FOURTEEN
The screams inside the empty trailer, amplified by the corrugated metal floor and steel walls, build and build, an aria of agony, which compels Bob, standing behind the crane, to look away, as the moving cadavers shamble toward the opening, drawn to the noise and smell of fear. Bob needs a drink more than ever now. He needs a lot of drinks. He needs to soak in the booze until he’s blind.
At least ninety percent of the herd—all shapes and sizes, in varying degrees of disintegration, faces contorted with scowling bloodlust—press toward the rear of the trailer. The first one trips on the foot of the ramp, falling face-first with a wet splat on the tread. Others follow closely, pushing their way up the incline, as Stinson shrieks inside the enclosure, his sanity torn to shreds.
The portly guardsman, bound to the front wall of the trailer with packing straps and chains, pisses himself, as the first walkers shuffle in for the feeding.
Outside the trailer, Martinez and his men keep an eye on the stragglers along the barricade, most of them milling about aimlessly in the glare of tungsten spotlights, cocking their gray faces and glazed eyes up at the night sky as though the screaming noises might be coming from the heavens. Only about a dozen of the dead miss this opportunity to feed. The men on the 50-calibers take aim, awaiting orders to blow the stragglers away.
The trailer fills up with specimens—the Governor’s growing collection of lab rats—until nearly three dozen walkers have swarmed Stinson. The unseen feeding frenzy ensues, and the screaming corrupts into watery, gagging death cries, as the last zombie staggers up the ramp and vanishes inside the mobile abattoir. The noises issuing out the back of the trailer now become almost feral, Stinson reduced to a mewling, squealing head of stock in a slaughterhouse, rendered by the ragged teeth and nails of the dead.
Out in the cold darkness Bob feels his soul contracting inward like an iris closing down. He needs a drink so badly his skull throbs. He barely hears the booming voice of the Governor.
“All right, Travis! Go ahead and pull trap now! Go ahead and close it down!”
The truck driver cautiously creeps around behind the vibrating death trailer and grabs for the rope hanging down from the lip of the door. He yanks it hard and fast, and the vertical gate slams down with a rusty squeak. Travis quickly latches the lock, and then backs away from the trailer as if from a time bomb.
“Take it back to the track, Travis! I’ll meet you there in a minute!”
The Governor turns and walks over to Martinez, who stands waiting on the lower rails of the crane. “All right, you can have your fun now,” the Governor says.
Martinez thumbs the radio send button. “Okay, guys—take the rest of them out.”
Bob jumps at the sudden roar of heavy artillery, the noise and sparks from the .50-calibers lighting up the night. Tracer bullets streak hot pink in the dark, crisscrossing the beams of magnesium-bright klieg lights, engaging their targets in plumes of black, oily blood mist. Bob turns away once again, not interested in seeing the walkers taken apart. The Governor, however, feels differently.
He climbs halfway up the crane ladder so he can see the festivities.
In short order the armor-piercing tracers eviscerate the stragglers. Skulls blossom, florets of brain matter spitting up into the night air, teeth and hair and cartilage and bone chips shattering. Some of the zombies remain upright for many moments, as the rounds spin them in macabre death jigs, arms flailing in the stage light. Bellies burst. Glistening tissue ejaculates in the glare.
The salvo ceases as abruptly as it had begun, the silence slamming hard in Bob’s ears.
For a moment the Governor savors the aftermath, the dripping sounds fading on the distant echoes of gunfire dying in the trees. The last few walkers still standing sink to the earth in heaps of bloody pulp and dead flesh, some of them now unrecognizable masses of vaguely human meat. Some of these mounds exude vapors in the chill air, mostly from the friction of the bullets and not from any kind of body heat. The Governor climbs down from his perch.
As the Piggly Wiggly truck pulls away with its load of moving cadavers, Bob swallows the urge to vomit. The ghastly noises from inside the trailer have diminished somewhat, Stinson reduced to a hollowed-out trough of flesh and bone. Now only the muffled smacking sounds of zombies feeding inside the enclosure fade away as the truck rattles toward the racetrack lot.
