The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Greer and Fadi arrived as the lit wick hit dynamite. Three men in front, all in HortiPlastics garb, pushed the refugees until one Syrian had to swipe to protect his face, the gesture obvious evidence of his murderous heart. The instigators pounced, and the scene erupted into the sloppy, slappy meat thwacks Greer had seen in parking lot fights—the quick-drop, the blood-gush, the red faces and held breath, the elbows to lips, the fingers to eyes. If you worked for HortiPlastics, your daily routine was swallowing pride, and here was a chance to win that pride back, your colleagues and friends versus those fucking Arabs.

  Greer shuddered. On which side would Daddy have landed?

  She felt Fadi Lolo’s wet scarf against her cheek again and realized she’d moved to him, not he to her. Despite her bag of weapons, she wanted only to evade this fight.

  “Mister,” she said. “We can get to the school the other way, past the junkyard.”

  “No,” Fadi said.

  She looked at his mud-spattered face and rain-tangled hair. The placid amiability of the Emmys-obsessed pedal-pusher was gone. Fadi’s face had relaxed, though not sedately, his forehead creasing along old lines of lament and his cheeks sagging into old pouches of pain, The face of the only happy person she’d ever seen at the Last Resort became the face of a man who’d seen things worse than this.

  He nodded at the people yelping and rolling like scrapping dogs.

  “Alkasālā.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You see? You cannot tell them apart.”

  Greer hated to get an inch closer. People would see her, a Black girl, and Fadi, a Syrian, and one faction or the other, or both, would punish them for their affiliation. But Fadi had asked for nothing in return for rescue, so she stepped closer. Maybe she’d been as prejudiced as any bumper-sticker bastard—she’d never believed the Syrians would blend in here in Bulk. Now they had, and in the worst way. The cliché that everyone bled the same never felt truer.

  One thing she could say for the white-eyed rabid: They never showed this much relish in violence.

  Fadi moved with a square-shouldered walk.

  “Mister,” Greer cried, “Mister—Fadi—don’t go!”

  He turned amid combat dust and pinned her with a look.

  “The fight waits for me,” he said, “It always waits.”

  “It doesn’t have to. Come with me. We can do anything we want.”

  From Fadi’s grimace, Greer felt she’d revealed something shameful.

  “I should not have insisted on Sunnybrook Mobile Home Resort,” he said. “I should have stayed with my people. What do you think, Greer Morgan? Why do the dead make others into the dead? Is it because They want to be with Their people as well?”

  That Fadi knew Greer’s name shouldn’t have surprised her. Maybe he’d hesitated to use it for the same reason she’d hesitated to use his. Knitting a closeness today was only to watch it unravel.

  “The bike?” Her voice had never sounded so weak.

  “Ride fast.”

  “The machete,” she offered.

  “Swing fast too.”

  She nodded. “Be careful, Fadi Lolo.”

  His unexpected grin burst like the gas-pump fire, melting a hole through her heart.

  “I cannot be harmed, Dana Scully,” he proclaimed. “I am Urschleim.”

  Fadi ran then, and Greer looked away, unwilling to see the first blow he took, or worse, the first he delivered. She slid the machete into the duffel bag, strapped it to her shoulders like a backpack, and took the Schwinn by its horns. The metal grips of the pedals drove into her bare feet like spurs. She was the one with the bicycle now, all that was left of Fadi. She didn’t look back, cutting down the hill at a diagonal toward the junkyard and Bulk High School. Once there, she’d play the part of rescuer Fadi Lolo had taught her, saving Conan, saving Qasim, maybe dozens more too, all balanced in a cheerleader stack atop a blue Schwinn as she pedaled them to safety.

  Being Decent

  No news-biz maxim was more notorious, despicable, and true than If it bleeds, it leads. But what was a poor executive producer to do when every story bled, and so profusely the anchor’s voice sounded clotted, as if gargling blood, and his skin looked sticky, as if he’d just wiped a layer of it away, By now, Nathan Baseman thought, people’s TV screens must be exuding bulbs of blood like condensation. One thing was certain, and it still brought him the same satisfaction it had in Chicago, Kansas City, Nashville, and Houston: he had people’s attention, that was for damn sure.

