“Look,” the Governor said, beginning to withdraw. “When I said the two of us needed to spend more time getting to know one another, I didn’t mean—”
“Answer the question!” boomed the Tycoon.
The Governor was taken aback. The perfect grin fell from his face for an instant. (It was only for an instant, but the Tycoon’s eagle eye caught it.) Then the Governor smiled again, as though nothing was, or had ever been, amiss.
“Why, I suppose I’d think of something that was dead, but still walking around.”
“Good,” said the Tycoon. “Yes. What else? Tell me, what does it look like?”
“It’s probably falling apart,” the Governor said. “It’s dead so … so it never heals when it gets hurt. Wounds stay open. Its skin is probably ripped up. It could be missing eyes and teeth.”
“And how does it smell?” asked the Tycoon.
“Oh, not good,” said the Governor. “Not good at all.”
“How does it move?” asked the Tycoon.
“It doesn’t walk normally,” the Governor said, seeming to grow more confident in his description. “It stumbles. It can’t walk fast or run. It … maybe it sticks its arms out in front of itself when it walks, like it’s feeling its way forward.”
“Can it talk, think, read?” asked the Tycoon.
“Why are you asking me all this?” the Governor said, bewildered.
The Tycoon regarded him severely.
“No, it can’t do any of those things,” said the Governor.
“And why not?” said the Tycoon.
The Governor thought.
“Because it’s a zombie,” he said.
The Tycoon smiled again.
“Now think again about that house covered in mold and roaches, and the woman who makes you want to puke just to look at her,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” said the Governor.
“Of course you don’t,” said the Tycoon. “But that’s fine. That’s fine. We are only beginning. I know we are overdue for lunch. But perhaps you will allow me to show you one thing more before we dine. Something that I believe will make everything much clearer.”
The Governor made a motion that said “lead on.”
The Tycoon did.
THE REPORTER
Jessica was surrounded by strange people. She had not been able to follow precisely the twists and turns the white SUV had taken after it had pulled away from the bar because someone’s hands had been in her face, and she had been struggling violently. Then she had been hooded. Sometime later in the ride, her hands had been bound.
But now they were somewhere else.
They had exited the car, and she had been hurried down at least one flight of steps. Her hood was removed and she found herself in what appeared to be a partially-finished basement. The floor was concrete and there was a water heater in the corner. There was also a table upon which several automatic firearms were resting. Jessica had been placed on a dilapidated couch, the cushions spongy from years of use. In front of Jessica stood two women and one man. They wore jeans and sweatshirts. They looked exhausted, sweaty, and alarmed.
One of them—a woman in her thirties with long black hair tied back—stepped forward.
“Who are you people?” Jessica asked.
“We are the people who just saved your life,” the woman said.
“And it cost us one of our own,” the man grumbled. He was built like a football lineman, tall and thick. He crossed his arms in frustration.
“Saved my life?” Jessica said. “You were the ones who were shooting. Do you know who I am? I am a reporter with the political bureau of—”
“We know who you are,” the woman said. “That’s why we came … to save you.”
“But who was that fat guy?” the man asked. “The one in the neck brace? We didn’t have any intel on him. It messed everything up. Was he somebody you just met at the bar?”
“That’s my friend Tim Fife,” Jessica said, after thinking of no reason why she should lie. “He is a journalist also. In a way.”
“Well he screwed things up, and now a friend of ours is dead,” the lineman barked.
“No, he didn’t,” the woman with the long hair disagreed. “That was not his fault.”
“What is happening?” Jessica asked.
“We’re here to keep you safe,” the woman replied. “We went to rescue you. Frankly, we weren’t sure it would work. What we’d do if we actually got you out of there … well, maybe we didn’t think that far.”
“Well we’re that far now,” Jessica said. “Can you at least untie my hands? I don’t have a gun or anything.”
The trio looked at each other. Then the woman who had not yet spoken stepped forward. She was very young and pale, and had a nearly-shaved head. As Jessica looked on, she reached to a tactical belt around her waist and pulled out an evil-looking collapsible blade. She motioned impatiently for Jessica to hold out her hands. Jessica obeyed, and the young woman sawed through the rope.
“Thank you,” Jessica told her, pulling her hands apart and freeing the remaining rope from her wrists. “Now, can you please tell me what’s going on? I’m not asking as a reporter. I’m asking as a person.”
The trio exchanged another look. Young woman with the buzz cut and the linebacker both nodded. The woman with the long hair spoke.
“We are called the Knights of Romero,” she said.
Jessica gave a look like she smelled something funny.
“What?” the reporter said. “I just met one of the Knights of Romero. He was Francis, that older guy at the bar. The one you shot.”
“This may be a little more complicated that you’re anticipating,” the woman with the long hair said. “There is a group called the Knights of Romero. And it’s us. Our mission is to prevent the rise of the undead. We work behind the scenes. When we’re doing our jobs right, nobody knows that we exist.”
“I know you exist,” Jessica pointed out.
