The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Chuck looked away from Baseman’s glare, spotted his earpiece on the floor, and picked it up. Lodging it back in place, he tried to sound unworried.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Lee emerged from Chuck’s ear canal. “Thirty seconds, Chuck. Get Baseman out of there.”

  Chuck blinked, all Baseman needed to guess Lee’s order.

  “Tell Lee to rerun Joanie,” he said.

  “I can’t tell him that,” Chuck whispered.

  Baseman puffed out hot breath. “You told him to kill the boobs, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but I can’t—”

  “You gotta stand up for yourself, Face. You gotta stand up for the human fucking race. It’s right now or maybe not ever again.”

  Chuck stared into Baseman’s eyes. The older man looked both dead exhausted and crazily alive, like he’d made a long, hard, sleepless drive to get to this place and time.

  “Rerun Joanie,” he said to Lee.

  He extracted his earpiece, letting it dangle down his neck. He met Baseman’s wide-eyed look. Chuck’s jaws creaked, and his tongue peeled off the dry roof of his mouth.

  “Tell me what to do,” he gasped.

  Baseman grinned ferociously, a fuck-the-man snarl. He leaned closer, blocking the monitor, where Joanie Abbott had been rewound to frame one. Chuck thought the producer’s breath now smelled more like a soldier’s hard-earned sweat.

  “Zoë Shillace,” Baseman said, “My intern. Every six-figure earner in this building running around like a headless chicken, and this twenty-one-year-old, pulling minimum wage, is trawling raw feeds. She’s found the needle in the haystack, Face. A camera broadcasting live from the White House briefing room. Not Reuters. Not AP. The feed’s coming in rough and rogue. Could be cell phone video, a Dejero box, I have no idea, But it’s coming from a closed-door briefing. Some Woodward or Bernstein’s trying to Hail Mary this story to someone. And Zoë Shillace caught it.”

  “You want to … Is it even legal?”

  Baseman pounded the desk hard enough for Chuck’s laptop to leap.

  “Fuck legal. We’re not going to have laws much longer if people don’t hear the truth. The media’s gone to shit, and it’s our fault. If anyone’s going to fight the power, it has to be us. Maybe it takes bad to beat bad, huh?”

  Chuck was blanketed by sadness.

  “Do we … have to fight?”

  Baseman nodded seriously, “It’s what we do, Face.”

  Chuck knew if he stood and tried to run, he’d stagger. But there was nothing wrong with staggering—if you were staggering in the right direction.

  “Okay,” he said, “All right.”

  Baseman cackled victoriously and pointed at the control room.

  “I’m going to go in there to stop Lee from killing the feed. Give me two minutes. No, give me one. Once we’re live, I’ll head off Glass. When she sees we’ve stolen her thunder, she’ll be on the warpath, Just remember this: Lee won’t take the feed unless you call for it. You have to call for it explicitly. Say it straight out, it’s a press briefing from the White House. Feed 8. You got that? Call for it with confidence, my man. Feed 8.”

  The earpiece shivered against Chuck’s neck, he assumed from the force of Lee’s shouts.

  “My career,” Chuck whispered. He identified his emotion: he was mourning.

  Baseman wrinkled his brow. “I know. Mine too.” His grin inched back, “But for a guy like me—maybe I’ve judged you wrong, Face. For people like us … I don’t think there’s any better way to go out.”

  Peculiarities

  Baseman had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours inside control rooms, and never had one seemed to him as kaleidoscopic as it did today. One hundred and fifty screens puked bad tidings. On the larger screens, Baseman saw the familiar faces, sets, and chyrons of their competitors, newspeople with stern-faced masks little more convincing than the Face’s. From the honeycomb of smaller screens, raw feeds of nervous, off-air reporters and helicopter shots, hopefully abandoning Ben Hines’s mansion. Most disturbing of all were the color bars, dozens of them, like bright, striped gravestones.

  At least it made for flattering light for the cellar-dweller crew seated along the half-octagon countertop: Carly DeSario, production assistant; Grace Canez, teleprompter; Rebecca Pearlman, sound board; Tim Fessler, switcher. And Lee Sutton, director. Only five people to deal with, not bad. Still too many to handle for a sixty-six-year-old guy whose office trash can was filled with fast-food wrappers.

