“What do you think?” Baseman whispered.
“Sounds like they’re good fighters,” Zoë said.
“You think we should let them down?”
“Yes.” Zoë sounded appalled. “We need people.”
“What if they don’t fit in?”
“You want them to die up there?”
“I mean, we have our own thing going. Maybe there’s just five of us, but we’re doing it.”
“Unlock the elevator! You want to live like this forever?”
Yes—he wished he could say it. He might have aired the infamous Jansky shot, he might have bitten his wife on the way to a busted marriage, he might have killed Rochelle Glass when it had not been irrefutably necessary, but the base man was redeeming himself, hour after hour. Adding more characters into the mix put that service in jeopardy.
Zoë Shillace, however, owed nothing to no one. She’d lost everything—friends, family, a significant other? Baseman didn’t know because she had kept her anguish private. He would not safeguard his own repentance at the expense of the greatest intern in American history.
He cursed, opened the elevator, withdrew the key easily from his pocket—he’d lost weight—and unlocked the bottom floor. Scrambling out, he watched the doors shut. The elevator’s hum upward was familiar, and therefore frightening. On the floor, one arm of a C-stand, used for holding filters before lights. He picked it up and handed it to Zoë, then removed Kwame’s pistol and pointed it at the elevator.
“If this goes bad,” he said, “you get the Face, head to the control room.”
“‘If this goes bad,’” Zoë echoed under her breath, “It’s all been going bad, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
The elevator light illuminated, carefree as ever, and the door parted, People, large objects, and sharp weapons burst out in a jumble, Baseman stumbled back, yelling incoherently, punching with Kwame’s revolver as if it were a fist. Anything might have happened in those seconds, including the shooting of all three people who emerged. Unlike with the Jansky shot, Baseman held off, and later, when things got really bad, he’d try to convince himself he’d done the right thing.
“Don’t shoot, Sheriff!”
The man who shouted this, following it with mad peals of laughter, wore a construction helmet, large plastic sunglasses, a bulging hiking backpack, and what looked like four layers of flannel shirts. He was pushing a six-wheeled motorized wheelchair in which slumped a frail, skinny man either unconscious or dead. Behind the duo stood a six-foot-three, big-bellied giant wearing a hooded Baja poncho and carrying an orange Black & Decker hedge trimmer, Instead of coated with the mulch of weeds, its blades were clotted with ghoul meat. All three were splattered with gore, and the two standing seemed giddy about it.
The one in the flannels rolled the wheelchair into the hall.
“Better lock that elevator again, Sheriff,” he said. “There’s thirty or forty of those things we didn’t get around to chopping into teeny pieces.”
Baseman look at Zoë, who shrugged. He pocketed the gun, skirted the three characters, and disabled the elevator. When he stepped back into the hall, he bumped into the man in the poncho, Baseman was a big guy, but this fellow was something else. He didn’t look like he’d exercised a day in his life, but his bone structure was prehistoric. Baseman hurried back into position; like any boss, he didn’t know how much he needed his intern until she wasn’t beside him.
The flannel guy looked around through sunglasses. “How many folks you got here?”
Baseman saw no point in lying, “There’s me, I’m Nathan Baseman. This is Zoë Shillace. We got three more.”
“You’ve been running this act with five people? Hot dog! Paddy, what’d I tell you?”
The giant chuckled. Blood ran down his chubby cheeks.
“Paddy thought you might have fifty down here, No freaking way, I said. Shit hits the fan, the newspeople jet set aren’t any braver than comedy lowlifes. We’re all just here to cash our checks, am I right? Huh, Sheriff? Deputy Zoë? Am I right?”
“It’s true we could use a few more hands,” Baseman said, “We’re glad you’re here.”
Something was off with this trio, way off. One clue came when the flannel guy perched his sunglasses atop his head. His irises were practically gone from extreme dilation, and the sclera was red—not pink, but red with fattened blood vessels. The ghoul blood splashed across his face did not quite mask the blood trickling from his nose. A battle wound? More likely, Baseman thought, this guy snorted something. The big guy, Paddy, too. It would explain where they’d gotten the energy, not to mention the balls, to take on a lobby full of ghouls with a Weedwacker.
