Rise of the Governor

SIXTEEN

Half a block south—in the darkness of a festering, airless tile room, among scattered remnants of True Detective magazines, plastic combs, dust bunnies of human hair, and tubes of Brylcreem—they dry their faces with towels and barber smocks, and then find more ingredients for homemade Molotov cocktails.

Bottles of hair tonic get emptied, and then filled with alcohol and plugged with wads of cotton. They also find an old, scarred Louisville Slugger hidden under the cash register. The baseball bat probably once warded off unruly customers or neighborhood punks looking to boost the day’s receipts. Now Philip gives the nascent weapon to Nick and tells him to use it wisely.

They scavenge for any other supplies they might be able to use. An old vending machine in back yields a handful of candy bars, a couple of Twinkies, and an ancient sausage stick. As they stuff their knapsacks, Philip tells them not to get too comfortable. He can hear noises outside—more dead encroaching on the area, drawn to the explosion. The rain is slowing down. Noises are carrying. They have to keep moving if they’re going to get out of the city before dark. “C’mon, c’mon,” Philip says. “Let’s get our asses in gear and get to that next zone—Nicky, you take the lead.”

Reluctantly, Nick leads them out of the barbershop, into the drizzle, and down another row of storefronts. Philip brings up the rear with the iron bar ready to rock, keeping a watchful eye on Penny, who clings with simian instinct to Brian’s back.

Halfway to the next safe zone, a stray corpse lurches out from behind a wreck, shuffling menacingly toward Brian and Penny. Philip lashes out at the back of its head with the hooked end of the iron prod—hitting it just above the six cervical vertebrae—so hard that the cranium detaches and hangs down across its chest as it collapses to the wet paving stones. Penny averts her gaze.

More cadavers are materializing in the mouths of alleys and the shadows of doorways.

Nick finds the next painted symbol, near the corner of two cross streets.

The star is scrawled above the glass door of a small shop of some sort. The store’s façade is draped in iron burglar screens, and other than a few frayed wires, broken neon tubes, and wads of gaffer’s tape, the display windows are empty. The door is shut but unlocked ( just as Nick had left it three days earlier).

Yanking the door open, Nick waves everybody inside, and they enter in a hurry.

In fact, they slip inside so quickly that nobody notices the shop’s sign over the door’s lintel, the letters formed by dark, cold neon script: TOM THUMB’S TINY TOY SHOPPE.

The front of the store, barely five hundred square feet, is littered with brightly colored debris. Overturned shelves have spilled their inventory of dolls and race cars and trains across the soiled tiles. A tornado of destruction has swirled through the shop. Wires dangle where mobiles once hung, the shattered plastic remains of LEGO sets and planes piled here and there. The feathery stuffing of ripped plush toys stirs like dead leaves in the slipstream of the visitors slamming the door behind them.

For a moment, they stand in the vestibule, dripping, catching their collective breaths, gaping at the startling ruins strewn before them. Nobody moves for the longest time. Something about the wreckage mesmerizes them, and keeps them glued to the threshold.

“Everybody stay put,” Philip finally says, pulling a handkerchief and wiping moisture from his neck. He sidesteps a mangled stuffed bear, and then he cautiously moves deeper into the shop. He sees an unmarked rear exit, maybe a stockroom, maybe a way out. Brian gently puts Penny down, and checks her for any signs of injury.

Penny stares at the sad rubble of decapitated Barbies and disemboweled stuffed animals.

“When I ran across this place,” Nick is saying from across the room, looking for something, “I was thinking they might have stuff we could use, gadgets, walkie-talkies, flashlights … something.” He moves around the end of the cashier’s counter, up a few steps, and over to a perch behind the register. “Place like this, in this part of town … hell, they might even have a gun.”

“What’s back there, Nicky?” Philip shoots a thumb at a curtained doorway in the rear of the store. The black privacy drape hangs down to the floor. “You get a chance to check it out?”

“Stockroom is my guess. Be careful, Philly. It’s dark back there.”

Philip pauses by the curtain, shrugs off his backpack and fishes in it for the small penlight he keeps in the side pocket. He flips it on, and he pushes his way through the drape … vanishing into the gloom.

