by Sean Platt
“She raised some interesting points. Overall, an excellent report on the Yosemite Reserve that had nothing specifically to do with us, but I swear her tone was still vaguely anti-Hemisphere.”
“What else is new?”
“Well, exactly. And there will always be detractors. It’s fine. I suppose it’s good that there are people out there asking the questions others are thinking, even if they won’t voice them because they think it’s un-American to do so. Don’t get me started. I have a whole political rant to go with this.”
“So … ” There was a point here, of course, and he’d prefer that Raymond find it. His boss never came to chew the fat. Unless maybe Gennifer just told him that Ian was asking strange questions that required immediate attention.
“I kind of like the dings in our stellar reputation. It makes us look real. Nobody believes anything that’s universally adored. And that’s especially true for the foreign markets, who are only hearing about us over the satellites and through the Internet. Which might be a good thing, really. When we used to travel, everyone hated Americans. Now they feel sorry for us. I guess I can accept pity. It’s better for the bottom line.”
“Nobody’s buying Phage because they pity America, Raymond.”
“No, no, of course not. But there will always be the doomsday people, and Archibald thinks a large portion of at least Western Europe might be looking to institute widespread preparedness campaigns. Just in case, you know.”
He stopped then glanced at Ian’s screen, perhaps wondering why it was cocked clear the hell around to point into the corner. Ian watched Raymond’s eyes on his monitor. Then he looked up again, his face wearing the same expression of could-be-friendly, could-be-up-to-something as always.
“You look up anything about Alice Frank lately?” Raymond nodded toward Ian’s computer.
“No,” Ian said too quickly. Then, more steadily: “Why would I?”
“I try to ignore her too. But that’s Archie’s point: We’re all turning away and pretending she doesn’t exist. But it’s not a good idea. She made herself relevant a long time ago, and today we’re the only ones who act dumb and say ‘Who?’ when someone mentions her. The media’s big boys seem to have permanent love hangovers for us — cure a plague once and everyone remembers — but you and I both know that independent media and the Internet’s pulse are far more influential and have been for decades. Ms. Frank is a big voice there, and this interview was huge. Huge, Ian, and still spreading. Everyone loves Bobby, and everyone respects Alice. Now they’re on the same screen discussing everyone’s favorite topic. Ignoring her is no longer an option.”
“So … what … is Archibald going to accept one of her interview requests?”
“No. But everyone on the executive team needs to watch the Baltimore video. In the right light, it’s actually pretty flattering. One of the MPs who took her to Baltimore once she arrived at Yosemite was necrotic. A three-day incubation period, I think. High-functioning, minor necrosis and atrophy, a few verbal tics. But trusted to handle a weapon. And this woman, one of her jobs is clearing fences for incoming.”
“What’s that?”
“Sometimes at Yosemite, when they need to bring a vehicle through the gates, there are deadheads in the way that might escape if the gates are opened. They have to clear the fences when that happens.” Raymond made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger and mimed a few shots.
“Oh.”
“Frank talked to the MP. It’s a great piece of reporting. This woman is infected, and her job is to kill people — well, what used to be people — who are also infected. Without Necrophage, the same MP would have been one of them. Comes off as an endorsement on one hand and a huge vote of trust on the other. The MP trusts us, and Panacea — hence the US government as a whole — trusts the MP.”
“Sounds like a good thing,” Ian said.
“That part is. She’s fair, I’ll give her that. But then there are other parts. Like footage of grazers who’ve formed a little village. The population there recycles, with the old members going increasingly feral and wandering off while incoming take the huts over as if they’ll bunker down and stay forever. She’s showing this footage as B-roll while talking to Baltimore about whether he ever feels bad about hunting.”
“That’s on Baltimore. And on Yosemite. And, hell, on the fucking disease. How is that Hemisphere’s problem?”
“It’s hard to put a finger on, Ian. But when you watch it, you’ll see. Somehow, Hemisphere is still the bad guy to Alice Frank.”
