The Governor’s smile had warped into a grimace and even that was crumbling. He stood abruptly. “I have to see…I mean I have a, uh, another meeting. Can you wait here for a moment?”
Collins leaned back, his face a mixture of shock and anger. “Hold on. You can’t possibly have another meeting as important as this one. I have men preparing…”
“I’ll be just a moment.” He left the general spluttering to go stand in the hallway. It was an important hallway, all stiff and dark with mahogany walls. It was too dark in his opinion. It was heavy, and gloomy and very foreboding. It was an important hallway that led to his important office where all the important decisions were made.
“Fuck,” Stimpson said in a whisper, before fleeing from the hall and the office and the important decisions. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the damned place.
Making important decisions wasn’t the reason he’d run for the position of governor. He wasn’t governor because of some puritanical calling. He wasn’t there because of the “public good”, either. He was governor because it had been a way for him to fulfill his potential. He was, after all, better and greater than everyone else—the title and the position proved it. He was governor because he was important. People deferred to him; some practically bowed to him, and they all came crawling on their hands and knees, begging when they wanted something.
All except that damned general. No, he was all stiff and righteous and… “There’s no way this is happening,” Stimpson said, as the general’s request echoed in his ears. Shoot on sight. “What the fuck is that? Who asks that?”
It was one thing when some freaked-out police dispatcher made ridiculous claims of zombies in their midst—regardless of whether the claims were at least partially corroborated by the superintendent of the State Police—but now a general as well? Had the lot of them been sniffing glue together?
Yes, he was sure something had happened out at the Walton facility, something horrific. Airborne PCP, or that crazy new drug: bathsalts; someone had probably poisoned the water with it, or maybe they had put heroin in the hash browns. It had to be something that made sense. But zombies? No way! It wasn’t possible. In fact, a part of him had agreed to call up the 42nd just to prove, if only to himself, that it was impossible.
General Collins wasn’t supposed to side with the crazies. He was supposed to be the adult in the room. But that was out the window now. Shoot on sight…the words kept on whispering in his ear like a skipping record.
In a patter of patent leather, Stimpson fled to a sitting room where his staff had waited in an uncomfortable silence. The Governor burst in, throwing his hands in the air. “He wants shoot on sight orders. Can you believe that?”
The six staffers and two guests were silent, each glancing around to see who would speak first. Offering opinions was the quickest way to having one’s career ruined—bad advice was remembered long after good advice had been appropriated by the Governor as his own.
Eventually, Jennifer Gilmore, Stimpson’s chief of staff, said in a quiet voice: “Don’t do it. These are your constituents, Bob. If you start killing them…I don’t know if they’ll forgive you.”
“You mean when they’re dead?” Andy Rizz, the Superintendent of the New York State Troopers asked. He laughed at his own joke; it was a dry, humorless sound. When no one joined in, he cleared his throat, making the knuckle of cartilage in his neck leap.
Jennifer gave him a scathing look. “I mean their relatives and their friends and everyone who sees the Governor on TV giving the execution orders.”
“And if he doesn’t give the orders?” Rizz demanded. “My troopers are dying like flies out there and it’ll be the same with the army!”
The man from Health and Human Services, Jerome something, Stimpson could never remember what, shook his head. “The army has much better guns. They have tanks. As far as I know, zombies can’t take down a tank.”
“He can’t authorize tanks,” Jennifer replied, talking about Stimpson as if he wasn’t there. “And for the same reason. Tanks and rockets and machine guns all kill indiscriminately. We can’t let this catastrophe be used an excuse to feed the military industrial complex. Remember, Bob, your voters are not big on the army and they voted you in to help put a stop to all this military spending.”
“You’ll look weak,” Rizz countered. “And if this gets out of control, you’ll be blamed.”
“No, the army will be,” Jennifer countered. “We’ll be able to spin it so you won’t be touched, Bob, but just as long as you aren’t seen as the trigger man.”
Rizz leapt to his feet. “This is ridiculous! If half the state gets eaten alive no one can spin you out of that.”
Jennifer, looking completely unruffled, folded her hands in her lap and said, “I can. You forget I was working for the mayor during Hurricane Katrina. Practically that whole stinking city was destroyed, but because of me, he came away smelling like roses. The trick is to pin it on someone else and just keep hammering it home. You see, Bob, it’s all about the optics and if you give these fascist orders to shoot on sight, it’ll be you who gets pinned.”
That was the winning argument.
They had gone on for a while longer. Jerome something had stuttered out a bunch of scientific sounding poppy-cock about the virility of the disease and its communicability and some nobody from the Department of Transportation had blah-blahed on about something called a panic-jam that could grip the entire state, but what Stimpson only really cared about were the optics.
How was he going to be perceived? That’s what mattered.
He nodded wisely as the conversation progressed and smiled when appropriate, his tanned face showing easy laugh lines that always had the voters thinking he was such an amiable, likable fellow. A guy you could have a beer with, that is if he actually drank beer, which he did only as county fairs when he needed to be seen as a ‘man of the people’.
He couldn’t be seen as the guy who murdered his own citizens.
