?The campaign has groupies,? observed Shaun.
?Always a good sign,? said Buffy.
The senator laughed. ?I certainly hope that you are,? he said. ?You?ll have the chance to make me put my money where my mouth is soon enough. In the meantime, good night, and God bless you all.? Waving to the audience, he turned and walked off the stage as ?The Star-Spangled Banner? began to play from speakers around the room. The applause wasn?t exactly thunderous?there wasn?t enough audience for that?but it was enthusiastic. More so than it had been at the last engagement, and that one had been more enthusiastic than the one before it, and so on, and so on. Maybe you couldn?t tell by looking at it, but the campaign was gathering steam.
I stayed where I was, observing the audience as they rose, and, surprisingly, began to talk among themselves rather than fleeing the hall for the safety of their cars. That was a new development, just like the applause. People were talking. Face-to-face, real-time talking, inspired by the senator and the things he had said.
More and more, I was beginning to feel like we were following a president.
?Georgia?? said Buffy.
?Go ahead and check the backstage feeds,? I said, and nodded toward the knot of chattering attendees. ?I?m going to go see what the buzz is.?
?Make sure you?re recording,? she said, and started for the stage, gesturing for Shaun to follow. Grumbling good-naturedly, he snagged his chain mail and went.
I walked toward the group of attendees. A few of them glanced over at my approach, took note of my press pass, and went back to talking. The news is either invisible or something to be avoided, depending on what?s going on and how many cameras the people around you can see. Since I didn?t have any visible recording equipment, I was just part of the scenery.
The first cluster was discussing Senator Ryman?s stance on the death penalty. That?s one that?s been going around since the dead first started getting up and walking. If you?re killing someone for the crime of killing people, doesn?t it sort of contradict the spirit of the thing if their corpse is going to get up and immediately start killing more people? Most death-row inmates stay there until they die of natural causes, at which point the government seizes their shambling corpses and adds them to the ongoing research on the cure. Everybody wins, except for the unlucky prisoners who get eaten by the newly deceased before they can be recovered.
The next group was talking about the potential candidates. Senator Ryman was definitely getting a favorable reception, since they were calling his closest competition respectively ?a cheap show-biz whore??that would be Congresswoman Wagman?and ?an arrogant tool of the religious right??that would be Governor Tate, originally of Texas, and currently the single loudest voice claiming the zombies would only stop eating good American men and women when the country got back to its moral and ethical roots. Whether this would stop the zombies from eating people of different national backgrounds never seemed to come up, which was a pity, since I liked the idea of zombies checking your passport before they decided whether or not they were allowed to bite down.
Satisfied that I wasn?t likely to hear anything new in this crowd, I started casting around for a conversation worth joining. The one nearest the doors looked promising; there was a lot of scowling going on, and that?s usually a sign that interest is warranted. I turned, walking close enough to hear what was going on.
?The real question is whether he can keep his promises,? one man was saying. He looked to be in his late fifties, old enough to have been an adult during the Rising and part of the generation that embraced quarantine as the only true route to safety. ?Can we trust another president who won?t commit to an all-out purge of the zombie population of the national parks??
?Be reasonable,? said one of the women. ?We can?t simply wipe out endangered species because they might undergo amplification. That kind of rash action isn?t going to do anything to make the average man safer.?
?No, but it might keep another mother from burying her children after they get attacked by a zombie deer,? countered the man.