Zombie-in-Chief

by Scott Kenemore

  Minutes later, Jessica strode into the second-rate conference room that housed TruthTeller. There she found Tim, Ryan, and Dan hunkering down for a working dinner. Pizza. They were already on their second pie.

  Only Dan noticed her approach. He lowered his slice of pizza and began to point.

  “You three,” Jessica said. “Meeting. Now.”

  Tim looked up in stunned surprise. Ryan made a choking noise and spat out a half-chewed crust. Dan continued to point.

  “But I thought …” Tim began to protest.

  “This is too important to worry about being seen together,” Jessica said. “There’s a bar across the street at Bolivar and Seventh. Meet me there in ten minutes.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then added: “And bring a laptop.”

  The bar had gone all-in for the conventioneers. American flags adorned every surface. Drink prices had been doubled. It was packed and rowdy, but the reporters still managed to find a booth together in one of the corners. All of them had turned off their phones.

  “We were actually going to get in touch with you,” Tim said, easing himself into the booth beside her. “We think the Uneeda Society met last night. I don’t have any source information on what was discussed yet, but it can’t be a coincidence that it’s the week of the convention.”

  “Then it may be that we’re here about the same thing,” Jessica said. “One of the Knights of Romero just took me aside and gave me this.”

  Jessica held up the nondescript thumb drive.

  “She said that something is supposed to happen tomorrow night when the candidate drops in to do his little teaser,” Jessica continued. “Apparently, if that thing doesn’t happen—the thing the Knights are planning—I’m supposed to look at this drive.”

  The TruthTeller trio exchanged a glance.

  “Or … we could just look at it now,” Ryan said, adjusting his backside in the small, crowded booth.

  “She said not to … and that if I do, they’ll know,” Jessica replied. “Is that right? Can they do that?”

  Ryan and Tim looked at Dan.

  “Theoretically, yes,” Dan said. “That’s Ed Snowden-level shit, but it’s possible to do. You put a drive into a computer, it can send a signal back to home base confirming as much.”

  “We could buy a new computer that can’t connect to the internet,” suggested Ryan. “Or, like, break the internet part of the computer, right?”

  “Yeah,” Jessica said skeptically. “We could do that. We could also wait and see what happens tomorrow night.”

  “What is going to happen?” Tim asked. “You’re the one who actually spent time with the Knights. Did they tell you anything? Drop hints?”

  Jessica shook her head. The table was silent for a moment as the harried, overworked waitress arrived with a tray and set four watery domestics before them. She regarded the quartet skeptically. They were not attired like wealthy conventioneers who might leave exorbitant tips. The waitress decided to cut her losses and move on.

  “What could it be, really?” Jessica said. “They’re not going to assassinate him, after all.”

  “That’s right,” said Dan, as if speaking from some expertise. “Onstage at a political convention would be about the hardest place to do that. You’d definitely want to catch him when he was in transit. Just explode his whole motorcade. Wouldn’t be that hard to do, even. Believe me.”

  After an awkward pause, Tim added: “And also, that doesn’t serve their purposes. My understanding is that the Knights aim to prevent the rise of zombies. Killing a presidential candidate, presumed to be human, doesn’t do that. So I can really only think of one thing.”

  Tim looked up into Jessica’s eyes. She understood that they both saw it.

  “They have to … unmask him somehow,” Jessica said quietly. “They have to show him for what he is. And they have to do it before the party can formally nominate him.”

  Tim nodded back.

  “Yes,” he said. “I just can’t see how they’ll do that.”

  “Neither can I,” Jessica said.

  They all looked again at the small, nondescript drive in Jessica’s hand.

  “It’s not going to be the picture of him eating the hand,” Tim said. “It needs to be something more.”

  “Right,” Jessica said. “But what?”

  Suddenly, Ryan—who had already finished his beer and waved at the waitress for another—stopped cold. He set down his empty glass and put his palms flat on the booth’s wooden table. His eyes were flitting back and forth very quickly.

  “What?” Tim shouted at his TruthTeller colleague. “Ryyyyyyyan … ? What are you thinking of?”

  “It’s …” Ryan sputtered. “It was just such a minor thing. I didn’t even think to mention it before. And then I guess I forgot about it.”

  “What?” both Tim and Dan said at the same time.

  “Jeez, relax,” Ryan said. “It’s just that I got a note from one of my regular tipsters a few hours ago that John Gitelman’s office just got broken into. They didn’t want to file a police report, but he—my tipster—attached some pictures from the scene that looked real. Apparently some hard-copy files got rooted through, but nothing seemed stolen.”

  Dr. John Gitelman was the Tycoon’s personal physician. He had made news earlier in the election cycle by penning a much-ridiculed letter suggesting that the Tycoon was the healthiest man ever to run for President of the United States. This had been his lone brush with national fame. The notorious letter had now been mostly forgotten in favor if fresher, meatier news items.

  “Why does anybody care about his doctor?” Dan asked, finishing his beer. “Are they still trying to find out of his hair is real?”