Across the store, Penny is transfixed by the broken dolls and eviscerated teddy bears. Brian watches her closely. He aches to help her, aches to get everybody back on track, but all he can do right now is kneel next to the child and try to keep her distracted. “You want one of those candy bars?”

“Nope.” It comes out of her like the crackle of a pull-string doll, her eyes fixed on all the busted toys.

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

“We got Twinkies,” Brian tells her, trying to fill the silence, trying to keep her talking, trying to keep her occupied. But right now, all Brian can think about is the look on Philip’s face, and the violence in his eyes, and the whole world—their world—falling apart.

“No, I’m okay,” Penny says. She sees a little Hello Kitty backpack lying in a pile of trash, and she goes over to it. She picks it up, inspects it. “You think anybody would get mad if I took some of these things?”

“What things, kiddo?” Brian looks at her. “You mean the toys?”

She nods.

A stab of sorrow and shame cleaves Brian’s midsection. “Go for it,” he says.

She starts gathering up pieces of trampled dolls and tattered stuffed animals. It looks almost like a ritual to Brian, like a rite of passage for the little girl, as she selects Barbies with missing limbs and teddy bears with torn seams. She slips the injured toys into the knapsack with the care of someone performing triage at a clinic. Brian lets out a sigh.

Right then, Philip’s voice calls out from somewhere deep in the guts of the back hallway, cutting off Brian’s thoughts—he was about to fecklessly offer Penny the sausage stick—and now Brian springs to his feet. “What did he say?”

Across the shop, behind the cash register, Nick perks up. “I don’t know—I didn’t hear.”

“Philip!” Brian starts toward the back curtain, his flesh crawling with nervous tension. “You okay?”

Hasty footsteps shuffle inside the draped doorway, and all at once, the curtain flaps open and Philip is peering out at them with a wild expression contorting his face, somewhere between excitement and mania. “Grab your shit, we just won the Irish fucking sweepstakes!”

Philip takes them down a narrow, dark corridor, past shelves of unopened toys and games, around a corner, and through a security door apparently left unlocked amid the previous occupants’ hurried exodus. Down another narrow hallway, guided by the thin beam of Philip’s penlight, and they come to a fire escape. The metal door is slightly ajar, the shadows of a passageway visible on the other side.

“Get a load of what’s on the other side of our little toy store.” Philip pushes the fire door open with his boot. “Our ticket out of this hellhole.”

The metal door swings wide, and Brian finds himself staring across another narrow hallway at the mirror image of the first fire door.

The metal door across the hall is also ajar, and through the gap Brian sees, cloaked in shadows, rows of gleaming spoked wheels. “Oh my God,” he utters. “Is that what I think it is?”

The space is huge—encompassing the entire corner of the adjacent building’s first floor—lined with reinforced window glass on three sides. Visible through the windows is the street corner outside, where shadowy forms wander aimlessly, drifting through the rain like doomed souls, but inside—in the shiny, happy world of Champion Cycle Center, Atlanta’s premier motorcycle dealership—all is warm and tidy and polished to a high sheen.

The showroom appears to be untouched by the plague. In the wan, overcast light filtering in through the massive display windows, motorcycles of all makes and models are lined up in four neat rows extending from one end of the dealership to the other. The air smells of new rubber and oiled leather and finely honed steel. The edges of the showroom are carpeted with logo-embroidered pile as lush and new as a fancy hotel lobby. Powerless neon signs hang down at junctures with product legends: Kawasaki, Ducati, Yamaha, Honda, Triumph, Harley-Davidson, and Suzuki.

“You think any of them have gas in them?” Brian turns in a slow three-sixty, taking in the whole of the showroom.

“We got our pick of the litter, sport.” Philip nods toward the rear of the room, past the sales counter and desks and shelves brimming with parts. “They got a workspace back there with a garage out back … we can siphon fuel into any one of them things easy enough.”

Penny stares emotionlessly at the banquet of chrome and rubber. She has the Hello Kitty pack strapped securely to her tiny shoulders.

Brian’s head is swimming. Contrary emotions crash up against each other like whitecaps—excitement, anxiety, hope, fear. “Only one problem,” he utters under his breath, the weight of his anguish and uncertainty pressing down on his shoulders.

