The Living Dead

He must have been thinking along the same lines, for when I turned to go, he called after me: 'Say, Rob, you needn't have come out tonight, you know.'

I looked back at him, the rain pasting my hair against my forehead and running down into my eyes. I shivered. 'I know,' I said. A moment later, I added: 'I just—I wanted to see her somehow.'

But Andy had already turned away.

I still remember the campaign ad, my own private nightmare dressed up in cinematic finery. Andy and I cobbled it together on Christmas Eve, and just after midnight in a darkened Boston studio, we cracked open a bottle of bourbon in celebration and sat back to view the final cut. I felt a wave of nausea roll over me as the first images flickered across the monitor. Andy had shot the whole thing from distorted angles in grainy black and white, the film just a hair overexposed to sharpen the contrast. Sixty seconds of derivative expressionism, some media critic dismissed it, but even he conceded it possessed a certain power.

You've seen it, too, I suppose. Who hasn't?

She will rise from her grave to haunt you, the opening title card reads, and the image holds in utter silence for maybe half a second too long. Long enough to be unsettling, Andy said, and you could imagine distracted viewers all across the heartland perking up, wondering what the hell was wrong with the sound.

The words dissolve into an image of hands, bloodless and pale, gouging at moist black earth. The hands of a child, battered and raw and smeared with the filth and corruption of the grave, digging, digging. There's something remorseless about them, something relentless and terrible. They could dig forever, and they might, you can see that. And now, gradually, you awaken to sound: rain hissing from a midnight sky, the steady slither of wet earth underhand, and something else, a sound so perfectly lacking that it's almost palpable in its absence, the unearthly silence of the dead. Freeze frame on a tableau out of Goya or Bosch: seven or eight zombies, half-dressed and rotting, laboring tirelessly over a fresh grave.

Fade to black, another slug line, another slow dissolve.

Dana Maguire came back.

The words melt into a long shot of the child, on her knees in the poison muck of the grave. Her dress clings to her thighs, and it's a dress someone has taken some care about—white and lacy, the kind of dress you'd bury your little girl in if you had to do it—and it's ruined. All the care and heartache that went into that dress, utterly ruined. Torn and fouled and sopping. Rain slicks her blonde hair black against her skull. And as the camera glides in upon Dana Maguire's face, half-shadowed and filling three-quarters of the screen, you can glimpse the wound at her throat, flushed clean and pale. Dark roses of rot bloom along the high ridge of her cheekbone. Her eyes burn with the cold hard light of vistas you never want to see, not even in your dreams.

The image holds for an instant, a mute imperative, and then, mercifully, fades. Words appear and deliquesce on an ebon screen, three phrases, one by one:The dead have spoken.

Now it's your turn.

Burton for president.

Andy touched a button. A reel caught and reversed itself. The screen went gray, and I realized I had forgotten to breathe. I sipped at my drink.

The whiskey burned in my throat, it made me feel alive.

'What do you think?' Andy said.

'I don't know. I don't know what to think.'

Grinning, he ejected the tape and tossed it in my lap. 'Merry Christmas,' he said, raising his glass. 'To our savior born.'

And so we drank again.

Dizzy with exhaustion, I made my way back to my hotel and slept for eleven hours straight. I woke around noon on Christmas day. An hour later, I was on a plane.

By the time I caught up to the campaign in Richmond, Lewis was in a rage, pale and apoplectic, his acne scars flaring an angry red. 'You seen these?' he said, thrusting a sheaf of papers at me.

I glanced through them quickly—more bad news from Angela Dey, Burton slipping further in the polls—and then I set them aside. 'Maybe this'll help,' I said, holding up the tape Andy and I had cobbled together.

We watched it together, all of us, Lewis and I, the entire senior staff, Burton himself, his face grim as the first images flickered across the screen. Even now, viewing it for the second time, I could feel its impact. And I could see it in the faces of the others as well—Dey's jaw dropping open, Lewis snorting in disbelief. As the screen froze on the penultimate image—Dana Maguire's decay-ravaged face—Libby Dixon turned away.

'There's no way we can run that,' she said.

'We've got—' I began, but Dey interrupted me.

'She's right, Rob. It's not a campaign ad, it's a horror movie.' She turned to Burton, drumming his fingers quietly at the head of the table. 'You put this out there, you'll drop ten points, I guarantee it.'

'Lewis?' Burton asked.

Lewis pondered the issue for a moment, rubbing his pitted cheek with one crooked finger. 'I agree,' he said finally. 'The ad's a frigging nightmare. It's not the answer.'

'The ad's revolting,' Libby said. 'The media will eat us alive for politicizing the kid's death.'

'We ought to be politicizing it,' I said. 'We ought to make it mean something.'

'You run that ad, Rob,' Lewis said, 'every redneck in America is going to remember you threatening to take away their guns. You want to make that mistake twice?'

'Is it a mistake? For Christ's sake, the dead are walking, Lewis. The old rules don't apply.' I turned to Libby. 'What's Stoddard say, Libby, can you tell me that?'

'He hasn't touched it since election day.'

'Exactly. He hasn't said a thing, not about Dana Maguire, not about the dead people staggering around in the street. Ever since the FEC overturned the election, he's been dodging the issue—'

'Because it's political suicide,' Dey said. 'He's been dodging it because it's the right thing to do.'

'Bullshit,' I snapped. 'It's not the right thing to do. It's pandering and it's cowardice—it's moral cowardice—and if we do it we deserve to lose.'

You could hear everything in the long silence that ensued—cars passing in the street, a local staffer talking on the phone in the next room, the faint tattoo of Burton's fingers against the formica table top. I studied him for a moment, and once again I had that sense of something else speaking through me, as though I were merely a conduit for another voice.

'What do you think about guns, sir?' I asked. 'What do you really think?'

Burton didn't answer for a long moment. When he did, I think he surprised everyone at the table. 'The death rate by handguns in this country is triple that for every other industrialized nation on the planet,' he said. 'They ought to be melted into pig iron, just like Rob said. Let's go with the ad.'

'Sir—' Dey was standing.

'I've made up my mind,' Burton said. He picked up the sheaf of papers at his elbow and shuffled through them. 'We're down in Texas and California, we're slipping in Michigan and Ohio.' He tossed the papers down in disgust. 'Stoddard looks good in the south, Angela. What do we got to lose?'

We couldn't have timed it better.

The new ad went into national saturation on December 30th, in the shadow of a strange new year. I was watching a bowl game in my hotel room the first time I saw it on the air. It chilled me all over, as though I'd never seen it before. Afterwards, the room filled with the sound of the ball game, but now it all seemed hollow. The cheers of the fans rang with a labored gaiety, the crack of pads had the crisp sharpness of movie sound effects. A barb of loneliness pierced me. I would have called someone, but I had no one to call.

Snapping off the television, I pocketed my key-card.

Downstairs, the same football game was playing, but at least there was liquor and a ring of conversation in the air. A few media folks from Burton's entourage clustered around the bar, but I begged off when they invited me