Rise of the Governor

emergency numbers—which, up to this point, have all played back recordings—are now sending back the classic “fuck you” from the phone company: The number you have dialed is not available at this time, please try again later.

By late morning that day, the sky clouds over.

In the afternoon, a dismal, chill mist falls on the community, and everybody huddles indoors, trying to ignore the fact that there’s a fine line between being safe and being a prisoner. Other than Nick, most of them are tired of talking about Atlanta. Atlanta seems farther away now—as if the more they ponder the twenty-some miles between Wiltshire and the city, the more impassable they seem.

That night, after everybody drifts off to sleep, Philip sits his lonely vigil in the living room next to a slumbering Penny.

The mist has deteriorated into full-blown thunder and lightning.

Philip pokes a finger between two shutter slats, and he peers out into the darkness. Through the gap, he can see—over the top of the barricade—the winding side streets and massive shadows of live oaks, their branches bending in the wind.

Lightning flickers.

Two hundred yards away, a dozen or so humanoid shapes materialize in the strobe light, moving aimlessly through the rain.

It’s hard to tell for sure from Philip’s vantage point, but it looks as though the things might be moving—in their leaden, retarded fashion, like stroke victims—this way. Do they smell fresh meat? Did the noises of human activity draw them out? Or are they simply lumbering around randomly like ghastly goldfish in a bowl?

Right then, for the first time since they arrived at Wiltshire Estates, Philip Blake begins to wonder if their days in this womb of wall-to-wall carpet and overstuffed sofas are numbered.

* * *

The fourth day dawns cold and overcast. The pewter-colored sky hangs low over the wet lawns and abandoned homes. Although the occasion goes unspoken, the new day marks a milestone of sorts: the beginning of the plague’s second week.

Now Philip stands with his coffee in the living room, peering out through the shutters at the jury-rigged barricade. In the pale morning light, he can see the northeast corner of the fence shuddering and trembling. “Son of a buck,” he mutters under his breath.

“What’s the matter?” Brian’s voice snaps Philip out of his stupor.

“There’s more of ’em.”

“Shit. How many?”

“Can’t tell.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Bobby!”

The big man trundles into the living room in his sweatpants and bare feet, eating a banana. Philip turns to his portly pal and says, “Get dressed.”

Bobby swallows a mouthful of banana. “What’s going on?”

Philip ignores the question, looks at Brian. “Keep Penny in the family room.”

“Will do,” Brian says, and hurries off.

Philip starts toward the stairs, calling out as he goes: “Get the nail gun and as many extension cords as you can carry … hatchets, too!”

* * *

FFFFFFFOOOMP! Number five goes down like a giant rag doll in tattered suit pants, the dead, milky eyes rolling back in its head as it slides down the other side of the fence, its putrid body collapsing to the parkway. Philip steps back, breathing hard from the exertion, damp with sweat in his denim jacket and jeans.

Numbers one through four had been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel—one female and three males—all of whom Philip had sneaked up on with the nail gun as they bumped and clawed against the weak spot at the fence’s corner. At that point, all Philip had to do was stand on the bottom strut with a good angle on the tops of their heads. He put them down quickly, one after another: FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP!

Number five had been slippery. Inadvertently jerking out of the line of fire at the last moment, it did a little intoxicated shuffle, then craned its neck upward at Philip, jaws snapping. Philip had to waste two nails—both of which ricocheted off the sidewalk—before he finally sent one home into the suit-wearing asshole’s cerebral cortex.

Now Philip catches his breath, doubled over with exhaustion, the nail gun still in his right hand, still plugged into the house with four twenty-five-foot cords. He straightens up and listens. The front parkway is silent now. The fence is still.

Glancing over his shoulder, Philip sees Bobby Marsh in the backyard, about a hundred feet away. The big man is sitting on his fat ass, trying to catch his breath, leaning against a small abandoned doghouse. The doghouse has a little shingle roof and the word LADDIE BOY mounted above the opening at one end.

These rich people and their fucking dogs, Philip thinks ruefully, still a little manic and wired. Probably fed that thing better than most kids.

Over the back fence, about twenty feet away from Bobby, the limp remains of a dead woman are draped over the crest, a hatchet still buried in her skull where Bobby Marsh put out her lights.

Philip gives Bobby a wave and a hard, questioning look: Everything cool?

Bobby returns the gesture with a thumbs-up.

Then … almost without warning … things begin happening very quickly.

* * *

The first indication that something is decidedly not cool occurs within a split second of Bobby signaling the thumbs-up sign to his friend and leader and mentor. Drenched in sweat, his heart still pumping with the burden of his huge girth as he sits leaning against the doghouse, Bobby manages to accompany the thumbs-up signal with a smile … completely oblivious to the muffled noise coming from inside the doghouse.

For years now, Bobby Marsh has secretly yearned to please Philip Blake, and the prospects of giving Philip the thumbs-up after a messy job well done fills Bobby with a weird kind of satisfaction.

An only child, barely able to make it out of high school, Bobby clung to Philip in the years before Sarah Blake had died, and after that—after Philip had drifted away from his drinking buddies—Bobby had desperately tried to reconnect. Bobby called Philip too many times; Bobby talked too much when they were together; and Bobby often made a fool of himself trying to keep up with the wiry, alpha dog of a ringleader. But now, in a strange way, Bobby feels as though this bizarre epidemic has—among other things—given Bobby a way to bond again with Philip.

All of which is probably why, at first, Bobby doesn’t hear the noise inside the doghouse.

When the thump comes—as if a giant heart were beating inside the little miniature shack—Bobby’s smile freezes on his face, and his upturned thumb falls to his side. And by the time the realization that there’s something inside the doghouse—something moving—manages to travel the synapses of Bobby’s brain and register plainly enough for him to move, it’s already too late.

Something small and low to the ground bursts out of the doghouse’s arched opening.

* * *

Philip is already halfway across the yard, running at a full sprint, when it becomes clear that the thing that has just thrust its way out of the doghouse is a tiny human being—or at least a rotting, bluish, contorted facsimile of a tiny human being—with leaves and dog shit in its filthy, matted blond bangs, and chains tangled around its waist and legs.

“F-FUH-FFUHHHHK!” Bobby yelps and jerks back away from the twelve-year-old corpse as the thing that was once a boy now pounces on Bobby’s ham-hock-sized leg.

Bobby tumbles sideways, ripping his leg free in the nick of time, just as the little contorted face—like a sunken gourd with hollow cavities for eyes—gobbles the grass where Bobby’s leg had been one millisecond earlier.