The red-eyed guy was Scotty Rolph, of course. When this was revealed, Zoë became starstruck, which broke Baseman’s heart. She deserved a world that could still delight. He was far more shocked to discover the man in the chair was Ramsey Dylan. Why a top CableCorp VP was consorting with rabble from Creative was puzzling, and also beyond Dylan’s ability to explain. His eyes were shut tight and his shoulders shuddered. Scotty said he wasn’t bitten, Fine, but he looked terrible.
Leaving Fessler and the Face to run the show, Lee Sutton joined the newly enlarged group at the kitchen table, where they observed, with growing disquiet, Scotty and Paddy treating Dylan like a daft cocker spaniel. Paddy, who had yet to say a word, waved morsels before Dylan’s eyes while Scotty tidied the exec’s bloody face with a towel. He dabbed at Dylan’s nose, which clearly upset him, before rotating the towel in Dylan’s ears while making a comical squeak-squeak sound. Scotty giggled throughout, and Paddy’s eyes leaked in silent guffaws.
Like Paddy, Ramsey Dylan did not speak. Scotty attributed this to trauma, and Baseman pretended to accept it, though something felt amiss, Dylan looked like he wanted to talk—was desperate to, even—but was for some reason unable.
“So!” Scotty clapped his hands together, “What’s the sitch in this bitch?”
“The sitch,” Baseman replied archly, “is we have a stairwell full of ghouls we have to keep watch on. There’s no way to nail the door shut because it’s metal. So we have it blocked with the heaviest stuff we could find. How many ghouls are in the lobby?”
“Enough to put on Les Mis if you can get Them to moan in tune.”
Paddy sputtered laughter.
“Don’t forget Glass,” Lee added.
Baseman shot Lee a glare, then regretted it. Regretted all of it. The soft, regular beat of Glass’s ghoul fists against Pam Tripler’s locked office door might as well be Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart. He shouldn’t have killed Rochelle Glass the first time. He should have killed her the second time.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Scotty half stood. “The Rochelle Glass ghoul is still kicking? Where is she? I want to see!”
“Hold on,” Baseman said.
“Oh, man, you’re the dude who pulled her off Corso! That was the best TV I’ve ever seen!” Scotty snapped his fingers on both hands. “Brainstorm: here’s what we do. We go get Glass, strap her to a chair, and put her in front of the camera. Just to see what she does, man.”
“I hope you’re kidding,” Lee said.
Scotty gestured expansively. “Give her a candy bar, see if she eats it. Give her an iPad, see which apps she opens. We experiment, man, for the good of the world! And the fact that it’s Rochelle mother-cunting Glass? Are you serious? People organized their whole lives around watching her show. What did she call them? She had this great fucking word.”
“Mendicans,” Zoë said.
Scotty hooted. “Yes! All the Mendicans out there will huddle around the tube, just like in olden days, to watch their big-haired guru again. If most of the TVs weren’t out, we’d have the Super Bowl on our hands. We’d have the fucking moon landing. Shit, Ramsey, this is why you pay me the big bucks, huh?”
He slapped Dylan on the back. Dylan’s closed eyelids quivered and Baseman’s face ached. He and Dylan were close in age; it was easy to picture himself in that chair, subje
ct to the abuses of a generation determined to turn everything into reality-show circuses. What rankled Baseman most was Scotty Rolph was dead-on. Putting Rochelle Glass back on the desk would be ratings gold.
Ratings drove the Jansky shot, Ratings killed his marriage.
Fuck ratings.
“You listen up,” Baseman said, “and you listen good. We’re glad you’re here. We are. We need some new blood. We need new ideas too. But just because the world’s on fire doesn’t mean I’m not producing this show.” He pointed at the ceiling, through it. “You want to be boss out there, be my guest. I’m boss down here, And we aren’t pulling stunts. Until the very last TV quits working, we’re going to be the news people trust, you got that?”
