Chapter 7
A few weeks back, Miles and Shae were invited to a barbeque at their cousin Stacey’s house. Miles didn’t really feel like attending. He had little in common with Stacey, other than their shared grandparents. But Shae wanted to go, and Miles eventually agreed it would be good for them to remain in contact with what family they had left.
Stacey and her husband Alistair were about a decade older than Miles, but they seemed almost middle-aged to him. Spending a whole afternoon listening to a couple of yuppies and their similarly materialistic friends talk about kitchen renovations and how remarkably gifted their young children were wasn’t exactly his idea of a fun day out, but he thought he would at least make an effort to be sociable.
It started off promisingly enough. He listened politely as Alistair droned on about his new work promotion, and to Stacey as she described the meal plans for her four- and six-year-old in meticulous detail. He could feign enthusiasm for this for a couple of hours, as long as he had one of Alistair’s imported beers in hand at all times.
The trouble started when Miles met some of the other guests. It began with a fairly innocuous question from Lisa, one of Stacey’s work colleagues, but quickly went downhill from there.
It went something like this:
Lisa: “So Miles, Stacey tells me you’ll be starting your commerce degree soon?”
Miles: “Well, that’s the plan. But right now I’m working for Dead Rite.”
Lisa: “Dead Rite? They’re the, um, pest control people, aren’t they?”
Miles: “They used to be. I think technically they might still do some of that. But their main focus now is UMC.”
Lisa: “UMC?”
Miles: “Undead management and control.”
Lisa: “Oh ... you mean zombies?”
Miles: “Well, yeah. Although we’re not supposed to call them ‘zombies’ anymore. ‘Former human’ or ‘undead being’ is the preferred term.”
Lisa: “So they’re one of those contractors who have thugs go around beating up the undead before sending them off to those giant prisons?”
Miles: “Uh, yeah ... well, no, we don’t beat them up. We try not to anyway.”
Lisa: “Zombies pose no real threat to humans. You know that, don’t you?”
Miles: “Uh ...”
Lisa (climbing on her high horse): “If we just left them alone we wouldn’t have all these problems, and we wouldn’t be wasting all our money on them either.”
Daniel (drunk party guest): “Oh, here we go. Another bleeding heart liberal complaining that we’re not treating the vermin of society with enough [finger quotes] respect.”
Lisa: “Yes, I’m a ‘bleeding-heart liberal’. That’s the term ignorant rednecks use whenever they try to justify their own selfishness and intolerance.”
Daniel: “Huh?”
Lisa: “Do you have any idea what happens to them inside those processing centres? How they’re treated? The brutal methods used to restrain them?”
Miles: “Actually, we’re pretty careful not to cause any distress when we’re restraining them ...”
Daniel: “Okay, so when you have zombies coming into your home in the middle of the night attacking your family, you can call the [finger quotes] touchy-feely politically correct guys who use [finger quotes] non-violence and [finger quotes] positive vibes to shoo it away, or you can call the guys who’ll get the job done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I know who I’ll be calling.”
Lisa: “So the ends always justifies the means? You’re willing to turn a blind eye to the inhumane atrocities taking place in our name if it means you can carry on undisturbed with your comfortable existence?”
Miles (trying to change the subject): “So Lisa, you and Stacey work together, right?”
Daniel: “How can it be inhumane? Those things are not even human anymore!”
Alistair (tipsy on imported beer and ill-informed opinions): “Why even bother with all that processing nonsense. It’s not like they’re ever going to find a cure. Just put a bullet in each one and be done with it.”
Stacey: “Alistair!”
Alistair: “What? I’m only saying what everyone here is thinking.”
Lisa: “No, you’re saying what you and your bigoted friends here are thinking. You don’t speak for the rest of us.”
Alistair: “Well it’s better we do that than waste taxpayer dollars on keeping them alive ... or whatever it is they are.”
Miles (trying to change the subject): “Speaking of wasting taxpayer dollars, has anyone seen that new piece of public artwork they’ve installed in the park opposite the town hall?”
Lisa: “In the end it always comes down to money with you people, doesn’t it?”
Alistair: “Do you know how much is being spent on zombies these days? All those processing centres and holding facilities they keep building, and all that artificial blood they pump into them to keep them going? Meanwhile, hospitals and schools are falling apart due to a lack of funding.”
Lisa: “What does one have to do with the other? Hospitals and schools were underfunded years before the zombies came along. You just can’t kill something because it costs you money.”
Daniel: “We need to be looking after our own kind first before worrying about zombies. Charity begins at home.”
Lisa: “That’s not even what the saying means, moron.”
Daniel: “Then why don’t you tell me what it does it mean, sweetheart?”
Lisa: “‘Charity begins at home’ means that learning to be a charitable person is something that is taught within the home. It doesn’t mean you should only show charity to your own kind.”
Daniel: “Tell that to the innocent victims who have had their lives ruined by those parasites.”
Lisa: “What does that even mean? What you just said has nothing to do with what we were talking about!”
The debate carried on like this for a further fifteen minutes. Voices became louder, the language harsher, both sides compared the other to Nazis, Daniel repeated the slogans he’d heard on TV and read in The Daily Ink, and the phrase “political correctness gone mad” was bandied around with abandon. Stacey and Alistair went off on a tangent and engaged in a full-blown domestic dispute – firstly about the amount he’d been drinking today when he promised he’d take it easy, and then about how much her credit card debt had ballooned in recent months.
