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by Mira Grant

  “Understandable,” I said. The job of a candidate’s spouse at the party convention is simple: stand around looking elegant and attractive, and say something witty if you get a microphone shoved in your face. That doesn’t leave much time for family togetherness, or for protecting kids from reporters itching to find something scandalous to start chewing on. Everything that happens at a party convention is on the record if the press finds out about it. Emily was doing the right thing. “Mind if I drop by later for an interview? I promise not to bring up the horses if you promise not to throw heavy objects at my head.”

  Emily’s lips quirked up in a smile. “My. Peter wasn’t kidding when he said that the convention had you feeling charitable.”

  “She’s saving up her catty for her interview with Governor Tate,” Shaun said.

  “He’s agreed to an interview?” asked Emily. “Peter said he’d been putting you off since the primaries.”

  “That would be why he’s finally agreed to an interview,” I replied, not bothering to keep the irritation from my voice. “Doing it before now was dismissible. I mean, what was I going to say about the man? ‘Governor Tate is so busy trying to get elected that he doesn’t have time to sit down with a woman who speaks publicly in support of his in-party opposition’? Not exactly a scathing indictment. Now we’re at the convention and if he doesn’t talk to me when he’s talking to everyone else, it looks like censorship.”

  Emily considered me for a moment. Then, slowly, she smiled. “Why, Georgia Mason, I do believe you’ve entrapped this poor man.”

  “No, ma’am, I’ve merely engaged in standard journalistic practice,” I said. “He entrapped himself.”

  An exclusive six weeks before the convention would have been something he could bury or buy off: No matter how good it was, unless I somehow got him to confess to a sex scandal or drug abuse, it wasn’t going to be enough to taint the shining purity of his “champion of the religious and conservative right” reputation. Senator Ryman is moderate leaning toward liberal, despite his strong affiliation to and affection for the Republican Party. Governor Tate, on the other hand, is so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the world. Few people are willing to stand for both the death penalty and an overturning of Roe v. Wade these days, but he does it, all while encouraging loosening the Mason’s Law restrictions preventing family farms from operating within a hundred miles of major metro areas and encouraging tighter interpretation of Raskin-Watts. Under his proposed legislation, it wouldn’t be a crime to own a cow in Albany, but it would be considered an act of terrorism to attempt to save the life of a heart attack victim before performing extensive blood tests. Did I want a little time alone with him, on the record, to see how much of a hole he could dig for himself when faced with the right questions?

  Did I ever.

  “When’s your interview?”

  “Three.” I glanced at my watch. “Actually, if you don’t mind Shaun escorting you from here, that would be a big help. I need to get moving if I don’t want to make the governor wait.”

  “I thought you did want to make the governor wait,” said Shaun.

  “Yes, but it has to be on purpose.” Making him wait intentionally was showing strategy. Making him wait because I didn’t allow enough time to get to his office was sloppy. I have a reputation for being a lot of things—after the article where I called Wagman a “publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change,” “bitch” has been at the top of the list—but “sloppy” isn’t among them.

  “Of course,” said Emily. “Thank you for coming out to meet me.”

  “It was my pleasure, Mrs. Ryman. Shaun, don’t make the nice potential First Lady poke any dead things before you deliver her to security.”

  “You never let me have any fun,” Shaun mock-grumbled, offering Emily his arm. “If you’d like to come with me, I believe I can promise an utterly dull, boring, and uneventful trip between points A and B.”

  “That sounds lovely, Shaun,” said Emily. Her security detail—three large gentlemen who looked just like every other private security guard at the convention—fell in behind her as Shaun led her away down the hall.

