Rise of the Governor

TWENTY-ONE

“What the hell are you doing?” Brian asks his brother as the dead girl claws at the air with stupid hunger. She fixes her milky eyes on Brian.

“It’ll be okay,” Philip says, yanking his dead daughter toward the back hall.

“You’re not—”

“Mind your own goddamn business.”

“But what if somebody—”

“Nobody saw me,” he says, kicking open the door to the laundry room.

It’s a small, claustrophic chamber of linoleum tile and corkboard walls with a broken-down washer and dryer, and ancient cat litter ground into the seams of the floor. Philip drags the drooling, snarling thing into the corner and attaches her leash to the exposed water pipes. He does this with the firm yet gentle hand of an animal trainer.

Brian watches from the hall, appalled at what he’s seeing. Philip has blankets spread out on the floor and duct-taped to the sharp edges of the washing machine to prevent the Penny-thing from making noise or hurting herself. It’s obvious he’s been preparing for this for a while now. He’s been thinking about it a lot. He rigs a makeshift leather halter—fashioned from a belt and pieces of the leash—around her head, attaching it to the pipes.

Philip goes about his business with the gentle rigor of a caretaker securing a wheelchair for a handicapped child. With the steel separator, he holds the tiny monster at arm’s length and carefully secures the restraints to the wall. All through this, the thing that was once a child snarls and slavers and yanks at her restraints.

Brian stares. He can’t decide whether to turn away, cry, or scream. He gets the feeling that he’s stumbled upon something disturbingly intimate here, and for a brief instant, his racing thoughts cast back to the time he was eighteen years old and visiting the nursing home in Waynesboro to say good-bye to his dying grandmother. He’ll never forget the look on her caretaker’s face. On an almost hourly basis, that male nurse had to clean the shit from the old lady’s backside, and the expression on his face while he did so, with relatives in the room, was horrible: a mixture of disgust, stoic professionalism, pity, and contempt.

That same weird expression is now contorting Philip Blake’s features as he buckles straps around the monster’s little head, carefully avoiding the danger zone around her snapping jaws. He sings softly to her as he works on her shackles—some sort of off-key lullaby that Brian can’t identify.

Eventually, Philip is satisfied with the restraints. He tenderly strokes the top of the Penny-thing’s head, and then kisses her forehead. The girl’s jaws snap at him, missing his jugular by centimeters.

“I’ll leave the light on, punkin,” Philip says to her, speaking loudly, as though addressing a foreigner, before calmly turning and walking out of the laundry room, shutting the door securely behind him.

Brian stands there in the hall, his veins running cold. “You want to talk about this?”

“It’ll be okay,” Philip reiterates, avoiding eye contact as he walks away, heading toward his room.

The worst part is that the laundry room is next door to Brian’s bedroom, and from that moment on, he hears the Penny-thing every night, clawing, moaning, straining against her bonds. She’s a constant reminder of … what? Armageddon? Madness? Brian doesn’t even have the vocabulary for what she represents. The smell is a thousand times worse than cat urine. And Philip spends a lot of time locked inside that laundry room with the dead girl, doing God-knows-what, and it drives the wedge deeper between the three men. Still in the throes of grief and shock, Brian is torn between pity and repulsion. He still loves his brother, but this is too much. Nick has no comment on the matter, but Brian can tell that Nick’s spirit is broken. The silences grow longer between the men, and Brian and Nick begin spending more time outside the apartment, wandering the safe zone, getting to know the dynamics of the inhabitants better.

Keeping a low profile, roaming the periphery of the little frontier enclave, Brian learns that the town is basically broken into two social castes. The first group—the one with the most power—includes anyone with a useful trade or vocation. Brian discovers that this first group features two bricklayers, a machinist, a doctor, a gun-store owner, a veterinarian, a plumber, a barber, an auto mechanic, a farmer, a fry cook, and an electrician. The second group—Brian thinks of them as the Dependents—features the sick, the young, and all the white-collar workers with obscure administrative backgrounds. These are the former middle managers and office drones, the paper pushers and corporate executives who once pulled down six-figure incomes running divisions of huge multinationals—now just taking up space, as obsolete as cassette tapes. With echoes of old sociology courses banging around the back of his mind, Brian wonders if this tenuous, rickety assemblage of desperate souls can ever develop into anything like a community.