  He’d lied to the Face. If Chuck introduced a White House press briefing, Lee might take it, The bigger problem would be keeping Feed 8 on the air once it got there. Anyone in this room had the ability to kill it. Baseman took a deep inhale.

  “I’m gonna smoke,” he announced. “Anybody minds, step outside.”

  The staff was too strained to turn from their monitors.

  Baseman cleared his throat, “Maybe you didn’t understand me. I’m extremely concerned about the effects of secondhand smoke.”

  Still no reaction. Baseman checked A Monitor. The Joanie Abbott package, something about a preschool, winding up. On B, a medium shot of Chuck Corso. For once, the Face wasn’t checking himself in a hand mirror. With one hand, he was adjusting his lavalier mic. The other, for some reason, was cruising on the touch pad of his laptop. He looked anxious. No shit, If he was sieving for good news, he was not going to find it.

  Baseman cleared his throat again. “I’d feel a lot better,” he growled, “if everybody would just step the fuck outside!”

  DeSario, Canez, Pearlman, and Fessler stood so quickly their chairs rolled back into the railing. As the four of them went for the door, Baseman suspected each was plotting the quickest path to their desk, planning to snatch their things and get the hell out.

  “Fessler, you stick,” Baseman said.

  The switchboard operator looked stricken. Probably the appropriate attitude. Fessler lowered himself into his seat like it was an electric chair. Lee Sutton, the only one not to budge, pressed the button on his mic and said, “Sixty seconds, Chuck.” He released the button, pushed his headset back, and spread his arms at Baseman.

  “We need a power trip right now,” he cried, “like we need a drill to the head!”

  Baseman had turned his back. He wrapped his arms around a waist-high filing cabinet, confirmed its weight, and began baby-stepping it toward the control-room door. It was the hardest physical labor he’d attempted in years. He put his back into it and felt a muscle along his spine seize. Swallowing an injured sob, he kept shoving. Once the cabinet was in place, blocking the door, he wobbled around to find Lee and Fessler staring at him.

  “Fessler,” Baseman panted, “Whatever you hear us discussing here, you will forget, understand? You tell your wife, your kids, your dog, Santa Claus, I will find you, stick toothpicks in your eyeballs, and serve them up as Swedish meatballs.”

  Fessler looked like he’d detected the flavor of what was going down and, to his credit, embraced it. “I have a terrible memory, Mr, Baseman,” he said. “Things just zip right out of my head.”

  Lee appeared immobilized by the grievances fighting for his contempt. He shook a finger at the filing cabinet until he was able to spit out a single, ineffective invective: “Fire hazard!”

  Baseman pointed to A Monitor. “Whole world’s on fire, Lee.”

  Joanie Abbott’s package had again reached its bleak conclusion—Joanie looking drained before a preschool playground aswirl in police tape. Fessler had no choice but to cut to Chuck. The three of them watched as Chuck saw Camera 2’s red light and lifted his face. A chilling sight: the worst improviser in the biz, live without the safety nets of teleprompter, script, or director. Lee popped his headphones over his ears and pressed the mic button.

  “Stand by,” Fessler said. “I’m working on capturing Feed 5.”

  Chuck Corso’s ruptured voice broke from the control room’s speakers.

  “We have … we have…�
�

  Lee paused. Seeing the despair in the Face’s eyes, Baseman wondered if he’d just arranged another Jansky shot. Chuck had no gun under the desk, but there might be a glass he could shatter, creating a shard he could draw across his throat. Lee and Fessler had to be thinking the same, along with whoever was rattling the door behind the filing cabinet, This was going to end really—

  Chuck’s eyes cleared. He sat up straight.

  “We have a live press briefing from the White House,” he said, “Feed 8.”

  Baseman saw Fessler check the Feed 8 monitor and recognize the White House briefing room.

  “Shit,” Fessler rasped.

  “What’s that?” Lee demanded, “What the hell is that, Baseman?”

  “Take it, Fessler,” Baseman said.

  “Do not take it!” Lee shouted. “That’s an order!”

  “Feed 8, please,” Chuck repeated.

  Fessler threw Baseman a harried look.

  “Make a mistake,” Baseman suggested, “Flip the wrong switch.”

