Rise of the Governor (3 page)

Nick gets one good glimpse at the thing before stumbling backward over his own feet and falling onto his ass on the lush carpet of Kentucky bluegrass. The dead golfer lumbers through the gap and onto the lawn just as a flash of rusty steel arcs through the air.

The business end of Philip's pickaxe lands squarely in the monster's head, cracking the coconutlike shell of the old man's skull, piercing the dense, fibrous membrane of the dura mater and sinking into the gelatinous parietal lobe. It makes a sound like celery snapping and sends a clot of dark brackish fluid into the air. The insectile verve on the grandfather's face instantly dims, like a cartoon whose projection system has just jammed.

The zombie folds to the ground with the inelegant deflation of an empty laundry sack.

The pickaxe, still deeply embedded, pulls Philip forward and down. He yanks at it. The point is stuck. “Shut the motherfucking gate now, shut the gate, and do it quietly, goddamnit,” Philip says, still affecting a frenzied stage whisper, slamming his left Chippewa steel-toed logger boot down on the breached skull of the cadaver.

The other two men move as if in some synchronized dance, Bobby quickly dropping his load and rushing over to the gate. Nick struggles to his feet and backs away in a horrified stupor. Bobby quickly latches the wrought-iron lever. It makes a hollow metallic rattle that is so noisy it echoes across the dark lawns.

At last, Philip wrenches the pick from the stubborn crag of the zombie's skull—it comes out with a soft smooch sound—and he is turning toward the remains of the family, his mind swimming with panic, when he hears something odd, something unexpected, coming from the house.

He looks up and sees the rear of the Colonial, the window glass lit brilliantly from within.

Brian is silhouetted behind the sliding glass door, tapping on the pane, motioning for Philip and the others to hurry back, right now. Urgency burns in Brian's expression. It has nothing to do with the dead golfer—Philip can tell—something is wrong.

Oh God, please let it
not
have to do with Penny.

Philip drops the pickaxe and crosses the lawn in seconds flat.

“What about the stiffs?” Bobby Marsh is calling after Philip.

“Leave 'em!” Philip yells, vaulting up the deck steps and rushing to the sliding doors.

Brian is waiting with the slider ajar. “I gotta show you something, man,” he says.

“What is it? Is it Penny? Is she okay?” Philip is out of breath as he slips back into the house. Bobby and Nick are coming across the deck, and they too slip into the warmth of the Colonial.

“Penny's fine,” Brian says. He's holding a framed photograph. “She's fine. Says she doesn't mind staying in the closet a little while longer.”

“Judas Priest, Brian, what the fuck!” Philip catches his breath, his hands balled into fists.

“I gotta show you something. You want to stay here tonight?” Brian turns toward the sliding glass door. “Look. The family died together in here, right? All six of them? Six?”

Philip wipes his face. “Spit it out, man.”

“Look. Somehow they all turned
together.
As a family, right?” Brian coughs, then points at the six pale bundles lying near the garage. “There's six of them out there on the grass. Look. Mom and dad and four kids.”

“So fucking
what
?”

Brian holds up a portrait in a frame, the family from a happier time, all smiling awkwardly, dressed in their starchy Sunday best. “I found this on the piano,” he says.

“And…?”

Brian points at the youngest child in the photo, a boy of eleven or twelve years old, little navy blue suit, blond bangs, stiff smile.

Brian looks at his brother and says very gravely, “There's seven of them in the picture.”

 

TWO

The graceful two-story Colonial that Philip selected for their extended pit stop sits on a manicured side street deep in the tree-lined labyrinth of a gated enclave known as Wiltshire Estates.

Situated off Highway 278, about twenty miles east of Atlanta, the six-thousand-acre community is carved out of a forest preserve of dense longleaf pine and massive, old live oaks. The southern boundary fronts the vast, rolling hills of a thirty-six-hole golf course designed by Fuzzy Zoeller.

In the free brochure, which Brian Blake found on the floor of an abandoned guard shack earlier that evening, a flowery sales pitch makes the place sound like a Martha Stewart wet dream:
Wiltshire Estates provides an award-winning lifestyle with world-class amenities … named the “Best of the Best” by
GOLF Magazine Living 
… also home to the Triple-A Five Diamond Shady Oaks Plantation Resort and Spa … full-time security patrols … homes from $475,000 to 1 million-plus
.