  “I never thought about that, but it makes sense,” Jessica said. “If you’re a zombie you don’t have a heartbeat and brainwaves. And yeah, your hair probably doesn’t grow anymore either. But the public wants to think you’re healthy and normal, and going to live another four-to-eight years. So you’d need a doctor’s collusion.

  “Yeah,” said Tim. “His doctor would have to know.”

  Jessica said: “Would a doctor actually keep a file somewhere that says his patient is a walking dead man?”

  Yet again, they all glanced at the drive in her hand.

  It seemed to Jessica that a medical record would not be conclusive, but it would certainly be a start.

  “What else did your contact say, Ryan?” Tim asked.

  “That was pretty much everything,” Ryan replied with a shrug. “I’ll forward you his email with the pictures of the busted-up office. That is, if I can even still find it.”

  “Do that,” Jessica said. “I don’t think we can know too much.”

  “What are we supposed to do at this point?” asked Ryan.

  “What can we do?” Tim responded. “A thing is going to happen tomorrow night. Our jobs are to report on it better than anybody else.”

  Tim turned to Jessica.

  “The only other thing I can think of is that we—you and I, Jessica—have to decide how much we want to be a part of the story,” he continued. “You need to think about if you want to include the conversations you had with the Knights. If you decide you do want to include those details, you’re probably going to need to be able to show a bunch of fact checkers that it actually happened. I’m happy to be a reference for my part of it, if you need.”

  “Yeah,” Jessica said absently. “To be honest, I’m trying not to think about that part of it. It feels like a giant black wave that’s going to crash over me, and then … I don’t know what. Everything I did this week is going to get picked apart. I’ll be faulted by somebody, somewhere, no matter what. Every decision I made will be criticized. It just feels like. Ugh. To be totally honest, it makes me want to move back home with my parents and not be a journalist anymore.”

  Ryan looked around the table. Then he said: “We could probably get you a job at TruthTeller, if you wanted.”

  Jessi
ca did not respond.

  Tim shook his head.

  “What?” said Ryan. “We probably could.”

  “No … it’s … that’s okay,” Jessica said, putting the thumb drive in her bag and preparing to stand. “I don’t think there’s anything else I can do at this point. Anyway, if I’m gone much longer George will miss me. I should get back to it.”

  “If nothing happens tomorrow night …” Tim said, rising to let Jessica out of the booth.

  “I’ll see if you’re available when I look at the drive,” she told him.

  “Oh, we’ll be available,” added Ryan. “You can be sure of that.”

  “Okay,” Jessica said. “Thanks.”

  She walked out of the crowded tavern and back into the warm summer night. She felt as though all the pieces of a puzzle had been presented to her, but she could not yet see how they fit together. She could not form them into any coherent shape, no matter how she rotated them mentally. She felt frustrated and increasingly inadequate.

  She allowed herself to hope that, overnight, the solution might come to her.

  THE FAKE NEWSMAN

  Tim Fife was alone. He was sitting in a theater with hundreds of empty velvet seats, but he was alone. The walls were draped in blackout curtains, and the stage before him was also curtained-over. It was hard to see much. It was very dark and very quiet. He did not know precisely where he was or how he had gotten there.

  Then a rousing noise jarred him. It was patriotic music, played through an unseen speaker system. The curtains hiding the stage did not move, but suddenly the illuminated Seal of the President of the United States was projected onto them amidst the tremendous fanfare. Then the seal faded. The heavy curtains gradually rose to reveal a screen. On the screen were animated reenactments of important scenes in American history. The Inauguration of George Washington. Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. Kennedy asking not what his country could do for you, but what you could do for his country.

  And all at once a rush of emotions swept over Tim, and he realized not only where he was but when he was.

  He was ten years old. At an amusement park in Florida. The amusement park in Florida. In the Hall of Presidents. Something told him his parents and his younger brother Ralph—not to mention other park visitors—ought to be present. But for whatever reason, they had stepped away for the moment, leaving him alone inside the enormous theater.

  His parents had assured him that everyone loved the Hall, and that he would too. Yet the idea of stiff, jerky animatronics of long-dead leaders filled him with ambivalence. It seemed such a thing could not fail to be strange and unnatural. Tim’s curiosity overrode any doubts or hesitations, however, and he stayed in his seat. Tim watched the glowing wonders pass before his eyes. He surrendered to the spirit of the program. He leaned back into his plush red seat and relaxed. And that was when all of it seemed to go wrong.

  The next image projected on the screens showed American soldiers huddled together at Valley Forge. While George Washington consulted with his officers, a group of enlisted men clustered together in a corner of the frame. The soldiers huddled close around a small campfire. Their faces were grim. Atop the licking flames, they seemed to be cooking a shoe. Tim had heard that things at Valley Forge had got that dire. But now that he looked closer, it seemed that a foot had been left inside of the shoe. Was that also how it had been? Before he could see any more, the image faded to black.

  Further images of Washington followed, but all of them seemed to contain new details Tim had never before noticed. In a familiar-seeming portrait, the first president’s chin and riding gloves were spattered with a thin patina of blood. As he crossed the Delaware, his crowded boat was piled high with human body parts. And a scene of him retiring to Mt. Vernon after serving two terms appeared to show a prosperous house and farmstead … where walking dead with outstretched arms littered the horizon like scarecrows in a field.

