The President’s Been Shot

By Rik Hoskin

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“The President’s been shot,” the reporter said with breathless shock.

In the Oval Office, Mike Rafael watched the screen with an unreal sense of bewilderment.  There he was, on screen, falling to the floor behind the podium in the aftermath of an assassin’s bullet.  Secret Service men were scrambling like ants from a nest that had been flooded with a garden hose, black suits rushing in all directions, piling on the perpetrator, protecting the crowd, and, most importantly, protecting the President who had slumped to the floor.  Which is to say, they were protecting him.  He was the President.  He was the man on screen in the news footage who’d dropped to that assassin’s bullet.

“Who did it?” Mike asked Hobbs, his Secret Service advisor who had brought in the footage.  “Do we know that yet?”

“We have the guy in custody, Mister President,” Hobbs said, “but that’s all we know just now.  It’ll turn out he’s either pro-America or anti-America, or he has some beef with religious freedoms or with the rights of an individual to do something or other, or maybe he just has a beef with beef.  These nuts are out there, every one with a story or a cause or a grudge.”

“And he shot me,” Mike said.  It sounded unreal even as he said it.

Hobbs made a face.  “Well, not actually.  Obviously.”

The President pointed to the screen where the footage continued to play out from twenty minutes earlier.  On screen, the man who looked like him and had been identified as him, was being hurried away on a gurney, eyes closed and face screwed up in pain, a bloodied handkerchief pressed to his chest.  “I don’t get it.  Who is this guy again?”

Before he spoke, Hobbs disconnected the looping wire that fed the earpiece he habitually wore, cutting him from the Secret Service chatter that was fed straight to his ear in a babbling brook of information.  Then, Hobbs fixed the President with a look.  “He’s a decoy,” he said emotionlessly.

“A decoy?” Mike asked.  “Now what in hell’s name do I need a decoy for?”

“To fool an assassin,” Hobbs said, and he smiled just slightly, Mike saw, like he’d completed a ten-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle he’d been working at for a year.

The President didn’t know what to say.  It raised so many questions.  Finally, he settled on one: “Why wasn’t I informed of this?”

“We’ve found sometimes it can be more effective if the President doesn’t know exactly what we’re doing,” Hobbs said with a kind of vague superiority that rankled Mike.  The Secret Service liked their vague superiority, it seemed to be their go-to.

“And you thought this was necessary?” Mike asked.  “Having a decoy running around pretending to be me until he gets shot.”

“He wasn’t supposed to be shot,” Hobbs said.  “But, well, better him than you.”

“And what do we tell the American people?” Mike asked.  “They’ll have seen this footage.  They’ll think I’m dead.”

“We’ll say you recovered,” said Hobbs.

Mike pointed at the screen.  “Will he?”

Hobbs shook his head slightly.  “That’s not important, Mister President.  What matters is that you’re safe.”

Mike felt like something was clawing at his stomach.  “Decoys.  Shit.  It’s like something those backwards-assed dictatorships have,” he said.  “Those Middle East regimes my predecessor tried so hard to bomb out of existence.  And it’s come to this?”

“The people don’t need to know,” Hobbs insisted.

“If they found out… if this got out…”  Mike couldn’t finish the sentence, he just kept looking at the screen where the dying man with his face was being carted away on a gurney surrounded by a posse of Secret Service men, over and over on loop as the news report was replayed, discussed and analysed.  Speculation was already rife; there was talk of the Vice President taking over, and two former presidents had already been tracked down for their opinion on what would happen next.  “They’re saying I’m dead,” Mike said finally.

Hobbs said nothing, he just stood there in the traditional Secret Service pose, hands behind his back, staring out into the middle distance, an unreadable expression on his face.  Hobbs was a good man, Mike knew, he’d talked him through a lot of situations in his early days in office — “briefed” him, was the term he’d used.  Mike knew the man had his welfare in mind, 24/7.

“What if I died?” Mike said.

“But you didn’t,” Hobbs said.  “Only the decoy did.”

“But let’s say I did,” Mike suggested, a cunning smile on his face.  “Deb could take over.”  Deb was what he called the Vice President, even though her name was Belinda.  He’d never got her name right, not since their early campaigning days that had ultimately led to his being in office.  Eventually people stopped correcting him.  “I’ve got eighteen more months to serve, and — do you know something? — I’m tired of it.  The House blocks everything they can, the endless debates make me look ineffective, and if I have to hold one more press conference where I simply do not yet have the facts, I tell you, I’ll — ” he slammed a fist on the desk — “I don’t know what.”

“I’ve served four Presidents, sir,” Hobbs said calmly.  “Every single one has expressed those same sentiments, I guarantee you.”

“They get themselves shot on live TV?” Mike asked.

“No, sir,” Hobbs said.

Mike looked thoughtful.  “Deb’s good, isn’t she?”

“Yes, the Vice President is very capable,” Hobbs said.  Though he indulged the President, he couldn’t bring himself to call her Deb.

“Then let her do it,” Mike said.  “I’ll go catch up on my fishing, sit on my boat and read something that doesn’t have a rubber stamp and a presidential seal on it for the first time in two-and-a-half years.  No one needs to know.”