“Today was a setback,” the woman said. “In more ways than one.”
“Francis … if that was even his name … had given Tim and me information about a politician being a zombie. Why would he do that?”
“You have to understand that the zombies’ number-one fear is being exposed,” the woman said. “If the existence of the Knights of Romero were to become generally known, then the public would understand that they—the zombies—also exist. Francis was part of an operation run by the undead to make sure that doesn’t happen. He worked for them, as part of their intelligence gathering service. But we have been monitoring that intelligence service closely. The undead are tricky, but we can be trickier.”
“What are you talking about?” said Jessica. “I still don’t understand what is going on.”
“The fact that certain people in high places—politicians, for example—might be zombies is an idea bandied about now and again on the internet,” the woman told Jessica. “But it sounds crazy. It’s dismissed. It gets lost in a wash of other wild theories and guesses. The undead aim to keep it that way. Of all the thousands of theories that people spend their days blogging about, the zombies are only concerned about one. They aim to ensure no reporter ever truly investigates it. So how do they do that? One effective approach is to entrap interested reporters and literally kill them. That’s what our intelligence said ‘Francis’ was doing. If you haven’t figured it out yet, he was going to drive you somewhere secluded and put a bullet in your head. Why do you think he had that gun?”
Jessica had no response.
“You, and apparently your friend, were to be ‘taken care of’ because you took the bait—the kind of bait they send out to reporters on a regular basis,” the woman continued. “Whoever follows up is killed.”
Jessica suddenly felt green and stupid all over again.
“When we—through our monitoring and counterintelligence—realized what the undead were planning today, we decided you had to be saved,” the woman continued. “I hope you
’ll appreciate that we took a serious risk in doing so. And that one of us is not here anymore because of it.”
Jessica looked up into the faces of the remaining trio. They all looked genuinely anguished. Jessica hung her head.
“There’s still so much I don’t understand,” Jessica said quietly. “Why here? At a political convention in Cleveland?”
“Our organization has been watching several key figures in contemporary American politics recently for signs of undead behavior,” the long-haired woman said cautiously. “We haven’t wanted to believe it could be true—that they could ever get so close—but what happened this morning brings us nearer than ever to confirming it.”
“Are you saying the politicians at the convention are zombies?” Jessica asked.
The sentence felt preposterous even as she said it.
The trio nodded back at her seriously.
“Which ones?” Jessica asked.
“We don’t yet know,” the woman said seriously.
“But … but … surely, people would be able to figure it out,” Jessica protested.
Suddenly, the quiet young woman with the short hair spoke up.
“Oh, would they?” she barked sarcastically. “Are you some kind of expert on zombies or something? Is that what you are? An expert on zombies who was so stupid she fell for the dumbest trick in the book?”
“Now, now, Trish,” said the woman with the long black hair.
And so Jessica knew at least one of their names.
The lineman spoke.
“Tell me, miss,” he began. “Just what do you know about zombies?”
Jessica looked back and forth. It seemed so obvious. Everyone knew about zombies, right?
“Err, they’re the walking dead,” she eventually answered.
“You’ve got that much,” said the man. “What else?”
“They eat people,” Jessica said. “Maybe their brains, especially?”
“Yes,” he said. “Go on.”
“They’re rotting and stupid and they smell bad. They moan. They can’t run. They can’t read. They’re kind of in a stupor all the time. They—what? Why are you all giving me that look?”
“Those things haven’t been true for a long time,” the lineman informed her. “Those are stereotypes—fictions the zombies themselves perpetuate. It’s not the truth. Not anymore.”
“Zombies have changed,” the woman with the long hair said. “They’ve evolved. Gotten better. Do you know about the Red Queen—the evolutionary theory? It’s based on stuff by that Alice in Wonderland guy. The Red Queen must run as fast as she can just to stay in the same place. In the natural world, the same thing happens. There are plains in Africa where lions have been chasing gazelles for thousands and thousands of years. But each year the lions get a little faster, and so do the gazelles. The slowest lions don’t catch enough gazelles to eat, so they don’t pass on their slow genes. Same with the gazelles. Only the fast ones live. It’s like an arms race that never ends. And it results in very fast lions and very fast gazelles.”
“So what does this have to do with—” Jessica began.
“Zombies?” said the woman. “Everything. Zombies that are slow and dumb and stumbly have tended to get killed by humans over the years. Humans were also evolving and improving. First, whenever zombies popped up, we fought them with branches and rocks. Then with swords and bows and arrows. Now we fight them with sniper rifles that can pick them off at damn near 1,000 yards away. As the centuries have gone by, we’ve gotten better. But the thing is, so have they. Doing an impression of a zombie by sticking your arms out and drooling is like impersonating a human by dressing in animal skins and carrying a wooden club. It hasn’t been that way for a long, long time.”
“How?” asked Jessica. “How does a zombie ‘advance’ exactly?”
“The strains of the zombie virus that get passed on are the ones that allow them to remain sharper, faster, cleverer. That let them pass as human. They walk, think, talk. See, zombies have developed their own camouflage.”