The Blake party happened upon the fancy outer gates at sunset that day—on their way to the refugee centers in Atlanta—all of them crammed into Philip's rust-pocked Chevy Suburban. In the spill of the headlights, they saw the fancy cast-iron finials and great arched legend with the Wiltshire name hammered in metal across the spires, and they stopped to investigate.

At first, Philip thought the place might serve as a quick pit stop, a place to rest and maybe forage for supplies before completing the last leg of the journey into the city. Perhaps they would find others like them, other living souls, maybe a few good Samaritans who would help them out. But as the five tired, hungry, wired, and dazed travelers made an initial circle of the winding roads of Wiltshire, with the darkness quickly closing in, they realized that the place was, for the most part,
dead.

No lights burned in any of the windows. Very few cars remained in the driveways or at the curbs. A fire hydrant gushed at one corner, unattended, sending a foamy spray across a lawn. At another corner, an abandoned BMW sat with its shattered front end wrapped around a telephone pole, its twisted passenger door gaping open. People had apparently left in a hurry.

The reason they left, for the most part, could be seen in the distant shadows of the golf course, in the gullies behind the resort, and even here and there on the well-lighted streets. Zombies shambled aimlessly like ghostly remnants of their original selves, their slack, yawning mouths letting out a rusty groan that Philip could hear well enough, even through the sealed windows of the Suburban, as he circumnavigated the maze of wide, newly paved roads.

The pandemic or the act of God—or whatever the hell started it all up—must have hit Wiltshire Estates hard and fast. Most of the undead seemed to be off in the berms and pathways of the golf course. Something must have happened there to speed the process. Maybe golfers are mostly old and slow. Maybe they taste good to the undead. Who the hell knows? But it is apparent, even from hundreds of yards away—glimpsed through trees or over the tops of privacy fences—that scores, maybe hundreds, of undead are congregated in the vast complex of clubhouses, fairways, footbridges, and sand traps.

In the dark of night, they resemble insects lazily swarming a hive.

It's disconcerting to look at, but somehow the phenomenon has left the adjacent community, with its endless circuit of cul-de-sacs and curving lanes, relatively deserted. And the more Philip and his wide-eyed passengers circled the neighborhood, the more they began to long for a small chunk of that award-winning lifestyle, just a taste, for just long enough to replenish themselves and recharge.

They thought that they could maybe spend the night here, get a fresh start in the morning.

They chose the big Colonial at the bottom of Green Briar Lane because it seemed far enough away from the golf course to avoid the attentions of the swarm. It had a big yard with good sight lines, and a high, sturdy privacy fence. It also seemed empty. But when they carefully backed the Suburban across the lawn and up to a side door—leaving the vehicle unlocked, the keys in the ignition—and they sneaked in a window, one by one, the house almost immediately started working on them. The first creaking noises came from the second floor, and that's when Philip had sent Nick back to the Suburban for the assortment of axes stored in the back well.

*   *   *

“I'm telling you, we got 'em all,” Philip is saying now, trying to calm his brother down, who sits across the kitchen in the breakfast nook.

Brian doesn't say anything, just stares at his bowl of soggy cereal. A bottle of cough medicine sits nearby, a quarter of which Brian has already chugged down.

Penny sits next to him, also with a bowl of Cap'n Crunch in front her. A little stuffed penguin the size of a pear sits next to her bowl, and every now and then Penny moves her spoon to the toy's mouth, pretending to share her cereal with the thing.

“We checked every inch of this place,” Philip goes on as he throws open cabinet after cabinet. The kitchen is a cornucopia, brimming with upper-class provisions and luxuries: gourmet coffees, immersion blenders, crystal goblets, wine racks, handmade pastas, fancy jams and jellies, condiments of every variety, expensive liqueurs, and cooking gadgets of every description. The giant Viking range is spotless, and the massive Sub-Zero refrigerator is packed with expensive meats and fruits and spreads and dairy products and little white Chinese carryout boxes full of still-fresh leftovers. “He might have been visiting a relative or something,” Philip adds, making note of a nice single-malt Scotch sitting on a shelf. “Might've been with his grandparents, staying over at a friend's house, whatever.”

