It’s amazing what you can use for a ramp, given the right motivation.
Someone’s collapsed fence was blocking half the road, jutting up at an angle, and I hit it at about fifty miles an hour. The handlebars shuddered in my hands like the horns of a mechanical bull, and the shocks weren’t doing much better. I didn’t even have to check the road in front of us because the moaning started as soon as we came into view. They’d blocked our exit fairly well while Shaun played with his little friend, and mindless plague carriers or not, they had a better grasp of the local geography than we did. We still had one advantage: Zombies aren’t good at predicting suicide charges. And if there’s a better term for driving up the side of a hill at fifty miles an hour with the goal of actually achieving flight when you run out of “up,” I don’t think I want to hear it.
The front wheel rose smoothly and the back followed, sending us into the air with a jerk that looked effortless and was actually scarier than hell. I was screaming. Shaun was whooping with gleeful understanding. And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid. We hung in the air for a heart-stopping moment, still shooting forward. At least I was fairly sure the impact would kill us.
BY MIRA GRANT
The Newsflesh Trilogy
Feed
Writing as Seanan McGuire
Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright Š 2010 by Seanan McGuire
Excerpt from Blackout copyright Š 2010 by Seanan McGuire
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Orbit
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at [http://www.HachetteBookGroup.com] www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
First eBook Edition: May 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-12246-7
Contents
It’s Amazing what you can use for a ramp, given the Right Motivation.
Copyright
BOOK I: The Rising
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
BOOK II: Dancing with the Dead
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
BOOK III: Index Case Studies
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
BOOK IV: Postcards from the Wall
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
BOOK V: Burial Writes
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
CODA: Dying For You
Chapter Thirty
Acknowledgments
Extras
Meet the Author
Interview
A Preview of Blackout
This book is gratefully dedicated to
Gian-Paolo Musumeci
and
Michael Ellis.
They each asked me a question.
This is my answer.
BOOK I
The Rising
You can’t kill the truth.
—GEORGIA MASON
Nothing is impossible to kill. It’s just that sometimes after you kill something, you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving. And that’s really sort of neat when you stop to think about it.
—SHAUN MASON
Everyone has someone on the Wall.
No matter how remote you may think you are from the events that changed the world during the brutal summer of 2014, you have someone on the Wall. Maybe they’re a cousin, maybe they’re an old family friend, or maybe they’re just somebody you saw on TV once, but they’re yours. They belong to you. They died to make sure that you could sit in your safe little house behind your safe little walls, watching the words of one jaded twenty-two-year-old journalist go scrolling across your computer screen. Think about that for a moment. They died for you.
Now take a good look at the life you’re living and tell me: Did they do the right thing?
—From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, May 16, 2039
One
Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot—in this case, my brother Shaun—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens. As if we didn’t already know what happens when you mess with a zombie: The zombie turns around and bites you, and you become the thing you poked. This isn’t a surprise. It hasn’t been a surprise for more than twenty years, and if you want to get technical, it wasn’t a surprise then.
When the infected first appeared—heralded by screams that the dead were rising and judgment day was at hand—they behaved just like the horror movies had been telling us for decades that they would behave. The only surprise was that this time, it was really happening.
There was no warning before the outbreaks began. One day, things were normal; the next, people who were supposedly dead were getting up and attacking anything that came into range. This was upsetting for everyone involved, except for the infected, who were past being upset about that sort of thing. The initial shock was followed by running and screaming, which eventually devolved into more infection and attacking, that being the way of things. So what do we have now, in this enlightened age twenty-six years after the Rising? We have idiots prodding zombies with sticks, which brings us full circle to my brother and why he probably won’t live a long and fulfilling life.
“Hey, George, check this out!” he shouted, giving the zombie another poke in the chest with his hockey stick. The zombie gave a low moan, swiping at him ineffectually. It had obviously been in a state of full viral amplification for some time and didn’t have the strength or physical dexterity left to knock the stick out of Shaun’s hands. I’ll give Shaun this much: He knows not to bother the fresh ones at close range. “We’re playing patty-cake!”
“Stop antagonizing the locals and get back on the bike,” I said, glaring from behind my sunglasses. His current buddy might be sick enough to be nearing its second, final death, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a healthier pack roaming the area. Santa Cruz is zombie territory. You don’t go there unless you’re suicidal, stupid, or both. There are times when even I can’t guess which of those options applies to Shaun.
“Can’t talk right now! I’m busy making friends with the locals!”
“Shaun Phillip Mason, you get back on this bike right now, or I swear to God, I am going to drive away and leave you here.”
Shaun looked around, eyes bright with sudden interest as he planted the end of his hockey stick at the center of the zombie’s chest to keep it at a safe distance. “Really? You’d do that for me? Because ‘My Sister Abandoned Me in Zombie Country Without a Vehicle’ would make a great article.”
“A posthumous one, maybe,” I snapped. “Get back on the goddamn bike!”
“In a minute!” he said, laughing, and turned back toward his moaning friend.
In retrospect, that’s when everything started going wrong.
The pack had probably been stalking us since before we hit the city limits, gathering reinforcements from all over the county as they approached. Packs of infected get smarter and more dangerous the larger they become. Groups of four or less are barely a threat unless they can corner you, but a pack of twenty or more stands a good chance of breaching any barrier the uninfected try to put up. You get enough of the infected together and they’ll start displaying pack hunting techniques; they’ll start using actual tactics. It’s like the virus that’s taken them over starts to reason when it gets enough hosts in the same place. It’s scary as hell, and it’s just about the worst nightmare of anyone who regularly goes into zombie territory—getting cornered by a large group that knows the land better than you do.
These zombies knew the land better than we did, and even the most malnourished and virus-ridden pack knows how to lay an ambush. A low moan echoed from all sides, and then they were shambling into the open, some moving with the slow lurch of the long infected, others moving at something close to a run. The runners led the pack, cutting off three of the remaining methods of escape before there was time to do more than stare. I looked at them and shuddered.
Fresh infected—really fresh ones—still look almost like the people that they used to be. Their faces show emotion, and they move with a jerkiness that could just mean they slept wrong the night before. It’s harder to kill something that still looks like a person, and worst of all, the bastards are fast. The only thing more dangerous than a fresh zombie is a pack of them, and I counted at least eighteen before I realized that it didn’t matter, and stopped bothering.
I grabbed my helmet and shoved it on without fastening the strap. If the bike went down, dying because my helmet didn’t stay on would be one of the better options. I’d reanimate, but at least I wouldn’t be aware of it. “Shaun!”
Shaun whipped around, staring at the emerging zombies. “Whoa.”
Unfortunately for Shaun, the addition of that many zombies had turned his buddy from a stupid solo into part of a thinking mob. The zombie grabbed the hockey stick as soon as Shaun’s attention was focused elsewhere, yanking it out of his hands. Shaun staggered forward and the zombie latched onto his cardigan, withered fingers locking down with deceptive strength. It hissed. I screamed, images of my inevitable future as an only child filling my mind.
“Shaun!” One bite and things would get a lot worse. There’s not much worse than being cornered by a pack of zombies in downtown Santa Cruz. Losing Shaun would qualify.
The fact that my brother convinced me to take a dirt bike into zombie territory doesn’t make me an idiot. I was wearing full off-road body armor, including a leather jacket with steel armor joints attached at the elbows and shoulders, a Kevlar vest, motorcycling pants with hip and knee protectors, and calf-high riding boots. It’s bulky as hell, and I don’t care, because once you factor in my gloves, my throat’s the only target I present in the field.
Shaun, on the other hand, is a moron and had gone zombie baiting in nothing more defensive than a cardigan, a Kevlar vest, and cargo pants. He won’t even wear goggles—he says they “spoil the effect.” Unprotected mucous membranes can spoil a hell of a lot more than that, but I practically have to blackmail him to get him into the Kevlar. Goggles are a nonstarter.
There’s one advantage to wearing a sweater in the field, no matter how idiotic I think it is: wool tears. Shaun ripped himself free and turned, running for the motorcycle with great speed, which is really the only effective weapon we have against the infected. Not even the fresh ones can keep up with an uninfected human over a short sprint. We have speed, and we have bullets. Everything else about this fight is in their favor.
“Shit, George, we’ve got company!” There was a perverse mixture of horror and delight in his tone. “Look at ’em all!”
“I’m looking! Now get on!”
I kicked us free as soon as he had his leg over the back of the bike and his arm around my waist. The bike leapt forward, tires bouncing and shuddering across the broken ground as I steered us into a wide curve. We needed to get out of there, or all the protective gear in the world wouldn’t do us a damn bit of good. I might live if the zombies caught up with us, but my brother would be dragged into the mob. I gunned the throttle, praying that God had time to preserve the life of the clinically suicidal.
We hit the last open route out of the square at twenty miles an hour, still gathering speed. Whooping, Shaun locked one arm around my waist and twisted to face the zombies, waving and blowing kisses in their direction. If it were possible to enrage a mob of the infected, he’d have managed it. As it was, they just moaned and kept following, arms extended toward the promise of fresh meat.
The road was pitted from years of weather damage without maintenance. I fought to keep control as we bounced from pothole to pothole. “Hold on, you idiot!”
“I’m holding on!” Shaun called back, seeming happy as a clam and oblivious to the fact that people who don’t follow proper safety procedures around zombies—like not winding up around zombies in the first place—tend to wind up in the obituaries.