The Governor comes over to Bob. “Looks like you could use a drink.”
Bob cannot muster a reply.
“C’mon, let’s go have a cool one,” the Governor suggests, slapping the man on the back. “I’m buying.”
* * *
By the next morning, the north lots have been cleaned up and all evidence of the massacre has been erased. People go about their business as though nothing ever happened, and the rest of that week passes uneventfully.
Over the next five days a few walkers drift into the range of the .50-calibers—drawn by the commotion of the hordes—but mostly things remain quiet. Christmas comes and goes with very little ceremony. Most of the inhabitants of Woodbury have given up on following the calendar.
A few feeble attempts at holiday cheer seem to exacerbate the grim proceedings. Martinez and his men decorate a tree in the courthouse lobby, and they put some tinsel on the gazebo in the square, but that’s about it. The Governor pipes Christmas music through the racetrack PA system, but it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. The weather stays fairly mild—no snow to speak of, with temperatures remaining in the upper forties.
On Christmas Eve, Lilly goes to the infirmary to have some of her injuries checked out by Dr. Stevens, and after the examination, the doctor invites Lilly to stick around for a little impromptu holiday party. Alice joins them, and they open cans of ham and sweet potatoes—and they even break out a case of Cabernet, which Stevens has been hiding in the storage closet—and they toast things like the old days, better times, and Josh Lee Hamilton.
Lilly senses that the doctor is watching her closely for signs of post-traumatic stress, maybe depression or some other kind of mental disturbance. But ironically, Lilly has never felt more focused and grounded in her life. She knows what she has to do. She knows that she cannot live like this much longer, and she is biding her time until an opportunity to escape presents itself. But maybe on some deeper level it is Lilly who is doing the observing.
Maybe she is subconsciously looking for allies, accomplices, collaborators.
Halfway through the evening, Martinez shows up—Stevens invited the young man earlier that day to stop by for a drink—and Lilly learns that she is not the only one here who wants out. After a few cocktails, Martinez gets talkative, and reveals that he fears the Governor will eventually lead them off a cliff. They argue about which is the lesser of two evils—tolerating the Governor’s madness or drifting out in the world without a safety net—and they come to zero conclusions. They drink some more.
At length, the evening deteriorates into a drunken bacchanal of off-key caroling and reminiscences of holidays past—all of which depresses everyone even further. The more they drink, the worse they feel. But amid all the lubricating Lilly learns new things—both trivial and important—about these three lost souls. She notices that Dr. Stevens has the worst singing voice she has ever heard, and that Alice has a major crush on Martinez, and that Martinez pines for an ex-wife in Arkansas.
Most importantly, though, Lilly gets a sense that the four of them are bonding in their collective misery, and that bond might serve them well.
* * *
The next day, at first light—after spending the night passed out on a gurney in the infirmary—Lilly Caul drags herself outside, blinking at the harsh winter sunshine hammering down on the deserted town. It’s Christmas morning, and the pale blue sky seems to punctuate Lilly’s sense of being trapped in purgatory. Lilly’s skull throbs painfully as she buttons her fleece jacket up to her chin and then makes her way eastward down the sidewalk.
Very few residents are up at this hour, the advent of Christmas morning keeping everybody hunkered inside. Lilly feels compelled to visit the playground on the east edge of the town. The desolate patch of bare ground lies behind a grove of denuded crab apples.
Lilly finds Josh’s grave, the sandy dirt still freshly packed in a large mound next to his cairn. She kneels on the edge of the grave and lowers her head. “Merry Christmas, Josh,” she utters into the wind, her voice hungover, thick and rusty with sleep.
Only the rustle of branches serves as a response. She takes a deep breath. “Some of the things I’ve done … the way I treated you … I’m not proud of.” She swallows the urge to cry, the sorrow rising up in her. She bites off her tears. “I just wanted you to know … you didn’t die in vain, Josh.… You taught me something important … you made a difference in my life.”
