The Governor smiles. “That’s cute. Get some rest—as much as you can, at least. A guy’s going to be in here later to clean you up, maybe give you some bandages. Maybe have a little fun himself. But mostly he’ll be getting you ready for when I come back.” He winks at her. “Just want to give you something to look forward to.” He turns and gives her a wave over his shoulder. “Later.”
He walks out.
The rolling door comes down with a metallic thud.
* * *
The sun comes up while the Governor is walking back to his place.
The air smells clean—rich earth and clover—the dark mood of the catacombs washing away in the golden light and breeze of a Georgia spring morning. The Governor sheds his hard demeanor along the way, and steps into the skin of the benevolent town leader. He sees a few early risers, and gives them neighborly waves, bidding them a good morning with the jovial smile of a town constable.
He walks along with a bounce in his step now, the master of his little fiefdom, thoughts of breaking women and controlling outsiders evaporating, stuffed back down into the lower compartments of his brain. The sounds of truck engines and nails going into new timber already fill the air—Martinez and his crew fortifying the new sections of the barricade.
Approaching his building, the Governor runs into a woman and her two children, the little boys scampering across the street.
The Governor chuckles at the kids, stepping out of their way. “Morning,” he says to the mother with a nod.
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.
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?—
You?—
He ignores the voice inside him and gets sleepy staring at those moving mouths, bubbling and twitching and screaming their silent watery screams.—How?— He sinks into the darkness of sleep. Staring. Absorbing. He begins to dream—the nightmare world seeping into the real world—and he is running through a dark forest. He tries to scream but his voice won’t make a sound. He opens his mouth and lets out a silent cry. No sound comes out of him—only bubbles, which spew up into the darkness and vanish. The woods close in on him. He stands still, fists clenched, white-hot rage flowing out of him, pouring out of his mouth. Burn it all down. Burn it all. Destroy it. Destroy everything. Now. Now! NOW!
* * *
The Governor jerks awake sometime later. He can’t tell at first if it’s day or night. His legs have fallen asleep, and his neck aches from lolling at an odd angle on the armchair’s headrest.
He gets up and goes into the bathroom and gets himself together. Standing at the mirror, he can hear the low snoring groans of his little girl chained to the wall in the other room. The windup alarm clock on the commode tells him it’s almost noon.
He feels refreshed. Strong. He has a busy day ahead of him. He uses pumice soap to wash away the black lady’s blood from under his fingernails. He cleans up, changes into fresh clothes, and has a quick breakfast—powdered milk for his Post Toasties, instant coffee heated on a Sterno can—and he gives Penny another fresh morsel from the steel container.
“Daddy’s gotta go to work,” he says cheerfully to the tiny corpse as he heads for the door. He grabs his gun and the walkie-talkie charging by the door. “I love you, honey. Stay outta trouble while I’m gone.”
On his way out of the building, he gets Bruce on the two-way. “Meet me at the track,” he says into the mouthpiece, “at the top of the service entrance.” He thumbs the walkie off without waiting for an answer.
Ten minutes later, the Governor stands at the apex of a greasy staircase, which leads down into the cavernous, dark, underground maze. The sky over the racetrack looks threatening, the day turning dark and blustery.
“Hey, boss,” the big bald man says as he lopes up from the parking lot.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I came right over, I’m sorry.”
The Governor glances over his shoulder, a few passersby catching his eye. He lowers his voice. “What’s the situation with the woman?”
“Still talking to herself. Bitch is bug-fuck crazy, you ask me.”
“Is she cleaned up?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Albert paid her a visit, looked her over, gave her some food … which she didn’t touch. I guess she had some water, that’s about it.”
“She still awake?”
“Yep. Far as I can tell. I looked in on her about an hour ago.”
“What was her … demeanor?”
“Her what?”
The Governor sighs. “Demeanor, Bruce. Her mood. What the fuck was she doing?”
Bruce shrugs. “I don’t know, just staring at the floor, talking to the voices in her head.” He licks his lips. “Can I ask you a question?”
“What?”
“Is she telling you anything? Giving you any information?”
The Governor runs his fingers through his long hair. “I’m not asking her anything … so there’s nothing for her to tell me, is there?”
Bruce furrows his brow, looks at him. “You’re not asking her anything?”
“That’s right.”
“Mind if I
ask why?”
The Governor glances off into the distance at the plumes of exhaust puffing out of a bulldozer moving earth against the barricade, the workmen securing the last sections, the buzz of engines and hammers filling the air. “That’s coming,” he says, thinking about it. “Speaking of that … I want you to do something for me. Where’s the young one being kept?”
“The Asian kid? He’s on B-level, in the warehouse room next to the infirmary.”
“I want you to move him to the stall right next to the woman’s.”
Bruce’s brow furrows deeper, the folds and creases spreading up across his bald head. “Okay, but … you want him to hear what’s going on in that room?”
The Governor gives him a cold smile. “You ain’t so dumb, Brucey. I want that kid to hear everything I do to that bitch tonight. Then one of them’ll talk. Trust me.”
Bruce starts to say something else when the Governor turns and walks away without another word.
* * *
In the dusty stillness of her apartment, Lilly and Austin each manage to grab a few hours of restless sleep that morning, and when they finally awaken around one o’clock, the convivial atmosphere of the previous night has transformed into a series of awkward negotiations.
“Oh … sorry,” Austin says when he pushes the door to the bathroom open and finds Lilly on the toilet in her Georgia Tech T-shirt with her panties around her ankles. Austin turns away immediately.
“No problem,” she says. “Can you just give me a minute or two? Then it’s all yours.”
“Absolutely,” he says, thrusting his hands in his pockets and pacing the hallway. Earlier that morning, he had dozed off on the floor of the living room, covered in a packing blanket from the truck, while Lilly slept in the bedroom on her broken-down futon. From the hallway, Austin calls to her, “You got time to give me another lesson today?”
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