Rise of the Governor (25 page)

“I'm cool,” she says, crabbing along with white knuckles and clenched jaw. The wind tousles her hair. Thirty feet beneath her, a pair of moving cadavers dumbly gaze around the air for the source of the voices.

“Almost home free,” Philip urges as he reaches the other side.

She crabs the remaining twenty feet. He helps her down onto the fire-escape landing. The cast-iron grating squeaks under their weight.

They find the open window and slip inside the former home of Stevenson and Sons Accounting and Estate Planning. The office corridors are darker and colder than they were the last time Philip traversed their length. The storm front has brought dusk to the area earlier than usual tonight.

They cross the empty hallways. “Don't worry,” Philip assures her as they crunch across debris and crumpled tax returns, “This place is as safe as you can get, this day and age.”

“That's not very reassuring,” she says, cradling the shotgun, thumbing the hammer nervously.

Dressed in tattered fleece and jeans, April has her arms and lower legs wrapped with gaffer's tape. Nobody else does this. Philip asked her about it once and she told him she saw an animal trainer do it on TV—a last-resort defense against a bite breaking the skin.

They cross the lobby and find the access stairs just past the ruined vending machines.

“Get a load of this,” Philip says as he leads her up the single flight to the unmarked door. He pauses before opening the door. “You remember Captain Nemo?”

“Who?”

“That old flick
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
? That old loony captain, playing his organ in that submarine, while the giant squids swim across them big picture windows?”

“Never saw it.”

Philip smiles at her. “Well, you're about to.”

*   *   *

The last thing April Chalmers expects is for something other than horrific violence to take her breath away, but that's pretty much what happens when she follows Philip through the unmarked door and onto the pedestrian bridge. She pauses on the threshold and just stares.

She's been in these urban breezeways before—maybe even this very bridge—but somehow, tonight, the gauzy light and space of the thing, as it stretches across the intersection, thirty feet above the streets, connecting up with the second floor of Dillard's, seems almost miraculous. Through the glass roof, veins of lightning flicker and thread across the storm clouds. Through the transparent walls, the darkening shadows of the city teem with wandering zombies. Atlanta looks like a vast game board in chaotic disarray.

“I see what you mean,” she says. Her voice comes out in a murmur, as she takes it all in, feeling a weird mixture of emotions—giddiness, fear, excitement.

Philip strolls down the center of the bridge, pausing by one wall and shrugging off the straps of his duffel bag. He nods to the south. “Want you to see something,” he says. “C'mere.”

She joins him, putting down her shotgun and backpack against the glass wall.

Philip points out the marks on the abandoned vehicles and doorways left by Nick Parsons. Philip explains the theory of “safe zones” and he talks about how cunning Nick has become. “I think he's got something really good going here,” Philip concludes.

April agrees. “We could use those hiding places when we find that generator everybody's talking about.”

“You got that right, sister.”

“Nick's a good guy.”

“That he is.”

The encroaching darkness is drawing down over the city, and in the bluish shadows of the bridgeway, Philip's rugged face looks even craggier to April than usual. With his inky black Fu Manchu whiskers and dark eyes nested in laugh lines, he reminds April of a cross between a young Clint Eastwood and … who? Her dad as a young man? Is that why she's feeling these twinges of attraction toward the big, lanky redneck? Is April so retarded that she's attracted to a man just because he's the doppelgänger of her father? Or does this pathetic puppy love have something to do with the stress of fighting to survive in a world suddenly doomed with extinction? This is the guy who cracked open her daddy's skull, for God's sake. But maybe that's unfair. That was
not
David Chalmers back there. Her daddy's spirit, as the song goes, had flown away. His soul had departed long before he climbed out of his bed and tried to make a meal out of his eldest daughter.

“I gotta tell you,” Philip is saying, gazing out at the ragged figures, like stray dogs, roaming the streets for scraps. “We get a few things in place, and we could stay for a long time in that apartment building.”

