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by Mira Grant

  The combination of sudden cold and the press of that many bodies was enough to make my impending headache throb. Hunching my shoulders, I began cutting my way diagonally across the crowd, aiming for the escalators. Presumably, the information kiosk would identify the locations of both the bathrooms and whatever was serving as a press staging area in this zoo.

  Getting there was easier said than done, but after swimming my way upstream against the delegates, merchants, voters, and tourists who felt that the inconvenience of going through security was worth the chance to have a little fun, I managed to reach the escalator and stepped on, clinging to the rail for all that I was worth. I think the average American’s tendency to hide inside while life goes whizzing by is an overreaction to a currently unavoidable situation, but I’m still a child of my generation; for me, a large crowd is fifteen people. The wistful looks older people sometimes get when they talk about gatherings of six and seven hundred are completely alien to me. That’s not the way I grew up, and shoving this many bodies into one space, even a space as large as the Oklahoma City Convention Center, just feels wrong.

  Judging from the makeup of the crowd, I wasn’t alone in that attitude. Except for the people dressed in the corporate colors of one exhibitor or another, I was the youngest person in sight. I’m better crowd-socialized than most people born after the Rising because I’ve forced myself to be; in addition to the paparazzi swarms, I’ve attended technology conventions and academic conferences, getting myself used to the idea that people gather in groups. If I hadn’t spent the past several years working up to this, just stepping into the hall would have made me run screaming, probably causing security to decide there was an outbreak in progress and lock us all inside.

  That’s me. The eternal optimist.

  I saw the information kiosk as soon as I stepped off the escalator: a brightly colored octagon surrounded by scantily clad young women handing out packs of cigarettes. I pushed past them, refusing three packs on the way, and squinted at the posted map of the convention center. “You are here,” I muttered. “That’s great. I already found me. The drinking fountain, on the other hand, would be exactly where?”

  “Nonsmoker?” inquired a voice at my elbow. I turned to find myself facing Dennis Stahl of the Eakly Times. He was smiling and had a press pass clipped to the lapel of his slightly wrinkled jacket. “I thought you looked familiar.”

  “Mr. Stahl,” I said, eyebrows rising. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Because I’m a newspaperman?”

  “No. Because this hall holds roughly the population of North America, and I wouldn’t expect to see my brother without a tracking device.”

  Mr. Stahl laughed. “Fair enough.” One of the scantily clad young women took advantage of his distraction and pushed a pack of cigarettes into his hand. He eyed it dubiously before holding it toward me. “Cigarette?”

  “Sorry. Don’t smoke.”

  He tilted his head to the side. “Why not? I’d expect a cigarette to be the perfect capper on your ‘look at me, I’m hard as nails’ air of journalistic integrity.” I raised my eyebrows farther. He laughed. “Come on, Ms. Mason. You wear all black, carry an actual handheld MP3 recorder—I haven’t seen anyone use one of those in years—and you never remove your sunglasses. You really think I don’t know how to spot an image when I see one?”

  “First off, I have retinal KA. The sunglasses are a medical necessity. Second…” I paused, smiling. “You got me. It’s an image. But I still don’t smoke. Do you know where the bathrooms are in this place? I need some water.”

  “I’ve been here three hours, and I haven’t seen a bathroom yet,” he said. “But there is a cunningly concealed Starbucks at the end of one of the exhibitors’ rows, if you wouldn’t mind my walking you?”

  “If it gets me water, I’m all for it,” I said, waving off another pack of cigarettes.

  Mr. Stahl nodded, opening a path through the crowd with a sweep of his arm as he led me through. “Water, or a suitable substitute thereof,” he agreed. “In exchange, I have a question for you… Why don’t you smoke? Again, it seems like the perfect capper to your image. Personal reasons?”

  “I like having sufficient lung capacity to run away from the living dead,” I replied, deadpan. Mr. Stahl raised an eyebrow, and I shrugged. “I’m serious. Cigarettes won’t give you cancer, but they still cause emphysema, and I have no desire to get eaten by a zombie just because I was trying to look cool. Besides, the smoke can interfere with some delicate electronics, and it’s hard enough to keep most kits working in the field. I don’t need to add a second level of pollution to the crap they’re already trying to function through.”

