Rise of the Governor (10 page)

“FUCK!—FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Philip slams a fist down on the steering wheel, hard enough to make the thing crack and send a splinter of pain up his arm. He practically shoves the foot feed through the floor, the engine screaming.

“Let up on it, man!” Nick hollers over the noise. “It's just digging us in deeper!”

“FUCK!”

Philip lets up on the gas.

The engine winds down, the Suburban leaning to one side, a foundering boat in brackish waters.

“We gotta push it out,” Brian says after a moment of tense silence.

“Take the wheel,” Philip says to Nick, opening his door and slipping outside. “Give it gas when I tell ya to. Come on, Brian.”

Brian opens the rear door, slips outside, and joins his brother in the glow of the taillights.

The rear tires have sunk at least six inches into the greasy muck, each rear quarter panel spattered with mud. The front wheels are no better. Philip places his big, gnarled hands on the wood grain of the tailgate, and Brian moves to the other side, assuming a wide stance in order to get a better purchase in the mud.

Neither of them notices the dark figures lumbering out of the trees on the other side of the highway.

“Okay, Nick, now!” Philip calls out and shoves with all his might.

The engine growls.

The wheels churn, spewing fountains of mud, as the Blake brothers push and push. They push with everything they have, all to no avail, as the slow-moving figures behind them shamble closer.

“Again!” Philip shouts, putting all his weight behind the shoving.

The rear wheels spin, sinking deeper into the mire, as Brian gets sprayed with an aerosol of mud.

Behind him, moving through a fog bank of smoke and shadows, the uninvited close the distance to about fifty yards, crunching through broken glass with the slow, lazy, awkward movements of injured lizards.

“Get back in the car, Brian.” Philip's voice has abruptly changed, becoming low and even. “Right now.”

“What is it?”

“Just do it.” Philip is opening the rear hatch. Hinges squeak as he reaches in and fishes for something. “Don't ask any questions.”

“But what about—” Brian's words stick in his throat as he catches a glimpse in his peripheral vision of at least a dozen dark figures—maybe more—closing in on them from several directions.

 

SIX

The figures approach from across the median, and from behind the flaming debris of the wreck, and from the adjacent woods—all shapes and sizes, faces the color of spackling compound, eyes gleaming like marbles in the firelight. Some are burned. Some are in tatters. Some are so well dressed and groomed they look as though they just came from church. Most have that curled-lip, exposed-incisor look of insatiable hunger.

“Shit.” Brian looks at his brother. “What are you gonna do? What are you thinking?”

“Get your ass in the car, Brian.”

“Shit—shit!” Brian hurries around to the side door, throws it open, and climbs in next to Penny, who is looking around with a bewildered expression. Brian slams the door, and smashes down the lock. “Lock the doors, Nick.”

“I'm gonna help him—” Nick goes for his goose gun and opens his door, but he stops abruptly when he hears the strange sound of Philip's flat, cold, metallic tone through the open rear hatch.

“I got this. Do what he says, Nick. Lock the doors and stay down.”

“There's too many of them!” Nick is thumbing the hammers on the Marlin, already with his right leg out the door, his work boot on the pavement.

“Stay in the car, Nick.” Philip is digging out a pair of matched log splitters. A few days ago he found the small axes in a garden shed of a mansion at Wiltshire Estates—two matched, balanced implements of razor-sharp carbon steel—and at the time he wondered what in the world some fat rich guy (who probably paid a yard service to split his firewood) would want a pair of small bad-axes for.

In the front seat, Nick pulls his leg back inside the SUV, slams his door, and bangs the lock down. He twists around with his eyes blazing and the gun cradled in his arms. “What the hell? What are you doing, Philly?”

The rear hatch slams.

The silence crashes down on the interior.

Brian looks down at the child. “I'm thinking maybe you ought to get down on the floor, kiddo.”

Penny says nothing as she slides down the front of the seat, and then curls into a fetal position. Something in her expression, some glint of knowing in her big soft eyes, reaches out to Brian and puts the squeeze on his heart. He pats her shoulder. “We'll get through this.”

