Zombie Flight

Zombie Flight - chapter 3 - The Senator Returns

I'd buried her at our favorite spot, near a giant sierra redwood in Sequoia National Park. Roots crisscrossed the ground, but the soil was soft—good digging. I wrapped her in our tartan picnic blanket and laid her out spooned around a root. If anyone dug her up now, they probably wouldn't even be able to make out her face, but I'd never forget it.

They should've charged me for stealing her cancer-ravaged body from the morgue, but my father-in-law had some serious pull. I drew him a map so he could visit the grave too. He was pissed, but he understood and got the charges dropped. The journalists hounded me to the point where I stopped watching TV and reading newspapers after that. So I quit and jumped on a plane to Japan, far enough away to be anonymous.

I was nowhere near ready to come back, but here I was.

The reflection in the undersized airline bathroom mirror seemed to agree. My fifteen-hundred-dollar suits had been left behind in the States what felt like a long time ago. My jeans and jumper were stained and dirty, and they looked good in comparison to the rest of me.

Based on some of the news stories I'd read before I'd left, I figured the party must have been glad to see me gone. Train-wreck senators were the wrong kind of distraction heading into the midterm elections. None of them tried to stop me leaving. I had no credibility to take with me into exile.

My old army buddy Howie organized a place for me to stay out in the Japanese countryside near the hot springs at Matsunoyama. As far as the locals were concerned, I was nobody. Thank God none of them read the LA Times. They let me be, the crazy drunk American gaijin, still 80 percent numb. I spent a few days a week doing jobs around the house for Howie's elderly mother-in-law, the rest of the time taken up with drinking. I prided myself on not having checked an email, or having read, listened to, or watched the news in eleven months.

Two days ago some goon with a New York accent in a bulging suit tracked me down with an ultimatum. Either I come back and vote on the Anthelmintic bill, or my passport would be revoked. I laughed in his face until he showed me a web page on his phone. I almost hit him. Right under my mug shot it read "Representing the great state of California, Senator Richard Steele."

My chief of staff, Pam, told me she'd pass my resignation letter on to the president and the speaker of the House eleven months ago. It had to be official? Nothing was left for me in the States—just sad memories and nasty tabloid rumors about my wife's death.

Being deported had never been on my bucket list, but they'd picked me up for my flight back to the States via the US Embassy the next morning. That is, after a long session with Howie. They'd threatened to deport him too, and he had a three-year-old Japanese daughter.

Back in Afghanistan, Howie had been one hell of an operator, Mr. Hearts and Minds in Psy Ops—"Psychological Operations," to civilians. Too much heart. He'd been badly shot up attempting to rescue me when I strolled into an ambush in downtown Kabul. He loved the sake these days but didn't like to drink alone. Which was why my head now felt like a squashed watermelon.

Howie filled me in on the latest weird stories going around the Tokyo ex-pat community about some epidemic—a parasitic worm infection named after a horse or something like that. Damn conspiracy theories.

The goon mentioned a link between some new treatable disease called Mustang and the Anthelmintic bill too. Even if I didn't care, two hours from now the media would be waiting for me at LAX with questions. And worse—politicians, lobbyists, and staffers.

I had to stop thinking; the hangover didn't like it. Whenever I had a pain-free second, I locked my head in place in the hope that it would stay that way. It never lasted. I would experiment with moving my head and neck by a matter of degrees, looking for the magical painless pose.