A blast of air into the earpiece.
“Chuck,” Lee said, only it sounded more like Jug, a burble chased by a spate of wet coughs. Was Lee injured? Had Baseman done something violent? It seemed possible; the producer had looked halfway crazy. More coughing, uglier but stronger. The sizzle of saliva, or something thicker, spattered Lee’s mic.
“We’re capturing playback of the briefing,” he mumbled. “Gonna send it to every station we can. Baseman was right. Fuck competition. We all gotta be together on this.” He spat and something hard—a tooth?—popped against the mic, “Gonna take a few minutes. You want to say something, Face, say anything at all. This is your moment. Go ahead. You earned it.”
It was a preposterous offer. Chuck didn’t want to say anything; what he wanted was to join the tide of evacuees and get the hell out of there. But the last thing he’d said to Baseman, that sad little plea, was thorned into his brain: My career. What career? The whole profession might be finished.
The soundproof silence of a broadcast set waiting for an anchor to begin had always felt to Chuck like the ticking of a bomb—there was no controlling what any human being might say, not really. His earpiece was mute. His teleprompter was blind. There was no intern handing him script pages still warm from the printer, no Baseman rooting him on, He was alone. Chuck slid his laptop closer and adjusted the screen, ChuckSux69 had always been there, ready with opinions on what Chuck ought to be saying.
Before his thumb brought the computer to life, Chuck caught a glimpse of his face in the black screen. Ink-black skin, charcoal-black eyes—it was the face of a corpse rotted down to casket sludge. A glimpse of his future, or worse, a glimpse at what he was right now, a dead-eyed, limp-limbed mannequin who spoke other people’s words to convey other people’s messages. That ink-black face of his could be a fine-grained walnut and he a Pinocchio; here, at last, was a chance to become a real boy, more than hair plugs and face-lifts.
Under the studio scuffles, he heard ChuckSux69’s cry of betrayal, strangled amid the howls of the forum’s lesser demons as they ate one another alive.
God, his face itched. But his hands had other things to do. Chuck toggled to a fresh window, trying to ignore his trembling fingers, and opened a search bar. Live TV, folks. Millions of Americans watching him type, backspace, await search results. Watching him click. Watching him read. The silence was a dead whale, bloating toward explosion under sweltering lights, Chuck brought up his laptop’s calculator, reread the operative passage, cleared his throat, and looked into Camera 2.
“Two people die every second,” he said.
Never had opening his mouth taken more courage, not even in front of cosmetic dental surgeons and their grinding armories of retractors, excavators, chisels, and burnishers.
“That’s one hundred and twenty deaths every minute,” he continued. “Seventy-two hundred deaths every hour, One hundred and seventy-two thousand, eight hundred deaths every day, Sixty-three million, seventy-two thousand deaths every year. In normal times. In normal times.”
Were the lights brighter, blocking his view of the staff exodus? Or had the remaining crew frozen in place, arrested by what the Face had just said? He thought he saw, piercing the gloom, dozens of eyes, crystalled by tears, looking to him. To him, with fear but hope, too, like no one had looked at him since September 11, 2001. Chuck knew now, as he’d known then, there was no point in false reassurances. He had to be what ChuckSux69, at the end, could not be: TRUTH TELLER.
“At issue here,” he said, “is the fact that most of those one hundred and twenty deaths per minute are now causing additional deaths. So the figures I quoted are”—near homonyms fought to escape his throat (impertinent, inefficient) but the correct word thrashed its way out—“insufficient. If dead people are killing people, the number of dead people is going to keep rising”—(expressly, expansively, extemporaneously)—“exponentially.”
There was no more doubting it: everyone in the studio was watching now, including new people peeking from offices. If the leathered WWN staff hung on his words, so did the public. Chuck took a giant breath and placed his hands on the cold, scriptless desk. He waited for his pulse to hammer and his vision to spin. Neither did, He was speaking from the heart for the first time in his life, something he’d never done even in intimacy with Arianna, Ljubica, Nathalia, and Gemma. It was exhilarating, if only in the way of bleeding out in a hot bath—no pain, only giddiness, with no time to waste.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I’ve been trained to keep you watching. We’ve all been trained to keep you watching. Which means I have failed to follow Kovach and Rosenstiel’s first rule. Let me explain that. In school, we read a book called The Elements of Journalism, by Kovach and Rosenstiel. Kovach and Rosenstiel came up with a set of principles you watching at home deserve to expect from your journalists. We had to memorize them. I’m going to share them with you. I think it’s important that we agree on them before whatever happens next happens next.”
