by Mira Grant
“It’s viral.” That’s the first thing she says in her reedy little voice, the words delivered with matter-of-fact calm. “Danny’s team over at the med school managed to isolate a sample and get some pictures. It looks sort of like Ebola, and sort of like the end of the fucking world. They’re online now.” She smiles, the heartbreaking smile of a corn husk angel. “They’ve been trying all the common anti-virals. Nothing’s making any difference in the progression of the infection.”
“Hello to you, too, Eva,” I say. A duct tape circle on the floor around the couch marks the edge of the “safe” area; any closer puts us at risk of infection. I walk to the circle’s edge and stop, uncertain what else to say. I settle for, “Professor Mason just gave an update. We’ve lost contact with the library.”
“That isn’t a surprise,” says Eva. “They had Jorge over there.”
“So?” asks Andrei.
“He updated his Facebook status about three hours ago to say that he’d been bitten, but they washed the wound out with bleach. Bleach won’t save you from Ebola, so it’s definitely not going to save you from Ebola’s bitchy big sister.” She coughs into her hand before saying, almost cheerfully, “Good news for you: the structure of the virus means it’s not droplet-based. So you don’t need to worry about sharing my air. Bad news for me: If Jorge took three hours to turn after being bitten, I’d say I have another hour—maybe two—before I go.”
“Don’t say that.” There’s no strength in Andrei’s command. He lost that when Eva got the blood in her eyes, when it became clear that she was going to get sick. She was the one who told him we needed to run. Losing her is proof that all of this is really happening.
Eva continues like she doesn’t hear him: “I’ve been collecting everyone’s data and reposting it. The campus network is still holding. That’s the advantage to everything happening as fast as it has. Professor Mason has a pretty decent file sharing hub in place. If you can keep trading data, keep track of where the biters are, you can probably maintain control of the campus until help arrives.” Matter-of-factly, she adds, “You’ll have to shoot me soon.”
Andrei is still arguing with her when I turn and leave the room. The smell of the swamp travels with me, hot decay and predators in hiding.
Minutes trickle by. Susan from the Drama Department gives way to Andy from Computer Science; Death Cab is replaced by Billy Ray Cyrus. There are no gunshots from inside. Professor Mason gives the afternoon update. Contact with the library has been reestablished. Six survivors, none of them bitten. There are no gunshots from inside. The hot smell of the swamp is everywhere, clinging to every inch of the campus, of the city, of the world. I wonder if the alligators have noticed that the world is ending, or if they have continued on as they always have… if they observe our extinction as they observed the extinction of the dinosaurs: with silence, and with infinite patience.
The risen dead have more in common with the alligators than they do with us, the living. That’s why the smell of the Everglades has followed them here, hanging sweet and shroudlike over everything. The swamp is coming home, draped across the shoulders of things that once were men. Was that how it began for the dinosaurs? With the bodies of their own rising up and coming home? Did they bring it on themselves, or did the dead simply rise and wash them from the world? The alligators might remember, if there was any way to ask them. But the alligators have no place here. Here there is only the rising of the dead.
Professor Mason is on the campus radio again, this time with an update from the CDC. They’re finally willing to admit that the zombie plague is real. Details are given, but the gunshots from inside drown them out. The smell of the swamp. The smell of blood and gunpowder. The smell of death.
My grandfather’s hand throwing the rock. The sound of the rock hitting the water. “Always remember that Nature can be cruel.”
“I never forgot,” I whisper, and open the door.
The campus stretches out in front of me, majestic in its stillness, the smell of swamp water and the dead holding sway over everything. The door swings shut behind me, the latch engaging with a click. No going back. There is never any going back for those who walk into the swamp alone. This is cleaner. This is the end as it was meant to be—for dinosaurs, for humans, for us all.
The rock fits easily in my hand, sized precisely to the span of my fingers. I look up at the speaker that broadcasts Professor Mason’s update, the masking sound that confuses the reality of my presence. Let the survivors cling to their petty hopes. I choose my window with care, making certain not to select one that shelters the living. I pull back my arm, remembering my grandfather’s face, my brother’s voice on the phone when his wife was bitten, the golden eyes of alligators in the Everglades. My aim is true; the sound of shattering glass is alien here. All I need to do is wait.
I close my eyes, and spread my hands, and I am eight years old. I am safe beside my grandfather, and the smell of the swamp is strong and green and sweet. The sound of water running in my memory is enough to block the sound of footsteps, the sound of distant moaning on the wind. I am eight years old in Florida, I am twenty-three in California, and I am temporary. Nature can be cruel, but the alligators, the Everglades, and the dead are eternal.
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats
Introduction
The San Diego International Comic Convention is a world entirely unto itself.
I’ve been attending since I was sixteen years old. I’ve missed a few years—mostly in my early twenties, when time and money were both tight—but on the whole, I’ve been a constant feature on the floor. I’ve seen the convention go from manageable to massive around me. The crowds are… well, they’re virtually impossible to describe. They can only be experienced.