  When she’d e-mailed asking us to meet her, she said she’d be arriving at one of the delivery doors, rather than the VIP entrance. “I want to avoid the press” was her quixotic, but sadly understandable, justification. Despite the snide implications that have been made by some of my colleagues, my team and I aren’t the lapdogs of what will hopefully become the Ryman administration. We’re twice as critical as anyone else when the candidate screws up because, quite frankly, we expect better of him. He’s ours. Win or lose, he belongs to us. And just like any proud parent or greedy shareholder, we want to see our investment make it to the finish line. If Peter screws the pooch, Shaun, Buffy, and I are right there in the thick of things, pointing to the wet spot and shouting for people to come quick and bring the cameras… but we’re also the ones who won. We have no interest in embarrassing the senator by harassing his family or dragging them inappropriately into the spotlight.

  An example: Rebecca Ryman fell off her horse during a show-jumping event at the Wisconsin State Fair three years ago. She was fifteen. I don’t understand the appeal of show-jumping—I don’t care for large mammals under any circumstances, and I like them even less when you’re stacking adolescents on their backs and teaching them to clear obstacles—so I can’t say what happened, just that the horse stepped wrong somehow, and Rebecca fell. She was fine. The horse broke a leg and had to be put down.

  The euthanasia was performed without a hitch; as is standard with large mammals, they used a captive bolt gun to the forehead, followed by a stiletto to the spinal column. Nothing was hurt except the horse, Rebecca’s pride, and the reputation of the Wisconsin State Fair. The horse never had a prayer of reanimating. That hasn’t prevented six of our rivals from airing the footage from that fair for weeks on end, as if the embarrassment of a teenage girl somehow cancels out the fact that they didn’t make the cut. “Ha-ha, you got the candidate, but we can mock his teenage daughter for an honest mistake.”

  Sometimes I wonder if my crew is the only group of professional journalists who managed to avoid the asshole pills during training. Then I look at some of my editorials, especially the ones involving Wagman and her slow political suicide, and I realize that we took the pills. We just got a small portion of journalistic ethics to make them go down more easily. Emily knew she was safe with us because, unlike our peers, Shaun and I don’t abuse innocent people for the sake of a few marketable quotes. We have politicians to abuse when we need that sort of thing.

  I checked my watch as I strode down the hall toward the main entrance. A shortcut through the press pen would take me to the governor’s offices, where his chief of staff would be happy to stall me for as long as possible. My interview wasn’t for a guaranteed sixty minutes; I’d need a lot more pull if I wanted to achieve something like that. No, I just got whatever questions I could ask and have answered in the span of an hour, no matter what else came up during that time. I wanted to make him wait no more than ten minutes. That would make a point but still leave me the time to get the answers I both wanted and needed to have. His chief of staff would not only want to make me wait, he’d want to make me wait for at least half an hour, thus gutting the interview and proving once more exactly who was in control of the situation.

  There are moments when I look at the world I’m living in, all the cutthroat politics and the incredibly petty, partisan deal mongering, and I wonder how anyone could be happy doing anything else. After this, local politics would seem like a bake sale. Which means I need to stay exactly where I am, and that means making sure everyone sees how good I am at my job.

  People called greetings my way as I cut through the press pen. I waved distractedly, attention focused on the route ahead. I have a reputation for aloofness in certain parts of the press corps. I guess I deserve it.
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  “Georgia!” called a man I vaguely recognized from Wagman’s press pool. He shouldered his way through the crowd, drawing up alongside me as I continued toward the door to Governor Tate’s offices. “Got a second?”

  “Not so much,” I said, reaching for the doorknob.

  He put a hand on my shoulder, ignoring the way I tensed, and said, “The congresswoman just dropped out of the race.”

  I froze, swinging my head around to face him before tugging my sunglasses down enough to allow me an unobstructed view of his face. The overhead lights burned my eyes. That didn’t matter; I could see his expression well enough to know that he wasn’t lying. “What do you want?” I asked, pushing my glasses back up.

  He looked over his shoulder toward the rest of the gathered journalists. None of them seemed to have realized that there was blood in the water. Not yet, anyway. They’d catch on fast, and once they did, we were cornered.

