by Mira Grant
“Yeah. But still…”
“Think about it this way, Becks. If these people had been exposed a year ago, they wouldn’t be here to help us now. Everything’s a tradeoff.” I turned off the frontage road we’d been traveling down, onto a smaller, even less well-maintained frontage road.
Becks sighed. “I guess that’s true.”
I grew up in California, and if you’d asked me two years ago whether it was possible to drive from Oregon to my hometown without taking I-5, I would have said no. The longer I drove the route assembled by our modified GPS, the more I realized how wrong I’d been—and how much of the country we actually lost during the Rising. Most of the roads we were following didn’t appear in normal mapping software anymore, because they’d been abandoned to the dead, or were located in places that were considered impossible to secure. Deer and coyotes peeked out of the woods at us as we drove past, showing absolutely no fear. I couldn’t tell whether that was because they’d been infected, or because they had forgotten what humans were. As long as we stayed in the van, it didn’t really matter.
“There used to be bears out here, you know,” I said.
“Really?” Becks glanced up, frowning suspiciously in my direction. “Is there a reason you’re telling me this? Should I be going for the biggest gun I can get my hands on?”
“No. I’m just wondering if there might not be bears out here again. I mean, California used to have a grizzly bear on the state flag, even.”
Becks shuddered. “I do not understand how anyone ever thought that was appropriate. I like the current flag a lot better.”
“You don’t think it’s a little, well… sanitized?” The old bear flag might not have been politically correct in a post-Rising world, but it felt like there was passion behind it, like once upon a time, someone really cared about that symbol and the things it represented. Its replacement—a crossed redwood branch and California poppy—always struck me as something cooked up by a frantic marketing department for a governor who just needed something to hang over the state capitol.
“There’s a reason the word ‘sanitized’ contains the word ‘sanity.’ Using a giant carnivore as your state symbol is insane, zombies or no zombies.”
“What’s the Connecticut state flag?”
“A shield with three grapevines on it.”
What? George sounded confused.
“My sentiments exactly,” I muttered. Louder, I asked, “What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Welcome to Connecticut; we’ll get you nice and drunk before the dead start walking’?”
“I have no idea what it means. It’s just the stupid flag. What did the bear mean? ‘Come to California; you won’t have to wait for the zombies if you’re looking to get eaten’?” Becks shot me a glare, expression challenging.
I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“We’re on the run from the Centers for Disease Control, heading for a gas station that caters to drug-runners and mad scientists, and we’re fighting about the meaning of state flags.”
Becks blinked at me. Then she put her tablet down on her knees, bent forward to rest her forehead on the dashboard, and began to laugh. Grinning, I hit the gas a little harder. If we were laughing, we weren’t thinking too hard about what was waiting for us down the road.
Years before I was born, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” like drugs might somehow realize they were under siege and decide they’d be better off going somewhere else. That war went on for decades even before the Kellis-Amberlee virus gave us something more concrete to fight against. A sane person might think the dead rising would be a good reason to stop stressing out over a few recreational pharmaceuticals. It turns out the lobbyists and corporations who stood to benefit from keeping those nasty drugs illegal didn’t agree, and the war on drugs continued, even up to the present day.
Smuggling is a time-honored human tradition. Make something illegal, create scarcity, and people will find a way to get it. Better, they’ll find a way to make it turn a profit. In some ways, the Rising was the best thing that could have happened to the world’s drug smugglers, because suddenly, there were all these roads and highways and even entire towns with no population, no police force, and best of all, no one to ask what those funny smells coming out of your basement windows were. They had to be constantly vigilant, both against the threat of the infected and the threat of the DEA, but they had more space than they’d ever had before.
The question remained: How were they supposed to move their product into more civilized areas? If drugs had been the only things in need of smuggling, maybe the answer would have involved tanks, or strapping backpacks to zombies before releasing them back into the wild. But drugs weren’t the only things people needed to move. Weapons. Ammunition. Livestock—the illegal breeding farms on the other side of the Canadian Hazard Line were constantly looking for fresh genetic lines, and would go to incredible lengths to get them. George and I once followed a woman all the way to the California state border as she tried to get her Great Dane to safety without being stopped by the authorities.
I don’t know whether she made it or not. We lost track of her shortly after she crossed into Oregon. But Buffy convinced George to let her scrub the identifying marks from our reports. These days, after spending some time on the wrong side of the rules, I sort of hope that woman and her dog made it over the border, into a place where they could live together the way she wanted them to.
That’s because you’re a sentimental idiot, said George.
“Probably,” I said, getting my laughter under control. “But isn’t that why you love me?”
Becks lifted her head from the dashboard, still chuckling, and went back to tapping on her tablet. “How much farther?”
“About ten miles,” I said. “Get the trade goods.”
“On it.”
The smuggler’s supply stations were largely maintained by people in the business of stealing the most forbidden commodity of all: freedom. They were the ones who chose to live in the places we’d abandoned, not because they were breeding large dogs or making meth, but because they wanted to live the way they always had. They wanted to open their doors on green trees and blue skies, not fences and security guards. I couldn’t blame them. Oh, I was pretty sure they were insane, but I couldn’t blame them.
