The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  That silence that follows is booming. The camera, designed to equalize levels, pumps the audio gain until we hear one reporter sobbing, another praying in Arabic, We also hear Shellenbarger breathing, each inhale a dry reed, each exhale that same reed being snapped. We know this is how everyone in the room is breathing, because it is how we are breathing too, Shellenbarger is right. Just look at us. All the same species of mammal, panting with the same kind of lungs, who might still turn to one another for safety, harbor, and strength.

  The snap of the last reed, and we are on our own, doomed.

  Fox News: “Did you say They’re eating each other?”

  Newsmax: “Are you saying They’re cannibals?”

  Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Politico, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, ABC, NPR, USA Today, BBC, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Univision, Fox News, New York Times, Newsmax, AP, CNN, CBS, McClatchy, MSNBC, The Hill, National Journal, Time, Daily Mail, Boston Globe, WWN—they punch and push and scrap and scratch, their bedrock egos cracked by the primeval panic of being the consumed instead of the consumer, cashiered in favor of a suddenly enfranchised underclass that has always been stronger, been hungrier, been waiting.

  Bloomberg: “Open up this goddamn fucking door, you bastards!”

  Concurrent with this impotent final cry, those of us who haven’t gone blind behind terrified tears see the White House chief of staff enter the room, shoulder past the Secret Service agent, and sidle up to Shellenbarger. He says something into her ear, three words or, more likely, three letters—WWN—and together their gazes land directly on the camera lens. The chief of staff points a finger and barks at the Secret Service agent, who looks grateful to be given a task. He moves toward the camera. The image whirls toward the door, wilder than anything from Ross Quincey’s stringer, but Bloomberg’s shriek tells us the door is locked, and the last thing we see is the blurred face of the Secret Service agent, his mouth wide enough to bite through the camera and swallow us.

  When Feed 8 cut out, WWN broadcast dead air for an astonishing eighty-four seconds. The screen was black as grave dirt, a study on where the world might be heading. Added to these apparent emotions were the practical matters of Tim Fessler looking absolutely lost and Lee Sutton only beginning to regain consciousness.

  They would pull together soon, Baseman thought. They had to. He called his bleeding hand, aching arms, and throbbing back into renewed service, sliding the filing cabinet away from the door and exiting into a crowd of studio staff congregated on the other side, panicked professionals gone still and silent. He shouldered past, into the dark studio, warding them off with the blood-soaked tie around his hand.

  It felt like the floor was rolling underfoot in a silent earthquake, tilting forward at the same time so Baseman’s sore legs had to move faster. He tumbled past the set, Chuck phosphorescent beneath the lights. He felt hungry; his stomach was actually rumbling. His sopping tie might have slowed the blood pumping from the cut between his knuckles, but stoppering that blood made the rest of his veins scream for release. He had begun to fight, and now fighting was all he craved, It was a chance to make up for Sherry, for Jansky, for everything.

  He heard her coming, the impatient thwack of her heels. Rochelle Glass was trotting toward Baseman from the vicinity of Hair and Makeup, buttoning a pearl-colored suit, wobbling on three-inch pumps with unbuckled ankle straps. The lack of flounced hair or dramatic eyeshadow provided evidence of her hasty departure. Her eyes were nevertheless two laser-guided missiles aimed at Chuck Corso. Baseman picked up his pace. Glass came with no entourage, no producers, no assistants. The two of them might as well be back in that elevator, all alone.

  Glass noticed him only when he blocked her path. She halted abruptly, just short of smacking into his chest.

  “Baseman! I’ll tear your boy off that desk if you don’t get his ass—”

  With his right hand, Baseman pushed open the infrequently noticed door to his right. With his damaged left, he grabbed Glass by the biceps and pulled her into the stairwell.

  Juicy, Grisly, Sexy

  From the door to the far wall, ten feet. Only four feet of landing before the down and up staircases. White everything—floors, stairs, ceiling, door—but a dingy eggshell white, because even in twenty-first-century monoliths like the CableCorp Tower, stairwells were eschewed by all but the most strung-out smokers and rabid exercisers, and years of shoe scuffs, cigarette ash, stomped roaches, and dust had sunk into the paint like falsified shadows. Each landing came standard, with no windows but a bank of pink-purple fluorescents, which droned like drugged bees and lent a slaughterhouse grimness to the area.