The sand in the works appears to be three members of the National Guard, who wandered into Woodbury from a nearby Guard Station a couple of weeks ago and started pushing people around. This little rogue clique—which Brian thinks of as the Bullies—is led by a gung-ho former marine with a flattop haircut and icy blue eyes who goes by the name of Gavin (or “the Major,” as his underlings call him). It only takes a couple of days for Brian to peg Gavin as a sociopath with designs on power and plunder. Maybe the plague made Gavin flip his wig, but over the course of that first week in Woodbury, Brian observes Gavin and his weekend warriors snatching provisions out of the hands of helpless families and taking advantage of several women at gunpoint out behind the racetrack at night.

Brian keeps his distance, and keeps his head down, and as he makes these silent observations about Woodbury’s pecking order, he keeps hearing the name Stevens.

From what Brian can glean from scattered conversations with townspeople, this Stevens gentleman was once an ear, nose, and throat man with his own practice in a suburb of Atlanta. After the turn, Stevens set out for safer pastures—apparently alone, some believe due to a divorce. The good doctor quickly stumbled upon the motley group of survivors in Woodbury. Seeing the ragged inhabitants gripped by sickness, malnourished, and many of them nursing injuries, Stevens decided to offer his services. He’s been busy ever since, operating out of the former Meriwether County Medical Center three blocks from the racetrack.

On the afternoon of his seventh day in Woodbury, still wheezing, every breath a stab of pain in his side, Brian finally gets up the nerve to visit the squat, gray-brick building on the south end of the safe zone.

“You’re lucky,” Stevens says, snapping an X-ray into its clip at the top of a light panel. He points at a milky image of Brian’s ribs. “No serious breaks … just three minor fractures to the second, fourth, and fifth pectorals.”

“Lucky, huh?” Brian mutters, sitting shirtless on the padded gurney. The room is a depressing tile crypt in the basement of the medical center—once the pathology lab—now serving as Stevens’s examination room. The air reeks of disinfectant and mold.

“Not a word I’ve used that often in recent days, I will admit,” Stevens says, turning toward a stainless steel cabinet next to the light panel. He’s a tall, trim, smartly groomed man in his late forties with designer steel-frame eyeglasses riding low on the bridge of his nose. He wears a lab coat over his wrinkled oxford shirt and has a sort of weary, professorial intelligence in his eyes.

“And the wheezing?” Brian asks.

The doctor fishes through a shelf of plastic vials. “Early stage pleurisy due to the damage to the ribs,” he mumbles as he searches the medication. “I would encourage you to cough as much as possible … it’s going to hurt, but it’ll prevent secretions from pooling in the lungs.”

“And my eye?” The stabbing pain in Brian’s left eye, radiating up from his bruised jaw, has worsened over the last few days. Every time he looks in the mirror, his eye seems more bloodshot.

“Looks fine to me,” the doctor says, pulling a pill bottle from the shelf. “Your mandible on that side has a nasty contusion, but that should heal up in time. I’m gonna give you some naproxen for the pain.”

Stevens hands the vial over and then stands there with arms crossed against his chest.

Brian almost involuntarily reaches for his wallet. “I’m not sure if I have—”

“There’s no payment for services rendered here,” the doctor says with a raised brow, somewhat bemused by Brian’s innate gesture. “There’s no staff, there’s no infrastructure, there’s no follow-up, and for that matter, there isn’t a decent cup of espresso or a half-assed daily newspaper to read.”

“Oh … right.” Brian puts the pills in his pocket. “What about the hip?”