Living off the grid came with its own set of problems, including limited access to medical care. So while the people we were on our way to buy gas from might take cash, they were likely to be a lot more interested in fresh blood test units, antibiotics, and birth control. More than half the “trade goods” we’d received from Dr. Abbey were contraceptives of one type or another.
“They choose their lives, and they love their lives, but bringing children into that environment isn’t something you want to do by mistake,” was her comment, as she showed Becks how to load the contraceptive implant gun. “This stuff is worth more than anything else you could possibly carry, and it’ll keep them from trying to barter for your ammunition. Just make sure they see that you’re armed, or you’re likely to find yourselves at the center of a good old-fashioned robbery.”
Becks unbuckled her seat belt and climbed over her seat into the rear of the van. I could hear her banging around back there as she got our kits ready. Glancing into the rearview mirror, I could see the back of her head. Her medium-brown hair was pulled into a no-nonsense braid, the streaks of white-blond from Dr. Abbey’s chemical showers striping it like a barber pole.
“We need gas, and maybe some munchies,” I called. “I think we can make it another eight or nine hours before we need to stop for the night.”
“Got it,” she called back. “Should I pack any of the antibiotics?”
“No, but grab the poison oak cream. That probably has some local demand.” I turned my attention back to the road. The counter on the GPS indicated that our turn was somewhere just up ahead. “How we wound up here is a mystery to me,”
I said, almost under my breath.
The part where we’re about to bribe criminals for gas, or the whole situation? asked George.
“A little bit of both.”
“I wish I’d known about this while I was alive.” It wasn’t that surprising when I heard her voice coming from the seat Becks had vacated. I glanced over to see George with her feet braced on the dashboard and her knees tucked up almost against her chest. “I mean, Becks is right. This would have made a fantastic exposé.”
“And destroyed these peoples’ way of life. They’ve never done anything to earn that.”
“How many of the people we exposed did? I mean, we were never tabloid journalists—”
“And thank God for that,” I muttered.
“—but we weren’t saints, either. If a story caught our eye, we chased it down, and sometimes people got hurt. Like that woman with the dog that you were just thinking about.”
“Can you not remind me that you can read my mind? That’s where I keep all my private thoughts.”
“Please. Like there’s anything in your head that could shock me?” George leaned forward, resting her cheek on her knee as she smiled at me. “The woman with the dog, Shaun. Even if she got out, how many of the routes we documented her taking were closed by Homeland Security immediately afterward? How many people like her tried to run when they saw our report, and got driven straight into a trap we’d created?”
“That’s not our fault.”
“Was it Dr. Kellis’s fault when Robert Stalnaker decided to write a sensationalistic article about his cure for the common cold, and kicked off the whole stupid Rising? We’re supposed to be responsible journalists. How do we cope when the stories we report get people hurt?” She sighed. “Do you honestly think Buffy and I were the first casualties?”
“Right now, I just think I’m lucky Buffy isn’t haunting me, too,” I said sourly.
“Shaun?”
I twisted in my seat to see Becks standing behind me. She looked concerned. I couldn’t blame her. I’d have looked concerned, too, if I were the one in her place.
“Hey, Becks,” I said, glancing to the empty passenger seat as I turned my eyes back to the road. George was gone. She’d be back. “Everything okay back there?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine—is everything okay up front?”
“Just arguing with myself again. Nothing new.”
“Please turn left,” said the GPS, cutting off any reply from Becks. That was probably for the best. Ignoring my crazy might seem okay when we were in a nice, relatively safe lab environment, but that didn’t mean her tolerance was going to extend to the field. I really didn’t feel like arguing about whether or not I could decide to be sane again.
The road the GPS directed us down was barely more than a dirt path winding into the trees. Tires had worn deep ruts into the earth, and the van shuddered and jumped as we jounced along. Becks dropped into her seat, grabbing hold of the oh-shit handle with one hand and bracing the other against the dashboard.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” she demanded.
“Destination in one hundred yards,” said the GPS.
“According to the creepy computer lady, yeah, it’s the right way.” I eased off on the gas. No sense in killing our shocks over a road that didn’t even come with any zombies.
“I hate this road.”
“It clearly hates us, too.”
“Destination in twenty yards,” said the GPS.
I frowned. All I could see ahead of us was more dirt road… at least until a pair of men stepped out of the trees, each holding a shotgun large and impractical enough to be essentially useless. Sure, you could shoot a zombie with one of those things, and sure, it would go down, but the kick from a shotgun that size would probably knock you down at the same time. Not to mention the weight of the ammunition. If you wanted to carry something like that and have the option to run for your life when the need inevitably arose, you’d be carrying less than two dozen rounds.
“Shaun…”
“It’s cool, Becks,” I said, turning off the engine. The men with the shotguns trained them on our windshield. I responded by blowing them a kiss and waving cheerfully. “They’re not planning to shoot us. Those guns wouldn’t make sense if they were planning to shoot us.”
