain’t helpless … and call me David. I see y’all cleaned out them floors real nice and tidy, and for that I thank you, I truly do.”

Philip and Nick turn and face the man. “Is there a problem?” Philip asks.

“Hell yeah, there’s a problem,” the old man says, eyes flashing with anger. “What you been doin’ up here, pitchin’ them bodies off the roof like that? You’re just cutting off your own feet!”

“What do you mean?”

The old man lets out a grunt. “Y’all deaf or somethin’? You can’t hear that?”

“Hear what?”

The old man shuffles out to the edge of the roof. “Take a gander.” He points a gnarled finger at two buildings in the distance. “You see what you done?”

Philip gazes off to the north, and all at once he realizes why he’s been hearing that infernal noise of a thousand and one moans for the past fifteen minutes. Legions of zombies are migrating toward their building, most likely drawn to the noise and spectacle of bodies hitting the pavement.

Maybe ten or twelve blocks away now, they move with the undulating slither of blood clots traveling down arteries. For a moment, Philip can’t tear his eyes away from the hideous migration.

They’re coming from all directions. Percolating through the shadows, oozing out of alleys, choking the main drags, they meet up and multiply at intersections like a great amoeba growing in size and strength, inexorably drawn to the catalyst of humans in their midst. Philip looks away finally and pats the old man on the shoulder. “Our bad, David … our bad.”

That night, they try to eat dinner and pretend that it’s just an ordinary meal among friends, but the persistent clawing noises outside the building keep killing the conversation. The sounds are a constant reminder of their exile, of the mortal threat just outside their door, of their isolation. They tell each other their life stories, and they try to make the best of it, but the menacing noises keep everybody on edge.

Considering there are seventeen other apartments in the building, they had expected to harvest a bounty of provisions from the upper floors that day. But all they found was a few dry goods in the pantries, some cereal and hard pasta, maybe half a dozen cans of soup, a bunch of stale crackers, and a few bottles of cheap grocery store wine.

It had been weeks now since the building lay abandoned, without power, infested with the dead, and all the food had rotted. Maggots crawled in most refrigerators, and even the bedding and the clothes and the furniture had mildewed and soured with the stink of zombies. Maybe folks took their essentials with them when they fled. Maybe they took all the bottled water and batteries and flashlights and wooden matches and weapons.

They left their medicine cabinets untouched, though, and Tara manages to collect a shoe box full of pills: tranquilizers like Xanax and Valium, stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, blood pressure meds, diet pills, beta-blockers, antidepressants, and cholesterol medications. She also finds a couple of bottles of bronchodilators that will serve the old man well. Philip gets a kick out of Tara’s flimsy pretense of being concerned for everybody’s health when he knows full well she is mostly interested in anything that will provide her with a recreational buzz. And who the hell can blame her? Pharmaceutical relief in this situation is as good an escape as any.

The truth is, by that second night, despite the constant din of the undead outside their windows, the Chalmers family has begun to grow on Philip. He likes them. He likes their Bohemian-country style, he likes their pluck, and he just plain likes being with other survivors. Nick also seems reenergized by the union of the two families, and Penny is actually talking again, her eyes clear for the first time in weeks. The presence of other females, in Philip’s estimation, is just what the doctor ordered for his daughter.

Even Brian, his chest cold almost completely gone now, seems stronger, more confident. He still has a long way to go, in Philip’s humble opinion, but he seems galvanized by the possibility of some kind of community, no matter how small and ragged.

The next day, they begin settling into a routine. From the roof Philip and Nick keep track of the zombie quotient on the streets, while Brian checks the weak spots around the first floor—the windows, the fire escapes, the courtyard, the front foyer. Penny is getting to know the Chalmers sisters, and David mostly keeps to himself. The old man is battling his lung disease as best he can. He naps and takes his inhaler and visits with the newcomers as much as possible.

In the afternoon, Nick starts working on a makeshift catwalk, which he plans to run between the roof of the apartment building and the roof of the neighboring structure. He’s got it in his head that he can make it to the pedestrian bridge at the corner without ever having to set foot on ground level. Philip thinks he’s crazy but tells him to go ahead and waste his time if he wants to.

Nick believes this maneuver is actually the key to their survival, especially since they are all secretly concerned—you can see it on the face of anyone who goes into the kitchen—that they will soon run out of supplies. The water is turned off in the building, and carrying bucketfuls of human waste from the bathroom to the back window overlooking the courtyard (for dumping) is the least of their problems. They have a limited supply of water, and that has everybody very worried.