“Thank you for your input,” he said, still showing that winning, confident smile as a hundred miles south of him a housewife named Janice Tate barricaded herself in her bathroom.
Janice was done screaming. When her husband had torn out their son’s throat with his teeth something in her voice-box had just plain ripped in mid-scream.
Since then she couldn’t even talk, not that there was anything to say. Joe had turned into one of the things…one of the demons roaming the streets in the town of Pleasant Valley, New York, a ten-minute drive from Poughkeepsie. Joe was a monster.
Janice threw her weight against the bathroom door just as Joe attacked it. The wood shuddered with the violence and all Janice could think about was Joe’s teeth. They were white in his dark mouth and so long and so sharp. She hadn’t had time to count them but now there seemed to be so many more than he once had.
Teeth, teeth, teeth.
She was going to be eaten alive. Janice Tate stretched out one arm for the medicine cabinet, hoping to God there were enough pills to kill her before the teeth got her.
The door thudded again and again. It was shaking; she was shaking. There was a sharp crack from it just as she grabbed the first bottle—Joe’s statin meds for his cholesterol. She flicked off the lid and chugged the twenty remaining pills, chewing them and, in her fear, not tasting the bitter medicine. The next bottle she grabbed was a half-finished bottle of Tylenol with codeine.
“Yes,” she whispered and then down the hatch went sixteen pills. Now a huge fracture split the door. Joe put an eye to the crack and it was just as black as the ace of spades. “No, no, no!” she said reaching for the next bottle.
Janice didn’t want to die like Mrs. Donner from across the street. She had gone on and on, wailing in horrendous pain as she was eaten. Two doors down, the Olson’s son, Freddy, had let out blood-curdling screams for twenty long minutes. His problem was he kept escaping, jumping up and running for his life, but he was always dragged down again. It was a problem because
he wouldn’t die. Janice knew what was best.
A white bottle of aspirin went down her gullet next and, as Joe smashed through a panel of the door, she washed it down with nearly a half a cup of cough syrup. She wanted to overdose. She wanted to go out quietly, however fate wasn’t so kind. Joe got through the door when she was two fisting bottles of who knew what.
He went for the soft skin of her stomach, his teeth slicing in as though she was made of cream cheese. She vomited an ugly goop of purple mess onto the top of his head and then she found her voice again and let out a reedy scream. She cried for help and she cried out to die.
A hundred miles away Governor Stimpson was oblivious. He sat back down behind his desk and looked at the general and secretly disliked him, although he didn’t know why.
General Collins was stiff in his chair. Like a fucking board, Stimpson thought. And when he nodded, the Governor was sure he heard the metallic creak of stiff-ass metal. He was like a robot and should be treated like one. “Your request to shoot on sight is denied,” Stimpson said, picking the tiniest piece of lint off of his suit coat. “Your men will fire their weapons if they are attacked by someone with a gun. Do you understand? Do not fire unless fired upon. That strategy worked in Iraq, it damned better work in America.”
Collins could see the dislike in the Governor’s eyes; he couldn’t care less. All he cared about was his men, his mission, and his country. “And if my men are attacked with some other deadly weapon? A knife, a club, what-have-you?” When the Governor paused to consider this, Collins added, “My men are not trained as law enforcement officers. You’d be endangering their lives if they aren’t allowed to fight back.”
But what about the optics? Stimpson wanted to ask, however the general was clearly a man who didn’t understand about the bigger picture. He was too short-sighted.
“I have to look at the bigger picture, General. Remember Kent State? I won’t subject my people to another Kent State, especially not on this scale. That reminds me, you are expressly forbidden to use any planes, bombs, tanks, mortars or machine guns. Oh, and no flame throwers, either.”
A hundred miles away Janice Tate was beating on her husband’s head with all her might. Joe had gotten to her liver and the pain was so exquisite that her bladder had let go in a hot rush.
Governor Stimpson picked another piece of almost invisible lint from his suit and said, “Really, this isn’t much of an issue. By their very presence, your men will deter anyone seeking to break the quarantine. And if someone tries, then I expect your men to use proper judgment and restraint. We both know how things can get out of hand. Perhaps we should consider bodycams. So the men will…”
“Bodycams?” Collins demanded, letting out a crazed cackle. “Yeah, let’s do that, and while we’re at it maybe we should read the zombies their fucking rights!” Collins found himself on his feet with the knuckles of both hands planted firmly on the ridiculously huge desk. “You have no clue what’s going on, do you?”
Janice went stiff, immobilized by the worst pain yet. Joe had chewed his way into the hepatic artery; she could feel her pulse like thunder. She could feel it right to the tips of her ears. Her arms shot out and her fingers were splayed. Then through the pain she thought she could hear her pulse and it was a miracle! The lub-dub grew fainter with each beat. She was dying. Finally she was dying.
“What I know, General, is that there are conflicting reports from a few hysterical eye witnesses. Yes, I know something bad is happening in and around Poughkeepsie, but so far no one has proved to me that it’s bad enough for us to turn the guns of our armed forces around on the very people they were sworn to protect. Your job is to contain this, nothing more.”