“Hold on with both arms!” The moaning was only coming from three sides now, but it didn’t mean anything; a pack this size was almost certainly smart enough to establish an ambush. I could be driving straight to the site of greatest concentration. They’d moan in the end, once we were right on top of them. No zombie can resist a good moan when dinner’s at hand. The fact that I could hear them over the engine meant that there were too many, too close. If we were lucky, it wasn’t already too late to get away.
Of course, if we were lucky, we wouldn’t be getting chased by an army of zombies through the quarantine area that used to be downtown Santa Cruz. We’d be somewhere safer, like Bikini Atoll just before the bomb testing kicked off. Once you decide to ignore the hazard rating and the signs saying Danger: Infection, you’re on your own.
Shaun grudgingly slid his other arm around my waist and linked his hands at the pit of my stomach, shouting, “Spoilsport,” as he settled.
I snorted and hit the gas again, aiming for a nearby hill. When you’re being chased by zombies, hills are either your best friends or your burial ground. The slope slows them down, which is great, unless you hit the peak and find out that you’re surrounded, with nowhere left to run to.
Idiot or not, Shaun knows the rules about zombies and hills. He’s not as dumb as he pretends to be, and he knows more about surviving zombie encounters than I do. His grip on my waist tightened, and for the first time, there was actual concern in his voice as he shouted, “George? What do you think you’re doing?”
“Hold, on,” I said. Then we were rolling up the hill, bringing more zombies stumbling out of their hiding places behind trash cans and in the spaces between the once-elegant beachfront houses that were now settling into a state of neglected decay.
Most of California was reclaimed after the Rising, but no one has ever managed to take back Santa Cruz. The geographical isolation that once made the town so desirable as a vacation spot pretty much damned it when the virus hit. Kellis-Amberlee may be unique in the way it interacts with the human body, but it behaves just like every other communicable disease known to man in at least one way: Put it on a school campus and it spreads like wildfire. U.C. Santa Cruz was a perfect breeding ground, and once all those perky co-eds became the shuffling infected, it was all over but the evacuation notices.
“Georgia, this is a hill!” he said with increasing urgency as the locals lunged toward the speeding bike. He was using my proper name; that was how I could tell he was worried. I’m only “Georgia” when he’s unhappy.
“I got that.” I hunched over to decrease wind resistance a few more precious degrees. Shaun mimicked the motion automatically, hunching down behind me.
“Why are we going up a hill?” he demanded. There was no way he’d be able to hear my answer over the combined roaring of the engine and the wind, but that’s my brother, always willing to question that which won’t talk back.
“Ever wonder how the Wright brothers felt?” I asked. The crest of the hill was in view. From the way the street vanished on the other side, it was probably a pretty steep drop. The moaning was coming from all sides now, so distorted by the wind that I had no real idea what we were driving into. Maybe it was a trap; maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it was too late to find another path. We were committed, and for once, Shaun was the one sweating.
“Georgia!”
“Hold on!” Ten yards. The zombies kept closing, single-minded in their pursuit of what might be the first fresh meat some had seen in years. From the looks of most of them, the zombie problem in Santa Cruz was decaying faster than it was rebuilding itself. Sure, there were plenty of fresh ones—there are always fresh ones because there are always idiots who wander into quarantined zones, either willingly or by mistake, and the average hitchhiker doesn’t get lucky where zombies are concerned—but we’ll take the city back in another three generations. Just not today.
Five yards.
Zombies hunt by moving toward the sound of other zombies hunting. It’s recursive, and that meant our friends at the base of the hill started for the peak when they heard the commotion. I was hoping so many of the locals had been cutting us off at ground level that they wouldn’t have many bodies left to mount an offensive on the hill’s far side. We weren’t supposed to make it that far, after all; the only thing keeping us alive was the fact that we had a motorcycle and the zombies didn’t.
I glimpsed the mob waiting for us as we reached the top. They were standing no more than three deep. Fifteen feet would see us clear.
Liftoff.
It’s amazing what you can use for a ramp, given the right motivation. Someone’s collapsed fence was blocking half the road, jutting up at an angle, and I hit it at about fifty miles an hour. The handlebars shuddered in my hands like the horns of a mechanical bull, and the shocks weren’t doing much better. I didn’t even have to check the road in front of us because the moaning started as soon as we came into view. They’d blocked our exit fairly well while Shaun played with his little friend, and mindless plague carriers or not, they had a better grasp of the local geography than we did. We still had one advantage: Zombies aren’t good at predicting suicide charges. And if there’s a better term for driving up the side of a hill at fifty miles an hour with the goal of actually achieving flight when you run out of “up,” I don’t think I want to hear it.
The front wheel rose smoothly and the back followed, sending us into the air with a jerk that looked effortless and was actually scarier than hell. I was screaming. Shaun was whooping with gleeful understanding. And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid. We hung in the air for a heart-stopping moment, still shooting forward. At least I was fairly sure the impact would kill us.
The laws of physics and the hours of work I’ve put into constructing and maintaining my bike combined to let the universe, for once, show mercy. We soared over the zombies, coming down on one of the few remaining stretches of smooth road with a bone-bruising jerk that nearly ripped the handlebars out of my grip. The front wheel went light on impact, trying to rise up, and I screamed, half terrified, half furious with Shaun for getting us into this situation in the first place. The handlebars shuddered harder, almost wrenching my arms out of their sockets before I hit the gas and forced the wheel back down. I’d pay for this in the morning, and not just with the repair bills.
Not that it mattered. We were on level ground, we were upright, and there was no moaning ahead. I hit the gas harder as we sped toward the outskirts of town, with Shaun whooping and cheering behind me like a big suicidal freak.
“Asshole,” I muttered, and drove on.
News is news and spin is spin, and when you introduce the second to the first, what you have isn’t news anymore. Hey, presto, you’ve created opinion.
Don’t get me wrong, opinion is powerful. Being able to be presented with differing opinions on the same issue is one of the glories of a free media, and it should make people stop and think. But a lot of people don’t want to. They don’t want to admit that whatever line being touted by their idol of the moment might not be unbiased and without ulterior motive. We’ve got people who claim Kellis-Amberlee was a plot by the Jews, the gays, the Middle East, even a branch of the Aryan Nation trying to achieve racial purity by killing the rest of us. Whoever orchestrated the creation and release of the virus masked their involvement with a conspiracy of Machiavellian proportions, and now they and their followers are sitting it out, peacefully immunized, waiting for the end of the world.
Pardon the expression, but I can smell the bullshit from here. Conspiracy? Cover up? I’m sure there are groups out there crazy enough to think killing thirty-two percent of the world’s population in a single summer is a good idea—and remember, that’s a conservative estimate, since we’ve never gotten accurate death tolls out of Africa, Asia, or parts of South America—but are any of them nuts enough to do it by turning what used to be Grandma loose to chew on people at random? Zombies don’t respect conspiracy. Conspiracy is for the living.
This piece is opinion. Take it as you will. But get your opinions the hell away from my news.
—From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, September 3, 2039
Zombies are pretty harmless as long as you treat them with respect. Some people say you should pity the zombie, empathize with the zombie, but I think they? Are likely to become the zombie, if you get my meaning. Don’t feel sorry for the zombie. The zombie’s not going to feel sorry for you when he starts gnawing on your head. Sorry, dude, but not even my sister gets to know me that well.
If you want to deal with zombies, stay away from the teeth, don’t let them scratch you, keep your hair short, and don’t wear loose clothes. It’s that simple. Making it more complicated would be boring, and who wants that? We have what basically amounts to walking corpses, dude.
Don’t suck all the fun out of it.
—From Hail to the King, the blog of Shaun Mason, January 2, 2039
Two
Neither of us spoke as we drove through the remains of Santa Cruz. There were no signs of movement, and the buildings were getting widely spaced enough that visual tracking was at least partially reliable. I started to relax as I took the first exit onto Highway 1, heading south. From there, we could cut over to Highway 152, which would take us into Watsonville, where we’d left the van.
Watsonville is another of Northern California’s “lost towns.” It was surrendered to the infected after the summer of 2014, but it’s safer than Santa Cruz, largely due to its geographical proximity to Gilroy, which is still a protected farming community. This means that while no one’s willing to live in Watsonville for fear that the zombies will shamble down from Santa Cruz in the middle of the night, the good people of Gilroy aren’t willing to let the infected have it either. They go in three times a year with flamethrowers and machine guns and clean the place out. That keeps Watsonville deserted, and lets the California farmers continue to feed the population.
I pulled off to the side of the road outside the ruins of a small town called Aptos, near the Highway 1 onramp. There was flat ground in all directions, giving us an adequate line of sight on anything that might be looking for a snack. My bike was running rough enough that I wanted to get a good look at it, and adding more gas probably wouldn’t hurt. Dirt bikes have small tanks, and we’d covered a lot of miles already.
Shaun turned toward me as he dismounted, grinning from ear to ear. The wind had raked his hair into a series of irregular spikes and snarls, making him look like he’d been possessed. “That,” he said, with almost religious fervor, “was the coolest thing you have ever done. In fact, that may have been the coolest thing you ever will do. Your entire existence has been moving toward one shining moment, George, and that was the moment when you thought, ‘Hey, why don’t I just go over the zombies?’ ” He paused for effect. “You are possibly cooler than God.”
