by Mira Grant
Buffy took the seat nearest the light, where the cameras studded through her jewelry would get the best pickup shots. Her portables work on the principles defined during the big pre-Rising wireless boom; they transmit data to the server on a constant basis, allowing her to come back later and edit it at her leisure. I once tried to figure out how many transmitters she actually had on her, but wound up giving up and wandering off to do something more productive, like answering Shaun’s fan mail. He gets more marriage proposals a week than he likes to think about, and he lets me handle them all.
The senator took the seat closest to the kitchen and his wife, thus conveniently leaving me the chair with the highest degree of shadow. So he was a family man and someone who understood that consideration was a virtue. Nice. I settled, asking, “You provide home-cooked meals for all your news staff?”
“Just the controversial ones,” he replied, his tone easy and assured. “I’m not going to beat around the bush. I read your public reports, your op-ed pieces, everything, before I agreed to your application. I know you’re smart and won’t forgive bullshit. That doesn’t,” he held up a finger, “mean I’m going to be one hundred percent straight with you, because there are some things no reporter ever gets to be privy to. Mostly having to do with my home life and my family, but still, there are no-go zones.”
“We respect that,” I said. Shaun and Buffy were nodding.
Senator Ryman seemed to approve, because he nodded in turn, looking satisfied. “Nobody wanted me to bring blog folks on this campaign,” he said, without preamble. I sat up a little straighter. The entire online community knew that the senator’s handlers had been recommending against including bloggers in the official campaign press corps, but I’d never expected to hear it put so baldly. “They have this idea that you three will report whatever you damn well want to and not what’s good for the campaign.”
“So you’re saying they’re pretty smart, then?” Shaun asked, in a bland surfer-boy drawl that might almost have been believable, if he hadn’t been smirking as he said it.
The senator roared with laughter, and Emily looked up from the stove, clearly amused. “That’s what I pay them for, so I certainly hope so, Shaun. Yeah, they’re pretty smart. They’ve got you pegged for exactly what you are.”
“And what’s that, Senator?” I asked.
Sobering, he leaned forward. “The children of the Rising. Biggest revolution that our generations—yours, mine, and at least two more besides—are ever going to see. The world changed overnight, and sometimes I’m sorry I was born too early to be in on the ground level of what it’s turned into. You kids, you’re the ones who get to shape the real tomorrow, the one that’s going to matter. Not me, not my lovely wife, and certainly not a bunch of talking heads who get paid to be smart enough to realize that a bunch of Bay Area blogger kids are going to tell the truth as they see it, and damn the political consequences.”
Eyebrows rising again, I said, “That does very little to explain why you felt it was important that we be here.”
“You’re here because of what you represent: the truth.” The senator smiled, boyish once more. “People are going to believe whatever you say. Your careers depend on how many dead folks your brother can prod with a stick, how many poems your friend can write, and how much truth you can tell.”
“So what if the things we say don’t paint you in a good enough light?” Buffy frowned, tilting her head. It would have looked like a natural gesture if I hadn’t known the silver moon-and-star earring dangling from her left ear was a camera that responded to head gestures. She was zooming in on the senator to catch his answer.
“If they don’t paint me in a good enough light, I suppose I wasn’t meant to be the President of the United States of America,” he said. “You want to dig for scandals, I’m sure my opponents have road maps for you to follow. You want to report on this campaign, you report what you see, and don’t worry about whether or not I’m going to like it. Because that doesn’t matter a bit.”
We were still staring at him, trying to frame responses to something that seemed about as realistic coming from a politician’s mouth as sonnets coming out of a zombie’s, when Emily Ryman walked over and started setting plates onto the table. I was grateful for the interruption. After the way the day had been going, I was running out of “surprised” and moving rapidly into the region of “mild shock,” and this was enough to give me a chance to regroup.
Emily sat once she’d finished putting the plates down, reaching for Senator Ryman’s hand. “Peter, will you say grace?”
“Of course,” he said. Shaun and I exchanged glances before joining hands with each other and the Rymans, closing the circle around the table. Senator Ryman bowed his head, closing his eyes. “Dear Lord, we ask that You bless this table and those who have come to gather around it. Thank You for the good gifts that You have given us. For the health of ourselves and our families, for the company and food we are about to enjoy, and for the future that You have seen fit to set before us. Thank You, oh Lord, for Your generosity, and for the trials by which we may come to know You better.”
Shaun and I left our eyes open, watching the senator as he spoke. We’re atheists. It’s hard to be anything else in a world where zombies can attack your elementary school talent show. Much of the country has turned back toward faith, however, acting under the vague supposition that it can’t hurt anything to have God on your side. I glanced at Buffy, who was nodding along with the senator’s words, eyes tightly closed. She’s a lot more religious than most people would guess. Her family is French Catholic. She’s been saying grace at any sort of large gathering since she was born, and she still attends a nonvirtual church on Sundays.
“Amen,” said the senator. We all echoed it with varying degrees of certainty.
Emily Ryman smiled. “Everybody, eat up. There’s more if you’re still hungry, but I want to eat too, so you’re going to have to serve yourselves after this round.” The senator got a kiss on the cheek to go with his fish tacos; the rest of us just got fed.