Ian wanted to protest as if it were Raymond, not the reporter, being unfair. Every hero had haters, but it had always seemed so wrong to Ian in Hemisphere’s case. Burgess had been the first to seek a solution (rather than fueling panic) when Sherman Pope had shown its face as a world-threatening epidemic.
Burgess had opened all of Hemisphere’s research to the Internet and rallied the world’s best minds to crack the case. Even then, it had been Burgess and Hemisphere — not the world’s complainers — providing the cure. Some hated Hemisphere just because the company had become the wealthiest in the world. But it had done ethically, in Ian’s opinion. The designer versions of Necrophage cost a fortune, but the base formulation was as cheap as generic antibiotics. Those who truly couldn’t afford it were provided their supplies free of charge. In Ian’s mind, those people should be thankful. A ruthless capitalist who didn’t care would let the poor go feral without their cure then ship them to Yosemite so they could … well, so they could be part of Alice Frank’s documentary decrying the company that had so generously provided the solution.
Raymond had been staring at Ian’s cocked monitor. Without warning, he reached for it and straightened it, as if its lack of square had been bothering him the entire time and he’d finally reached his breaking point. Ian winced as his boss leaned in to glance at the screen, but instead of commenting, Raymond stood as if to leave.
Ian chanced a look at the screen for himself. The bookmarks he’d yet to clear and the odd research had been tidied up — either organized out of sight or cleared from Ian’s queue. Maybe the drooling, groaning, half-undead clerk who’d set Ian on edge all day over nothing had finally realized his mistake.
Ian thought he should feel better, but the near-miss had set his heart to a trip hammer.
“Anyway,” Raymond said, now nearing the door, “something to think about as you watch the interview. Try to come up with some ways we can twist negative — or at least skeptical — into positive. Anything she raises that needs addressing, we’ll want to do it. That’ll score us some brownie points. But anything that comes up that we could honestly improve, maybe we should look into upgrading what we’re doing. This company tries hard, but nobody’s perfect.”
Ian nodded after Raymond as he vanished. Once he was gone, Ian sat in his chair and breathed, willing his overreacting body to calm the hell down, because whatever had been wrong was over — or even more poignantly, it had never actually begun.
There was movement on Ian’s screen as a new task notification appeared on the desktop.
Copy this, read it, and then delete.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DELETED SCENES
ALICE WAS SCRUBBING THROUGH HER Yosemite footage, wondering if it was best to archive and be done with it, or if there was more to mine for immediate use. Alice knew herself well enough to believe it was only the part of her craving disorder that insisted on not dumping the footage onto a drive straightaway, but still — there was so much she hadn’t been able to use. So much stuff that had been trimmed for time and attention constraints, snippets of which, even out of formal context, might make for great website content.
As just one of many examples, Alice had all of her ancillary interviews. She’d used a few bits from the MP in the hour-long special, but it was aired on the network and that meant that hour-long actually broke down to forty-six minutes to account for commercials, so non-Bobby time (given that it was supposed to be a Frank/Bobby fe
ature) was limited. She could make longer versions for herself and YouTube, of course, but who had the time? It had taken forever to log all she had, plus the editing, and Alice didn’t know any editors she trusted enough to do it for her. But if she could get her head around it, she had many additional voices: Calais, more from the necrotic MP, even the kid who’d given her the bite shirt and body armor. And plenty more with Bobby Baltimore, of course.
There were hours and hours of footage of the next day’s hunt, which had unnerved her far less than the first day’s, now that the worst of the shock was over.