“Holy freaking Jesus, look at this!” Bobby Marsh exclaims across the room. He stands in front of the pantry, and he's lustily inspecting the goodies inside it. “Looks like Willy-damn-Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in here … cookies, lady fingers, and the bread's still fresh.”

“The place is safe, Brian,” Philip says, pulling the bottle of Scotch down.

“Safe?” Brian Blake stares at the tabletop. He lets out a cough and cringes.

“That's what I said. Matter of fact, I'm thinking—”

“Just lost another one!” a voice pipes in from the other side of the kitchen.

It's Nick. For the past ten minutes, he's been nervously surfing through the TV channels on a little plasma screen mounted under a cabinet to the left of the sink, checking the local stations for updates, and now, at a quarter to twelve Central Standard Time, Fox 5 News out of Atlanta has just crumbled into snow. All that leaves on the cable box—other than national networks showing reruns of nature programs and old movies—is Atlanta's stalwart, CNN, and all
they're
showing at the moment are emergency robo-announcements, the same warning screens with the same bullet points that have been airing for days. Even Brian's BlackBerry is giving up the ghost, the signal very spotty in this area. When it
does
work, the device is full of blind e-mails and Facebook tags and anonymous tweets with cryptic messages such as:

… AND THE KINGDOM WILL BE IN DARKNESS …

… IT'S THE BIRDS FALLING FROM THE SKY, THAT'S WHAT STARTED IT …

… BURN IT ALL DOWN BURN IT ALL …

… BLASPHEMIES AGAINST GOD …

… U SUCK U DIE …

… THE HOUSE OF THE LORD HAS BECOME A DWELLING PLACE OF DEMONS …

… DON'T BLAME ME FOR THIS I'M A LIBERTARIAN …

… EAT ME …

“Turn it off, Nick,” Philip says gloomily, plopping down on a chair in the breakfast nook with his bottle. He frowns and reaches around to the back of his belt, where his pistol is digging into the small of his back. He lays the Ruger on the table and thumbs the cap off the Scotch, then takes a healthy swig.

Brian and Penny both stare at the gun.

Philip puts the cap back on the bottle, then tosses the Scotch across the kitchen to Nick, who catches it with the aplomb of an all-state second basemen (which he once was). “Tune in to the all-booze channel for a while … you need to get some sleep, stop watching screens.”

Nick takes a taste. He takes another one, then caps the bottle and tosses it to Bobby.

Bobby nearly drops it. Still standing at the pantry, he is busily wolfing down an entire package of Oreos, the black crust already forming in the corners of his mouth. He washes the cookies down with a big pull of single-malt, and lets out a grateful belch.

Drinking is something Philip and his two friends are accustomed to doing together, and they need to do it tonight more than ever. It started in their freshman year at Burke County, with crème de menthe and watermelon wine in pup tents in each others' backyards. Later, they graduated to boilermakers after football games. Nobody can hold his liquor like Philip Blake, but the other two men are close rivals in the juicer sweepstakes.

Early in his married life, Philip would go out carousing with his two high school buddies on a regular basis, mostly to remind himself what it was like to be young and single and irresponsible. But after Sarah's death, the three men drifted apart. The stress of being a single parent, and working days at the muffler shop, and nights driving the freightliner with Penny in the sleeper compartment, had consumed him. The boys' nights out became less and less frequent. Once in a while, though—in fact, as recently as last month—Philip still finds time to meet Bobby and Nick down at the Tally Ho or the Wagon Wheel Inn or some other Waynesboro dive for an evening of good-natured debauchery (while Mama Rose watches Penny).

In recent years, Philip had started wondering if he was just going through the motions with Bobby and Nick to remind himself that he was alive. Maybe that was why, this past Sunday—when the feces hit the fan in Waynesboro, and he decided to take Penny and shuffle off to a safer place—he rounded up Nick and Bobby for the journey. They felt like a piece of his past, and that helped somehow.

He had never intended to take Brian along, though. Bumping into Brian had been an accident. That first day on the road, about forty miles west of Waynesboro, Philip had taken a quick detour into Deering, to check on his mom and dad. The elderly couple lived in a retirement community near the Fort Gordon military base. When Philip arrived at his folks' little town house, he found that the entire population of Deering had been moved to the base for safekeeping.