  “Do not!” Lee cried, scrambling from his chair, obviously intent on stopping Fessler. Only he’d forgotten his headphones; the cable stretched taut and stopped him like a tethered dog. In the two seconds it took for him to rip off the phones, Baseman had covered the distance and taken the kind of swing he hadn’t made since his Chicago days, when six months did not pass without him defending himself from an inebriated bigot.

  The punch was on the mark, nailing Lee in the mouth. The moist cluck of an uprooted tooth was followed by the dropped-keys splat of blood hitting the floor. Lee’s head jolted sideways, and his knees dropped to the tile like dual anchors.

  The pain was instant. Baseman drew up his fist—he was a leftie—to find a pyramidal notch between his first and second knuckle. One of Lee’s teeth had made him pay for the punch. Blood hesitated at the cleft as if shy, then pushed out, creating a short, red stripe on the floor—more color bars. Baseman lodged his bleeding fist under his right armpit and turned to Fessler.

  “You heard the man,” he grunted, “Feed 8.”

  The strain, the sudden injury, they muddied things. Baseman found himself in Lee’s chair, a full minute lost. He tried to recover it. Yes, he’d unknotted his tie one-handed and awkwardly wrapped it around the badly placed wound. He blinked away black starbursts and saw the White House video running live on A Monitor. That wasn’t the strangest part. In his woozy stupor, Baseman could see himself watching the video. See Fessler watching it. Chuck too. All of WWN, in fact. He could see the whole viewing public watching and, growing firmer under his light-headedness, there was a feeling he’d forgotten: pride.

  We join a conference in chaos, There’s Press Secretary Tammy Shellenbarger. She’s wearing her usual lavender suit, standing behind the podium. All normal, until we notice how deeply her fingernails are sunk into the wood. Even in the jittery, low-res video, we can see her knuckles are white. It’s a stressful job; we know that. Obama cycled through three press secretaries, George W. exhausted four, Clinton blew through five. We’d be tempted to believe things are normal, if not for the goo splattered across the White House seal. It looks like yogurt, maybe a smoothie. Someone must have thrown it, That is not normal at all.

  The camera spins, Whoever is operating it is moving. We see a flap of overcoat. Is the camera being smuggled beneath a coat? Is the most important press conference of our time being transmitted via the silliest of junior-sleuth ploys? For a second, we are blinded by a row of Fresnel lights. We see tripods at the back of the room, all decapitated. We don’t know how the camera signal is getting out, but the briefing room is loaded with transmitters, and if the White House has been lax today in accounting for every one, they can’t be faulted. It is quite a day, one that, if we want to get lofty about it, might indeed live in infamy.

  The camera points down the middle of the room. The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room has seven rows of seats, each seven chairs wide. Typically all are filled, roughly in order of White House favor, with a dozen other reporters crowded into the aisles and rear. Today, attendance is patchy and disordered. A clump of reporters are on their feet and raging, bellies to Shellenbarger’s riser; another clump sits poised near the door as if valuing an exit route over all else; still others roam, pads of paper crumpling in their fists. A reporter from Bloomberg is the first person we hear clearly.

  Bloomberg: “Give me my phone back! I want my phone back!”

  Shellenbarger, an obstructionist automaton dubbed the Ice Queen, is not so cold today. She blots sweat from her face with a wad of tissue. She looks awful. Everyone looks awful. The reporters are sporting attire that, on any other day, might inspire work-apparel jokes on late-night TV. The Washington Post in a T-shirt. Politico in sneakers. Al Jazeera in Crocs.

  Shellenbarger: “You’ll all get your devices back when—”

  ABC: “Can we isolate the start of this? Is there a ground zero?”

  Shellenbarger: “Like I said, the VSDC network is tracking this.”

  NPR: “How many cases have been reported? Do we have even a rough figure?”

  Shellenbarger knots her brow. We are surprised to feel a reciprocal twinge on our foreheads, sympathy for the Ice Queen. We, too, have failed to answer the simplest of questions today and are starting to think we will never have answers again. Shellenbarger makes a show of paging through papers that she, in her state, cannot possibly read. “I don’t have … the latest statistics aren’t—”

  NPR: “A shitload, right? There have been a shitload of cases. That’s what we’re going to report.”

  Bloomberg: “One of your goons took my phone! Is the American press under martial law?”

  USA Today: “How could the president have possibly called the attacks normal?”

