Rise of the Governor

FIFTEEN

“All right … go easy, sis.” Philip makes no move. He just stands there, frozen in the hallway, with his free hand raised, and the coffee in his other hand, jutting out to the side like he’s interested in offering it to her. “Whatever it is, we can work it out.”

“Really…?” Tara Chalmers glowers at him with her painted eyes flaring. “Ya think?”

“Look … I don’t know what’s going on—”

“What’s going on,” she says without a trace of nerves or fear, “is that we’re changing the lineup around here.”

“Tara, whatever you’re thinking—”

“Let’s get something straight.” Her voice is steady and flatlined of emotion. “I need you to shut the fuck up and do what I say, or I will blow you the fuck away and don’t think I won’t.”

“This ain’t—”

“Put the cup down.”

Philip obliges, slowly setting the cup on the floor. “Okay, sis. Whatever you say.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now we’re gonna go get your brother, your friend, and your kid.”

Philip buzzes with adrenaline. He doesn’t think Tara has the balls to do any real harm, and he considers making a move for the weapon—a distance of six to eight feet lies between him and the barrel of the Ruger—but he resists the temptation. Better to comply at this point and try and get her talking.

“May I say somethin’?”

“MOVE!”

Her sudden cry shatters the stillness, loud enough to not only awaken Penny and Brian, but probably be heard up on the second floor where Nick—an early riser—is likely already up and about. Philip takes a step toward her. “If you’d just give me a chance to—”

The Ruger barks.

The blast goes wide—maybe on purpose, maybe not—chewing a divot in the wall eighteen inches from Philip’s left shoulder. The roar of the gun is enormous in the enclosed space of the hallway, and Philip’s ears are ringing as he realizes a particle of the plaster wall has stuck to his cheek.

He can barely see Tara through the blue smoke of cordite. She is either grinning or grimacing, it’s hard to tell at this point.

“The next one goes in your face,” she tells him. “Now, you gonna be a good boy or what?”

Nick Parsons hears the gunfire just after opening his Concordance Bible for his morning read. Sitting in bed, with his back against the headboard, he jumps at the noise, the Bible flying out of his hands. It was open to the Revelation to John, Chapter 1 Verse 9, the part where John says to the church, “I am John your brother who shares with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and patient endurance.”

Leaping out of bed, he goes to the closet where his Marlin shotgun is supposed to be resting against the wall in the corner, except it’s not there. Panic vibrates down through Nick’s spine, and he spins, and he looks around his room at all the missing gear. His knapsack—gone. His boxes of shotgun shells—gone. His tools, his pickaxe, his boots, his maps—all gone.

At least his jeans are still there, neatly folded over the back of a chair. He yanks them on and charges out of the room. Through the studio apartment. Out the door. Down the corridor. Down a flight of steps and out onto the first floor. He thinks he hears the sound of a voice raised in anger but he’s not sure. He rushes toward the Chalmers’s apartment. The door is unlocked and he pushes his way inside.

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” Nick keeps repeating as he slams to a stop in the living room. He sees something that doesn’t make any sense. He sees Tara Chalmers with the Ruger pointed at Philip, and Philip with this weird look on his face, and Brian standing a few feet away with Penny drawn close to him, his arms around the little girl in a protective posture. And weirder still: Nick sees their belongings piled on the floor in front of the sofa.

“Move over there,” Tara says, brandishing the gun, and directing Nick toward Philip, Brian, and Penny.

“What’s wrong?”

“Never mind, just do what I say.”

Nick slowly complies but his mind is swimming with confusion. What in God’s name happened here? Almost involuntarily, Nick looks at Philip, looks into the big man’s eyes for answers, but for the first time since Nick has known Philip Blake, the big guy looks almost sheepish, almost blank with indecision and frustration. Nick looks at Tara. “Where’s April? What happened?”

“Never mind.”

“What are you doing? What’s the idea putting of all our stuff in a—”

“Nicky,” Philip chimes in. “Let it go. Tara’s gonna tell us what she wants us to do. And we’re gonna do it, and everything’s gonna be okay.”

