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by Mira Grant

  “You said you were heading for Canada,” said Scott. “Do you have a goal in mind after that? Most of the communities close enough to drive to and safe enough to approach aren’t looking for journalists. You’re going to run out of trade goods sooner than you probably think.”

  “I’m still an Irish citizen,” I said. “We can get ourselves onto a plane and go back to the Republic. Let the people who don’t like what we have to say come and try to blast us out of my homeland.” Even as I said the words, I began to feel uneasy about them. Dr. Lake had implied that every major medical organization in the world knew about the situation with Kellis-Amberlee—and they’d have to, wouldn’t they? At least in the start, there had been a race on to find the cure. Every doctor on the planet had been trying to be the one whose name went on that all-important step toward salvation. And somewhere along the way that had all slowed down, until no one really noticed when people stopped talking about it. We’d all had other things to worry about.

  The CDC didn’t have much power in Ireland, but the World Health Organization did, and they weren’t going to let us walk away if we started talking about what we knew. Maybe we could get out of the country and maybe not. Regardless, our lives were never going to be the same.

  And there was always Australia, if it came to that.

  “I’m a doctor,” said Audrey. “That’s always going to be a trade good.”

  “Assuming someone doesn’t try to take you for their own, and dump the people you’re traveling with in a shallow grave.” Scott made the statement sound almost casual. There was no way he could remove it from its context, however. We were in an enclosed space with dogs and strangers. If he wanted to turn that comment into a threat, he could do so very easily indeed.

  “Ash and Amber are both very, very good shots,” said Audrey, sounding unflustered. “Ben isn’t the best gunman I’ve ever met, but he manages data manipulation and signaling remarkably well. If someone tried to take me, they’d either wind up dead or with their location broadcast to the entire world. A Pyrrhic victory, sure. It’s still a victory. If it came to that, we’d take it.”

  “I like you,” said Beth. “You’re not fucking around, and I respect that. So I’m going to give you a little advice: Go back to your lives. If there’s any way you can make this right with the people you’re running from, go back. You’re nice kids, but that’s exactly what you are right now. You’re kids. You think you know what you’re getting into, and you don’t. Go back to your comfortable, confined lives, and let this be the only glimpse you get of the way the rest of the world lives. We’re a nice enough outlier. We’re more Norman Rockwell than Norman Bates, at least, and that’s more than I can say for some of the folks you’ll find out here.”

  “There used to be a farming community over the ridge,” said Scott, waving a hand to the east. “They figured since women don’t infect themselves when they menstruate, and kids don’t infect themselves when they lose a tooth, that the trick to avoiding amplification was drinking each other’s blood. They all donated a pint a week to the cause, and drank big ol’ glasses of the stuff. Yum yum vampirism.”

  “That worked?” asked Ben, sounding horrified and fascinated at the same time.

  “That makes no medical or scientific sense,” said Audrey.

  Scott snorted. “Hell no, that didn’t work. Virus is virus, and being resistant to your own blood doesn’t make you resistant to anybody else’s. They drank their special protein shakes and thought they were building up an immunity, right up until the first person with a cut in their mouth took a swallow. Amplification, zombification, and slaughter followed, in that order. It took the rest of us months to track down all the stragglers. Their fence wasn’t as good as they thought it was.”

  “Charming,” said Amber.

  “Normal,” said Scott. “Do you follow? We’re the weird ones out here. We went into the woods because we weren’t going to let them take our dogs away, and we’ve been breeding and placing pups ever since. We don’t hurt anyone. We don’t take things that aren’t ours or force people to take things that aren’t theirs. We’re just in it for the dogs, and for the chance to live our lives the way we want to, not the way we’re told to.”

  “There are costs,” added Beth. “Don’t start thinking this is some idyllic paradise for the individualist. It’s hard as hell out here. There are always pirates and raiders around, and you have to keep a close eye on what’s yours, or chances are that it won’t be yours for long. I was a marathon runner once. Not Olympic level, but I did okay. I enjoyed myself, and I wasn’t willing to stop running just because the world was locking the doors. Hell, I got through the Rising because I ran faster than the dead did.” There was a faint, wistful note in her voice, and for one shining moment, I felt like I could see it: the woman with the cane and the big, floppy dog, stripped of two decades of time and consequences. She would have been twenty, maybe twenty-five, fleet as the wind and light as the moon, racing down the streets of a dying world with mobs of the infected running in her wake. She must have been amazing. When you’re running that kind of race, you only get to come in second once.

  “Broken leg?” asked Audrey.

  “Broken leg might have been all right; those are easier to set when you’re the only doctor you’re going to get,” said Beth. “Broken ankle. I couldn’t figure out how to immobilize it safely, so I wrapped it as tight as I could and walked another two miles to the nearest safe house. By the time I got there, the damage was done.”

  “That could still be corrected, if you went to a hospital,” said Audrey. “Titanium implants are safe.”

  “Surgery is never safe,” said Beth. “I haven’t been near ‘real society’ in more than fifteen years, not since they started rounding up and outlawing any dog that weighed more than twelve pounds. I’m not going back because I miss going for a jog. Not when there’s a chance I could be followed back to the compound.”