Brian turns and peers over the backseat, over the cargo and out through the rear window.

Philip has a bad-axe in either hand, and is calmly walking toward the converging crowd of zombies. “Jesus,” Brian utters under his breath.

“What's he doing, Brian?” Nick's voice is high and taut, his hands fingering the Marlin's bolt.

Brian cannot muster a response because he is now held rapt by the terrible sight through the window.

*   *   *

It's not pretty. It's not graceful or cool or heroic or manly or even well executed … but it feels good. “I got this,” Philip says to himself, under his breath, as he lashes out at the closest one, a heavyset man in farmer's dungarees.

The bad-axe sheers off a grapefruit-sized lobe of the fat one's skull, sending a geyser of pink matter into the night air. The zombie falls. But Philip doesn't stop. Before the next closest one can reach him, Philip goes to work on the big flaccid body on the ground, windmilling the cold steel in each hand down on the dead flesh. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Blood and tissue fountain. Sparks kick off the pavement with each blow.

“I got this, I got this, I got this,” Philip murmurs to no one in particular, letting all the pent-up rage and sorrow come out in a flurry of glancing blows. “I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this—”

By this point others have closed in—a skinny young man with black fluid dripping off his lips, a fat woman with a bloated, dead face, a guy in a bloody suit—and Philip spins away from the mangled corpse on the ground to go to work on the others. He grunts with each blow—
I GOT THIS!
—cleaving skulls—
I GOT THIS!
—severing carotid arteries—
I GOT THIS!
—letting his anger drive the cold steel through cartilage and bone and nasal cavities—
I GOT THIS!
—the blood and brain matter misting up across his face as he remembers the foaming mouth of rabid fangs coming for him when he was a kid, and God taking his wife Sarah, and the monsters taking his best friend Bobby Marsh—
I GOT THIS!—I GOT THIS!—I GOT THIS!!

*   *   *

Inside the Suburban, Brian turns away from the scene outside the back window, coughs, and feels his gut rising at the nauseating sounds penetrating the sealed interior of the Suburban. He stifles the urge to vomit. He reaches down and gently puts his hands around Penny's ears, a gesture which, sadly, is becoming a routine.

In the front seat Nick cannot tear his eyes from the carnage behind them. On Nick's face Brian can see a weird mixture of repulsion and admiration—a kind of thank-God-he's-on-our-side type of awe—but it only serves to tighten Brian's gut. He will not throw up, goddamnit, he will be strong for Penny.

Brian slips down on the floor and holds the girl close to him. The child is limp and damp. Brian's brain swims with confusion.

His brother is everything to him. His brother is the key. But something is happening to Philip, something horrible, and it's beginning to gnaw at Brian. What are the rules? These walking abominations deserve every fucking thing Philip is dishing out … but what are the rules of engagement?

Brian is trying to put these thoughts out of his mind when he realizes the killing noises have ceased. Then he hears the heavy boot steps of a person outside the driver's side door. The door clicks.

Philip Blake slips back inside the Suburban, dropping the bloody hand-axes on the floor in front of Nick. “There'll be more of 'em,” he says, still winded, his face beaded with perspiration. “The gunshot woke 'em up.”

Nick peers out the back window at the battlefield of bodies visible in the firelight on the slope, his voice coming out in a monotone, a combination of awe and disgust: “Home run, man … grand slam home run.”

“We gotta get outta here,” Philip says, wiping a pearl of sweat from his nose, catching his breath, and glancing up at the rearview mirror, searching for Penny in the shadows of the backseat as if he doesn't even hear Nick.

Brian speaks up. “What's the plan, Philip?”

“We gotta find a safe place to stay for the night.”

Nick looks at Philip. “What do you mean exactly? You mean other than the Suburban?”

“It's too dangerous out here in the dark.”

“Yeah, but—”

“We'll push it out of the mud in the morning.”

“Yeah, but what about—”

“Grab whatever you need for the night,” Philip says, reaching for the Ruger.