Philip says this to Nick but as he’s saying it, he’s looking at Tara.

“Listen to your pal here, Nick,” Tara says, and she too says this to Nick but doesn’t take her gaze off Philip. Her eyes practically glow with contempt and anger and vengeance and something else—something incomprehensible to Nick, something that feels disturbingly intimate.

Now it’s Brian’s turn to pipe in: “What is it you want us to do exactly?”

Tara still doesn’t take her eyes off Philip as she says, “Get out.”

At first, this simple imperative sentence sounds to Nick Parsons like a rhetorical statement. To his stunned ears, it sounds as though she’s not exactly telling them to do something as much as she’s making some kind of a point. But this initial reaction—and maybe hopeful thinking—is immediately short-circuited by the look on Tara Chalmers’s face.

“Hit the road.”

Philip keeps staring at her. “Where I come from, that’s called murder.”

“Call it whatever you want. Just take your shit and go.”

“You’re gonna send us out there without weapons.”

“I’m gonna do more than that,” she says. “I’m gonna climb up on that roof with one of them high-powered pigeon guns and I’m gonna make sure you leave.”

After a long, horrible moment of silence, Nick looks at Philip.

And finally, Philip tears his gaze away from the stout, buxom girl with the pistol. “Get your stuff,” he says to Nick, and then to Brian he says, “There’s a rain poncho in my pack, put it on Penny.”

The amount of time it takes them to get dressed and ready to leave is nominal—mere minutes, with Tara Chalmers standing guard like a stone sentry—but it gives Brian Blake plenty of time to wildly ruminate to himself about what could have happened. Tying his boots, and putting the slicker on Penny, he realizes that all indications point to some kind of sick triangle going on. April’s absence speaks volumes. As does Tara’s unmitigated, righteous anger. But what caused it? It couldn’t be something Philip said or did. What could offend the girls this deeply?

For a crazy instant, Brian’s mind casts back to his insane ex-wife. Compulsive, volatile, flaky Jocelyn had done stuff like this. She would vanish without a trace for weeks. One time, while Brian was at night school, she actually put all his shit out on the stairs of their tenement building, as though she were removing a stain from her life. But this. This is different. The Chalmers girls have shown no previous signs of being irrational or nuts.

The thing that bothers Brian the most is the way his brother is behaving. Beneath the surface of his simmering anger and frustration, Philip Blake almost seems resolved, maybe even hopeless. This is a clue. This is important. But the problem is, there’s no time to figure it out.

“Come on, let’s roll,” Philip says, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He has his denim jacket on now—the black, oily grime and gore from their earlier journey still visible all over it—and he’s heading toward the door.

“Wait!” Brian says. He turns to Tara. “At least let us take some food. For Penny’s sake.”

She just levels her gaze at him and says, “I’m letting you walk outta here alive.”

“Come on, Brian.” Philip pauses in the doorway. “It’s over.”

Brian looks at his brother. Something about that deeply lined, weathered face is galvanizing to Brian. Philip is family, he’s blood. And they’ve come a long way. They’ve survived too many jams to die now like homeless pets abandoned on the side of the road. Brian feels a strange sensation building in the base of his spine, filling him with an unexpected strength. “Fine,” he says. “If this is the way it has to be…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence—there is nothing more to say—he simply puts an arm around Penny and ushers her out behind her father.

The rain is both a blessing and a curse. It bullwhips across their faces as they emerge from the building’s front entrance, but as they crouch under spindly trees along the parkway to get their bearings, they see that the storm has apparently driven the Biters off the streets. The sewers are flooding, the roads streaming with overflow, and the gray sky hangs low.

Nick squints into the distance to the south, the streets relatively clear. “That way’s best! Most of the safe zones are down there!”

“Okay, we’ll head south,” Philip says and turns to Brian. “Can you piggyback her again? I’m countin’ on you, sport. Watch her back.”

Brian wipes moisture from his face and gives his brother a thumbs-up.

Turning to the child, Brian starts to go about the business of gently lifting her onto his back, but he abruptly stops. For the briefest instant, he just stares in amazement at the little girl. She is also giving a thumbs-up sign. Brian glances at his brother, and the two men acknowledge something beyond words.