After dinner that night, at a little after about eight o’clock, when an awkward silence in the conversation reminds everybody of the unrelenting noises coming from the dark outside, Philip gets an idea. “Why don’t y’all play something for us,” he says. “Drown those bastards out.”

“Hey,” Brian says, his eyes lighting up. “That’s a great idea.”

“We’re a little rusty,” the old man says from his rocker. He looks tired and drawn tonight, the sickness working on him. “If you want to know the truth, we haven’t strummed a note since this all started up.”

“Chicken,” Tara remarks from the couch, rolling a number with the flecks of tobacco, seeds, and stems at the bottom of her little Band-Aid canister. The others sit around the living room, ears perking up at the prospect of hearing the World Famous Chalmers Family Band.

“Come on, Daddy,” April chimes in. “We can play ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ for ’em.”

“Naw, they don’t want to hear no religious claptrap, occasion such as this.”

Tara is already maneuvering her portly self across the room toward her gigantic bass fiddle case, her makeshift cigarette dangling from her lip. “You name it, Daddy, I’ll slap a bass line to it.”

“Aw, what could it hurt?” David Chalmers relents as he levers his creaking body out of the rocker.

The Chalmers dig their instruments out of their cases, and then tune up. When they’re ready, they seem to position themselves in a tight formation before they begin, as synchronized as a marine drill team, with April in front, on guitar, and David and Tara on the flanks in back, on mandolin and bass respectively. Philip can just imagine them on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, and he can see Brian soaking it all in across the room. One thing about Brian Blake, he knows his music. Philip has always marveled at his brother’s depth of knowledge on the subject, and now, with this unexpected boon, Philip figures that Brian must be delighted.

They start playing.

Philip gets very still.

It feels as though his heart is suddenly being inflated with helium.

It’s not just the stark and unexpected beauty of their music—that first number a lovely old Irish jig, with a sad, thumping bass line and a rolling guitar pattern that sounds like a hundred-year-old hurdy-gurdy. Nor is it the fact that sweet little Penny seems suddenly transported by the melody as she sits on the floor, her eyes going all dreamy. Nor is it the fact that a simple, delicate tune in the face of all this ugliness practically breaks Philip’s heart. It’s the moment when April begins to sing that floods Philip’s soul with electric honey:

There’s a shadow on my wall, but it don’t scare me at all

I’m happy all night long in my dreams

As clean and crisp as a glass bell, with perfect pitch, April’s spectacular, velvety alto voice rings in the room. It caresses the notes, and even has a hint of the church in it, a slight soulful sauciness that reminds Philip of a choir singer in a country chapel:

In my dreams, in my dreams

I’m happy all night long in my dreams

I’m safe here in my bed, happy thoughts are in my head

And I’m happy all night long in my dreams

The voice awakens an aching desire in Philip—something he hasn’t felt since Sarah died. He has X-ray vision all of a sudden. He can see little things about April Chalmers as she strums her six-string and warbles joyously that he hadn’t noticed before. He sees a tiny anklet chain around her ankle, and a small tattoo of a rose inside the crook of her arm, and the pale half-moons of her breasts—as white as mother-of-pearl—between the bunched buttons of her blouse.

The song comes to an end and everybody applauds—Philip’s clapping the most vigorous of all.

The next day, after a meager breakfast of stale cereal and powdered milk, Philip notices April, off to herself, near the front door, putting on her hiking boots, and wrapping the sleeves of her sweatshirt with duct tape.

“Thought you might like a second cup,” Philip says to her innocently, coming up to her with a cup of coffee in each hand. “It’s instant but it ain’t half bad.” He notices her wrapping her ankles with tape. “What the hell are you doing?”

She looks at the coffee. “You use the rest of that gallon jug for that?”

“I guess so.”

“We got one more gallon to last the seven of us until the twelfth of never.”

“What do you got in that head of yours?”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it.” She zips up her sweatshirt, and tightens the rubber band on her ponytail, tucking it into the hood. “I’ve been planning this for a while, and I want to do it by myself.”

“Planning what?”

She reaches into the front coat closet and pulls out a metal baseball bat. “We found this thing in one of the apartments, knew it’d be useful one day.”

“What are you doing, April?”

“You know that fire escape ladder on the south side of the building?”

“You’re not going out there by yourself.”

“I can slip out 3F, climb down the ladder, and draw the Biters away from the building.”

“No … no.”

“Draw them away long enough to go get supplies and slip back in.”

Philip sees his own filthy logger boots by the door, where he left them the night before. “Mind handing me those boots?” he says. “If your mind’s made up, you sure as shit ain’t doing this alone.”