  The door clicked shut behind him, and Baseman’s skin tightened in the concrete chill. He stopped at the base of the up staircase and wrenched Glass forward. She tottered on an unstrapped high heel and caught herself against the far wall. She gripped her arm where he’d grabbed her and stared at him in amazement.

  “You know what a touch like that gets you in today’s workplace, Baseman?”

  “You think I give a shit? Today?”

  “Naturally, you don’t. Because I won’t sue and you know it.” She pounded dust from her sleeves. “I happen to find the directness rather refreshing.” She wagged a finger. “But I’m warning you. If you’ve handled younger women this way, hoo boy, the clock is ticking on you, buster. I honestly expected more from you, Baseman. You’re an underprivileged class too, you know. I guess dick trumps all. You men. You’re going down, every one of you.”

  “We’re all going down.”

  Glass crossed her arms and glared. “That press briefing was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You lose one argument in front of Unitas and this is how you react? You child. You infant.” Glass shook a fist, a gesture beloved by Mendicans. “You know what kind of work I’ve done to gain the president’s trust? To get the kind of access I get—that only I get? Of course you don’t! Because you’re living in the sixties! Some civil rights la-la land where you think you’ve got to stick it to the Man! I’ve got news for you, Baseman. You are the Man. You created this whole system while I was still playing with dolls.”

  The stairwell was all hard surfaces, Her voice, elongated into its broadcast twang, came at Baseman as if from a dozen Rochelle Glasses at once, clones created to make the rest of his life a torture. Beneath her braying, smaller sounds also benefited from the stairwell’s amplification. Buzzes, beeps, whistles, honks: both of their phones fuming like ignored children.

  But Baseman had realized that talking was Glass’s game. All he could hear, anyway, was his pulse in his ears, whisked thick by the wound on his hand. It had felt good, punching Lee. It had felt great, biting Sherry. When Rochelle Glass made for the door, those sensations guided him.

  “Hello, Kwame, this is Rochelle Glass.” She was speaking into her phone. “I’m afraid I’m in need of assistance. I’m with Nathan Baseman in—”

  The person who struck her was not executive producer Nathan Baseman but rather a base man, returned to simpler instincts. His swipe avoided the phone—a base man had no interest in gadgets—and clubbed Glass across her right cheek. Her phone beat her down the flight of stairs, careening around walls and floor like a hockey puck. An instant later, Glass herself fell, rolling down the steps without grace, a bag of laundry.

  Those three seconds represented the end of his career, Baseman knew. Well, so be it, they were all clocking out—he’d known that from the first viewing of Quincey’s tape. He chased her, taking the stairs as he had in his twenties, three at a jump. He hit Glass the instant she struck the lower landing, his full weight on her back. They crumpled into the wall. One of Glass’s heels flew off, clattering like her phone. Her knees buckled. His temple struck concrete. They lay in a tangled heap on the cold floor, a workplace nightmare beyond any imagined HR scenario.

  Her hair was in his mouth; he tasted bitter product. Despite having no leverage, Glass jackhammered an elbow back into his ribs. Baseman’s a
rms curled around Glass’s bucking body, trying to snake beneath her chest, where he knew her phone was pinned. His hand, a beastly invader, rustled past arms and breasts and stomach before coming upon plastic. Out the phone came, but Glass had a hand on it too, and they fought for it like Aztec priests after the energies of an extracted human heart.

  “Kwame—the studio stairs—help—”

  Baseman squeezed her wrist as hard as he could, hoping to strangle the phone out of her hand. Her other hand writhed free and yanked on his left thumb, The fissure between his knuckles ripped wider, the skin tearing like bread. Hot blood flowed. Unraveled, his soaked tie was useless, a symbol of professionalism dangling like pulled innards.

