Feed

by Mira Grant

  “Sometimes it’s great living in a world where ‘good’ and ‘news’ don’t always combine to mean ‘positive information.’ ” I looked to Shaun. “Where do we start?”

  I’m in charge in the editing studio and the office. It’s different in the field. Shaun calls the shots unless I’m demanding an immediate evac. Both of us are smart enough to know where our strengths lie. His involve poking dead things with sticks and living to blog about it.

  “Everyone armed?” he asked—more for Rick’s benefit than mine. He knows I’d stick my hand in a zombie’s mouth for fun before I’d enter a field situation unarmed.

  “Clear,” I said, pulling out my .40.

  “Yes,” said Rick. His own gun was larger than mine, but he handled it easily enough for me to think it was a matter of preference, not machismo. He slid it back into the holster in his vest, adding, “I’d offer to take some marksmanship tests, but this doesn’t seem like the place.”

  “Later,” said Shaun. Rick looked amused. I smothered a snort of laughter. Poor guy probably thought my brother was kidding. “Right now, we’re splitting up. George, you take the foaling barn. Rick, you hit the adult quarters. I’ll take the hospital barn, and we’ll meet up back here to go through the yearling barn together. Radio contact at all times. If you see anything, scream as loudly as you can.”

  “So we can all come together to help?” asked Rick.

  “So the rest of us have time to get away,” I said. “Cameras on, people, and look alive; this is not a drill. This is the news.”

  Splitting up made the most sense: All four barns were involved in the outbreak, but it started in a single place. We’d search the other areas individually, get some good atmospheric shots for background, and then get back together where we might actually find something. That didn’t stop my heart from racing as I opened the door to the foaling barn feed room and stepped inside. The barn was dark. I removed my glasses and the burning in my eyes stopped almost immediately, pupils abandoning their futile efforts to contract and relaxing into full expansion as I walked into the main barn. This unvaried twilight was the sort of light they’re best suited to. I saw in it the way the infected did, and like the infected, I saw everything.

  The ranch was clearly a state-of-the-art establishment, on top of all the latest developments in animal husbandry. The stalls were spacious, designed to maximize the comfort of all parties involved. It was actually possible to ignore the federally mandated hazmat suits hanging from one wall and the yellow-and-red biohazard bins that marked the barn’s four corners.

  The smell of bleach was harder to ignore, and once I admitted it was there, the rest came clear. The stains on the walls that weren’t paint or spilled feed. The way the straw in the stalls was matted down with the remains of some thick, tacky liquid. They hadn’t finished the biohazard cleanup in here yet. That’s standard operating procedure. First you remove all infected bodies and any… chunks… that were left behind. Then you seal the building as well as you can and fill the air with bleach. Finally, you set off the aerosol disinfectants and formalin bombs. Formalin is a formaldehyde-based compound that can kill almost anything, including the mobile infected, and standard decontamination procedures call for five waves of the stuff, releasing a new batch as the previous one is depleted by the organic materials around you. It’s only after the area has been bleached so thoroughly that anything living is pretty much toast and has been allowed to sit long enough for all fluids to dry to a splatter-free state that it’s considered safe to start removing and incinerating potentially infected materials, like the straw in the stalls.

  My shoulder cam was already recording. I activated three more cameras, one attached to my bag, one at my hip, and one concealed in my barrette, and began to make my first slow turn, looking around the barn.

  A pile of dead cats was under the hayloft, their multicolored bodies twisted from the brutal abdominal hemorrhaging that killed them. They’d survived the outbreak and the chaos that followed, but they couldn’t outrun the formalin. I spent several seconds standing there, looking at them. They looked so small and harmless… and they were. Cats don’t reach the Mason barrier. They weigh less than forty pounds. Kellis-Amberlee isn’t interested in them, and they don’t reanimate. For cats, dead is still dead.

  I made it almost to the wall before I threw up.