“Bruised but intact,” he says, flipping off the light panel and closing the cabinet. “I wouldn’t worry. You can put your shirt back on now.”

“Good … thanks.”

“Not a big talker, are you?” The doctor washes his hands at a wall sink, dries them on a dirty towel.

“I guess not.”

“Probably better that way,” the doctor says, wadding the towel and tossing it into the sink. “You probably don’t even want to tell me your name.”

“Well…”

“It’s okay. Forget it. You’ll be known in the records as the Bohemian Fellow with the Cracked Ribs. You want to tell me how it happened?”

Brian shrugs as he buttons his shirt. “Took a fall.”

“Fighting off the specimens?”

Brian looks at him. “Specimens?”

“Sorry … clinical-speak. Biters, zombies, pus bags, whatever they’re calling them nowadays. That how you got injured?”

“Yeah … something like that.”

“You want a professional opinion? A prognosis?”

“Sure.”

“Get the hell outta here while you still can.”

“Why’s that?”

“Chaos theory.”

“Excuse me?”

“Entropy … empires fall, stars wink out … the ice cubes in your drink melt.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

The doctor pushes his glasses up his nose. “There’s a crematorium in the sublevel of this building … we destroyed two more men today, one of them the father of two children. They were attacked on the north side yesterday morning. They reanimated last night. More Biters are getting through … the barricade’s a sieve. Chaos theory is the impossibility of a closed system remaining stable. This town is doomed. There’s nobody at the controls … Gavin and his cronies are getting bolder … and you, my friend, are simply another piece of fodder.”

For the longest time, Brian doesn’t say anything, he just stares past the doctor.

At last, Brian pushes himself off the table and extends his hand. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

That night, woozy from the painkillers, Brian Blake hears a knock at his bedroom door. Before he even has a chance to get his bearings and turn on a light, the door clicks open and Nick sticks his head in. “Brian, you awake?”

“Always.” Brian grunts as he climbs out of the blankets and sits up on the side of the bed. Only a few of the apartment’s wall outlets are live with generated power. Brian’s room is a dead circuit. He switches on a battery-operated lantern and sees Nick pushing into the room, fully dressed, his expression tight with alarm.

“You gotta see something,” Nick says, going to the window, peering through the blinds. “I saw him last night, same deal, didn’t think much of it.”

Still groggy, Brian joins Nick at the window. “What are we looking at?”

Through the slat, out in the darkness of a vacant lot, Philip’s silhouette can be seen emerging from the far trees. He looks like a stick figure in the darkness. Since Penny’s death, he’s been losing weight, going without sleep, hardly eating a thing. He looks sick, broken, like his faded denims are the only things holding his long, lanky limbs together. He carries a bucket, and he walks with a strange, wooden kind of purpose, like a sleepwalker or an automaton.

“What’s with the bucket?” Brian asks under his breath, almost rhetorically.

“Exactly.” Nick nervously scratches himself. “He had it last night, too.”

“Just take it easy, Nick. Stay in here.” Brian turns the lantern out. “Let’s just see what happens.”

A few moments later, the sound of the front door clicking open reverberates through the dark apartment. Philip’s shuffling footsteps can be heard crossing the living room and making their way down the hall.

The click of the laundry room door is followed by the sound of Penny becoming agitated, the chain clanking, the garbled sounds of groaning—noises to which Brian and Nick have almost grown accustomed. Then something reaches their ears that they haven’t heard before: the wet slosh of something hitting the tiles … followed by the strange, animalistic, gooey noises of a zombie feeding.

“What the fuck is he doing?” In the half-light, Nick’s face is a pale gibbous moon of terror.

“Holy Christ,” Brian whispers. “He can’t be—”

Brian doesn’t even get a chance to finish the thought, because Nick is on his way to the door with a full head of steam, heading for the hallway.

