Rise of the Governor

“My daughter’s in there,” Philip says, coming nose to nose with Marsh. The volatile chemicals of rage and panic and pain can instantly ignite in Philip Blake.

Bobby looks at the blood-slicked floor. “Sorry, sorry.”

“Go get the tarps, Bobby.”

Six feet away, Brian Blake, still on his hands and knees, expels the last of his stomach contents, and continues to dry-heave.

Philip goes over to his older brother, kneels by him. “Let it out.”

“I’m—uh—” Brian croaks, sniffing, trying to form a complete thought.

Philip gently lays a big, grimy, callused hand on his brother’s hunched shoulders. “It’s okay, bro … just let it all out.”

“I’m—s-sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

Brian gets himself under control, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Y-you think you got all of them?”

“I do.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

“You searched … everywhere? In the basement and stuff?”

“Yes, sir, we did. All the bedrooms … even the attic. Last one came out of hiding at the sound of that fucking cough, loud enough to wake the fucking dead. Teenage girl, tried to have one of Bobby’s chins for lunch.”

Brian gulps down a raw, painful swallow. “These people … they … lived here.”

Philip sighs. “Not anymore.”

Brian manages to look around the room, then gazes up at his brother. Brian’s face is wet with tears. “But they were like … a family.”

Philip nods, and he doesn’t say anything. He feels like giving his brother a shrug—so fucking what—but all he does is keep nodding. He’s not thinking about the zombified family he just dispatched, or the implications of all the mind-numbing butchery he’s already wreaked over the last three days— slaughtering individuals who were recently soccer moms and mailmen and gas station attendants. Yesterday, Brian had gone off on some bullshit intellectual tangent about the difference between morals and ethics in this situation: Morally, one should never kill, ever, but ethically, which is subtly different, one should maintain the policy of killing only if it’s in self-defense. But Philip doesn’t see what they’re doing as killing. You can’t kill a thing that’s already been killed. What you do is squash it like a bug, and move on, and stop thinking so much.

The fact is, right now, Philip isn’t even thinking about the next move his little ragtag group will make—which is probably going to be entirely up to him (he has become the de facto leader of this bunch, and he might as well face it). Right now, Philip Blake is focused on a single objective: Since the nightmare started less than seventy-two hours ago, and folks started turning—for reasons nobody has yet been able to figure out—all that Philip Blake has been able to think about is protecting Penny. It is why he got the hell out of his hometown, Waynesboro, two days ago.

A small farming community on the eastern edge of central Georgia, the place had gone to hell quickly when folks had started dying and coming back. But it was Penny’s safety that had ultimately convinced Philip to fly the coop. It was because of Penny he had enlisted the help of his old high school buddies; and it was because of Penny he had set out for Atlanta, where, according to the news, refugee centers were being set up. It was all because of Penny. Penny is all that Philip Blake has left. She is the only thing keeping him going—the only salve on his wounded soul.

Long before this inexplicable epidemic had broken out, the void in Philip’s heart would pang at 3 A.M on sleepless nights. That’s the exact hour he had lost his wife—hard to believe it’s been nearly four years now—on a rain-slick highway south of Athens. Sarah had been visiting a friend at the University of Georgia, and she’d been drinking, and she lost control of her car on a winding road in Wilkes County.

From the moment he had identified the body, Philip knew he would never be the same. He had no qualms about doing the right thing—taking on two jobs to keep Penny fed and clothed and cared for—but he would never be the same. Maybe that’s why all this was happening. God’s little gag. When the locusts come, and the river runs red with blood, the guy with the most to lose gets to lead the pack.

“Doesn’t matter who they were,” Philip finally says to his brother. “Or what they were.”

“Yeah … I guess you’re right.” By this point, Brian has managed to sit up, cross-legged now, taking deep wheezing breaths. He watches Bobby and Nick across the room, unrolling large canvas tarps and shaking open garbage bags. They begin rolling corpses, still dripping, into the tarps.

“Only thing that matters is we got this place cleaned out now,” Philip says. “We can stay here tonight, and if we can score some gas in the morning, we can make it to Atlanta tomorrow.”

“Doesn’t make any sense, though,” Brian mutters now, glancing from corpse to corpse.

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at them.”

“What?” Philip glances over his shoulder at the gruesome remains of the matriarch being rolled up in a tarp. “What about ’em?”

“It’s just the family.”

“So?”

Brian coughs into his sleeve, then wipes his mouth. “What I’m saying is … you got the mother, the father, four teenage kids … and that’s like it.”

“Yeah, so what?”

Brian looks up at Philip. “So, how the hell does something like this happen? They all … turned together? Did one of them get bitten and bring it back inside?”

Philip thinks about it for a moment—after all, he’s still trying to figure out just exactly what is going on, too, how this madness works—but finally Philip gets tired of thinking about it and says, “C’mon, get off your lazy ass and help us.”

* * *

It takes them about an hour to get the place cleaned up. Penny stays in the closet for the duration of the process. Philip brings her a stuffed animal from one of the kid’s rooms, and tells her it won’t be long before she can come out. Brian mops the blood, coughing fitfully, while the other three men drag the canvas-covered corpses—two large and four smaller ones—out the back sliding doors and across the large cedar deck.

The late-September night sky above them is as clear and cold as a black ocean, a riot of stars shining down, taunting them with their impassive, cheerful twinkling. The breaths of the three men show in the darkness as they drag the bundles across dew-frosted planks. They carry pickaxes on their belts. Philip has a gun stuffed down the back of his belt. It’s an old .22 Ruger that he bought at a flea market years ago, but nobody wants to rouse the dead with the bark of gunfire right now. They can hear the telltale drone of walking dead on the wind—garbled moaning sounds, shuffling footsteps—coming from somewhere in the darkness of the neighboring yards.

It’s been an unusually nippy early autumn in Georgia, and tonight the mercury is supposed to dip into the lower forties, perhaps even the upper thirties. Or at least that’s what the local AM radio station claimed before it petered out in a gust of static. Up to this point in their journey, Philip and his crew have been monitoring TV, radio, and the Internet on Brian’s BlackBerry.

Amid the general chaos, the news reports have been assuring people that everything is just peachy-keen— your trusty government is in control of the situation—and this little bump in the road will be smoothed out in a matter of hours. Regular warnings chime in on civil defense frequencies, admonishing folks to stay indoors, and keep out of sparsely populated areas, and wash their hands frequently, and drink bottled water, and blah, blah, blah.

Of course, nobody has any answers. And maybe the most ominous sign of all is the increasing number of station failures. Thankfully, gas stations still have gas, grocery stores are still stocked, and electrical grids and stoplights and police stations and all the infrastructural paraphernalia of civilization seem to be hanging on.

But Philip worries that a loss of power will raise the stakes in unimaginable ways.