* * *
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?”
“You’re really a glutton for punishment,” she says inside the bathroom, flushing the toilet and getting herself together at the mirror. She comes out and gives him a good-natured punch in the arm. “Whaddaya say we give that side a chance to heal up first?”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“I could make you dinner,” he says, his eyes bright and guileless.
“Oh … um … wow.” Lilly wants so badly to say the right thing. She doesn’t want to lose Austin as a friend. Contrary emotions roil through her as she searches for the right words. She feels at once closer to him and strangely alienated from him. The fact is she can’t ignore her feelings for the scruffy young man. He is good-hearted, ballsy, loyal, and—she might as well admit it to herself—an amazing lover. But what does she really know about him? What does anybody really know about anybody in this fucked-up new society? Is Austin one of those old-school men who think sex seals the deal? And for that matter, why can’t Lilly just surrender to her tender feelings for him? What’s wrong with her? The answer is elusive—fear, self-preservation, guilt, self-loathing—she can’t quite put her finger on it. But she knows one thing for sure: She’s not ready for a relationship. Not yet. And she can tell by the look in the young man’s eyes right now, he’s already halfway there. Lilly finally says, “Let me … think about it.”
He looks crestfallen. “Lilly, it’s just dinner … I’m not asking you to pick out furniture.”
“I know … I just … I need to think about it.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No. Not at all. It’s just…” She pauses. “It’s just that…”
He gives her a grin. “Please don’t say ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’”
She laughs. “Okay, I’m sorry. All I’m saying is … just give me some time.”
He gives her a little bow. “You got it, m’lady … I will give you time and space.” He goes out into the living room and gathers his gun, his coat, and his knapsack, and she follows him to the front door.
They go outside.
“Looks like a storm brewing,” Austin says, glancing up at the dark cloud cover.
“That it does,” she says, squinting up at the gray light, her headache returning.
He starts to descend the steps when Lilly reaches out and gently tugs on his arm. “Austin, wait.” She searches for the proper words. “I’m sorry … I’m being ridiculous. I just want to take it slow. What happened last night…”
He takes her by the arms, looks deep into her eyes, and says, “What happened last night was beautiful. And I don’t want to fuck it up.” His face softens. He touches her hair, and plants a platonic little smack on the side of her face. He does this without guile, without premeditation. He simply kisses her temple with great tenderness. “You want to know the truth of the matter?” He looks into her eyes. “You’re totally worth the wait.”
And with that, he shuffles down the steps and plods off into the gathering storm.
* * *
The rain comes in waves that afternoon. Martinez has to suspend the last of the construction on the northeast corner of the rampart, and he and his crew relocate under the awnings along the derelict train station, where
they stand around, smoking, watching the weather, and keeping an eye on the woods to the north.
Walker sightings have increased over the last few weeks out there in the thickets and swamps behind the palisades of white pines. Now the curtains of rain unfurl from the heavens, strafing the forest and washing out the meadows. The sky unleashes volleys of thunder, while veins of lightning crackle off the horizon. It’s an angry storm, biblical in its volume and fury, and it makes Martinez nervous. He smokes his filterless cigarette with a vengeance—he rolls his own—sucking it down to the nub as he gazes at the storm. The last thing he needs right now is drama.
But that very moment it comes around the corner in the form of Lilly Caul. She hurries across the adjacent lot with her jean jacket held high over her head to ward off the rain. She approaches with an anxious expression on her face, hustling under the temporary shelter, out of breath, shaking the moisture from her jacket. “Jesus Christ, that came on quick,” she pants at Martinez.
“Afternoon, Lilly,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette on the pavement.
She catches her breath, looking around. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going.”
“What’s happening with the interlopers?”
“The who?”
“The strangers,” she says, wiping her face. “The ones … came in the other night?”
“What about them?” Martinez gives her a shrug, glancing nervously over his shoulder at his men. “I don’t have anything to do with that.”
“Aren’t they being questioned?” She looks at him. “What’s wrong?”
He gives her a strange look. “You weren’t even supposed to know about that.”
“About what?”
Martinez grabs her, leads her away from the men, over to the far edge of the awning. The rain has settled into a steady downpour, and now the jet-engine hum of the storm masks their conversation. “Look,” Martinez says to her, measuring his words, “this has nothing to do with us, and I would advise you to stay out of it.”