by Mira Grant
He sounded so matter-of-fact that I wanted to throw my arms around him and hug him until he couldn’t breathe. No matter what else was going on in the world, I could always count on Ben to look at the facts of the situation before he made up his mind. “Third row back from the camera, see the woman in the bright orange blazer? Bad perm, looks like she’s wearing one of Mat’s eye shadow designs?”
“Got her.”
“Now look at this.” I dragged and dropped another video, splicing it into the space next to the first. “Blazer’s gone, but she’s got the same makeup on, see? It’s just smudged. She must have used the stuff that doesn’t come off unless you use paint thinner on your face.”
Ben’s eyes widened in slow horror. “This is the same woman.”
“Not just her. I’ve identified almost all the zombies from the first mob as being part of that rally—sixteen total, which means some of the others probably were as well. It was held three days before the convention. One of their buses never reported back. I think someone hijacked and infected them, then released them out into the woods. Look at the zombies. It took me a while to see it, because I wasn’t looking right. You see a zombie and that’s it, it’s a zombie, it’s a problem but it’s not a person, yeah? You’re not trying to figure out their story. You already know their story.”
“Ash, I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“None of them are missing any pieces,” I said. “Look at their arms and throats and faces. Those are the spots most often bitten during initial attacks, but none of these people have been bitten. We have some scratches and bruises, which are consistent with infected individuals being held in an enclosed space. They’re also consistent with roaming around in the woods. There’s one male with a piece missing from his shoulder, but it looks like a feeding bite—they didn’t have enough to eat, so a stronger zombie took a chunk out of him. There’s no defensive tearing. He didn’t fight back, because he was already dead when that happened. There is no visible reason for these people to have become infected. I’ll give you one heart attack victim in a group that size. Sixteen? No. That strains credulity.”
“What about the other zombies?” asked Ben.
“You mean mob number two? Dropping you another video.” I dragged, released, and said, “Chase took this one. It’s a political protest about fracking in Athens-Limestone County. Seems some people want to see what they can get out of the ground, but doing so would destroy the last community pumpkin patch in Alabama. They take their Halloweens very seriously there, hence the declaration of a gourd farm as a historical landmark, which allows them to operate it independent of the public health and safety laws that shut all the other pumpkin patches down. They still trick-or-treat in Athens. It’s a major tourist destination, because it’s the last ‘all-American Halloween experience’ in the country. Again, look at their faces, and then compare them to this video footage of mob number two.”
I dropped the file into the window. I waited. Ben stared, first at his screen and then at me.
“Same situation?”
“You mean the lack of obvious infection points? Yeah. And again, the protest was held a few days before the convention, and a bus full of protestors disappeared on the way back to the lot where they’d stowed their cars.” I shook my head. “Local police were looking, but not very hard. They had the whole Democratic National Convention rolling into town. They had bigger things to worry about, things that would mean tax dollars and tourism and positive media attention for their city. Some people who didn’t know how to read a map barely rated a search party.”
“So you’re saying two busloads of people were abducted, infected, held for at least two days, and then released into the woods to spoil your party. Aislinn, I know you’re upset about what happened, and I know all this business with Audrey is making you tense, but don’t you think you might be stretching a bit?” Ben frowned. “I absolutely buy that these attacks are a setup, but this one would require way too much work to put together.”
“They buried the dead in Portland, and left them for us to find,” I said doggedly. “They spiked the pancake makeup at Wagman’s fund-raiser, and when I was talking to Jody—one of Blackburn’s Irwins—after the attack, she mentioned that they’d had trouble, too. Something’s going on, Ben. Something bad. This isn’t me being paranoid, although if I were going to start, I might point out that several of these attacks have focused on taking out the candidate’s media team as well as the candidate. Social media and Internet news are not friends of people who want things to stay hidden. We never have been. If I were trying to kill someone without getting caught, I’d absolutely focus on killing the people standing nearby with cameras. It would be the only way to have half a prayer of keeping things secret.”
“You’re connecting several attacks with no obvious common threads,” said Ben.
“Senator Ryman’s family farm was the site of an outbreak as he was accepting the nomination to run for his party,” I said. “Governor Kilburn doesn’t have any family to go after. There’s nothing to use to make her sympathetic the way that losing a daughter makes him sympathetic. But killing a bunch of Irwins outside? Especially when I’m there, and I have a track record that involves scrambling fast responses to bad situations? The attack makes her look good. Either she loses a member of her team, or that team member scrambles a response that gets people out alive. It’s win-win for public approval.”
“She was genuinely upset when she heard what was going on, Ash. Surely you’re not implying—”
I put up a hand to cut him off. “No, I’m not. She doesn’t know what’s happening any more than the rest of us do. But I think someone is using a lot of different tactics to get the same end result: a candidate who looks sympathetic, like they’ve been personally touched by Kellis-Amberlee and will understand the woes and fears of the American people. Whoever it is either can’t or won’t fix the election, so they’re tinkering on both sides. That’s why all the viable candidates have been attacked at least once, even if no one’s connecting the dots. Zombie outbreaks are still too common for people to see this as the hazard that it is.”
“York wasn’t attacked,” said Ben.