  The pain was excruciating. Baseman screamed. His mouth, alongside her ear, did what his muscles could not, startling her into loosening her grip. He jerked her phone out of her reach and looked at it, a jolly pink gadget enveloped by a hand dripping blood. He flung the device down the final flight of stairs and was rewarded by a splintering scrunch.

  Glass did not waste his moment of inattention. She rolled faceup and cycled her legs furiously until she’d wedged her backbone into the corner, then covered her face to ward off whatever was coming next. Baseman watched her gasp for air and realized that he, too, heaved for breath. It felt like the muscles under his skin were being broiled, His heart was going so fast it felt arrhythmic. Was he having a heart attack?

  Glass waved her hands for his attention.

  “Stop! Please! Baseman!”

  He felt himself swaying over her like a cobra. The blood loss, it must be leaking away what little sense he had. He wondered if clashes like this were happening all over the world, thousands injured as better judgment oozed away with blood. He pressed his torn hand to his chest and tried to bring Glass into focus through blurring tears of pain.

  “You don’t want me on the desk,” Glass gasped. “All right. Fine. But I can’t stay here, Neither can you. Eventually, we have to get up, like adults, and go back to the studio. Right?”

  Baseman’s tongue felt too thick to speak. That was a good thing. Words could turn against him. Glass laughed, too hard, a clear attempt to get a psychopath on her side. Except Nathan Baseman wasn’t a psychopath. No, he was a defender of the people, the free press.

  “Okay, we can sit here a while longer,” Glass said soothingly. “Catch our breath. You know, Baseman, I remember our first fight. Is that cute or what? I was new here and brash, and I said September 11 was the best thing that ever happened to news. You didn’t agree. We had the biggest row, right in front of everyone. You remember, Baseman?”

  His eyes were drying and his vision sharpening. Glass smiled through a split lip. Her capped teeth were dark with blood. Long, pink scratches hatched her neck and wrists. Her hair and makeup were undone. Her state reminded Baseman of Sherry when she’d wake up in the morning. We are all the same when we first awake: vulnerable, disheveled, still believing in dreams.

  “I was going on about the tickers and the graphics and how the attacks—well, they just made things clearer, you know? We didn’t need to bother anymore with squishy nuance. I wasn’t partisan, I was patriotic!” She chuckled. “It’s amazing how easily you see your mistakes when you’ve been pushed down the stairs.”

  She’s persuading you, Baseman warned himself. Like she’s persuaded millions.

  “I see people as aggregate numbers,” she said. “It’s a flaw—I know that because you told me so, Baseman. You said each one of those numbers had moms and dads, and I think of that a lot. I really do. I’ll never forget when Unitas said WWN was a ‘content creator,’ and you went apeshit. What did you say? While the rest of us sat there yawning? Do you remember?”

  Water had sprung back to his eyelids, this time from emotion. Perhaps his blood had run out and tears were the on-deck liquid.

  “News…” His voice cracked and wavered.

  “News is…” Glass prompted.

  “News is evaluated,” Baseman said, “Content is…”

  Glass nodded him on. Baseman cleared his throat of tears.

  “Content,” he said, “is herded.”

  Glass pulled herself into a more comfortable position.

  “You’ve asked me fifty times since: ‘What do we choose to cover?’ In my head, I’ve always said we cover what gets ratings, and what gets ratings are hooks. Juicy, grisly, sexy hooks—the stuff that gets your amygdala going. But what you’re saying is when we cover Ben Hines, we aren’t covering some Black kid shot in the projects. Which means no one else pays attention to it either, Which means life in those projects doesn’t get any better, Which means when something happens like it did today, those projects go haywire first. Whatever’s going on today, we own it. And those hooks?” Glass smiled. “Might as well be meat hooks, right? Big, bleeding hunks of meat.”

  Glass settled her hand gently upon one of her dislodged shoes. Pearl-colored like her suit. The ankle strap broken. Heel like an ice cream cone, tapering to a point. Easily worth over a thousand dollars. Glass stroked the shoe as if it were the symbol of every poor call she’d ever made.

