Rise of the Governor (24 page)

“That other one's a slice, though, ain't she?” Philip says.

“Tara? Yeah. Not a happy camper.”

For the past few days, Brian has been generally avoiding Tara Chalmers—she is a walking ulcer, always irritable, paranoid, still in the throes of grief over her dad. But Brian figures she'll eventually work her way through it. She seems like a decent person.

“The girl does not realize I saved her fucking life,” Philip says.

Brian lets out a series of dry coughs. Then he says, “I've been meaning to talk to you about that.”

Philip looks at him. “What.”

“The old man turning like that?” Brian measures his words. He knows he's not the only one worrying about this. Ever since David Chalmers came back from the dead and tried to devour his oldest daughter, Brian has been ruminating about the phenomenon, and the implications of what happened, and the rules of this savage new world, and maybe even the prognosis for the entire human race. “Think about it, Philip. He didn't get bit. Right?”

“No, he didn't.”

“So, why did he turn?”

For a moment, Philip just stares at Brian, and the darkness seems to expand around them. The city seems to stretch into infinity like the landscape of a dream. Brian feels gooseflesh on his arms as though the very act of putting it into words—saying it out loud—has unleashed a malevolent genie from a bottle. And they will never, ever be able to put that genie back.

Philip sips his wine. In the darkness, his face is grim and set. “Hell of lot we don't know. Maybe he got infected with something earlier, maybe came into contact with just enough of it to start working on his system. The old man was on his way out anyway.”

“If that's true, then we all—”

“Hey, professor. Give it a rest. We're all healthy and we're gonna stay that way.”

“I know. I'm just saying … maybe we ought to think about taking more precautions.”

“What precautions? I got your precautions right here.” He touches the stock of his .22-caliber Ruger stuffed behind his belt.

“I'm talking about washing up better, sterilizing stuff.”

“With what?”

Brian lets out a sigh and looks up at the overcast night sky, a low canopy of haze as dark as black wool. Autumn rains are brewing. “We got the water upstairs in the toilets,” he says. “We got the filters and the propane, and we got access to cleaning products down the street, soaps and cleansers and shit.”

“We're already filtering the water, sport.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And we're washing up with that contraption Nicky found.” The so-called contraption is an outdoor camp shower that Nick found in Dillard's sporting goods department. About the size of a small cooler, it has a collapsible five-gallon tank and a shower hose that operates off a battery-powered pump. For five days now, they've each been enjoying the periodic luxury of a brief shower, recycling the water as much as possible.

“I know, I know … I'm just saying, maybe it's like, better to go overboard right now with the cleanliness. That's all. Until we know more.”

Philip gives him a hard look. “And what if there ain't nothing more to learn?”

Brian has no answer for that one.

The only response comes from the city, humming darkly back at them, with a blast of foul-smelling wind and a big, silent fuck you.

*   *   *

Maybe it's the alarming conglomeration of unappetizing ingredients concocted that night by April and Penny for dinner—a mixture of canned asparagus, Spam, and crumbled potato chips cooked over a propane flame—sitting like a dropped anchor in the pit of Philip's stomach. Or perhaps it's the cumulative effect of all the stress and rage and sleeplessness that does it. Or maybe it's the conversation he had on the balcony with his brother. But regardless of the cause, after he turns in for the night, and drifts off into an uneasy sleep, Philip Blake experiences an elaborate and lurid dream.

He has the dream in his newly established private quarters (April's former bedroom was apparently once somebody's home office—while clearing out the owner's things, Philip and April found stacks of Mary Kay Cosmetics order forms and makeup samples). But now, lying on the queen-sized bed shoved against the wall, Philip writhes in semiconsciousness, drifting in and out of a feverish horror show. It's the kind of dream that has no shape. It has no beginning, middle, or end. It just keeps spinning in its rut of circular terror.

He finds himself back in his childhood home in Waynesboro—the shabby little bungalow on Farrel Street—in the back bedroom he used to share with Brian. Philip is not a child in the dream, he is an adult, and somehow the plague has time-traveled back to the 1970s. The dream is almost three-dimensionally vivid. There's the lily of the valley wallpaper, and the Iron Maiden posters, and the scarred school desk, and Brian is somewhere in the house, unseen, screaming, and Penny is also there, in some adjacent room, crying for her daddy. Philip runs through the hallways, which form an endless labyrinth. Plaster is cracking. The zombie horde is outside, clamoring to get in. The boarded windows are trembling. Philip has a hammer and tries to secure the windows with nails, but the head of the hammer falls off. Crashing noises. Philip sees a door cracking open and he rushes over to it, and the doorknob comes off in his hand. He searches drawers and cabinets for weapons, and the facings fall off the cabinets, and plaster sifts down from the ceiling, and his boot breaks through a hole in the floor. The walls are collapsing, and the linoleum is buckling, and the windows are falling from their frames, and Philip keeps hearing Penny's desperate, shrieking voice calling for him: “DADDY!”