The party finally came to an end when Lisa emptied her drink on Daniel’s head.
Miles figured this was a good time to leave, and made a mental note to invent a less controversial job title the next time someone asked what he did for a living. Parking inspector sounded good.
He sent Stacey an apologetic text the next day, and even though she told him it wasn’t his fault, he got the impression that he might not be invited to any more barbeques or dinner parties in the near future. He was perfectly okay with that.
Anti-zombie sentiment had intensified in the past year, and had only gotten worse as the forthcoming election drew nearer. Zombie-bashing was now an acceptable form of bigotry – unlike racism, xenophobia, homophobia and religious intolerance, which were all now considered to be inappropriate and unacceptable, people were free to air their undead prejudices in public without fear of castigation. The reason for this dramatic surge in resentment could be summed up in two words:
Bernard Marlowe.
Marlowe was a former editor of The Daily Ink, the nation’s most popular tabloid newspaper, and he was now running for Prime Minister. Editing a tabloid was excellent training for his current campaign, which consisted mostly of scapegoating minorities, stoking the public’s illogical fears, and giving society’s lowest common denominator reasons for being outraged on a daily basis. He knew that fear bred like rabbits and there was no myxomatosis to curb it.
The results of his scaremongering strategy were spectacular; if an election was to be held tomorrow, it was estimated that Marlowe would win over sixty-five percent of the popular vote.
His success was largely due to his ability to sell the public on two lies.
The first lie was that they were living in one of the toughest economic climates in recent memory. This assertion bore little resemblance to the truth; unemployment was low, wage growth was high, and inflation was down. Despite the potentially catastrophic zombie uprising of a few years prior, people were actually far wealthier now than at any point in history. But since most people weren’t as rich as they thought they deserved to be, they swallowed that line fairly easily.
Marlowe’s second lie was to blame this perceived disadvantage, and everything else that went wrong in the world, on zombies. He sensed a growing unease about the presence of the undead in society and he didn’t hesitate to ride this wave of ignorance and resentment. Most other public officials maintained a respectful silence on the issue; they didn’t want to appear to be capitalising on people’s grief and misfortune, and so they allowed the various departments to do their jobs. But Marlowe had no such qualms about hijacking the tragedy to further his own political ambitions. He repeatedly claimed that the current government’s policies protecting the undead had left regular law-abiding citizens vulnerable to attacks from these bloodthirsty creatures, and that too much money was being spent on undead-related matters. His policies were lifted straight from the handbooks of the militant anti-zombie groups and far-right religious nutcases, but he was able to present them in a way that assured the public that being protective of your family and your community made you a patriot rather than an angry and hateful bigot.
His campaign focused exclusively on the issue of zombies, which he referred to as a “national emergency”, and treated everything else such as education, health, defence, employment and the environment as minor concerns that didn’t really affect the average person. He cherry-picked data from studies if it suited his agenda, and ignored the majority of evidence that contradicted it. He appealed to people’s worst instincts, so long as there was a vote in it.
This strategy worked almost immediately, and his approval rating skyrocketed. The lower classes praised his straight-talking, tell-it-like-it-is demeanour. They also liked being told that if your life wasn’t going so great it was probably all the zombies’ fault.
But it was support from the middle and upper classes that really solidified his popularity. Many were furious about the costs associated with processing and housing zombies, although what they were most upset about was that money was being spent on someone other than themselves.
Affluence is a drug. During election campaigns, politicians become drug dealers. The privileged masses are all hopeless junkies who will do anything, no matter how immoral or degrading, to keep their drug of choice coming in. The easiest way for a political party to win the popular vote is to scare these addicts into believing their supply might be cut off.
If you repeat a lie enough times, sooner or later everyone will start to believe it.
Marlowe had done more than just convince the majority of the country that their lives were in danger and only he could save them. He had induced millions of people to fall into a mass psychosis, and created an army of frightened, strung-out dope fiends scared of their own shadow.
Last year, a story appeared in The Daily Ink about a town in Denmark that had trialled a new method of dealing with and managing the undead. The Danish government had caved in to the demands of interfering do-gooders and allowed zombies to remain in their homes instead of being incarcerated. Volunteers would check in on them on a regular basis to supply them with artificial blood and ensure everything was running smoothly. The aim of this program was to improve their quality of life by reducing the amount of trauma and suffering the undead often endured when locked up in confined areas.
Within days of the trial commencing, disaster struck. No one knew exactly how it started, but the infection took over the entire community almost overnight. It was the absolute worst-case scenario. The undead ran riot, and no one escaped the massacre. More than half the victims were children, some as young as two.
It was a case that shocked the nation. Fortunately, none of it was true.
The story turned out to be a hoax, a piece of creative fiction that had already done the rounds on the internet a few months earlier. If the journalist filing the story had bothered to do the bare minimum of research and fact-checking he would have discovered that no such trial had ever taken place, in Denmark or anywhere else, and no Danish town had ever been wiped out by rampaging zombies. But he took the story as gospel, and splashed it across the front page.
It took more than two months before The Daily Ink would admit its mistake. They eventually published a small correction, buried at the bottom of page thirty-three next to a piece about a golden retriever that had been elected mayor of a small town. Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that the story was a plant by Bernard Marlowe, who had kicked off his campaign for PM days earlier, and was designed to stoke the public’s fears and build resentment towards the undead population. Marlowe denied that any such subterfuge had taken place, and that the timing of the piece was a mere coincidence.