Rise of the Governor

because he lost Penny—we’ve all lost people we love. He came very close to taking you out.”

Brian looks at his own mangled feet sticking out of the bottom of the blankets. With great effort, he says, “I deserve everything I got.”

“Don’t say that! It wasn’t your fault, what happened. Your brother’s turned a corner with this thing. I’m really worried about him.”

“He’ll be okay.” Brian looks at Nick. “What’s wrong? Something else is bothering you.”

Nick takes a deep breath and wonders whether he should confide in Brian. The Blake brothers have always had a complex relationship, and over the years, Nick Parsons has often felt that he was more of a brother to Philip Blake than his biological sibling. But there’s always been an X factor with the Blakes, a bond of blood that runs deep within the two men.

Nick finally says, “I know you aren’t exactly the religious type. I know you think I’m a Holy Roller.”

“That’s not true, Nick.”

Nick waves it off. “Doesn’t matter … my faith is strong, and I don’t judge a man by his religion.”

“Where you going with this?”

Nick looks at Brian. “He’s keeping her alive, Brian … or maybe alive is not the right word.”

“Penny?”

“He’s out there with her now.”

“Where?”

Nick explains what’s been going on over these last two days since the firefight. While Brian has been recovering from the beating, Philip’s been busy. He’s keeping two of the intruders—the only ones who survived the firefight—locked up in the barn. Philip claims he’s questioning them about possible human settlements. Nick is worried he’s torturing them. But that’s the least of their worries. The fate of Penny Blake is what’s eating at Nick. “He’s got her chained to a tree like a pet,” Nick says.

Brian frowns. “Where?”

“Out in the orchard. He goes out there at night. Spends time with her.”

“Oh God.”

“Listen, I know you think this is bullshit, but the way I was brought up, there’s a force in the universe called Good and a force called Evil.”

“Nick, I don’t think this is—”

“Wait. Let me finish. I believe that all this—the plague or whatever you want to call it—is the work of what you would call the Devil or Satan.”

“Nick—”

“Just let me say my piece. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“What’s the thing Satan hates the most? The power of love? Maybe. Somebody being born again. Yeah, probably. But I kinda think it’s when a person passes, and their spirit flies up to Paradise.”

“I’m not following you.”

Nick looks into Brian’s hollow gaze. “That’s what’s going on here, Brian. The Devil’s figured out a way to keep people’s souls trapped here on earth.”

A moment passes as Brian absorbs this. Nick doesn’t expect Brian to believe any of this, but maybe, just maybe, Nick can get him to understand.

In that brief silence, the north wind whistles in the shutters. The weather is turning. The villa creaks and moans. Nick lifts the collar of his mothball-scented sweater—days ago, they found some warm clothes in the villa’s attic—and now he shivers in the frigid air of the second floor. “What your brother’s doing is wrong, it’s against God,” Nick says then, and the statement hangs in the gloom.

* * *

At that moment, out in the darkness of the orchard, a small campfire crackles and flickers on the ground. Philip sits on the cold earth in front of the fire, his shotgun next to him, a musty little book he found in the villa’s nursery open on his lap. “‘Let me in, Let me in, Little Pig,’” Philip reads aloud in a stiff, labored singsong voice. “‘Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and blow your house in!’”

Three feet away, tied to the tree trunk, Penny Blake snarls and drools at every word, her tiny jaws snapping impotently.

“‘Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin,’” Philip recites, turning a delicate page of onionskin. He pauses and glances up at the thing that used to be his daughter.

In the flicker of firelight, Penny’s small face contorts with unyielding hunger, as wrinkled and bloated as a jack-o’-lantern. Her midsection, wound with baling wire, strains against the tree. She reaches out with curled, clawlike fingers and clutches at the air—yearning to break free and make a meal of her father.

“‘But of course,’” Philip continues, his voice breaking, “‘the wolf did blow the house in.’” An agonizing pause before Philip says in a shattered voice, filled with equal parts sorrow and madness, “‘And he ate the pig.’”

* * *

Over the remainder of that week, sleep does not come easily for Philip Blake. He tries to get a few hours each night but the nervous energy keeps him tossing and turning until he has to get up and do something. Most nights, he goes out to the barn and works off some of his rage on Sonny and Cher. They are the ostensible reasons Penny has turned, and it is up to Philip to make sure they suffer like no man or woman has ever suffered. The delicate process of keeping them just this side of death is not easy. Every once in a while, Philip has to give them water to make sure they don’t die on him. He also has to be careful they don’t kill themselves in order to escape their torments. Like a good jailer, Philip keeps the ropes tight, and all sharp objects out of their grasp.

On this night—Philip thinks it’s a Friday—he waits until Nick and Brian are asleep before he slips out of his room, pulls on his denim jacket and boots, and makes his way out the back door and across the moonlit grounds to the weather-beaten barn on the northeast corner of the property. He likes to announce himself as he arrives.

“Daddy’s home,” he murmurs in a convivial tone, his breath showing in puffs of vapor as he pulls the padlock and pushes open the double doors.

He flips on a battery-powered lantern.

Sonny and Cher are slumped in the shadows where he left them, two ragged creatures trussed up like suckling pigs, side by side, sitting in a spreading pool of their own blood, piss, and shit. Sonny is barely awake, his head lolled to one side, his heavy-lidded junkie eyes rimmed in red. Cher is unconscious. She lies next to him, her leather pants still down around her ankles.

Each of them bear the festering marks of Philip’s tools of punishment—needle-nosed pliers, barbed wire, two-by-fours with exposed rusty nails, and various blunt objects that occur to Philip in the heat of the moment.

“Wake up, sis!” Philip reaches down and flips the woman onto her back, the restraints cutting into her wrists, the rope around her neck keeping her from squirming too much. He slaps her. Her eyes flutter. Philip slaps her again. She comes awake now, the muffled cries dampened by the hank of duct tape over her mouth.

At some point in the night, she managed to pull her bloody panties back up and over her privates.

“Let me once again remind you,” Philip says, yanking her panties back down to her knees. He stands over her, wrenching her legs apart with his boots as though clearing a path for himself. She writhes and wriggles below him as if she might be able to squirm out of her own skin. “Y’all are the ones took my daughter from me—so we’re all gonna go to hell together.”

Philip unbuckles his belt, and drops his pants, and it doesn’t require much imagination for him to instantly produce an erection—his rage and hate burn so warmly in his solar plexus, it feels like a battering ram. He drops to his knees between the woman’s trembling legs.

The first thrust is always the trigger—the voice in his brain abruptly chiming out, taunting him, urging him on with fragments of old biblical nonsense that his daddy used to mumble while drunk: Vengeance is mine, vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord!

But tonight, after the third or fourth thrust into the limp woman, Philip stops.

A combination of things steals his focus, hooks his attention. He hears footsteps outside, crunching across the rear of the property, and he even sees, through the slatted siding, the shadow of a figure blurring past the barn.