Janice breathed her last, a hitching, bubbling sound that never seemed to end. It just got quieter by degrees until it disappeared beneath the sound of Joe’s lips smacking as he rooted around in her guts like a pig at a trough.
Collins kept his fists on the desk because he knew if they came off he would punch the Governor right in that smarmy smile. Through gritted teeth he said: “Containment isn’t going to be enough.”
Stimpson let out a practiced air of sadness as though he wished there was something more he could do in the situation. “Get me some hard proof, General, that I can bring to the people. Until then I want anyone caught trying to break the quarantine detained only. Think about how they must be feeling, in their minds they’ve done nothing illegal, certainly nothing that would warrant execution. They will be detained only. Is that clear?”
“Yes Sir,” Collins replied, feeling a pain in his guts. His men were going to pay with their lives. “I have one question. Why did you bother calling us up if you aren’t going to use us properly?”
Because that’s what the optics called for, wasn’t an answer Stimpson could give to this narrow-minded general. As Governor, he had to be seen as doing something, but what he couldn’t be seen doing was killing his own people. “Like I said, you were called up to enforce a quarantine, not to kill people. Really, General, you’re embarrassing yourself with this shoot first attitude. Have you considered that this issue might burn out naturally? Have you stopped to think that these infected persons might just die on their own? Or get better on their own? You see? We just don’t have enough information yet to just go around killing people and until we do you will carry out your orders with the minimum amount of bloodshed.”
The general pictured the one and only zombie he had faced: it had taken three rounds to the chest and hadn’t even slowed. These things weren’t going to die on their own, of that he was certain. “You need to see for yourself what’s going on.”
“I plan on it,” the Governor replied. He would tour the front, eventually…but only when the camera crews arrived and the situation was more controlled. Going without the cameras would be like not going at all. “Until then, you have your orders. Oh, and General, find out who did this. We need to bring them to justice.” By this he meant he needed to be able to point a finger somewhere else just in case fingers started pointing at him.
At that moment, the zombie, Joe Tate, lost interest in the corpse of his wife. The body was growing cold and the maddeningly erotic thump of its heart had ceased. In somewhat of a lethargic stupor, it left the house and stumbled uncertainly for a few hundred yards. His hunger had been satiated, however it came roaring back an instant later. He’d heard the scream of another human and that was all it took.
Chapter 3
A Choice of Socks
6:30 a.m.
At exactly half past six, the President’s Chief of Staff, Marty Aleman, received the daily security briefing, just as he had for the previous six months and, as always, he marked the President as “in attendance” though the old man was still snoozing away. It was a little white lie that hurt no one. Hearing the endlessly dire reports straight from the mouth of the experts about the Russians and the Chinese and Iranians and the seemingly endless number of terrorists, had given the President an ulcer in his first year in office. That was another little secret no one talked about; no one could know that the great man had any weaknesses. He felt he had to appear perfect from his shining, helmet-like hair down to his perfectly manicured toenails.
Marty would normally give him a watered down version of the threats facing the country right after the President ate breakfast. A servant would bring tea and coffee, the official photographer would snap pictures of the him nodding sagely, and they would be interrupted a dozen times, but in the end, the President would get the knowledge he would need to face the reporters and he would get the advice he would need to get re-elected.
The advice was always the same: do nothing.
Who really cared if the Russians were gobbling up chunks of the Ukraine? What business was it of ours if the Chinese took over the South Pacific? And who were we to tell the Mullahs in Iran that they couldn’t have a nuclear bomb? Sure, these were issues that would have to be dealt with, but that didn’t mean it had to be dealt with now. The Americ
an people had spoken in three straight elections: they weren’t going to put out any effort to nip things in the bud if it didn’t affect them right at that moment.
This morning was different.
With his mirror-shined shoes snap-snapping urgently across the glossy, wood floors, Marty hurried from the West Wing to the Executive Residence. Normally, he gave the security briefing in the Yellow Oval Room, a spacious open room that was also used as a reception area prior to state dinners. That morning he bypassed it, heading through the West Sitting Hall and right to the President’s Bedroom.
A pair of Secret Service agents gave him a quizzical look, but said nothing as Marty began tapping on the door, lightly—the President didn’t care for loud, incessant knocking, even if it was an emergency. It made him high-strung and snappish.
Emanuel Geometti, the President’s butler, answered, again with little more than an inquisitive look—the President also didn’t care for whispering, it made him paranoid and he didn’t like it when people within earshot spoke to each other in a normal tone either—it interfered with his concentration, even if he was just picking out socks.
“It’s important,” was all Marty said as way of explanation to the butler.
“What’s important?” the President asked. He was seated on the end of the bed holding two pairs of socks: red for a touch of whimsy, black for a serious day. He had been thinking about going for the red, but the early knock had him thinking otherwise.
“Emanuel, can you give us a minute?” Marty asked. When the butler stepped out into the hall, Marty explained the situation, and then when the President just stood there with his mouth hanging open, he went over it again. The word “zombie” hadn’t been uttered by Governor Stimpson and yet the concept was right there front and center. Marty did his best to downplay that side of the situation occurring in New York, but the President wasn’t a complete fool.
“What you’re describing is a zombie outbreak,” he said.
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