Not that Shaun was going to let lunch pass without a little light conversation. Of the two of us, he’s the gregarious one. Someone had to be. “Will you be coming along on the whole campaign, ma’am, or just this leg of it?” he asked, with uncharacteristic politeness. Then again, he’s always had a healthy respect for women with food.
“You couldn’t pay me enough to accompany this dog and pony show,” Emily said, dryly. “I think you kids are totally insane. Entertaining as all heck, and I love your site, but insane.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’ ” I said.
“Uh-uh. For one thing, I am not taking the kids out on the road. No way. The tutors they hire for these things are never the sort I approve of.” She smiled at the senator, who patted her knee in an unconsciously companionable fashion. “And they wind up seeing way too many reporters and politicians. Not the sort you want keeping company with a bunch of impressionable young kids.”
“Look how it’s warped us,” said Shaun.
“Exactly,” she said, unflustered. “Besides which, the ranch doesn’t run itself.”
I nodded. “Your family still manages an actual horse ranch, don’t they?”
“You know the answer to that, Georgia,” said the senator. “Been in Emily’s family since the late eighteen hundreds.”
“If you think the risk of zombie palominos is enough to make me give up my horses, you’ve never met a real horse nut,” she said, grinning. “Now, don’t get your back up. I know where you stand on the animal mass restrictions. You’re a big supporter of Mason’s Law, aren’t you?”
“In all recreational and nonessential capacities, yes,” I said.
Thanks to the Masons’ biological son, Shaun and I have often found ourselves with an element of unasked-for name recognition when dealing with people who work with animals. Before Phillip, no one realized that all mammals with a bod
y mass of forty pounds or more could become carriers of the live-state virus, or that Kellis-Amberlee was happy to cross species, going from man to beast and back again. Mom put a bullet through her only son’s head, back when that was still something new enough to break you forever—when it felt like murder, not mercy. So yeah, I guess you could say I support Mason’s Law.
“I would, too, in your position,” Emily said. Her tone carried none of the accusations I’m used to hearing from animal rights activists; she was speaking the truth, and I could deal, or not, as I so chose. “Now, if everyone wants to tuck in, it’s the start of a long day—and a longer month.”
“Eat up, everybody, before your lunch gets cold,” added the senator, and reached for the mimosas. Shaun and I exchanged a look, shrugged in near-unison, and reached for our forks.
One way or another, we were on our way.
My sister has retinal KA syndrome. That’s where the filovirus does this massive replication thing in the ocular fluid—there’s some more advanced technical term for it, but personally, I like to call it “eye goo,” because it pisses George off—and the pupils dilate as wide as they can and never close down like they do in a normal person. Mostly only girls get it, which is a relief, since I look stupid in sunglasses. Her eyes are supposed to be brown, but everyone thinks they’re black, because of her pupils being broken.
She was diagnosed when we were five, so I don’t really remember her without her sunglasses. And when we were nine, we got this really dumb babysitter who took George’s glasses, said, “You don’t need these,” and threw them into the backyard, thinking we were spoiled little suburban brats too afraid of the outdoors to go out after them. So it’s pretty plain that she was about as bright as a box of zombies.
Next thing you know, there’s me and George digging through the high grass looking for her sunglasses, when suddenly she freezes, eyes getting all wide, and says, “Shaun?” And I’m like, “What?” And she’s all, “There’s somebody else in the yard.” And then I turn around, and wham, zombie, right there! I hadn’t seen it because I don’t see as well in low light as she does. So there are some advantages to having your pupils permanently dilated. Besides the part where they can’t tell if you’re stoned or not without a blood test when you’re at school.
But anyway, zombie, in our backyard. So. Fucking. Cool.
You know, it’s been more than a decade since that evening, and that is still probably the best present that she’s ever gotten for me.
—From Hail to the King, the blog of Shaun Mason, April 7, 2037
Six
Getting our equipment past the security screening offered by Senator Ryman’s staff took six and a half hours. Shaun spent the first two hours getting underfoot as he tried to guard his gear and finally got all of us banished inside. Now he was sulking on the parlor couch, chin almost level with his chest. “What are they doing, taking the van apart to make sure we didn’t stuff any zombies inside the paneling?” he grumbled. “Because, gee, that would work really well as an assassination tool.”
“It’s been tried,” Buffy said. “Do you remember the guy who tried to kill George Romero with the zombie pit bulls?”
“That’s an urban myth, Buffy. It’s been disproven about ninety times,” I said, continuing to pace. “George Romero died peacefully in his bed.”
“And now he’s a happy shambler at a government research facility,” said Shaun, abandoning his sulk in order to make “zombie” motions with his arms. The ASL for “zombie” has joined the raised middle finger as one of the few truly universal hand gestures. Some points just need to be made quickly.
“It’s sort of sad, thinking about him shuffling around out there, all decayed and mindless and not remembering the classics of his heyday,” said Buffy.
I eyed her. “He’s a government zombie. He eats better than we do.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” she said.
