Rise of the Governor

NINETEEN

The next day, Philip spends an hour in the toolshed out behind the villa, going through the collection of weapons taken from the intruders, as well as all the bladed tools and farm implements left by the former inhabitants. He knows what he has to do, but choosing the mode of execution is agonizing for him. At first, he decides on the nine-millimeter semiauto. It’ll be the fastest and the cleanest. But then he has second thoughts about using a gun. It just seems unfair somehow. Too cold and impersonal. Nor can he bring himself to use an axe or a machete. Too messy and uncertain. What if his aim is off by half an inch and he botches the job?

At last he decides on the nine-millimeter Glock, shoving a fresh mag of rounds into the hilt and snapping back the cocking slide.

He takes a deep breath, and then goes over to the shed’s door. He pauses and braces himself. Scratching noises sporadically travel across the exterior walls of the shed. The villa’s property buzzes with Biter activity, scores of the things drawn to the commotion of the previous day’s firefight. Philip kicks the door open.

The door bangs into a middle-aged female zombie in a stained pinafore dress who was sniffing around the shed. The force of the impact sends her skeletal form stumbling backward, arms pinwheeling, a ghastly moan rising out of her decomposed face. Philip walks past her, casually raising the Glock, hardly even breaking his stride as he quickly squeezes off a single shot into the side of her skull.

The roar of the Glock echoes as the female corpse whiplashes sideways in a cloud of scarlet mist, then folds to the ground.

Philip marches across the rear of the villa, raising the Glock and taking out another pair of errant Biters. One of them is an old man dressed only in yellowed underwear—maybe an escapee from a nursing home. Another one is most likely a former fruit grower, his bloated, blackened body still clad in its original sappy dungarees. Philip puts them down with a minimum of fuss—a single shot each—and he makes a mental note to clear the remains later that day with one of the snow-shovel attachments on the riding mower.

Almost a full day has passed since Penny died in his arms, and now the new dawn is rising clear and blue, the crisp autumn sky high and clean over the acres of peach trees. It’s taken Philip nearly twenty-four hours to work up the nerve to do what he has to do. Now he grips the gun with a sweaty palm as he enters the orchard.

He has five rounds left in the magazine.

In the shadows of the woods, a figure writhes and moans against an ancient tree trunk. Bound with rope and duct tape, the prisoner strains with futile desperation to escape. Philip approaches and raises the gun. He points the barrel between the figure’s eyes, and for just an instant, Philip tells himself to get it over with quickly: Lance the wound, remove the tumor, get it done.

The muzzle wavers, Philip’s finger freezing up on the trigger pad, and he lets out a tormented sigh. “I can’t do it,” he utters under his breath.

He lowers the gun and stares at his daughter. Six feet from him, tied to the tree, Penny growls with the feral hunger of a rabid dog. Her china doll face has narrowed and sunken into a rotted white gourd, her soft eyes hardened into tiny silver coins. Her once innocent tulip-shaped lips are now blackened and curled away from slimy teeth. She doesn’t recognize her father.

This is the part that tears the biggest chunk out of Philip’s soul. He can’t stop remembering the look in Penny’s eyes each time he would pick her up at the day care center or at her aunt Nina’s house at the end of a long, hard work day. The spark of recognition and excitement—and hell yes, unadulterated love—in those big, brown doelike eyes each time Philip returned was enough to keep Philip going no matter what. Now that spark is gone forever—cemented over with the gray film of the undead.

Philip knows what he has to do.

Penny snarls.

Philip’s eyes burn with agony.

“I can’t do it,” he murmurs again, looking down, not really addressing Penny or even himself. Seeing her like this sends a bolt of electric rage down through his system, arcing like the pilot of a welding torch, touching off a secret flame deep within him. He hears the voice: Tear the world open, tear it apart, rip open its fucking heart … do it now.

He backs away from the horror in the orchard, his brain roiling with fury.

The villa’s property—now basking in a mild autumn morning—is a half-moon-shaped plot of land, the main house at its center. Several outbuildings rise along the gentle curve behind the house: the carriage house, a small storage shed for the riding mower and tractor, a second shed for tools, a coach house on elevated pilings for guests, and a large wood-sided barn with a huge weather vane and cupola on top. This last structure, the worm-eaten wood siding faded to a sun-bleached pink, is where Philip now heads.