  It was easier once the initial wash of disgust was out of my system. My first pass brought up nothing. There were no signs that anything unusual had happened; it was just the site of an outbreak, tragic and horrible, but not special. Here was the place where one of the infected horses kicked its way inside, knocking the barn’s sliding door off its rails. It would have hit the nursing mares in the first three stalls without slowing down, and the humans on duty were probably totally undefended. They had no idea anything was wrong until it was too late. If they were lucky, they died fast, either bleeding out or ripped to pieces before the virus had a chance to take hold and start rewriting them into another iteration of it. That was sadly unlikely. A fresh mob wants to infect, not devour.

  It was easy to picture infected horses rampaging through the place, biting everything in sight and rushing on to bite still more. It was a nightmare image; it’s how we almost lost the world at the beginning of the century, and it was probably accurate. We know how this sort of outbreak goes, even though we wish we didn’t. The virus is dependable, not creative.

  It took me twenty minutes to sweep the barn. By the time I was done, I was in such a hurry to get out of there that I forgot to put my sunglasses on before rushing out into the sunlight. The sudden glare was more than I could take. I staggered and caught myself against the barn door, eyes squinting shut.

  “This is how we can tell she hasn’t converted,” Shaun commented to my left. “Real zombies don’t get flash-blinded by sunlight when they forget their sunglasses.”

  “Fuck you, too,” I muttered, as Shaun got his arm around me and hoisted me away from the barn.

  “You kiss our mother with that mouth?”

  “Our mother and you both, dickhead. Give me my sunglasses.”

  “Which are where?”

  “Left-hand vest pocket.”

  “I’ve got it.” That was Rick’s voice, and it was Rick who pressed my glasses into my hand.

  “Thanks.” I snapped the glasses open, continuing to lean against Shaun as I pushed them on. Both their cameras were catching this. I really didn’t care. “Either of you find anything?”

  “Not me,” said Shaun. For some reason, he sounded like he was… laughing? His barn couldn’t have been any better than mine; if anything, it should have been worse, since more of the medical staff would have been on duty overnight. “Looks like Rick’s the only one who got lucky.”

  “I’ve always had a way with the ladies,” said Rick. Unlike Shaun and his evident amusement, Rick sounded almost embarrassed.

  I clearly needed to see whatever was going on to understand it. Wary of the light, I opened first one eye, and then the other. There was Shaun, his arm still around me, holding me upright as best he could; my eyes are a lot of why I’m so leery to go into live field situations, and no one understands that better than him. And there was Rick, standing just a few feet away, his expression a mixture of anxiety and confusion.

  Rick’s shoulder bag was moving.

  I jerked upright, demanding, “What is that?”

  ” ‘That’ would be Rick’s new lady friend,” Shaun said, snickering. “He’s irresistible, George. You should’ve seen it. He came out of that barn and she was all over him. I’ve seen clingy girlfriends before, but this one doesn’t just take the cake, she takes the entire bakery.”

  I eyed the junior member of my reporting staff warily. “Rick?”

  “He’s right. She latched on once she realized I was in the barn, not aiming a bleach gun at her face, and not planning to hurt her.” Rick opened the flap of his shoulder bag. A
narrow orange-and-white head poked out, yellow eyes regarding me warily. I blinked. The head withdrew.

  “It’s a cat.”

  “All the others were dead,” Rick said, closing his bag. “She must have managed to burrow farther under the hay than they did. Or maybe she was outside when the cleaners came through and somehow got trapped inside when they left.”

  “A cat.”

  “She tests clean, George,” Shaun said.

  Mammals under forty pounds can’t convert—they lack some crucial balance between body and brain mass—but they can sometimes carry the live virus, at least until it kills them. It’s rare. Most of the time, they just shrug it off and carry on, uninfected. In the field, “rare” isn’t something you can gamble on.

  “How many blood tests?” I asked, looking toward Shaun.

  “Four. One for each paw.” He held up his arms, anticipating my next question. “No, I didn’t get scratched, and yes, I’m sure the kitty’s clean.”

