by Mira Grant
Shaun pushed through the crowd, nodding to Steve before settling next to me. “Word?”
“Generally positive. People like our boy.” I nodded to the senator, who had pulled a Jenny up onto the table with him. The audience cheered louder. “I think we might be able to ride this one all the way.”
“Buffy said the same thing,” Shaun agreed, taking a swig from his beer. “Ready to review tonight’s footage?”
“What, and miss the bacchanal? Let me think…yes.” I shook my head. “Get me out of here.”
The first postappearance party was fun. So was the third. And the fifteenth. By the twenty-third, I had come to recognize them as a clever method of controlling the locals: let the peons blow off some steam, reinforce the idea that you’re just “one of the gang,” and get down to the real business after most of the campaign had gone to bed. It was cunning, it was productive, and I salute Senator Ryman for thinking of it. All that being what it is, I saw no reason to spend any more time in an overly bright, overly crowded RV drinking crappy wine coolers than I absolutely had to.
Steve smiled wryly as we turned to push past him. “Leaving so soon?”
“I’ll be back for the midnight football game,” Shaun promised, and propelled me out the door with a solid push to the middle of my back. The dimness outside was like a benediction.
“Midnight football?” I asked, giving him a sidelong look as we moved away from the raucous RV, heading for our much quieter van. “Do you sleep?”
“Do you?” he countered.
“Touche.”
Shaun spends his time moving, planning to move, and coming up with new ways to move, many of them involving heavy explosives or the undead. I spend my time writing, thinking about writing, and trying to come up with new things I can write about. Sleep has never been high on the priority list for either of us, which is probably a blessing in disguise. We kept each other amused as kids. If one of us had actually wanted to get some rest, we would have made each other crazy.
The van lights were on and the back door was unlocked. Buffy looked up as we entered, her expression remaining distracted even as she made note of our arrival. Once she was sure that we weren’t being pursued by a rampaging horde of zombies, she turned back to her keyboard.
“Working on?” I asked, putting the wine cooler down next to my station.
“Splicing the footage from tonight and synchronizing the sound feeds. I’m thinking of doing a music video remix once it’s all finished. Pick something retro and rock the house. Also, I’m chatting with Chuck. He’s going to let me access his campaign footage to date and see if I can’t put together a sort of retrospective.”
I raised an eyebrow as I grabbed a Coke from the fridge. “Because you couldn’t get at that footage without help?”
Buffy’s cheeks reddened. “He’s being helpful.”
“Buffy has a crush,” Shaun sing-songed.
“Play nice,” I said, and sat, cracking my knuckles. “I need to hit the op-ed sites, see who’s saying what, and start prepping the morning headlines. It’s going to be a fun night, and I don’t need you starting a fight and spoiling it.”
Shaun rolled his eyes. “Riiiiight. You girls feel free to stay cooped up in here screwing around all night—”
“It’s called ‘making a living’, dumb-ass,” I said, flicking the screen on and entering my password.
“Like I said, screwing around all night. I’m going out with the boys. We’re going to find some action, and I’m going to fuck with it, and tomorrow, we’ll have a ratings bonanza like you’ve never seen.” Shaun spread his hands, framing his illusionary triumph. “I can see it now: ‘Flagging News Site Saved by Intrepid Irwin.’ “
“Get glasses,” said Buffy.
I snickered.
Shaun gave Buffy his best wounded look, opening his mouth to rebut.
Whatever he was going to say was drowned out by the gunshots from outside.
You want to talk hypocrisy? Here’s hypocrisy: the people who claim Kellis-Amberlee is God’s punishment on humanity for daring to dabble where He never intended us to go. I might buy it if zombies had some sort of supernatural scientist-detecting powers and only went for the heretics, but when I look at the yearly lists of KA-related casualties—you can see the raw lists at the official CDC Web site, and a more detailed list is posted on the Wall every Rising Day—I don’t see many scientists. What do I see?
