Rise of the Governor

brewed on a Sterno can. Her eyes are clear for the first time since she came out of the death room that morning. “Poor thing … I think she’s trying to pray him back to life.”

“No shame in that,” Philip says. He sits across the table from her, a half-eaten bowl of rice in front of him. He has no appetite.

“Have you thought about what you want to do?” Brian asks from across the kitchen. He stands at the sink where he’s pouring water, which was collected from some of the toilets upstairs, into filter canisters.

The sounds of Nick and Penny playing cards in the other room drift in.

April looks up at Brian. “Do about what?”

“Your father … you know … like, burialwise?”

April sighs. “You’ve been through this before, haven’t you?” she says to Philip.

Philip looks at his uneaten rice. He has no idea if she’s talking about Bobby Marsh or Sarah Blake, both of whose deaths Philip recounted to April the other night. “Yes, ma’am, that’s true.” He looks at her. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll help you do it.”

“Of course we’ll bury him.” Her voice breaks a little bit. She looks down. “I just never pictured myself doing it in a place like this.”

“We’ll do it together,” Philip says. “We’ll do it right and proper.”

April looks down, a tear falling into her tea. “I hate this.”

“We gotta stick together,” Philip says without much conviction. He says it because he doesn’t know what else to say.

April wipes her eyes. “There’s a patch of ground out back under the—”

A sharp noise from the hallway interrupts, and all heads turn.

A muffled thump is followed by a crash, the sound of furniture overturning.

Philip is out of his chair before the others even realize that the noise is coming from behind the closed door of the master bedroom.

THIRTEEN

Philip kicks the door open. Advent candles on the floor. The carpet burning in places. The smoky air vibrating with screams. A blur of movement smears across the darkness and it takes breathless nanoseconds for Philip to realize what he’s looking at in the flickering shadows.

The overturned dresser—the source of the crashing noise—has landed inches away from Tara, who’s on the floor, crawling with animal instinct, trying desperately to pull herself free of the vise grip of dead fingers on her legs.

Dead fingers?

At first, just for an instant, Philip figures something got in through a window, but then he sees the withered form of David Chalmers—completely turned now—on the floor, on top of Tara’s legs, digging yellowed fingernails into her flesh. The old man’s sunken face is livid now, the color of mold, his eyes frosted with glassy-white cataracts. He snarls with a ravenous guttural groan.

Tara manages to extricate herself and struggles to her feet, and then slams sideways into the wall.

Right then, many things happen at once: Philip realizes what’s going on, and that he left his gun in the kitchen, and that he has a limited amount of time to eradicate this threat.

That is the key—the fact that the kindly old mandolin player is long gone—and what this is, this hulking mass of dead tissue rising up and growling a garbled, drooling cry, is a threat. More than the flames licking across the carpet, more than the smoke—already forming a nightmarish haze in the room—this thing that has materialized inside their sanctuary is the biggest threat.

A threat to all of them.

At this same moment, before Philip has a chance to even move, the others arrive, filling the open doorway. April lets out an anguished yelp—not really a scream, more like a shriek of pain, like an animal getting gut shot. She pushes her way into the room, but Brian grabs her and holds her back. April writhes in his arms.

All this happens in the space of an instant as Philip sees the bat.

In all the excitement on the previous night, April had left her Hank Aaron autographed metal baseball bat in the corner by the barred window. Now it sits gleaming in the flickering flames, maybe fifteen feet away from Philip. There is no time to consider the distance or even map out a maneuver in his mind. All he has time to do is make a lunge across the room.

By this point, Nick has whirled around and is racing across the apartment for his gun. Brian tries to pull April out of the room, but she’s strong and she’s frantic and she’s screaming now.

It takes Philip mere seconds to cover the distance between the door and the bat. But in that brief span of time, the thing that was once David Chalmers goes for Tara. Before the large woman can get her bearings and flee the room, the dead man is upon her.

Cold, gray fingers ply themselves awkwardly toward her throat. She slams back against the wall, flailing at it, trying to push it away. Rotting jaws part, rancid breath wafting up in her face. Blackened teeth gape open. The thing goes for the pale, fleshy curve of her jugular.

Tara shrieks, but before the teeth have a chance to make contact, the bat comes down.

* * *

Up until this moment—especially for Philip—the act of vanquishing a moving corpse had become an almost perfunctory deed, as mechanical and obligatory as stunning a pig for the slaughter. But this feels different. It takes only three sharp blows.

The first one—a hard crack to the back temporal region of David Chalmers’s skull—stiffens the zombie and arrests its progress toward Tara’s neck. She slips to the floor in a paroxysm of tears and snot.

The second blow strikes the side of the skull as the thing is involuntarily turning toward its attacker, the tempered steel of the bat caving in the parietal bone and part of the nasal cavity, sending threads of pink matter into the air.

The third and final whack totals the entire left hemisphere of its skull as the thing is falling—the sound like a head of cabbage smashed in a drill press. The monster that was David Chalmers lands in a wet heap on one of the spilled candles, the ribbons of drool, blood, and gluey gray tissue hitting the flames and sizzling across the floor.

Philip stands over the body, out of breath, his hands still welded to the bat. Almost as punctuation to the horror, a high-pitched beeping noise begins to shrill. Battery-operated fire alarms across the first floor are loudly chirping, and it takes Philip a second to identify the sounds in his ringing ears. He drops the bloody bat.

And that is when he notices the difference. This time, after this extermination, nobody moves. April stares from the doorway. Brian releases his grip on her, and he too gapes. Even Tara, sitting up against the wall across the room, gripped in tears of revulsion and agony, settles into an almost catatonic stare.

The strangest thing is, rather than staring at the bloody heap on the floor, they are all staring at Philip.

* * *

In due course, they put out all the fires, and they clean the place up. They wrap the body and move it out into the corridor where it will be safe until burial.

Luckily, Penny witnessed very little of the debacle in the room. She heard enough of it, though, to make her withdraw back into her mute, invisible shell.

In fact, for quite a long time, nobody else has much to say, either, and the edgy silence continues throughout the rest of that day.

The sisters seem to be in some kind of shocked stupor, just going through the motions of the cleanup, not even talking to each other. They have each cried their eyes dry. But they keep staring at Philip; he can feel it like cold fingers on the back of his neck. What the hell did they expect? What did they want him to do? Let the monster feed on Tara? Did they want Philip to try and negotiate with the thing?

* * *

At noon the following day, they hold a makeshift memorial service in a section of the courtyard surrounded by