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One

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot—in this case, my brother Shaun—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens. As if we didn’t already know what happens when you mess with a zombie: The zombie turns around and bites you, and you become the thing you poked. This isn’t a surprise. It hasn’t been a surprise for more than twenty years, and if you want to get technical, it wasn’t a surprise then.

When the infected first appeared—heralded by screams that the dead were rising and judgment day was at hand—they behaved just like the horror movies had been telling us for decades that they would behave. The only surprise was that this time, it was really happening.

There was no warning before the outbreaks began. One day, things were normal; the next, people who were supposedly dead were getting up and attacking anything that came into range. This was upsetting for everyone involved, except for the infected, who were past being upset about that sort of thing. The initial shock was followed by running and screaming, which eventually devolved into more infection and attacking, that being the way of things. So what do we have now, in this enlightened age twenty-six years after the Rising? We have idiots prodding zombies with sticks, which brings us full circle to my brother and why he probably won’t live a long and fulfilling life.

“Hey, George, check this out!” he shouted, giving the zombie another poke in the chest with his hockey stick. The zombie gave a low moan, swiping at him ineffectually. It had obviously been in a state of full viral amplification for some time and didn’t have the strength or physical dexterity left to knock the stick out of Shaun’s hands. I’ll give Shaun this much: He knows not to bother the fresh ones at close range. “We’re playing patty-cake!”

“Stop antagonizing the locals and get back on the bike,” I said, glaring from behind my sunglasses. His current buddy might be sick enough to be nearing its second, final death, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a healthier pack roaming the area. Santa Cruz is zombie territory. You don’t go there unless you’re suicidal, stupid, or both. There are times when even I can’t guess which of those options applies to Shaun.

“Can’t talk right now! I’m busy making friends with the locals!”

“Shaun Phillip Mason, you get back on this bike right now, or I swear to God, I am going to drive away and leave you here.”

Shaun looked around, eyes bright with sudden interest as he planted the end of his hockey stick at the center of the zombie’s chest to keep it at a safe distance. “Really? You’d do that for me? Because ‘My Sister Abandoned Me in Zombie Country Without a Vehicle’ would make a great article.”

“A posthumous one, maybe,” I snapped. “Get back on the goddamn bike!”

“In a minute!” he said, laughing, and turned back toward his moaning friend.

In retrospect, that’s when everything started going wrong.

The pack had probably been stalking us since before we hit the city limits, gathering reinforcements from all over the county as they approached. Packs of infected get smarter and more dangerous the larger they become. Groups of four or less are barely a threat unless they can corner you, but a pack of twenty or more stands a good chance of breaching any barrier the uninfected try to put up. You get enough of the infected together and they’ll start displaying pack hunting techniques; they’ll start using actual tactics. It’s like the virus that’s taken them over starts to reason when it gets enough hosts in the same place. It’s scary as hell, and it’s just about the worst nightmare of anyone who regularly goes into zombie territory—getting cornered by a large group that knows the land better than you do.

These zombies knew the land better than we did, and even the most malnourished and virus-ridden pack knows how to lay an ambush. A low moan echoed from all sides, and then they were shambling into the open, some moving with the slow lurch of the long infected, others moving at something close to a run. The runners led the pack, cutting off three of the remaining methods of escape before there was time to do more than stare. I looked at them and shuddered.

Fresh infected—really fresh ones—still look almost like the people that they used to be. Their faces show emotion, and they move with a jerkiness that could just mean they slept wrong the night before. It’s harder to kill something that still looks like a person, and worst of all, the bastards are fast. The only thing more dangerous than a fresh zombie is a pack of them, and I counted at least eighteen before I realized that it didn’t matter, and stopped bothering.

I grabbed my helmet and shoved it on without fastening the strap. If the bike went down, dying because my helmet didn’t stay on would be one of the better options. I’d reanimate, but at least I wouldn’t be aware of it. “Shaun!”

Shaun whipped around, staring at the emerging zombies. “Whoa.”

Unfortunately for Shaun, the addition of that many zombies had turned his buddy from a stupid solo into part of a thinking mob. The zombie grabbed the hockey stick as soon as Shaun’s attention was focused elsewhere, yanking it out of his hands. Shaun staggered forward and the zombie latched onto his cardigan, withered fingers locking down with deceptive strength. It hissed. I screamed, images of my inevitable future as an only child filling my mind.

“Shaun!” One bite and things would get a lot worse. There’s not much worse than being cornered by a pack of zombies in downtown Santa Cruz. Losing Shaun would qualify.

The fact that my brother convinced me to take a dirt bike into zombie territory doesn’t make me an idiot. I was wearing full off-road body armor, including a leather jacket with steel armor joints attached at the elbows and shoulders, a Kevlar vest, motorcycling pants with hip and knee protectors, and calf-high riding boots. It’s bulky as hell, and I don’t care, because once you factor in my gloves, my throat’s the only target I present in the field.

Shaun, on the other hand, is a moron and had gone zombie baiting in nothing more defensive than a cardigan, a Kevlar vest, and cargo pants. He won’t even wear goggles—he says they “spoil the effect.” Unprotected mucous membranes can spoil a hell of a lot more than that, but I practically have to blackmail him to get him into the Kevlar. Goggles are a nonstarter.

There’s one advantage to wearing a sweater in the field, no matter how idiotic I think it is: wool tears. Shaun ripped himself free and turned, running for the motorcycle with great speed, which is really the only effective weapon we have against the infected. Not even the fresh ones can keep up with an uninfected human over a short sprint. We have speed, and we have bullets. Everything else about this fight is in their favor.

“Shit, George, we’ve got company!” There was a perverse mixture of horror and delight in his tone. “Look at ’em all!”

“I’m looking! Now get on!”

I kicked us free as soon as he had his leg over the back of the bike and his arm around my waist. The bike leapt forward, tires bouncing and shuddering across the broken ground as I steered us into a wide curve. We needed to get out of there, or all the protective gear in the world wouldn’t do us a damn bit of good. I might live if the zombies caught up with us, but my brother would be dragged into the mob. I gunned the throttle, praying that God had time to preserve the life of the clinically suicidal.

We hit the last open route out of the square at twenty miles an hour, still gathering speed. Whooping, Shaun locked one arm around my waist and twisted to face the zombies, waving and blowing kisses in their direction. If it were possible to enrage a mob of the infected, he’d have managed it. As it was, they just moaned and kept following, arms extended toward the promise of fresh meat.

The road was pitted from years of weather damage without maintenance. I fought to keep control as we bounced from pothole to pothole. “Hold on, you idiot!”

“I’m holding on!” Shaun called back, seeming happy as a clam and oblivious to the fact that people who don’t follow proper safety procedures around zombies—like not winding up around zombies in the first place—tend to wind up in the obituaries.

“Hold on with both arms!” The moaning was only coming from three sides now, but it didn’t mean anything; a pack this size was almost certainly smart enough to establish an ambush. I could be driving straight to the site of greatest concentration. They’d moan in the end, once we were right on top of them. No zombie can resist a good moan when dinner’s at hand. The fact that I could hear them over the engine meant that there were too many, too close. If we were lucky, it wasn’t already too late to get away.

Of course, if we were lucky, we wouldn’t be getting chased by an army of zombies through the quarantine area that used to be downtown Santa Cruz. We’d be somewhere safer, like Bikini Atoll just before the bomb testing kicked off. Once you decide to ignore the hazard rating and the signs saying Danger: Infection, you’re on your own.

Shaun grudgingly slid his other arm around my waist and linked his hands at the pit of my stomach, shouting, “Spoilsport,” as he settled.

I snorted and hit the gas again, aiming for a nearby hill. When you’re being chased by zombies, hills are either your best friends or your burial ground. The slope slows them down, which is great, unless you hit the peak and find out that you’re surrounded, with nowhere left to run to.

Idiot or not, Shaun knows the rules about zombies and hills. He’s not as dumb as he pretends to be, and he knows more about surviving zombie encounters than I do. His grip on my waist tightened, and for the first time, there was actual concern in his voice as he shouted, “George? What do you think you’re doing?”

“Hold, on,” I said. Then we were rolling up the hill, bringing more zombies stumbling out of their hiding places behind trash cans and in the spaces between the once-elegant beachfront houses that were now settling into a state of neglected decay.

Most of California was reclaimed after the Rising, but no one has ever managed to take back Santa Cruz. The geographical isolation that once made the town so desirable as a vacation spot pretty much damned it when the virus hit. Kellis-Amberlee may be unique in the way it interacts with the human body, but it behaves just like every other communicable disease known to man in at least one way: Put it on a school campus and it spreads like wildfire. U.C. Santa Cruz was a perfect breeding ground, and once all those perky co-eds became the shuffling infected, it was all over but the evacuation notices.

“Georgia, this is a hill!” he said with increasing urgency as the locals lunged toward the speeding bike. He was using my proper name; that was how I could tell he was worried. I’m only “Georgia” when he’s unhappy.

“I got that.” I hunched over to decrease wind resistance a few more precious degrees. Shaun mimicked the motion automatically, hunching down behind me.

“Why are we going up a hill?” he demanded. There was no way he’d be able to hear my answer over the combined roaring of the engine and the wind, but that’s my brother, always willing to question that which won’t talk back.

“Ever wonder how the Wright brothers felt?” I asked. The crest of the hill was in view. From the way the street vanished on the other side, it was probably a pretty steep drop. The moaning was coming from all sides now, so distorted by the wind that I had no real idea what we were driving into. Maybe it was a trap; maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it was too late to find another path. We were committed, and for once, Shaun was the one sweating.

“Georgia!”

“Hold on!” Ten yards. The zombies kept closing, single-minded in their pursuit of what might be the first fresh meat some had seen in years. From the looks of most of them, the zombie problem in Santa Cruz was decaying faster than it was rebuilding itself. Sure, there were plenty of fresh ones—there are always fresh ones because there are always idiots who wander into quarantined zones, either willingly or by mistake, and the average hitchhiker doesn’t get lucky where zombies are concerned—but we’ll take the city back in another three generations. Just not today.

Five yards.

Zombies hunt by moving toward the sound of other zombies hunting. It’s recursive, and that meant our friends at the base of the hill started for the peak when they heard the commotion. I was hoping so many of the locals had been cutting us off at ground level that they wouldn’t have many bodies left to mount an offensive on the hill’s far side. We weren’t supposed to make it that far, after all; the only thing keeping us alive was the fact that we had a motorcycle and the zombies didn’t.

I glimpsed the mob waiting for us as we reached the top. They were standing no more than three deep. Fifteen feet would see us clear.

Liftoff.

It’s amazing what you can use for a ramp, given the right motivation. Someone’s collapsed fence was blocking half the road, jutting up at an angle, and I hit it at about fifty miles an hour. The handlebars shuddered in my hands like the horns of a mechanical bull, and the shocks weren’t doing much better. I didn’t even have to check the road in front of us because the moaning started as soon as we came into view. They’d blocked our exit fairly well while Shaun played with his little friend, and mindless plague carriers or not, they had a better grasp of the local geography than we did. We still had one advantage: Zombies aren’t good at predicting suicide charges. And if there’s a better term for driving up the side of a hill at fifty miles an hour with the goal of actually achieving flight when you run out of “up,” I don’t think I want to hear it.

The front wheel rose smoothly and the back followed, sending us into the air with a jerk that looked effortless and was actually scarier than hell. I was screaming. Shaun was whooping with gleeful understanding. And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid. We hung in the air for a heart-stopping moment, still shooting forward. At least I was fairly sure the impact would kill us.

The laws of physics and the hours of work I’ve put into constructing and maintaining my bike combined to let the universe, for once, show mercy. We soared over the zombies, coming down on one of the few remaining stretches of smooth road with a bone-bruising jerk that nearly ripped the handlebars out of my grip. The front wheel went light on impact, trying to rise up, and I screamed, half terrified, half furious with Shaun for getting us into this situation in the first place. The handlebars shuddered harder, almost wrenching my arms out of their sockets before I hit the gas and forced the wheel back down. I’d pay for this in the morning, and not just with the repair bills.

Not that it mattered. We were on level ground, we were upright, and there was no moaning ahead. I hit the gas harder as we sped toward the outskirts of town, with Shaun whooping and cheering behind me like a big suicidal freak.

“Asshole,” I muttered, and drove on.

Two

Neither of us spoke as we drove through the remains of Santa Cruz. There were no signs of movement, and the buildings were getting widely spaced enough that visual tracking was at least partially reliable. I started to relax as I took the first exit onto Highway 1, heading south. From there, we could cut over to Highway 152, which would take us into Watsonville, where we’d left the van.

Watsonville is another of Northern California’s “lost towns.” It was surrendered to the infected after the summer of 2014, but it’s safer than Santa Cruz, largely due to its geographical proximity to Gilroy, which is still a protected farming community. This means that while no one’s willing to live in Watsonville for fear that the zombies will shamble down from Santa Cruz in the middle of the night, the good people of Gilroy aren’t willing to let the infected have it either. They go in three times a year with flamethrowers and machine guns and clean the place out. That keeps Watsonville deserted, and lets the California farmers continue to feed the population.

I pulled off to the side of the road outside the ruins of a small town called Aptos, near the Highway 1 onramp. There was flat ground in all directions, giving us an adequate line of sight on anything that might be looking for a snack. My bike was running rough enough that I wanted to get a good look at it, and adding more gas probably wouldn’t hurt. Dirt bikes have small tanks, and we’d covered a lot of miles already.