Penny Blake just stands there, waiting, chin jutting defiantly. Her soft little eyes are blinking away the rain, and the look on her face is reminiscent of the expression her late mother would often display when impatient with male nonsense. Finally, the child says, “I’m not a baby … can we go now?”

They make their way to the corner, staying low, slipping on the slimy walk, the rain a constant drag on their progress. It gets in their faces and in their clothes and into their joints almost immediately. It’s an icy, needling autumn rain with no signs of slowing down.

Up ahead, a few shabby, cadaverous zombies cluster near an abandoned bus stop, their greasy heads of hair like moss matted across their dead faces. They look like they’re waiting for a bus that will never come.

Philip leads his group across the corner and under an awning. Nick points the way to the first safe zone—the city bus sitting in mothballs half a block south of the pedestrian bridge. A quick hand gesture from Philip, and now they hurry along the storefronts toward the bus.

“I say we go back,” Nick Parsons is grumbling as he crouches down on the floor of the bus and fishes through his backpack. The rain makes a muffled tommy-gun noise on the bus’s roof. Nick finds a T-shirt, pulls it out, and wipes the moisture from his face. “We’re talking about a single girl here—we can take the place back from her—I say we go back and kick her the hell out.”

“Think we can take it from her, huh?” Philip is up in the pilot area, searching the compartments for things left behind by the driver. “You got a bulletproof vest in that backpack of yours?”

The bus—a thirty-foot fuselage of molded seats facing inward along either side—reeks with the ghostly secretions of former passengers, a sort of wet dog-fur smell. In the rear of the bus, resting on the second-to-last seat, with Penny in the seat next to him, Brian shivers in his wet sweatshirt and jeans. He has a bad feeling, and it’s not only because of their exposure to the stormy, urban wilderness of Atlanta.

Brian’s sense of doom has more to do with the mystery of what happened back at the apartment building last night. He can’t stop wondering just exactly what transpired between the hours of 5 P.M. (when Philip and April embarked on their mission) and 5 A.M. the following morning (when everything suddenly blew up in their faces). From the gravelly tension in his brother’s voice and the cold determination on his face, it’s becoming clear to Brian that it may already be a moot point. Their immediate priority is now survival. But Brian can’t stop thinking about it. The mystery speaks to something deeper, something gnawing at Brian to which he can’t quite put words.

Lightning flashes outside the bus, as brilliant as a photographer’s strobe.

“We had a good thing going at that place,” Nick goes on, his voice whiny and unsteady. He stands up, grabbing a hand strap for purchase. “Those are our guns, man. All the work we did? That’s our stuff as much as theirs!”

“Stay down, Nick,” Philip says flatly. “I don’t want any of them pus bags seeing us in here.”

Nick ducks down.

Philip sits down in the driver’s seat, the springs squeaking. He checks a map case on the dash and finds nothing useful. The keys are in the ignition. Philip turns it over and gets nothing but a clicking noise. “I’m not going to say it again. That place is over for us.”

“Why, though? Why can’t we take it back, Philly? We can take that fat bitch. The three of us?”

“Let it go, Nick,” Philip says, and even Brian, all the way in the back of the bus, hears the icy warning tone in Philip’s voice.

“I just don’t get it,” Nick complains under his breath. “How something like this could happen—”

“Bingo!” At last, Philip has found something useful. The four-foot-long steel rod—about the width and heft of a short length of iron rebar—is attached to clips under the driver’s side window. Hooked on one end, the tool is likely used to reach across the cab to the accordion door (in order to manually pull it shut). Now, as Philip wields the thing in the gloomy light, it looks like an excellent makeshift weapon. “This’ll do,” he murmurs.

“How did this happen, Philly?” Nick persists, crouching down in the flickering stutter of lightning.

“GODDAMNIT!”

Philip suddenly slams the iron rod against the dash, sending shards of plastic flying and making everybody jump. He smacks it again, cracking the two-way radio. He strikes it again and again with all his might, caving in the controls and shattering the fare box, sending coins flying. He keeps striking the console until the dashboard is totaled.