  Shellenbarger: “Hold on. He didn’t say normal. I never said he said that. I said we are following normal procedures.”

  BBC: “Are there normal procedures for this? For the dead coming back to life? Does that mean the White House knew this was a possibility?”

  USA Today: “Is this a cover-up? Is that what it is?”

  Bloomberg: “That’s why they took my phone! Why they took all our phones!”

  Shellenbarger: “We are not prepared to confirm reports of … what you’re saying.”

  Reuters: “You know we have bureaus all over the world, right?”

  NPR: “You don’t have to confirm shit! We’ve confirmed it! We’ve all fucking confirmed it!”

  Wall Street Journal: “You see this? This is a list. Of hospitals and morgues turned into disaster sites. Of emergency medical stations being set up on the sides of roads. We haven’t seen anything like this since 9/11.”

  Shellenbarger: “I know you are all reporting … peculiarities—”

  NPR: “Dead people walking around? That’s pretty fucking peculiar!”

  Shellenbarger: “I think we are very much still in a discovery period regarding who They are and what They want, and if we start describing Them prematurely as some sort of—”

  Univision: “These are very dangerous words, you understand? They? Them? To anyone in this country who looks differently, or speaks differently, or behaves differently? Do you see how using language like this, right now, could lead to more civilian deaths?”

  Fox News: “Isn’t it possible this is an act of radical Islamic terrorism?”

  Univision: “You have to be shitting me.”

  Fox News: “Do They or do They not, these attackers, exhibit all the signs of jihadist suicide bombers?”

  Univision: “Except that people who set off suicide bombs cannot already be dead!”

  Shellenbarger appears relieved by this internal spat, She glances to her right, clearly hoping for reprieve, but the Secret Service agent remains alone, and if we are being honest, does not look so good either. The athletic, ball-of-the-feet stance all agents usually hold has succumbed to slumped shoulders and slack arms. It does not take much imagination to picture him using his visible si
dearm as an express ticket out of the White House.

  Bloomberg: “I’m leaving! And if I’m not handed my phone the second I’m in that hallway, you will have a civil liberties lawsuit on your desk by the end of the day!”

  New York Times: “Secretary Shellenbarger. You called this briefing. But you haven’t given us a single thing we can give to the public. They need to know what to do right now. Should they be barricading themselves inside? Or trying to find safety in numbers?”

  Shellenbarger: “A document has been sent to your organizations, listing rescue stations. It’s being updated regularly. I think people in rural areas should head for the nearest station, yes.”

  USA Today: “You think? Why don’t you know?”

  Bloomberg: “The door is locked. Why the fuck is the door locked?”

  We hear a crunch. All of us across the nation hear it. Shellenbarger’s eyes go wide with a surprise that’s somehow girlish, and she raises her right hand. A dark thread of blood runs down her wrist. The fingernail of her middle finger is bent back, jutting out at forty-five degrees. She has done this to herself by gripping the podium too hard. Somehow this is worse than if that dick from Fox had attacked her. This is self-harm, and that’s what we’re most afraid of, down in our marrow, How bad will it have to get before we do something to ourselves to make the hopelessness go away?

  Shellenbarger: “Excuse me … I…”

  She tucks the bloody finger inside her sweat-sodden tissue and holds it tightly. As she blinks into the dazzling lights, the camera jostles for a closer vantage. What we feel now is beyond anything we’d ever believed we’d feel for the Ice Queen. We want to whisk her away from that hothouse, address her injured flesh, show her our own. Perhaps by doing so, we can all still be saved.

  The press secretary squints over the podium and, from her tentative smile, is truly seeing the press corps for the first time, just as the press corps might be truly seeing her for the first time. Shellenbarger’s smile is sad, and we understand why. It comes too late, this cleared sight of hers, and ours.

  Shellenbarger: “I … can’t tell you what’s going on. Because I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s some sort of cult … or some sort of bioweapon … I’m just … In the end, I’m just a mouthpiece, you know? Whatever this is, it’s not a Republican thing, or a Democrat thing. It’s not white, or Black, or Christian, or Muslim … I know there are a lot of bad people out there, You think I don’t know that? But they don’t … bite each other. They don’t eat each other. It’s against nature. We’re the same, We’re all the same. Maybe that’s why I called this meeting. Just to remind you, before you run off and forget.”