Three minutes and twenty-three seconds before the skeleton came at him with an axe, the candidate for US Senate stood grim, trim and confident behind a mahogany lectern set on the freshly hacked weeds of an abandoned farm. The wind hurled the first of the autumn’s dead leaves across the lenses of the television cameras. A storm approached in the darkening sky. It was to be fine campaign video on the dire plight of the Illinois farmer.
‘It’s time to build new farms and barns and silos,’ Timothy Wade intoned rhythmically for the dozens of admirers that had been bused in to applaud for the television news cameras. On script, he then turned and strode purposefully to the crumbling silo, picked up a long-handled sledge and swung it at the discreet green dot painted by a campaign aide.
The cracked, carefully reassembled cement fell apart precisely as planned, opening a ragged hole on the side of the silo. Clumps of damp, dark grain, the size of fists, began spilling onto the ground. The candidate stepped back to prevent his glossy wingtips getting mucky and eyed the tumbling rotted wheat morosely. Absolutely, it would be excellent video.
The forearm and hand materialized white in the black cascade of lumpy grain. The flesh, ligaments and muscles were gone; they were now only disconnected beige bones, pressed together by the weight of the rotting wet wheat.
They clutched a small, shiny-headed hatchet, pointed straight at the candidate.
It was over in an instant. The wheat and the bones and the tiny axe broke apart, falling to the ground.
But that instant was enough for the television cameras. They caught the fleshless bones aiming the axe. Worse, they recorded what happened next.
The candidate panicked. Red-faced, sweating, he bolted through the small crowd to dive into the back of his black Cadillac Escalade, tugging the door shut behind him like a child spooked wild-eyed in the night.
Though his driver, a fresh-faced young volunteer, had the wits to race after him and speed them away, it was too late. The anointed candidate of the Cook County Democratic machine, sure to become the next senator from Illinois and, some said, a future president of the United States, had been recorded melting down.
The video went viral within an hour. Chicago television stations broke into their afternoon talkers and soaps to show clips. Cable stations and the national networks snagged snippets from the Chicago locals and a thousand Internet sites got it from them. By midnight, twenty million people across the country had seen the candidate in Illinois running from bones, as though fleeing the Devil himself.
That was the beginning.