“I’m a more viable candidate than York, and I can’t legally run,” I said. “The man never left his house. Not once during the whole process. It was always a grandstand for him, and he was never going to get the nomination. No, the focus was on the candidates who mattered.”
“We don’t know whether there was an attack on Tate, either,” insisted Ben.
“Wagman had a better shot at the nomination than Tate did,” I said. “People want to make it out like it was always going to be either Tate or Ryman, but that’s not what the polling data says. You know that, and if you don’t, it’s because you bought into the whole ‘Wagman’s a self-obsessed whore’ narrative that some of your colleagues were trying to sell. I thought better of you than that. I thought you liked looking at the facts.”
“I have been looking at the facts!” protested Ben, cheeks darkening with embarrassment. “There is some really strong evidence that Wagman plays on her sexuality for power, like say, showing up for work wearing nothing but frilly lace and a smile. If it’s not all right for men to do it, then it’s not all right for women to do it.”
“It’s not right for anyone to be forced to weaponize sexuality, or to take choices away from someone else, but are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that by keeping the promises she made when she was elected, Wagman made herself less trustworthy as a politician?” I shook my head. “This isn’t about feminism or the men’s rights movement or anything else like that. This is about the fact that she said ‘if you elect me, I will do this,’ and when they elected her, she did it. How many politicians can you say that about? Her poll numbers were always good, because even the people who hated what she stood for knew she’d do what she promised. The Republican race was Wagman or Ryman, with Tate in a close third, just like the Democratic race was Kilburn or Black
burn. Honestly, I’d be happier if Ryman had tapped Wagman as his VP. At least then we might not be getting an isolationist zealot that close to the Oval Office.”
I glared at Ben. Ben glared back. Then, to my surprise and relief, he laughed.
“I’ve missed fighting with you,” he said, turning his attention back to his screen. “You’ve been so wrapped up with looking through all this footage that you’ve barely spoken to me in days. Good job, by the way. You might have a future in Factual News.”
“If I had anything to throw at you right now, I would throw it,” I said gravely. “Please assume that you’re under siege from a barrage of flying objects even as we speak.”
“Ouch, ouch, please stop,” he deadpanned. Then he sobered. “To recap, you’re saying that attacks on all four of the major candidates were staged to make them more relatable to the American people. That implies that someone, somewhere, doesn’t care who winds up being elected; they just care about how that person will be regarded, and whether that person will be sympathetic toward the infected.”
“It’s sort of hard to stay a ‘soft on zombies’ politician after they’ve tried to chew your face off a time or two,” I said. “Even people who started out saying that they’d like to improve conditions in the research facilities, and increase the size of the fenced-off hazard areas, well. A change in that attitude makes plenty of sense after the dead have tried to get a chunk or two out of them, yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Ben. “Have you shared this data with anyone?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I wanted to run it all through you, and be sure that I wasn’t missing something. You’re the first.”
“Not quite,” said a voice from behind me. Ben and I turned to see John standing in the bedroom door. He was clothed; either he’d been awake for a while, or he’d taken to sleeping with his pants on. It was difficult to say which I thought was more likely.
He looked almost sad. “I heard everything you said.”
“That’s a nice trick, since I know that door was closed when I started.” I kept my voice light, but alarm bells were sounding at the back of my head. There was something about John’s eyes that I didn’t like one bit, something cold and distant and oddly regretful. If the eyes were the windows to the soul, his were filled with broken glass and cobwebs. “You got a listening device on us, Johnny-boy?”
“Yes,” said John, startling both me and Ben into silence. “I got access to plant the bugs weeks ago. This is the first time you’ve used the keywords to activate them. The trick to proper data scanning isn’t to flag every instance of a trigger; that gives you too much data to be useful. It’s to flag the third within a short period of time. That’s when you know you’ve found something worth listening in on. You just had to go and analyze that data, didn’t you, Mrs. North?”
“Wait,” said Ben. “You actually bugged our RV? You’re not joking?”
“You should really sweep for listening devices more than once a year,” said John. “Don’t you people have corporate espionage in your little industry?”
“We swept yesterday. How the hell did you plant bugs that Mat couldn’t find?”
Ben half-rose. “This can’t be happening.”
“Sit down,” said John.
Ben sat.
“I’ve got nothing for anyone to listen in on,” I said. John was eight feet away, give or take; I’d never actually measured the interior of the RV. It had never seemed important. I silently promised myself that I was going to measure everything once this was over, no matter how unimportant it might seem. I was going to measure the goddamn air ducts, if that was what it took. “All my work is in the field. Can’t scoop getting bitten by a zombie, you know? It’s actually the definition of the unstealable moment. So I do okay. And Mat works mostly on video. You need to see what they’re doing with their hands if you want to get the full effect of their tutorials.”
There was a closed door between us and the driver’s compartment. Long gone were the days when the driver could have casually leaned back and joined a conversation. Safety regulations allowed for things like RVs and buses—they had to, people still had to get from one place to another—but that didn’t mean they hadn’t made some changes to the interior. Mat was effectively cut off from the rest of us. Maybe that was a good thing. They were a fast thinker and a fast talker, but they didn’t do well when challenged by authority. Especially authority that was this much bigger than us.