He needs to drain off this poisonous current coursing through him; he needs to vent.

The main entrance of the barn is a double door at one end, latched with a giant timber across its center. Philip walks up and throws open the plank, the doors squeaking apart, revealing the dust motes floating in shadows inside. Philip enters, closing the double doors behind him. The air smells of horse piss and moldy hay.

Two more figures wriggle and squirm in the corner, gripped in their own brand of hellish torment, bound and gagged with duct tape: Sonny and Cher.

The twosome tremble against each other on the floor of the barn, their mouths taped, their backs pressed against the door of an empty horse stall, their bodies in the throes of some kind of withdrawal. Either heroin or crack or something else, it doesn’t really matter to Philip. The only thing that matters now is that these two have no idea how much worse life is about to get for them.

Philip walks over to the dynamic duo. The skinny gal is trembling with spasms, her painted eyes caked with dried tears. The man is breathing hard through his nostrils.

Standing in a narrow beam of sunlight teeming with dust and hay dander, Philip stares down at them like an angry god. “You,” he says to Sonny. “Gonna ask you a question … and I know it’s hard to nod with your head taped up and shit, so just blink once for yes, twice for no.”

The man looks up through raw, watery, sunken eyes. He blinks once.

Philip looks at him. “You like to watch?”

Two blinks.

Philip reaches down to his belt buckle and starts to unfasten it. “That’s a shame, because I’m gonna give one hell of a show.”

Two blinks.

Again … two blinks.

Two blinks, two blinks, two blinks.

“Easy, Brian, not so fast,” Nick says to Brian the next night, up in the second-floor sewing room. In the light of kerosene lanterns, Nick is helping Brian drink water through a straw. Brian’s mouth is still swollen and clumsy, and he dribbles on himself. Nick has been doing everything he can to help Brian recover, and keeping food down him is paramount. “Try some more of the vegetable soup,” Nick suggests.

Brian has a few spoonfuls. “Thanks, Nick.” Brian’s voice is choked, thick with pain. “Thanks for everything.” His words are slightly slurred, his soft palate still inflamed. He speaks tentatively, haltingly. Lying in bed, he has rags wrapped snugly around his broken ribs, Band-Aids on his face and neck, his left eye puffy with a purplish bruise. Something might be wrong with his hip; neither of them can tell for sure.

“You’re gonna be fine, man,” Nick says. “Your brother is another story.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s lost it, man.”

“He’s been through a lot, Nick.”

“How can you say that?” Nick sits back, lets out a pained sigh. “Look what he did to you. And don’t say it’s because he lost Penny—we’ve all lost people we love. He came very close to taking you out.”

Brian looks at his own mangled feet sticking out of the bottom of the blankets. With great effort, he says, “I deserve everything I got.”

“Don’t say that! It wasn’t your fault, what happened. Your brother’s turned a corner with this thing. I’m really worried about him.”

“He’ll be okay.” Brian looks at Nick. “What’s wrong? Something else is bothering you.”

Nick takes a deep breath and wonders whether he should confide in Brian. The Blake brothers have always had a complex relationship, and over the years, Nick Parsons has often felt that he was more of a brother to Philip Blake than his biological sibling. But there’s always been an X factor with the Blakes, a bond of blood that runs deep within the two men.

Nick finally says, “I know you aren’t exactly the religious type. I know you think I’m a Holy Roller.”

“That’s not true, Nick.”

Nick waves it off. “Doesn’t matter … my faith is strong, and I don’t judge a man by his religion.”

“Where you going with this?”

Nick looks at Brian. “He’s keeping her alive, Brian … or maybe alive is not the right word.”

“Penny?”

“He’s out there with her now.”

“Where?”

Nick explains what’s been going on over these last two days since the firefight. While Brian has been recovering from the beating, Philip’s been busy. He’s keeping two of the intruders—the only ones who survived the firefight—locked up in the barn. Philip claims he’s questioning them about possible human settlements. Nick is worried he’s torturing them. But that’s the least of their worries. The fate of Penny Blake is what’s eating at Nick. “He’s got her chained to a tree like a pet,” Nick says.