Shaun turned toward me as he dismounted, grinning from ear to ear. The wind had raked his hair into a series of irregular spikes and snarls, making him look like he’d been possessed. “That,” he said, with almost religious fervor, “was the coolest thing you have ever done. In fact, that may have been the coolest thing you ever will do. Your entire existence has been moving toward one shining moment, George, and that was the moment when you thought, ‘Hey, why don’t I just go over the zombies?’” He paused for effect. “You are possibly cooler than God.”

“Yet another chance to be free of you, down the drain.” I hopped off the bike and pulled off my helmet, starting to assess the most obvious problems. They looked minor, but I still intended to get them looked at as soon as possible. Some damage was beyond my admittedly limited mechanical capabilities, and I was sure I’d managed to cause most of it.

“You’ll get another one.”

“That’s the hope that keeps me going.” I balanced my helmet against the windscreen before unzipping the right saddlebag and removing the gas can. Setting the can on the ground, I pulled out the first-aid kit. “Blood test time.”

“George—”

“You know the rules. We’ve been in the field, and we don’t go back to base until we’ve checked our virus levels.” I extracted two small handheld testing units, holding one out to him. “No levels, no van. No van, no coffee. No coffee, no joy. Do you want the joy, Shaun, or would you rather stand out here and argue with me about whether you’re going to let me test your blood?”

“You’re burning cool by the minute here,” he grumbled, and took the unit.

“I’m okay with that,” I said. “Now let’s see if I’ll live.”

Moving with synchronicity born of long practice, we broke the biohazard seals and popped the plastic lids off our testing units, exposing the sterile metal pressure pads. Basic field test units only work once, but they’re cheap and necessary. You need to know if someone’s gone into viral amplification—preferably before they start chewing on your tasty flesh.

I unsnapped my right glove and peeled it off, shoving it into my pocket. “On three?”

“On three,” Shaun agreed.

“One.”

“Two.”

We both reached out and slid our index fingers into the unit in the other’s hand. Call it a quirk. Also call it an early-warning system. If either of us ever waits for “three,” something’s very wrong.

The metal was cool against my finger as I depressed the pressure pad, a soothing sensation followed by the sting of the test’s embedded needle breaking my skin. Diabetes tests don’t hurt; they want you to keep using them, and comfort makes a difference. Kellis-Amberlee blood testing units hurt on purpose. Lack of sensitivity to pain is an early sign of viral amplification.

The LEDs on top of the box turned on, one red, one green, beginning to flash in an alternating pattern. The flashing slowed and finally stopped as the red light went out, leaving the green. Still clean. I glanced at the test I was holding and let out a slow breath as I saw that Shaun’s unit had also stabilized on green.

“Guess I don’t get to clean your room out just yet,” I said.

“Maybe next time,” he said. I passed him back his test, letting him handle the storage while I refilled the gas tank. He did so with admirable efficiency, snapping the plastic covers back onto the testing units and triggering the internal bleach dispensers before pulling a biohazard bag out of the first-aid kit and dropping the units in. The top of the bag turned red when he sealed it, the plastic melting itself closed. That bag was triple-reinforced, and it would take a Herculean effort to open it now that it was shut. Even so, he checked the seal and the seams of the bag before securing it in the saddlebag’s biohazardous materials compartment.

While he was busy with containment, I tipped the contents of the gas can into the tank. I’d been running close enough to empty that the can drained completely, which was scary. If we’d run out of gas during the chase…

Best not to think about it. I put the gas cap back on and shoved the empty can into the saddlebag. Shaun was starting to climb onto the back of the bike. I turned toward him, raising a warning finger. “What are we forgetting?”

He paused. “Uh… to go back to Santa Cruz for postcards?”

“Helmet.”

“We’re on a flat stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. We’re not going to have an accident.”

“Helmet.”

“You didn’t make me wear a helmet before.”

“We were being chased by zombies before. Since there are no zombies now, you’ll wear a helmet. Or you’ll walk the rest of the way to Watsonville.”

Rolling his eyes, Shaun unstrapped his helmet from the left-hand saddlebag and crammed it over his head. “Happy now?” he asked, voice muffled by the face shield.

“Ecstatic.” I put my own helmet back on. “Let’s go.”

The roads were clean the rest of the way to Watsonville. We didn’t see any other vehicles, which wasn’t surprising. More important, we didn’t see any of the infected. Call me dull, but I’d seen enough zombies for one day.

Our van was parked at the edge of town, a good twenty yards from any standing structures. Standard safety precautions; lack of cover makes it harder for things to sneak up on you. I pulled up in front of it and cut the engine. Shaun didn’t wait for the bike to come to a complete stop before he was leaping down and bounding for the door, yanking his helmet off as he shouted, “Buffy! How’s the footage?”

Ah, the enthusiasm of the young. Not that I’m much older than he is—neither of us came with an original birth certificate when we were adopted, but the doctors estimated me as being at least three weeks ahead of him. From the way he acts sometimes, you’d think it was a matter of years, not just an accident of birth order. I removed my helmet and gloves and slung them over the handlebars, before following at a more sedate pace.

The inside of our van is a testament to what you can do with a lot of time, a reasonable amount of money, and three years of night classes in electronics. And help from the Internet, of course; we’d never have figured out the wiring without people chiming in from places ranging from Oregon to Australia. Mom did the structural reinforcements and security upgrades, supposedly as a favor, but really to give her an excuse to try building back doors into our systems. Buffy disabled them all as quickly as they were installed. That hasn’t stopped Mom from trying.

After five years of work, we’ve managed to convert a mostly gutted Channel 7 news van into a state-of-the-art traveling blog center, with camera feeds, its own wireless tower, a self-sustaining homing device, and so many backup storage arrays that it makes my head hurt when I think about them too hard. So I don’t think about them at all. That’s Buffy’s job, along with being the perkiest, blondest, outwardly flakiest member of the team. And she does all four parts of her job very, very well.

Buffy herself was cross-legged in one of the three chairs crammed into the van’s remaining floor space, looking thoughtful as she held a headset up to one ear. Shaun was standing behind her, nearly jigging up and down in his excitement.

She didn’t seem to register my presence as I stepped into the van, but spoke as soon as the door was closed, saying, “Hey, Georgia,” in a dreamy, detached tone.

“Hey, Buffy,” I said, heading for the minifridge and pulling out a can of Coke. Shaun takes his caffeine hot, and I take mine cold. Call it our way of rebelling against similarity. “How’re we looking?”

Buffy flashed a quick thumbs-up, actually animated for a moment. “We’re looking good.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” I said.

Buffy’s real name is Georgette Meissonier. Like Shaun and me, she was born after the zombies became a fact of life, during the period when Georgia, Georgette, and Barbara were the three most common girl’s names in America. We are the Jennifers of our generation. Most of us just rolled over and took it. After all, George Romero is considered one of the accidental saviors of the human race, and it’s not like being named after him is uncool. It’s just, well, common. And Buffy has never been willing to be common when she can help it.

She was all cool professionalism when Shaun and I found her at an online job fair. That lasted about five minutes after we met in person. She introduced herself, then grinned and said, “I’m cute, blonde, and living in a world full of zombies. What do you think I should call myself?”

We looked at her blankly. She muttered something about a pre-Rising TV show and let it drop. Not that it matters, since as far as I’m concerned, as long as she keeps our equipment in working order, she can call herself whatever she damn well wants. Plus, having her on the team grants us an air of the exotic: She was born in Alaska, the last, lost frontier. Her family moved after the government declared the state impossible to secure and ceded it to the infected.

“Got it,” she announced, disconnecting the headset and leaning over to flick on the nearest video feedback screen. The image of Shaun holding back his decaying pal with the hockey stick flickered into view. No sound came from the van’s main speakers. A single moan can attract zombies from a mile away if you’re unlucky with your acoustics, and it’s not safe to soundproof in the field. Soundproofing works both ways, and zombies tend to surround structures on the off chance they might contain things to eat or infect. Opening the van doors to find ourselves surrounded by a pack we didn’t hear coming didn’t particularly appeal to any of us.

“The image is a little fuzzy, but I’ve filtered out most of the visual artifacts, and I can clean it further once I’ve had the chance to hit the source files. Georgia, thanks for remembering to put your helmet on before you started driving. The front-mount camera worked like a charm.”

To be honest, I hadn’t remembered that the camera was there. I’d been too focused on not cracking my skull open. Still, I nodded agreeably, taking a long drink of Coke before saying, “No problem. How many of the cameras kept feeding through the chase?”

“Three of the four. Shaun’s helmet didn’t come on until you were almost here.”

“Shaun didn’t have time to put on his helmet, or he would have ceased to have a head,” Shaun protested.

“Shaun needs to stop talking about himself in the third person,” Buffy said, and hit a button on her keyboard. The image was replaced by a close-up shot of the flickering lights on our blood tests. “I want to screenshot this for the main site. What do you think?”

“Whatever you say,” I said. The screen broadcasting our main external security camera was showing an abandoned, undisturbed landscape. Nothing moved in Watsonville. “You know I don’t care about the graphics.”

“And that’s why your ratings aren’t higher, George,” said Shaun. “I like the lights. Use them as a slow fade in tonight’s teaser, too—tack on something about, I don’t know, how close is too close, that whole old saw.”

“‘Close Encounters on the Edge of the Grave,’” I murmured, moving toward the screen. It was a little too unmoving out there. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I’ve learned to pay attention to my instincts. God knows Shaun and Buffy weren’t paying attention to anything but tomorrow’s headlines.

Shaun grinned. “I like it. Grayscale the image except for the lights and use that.”

“On it.” Buffy typed a quick note before shutting down the screen. “Have we got any more big plans for the afternoon, folks?”

“Getting out of here,” I said, turning back to the others. “I’m on the bike. I’ll take point, but we need to get back to civilization.”

Buffy blinked at me, looking baffled. She’s a Fictional; her style of blogging is totally self-contained, and she only sees the field when Shaun and I haul her out to work our equipment. Even then, she pretty much never leaves the van. It’s not her job to pay attention to anything that doesn’t live on a computer screen.

Shaun, on the other hand, sobered immediately. “Why?”

“There’s nothing moving out there.” I opened the back door, scanning the land more closely. It had taken me a few minutes—maybe too long—to realize what was wrong, but now that I’d seen it, it was obvious.

There should always be something moving in a town the size of Watsonville. Feral cats, rabbits, even herds of wild deer looking for the overgrown remains of what used to be gardens. We’ve seen everything from goats to somebody’s abandoned Shetland pony wandering through the remains of the old towns, living off the land. So where were they? There wasn’t as much as a squirrel in sight.

Shaun grimaced. “Crap.”

“Crap,” I agreed. “Buffy, grab your gear.”

“I’ll drive,” Shaun said, and started for the front of the van.

Buffy was looking between us with wide-eyed bafflement. “Okay, does somebody want to tell me what’s causing the evacuation?” she demanded.

“There aren’t any animals,” Shaun said, dropping into the driver’s seat.

I paused while yanking my gloves back on, taking pity, and replied, “Nothing clears the wildlife like the infected. We need to get out of here before we have—”

As if on cue, a low, distant moan came through the van’s back door, carried by the prevailing winds. I grimaced.

“—company,” Shaun and I finished, in unison.

“Race you home,” I called, and ducked out the door. Buffy slammed it behind me, and I heard all three bolts click home. Even if I screamed, they’d never let me back inside. That’s the protocol when you’re in the field. No matter how loudly you yell, they never let you in.

Not if they want to live, anyway.

There were no zombies in sight, but the moaning from the north and east was getting louder. I tightened the straps on my gloves, grabbed my helmet, and slung my leg over the bike’s still-warm seat. Inside the van, I knew Buffy would be checking her cameras, fastening her seatbelt, and trying to figure out why we were reacting so badly to zombies that probably weren’t even in range. If there’s really a God, she’s never going to know the answer to that one.

The van pulled out, bumping and shaking as it made its way onto the freeway. I gunned the bike’s engine and followed, pulling up alongside the van before moving out about ten feet ahead, where Shaun could see me and we could both watch the road for obstructions. It’s a simple safety formation, but it’s saved a lot of asses in the last twenty years. We rode like that, separated by a thin ribbon of broken road, all the way out of the valley, through the South Bay, and into the cool, welcoming air of Berkeley, California.

Home sweet zombie-free home.

Three

Buffy’s neighborhood doesn’t allow nonresident vehicles to enter without running blood tests on all passengers, so we dropped her at the gate where she could get tested and head inside on foot. I don’t like pricking my fingers, and we were already looking at a second blood test when we reached the house. We live in an open neighborhood—one of the last in Alameda County—but our parents have to meet certain requirements if they want to keep their home-owner’s insurance, and until we can afford to move out on our own, we have to play along.

“I’ll upload the footage as soon as I finish cleaning it up,” Buffy promised. “Drop me a text when you hit the house, let me know you made it okay?”

“Sure, Buff,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

Buffy’s a great techie and a decent friend, but her ideas about safety are a little skewed, probably thanks to growing up in a high-security zone. She’s less worried in the field than she is in supposedly protected urban environments. While there are more attacks on an annual basis in cities than in rural areas, there are also a lot more large men with guns once you get away from the creeks and the cornfields. Given a choice between the two, I’m going to take the city every time.

“See you tomorrow!” she said, and waved to Shaun through the van’s front window before she turned to head for the guard station where she’d spend the next five minutes being checked for contamination. Shaun waved back and restarted the engine, backing the van away from the gate. That was my cue. I flashed a thumbs-up to show that I was good to go as I kicked my bike into a turn, leading the way back to Telegraph Avenue and into the tangled warren of suburban streets surrounding our house.

Like Santa Cruz, Berkeley is a college town, and we got swarmed during the Rising. Kellis-Amberlee hit the dorms, incubated, and exploded outward in an epidemic pattern that took practically everyone by surprise. “Practically” is the important word there. By the time the infection hit Berkeley, the first posts about activity in schools across the country were starting to show up online, and we had an advantage most college towns didn’t: We started with more than our fair share of crazy people.