“Yet another chance to be free of you, down the drain.” I hopped off the bike and pulled off my helmet, starting to assess the most obvious problems. They looked minor, but I still intended to get them looked at as soon as possible. Some damage was beyond my admittedly limited mechanical capabilities, and I was sure I’d managed to cause most of it.
“You’ll get another one.”
“That’s the hope that keeps me going.” I balanced my helmet against the windscreen before unzipping the right saddlebag and removing the gas can. Setting the can on the ground, I pulled out the first-aid kit. “Blood test time.”
“George—”
“You know the rules. We’ve been in the field, and we don’t go back to base until we’ve checked our virus levels.” I extracted two small handheld testing units, holding one out to him. “No levels, no van. No van, no coffee. No coffee, no joy. Do you want the joy, Shaun, or would you rather stand out here and argue with me about whether you’re going to let me test your blood?”
“You’re burning cool by the minute here,” he grumbled, and took the unit.
“I’m okay with that,” I said. “Now let’s see if I’ll live.”
Moving with synchronicity born of long practice, we broke the biohazard seals and popped the plastic lids off our testing units, exposing the sterile metal pressure pads. Basic field test units only work once, but they’re cheap and necessary. You need to know if someone’s gone into viral amplification—preferably before they start chewing on your tasty flesh.
I unsnapped my right glove and peeled it off, shoving it into my pocket. “On three?”
“On three,” Shaun agreed.
“One.”
“Two.”
We both reached out and slid our index fingers into the unit in the other’s hand. Call it a quirk. Also call it an early-warning system. If either of us ever waits for “three,” something’s very wrong.
The metal was cool against my finger as I depressed the pressure pad, a soothing sensation followed by the sting of the test’s embedded needle breaking my skin. Diabetes tests don’t hurt; they want you to keep using them, and comfort makes a difference. Kellis-Amberlee blood testing units hurt on purpose. Lack of sensitivity to pain is an early sign of viral amplification.
The LEDs on top of the box turned on, one red, one green, beginning to flash in an alternating pattern. The flashing slowed and finally stopped as the red light went out, leaving the green. Still clean. I glanced at the test I was holding and let out a slow breath as I saw that Shaun’s unit had also stabilized on green.
“Guess I don’t get to clean your room out just yet,” I said.
“Maybe next time,” he said. I passed him back his test, letting him handle the storage while I refilled the gas tank. He did so with admirable efficiency, snapping the plastic covers back onto the testing units and triggering the internal bleach dispensers before pulling a biohazard bag out of the first-aid kit and dropping the units in. The top of the bag turned red when he sealed it, the plastic melting itself closed. That bag was triple-reinforced, and it would take a Herculean effort to open it now that it was shut. Even so, he checked the seal and the seams of the bag before securing it in the saddlebag’s biohazardous materials compartment.
While he was busy with containment, I tipped the contents of the gas can into the tank. I’d been running close enough to empty that the can drained completely, which was scary. If we’d run out of gas during the chase…
Best not to think about it. I put the gas cap back on and shoved the empty can into the saddlebag. Shaun was starting to climb onto the back of the bike. I turned toward him, raising a warning finger. “What are we forgetting?”
He paused. “Uh… to go back to Santa Cruz for postcards?”
“Helmet.”
“We’re on a flat stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. We’re not going to have an accident.”
“Helmet.”
“You didn’t make me wear a helmet before.”
“We were being chased by zombies before. Since there are no zombies now, you’ll wear a helmet. Or you’ll walk the rest of the way to Watsonville.”
Rolling his eyes, Shaun unstrapped his helmet from the left-hand saddlebag and crammed it over his head. “Happy now?” he asked, voice muffled by the face shield.
“Ecstatic.” I put my own helmet back on. “Let’s go.”
The roads were clean the rest of the way to Watsonville. We didn’t see any other vehicles, which wasn’t surprising. More important, we didn’t see any of the infected. Call me dull, but I’d seen enough zombies for one day.
Our van was parked at the edge of town, a good twenty yards from any standing structures. Standard safety precautions; lack of cover makes it harder for things to sneak up on you. I pulled up in front of it and cut the engine. Shaun didn’t wait for the bike to come to a complete stop before he was leaping down and bounding for the door, yanking his helmet off as he shouted, “Buffy! How’s the footage?”
Ah, the enthusiasm of the young. Not that I’m much older than he is—neither of us came with an original birth certificate when we were adopted, but the doctors estimated me as being at least three weeks ahead of him. From the way he acts sometimes, you’d think it was a matter of years, not just an accident of birth order. I removed my helmet and gloves and slung them over the handlebars, before following at a more sedate pace.
The inside of our van is a testament to what you can do with a lot of time, a reasonable amount of money, and three years of night classes in electronics. And help from the Internet, of course; we’d never have figured out the wiring without people chiming in from places ranging from Oregon to Australia. Mom did the structural reinforcements and security upgrades, supposedly as a favor, but really to give her an excuse to try building back doors into our systems. Buffy disabled them all as quickly as they were installed. That hasn’t stopped Mom from trying.
After five years of work, we’ve managed to convert a mostly gutted Channel 7 news van into a state-of-the-art traveling blog center, with camera feeds, its own wireless tower, a self-sustaining homing device, and so many backup storage arrays that it makes my head hurt when I think about them too hard. So I don’t think about them at all. That’s Buffy’s job, along with being the perkiest, blondest, outwardly flakiest member of the team. And she does all four parts of her job very, very well.
Buffy herself was cross-legged in one of the three chairs crammed into the van’s remaining floor space, looking thoughtful as she held a headset up to one ear. Shaun was standing behind her, nearly jigging up and down in his excitement.
She didn’t seem to register my presence as I stepped into the van, but spoke as soon as the door was closed, saying, “Hey, Georgia,” in a dreamy, detached tone.
“Hey, Buffy,” I said, heading for the minifridge and pulling out a can of Coke. Shaun takes his caffeine hot, and I take mine cold. Call it our way of rebelling against similarity. “How’re we looking?”
Buffy flashed a quick thumbs-up, actually animated for a moment. “We’re looking good.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” I said.
Buffy’s real name is Georgette Meissonier. Like Shaun and me, she was born after the zombies became a fact of life, during the period when Georgia, Georgette, and Barbara were the three most common girl’s names in America. We are the Jennifers of our generation. Most of us just rolled over and took it. After all, George Romero is considered one of the accidental saviors of the human race, and it’s not like being named after him is uncool. It’s just, well, common. And Buffy has never been willing to be common when she can help it.
She was all cool professionalism when Shaun and I found her at an online job fair. That lasted about five minutes after we met in person. She introduced herself, then grinned and said, “I’m cute, blonde, and living in a world full of zombies. What do you think I should call myself?”
We looked at her blankly. She muttered something about a pre-Rising TV show and let it drop. Not that it matters, since as far as I’m concerned, as long as she keeps our equipment in working order, she can call herself whatever she damn well wants. Plus, having her on the team grants us an air of the exotic: She was born in Alaska, the last, lost frontier. Her family moved after the government declared the state impossible to secure and ceded it to the infected.
“Got it,” she announced, disconnecting the headset and leaning over to flick on the nearest video feedback screen. The image of Shaun holding back his decaying pal with the hockey stick flickered into view. No sound came from the van’s main speakers. A single moan can attract zombies from a mile away if you’re unlucky with your acoustics, and it’s not safe to soundproof in the field. Soundproofing works both ways, and zombies tend to surround structures on the off chance they might contain things to eat or infect. Opening the van doors to find ourselves surrounded by a pack we didn’t hear coming didn’t particularly appeal to any of us.
“The image is a little fuzzy, but I’ve filtered out most of the visual artifacts, and I can clean it further once I’ve had the chance to hit the source files. Georgia, thanks for remembering to put your helmet on before you started driving. The front-mount camera worked like a charm.”
To be honest, I hadn’t remembered that the camera was there. I’d been too focused on not cracking my skull open. Still, I nodded agreeably, taking a long drink of Coke before saying, “No problem. How many of the cameras kept feeding through the chase?”
“Three of the four. Shaun’s helmet didn’t come on until you were almost here.”
“Shaun didn’t have time to put on his helmet, or he would have ceased to have a head,” Shaun protested.
“Shaun needs to stop talking about himself in the third person,” Buffy said, and hit a button on her keyboard. The image was replaced by a close-up shot of the flickering lights on our blood tests. “I want to screenshot this for the main site. What do you think?”
“Whatever you say,” I said. The screen broadcasting our main external security camera was showing an abandoned, undisturbed landscape. Nothing moved in Watsonville. “You know I don’t care about the graphics.”
“And that’s why your ratings aren’t higher, George,” said Shaun. “I like the lights. Use them as a slow fade in tonight’s teaser, too—tack on something about, I don’t know, how close is too close, that whole old saw.”
“‘Close Encounters on the Edge of the Grave,’ ” I murmured, moving toward the screen. It was a little too unmoving out there. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I’ve learned to pay attention to my instincts. God knows Shaun and Buffy weren’t paying attention to anything but tomorrow’s headlines.
Shaun grinned. “I like it. Grayscale the image except for the lights and use that.”
“On it.” Buffy typed a quick note before shutting down the screen. “Have we got any more big plans for the afternoon, folks?”
