More cheers and applause.
“Not to harp on my opponent here … but when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes over 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, lies about it in every different form—and, I might add, is strongly rumored to be a vampire—I know that corruption has reached a level like never before. That’s right. You heard me. I didn’t misspeak. Over 33,000. Also, a vampire. You know, back in the good old days, they would have taken care of someone like her with a stake. But now you have to be politically correct.”
The cheers came and they did not stop coming.
In a trice, the Tycoon saw it all unfolding before him. This would work. This was the way forward. His “honest” approach would be effective.
Now nothing would stop him. Nothing at all.
As he continued his speech, he only became more certain of it. He could already taste victory. It might not be brains, but it was still damned delicious.
THE REPORTER
Jessica had seen many remarkable things since landing in Cleveland, but the spell weaved by the Tycoon as he accepted the nomination might have been the most remarkable of all.
There were moments in life where you had to decide if you were okay with something. And Jessica knew that what one decided one was “okay with” could determine the fate of men and nations. Were you okay with a little corruption? Were you okay with a little tyranny (as long as it was less than in the neighboring country)? What about with just a little bit of zombie presence? Just a little?
Jessica’s head swam as she listened to the Tycoon outline his plan for the future. Her thoughts went immediately to a date she’d had in J-school. A blind date her friend had set her up on. She’d arrived at the Morningside Heights bistro to find that the man awaiting her was handsome, kind, had a great sense of humor … and was fifteen years her senior. Also, he had a kid. And she had thought to herself, “Wait, do I do this? Do I, Jessica Smith, date men who are fifteen years older than me and have kids? Am I okay with this?”
Quite abruptly and unexpectedly, she had been confronted with whether or not she would cross a line.
In her online dating profiles, Jessica capped the age limit at a hard 29. But in the presence of this charming, urbane Human Resources manager for a Fortune 500 company, everything suddenly felt negotiable. And Jessica had decided she was okay with it.
Her thoughts went to that handsome HR manager because she realized something even more surprising and remarkable was happening here in Cleveland. She was watching the electors of a major American political party indicate that they were “okay with” a zombie as their president.
The electorate had not blanched as the Tycoon had lampooned the disabled, bragged of groping women, and called for protestors at his rallies to be taken out and beaten. The Tycoon’s supporters had been “okay with” these things. But the candidate’s being a zombie? Literally a blood-drinking, brain-eating zombie? Surely, one imagined, that would be a bridge too far.
But no. From the look and sound of things, they were absolutely loving it.
Was there no bridge too far?
Perhaps there was not. Perhaps this man really would win. Perhaps the country would discover something new about itself. Or something old and hidden. Something long forgotten. That the American people could be “okay with” all sorts of dark bargains.
Standing near Jessica was an ancient movie actor, famous since before she was born. He was also watching the Tycoon’s performance, and he was smiling from ear to ear.
Then another man approached and stood near her, lingering in the shadows. Close, but not too close. It took a moment for Jessica to recognize him in her peripheral vision.
“Omigod, Tim,” she whispered. “Where have you been? Are you seeing this?”
“I sure am,” he said in a voice that sounded uncharacteristically flat.
“You think there’s something that will be too far … or too much, right? And then he goes there, and it’s not too much. I just can’t believe it.”
“Uh, yeah,” Tim said. “It’s … yeah.”
Something was wrong. Beyond a natural adverse reaction to what they were seeing on the stage, Tim seemed not right.
Jessica forced herself to tear her eyes away from the Tycoon. Tim did not look like himself. He was deathly pale. More alarmingly, the front of his face and the top of his t-shirt were covered in blood.
“Tim,” Jessica said, putting her hand to her lips. “What is—”
“A new kind of political costume,” Tim said. “People are dressing up like zombies to show support for him. Crazy huh?”
“Well isn’t that a little inappropriate for you to do, seeing as how you’re a member of the media?” Jessica asked.
Then she smiled and turned back to watch the candidate’s speech.
“That’s sort of why I’m here,” Tim said. “I don’t know if I can go on in the same way anymore. I’m not the same, Jessica.”
Jessica turned back to him.
“I know how you feel,” she said. “The past twenty-four hours have changed things for me too. I never thought the world could be like this. All of it seems impossible, unbelievable—but here we are. And you and I are kind of at the center of it. It’s crazy.”
“I’ve changed, Jessica,” Tim continued.
“Tell me about it,” she replied.
“No, I don’t think you fully understand,” said Tim, taking a step back.
The portly reporter seemed to fumble with something in his pocket. Jessica looked down and realized that he was holding a handgun. She froze.
“Tim!” she whisper-shouted, glancing frantically. “What are you doing? You can’t have that back here. The Secret Service will literally kill you.”
“Knowing what I know now—what I’ve discovered in the last few hours—I … have to do this, Jessica,” he whispered back.