See, Berkeley has always drawn the nuts and flakes of the academic world. That’s what happens when you have a university that offers degrees in both computer science and parapsychology. It was a city primed to believe any weird thing that came across the wire, and when all those arguably crazy people started hearing rumors about the dead rising from their graves, they didn’t dismiss them. They began gathering weapons, watching the streets for strange behavior and signs of sickness, and generally behaving like folks who’d actually seen a George Romero movie. Not everyone believed what they heard… but some did, and that turned out to be enough.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer when the first major waves of infection hit. More than half the population of Berkeley died over the course of six long days and nights, including the biological son of our adoptive parents, Phillip Mason, who was barely six years old. The things that happened here weren’t nice, and they weren’t pretty, but unlike many towns that started out with similar conditions—a large homeless population, a major school, a lot of dark, narrow, one-way streets—Berkeley survived.

Shaun and I grew up in a house that used to belong to the university. It’s located in an area that was judged “impossible to secure” when the government inspectors started getting their act together, and as a result, it was sold off to help fund the rebuilding of the main campus. The Masons didn’t want to live in the house where their son had died, and the security rating of the neighborhood meant they were able to get the property for a song. They finalized the adoptions for the two of us the day before they moved in, an “everything is normal” ratings stunt that eventually left them with a big house in the scary suburbs, two kids, and no idea what to do. So they did what came naturally: They gave more interviews, they wrote more articles, and they chased the numbers.

From the outside, they looked devoted to giving us the sort of “normal” childhood they remembered having. They never moved us to a gated neighborhood, they let us have pets that lacked sufficient mass for reanimation, and when public schools started requiring mandatory blood tests three times a day, they had us enrolled in a private school before the end of the week. There’s a semifamous interview Dad gave right after that transfer, where he said they were doing their best to make us “citizens of the world instead of citizens of fear.” Pretty words, especially coming from a man who regarded his kids as a convenient way to stay on top of the news feeds. Numbers start slipping? Go for a field trip to a zoo. That’ll get you right back to the top.

There were a few changes they couldn’t avoid, thanks to the government’s anti-infection legislation—blood tests and psych tests and all that fun stuff—but they did their best, and I’ll give them this much: A lot of the things they did for us weren’t cheap. They paid for the right to raise us the way that they did. Entertainment equipment, internal security, even home medical centers can be bought for practically nothing. Anything that lets you outside, from vehicles to gasoline to gear that doesn’t cut you off completely from the natural world… that’s where things get expensive. The Masons paid in everything but blood to keep us in a place where there were blue skies and open spaces, and I’m thankful, even if it was always about ratings and a boy we never knew.

The garage door slid open as we pulled into the driveway, registering the sensors Shaun and I wear around our neck. In case of viral amplification, the garage becomes the zombie equivalent of a roach motel: Our sensors get us in, but only a clean blood test and a successful voice check gets us out. If we ever fail those tests, we’ll be incinerated by the house defense system before we can do any further damage.

Mom’s armored minivan and the old Jeep Dad insists on driving to his job on campus were parked in their normal spots. I pulled over and killed the bike’s engine, removing my helmet as I started a basic postfield check of the machinery. I needed to see a mechanic; the ride through Santa Cruz had seriously damaged my shocks. Buffy’s cameras were still attached to the helmet and back of the bike. I pulled them off and shoved them into my left saddlebag, unsnapping it and slinging it over my shoulder as Shaun pulled in behind me.

Shaun got out of the van and reached the back door three steps before I did. “We made good time,” he said, positioning himself in front of the right-hand sensors.

“Sure did,” I said, and positioned myself on the left.

“Please identify yourselves,” said the bland voice of the house security system.

Most of the newer systems sound more like people than ours does. They’ll even make jokes with their owners, to keep them at ease. Psychological studies have shown that closing the gap between man and machine increases comfort and acceptance and prevents nervous breakdowns stemming from isolation anxiety—in short, people don’t get cabin fever as much when they think they have more people they can safely talk to. I think that’s bullshit. If you want to avoid cabin fever, go outside. Our machines have stayed mechanical, at least so far.

“Georgia Carolyn Mason,” said Shaun.

I smirked. “Shaun Phillip Mason.”

The light above the door blinked as the house checked our vocal intonations. We must have passed muster, because it spoke again: “Voice prints confirmed. Please read the phrase appearing on your display screen.”

Words appeared on my screen. I squinted to make them out through my sunglasses, and read, “Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy, too. Wouldn’t you?”

The words blinked out. I glanced at Shaun, but couldn’t quite see the words appearing on his screen before he was reciting them: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens. You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins. When will you pay me, say the bells of Old Bailey.”

The light over the door changed from red to yellow.

“Place your right hands on the testing pads,” commanded the security system. Shaun and I did as requested, pressing our hands against the metal panels set into the wall. The metal chilled beneath my palm a split second before there was a stinging sensation in my index finger. The light above the door began to flash, alternating red and yellow.

“Think we’re clean?” Shaun asked.

“If not, it’s been nice knowing you,” I said. Coming in together means that if one of us ever tests positive, that’s all she wrote; they won’t let anybody out of the garage until a cleanup crew arrives, and the chances of whoever comes up clean making it to the van before something happens aren’t good. Our next-door neighbor used to call Child Protective Services every six months because our folks wouldn’t stop us from coming in together. But what’s the point of life if you can’t take risks now and then, like coming into the damn house with your brother?

The light started flashing green instead of red, continuing to alternate with yellow for a few more seconds before yellow bowed out, leaving green to flash alone. The door unlocked, and the bland voice of the house said, “Welcome, Shaun and Georgia.”

“S’up, the house?” Shaun replied, removing his shoes and tossing them into the outdoor cleaning unit before he walked inside, hollering, “Hey, ’rents! We’re home!” Our parents hate being called “ ’rents.” I’m pretty sure that’s why he does it.

“And we survived!” I added, copying the gesture and following him through the garage door. It swung closed and locked itself behind me. The kitchen smelled like spaghetti sauce and garlic bread.

“Failure to die is always appreciated,” Mom said, entering the kitchen and putting an empty laundry basket on the counter. “You know the drill. Both of you, upstairs, and strip for sterilization.”

“Yes, Mom,” I said, picking up the basket. “Come, Shaun. The insurance bill calls us.”

“Yes, master,” he drawled. Ignoring Mom entirely, he turned and followed me up the stairs.

The house was a duplex before Mom and Dad had it converted back into a single-family home. Our bedrooms literally adjoin; there’s an inside door between them. It makes life easier when it’s time for editing and prep work, and it’s been like that all our lives. On the few occasions when I’ve had to try sleeping without Shaun in the next room, well, let’s just say I can go a long way on a six-pack of Coke.

I dropped the laundry basket in the hallway between our doors before going into my room and flicking the switch to turn on the overheads. We use low-wattage bulbs in the entire house, but I’ve abandoned white light entirely in my private space, preferring to live by the gleam of computer monitors and the comforting nonlight of black-light UV lamps. They can cause premature wrinkling if used extensively; what they can’t do is cause corneal damage, and I appreciate that.

“Shaun! Inside door!”

“Got it,” Shaun called. The connecting door slammed shut, and the band of light beneath it was cut off a second later as he slid the damper into place. Sighing with relief, I removed my sunglasses, forcing my eyes to open all the way. I’d been out in the sun for too long; even the UV lamps stung for a few seconds before my eyes adjusted and the room snapped into the sort of detailed focus most people only get in direct light.

“Retinal Kellis-Amberlee,” as it’s popularly called, is more properly referred to as “Acquired Kellis-Amberlee Optic Neuropathic Reservoir Condition.” I’ve never heard anyone call it that outside a hospital, and even there, it’s usually just “retinal KA.” Those good old reservoir conditions: One more way for the virus to make life more interesting for everybody. My pupils are permanently dilated and don’t contract in response to light, retinal scans are impossible, testing my vitreous and aqueous humors will always register a live infection, and best of all, my condition is advanced enough that my eyes don’t even water. The virus produces a protective film and keeps the eyes from drying out. My tear ducts are atrophied. The only upside? Absolutely stellar low-light vision.

I tossed my sunglasses into the biohazard disposal canister and started across the room. My living space shares a lot of features with the van, including the part where Buffy maintains about ninety percent of the equipment and I understand less than half of it. Flat-screen monitors take up most of the walls, and we moved the group servers into my wardrobe last year when Shaun decided he needed more space for his weapons. Whatever. It’s not like I was using it; I don’t wear anything that actually needs to be hung up. I belong to the Hunter S. Thompson School of Journalistic Fashion: If I have to think about it, I have no business wearing it.

When you get right down to it, about the only similarity between my room and the room of your stereotypical twentysomething woman is the full-length mirror next to the bed. There’s a wall dispenser mounted next to the mirror. I ripped loose a sheet of tear-away plastic and spread it on the floor, stepping onto it as I turned to face my reflection.

Hello, Georgia. Nice to see you’re not dead yet.

Slicking my sweat-soaked hair back from my face, I started studying my clothes for the telltale fluorescence that under the black lights would indicate traces of blood.

Shaun and I operate under Class A-15 blogging licenses: We’re cleared to report on events both inside and outside city limits, although we’re still not permitted to enter any zones with a hazard rating at or above Level 3. The zones start at Level 10, the code for any area with resident mammals of sufficient body mass to undergo Kellis-Amberlee amplification and reanimation. Humans count. Level 9 means those mammals are not entirely kept in confinement. Buffy’s neighborhood is considered a Level 10 hazard zone, which means it’s safe to let your children play outside, except for the part where it would instantly convert the zone to a Level 9. Our house is classified as a Level 7 hazard, possessing free-range mammals of sufficient body mass for full viral amplification, local wildlife capable of carrying blood or other bodily wastes onto the property, insufficiently secured borders, and windows more than a foot and a half in diameter. There’s legislation currently under review that would make it a federal offense to raise any child in a hazard zone above Level 8. I don’t expect it to pass. It frightens me that it exists at all.

It requires an A-10 blogging license to enter a Level 3 hazard zone with any prayer of being allowed to exit it. We can’t get those licenses or anything above until we turn twenty-five and pass a series of government-mandated tests, most of which center on the ability to make accurate headshots with a variety of firearms. That means no Yosemite for at least another two years. I’m fine with that. There’s plenty of news to be found in more populated areas.

Shaun feels different, but he’s an Irwin, and they thrive on wandering blindly into danger. All I’ve ever wanted to be is what I am—a Newsie. I’m happy this way. Danger is a side effect of what I do, not the reason behind it. That doesn’t mean danger throws up its hands and says “oh, sorry, Georgia, I won’t mess with you.” Contamination is always a risk when dealing with zombies, especially when you have the recently infected involved. The older infected are usually too concerned with keeping themselves from dissolving to worry about smearing you with their precious bodily fluids, but new ones are fresh enough to have fluid to spare. They’ll splatter you if they can manage it, and then count on the viral bricks filling their bloodstream to do the hard part for them. It’s not great as a hunting strategy, but as a way of spreading the infection it works better than any uninfected person wants it to.

Not that anyone left in the world is actually uninfected—that’s part of the problem. We call people who have succumbed to viral amplification “the infected,” like it changes the fact that the virus is inside every one of us, patiently waiting for the day it gets invited to take over. The Kellis-Amberlee virus can remain in its dormant state for decades, if not forever; unlike the people it infects, it can wait. One day you’re fine. The next day, your personal stockpile of virus wakes up, and you’re on the road to amplification, the death of the part of you that’s a thinking, feeling human being, and the birth of your zombie future. Calling zombies “the infected” creates an artificial feeling of security, like we can somehow avoid joining them. Well, guess what? We can’t.

Viral amplification primarily occurs under one of two conditions: the initial death of the host causing a disruption of the body’s nervous system and activating the virus already there, or contact with virus that has already switched over from “dormant” to “live.” Hence the real risk of engaging the zombies, because any hand-to-hand conflict is going to result in a minimum casualty rate of sixty percent. Maybe thirty percent of those casualties are going to occur in the actual combat, if you’re talking about people who know what they’re doing. I’ve seen videos of martial arts clubs and idiots with swords going up against the zombies in the Rising, and I’ll be among the first to admit that they’re damned impressive to watch. There’s this amazing contrast between the grace and speed of a healthy person and the shambling slowness of the zombie that just… It’s like seeing poetry come alive. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s sad, and it’s beautiful as hell.

And then the survivors go home, laughing and elated and mourning for their dead. They take off their armor, and they clean their weapons, and maybe one of them nicks his thumb on the edge of an arm guard or wipes his eyes with a hand that got a little too close to a leaking zombie. Live viral particles hit the bloodstream, the cascade kicks off, and amplification begins. In an average-sized human adult, full conversion happens inside of an hour and the whole thing starts again, without warning, without reprieve. The question “Johnny, is that you?” went from horror movie cliché to real-world crisis damn fast when people started facing the infected hand-to-hand.

The closest call I’ve ever had came when a zombie managed to spit a mouthful of blood in my face. If I hadn’t been wearing safety goggles over my sunglasses, I’d be dead. Shaun’s come closer than I have; I try not to ask anymore. I don’t really want to know.

