Rise of the Governor

“What? I can’t—”

The woman tries to swallow, and again she says, “K-kill uss … p-please…”

Nick stares. His guts go cold. He feels something softly nudging his hip and he looks down and sees the woman’s scabby hand fumbling at the pistol grip sticking out of his belt. Nick feels all the fight go out of him. His heart sinks down through the floor.

He pulls the .357 from his belt and stands up and gazes down at the abominations on the floor of the barn for a long time.

He says a prayer: the Twenty-third Psalm.

* * *

Brian is on his way back to the barn with a plastic pail of well water when he hears the two muffled pops from inside the barn. Like firecrackers bursting inside tin cans, the blasts are short and sharp. The sound of them makes Brian freeze in his tracks, the water sloshing over the rim of the bucket. He sucks in a startled breath.

Then he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a faint light flickering on in one of the villa’s second-floor windows: Philip’s room. A flashlight up there plays across the window, then vanishes. This is followed by a series of muffled footsteps banging down the stairs and through the house, hard and fast, and this gets Brian moving again.

He drops the pail. He charges back across the property to the barn. He slams through the doorway, plunging into the dark. Then he hurtles through the shadows, toward the silver beam of light on the floor in the rear. He sees Nick standing over the captives.

A ribbon of cordite smoke rises from the muzzle of the .357 in Nick’s right hand, now hanging at his side as he stares down at the bodies.

Brian joins Nick and starts to say something when all at once Brian looks down and sees the head wounds: blossoms of gore bloom up the stall door—shimmering in the horizontal light beam.

The man and the woman are stone-cold dead, each one of them now lying supine in their drying fluids, their faces at peace, released from their contortions of misery. Again, Brian tries to say something.

He can’t get out any words.

* * *

A moment later, in the darkness across the barn, the double doors burst open and Philip storms in. Fists clenched at his sides, face chiseled with rage, eyes flashing with white-hot madness, he marches toward the light. He looks as though he’s going to devour somebody. He has a pistol shoved down the side of his belt and a machete banging on one hip.

He gets about halfway across the barn before he starts to slow down.

Nick has turned away from the bodies and is now standing his ground, staring at Philip as he approaches. Brian steps back, a tidal wave of shame crashing down over him. He feels like his soul is being ripped in half. He stares at the floor as his brother approaches slowly now, warily, glancing nervously from the dead bodies to Nick, and then to Brian, and then back at the dead bodies.

For the longest time, nobody can think of anything to say. Philip keeps looking at Brian, and Brian keeps trying to conceal the paralyzing shame spreading through him, but the more he tries to conceal it, the more it drags him down.

If Brian only had the guts for it, he would put the barrel of the snub-nose in his mouth right now and put himself out of his misery. In some strange way, he feels responsible for this—for all of it —but he’s too much of a coward to kill himself like a man.

He can only stand there and look away in abject shame and humiliation.

And like an invisible chain reaction, the pathetic, gruesome tableau of desecrated bodies—combined with the unyielding silence of his brother and his friend—begins to break Philip down.

He fights the tears pooling in his eyes and juts his quivering chin out in a mixture of defiance and self- loathing. He works his mouth like he’s got something important to impart, and it takes a huge effort to speak, but he finally manages to say in a choked mutter, “Whatever.”

Nick looks mortified, staring at Philip in disbelief. “‘Whatever’?”

Philip turns and walks away, pulling the Glock from his belt as he goes. He snaps the slide and fires into the wall of the barn—BOOOOMMMMMM!—the recoil kicking in his hand, the loud bark making Brian jump. BOOOOOMMMM! Another blast flashes in the darkness, taking a chunk of the door. BOOOOOMMMM! The third shot puts a chink in the rafter and rains debris down on the floor.

Philip angrily kicks the doors open and storms out of the barn.

The silence left behind seems to ripple for a moment with afterimages of Philip’s fiery wrath. Brian hasn’t taken his eyes off the floor throughout all this, and he continues to hang his head and stare miserably at the moldy matted hay. Nick takes one last look at the bodies, and then lets out a long, pained, unsteady breath. He looks at Brian, and he shakes his head. “There you have it,” he says.

But something behind his words—the subtle tone of dread in his voice—tells Brian that things have now irrevocably changed in their little dysfunctional family.

TWENTY

“What the fuck is he doing?” Nick stands at the villa’s front window, staring out at the overcast morning.

Across the front of the property, at the top of the driveway, Philip has Penny on a modified dog leash, assembled from spare parts found in the toolshed—a long length of copper pipe with a spiked collar threaded through one end. He drags her toward a Ford S-10 pickup parked on the grass. The truck is one of the vehicles owned by the bald man’s crew, and Philip has now loaded its cargo bed with canned goods, guns, provisions, and bedding.

Penny sputters and growls as she is yanked along, grabbing at the pipe leashed to her neck, biting at the air. In the diffuse, watery light, her dead face looks like a living Halloween mask, sculpted out of wormy-gray modeling clay.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Brian says, standing next to Nick, gazing out at the bizarre scene unfolding in the front yard. “He got up this morning convinced we can’t stay here anymore.”

“And why’s that?”

Brian shrugs. “I don’t know … after all that’s happened … I guess the place is like poison for him, full of ghosts … I don’t know.”

Brian and Nick have been up all night, guzzling coffee and discussing their situation. Nick has been dancing around the fact that he thinks Philip has gone off his spindle, succumbing to the stress of losing Penny, and to the cumulative pressure of protecting them. Although Nick has stopped short of verbalizing it, he has alluded to the possibility that the Devil has gotten his hooks into Philip. Brian is too exhausted to argue metaphysics with Nick, but there is no denying the fact that things have become dire.

“Let him go,” Nick says finally, turning away from the window.

Brian looks at him. “What do you mean? You mean you’re staying?”

“Yeah, I’m staying, and you should, too.”

“Nick, come on.”

“How can we keep following him … after all this shit … the stuff that’s gone down?”

Brian wipes his mouth and thinks about it. “Look. I’ll say it again. What he did to those people is, like, beyond awful. He lost his way. And I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at him the same way again … but this is about survival now. We can’t split up. Our best shot is sticking together no matter what.”

Nick glances back out the window. “You really think we’re gonna make it to the Gulf Coast? That’s like four hundred miles and change.”

“Our best shot is doing it together.”

Nick fixes his gaze on Brian. “He’s got his dead daughter on a fucking leash. He pretty near beat you to death. He’s a loose cannon, Brian, and he’s gonna blow up in our faces.”

“That loose cannon got us all the way across Georgia from Waynesboro in one piece,” Brian says, a flare of anger burning in his gut. “So, he’s nuts, he’s volatile, he’s possessed by demons, he’s the prince of fucking