  Ben tilted his head, looking at Scott, and asked, “When you let us in, were you planning on letting us leave again?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Scott. “You did make a point of how you had trade goods. We try to be decent people here. We try not to prey too much on the ignorant and the underprepared. But we can’t afford to have you go telling anyone where to find us.”

  “The EIS knew where to find you,” said Audrey.

  “There are some people at the EIS who slip us medication for our population and our animals in exchange for certain medical information,” said Scott. “Dogs are a unique population. There are plenty of pigs being studied, but dogs? Those have basically gone the way of the dodo.”

  “I see.” Audrey reached into her pocket and produced a slim black wallet, which she tossed onto the table in front of Scott. All motion at the table ceased, and I had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that we had all just moved a lot closer to being shot. “My badge. I’m EIS—or at least, I used to be, and I still have a lot of friends there.”

  “Is that so?” Scott picked up the wallet, flipping it open. He showed its contents to Beth, who whistled. “This isn’t a recent picture.”

  “Like I said, I’m retired.” Audrey held out her hand. “You’re going to give us the fuel we need and let us leave, aren’t you?”

  “I guess I am.” Scott slapped the wallet back down into her palm. “I’m also going to give you some unasked-for advice. Don’t go flashing this around. Most people aren’t as friendly toward the government as we are.”

  “You know, every time you say that, I become more convinced that you’re going to kill us all, grind up our bodies, and feed them to the dogs,” said Amber.

  “They can try,” I said stiffly.

  Scott laughed. “We don’t want our dogs to get a taste for human flesh. That’s Life With Carnivores 101. We feed them fish and poultry, neither of which can carry the Kellis-Amberlee virus. But it’s good to be cautious. You need to know that this world is not on your side.”

  “It never has been,
” said Ben. “Now. About that gas…?”

  The bartering process went fast, once we got started. Over sandwiches and surrounded by dogs, we agreed to swap two bottles of painkillers, some condoms, and a dozen jars of caviar for ten gallons of gas. I felt like we were taking advantage. From the way Beth kept looking at anything but us, so did she, which meant that this was really a relatively fair exchange. If both parties come away feeling like they got the better side of the deal, then things were done correctly.

  Scott escorted us back to the fence. He paused before opening the gate, looking toward our over-packed vehicle—which was less tightly packed now, if not measurably so; still, the holes we had opened in our supplies spoke of more holes to come, and a journey that wouldn’t end until we were exhausted—and shaking his head. “You don’t have to go,” he said. “We can support some more settlers here, and there’s always a need for more people who can use their hands. You’ve got enough trade goods in that trunk of yours to get well situated before we have to put you to work. And you wouldn’t have to go back out there. That’s the best thing I can offer you. The chance to not go back out there. The world isn’t kind to runaways anymore, if it ever was in the first place.”

  “Thanks for the offer,” said Ben, who had taken Amber’s place in the front seat, at least for the next stretch of road. “We have places to go and stories to tell, and it wouldn’t be safe for us to stay with you. There are people after us; we’d get you hurt. Still, we appreciate the fact that you were willing to let us. It means a lot.”

  “You’re going to learn just how much,” said Scott. He sounded… not disappointed, exactly, but grim, like he had been expecting this answer and had made his offer anyway, more out of obligation than anything else. “Good luck. Try not to die.”

  “We will,” said Ben.

  Scott opened the gate and we drove on, back out into the green world that had replaced so much of California. I heard the gate close behind us before I hit the button to roll up the windows, and we rolled on, heading into the future.

  BOOK IV

  Where You Own What You Build

  I used to want to be an actress. Before that, I wanted to be a fairy godmother. I guess “paid killer” was a compromise between the two. Kids are weird, aren’t they?

  —AMBER BURTON

  We never got to be the heroes. Now we’re just going to be statistics. That’s the worst part of all.

  —AISLINN “ASH” NORTH

  Everyone’s asleep but me. This is my watch, and I suppose fulfilling it by the glow of my tablet is as good as anything. The windows are polarized: The light won’t get out, won’t attract anything that might make our lives harder than they already are. So it’s just me and these words, which I can’t share with anyone except the people around me, and none of them care. That’s not meant to be a complaint. Why should they care what I write down when they can just ask me what I think? We’re living in each other’s pockets. We’re getting to the point where even the casual conversations to fill the silence of the woods aren’t needed. Soon I guess we won’t be talking at all. I’m a little worried about what happens after that.

  We’ve had to stop driving straight through, start taking these breaks. Without them, we’d have collapsed from exhaustion by now.

  The woods are remarkably alive. I’ve seen two deer come stepping through, long, graceful things with ears that never stop moving. A third deer came through at a run, and this one was matted and bloody, clearly infected. So the virus is remarkably alive here, too. But this is a good, green world, and it’s finding its own balance without us. It will endure, even if humanity never comes to take it back. Maybe it will endure better because humanity isn’t coming to take it back.