“Does Governor Kilburn know you bugged our RV?” demanded Ben. He was starting to sound angry. This was all sinking in for him, and he didn’t like where it was going.
“Susan? God, no. She would never have tolerated it. She invited you to join us because she wanted to emulate Ryman—he’s been this cycle’s golden boy from day one, and I’m jealous as hell of the boys who got assigned to his detail—but she’s always wanted to run a clean campaign. Let the people make up their own minds. That means not spying on her precious journalists. Good thing, too. I would have needed to find a way to spoil her data, and that always looks so suspicious.”
The math of the situation was clear. If Ben hadn’t put it together yet, it was only because he’d never been an Irwin: His usual opponents were words and images on a screen, which were less likely to bite when he made them dance for his bidding. I had the field experience to know what this looked like, and I didn’t appreciate it. “Lots of things can look suspicious,” I said, beginning to stand. “You popping out of the bedroom telling us all about how you bugged the place, for example. Plenty suspicious. I know I’m not feeling too good about it. How about you explain what you’re on about, and we’ll see if we can’t make you feel better?”
His hand moved, and there was a gun in it. Under any other circumstances, I would have been asking how he’d done that. Given that he was aiming the gun at me, I didn’t really care.
“How about you sit back down, and I don’t explain a damn thing?” he asked pleasantly. “Here’s how this is going to go. You’re going to call Mat, and tell that weirdo that we need to make an emergency stop, because Ben isn’t feeling so well. I’m going to shoot you both. When Mat stops the RV, I’ll get out, and tell him Ben amplified and infected you, and I did what I had to do to protect myself. I’ll tell him how sorry I am. I’ll tell your girlfriend how sorry I am. Lots of sorry is going to get handed around.”
“Not seeing that we’d even consider going along with this,” I said. My voice was low, quiet; I wanted him to stay focused on me. Leave Ben out of this. Ben, with his quick, clever fingers, and his keyboard, and his active Internet connection. The man could type almost two hundred words a minute, when he needed to get something out fast; he could go even faster when he was just swiping his fingers across a screen. This seemed like something worth getting out.
“If you don’t, I’ll still shoot you both, but then I’ll be forced to activate the vehicle’s safety alerts, and when Mat pulls over, I’ll shoot him too,” said John. “Save your friends or don’t save anyone. The choice is yours. I know what I’d do, but then, I think I have a bit more loyalty than you do. I never married a man I didn’t love, or toyed with a woman I could never really be with. You’re a piece of work, you know that?”
“It takes one to know one, and Audrey turned you down fair and square,” I said. His continued misgendering of Mat was beginning to wear on my nerves. “Not my fault you went after a woman who wasn’t available. You never worked for the governor at all, did you? Who’s pulling your strings, love?”
“Shut up and call him,” said John.
I gave Ben a sidelong look. He nodded minutely. All right. If he was going to call the play, I was going to roll with it as hard as I could.
I tapped my ear cuff, activating the connection, and waited for the cycle to complete before I said, pleasantly, “Mat? You there, love?”
“Hey, Ash, what’s up?” Mat sounded curious but not distressed. They had no idea that anything was wrong. I felt a brief stab of envy. It must have been ni
ce to just be rolling down the road, not looking at a man with a gun and wondering whether you were about to die.
“Oh, not so much,” I said. I kept my voice light and easy, and my eyes on John. “It’s just that Ben’s not feeling so well, so I’m going to need you to hit the gas as hard as you can John is back here and he’s got a gun!”
There was no hesitation. The RV accelerated, hard and fast enough that anything that wasn’t nailed down went flying. That included John, who stumbled, falling back into the bedroom doorway before he caught himself. I was already in motion, shoving myself out of my seat and racing toward him. My own gun was in its holster on the rack, and I didn’t have time to get it, no matter how much safer and more comforting that would have been. I was the only weapon I had. I was going to use me.
My shoulder hit John in the chest, and his first shot went wild. I heard it hit the ceiling. I didn’t turn to look. I was too busy trying to grab for his gun, keeping him off balance and distracted.
“He’s not shooting bullets!” shouted Ben. “Be careful!”
The urge to look and see what Ben was talking about was almost unbearable. I didn’t have time. I kept grabbing for the gun. It went off again, and this time I heard the difference in the shot, which was too quiet for the caliber of the weapon: It sounded more like an air pistol than an actual firearm. Mat was driving faster and faster, having apparently found a new gear that the rest of us had been previously unaware of, one which allowed the RV to break the laws of physics. Or maybe it just felt like that because I was on my feet and wrestling a trained security professional over a firearm.
“Get down!” I shouted.
I heard Ben’s chair fall over, and heard him start muttering a moment later. He had called someone. Hopefully the authorities. Or John’s mother. Under the circumstances, I’d have taken anything that would make him stop.
“You’re a bastard and an asshole and a bunch of other things I don’t feel like thinking of right now,” I shrieked, and kneed him in the balls. John grunted, but didn’t collapse. The man must have had the pain tolerance of a charging rhino. Just my luck. “Give me the goddamn gun!”