“Jesus,” Jessica said. “That’s not a costume you’re wearing, is it? That’s not fake blood! I don’t understand. I don’t …”
Tim did not respond verbally, but his grip on the .357 seemed to tighten.
“Tim, you can’t,” Jessica continued, serious as a heart attack. “Whatever they’ve done to you, however you feel right now, this is not the way. I can’t believe this, Tim. No! You’d shoot him? What the hell?”
“No,” Tim said icily. “This is not for him, Jessica. This is for you.”
“Tim, what—”
“Now that I’ve seen the other side, I understand everything,” he told her. “What this man is doing will make America unstoppable for years to come. Maybe for centuries. It’s the best thing anyone has ever done, ever. Now that I’m like him I can see it all—everything he’s going to do—like it’s a movie playing out in my head. I can see every part of it, clear as day.”
“Tim, why are you pointing that at me?”
“Because you’re the only thing that stands in his way,” Tim said. “That’s what I’ve realized. It’s you. You’re the only one with the experience. You know the Knights. You’re the only one who has gotten close enough to his camp to actually bring him down.”
Tim’s eyes looked inhuman and insane. Jessica began to believe that Tim really would use the gun. She waited for security, for the Secret Service, for someone to notice what was happening in the dark wings of the stage. But there was no response. Not even the movie actor seemed to have noticed Tim’s firearm. Jessica wondered how long she could stall. Someone was bound to help her soon.
Weren’t they?
“If you shoot me, they’ll put you in jail,” Jessica tried. “You can’t eat anybody’s brains in jail. At least I don’t think you can.”
“I don’t think the rules about what we can or can’t do are set in stone just yet,” Tim said. “Besides … I’m sort of counting on a presidential pardon.”
Then he raised the weapon and pulled the trigger.
Jessica would, in later years, be unable to say precisely how con
scious her reaction to the weapon had been. She had flinched and screamed. The same thing almost everybody does when they are about to be murdered. And in what seemed to be the same instant, two Secret Service (who, at the last minute, had noticed the armed Tim Fife) had raced over and thrown themselves onto his back.
Tim had wobbled, but not gone down right away. He staggered like a bull fighting to maintain focus under the jab and bite of the picador’s lance. The Secret Service punched him violently, and his legs began to give. Sensing that it was now or never, Tim did his best to flail his arm in Jessica’s direction. Then he squeezed the trigger hard.
The report was very loud, but the bullet went nowhere near Jessica. A moment later, Tim was on the ground—choked, unconscious, and/or merely a zombie playing dead. A cry of alarm went up from the audience. Jessica spun around to see the Tycoon on the floor of the stage. The bullet had hit him squarely in the chest and knocked him off of his feet.
For the third night in a row, pandemonium reigned at the convention.
Then Jessica—and the rest of the nation—watched in astonishment as the Tycoon got back up. He pushed away the Secret Service who had rushed to form a circle around him. These men and women looked on disbelievingly as the Tycoon fingered the hole in the front of his chest where the bullet had gone in. At one point a medical professional appeared to approach the Tycoon for a moment, examine him in bafflement, and shrug as the zombie assured him that no assistance was needed.
With the stage still crowded, cries of “We got him!” and “Over here!” boomed from beside where Jessica still stood. She watched as the limp form of Tim Fife was carried away by men and women in black suits.
Then Jessica glanced back in the direction of the stage, because the Tycoon had resumed speaking into the microphone.
“Is everybody all right?” he asked. “The bullet didn’t hit anybody else, did it?”
Indeed, there seemed to be no other injured. The crowd’s murmurs of alarm began to die away. People found their seats once again.
“Headshots, somebody should have told him!” the Tycoon said through a good-natured smile. “Headshots kill zombies. Everybody knows that!”
He stuck his finger into his chest to the second knuckle, then held it up for the crowd’s amusement. They loved it.
“I told you I was tough!” he said. “I wasn’t lying, was I?”
The cheers were unearthly and deafening.
Impossibly, the Tycoon had presented his audience with one more miracle. With one more dazzling display of who they would get if they voted for him. If Jessica had not known better, she would have said the Tycoon had staged the event himself.
But it was real. All of it.
The Tycoon.
Tim Fife.
Zombies.
All of it was real.
THE FAKE NEWSMAN
Tim Fife’s punishment was especially harsh.
As the months went by and the Tycoon took office—and then gradually began to implement his policies—Tim Fife was probably the lone zombie who failed to enjoy the magnificent changes being made to the United States. Confined to a cell for an indeterminate period, Tim knew only privation and hunger. A zombie could subsist nearly forever without eating, though it was by no means a pleasant existence. The human food brought to his cell sickened him. He never touched it, and after some time the guards got permission to cease feeding him entirely.
His access to television and radio were spotty, but he heard quite a bit through guards’ palaver.
It sounded like a brave new world. For zombies.