I see children. I see Julie Wade, age seven, of Discovery Bay, California; I see Leroy Russell, age eleven, of Bar Harbor, Maine; I see a lot more than just them. Of the two thousand six hundred and fifty-three deaths directly attributed to Kellis-Amberlee within the United States over the past year, sixty-three percent were persons under the age of sixteen. Doesn’t sound like a merciful God to me.
I see the elderly. I see Nicholas and Tina Postoloff, late of the Pleasant Valley Nursing Home in Warsaw, Indiana. Reports say Nicholas would have survived if he hadn’t gone back for Tina, his wife of forty-seven years. They died and were reanimated by the virus before help could arrive. They were put down in the street like wild animals. Doesn’t sound like divine judgment. Doesn’t sound like divine anything.
I see men and women like you and me, people trying to live their lives without making any mistakes that will come back to haunt them later. I don’t see sinners or people who have called down some sort of righteous plague. So stop. Stop trying to make people even more afraid than they already are by implying that, somehow, this is just a taste of the torments to come. I’m tired of it, and if there’s a God, I bet He’s tired of it, too.
—From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, January 12, 2040
Eight
Shaun didn’t hesitate. Putting his beer on the nearest counter, he grabbed a crossbow off the wall and ran for the door. I was only a few feet behind him, Coke in one hand. Unlike my idiot brother, I have no intention of becoming a footnote on the Wall, but that doesn’t mean I can’t watch from a safe remove.
“Georgia!” There was enough anxiety in Buffy’s voice to make me turn. She lobbed a handheld camera in my direction. I caught it, raising my eyebrows in question. “Better picture quality and sixty hours of battery life.”
And audiences love a little hand-shot footage, as long as you cut to the smoother computer-operated stuff before they get motion sickness. “Got it,” I said, and followed Shaun, opening my soda as I went.
The encampment was ablaze with activity. Guards swarmed everywhere I turned, weapons out and ready. I couldn’t blame them for their excitement. Anyone who goes into private security in this day and age is likely to be a lot like Shaun, and he’d slowly been going nuts from the lack of dangerous things to pester.
More gunshots sounded from the south. I turned in that direction, flipping on the camera, and tapped my soda twice against the pressure pad on my belt. My ear cuff beeped. A moment later, Shaun’s slightly breathless voice was in my ear: “Kinda busy, George. What gives?”
“Need a position if you want this on film.” Distant moaning was audible as a whisper on the wind. Buffy’s microphones are pretty sensitive. If she could get any sort of audio track, she’d be able to intensify it and play it back with the report, twice as loud and ten times as chilling.
“Location?”
“Just outside the van.”
“Northwest. I’m at the fence.”
That was directly away from the loudest signs of combat. “You sure about that?”
“Hurry and get over here!” he snapped, and clicked off. Shrugging, I turned toward the northern fence, breaking into a trot. I’ve learned not to argue with Shaun where zombies are concerned; he knows more about their behavior than I can imagine wanting to, and if he says “north,” he’s probably right. Gunshots continued to sound as the moaning, faint as it was, began getting louder.
The glare from the perimeter lights confused my night vision; I
heard Shaun before I saw him. He was swearing merrily, using language that would make a longshoreman blush, as he taunted the infected closer to the fence. There were five of them, all fresh enough to look almost human, assuming you discounted the extreme dilation of their pupils and the slack, hungry way they stared at my brother as their fingers clawed against the fence. They’d died within the past few hours. I raised the camera, zooming in on their faces.
Shaun didn’t even realize I was there until my soda hit the pavement. He stopped taunting the infected, stepping clear of the fence as he turned to stare at me. “George? What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I have.” I indicated one of the zombies. Before amplification, she’d been a slender young woman, no heavier than Buffy. The wound that killed her the first time stood out livid and red against the still-pink flesh of her throat, and the fabric of her pale gray University of Oklahoma sweatshirt was stained bloody. “Recognize her?”