There were casual moments back at the Bivouac. She’d used a pan from its top platform (a zillion stairs’ worth of climbing) as B-roll in the opening sequence, but she had plenty with Bobby and his crew as well as the other hunters along for the ride. Those were interesting folks. The vast majority of Yosemite’s hunters came in on day passes, riding around in open Jeeps, and shooting anything that moved in their direction. But the hunters who paid to stay at the Bivouac in the reserve’s middle were those with money to burn or a psychosis to feed. They seemed to stay an average of four days, but one man had admitted off the record (while drunk) that he’d been around for more than two weeks because he was looking for one deadhead in particular: his son-of-a-bitch father, who’d been bitten, denied it for three weeks as his symptoms worsened, and finally was heard by a neighbor and sent here by clarifiers. Ironically, that man’s exodus to Yosemite had saved him. The hunter had tried beating him to death with a shovel before clarifiers had pulled him away so they could do their formal testing.
Bobby was a talker, and their interview — not including all the casual chats over the next two days — had lasted three hours. Alice had full-length tangents that she hadn’t been able to include. A proper producer could see about getting those segments pulled as yet more Alice Frank exclusive content. She could sell that stuff, and the ad revenue would pay for another plane ticket, even if she posted it for free. But Alice had plenty of money already, wasn’t greedy, was an admitted control freak about her work, and quite honestly didn’t give enough of a shit to sit through all the minutiae to assemble the pieces.
But she could watch it all. Seeing her footage — all shot guerrilla style on her slightly-better-than-average cell phone camera for the touch of reality — was simple. She attached the wireless dongle to the phone and pressed play. Now she could kick back, have a glass of wine on the couch, and order a pizza. Wine and pizza didn’t always go together. The trick was in not caring, or being tired enough not to bother with anything else.
It was all fodder for articles and blog posts she wanted to write anyway. It all sank in — endless hours of Bobby Baltimore. Hours of reanimated corpses ambling toward her then being raked back as if by invisible hooks while hunters fired. Target practice back at the Bivouac, where the only targets were large cantaloupes placed mostly at eye level.
She’d caught a single bite incident on camera — a segment that Alice had opted to keep from the final cut with some amount of journalistic regret. She wanted to portray reality, and it had been plenty real when the deadhead had come from behind a rock to bite a hunter named Dave between glove and shirt, but it was also an atypical kind of reality. Most people didn’t head into a park filled with tens of thousands of dead looking for something to kill again, so the Dave-gets-bitten footage would only have been inflammatory.
Alice queued the latest unused clip, pressed play, and kicked her feet up on her coffee table. Bobby Baltimore’s blue eyes and bright smile filled the right side of her screen.
Off to one side, Alice heard herself say, “Tell me about your white whale.”
A giant smile from Bobby. The kind that seemed to pull the corners of his mouth on fishhooks, exposing his white teeth all the way back. A few crowd-pleasing dimples formed, and his eyes sparkled playfully.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s what Cindy called him. The one who built the big shack in Purgatory Valley.”
On the couch, Alice crossed one foot over the other atop her coffee table. She’d mostly forgotten about this section of the interview, but it was a good one. She’d very much wanted to include this thread for personal interest (the hunter captivated by his prey), but it didn’t exactly lift right out. She’d have lost five minutes or more to setup, exposition, and decent resolution for the arc. And doing so might weaken the emotional impact of the Purgatory Valley segment.
“Ah yes. Golem.”
“Is that his name?”
“Not unless his parents were cruel. Believe me, I’ve tried to find his name, but Yosemite doesn’t keep personal records. Only designations.”
Alice’s voice said, “Isn’t that a bit twisted, trying to find the name of a man — a former man — you mean to kill?”
“That’s the impression I got when I asked, yes. I got the most horrible look from the clerks. And that’s why they don’t keep personal records. Biologically speaking, the people who come here are still alive until the native machinery gives up the ghost and the reanimators fully take over, but legally they’re declared dead on entry. I even hear that most families hold funerals at that point, likely while the subjects are still breathing.”
“That’s morbid.”
“That’s the disease,” Bobby countered, still with his winning smile. Alice hated to admit it, but if a less-attractive, less-charming man did the same things that Bobby did, she’d probably judge him far more harshly.