Paddy gave Scotty a you’re-in-trouble-now grin. Scotty flashed hostility for only a fraction of a second, but Baseman knew anger that hot could not be extinguished so quickly. It could only be concealed. Scotty lowered himself back into his chair and removed his construction helmet. A fern of bleached-white hair sprung up. He picked up the cup of tea Baseman had poured, nestling it gently in his hands in a way that felt too docile.
“You’re the sheriff,” Scotty said. “You tell us how to help, and we’ll help.”
He smiled. Baseman mistrusted the expression but forged a smile in return. It had been eight days since he’d faked an emotion, a lifetime record.
“I see you’ve got full backpacks,” he said. “Tell me you got some SpaghettiOs in there, Kraft Mac & Cheese, something.”
“Please,” Zoë added. “Please, oh, please.”
Scotty looked at Paddy, who mimed tying his mouth shut to keep in his laughter. Scotty hoisted his backpack to the tabletop, unzipped it, and scooped several layers of bags onto the table. Paddy did the same with his bag. The landings rattled the teacups. Baseman had to lean in to make sure he was seeing this right. For decades, he’d seen hauls like this in footage of ATF busts, but never without a cadre of cops.
Sixteen bulging packs of marijuana, three colossal bags of cocaine, and dozens of twist-tied baggies of assorted pills. Were drugs the reason for Dylan Ramsey’s incapacitation?
“SpaghettiOs,” Scotty mused, “Something like that.”
The Wrong Pilot
“This is where you live, This fan room.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that hole in the AC, the rubber tubing, that’s where you’re getting your water?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Good. Imaginative. And I see your food pile. I imagine that’s from the crew galley on this level? What I don’t get is why you didn’t stay there, It’s got to be the safest place on the whole boat. Did the ghouls overrun it?”
“Ghouls, sir?”
“What Father Bill calls demons.”
“No, sir. It was…”
“Other people. They were fighting over the food?”
“It wasn’t safe, sir.”
“I bet it wasn’t.”
“For a…”
“Right. For a woman, I’m sorry, pilot. I’ve been down here before, with a group from up top. We’ve heard people run away from us but never came across anyone waiting to be found.”
“We’re scared, sir.”
“Don’t say that. I know Olympia’s women. They wouldn’t just hide.”
“No one’s fighting harder, sir. Teenagers. Trans women. There are heroes down here no one will ever know about, sir.”
“Will you stop calling me sir? It doesn’t make sense while you’re also holding a knife on me.”
“Sorry, sir. But I will not put the knife down.”
“Fine, Just—ease up a little? A few inches? There. Thank you. Now. I do want to try to understand. The people down here, they’ve divided into groups, you say. How many?”
“I don’t know. Four? Five?”
“Is it by rank? Or job? How can you tell them apart?”
“Colors, sir. They started wearing different colors.”
“And here I hoped things were better down here, There’s ten times as many of you, you know. You have more people, more weapons. If the Fifty-Fourth could take on Fort Wagner in the U.S. Civil War, pilot, you all can take that island! Why don’t you band together and rise up?”
“Respectfully, sir. You don’t know. You don’t know.”
“You think it’s only tough down here, pilot? Is that what you think?”
“You people have the speaker system, sir.”
“The speaker…? So Father Bill rambles into the 1MC five times a day. So what?”
“It’s still words, sir. It’s like … TV, Or radio. Or internet. Words still matter. They … tell us how to feel. What to fear. It’s hard not to listen, We’re weak. We’re starving. We’re crowded into safe areas. Everyone fights for room, all the time. No one can sleep, A lot of the food’s gone bad. A lot of us are sick, There’s rats. Because there’s trash.”
“Are people eating…?”
“The rats, sir? Affirmative. You’re not going to think of something we haven’t already.”
“Right. I’m sorry. Some of it’s our fault, us up above. We took over the dry goods rooms. We’ve got the engine rooms too. Next thing we’re going after are the reactors. Bit by bit, we’re buying up all the real estate down here. You’re going to get shoved into smaller and smaller spaces.”