“Wait!” Nick grabs Philip's arm. “You're talking about leaving the car! Leaving all our shit out here?”

“Just for the night, come on,” Philip says, opening his door and climbing out.

Brian lets out a sigh and looks up at Nick. “Shut up and help me with the backpacks.”

*   *   *

They camp that night about a quarter of a mile west of the overturned tanker, inside an abandoned yellow school bus, which sits on the shoulder, well illuminated by the cold glow of a sodium vapor light.

The bus is still fairly warm and dry, and it's high enough off the pavement to give them good sight lines on the woods on either side of the interstate. It has two doors—one in the front and one off the rear—for easy escape. Plus the bench seats are padded and long enough for each of them to stretch out for some semblance of rest. The keys are still in the ignition, and the battery still has juice.

Inside the bus it smells like the inside of a stale lunchbox, the ghosts of sweaty, rambunctious kids with their wet mittens and body odors lingering in the fusty air.

They eat some Spam and some sardines and some expensive pita crackers that were probably meant to adorn party trays at golf outings. They use flashlights, careful not to shine them off the windows, and eventually they spread their sleeping bags on the bench seats for some shut-eye, or at least some facsimile of sleep.

They each take turns sitting watch in the cab with one of the Marlins, using the huge side mirrors for unobstructed views of the bus's rear end. Nick takes the first shift and tries unsuccessfully for nearly an hour to raise a station on his portable weather radio. The world has shut down, but at least this section of Interstate 20 is equally still. The edges of the woods remain quiet.

When it's Brian's turn to sit watch—up to this point he has only managed a few minutes of fitful dozing on a squeaky bench seat in back—he gladly takes his place in the cab with all the levers and the dangling pine tree air fresheners and the laminated photograph of some long-lost driver's baby son. Not that Brian is very comfortable with the prospects of being the only one awake, or for that matter, having to fire the goose gun. Still, he needs some time to think.

At some point just before dawn, Brian hears Penny's breathing—just barely audible over the faint whistle of the wind through the ranks of sliding windows—becoming erratic and hyperventilated. The child has been dozing a few seats away from the cab, next to her father.

Now the little girl sits up with a silent gasp. “Oh … I got it … I mean…” Her voice is barely a whisper. “I got it, I think.”

“Ssshhh,” Brian says, rising from his seat, creeping back down the cabin to the little girl, whispering, “It's okay, kiddo … Uncle Brian's here.”

“Um.”

“It's okay … ssshhhh … let's not wake your dad.” Brian glances over at Philip, who is tangled in a blanket, his face contorted with troubling dreams. He took half a pint of brandy before bed to knock himself out.

“I'm okay,” Penny utters in her mousey little voice, looking down at the stuffed penguin in her small hands, squeezing it like a talisman. The thing is soiled and threadbare, and it breaks Brian's heart.

“Bad dreams?”

Penny nods.

Brian looks at her and thinks it over. “Got an idea,” he whispers. “Why don't you come up and keep me company for a while.”

The little girl nods.

He helps her up, and then, draping a blanket around her and taking her hand, he silently leads her back up to the cab. He flips down a little jump seat next to the driver's perch, and says, “There ya go.” He pats the worn upholstery. “You can be my copilot.”

Penny settles into the seat with her blanket pulled tightly around her and the penguin.

“See that?” Brian points to a filthy little video monitor above the dash, about the size of a paperback book, on which a grainy black-and-white image reveals the highway behind them. The wind rustles through the trees, the sodium lights gleaming off the roofs of wrecked cars. “That's a security camera, for backing up, see?”

The girl sees it.

“We're safe here, kiddo,” Brian says as convincingly as possible. Earlier in his shift he had figured out a way to turn the ignition key to the accessory position, lighting up the dash like an old pinball machine coming to life. “Everything's under control.”

The girl nods.

“You want to tell me about it?” Brian says softly a moment later.

Penny looks confused. “Tell you about what?”

“The bad dream. Sometimes it helps to like …
tell
someone … you know? Makes it go away …
poof
.”

Penny gives him a feeble little shrug. “I dreamed I got sick.”