“I don’t understand,” Jessica said. “If they do all those things, are they even still zombies anymore?”
The lineman spoke up.
“Yes,” he said. “They’re still zombies because they still want to eat people. And they’re still undead. They can’t be killed through normal means. Those core traits never change.”
“That’s right,” agreed the woman with the long hair. “A lion who lived 100,000 years ago would come off as a handicapped cur compared to the lions of today. But know what they’d both still have in common? A taste for gazelle. That never leaves.”
“So the zombies can blend in with regular people?”
“Some of them, yes,” the woman said. “To catch them out, you normally have to find them engaging in something unique to their species.”
“You mean something like this?” Jessica said.
She reached into her pocket and carefully withdrew the photograph of the Tycoon eating a human hand.
The woman accepted it. She studied it for a long time without speaking, then showed it to the other members of her trio.
“Wow,” said Trish. “This is what they used to bait you? Brave on their part. I’ll give them that.”
“That looks real,” the lineman said. “Like, really real.”
“Some of us have suspected him for a long time, but never had any proof,” Trish said. “Maybe it should have been more obvious to us. The loping gate. The orange makeup. The dislike for reading.”
“Contemporary zombies can read,” the lineman explained to Jessica. “It’s just not pleasant for them.”
The long haired woman began to pace.
“If this is real … if this is real … oh my God.”
“There have been rumors of gatherings at his estate in Florida,” the lineman said. “We’ve seen spotty intelligence before. Never something this good. A few blurry cell phone videos of people eating people. A dinner table laid out with something vaguely humanoid—and still moving—on a serving tray in the center. But it’s always looked fake. Like something some of his political enemies cooked up for a laugh. I’ll be damned if it looks that way now.”
“We need to think about how to use this to our advantage,” the woman with the long hair said. “This could be the opportunity to strike a very big blow.”
It suddenly seemed to Jessica that the Knights had much to discuss. She began to stand up.
“Whoa,” said the lineman. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Look, I’m a reporter and I have a job to do,” Jessica said. “I appreciate everything, but I need to get back to where I’m supposed to be. Unless you want my paper filing a missing persons report on me? The cops tracing my cell phone location history? Do you want that?”
The woman with the long hair approached Jessica. Stood close.
“I think you understand what we did for you today, and what it just cost us,” she said. “I know you’re a reporter, but I also hope you understand that I can’t let you write about this.”
“I’m not going to,” Jessica said. “I’m not going to write about you. But what about the fact that the next President of the United States might be a zombie? I can’t ignore that.”
“I won’t ask you to,” the woman said. “Write what you have to write based on your own research. But not based on this. Not on what just happened.”
“Fine,” Jessica said. “I can do my own digging. It should be easy, given that now I know what to look for.”
“All right then,” the woman said. “Also … don’t go anywhere, okay?”
Jessica was unsure what this meant.
“Where would I go?” Jessica asked. “I’m in Cleveland until the convention is over.”
“Good,” said the long haired woman. “Because we may just be in touch …”
THE FAKE NEWSMAN
Tim Fife and his associates sat in a secluded corner of the hotel lobby, huddling confidentially. A nervous ex
citement ran through each one of them. Ryan’s nervous tics sometimes jostled his belly as though he were being physically electrified. For all three, Tim’s tale had been revelatory because it confirmed that, at long last, one of their more remarkable leads had proved … if not precisely true then at least … something!
“They just came and took her?” Ryan asked, vibrating steadily.
Tim nodded.
“They pulled out their machine guns, killed Francis, and threw her into the back of the SUV.”
“Any idea why?” Ryan pressed further.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Tim said. “Maybe they worked for the zombies. Could be they were there to take out a Knight of Romero, and Jessica and I just got in the way.”
“‘Worked for the zombies’ is a phrase I never thought I’d hear,” offered Dan, leaning back in his chair. “What do they pay you in? Severed ears or something?”
Dan seemed positively jealous of Tim’s encounter. Probably because it had involved the proximity to extreme violence.
“Look, I’ll be the first to admit we’re in uncharted territory here,” Tim said. “There could still be a lot we don’t know.”
“There most definitely is,” opined Ryan. “Like, why did they abduct Jessica and not you?”
Dan said: “You mean other than the fact she’s good looking, much easier to carry, and comes from a more prestigious news organization?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Other than that.”
“Isn’t she also from a rich family?” Dan said.
They turned to Tim.
“Yeah,” Tim said, “but something tells me this wasn’t kidnappers randomly interrupting the Knights of Romero. That’s crazy. It has to be connected.”
“I’ve still got my old emails archived from people claiming to know about the Knights,” Dan said. “I’ll pull them right away. They were never leads I followed up on. Now I wish I had.”
Dan was too excited by these developments to remain still any longer. He rose from his chair and began to pace around the corner of the lobby.
“Maybe we should go back there and look for clues,” he continued. “We might find something useful. We can at least take pictures for the article.”
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