“Getting out of here,” I said, turning back to the others. “I’m on the bike. I’ll take point, but we need to get back to civilization.”
Buffy blinked at me, looking baffled. She’s a Fictional; her style of blogging is totally self-contained, and she only sees the field when Shaun and I haul her out to work our equipment. Even then, she pretty much never leaves the van. It’s not her job to pay attention to anything that doesn’t live on a computer screen.
Shaun, on the other hand, sobered immediately. “Why?”
“There’s nothing moving out there.” I opened the back door, scanning the land more closely. It had taken me a few minutes—maybe too long—to realize what was wrong, but now that I’d seen it, it was obvious.
There should always be something moving in a town the size of Watsonville. Feral cats, rabbits, even herds of wild deer looking for the overgrown remains of what used to be gardens. We’ve seen everything from goats to somebody’s abandoned Shetland pony wandering through the remains of the old towns, living off the land. So where were they? There wasn’t as much as a squirrel in sight.
Shaun grimaced. “Crap.”
“Crap,” I agreed. “Buffy, grab your gear.”
“I’ll drive,” Shaun said, and started for the front of the van.
Buffy was looking between us with wide-eyed bafflement. “Okay, does somebody want to tell me what’s causing the evacuation?” she demanded.
“There aren’t any animals,” Shaun said, dropping into the driver’s seat.
I paused while yanking my gloves back on, taking pity, and replied, “Nothing clears the wildlife like the infected. We need to get out of here before we have—”
As if on cue, a low, distant moan came through the van’s back door, carried by the prevailing winds. I grimaced.
“—company,” Shaun and I finished, in unison.
“Race you home,” I called, and ducked out the door. Buffy slammed it behind me, and I heard all three bolts click home. Even if I screamed, they’d never let me back inside. That’s the protocol when you’re in the field. No matter how loudly you yell, they never let you in.
Not if they want to live, anyway.
There were no zombies in sight, but the moaning from the north and east was getting louder. I tightened the straps on my gloves, grabbed my helmet, and slung my leg over the bike’s still-warm seat. Inside the van, I knew Buffy would be checking her cameras, fastening her seatbelt, and trying to figure out why we were reacting so badly to zombies that probably weren’t even in range. If there’s really a God, she’s never going to know the answer to that one.
The van pulled out, bumping and shaking as it made its way onto the freeway. I gunned the bike’s engine and followed, pulling up alongside the van before moving out about ten feet ahead, where Shaun could see me and we could both watch the road for obstructions. It’s a simple safety formation, but it’s saved a lot of asses in the last twenty years. We rode like that, separated by a thin ribbon of broken road, all the way out of the valley, through the South Bay, and into the cool, welcoming air of Berkeley, California.
Home sweet zombie-free home.
… as he pressed his hand to her cheek, Marie could feel his flesh burning up from within, changing as the virus that slept in all of us awoke in her lover. She blinked back tears, licking suddenly dry lips before she managed to whisper, “I’m so sorry, Vincent. I never thought that it would end this way.”
“It doesn’t have to end this way for you,” he replied, and smiled, sorrow written in his still-bright eyes. “Get the hell out of here, Marie. There’s nothing in this wasteland but the dead. Go home. Live, and be happy.”
“It’s too late for that. It’s too late for me.” She held up the blood testing kit and watched his eyes widen as he took in the meaning of the single red light burning at the top. “It’s been too late since the attack.” Her own smile was as weak as his. “You called me the hyacinth girl. I guess I belong in the wasteland.”
“At least we’re damned together,” he said, and kissed her.
—From Love as a Metaphor, originally published in By the Sounding Sea, the blog of Buffy Meissonier, August 3, 2039
Shaun and I never met our parents’ biological son. He was a kindergarten student during the Rising, and he survived the initial wave thanks to our parents, who pulled him out of class as soon as the data started pointing to public schools as amplification flash points. They did everything they could to protect him from the threat of infection. Everyone assumed he’d be one of the lucky ones.
The people next door had two golden retrievers, each weighing well over forty pounds, putting them in the range where amplification becomes possible. One of them was bitten—it was never determined by what—and began conversion. No one saw it coming because it had never happened before. Phillip Anthony Mason was the first confirmed case of human Kellis-Amberlee conversion initiated by an animal.
This honor does not help my parents sleep at night.
I am aware that my stance on pet ownership legislation is not popular. People love dogs, people love horses, and they want to continue to keep them in private homes. I understand this. I also understand that animals want to be free, and that sick animals are twice as likely to slip their restraints and go looking for comfort. Eventually, “comfort” becomes “something to bite.” I support the Biological Mass Pet Ownership Restrictions, as do my parents. Were my brother alive today, he might feel different. But he’s not.
—From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, November 3, 2039
Three
Buffy’s neighborhood doesn’t allow nonresident vehicles to enter without running blood tests on all passengers, so we dropped her at the gate where she could get tested and head inside on foot. I don’t like pricking my fingers, and we were already looking at a second blood test when we reached the house. We live in an open neighborhood—one of the last in Alameda County—but our parents have to meet certain requirements if they want to keep their home-owner’s insurance, and until we can afford to move out on our own, we have to play along.
“I’ll upload the footage as soon as I finish cleaning it up,” Buffy promised. “Drop me a text when you hit the house, let me know you made it okay?”
“Sure, Buff,” I said. “Whatever you say.”
Buffy’s a great techie and a decent friend, but her ideas about safety are a little skewed, probably thanks to growing up in a high-security zone. She’s less worried in the field than she is in supposedly protected urban environments. While there are more attacks on an annual basis in cities than in rural areas, there are also a lot more large men with guns once you get away from the creeks and the cornfields. Given a choice between the two, I’m going to take the city every time.
“See you tomorrow!” she said, and waved to Shaun through the van’s front window before she turned to head for the guard station where she’d spend the next five minutes being checked for contamination. Shaun waved back and restarted the engine, backing the van away from the gate. That was my cue. I flashed a thumbs-up to show that I was good to go as I kicked my bike into a turn, leading the way back to Telegraph Avenue and into the tangled warren of suburban streets surrounding our house.
Like Santa Cruz, Berkeley is a college town, and we got swarmed during the Rising. Kellis-Amberlee hit the dorms, incubated, and exploded outward in an epidemic pattern that took practically everyone by surprise. “Practically” is the important word there. By the time the infection hit Berkeley, the first posts about activity in schools across the country were starting to show up online, and we had an advantage most college towns didn’t: We started with more than our fair share of crazy people.
See, Berkeley has always drawn the nuts and flakes of the academic world. That’s what happens when you have a university that offers degrees in both computer science and parapsychology. It was a city primed to believe any weird thing that came across the wire, and when all those arguably crazy people started hearing rumors about the dead rising from their graves, they didn’t dismiss them. They began gathering weapons, watching the streets for strange behavior and signs of sickness, and generally behaving like folks who’d actually seen a George Romero movie. Not everyone believed what they heard… but some did, and that turned out to be enough.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer when the first major waves of infection hit. More than half the population of Berkeley died over the course of six long days and nights, including the biological son of our adoptive parents, Phillip Mason, who was barely six years old. The things that happened here weren’t nice, and they weren’t pretty, but unlike many towns that started out with similar conditions—a large homeless population, a major school, a lot of dark, narrow, one-way streets—Berkeley survived.
Shaun and I grew up in a house that used to belong to the university. It’s located in an area that was judged “impossible to secure” when the government inspectors started getting their act together, and as a result, it was sold off to help fund the rebuilding of the main campus. The Masons didn’t want to live in the house where their son had died, and the security rating of the neighborhood meant they were able to get the property for a song. They finalized the adoptions for the two of us the day before they moved in, an “everything is normal” ratings stunt that eventually left them with a big house in the scary suburbs, two kids, and no idea what to do. So they did what came naturally: They gave more interviews, they wrote more articles, and they chased the numbers.
From the outside, they looked devoted to giving us the sort of “normal” childhood they remembered having. They never moved us to a gated neighborhood, they let us have pets that lacked sufficient mass for reanimation, and when public schools started requiring mandatory blood tests three times a day, they had us enrolled in a private school before the end of the week. There’s a semifamous interview Dad gave right after that transfer, where he said they were doing their best to make us “citizens of the world instead of citizens of fear.” Pretty words, especially coming from a man who regarded his kids as a convenient way to stay on top of the news feeds. Numbers start slipping? Go for a field trip to a zoo. That’ll get you right back to the top.
There were a few changes they couldn’t avoid, thanks to the government’s anti-infection legislation—blood tests and psych tests and all that fun stuff—but they did their best, and I’ll give them this much: A lot of the things they did for us weren’t cheap. They paid for the right to raise us the way that they did. Entertainment equipment, internal security, even home medical centers can be bought for practically nothing. Anything that lets you outside, from vehicles to gasoline to gear that doesn’t cut you off completely from the natural world… that’s where things get expensive. The Masons paid in everything but blood to keep us in a place where there were blue skies and open spaces, and I’m thankful, even if it was always about ratings and a boy we never knew.
The garage door slid open as we pulled into the driveway, registering the sensors Shaun and I wear around our neck. In case of viral amplification, the garage becomes the zombie equivalent of a roach motel: Our sensors get us in, but only a clean blood test and a successful voice check gets us out. If we ever fail those tests, we’ll be incinerated by the house defense system before we can do any further damage.