That could have been smoother, but for once, he was able to flick away self-criticism like a housefly. He’d never felt worse in his life—oh, that itch—but at the same time, he’d never felt stronger. It was like he was floating, only the cables of his lapel mic tethering him to the desk.
“A journalist’s first obligation is truth. Which is why I showed you that meeting in Washington. Which is why, as long as I’m sitting here, I will not sugarcoat anything.”
Chuck waited for Lee to order him to can this end-times shit, but Lee had either undergone a change similar to Chuck’s or he’d scrammed, If so, Chuck had no intent to follow suit. An arrow of truth had pierced him, and until someone dragged him off the desk, his pressured air would keep blasting out.
“Kovach and Rosenstiel said news’s first loyalty is to its citizens. We’ve failed in this. I’ve failed in this. Look where the attacks began. Housing projects. Nursing homes. You think we’ve been loyal to them? When we talk about a MPWW, a Missing Pretty White Woman, we know everything about her. What brand of clothing she wore. What kind of music she liked. We’ll talk about it for months.
“If people in a housing project die? The details don’t matter. The names don’t matter. One day of coverage, two tops. We’ve come up with codes to tell you why. We say Grove Park so we don’t have to say Black. Loyalty to citizens? No. We have loyalty to money. And if our inattention is part of why this started where it started, and why no one can stop it, then I don’t know. Maybe it’s a purge. Maybe it had to happen.”
Static in his earpiece. Lee’s revival, maybe, or maybe the first sign of the station’s infrastructure bowing under the systemic failure of the outside world. Chuck chose not to know; he pulled the earpiece, and this time it was the cutting of his umbilical.
“The thing I remember most from Kovach and Rosenstiel was that reporters must listen to their conscience. That’s what I’m doing. But this isn’t about me. It’s not about making up for things I’ve screwed up in the past.” He laughed once and was surprised that it launched tears to his eyes. “How did I ever think it was? I’m so ashamed.”
From the rear of the studio came a bright little nuclear blast, a door opening to what Chuck believed was the studio stairwell. Into the brief violet glow lumbered a shape he recognized as Nathan Baseman, Gladness warmed Chuck’s chest. If this was his final broadcast, it had been only the second one to matter, and for that, he thanked Baseman. Chuck resumed the best vamp of his career, if only to prove to Baseman he hadn’t put his faith in the wrong anchor.
“I shouldn’t need Kovach and Rosenstiel,” Chuck said. “Why should any of us need a book to understand our responsibility to one another? It feels like we’ve been sleepwalking through a dreamworld we convinced ourselves was working just fine for everyone. It may be too late, but at least we’re waking up.”
Baseman approached, opposite the flow of traffic. Chuck couldn’t wait to see him better; Baseman would give him a pleased grin, he knew. The same sort of proud, private smirk Chuck us
ed to get from his Italian nonna. He hadn’t thought of the old woman in a very long time. Chuck smiled, and not the precisely quarter-inch-of-teeth smile the WWN image consultant made him practice. This smile was wide enough for Chuck to feel the spotlights warm his ceramic caps.
“I’m smiling. I know it’s strange, But Press Secretary Shellenbarger, she said the dead were eating the living, and that reminded me of something my nonna used to say. She was superstitious, always crossed herself passing cemeteries. She was sure nasty things were going on there.” Warmth on his teeth again, miraculous in the midst of such dread. “Nonna used the word ghouls. ‘Don’t walk near the cemetery, Chuckie, there’s ghouls in there, They’ll get you.’ Well, I guess Nonna was right. There were ghouls in there, and They’ve gotten out.”
There was renewed movement at the edge of his vision: people had resumed leaving. Chuck believed that was proof he was doing his job well. Those feeling no deep obligation to stay here should go. Zoë Shillace, there was no more reason to impress your boss. Get out, try to live, for as long as you had left.