My armor and pants were clean. I removed them and tossed them onto the plastic sheeting, performing the same check on my sweatshirt and thermal pants before stripping them off and adding them to the pile. A quick examination of my arms and legs revealed no unexpected smears or streaks of blood. I already knew I wasn’t wounded; I’d cleared two blood tests since the field. If I’d been so much as scratched, I’d have started amplification before we had hit Watsonville. My socks, bra, and underwear joined the rest. They hadn’t been exposed to the outside air. That didn’t matter; they went into a hazard zone. They were getting sterilized. There are a lot of folks who advocate for sterilization outside the home. They get shouted down by the people who want to keep it internal, since field sterilization—or even “front-yard chemical shower” sterilization—leaves the risk of recontamination before you reach a secure zone. So far, the groups have been able to keep things deadlocked and we’ve been able to keep doing our self-examinations in relative peace.

I stepped off the plastic sheet, folded it around my clothes, scooped it up, and carried it to the bedroom door, which I opened long enough to toss the whole bundle into the hamper. It would go through an industrial-grade bleaching guaranteed to neutralize any viral bodies clinging to the fabric, and the clothes would be ready to wear again by morning.

Even that brief blast of white light was enough to make my eyes burn. I scrubbed at them with the back of my hand as I turned toward the bathroom. Shaun’s door was still closed. I called, “Showering now!” A thump on the wall answered me.

Shaun and I share a private bathroom with its own fully modernized and airtight shower system. Another little requirement of the household insurance—since we leave safe zones all the time in order to do our jobs, we have to be able to prove we’ve been properly sterilized, and that means logged computer verification of our sterilizations. The bathroom started life as the closets of our respective bedrooms. Personally, I consider this a much better use of the space.

The bathroom lights switched to UV when my door opened. I walked over and pressed my hand to the shower’s keypad, saying, “Georgia Carolyn Mason.”

“Accessing travel records,” the shower replied. We don’t screw with the shower the way we screw with the house system. House security is kept at an absolute minimum, but the shower is governmentally required for journalist use, and we could get in serious trouble if the records don’t match up. The fines for posing a contamination risk are more than I could afford in six years of freelancing.

The shower door unsealed. “You have been exposed to a Level 4 hazard zone. Please enter the stall for decontamination and sterilization.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, and stepped in. The door shut behind me, locking with an audible hiss as the air lock seal engaged.

A stinging compound of antiseptic and bleach squirted from the bottommost nozzle on the wall, coating me with icy spray. I held my breath and closed my eyes, counting the seconds before it would stop. They can only legally bathe you in bleach for half a minute unless you’ve been in a Level 2 zone. At that point, they can keep dunking you until they’re sure the viral blocks are clean. Everyone knows it doesn’t do any good beyond the first thirty seconds, but that doesn’t stop people from being afraid.

Travel in a Level 1 zone means they’re not legally obligated to do anything but shoot you.

The bleach stopped. The upper nozzle came on, spraying out water almost hot enough to burn. I cringed but turned my face toward it, reaching for the soap.

“Clean,” I said, once the shampoo was out of my hair. I keep it short for a variety of reasons. Most have to do with making myself harder to grab, but showering faster is also a definite motivation. If I wanted it to get any longer, I’d have to start using conditioner and a variety of other hair-care chemicals to make up for the damage the bleach does every day. My one true concession to vanity is dyeing it back to the color nature gave me every few weeks. I look terrible blonde.

“Acknowledged,” said the shower, and the water turned off, replaced by jets of air from all four sides. The one good part of our shower system. I was dry in a matter of minutes, leaving only a little residual dampness in my hair. The door unsealed, and I stepped out into the bathroom, grabbing for my bottle of lotion.

Bleach and human skin aren’t good buddies. The solution: acid-based lotion, usually formulated around some sort of citrus, to help repair the damage the bleaching does. Professional swimmers did it pre-Rising, and everybody does it now. It also helps to lend a standardized scent tag to people who have scrubbed themselves recently. My lotion was as close to scentless as possible, and it still carried a faint, irritating hint of lemon, like floor cleanser.

I worked the lotion into my skin and retreated to my own room, shouting, “Shaun, it’s all yours!” I got the door closed as his was opening, spilling white light into the room. That’s not uncommon. We’re pretty good about our timing.

I grabbed my robe from the back of the door and shrugged it on as I walked to the main desk. The monitor detected my proximity and switched on, displaying the default menu screen. Our main system never goes off-line. That’s where group mail is routed, sorted according to which byline and category it’s meant for—news to me, action to Shaun, or fiction, which goes straight to Buffy—and delivered to the appropriate in-boxes. I get the administrative junk that Shaun’s too much of a jerk and Buffy’s too much of a flake to deal with. Technically, we’re a collective, but functionally? It’s all me.

Not that I object to the responsibility, except when it fills my in-box to the point of inspiring nightmares. It’s nice to know that our licenses are paid up, we’re in good with the umbrella network that supports our accreditation, and nobody’s suing us for libel. We make pretty consistent ratings, with Shaun and Buffy hitting top ten percent for the Bay Area at least twice a month and me holding steady in the thirteen to seventeen percent bracket, which isn’t bad for a strict Newsie. I could increase my numbers if I went multimedia and started giving my reports naked, but unlike some people, I’m still in this for the news.

Shaun, Buffy, and I all publish under our own blogs and bylines, which is why I get so damn much mail, but those blogs are published under the umbrella of Bridge Supporters, the second-largest aggregator site in Northern California. We get readers and click-through traffic by dint of being listed on their front page, and they get a cut of our profits from all secondary-market and merchandise sales. We’ve been trying to strike out on our own for a while now, to go from being beta bloggers in an alpha world to baby alphas with a domain to defend. It’s not easy. You need some story or feature that’s big enough and unique enough to guarantee you’ll take your readership with you, and our numbers haven’t been sustainably high enough to interest any sponsors.

My in-box finished loading. I began picking through the messages, moving with a speed that was half long practice and half the desire to get downstairs to dinner. Spam; misrouted critique of Buffy’s latest poem cycle, “Decay of the Human Soul: I through XII”; a threatened lawsuit if we didn’t stop uploading a picture of someone’s infected and shambling uncle—all the usual crap. I reached for my mouse, intending to minimize the program and get up, when a message toward the bottom of the screen caught my eye.

I would have dismissed that as spam, except for the first word: urgent. People stopped flinging that word around like confetti after the Rising. Somehow, the potential for missing the message that zombies just ate your mom made offering to give people a bigger dick seem less important. Intrigued, I clicked the title.

I was still sitting there staring at the screen five minutes later when Shaun opened the door to my room and casually stepped inside. A flood of white light accompanied him, stinging my eyes. I barely flinched. “George, Mom says if you don’t get downstairs, she’ll… George?” There was a note of real concern in his voice as he took in my posture, my missing sunglasses, and the fact that I wasn’t dressed. “Is everything okay? Buffy’s okay, isn’t she?”

Wordless, I gestured to the screen. He stepped up behind me and fell silent, reading over my shoulder. Another five minutes passed before he said, in a careful, subdued tone, “Georgia, is that what I think it is?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They really… It’s not a joke?”

“That’s the federal seal. The registered letter should be here in the morning.” I turned to face him, grinning so broadly that it felt like I was going to pull something. “They picked our application. They picked us. We’re going to do it.

“We’re going to cover the presidential campaign.”

Four

Presidential campaigns have traditionally been attended by “pet journalists” selected to follow the campaign and report on everything from the bright beginning to the sometimes-bitter end. The Rising didn’t change that. Candidates announce their runs for the big chair, pick up their little flock of television, radio, and print reporters, and hit the road.

This year’s presidential election is different, largely because one of the lead candidates, Senator Peter Ryman—born, raised, and elected in Wisconsin—is the first man to run for office who was under eighteen during the summer of ’14. He remembers the feeling of being betrayed by the news, of watching people die because they trusted the media to tell them the truth. So when he announced his candidacy, he made it a point that he wouldn’t just be inviting the usual crew to follow his campaign; he’d also invite a group of bloggers to walk the campaign trail with him from before the first primary all the way to the election, assuming he made it that far.

It was a bold move. It was a huge strike for the legitimacy of Internet news. Maybe we’re licensed journalists now, with all the insurance costs and restrictions that implies, but we’re still sneered at by certain organizations, and we can have trouble getting to information from a lot of the “mainstream” agencies. Having a presidential candidate acknowledge us was an amazing step forward. Of course, he was only going to allow three bloggers to come along. All of them had to have their Class A-15 licenses before they could even apply; if you were in the process of qualifying, your application would be thrown out without any sort of review.

Most of the bloggers we know applied, either singly or in groups, and we wanted that posting so bad that we could taste it. It was our ticket to the big leagues. Buffy had been operating under a Class B-20 license for years; as a Fictional, she didn’t need the clearance for field work, political reporting, or biohazard zones, and so she’d never seen the point in paying the license fees or taking the tests. Shaun and I rushed her through her A-level tests and classifications so fast that she just looked sort of stunned when they handed her the upgraded license. We sent in our application the next day.

Shaun was sure we’d get it. I was sure we wouldn’t. Now, still staring at my monitor, Shaun said, “George?”

“Yeah?”

“You owe me twenty bucks.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, before standing and throwing my arms around his neck. Shaun responded by whooping, putting his arms around my waist, and lifting me off the ground in order to whirl me around the room.

“We got the job!” he shouted.

“We got the job!” I shouted back.

After that, we devolved to shouting the words together, Shaun still swinging me in a circle, until the bedroom intercom crackled on and Dad’s voice demanded, “Are you two making that racket for a reason?”

“We got the job!” we shouted, in unison.

“Which job?”

“The big job!” Shaun said, putting me down and grinning at the intercom like he thought it could see him. “The biggest big job in the history of big jobs!”

“The campaign,” I said, aware that the grin on my face was probably just as big and stupid as the grin on Shaun’s. “We got the posting for the presidential campaign.”

There was a long pause before the intercom crackled again and Dad said, “You kids get dressed. I’ll get your mother. We’re going out.”

“But dinner—”

“Can go into the fridge. If you two are going to go stalk politicians all over the country, we’re going out for dinner first. Call Buffy and see if she wants to come. And that’s an order.”

“Yes, sir,” said Shaun, saluting the intercom. It clicked off and he turned on me, holding out his right hand. “Pay up.”

I pointed to the door. “Get out. There’s about to be nudity, and you’ll just complicate things.”

“Finally, adult content! Should I turn the webcams on? We can have a front-page feed in less than five—” I grabbed my pocket recorder and flung it at his head. He ducked, grinning again. “—minutes. I’ll go get some nicer clothes on. You can call the Buff one.”

“Out,” I said again, lips twitching as I fought a smile.

He walked back to the door between our rooms, stepping through before he shot back, “Wear a skirt, and I’ll release you from your debts.”

He managed to close the door before I found anything else to throw.

Shaking my head, I moved to the dresser, saying, “Phone, dial Buffy Meissonier, home line. Keep dialing until she picks up.” Buffy has a tendency to leave her phone on vibrate and ignore it while she “follows her muse,” which is basically a fancy way of saying “screws around online, writes a really depressing poem or short story, posts it, and makes three times what I do in click-through revenue and T-shirt sales.” Not that I’m bitter or anything. The truth will make you free, but it won’t make you particularly wealthy. I knew that when I chose my profession.

Playing with dead things is a little more lucrative, but Shaun doesn’t make enough to support us both—not yet, anyway—and he isn’t willing to move out without me. A lifetime spent within arm’s reach and counting primarily on each other has left us a little dependent on one another’s company. In an earlier, zombie-free era, this would have been dubbed “co-dependence” and resulted in years of therapy, culminating in us hating each other’s guts. Adoptive siblings aren’t supposed to treat each other like they’re the center of the world.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, that was an attitude for a different world. Here and now, sticking with the people who know you best is the most guaranteed way of staying alive. Shaun won’t leave the house until I do, and when we go, we’ll be going together.

By the time Buffy picked up her phone, I had actually managed to find a dark gray tweed skirt that not only fit, but that I was willing to wear in a public place. I was digging for a top when the line clicked, and she said, peevishly, “I was writing.”

“You’re always writing, unless you’re reading, screwing with something mechanical, or masturbating,” I replied. “Are you wearing clothes?”

“Currently,” she said, irritation fading into confusion. “Georgia, is that you?”

“It ain’t Shaun.” I pulled on a white button-down shirt, jamming the hem under the waistband of my skirt. “We’ll be there to pick you up in fifteen. ‘We’ being me, Shaun, and the ’rents. They’re taking the whole crew to dinner. It’s just them trying to piggy-back on our publicity for some rating points, but right now, failing to care.”

Buffy isn’t as slow on the uptake as she sometimes seems. Her voice suddenly tight with suppressed excitement, she asked, “Did we get it?”

“We got it,” I confirmed. Her ear-splitting shriek of joy was enough to make me wince, even after it had been reduced by the phone’s volume filters. Smiling, I pulled a crumpled black blazer out of my drawer and shrugged it on before grabbing a fresh pair of sunglasses from the stack on the dresser. “So we’re picking you up in fifteen. Deal?”

“Yes! Yes, yes, deal, hallelujah, yes!” she babbled. “I have to change! And tell my roommates! And change! And see you! Bye!”

There was another click. My phone announced, “The call has been terminated. Would you like to place another call?”

“No, I’m good,” I said.

“The call has been terminated,” the phone repeated. “Would you like—”

I sighed. “No, thank you. Disconnect.” The phone beeped and turned itself off. With the strides they’ve been making in voice-recognition software, you’d think they could teach the stuff to acknowledge colloquial English. One step at a time, I suppose.

Mom, Dad, and Shaun were in the living room when I came breezing down the stairs, shoving my handheld MP3 recorder into the loop at my belt. The backup recorder in my watch has a recording capacity of only thirty megabytes, and that’s barely enough for a good interview. My handheld can hold up to five terabytes. If I need more than that before I can get to a server to dump the contents, I’d better be bucking for a Pulitzer.