  “And he already yelled at me for picking her up before I was certain,” Rick said.

  “Don’t think that means I’m not planning to yell at you, too.” I pushed away from Shaun. “I’ll just do it when we’re back inside. We have three clean barns and one live cat, gentlemen. Are we ready to proceed?”

  “I’ve got nothing better planned for the afternoon,” Shaun said, his tone still cheerful. This was Irwin territory. Very little makes him happier. “Cameras on?”

  “Rolling.” I glanced at my watch. “We have clean feeds and more than enough memory. You going to grandstand?”

  “Do I ever not?” Shaun backed away until he was standing at the proper angle in front of the remaining barn, backlit by the afternoon sun. I had to admire his flare for the theatrics. We’d do two reports on the day’s events—one for his side of the site, playing up the dangers of entering an area that had suffered such a recent outbreak, and one for my side, talking about the human aspects of the tragedy. My opening spiel could be recorded later, when I had a better idea of what happened. Irwins sell suspense. Newsies sell the news.

  “What’s he doing?” Rick asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “You’ve seen those video clips of Irwins talking about fabulous dangers and horrible lurking monsters?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That. On your count, Shaun!”

  That was his cue. Suddenly grinning, suddenly relaxed, Shaun directed the smile that sold a thousand T-shirts toward the camera, flicked sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes with one gloved hand, and said, “Hey, audience. It’s been pretty boring around here lately, what with all the politics and the sealed-room stuff that only the heavy-duty news geeks care about. But today? Today, we get a treat. Because today, we’re the only news team being allowed into the Ryman ranch before decon is finished. You’re gonna see blood, guys. You’re gonna see stains. You’re gonna do everything but taste the formalin in the air—” He was off and running.

  I admit it: I tuned him out as he started getting into his spiel, preferring to watch rather than actively listening. Shaun has working his audience into a frenzy down to a science; by the time he’s done with them, they get excited by the mysterious discovery of pocket lint. It’s impressive, but I’d rather watch him move. There’s something wonderful about the way he lets go, becoming all energy and excitement as he outlines what’s coming next. Maybe it’s geeky for a girl my age to admit she still loves her brother. I don’t care. I love him, and one day I’ll bury him, and until then, I’m going to be grateful that I’m allowed to watch him talk.

  “—so come with me, and let’s see what really happened here on that cold March afternoon.” Shaun grinned again, winking at the camera, and turned to head for the barn doors. As he reached them, he called, “Cut segment!” and turned back, joviality gone. “We ready?”

  “Ready,” I said.

  With all chances to gracefully decide, “You know what? This is a job for the authorities—the people we pay to risk their lives for information” behind us, Rick and I followed Shaun through the feed room and into the last of the Ryman’s four barns.

  The smell hit first. There’s a stench to an outbreak site that you never find anywhere else. Scientists have been trying for years to determine why it is that we can smell the infection even when it’s been declared safely dead, and they’ve been forced to conclude that it’s the same viral sense that lets zombies recognize each other, just acting on a somewhat smaller scale. Zombies don’t try to kill other zombies on sight unless they haven’t had anything to eat in weeks; the living can tell where an outbreak started. It’s probably another handy function of the virus slumbering in our own bodies—not that anyone can say for sure. No one has ever been able to put the smell into words. Not really. It smells like death. Everything in your body says “run.” And, like idiots, we didn’t.

  Once the feed room door was shut, the barn was washed with the same dimness I experienced before. “George, Rick, lights,” Shaun called. I had time to raise my arm to shield my eyes before the overhead lights clicked on. Rick made a faint gagging noise, and I heard him throwing up somewhere behind me. Not a real surprise. Everyone tosses their cookies at least once on this sort of trip—I had, after all.