Brian chases after him. “Nick, don’t—”

“This isn’t happening.” Nick barrels down the hallway, moving toward the laundry room. He knocks hard on the door. “Philip, what’s going on?”

“Go away!”

The sound of Philip’s muffled voice is clogged with emotion.

“Nick—” Brian tries to get in between Nick and the door but it’s too late.

Nick turns the knob. The door is unlocked. Nick enters the laundry room.

“Oh God.”

Nick’s mortified reaction reaches Brian’s ears a split second before Brian can get a good look at what’s going on in the laundry room.

Brian pushes his way into the narrow enclosure and sees the dead girl eating a human hand.

Brian’s initial reaction is not one of repulsion or disgust or outrage (which, as it happens, is exactly the combination of emotions currently twisting Nick’s features as he gapes at the feeding in progress). Instead, Brian is overcome by a wave of sadness. He says nothing at first, simply looks on as his brother crouches down in front of the tiny upright corpse.

Ignoring the presence of the other men, Philip calmly pulls a severed human ear from the bucket, and waits patiently for the Penny-thing to finish consuming the hand. She gobbles the middle-aged male fingers with unbridled gusto, chewing the bloodless hairy knuckles as though they were delicacies, the stringers of pink, foamy saliva dangling from her lips.

She hardly pauses long enough to swallow before Philip places the human ear within range of her blackened teeth, offering the morsel to the child with the care and concern of a priest proffering a wafer to a communicant. The Penny-thing devours the cartilage and gristly rolls of human skin with mindless abandon.

“I’m outta here,” Nick Parsons finally manages to blurt, pivoting and storming out of the room.

Brian enters and crouches down next to his brother. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t accuse Philip of anything. Brian is drowning in sorrow right now and all he can think of saying is, “What’s going on, man?”

Philip hangs his head. “He was already dead … they were gonna burn him … found his body in a bag out behind the clinic … he died of something else … I just took a few pieces … nobody’ll notice…”

The Penny-thing finishes the ear, and starts groaning for more.

Philip feeds her a dripping, severed foot, the jagged bone exposed at the ankle like a slimy tusk of ivory.

“You think this is…?” Brian searches for words. “You think this is a good idea?”

Philip looks down at the floor as the sticky, wet noises of the feeding frenzy fill the laundry room. The girl-thing gnaws at the bone as Philip’s voice drops an octave, beginning to crack with emotion. “Think of him as an organ donor…”

“Philip—”

“I can’t let go of her, Brian … I can’t … she’s all I got.”

Brian takes a deep breath and fights his own tears. “The thing of it is … she’s not Penny anymore.”

“I know that.”

“Then why—”

“I see her and I try to remember … but I can’t … I can’t remember … I can’t remember anything but this shit storm we’re living in … and them road rats that shot her … and she’s all I got…” The pain and grief choking his voice start to thicken, hardening into something darker. “They took her from me … my whole universe … new rules now … new rules…”

Brian can’t breathe. He watches the Penny-thing gnawing on that pasty severed foot. He looks away. He can’t take it anymore. His stomach is clenched with nausea, his mouth watering. He can feel the heat rising in his gorge, and he struggles to his feet. “I have to … I can’t stay in here, Philip … I have to go.”

Whirling around, Brian stumbles out of the laundry room and gets halfway down the hall when he drops to his knees and roars vomit.

His stomach is relatively empty. What comes out of him is mostly bile. But it comes on spasms of agony. He retches and retches, the acids spattering a six-foot length of carpet between the hallway and the living room. He upchucks his guts, which instantly makes a cold sweat break out all over his body and sends him into a paroxysm of coughing. The fit goes on for endless minutes, each cough throbbing painfully in his ribs. He coughs and coughs until he finally collapses into a heap on the floor.

Fifteen feet away, in the light of a battery-powered lantern, Nick Parsons packs his knapsack. He shoves in a change of clothes, a couple of cans of beans, blankets, a flashlight, some bottled water. He searches the cluttered coffee table for something.