(The closest comparison I have to trying to move across the San Diego Comic-Con floor on a Saturday afternoon is trying to cut through Times Square on New Year’s Eve, or across the plaza in front of Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World just before the fireworks show. If you have ever done any of these things, I’m sorry. If you haven’t, well, I have done all three of them, which means you don’t have to.)
It’s sort of inevitable that someone with a morbid turn of mind will eventually look at San Diego Comic-Con and think “if the zombie apocalypse happened here, we’d be massively fucked.” It’s a lot of people crammed into a small space; many of them are in costume, some covered in fake blood; because there’s so much noise and so much going on, even emergencies tend to go overlooked by people who are not immediately effected. Up until recently, the Wi-Fi and cellular signals inside the convention center were mind-numbingly terrible, which meant that people who were inside the hall were essentially isolated from people outside the hall.
What a perfect recipe for chaos.
On a parallel track: Some years ago, Joss Whedon made a television show called Firefly. It aired for a season on Fox before it was canceled, inspiring a devoted fan base, including the nonprofit organization known as the California Browncoats. They appear annually at Comic-Con, raising money for charity and keeping the signal going. Several good friends of mine, including Shawn Tutt, are involved with the California Browncoats. I knew when I decided to write my Comic-Con story that I wanted the Browncoats to be involved.
Not only are several of the characters in San Diego 2014 based on real people—including Shawn and Lynn Tutt, and their daughter, Lorelei—but the California Browncoats were given the opportunity to auction off several Tuckerizations for charity. “Tuckerizations” are a literary tradition of long standing, in which individuals are written into a fictional universe, whether as heroes or villains, with their full and informed consent. Kelly Nakata and Lesley Smith (and Lesley’s service dog) were written into this story because they won the auction. I remain grateful for the support of the California Browncoats, and of the Trevor Project, which was the recipient of their donations.
During the writing of this story, I fell a little bit in l
ove with Elle Riley and her fictional show, Space Crime Continuum. I was disappointed when the Canadian science fiction drama, Continuum, premiered—I had been looking forward to writing lots and lots of fanfic for a show that didn’t exist.
Oh, well.
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats
Prologue: Chasing the Story
The Rising is not a single narrative; there is no one true story that unifies that entire bloody summer, no one event which exemplifies the human experience. It is a piece of history like any other, a tapestry of lives which, viewed in total, may someday give us that rarest of commodities: We may, by looking at them all, someday discover the truth.
—MAHIR GOWDA
When I was a kid, people used to talk about living in the future. Well, I live in the future. I want to go back to living in the past.
—LORELEI TUTT CAPTAIN, UNITED STATES COAST GUARD
LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT, LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044
Lorelei Tutt is a harshly attractive woman in her forties, tall and lean, with scars from her combat gear on her hands and elbows. Her naturally brown hair is streaked with natural gray and sterilization blonde, and she wears it in a short-cropped, almost military style that does nothing to soften the lines of her face. She walks with a subtle limp, the result of learning to walk on a prosthetic right leg at the age of twenty-five. Her left eye is shaped normally but filmed with cataract white from an old war injury. She moves with studied precision, and it is clear from her expression that she is not happy to see me.
The front room of her London flat is at odds with her appearance: The time she spent in the United States Coast Guard has left her seeming businesslike and cool, but her decor is that of a teenage member of the science fiction and fantasy subculture that thrived before the Rising. Books and assorted forms of recorded media pack her shelves, and the walls are covered in posters advertising long-canceled television shows, long-forgotten movies.
She indicates that I should sit. She does not do the same. Her accent is American: She may have left the country of her birth after she left the Coast Guard, but some things are not so easily forgotten.
LORELEI: You know, I don’t know why you people keep coming looking for me, sniffing around the graves like this. San Diego was thirty years ago. There’s no reason to keep dredging up what happened.
MAHIR: Actually, ma’am, that’s precisely why people are becoming interested again. Thirty years… that’s long enough for terror to fade and nostalgia to start taking over. Did you hear that there’s been talk of doing another convention? The city of San Diego has expressed a willingness to host it. They think it might help restore the tourist trade.
Lorelei freezes. I have never seen this happen so literally before: One moment I am speaking to a living, if cold, woman, and the next, I am sharing a room with a statue made of flesh. When she speaks again, what little human warmth her voice contained is gone.
LORELEI: This interview is over. Get out.
MAHIR: You never intended to speak with me today, did you? [silence from Lorelei] That’s your right, of course, but I have to ask you… why? Why did you let me come here if you weren’t intending to actually have a conversation about what happened?
LORELEI: You people have wasted so much of my time over the last thirty years—all you damn bloggers acting like you’re heroes because you stayed in your rooms and told each other about the zombie apocalypse. You people had been doing that since long before the zombies came. You weren’t heroes.
MAHIR: But your parents were. [again, silence from Lorelei] Isn’t that why you’re angry? Because your parents were true heroes of the Rising, and almost no one knows their names? It was very hard to track you down, Miss Tutt. You have no idea.
