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 sh
aded 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.
FIFTEEN
On the west side of town, within the walled area, inside a second-story apartment near the post office, Bob Stookey hears a knock. Sitting up against the headboard of a brass bed, he puts down his dog-eared paperback book—a Louis L’Amour western called The Outlaws of Mesquite—and steps into his scuffed loafers. He pulls on his pants. He has some trouble with the zipper, his hands fumbling.
After drinking himself insensate earlier that evening, he still feels wonky and disconnected. The dizziness tugs at his focus and his stomach lurches, as he staggers out of the room and crosses the apartment to the side door, which opens out onto the darkness of a wooden landing at the top of a staircase. Bob belches and swallows bile as he pushes the door open.
“Bob … something horrible has … Oh, God, Bob,” Megan Lafferty sobs from the shadows of the staircase. Her face wet and drawn, her eyes sunken and red, she looks as though she’s about to shatter apart like a glass figurine. She trembles in the cold, holding the collar of her denim jacket tight against the bitter winds.
“Come in, darlin’, c’mon in,” Bob says, pushing the door wider, his heart beating a little faster. “What in God’s name happened?”
Megan staggers into the kitchen. Bob takes her by the arms and helps her over to a hard chair canted next to the cluttered dining table. She flops down in her chair and tries to speak but the sobs won’t let her. Bob kneels by her chair, stro
king her shoulder as she cries. She buries her face in his chest and cries.
Bob holds her. “It’s okay, darlin’ … whatever it is … we’ll figure it out.”
She moans—gut shot with anguish and horror—her tears soaking his sleeveless undershirt. He cradles her head, stroking her damp curls. After an agonizing moment, she looks up at him. “Scott’s dead.”
“What!”
“I saw him, Bob.” She speaks in hitching gasps, her sobs shuddering through her. “He’s … he’s dead and … he’s turned into one of those things.”
“Easy, darlin’, take a breath and try to tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened!”
“Where did you see him?”
She sniffs back the gasps and then tells Bob in broken, half-formed sentences about the severed heads bobbing in the darkness.
“Where did you see this?”
She hyperventilates. “In the … over in … in the Governor’s place.”
“The Governor’s place? You saw Scott at the Governor’s place?”
She nods and nods. She tries to explain but the words are caught in her throat.
Bob strokes her arm. “Darlin,’ what were you doing in the Governor’s place?”
She tries to speak. The sobs return. She buries her face in her hands.
“Let me get you some water,” Bob says at last. He hurries over to the sink and runs water into a plastic cup. Half the homes in Woodbury have no utilities, no heat or power or running water. The lucky few who still have these amenities are members of the Governor’s inner circle—those to whom the makeshift power structure has bestowed perks. Bob has become a sort of sentimental favorite, and his private quarters reflect this status. Littered with empty bottles and food wrappers, tins of pipe tobacco and girlie magazines, warm blankets and electronic gadgets, the apartment has taken on the look of a shabby man-cave.
Bob brings the water over to Megan, and she gulps it from the plastic cup, some of it seeping out the sides of her mouth and soaking her jacket. Bob gently helps her remove her coat as she finishes the water. He looks away when he sees the front of her blouse buttoned haphazardly, open at the navel, a series of red blotches and deep scratches running down the length of her sternum between her pale breasts. Her bra is askew and one of her nipples shows prominently.
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