Brian manages to sit up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You can’t leave, man … not now.”

“Hell I can’t,” Nick says, finding his Bible under a pile of candy wrappers. He puts the Bible in the backpack. The muffled feeding noises drift down the hallway, fueling Nick’s anxiety.

“I’m begging you, Nick.”

Nick zips the knapsack shut. He doesn’t look at Brian as he says, “You don’t need me…”

“That’s not true.” Brian swallows the bitter taste of bile. “I need you now more than ever … I need your help … to keep things together.”

“Together?” Nick looks up. He slings the backpack over his shoulder, and then he walks over to where Brian is slumped on the floor. “Things haven’t been together around here for a long time.”

“Nick. Listen to me—”

“He’s too far gone, Brian.”

“Listen. I understand what you’re saying. Give him one more chance. Maybe this is like a one-time thing. Maybe … I don’t know … it’s grief. One more chance, Nick. We got a much better shot at survival if we stay together.”

For a long, agonizing moment, Nick considers all this. Then, on a weary, exasperated sigh, which seems to deflate his very spirit, he drops the knapsack.

The next day, Philip vanishes. Brian and Nick don’t even bother looking for him. They stay inside for most of the day, hardly speaking to each other, feeling like zombies themselves, moving silently from bathroom to kitchen to living room, where they sit staring out the barred window at the blustery sky, trying to come up with an answer, a way out of this downward spiral.

Around five o’clock that afternoon, they hear a strange buzzing noise coming from outside—like a cross between a chain saw and a boat motor. Worried that it might have something to do with Philip, Brian goes to the back door, listens, then pushes his way outside and takes a few steps across the cracked cement of the back porch.

The noise is louder now. In the distance, on the north side of town, a thundercloud of dust rises into the steel-gray sky. The howl of engines sputters and waxes and wanes on the breeze, and with a surge of relief, Brian realizes that it’s merely somebody maneuvering race cars around the dirt track arena. Every so often, the sound of cheers warbles and echoes on the wind.

For a moment, Brian panics. Don’t these idiots realize all this noise is going to draw every Biter within a fifty-mile radius? At the same time, though, Brian is transfixed by that buzz-saw sound drifting on the breeze. Like a wandering radio signal, it touches something sore inside him, an ache for preplague times, a series of painful memories of lazy Sunday afternoons, a good night’s sleep, walking into a goddamn grocery store and buying a fucking gallon of milk.

He goes back inside, puts his jacket on, and tells Nick he’s going for a walk.

The entrance to the racetrack borders the main drag, a high cyclone fence stretched between two brick piles. As Brian approaches, he sees drifts of trash and old tires scattered across the meager box office, which is boarded by graffiti-stained planks.

The noise rises to ear-piercing levels—the winding scream of motors and caterwauling crowds—tainted by the odors of gasoline and burning rubber. The sky is choked with a haze of dust and smoke.

Brian finds a gap in the fence, and he heads for it, when he hears a voice.

“Hey!”

He pauses, turns, and sees three men in ratty camo-fatigues coming toward him. Two of the men are in their twenties, with greasy long hair and assault rifles pinned up high against their shoulders patrol-style. The oldest of the three—a crew-cut hard-ass, his olive drab jacket buttoned up with a bullet bandolier across his chest—walks out front, obviously in command.

“Admission is forty bucks or the equivalent in trade,” says the commander.

“Admission?” Brian says, taken aback. He sees a name patch on the older man’s breast pocket: maj. gavin. Up to this point, Brian has only stolen glimpses of the vicious National Guardsman, but now, at this proximity, Brian can see a glint of crazy in the man’s frosty blue eyes. His breath smells of Jim Beam.

“Forty bucks for an adult, son—you an adult?” The other men chuckle. “Kids get in free, of course, but you look over eighteen to me. Just barely.”

“You’re taking money from people?” Brian is confused. “Times like these?”

