Rise of the Governor

“Looking for that damned refugee center everybody was talking about.”

Philip stares at the shotgun. “‘Best laid plans,’ I guess.”

“Damn straight,” says the old man, the faint whistle of oxygen seeping from the tank. “I don’t suppose you realize what you done to us.”

“I’m listening.”

“You got them Biters all stirred up. By sundown, there’s gonna be a goddamn convention of them things outside our door.”

Philip sniffs. “I’m sorry about that but it ain’t like we had a choice.”

The old man sighs. “Well now … I suppose that’s true.”

“Your daughter’s the one pulled us off the street … we had no bad intentions. Hell, we had no intentions at all … other than keepin’ from getting bit.”

“Yeah, well … I can see your point there.”

A long beat of silence follows. Everybody waits. The two firearms begin to lower.

“What are them cases for?” Philip finally asks, nodding toward the row of tattered instrument cases across the rear of the living room. His gun is still raised but the fight-or-flight juice has drained from him. “You got tommy guns in them things?”

The old man finally lets out a flinty laugh. He lays his gun on his lap, crosswise, letting up on the hammers, all the tension draining out of his gaunt face. The oxygen tank pings. “My friend, you’re lookin’ at what’s left of the World Famous Chalmers Family Band, stars of stage, screen, and state fairs across the South.” The old man sets the gun down on the floor with a grunt. He looks up at Philip. “I apologize for the ornery reception.” He struggles to his feet, rising to his full height until he looks like a withered Abe Lincoln. “Name’s David Chalmers, mandolin, vocals, and father of these two ragamuffins.”

Philip shoves his gun back behind his belt. “Philip Blake. This is my brother Brian. And that wallflower over there is Nick Parsons … and I thank you kindly for saving our asses out there.”

The two patriarchs shake hands, and the tension goes out of the room with the suddenness of an off switch being thrown.

* * *

It turns out there was a fourth member of the Chalmers Family Band—Mrs. Chalmers—a portly little matron from Chattanooga who sang high soprano on the group’s bluegrass and old-timey numbers. According to April, it was a blessing in disguise that the matriarch of the family succumbed to pneumonia five years earlier. If she had lived to see this horrible shit inflicting the human race, she would have been crushed, would have seen it as the end-time, and probably would have walked right off the pier at Clark’s Hill Lake.

So it was that the Chalmers Family Band became a trio, and went on with the act, playing the carny circuit across the tristate area, with Tara on bass, April on guitar, and Daddy on mandolin. As a single father, the sixty- six-year-old David had his hands full. Tara was a pothead, and April had her mother’s temper and single- mindedness.

When the plague broke out, they were in Tennessee at a bluegrass festival, and they made their way back home in the band’s camper. They got as far as the Georgia border before the camper broke down. From there, they got lucky enough to find an Amtrak train that was still running between Dalton and Atlanta. Unfortunately, the train deposited them smack-dab in the middle of the southeast side, at King Memorial Station, which was now lousy with the dead. Somehow, they managed to work their way north without getting attacked, traveling at night in stolen cars, searching for the mythical refugee center.

“And that’s how we ended up here in our little low-rent paradise,” April tells Philip in a soft voice late that night. She sits on the end of a tattered sofa, while Penny dozes restlessly next to her in a wad of blankets. Philip sits nearby.

Candles are lit on the coffee table. Nick and Brian are asleep on the floor across the room, while David and Tara are each snoring in a different musical key in their respective rooms.

“We’re too petrified to go upstairs, though,” April adds with a trace of regret in her voice. “Even though we could use whatever supplies are still up there. Batteries, canned goods, whatever. Jesus, I’d give my left tit for some toilet paper.”

“Never give that up for a little toilet paper,” Philip says with a grin, sitting barefoot in his stained T-shirt and jeans at the other end of the sofa, his belly full of rice and beans. The Chalmerses’ supplies are running low, but they still had half of the ten-pound bag of rice that they pilfered from a broken shop window a week ago, and enough beans to make dinner for everyone. April cooked. The grub wasn’t bad, either. After dinner, Tara rolled cigarettes with the last of her Red Man tobacco and a few buds of skunkweed. Philip partook in a few puffs, even though he had sworn off pot years ago—it usually made him hear things in his head that he didn’t want to hear. Now his brain feels woolly and thick in the strange afterglow.

April manages a sad smile. “Yeah, well … so close and yet so far.”

“What do you mean?” Philip looks at her, and then slowly looks up at the ceiling. “Oh … right.” He remembers hearing the noise earlier, and making note of it. They’ve quieted down now, but the shuffling, creaking noises from the higher floors have intermittently been crossing the ceiling all evening, moving with the insidious, invisible presence of termites. The fact that Philip almost forgot about these noises is a testament to how desensitized he’s becoming to the prospects of such proximity to the dead. “What about the other ground-floor apartments?” he asks her.

“We picked them clean, got every last bit of usable stuff out of them.”

“What happened in Druid Hills?” he asks after a moment of silence.

April lets out a sigh. “Folks told us there was a refugee center up there. There wasn’t.”

Philip looks at her. “And?”

April shrugs. “We got there and found a whole bunch of people hiding out behind the gates of this big scrap-metal place. People just like us. Scared, confused. We tried to talk some of them into leaving with us. Strength in numbers, all that gung-ho shit.”

“So, what happened?”

“I guess they were too scared to leave and too scared to stay.” April looks down, her face reflecting the candlelight. “Tara and Dad and I found a car that would run, and we gathered up some supplies and took off. But we heard the motorcycles coming when we were pulling away.”

“Motorcycles?”

She nods, rubs her eyes. “We got about a quarter of a mile down the road—maybe not even that far—and we round this hill and all of a sudden we hear, way in the distance behind us, these screams. And we look back across the valley, where this dusty old salvage yard is, and it’s like … I don’t know. Fucking Road Warrior or something.”

“It’s what?”

“This motorcycle gang is tearing the place apart, running people down, entire families, God knows what else. It was pretty damn ugly. And the weird thing is, it wasn’t the near-miss that got to us. It wasn’t the bullet we dodged. I think it was the guilt. We all wanted to go back and help, and be good upstanding citizens and all that, but we didn’t.” She looks at him. “Because we ain’t good upstanding citizens; there ain’t any of those left.”

Philip looks at Penny. “I can see why your daddy wasn’t crazy about the idea of taking in boarders.”

“Ever since that scrap-yard fiasco, he’s been real paranoid about running across any survivors—maybe more paranoid than he is about the Biters.”

“Biters … I heard you say that before. Who came up with that one?”

“That’s my dad’s term; it kinda stuck.”

“I like it.” Philip smiles at her again. “And I like your daddy. He takes care of business, and I don’t blame him for not trusting us. He seems like a tough old nut, and I respect that. We need more like him.”

She sighs. “He’s not as tough as he used to be, I’ll tell you that.”

“What’s he got? Lung cancer?”

“Emphysema.”

“That’s not good,” Philip says, and then he sees something that stops him cold.

April Chalmers has her hand on Penny’s shoulder and is almost absently stroking the little girl as she sleeps. It’s such a tender, unexpected gesture—so natural—that it reaches down into Philip and awakens something inside him that’s long been dormant. He can’t understand the feeling at first, and his confusion must be showing on his