Hobbs’s eyes widened in momentary surprise.  It gave Mike a feeling of satisfaction he’d rarely felt in his life, surprising the Secret Service operative.  The last time he’d felt this satisfied was when he’d corrected his Fourth Grade teacher, Miss Hennings, after she’d misspelled the word “cataclysm” in a worksheet.  “The American people voted for you, Mister President,” Hobbs said.  “You have a responsibility —”

“Screw it,” Mike said.  “They didn’t vote for me.  They voted against the other guy; that’s how democracy works.  People don’t vote for what they want, they vote against what they don’t want.  Those that vote at all.”

“Eighty million people voted you into office,” Hobbs said.  Mike could see his emotionless façade was slipping; he had him on the ropes.

“Eighty million,” Mike said, “in a country of — what? — three-hundred-and-fifty million.  Less than a fourth of the population.”

“Many of those three-hundred million are not eligible to vote,” Hobbs said.  “There are children and …”

“How many?” Mike asked.  “How many can vote but don’t?”

“I’m sorry, sir, offhand I don’t know what the turn out was for the last election,” Hobbs admitted.

“I do,” the President said.  “Sixty-six percent.  Two thirds.  Two thirds of the people who could vote, voted.  And of them I got just over half.  Which means more people didn’t vote for me or voted for the other fella than actually, consciously put a cross on their ballot for me.”

“With all due respect, sir, that’s a rather cynical way to look at it,” Hobbs said.

“So?” Mike said.  “Let me be cynical on my boat.  The lull of the ocean, the bite of a trout.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

“But, sir, you’re the President,” Hobbs said.

“I can’t be,” Mike said, getting up from his desk.  “I saw him get shot on television.”

With that, Mike Rafael strode across the office to the door, opened it, stepped out, and closed it behind him, whistling what might have been a sea shanty.

Hobbs watched the door for a long time, wondering what to do next.

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The ocean off the coast of Florida was cleaner and bluer than any ocean Mike Rafael had ever seen in his whole life.  He sat on the deck of his yacht, wearing a baseball cap with its peak down to shade his eyes from the sun, a new-grown beard on his chin that had a lot more white in it than the last time he’d grown a beard twenty-something years before.  He’d left his wife at the spa for the day while he went in search of those elusive trout who swum in these waters, just waiting to be hooked by his bait.

The beard made him look older, and different too.  Even now, three weeks after growing it, he still felt surprise when he caught sight of himself in the mirror sometimes, wondering just who that old guy was who stared back at him.  The beard and the baseball cap were a rudimentary disguise, but no one should be looking for him now.  The President was dead, just like they had said in that report all those weeks ago.

Hobbs had been wrong about what he owed the people.  He’d done all he could do in those first two years, and the third one had been getting to be an uphill slog when he’d quit.  He had a record he could be proud of, even if he couldn’t write his memoir, unless it somehow came from “beyond the grave.”

The sun started to set, and with it Mike felt just a little chill on his bare arms.  He headed inside the cabin for his shirt, and while he was there he grabbed the portable TV and played with the aerial a little until he found a news station.

On screen, one Mike Rafael, President of the United States of America, was live, striding out of a hospital in Washington DC, wearing a perfectly tailored suit and holding his arms up like he’d just punched Rocky Balboa to the mat for the ten count.  The crowd outside, made up primarily of press reporters, cheered and applauded.

Mike watched, aghast, reaching for the little earpiece that clipped into the portable set, and pushing it into his ear.

“Mark Twain said it best,” the Mike on screen was saying, “when he said that rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

A Mark Twain quote, Mike thought.  How very appropriate.  He’d quoted Twain when he took office, and used his words on several occasions in his speeches.  There was one quote he had used, early in his term… how did it go?  “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”  People liked that one.

As he remembered that, he remembered something else too:  another life, a sterile room, a man with a light that shone bright in his eyes.

“Do you read, Mister Bridger?”

“Sometimes,” Mike had replied.  “The sports section mostly.”

“Ah, very good,” the man behind the bright light had said.  “We’ll furnish you with everything you need, a little Twain, a little Payne; Presidential reading.”

Had he had another life once?  One he couldn’t remember now?

The man on screen waved to the crowd once more then met Mike’s wife, and his two grown-up children, and they made their way to a waiting car.

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Hobbs waited in the sterile room, while the man with the light checked his data.

“That seemed to go well,” the man said, as he realized Hobbs was waiting for him to speak first.

“What about Bridger?” Hobbs asked.  “You think he’ll cause us any problems?”

“He won’t remember,” the other man said, shrugging.  “And if he does, what can he do?  If he comes out from retirement and claims he’s the real President of the United States, people will take him to be a madman.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Hobbs said.

“So tell me, Mister Hobbs,” the man with the light asked, “what type of President do you feel like next time?”

Hobbs shook his head.  “Oh no, that’s your business, not mine.  I just keep them calm once you’ve put them in the office.”

“What about a woman then?” the man with the light mused.  “Maybe someone like an older Debbie Harry, or… who was that French actress, do you recall?”

Hobbs nodded.  “Her name will come back to me,” he said.

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Rik Hoskin is a multi-award winning writer of novels, graphic novels, video games and animation.  He’s written comics for Star Wars, Doctor Who and various other properties, and won the Dragon Award for Best Graphic Novel 2018 for White Sand (with Brandon Sanderson), which also made the New York Times Bestseller list.  He writes SF and horror novels and short stories under his own name and as “James Axler”.  He also writes video games, where he has served as head writer, and has written animation for BBC television in the UK.

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