“I think you're right. All we gotta do is figure out a way to slip some Valium into Tara's oatmeal.”

Philip laughs—a good, clean laugh—which shows a side of him that April has not yet seen. He looks at her. “We got an opportunity here, we can make this work. We can do more than just survive. And I'm not just talking about getting a generator.”

April looks up into his eyes. “Whaddaya mean?”

He turns toward her. “Met a lotta girls in my day, ain't never run across one quite like you. Tough as nails … but the tenderness you show toward my kid? Never seen Penny take to somebody like she's taken to you. Hell, you saved our asses, pulling us off the streets. You're a very special lady, you know that?”

All at once April feels her skin flush hot with chills, and her midsection weaken, and she realizes Philip is looking at her in a new way. His eyes shimmer with emotion. She knows now that he's been thinking the same thing that she has. She looks down, embarrassed. “Your standards must be low,” she mutters.

He reaches out and gently puts one of his big, callused workman's hands on the curve of her jaw. “I got the highest standards of anybody I know.”

A clap of thunder booms outside the glass, rattling the bridge and making April jump.

Philip kisses her on the lips.

She pulls back. “I don't know, Philip … I mean … I don't know if this is … you know.”

Second thoughts and third thoughts and fourth thoughts flow through April in the space of an instant. If she takes this to the next level, what will happen with Tara? How will it fuck up the dynamics at the apartment? How will it complicate things? How will it affect their safety, their chances of survival, their future (if they even have one)?

Philip's expression brings her back—the way he's looking at her, his gaze almost glassy with emotion, his mouth slack with desire.

He leans in and kisses her again, and this time she finds herself putting her arms around him and returning the kiss, and she doesn't even notice the droplets of rain beginning to ping off the glass over her head.

She feels her body go limp in Philip's forceful embrace. Their lips part, and electricity flows through April as they explore each other with their tongues, the taste of coffee and spearmint gum and Philip's musky odor filling her senses. Her nipples harden under her sweater.

A flash of blue lightning turns the dusk to brilliant silver daylight.

April loses track of herself. She loses track of
everything.
Her head is spinning. She doesn't notice the rain slapping against the glass roof. She doesn't even notice the fact that Philip is gently lowering both of them to the floor of the walkway. Their lips locked and working sensually, Philip's big hands caressing April's breasts, he carefully lays her back against the glass wall, and before April knows what is happening, he is on top of her.

The storm unleashes its fury. The rain comes down now in sheets against the roof. Thunder rolls and lightning crackles and sparks like static electricity in the anxious air as Philip fumbles April's sweater up across her bare midriff, exposing her bra in the blue light.

Gnarled fingers wrestle open belt buckles. Thunder booms. April feels the urgent nudge of Philip's loins burrowing between her legs. Lightning flickers. Her jeans are halfway down her legs, her breasts free now.

The edge of a fingernail brushes her belly, and all at once, like a switch flipping inside her—accompanied by a single volley of thunder—she thinks,
WAIT
.

BOOOOOOOM!

WAIT!

*   *   *

A tidal wave of desire carries Philip Blake off on its roaring currents.

He can barely hear April's voice coming from somewhere far away, telling him to
Stop, wait, hold on, listen, listen, this is too much, I'm not ready for this, please, please, stop right now, stop
. None of it registers in Philip's brain as it swims with lust and passion and pain and loneliness and a desperate need to
feel something,
because now his entire being is wired to his groin, all his pent-up emotion coursing through him.

“God, I'm begging you to stop!” the faraway voice pleads, April's body stiffening.

Philip rides the writhing woman beneath him as if surfing a pipeline of white noise, knowing that she secretly wants him,
loves him,
despite what she's saying. So, he keeps shoving himself into her, again and again, in great magnesium-bright flashes of lightning and raw energy, filling her, taking her, nourishing her, transforming her, until she goes limp beneath him, limp and silent now.

The soft white explosion of pleasure erupts like a skyrocket launching inside Philip.