Mom was wearing her best green dress, the one that appears in all her publicity shots, and Dad was in his usual professorial ensemble—tweed jacket, white shirt, khaki slacks. Put them next to Shaun, who was wearing a button-down shirt with his customary cargo pants, and they looked just like the last family publicity picture, even down to Mom’s overstuffed handbag with all the guns inside it. She takes advantage of her A-5 blogging license in ways that boggle the mind, but it’s the government’s fault for leaving the loopholes there. If they want to give anybody with a journalist’s license ranked Class A-7 or above the right to carry concealed weapons when entering any zone that’s had a breakout within the last ten years, that’s their problem. At least Mom’s responsible about it. She always secures the safety on any gun that she’s planning to take into a restaurant.

“Buffy’s going to be ready in fifteen,” I said, pushing my sunglasses more solidly up the bridge of my nose. Some of the newer models have magnetic clamps instead of earpieces. They won’t come off without someone intentionally disengaging them. I would have been tempted to invest in a pair if they weren’t expensive enough to require decontamination and reuse.

“The sun’s going down; you could wear your contacts,” Dad said, sounding amused. He’s good at sounding amused. He’s been sounding professionally amused since before the Rising, back when he used his campus webcast to keep biology students around the Berkeley area paying attention and doing their homework. Eventually, that same webcast let him coordinate pockets of survivors, moving them from place to place while reporting on the movement of the local zombie mobs. A lot of people owe their lives to that warm, professional-sounding voice. He could’ve become a news anchor with any network in the world after the dust cleared. He stayed at Berkeley instead, and became one of the pioneers of the evolving blogger society.

“I could also stick a fork in my eye, but where would be the fun in that?” I walked over to Shaun, offering a thin smile. He studied my skirt and then flashed me a thumbs-up sign. I had passed the all-judging court of my brother’s fashion sense, which, cargo pants aside, is more advanced than mine will ever be.

“I called Bronson’s. They have a table for us on the patio,” Mom said, smiling beatifically. “It’s a beautiful night. We should be able to see the entire city.”

Shaun glanced at me, murmuring, “We let Mom pick the restaurant.”

I smirked. “I can see that.”

Bronson’s is the last open-air restaurant in Berkeley. More, they’re the last open-air restaurant in the entire Bay Area to be located on a hillside and surrounded by trees. Eating there is what I imagine it was like to go out to dinner before the constant threat of the infected drove most people away from the wilderness. The entire place is considered a Level 6 hazard zone. You can’t even get in without a basic field license, and they require blood tests before they let you leave. Not that there’s any real danger: It’s surrounded by an electric fence too high for the local deer to jump over, and floodlights click on if anything larger than a rabbit moves in the woods. The only serious threat comes from the chance that an abnormally large raccoon might go into conversion, make it over the fence before it lost the coordination to climb trees, and drop down inside. That’s never happened.

Not that this stops Mom from hoping to be there when it near-inevitably does. She was one of the first true Irwins, and old habits die hard, when they die at all. Shouldering her purse, she gave me a disapproving look. “Could you at least pretend to comb your hair?” she asked. “It looks like you have a hedgehog nesting on your head.”

“That’s the look I was going for,” I said. Mom is blessed with sleek, well-behaved ash blonde hair that started silvering gracefully when Shaun and I were ten. Dad has practically no hair left, but when he had it, it was a muted Irish red. I, on the other hand, have thick, dark brown hair that comes in two settings: long enough to tangle, and short enough to look like I haven’t brushed it in years. I prefer the short version.

Shaun’s hair is a little lighter than mine, but still brown, and when he keeps it short, no one can tell that his is straight and mine wants to curl. It helps us get away with just saying we’re twins, rather than going into the whole messy explanation.

Mom sighed. “You two realize the odds are good that someone already knows you got the assignment, and you’re going to get swarmed tonight, yes?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” I said. “Someone” probably received a quick phone call from one or both of our parents, and “someone” was probably already waiting at the restaurant. We grew up with the ratings game.

“Looking forward to it,” said Shaun. He’s better at playing nice with our parents than I am. “Every site that runs my picture tonight is five more foxy ladies around the country realizing that they want to hit the road with me.”

“Pig,” I said, and punched him in the arm.

“Oink,” he said. “It’s all right, we know the drill. Smile pretty for the cameras, show off my scars, let George and Dad look wise and trustworthy, pose for anyone who asks, and don’t try to answer any questions with actual content.”

“Whereas I don’t smile unless forced, stay behind my sunglasses, and make a point of how incisive and hard-hitting every report I approve for release is going to be,” I said, dryly. “We let Buffy babble to her heart’s content about the poetic potential of traveling around the country with a bunch of political yahoos who think we’re idiots.”

“And we make the front page of every alpha site in the country, and our ratings go up nine points overnight,” Shaun said.

“Thus allowing us to announce the formation of our own site early next week, just before heading out on the campaign trail.” I slid my sunglasses down my nose, ignoring the way the light stung as I offered a brief smile. “We’ve thought about this as much as you have.”

“Maybe more,” Shaun added.

Dad laughed. “Face it, Stacy, they’ve got it covered. Kids, just in case there isn’t another chance for me to tell you this, your mother and I are very proud of you. Very proud of you, indeed.”

Liar. “We’re pretty proud of us, too,” I said.

“Well, then,” Shaun said, clapping his hands together. “This is touching and all, but come on—let’s go eat.”

Getting out of the house is easier with our parents in tow, largely because Mom’s minivan is kept ready at all times. Food, water, a CDC-certified biohazard containment unit for temperature-sensitive medications, a coffeemaker, steel-reinforced windows… We could be trapped inside that thing for a week, and we’d be fine. Except for the part where we’d go crazy from stress and confinement and kill each other before rescue came. When Shaun and I go into the field, we need to check our gear, sometimes twice, to make sure it’s not going to let us down. Mom just grabs her keys.

Buffy was waiting at her neighborhood guard station, dressed in an eye-popping combination of tie-dyed leggings and knee-length glitter tunic, with star-and-moon hologram clips in her hair. Anyone who didn’t know her would have thought she was completely devoid of sense, fashion or common. That’s what she was aiming for. Buffy travels with more hidden cameras than Shaun and I combined. As long as people are busy staring at her hair, they don’t wonder why she’s so careful about pointing the tiny jewels she has pasted to her nails in their direction.

She waved and grabbed her duffel bag when the van pulled up. Then she ran to hop into the back with Shaun and me. The footage of that moment would be on the site within the hour.

“Hey, Georgia. Hey, Shaun—good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Mason,” she chirped, buckling herself in while Shaun slammed the door. “I just finished watching your trip to Colma, Mrs. Mason. Really great stuff. I would never have thought to elude a bunch of zombies by climbing a high-dive platform.”

“Why, thank you, Georgette,” said Mom.

“Thrill as Buffy kisses ass,” Shaun said, deadpan. Buffy shot him a poisonous look, and he just laughed.

Content that all was right with the world, I settled back in my seat, folded my arms across my chest, and closed my eyes, letting the chatter in the van wash over me without registering it. It had been a long day, and it was nowhere near over.

When blogging first emerged as a major societal trend, it was news rendered anonymous. Rather than trusting something because Dan Rather looked good on camera, you trusted things because they sounded true. The same went for reports of personal adventures, or people writing poetry, or whatever else folks felt like putting out there for the world to see; you got no context on who created it, and so you judged the work on the basis of what it actually was. That changed when the zombies came, at least for the people who went professional. These days, bloggers don’t just report the news; they create it, and sometimes, they become it. Landing the position of pet bloggers for Senator Ryman’s presidential campaign? That definitely counts as becoming the news.

That’s part of why Shaun and Buffy keep me around. My journalistic integrity is unquestioned by our peers, and when we make the jump to alpha—the suddenly feasible jump to alpha—that’s going to cement our credibility. Shaun and Buffy will bring in the readers. I’ll make it okay for them to trust us. They just have to deal with my depressed personal ratings because part of what makes me so credible is the fact that my news is free from passion, opinion, and spin. I do op-ed, but for the most part, what you’ll get from me is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

So help me God.

Shaun elbowed me when we reached Bronson’s. I slid my sunglasses back into position and opened my eyes.

“Status?” I asked.

“A least four visible cameras. Probably twelve to fifteen, all told.”

“Leaks?”

“That many cameras, at least six sites already know.”

“Got it. Buffy?”

“Taking point,” she said, and straightened, putting on her best camera-ready smile. My parents exchanged amused looks in the front seat.

“It’s all uphill from here,” I said.

Shaun leaned over and opened the van door.

Before the Rising, crowds of paparazzi were pretty much confined to the known haunts of celebrities and politicians—the people whose faces could be used to sell a few more magazines. The rise of reality television and the Internet media changed all that. Suddenly, anybody could be a star if they were willing to embarrass themselves in the right ways. People got famous for wanting to get laid, a stunt men have been trying to achieve since the day we discovered puberty. People got famous for having useless talents, memorizing trivia, or just being willing to get filmed twenty-four hours a day while living in a house full of strangers. The world was a weird place before the Rising.

After the Rising, with an estimated eighty-seven percent of the populace living in fear of infection and unwilling to leave their homes, a new breed of reality star was born: the reporter. While you can be an aggregator or a Stewart without risking yourself in the real world, it’s hard to be an Irwin, a Newsie, or even a really good Fictional if you cut yourself off that way. So we’re the ones who eat in restaurants and go to theme parks, the ones who visit national parks even though we’d really rather not, the ones who take the risks the rest of the country has decided to avoid. And when we’re not taking those risks ourselves, we report on the people who are. We’re like a snake devouring its own tail, over and over again, forever. Shaun and I have done paparazzi duty when the stories were thin on the ground and we needed to make a few bucks fast. I’d rather go for another filming session in Santa Cruz. Something about playing vulture just makes me feel dirty.

Buffy was the first to flounce into the crowd, looking like a little glittering ball of sunshine and happiness before they closed ranks around her, flashbulbs going off in all directions. Her giggle could cut through steel. I could hear it even after she’d made it halfway to the restaurant doors, distracting the worst of the paparazzi in the process. Buffy’s cute, photogenic, a hell of a lot friendlier than I am, and, best of all, she’s been known to drop hints about her personal life that can be turned into valuable rating points when the stories go live. Once, she even brought out a boyfriend. He didn’t last long, but when she had him, Shaun and I could practically have danced naked on the van without getting harassed. Good times.

Shaun stepped out of the van already smiling. That smile’s made him a lot of friends in the female portion of the blogosphere—something about him looking like he’d be just as happy to explore the dangerous wilderness of the bedroom as he is to explore the mysteries of things that want to make him die. They should know by now it’s a gimmick, given his continuing lack of a social life that doesn’t include the infected, but they keep falling for it. Half the cameras swung around to face him, and several of the chirpy little “anchorwomen”—because every twit who knows how to post an interview on the vid sites is an anchorwoman these days; just ask them—shoved their microphones into his face. Shaun immediately started giving them what they wanted, chattering merrily about our latest reports, offering coy, meaningless come-ons, and basically talking about anything and everything other than our new assignment.

Shaun’s smoke screen gave me the opportunity I needed to slip out of the car and start worming my way toward the restaurant doors. Paparazzi gatherings are one of the few times you’ll see a crowd in public. I spotted nervous-looking Berkeley Police in riot gear around the edge of the crowd as I made my way toward the thinner concentration of bodies. They were waiting for something to go wrong. They’d just have to keep waiting. There’s only been one incident where an outbreak started from a gathering of licensed reporters, and it happened when a nervous celebrity—the real sort, a TV sitcom star, not one of the ones who built themselves celebrity out of boredom—freaked out, pulled a gun out of her purse, and started shooting. The jury found the TV star, not the paparazzi, at fault for the outbreak that followed.

One of the Newsies near the police offered me a sidelong nod, making no move to draw attention to my position. I nodded back, relieved by his discretion. He was just crowd-surfing, but it was a nice thing to do. I made a note of his face: If his site put in for an interview, I’d grant it.

Irwins get crowd-comfortable the easy way: When you live in the hope that an outbreak will happen where you can observe it, you don’t worry about avoiding them the way a sane person might. Fictionals go one of two directions: Some avoid crowds like everybody else. Others refuse to acknowledge that they could possibly get infected when they haven’t put it in the script and they go gaily bouncing hither and yon, ignoring the danger. Newsies tend to be more cautious because we know what could happen if we’re not. Unfortunately, the demands of our job make it hard for us to be total hermits, and so even those of us who don’t need the additional income or exposure from the paparazzi flocks join up with them from time to time, getting accustomed to the feeling of being surrounded by other bodies. The paparazzi flocks are our version of the obstacle course. Stand in them without freaking out and you might be ready for real field work.

My “skirt the crowd and keep your eyes on the door” technique seemed to be working. With Shaun and Buffy providing louder, more visible targets, no one was going for me. Besides, I have a well-established—and well-deserved—reputation for being the sort of interviewee who walks away leaving you with nothing you can use as a front-page quote or saleable sound byte. It’s hard to interview someone who refuses to talk to you.

Ten feet to the door. Nine. Eight. Seven…

“—and this is my gorgeous daughter, Georgia, who’s going to be the head of Senator Ryman’s hand-selected blogging team!” Mom’s hand caught my elbow just as the gushing, ebullient tone of her voice caught my ears. Trapped. She swung me around to face the crowd of paparazzi, fingers digging into my arm. More quietly, through gritted teeth, she said, “You owe me this.”

“Got it,” I said, out of the corner of my mouth, and let myself be turned.

Shaun and I figured out early what our purpose was in our parents’ lives. When your classmates aren’t allowed to go to the movies because they might be exposed to unknown individuals, while your parents are constantly proposing wild adventures in the outside world, you get the idea that maybe something’s going on. Shaun was the first to realize how they were using us; it’s about the only place where he grew up before I did. I got over Santa. He got over our parents.