  “I bring you what I have—and there’s footage, too, lots of stuff, all the votes, details on where she’s throwing what’s left of her weight—and you let me on the team.”

  “You want to follow Ryman?”

  “I do.”

  I considered this, keeping my face impassive. Finally, incrementally, I nodded. “Be at our rooms in an hour, with copies of all your recent publications, and everything you’ve got on Wagman. We’ll talk there.”

  “Great,” he said, and stepped back, letting me continue on my way.

  Governor Tate’s security agents nodded as I stepped through the doorway into the governor’s offices, holding up my press pass for their review. It passed muster; they didn’t stop me.

  Governor Tate’s quarters looked just like Senator Ryman’s, and were, I’m sure, close to identical to Wagman’s. Since presidential hopefuls are packed into contiguous convention centers these days, the folks organizing the conventions go out of their way to prevent the appearance that they’re “showing favor” to any particular candidate. One of our guys was going to come away the Crown prince of the party while the other went begging for scraps, but until the votes were counted, they’d be standing on equal footing.

  The office was full of volunteers and staffers, and the walls were plastered with the requisite “Tate for President” posters, but the atmosphere still managed to be quiet and almost funereal. People didn’t look frightened, just focused on what they were doing. I tapped the button on my lapel, triggering its internal camera to start taking still shots every fifteen seconds. There was enough memory to keep it doing that for two hours before I needed to dump the pictures to disk. Most of the shots would be crap, but there would probably be one or two that I could use.

  I killed a few minutes pouring myself an unwanted cup of coffee and doctoring it to my supposed satisfaction before walking over to show my press pass to the guards waiting at the governor’s office door.

  “Georgia Mason, After the End Times, here to see Governor Tate.”

  One of them looked over his sunglasses at me. “You’re late.”

  “Got held up,” I replied, smiling. My own sunglasses were firmly in place, making it difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether the smile was reaching my eyes.

  The guards exchanged a look. I’ve found that men in sunglasses really hate it when they can’t see your eyes—it’s like the air of mystique they’re trying to create isn’t meant to be shared with anyone else, especially not a silly little journalist who happens to suffer from an ocular medical condition. I held my ground and my smile.

  Late or not, they didn’t have a valid reason to keep me out. “Don’t do it again,” said the taller of the two, and opened the door to the governor’s private office.

  “Right,” I said, and let my smile drop as I walked past them. They closed the door behind me with a sharp click. I didn’t bother to turn. I’d only get one first look at the private office of the man who stood the best shot at putting me out of a job. I wanted to savor it.

  Governor Tate’s office was decorated austerely. He’d chosen to cover the room’s two windows; shelves blocked them almost completely, and the ambient light was provided by soft overhead fluorescents. Two massive flags covered most of the rear wall, representing, respectively, the United States and Texas. There were no other personal touches in evidence. This office was a stopping place, not a destination.

  The governor himself was behind his desk, carefully placed so he was framed by the flags. I could imagine his handlers spending hours arguing about how best to create the image that he was a man who would be strong, both for his country and for the world. They’d done it; he looked perfectly presidential. If Peter Ryman was all boyish good looks and all-American charm, Governor David Tate was the embodiment of the American military man, from his solemn demeanor down to his respectable gray crew cut. I didn’t need to call up his service record; the fact that he had one while Senator Ryman didn’t has been the source of a lot of ads paid for by “concerned citizens” since the campaign cycle began. Three-star general, saw combat in the Canadian Border Cleansing of ’17, when we took back Niagara Falls from the infected, and then again in New Guinea in ’19, when a terrorist action involving aerosolized live-state Kellis-Amberlee nearly cost us the country. He’d been wounded in battle, he’d fought for his nation and for the rights of the uninfected, and he understood the war we fight every day against the creatures that used to be our loved ones.

  There are a lot of good reasons the man scares the crap out of me. Those are just the beginning.