Finally, with the veins in his neck bulging, his face livid with rage, he turns and burns his gaze into Nick Parsons. “Would you please shut the fuck up!”

Nick stares.

In the rear of the bus, sitting next to Brian, Penny Blake turns away and gazes out the window, the dirty rain tracking down in rivulets. Her expression hardens as though she’s working out a complicated mathematical problem that’s far too complex for her grade level.

Meanwhile, up front, Nick is frozen with shock. “Take it easy, Philly … I’m just … babbling. You know? Didn’t mean anything. The place just kinda grew on me.”

Philip licks his lips. The fire in his eyes dwindles. He takes a deep breath and lets out a pained exhalation. He puts the rod down on the driver’s seat. “Look … I’m sorry … I understand how you feel. But it’s better this way. Without electricity, that place is going to be a walk-in freezer by mid-November.”

Nick keeps looking down. “Yeah … I guess I see your point.”

“It’s better this way, Nicky.”

“Sure.”

At this point, Brian tells Penny he’ll be right back, and he pushes himself off his seat.

He moves up the aisle, staying low, moving just beneath the level of the sliding windows, until he joins Nick and his brother. “What’s the plan, Philip?”

“We’ll find someplace we can build fires. Can’t build fires in an apartment building.”

“Nick, how many more of these ‘safe zones’ have you got mapped out?”

“Enough to get outta this part of town, if we catch a break or two.”

“Sooner or later, we’re gonna have to find a car, though,” Brian says.

Philip grunts. “No shit.”

“You think there’s gas in this bus?”

“Deisel, probably.”

“Guess it doesn’t matter what it is. We got no way to siphon it.”

“And no way to store it,” Philip reminds him.

“And no way to move it,” Nick adds.

“That metal thing over there?” Brian points at the metal reacher on the driver’s seat. “You think that thing’s sharp enough to puncture the gas tank?”

“On the bus?” Philip glances at the steel rod. “I suppose. What good’s that gonna do?”

Brian swallows hard. He has an idea.

One by one, they each quickly slip through the accordion door and into the rain, which has now settled into a low, cold drizzle. The daylight is muddy. Philip carries the steel rod, Nick the three brown Miller Light bottles that Brian found wedged under the rear seats. Brian keeps Penny close—there are dark figures visible in all directions, the closest ones maybe a block away—and the clock is ticking.

Every few moments, the lightning turns the city magnesium bright—illuminating the dead coming from either end of the street. Some of the Biters have noticed humans scurrying around the back of the bus, and those zombies approach now with a more defined purpose in their lumbering gait.

Philip knows the location of the gas tank from his days as a truck driver.

He crouches down near the massive front tire, and he quickly feels under the chassis for the bottom edge of the tank as the rain drips off his chin. This bus has two separate reservoirs, each one containing a hundred gallons of fuel.

“Hurry, man, they’re coming!” Nick kneels behind Philip with the bottles.

Philip slams the pointed end of the steel rod into the bottom of the forward tank, but it only dents the iron enclosure. He cries out a garbled howl of white-hot anger and drives the point again into the reservoir.

This time, the point punctures the skin of the tank and a thin stream of yellow, oily liquid suddenly shoots out all over Philip’s arms and hands. Nick leans in and quickly fills the first twelve-ounce bottle.

Thunder pounds the sky, followed by another salvo of lightning. Brian glances over his shoulder and sees an entire regiment of walking corpses—closer now in the flash of heavenly daylight, only twenty-five yards away—many of their faces clearly discernible in the photostrobe radiance.

One of them is missing a jaw, another one walking along with a streamer of intestines lolling out of a gaping hole in its stomach.

“Hurry, Nick! Hurry!” Brian has pieces of a torn shirt ready to go in one hand, the lighter in the other. He fidgets restlessly next to Penny, who is trying her best to be brave, clenching her little fists, chewing her lip as she keeps tabs on the advancing army of upright cadavers.

“There’s one—go, GO!” Nick hands the first bottle of fuel to Brian.

