Rise of the Governor (35 page)

Brian sighs. Further protest seems futile, so he simply stares at his coffee.

“And you're wrong about it not serving any purpose,” Philip concludes, after a moment of thought. “It serves the purpose of making me feel better.”

*   *   *

The next night, after the lanterns go out, and the fires in the three separate fireplaces dwindle down to coals, and the northeasterly wind begins toying with the dormers and loose shingles, Brian is lying in bed in the sewing room, trying to lull himself into a troubled sleep, when he hears the door latch click and sees the silhouette of Nick Parsons slipping into his room. Brian sits up. “What's going on?”

“Sssshhh,” Nick whispers, coming across the room and kneeling by the bed. Nick has his coat on, his gloves, and a bulge on his hip that looks like the grip of a handgun. “Keep it down.”

“What is it?”

“Your brother's asleep … finally.”

“So what?”

“So we gotta do a—whaddaya callit—an intervention.”

“What are you talking about? Penny? You're talking about trying to take Penny out again?”

“No! The barn, man! The barn!”

Brian moves to the edge of the bed and rubs his eyes, stretches his sore limbs, shakes the cobwebs off. “I don't know if I'm ready for this.”

*   *   *

They slip out the back, each one of them armed with a handgun. Nick has the bald man's .357 steel-plated revolver, Brian has a snub-nose that belonged to one of the thug gunmen. They steal across the property to the barn, and Brian shines a flashlight on the padlock. They find a piece of timber in a woodpile, and they use it to pry open the rotted doors, making as little noise as possible.

Brian's heart hammers in his chest as they slip inside the dark barn.

The stench of mold and urine fills their senses as they work their way back through the fetid shadows to the rear of the barn, where two dark heaps lie on the floor in puddles of blood as black as oil. At first, the shapes don't even look human, but when the beam of Brian's flashlight falls on a pale face, Brian lets out a gasp.

“Holy fucking shit.”

The man and woman are still alive, barely, their faces disfigured and swollen, their midsections exposed like raw meat. A thin tendril of steam rises from festering, sucking wounds. Both captives are semiconscious, their parboiled eyes fixed on the rafters. The woman is brutalized, a broken doll with legs akimbo and blood patterns covering her pasty, tattooed flesh.

Brian begins to tremble. “Holy shit … what have we…? Holy
fucking shit
…”

Nick kneels by the woman. “Brian, get some water.”

“What about—”

“Get it from the well! Hurry!”

Brian hands over his flashlight, spins, and hustles back the way he came.

Nick shines the light on the constellation of wounds and sores—some old and infected, some fresh—across a hundred percent of their twisted bodies. The man's chest rises and falls quickly, convulsively, with shallow breaths. The woman struggles to fix her rheumy gaze on Nick. She is blinking wildly.

Her lips move beneath the duct tape. Nick starts to carefully peel the gag away from her mouth.

“P-p-pleeee … kuhhh…” She's trying to say something urgent but Nick can't understand her.

“It's okay, we're gonna get you outta here, it's okay, you're gonna make it.”

“K-khhh…”

“Cold?” Nick tries to pull her pants back on her. “Try to breathe, try to—”

“K-khhlll.”

“What? I can't—”

The woman tries to swallow, and again she says, “K-kill uss … p-please…”

Nick stares. His guts go cold. He feels something softly nudging his hip and he looks down and sees the woman's scabby hand fumbling at the pistol grip sticking out of his belt. Nick feels all the fight go out of him. His heart sinks down through the floor.

He pulls the .357 from his belt and stands up and gazes down at the abominations on the floor of the barn for a long time.

He says a prayer: the Twenty-third Psalm.

*   *   *

Brian is on his way back to the barn with a plastic pail of well water when he hears the two muffled pops from inside the barn. Like firecrackers bursting inside tin cans, the blasts are short and sharp. The sound of them makes Brian freeze in his tracks, the water sloshing over the rim of the bucket. He sucks in a startled breath.