Mom kept an iron grip on my arm as she mugged and preened, re-creating her favorite photo opportunity, version five hundred and eleven: the flamboyant Irwin poses with her stoic daughter, polar opposites united by a passion for the news. I once sat down with the news aggregators and compared a public-image search to the collection of private pictures on the house database. Eighty-two percent of the physical affection I’ve received from my mother has been in public, in careful view of one or more cameras. If that seems cynical, answer this: Why has she reliably, for my entire life, waited to touch me until there was someone with a visible camera in shooting range?

People wonder why I’m not physically affectionate. The number of times I’ve been a rating-boosting photo opportunity for my parents should be sufficient answer. The only person who’s ever hugged me without thinking about the shooting angles and light saturation is my brother, and he’s the only one whose hugs I’ve ever given a damn about.

My glasses filtered camera flashes, although it wasn’t long before I had to close my eyes anyway. Some of the newer cameras have lights on them strong enough to take photographs in total darkness that seem to have been taken at noon, and there’s not an intelligence check associated with buying that sort of equipment. One of those suckers goes off in your face, you know you’ve been photographed. I was going to have a migraine for days thanks to Mom’s forced photo opportunity. There was no way I could have avoided it; it was give in before dinner or spend the entire meal being harangued about my duties as a good daughter, leading to a much longer photo session afterward. I’d rather kiss a zombie raccoon.

Buffy came to my rescue, slinking through the crowd with the sort of grace that only comes from the kind of practice most of our generation has avoided. Reaching out, she caught hold of my other arm and chirped, all dizzy good cheer, “Ms. Mason, Georgia, Mr. Mason says our table’s ready! Only if you don’t come now, they may release it, and then we’ll have to wait at least a half an hour for another table.” She paused before delivering the coup de grace. “An inside table.”

That was the perfect thing to say. Sitting outside added to the family’s mystique, making us look brave and adventurous. Parental opinion, not mine. I think eating outside when you don’t have to makes you look like a suicidal idiot dying to get munched by a zombie deer. Shaun sides with everybody on this one—he’d rather eat outside when we have to eat with the parents in public, since that way there’s the chance a zombie deer will come along and rescue him. He just agrees that it’s a stupid thing to do. Mom doesn’t see the stupidity. If it was a choice between an outdoor table where the photographers could get some decent shots and an indoor table where people might gossip about the fearless Stacy Mason losing her nerve, well… her answer was obvious.

Flashing her award-winning—literally—smile at the crowd, Mom pulled me into an “impulsive” hug and announced, “Well, folks, our table’s ready.” Noises of displeasure greeted her statement. Her smile widened. “But we’ll be back after food, so if you guys want to grab a burger, we might be able to coax a few wise statements out of my girl.” She gave me a squeeze and let go, to the sound of general applause.

I sometimes wonder why none of these news site cluster bombs ever catch the way her smile dies when she’s not facing the cameras. They run solemn pictures of her once in a while, but they’re as posed as the rest; they show her looking mournfully at abandoned playgrounds or locked cemetery gates, and once—when her ratings dipped to an all-time low during the summer Shaun and I turned thirteen and locked ourselves in our rooms—at the school Phillip had attended. That’s our Mom, selling the death of her only biological child for a few points in the ratings game.

Shaun says I shouldn’t judge her so harshly, since we make our living doing the same thing. I say it’s different when we do it. We don’t have kids. The only things we’re selling are ourselves, and I guess we have a right to that.

Dad and Shaun were standing outside the restaurant doors, turned just far enough that none of the microphones capable of withstanding the crowd noise without shorting out would be able to make out what they were saying. As I drew closer, I heard Shaun saying, in an entirely pleasant tone, “… I really don’t care what you consider ‘reasonable.’ You’re not part of our team; you’re not getting any exclusives.”

“Now, Shaun—”

“Dinnertime,” I said, snagging Shaun’s arm as I walked past. He came with me as gratefully as I’d gone with Buffy a few moments before. Shaun, Buffy, and I walked into the restaurant practically arm-in-arm, with our parents trailing behind us, both struggling to conceal their irritation. Tough. If they didn’t want us embarrassing them in public, they shouldn’t have made us go out.

Our table proved to be nice enough to suit Mom’s idea of propriety; it was located in the far corner of the yard, close to both the fence keeping out the woods and the fence isolating us from the street. Several enterprising paparazzi had drifted over to that portion of the sidewalk and were snapping candid shots through the bars. Mom flashed them a dimpled grin. Dad looked knowing and wise. I fought the urge to gag.

My handheld vibrated, signaling an incoming text message. I unclipped it from my belt, tilting it to show the screen.

“Think this’ll die down when we’re on the road?—S”

I smirked, tapping out, “Once the media machine (aka ‘Mom’) has been left here? Absolutely. We’ll be small potatoes next to the main course.”

He tapped back: “I love it when you compare people to food.”

“Practicing for the inevitable.”

Shaun snorted laughter, nearly dropping his phone into the basket of breadsticks. Dad shot him a sharp look, and he put his phone down next to his silverware, saying angelically, “I was checking my ratings.”

Dad’s scowl melted instantly. “How’s it looking?”

“Not bad. The footage the Buffster managed to clean before we hauled her away from her computer is getting a really good download rate.” Shaun flashed a grin at Buffy, who preened. If you want her to like you, compliment her poetry. If you want her to love you, compliment her tech. “I figure once I do the parallel reports and record my commentary, my share’s going to jump another eight points. I may break my own top stats this month.”

“Show-off,” I said, and smacked him on the arm with my fork.

“Slacker,” he replied, still grinning.

“Children,” said Mom, but there was no heat behind it. She loved it when we goofed around. It made us look more like a real family.

“I’m going to have the teriyaki soy burger,” said Buffy. She leaned forward and said conspiratorially, “I heard from a guy who knows a girl whose boyfriend’s best friend is in biotech that he—the best friend, I mean—ate some beef that was cloned in a clean room and didn’t have a viral colony, and it tasted just like teriyaki soy.”

“Would that it were true,” said Dad, with the weird sort of mournfulness reserved for people who grew up before the Rising and were now confronted with something that’s been lost forever. Like red meat.

That’s another nasty side effect of the KA infection that no one thought about until they were forced to deal with it firsthand: Everything mammalian harbors a virus colony, and the death of the organism causes the virus to transmute into its live state. Hot dogs, hamburgers, steaks, and pork chops are things of the past. Eat them, and you’re eating live viral particles. Are you sure there aren’t any sores in your mouth? In your esophagus? Can you be one hundred percent certain that no part of your digestive tract has been compromised in any way? All it takes is the smallest break in the body’s defenses and your slumbering infection wakes up. Cooking the meat enough to kill the infection also kills the flavor, and it’s still a form of Russian roulette.

The most well-done steak in the world may have one tiny speck of rare meat somewhere inside it, and that’s all that it takes. My brother wrestles with the infected, gives speeches while standing on cars in designated disaster zones, never wears sufficient armor, and generally goes through life giving the impression that he’s a suicide waiting to happen. Even he won’t eat red meat.

Poultry and fish are safe, but a lot of people avoid them anyway. Something about the act of eating flesh makes them uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the fact that suddenly, after centuries of ruling the farmyard, mankind has reason to empathize with the chicken. We always had turkeys at Thanksgiving and geese at Christmas. Just another ratings stunt on the part of our increasingly media-savvy parents, but at least this one had some useful side effects. Shaun and I are some of the only people I know in our generation who don’t have any unreasonable dietary hang-ups.

“I’m going to have the chicken salad and a cup of today’s soup,” I said.

“And a Coke,” prompted Shaun.

“And a carafe,” I corrected him.

He was still teasing me about my caffeine intake when the waiter appeared, accompanied by the beaming manager. No surprise there. As a family, we’ve been excellent customers for as long as I can remember. Every time a local outbreak has closed down outside gathering areas, Mom’s been at Bronson’s, eating in the enclosed dining area and making a point of being the first one outside when they’re allowed to reopen it. They’d be stupid not to appreciate what we’ve done for their business.

The waiter was carrying a tray laden with our usual assortment of drinks: coffee for Mom and Dad, a virgin daiquiri for Buffy, a bottle of sparkling apple cider for Shaun—it looks like beer from any sort of a distance—and a pitcher of Coke for me.

“Compliments of the house,” the manager declared, turning his smile on me and Shaun. “We’re so proud of you. Going off to be media superstars! It runs in the family.”

“It definitely does,” simpered Mom, doing her best to look like a giggling schoolgirl. She was only succeeding at looking like an idiot, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. We were almost on the campaign trail. It wasn’t worth the fight.

“Be sure to sign a menu before you leave?” the manager pressed. “We’ll put it on the wall. When you’re too big to come to places like this, we’ll be able to say, ‘They ate here, they ate fries right there, right at that table, while they did their math homework.’”

“It was physics,” protested Shaun, laughing.

“Whatever you say,” said the manager.

The waiter passed drinks around as we placed our orders. He finished by pouring the first cup of Coke from my pitcher with a flourish of his wrist. I smiled at that, and he winked at me, clearly pleased. I let my smile die, spiking an eyebrow upward. Hours of practice with my mirror have shown me that particular expression’s success in conveying disdain. It’s one of the few facial expressions that’s helped by my sunglasses, rather than being hindered by them. His pleasure faded, and he hustled through the rest of his duties without looking at me.

Shaun caught my eye, mouthing “That wasn’t nice” at me.

I shrugged, mouthing “He should have known better” back at him. I don’t flirt. Not with waiters, not with other reporters, not with anybody.

Finally, the staff retreated, and Mom raised her glass, clearly signaling for a toast. Choosing the path of least resistance, the rest of us did the same.

“To ratings!” she said.

“To ratings,” we agreed and clinked our glasses around the table in doleful adherence to the ritual.

We were on the road to those ratings now. All we had to do was hope that we were good enough to keep them. Whatever it might take.

Five

“ID?”

“Georgia Carolyn Mason, licensed online news representative, After the End Times.” I handed my license and photo identification to the man in black, turning my left wrist over to reveal the blue-and-red ID tattoo I had done when I tested for my first Class B license. Tattooing isn’t legally required—yet—but it gives them something to identify your body by. Every little bit helps. “Registered with the North American Association of Internet Journalists; dental records, skin sample, and identifying markings on file.”

“Remove the sunglasses.”

That was a request I was all too familiar with. “If you’ll check my file, you’ll see that I have a filed notation of retinal Kellis-Amberlee syndrome. If there’s another test we can perform, I’d be happy to—”

“Remove the sunglasses.”

“You realize I won’t display a normal retinal pattern?”

The man in black offered me the ghost of a smile. “Well, ma’am, if your eyes check normal, we’ll know you’ve been making all this fuss because you weren’t who you claimed to be, now, won’t we?”

Damn. “Right,” I muttered, and removed my glasses. Forcing myself to keep my eyes open despite the pain, I turned to press my face into the retinal scanner being held by the second member of Senator Ryman’s private security team. They would compare the scan results to the ocular patterns in my file, checking for signs of degradation or decay that could signify a recent viral flare. Not that they’d get any useful results from me; retinal KA means my eyes always register as if I were harboring a live infection.

Buffy and Shaun were going through the standard version of the same process with their own detachments of black-suited security representatives just a few feet away from me. I was willing to bet theirs hurt less.

The light at the top of the retinal scanner went from red to green, and the man pulled it away, nodding to his companion. “Hand,” said the first man.

I took a few precious seconds to slide my sunglasses back into place before holding out my right hand, and managed not to grimace as it was grabbed and thrust into a closed-case blood testing unit. Clinical interest took over, wiping away my distaste for the process as I studied the unit’s casing.

“Is that an Apple unit?” I asked.

“Apple XH-224,” he replied.

“Wow.” I’d seen the top-of-the-line units before, but I’d never had the opportunity to use one. They’re more sophisticated than our standard field units, capable of detecting a live infection at something like ten times the speed. One of those babies can tell you that you’re dead before you even realize that you’ve been bitten. Which didn’t make the process of getting tested any more enjoyable, but it definitely made it more interesting to observe. It was almost worth the pain. Almost.

Five red lights came on along the top of the box, beginning to blink as needles pricked the skin between my thumb and forefinger, at my wrist, and at the tip of my pinkie. Each time, the bite of the needle was followed by a cool blast of antiseptic foam. When all five lights had gone from red to green, the agent pulled the box away and smiled genuinely for the first time.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Mason. You’re free to proceed.”

“Thanks,” I said, and pushed my sunglasses farther up the bridge of my nose. My headache settled back into its previous grumble. “Mind if I wait for the rest of my crew?” Buffy was sticking her hand into the box, and they were waiting for Shaun’s retinal check to complete. He has retinal scarring in his left eye from a stupid incident with some crappy Chinatown fireworks when we were fifteen, and that makes his scans take longer than they should. Mine may be weird, but they’re a standard weird. His confuse just about every scanner we’ve ever met.

“Not at all,” the agent said. “Just don’t cross the quarantine line, or we’ll have to start over.”

“Got it.” I stepped back and studied the area, careful to keep my feet well away from the red line marking the edge of the defined “safe” zone.

We’d been expecting increased security around the campaign, but this was more than I’d been bargaining for. They picked us up from Buffy’s house; the senator’s security dispatch wasn’t even willing to let us near their cars unless they were collecting us from a secured location, which took our place out of the running. Given that they gave us blood tests before they said hello, I don’t quite get the reasoning. Maybe they didn’t want to deal with a zombie attack before lunch. Or maybe they were avoiding our parents, who were practically panting at the idea of a photo opportunity with the senator’s men.