As president, the Tycoon had begun with executive orders mandating the closure of the country’s southern border entirely. Then regulations of every kind were rolled back. International, globalist agreements fettering the United States to other nations were severed wholesale. A new nationalism reigned.
But what kind of nation would it be?
There seemed to be new freedoms everywhere. New opportunities. New amendments. (It felt like every day, the Tycoon was decreeing something or the other.) And in all of them, the zombies were given primacy.
During this period, the ardently faithful Vice President was keen to remind the nation of the Bible’s promise that the last should one day be first. And the last, by his reckoning, could be nothing other than the zombie. They had been kept low for so long. They had been forced to exist in the shadows for centuries. Killed on sight, most of the time. (And they were slow enough that they were often literally last in any kind of race they ran.) But all of that—with the lord’s blessing, the Vice President assured the nation—was now beginning to change. Precisely as had been foretold.
As Tim languished in his cell, the world around him metamorphosed. Zombies outside killed at will. Humans came more and more to accept their lot as convenient meat for the the undead.
Even to a zombie, it was sometimes difficult for Tim to credit the tales he heard of the outer world from the talkative prison guards. (At times, he wondered if they were exaggerating in order to intentionally titillate him, and thus make his imprisonment all the more painful.) But the most unbelievable part was not just how good it was getting for zombies. The most unbelievable part seemed to be that the Tycoon had gotten Americans of all stripes to accept the changes.
In the Tycoon’s America, firearms regulations had been relaxed even further. Now, age limits and waiting periods were entirely a thing of the past. Prohibitions for the drug addicted and insane were lifted too. Enthusiasts of personal freedom had never been so ecstatic. The only thing the Tycoon had asked in return was that the penalty for violence upon a zombie should be immediate death. It was a bargain Americans urged their legislators to make.
The new President had next legalized all drugs and formerly banned substances. His only sticking point had been that “human brains” be included among these substances made newly-legal to consume. The request seemed so modest—and enthusiasts of drug legalization so adamant—that, again, the bargain was struck. (“It probably won’t be my brain that gets eaten,” the constituents told themselves—and urged their representatives to support the law.)
Healthcare was also gutted. If zombies did not require it, then how important could it be? Besides, the new President pointed out in a famous Rose Garden address, 90% of people who died, died in hospitals. Did it not then follow that they were dangerous places that the country would be better off without? To many Americans, this logic seemed unassailable.
In area after area, the nation was being reduced for humans … and enhanced for zombies. All with the willing consent of the majority.
Was there opposition? From what Tim could ascertain from inside his cell, there surely was. But the Tycoon’s masterstroke had been the insinuation that his opponent in the general election had also been a member of the undead—albeit a slightly different variety. This new world of zombies might be bad … but bad compared to what? A bunch of decadent, elitist bats flying around and sucking your blood sounded worse to most people. (Zombies, at least, you could mostly outrun.) The fact that his opponent showed no evidence of actually being a vampire—and that the Tycoon was believed to have used doctored photos to convince reporters (Jessica Smith, among them) of her initial battiness—did not seem to sway the voters back in her direction. In fact, her every attempt to prove her humanity—garlic soup, wearing crosses, bathing in holy water—only showed the voters that she was protesting too much. Trying too hard. And the Tycoon had set the precedent that these tests could be faked with his stethoscope trick. “That’s not even real garlic soup” the voters said. And so, feeling that they were to have an undead leader no matter what, the American people had chosen the zombie.
A year into the Tycoon’s first term, America was truly shaping up into a wonderland for the undead. The prison guards Tim overheard said that the growing levels of zombie invasion and contagion were different from city-to-city and state-to-state, but it was all rather hard to gauge because of the changes to the media. Any news outl
et that characterized zombies in a negative light was swiftly labeled a hate group by the White House and just as promptly shut down by executive order. There were also simply more news outlets than there had ever been before, many of which offered “alternative facts” about the “alternatively alive.” It all made it quite difficult for anybody trying to keep things straight. Was the next county over beset with a plague of the undead, or was it experiencing a vibrant cultural revival? The answer depended very much on which networks you watched or which papers you read.
The only thing that seemed certain was that it was now a land by and for zombies, and would remain so henceforward. The undead walked unafraid in sunlight. They fed upon whomever they wished, whenever they wished. Shooting them was a crime, and speaking out against them was downright un-American.
Zombies were putting the red back in the good old red, white, and blue. The tree of liberty was being watered with the blood of tyrants, yes, but also the blood of just anybody the zombies happened to feel like eating.
And poor Tim Fife?
He was missing it all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott Kenemore is the author of the horror novels The Grand Hotel; Zombie, Indiana; Zombie, Illinois; and the bestselling Zombie, Ohio, as well as the Zen of Zombie series of undead-themed satire books. He is a graduate of Kenyon College and Columbia University. A member of the Horror Writers Association and the Zombie Research Society, Scott lives in Chicago and is the drummer for the musical band The Blissters.
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