LORELEI: I thought I told you to leave.
MAHIR: Miss Tutt… I’ve lost people, too. Maybe not as many as you have, maybe not the way that you did, but I’ve lost them, and I can’t have them back. And I know that the only thing that would have made it even harder for me—the only thing that could have made the worst thing that ever happened to me even worse—would have been knowing that someone else was telling their stories, and telling them wrong. This story is going to be told. I can’t stop it. Neither can you. But what I can do, what I have the power to do, is to ask you if you’ll let me tell it the way you want it told. If you’ll let me tell the truth.
There is a long silence. I begin to think that I’ve lost her—and then Lorelei gestures for me to stand, beckoning me deeper into the flat.
LORELEI: I need to put the kettle on. If I’m going to tell you what happened, I’m going to want a cup of tea in front of me.
I nod, rise, and follow the last known survivor of the 2014 San Diego International Comic Convention out of the front room. She leads me to the kitchen, where she fills the electric kettle and sets the water to boil. She moves with nervous efficiency. She does not look at me. The time for looking at me is done.
LORELEI: I was just a kid when the Rising started. I didn’t think of myself that way—I was eighteen, I was a grown woman, I was not a child—but I was still just a kid. I had no idea how ugly the world could be, or how bad things could get. We’d heard the news. I mean, who hadn’t? But we didn’t think it was really happening, and even if it was, it wasn’t happening where we lived. We did the con every year. It was one of the things we all looked forward to as a family. Me, and Mom, and Dad, rolling into San Diego like we were going home…
Preview Night
The trouble with saying “I would have done it differently” is that we’re always speaking from a position of knowing exactly what is about to go horribly wrong. The truth is, we’d be lucky to do half so well if the Rising began again today.
—MAHIR GOWDA
Get it in, get it up, get it done.
—SHAWN TUTT, LT. COMMANDER, UNITED STATES COAST GUARD (D. 2014)
The San Diego International Comic Convention was an annual event which drew hundreds of thousands of comic book, science fiction, fantasy, and horror enthusiasts from around the world. For a week every year, San Diego’s Gaslight District would be transformed into a strange new country, one with its own traditions, rules, and hazards. It was a golden age for what those enthusiasts called “fandom,” and as with all golden ages, it was not properly recognized until it was over.
It’s easy to look back on July of 2014 from our modern perspective, with our full knowledge of what was already happening to the world, and condemn the people who chose to attend that year’s comic book convention, or “Comic-Con.” We tell ourselves that they should have known better. But why should they have known better? It was a different time. It was a more innocent era. And the fans of the world were descending, as they always did, on San Diego, California.
The following narrative has been assembled from eyewitness accounts, security footage, social media updates, and various other sources that I am not currently at liberty to disclose. Some of the events described may not have happened in this exact fashion, but for once, I have put aside the goal of absolute truth in favor of a greater goal: understanding. To truly understand what it was like for those brave souls who died in the first major San Diego outbreak, we must first understand what it meant to be them…
—From San Diego 2014 by Mahir Gowda, June 11, 2044
Wednesday, July 23, 2014: 10:24 A.M.
The sky over San Diego was a beautifully pristine shade of blue, the sort of thing that triggered a thousand tourist snapshots and seemed impossible to anyone who hadn’t seen it with their own eyes. The streets were already beginning to fill with the early arrivals, the people who had come to town for whatever reason before the official start of the convention. Some were there to wait for the doors to open on Preview Night, hoping to snag early bargains or rare collectibles. Others were there to settle into their hotel rooms and prepare for the chaos to come. And still others—such as the California Browncoats, a nonprofit fan organization modeled around the prota
gonists of a canceled science fiction Western called Firefly—were there to set up their official booths.
“I know you don’t have much respect for authority, Dwight, but around here we respect the laws of physics,” said Rebecca, a petite brunette with a clipboard in one hand. She looked from her paperwork to the former Marine, who was trying, somewhat vainly, to hang the awning from their booth’s precarious piping-and-plywood frame. “That means that if you’re not careful, you’re going to plummet and crack your skull open on this lovely concrete floor. Can we try to not have any major injuries before the show opens this year? It would be a fantastic improvement over last year.”
“I’m not the one who injured myself last year,” Dwight shot back as he continued tinkering with the bolts that were supposed to hold the awning in place. “That honor goes to Leita, who doesn’t understand that you’re not supposed to pick up knives by the pointy end.”
“Hey!” Leita’s head popped up over the edge of the display case. She pouted prettily at Dwight, the studs beneath her lower lip poking upward at an angle. “It’s not my fault.”
“It never is,” Dwight said, and kept working.
Rebecca sighed. “Just please try not to fall and die before we’re finished setting up? I am begging you. This is my begging-you voice.”
“Do you need me to whip these heathens into shape?” demanded a voice from behind her, loud enough to command attention without shouting, the kind of voice that made cadets jump and crowds clear out of the way.