“Should I?” Shaun leaned closer to the fence. The zombie bared her teeth and hissed, increasing her attempts to break through. “She’s definitely not one of my exes, George. I mean, she’s cute, but way too dead for my tastes.”
“Like you have any exes?” Shaun has dated as much as I have, which is to say “not at all.” Buffy usually has five or six paramours at any given time, but Shaun and I haven’t ever bothered. Other things keep getting in the way.
“Well, if I did have exes, they wouldn’t look like her. Fill me in?”
“She was the cheering section at the senator’s presentation.” She’d looked a hell of a lot better when she was alive. I didn’t remember seeing her after the Q&A broke up. If she left promptly and got caught on the street… given her body mass, she’d have had plenty of time to reach full amplification and rise again. It wasn’t a difficult scenario to imagine. A young college student comes alone to a risky meeting in a public place and leaves the same way. No one would have been there to help her. A single bite is a death sentence, and not everyone has the guts to call the police and request a bullet to the brain before it gets too late to avoid rising.
Whoever she was, she died alone, and she died stupid. I couldn’t help feeling bad for her.
“Oh, jeez, you’re right.” Shaun leaned closer still, moving well out of what most people would call the safe zone. All five zombies were clustering around the same stretch of fence now, hissing and snarling at him. “That was fast.”
“This isn’t the primary pack. They’re too fresh.” The most decayed of the zombies would still have been able to pass for human in a dark alley, assuming he could keep himself from trying to eat anyone in range. “Something had to bite them.”
“Or one of ‘em dropped dead of a heart attack,” Shaun said. “You’re right. The rest are south, harassing the guards.” He gave the fence an assessing look. “I’d put this at what, twelve feet?”
“Shaun Phillip Mason, you are not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
“Sure as hell am. Keep ‘em distracted, okay?” He didn’t wait for a reply before backing up, getting a running start, and launching himself at the fence. His fingers caught well above the reach of the tallest of the zombies. His toes didn’t fare quite as well, but that didn’t matter much—steel-toed combat boots are too tough for even the infected to gnaw their way through. Laughing at their moans, Shaun began pulling himself up toward the top of the fence.
“Next up, we have my brother, committing suicide,” I muttered and focused the camera on him, tapping the pad at my belt again to dial Buffy. “Don’t fall, asshole, or I’m telling Mom you did it for love of the dead girl.”
“Bite me,” Shaun called back. He swung his leading leg over the top of the fence and stood astride it, with one foot hooked into the chain on either side. Unhooking the crossbow from his belt, he loaded the first quarrel.
“Not while I’m breathing, oh brother mine.”
“Buffy here,” said Buffy’s voice in my ear.
“Buffy, you getting the feeds on this? I want any positive IDs you can pull on our friends. You can cross-reference the one in the sweatshirt with footage from the—”
“I’m on it. Her name was Dayna Baldwin, age twenty-three, political science major at the University of Oklahoma. I’m running lookups on the other four. I have a few possible matches, but there’s nothing confirmed.”
Shaun pulled back the catch, taking careful, almost affectionate aim on the nearest of his admirers. I directed the handheld camera toward the mob as a crossbow bolt appeared in the center of their leader’s forehead. He fell and two of the remaining four were suddenly distracted with cannibalizing his remains, leaving two to menace Shaun. The virus that drives the infected is only in it for the meat. Zombies generally choose the living over the dead, but something that won’t put up a fight is always better than nothing at all.
“Keep looking,” I said. Shaun reloaded his crossbow, moving with calm, unhurried precision. I have to give my brother this: He’s damn good at what he does.
“Of course,” said Buffy, sounding affronted. She hung up, presumably to focus on her cameras. We’d get a clearer picture of everything that had happened once Shaun finished having his fun and we could get back to the van. If there’s a square inch of convoy that Buffy can’t get on film, I’ll eat my sunglasses.