  He took another pull of the bourbon he’d kept in his desk drawer since airing the Jansky shot three years ago; he’d been convinced he’d need it one day, if only to build up courage to walk into Interstate 85 traffic. He’d made it through that grueling time without breaking the bourbon’s seal. Now, a few hours into this ghoul business, the bottle was already nearly empty. Some of it, true, he’d used as disinfectant, sloshed over the gash between his knuckles and through the hole Rochelle Glass had punched through his cheek. Lord, did that one hurt.

  Baseman could bleed, all right. Could he still lead?

  He tried to focus on his scrawled notes. At its most mechanical, the job of producer was to thumbs-up or thumbs-down stories for the newscast and arrange packages, live shots, and readers for utmost impact. Like most producers, Baseman usually promoted the emotion-driven “peak-and-valley” pattern of anxiety and relief, but that had all gone into the wood chipper now. The new method was “peak-and-peak-and-peak,” each story surpassing the previous in atrocity.

  Baseman tapped his pen. What deserved the first slot of A-block? How about the LA Fitness branch in Knoxville that had become a ghoul slaughterhouse, with witnesses describing stacks of dismembered ghouls in the aerobics room while living ghouls were gleefully tortured in weight machines by staff trainers? Or was it better to go with the more threatening report of a sniper atop a Cleveland-area roller coaster, taking advantage of freeway gridlock to pick off both ghouls and people?

  Fuck it. It was all going in anyway, all regular features jettisoned, including the Unitas-mandated, D-block, cute-kid send-off—unless the cute kid in question had a mouthful of Mommy. No one had seen Nick Unitas since the Ross Quincey meeting, so fuck him too, right? Baseman numbered the stories at random and stood up. His jacket practically fell off; it was weighed down by Item One and Item Two. He steadied them and stumbled into the control room like a newborn foal, every sinew aching from the stairwell mêlée.

  “Boom,” he said, handing the outline to Lee Sutton. “Our next hour.”

  Lee slid his headphones down. “You look like walking death.”

  “You’re not exactly dressed for the prom.”

  His grin revealing his newly missing tooth, Lee looked at the dried blood snarling his shirt, the aftereffect of Baseman’s punch. He swiped the page from Baseman, gave it a once-over, and rattled off instructions with enough briskness to spatter the page with red saliva.

  “Fessler, we’re going to need Feeds 2 and 10. Watch for Octavia on Line 1. Zoë’s coming with that CDC report. If she makes it in time, let’s stick it between A2 and A3, or swap it for B1 if we need to. How’s the Telemundo package?”

  “Almost got it, It’s, you know, in Spanish.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ll run that shit todo el tiempo.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  Baseman could hear the swagger in Lee’s voice, the determination in Fessler’s. He steadied himself against the same file cabinet he’d shoved against the door so he could grab the rogue White House feed uncontested. He’d blame this dizziness on the bourbon if it came from his head. Instead, it came from his heart. These people he worked with. Once upon a time, perhaps he’d deserved them, but no longer.

  Lee Sutton, bootlicking yes-man. Baseman would have bet a year’s salary he’d have been the first out of WWN’s double doors. Maybe he should have decked the director years ago. Lee had spat out his spineless parts along with the blood and mucus and
was now proving just how few people could keep a news network operating. Tim Fessler should have scrammed—he had a young wife, kids—but it took two, at severe minimum, to run a control room, and he’d recognized the higher calling of that. Baseman had outright ordered Zoë Shillace, his intern, to leave, roaring it from behind the bag of frozen corn pressed to his cheek, but she hadn’t. Baseman could not fathom it. She had her whole life left, and should be out there fighting for it. Then again, maybe that’s what she was doing by staying here.

  Then there was the Face. Baseman had sopped up a lot of motivational D-block drivel in his day, but nothing had come closer to restoring his faith in humanity than what had overtaken Chuck Corso.