  “Huh. And here I thought that once you took cancer out of the equation, we’d be back to a world where every hard-hitting journalist was up to eight packs a day.”

  The exhibitors’ row was packed with people selling things of every shape and size, from freeze-dried food guaranteed to stay good for the duration of a siege to medieval weaponry with built-in splatter guards. If you were looking for fluffier entertainments, there were the usual assortment of new cars, hair-care accessories, and toys for the kids, although I had to admit a certain affection for the Mattel booth advertising Urban Survival Barbie, now with her own machete and blood testing unit.

  “That assumes every ‘hard-hitting journalist’ comes equipped with parents who don’t mind them living at home and stinking up the curtains,” I said. “What about you? I don’t see you lighting up.”

  “Asthma. I could smoke if I wanted to. I could also collapse in the middle of the sidewalk clutching my chest, and somehow, that makes it substantially less fun.” He pointed to the end of the row. “There’s the Starbucks. What brings you out this way?”

  “The usual: following the Senator around like a kitten on a string. Yourself?”

  “A little bit of the same, on a somewhat more general scale.” There was no line at the Starbucks, just three bored-looking baristas leaning on the counter and trying to seem busy. Mr. Stahl stepped up to them and said, “Large black coffee, please, to go.”

  The baristas exchanged a glance, but they’d clearly had their fill of arguing with men wearing press passes. One of them moved to start filling his order.

  Glancing to me, Dennis asked, “Want anything?”

  “Just a bottled water, thanks.”

  “Got it.” He collected his coffee and handed me my water, passing a debit card to the barista at the register.

  I dug a hand into my pocket. “What do I owe you?”

  “Forget it.” He reclaimed his card and turned to head for an open table near the edge of the exhibit line. I followed, sitting down across from him. He smiled. “Consider it payback for the circulation figures I got off that little incident out at your encampment after the rally the other week. Remember?”

  “How could I forget?” I pulled a bottle of prescription-strength painkillers out of my shoulder bag, uncapping them with my thumb. “That ‘little incident’ has been defining my life for weeks.”

  “Got any juicy details for an old friend?”

  It had been impossible to keep from releasing the fact that the screamers had been sabotaged. Even if we’d wanted to damage our ratings that way, the families of the victims could have sued us for interfering with a federal case if we’d attempted to suppress details. I shook my head. “Not that the press hasn’t already released.”

  “The dangers of pumping industry sources,” Mr. Stahl said, and sipped his coffee. “Seriously, though, how have things been around the camp? Everything going smoothly?”

  “Relatively so,” I said, shaking four pills into my palm and slamming them down with a long gulp of icy water. Once I finished swallowing, I added, “Tense, but smooth. There haven’t been any real leads on who sabotaged our perimeter. Causes a bit of internal strife, if you understand what I’m saying.”

  “Unfortunately
, I do.” Mr. Stahl shook his head. “Whoever it was must have been careful to cover their tracks.”

  “With good reason. People died in that attack. That makes it murder and that means they could be tried under Raskin-Watts. Most folks don’t commit acts of terrorism expecting to get caught.” I took another slower sip of water, waiting for the painkillers to kick in.

  Mr. Stahl nodded, lips pressed into a thin line. “I know. Carl Boucher was a blowhard and an opinionated bastard, but he didn’t deserve to die like that. None of those folks did. Good or bad, people deserve better deaths than that.” He pushed away from the table, taking his coffee with him. “Well, I need to go meet up with my camera crew. We’re interviewing Wagman in half an hour, and she likes it when her news crews are prompt. You take care of yourself, Miss Mason, all right?”

  “Do my best,” I replied, with a nod. “You’ve got my e-mail address.”

  “I’ll keep in touch,” he assured me, and turned, striding off into the crowd. It swallowed him up, and he was gone.