“You’re free to trade, friend. You got a chicken? Some Penthouse magazines you been jackin’ off to?”

More snickers.

Brian’s gut goes cold with anger. “I don’t have forty bucks.”

The smile disappears from the Major’s face like a switch has been thrown. “Then have a nice day.”

“Who gets the money?”

This gets the attention of the other two Guardsmen. They move in closer. Gavin comes nose to nose with Brian, and says in a soft, threatening grunt, “It’s for the Commons.”

“The what?”

“The Commons … the collective … community improvements and what-not.”

Brian feels a surge of rage twisting inside him. “You sure it’s not for the collective of you three?”

“I’m sorry,” the Major says in a flat, icy tone, “I must have missed the memo that says you’re the new city clerk. You boys get the memo stating that this peckerwood is the new Woodbury city clerk?”

“No, sir,” says one of the greasy-haired minions. “Didn’t get that memo.”

Gavin pulls a .45 semiauto from his belt holster, thumbs off the safety, and presses the barrel against Brian’s temple. “You need to study up on group dynamics, son. You flunk civics class in high school?”

Brian says nothing. He stares into the Major’s eyes, and a red lens draws down over Brian’s vision. Everything goes red. Brian’s hands tingle, his head spins.

“Say ahh,” the Major says.

“What?”

“I SAID OPEN YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH!” Gavin bellows, and the other two Guardsmen swing their assault rifles into ready positions, the muzzles trained on Brian’s skull. Brian opens his mouth, and Gavin inserts the cold barrel of the .45 between Brian’s teeth like a dentist checking for cavities.

Something breaks inside Brian. The steel muzzle tastes like old coins and bitter oil. The entire world turns the deepest shade of scarlet.

“Go back to where you came from,” the Major says. “Before you get yourself hurt.”

Brian manages a nod.

The muzzle slips out of his mouth.

Moving as if in a dream, Brian slowly backs away from the Guardsmen, turns, and walks stiffly back the way he came, now traveling through an invisible mist of crimson.

Around seven o’clock that evening, Brian is back at the apartment, alone, still bundled in his jacket, standing at the barred window in the rear of the living room, gazing out at the dwindling daylight, his racing thoughts like contrary waves crashing against a breakwater. He covers his ears. The muffled thumping noises of the miniature zombie in the next room fuel his stupor—a phonograph needle skipping on a record—driving Brian further and further inward.

At first, he barely registers the sound of Nick returning from who-knows-where, the shuffling footsteps, the click of the closet door. But when he hears the muted mutterings drifting down the hallway, he snaps out of his trance and goes to investigate.

Nick is digging in the closet for something. His tattered nylon coat is damp, his sneakers muddy, and he’s murmuring under his breath, “‘I will lift my eyes up to the hills … And from whence comes my help?… My help comes from the Lord … Who made heaven and earth.’”

Brian sees Nick pull the pistol-grip shotgun from the closet.

“Nick, what are you doing?”

Nick doesn’t answer. He snaps open the gun’s pump mechanism, and checks the breech. It’s empty. He madly searches the floor of the closet, and he finds the single box of shells, which they managed to spirit all the way from the villa to Woodbury. He keeps muttering, “‘The Lord shall preserve us from all evil … He shall preserve our souls…’”

Brian takes a step closer. “Nick, what the hell is going on?”

Still no answer. Nick tries to load the shells with shaky hands and he drops one. It rolls across the floor. Nick fumbles another one into the breech, and then pumps it home with a clang. “‘Behold he who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep…’”

“Nick!” Brian grabs the man’s shoulder and spins him around. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

For a moment, it almost looks like Nick is about to swing the shotgun up and blow Brian’s head off—the look of unadulterated fury contorts Nick’s face. Then he gets himself under control, and swallows, and looks at Brian and says, “This can’t go on.”

Then, without another word, Nick turns and marches across the room and out the front door.

Brian grabs his .38, shoves it down the back of his belt, and hurries after Nick.