It took a while for the first Kellis-Amberlee outbreaks to be confirmed as anything but hoaxes, and even after that was accomplished, it took time for the various governmental agencies to finish fighting over whose problem it was. The CDC got sick of the arguing about three days in, jumped into things with both feet, and never looked back. They had squads in the field by the end of week two, capturing zombies for study. It was quickly apparent that there’s no curing a zombie; you can’t undo the amount of brain damage the virus does with anything gentler than a bullet to the brainpan. But you can work on ways to neutralize Kellis-Amberlee itself, and since all a zombie really does is convert flesh into virus, a few captive shamblers provided the best possible test subjects.
After twenty years of testing and the derailment of almost every technical field that didn’t feed directly into the medical profession, we’ve managed little more than absolutely nothing. At this point, they can completely remove Kellis-Amberlee from a living body, using a combination of chemotherapy, blood replacement, and a nasty strain of Ebola that’s been modified to search and destroy its cousin. There are just a few downsides, like the part where it costs upward of ten thousand dollars for a treatment, none of the test subjects has survived, and oh, right, the constant fear the modified virus will mutate like Marburg Amberlee did and leave us with something even worse to deal with. Where the living dead are concerned, we pretty much exist on square one.
It didn’t take long for researchers to connect the health of their “pet” zombies to the amount of protein—specifically living or recently killed flesh; soybeans and legumes won’t cut it—they consumed. Kellis-Amberlee converts tissue into viral blocks. The more tissue it can find, the less of the original zombie it converts. So if you feed a zombie constantly, it won’t wither to the point of becoming useless. Most of the nation’s remaining cattle ranches are there to feed the living dead. A beautiful irony, when you consider that cows break the forty-pound threshold, and thus reanimate upon death. Zombies eating zombies. Good work if you can get it.
A lot of folks leave their bodies to science. Your family skips funeral expenses, the government pays a nice settlement so they won’t sue if your image winds up on television one of these days, and if you belong to one of those religious sects that believes the body has to remain intact in order to eventually get carried up to Heaven, you don’t run the risk of offending God. You just risk eating the research scientists if containment fails, and some people don’t see that as being as much of an abomination as cremation.
George Romero didn’t mean to save the world any more than Dr. Alexander Kellis meant to almost destroy it, but you can’t always choose your lot in life. Most people wouldn’t have had the first idea of how to deal with the zombies if it weren’t for the lessons they’d learned from Romero’s movies. Go for the brain; fire works, but only if you don’t let the burning zombie touch you; once you’re bitten, you’re dead. Fans of Romero’s films applied the lessons of a thousand zombie movies to the reality of what had happened. They traded details of the attacks and their results over a thousand blogs from a thousand places, and humanity survived.
In interviews, Mr. Romero always seemed baffled and a little delighted by the power his movies had proven to have. “Always knew there was a reason people didn’t like seeing the zombies win,” he’d said. If anyone was surprised when he left his body to the government, they didn’t say anything. It seemed like a fitting end for a man who went from king of bad horror to national hero practically overnight.
“They better not damage any of my equipment,” Shaun said, snapping me back to the present. He was scowling at the window again. “Some of that stuff took serious barter to get.”
“They’re not going to damage your equipment, dumb ass. They’re the government, we’re journalists, and they know we’d tell everyone in the whole damn world, starting with our insurance agency.” I leaned over to hit him in the back of the head. “They just need to make sure we’re not carrying any bombs.”
“Or zom
bies,” added Buffy.
“Or drugs,” said Shaun.
“Actually,” said the senator, stepping into the room, “we’re slightly disappointed by the lack of bombs, zombies, or drugs hidden in your gear. I thought you folks were supposed to be reporters, but there wasn’t even any illicit booze.”
“We’re clear?” I asked, ceasing my pacing. Shaun and Buffy were already on their feet, nearly vibrating. I understood their anxiety; the senator’s security crew had their hands on all our servers, which had Buffy unhappy, and on Shaun’s zombie hunting and handling equipment, which usually makes him so restless that I wind up locking him in the bathroom just to get some peace and quiet. It’s times like this that I’m truly glad of my role as the hard-nosed reporter in our little crew. Maybe Buffy and Shaun call me a Luddite, but when the government goons take away all our equipment for examination, they lose everything. I, on the other hand, retain my MP3 recorder, cellular phone, notebook computer, and stylus. They’re all too basic to require much examination.
Of course, I can’t keep my hands on the vehicles, which had me almost as restless as my companions. The van and my bike represent the most expensive articles we travel with, and most of our livelihood depends on their upkeep. At the same time, they’re probably the easiest items to repair—a good mechanic can undo almost any damage, and my bike isn’t that customized. As long as the feds didn’t bust up the van, we’d be fine.
“You’re clear,” the senator said. He didn’t bat an eye as Shaun and Buffy ran out of the room, despite the fact that neither of them said good-bye. I remained where I was, and after a moment, he turned toward me. “I must admit, we were impressed by the structural reinforcements on your van. Planning to last out a siege in that thing?”
“We’ve considered it. The security upgrades were our mother’s design. We did the electrical work ourselves.”