Shaun was taking aim on the third zombie when I realized there was something wrong with the quality of the moans. They were getting louder and moving against the prevailing wind. I dropped the camera, hearing its case crack as it hit the ground, and turned to look behind me.
The leader of the zombies—another familiar face, opinionated Carl from the after-meeting—was ten feet away and closing fast, moving at that horrible, disconnected half-run that only the freshest zombies can sustain for long. He must have died even more recently than Dayna, because he’d been up and moving around less than an hour before. That implied multiple bites and a group attack, possibly by the pack that Shaun was in the process of dispatching.
Six more zombies followed the ill-fated Carl, moving at speeds ranging from a half-run to a shamble. Pulling the pistol from my belt, I shot Carl twice in the head, turning to aim at the zombie behind him. I didn’t have enough bullets. Even if I were as good of a shot as Shaun, which I’m not, eight bullets and seven zombies didn’t leave me in a position with much of a margin for error. I was already down below the one-for-one divide, and that made survival a lot less likely. I pulled the trigger and the second zombie fell.
The sound of gunshots attracted Shaun’s attention. I heard his sharp intake of breath as he turned, surveying my attackers. “Holy—”
“We’re past saying it and all the way to doing it,” I snarled, and fired again. The shot went wild. Four bullets and only two zombies down; the odds were not in my favor. “Buffy!”
Buffy never sends out a camera without a two-way sound pickup. She says she doesn’t trust us to manage our own levels, but really, I think she just likes being able to eavesdrop without leaving the van. Her voice emerged from the speaker a moment after I called her name, coming through crackly and distorted. “Sorry for the delay—distracted. We’ve had a perimeter breech on the south fence. One of the gates went down and they’re reporting casualties. How’re you two faring?”
“Let’s just say that if you have a broadcast point near some unoccupied men with heavy weaponry, now would be a swell time to use it.” I fired twice more. The second bullet hit its target. Six bullets and three zombies down, while the remaining four continued to approach. I fired at the new leader of the pack and missed. A crossbow bolt whizzed by my shoulder and the zombie toppled, the end of the bolt protruding from its forehead. Three zombies. “I didn’t come out here expecting to actually fight anything—I’m only carrying a pistol, and I’m about to be out of bullets. Shaun?”
“Three bolts left,” he called. “Think you can make it up this fence?”
“No
.” I’m a decent sprinter and I can gun a motorcycle from zero to suicidal in less than ten seconds, but I’m not a climber. I nearly washed out of the physical section of my licensing exams, twice, thanks to my lack of upper-body strength. If I was lucky, I’d be able to cling to the fence until the zombies grabbing my ankles hauled me down and ate me. If I wasn’t, I’d just fall.
The speaker crackled. “There’s a group of guards on the way,” Buffy said. “They’re having some problems, but they said they’d be there as fast as they could.”
“Hope it’s fast enough,” I said. I started backing up toward Shaun and the fence. My father has always had just one piece of advice about zombies and ammunition, one he’s drilled into my head enough times that it’s managed to stick: When you have one bullet left and there’s no visible way out of the shit you’re standing in, save it for yourself. It’s better than the alternative.
Two more crossbow bolts whizzed by, and two more zombies fell, leaving just one to shamble toward us, still moaning. There were no answering moans, either from the sides or from behind. Shaun’s pack was down, and there didn’t seem to be any further reinforcements coming.
“Fire any time now, Shaun,” I said tightly.
“Not until I know that there aren’t more coming,” he said.
I kept backing up until I hit the fence and stopped, keeping my gun in front of me, muzzle aimed toward the shambler. Between the two of us, we had the ammo to take it down… as long as that was all there was. “It figures,” I said.
“What figures?”
“We finally crack the global top five, so of course we’re going to get eaten by zombies that same night.”
Shaun’s laughter managed to be bitter and amused at the same time. “Are you ever not a pessimist?”
“Sometimes. But then I wake up.” The zombie was continuing to advance, moaning as it came. There were no answering moans. “I think it’s alone.”