  We’re mostly cut off here, in the woods, but the sky was clear enough above the compound with the dogs that we were all able to download the latest news. We’re all dead, according to the various sites: Ben and I in the accident, Audrey and Amber when they went looking for our bodies. They picked a lovely picture of me for the Wall. I look so happy. I have my arms around Audrey, and she’s smiling, and Ben’s standing off to one side watching us, and we all look like we’re going to live forever. Maybe it’s better this way. We get to craft the narrative of our afterlives. How often does anyone get to do that?

  Maybe more often than I think. The EIS has probably done this before. We’re true exiles now. No country, no past. No future.

  Just the truth.

  —From Erin Go Blog, the blog of Ash North, May 4, 2040 (unpublished)

  Eighteen

  Our days fell into an easy, if unpleasant, rhythm. We drove through the woods as much as we could, inconveniencing the wildlife rather than risking exposure. Amber and I split the time behind the wheel, with Ben and Audrey spelling us when we needed a break. They weren’t sitting idle while we drove—they were watching the forest, scanning for signs of danger, and looking for signs of new growth. Audrey had already spotted two virtually collapsed structures, and searching them had rewarded us with some as-yet-unspoiled cans of food to add to our collection. There were even four cans of old tinned beef, which was a treasure more valuable than gold or jewels in the post-zombie world. Meat prepared before the Kellis-Amberlee virus got into the air was clean; it couldn’t infect or trigger conversion. There were people who’d pay dearly for the chance to taste flesh again.

  The animals we saw were bold, with no fear of man. Deer grazed as we drove by, their satellite dish ears swiveling constantly, and didn’t run away. Opossums watched us from the trees, pale flashes of fur amongst the branches. Audrey exclaimed every time she spotted one. Sometimes “Look, it’s another possum” was the only thing she’d say for hours at a time. They were worth exclaiming over. Before the Rising, they’d been purely nocturnal. But the sun blinded zombie eyes, enough so that most of the dead chose to hunt after dark if they weren’t actually starving. Opossums were too small to amplify. They weren’t too small to be a snack for something larger and maddened by the disease. So they’d started coming out more and more during the day, shrugging off centuries of evolution in favor of staying alive long enough to evolve a little further. It was a remarkable adaptation. It probably mirrored similarly remarkable adaptations happening all over the world, largely unobserved now that people left the woods alone.

  I was honestly sick of hearing about it.

  “What’s the next safe house on the map?” I asked Amber. She was wedged into the passenger seat, rifle in her lap, eyes scanning the trees constantly as we rolled along. So far, we’d used very few bullets, but the constant knowledge of where we were was grinding us all down.

  “No gas stops for another two hundred miles,” said Ben, from the backseat. “There’s a medical stop marked off in a business park about another fifty miles up the coast. No guarantee that they’d have fuel to spare, but they might have showers.”

  “Showers,” breathed Amber, making the word sound like something holy. It didn’t take much effort. None of us had bathed in days, and so we left the car less and less, trying to avoid fresh air. If we breathed in too much of it, we wouldn’t be able to stand the thought of getting back into the car with ourselves, much less with everyone else. We were marinating in our own stink, and while that was probably a metaphor for the human condition, I doubt any of us cared. We just wanted to be clean. And showers meant civilization, the chance for hot food and soft beds and questions answered about what was going on in the world.

  Still… “Do we know anything about it beyond ‘a medical stop’?” I asked. “Not to be a party pooper, but I’d rather not have my kidneys harvested because I decided to pull into the wrong parking lot.”

  “Your kidneys are probably terrible anyway,” said Amber. “Not worth stealing. I, on the other hand, have excellent lungs.”

  “Oh, yes, this is exactly the conversation I was hoping to get involved with today,” deadpanned Audrey. “Tell me more about the delightful condition of your delicate lung meats.”

 
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” said Amber. “I’m just stating facts.”

  “According to what I have here, it’s a research station, independent, run by a former associate of the CDC known to be well inclined toward refugees, especially refugees the CDC doesn’t like,” said Ben. “The doctor’s name is Shannon Abbey, no gender given, specialty is virology and genetic manipulation. Which sounds like the absolute best thing to run toward. You, too, could be at the center of a new outbreak.”

  “But we’d be clean at the center of a new outbreak,” protested Amber. “Remember being clean? Clean was amazing. Clean was like having your birthday every day of your life, and the party was in your pants, where your crotch didn’t smell like a dock.”

  “That is an image I could have gone the rest of my life without,” said Ben. “Can we find something else to talk about? Or not talk about? We were all being quiet before, and I enjoyed that quite a bit.”

  I laughed and kept on driving. “Just give me directions, and we can angle toward this Abbey person. Maybe they’ll trade us some shower time for topping off their antibiotics, and we can ask what’s been going on with the campaigns.” We didn’t dare download anything truly in-depth with our makeshift network. There was being a small wireless booster in the middle of nowhere, and then there was being a small wireless booster trying to download specialized information. One of them told the CDC that Ben’s increasingly fictional reports were exactly that—fiction—and brought the world crashing down on our heads. No, thank you.