John Adams: The Living Dead

Lewis came to my hotel room at dusk to tell me.

“We’re in business,” he said.

When I didn’t answer, he took a chair across from me. We stared over the fog-shrouded city in silence. Far out above the lake, threads of rain seamed the sky. Good news for the dead. The digging would go easier.

Lewis turned the bottle on the table so he could read the label. I knew what it was: Glenfiddich, a good single malt. I’d been sipping it from a hotel tumbler most of the afternoon.

“Why’nt you turn on some lights in here?” Lewis said.

“I’m fine in the dark.”

Lewis grunted. After a moment, he fetched the other glass. He wiped it out with his handkerchief and poured.

“So tell me.”

Lewis tilted his glass, grimaced. “January fourth. The president signed the bill twenty minutes ago. Protective cordons fifty yards from polling stations. Only the living can vote. Jesus. I can’t believe I’m even saying that.” He cradled his long face in his hands. “So you in?”

“Does he want me?”

“Yes.”

“What about you, Lewis? Do you want me?”

Lewis said nothing. We just sat there, breathing in the woodsy aroma of the scotch, watching night bleed into the sky.

“You screwed me at staff meeting the other day,” I said. “You hung me out to dry in front of everyone. It won’t work if you keep cutting the ground out from under my feet.”

“Goddamnit, I was right . In ten seconds, you destroyed everything we’ve worked for. We had it won.”

“Oh come on, Lewis. If Crossfire never happened, it could have gone either way. Five points, that’s nothing. We were barely outside the plus and minus, you know that.”

“Still. Why’d you have to say that?”

I thought about that strange sense I’d had at the time: another voice speaking through me. Mouthpiece of the dead.

“You ever think about that little girl, Lewis?”

He sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He lifted his glass. “Look. If you’re angling for some kind of apology—”

“I don’t want an apology.”

“Good,” he said. Then, grudgingly: “We need you on this one, Rob. You know that.”

“January,” I said. “That gives us almost two months.”

“We’re way up right now.”

“Stoddard will make a run. Wait and see.”

“Yeah.” Lewis touched his face. It was dark, but I could sense the gesture. He’d be fingering his acne scars, I’d spent enough time with him to know that. “I don’t know, though,” he said. “I think the right might sit this one out. They think it’s the fuckin’ Rapture, who’s got time for politics?”

“We’ll see.”

He took the rest of his scotch in a gulp and stood. “Yeah. We’ll see.”

I didn’t move as he showed himself out, just watched his reflection in the big plate glass window. He opened the door and turned to look back, a tall man framed in light from the hall, his face lost in shadow.

“Rob?”

“Yeah?”

“You all right?”

I drained my glass and swished the scotch around in my mouth. I’m having a little trouble sleeping these days, I wanted to say. I’m having these dreams.

But all I said was, “I’m fine, Lewis. I’m just fine.”

I wasn’t, though, not really.

None of us were, I guess, but even now—maybe especially now—the thing I remember most about those first weeks is how little the resurrection of the dead altered our everyday lives. Isolated incidents made the news—I remember a serial killer being arrested as his victims heaved themselves bodily from their shallow backyard graves—but mostly people just carried on. After the initial shock, markets stabilized. Stores filled up with Thanksgiving turkeys; radio stations began counting the shopping days until Christmas.

Yet I think the hysteria must have been there all along, like a swift current just beneath the surface of a placid lake. An undertow, the kind of current that’ll kill you if you’re not careful. Most people looked okay, but scratch the surface and we were all going nuts in a thousand quiet ways.

Ahh, who’s digging on my grave , and all that.

Me, I couldn’t sleep. The stress of the campaign had been mounting steadily even before my meltdown on Crossfire , and in those closing days, with the polls in California—and all those lovely delegates—a hair too close to call, I’d been waking grainy-eyed and yawning every morning. I was feeling guilty, too. Three years ago, Gran broke her hip and landed in a Long Beach nursing home. And while I talked to her daily, I could never manage to steal a day or two to see her, despite all the time we spent campaigning in California.

But the resurrection of the dead marked a new era in my insomnia. Stumbling to bed late on election night, my mind blistered with images of zombies in the streets, I fell into a fevered dream. I found myself wandering through an abandoned city. Everything burned with the tenebrous significance of dreams—every brick and stone, the scraps of newsprint tumbling down high-rise canyons, the darkness pooling in the mouths of desolate subways. But the worst thing of all was the sound, the lone sound in all that sea of silence: the obscurely terrible cadence of a faraway clock, impossibly magnified, echoing down empty alleys and forsaken avenues.

The air rang with it, haunting me, drawing me on at last into a district where the buildings loomed over steep, close streets, admitting only a narrow wedge of sky. An open door beckoned, a black slot in a high, thin house. I pushed open the gate, climbed the broken stairs, paused in the threshold. A colossal grandfather clock towered within, its hands poised a minute short of midnight. Transfixed, I watched the heavy pendulum sweep through its arc, driving home the hour.

The massive hands stood upright.

The air shattered around me. The very stones shook as the clock began to toll. Clapping my hands over my ears, I turned to flee, but there was nowhere to go. In the yard, in the street—as far as I could see—the dead had gathered. They stood there while the clock stroked out the hours, staring up at me with those haunted eyes, and I knew suddenly and absolutely—the way you know things in dreams—that they had come for me at last, that they had always been coming for me, for all of us, if only we had known it.

I woke then, coldly afraid.

The first gray light of morning slit the drapes, but I had a premonition that no dawn was coming, or at least a very different dawn from any I had ever dared imagine.

Stoddard made his run with two weeks to go.

December fourteenth, we’re 37,000 feet over the Midwest in a leased Boeing 737, and Angela Dey drops the new numbers on us.

“Gentleman,” she says, “we’ve hit a little turbulence.”

It was a turning point, I can see that now. At the time, though, none of us much appreciated her little joke.

The resurrection of the dead had shaken things up—it had put us on top for a month or so—but Stoddard had been clawing his way back for a couple of weeks, crucifying us in the farm belt on a couple of ag bills where Burton cast deciding votes, hammering us in the south on vouchers. We knew that, of course, but I don’t think any of us had foreseen just how close things were becoming.

“We’re up seven points in California,” Dey said. “The gay vote’s keeping our heads above water, but the numbers are soft. Stoddard’s got momentum.”

“Christ,” Lewis said, but Dey was already passing around another sheet.

“It gets worse,” she said. “Florida, we’re up two points. A statistical dead heat. We’ve got the minorities, Stoddard has the seniors. Everything’s riding on turnout.”

Libby Dixon, Burton’s press secretary, cleared her throat. “We’ve got a pretty solid network among Hispanics—”