  “Miss Mason,” he said, indicating the chair on the far side of his desk with a sweep of one hand as he rose. “I trust you didn’t get lost? I was beginning to think you weren’t intending to come.”

  “Governor,” I replied. I walked over and sat down, pulling my MP3 recorder from my pocket and placing it on the table. The action triggered at least two video cameras concealed in my clothing. Those were the ones I knew about; I was sure Buffy had hidden half a dozen more in case someone got cute with an EMP pulse. “I was unavoidably detained.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, sitting back down. “Those security checks can be murder, can’t they?”

  “They certainly can.” I leaned over to turn on the MP3 recorder with a theatrical flick of my index finger. Smoke and mirrors: If he thought that was my only recording device, he’d worry less about what was really going on the record. “I wanted to thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today and, of course, with our audience at After the End Times. Our readers have been following this campaign with a great deal of interest, and your platform is something that they’re eager to understand in more depth.”

  “Clever folks, your readers,” the governor drawled, settling back in his seat. I glanced up without moving my head; the ability to see your interviewees when they don’t know you’re looking is one of the great advantages to living your life behind tinted glass.

  It was easier to look than it was to avoid flinching at what I saw. The governor was watching me with undisguised blankness, like a little boy watching a bug he intended to smash. I’m used to people disliking reporters, but that was a bit much. Sitting up again, I straightened my glasses and said, “They are among the most discriminating in the blogging community.”

  “Is that so? Well, I suppose that explains their unflagging interest in this year’s race. Been glorious for your ratings, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Governor, it has. Now, your run for president was a bit of a surprise—political circles held that you wouldn’t be reaching for the office for another cycle. What prompted this early entrance into the race?”

  The governor smiled, erasing the blankness from his eyes. Too late; I’d already seen it. In a way, the sudden life in his expression was even more frightening. He was on script now. He thought he knew how to handle me.

  “Well, Miss Mason, the long and the short of it is that I’ve been getting a mite worried watching the way things have been going around here. I looked out at the field and realized that, unless I w
as on it, there just wasn’t anyone out there that I’d trust to watch after my wife and two boys when the dead decided it was time for another mass uprising. America needs a strong leader in this time of turmoil. Someone who knows what it means for a man to fight to hold what’s his. No offense against my esteemed opponent, but the good senator hasn’t ever fought for what he loves. He doesn’t understand it the way he would if he’d ever bled to keep it.” His tone was jovial and almost jocular, a father figure imparting wisdom on a privileged student.

  I wasn’t buying it. Keeping my expression professional, I said, “So you see this as a two-man race—between yourself and Senator Ryman.”

  “Let’s be honest here: It is a two-man race. Kirsten Wagman is a good woman with strong Republican values and a firm grasp of the morals of this nation, but she’s not going to be our next president. She isn’t prepared to do what’s needed for the people and the economy of this great land.”

  Resisting the urge to point out that Kirsten Wagman believed in using her breasts in place of an informed debate, I asked, “Governor, what do you feel is needed for the people of America?”

  “This country was based on the three Fs, Miss Mason: Freedom, Faith, and Family.” I could hear the capital letters in his voice; he said the words with that much force. “We’ve gone to great lengths to preserve the first of those things, but we’ve allowed the other two to slip by the wayside as we focused on the here and now. We’re drifting away from God.” The blankness was back in his eyes. “We’re being judged; we’re being tested. I’m afraid we’re coming direly close to failing, and this isn’t a test you get to take more than once.”

  “Can you give me an example of this ‘failure’?”

  “Why, the loss of Alaska, Miss Mason; a great American territory ceded to the dead because we didn’t have the guts to stand up for what was rightly ours. Our boys weren’t willing to put their faith in God and stand that line, and now a treasured part of our nation is lost, maybe forever. How long before that happens again, in Hawaii or Puerto Rico or, God forbid, even the American Heartland? We’ve gotten soft behind our walls. It’s time to put our trust in God.”