Gooseflesh erupted along my arms, and it had nothing to do with the wind off Lake Michigan.
“My God,” I said again, when I finally managed to unlock my brain. “What do they want?”
“They want to vote,” said Lewis.
The dead have been voting in Chicago elections since long before Richard J. Daley took office, one wag wrote in the next morning’s Tribune, but yesterday’s events bring a whole new meaning to the tradition.
I’ll say.
The dead had voted, all right, and not just in Chicago. They had risen from hospital gurneys and autopsy slabs, from open coffins and embalming tables in every precinct in the nation, and they had cast their ballots largely without interference. Who was going to stop them? More than half the poll-workers had abandoned ship when the zombies started shambling through the doors, and even workers who stayed at their posts had usually permitted them to do as they pleased. The dead didn’t threaten anyone—they didn’t do much of anything you’d expect zombies to do, in fact. But most people found that inscrutable gaze unnerving. Better to let them cast their ballots than bear for long the knowing light in those strange eyes.
And when the ballots were counted, we learned something else as welclass="underline" They voted for Burton. Every last one of them voted for Burton.
“It’s your fault,” Lewis said at breakfast the next day.
Everyone else agreed with him, I could tell, the entire senior staff, harried and sleep-deprived. They studied their food as he ranted, or scrutinized the conference table or scribbled frantic notes in their day-planners. Anything to avoid looking me in the eye. Even Burton, alone at the head of the table, just munched on a bagel and stared at CNN, the muted screen aflicker with footage of zombies staggering along on their unfathomable errands. Toward dawn, as the final tallies rolled in from the western districts, they had started to gravitate toward cemeteries. No one yet knew why.
“My fault?” I said, but my indignation was manufactured. About five that morning, waking from nightmare in my darkened hotel room, I had arrived at the same conclusion as everyone else.
“The goddamn talk show,” Lewis said, as if that explained everything.
And maybe it did.
The goddamn talk show in question was none other than Crossfire and the Sunday before the polls opened I got caught in it. I had broken the first commandment of political life, a commandment I had flogged relentlessly for the last year. Stay on message, stick to the talking points.
Thou shalt not speak from the heart.
The occasion of this amateurish mistake was a six-year-old girl named Dana Maguire. Three days before I went on the air, a five-year-old boy gunned Dana down in her after-school program. The kid had found the pistol in his father’s nightstand, and just as Dana’s mother was coming in to pick her up, he tugged it from his insulated lunch sack and shot Dana in the neck. She died in her mother’s arms while the five-year-old looked on in tears.
Just your typical day in America, except the first time I saw Dana’s photo in the news, I felt something kick a hole in my chest. I can remember the moment to this day: October light slanting through hotel windows, the television on low while I talked to my grandmother in California. I don’t have much in the way of family. There had been an uncle on my father’s side, but he had drifted out of my life after my folks died, leaving my mother’s parents to raise me. There’s just the two of us since my grandfather passed on five years ago, and even in the heat of a campaign, I try to check on Gran every day. Mostly she rattles on about old folks in the home, a litany of names and ailments I can barely keep straight at the best of times. And that afternoon, half-watching some glib CNN hardbody do a stand-up in front of Little Tykes Academy, I lost the thread of her words altogether.
Next thing I know, she’s saying, “Robert, Robert—” in this troubled voice, and me, I’m sitting on a hotel bed in Dayton, Ohio, weeping for a little girl I never heard of. Grief, shock, you name it—ten years in public life, nothing like that had ever happened to me before. But after that, I couldn’t think of it in political terms. After that, Dana Maguire was personal.
Predictably, the whole thing came up on Crossfire. Joe Stern, Stoddard’s campaign director and a man I’ve known for years, leaned into the camera and espoused the usual line—you know, the one about the constitutional right to bear arms, as if Jefferson had personally foreseen the rapid-fire semi-automatic with a sixteen-round clip. Coming from the mouth of Joe Stern, a smug fleshy ideologue who ought to have known better, this line enraged me.
Even so, I hardly recognized the voice that responded to him. I felt as though something else was speaking through me—as though a voice had possessed me, a speaker from that broken hole in the center of my chest.
What it said, that voice, was: “If Grant Burton is elected, he’ll see that every handgun in the United States is melted into pig iron. He’ll do everything in his power to save the Dana Maguires of this nation.”
Joe Stern puffed up like a toad. “This isn’t about Dana Maguire—”
The voice interrupted him. “If there’s any justice in the universe, Dana Maguire will rise up from her grave to haunt you,” the voice said. It said, “If it’s not about Dana Maguire, then what on Earth is it about?”
Stoddard had new ads in saturation before the day was out: Burton’s face, my words in voice-over. If Grant Burton is elected, he’ll see that every handgun in the United States is melted into pig iron. By Monday afternoon, we had plummeted six points and Lewis wasn’t speaking to me.
I couldn’t seem to shut him up now, though.
He leaned across the table and jabbed a thick finger at me, overturning a styrofoam cup of coffee. I watched the black pool spread as he shouted. “We were up five points, we had it won before you opened your goddamn—”
Angela Dey, our chief pollster, interrupted him. “Look!” she said, pointing at the television.
Burton touched the volume button on the remote, but the image on the screen was clear enough: a cemetery in upstate New York, one of the new ones where the stones are set flush to the earth to make mowing easier. Three or four zombies had fallen to their knees by a fresh grave.
“Good God,” Dey whispered. “What are they doing?”
No one gave her an answer and I suppose she hadn’t expected one. She could see as well as the rest of us what was happening. The dead were scrabbling at the earth with their bare hands.
A line from some old poem I had read in college—
—ahh, who’s digging on my grave—
—lodged in my head, rattling around like angry candy, and for the first time I had a taste of the hysteria that would possess us all by the time this was done. Graves had opened, the dead walked the earth. All humanity trembled.
Ahh, who’s digging on my grave?
Lewis flung himself back against his chair and glared at me balefully. “This is all your fault.”
“At least they voted for us,” I said.
Not that we swept into the White House at the head of a triumphal procession of zombies. Anything but, actually. The voting rights of the dead turned out to be a serious constitutional question, and Stoddard lodged a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Dead people had no say in the affairs of the living, he argued, and besides, none of them were legally registered anyway. Sensing defeat, the Democratic National Committee counter-sued, claiming that the sheer presence of the dead may have kept legitimate voters from the polls.