Philip looks at his brother. “What the hell’s the problem now?”

Brian wipes his mouth. “I have no idea how to work one of those things.”

They all have a much-needed laugh—nervous, brittle laughter, perhaps, but laughter nonetheless—at the expense of Brian. Philip assures his brother that it doesn’t make one lick of difference that Brian has never ridden a motorcycle—a “retard” could learn it in two minutes. More importantly, both Philip and Nick have owned hogs over the years, and the last time Philip checked, there was only four of them, so the two nonoperators can ride along on the saddles.

“Faster we get outta A-T-L, the better chances we got with no guns,” Philip says minutes later, rifling through a rack of leathers in the rear corner of the store—jackets, trousers, vests, and accessories. He chooses a bomber-brown Harley jacket and a pair of heavy-duty black boots. “I want everybody changed outta their wet clothes and ready to go in five minutes—Brian, you help Penny.”

They get changed as the rain eases up outside the big windows. The street corner crawls with shambling figures now—scores of frayed, tattered souls, some of them scorched from the explosion, others in advanced stages of decomposition. Faces are starting to cave in, some of them dripping with parasites and blackening into moldy masks of putrefied flesh. None of them, however, notices the movement inside the dark showroom.

“You see them Biters gathering out there?” Nick says to Philip under his breath. Nick already has dry clothes on, and is zipping up a black leather jacket. He gives a little nod toward the gray light of the storefront. “Some of them things are pretty ripe.”

“So?”

“Some of them got—what?—three, four weeks on ’em?”

“At least.” Philip thinks about it for a moment, changing out of his wet denims. His underwear is stuck to him and he has to practically peel it off. He turns away so that Penny doesn’t see his package. “Whole thing broke out over a month ago … so what?”

“They’re rotting.”

“Huh?”

Nick lowers his voice so that he doesn’t catch Penny’s ear; the little girl is busying herself across the showroom with a size small winter coat, which Brian is trying to figure out how to snap. “Think about it, Philly. The normal course of affairs, a dead body is dust in a year or so.” He lowers his voice further. “Especially one that’s exposed to the elements.”

“What are you saying, Nick? All we gotta do is wait out the clock? Let the maggots do the work?”

Nick shrugs. “Well, yeah, I guess I just thought—”

“Listen to me.” Philip jabs a finger in Nick’s face. “Keep your theories to yourself.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“They ain’t going away, Nicky. Get that through your thick fucking skull. I don’t want my daughter hearing any of this shit. They eat the living, and they reproduce, and when they rot away, there’s gonna be more of them to take their place, and judging from the fact that old man Chalmers turned without even getting bit, the whole goddamn world’s days are numbered, so drink up, bubba, it’s later than y’all think.”

Nick looks down. “All right, man, I get it … cool down, Philly.”

At this point, Brian has Penny bundled up, and the two of them come over. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

“What time you got?” Philip asks Brian, who looks semiridiculous in a Harley leather jacket that’s a size and half too big for him.

He looks at his watch. “Almost noon.”

“Good … gives us a good six, seven hours of daylight to get the hell outta Dodge.”

“You guys pick out your bikes?” Brian asks.

Philip gives him a cold smile.

They choose two of the biggest metal masterpieces in the place—a couple of Harley-Davidson Electra Glides, one in pearl blue and the other in midnight black. They choose them for the size of the engines, the roominess of the seats, the cubic inches of storage space, and also because—hey—they’re fucking Harleys. Philip decides that Penny will ride with him, and Brian will ride with Nick. The gas tanks are empty but several bikes in the repair garage in the rear have fuel in them so they siphon as much as they can into the Harleys.

Over the course of the fifteen minutes it takes them to get the bikes ready and find helmets that fit and transfer all their belongings into the luggage carriers, the street outside the front of the place grows hectic with dead. Hundreds of Biters crowd the intersection now, wandering aimlessly in the gray drizzle, brushing against the glass, groaning their rusty groans, drooling their black bile, fixing their pewter-colored eyes on the moving shadows inside the windows of Champion Cycle Center.

“It’s busy out there,” Nick mumbles to no one in particular as he rolls the massive two-wheeler toward the side exit, where a small vertical garage door faces the parking lot along the side of the dealership. He straps on his helmet.