Mom’s armored minivan and the old Jeep Dad insists on driving to his job on campus were parked in their normal spots. I pulled over and killed the bike’s engine, removing my helmet as I started a basic postfield check of the machinery. I needed to see a mechanic; the ride through Santa Cruz had seriously damaged my shocks. Buffy’s cameras were still attached to the helmet and back of the bike. I pulled them off and shoved them into my left saddlebag, unsnapping it and slinging it over my shoulder as Shaun pulled in behind me.
Shaun got out of the van and reached the back door three steps before I did. “We made good time,” he said, positioning himself in front of the right-hand sensors.
“Sure did,” I said, and positioned myself on the left.
“Please identify yourselves,” said the bland voice of the house security system.
Most of the newer systems sound more like people than ours does. They’ll even make jokes with their owners, to keep them at ease. Psychological studies have shown that closing the gap between man and machine increases comfort and acceptance and prevents nervous breakdowns stemming from isolation anxiety—in short, people don’t get cabin fever as much when they think they have more people they can safely talk to. I think that’s bullshit. If you want to avoid cabin fever, go outside. Our machines have stayed mechanical, at least so far.
“Georgia Carolyn Mason,” said Shaun.
I smirked. “Shaun Phillip Mason.”
The light above the door blinked as the house checked our vocal intonations. We must have passed muster, because it spoke again: “Voice prints confirmed. Please read the phrase appearing on your display screen.”
Words appeared on my screen. I squinted to make them out through my sunglasses, and read, “Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy, too. Wouldn’t you?”
The words blinked out. I glanced at Shaun, but couldn’t quite see the words appearing on his screen before he was reciting them: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens. You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins. When will you pay me, say the bells of Old Bailey.”
The light over the door changed from red to yellow.
“Place your right hands on the testing pads,” commanded the security system. Shaun and I did as requested, pressing our hands against the metal panels set into the wall. The metal chilled beneath my palm a split second before there was a stinging sensation in my index finger. The light above the door began to flash, alternating red and yellow.
“Think we’re clean?” Shaun asked.
“If not, it’s been nice knowing you,” I said. Coming in together means that if one of us ever tests positive, that’s all she wrote; they won’t let anybody out of the garage until a cleanup crew arrives, and the chances of whoever comes up clean making it to the van before something happens aren’t good. Our next-door neighbor used to call Child Protective Services every six months because our folks wouldn’t stop us from coming in together. But what’s the point of life if you can’t take risks now and then, like coming into the damn house with your brother?
The light started flashing green instead of red, continuing to alternate with yellow for a few more seconds before yellow bowed out, leaving green to flash alone. The door unlocked, and the bland voice of the house said, “Welcome, Shaun and Georgia.”
“S’up, the house?” Shaun replied, removing his shoes and tossing them into the outdoor cleaning unit before he walked inside, hollering, “Hey, ’rents! We’re home!” Our parents hate being called “ ’rents.” I’m pretty sure that’s why he does it.
“And we survived!” I added, copying the gesture and following him through the garage door. It swung closed and locked itself behind me. The kitchen smelled like spaghetti sauce and garlic bread.
“Failure to die is always appreciated,” Mom said, entering the kitchen and putting an empty laundry basket on the counter. “You know the drill. Both of you, upstairs, and strip for sterilization.”
“Yes, Mom,” I said, picking up the basket. “Come, Shaun. The insurance bill calls us.”
“Yes, master,” he drawled. Ignoring Mom entirely, he turned and followed me up the stairs.
The house was a duplex before Mom and Dad had it converted back into a single-family home. Our bedrooms literally adjoin; there’s an inside door between them. It makes life easier when it’s time for editing and prep work, and it’s been like that all our lives. On the few occasions when I’ve had to try sleeping without Shaun in the next room, well, let’s just say I can go a long way on a six-pack of Coke.
I dropped the laundry basket in the hallway between our doors before going into my room and flicking the switch to turn on the overheads. We use low-wattage bulbs in the entire house, but I’ve abandoned white light entirely in my private space, preferring to live by the gleam of computer monitors and the comforting nonlight of black-light UV lamps. They can cause premature wrinkling if used extensively; what they can’t do is cause corneal damage, and I appreciate that.
“Shaun! Inside door!”
“Got it,” Shaun called. The connecting door slammed shut, and the band of light beneath it was cut off a second later as he slid the damper into place. Sighing with relief, I removed my sunglasses, forcing my eyes to open all the way. I’d been out in the sun for too long; even the UV lamps stung for a few seconds before my eyes adjusted and the room snapped into the sort of detailed focus most people only get in direct light.
“Retinal Kellis-Amberlee,” as it’s popularly called, is more properly referred to as “Acquired Kellis-Amberlee Optic Neuropathic Reservoir Condition.” I’ve never heard anyone call it that outside a hospital, and even there, it’s usually just “retinal KA.” Those good old reservoir conditions: One more way for the virus to make life more interesting for everybody. My pupils are permanently dilated and don’t contract in response to light, retinal scans are impossible, testing my vitreous and aqueous humors will always register a live infection, and best of all, my condition is advanced enough that my eyes don’t even water. The virus produces a protective film and keeps the eyes from drying out. My tear ducts are atrophied. The only upside? Absolutely stellar low-light vision.
I tossed my sunglasses into the biohazard disposal canister and started across the room. My living space shares a lot of features with the van, including the part where Buffy maintains about ninety percent of the equipment and I understand less than half of it. Flat-screen monitors take up most of the walls, and we moved the group servers into my wardrobe last year when Shaun decided he needed more space for his weapons. Whatever. It’s not like I was using it; I don’t wear anything that actually needs to be hung up. I belong to the Hunter S. Thompson School of Journalistic Fashion: If I have to think about it, I have no business wearing it.
When you get right down to it, about the only similarity between my room and the room of your stereotypical twentysomething woman is the full-length mirror next to the bed. There’s a wall dispenser mounted next to the mirror. I ripped loose a sheet of tear-away plastic and spread it on the floor, stepping onto it as I turned to face my reflection.
Hello, Georgia. Nice to see you’re not dead yet.
Slicking my sweat-soaked hair back from my face, I started studying my clothes for the telltale fluorescence that under the black lights would indicate traces of blood.
Shaun and I operate under Class A-15 blogging licenses: We’re cleared to report on events both inside and outside city limits, although we’re still not permitted to enter any zones with a hazard rating at or above Level 3. The zones start at Level 10, the code for any area with resident mammals of sufficient body mass to undergo Kellis-Amberlee amplification and reanimation. Humans count. Level 9 means those mammals are not entirely kept in confinement. Buffy’s neighborhood is considered a Level 10 hazard zone, which means it’s safe to let your children play outside, except for the part where it would instantly convert the zone to a Level 9. Our house is classified as a Level 7 hazard, possessing free-range mammals of sufficient body mass for full viral amplification, local wildlife capable of carrying blood or other bodily wastes onto the property, insufficiently secured borders, and windows more than a foot and a half in diameter. There’s legislation currently under review that would make it a federal offense to raise any child in a hazard zone above Level 8. I don’t expect it to pass. It frightens me that it exists at all.
It requires an A-10 blogging license to enter a Level 3 hazard zone with any prayer of being allowed to exit it. We can’t get those licenses or anything above until we turn twenty-five and pass a series of government-mandated tests, most of which center on the ability to make accurate headshots with a variety of firearms. That means no Yosemite for at least another two years. I’m fine with that. There’s plenty of news to be found in more populated areas.
Shaun feels different, but he’s an Irwin, and they thrive on wandering blindly into danger. All I’ve ever wanted to be is what I am—a Newsie. I’m happy this way. Danger is a side effect of what I do, not the reason behind it. That doesn’t mean danger throws up its hands and says “oh, sorry, Georgia, I won’t mess with you.” Contamination is always a risk when dealing with zombies, especially when you have the recently infected involved. The older infected are usually too concerned with keeping themselves from dissolving to worry about smearing you with their precious bodily fluids, but new ones are fresh enough to have fluid to spare. They’ll splatter you if they can manage it, and then count on the viral bricks filling their bloodstream to do the hard part for them. It’s not great as a hunting strategy, but as a way of spreading the infection it works better than any uninfected person wants it to.
Not that anyone left in the world is actually uninfected—that’s part of the problem. We call people who have succumbed to viral amplification “the infected,” like it changes the fact that the virus is inside every one of us, patiently waiting for the day it gets invited to take over. The Kellis-Amberlee virus can remain in its dormant state for decades, if not forever; unlike the people it infects, it can wait. One day you’re fine. The next day, your personal stockpile of virus wakes up, and you’re on the road to amplification, the death of the part of you that’s a thinking, feeling human being, and the birth of your zombie future. Calling zombies “the infected” creates an artificial feeling of security, like we can somehow avoid joining them. Well, guess what? We can’t.
Viral amplification primarily occurs under one of two conditions: the initial death of the host causing a disruption of the body’s nervous system and activating the virus already there, or contact with virus that has already switched over from “dormant” to “live.” Hence the real risk of engaging the zombies, because any hand-to-hand conflict is going to result in a minimum casualty rate of sixty percent. Maybe thirty percent of those casualties are going to occur in the actual combat, if you’re talking about people who know what they’re doing. I’ve seen videos of martial arts clubs and idiots with swords going up against the zombies in the Rising, and I’ll be among the first to admit that they’re damned impressive to watch. There’s this amazing contrast between the grace and speed of a healthy person and the shambling slowness of the zombie that just… It’s like seeing poetry come alive. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s sad, and it’s beautiful as hell.