He slides off her, landing on the floor next to her, staring straight up at the rain—momentarily oblivious to the shadowy, desecrated souls thirty feet below them, captured in the flicker-show of lightning like monstrous figures in a silent movie.

*   *   *

Philip takes April's silence as a sign that maybe, just maybe, everything's going to be okay. As the storm settles into a steady deluge, its muffled jet-engine roar filling the walkway, the two of them pull their clothes back on and lie there side by side for a long time, not saying a word, staring up at the strafing sheets of rain crashing off the glass roof.

Philip is in a state of shock, his heart racing, his skin clammy and cold. He feels like a broken mirror, as if a shard of his own soul has fractured off and reflected back the face of a monster. What did he just do? He knows he did something wrong. But it almost feels like somebody else did it.

“Got a little carried away there,” he says at last, after many minutes of terrible silence.

She doesn't say a word. He glances over at her, and sees her face in the darkness, reflecting the liquid shadows of rain streaming down the sides of the glass walkway. She looks semiconscious. Like she's having a waking dream.

“Sorry about that,” he says, the words sounding tinny and hollow in his own ears. He shoots another glance at her, trying to gauge her mood. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Her voice has a mechanical quality to it, completely colorless, barely audible above the noise of the rain. Philip is about to say something else when a volley of thunder interrupts his thought. The rumbling reverberates through the iron framework of the walkway, a teeth-rattling vibration that makes Philip cringe.

“April?”

“Yes.”

“We ought to get back.”

*   *   *

The return trip is shrouded in silence. Philip walks a few paces behind April through the deserted lobby, up a staircase, and down the empty, litter-strewn corridors. Every now and then, Philip considers saying something, but he doesn't. He figures it's probably best to let it ride right now. Let her work through it. Anything Philip says might make it worse. April walks ahead of him with the shotgun on her shoulder, looking like a tired soldier returning from a rough patrol. They reach the top floor of the accounting firm and find the gaping window, the rain blowing in past jagged, broken glass. Only a few words are spoken—“You go first” and “Watch your step”—as Philip helps her climb out and cross the rain-swept fire escape. The pounding wind and rain that lashes down on them as they shimmy across the treacherous makeshift catwalk almost feels good to Philip. It braces him and wakes him up and gives him hope that maybe he can repair whatever damage has been done here tonight with this woman.

By the time they get back to the apartment—both of them soaked to the bone, exhausted, and dazed—Philip is confident he can fix this.

Brian is in the office bedroom with Penny, putting her to sleep on her cot. Nick is in the living room, working on his map of safe zones. “Hey, how'd it go?” he asks, looking up from his papers. “You guys look like drowned rats; you find any Home Depots out there?”

“Not this time,” Philip replies, heading for the bedroom, not even pausing to take off his shoes.

April says nothing, doesn't even meet Nick's gaze as she heads toward the hallway.

“Look at you two,” Tara says, coming out of the kitchen with a surly expression and a lit cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth. “Just like I thought—a wild fucking goose chase!”

She stands there with her hands on her hips as her sister vanishes without a word into her room at the end of the hall. Tara gives Philip a look, and then storms away, following her sister.

“I'm going to bed,” Philip says flatly to Nick and then adjourns to his room.

*   *   *

The next morning, Philip stirs awake just before dawn. The rain still pounds the streets outside. He can hear it drumming off the window. The room is dark and cold and dank, and smells of mold. He sits on the edge of the bed for the longest time, looking at Penny, who slumbers across the room on her cot, her tiny body all balled up in a fetal position. The half-formed memories of a dream cling to Philip's woozy brain, as well as the sickening sensation that he doesn't know where the nightmares end and the episode with April the previous evening begins.

If only he had
dreamed
those events in the pedestrian walkway instead of actually acting them out. But the hard, sharp edge of reality comes back to him in that dark room in a series of flash frames in his mind, as though he's watching someone else perpetrate the crime. Philip hangs his head, trying to push the feelings of dread and guilt from his mind.