  I stayed where I was, sipping my water and considering the atmosphere of the room. In some ways, it was like a cross between a carnival and a frat party, with people of all ages, stripes, and creeds bent on having as much fun as they could before it was time to leave for less well-secured climes. Signs hanging from the ceiling directed voters of the various districts where they should go if they wanted to place their votes in the old, physical way, rather than doing them from home via real-time electronic ballot. From the way most folks were ignoring the signs, I guessed the majority had placed their votes online before hitting the convention center. The paper-voting booths are more of a curiosity than anything else, maintained because the law insists that anyone who wishes to do so be able to place their ballot via physical, nonelectronic means. What this really means is that we can’t get exact results on any election until the paper ballots have been tabulated, even when ninety-five percent of the votes have been already placed electronically.

  The tobacco companies weren’t the only ones working the time-honored selling power of half-clothed female flesh to push their wares. Girls wearing little more than a bikini and a smile were weaving their way in and out of the crowd, offering buttons and banners with political slogans to the passersby. More than half the swag was finding its way into nearby trash cans or onto the floor. Most of the buttons that stayed on, I noted, were either promoting Senator Ryman or Governor Tate, who was definitely shaping up to be Ryman’s closest in-party competitor. Congresswoman Wagman had been able to ride her one-trick pony pretty far, but the buzz was pretty uniform in agreeing that it wouldn’t get her much further. You can take the “porn star” platform a long way, but it’s never going to get you to the White House. Signs indicated it would either be Ryman or Tate for the Republican nomination.

  The results of the day would probably solidify one of them in the lead and make the upcoming convention nothing but a formality. I’d been hoping for a third candidate to mix things up at least a little, but there hadn’t been any real breakouts on the campaign trail. Among the Republican voters—and even some of the Democrats and Independents—it was either Ryman’s brand of laid-back “we should all get along while we’re here,” or Tate’s hellfire and damnation that was attracting the attention, and hence the potential support, of just about everyone.

  Tapping my watch to activate the memo function, I raised my wrist and murmured, “Note to self: See what you can do about getting an interview out of Tate’s camp sometime after the primary closes, whatever the results.” Technically, Shaun, Buffy, and I count as “rival journalists,” given that we’re mostly devoted to following Ryman’s campaign. At the same time, we’ve all taken public oaths of journalistic integrity, and that means we can—at least supposedly—be trusted to provide a fair and unbiased report on any subject we address, unless it’s in a clearly flagged editorial. Getting close enough to Tate to see how the man ticks might help with my growing objections to his political standpoints. Or it might not, and that could give me a renewed reason to rally for Ryman. Either way, it would make for good news.

  My water was nearly gone, and I hadn’t come to the convention center to people watch and cadge free beverages from the local newspapermen, no matter how much of an improvement that was over life at the convoy. I tapped my ear cuff. “Call Buffy.”

  There was a pause as the connection was made, and then Buffy’s voice was in my ear, asking, “What glorious service may this unworthy one perform for her majesty on this hallowed afternoon?”

  I smirked. “Interrupt your poker game?”

  “Actually, we were watching a movie.”

  “You and Chuckles are getting a little cozy there, don’t you think?”

  Buffy’s reply was a prim, “You don’t ask about my business, and I won’t ask about yours. Besides, I’m off-duty. There’s nothing to edit, and all my material for the week has already been uploaded to the time-release server.”

  “Fine with me,” I said. Contrary to my earlier fears, the painkillers were preventing the headache from becoming more than an annoying throb at the back of my temples. “Can you get me a current location on the senator? I’m over at the convention center, and the place is a madhouse. If I try to find him on my own, I may never be heard from again.”

  “I’d be able to track a government official because…?”

  “I know you have at least one transmitter planted on the man, and you never let a piece of equipment out of your sight without a tracking device.”

  Buffy paused. Then she asked, “Are you near a data port?”

  I looked around. “There’s a public jack about ten yards from me.”

