USA

Vindication means nothing without justice.

By Sarah Kendzior | Feb 17, 2026

There is a shipwreck at the end of Zombie Road. I walked miles to see it: past moss-covered cliffs and century-old railroad tracks half-buried in the earth. I hadn’t hiked Zombie Road since 2022, when an elderly woman I used to pass on the trail disappeared. I didn’t know her name, but I knew her smile. When she went missing, I checked the news round the clock, hoping she would be found. Her face is on a memorial bench now. I put a flower there.

I finally felt ready to return to Zombie Road. 2026 leaves you ready for everything and nothing. I live in a nightmare echo chamber where topics I covered for over a decade in my books and articles — autocracy, institutional complicity, extremely specific details of the Epstein/Maxwell case — are now repeated by the same pundits and officials who dismissed them when it mattered most. They buried crimes in silence, then noise, and now spectacle.

The lack of accountability stays the same.

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People ask if I feel vindicated. It’s an evil question. I wanted justice, not approval. No one needed to vindicate me. I knew I was right: I wanted the world to make me wrong. Facts are facts, and cowards are cowards, and belated recognition of obvious crimes does not negate the harm done to victims.

What the truth can do is shine a light to a better future. But officials behave as if the future is foreclosed. They rush toward evil in every form: genocide, eugenics, the replacement of humanity with artificial intelligence. They are part and parcel with the predators they were supposed to expose and condemn and prosecute.

They always were.

* * *

I go to Zombie Road because it doesn’t lie, no matter how it changes. The haunted path winds between hulking hills that were once Native American burial mounds. I pass a signpost that says “Zombie West, Zombie East” with mileage markers for trails.

Over the past decade, Zombie Road got gentrified. One of St. Louis’s most notorious sites — where locals claim to see the reanimated corpses of train robbers and Civil War soldiers and “a shadow nest of children” on the cliffs at night — now boasts mountain biking and hilltop McMansions. County officials decided to lean into the zombie lore instead of feigning respectability. It was the right move.

“Zombie West, Zombie East.” That’s how it feels to live in the middle of a technofascist criminal syndicate spanning the globe.

We no longer watch the news: the news watches us. Stories written by robots are posted on websites that suck personal information from our phones and hand it to data miners controlled by oligarchs. “Journalists” brag that they rely on AI to map the child rape networks that they once denied existed; the networks that include the very oligarchs breeding the AI. They dig humanity’s grave and stagger back out of it.

“Fake news” used to mean propaganda or inconvenient truths that Trump deemed lies. Now fake news is news written by non-human entities hallucinating a counterfeit reality. It is fake without motive, fake for the sake of being fake and making you lose confidence that anything can be real. It is zombie news for zombie consumption.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” St. Louis native Maya Angelou famously said.

When people refuse to admit that a conspiracy of wealthy predators is real — even though it has been documented publicly since Epstein was first indicted in 2006, confirmed by dozens of victims over decades, and investigated by journalists who were threatened by the perpetrators and their lawyers — believe that these denialists were acting as enablers the first time, and never grant them your trust.

They are zombies. They eat pain and spit it out as content in an attempt to inure you to the depths of depravity. They want voyeurism, not accountability. If they wanted justice, they would have believed the trafficked child rape victims the first time. If they had integrity, they would have not only surrendered their access to criminal elites when the story broke years ago but been ashamed that they ever coveted it.

I believe in redemption, but not for this. Not for the predators, not for the enablers. This has always been a clearcut case. This has always been a spiritual war.

* * *

The shipwreck lies on a sandbar off deep blue water where icebergs drift like silver rafts. This stretch of the Meramec River is isolated and idyllic, an oasis of driftwood and birdsong. Locals nicknamed it the River of Death for all the people who drowned here. Euphemisms do no good in a dystopia.

I’d seen the shipwreck when the water was high enough to form a barrier around it. Now the river ran low, and a brush trail led to a steep incline where I could climb down to the ruins. I could see the hull and a rusted red entryway shaped like a shack. A tree grew in the midsection. It had been there a long time.

I’ve been told this is not really a shipwreck, but the remains of a gravel barge that crashed some fifty years ago. I still call it a shipwreck, because you still call this a government, and that crashed some fifty years ago too.

I was a woman alone on the river of death in winter. This adventure was unwise, but no more unwise than investigating an international crime syndicate of wealthy pedophiles for ten years, so I decided to explore.

I slid to the ground and peered into the barge. Rotting equipment lay by a pile of tires. Someone else had been here. Iron hooks lined a concrete outer wall where the boat used to dock. I wondered why no one bothered to fix the ship or remove it. I don’t want them to do that: the wreck is too interesting. It made me feel like a child again, a child unbothered, a child unaware of how her country treats children.

I felt safe in my shipwreck because I was far from the men with the yachts.

* * *

I hopped over ice puddles and climbed back to Zombie Road. I followed the train tracks into the woods and walked past the skeleton of an animal, hollowed out so only its head and spinal cord remained, and wondered what picked it clean.

I thought of all the people who had walked this trail for centuries, and the terrible things they had witnessed, and how nothing seemed to match the horrors in my 21^st-century mind. The patterns of elite criminality and complicity, the patterns I can’t comprehend why others refused for so long to see.

I sat on a bench and closed my eyes and mourned the unbelieved.

When I looked up, two trees were hugging. One stretched out its branches in a warm embrace and the other leaned in. They were in love and they didn’t care who knew it.

I felt grateful that whatever part of me let me see the dystopia coming let me see that too.

* * *