Rise of the Governor

“What was that, Pen?” Brian cradles her against him and wipes her tear.

She says something again, and again, and again, but not exactly to Brian. She says it more like a mantra, or a prayer, or an incantation: “It’s never-ever going to be okay, never-ever-ever-ever- ever.”

“Sshhhhh.” He holds her head, pressing it gently against the folds of his T-shirt. He feels the damp heat of her face against his ribs. He covers her ears again as he hears the THWACK of another axe blade outside the closet, smashing through the membrane of a scalp, into the hard shell of a skull, through the layers of dura, and into the pulpy gray gelatin of an occipital lobe.

It makes a smacking noise like a baseball bat hitting a wet softball—the ejaculate of blood like a mop head slapping the floor—followed by a ghastly, wet thud. Oddly, that’s the worst part for Brian: that hollow, moist thump of a body landing on expensive ceramic tile. The tile is custom made for the house, with elaborate inlay and Aztec designs. It’s a lovely house … or at least, it once was.

Again the noises cease.

Again the horrible dripping silence follows. Brian stifles a cough, holding it in like a firecracker that’s about to pop, so he can better hear the minute changes in breathing outside the closet, the greasy footsteps shuffling through gore. But the place is dead silent now.

Brian feels the child seize up next to him—little Penny girding herself for another salvo of axe blows—but the silence stretches.

Inches away, the sound of a bolt clicking, and the closet doorknob turning, rashes Brian’s body with gooseflesh. The door swings open.

“Okay, we’re good.” The baritone voice, whiskey-cured and smoky, comes from a man peering down into the recesses of the closet. Eyes blinking at the darkness, face shimmering with sweat, flush with the exertion of zombie disposal, Philip Blake holds a grue-slick axe in his workman’s hand.

“You sure?” Brian utters.

Ignoring his brother, Philip gazes down at his daughter. “Everything’s okay, punkin, Daddy’s okay.”

“Are you sure?” Brian says with a cough.

Philip looks at his brother. “You mind covering your mouth, sport?”

Brian wheezes, “You sure it’s clear?”

“Punkin?” Philip Blake addresses his daughter tenderly, his faint Southern drawl belying the bright, feral embers of violence just now fading in his eyes. “I’m gonna need y’all to stay right there for a minute. Awright? You stay right there until Daddy says it’s okay to come out. You understand?”

With a slight nod, the pale little girl gives him a feeble gesture of understanding.

“C’mon, sport,” Philip urges his older brother out of the shadows. “Gonna need your help with the cleanup.”

Brian struggles to his feet, pushing his way through the hanging overcoats.

He emerges from the closet and blinks at the harsh light of the vestibule. He stares and coughs and stares some more. For a brief moment, it looks as though the lavish entryway of the two-story Colonial, brightly lit by fancy copper chandeliers, is in the throes of being redecorated by a work crew afflicted by palsy. Great swaths of eggplant-purple spatters stain the teal green plaster walls. Rorschach patterns of black and crimson adorn the baseboards and moldings. Then the shapes on the floor register.

Six bodies lie akimbo in bloody heaps. Ages and genders are obscured by the wet carnage, the mottled, livid skin tones, and the misshapen skulls. The largest lies in a spreading pool of bile at the foot of the great circular staircase. Another one, perhaps the lady of the house, perhaps once a convivial hostess offering peach cobbler and Southern hospitality, is now splayed across the lovely white parquet floor in a contorted mess, a stringer of wormy gray matter flagging from her breached cranium.

Brian Blake feels his gorge rising, his throat involuntarily dilating.

“Okay, gentlemen, we got our work cut out for us,” Philip is saying, addressing his two cronies, Nick and Bobby, as well as his brother, but Brian can barely hear over the sick thump of his own heartbeat.