  “Let me take you up on your elevator offer,” she said quietly. “Let’s work together. Support Chuck, This is bigger than ratings. Bigger than any of us.”

  Baseman felt parts of him quiver, as if individual muscles were crying. If Rochelle Glass could be convinced, who was to say the rest of the world was beyond help?

  He was starting to smile when the shoe heel rocketed into the side of his face. His skull crunched against a railing. When Glass retracted the three-inch heel, his back teeth felt the shock of chilly stairwell air through a ragged hole in his cheek. His mouth filled with blood, which poured into his sinuses and down his throat.

  He spewed it over Glass in an endless red spout. The shoe heel whacked his forehead next, hard enough to drive his head to the floor. He blinked into the pink-purple fluorescents, heard himself moan, felt hot blood pour from his face.

  “You fuck.” Conciliation was gone from Glass’s voice. “Trapping a woman half your size and you still think you’re the good guy here? You miserable piece of shit? You’re done. You’re fucking buried. You know-it-all, mansplaining, gasbag ape.”

  If only she hadn’t used that word. He had a hole in his cheek. A hole in his hand. Who knew what other holes he had yet to uncover. But ape was an electric charge, a reminder of the things he’d been called back in Chicago: gorilla, porch monkey, baboon.

  His right hand, the good one, found one of Glass’s ankles, pulled. Glass fell, her ulna, clavicle, pelvis, and kneecap xylophoning along stair edges. Baseman coughed blood, then sucked in air. Sure, he might be a bad guy here. But Unitas had said it best, Baseman vs. Glass was Bad vs. Badder. He knew it, she knew it: she cried out, a siren of real panic now, and why not? He’d pretty much risen from the dead.

  Glass was sprawled across the upstairs incline. She kicked, but her shoeless feet caused only flat, broad pain. Baseman climbed her legs like a ladder. Her features were pinched into a Rottweiler knot, her teeth bared to the bloody gums, her face hot pink and sweating. She was out of control, her malevolence revealed. For all her inflammatory, demagogic dialogue, all she had left was a noise hummed through a mouthful of slobber: HNNNNN.

  Baseman felt an absurd surge of joy. The expression on Glass’s face was so foreign it took time to identify it. Rochelle Glass was afraid, and he was glad. One way or another, Baseman and Glass, the left and the right, had always been devouring each other.

  He blocked her kicking legs with his own, pulled her arms out of the way, and sank his teeth into her throat. It was startling how quickly his mouth was stuffed with skin; the boiling blood that followed had to seep around the wad of flesh before he could taste it. He was the Rottweiler now. He whipped his head until muscle ripped free, then he spat, and spat, and spat, black blood splashing everywhere as Glass gasped, and gasped, and gasped. The gasps turned into gurgles, and she wilted, her fingers lacing gingerly around her opened t
hroat, as if wishing not to staunch the blood but caress it, to know what both death and birth felt like, the going and coming, the mix-up at the crossroads, the blind trail everyone was soon to follow.

  Ghouls

  Chuck’s face itched. It started the moment Camera 2’s red eye blinked on from dead air. Like the sun cresting over a mountain ridge, his monitor brightened with the live shot of himself, and in those first moments, while Chuck resisted scratching his face, he perceived strange goings-on in the basement dawn.

  The panic that had poisoned the White House briefing had sprayed WWN like a toxic sneeze. He heard hissing arguments. He saw a shove, a retaliatory punch. Half the crew members were gone from their positions, some for good—there was no mistaking the shapes jostling for the elevator. One of the missing was Camera 1’s operator; the camera was tilted at the lighting grid as if lost in thought.

  Any anchor was practiced at ignoring itches. Chuck took a stabilizing inhale. He’d been the one to request Feed 8. Now he had to own the result. Was he up to it? His memory of his lousy vamping from earlier that morning was still fresh. He would botch this, and considering he’d likely be fired for Feed 8, it might be the last broadcast he’d ever botch. He twitched his itchy nose and touched his earpiece.

  “Lee?”

  He didn’t expect a response. Chuck nearly laughed: they’d have to retire the TEAM COVERAGE chyron if they ran out of team.