  “Great. They don’t have wireless maps of the convention center up for public access—something about ‘preserving the security of the hall’ or whatever. Go over and plug yourself in, and I can give you Senator Ryman’s current location, assuming he’s not standing within ten yards of a scrambler.”

  “Have I mentioned recently that I adore you?” I rose, chucked my bottle into a recycler, and walked toward the jack-in point. “So, Chuck, huh? I guess he’s cute, if you like the weedy techie type. Personally, I’d go for something a little taller, but whatever floats your boat. Just make sure you know where he’s been.”

  “Yes, mother,” Buffy replied. “Are you there yet?”

  “Plugging in now.” Hooking my handheld to the wall unit was a matter of seconds. The standardization of data ports has been a true blessing to the technically inept computer users of the world. My system took a few seconds to negotiate a connection with the convention center servers, and most of that was verifying compatibility of antiviral and anti-spam software. It beeped, signaling its readiness to proceed. “I’m in.”

  “Great.” Buffy quieted. I could hear typing in the background. “Got it. You’re in the exhibition zone on the second level, right?”

  “Right. Near the Starbucks.”

  “Drop the singular; there are eight Starbucks kiosks on that level alone. Bring me a sugar-free vanilla raspberry mocha when you come back. The senator is on the conference floor three levels down. I’m dropping you a map.” My handheld beeped, acknowledging receipt. “That should have everything you need, assuming he doesn’t move.”

  “Thanks, Buffy.” I unplugged myself from the wall. “Have fun.”

  “Don’t call back for at least an hour.” The connection cut itself off.

  Shaking my head, I focused on the map dominating my screen. It was fairly simplistic, representing the convention center in clear enough lines that my route was difficult to misinterpret. The senator’s last known location was marked in red, and a thin yellow line connected him to the blinking white dot representing the data port where I’d downloaded the information. Nicely done. Pushing my sunglasses back up, I began making my way down the exhibition hall.

  The crowd had grown thicker during my water break. That wasn’t a problem: Buffy�
��s mapping software was equipped with a full overview of the pedestrian routes through the convention center and had been programmed to come up with the fastest route between points, rather than the shortest. After estimating congestion levels, it displayed a route that made use of little-used hallways, half-hidden shortcuts, and a lot of stairwells. Since most people will use escalators whenever possible, taking the stairs is often the best way to avoid getting yourself lost in a crowd.

  The human tropism toward illusionary time-saving devices has been the topic of a lot of studies since the Rising. There were an estimated six hundred casualties in one large Midwestern mall due entirely to people’s unwillingness to take the stairs during a crisis. Escalators jam if you overload them. People got stuck on elevators or ambushed by zombies that had been able to worm their way into the crush of people trying to force their way up the frozen escalators, and that was all she wrote. You’d think that after something like that, folks would start getting better about expending a little extra effort, but you’d be wrong. Sometimes, the hardest habit to break is the habit of doing nothing beyond the necessary.

  It took about fifteen minutes to descend three levels and make it past the cursory security checkpoint between the exhibition levels and the conference floor, which was closed to everyone save the candidates, members of their immediate family, official staff, and the press. The security check consisted of scanning my press pass to confirm that it wasn’t a fake, patting me down for unlicensed weapons, and performing a basic blood check with a cheap handheld unit from a brand that I know for a fact returns false negatives three times out of ten. I guess once you’re past the door in these places, they don’t worry as much about your health.

  The quiet of the conference floor was a welcome change from the hustle and bustle of the levels above. Down here, the business of waiting for results was exactly that: business. There are always a few hopefuls who stick it out even after the numbers indicate they don’t have much of a shot at the big seat, but the fact of the matter is that the party nominations almost always go to the folks who take Super Tuesday, and without party backing, your odds of taking the presidency are slim to none. You’re welcome to try, but you’re probably not going to win. Nine out of ten of the folks who’ve been out pounding the pavement for the last few months will be heading home after the polls close. It’ll be four more years before they have another shot at the big time, and for some of them, that’s too long to wait; a lot of this year’s candidates will never try for it again. Dreams are made and broken on days like this.