Then he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a faint light flickering on in one of the villa's second-floor windows: Philip's room. A flashlight up there plays across the window, then vanishes. This is followed by a series of muffled footsteps banging down the stairs and through the house, hard and fast, and this gets Brian moving again.

He drops the pail. He charges back across the property to the barn. He slams through the doorway, plunging into the dark. Then he hurtles through the shadows, toward the silver beam of light on the floor in the rear. He sees Nick standing over the captives.

A ribbon of cordite smoke rises from the muzzle of the .357 in Nick's right hand, now hanging at his side as he stares down at the bodies.

Brian joins Nick and starts to say something when all at once Brian looks down and sees the head wounds: blossoms of gore bloom up the stall door—shimmering in the horizontal light beam.

The man and the woman are stone-cold dead, each one of them now lying supine in their drying fluids, their faces at peace, released from their contortions of misery. Again, Brian tries to say something.

He can't get out any words.

*   *   *

A moment later, in the darkness across the barn, the double doors burst open and Philip storms in. Fists clenched at his sides, face chiseled with rage, eyes flashing with white-hot madness, he marches toward the light. He looks as though he's going to devour somebody. He has a pistol shoved down the side of his belt and a machete banging on one hip.

He gets about halfway across the barn before he starts to slow down.

Nick has turned away from the bodies and is now standing his ground, staring at Philip as he approaches. Brian steps back, a tidal wave of shame crashing down over him. He feels like his soul is being ripped in half. He stares at the floor as his brother approaches slowly now, warily, glancing nervously from the dead bodies to Nick, and then to Brian, and then back at the dead bodies.

For the longest time, nobody can think of anything to say. Philip keeps looking at Brian, and Brian keeps trying to conceal the paralyzing shame spreading through him, but the more he tries to conceal it, the more it drags him down.

If Brian only had the guts for it, he would put the barrel of the snub-nose in his mouth right now and put
himself
out of his misery. In some strange way, he feels responsible for this—for all of it—but he's too much of a coward to kill himself like a man.

He can only stand there and look away in abject shame and humiliation.

And like an invisible chain reaction, the pathetic, gruesome tableau of desecrated bodies—combined with the unyielding silence of his brother and his friend—begins to break Philip down.

He fights the tears pooling in his eyes and juts his quivering chin out in a mixture of defiance and self-loathing. He works his mouth like he's got something important to impart, and it takes a huge effort to speak, but he finally manages to say in a choked mutter, “Whatever.”

Nick looks mortified, staring at Philip in disbelief.
“
‘
Whatever'?”

Philip turns and walks away, pulling the Glock from his belt as he goes. He snaps the slide and fires into the wall of the barn—BOOOOMMMMMM!—the recoil kicking in his hand, the loud bark making Brian jump. BOOOOOMMMM! Another blast flashes in the darkness, taking a chunk of the door. BOOOOOMMMM! The third shot puts a chink in the rafter and rains debris down on the floor.

Philip angrily kicks the doors open and storms out of the barn.

The silence left behind seems to ripple for a moment with afterimages of Philip's fiery wrath. Brian hasn't taken his eyes off the floor throughout all this, and he continues to hang his head and stare miserably at the moldy matted hay. Nick takes one last look at the bodies, and then lets out a long, pained, unsteady breath. He looks at Brian, and he shakes his head. “There you have it,” he says.

But something behind his words—the subtle tone of dread in his voice—tells Brian that things have now irrevocably changed in their little dysfunctional family.

 

TWENTY

“What the fuck is he doing?” Nick stands at the villa's front window, staring out at the overcast morning.

Across the front of the property, at the top of the driveway, Philip has Penny on a modified dog leash, assembled from spare parts found in the toolshed—a long length of copper pipe with a spiked collar threaded through one end. He drags her toward a Ford S-10 pickup parked on the grass. The truck is one of the vehicles owned by the bald man's crew, and Philip has now loaded its cargo bed with canned goods, guns, provisions, and bedding.

Penny sputters and growls as she is yanked along, grabbing at the pipe leashed to her neck, biting at the air. In the diffuse, watery light, her dead face looks like a living Halloween mask, sculpted out of wormy-gray modeling clay.