Brian frowns. “Where?”

“Out in the orchard. He goes out there at night. Spends time with her.”

“Oh God.”

“Listen, I know you think this is bullshit, but the way I was brought up, there’s a force in the universe called Good and a force called Evil.”

“Nick, I don’t think this is—”

“Wait. Let me finish. I believe that all this—the plague or whatever you want to call it—is the work of what you would call the Devil or Satan.”

“Nick—”

“Just let me say my piece. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“What’s the thing Satan hates the most? The power of love? Maybe. Somebody being born again. Yeah, probably. But I kinda think it’s when a person passes, and their spirit flies up to Paradise.”

“I’m not following you.”

Nick looks into Brian’s hollow gaze. “That’s what’s going on here, Brian. The Devil’s figured out a way to keep people’s souls trapped here on earth.”

A moment passes as Brian absorbs this. Nick doesn’t expect Brian to believe any of this, but maybe, just maybe, Nick can get him to understand.

In that brief silence, the north wind whistles in the shutters. The weather is turning. The villa creaks and moans. Nick lifts the collar of his mothball-scented sweater—days ago, they found some warm clothes in the villa’s attic—and now he shivers in the frigid air of the second floor. “What your brother’s doing is wrong, it’s against God,” Nick says then, and the statement hangs in the gloom.

At that moment, out in the darkness of the orchard, a small campfire crackles and flickers on the ground. Philip sits on the cold earth in front of the fire, his shotgun next to him, a musty little book he found in the villa’s nursery open on his lap. “‘Let me in, Let me in, Little Pig,’” Philip reads aloud in a stiff, labored singsong voice. “‘Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and blow your house in!’”

Three feet away, tied to the tree trunk, Penny Blake snarls and drools at every word, her tiny jaws snapping impotently.

“‘Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin,’” Philip recites, turning a delicate page of onionskin. He pauses and glances up at the thing that used to be his daughter.

In the flicker of firelight, Penny’s small face contorts with unyielding hunger, as wrinkled and bloated as a jack-o’-lantern. Her midsection, wound with baling wire, strains against the tree. She reaches out with curled, clawlike fingers and clutches at the air—yearning to break free and make a meal of her father.

“‘But of course,’” Philip continues, his voice breaking, “‘the wolf did blow the house in.’” An agonizing pause before Philip says in a shattered voice, filled with equal parts sorrow and madness, “‘And he ate the pig.’”

Over the remainder of that week, sleep does not come easily for Philip Blake. He tries to get a few hours each night but the nervous energy keeps him tossing and turning until he has to get up and do something. Most nights, he goes out to the barn and works off some of his rage on Sonny and Cher. They are the ostensible reasons Penny has turned, and it is up to Philip to make sure they suffer like no man or woman has ever suffered. The delicate process of keeping them just this side of death is not easy. Every once in a while, Philip has to give them water to make sure they don’t die on him. He also has to be careful they don’t kill themselves in order to escape their torments. Like a good jailer, Philip keeps the ropes tight, and all sharp objects out of their grasp.

On this night—Philip thinks it’s a Friday—he waits until Nick and Brian are asleep before he slips out of his room, pulls on his denim jacket and boots, and makes his way out the back door and across the moonlit grounds to the weather-beaten barn on the northeast corner of the property. He likes to announce himself as he arrives.

“Daddy’s home,” he murmurs in a convivial tone, his breath showing in puffs of vapor as he pulls the padlock and pushes open the double doors.

He flips on a battery-powered lantern.

Sonny and Cher are slumped in the shadows where he left them, two ragged creatures trussed up like suckling pigs, side by side, sitting in a spreading pool of their own blood, piss, and shit. Sonny is barely awake, his head lolled to one side, his heavy-lidded junkie eyes rimmed in red. Cher is unconscious. She lies next to him, her leather pants still down around her ankles.

Each of them bear the festering marks of Philip’s tools of punishment—needle-nosed pliers, barbed wire, two-by-fours with exposed rusty nails, and various blunt objects that occur to Philip in the heat of the moment.