“Sure you care now. Now that you’re one of us.”
“I’m not going to pretend that’s not true. Especially given that knife you won’t put down. I guess a person gets blinded by his own problems. Look, what matters now is I’m here. I’m ready to help. But I can’t do that if I’m your prisoner. I’m not going to hurt you. You’ve got my big, fancy weapons right there behind you. The best of which is a busted crucifix.”
“I know that crucifix, sir.”
“Were you a believer? The Long Walk and all that? See, we all make mistakes, don’t we?”
“See this?”
“What is it? A bandage? It needs to be changed, pilot.”
“Father Bill did that. He stuck that crucifix in my back.”
“When?”
“Before. We were in an access trunk.”
“I wish you’d ended him there. How’d you get out?”
“I fell. All the way. Nine levels.”
“What about the safety nets?”
“He cut them up. My flight suit caught on a trunk handle, and I stopped falling.”
“Miracle you didn’t break every bone in your body.”
“There were demons.”
“Let’s not use his word.”
“There were ghouls. Lots of them. They’d fallen down, too, so They were broken up. But some of Them managed to grab me. And They ripped at me. They held me and They ripped at my clothes. One of the demons, one of the ghouls, he had hold of my shoulders, and I—I recognized him. He was my squadron XO. He’d probably been looking for me, because of my bolting. I deserved a flight restriction. I deserved it. I was supposed to submit to punishment. So I let him crawl up my arms. I was just going to let it happen. Then I thought back to basic. Before I was an FNG, before I was a nugget. When I was just a SLJO and men had all the power. Even if they didn’t outrank me, They’d mess with me. They’d touch me. The furthest I dared go was Wrist Warfare.”
“Wrist…?”
“Something just broke. All women down here, they break and become different. Worse in some ways, but better in others, I decided I was done with it. I put my thumbs in my XO’s eyes, There was this thing called the Sweetheart Wall. He condoned it. I shoved my thumbs in deep. The Sweetheart Wall, I kept thinking about it, until my thumbs could feel brain. The other ghouls got excited, They ripped my XO down. But my thumbs were stuck, and pretty soon I just had his head, I was holding just his head, and his mouth was still trying to bite me. So I threw it. I imagined throwing it straight into the Sweetheart Wall. I imagined throwing it against the side of a plane. Did you know I’m the only Red Serpent who doesn’t have her name on a plane? I don’t even h
ave a call sign. I don’t even have a call sign.”
“Did someone save you?”
“I guess. If you want to call it that. My strap broke. I fell. I should have died. But men came in, They had headlamps. They had tools. They knocked the ghouls off me. They were nuke guys. Guys who worked on the reactors. They picked me up. They bandaged me up. They gave me water. They fed me. They were so nice to me.”
“Oh no.”
“I don’t know if you know this. I don’t know who you are, But the final course a pilot takes before fleet assignment is called SERE. Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. It’s about what to do if you’re a POW. It’s classified. But I can tell you this. I know how to kill myself. I don’t need anything but my hands to do it.”
“The navy’s better since Tailhook. More female recruits, more sensitivity training—”
“Excuse me, sir—”
“The culture, it’s tribal, it’s—”
“Sir, please don’t make excuses for them. I didn’t kill myself. I used the other things SERE taught us. I killed them. I killed them like I was one of the ghouls. I’m not sure I’m not on Their side, sir. If They’re golems, They’re here to cleanse, and why should we stand in the way of that? I killed those men, sir. I don’t even know who you are and I’m telling you everything. I guess because you asked. Because you gave a shit enough to ask, Sir.”
“Don’t give me too much credit. You don’t have that knife, we’re probably having a very different conversation.”
“I’m not going to be as bad as them.”
“You’re right, you don’t know me, you should never put down that knife—”
“I refuse to be as bad as them. And don’t forget, sir. I still have my hands. I know how to use them.”
“I don’t doubt that. So you’ve been on the run ever since? Faction to faction?”
The Living Dead Page 39