Lilly looks down at the dirty white sand beneath her knees and she refuses to cry. “You taught me not to be scared anymore.” She mutters this to herself, to the ground, to the cold wind. “We don’t have that luxury these days … so from now on … I’m ready.”
Her voice trails off, and she kneels there for the longest time, unaware that her right hand has been digging into the side of her leg through her jeans, hard enough to break the skin and draw blood.
“I’m ready…”
* * *
The turning of the New Year closes in.
Late one night, beset with the melancholy mood of the season, the man known as the Governor locks himself into the back room of his second-floor apartment with a bottle of expensive French champagne and a galvanized pail brimming with an assortment of human bodily organs.
The tiny zombie chained to the wall across the laundry room sputters and snarls at the sight of him. Her once cherubic face now chiseled with rigor mortis, her flesh as yellow as rotten Stilton, she peels her lips back away from rows of blackened baby teeth. The laundry room with its bare bulbs hanging down and exposed fiberglass insulation—impregnated now with her stench—reeks of foul, infected oils and molds.
“Calm down, sweetheart,” the man with several names murmurs softly as he sits down on the floor in front of her, setting the bottle down on one side of him and the bucket on the other. He pulls a latex surgical glove from his pocket and works his right hand into it. “Daddy’s got some more goodies for you, keep your tummy full.”
He fishes a slimy, purplish-brown lobe from the bucket of entrails and tosses it to her.
Little Penny Blake pounces on the human kidney that has landed with a wet splat on the floor in front of her, her chain stretching to its limit with a clank. She clutches the organ with both of her little hands and gobbles the human tissue with feral abandon until the bloody bile runs between her tiny fingers and paints her face with a stain the consistency of chocolate sauce.
“Happy New Year, sweetheart,” the Governor says and pries at the champagne cork. The cork resists. He worries at it with his thumbs until the thing pops, and a stream of golden bubbly percolates over the rim and onto the worn tiles. The Governor has no idea if it is actually New Year’s Eve. He knows it’s imminent … might as well be tonight.
He stares at the puddle of champagne spreading on the floor, the tiny foam of carbonation vanishing into the seams of grout. He finds himself casting his thoughts back to New Year’s celebrations of his childhood.
In the old days he looked forward to New Year’s Eve for months. Back in Waynesboro he and his buddies would get a whole pig delivered on the thirtieth and start it slow-roasting in the ground behind his parents’ place, lining the hole with bricks—Hawaiian luau style—and they would have a two-day feast. The local bluegrass band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, would play all night long, and Philip would get really good weed, and they would party through the first and Philip would get laid and have a grand old time with—
The Governor blinks. He cannot remember if Philip Blake used to do this on New Year’s Eve or if it was Brian Blake who did this. He cannot remember where one brother ends and the other begins. He stares at the floor, blinking, the champagne reflecting a dull, milky, distorted reflection of his own face, the handlebar mustache as dark as lampblack now, the eyes deep set and glinting with cinders of something like madness. He looks at himself and sees Philip Blake staring back. But something is wrong. Philip can also see a ghostly overlay superimposed across his face, an ashen, frightened simulacrum called “Brian.”
Penny’s watery, garbled feeding noises fade in his ears, drifting far away, and Philip takes his first hit of champagne. The gulp burns his throat as it goes down cold and astringent. The taste of it reminds him of better times. It reminds him of holiday celebrations, family reunions, loved ones coming together after a long estrangement. It tears him apart inside. He knows who he is: He’s the Governor, he’s Philip Blake, the man who gets things done.
But.
But …
Brian starts to cry. He drops the bottle, and more champagne spills across the tiles, seeping under Penny, who is oblivious to the invisible war going on at the moment within the mind of her caretaker. Brian shuts his eyes, the tears seeping out the corners of his eyelids and tracking down his face in snotty runnels.
He cries for those New Year’s Eves gone by, those happy moments between friends … and brothers. He cries for Penny, and he cries for her woeful condition, for which he blames himself. He cannot block out the flash-frame image burned into the retina of his mind’s eye: Philip Blake lying in a cold, bloody heap next to a girl on the edge of the woods north of Woodbury.
