Rise of the Governor

had encountered prostitutes over the years since Sarah’s death who had given up more in the kissing department. Even hookers have feelings, and Philip would usually ask at the beginning of a session if they would mind terribly if he slipped in a few kisses, just for good measure, just to pretend there was love involved. But this little smooch of April’s is more like hors d’oeuvres, a hint of things to come. Philip wouldn’t call it a tease. Nor would he call it the platonic kind of kiss a sister might give a brother. It exists in that irresistible limbo between two extremes. It is— from Philip’s perspective—a knock on the door, an attempt to see if anyone’s home.

* * *

That afternoon, Philip expects the rain to come but it doesn’t. It’s already mid-October—he has no idea what day it is—and everybody keeps expecting the gulley-washers that traditionally sweep through central Georgia this time of year to roll in, but something keeps them at bay. The temperature is dropping, and the air buzzes with latent moisture, but still the rain doesn’t come. Maybe the drought has something to do with the plague. But for whatever reason, the unsettled sky, with its dark underbelly of storm clouds, seems to reflect the strange, inexplicable tension building in Philip.

Late in the day, he asks April to go with him on a quick trip down the street.

It takes some convincing—despite the fact that the zombie quotient has thinned dramatically since the last time they went out. Philip tells April he needs help scouting the vicinity for a Home Depot or a Lowe’s that might have generators lying around. It’s getting colder and colder, especially at night, and they’re going to need power soon in order to survive. He says he needs somebody who knows the area.

He also tells her that he wants to show her the safe routes Nick has been carving out. Nick offers to go along but Philip says it would be better if he stuck around and kept watch on the place with Brian.

April is up to the task, and is willing to go, but she’s a little dubious about the rickety, homemade catwalk. What if it starts raining when they’re on the ladders? Philip assures her it’s a piece of cake, especially for a little drink of water her size.

They get their coats on and get their weapons ready—April brings along one of the Marlins this time—and they prepare to embark. Tara is seething with anger at them, disgusted by what she calls “a stupid, dangerous, immature, retarded waste of time.” Philip and April politely ignore her.

* * *

“Don’t look down!”

Philip is halfway across the makeshift ladder-bridge over the back alley. April is ten feet behind him, holding on for dear life. Gazing over his shoulder at her, he smiles to himself. Major cojones on this girl.

“I’m cool,” she says, crabbing along with white knuckles and clenched jaw. The wind tousles her hair. Thirty feet beneath her, a pair of moving cadavers dumbly gaze around the air for the source of the voices.

“Almost home free,” Philip urges as he reaches the other side.

She crabs the remaining twenty feet. He helps her down onto the fire-escape landing. The cast-iron grating squeaks under their weight.

They find the open window and slip inside the former home of Stevenson and Sons Accounting and Estate Planning. The office corridors are darker and colder than they were the last time Philip traversed their length. The storm front has brought dusk to the area earlier than usual tonight.

They cross the empty hallways. “Don’t worry,” Philip assures her as they crunch across debris and crumpled tax returns, “This place is as safe as you can get, this day and age.”

“That’s not very reassuring,” she says, cradling the shotgun, thumbing the hammer nervously.

Dressed in tattered fleece and jeans, April has her arms and lower legs wrapped with gaffer’s tape. Nobody else does this. Philip asked her about it once and she told him she saw an animal trainer do it on TV—a last-resort defense against a bite breaking the skin.

They cross the lobby and find the access stairs just past the ruined vending machines.

“Get a load of this,” Philip says as he leads her up the single flight to the unmarked door. He pauses before opening the door. “You remember Captain Nemo?”

“Who?”

“That old flick Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? That old loony captain, playing his organ in that submarine, while the giant squids swim across them big picture windows?”

“Never saw it.”

Philip smiles at her. “Well, you’re about to.”

* * *

The last thing April Chalmers expects is for something other than horrific violence to take her breath away, but that’s pretty much what happens when she follows Philip through the unmarked door and onto the pedestrian bridge. She pauses on the threshold and just stares.

She’s been in these urban breezeways before—maybe even this very bridge—but somehow, tonight, the gauzy light and space of the thing, as it stretches across the intersection, thirty feet above the streets, connecting up with the second floor of Dillard’s, seems almost miraculous. Through the glass roof, veins of lightning flicker and thread across the storm clouds. Through the transparent walls, the darkening shadows of the city teem with wandering zombies. Atlanta looks like a vast game board in chaotic disarray.

“I see what you mean,” she says. Her voice comes out in a murmur, as she takes it all in, feeling a weird mixture of emotions—giddiness, fear, excitement.

Philip strolls down the center of the bridge, pausing by one wall and shrugging off the straps of his duffel bag. He nods to the south. “Want you to see something,” he says. “C’mere.”

She joins him, putting down her shotgun and backpack against the glass wall.

Philip points out the marks on the abandoned vehicles and doorways left by Nick Parsons. Philip explains the theory of “safe zones” and he talks about how cunning Nick has become. “I think he’s got something really good going here,” Philip concludes.

April agrees. “We could use those hiding places when we find that generator everybody’s talking about.”

“You got that right, sister.”

“Nick’s a good guy.”

“That he is.”

The encroaching darkness is drawing down over the city, and in the bluish shadows of the bridgeway, Philip’s rugged face looks even craggier to April than usual. With his inky black Fu Manchu whiskers and dark eyes nested in laugh lines, he reminds April of a cross between a young Clint Eastwood and … who? Her dad as a young man? Is that why she’s feeling these twinges of attraction toward the big, lanky redneck? Is April so retarded that she’s attracted to a man just because he’s the doppelganger of her father? Or does this pathetic puppy love have something to do with the stress of fighting to survive in a world suddenly doomed with extinction? This is the guy who cracked open her daddy’s skull, for God’s sake. But maybe that’s unfair. That was not David Chalmers back there. Her daddy’s spirit, as the song goes, had flown away. His soul had departed long before he climbed out of his bed and tried to make a meal out of his eldest daughter.

“I gotta tell you,” Philip is saying, gazing out at the ragged figures, like stray dogs, roaming the streets for scraps. “We get a few things in place, and we could stay for a long time in that apartment building.”

“I think you’re right. All we gotta do is figure out a way to slip some Valium into Tara’s oatmeal.”

Philip laughs—a good, clean laugh—which shows a side of him that April has not yet seen. He looks at her. “We got an opportunity here, we can make this work. We can do more than just survive. And I’m not just talking about getting a generator.”

April looks up into his eyes. “Whaddaya mean?”

He turns toward her. “Met a lotta girls in my day, ain’t never run across one quite like you. Tough as nails … but the tenderness you show toward my kid? Never seen Penny take to somebody like she’s taken to you. Hell, you saved our asses, pulling us off the streets. You’re a very special lady, you know that?”

All at once April feels her skin flush hot with chills, and her midsection weaken, and she realizes Philip is looking at her in a new way. His eyes shimmer with emotion. She knows now that he’s been thinking the same thing that she has. She looks down, embarrassed. “Your standards must be low,” she mutters.

He reaches out and gently puts one of his big, callused workman’s hands on the curve of her jaw. “I got the highest standards of anybody I know.”

A clap of thunder booms outside the glass, rattling the bridge and making April jump.