Skeletal arms thrust through crumbling window casements, blackened, curled fingers groping.

“DADDY?”

Bone-white skulls burst up through the floor like gruesome periscopes.

“DADDY!”

Philip lets out a silent scream as the dream shatters apart like spun glass.

 

FOURTEEN

Philip gasps awake with a start. He jerks forward on the bed, blinking and squinting at the pale morning light. Someone stands at the foot of his bed. No. Two people. He sees them now—one tall and one short.

“Good morning, sunshine,” April says with her hand around Penny's shoulder.

“Jesus.” Philip sits up against the headboard in his wifebeater and sweatpants. “What the hell time is it?”

“It's like almost noon.”

“Holy Christ,” Philip utters, getting his bearings. His entire sinewy form is filmed with cold sweat. His neck aches and his mouth tastes like a litter box. “I can't believe it.”

“We gotta show you something, Daddy,” the little girl tells him, her big eyes ablaze with excitement. The sight of his daughter looking so happy sends a soothing wave of relief through Philip, driving the last remnants of the dream from his feverish brain.

He gets up and gets dressed, telling the two ladies to calm down. “Gimme a second to put my face on,” he says in a hoarse, whiskey-cured grunt, running fingers through his greasy hair.

*   *   *

They take him up to the roof. When they emerge from the fire door and plunge into the cool air and light, Philip balks at the glare. Despite the fact that the day is overcast and dark, Philip is hungover and the light makes his eyeballs throb. He squints up at the sky and sees the foreboding storm clouds churning and roiling into the area from the north. “Looks like rain,” he says.

“That's good,” April says, giving Penny a wink. “Show him why, honey.”

The little girl grasps her father's hand and drags him across the roof. “Look, Daddy, me and April made a garden to grow stuff in.”

She shows him a small makeshift planter in the center of the roof. It takes a moment for Philip to realize that the garden is constructed out of four wheelbarrows, their wheels removed, their housings taped together. A six-inch layer of soil fills each of the four cavities, a few unidentified shoots of green already transplanted into each barrow. “This is pretty damn fine,” he says, giving the child a squeeze. He looks at April. “Pretty damn fine.”

“It was Penny's idea,” April says with a little gleam of pride in her eyes. She points at a row of buckets. “We're gonna collect the rain, too.”

Philip drinks in April Chalmers's beautiful, slightly bruised face, her sea-foam blue eyes, her ashy blond hair undone and hanging over the collar of her scroungy cable-knit sweater. He can't take his eyes off her. And even as Penny starts jabbering happily about all the things she wants to grow—cotton candy plants, bubblegum bushes—Philip cannot help but extrapolate: The way April kneels down next to the child, listening intently with her hand on Penny's back, the look of affection on the woman's face, the easy rapport between the two, the sense of connection—all of it suggests something deeper than mere survival.

Philip can barely allow himself to think the word, and yet it comes to him right then, on that windy precipice, in a rush:
family.

“Excuse me!”

The gruff voice comes from the fire door behind them, on the other side of the roof. Philip whirls. He sees Tara in one of her stained muumuus and one of her patented moods in the open doorway. She holds a bucket. Her heavily jowled face and Maybelline eyes look even more lined and surly than usual. “Would it be too much to ask for a little help?”

April rises and turns. “I told you I'd help you in a minute.”

Philip can see that Tara has been collecting water from toilet basins. He considers getting in the middle of this but decides against it.

“That was half an hour ago,” Tara says. “Meantime, I been lugging water while you've been lollygaggin' up here in Mr. Rogers's neighborhood.”

“Tara, just … calm down.” April sighs. “Gimme a second, I'll be right there.”

“Fine—whatever!” Tara turns in a huff and swishes angrily back down the inner stairs, leaving the sour vibration of contempt in her slipstream.

April looks down. “I'm sorry about that, she's still dealing with … you know …
stuff.
”

By the downtrodden expression on April's face, it's clear that it would take too much energy for her to run down the litany of what's needling at her sister. Philip's no dummy. He knows it's complicated and it has something to do with jealousy and sibling rivalry, and maybe even the fact that April seems to be going through her grieving period with someone other than Tara.

“No need to apologize,” Philip tells her. “There
is
somethin' I want you to know, though.”

“What's that?”

“Just want you to know how grateful I am, the way you been treatin' my daughter.”

April smiles. “She's a great kid.”

“Yes, ma'am … she is … and you ain't so bad yourself.”

“Why, thank you.” She leans over and gives Philip a peck on the cheek. Nothing fancy, just a quick little kiss. But it makes an impression. “Now I gotta get back before my sister shoots me.”

April walks off, leaving Philip thunderstruck and reeling in the wind.

*   *   *

As kisses go, it wasn't anything special. Philip's late wife, Sarah, had been a blue ribbon kisser. Hell, Philip 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.