  When enough time had passed to let my eyes adjust to the limits of their capacity, I lowered my arm. What I saw was sheer chaos. The foaling barn seemed bad at first, but it was really nothing, just a few odd stains and some dead cats. The dead cats were here, too, strewn around the floor like discarded rags. As for the rest…

  My first thought was that the entire barn had been drenched with blood. Not just sprayed; literally drenched, like someone took a bucket and started painting the walls. That impression passed as it became clear that the majority of the blood was in one of two locations—either smeared along the walls in a band roughly three feet off the floor, or soaking the floor itself, which had turned a dozen different shades of brown and black as the mixture of bleach, blood, and fecal matter dried into an uneven crust. I stared at it, unblinking, until I was over the urge to vomit. Once was fine. Twice was not, especially when round two happened in front of the others.

  “These are labeled with the names of the horses,” Shaun called. He was on the far side of the barn, studying one of the stalls. “This one was called ‘Tuesday Blues.’ What kind of name is that for a horse?”

  “They liked weather names. Look for Gold Rush Weather and Red Sky at Morning. If anything odd happened here, we might find signs of it around their stalls.”

  “Under the six hundred gallons of gore,” Rick muttered.

  “Hope you brought a shovel!” Shaun called, sounding ungodly cheerful.

  Rick stared at him. “Your brother is an alien.”

  “Yeah, but he’s a cute one,” I said. “Start checking stalls.”

  I was halfway down my own row of stalls—between “Dorothy’s Gale” and “Hurricane Warning”—when Rick called, “Over here.” Shaun and I looked toward him. He was indicating a corner stall. “I found Goldie.”

  “Great,” Shaun said, and we started toward him. “Did you touch anything?”

  “No,” Rick replied. “I was waiting for you.”

  “Good.”

  The stall door hung askew. The hinges had been broken from the inside, and the wood was half-splintered in places, dented with the crescent shapes of a horse’s hooves. Shaun whistled low. “Goldie wanted out pretty darn bad.”

  “Can’t say that I blame him,” I said, leaning forward to study the broken wood. “Shaun, you’ve got gloves on. Can you open that?”

  “For you, the world. Or at least an open door on a really disgusting horse stall.” Shaun swung the door open, latching it with a small hook to keep it that way. I bent forward, letting my camera record every inch, as Shaun stepped past us into the stall itself.

  Something crunched under his feet.

  Rick and I whipped around to face him. My should
ers were suddenly tight with tension. Crunching noises in the field are almost never good. At best, they mean a close call. At worst…

  “Shaun? Report.”

  Face pale, Shaun lifted first one foot, and then the other. A piece of sharp-edged plastic was wedged in the sole of his left boot. “Just some junk,” he said, expression broadcasting his relief. “No big deal.” He reached down to pull it loose.

  “Wait!”

  Shaun froze. I turned to stare at Rick. “Explain.”

  “It’s sharp.” Rick looked between us, eyes wide. “It’s sharp-edged, in a horse stall, on a breeding ranch. Do you see any broken windows around here? Any broken equipment? Neither do I. What is something sharp doing in the stall? Horses have hard hooves, but they’re soft on the inside, and they get cut up really easily. Competent handlers don’t allow anything with a sharp edge loose near the stalls.”

  Shaun lowered his foot, careful to keep his weight balanced on his toe, not pressing on the plastic. “Son of a—”

  “Shaun, get out of there. Rick, find me a rake or something. We need to turn that straw.”

  “Got it.” Rick turned and headed for the rear corner of the barn where, I supposed, he’d seen some cleaning equipment. Shaun was limping out of the stall, still pale-faced.

  I hit him on the shoulder with the heel of my right hand as soon as he came into range. “Asshole,” I accused.

  “Probably,” he agreed, calming. If I was calling him names, it couldn’t be too bad. “You think we found something?”

  “It seems likely, but it’s not your concern right now. Get the pliers, get that goddamn thing out of your shoe, and get it bagged. If you touch it, I’ll kill you.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Rick came trotting back, rake in hand. I took it from him and leaned over, starting to poke through the straw. “Rick, keep an eye on my stupid brother.”