And then the survivors go home, laughing and elated and mourning for their dead. They take off their armor, and they clean their weapons, and maybe one of them nicks his thumb on the edge of an arm guard or wipes his eyes with a hand that got a little too close to a leaking zombie. Live viral particles hit the bloodstream, the cascade kicks off, and amplification begins. In an average-sized human adult, full conversion happens inside of an hour and the whole thing starts again, without warning, without reprieve. The question “Johnny, is that you?” went from horror movie cliché to real-world crisis damn fast when people started facing the infected hand-to-hand.
The closest call I’ve ever had came when a zombie managed to spit a mouthful of blood in my face. If I hadn’t been wearing safety goggles over my sunglasses, I’d be dead. Shaun’s come closer than I have; I try not to ask anymore. I don’t really want to know.
My armor and pants were clean. I removed them and tossed them onto the plastic sheeting, performing the same check on my sweatshirt and thermal pants before stripping them off and adding them to the pile. A quick examination of my arms and legs revealed no unexpected smears or streaks of blood. I already knew I wasn’t wounded; I’d cleared two blood tests since the field. If I’d been so much as scratched, I’d have started amplification before we had hit Watsonville. My socks, bra, and underwear joined the rest. They hadn’t been exposed to the outside air. That didn’t matter; they went into a hazard zone. They were getting sterilized. There are a lot of folks who advocate for sterilization outside the home. They get shouted down by the people who want to keep it internal, since field sterilization—or even “front-yard chemical shower” sterilization—leaves the risk of recontamination before you reach a secure zone. So far, the groups have been able to keep things deadlocked and we’ve been able to keep doing our self-examinations in relative peace.
I stepped off the plastic sheet, folded it around my clothes, scooped it up, and carried it to the bedroom door, which I opened long enough to toss the whole bundle into the hamper. It would go through an industrial-grade bleaching guaranteed to neutralize any viral bodies clinging to the fabric, and the clothes would be ready to wear again by morning.
Even that brief blast of white light was enough to make my eyes burn. I scrubbed at them with the back of my hand as I turned toward the bathroom. Shaun’s door was still closed. I called, “Showering now!” A thump on the wall answered me.
Shaun and I share a private bathroom with its own fully modernized and airtight shower system. Another little requirement of the household insurance—since we leave safe zones all the time in order to do our jobs, we have to be able to prove we’ve been properly sterilized, and that means logged computer verification of our sterilizations. The bathroom started life as the closets of our respective bedrooms. Personally, I consider this a much better use of the space.
The bathroom lights switched to UV when my door opened. I walked over and pressed my hand to the shower’s keypad, saying, “Georgia Carolyn Mason.”
“Accessing travel records,” the shower replied. We don’t screw with the shower the way we screw with the house system. House security is kept at an absolute minimum, but the shower is governmentally required for journalist use, and we could get in serious trouble if the records don’t match up. The fines for posing a contamination risk are more than I could afford in six years of freelancing.
The shower door unsealed. “You have been exposed to a Level 4 hazard zone. Please enter the stall for decontamination and sterilization.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, and stepped in. The door shut behind me, locking with an audible hiss as the air lock seal engaged.
A stinging compound of antiseptic and bleach squirted from the bottommost nozzle on the wall, coating me with icy spray. I held my breath and closed my eyes, counting the seconds before it would stop. They can only legally bathe you in bleach for half a minute unless you’ve been in a Level 2 zone. At that point, they can keep dunking you until they’re sure the viral blocks are clean. Everyone knows it doesn’t do any good beyond the first thirty seconds, but that doesn’t stop people from being afraid.
Travel in a Level 1 zone means they’re not legally obligated to do anything but shoot you.
The bleach stopped. The upper nozzle came on, spraying out water almost hot enough to burn. I cringed but turned my face toward it, reaching for the soap.
“Clean,” I said, once the shampoo was out of my hair. I keep it short for a variety of reasons. Most have to do with making myself harder to grab, but showering faster is also a definite motivation. If I wanted it to get any longer, I’d have to start using conditioner and a variety of other hair-care chemicals to make up for the damage the bleach does every day. My one true concession to vanity is dyeing it back to the color nature gave me every few weeks. I look terrible blonde.
“Acknowledged,” said the shower, and the water turned off, replaced by jets of air from all four sides. The one good part of our shower system. I was dry in a matter of minutes, leaving only a little residual dampness in my hair. The door unsealed, and I stepped out into the bathroom, grabbing for my bottle of lotion.
Bleach and human skin aren’t good buddies. The solution: acid-based lotion, usually formulated around some sort of citrus, to help repair the damage the bleaching does. Professional swimmers did it pre-Rising, and everybody does it now. It also helps to lend a standardized scent tag to people who have scrubbed themselves recently. My lotion was as close to scentless as possible, and it still carried a faint, irritating hint of lemon, like floor cleanser.
I worked the lotion into my skin and retreated to my own room, shouting, “Shaun, it’s all yours!” I got the door closed as his was opening, spilling white light into the room. That’s not uncommon. We’re pretty good about our timing.
I grabbed my robe from the back of the door and shrugged it on as I walked to the main desk. The monitor detected my proximity and switched on, displaying the default menu screen. Our main system never goes off-line. That’s where group mail is routed, sorted according to which byline and category it’s meant for—news to me, action to Shaun, or fiction, which goes straight to Buffy—and delivered to the appropriate in-boxes. I get the administrative junk that Shaun’s too much of a jerk and Buffy’s too much of a flake to deal with. Technically, we’re a collective, but functionally? It’s all me.
Not that I object to the responsibility, except when it fills my in-box to the point of inspiring nightmares. It’s nice to know that our licenses are paid up, we’re in good with the umbrella network that supports our accreditation, and nobody’s suing us for libel. We make pretty consistent ratings, with Shaun and Buffy hitting top ten percent for the Bay Area at least twice a month and me holding steady in the thirteen to seventeen percent bracket, which isn’t bad for a strict Newsie. I could increase my numbers if I went multimedia and started giving my reports naked, but unlike some people, I’m still in this for the news.
Shaun, Buffy, and I all publish under our own blogs and bylines, which is why I get so damn much mail, but those blogs are published under the umbrella of Bridge Supporters, the second-largest aggregator site in Northern California. We get readers and click-through traffic by dint of being listed on their front page, and they get a cut of our profits from all secondary-market and merchandise sales. We’ve been trying to strike out on our own for a while now, to go from being beta bloggers in an alpha world to baby alphas with a domain to defend. It’s not easy. You need some story or feature that’s big enough and unique enough to guarantee you’ll take your readership with you, and our numbers haven’t been sustainably high enough to interest any sponsors.
My in-box finished loading. I began picking through the messages, moving with a speed that was half long practice and half the desire to get downstairs to dinner. Spam; misrouted critique of Buffy’s latest poem cycle, “Decay of the Human Soul: I through XII”; a threatened lawsuit if we didn’t stop uploading a picture of someone’s infected and shambling uncle—all the usual crap. I reached for my mouse, intending to minimize the program and get up, when a message toward the bottom of the screen caught my eye.
URGENT—PLEASE REPLY—YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED.
I would have dismissed that as spam, except for the first word: urgent. People stopped flinging that word around like confetti after the Rising. Somehow, the potential for missing the message that zombies just ate your mom made offering to give people a bigger dick seem less important. Intrigued, I clicked the title.
I was still sitting there staring at the screen five minutes later when Shaun opened the door to my room and casually stepped inside. A flood of white light accompanied him, stinging my eyes. I barely flinched. “George, Mom says if you don’t get downstairs, she’ll… George?” There was a note of real concern in his voice as he took in my posture, my missing sunglasses, and the fact that I wasn’t dressed. “Is everything okay? Buffy’s okay, isn’t she?”
Wordless, I gestured to the screen. He stepped up behind me and fell silent, reading over my shoulder. Another five minutes passed before he said, in a careful, subdued tone, “Georgia, is that what I think it is?”
“Uh-huh.”
“They really… It’s not a joke?”
“That’s the federal seal. The registered letter should be here in the morning.” I turned to face him, grinning so broadly that it felt like I was going to pull something. “They picked our application. They picked us. We’re going to do it.
“We’re going to cover the presidential campaign.”
My profession owes a lot to Dr. Alexander Kellis, inventor of the misnamed “Kellis flu,” and Amanda Amberlee, the first individual successfully infected with the modified filovirus that researchers dubbed “Marburg Amberlee.” Before them, blogging was something people thought should be done by bored teenagers talking about how depressed they were. Some folks used it to report on politics and the news, but that application was widely viewed as reserved for conspiracy nuts and people whose opinions were too vitriolic for the mainstream. The blogosphere wasn’t threatening the traditional news media, not even as it started having a real place on the world stage. They thought of us as “quaint.” Then the zombies came, and everything changed.