  Where Lee Sutton had unloaded himself of fear like one might throw objects from a sinking boat, the Face hadn’t rid himself of anything. His dread remained. His anxiety remained. His verbal garblings remained. His lack of global insight remained. But to this shoddy repertoire he’d added something no newsperson before him had dared: raw honesty. Each monitor Baseman passed blew his mind. The Face opining, “That was the worst shit I’ve ever fucking seen.” The Face admitting, “I don’t know to pronounce that word.” The Face picking his nose. The Face announcing he had to take a shit, he’d be right back. He was a man on a ledge, fully open to horror and pain and beauty, reacting with an infant’s purity.

  The damn male model was saving lives. As WWN did during natural disasters, they’d taken to patching in viewers lucky enough to have phone service. The Face had convinced, on air, a hysterical grandfather to go back into a twelve-unit building full of ghouls to save his wheelchair-using son. He did this not with facts but empathy; the Face was nakedly horrified by what the man said. On the other hand, he’d convinced a retired woman not to go into the factory where her daughter was trapped, and by the same method: feeling it along with her and speaking those feelings aloud.

  As it turned out, once severed from one’s ego, a person’s instincts could be quite refined. At one point, Zoë had made the studio staff aware of a tweet going through the roof, a 123-character update posted by a San Diego medical examiner named Luis Acocella. His credentials checked out, but the Face didn’t care; he ran to the control room to personally ask Tim Fessler to put the tweet on the screen in a graphic. It popped up on the screen nearly instantly:

  URGENT: I’M A DOCTOR & THE ONLY WAY TO STOP THE DEAD PEOPLE RETURNING TO LIFE IS BY DIRECT TRAUMA TO THE HEAD. PLEASE RT!!!

  People flocked to WWN’s media accounts to report successes: kill the brain and you kill the ghoul. The word was being embraced; Zoë reported the Face’s tangent about Nonna had inspired #ghouls, the world’s number-one trending topic. Unitas would have preferred #WWN, and a day ago, Baseman would have felt the same pang of missed opportunity. Today, all that mattered was the message. His coworkers had taught him that. Coworkers was too cold. Colleagues was better. Dare he get even warmer? He realized he loved this foursome like he hadn’t loved a crew since his days rollicking around Chicago.

  It was the kind of love, he suspected, a battalion of soldiers felt when it looked like none of them were getting out of a battle alive.

  Baseman swung by the kitchen. Item One jangled in his left pocket. Item Two, much heavier, thunked against the stove. A couple of days without kitchen etiquette and this was what happened. Crumby counters, a floor gummy with spills. He opened the fridge, grabbed a water, and threw open a couple of cabinets. So much had been cleared out. He claimed a column of saltines.

  Lee had raised the studio lights to neutralize any more from-the-dark surprises. Camera 2 had been secured in place by pedestal brakes and a dune of sandbags. The anchor desk was still brilliant, a dais fit for a royal. The Face was talking, that’s all. Baseman didn’t think he’d ever get over it. Banter, ad-libs, bumps, teases, tosses—Chuck Corso had never been capable of doing them right. This, of course, wasn’t “right” either, not as the world would have defined it yesterday.

  Baseman stood by Camera 2 and held up the saltines. One of the ten billion new tasks that had fallen under his executive producer purview was making sure his talent stayed fed. The Face acknowledged Baseman with a glance, then completed telling a personal story about finding a dead dog in a field as a kid. What this had to do with the price of tea in China, Baseman couldn’t say, but he trusted it did. Moreover, it did not matter. The Face was connecting. Baseman felt the urge to sit cross-legged like a kindergartener at story time.

  The Telemundo package came through. The Face touched his earpiece, listened to Lee, then admitted to viewers he didn’t know what they were about to see, though chances were, of course, it wasn’t going to be pretty. All he had were the specs: seven minutes, thirty-two seconds. He’d see them back here afterward, where together they’d deal with it.

  The live light went dark, Baseman climbed the platform, circled the desk, and flopped on the carpet behind it, his back to one of the legs. If the camera went live earlier than expected, at least he’d been hidden down here. He held up the meager snacks, and the Face, reclining in his chair, took them. He placed five crackers into his mouth at once and gnashed.

  “Wmp smp?” Want some?

  Baseman showed the Face the bourbon, the sole sustenance he required. For a minute, they ate and drank, their dinner music the tinny Telemundo audio coming through the Face’s earpiece. Screams required no translation.

