It is, in fact,
It is Philip who crosses the living room with his trademark strut. Heart rate slowing, lungs filling with oxygen, his consciousness fully transformed back into the Governor—his eyes clear and sharp—he answers the door on the fifth series of knocks. “What the hell is so goddamn important at this hour that you can’t—”
Not fully recognizing the woman standing outside the door, he stops himself. He had expected one of his men—Gabe or Bruce or Martinez—coming to bother him with some minor fire to be put out or some horseshit drama to be settled among the restless townspeople.
“Is this a bad time?” Megan Lafferty purrs with a dreamy tilt of her head, leaning against the doorjamb, the blouse under her denim jacket unbuttoned and showing generous amounts of cleavage.
The Governor pins her with his unwavering gaze. “Honey, I don’t know what game you’re running down right now but I’m in the middle of something.”
“Just thought you might need a little company,” she says with faux innocence. She looks like a caricature of a tart, her wine-colored curls mussed and hanging down in suggestive tendrils across her drugged features. She wears too much makeup and appears almost clownlike. “But I totally understand if you’re busy.”
The Governor lets out a sigh. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Something tells me you ain’t here to borrow a cup of sugar.”
Megan throws a glance over her shoulder. The jitters show on her face, in the way her gaze shifts back and forth from the shadows of the empty corridor to the doorway, in the way she holds one of her arms against her side, compulsively stroking the Chinese character tattooed on her elbow. Nobody ever comes up here. The Governor’s private quarters are off-limits to even Gabe and Bruce.
“I just—I thought—I—” she stutters.
“No reason to be afraid, darlin’,” the Governor says at last.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Might as well c’mon inside,” he says and takes her by the arm. “Before you catch your death.”
He pulls her inside and secures the door with a click. The sound of the bolt clanking home makes her jump. Her breathing quickens, and the Governor cannot help but notice the rise and fall of her surprisingly fulsome breasts underneath her decolletage, her hourglass figure, her generous hips. This little gal is ripe for breeding. The Governor searches the back of his mind for the last time he used a condom. Did he stock up? Did he have any left in his medicine cabinet? “Get you a drink?”
“Sure.” Megan gazes around the spartan furnishings of the living room—the carpet remnants, the mismatched chairs and sofa pulled off the back of a Salvation Army truck. For the briefest instant she frowns, turning up her nose, probably registering the odors permeating the place from the laundry room. “Y’all got any vodka?”
The Governor gives her a grin. “I think we might be able to come up with some.” He goes over to the cabinet next to the shuttered front window. He digs out a bottle, pours a few fingers in a couple of paper cups. “Got some orange juice around here somewhere,” he murmurs, finding a half-empty can of juice.
He comes back over to her with the drinks. She slugs hers down in one frantic gulp. She looks as though she’s been lost in the desert for days and this is her first taste of liquid. She wipes her mouth and lets loose a little belch. “Excuse me … sorry.”
“You are just the cutest little thing,” the Governor says to her with a grin. “You know something, Bonnie Raitt ain’t got nothing on you.”
She looks at the floor. “Reason I dropped by, I was just wondering…”
“Yeah?”
“Guy at the food center told me you might have some weed, Demerol maybe?”
“Duane?”
She nods. “Said you might have some good shit.”
The Governor sips his drink. “Now I wonder how Duane would know such a thing.”
Megan shrugs. “Anyway, the thing is—”
“Why come to me?” The Governor fixes her with that dark stare. “Why not go to your buddy Bob? He’s got a whole medicine chest in that truck of his.”
Another shrug. “I don’t know, I was just thinking, you and me, we could like … make a trade.”
Now she looks up at him and bites her lower lip, and the Governor feels the blood rushing to his loins.
* * *
Megan rides him in the moonlight darkness of an adjacent room. Completely nude, filmed in a cold sweat, her hair matted to her face, she pistons up and down on his erection with the empty fury of a hobbyhorse on a carousel. She feels nothing other than the painful thrusting. She feels no fear, no emotion, no regret, no shame. Nothing. Just the mechanical gymnastics of sex.
All the lights are off in the room, the only illumination coming from the transom above the drapes, through which the silver light of a wintry moon shines down across the dust motes and dapples the bare wall behind the Governor’s secondhand La-Z-Boy recliner.
The man sits sprawled on the armchair, his naked, lanky body writhing beneath Megan, his head tossing backward, the veins in his neck pulsing. But he makes very little sound, shows very little pleasure in the act. Megan can only hear the regular thrumming of his breath, as he thrusts angrily into her again and again.
The La-Z-Boy chair is positioned in a way that draws Megan’s peripheral attention to the wall behind her, even as she feels the man’s orgasm building, the climax imminent. No pictures hang in the room, no coffee tables, no shaded lamps—only the faint shimmer of rectangular objects lining the wall. At first Megan misidentifies these objects as TV sets, a configuration reminiscent of an electronics-store display. But what would this guy be doing with two dozen TV sets? Soon Megan realizes she’s hearing a low burble of white noise issuing from the objects.
“What the hell’s the matter?” the Governor grunts beneath her.
Megan has twisted around, her eyes adjusting to the moon shadows. She sees things moving inside the rectangular enclosures. The ghostly movement makes her stiffen, tightening up on his genitals. “Nothing … nothing … sorry … I just … I couldn’t help but—”
“Goddammit, woman!” He reaches over and flips on a battery-operated camp lantern, which sits on a crate next to the chair.
The light reveals rows of aquariums filled with severed human heads.
Megan lets out a gasp and slips off his cock, tumbling to the floor. She struggles to breathe. Lying prone on the damp carpet, her body rashing with gooseflesh, she gapes at the glass enclosures. In neatly stacked containers of fluid the zombified faces twitch and tic on ragged stumps, mouths palpitating like oxygen-starved fish, their milky eyes rolling around sightlessly in the watery capsules.
“I haven’t finished!” The Governor pounces on her, rolls her over, yanks her legs open. He’s still hard and enters her violently, the painful friction sending bolts of agony up her spine. “Hold still, goddammit!”
Megan sees a familiar face within the confines of the last tank on the left, and the sight of it turns her to stone. She lies supine on the floor, thunderstruck, her head turned sideways as she gapes in horror at that narrow face engulfed in bubbles in that last aquarium, as the Governor mercilessly plunges into her. She recognizes the peroxide-blond hair suspended in the fluid, forming a seaweedlike corona around the boyish features, the slack mouth, the long lashes, and the pointy button nose.
The recognition of Scott Moon’s severed head coincides with the hot gush inside her as the Governor finally finishes his business.
Something deep inside Megan Lafferty crumbles apart as permanently and irreparably as a sand castle collapsing under the weight of a wave.
* * *
A moment later the Governor says, “You can get up now, honey … clean yourself up.”
He says this to the woman without any rancor or contempt, as a proctor might inform a classroom at the end of a test that it’s time to put down the pencils.
Then he sees her gaping at the aquarium containing Scott Moon’s head, and he realizes this is a moment of truth, an opportunity, a critical juncture in the evening’s festivities. A decisive man like Philip Blake always knows when to look for opportunities. He knows when to take advantage of a superior position. He never hesitates, never