“That's what I've been trying to tell you,” Brian says, standing next to Nick, gazing out at the bizarre scene unfolding in the front yard. “He got up this morning convinced we can't stay here anymore.”

“And why's that?”

Brian shrugs. “I don't know … after all that's happened … I guess the place is like poison for him, full of ghosts … I don't know.”

Brian and Nick have been up all night, guzzling coffee and discussing their situation. Nick has been dancing around the fact that he thinks Philip has gone off his spindle, succumbing to the stress of losing Penny, and to the cumulative pressure of protecting them. Although Nick has stopped short of verbalizing it, he has alluded to the possibility that the Devil has gotten his hooks into Philip. Brian is too exhausted to argue metaphysics with Nick, but there is no denying the fact that things have become dire.

“Let him go,” Nick says finally, turning away from the window.

Brian looks at him. “What do you mean? You mean you're staying?”

“Yeah, I'm staying, and you should, too.”

“Nick, come on.”

“How can we keep following him … after all this shit … the stuff that's gone down?”

Brian wipes his mouth and thinks about it. “Look. I'll say it again. What he did to those people is, like,
beyond awful.
He lost his way. And I'm not sure I'll ever be able to look at him the same way again … but this is about survival now. We can't split up. Our best shot is sticking together no matter what.”

Nick glances back out the window. “You really think we're gonna make it to the Gulf Coast? That's like four hundred miles and change.”

“Our best shot is doing it together.”

Nick fixes his gaze on Brian. “He's got his dead daughter on a fucking leash. He pretty near beat you to death. He's a loose cannon, Brian, and he's gonna blow up in our faces.”

“That loose cannon got us all the way across Georgia from Waynesboro in one piece,” Brian says, a flare of anger burning in his gut. “So, he's nuts, he's volatile, he's possessed by demons, he's the prince of fucking darkness … he's still my brother and he's our best chance of survival.”

Nick looks at him. “Is that what we're calling it now? Survival?”

“You want to stay here, be my guest.”

“Thanks, I'll do that.”

Nick walks away, leaving Brian to turn back to the window and nervously watch his brother.

*   *   *

Utilizing a radiator hose as a siphon, they consolidate all the fuel on the property—from tractors, from vehicles, even from the Harleys—into the Ford S-10. All told, they're able to top off the seventeen-gallon tank and then some. Philip arranges a place for Penny in the rear cargo bay by moving the boxes of supplies around into a semicircle and laying blankets down on the deck. He chains her to a U-bolt so she can't get herself into any mischief or fall over the side.

Nick watches all this from his second-floor window, pacing the room like a caged animal. The reality of the situation starts to set in. He'll be alone in this big old drafty villa. He'll spend nights alone. He'll spend the whole winter alone. He'll hear the north winds shrieking through the gutters and the distant moaning of Biters wandering the orchards … all while biding his time alone. He'll wake up alone and eat alone and forage for food alone and dream of better days alone and pray to God for deliverance … all by himself. As he watches Philip and Brian finish up the last of the preparations for departure, a twinge of regret tightens Nick's midsection—
seller's remorse.
He crosses the room to his closet.

It takes him a matter of seconds to stuff his essentials into a duffel bag.

He rushes out of the room and takes the stairs two at a time.

*   *   *

Brian is just settling into the passenger seat, and Philip is just putting the truck in gear, just beginning to pull away from the villa, when the sound of the front door ripping open reaches their ears.

Brian glances over his shoulder and sees Nick with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, running across the front parkway, waving them back.

*   *   *

It's hard to believe that Philip would neglect to check under the pickup's hood. Had he taken three minutes to make sure everything was in working order, he would have found the perforated hose. But Philip Blake is not exactly a hundred percent these days. His mind is a shortwave radio tuned to different stations now.

But regardless of whether it was a deliberate cut made by the home invaders after the firefight broke out (to ensure that nobody escaped), or it was a piece of flak that had pierced the truck's grill, or it was simply a coincidental failure, the pickup begins to smoke and sputter less than five miles from the villa.