Baseman had nearly reached Camera 2, still within the curtain of darkness. The pained slump of his shoulders was defined by a flare of backlight originating from the studio stairwell as the door opened again, revealing a second silhouette Chuck recognized: Rochelle Glass.
She instantly began moving in Chuck’s direction. No surprise there—Baseman had told him Glass wanted the desk.
A distant click: Lee, back from the dead.
“Face? Face?”
Chuck picked up the earpiece and reinserted it.
“We’ve got Octavia on the phone,” Lee sobbed. “Can you believe it? She’s okay. She’s okay, Face. Will you talk to her? She’s got updates you won’t believe.”
Chuck was deluged with cool relief. Octavia Gloucester, their senior reporter, was only one person, but she was alive and fighting, and that was a start. He grinned.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have good news,” he said. “Great news, right when we could really use it, We’re going to go live now to—well, I’ll let her introduce herself. She’s going to tell us some things about the ghouls. I think you’ll be as glad as I am to hear from her. Hello, are you there?”
Not wanting the beguilement of the internet, possibly ever again, Chuck pushed his laptop away. Stage lights caught the metallic shell and were reflected right onto Nathan Baseman’s face. Both lips were obscured by a walrus mustache of blood that looked to be oozing from a hole in his cheek. Baseman applied pressure to the wound with a hand that looked equally mangled. His forehead was a lumpy, shining plum. He looked like he should be dead, but he wasn’t a ghoul, Baseman nodded at Chuck, sending bloody spit from his face.
“Hello?” Chuck called. “Octavia? Are you there?”
Rochelle Glass walked onto the set, directly in front of Camera 2. Her foot butted the riser and her progress glitched before she appeared to recall the logistics of climbing. Her arms were raised and her fingers clawed blindly. These irregularities might have excuses, but there was no excusing Glass’s lowered head. She might have faults, but she lived with her face upturned, to sniff out humanity’s weaker members.
Gradually that head rose, revealing Glass’s throat: a chasm, the skin in leathery strips, purple muscles drooping, trachea pink and hollowed, pharyngeal nerves feathered like baby’s breath. Glass’s next step threw Chuck into cool shadow. He stared up at her. Her eyes had gone white as milk. Gore-speckled spit swayed like decorative beads. One string of saliva touched down on his laptop and sizzled.
“Hi, Chuck.”
For a moment he thought the voice was Glass’s, a drop of sanity spurting from gristled madness, then recognized Octavia, her voice in his ear, a hand extended from a steadier place. He couldn’t meet it; he pushed away from the desk even as his earpiece and lapel mic tied him there, a prisoner.
Baseman sprang at Glass, bloody slobber rippling from his face, but he bungled the step and dropped from sight. Glass crawled on top of the anchor desk she’d coveted, the torn seat of her suit facing the world, and moaned hungrily, ejecting a fizz of mulberry-colored spit. The serrated fingernails of her outstretched hand grazed Chuck’s cheek, inciting the savage itch rooted deep in his flesh. He should let her do the hard part, he thought wildly, and make the first cut with her nails, after which he could pull his face all the way off and see exactly what had been lurking beneath his skin all this time.
“Are you there, Chuck?” Octavia asked. “Is everyone gone?”
Glass sprawled onto Chuck’s lap. Her pearl pantsuit hissed as it split up the back. Her jagged nails made fast knots of the fine, artificially straight lines of Chuck’s plugged hair. He pulled away, neck muscles rigid, but kept talking, because this was his desk, his desk. He took hold of her ruined neck and pushed back.
“Ladies … and gentlemen … stay with us,” he grunted. “For once in my career … I don’t know how this … is going to turn out. I am thoroughly,” he added, without effort or thinking twice, “perplexed.”
THE
WHANG
AND THE
WHOOSH
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
When Lieutenant Commander William Koppenborg, Catholic chaplain for the aircraft carrier USS Olympia, heard six ship whistles followed by the XO’s bark of “Man overboard, man overboard!” from the wall-mounted 1MC, his first thought was disgracefully vain: The XO’s talking about me. My soul. It’s gone overboard and is sinking to the floor of the sea.