“Wake up, sis!” Philip reaches down and flips the woman onto her back, the restraints cutting into her wrists, the rope around her neck keeping her from squirming too much. He slaps her. Her eyes flutter. Philip slaps her again. She comes awake now, the muffled cries dampened by the hank of duct tape over her mouth.

At some point in the night, she managed to pull her bloody panties back up and over her privates.

“Let me once again remind you,” Philip says, yanking her panties back down to her knees. He stands over her, wrenching her legs apart with his boots as though clearing a path for himself. She writhes and wriggles below him as if she might be able to squirm out of her own skin. “Y’all are the ones took my daughter from me—so we’re all gonna go to hell together.”

Philip unbuckles his belt, and drops his pants, and it doesn’t require much imagination for him to instantly produce an erection—his rage and hate burn so warmly in his solar plexus, it feels like a battering ram. He drops to his knees between the woman’s trembling legs.

The first thrust is always the trigger—the voice in his brain abruptly chiming out, taunting him, urging him on with fragments of old biblical nonsense that his daddy used to mumble while drunk: Vengeance is mine, vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord!

But tonight, after the third or fourth thrust into the limp woman, Philip stops.

A combination of things steals his focus, hooks his attention. He hears footsteps outside, crunching across the rear of the property, and he even sees, through the slatted siding, the shadow of a figure blurring past the barn. But what gets Philip to draw back and stand up, and hurriedly pull his pants back on, is the fact that this figure is moving toward the orchard.

Toward the place where Penny resides.

Philip exits the barn and instantly sees a figure plunging into the shadows of the orchard. The figure is a compact, trim man in his thirties clad in a sweater and jeans, carrying a huge rusty spade over his shoulder.

“Nick!”

Philip’s warning cry goes unheeded. Nick has already vanished into the trees.

Drawing the nine-millimeter from behind his belt, Philip charges toward the orchard. He snaps a round into the chamber as he plunges into the woods. Darkness gives way to the beam of a flashlight.

Fifty feet away, Nick Parsons is shining a light on the livid face of the Penny-thing.

“NICK!”

Nick whirls suddenly with the shovel raised, and the flashlight tumbles out of his hand. “It’s gone too far, Philly, it’s gone too far.”

“Put the shovel down,” Philip says as he approaches with the gun raised. The flashlight beam shines up into the leaves, casting an eerie, pale glow over everything, like a grainy black-and-white film.

“You can’t do this to your daughter, you don’t realize what you’re doing.”

“Put it down.”

“You’re keeping her soul from entering heaven, Philly.”

“Shut up!”

Twenty feet away, the Penny-thing yanks on its bonds in the shadows. The cockeyed beam of the flashlight highlights her monstrous features from below. Her eyes reflect the dry silver light.

“Philly, listen to me.” Nick lowers the shovel, his voice unsteady with emotion. “You have to let her die … she’s one of God’s children. Please … I’m begging you as a Christian … please let her go.”

Philip aims the Glock directly at Nick’s forehead. “If she dies … you die next.”

For a moment, Nick Parsons looks crestfallen, absolutely beaten.

Then he drops the shovel, hangs his head, and walks back toward the villa.

Throughout all this, the Penny-thing keeps its sharklike gaze on the man it once called father.

Brian continues to heal. Six days after the beating, he feels strong enough to get out of bed and limp around the house. His hip twinges with every step, and the dizziness comes in waves whenever he goes up and down the stairs, but on the whole, he’s doing pretty well. His bruises have faded and the swelling has gone down, and he feels his appetite returning. He also has a good talk with Philip.

“I miss her something fierce,” Brian says to his brother late one night in the kitchen, each man suffering from severe insomnia. “I’d trade places with her in a heartbeat if it meant bringing her back.”

Philip looks down. He has developed a series of very subtle tics, which emerge when he’s under pressure—sniffing, pursing his lips, clearing his throat. “I know, sport. It ain’t your fault … what happened out there. I never should have done that to you.”

Brian’s eyes moisten. “I probably would have done the same thing.”

“Let’s put it behind us.”

