Preoccupied with her brood, the woman—a matronly gal from Augusta—shouts at the boys, “Kids, please! I told you to stop running!” She turns to Philip and gives him a demure little smile. “Morning, Governor.”
The man walks on, and he sees Bob hunched on the sidewalk near his steps.
“Bob, please,” he says as he walks over to the ragged wreck of a human being hunkered down under an awning next to the Governor’s entrance. “Get some food. I hate to see you wasting away like this. We got rid of the barter system, they’ll just give you something.”
Bob gurgles and lets out a belch. “Fine … okay … if it’ll get ‘Mother Hen’ off my back.”
“Thanks, Bob,” the Governor says, heading for his foyer. “I worry about you.”
Bob mumbles something that sounds like “Whatever…”
The Governor goes inside his building. A fly—a huge bluebottle—buzzes over the staircase. The hallways are as silent as empty crypts.
Inside his apartment, he finds his dead baby girl crouching on the floor of the living room, staring emptily down at the stained carpet, making little noises that sound almost like snores. The stench wafts around her. The Governor goes to her, filled with affection. “I know, I know,” he says to her lovingly. “Sorry I was out so late … or early, depending on how you look at it.”
She roars suddenly—a screechy growl that comes out of her like the squeal of a tortured cat—and she springs to her feet and lunges at him.
He slaps her—hard—backhanding her, sending her slamming against the wall. “Behave yourself, goddamnit!”
She staggers and gazes up at him through milk-glass eyes. An expression like fear flutters across her livid blue face, twitches at her lipless rictus of a mouth, and makes her look oddly sheepish and docile. The sight of it makes the Governor deflate.
“I’m sorry, honey.” He wonders if she’s hungry. “What’s got you so riled lately?” He notices her bucket has overturned. “No food, huh?”
He goes over and picks up the bucket, shoving a severed foot back into it. “You need to be more careful. If you knock your bucket over, it’ll roll outta your reach. I raised you better than this.”
He looks inside the bucket. The contents have decomposed severely. The severed foot looks so bloated and livid it resembles a balloon. Furry with mold, radiating an indescribable stench that literally leeches tears from the eyes, the body parts stew in a thick, viscous substance with which pathologists are all too familiar: the yellow, bilelike goo that is essentially the signal that advanced decomposition has started—that all the maggots and blowflies have departed and left behind a mass of drying proteins.
“You don’t want that, do you?” the Governor asks the dead girl, plucking the swollen, blackened foot distastefully from the bin. He holds it with thumb and index finger, forming a pincerlike tong, and tosses it to the creature. “Here … go ahead.”
She gobbles the morsel on her hands and knees, her back arched with simian fervor. She seems to stiffen suddenly at the taste of it. “PFUH!” she grunts as she spits out the chewed particles.
The Governor just sadly shakes his head as he turns away and heads for the dining room, chastising her over his shoulder. “See … you knocked your bucket over and now your food has spoiled. That’s what you get.” He lowers his voice, adding under his breath, “Even fresh, I don’t see how you eat that stuff … really.”
He collapses into his Barcalounger, the chair creaking as it reclines. Eyelids heavy, joints aching, his genitals sore from all the exertion, he lies back and thinks about the time he actually tasted Penny’s food.
*
It was late one night about three months ago, and the Governor was drunk, and trying to get the dead child to calm down. It happened almost spontaneously. He simply grabbed a piece of tissue—part of a human finger; he can’t even remember its original owner—and popped it in his mouth. Contrary to all the jokes, it did not taste even remotely like chicken. It had a bitter, metallic, gamey taste—coppery like blood but with a mouth-feel similar to extremely tough, extremely granular stew meat—and he had immediately spit it out.
There is an axiom among gourmets that the food that is closest in genetic makeup to its consumer is the most delicious, the most succulent, the most satisfying. Hence the existence of exotic dishes among Eastern cultures such as trepanned chimpanzee brains and various sweetbreads. But Philip Blake knows this belief to be a lie—humans taste like shit. Perhaps if served raw with seasoning—human tartare, let’s say—the tissue and organs might be tolerable, but the Governor has yet to be in the mood to experiment.
“I’d get you some more food, honey,” he softly calls out now to the tiny cadaver in the other room, his body relaxing as he drifts off in his recliner to the soothing sounds of bubbles percolating in the shadows across the dining room. The soft hissing noises of aquariums are omnipresent in the apartment, like white noise, or static from a defunct television station. “But Daddy’s tired today, needs some shut-eye … so you’ll have to wait, honey … until I wake up.”
He falls fast asleep to the drone of burbling water tanks and has no idea how long he’s been out when the sound of knocking penetrates his slumber, and makes him sit up with a jerk.
At first he thinks it’s Penny making noise in the other room but then he hears it again, harder this time, coming from the back door. “This better be good,” he mumbles as he trudges across the apartment.