“Element of surprise,” Philip says, pushing his black Harley over to the door. His stomach growls with hunger and nerves as he puts on his helmet. He hasn’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours. None of them has. He shoves the iron rod from the bus into a seam between the handlebars and windscreen (for quick and easy access). “C’mon, punkin, hop on,” he says to Penny, who stands sheepishly nearby with a kiddie helmet on. “Gonna take a little spin, get outta this place.”

Brian helps the child climb up onto the rear seat, a padded perch above the black lacquer luggage compartment. There’s a safety belt in one of the side compartments, and Brian snaps it around the little girl’s waist. “Don’t worry, kiddo,” he says softly to her.

“Gonna head south and then west, y’all,” Philip says as he mounts the iron beast. “Nicky, you follow me.”

“Copy that.”

“Everybody ready?”

Brian goes over to the door and gives a nervous nod. “Ready.”

Philip kicks the Harley to life, the engine howling and filling the dark showroom with noise and fumes. Nick kicks his bike on. The second engine sings a noisy aria in dissonant unison with the first. Philip revs the throttle and gives Brian the high sign.

Brian jacks the manual lock on the door and then throws it open, letting in the wet wind. Philip kicks the gear and takes off.

Brian leaps onto the back of Nick’s bike and they blast off after Philip.

“OH SHIT! OH GOD! PHILIP! PHILIP! LOOK DOWN! LOOK DOWN, MAN! PHILIP, LOOK DOWN!”

Brian’s frantic wail is muffled by his helmet and drowned by the noise of the cycles.

It happens mere moments after they slam through a mass of Biters choking the intersection, the ragged bodies bouncing off their fenders. After making a hard left turn and zooming south on Water Street, leaving the throngs in their dust and fumes, Brian sees the mangled corpse dragging along the pavement behind Philip’s bike.

The bottom half of the thing is torn away, its intestines like electrical wiring flagging in the wind, but the torso still has fight left in it, its moldering head still intact. With its two dead arms, it clings to the rear fenders, and it starts pulling itself up the side of the Harley.

The worst part is, neither Philip nor Penny seem to be aware of it.

“PULL ALONGSIDE HIM! NICK, PULL UP!” Brian screams, his arms clutched around Nick’s midsection.

“I’M TRYING!”

At this point, roaring down the deserted, wet side street, the bike hydroplaning on slick pavement, Penny notices the creature stuck to the bike, clawing its way toward her, and she starts screaming. From Brian’s vantage point, thirty feet behind her, the child’s scream is inaudible—like an exaggerated gesture of a silent-movie actress.

Nick opens up the throttle. His Harley closes the distance.

“GRAB THE BAT!” he screams over the din, and Brian tries to root the baseball bat out from beneath the luggage carrier behind him.

Up ahead, almost without warning, Philip Blake notices the thing attached to the back of his bike. Philip’s helmet cocks around quickly as he gropes for his weapon.

By this point, Nick is within five or six feet of the black Harley’s taillights, but before Brian can intercede with the bat, he sees Philip drawing the iron rod from its makeshift scabbard on the front of his bike.

With a quick and violent motion, which causes the black Harley to veer slightly off course, Philip twists around in his seat—one-handing the handlebars—and thrusts the hooked end of the metal rod into the zombie’s mouth.

The skewered head of the monster gets stuck inches below Penny, the rod wedged between the gleaming exhaust pipes. Philip draws his right leg up and—with the force of a battering ram—he kicks the corpse (rod and all) off the bike. The thing tumbles and rolls, and Nick has to swerve suddenly to avoid it.

Philip increases his speed, staying on course, heading south, not even bothering to look back.

They continue on, zigzagging through the south side of town, avoiding the congested areas. A mile down the road, Philip manages to find another main artery that’s relatively clear of wreckage and roaming dead, and he leads them down it. They are now three miles from the Atlanta city limits.

The horizon line is clear, the sky lightening slightly to the west.

They have enough gas to get four hundred miles without refueling.

Whatever awaits them out there in the gray rural countryside has to be better than what they suffered through in Atlanta.

It has to be.