Once in the cars, we were transported to the Oakland Airport, where we had to take another blood test before they loaded us and our portable gear onto a private helicopter. We flew to what was supposedly an undisclosed location but I was pretty sure was the city of Clayton, near the foothills of Mount Diablo. Most of that area was purchased by the government after the original residents evacuated, and it’s been rumored for years that they were using some of the old ranches as short-term housing. It’s a nice place, assuming you don’t mind the occasional threat of zombie coyotes, wild dogs, and bobcats. Rural areas offer a lot where privacy is concerned, but not so much if what you’re looking for is safety.

Judging by the stables around the perimeter, our destination started life as a working farm. Now it was clearly a private residence, with electric fences spanning the spaces between buildings and barbed wire strung as far as the eye could see. Factor in the helipad and it didn’t take any great leap of logic to conclude that this place confirmed the rumors about the government setting up hidey-holes out in the abandoned boonies. Nice digs, if you can get them. I smiled as I continued looking around. Our first day, and we already had a scoop: Government Use of Abandoned Land in Northern California Confirmed. Read all about it.

Buffy picked up her bags and walked over to me, looking flustered. “I don’t think I’ve ever been poked that many times,” she complained.

“At least now you know you’re clean,” I said. “Cameras rolling?”

“There was a minor EMP band at the entrance that took two and five off-line, but I anticipated for that and built in redundancies. One, three, and four, and six through eight, are all transmitting live and have been since pickup.”

I looked at her flatly. “I didn’t understand a word of that, so I’m just going to assume you said ‘yes’ and move on with my life, all right?”

“Works for me,” she said, waving at Shaun as he joined us. “You’re done?”

“They know Shaun can’t be a zombie,” I said, adjusting my sunglasses. “You need a brain to reanimate.”

He elbowed me amiably and shook his head. “Dude, I’m amazed they didn’t strip search us. They should’ve bought us dinner first, or something.”

“Will lunch do?” asked a jocular voice. All three of us turned, finding ourselves facing a tall, generically handsome man whose carefully cropped brown hair was starting to gray but had been left just long enough in the front to fall across his forehead and create the illusion of boyishness. His skin was tan but relatively unlined, and his eyes were very blue. He was casually dressed in tan slacks and a white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up around his elbows.

“Senator Ryman,” I said, and offered him my hand. “I’m Georgia Mason. These are my associates, Shaun Mason—”

“Hey,” interjected Shaun.

“—and Georgette Meissonier.”

“You can call me Buffy,” said Buffy.

“Of course,” the senator said, taking my hand and shaking it. He had a good grip, solid without being overwhelming, and the teeth he revealed when he smiled were straight and white. “It’s a pleasure to meet all three of you. I’ve been watching your precampaign preparations with interest.” He released my hand.

“We had a lot to accomplish and not much time to accomplish it in,” I said.

“A lot to accomplish” verged on understatement. We had seven baby bloggers contact us before we finished eating dinner, all wanting to know if we were planning to schism. Once people knew the size of the story we’d landed, there was no way striking out on our own would have been a surprise, so we didn’t try to make it one. The folks at Bridge Supporters were sorry to see us go and pleased by our severance offer: We took exclusive rights to all campaign-trail stories to our new site, but we allowed them to keep running two of Buffy’s ongoing poetry series, gave them first rights on any continuations to Shaun’s series on exploring the ruins of Yreka, and guaranteed two op-ed pieces from me per month for the next year. They’d get click-through reads from the folks following us on campaign, and we’d get the same in return as existing Bridge Support readers found their way to our new site through the shared material. My friend Mahir had been looking to move on to new challenges, and he was glad to sign on to help me moderate the Newsies. Shaun and Buffy had their own hiring to do, and I left it to them.

Finding a host for our new site was disturbingly easy. One of Buffy’s biggest fans runs a small ISP, and he was willing to put us up and online in exchange for a minimal fee and a lifetime membership to our exclusive features, once we had some to offer. Less than twenty minutes after calling him, we had a URL, a place to put our files, and our very first subscriber. The baby bloggers who contacted us the first night were quickly joined by two dozen others, and that gave us the liberty to pick and choose, looking for people who fit a profile other than “available.” We wound up with twelve supporting betas, four in each major category, already producing content for a site that hadn’t even officially launched yet. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe it could be that easy to get everything you’d ever wanted… but it was.

After the End Times went live six days after we got the notice that we had been chosen to accompany Senator Ryman’s campaign, with my name on the masthead as senior editor, Buffy listed as our graphic designer and technical expert, and Shaun responsible for hiring and marketing. Whether we sank or swam, there was no going back; once you make alpha, you can never be a beta again. Blogging is a territorial world, and the other betas would eat you alive if you tried.

I hadn’t slept more than four hours a night in two weeks. Sleep was a luxury reserved for people who weren’t trying to design their futures around a meal ticket that might still prove to be a rotten apple. I just had to hope the dirt we found on the campaign trail would be enough to support us, or our careers would be short, sour, and too interesting by far.

“Still, you seem to have done all right,” Senator Ryman said. His Wisconsin accent was stronger than it sounded on the newscasts; either he didn’t realize we were filming, or he figured there was no point in playing fake around the people who were going to be sharing his quarters over the next year. “If you’ll come with me, Emily has a nice lunch going, and she’s been looking forward to meeting you.”

“Is your wife coming with you for the whole campaign?” I asked. He started to walk toward a nearby door, and I followed, gesturing for the others to do the same. We knew the answer already—Emily Ryman was going to be staying on the family ranch in Parrish, Wisconsin, during most of the year, taking care of the kids while her husband did the moving and shaking—but I wanted him to say it for our pickup recordings. The best sound clips are the ones you gather for yourself.

“Em? I couldn’t make her come the whole way if I used a tractor pull,” the senator said, and opened the door. “Wipe your feet, all three of you. There’s no point to making you go through another damned blood test—if you’re this far past the gate and you’re not clean, we’re dead already. May as well be friendly about it.” Then he was inside, bellowing, “Emily! The bloggers are here!”

Shaun gave me a look, mouthing “I like him.” I nodded. We’d just met the man, and he was probably a master of political bullshit, but I was starting to like him, too. There was something about him that said “I know how pointless all of these political circuses are. Let’s see how it long it takes for them to realize that I’m just playing along, shall we?” I had to respect that.

He might be playing us for a bunch of saps, but if he was, he’d slip eventually, and we’d take him apart. That would be almost as much fun as getting along with him, and definitely better for our market share.

The interior of the house was decorated with a distinctly Southwestern flare, all bright, solid colors and geometric patterns. Southwestern art has shifted in the last twenty years; before the Rising, any house with that many potted cacti and Native American–style throw rugs would have boasted a coyote statue or two and possibly a polished steer’s skull, complete with horns. I’ve seen pictures—it was pretty morbid stuff. These days, representations of any animal that weighs more than forty pounds have a tendency to make people uncomfortable, so coyotes and steers are both out of fashion, unless you’re dealing with a serious nihilist or some kid playing “creature of the night.” Only the painted deserts remain. An enormous picture window took up half of one wall, marking the house as having been put up before the Rising. No one builds windows like that anymore. They’re an invitation to attack.

The kitchen was defined by raised counters rather than walls, spilling tile flooring into the hall and attached dining room in an almost organic fashion. Senator Ryman was standing by the big butcher’s block at the center when we entered, arms around the waist of a woman in blue jeans and a flannel lumberjack’s shirt. Her brown hair was pulled back in a high, girlish ponytail. He was murmuring something in her ear, looking a good ten years younger than he had when we met outside.

Shaun and I exchanged a glance, debating the merits of retreating and allowing them this private time. My journalistic instincts said “stay,” and I certainly wasn’t turning off the cameras, but my sense of ethics told me that people deserve a chance to unwind before starting on something as huge as a full-on political campaign.

Luckily, Buffy saved us from the conundrum by barreling straight ahead, sniffing the air appreciatively, and asking, “What’s for lunch? Wow, I’m starving. That smells like shrimp and mahimahi—am I close? Can I do anything to help?”

Senator Ryman stepped away from his wife, exchanging an amused look with her before turning a grin on Buffy, and said, “I think things are pretty much in hand. Besides which, Emily’s too territorial to share her kitchen with another woman. Even if it’s a borrowed kitchen.”

“Quiet, you,” said Emily, jabbing him in the ribs with a wooden spoon. He winced theatrically, and she laughed. The laugh was bright, perfectly in keeping with the practical, elegantly simple kitchen. “Now, let me see if I can guess which of you is which. I know you have two Georges and a Shaun—how is that fair?” She put on an exaggerated pout, not looking a bit like a senator’s wife. “Three boys’ names for two girls and a boy. It puts me at a disadvantage.”

“We didn’t get to choose our own names, ma’am,” I said, fighting a smile. Shaun and I don’t even know what names we were born with. We were orphaned in the Rising, and when the Masons adopted us, we were both listed under “Baby Doe.”

“Oh, but one of you did,” she said. “One of the Georges is also a Buffy, and if I remember my pop culture right, it should be the blonde one.” She turned, extending a hand toward Buffy. “Georgette Meissonier, correct?”

“Absolutely,” Buffy said, taking her hand. “You can call me Buffy. Everyone else does.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Emily replied, and released her hand, turning toward Shaun and me. “That must make you the Masons. Shaun and Georgia. Yes?”

“Got it,” Shaun said, saluting her. Somehow, he kept the gesture from looking like he was making fun. I’ve never understood how he does that.

I stepped forward, offering her a hand. “George is fine by me, or Georgia. Whichever is easier for you, Mrs. Ryman.”

“Call me Emily,” she said. Her grip was cool, and the glance she cast toward my sunglasses was understanding. “Are the lights too bright for you? They’re all soft bulbs, but I can dim the window a bit more if you need me to.”

“No, thank you,” I said, eyebrows rising as I studied her face more closely. Her eyes weren’t dark, as I had first assumed; what I had taken to be deep brown irises were actually her pupils, so dilated that they pushed the natural muddy hazel of her eyes into a thin ring around the edges. “Wouldn’t you know if the lights were a problem?”

She smiled, wryly. “My eyes aren’t as sensitive as they used to be. I was an early case, and there was some nerve damage by the time they figured out what was going on. You’ll tell me if the lights get to be too much?”

I nodded. “Sure will.”

“Wonderful. You three make yourselves comfortable. Lunch will be up in a few minutes. We’re having fish tacos with mango salsa and virgin mimosas.” She raised a finger to the senator, adding playfully, “I don’t want to hear a word of complaint from you, Mister. We’re not getting these nice reporters drunk before things even get started.”

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Shaun said. “Some of us can hold our liquor.”

“And some of us can’t,” I said dryly. Buffy weighs ninety-five pounds, soaking wet. The one time we took her out drinking, she wound up climbing onto a table and reciting half of Night of the Living Dead before Shaun and I could pull her down. “Thank you, Mrs…. Emily.”

Her smile was approving. “You can be taught. Now all of you, go sit down while I finish taking care of business. Peter, that means you, too.”

“Yes, dear,” said the senator, kissing her on the cheek before moving to take a seat at the dining room table. The three of us followed him in an obedient, slightly ragged line. I’ll challenge senators and kings for the right to know the truth, but far be it from me to challenge a woman in her own kitchen.

Watching the places everyone took around the table was interesting in a purely sociological sense. Shaun settled with his back to the wall, affording him the best view of the room. He may seem like an idiot, but in some ways, he’s the most careful of us all. You can’t be an Irwin and not learn some things about keeping your exits open. If the zombies ever mob en masse again, he’ll be ready. And filming.

Buffy took the seat nearest the light, where the cameras studded through her jewelry would get the best pickup shots. Her portables work on the principles defined during the big pre-Rising wireless boom; they transmit data to the server on a constant basis, allowing her to come back later and edit it at her leisure. I once tried to figure out how many transmitters she actually had on her, but wound up giving up and wandering off to do something more productive, like answering Shaun’s fan mail. He gets more marriage proposals a week than he likes to think about, and he lets me handle them all.

The senator took the seat closest to the kitchen and his wife, thus conveniently leaving me the chair with the highest degree of shadow. So he was a family man and someone who understood that consideration was a virtue. Nice. I settled, asking, “You provide home-cooked meals for all your news staff?”

“Just the controversial ones,” he replied, his tone easy and assured. “I’m not going to beat around the bush. I read your public reports, your op-ed pieces, everything, before I agreed to your application. I know you’re smart and won’t forgive bullshit. That doesn’t,” he held up a finger, “mean I’m going to be one hundred percent straight with you, because there are some things no reporter ever gets to be privy to. Mostly having to do with my home life and my family, but still, there are no-go zones.”

“We respect that,” I said. Shaun and Buffy were nodding.

Senator Ryman seemed to approve, because he nodded in turn, looking satisfied. “Nobody wanted me to bring blog folks on this campaign,” he said, without preamble. I sat up a little straighter. The entire online community knew that the senator’s handlers had been recommending against including bloggers in the official campaign press corps, but I’d never expected to hear it put so baldly. “They have this idea that you three will report whatever you damn well want to and not what’s good for the campaign.”

“So you’re saying they’re pretty smart, then?” Shaun asked, in a bland surfer-boy drawl that might almost have been believable, if he hadn’t been smirking as he said it.

The senator roared with laughter, and Emily looked up from the stove, clearly amused. “That’s what I pay them for, so I certainly hope so, Shaun. Yeah, they’re pretty smart. They’ve got you pegged for exactly what you are.”

“And what’s that, Senator?” I asked.