He sees the other remains—over the last two days, Philip has started calling the ones they destroy “twice- cooked pork”—strewn along the dark, burnished baseboards at the threshold of the living room. Maybe the teenage children who once lived here, maybe visitors who suffered the Southern inhospitality of an infected bite, these bodies lie in sunbursts of arterial spray. One of them, his or her dented head lying facedown like a spilled soup pan, still pumps its scarlet fluids across the floor with the profusion of a breached fire hydrant. A couple of others still have small hatchet blades embedded in their crania, sunk down to the hilt, like the flags of explorers triumphantly stuck into once unattainable summits.

Brian’s hand flies up to his mouth, as if he might stem the tide rising up his esophagus. He feels a tapping sensation on the top of his skull, as though a moth is ticking against his scalp. He looks up.

Blood drips from the overhead chandelier, a droplet landing on Brian’s nose.

“Nick, why don’t you go grab some of them tarps we saw earlier in the—”

Brian falls to his knees, hunches forward, and roars vomit across the parquet. The steaming flood of khaki- colored bile sluices across the tiles, mingling with the spoor of the fallen dead.

Tears burn Brian’s eyes as he heaves four days of soul-sickness onto the floor.

* * *

Philip Blake lets out a tense sigh, the buzz of adrenaline still coursing through him. For a moment he makes no effort to go to his brother’s side, but simply stands there, setting down his bloody axe, rolling his eyes. It’s a miracle Philip doesn’t have a groove worn into the tops of his eye sockets from all the eye rolling he’s done over the years on his brother’s account. But what else is Philip supposed to do? The poor son of bitch is family, and family is family … especially in off-the-scale times such as these.

The resemblance is sure there—nothing Philip can do about that. A tall, rangy, sinewy man with the ropy muscles of a tradesman, Philip Blake shares the same dark features as his brother, the same dark almond eyes and coal-black hair of their Mexican-American mother. Mama Rose’s maiden name was Garcia, and her features had dominated the lineage over those of the boys’ father, a big, coarse alcoholic of Scots- Irish descent named Ed Blake. But Philip, three years younger than Brian, had gotten all the muscle.

He now stands over six feet tall in his faded jeans, work boots, and chambray shirt, with the Fu Manchu mustache and jailhouse tats of a biker; and he is about to move his imposing figure over to his retching brother, and maybe say something harsh, when he stops himself. He hears something he doesn’t like coming from across the vestibule.

Bobby Marsh, an old high school pal of Philip’s, stands near the base of the staircase, wiping an axe blade on his size XXL jeans. A portly thirty-two-year-old junior college dropout, his long greasy brown hair pulled back in a rattail, Bobby Marsh is not exactly obese, but definitely overweight, definitely the type of guy his Burke County High classmates would call a butterball. He now giggles with nervous, edgy, belly-shivering laughter as he watches Brian Blake vomit. The giggling is colorless and hollow—a sort of tic that Bobby cannot seem to control.

The anxious giggling had started three days ago when one of the first of the undead had lumbered out of a service bay at a gas station near the Augusta airport. Clad in blood-soaked overalls, the grease monkey shuffled out of hiding with a trail of toilet paper on his heel, and the thing had tried to make a meal out of Bobby’s fat neck before Philip had stepped in and clobbered the thing with a crowbar.

The discovery that day—that a major blow to the head does the job quite nicely—had led to more nervous chortling on Bobby’s part—definitely a defense mechanism—with a lot of anxious chatter about it being “something in the water, man, like the black-fucking-plague.” But Philip didn’t want to hear about reasons for this shit storm then, and he sure doesn’t want to hear about them now.

“Hey!” Philip addresses the heavyset man. “You still think this is funny?”

Bobby’s laughter dies.

On the other side of the room, near a window overlooking the dark expanse of a backyard, which is currently shrouded in night, a fourth figure watches uneasily. Nick Parsons, another friend from Philip’s wayward childhood, is a compact, lean thirty-something with the kind of prep-school grooming and marine-cut hair of an eternal jock. The religious one of the bunch, Nick has taken the longest to get used to the idea of destroying things that were once human. Now his khakis and sneakers are stippled with blood, and his eyes burn with trauma, as he watches Philip approach Bobby.

“Sorry, man,” Bobby mutters.