Brian stuffs the rag into it, then quickly turns the bottle upside down until the cloth is soaked. This procedure only encompasses a few seconds, but Brian can feel the time running out, the presence of hundreds of Biters closing in. A flick of the lighter produces a flame that is instantly extinguished by the wind.

“C’mon, sport … c’mon, c’mon!” Philip is turning to the oncoming horde, raising his steel implement. Behind him, Brian cups his hands around the wick and finally gets it lit. The rag flares, the flames curling down the side of the bottle, feeding off the fumes and spill.

Brian hurls the Molotov cocktail at the leading edge of the crowd.

The bottle shatters five feet away from the closest zombies and blooms in a yellow sunburst of fire, making a crackling sound in the mist. Several corpses stagger backward at the unexpected light and heat, some of them bumping into their counterparts, knocking them over like dominoes. The sight of these monsters tumbling would ordinarily be almost funny, but not now.

Now Philip grabs the second full bottle, and stuffs the rag in. “Gimme the lighter!” Brian hands over the Bic. “Now get moving!” Philip commands, lighting the rag and hurling the flaming bottle at the army of monsters coming from the opposite direction.

This time, the bottle lands in their midst, erupting in their ranks, setting ablaze at least a dozen Biters with the ferocity of napalm.

Brian doesn’t look back as he scoops Penny off the ground and follows Nick in a desperate run for the barbershop.

Brian, Penny, and Nick get halfway to the next safe zone when they realize that Philip is lagging behind them.

“What the hell’s he doing!” Nick’s voice is shrill and frantic as he ducks into the doorway of another boarded storefront.

“Hell if I know!” Brian says, ducking into the doorway with Penny, gazing back at his brother.

A hundred yards away, Philip is yelling something obscene and inarticulate at the monsters, swinging his iron weapon at an attacker. The flaming zombie comes at him in a wreath of smoke and sparks.

“Oh my God!” Brian shields Penny’s face. “Get down—GET DOWN!”

In the distance, Philip Blake is backing away from the mob with the lighter raised in one hand and the bloody iron raised in the other, some kind of Viking brazenness taking over now, all his pent-up rage coming out in a series of big, portentous gestures.

He pauses and lights a spreading pool of fuel seeping out from underneath the bus, and then turns and flees the scene with the full-tilt abandon of a ball carrier charging toward open field.

Behind him, the puddle of fuel catches and spreads, the blue flames billowing toward the massive steel girth of the bus. Philip traverses about fifty yards of wet pavement, cracking the skulls of half a dozen Biters along the way, while the fire crawls up the side of the bus.

A low, subsonic thump rises above the rain and moaning noises. Philip can’t see Brian and the others in the mist ahead of him.

“PHILIP! IN HERE!”

Brian’s howl is a beacon, and Philip dives toward the sound of it as the explosion rocks the ground and turns a dark, gray afternoon into the surface of the sun.

None of them gets a good look at it. They are all slammed against a door inside the boarded alcove, shielding their faces from the flaming shrapnel—pieces of the bus, jagged shards of metal bulwark, and fountains of glass—flying past the doorway. Brian manages to glimpse a reflection off the glass of a store window across the street: The explosion, half a block away, has launched twenty tons of bus straight up, a mushroom cloud of dazzling, horrifying fire, the force of the blast bursting open the cabin, the molten hot shock wave punching through multitudes of dead with the violent brilliance of a supernova—countless bodies swept away on the wave, incinerated in the furnace, some of them torn to pieces by the flying debris, the mortified body parts flying up into the storm-lashed sky like a flock of birds attempting to escape.

A flaming piece of fender lands fifteen feet from the doorway.

Everybody jumps at the clanging noise, their eyes wide with shock. “Fuck! FUCK!” Nick exclaims, hands shielding his face. Brian holds Penny in a locked embrace, speechless, momentarily paralyzed.

Philip wipes his face with the back of his hand and gazes around the doorway with the stupor of a sleepwalker just coming awake. “Awright then.” He glances over his shoulder, and then back at Nick. “Where’s this barber shop?”