“So what are they planning to do? Please, enlighten me.” Becks scowled.
I undid my seat belt. “They’re trying to scare us,” I said, and opened the van door. I kept my hands in view as I slid out of the driver’s seat. The men with the guns shifted to train them squarely on me. I smiled ingratiatingly at them, stepping far enough from the van that they could see for themselves that I wasn’t hiding anything. “We come in peace,” I called. More quietly, I added, for Becks’s benefit, “I have always wanted to say that.”
Sometimes you are an enormous dork, said George.
“True,” I agreed. The men were still pointing their guns in my direction. I sighed and raised my voice, trying another approach: “Dr. Abbey sent us. We just need gas, and then we’ll be on our way.”
The man to my left lowered his gun. The one to my right did not. Eyes narrowed with suspicion, he asked, “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t, although I suppose you could make us stand out here while you try to find someone who has the current number for Dr. Abbey’s lab and get her to give us her okay. But I really am telling the truth. I’m Shaun Mason. The lady in the car is Rebecca Atherton. We’re from After the End Times, we’re hiding from the CDC, and Dr. Abbey sent us.”
Most of that would qualify as “too much information” if I were talking to anyone else. But these were men who had chosen, for whatever reason, to remove themselves from the grid of modern existence—no small task, with government surveillance and public health tracking becoming more invasive with every year that passed. Telling them we were hiding wouldn’t give them a lever to use against us; it would give us a point of commonality with them. We were all hiding from the world together.
The second man lowered his gun. “How’s that damn dog of hers doing?” he asked. I could barely see his mouth through the bushy red thicket of his beard. He was wearing denim overalls and a plaid lumberjack shirt with the cuffs pegged up around his elbows. It was like being questioned by Paul Bunyan’s much, much shorter brother.
“Still the size of a small tank,” I said.
“She tell you we don’t take plastic?” asked the first man, apparently unwilling to let his companion do all the talking. If the second man was Paul Bunyan’s midget cousin, the first man would have made a decent stand-in for Ichabod Crane, even down to the prominent Adam’s apple and impressively oversized nose.
I wish we were filming this, said George.
I swallowed my automatic “Me, too,” focusing instead on looking as harmless and sincere as possible. It wasn’t easy. Most of my training had focused on looking daring and oblivious, which probably wasn’t going to fly here. “She told us our money wouldn’t be any good,” I said, still smiling. “She also said you might be willing to consider blood test units that wouldn’t give you tetanus as a fair trade for some gas and a couple of sandwiches.”
Paul Bunyan frowned for a moment—long enough that I was starting to wonder whether Becks would be able to move into the driver’s seat and hit the gas before we both got shot. Then he grinned, showing the gaps where his front teeth had presumably been, once upon a time. “Well, hell, boy, why didn’t you open with that?”
“We’re still new at this,” I replied. “Does that mean we can come in?”
“Sure does,” said Ichabod. He and Paul started toward the van, leaning their guns against their shoulders in an almost synchronized motion. “Hope you’re not averse to giving us a lift.”
This had all the hallmarks of a test. “Sure,” I said, motioning for them to follow me as I moved to climb back into the van. As expected, Becks had her pistol out, and was holding it just out of view behind the dashboar
d. I gestured for her to put it away before one of our new “friends” saw it.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she hissed, voice barely above a whisper.
“Nope,” I said. I would have said more, but Paul and Ichabod had reached the van. “It’s open!” I called.
“Much obliged,” said Ichabod. He opened the van’s rear door and climbed inside, with Paul close behind him. “I’m Nathan. This is Paul.”
“Nice to meet you folks,” said Paul.
“Charmed,” said Becks, with a professional smile. Anyone who didn’t know her would have trouble telling it from an expression of actual pleasure. Anyone who did know her would recognize it as a cue to grab a weapon and run.
“You look like a Paul,” I said, ignoring the danger inherent in Becks’s expression. She might not be happy about having strangers in our van, but she could cope. In the back of my head, Georgia laughed. “Go ahead and close the door. I assume you know where we’re going?”
Paul slammed the van door and replied, “Just keep heading up the road. You’ll see the turnoff in about another twenty yards.”
“Awesome.” I started the van’s engine and began driving slowly down the uneven dirt road. Much to my surprise, the surface leveled out dramatically before we’d gone very much farther. The van stopped jarring and jouncing, settling into a more normal, smooth ride. The look on my face must have been good, because Nathan and Paul both burst out laughing.
“Oh, man, that gets you newbies every time!” said Paul, slapping his knee with one meaty lumberjack hand. “We maintain the road once you get far enough off the surface streets. Never know when you’re going to need to burn rubber without blowing an axle.”
“Yeah, that was high comedy,” I said, barely managing to keep the annoyance out of my voice. I couldn’t afford to get annoyed. Becks was already halfway there, and one of us needed to be the reasonable one.
I could do it, offered George.
One of us who actually had a body needed to be the reasonable one, I inwardly amended. “Where to next?” I asked.