While Penny feeds, slurping and smacking her dead lips, and Brian softly sobs, an unexpected noise comes from across the room.
Somebody is knocking on the Governor’s door.
* * *
It takes a while for the noise to register, the sound of knocking coming in a series of small bursts—hesitant, tentative—and it goes on for quite a while before Philip Blake realizes somebody is out there in the hallway banging on his door.
The identity crisis ceases immediately, the curtain in the Governor’s brain sweeping back in place with the abruptness of a power blackout.
It is, in fact, Philip who stands, removes his surgical gloves, brushes himself off, wipes his mucusy chin with the sleeve of his sweater, pulls on his stovepipe boots, brushes his long obsidian locks from his eyes, sniffs back his emotion, and exits the laundry room, locking the door behind him.
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 décolletage, 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 backs off, never shies away from dirty work.
The Governor reaches down and finds the elastic waistband of his underwear—which is bunched around his ankles—and pulls his briefs back up and over himself. He stands and gazes down at the woman curled into a fetal position on his floor. “C’mon, honey … let’s go get you cleaned up and have a little talk, you and me.”
Megan buries her face in the floor and mutters, “Please don’t hurt me.”
The Governor leans down and applies a pinch grip to the nape of her neck—nothing intense, just an attention grabber—and says, “I’m not going to ask you again … get your ass in the bathroom.”
She struggles to her feet, holding herself as though she might burst apart at any moment.
“This way, honey.” He roughly clutches her bare arm as he ushers her across the room, out the doorway, and into an adjacent bathroom.
Standing in the doorway, watching her, the Governor feels bad about manhandling her but he also knows Philip Blake would not let up at a time like this. Philip would do what has to be done, he would be strong and resolute; and the part of the Governor that used to be called “Brian” has to follow through with this.
Megan hunches over the sink and picks up the washcloth with trembling hands. She runs water and tentatively wipes herself and trembles. “I swear to God I won’t tell anybody,” she mutters through her tears. “I just want to go home … just want to be alone.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” the Governor says to her from the doorway.
“I won’t tell—”
“Look at me, honey.”
“I won’t—”
“Calm down. Take a deep breath. And look at me. Megan, I said look at me.”
She looks up at him, her chin quivering, tears tracking down her cheeks.
He looks at her. “You’re with Bob now.”
“I’m sorry … what?” She wipes her eyes. “I’m what?”
“You’re with Bob,” he says. “You remember Bob Stookey, guy you came here with?”
She nods.
“You’re with him now. You understand? From now on you’re with him.”
Again she slowly nods.
“Oh and one more thing,” the Governor adds softly, almost as an afterthought. “Tell anyone about any of this … and your pretty little head goes in the tank next to the stoner.”
* * *
Minutes after Megan Lafferty makes her exit, vanishing into the shadows of the corridor, shivering and hyperventilating as she pulls on her coat, the Governor retires to the side room. He flops down on his La-Z-Boy and sits facing the matrix of fish tanks.
He sits there for quite a while, staring at the tanks, feeling empty. Muffled groans drift through the empty rooms behind him. The thing that was once a little girl is hungry again. Nausea begins to creep up the Governor’s gorge, clenching his insides and making his eyes water. He begins to shake. A current of terror over what he’s done crackles through him, turning his tendons to ice.
A moment later he lurches forward, slipping off the chair, falling on his knees, and roaring vomit. What is left of his dinner sluices across the filthy carpet. On his hands and knees he upchucks the remaining contents of his stomach, then sits back against the foot of the chair, gasping for breath.
A part of him—that deeply buried part known as “Brian”—feels the tide of revulsion drowning him. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. And yet he forces himself to keep gazing at the bloated, waterlogged faces staring back at him, bobbing and spewing bubbles in the tanks.
He wants to look away. He wants to flee the room and get away from these twitching, gurgling, dismembered heads. But he knows he must keep staring until his senses are numbed. He needs to be strong.
He needs to be prepared for what is to come.