The “real” media was bound by rules and regulations, while the bloggers were bound by nothing more than the speed of their typing. We were the first to report that people who’d been pronounced dead were getting up and noshing on their relatives. We were the ones who stood up and said “yes, there are zombies, and yes, they’re killing people” while the rest of the world was still buzzing about the amazing act of ecoterrorism that released a half-tested “cure for the common cold” into the atmosphere. We were giving tips on self-defense when everybody else was barely beginning to admit that there might be a problem.
The early network reports are preserved online, over the protests of the media conglomerates. They sue from time to time and get the reports taken down, but someone always puts them up again. We’re never going to forget how badly we were betrayed. People died in the streets while news anchors made jokes about people taking their zombie movies too seriously and showed footage they claimed depicted teenagers “horsing around” in latex and bad stage makeup. According to the time stamps on those reports, the first one aired the day Dr. Matras from the CDC violated national security to post details on the infection on his eleven-year-old daughter’s blog. Twenty-five years after the fact his words—simple, bleak, and unforgiving against their background of happy teddy bears—still send shivers down my spine. There was a war on, and the ones whose responsibility it was to inform us wouldn’t even admit that we were fighting it.
But some people knew and screamed everything they understood across the Internet. Yes, the dead were rising, said the bloggers; yes, they were attacking people; yes, it was a virus; and yes, there was a chance we might lose because by the time we understood what was going on, the whole damn world was infected. The moment Dr. Kellis’s cure hit the air, we had no choice but to fight.
We fought as hard as we could. That’s when the Wall began. Every blogger who died during the summer of ’14 is preserved there, from the politicos to the soccer moms. We’ve taken their last entries and collected them in one place, to honor them, and to remember what they paid for the truth. We still add people to the Wall. Someday, I’ll probably post Shaun’s name there, along with some lighthearted last entry that ends with “See you later.”
Every method of killing a zombie was tested somewhere. A lot of the time, the people who tested it died shortly afterward, but they posted their results first. We learned what worked, what to do, and what to watch for in the people around us. It was a grassroots revolution based on two simple precepts: survive however you could, and report back whatever you learned because it might keep somebody else alive. They say that everything you ever needed to know, you learned in kindergarten. What the world learned that summer was “share.”
Things were different when the dust cleared. Some people might find it petty to say “especially where the news was concerned,” but if you ask me, that’s where the real change happened. People didn’t trust regulated news anymore. They were confused and scared, and they turned to the bloggers, who might be unfiltered and full of shit, but were fast, prolific, and allowed you to triangulate on the truth. Get your news from six or nine sources and you can usually tell the bullshit from the reality. If that’s too much work, you can find a blogger who does your triangulation for you. You don’t have to worry about another zombie invasion going unreported because someone, somewhere, is putting it online.
The blogging community divided into its current branches within a few years of the Rising, reacting to swelling ranks and a changing society. You’ve got Newsies, who report fact as untainted by opinion as we can manage, and our cousins, the Stewarts, who report opinion informed by fact. The Irwins go out and harass danger to give the relatively housebound general populace a little thrill, while their more sedate counterparts, the Aunties, share stories of their lives, recipes, and other snippets to keep people happy and relaxed. And, of course, the Fictionals, who fill the online world with poetry, stories, and fantasy. They have a thousand branches, all with their own names and customs, none of them meaning a damn thing to anyone who isn’t a Fictional. We’re the all-purpose opiate of the new millennium: We report the news, we make the news, and we give you a way to escape when the news becomes too much to handle.
—From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, August 6, 2039
Four
Presidential campaigns have traditionally been attended by “pet journalists” selected to follow the campaign and report on everything from the bright beginning to the sometimes-bitter end. The Rising didn’t change that. Candidates announce their runs for the big chair, pick up their little flock of television, radio, and print reporters, and hit the road.
This year’s presidential election is different, largely because one of the lead candidates, Senator Peter Ryman—born, raised, and elected in Wisconsin—is the first man to run for office who was under eighteen during the summer of ’14. He remembers the feeling of being betrayed by the news, of watching people die because they trusted the media to tell them the truth. So when he announced his candidacy, he made it a point that he wouldn’t just be inviting the usual crew to follow his campaign; he’d also invite a group of bloggers to walk the campaign trail with him from before the first primary all the way to the election, assuming he made it that far.
It was a bold move. It was a huge strike for the legitimacy of Internet news. Maybe we’re licensed journalists now, with all the insurance costs and restrictions that implies, but we’re still sneered at by certain organizations, and we can have trouble getting to information from a lot of the “mainstream” agencies. Having a presidential candidate acknowledge us was an amazing step forward. Of course, he was only going to allow three bloggers to come along. All of them had to have their Class A-15 licenses before they could even apply; if you were in the process of qualifying, your application would be thrown out without any sort of review.
Most of the bloggers we know applied, either singly or in groups, and we wanted that posting so bad that we could taste it. It was our ticket to the big leagues. Buffy had been operating under a Class B-20 license for years; as a Fictional, she didn’t need the clearance for field work, political reporting, or biohazard zones, and so she’d never seen the point in paying the license fees or taking the tests. Shaun and I rushed her through her A-level tests and classifications so fast that she just looked sort of stunned when they handed her the upgraded license. We sent in our application the next day.
Shaun was sure we’d get it. I was sure we wouldn’t. Now, still staring at my monitor, Shaun said, “George?”
“Yeah?”
“You owe me twenty bucks.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, before standing and throwing my arms around his neck. Shaun responded by whooping, putting his arms around my waist, and lifting me off the ground in order to whirl me around the room.
“We got the job!” he shouted.
“We got the job!” I shouted back.
After that, we devolved to shouting the words together, Shaun still swinging me in a circle, until the bedroom intercom crackled on and Dad’s voice demanded, “Are you two making that racket for a reason?”
“We got the job!” we shouted, in unison.
“Which job?”
“The big job!” Shaun said, putting me down and grinning at the intercom like he thought it could see him. “The biggest big job in the history of big jobs!”
“The campaign,” I said, aware that the grin on my face was probably just as big and stupid as the grin on Shaun’s. “We got the posting for the presidential campaign.”
There was a long pause before the intercom crackled again and Dad said, “You kids get dressed. I’ll get your mother. We’re going out.”
“But dinner—”
“Can go into the fridge. If you two are going to go stalk politicians all over the country, we’re going out for dinner first. Call Buffy and see if she wants to come. And that’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” said Shaun, saluting the intercom. It clicked off and he turned on me, holding out his right hand. “Pay up.”
I pointed to the door. “Get out. There’s about to be nudity, and you’ll just complicate things.”
“Finally, adult content! Should I turn the webcams on? We can have a front-page feed in less than five—” I grabbed my pocket recorder and flung it at his head. He ducked, grinning again. “—minutes. I’ll go get some nicer clothes on. You can call the Buff one.”
“Out,” I said again, lips twitching as I fought a smile.
He walked back to the door between our rooms, stepping through before he shot back, “Wear a skirt, and I’ll release you from your debts.”
He managed to close the door before I found anything else to throw.
Shaking my head, I moved to the dresser, saying, “Phone, dial Buffy Meissonier, home line. Keep dialing until she picks up.” Buffy has a tendency to leave her phone on vibrate and ignore it while she “follows her muse,” which is basically a fancy way of saying “screws around online, writes a really depressing poem or short story, posts it, and makes three times what I do in click-through revenue and T-shirt sales.” Not that I’m bitter or anything. The truth will make you free, but it won’t make you particularly wealthy. I knew that when I chose my profession.
Playing with dead things is a little more lucrative, but Shaun doesn’t make enough to support us both—not yet, anyway—and he isn’t willing to move out without me. A lifetime spent within arm’s reach and counting primarily on each other has left us a little dependent on one another’s company. In an earlier, zombie-free era, this would have been dubbed “co-dependence” and resulted in years of therapy, culminating in us hating each other’s guts. Adoptive siblings aren’t supposed to treat each other like they’re the center of the world.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, that was an attitude for a different world. Here and now, sticking with the people who know you best is the most guaranteed way of staying alive. Shaun won’t leave the house until I do, and when we go, we’ll be going together.
By the time Buffy picked up her phone, I had actually managed to find a dark gray tweed skirt that not only fit, but that I was willing to wear in a public place. I was digging for a top when the line clicked, and she said, peevishly, “I was writing.”
“You’re always writing, unless you’re reading, screwing with something mechanical, or masturbating,” I replied. “Are you wearing clothes?”
“Currently,” she said, irritation fading into confusion. “Georgia, is that you?”
“It ain’t Shaun.” I pulled on a white button-down shirt, jamming the hem under the waistband of my skirt. “We’ll be there to pick you up in fifteen. ‘We’ being me, Shaun, and the ’rents. They’re taking the whole crew to dinner. It’s just them trying to piggy-back on our publicity for some rating points, but right now, failing to care.”
Buffy isn’t as slow on the uptake as she sometimes seems. Her voice suddenly tight with suppressed excitement, she asked, “Did we get it?”
“We got it,” I confirmed. Her ear-splitting shriek of joy was enough to make me wince, even after it had been reduced by the phone’s volume filters. Smiling, I pulled a crumpled black blazer out of my drawer and shrugged it on before grabbing a fresh pair of sunglasses from the stack on the dresser. “So we’re picking you up in fifteen. Deal?”
“Yes! Yes, yes, deal, hallelujah, yes!” she babbled. “I have to change! And tell my roommates! And change! And see you! Bye!”