“So why do you call him Golem?”
“It’s a word from Jewish mythology: a being animated from inanimate matter. They’re characterized as big, tall, strong … like monsters.”
“Are you Jewish?”
“Just a goy with a decent education.”
“So he’s big, your white whale. Appropriately.”
Bobby nodded. “Oh yes. I’d guess he’s six-eight or more. Not truly broad, but broad enough. I’m sure he bloated when he died like all the rest, but by the time I started, he was already dead. I’ve only known him as thin. A lean kind of muscular. He’s kept his hair, like a lot of them do as the disease props them up. He’s blond. Scandinavian, maybe. With severe, hawklike features. Some necrosis, but not as much as you’d expect. Definitely seems to have reached equilibrium.”
“And you still haven’t found him? The way you talk, it sounds like he stands out.”
“I haven’t. I see him here and there, so I know he’s still around. But always from a distance. And when I get close, it’s like he somehow knows it. Others, I can catch up to. But not him.”
“How long have you been chasing this … Golem?”
“Two years.”
Watching, Alice remembered her surprise when he’d said that. She felt it anew, a hundred questions again percolating to the surface that she was sorry she hadn’t asked.
“You said they don’t survive the winters,” asked Alice offscreen.
“Some do; some don’t. Luck of the draw, maybe. In the absence of stimulus, they might stay in holes and caves. It doesn’t get incredibly cold here — lows that barely dip below freezing in the dead of winter. And Golem seems tough.”
A pause from Alice on the recording. A bit tentatively, she said, “You seem to have built up quite the picture of this particular deadhead.”
“Now you sound like Cindy,” said Bobby, laughing.
“Well, haven’t you?”
“Are you worried about my sanity? My psychological well-being?”
“I think it’s worth asking.”
“Maybe it’s my way of coping. Tell me, Alice. Who did you lose in the epidemic?”
On the video, Alice said nothing.
“We all had to adjust. Sherman Pope didn’t just wipe out — what? A third at the time? — of our friends and family. It turned them into something else. They kept existing, and we all, before Necrophage, had to turn against them in some way. My mother got it. Just like anyone left untreated today, it took about six weeks for her to fully turn. I remem
ber how horrible the wait felt, because we all knew what it was — everyone, everywhere knew — but what were we supposed to do? Kill her out of hand and be done with it? Walk away? No. Our only choice was to wait. And at the end, it was just like something out of a movie. We tied her down, and every day we wondered if it would happen, or if we’d have to keep waiting.”
Bobby shifted in his chair, leaning forward.
“Tell you a secret, Alice?”
“Would you like this to be off the record?”
Bobby looked directly into Alice’s mounted camera. Then, back to Alice: “No. Because maybe this is something people want to hear. Or need to hear.”
A creeping dread crawled up Alice’s spine as she sat on the couch, remembering what was coming. Part of her wanted to kill the video, but her journalist’s fascination kept her rooted.
“Starting about two weeks after Mom was bitten — or maybe it was three, so right near the so-called inflection point where a clarifier today would declare her too far gone — I started to want her to be dead just so it’d be over. Those first weeks of knowing what was coming and being unable to stop it were hell, and I couldn’t take another three, not when she’d barely be my mother anymore. So I got my father’s gun. And every day, I’d load it. I’d stand outside her door with the thing in my hand, bullet in the chamber, safety off. And I’d try to make myself go in and do it. But I couldn’t. And so every day, I’d unload and put it away. It wasn’t until the very end when my uncle did it to save all of us from needing to.”
Alice — both on the video, she remembered, and now on the couch — swallowed.
“Maybe that's why I do this. There needs to be something out there for me to punish; so as long as it’s legal, I’ll take what I can.”
At the time of the live interview, Alice had had no idea what to say. If she hadn’t been rolling (not to mention sitting right there asking questions), she would have walked away.
Bobby looked at the camera. There were no bottoms to his suddenly empty eyes.