“Sure.” Brian wipes his eyes. He looks at Philip. “So, what’s the deal with the people in the barn?”

Philip looks up. “What about ’em?”

“The whole thing has Nick on edge … and you can hear things out there … at night, I’m talking about. Nick thinks you’re, like … pulling their fingernails off.”

A cold smile twitches at the corner of Philip’s mouth. “That’s sick.”

Brian isn’t smiling. “Philip, whatever you’re doing out there, it’s not going to bring Penny back.”

Philip looks down again. “I know that … don’t you think I know that?”

“Then I’m begging you to stop. Whatever it is you’re doing … stop.” Brian looks at his brother. “It’s not serving any purpose.”

Philip looks up with embers of emotion in his eyes. “That trash out there in the barn stole everything that mattered to me … that bald motherfucker and his crew … them two junkies … they destroyed the life of a beautiful innocent little girl and they did it outta sheer meanness and greed. Ain’t nothing I could do to them would suffice.”

Brian sighs. Further protest seems futile, so he simply stares at his coffee.

“And you’re wrong about it not serving any purpose,” Philip concludes, after a moment of thought. “It serves the purpose of making me feel better.”

The next night, after the lanterns go out, and the fires in the three separate fireplaces dwindle down to coals, and the northeasterly wind begins toying with the dormers and loose shingles, Brian is lying in bed in the sewing room, trying to lull himself into a troubled sleep, when he hears the door latch click and sees the silhouette of Nick Parsons slipping into his room. Brian sits up. “What’s going on?”

“Sssshhh,” Nick whispers, coming across the room and kneeling by the bed. Nick has his coat on, his gloves, and a bulge on his hip that looks like the grip of a handgun. “Keep it down.”

“What is it?”

“Your brother’s asleep … finally.”

“So what?”

“So we gotta do a—whaddaya callit—an intervention.”

“What are you talking about? Penny? You’re talking about trying to take Penny out again?”

“No! The barn, man! The barn!”

Brian moves to the edge of the bed and rubs his eyes, stretches his sore limbs, shakes the cobwebs off. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

They slip out the back, each one of them armed with a handgun. Nick has the bald man’s .357 steel-plated revolver, Brian has a snub-nose that belonged to one of the thug gunmen. They steal across the property to the barn, and Brian shines a flashlight on the padlock. They find a piece of timber in a woodpile, and they use it to pry open the rotted doors, making as little noise as possible.

Brian’s heart hammers in his chest as they slip inside the dark barn.

The stench of mold and urine fills their senses as they work their way back through the fetid shadows to the rear of the barn, where two dark heaps lie on the floor in puddles of blood as black as oil. At first, the shapes don’t even look human, but when the beam of Brian’s flashlight falls on a pale face, Brian lets out a gasp.

“Holy fucking shit.”

The man and woman are still alive, barely, their faces disfigured and swollen, their midsections exposed like raw meat. A thin tendril of steam rises from festering, sucking wounds. Both captives are semiconscious, their parboiled eyes fixed on the rafters. The woman is brutalized, a broken doll with legs akimbo and blood patterns covering her pasty, tattooed flesh.

Brian begins to tremble. “Holy shit … what have we…? Holy fucking shit…”

Nick kneels by the woman. “Brian, get some water.”

“What about—”

“Get it from the well! Hurry!”

Brian hands over his flashlight, spins, and hustles back the way he came.

Nick shines the light on the constellation of wounds and sores—some old and infected, some fresh—across a hundred percent of their twisted bodies. The man’s chest rises and falls quickly, convulsively, with shallow breaths. The woman struggles to fix her rheumy gaze on Nick. She is blinking wildly.

Her lips move beneath the duct tape. Nick starts to carefully peel the gag away from her mouth.

“P-p-pleeee … kuhhh…” She’s trying to say something urgent but Nick can’t understand her.

“It’s okay, we’re gonna get you outta here, it’s okay, you’re gonna make it.”

“K-khhh…”

“Cold?” Nick tries to pull her pants back on her. “Try to breathe, try to—”

“K-khhlll.”