He was in the chapel. Its eight-foot ceiling, metal folding chairs, and wan fluorescents made the sprightliest seaman look as if they stood at death’s door and felt more like the site of a basement AA meeting than a place where anything holy happened. After dropping off three dozen sailors at Pearl Harbor, Olympia’s final stop before concluding her six-month deployment, the carrier was down to a trim 5,102 people, a population still large enough to require religious leaders. The chapel’s walls were kept bare, the better to serve multiple denominations; Olympia’s crew included members of the Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic faiths, among others.
As chaplain, he was Father Bill to regular service attendees, Padre to old-timers, Chaps or Chappy to those fond of pally nicknames, and just plain “sir” to lowly E-1s and E-2s too overwhelmed by their first carrier voyage to recall the finer points of navy etiquette. Right now, though, Father Bill was nothing to no one, a nameless wretch suffering inside the chapel closet, his slacks folded atop a stack of Bibles and a garbage bag placed beneath his feet to catch the dribbles of blood, while he ran a box cutter across his pale, naked thigh.
WHANG! WHOOSH!
The deafening noises were the catapults, hurling Hornets, Hawkeyes, Growlers, and Greyhounds into the sky. The chapel was on 02 deck, just beneath the flight deck, and with each takeoff, as often as one every thirty seconds, the whole place shook like a giant maraca. With no bodies to hold them in place, the folding chairs moseyed. Hymnals plopped from the pulpit. Paint flaked from the wall. Father Bill believed he could hear communion wafers in a nearby box crumble.
Once upon a time, the whang and whoosh had brought comfort. It was otherworldly, a reminder of bigger things, higher powers. Here in the closet, the whang was a backhand to his face; the whoosh, his breath being stomped from him by an invisible boot.
When not blinded by boiling-hot tears, he used the disturbances to his advantage, sinking the box cutter into his thigh on the whang and drawing it across on the whoosh. Father Bill relished the sensations, controlling his own pain rather than enduring the agonies of a disappointed Jesus Christ, who loomed over him from a floating crucifix, the thorns from his crown nipping like needles at Father Bill’s scalp.
The XO again: “Man overboard. Time: plus one, All hands to muster, all hands.”
Flight ops had barely begun; there would be a few more takeoffs before the deck crew could safely halt the catapults, Lifting the blade to his mouth, Father Bill licked off the blood, a salty fina
l punishment before he took up the roll of gauze and began winding it around his thigh. The bandages soaked through instantly, sprouting butterflies of blood, and he felt a flicker of concern, Perhaps he’d sawed through scar tissue too many times, and when he mustered a few minutes from now, blood would bloom through his pants like urine, proof of the filth that had taken hold of him.
Life aboard an aircraft carrier was loud, dirty, and cramped, too hot, or too cold. But until these past months, Father Bill had never regretted accepting a commission as a naval officer and military chaplain twenty-one years ago. It was inspiring work. Baptizing sailors at dawn in a flight-deck tub, Receiving prayer requests that astonished and moved him. Finding joy in daily homilies, no matter how sparse his congregation. Counseling sailors of every rank through untold personal struggles.
That was where things had gone wrong. Three weeks into Olympia’s current deployment, a homesick PO3 ready to give his life to the Lord had surrendered to Father Bill a wrinkled issue of a pornographic magazine called Fresh Meat. The confiscation was routine. Most of the five thousand sailors packed into the carrier were between age eighteen and twenty-five, but romantic relationships were forbidden and sexual encounters considered a punishable infraction. Decades ago, so-called training films had abounded—stag films, really. Those filmstrips, and later videotapes, were superseded by websites, many of which were blocked by the navy’s so-called filters.
This created a space for old-fashioned magazines. Father Bill presumed half the men’s racks were lined with these cheaply printed obscenities. During each deployment, a number of guilt-ridden sailors handed over their sinful stashes.
Father Bill had a lockbox in the chapel closet, a balsa-wood carton with a puny padlock. There he chucked all pornographic materials while at sea. Periodically, during stints of liberty on land, he would empty the lockbox, where he could burn its contents. Hustler, Barely Legal, Cheri, Gallery, Swank—not once in twenty-one years had he done anything but destroy them. Once the guilt-ridden PO3 who had handed him the issue of Fresh Meat left, however, Father Bill did something different, for reasons he still did not understand.
The Living Dead Page 18