The Living Dead by Various Page B

head. "Seniors win that one every time."
    "Hispanics never vote," Lewis said. "We might as well wrap Florida up with a little bow and send it to Stoddard."
    Dey handed around another sheet. She'd orchestrated the moment for maximum impact, doling it out one sheet at a time like that. Lewis slumped in his seat, probing his scars as she worked her way through the list: Michigan, New York, Ohio, all three delegate rich, all three of them neck-and-neck races. Three almost physical blows, too, you could see them in the faces ranged around the table.
    "What the hell's going on here?" Lewis muttered as Dey passed out another sheet, and then the news out of Texas rendered even him speechless. Stoddard had us by six points. I ran through a couple of Alamo analogies before deciding that discretion was the better part of wisdom. "I thought we were gaining there," Lewis said.
    Dey shrugged. I just read the numbers, I don't make them up.
    "Things could be worse," Libby Dixon said.
    "Yeah, but Rob's not allowed to do Crossfire any more," Lewis said, and a titter ran around the table. Lewis is good, I'll give him that. You could feel the tension ease.
    "Suggestions?" Burton said.
    Dey said, "I've got some focus group stuff on education. I was thinking maybe some ads clarifying our—"
    "Hell with the ads," someone else said, "we've gotta spend more time in Florida. We've got to engage Stoddard on his ground."
    "Maybe a series of town meetings?" Lewis said, and they went around like that for a while. I tried to listen, but Lewis's little icebreaker had reminded me of the dreams. I knew where I was—37,000 feet of dead air below me, winging my way toward a rally in Virginia—but inside my head I hadn't gone anywhere at all. Inside my head, I was stuck in the threshold of that dream house, staring out into the eyes of the dead.
    The world had changed irrevocably, I thought abruptly.
    That seems self-evident, I suppose, but at the time it had the quality of genuine revelation. The fact is, we had all—and I mean everyone by that, the entire culture, not just the campaign—we had all been pretending that nothing much had changed. Sure, we had UN debates and a CNN feed right out of a George Romero movie, but the implications of mass resurrection—the spiritual implications—had yet to bear down upon us. We were in denial. In that moment, with the plane rolling underneath me and someone—Tyler O'Neill I think it was, Libby Dixon's mousy assistant—droning on about going negative, I thought of something I'd heard a professor mention back at Northwestern: Copernicus formulated the heliocentric model of the solar system in the mid-1500s, but the Church didn't get around to punishing anyone for it until they threw Galileo in jail nearly a hundred years later. They spent the better part of a century trying to ignore the fact that the fundamental geography of the universe had been altered with a single stroke.
    And so it had again.
    The dead walked.
    Three simple words, but everything else paled beside them—social security, campaign finance reform, education vouchers. Everything .
    I wadded Dey's sheet into a noisy ball and flung it across the table. Tyler O'Neill stuttered and choked, and for a moment everyone just stared in silence at that wad of paper. You'd have thought I'd hurled a hand grenade, not a two-paragraph summary of voter idiocy in the Lone Star State.
    Libby Dixon cleared her throat. "I hardly thin—"
    "Shut up, Libby," I said. "Listen to yourselves for Christ's sake. We got zombies in the street and you guys are worried about going negative?"
    "The whole . . ." Dey flapped her hand. ". . . zombie thing, it's not even on the radar. My numbers—"
    "People lie , Angela."
    Libby Dixon swallowed audibly.
    "When it comes to death, sex, and money, everybody lies. A total stranger calls up on the telephone, and you expect some soccer mom to share her feelings about the fact that grandpa's rotten corpse is staggering around in the