“What? I can’t—”

The woman tries to swallow, and again she says, “K-kill uss … p-please…”

Nick stares. His guts go cold. He feels something softly nudging his hip and he looks down and sees the woman’s scabby hand fumbling at the pistol grip sticking out of his belt. Nick feels all the fight go out of him. His heart sinks down through the floor.

He pulls the .357 from his belt and stands up and gazes down at the abominations on the floor of the barn for a long time.

He says a prayer: the Twenty-third Psalm.

Brian is on his way back to the barn with a plastic pail of well water when he hears the two muffled pops from inside the barn. Like firecrackers bursting inside tin cans, the blasts are short and sharp. The sound of them makes Brian freeze in his tracks, the water sloshing over the rim of the bucket. He sucks in a startled breath.

Then he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a faint light flickering on in one of the villa’s second-floor windows: Philip’s room. A flashlight up there plays across the window, then vanishes. This is followed by a series of muffled footsteps banging down the stairs and through the house, hard and fast, and this gets Brian moving again.

He drops the pail. He charges back across the property to the barn. He slams through the doorway, plunging into the dark. Then he hurtles through the shadows, toward the silver beam of light on the floor in the rear. He sees Nick standing over the captives.

A ribbon of cordite smoke rises from the muzzle of the .357 in Nick’s right hand, now hanging at his side as he stares down at the bodies.

Brian joins Nick and starts to say something when all at once Brian looks down and sees the head wounds: blossoms of gore bloom up the stall door—shimmering in the horizontal light beam.

The man and the woman are stone-cold dead, each one of them now lying supine in their drying fluids, their faces at peace, released from their contortions of misery. Again, Brian tries to say something.

He can’t get out any words.

A moment later, in the darkness across the barn, the double doors burst open and Philip storms in. Fists clenched at his sides, face chiseled with rage, eyes flashing with white-hot madness, he marches toward the light. He looks as though he’s going to devour somebody. He has a pistol shoved down the side of his belt and a machete banging on one hip.

He gets about halfway across the barn before he starts to slow down.

Nick has turned away from the bodies and is now standing his ground, staring at Philip as he approaches. Brian steps back, a tidal wave of shame crashing down over him. He feels like his soul is being ripped in half. He stares at the floor as his brother approaches slowly now, warily, glancing nervously from the dead bodies to Nick, and then to Brian, and then back at the dead bodies.

For the longest time, nobody can think of anything to say. Philip keeps looking at Brian, and Brian keeps trying to conceal the paralyzing shame spreading through him, but the more he tries to conceal it, the more it drags him down.

If Brian only had the guts for it, he would put the barrel of the snub-nose in his mouth right now and put himself out of his misery. In some strange way, he feels responsible for this—for all of it—but he’s too much of a coward to kill himself like a man.

He can only stand there and look away in abject shame and humiliation.

And like an invisible chain reaction, the pathetic, gruesome tableau of desecrated bodies—combined with the unyielding silence of his brother and his friend—begins to break Philip down.

He fights the tears pooling in his eyes and juts his quivering chin out in a mixture of defiance and self-loathing. He works his mouth like he’s got something important to impart, and it takes a huge effort to speak, but he finally manages to say in a choked mutter, “Whatever.”

Nick looks mortified, staring at Philip in disbelief. “‘Whatever’?”

Philip turns and walks away, pulling the Glock from his belt as he goes. He snaps the slide and fires into the wall of the barn—BOOOOMMMMMM!—the recoil kicking in his hand, the loud bark making Brian jump. BOOOOOMMMM! Another blast flashes in the darkness, taking a chunk of the door. BOOOOOMMMM! The third shot puts a chink in the rafter and rains debris down on the floor.

Philip angrily kicks the doors open and storms out of the barn.

The silence left behind seems to ripple for a moment with afterimages of Philip’s fiery wrath. Brian hasn’t taken his eyes off the floor throughout all this, and he continues to hang his head and stare miserably at the moldy matted hay. Nick takes one last look at the bodies, and then lets out a long, pained, unsteady breath. He looks at Brian, and he shakes his head. “There you have it,” he says.

But something behind his words—the subtle tone of dread in his voice—tells Brian that things have now irrevocably changed in their little dysfunctional family.