He opens the back door. “What?”
“Here’s what you asked for,” Gabe says, standing outside the storm door, holding a blood-speckled metal container. The thick-necked man looks grim and jumpy, uncertain of the prevailing mood, glancing over his shoulder. The ammo box he’s holding, procured from the Guard station, has been serving them well as a makeshift bio-container. He looks at the Governor. “The two from the helicopter.” He blinks. “Oh … and I put something else in there.” Another blink. “Didn’t know if you’d want to keep it. You can just get rid of it if you don’t want it.”
“Thanks,” the Governor mumbles, taking the container from him. The metal is warm, and sticky from the blood. “Make sure I get some sleep, okay? Don’t let anyone else up here.”
“Okay, boss.”
Gabe turns and descends the stairs quickly, happy to be rid of the package.
The Governor shuts the door, turns, and heads back to his dining room.
Penny lurches at him as he passes, stretching her chain, snuffling at him, reaching her spindly little dead arms for the goodies. She can smell the mortified flesh. Her eyes are big silver coins, locked onto the box.
“No!” the Governor scolds her. “This ain’t for you, honey.”
She snarls and sputters.
He pauses. “Well … okay … hold on.” Thinking it over, he pries open the top and reaches into the container. Wet, fleshy objects are enclosed inside large Ziplocs. One of the objects—a severed human hand curled like a fleshy white crab frozen in death—brings a smirk to the Governor’s lips. “I suppose you can have this.” He pulls out the hand once belonging to the intruder named Rick, and tosses it to the girl. “That should keep you quiet long enough for me to doze off.”
The dead child goes to town on the dripping appendage, making lusty slurping noises, cartilage crackling like chicken bones in her black little teeth. The Governor walks away, carrying the container around the corner and into the dining room.
In the dimly lit chamber, the Governor pulls the other two objects from their bags.
“You guys have got guests,” he says to somebody in the shadows, kneeling down and pulling a severed female head from the plastic. The dripping cranium belongs to the woman named Christina. The expression fixed on its face—now as doughy, puffy, and soft as unbaked bread—is one of unadulterated horror. “New neighbors, actually.”
He opens the top of an empty aquarium, which is pushed against the far wall, and drops the news producer’s head into the fluid.
“You can keep each other company,” he says softly, almost tenderly, as he drops the second cranium, the one belonging to the pilot, into the murky water of an adjacent aquarium. He lets out a sigh. The housefly buzzes somewhere nearby, invisible, incessant. “Gotta get off my feet now.”
He returns to his chair and plops down with a weary, satisfied groan.
Twenty-six aquariums bubble softly across the room, each one containing at least two—some of them as many as three or four—reanimated human heads. The filters pop and gurgle, the top-lights humming softly. Each apparatus is connected to a master power strip, its anaconda-thick cord running across the baseboard and up the corner of the wall to a generator on the building’s roof.
Encapsulated in their green vials of water, rows of livid, discolored faces twitch as though invisible puppet strings are tugging at them. Eyelids as thin and veined as ancient dried leaves blink at random intervals, the cataract-filmed eyeballs fixed on passing reflections and shadows refracted by the water. Mouths gape open and snap shut intermittently, like a perpetual Whac-A-Mole game spanning the length of the glass panels. The Governor has collected the heads over the course of twelve months with the care of a museum curator. The selection process is instinctive, the effect of all these dead faces quite mysterious.
He leans back in his chair, the springs squeaking as the footrest levitates. He lounges there, the heaviness of exhaustion pressing down on him as he stares at the totality of faces. He barely notices the new visage—the head of a woman once known for brilliant segment producing at WROM Fox Atlanta—now gasping and spewing bubbles from her insensate mouth. The Governor sees only the whole, the totality of all the heads—the larger impression of all these random victims.
The screams of that skinny black gal in the underground vault are still reverberating in the back of his mind. The part of him that is repulsed by such behavior still whines and objects in a deeper partition of his brain. How could you do that to another human being? He stares at the heads. How could anybody do that to another person? He gapes harder at those pale, bloated visages.
The nauseating horror of all those helpless faces—gasping for a deliverance that will never come—is so bleak, so grim, so perfectly timely, that it once again, somehow, penetrates Philip Blake’s rumination and cleanses him. Somehow, it seals his wounded psyche with the caustic nature of reality. It inoculates him from doubt, from hesitation, from mercy, from empathy. This, after all, could be how we all end up: heads floating in tanks for eternity. Who’s to say? This is the logical extreme, a constant reminder of what is waiting if one is weak for one millisecond. The heads represent the old Philip Blake. The weak one, the milquetoast … the eternal complainer. How could you do this horrible thing? How could anyone do such a thing? He stares. The heads gird him, empower him, energize him.
His voice drops a full octave and comes out in barely a murmur, “Fifty-seven channels and nothing on.”
How?—
Could?—