  “NBC still out?” the Face asked.

  Baseman let the whiskey slosh in his mouth to numb his cheek. Grotesquely, a drop seeped through the hole, He swallowed and felt coagulated blood slide down his throat.

  “Uh-huh. CBS is bye-bye too. Fox is in and out, It’s the power outages. New York is dark. Times Square is lights-out. Never thought I’d be glad to be marooned in Georgia, but there it is.”

  “How long you think our grid will hold?”

  “Depends how long people stay at their stations.” Baseman gestured at the empty studio, “Doesn’t bode well, does it?”

  “Our wireless seems all right.”

  “Can’t use your phone, though, can you?”

  “Then how are calls getting in?”

  “You noticed something about our callers, right? How old most of them are?”

  “Landlines.”

  “Who would’ve guessed it, huh? The last demographic with the means to band together: old folks. My people.”

  The Face took a sloppy pull of water and gasped for air. “I keep thinking of that interview we ran last hour, the guy freaking out about mummies.”

  “Missed it,” Baseman said. “Not sure mummies are priority one.”

  “I guess the power’s out at the Met. They keep the mummies behind this plexiglass that imitates, you know, the conditions of Egyptian tombs, This guy was saying they’re all going to rot now—humidity, mold. He was crying. I mean, really sobbing, Five thousand years old, he was saying, a record of the most important thing of all, how people died.”

  “How they used to die.” Under the stage lights, Baseman felt like a mummy, baked dry, the relic Glass had accused him of being. “I can’t tell what’s important anymore. I don’t know what we’re doing. Only thing I know is you’re doing a hell of a good job.”

  Baseman glanced up. The Face, formerly known for the perfection of his clothes, face, and hair, had lost ground in all three departments. Tie loosened, shirt rumpled and wet, sleeves rolled up, cheeks showing stubble that, on any normal day, an armada of touch-up artists would have disposed of or buried. His face and neck were spotted pink—he kept scratching—and the spot where the Glass-thing had harvested a sprout of his hair plugs had bruised. It gave the pretty boy a boxer’s distinction.

  The Face shrugged. “You trusted me to do it.”

  “I don’t deserve any credit.” Baseman muttered. “You did this. You’re doing it. You’re mattering. And just by being decent.” He laughed once, a self-inflicted shot to his chest. “Never thought I’d see that on the news.”

  “I wonder if that’s all Glass was.
Honest, in her own way. Maybe that’s why so many people liked her.”

  The urge to come clean burned, cheap bourbon through Baseman’s veins. I murdered Rochelle Glass, he wanted to say, I bit her throat out in the stairwell, and not because I had to but because I wanted to.

  His memory of it was dim. He’d sat on the lower landing for a while, his arms resting on his knees as he tried to vomit up the gluey blood of Glass’s trachea, pint by pint. He could feel the blood in his stomach and intestines, a long, warm, wriggling tapeworm. He had to puke it out. Otherwise, it would burrow out and reveal him for what he was: a base man. After a while, he gave up. He’d had other things to do, like pry Glass’s corpse off the Face on live TV.

  No one knew what Nathan Baseman looked like. He was just some blood-soaked Black guy dragging America’s top-rated cable host off Chuck Corso. The internet had exploded; anyone who hadn’t been tuned to WWN before switched over and stayed. As the torrent of uploaded videos, GIFs, and still frames made clear, the white-eyed Rochelle Glass was not the Rochelle Glass anyone knew. She was America’s first celebrity ghoul, one everyone in the nation could recognize as fundamentally changed. Alongside Tammy Shellenbarger’s apocalyptic press conference, it erased all doubt that the ghoul uprising, whatever it was, was for real.

  With the help of a camera operator and floor manager, both of whom ended up bitten and soon fled the building, Baseman was able to lug the hissing, flailing Glass to the cyclorama wall. This was before Luis Acocella’s tweet about head trauma had gone viral, and Baseman uselessly bashed Glass’s body with a stool until the white-painted cyc wall was filigreed with scarlet blood. Believing he might cause himself a heart attack, he dragged her by the hair into news director Pam Tripler’s office, locked the door, and used a magic marker to write on it, DO NOT OPEN!!!