Election Day

By Niz Thomas

November 7, 2028. Election Day.

 

Facing a world that seems increasingly unstable and difficult to navigate, a man with a shadowy and mysterious background returns to his high school gymnasium to cast his vote for the next President of the United States of America.

 

What follows is a literary tour de force of a novella that captivates and intrigues — a near-future geopolitical cat-and-mouse battle that takes a serious look at America's place on the current world stage and extrapolates today's news into the headlines of tomorrow.

 

From an eleven-time Writers of the Future award nominee comes the perfect blend of witty dialogue, spy tradecraft, and engaging, unforgettable characters. A must-read in today's political climate!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Throughplace Publishing
• Release date: Jun 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227583017

Book preview

ONE

It was 6:01 a.m. when I stepped into the quiet orange-and-blue clad Webber Hall High School gymnasium, though today it had been transformed with enough folding tables, chairs, and civic signage so that no sporting events would be conducted here—at least not the traditional kind. It smelled like watered-down wood polish and more than a little dust from the parts of the gym too high for anybody to clean with regularity.

A few considered Election Season to be the single biggest sporting spectacle in this country (these were, of course, the kind of people who had heard of the Super Bowl but had never been invited to any of the parties). But to give those dweebs credit, while the Super Bowl was B-I-G—with ad dollars and endorsement deals and celebrity-hosted parties all swirling around one fine weekend in whatever temperate venue The League decided to let host the game, it didn’t hold a candle to a United States Presidential Election.

You want to talk about ad dollars? Elections trump the big game ten-to-one. Easy.

Endorsement deals? While there’s plenty of power and notoriety when you are an ambassador for the hottest apparel brand (or increasingly, the ‘hottest’ insurance company—you think those suckers are raking it in or what?), think about what it means to be the ambassador for an entire country. Scratch that, even. You have literal ambassadors who report into you, the figurehead of the most powerful country on Earth.

Yeah, little bit of prestige there.

Celebrities host parties that presidents couldn’t even be bothered to attend because they rolled with such a deep posse of Secret Service—their own intelligence, protective, and investigative force all rolled into one. You ever wonder why you don’t see the same kind of paparazzi scum around the President as you see around your favorite movie star? The President might not be as nice to look at all the time (though America’s a sucker for the handsome ones), but their scandals can take a star-snapper from the cover of the National Enquirer to the cover of Time on their way to a Pulitzer. Only thing standing in their way is a singularly dedicated force of men and women who wouldn’t bat an eye to snuff out a problem like that for their Commander-in-Chief (don’t let the noble oaths fool you, it’s a D.C. crowd, and that means they’re after power, plain and simple).

That’s all why the political news coverage looks like it does these days. A mixture of the continual dopamine drip of Breaking News and This Just In plot twists with the ferocious insider analysis that would make the nerdiest of fantasy football players wet themselves in their mother’s basement.

Election Season wasn’t just sport. It was blood sport.

But it was blood sport draped in some of the most mundane elements of American life. Which was why I loved it so damn much.

And there are few destinations in civic life so mundane as the inside of a high school gymnasium on Election Day. The WHHS gym was a space that received more serious use from assemblies than from basketball games, so something told me that today’s influx of non-athletes wouldn’t be such a departure from normal. And besides, given the hadn’t-won-a-game-in-two-seasons Mustangs weren’t so much a collection of athletes as they were a group of kids who needed something to do after school during basketball season, I don’t know how many athletes were actually around here on a regular day. Probably whatever football players happened to be walking through on their way to class.

A blunt truth, but that had always been something I was known for, I guess you could say. Straight talk. And for whatever reason (by golly, I sure as heck didn’t know what it was), people liked me for it.

Besides, the kids these days needed the straight talk. The country was going to hell faster than ever before—and in the time between when the kids who stepped onto this court (to lose their bleeding hearts out) had been born and today, their futures had become surprisingly and devastatingly irrelevant. They wouldn’t starve to death or anything. We were probably still another decade from being poor enough for that eventuality.

But they sure as hell wouldn’t thrive.

Still the world leaders (inertia was a hell of a force).

But the world had seen far better days.

And—most worryingly for American world leadership—in some places, their prognosis was that the worst of times were in their rearview. They were on the ascent, right when Americans were too focused on the buffed-out and glammed-up images of themselves inside their phone screens to even notice we were getting our asses kicked on their way to top.

The gym was warm but not stiflingly so. I came in through the gymnasium’s front doors, which faced out toward the student parking lot. The entry way was about what you’d expect from a team that didn’t win. Unspectacular. Straight ahead of me were the pride and joy of WHHS, placed with utter reverence above the accordion-folded Watchtower—where the top row of the bleachers housed a rowdy band of misfits back in my day, all who cheered like hell for whatever event was going on atop this hardwood flooring. I wasn’t sure if they did that anymore, but the banners still hung. Plus several more that had been added since my time here.

Despite the poor performance of the basketball team, the football team were perennial state title contenders. Theirs were the championship banners that hung for all to see upon entering this otherwise unremarkable gym, the orange-and-blue stripes immediately drawing the eye up and toward what passed for rafters here. WHHS had won two titles in the past decade and four since the time I’d gone here. That was in addition to the two we had during my own prep years. That all meant a hell of a lot in Texas. No matter how much my ambitions lofted, or how high my lone star ascended, I had never forgotten what it felt like to be from the middle of nowhere (what felt like it anyway), and to know that my little community had reached the highest of high—so far as my little mind could conceive anyway.

Even with the direction our country was going, football was still as important as ever.

And I didn’t see much in the way of anything that would change that.

Ad dollars might be dwarfed by our little quadrennial tradition here, but overall, they were on the ascent. I guess we’d just collectively burn up in a flaming pile of cash as the scrappy rest of the countries clawed their way to the top over our fat bloated bodies.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but that’s the way I saw it so far.

And I had made a whole lifetime about seeing things clear eyed for what they actually were.

There wasn’t a sun yet to stream through the murky windows, which for whatever reason, never seemed to let anything approaching luminescence into the space, and so even with the overhead lights (which were equally as bright), the gym didn’t have much in the way of vibrance. Appropriate, I think, given today’s event. While the T-V wanted to make any election into what the Super Bowl actually was, culturally speaking, in reality elections were all about the lowest common denominator.

I mean that with all due respect and reverence, too.

Like I said, elections took place in the unglamorous, dusty civic spaces of our great lands. Votes processed and counted by folks who didn’t have the high-powered corporate jobs (else they’d be busy). There were no athletes or celebrities who spent a day or two sorting through chicken scratch ballots to make sure the count was good, then checking it again and again to ensure the word of the people was preserved.

It was all just regular folks—grocery store clerks, retired librarians, stay-at-home moms.

God willing, it would always stay that way.

That was mostly what I saw around the gym this morning. Bodies of all shapes and sizes. Clothes from plenty of places—second-hand stores, the clearance section of the fancy mall over in San Antonio, the fancy section in Walmart. Those funny rubber shoe-sandal things. Cowboy boots with no scuffs (aka pretender kickers). And—thankfully, so we knew something productive was getting done—cowboy boots that had enough wear-and-tear to maybe even be second-generation.

I’m as cynical as they come. But this scene, in this gym, really filled my heart with pride.

This being Texas, naturally all the school’s athletic funds funneled toward the gridiron—which resembled a smaller version of the SMU Mustangs stadium with its horseshoe stands, bright lights, concessions which housed both a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Whataburger, and a jumbotron so that everyone in the stadium could watch the replays off the live television feed, which were broadcast across the state on a specially created television channel just for high school football. Not