  The presentation then skipped to a series of images concerning Andrew Jackson. Here, he fought bravely in the Battle of New Orleans—not just stabbing a British soldier with his sword, but biting him in the neck and releasing a frothy geyser of blood. In the next image, Jackson survived an assassination attempt. Sequential art showed him beating the attacker with his cane after the would-be killer’s gun misfired, then licking the end of the cane with great satisfaction.

  The images shifted again, this time to FDR. In the first portrait, he reassured America during World War II with avuncular fireside chats. Subsequent photographs showed the seated president carefully reading into a microphone, while other shots showed hardscrabble American families listening intently to their radios. Only by chance did Tim notice the jar of human toes set alongside FDR’s ashtray and water glass.

  Then more. Other images of other presidents. They came so quickly that Tim could hardly keep track. White haired Whigs holding human fingers in their mouths as though they were cigars. Twenty-first century presidents giving speeches in tailored suits with twin pins on their lapels; one pin, an American flag—the other, a pink human brain.

  Tim’s uneasiness began to spiral into all-out alarum. He looked frantically around the darkened theater for a friendly green EXIT sign, but saw none. There appeared to be no exits at all. He resolved that he would stand up and find one, even if it meant feeling his way along the edges of the auditorium’s darkened rear walls. Yet he found that his body could not stand, no matter how firmly he willed it to.

  Tim could only look on in horror as, then, the screens began to retract up, revealing what he had always known would come next. Forty-three animatronic figures standing on a series of raised platforms. At first, they were only silhouettes against a softly glowing backdrop. But then the footlights at the front of the stage began to come up. (Tim wished he could do anything to stop them—to diminish their glow—but he was powerless even to look away.) The rising lights revealed an orgy of blood. Most of the presidents familiar to Tim—if not from television news clips then from history textbooks—were covered in blood spatter. The blood was a mix of old and knew. Some presidents wore garments that showed months of crusted red stains. Others positively glistened, as if coming fresh from a kill. A few of the presidents were still actively eating, raising and lowering various limbs to their mouths while taking jerky, robotic bites. The automatons pretended to masticate, grinning through permanently ruby teeth. FDR had been rendered in his wheelchair. He wore a bib and held a knife and fork. Before him had been placed a small end table, and upon that rested a full human brain. The robotic FDR lifted his cutlery every few moments, appearing to cut at the brain like a man carving off a piece of filet. The robot then brought the empty fork up to its mouth and appeared to eat. Once, it even paused to wipe its mouth.

  Tim slowly turned his head from left to right, doing a slow pan, trying to take it all in—absolutely everything that was happening on the enormous, horizontal stage. He would have rather not looked at all, but something compelled him. Something held him fast.

  The floor of the stage was full of thick red liquid. It pooled at the front of the stage. It threatened to flow down into the first row.

  Then, as Tim looked on, a narrator began to speak.

  “The spirit of America is incarnate in a profoundly simple idea,” said the hauntingly familiar basso voice. “That from among men like these, we should choose our own leaders. That our hopes were their hopes. That our desires were their desires. Our appetites, their appetites.”

  Suddenly, Tim began to feel a bit sick to his stomach. What was the narrator implying?

  But no. He realized that it was not nausea he felt. Not disgust. At least not completely. It was also … peckishness. Hunger. Something about the sight before him had put Tim in the mood for a snack. His stomach grumbled.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the narrator said, “I present to you the presidents of the United States.”

  The disembodied voice began naming presidents. A spotlight shone on each as his name was called. When
thus acknowledged, the president paused from his feasting and nodded to the audience.

  Tim’s stomach growled again. He looked down and saw a popcorn bucket sitting in his lap. Tim rarely took in any kind of show without popcorn. Yet as he reached down into the extra-large tub and began to bring his hand up to his face, Tim realized that it was not popcorn resting warm and fragrant between his legs (though it had precisely the feel and consistency). Rather, it was ground meat and bones. Human meat and bones.

  As he glanced down at the warm handful, a human eye (mangled by the grinder, but still essentially intact) glanced back.

  It was only then that he started to scream.

  Tim Fife awoke in time to reach the toilet before vomiting up what remained of his pizza. He reclined beside the basin when he had finished, and pressed his face against the cool tile floor. He breathed quite hard, as if he had just very gently exercised.

  “What the fuck was that?” he wheezed as he looked up into the white bathroom ceiling.

  Then he threw up again.

  When he had recovered from this second bout, Tim chanced to look at the digital clock set into the bathroom mirror. Somehow, it was already seven in the morning. Tim rinsed out his mouth and flushed the toilet. It was possible, just possible, that one of the most consequential days in American history was about to begin. He showered, dressed, and did his best to prepare himself for it.

  The morning passed with interminable slowness. Tim checked his phone and email constantly for anything that might be salient. Lunch came and went, and Jessica still had not been in touch.

  “Are you okay?” Ryan asked as they lounged nervously around their conference table. “Your face looks white. Like, whiter than usual. Extra-white. And you didn’t even have seconds at lunch.”