There was another click. My phone announced, “The call has been terminated. Would you like to place another call?”
“No, I’m good,” I said.
“The call has been terminated,” the phone repeated. “Would you like—”
I sighed. “No, thank you. Disconnect.” The phone beeped and turned itself off. With the strides they’ve been making in voice-recognition software, you’d think they could teach the stuff to acknowledge colloquial English. One step at a time, I suppose.
Mom, Dad, and Shaun were in the living room when I came breezing down the stairs, shoving my handheld MP3 recorder into the loop at my belt. The backup recorder in my watch has a recording capacity of only thirty megabytes, and that’s barely enough for a good interview. My handheld can hold up to five terabytes. If I need more than that before I can get to a server to dump the contents, I’d better be bucking for a Pulitzer.
Mom was wearing her best green dress, the one that appears in all her publicity shots, and Dad was in his usual professorial ensemble—tweed jacket, white shirt, khaki slacks. Put them next to Shaun, who was wearing a button-down shirt with his customary cargo pants, and they looked just like the last family publicity picture, even down to Mom’s overstuffed handbag with all the guns inside it. She takes advantage of her A-5 blogging license in ways that boggle the mind, but it’s the government’s fault for leaving the loopholes there. If they want to give anybody with a journalist’s license ranked Class A-7 or above the right to carry concealed weapons when entering any zone that’s had a breakout within the last ten years, that’s their problem. At least Mom’s responsible about it. She always secures the safety on any gun that she’s planning to take into a restaurant.
“Buffy’s going to be ready in fifteen,” I said, pushing my sunglasses more solidly up the bridge of my nose. Some of the newer models have magnetic clamps instead of earpieces. They won’t come off without someone intentionally disengaging them. I would have been tempted to invest in a pair if they weren’t expensive enough to require decontamination and reuse.
“The sun’s going down; you could wear your contacts,” Dad said, sounding amused. He’s good at sounding amused. He’s been sounding professionally amused since before the Rising, back when he used his campus webcast to keep biology students around the Berkeley area paying attention and doing their homework. Eventually, that same webcast let him coordinate pockets of survivors, moving them from place to place while reporting on the movement of the local zombie mobs. A lot of people owe their lives to that warm, professional-sounding voice. He could’ve become a news anchor with any network in the world after the dust cleared. He stayed at Berkeley instead, and became one of the pioneers of the evolving blogger society.
“I could also stick a fork in my eye, but where would be the fun in that?” I walked over to Shaun, offering a thin smile. He studied my skirt and then flashed me a thumbs-up sign. I had passed the all-judging court of my brother’s fashion sense, which, cargo pants aside, is more advanced than mine will ever be.
“I called Bronson’s. They have a table for us on the patio,” Mom said, smiling beatifically. “It’s a beautiful night. We should be able to see the entire city.”
Shaun glanced at me, murmuring, “We let Mom pick the restaurant.”
I smirked. “I can see that.”
Bronson’s is the last open-air restaurant in Berkeley. More, they’re the last open-air restaurant in the entire Bay Area to be located on a hillside and surrounded by trees. Eating there is what I imagine it was like to go out to dinner before the constant threat of the infected drove most people away from the wilderness. The entire place is considered a Level 6 hazard zone. You can’t even get in without a basic field license, and they require blood tests before they let you leave. Not that there’s any real danger: It’s surrounded by an electric fence too high for the local deer to jump over, and floodlights click on if anything larger than a rabbit moves in the woods. The only serious threat comes from the chance that an abnormally large raccoon might go into conversion, make it over the fence before it lost the coordination to climb trees, and drop down inside. That’s never happened.
Not that this stops Mom from hoping to be there when it near-inevitably does. She was one of the first true Irwins, and old habits die hard, when they die at all. Shouldering her purse, she gave me a disapproving look. “Could you at least pretend to comb your hair?” she asked. “It looks like you have a hedgehog nesting on your head.”
“That’s the look I was going for,” I said. Mom is blessed with sleek, well-behaved ash blonde hair that started silvering gracefully when Shaun and I were ten. Dad has practically no hair left, but when he had it, it was a muted Irish red. I, on the other hand, have thick, dark brown hair that comes in two settings: long enough to tangle, and short enough to look like I haven’t brushed it in years. I prefer the short version.
Shaun’s hair is a little lighter than mine, but still brown, and when he keeps it short, no one can tell that his is straight and mine wants to curl. It helps us get away with just saying we’re twins, rather than going into the whole messy explanation.
Mom sighed. “You two realize the odds are good that someone already knows you got the assignment, and you’re going to get swarmed tonight, yes?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I said. “Someone” probably received a quick phone call from one or both of our parents, and “someone” was probably already waiting at the restaurant. We grew up with the ratings game.
“Looking forward to it,” said Shaun. He’s better at playing nice with our parents than I am. “Every site that runs my picture tonight is five more foxy ladies around the country realizing that they want to hit the road with me.”
“Pig,” I said, and punched him in the arm.
“Oink,” he said. “It’s all right, we know the drill. Smile pretty for the cameras, show off my scars, let George and Dad look wise and trustworthy, pose for anyone who asks, and don’t try to answer any questions with actual content.”
“Whereas I don’t smile unless forced, stay behind my sunglasses, and make a point of how incisive and hard-hitting every report I approve for release is going to be,” I said, dryly. “We let Buffy babble to her heart’s content about the poetic potential of traveling around the country with a bunch of political yahoos who think we’re idiots.”
“And we make the front page of every alpha site in the country, and our ratings go up nine points overnight,” Shaun said.
“Thus allowing us to announce the formation of our own site early next week, just before heading out on the campaign trail.” I slid my sunglasses down my nose, ignoring the way the light stung as I offered a brief smile. “We’ve thought about this as much as you have.”
“Maybe more,” Shaun added.
Dad laughed. “Face it, Stacy, they’ve got it covered. Kids, just in case there isn’t another chance for me to tell you this, your mother and I are very proud of you. Very proud of you, indeed.”
Liar. “We’re pretty proud of us, too,” I said.
“Well, then,” Shaun said, clapping his hands together. “This is touching and all, but come on—let’s go eat.”
Getting out of the house is easier with our parents in tow, largely because Mom’s minivan is kept ready at all times. Food, water, a CDC-certified biohazard containment unit for temperature-sensitive medications, a coffeemaker, steel-reinforced windows… We could be trapped inside that thing for a week, and we’d be fine. Except for the part where we’d go crazy from stress and confinement and kill each other before rescue came. When Shaun and I go into the field, we need to check our gear, sometimes twice, to make sure it’s not going to let us down. Mom just grabs her keys.
Buffy was waiting at her neighborhood guard station, dressed in an eye-popping combination of tie-dyed leggings and knee-length glitter tunic, with star-and-moon hologram clips in her hair. Anyone who didn’t know her would have thought she was completely devoid of sense, fashion or common. That’s what she was aiming for. Buffy travels with more hidden cameras than Shaun and I combined. As long as people are busy staring at her hair, they don’t wonder why she’s so careful about pointing the tiny jewels she has pasted to her nails in their direction.
She waved and grabbed her duffel bag when the van pulled up. Then she ran to hop into the back with Shaun and me. The footage of that moment would be on the site within the hour.
“Hey, Georgia. Hey, Shaun—good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Mason,” she chirped, buckling herself in while Shaun slammed the door. “I just finished watching your trip to Colma, Mrs. Mason. Really great stuff. I would never have thought to elude a bunch of zombies by climbing a high-dive platform.”
“Why, thank you, Georgette,” said Mom.
“Thrill as Buffy kisses ass,” Shaun said, deadpan. Buffy shot him a poisonous look, and he just laughed.
Content that all was right with the world, I settled back in my seat, folded my arms across my chest, and closed my eyes, letting the chatter in the van wash over me without registering it. It had been a long day, and it was nowhere near over.
When blogging first emerged as a major societal trend, it was news rendered anonymous. Rather than trusting something because Dan Rather looked good on camera, you trusted things because they sounded true. The same went for reports of personal adventures, or people writing poetry, or whatever else folks felt like putting out there for the world to see; you got no context on who created it, and so you judged the work on the basis of what it actually was. That changed when the zombies came, at least for the people who went professional. These days, bloggers don’t just report the news; they create it, and sometimes, they become it. Landing the position of pet bloggers for Senator Ryman’s presidential campaign? That definitely counts as becoming the news.
That’s part of why Shaun and Buffy keep me around. My journalistic integrity is unquestioned by our peers, and when we make the jump to alpha—the suddenly feasible jump to alpha—that’s going to cement our credibility. Shaun and Buffy will bring in the readers. I’ll make it okay for them to trust us. They just have to deal with my depressed personal ratings because part of what makes me so credible is the fact that my news is free from passion, opinion, and spin. I do op-ed, but for the most part, what you’ll get from me is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
So help me God.
Shaun elbowed me when we reached Bronson’s. I slid my sunglasses back into position and opened my eyes.
“Status?” I asked.
“A least four visible cameras. Probably twelve to fifteen, all told.”
“Leaks?”
“That many cameras, at least six sites already know.”
“Got it. Buffy?”
“Taking point,” she said, and straightened, putting on her best camera-ready smile. My parents exchanged amused looks in the front seat.