Sobering, he leaned forward. “The children of the Rising. Biggest revolution that our generations—yours, mine, and at least two more besides—are ever going to see. The world changed overnight, and sometimes I’m sorry I was born too early to be in on the ground level of what it’s turned into. You kids, you’re the ones who get to shape the real tomorrow, the one that’s going to matter. Not me, not my lovely wife, and certainly not a bunch of talking heads who get paid to be smart enough to realize that a bunch of Bay Area blogger kids are going to tell the truth as they see it, and damn the political consequences.”

Eyebrows rising again, I said, “That does very little to explain why you felt it was important that we be here.”

“You’re here because of what you represent: the truth.” The senator smiled, boyish once more. “People are going to believe whatever you say. Your careers depend on how many dead folks your brother can prod with a stick, how many poems your friend can write, and how much truth you can tell.”

“So what if the things we say don’t paint you in a good enough light?” Buffy frowned, tilting her head. It would have looked like a natural gesture if I hadn’t known the silver moon-and-star earring dangling from her left ear was a camera that responded to head gestures. She was zooming in on the senator to catch his answer.

“If they don’t paint me in a good enough light, I suppose I wasn’t meant to be the President of the United States of America,” he said. “You want to dig for scandals, I’m sure my opponents have road maps for you to follow. You want to report on this campaign, you report what you see, and don’t worry about whether or not I’m going to like it. Because that doesn’t matter a bit.”

We were still staring at him, trying to frame responses to something that seemed about as realistic coming from a politician’s mouth as sonnets coming out of a zombie’s, when Emily Ryman walked over and started setting plates onto the table. I was grateful for the interruption. After the way the day had been going, I was running out of “surprised” and moving rapidly into the region of “mild shock,” and this was enough to give me a chance to regroup.

Emily sat once she’d finished putting the plates down, reaching for Senator Ryman’s hand. “Peter, will you say grace?”

“Of course,” he said. Shaun and I exchanged glances before joining hands with each other and the Rymans, closing the circle around the table. Senator Ryman bowed his head, closing his eyes. “Dear Lord, we ask that You bless this table and those who have come to gather around it. Thank You for the good gifts that You have given us. For the health of ourselves and our families, for the company and food we are about to enjoy, and for the future that You have seen fit to set before us. Thank You, oh Lord, for Your generosity, and for the trials by which we may come to know You better.”

Shaun and I left our eyes open, watching the senator as he spoke. We’re atheists. It’s hard to be anything else in a world where zombies can attack your elementary school talent show. Much of the country has turned back toward faith, however, acting under the vague supposition that it can’t hurt anything to have God on your side. I glanced at Buffy, who was nodding along with the senator’s words, eyes tightly closed. She’s a lot more religious than most people would guess. Her family is French Catholic. She’s been saying grace at any sort of large gathering since she was born, and she still attends a nonvirtual church on Sundays.

“Amen,” said the senator. We all echoed it with varying degrees of certainty.

Emily Ryman smiled. “Everybody, eat up. There’s more if you’re still hungry, but I want to eat too, so you’re going to have to serve yourselves after this round.” The senator got a kiss on the cheek to go with his fish tacos; the rest of us just got fed.

Not that Shaun was going to let lunch pass without a little light conversation. Of the two of us, he’s the gregarious one. Someone had to be. “Will you be coming along on the whole campaign, ma’am, or just this leg of it?” he asked, with uncharacteristic politeness. Then again, he’s always had a healthy respect for women with food.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to accompany this dog and pony show,” Emily said, dryly. “I think you kids are totally insane. Entertaining as all heck, and I love your site, but insane.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” I said.

“Uh-uh. For one thing, I am not taking the kids out on the road. No way. The tutors they hire for these things are never the sort I approve of.” She smiled at the senator, who patted her knee in an unconsciously companionable fashion. “And they wind up seeing way too many reporters and politicians. Not the sort you want keeping company with a bunch of impressionable young kids.”

“Look how it’s warped us,” said Shaun.

“Exactly,” she said, unflustered. “Besides which, the ranch doesn’t run itself.”

I nodded. “Your family still manages an actual horse ranch, don’t they?”

“You know the answer to that, Georgia,” said the senator. “Been in Emily’s family since the late eighteen hundreds.”

“If you think the risk of zombie palominos is enough to make me give up my horses, you’ve never met a real horse nut,” she said, grinning. “Now, don’t get your back up. I know where you stand on the animal mass restrictions. You’re a big supporter of Mason’s Law, aren’t you?”

“In all recreational and nonessential capacities, yes,” I said.

Thanks to the Masons’ biological son, Shaun and I have often found ourselves with an element of unasked-for name recognition when dealing with people who work with animals. Before Phillip, no one realized that all mammals with a body mass of forty pounds or more could become carriers of the live-state virus, or that Kellis-Amberlee was happy to cross species, going from man to beast and back again. Mom put a bullet through her only son’s head, back when that was still something new enough to break you forever—when it felt like murder, not mercy. So yeah, I guess you could say I support Mason’s Law.

“I would, too, in your position,” Emily said. Her tone carried none of the accusations I’m used to hearing from animal rights activists; she was speaking the truth, and I could deal, or not, as I so chose. “Now, if everyone wants to tuck in, it’s the start of a long day—and a longer month.”

“Eat up, everybody, before your lunch gets cold,” added the senator, and reached for the mimosas. Shaun and I exchanged a look, shrugged in near-unison, and reached for our forks.

One way or another, we were on our way.

Six

Getting our equipment past the security screening offered by Senator Ryman’s staff took six and a half hours. Shaun spent the first two hours getting underfoot as he tried to guard his gear and finally got all of us banished inside. Now he was sulking on the parlor couch, chin almost level with his chest. “What are they doing, taking the van apart to make sure we didn’t stuff any zombies inside the paneling?” he grumbled. “Because, gee, that would work really well as an assassination tool.”

“It’s been tried,” Buffy said. “Do you remember the guy who tried to kill George Romero with the zombie pit bulls?”

“That’s an urban myth, Buffy. It’s been disproven about ninety times,” I said, continuing to pace. “George Romero died peacefully in his bed.”

“And now he’s a happy shambler at a government research facility,” said Shaun, abandoning his sulk in order to make “zombie” motions with his arms. The ASL for “zombie” has joined the raised middle finger as one of the few truly universal hand gestures. Some points just need to be made quickly.

“It’s sort of sad, thinking about him shuffling around out there, all decayed and mindless and not remembering the classics of his heyday,” said Buffy.

I eyed her. “He’s a government zombie. He eats better than we do.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” she said.

It took a while for the first Kellis-Amberlee outbreaks to be confirmed as anything but hoaxes, and even after that was accomplished, it took time for the various governmental agencies to finish fighting over whose problem it was. The CDC got sick of the arguing about three days in, jumped into things with both feet, and never looked back. They had squads in the field by the end of week two, capturing zombies for study. It was quickly apparent that there’s no curing a zombie; you can’t undo the amount of brain damage the virus does with anything gentler than a bullet to the brainpan. But you can work on ways to neutralize Kellis-Amberlee itself, and since all a zombie really does is convert flesh into virus, a few captive shamblers provided the best possible test subjects.

After twenty years of testing and the derailment of almost every technical field that didn’t feed directly into the medical profession, we’ve managed little more than absolutely nothing. At this point, they can completely remove Kellis-Amberlee from a living body, using a combination of chemotherapy, blood replacement, and a nasty strain of Ebola that’s been modified to search and destroy its cousin. There are just a few downsides, like the part where it costs upward of ten thousand dollars for a treatment, none of the test subjects has survived, and oh, right, the constant fear the modified virus will mutate like Marburg Amberlee did and leave us with something even worse to deal with. Where the living dead are concerned, we pretty much exist on square one.

It didn’t take long for researchers to connect the health of their “pet” zombies to the amount of protein—specifically living or recently killed flesh; soybeans and legumes won’t cut it—they consumed. Kellis-Amberlee converts tissue into viral blocks. The more tissue it can find, the less of the original zombie it converts. So if you feed a zombie constantly, it won’t wither to the point of becoming useless. Most of the nation’s remaining cattle ranches are there to feed the living dead. A beautiful irony, when you consider that cows break the forty-pound threshold, and thus reanimate upon death. Zombies eating zombies. Good work if you can get it.

A lot of folks leave their bodies to science. Your family skips funeral expenses, the government pays a nice settlement so they won’t sue if your image winds up on television one of these days, and if you belong to one of those religious sects that believes the body has to remain intact in order to eventually get carried up to Heaven, you don’t run the risk of offending God. You just risk eating the research scientists if containment fails, and some people don’t see that as being as much of an abomination as cremation.

George Romero didn’t mean to save the world any more than Dr. Alexander Kellis meant to almost destroy it, but you can’t always choose your lot in life. Most people wouldn’t have had the first idea of how to deal with the zombies if it weren’t for the lessons they’d learned from Romero’s movies. Go for the brain; fire works, but only if you don’t let the burning zombie touch you; once you’re bitten, you’re dead. Fans of Romero’s films applied the lessons of a thousand zombie movies to the reality of what had happened. They traded details of the attacks and their results over a thousand blogs from a thousand places, and humanity survived.

In interviews, Mr. Romero always seemed baffled and a little delighted by the power his movies had proven to have. “Always knew there was a reason people didn’t like seeing the zombies win,” he’d said. If anyone was surprised when he left his body to the government, they didn’t say anything. It seemed like a fitting end for a man who went from king of bad horror to national hero practically overnight.

“They better not damage any of my equipment,” Shaun said, snapping me back to the present. He was scowling at the window again. “Some of that stuff took serious barter to get.”

“They’re not going to damage your equipment, dumb ass. They’re the government, we’re journalists, and they know we’d tell everyone in the whole damn world, starting with our insurance agency.” I leaned over to hit him in the back of the head. “They just need to make sure we’re not carrying any bombs.”

“Or zombies,” added Buffy.

“Or drugs,” said Shaun.

“Actually,” said the senator, stepping into the room, “we’re slightly disappointed by the lack of bombs, zombies, or drugs hidden in your gear. I thought you folks were supposed to be reporters, but there wasn’t even any illicit booze.”

“We’re clear?” I asked, ceasing my pacing. Shaun and Buffy were already on their feet, nearly vibrating. I understood their anxiety; the senator’s security crew had their hands on all our servers, which had Buffy unhappy, and on Shaun’s zombie hunting and handling equipment, which usually makes him so restless that I wind up locking him in the bathroom just to get some peace and quiet. It’s times like this that I’m truly glad of my role as the hard-nosed reporter in our little crew. Maybe Buffy and Shaun call me a Luddite, but when the government goons take away all our equipment for examination, they lose everything. I, on the other hand, retain my MP3 recorder, cellular phone, notebook computer, and stylus. They’re all too basic to require much examination.

Of course, I can’t keep my hands on the vehicles, which had me almost as restless as my companions. The van and my bike represent the most expensive articles we travel with, and most of our livelihood depends on their upkeep. At the same time, they’re probably the easiest items to repair—a good mechanic can undo almost any damage, and my bike isn’t that customized. As long as the feds didn’t bust up the van, we’d be fine.

“You’re clear,” the senator said. He didn’t bat an eye as Shaun and Buffy ran out of the room, despite the fact that neither of them said good-bye. I remained where I was, and after a moment, he turned toward me. “I must admit, we were impressed by the structural reinforcements on your van. Planning to last out a siege in that thing?”

“We’ve considered it. The security upgrades were our mother’s design. We did the electrical work ourselves.”

Senator Ryman nodded as if this explained everything. In a way, it did. Stacy Mason has been the first name in zombie-proof structural engineering for a long time. “I have to admit, I don’t really understand most of your professional equipment, but the security systems… Your mother did a truly lovely job.”

“I’ll give her your compliments.” I gestured toward the door. “I should join the feeding frenzy. Buffy’s going to want to start assembling today’s footage, and she always goes overboard without me standing over her.”

“I see.” The senator paused for a moment. His voice was uncharacteristically stiff as he continued, “I wondered if I might ask you a small favor, Miss Mason.”

Ah, the first demand for censorship. I was going to owe Shaun ten bucks; I’d been betting that Senator Ryman could make it at least until we hit the actual campaign trail before he started trying to control the media. Keeping my voice level, I said, “And that would be, Senator?”

“Emily.” He shook his head, a smile tugging at his lips. “I know you’ll release whatever you want to, and I look forward to having the chance to read and watch it all. I don’t figure we caught half the cameras and recorders you three had on you—some of the ones Miss Meissonier was carrying were barely in the range of our sensors, which leads me to believe that she had others we couldn’t see at all, and if she ever wishes to pursue a career in espionage, I only pray she offers her services to us first—so you’ve doubtless got some great footage. And that’s fabulous. But Emily, you see, well… she’s not so comfortable with a lot of media attention.”

I looked at him, thoughtfully. “So you want me to minimize the use of your wife?” That was odd. Emily Ryman was friendly, photogenic, and, except for the horses, just about the sanest politician’s wife I’d ever met. I expected him to milk her as the asset she was. “She’s going to have to feature in this campaign. And if you win—”

“She understands her role in things, and she doesn’t mind being written about, but she’d rather her picture wasn’t used excessively,” he said. He was clearly uncomfortable with the request. That made me a lot more likely to grant it. “Please. If it’s at all possible, I would see it as a great personal favor.”

Lowering my sunglasses enough to let him see my eyes, I asked, “Why?”

“Because she raises horses. I know you don’t approve of keeping mammals that meet the size for Kellis-Amberlee amplification, but you’re polite about it. You write articles and you lobby for stricter controls, and that’s fine, that’s your right as an American citizen. Given your family connections, it’s even unavoidable. Some people, however, get a little more… aggressive.”

“You’re talking about the bombing in San Diego, aren’t you?” It was the darling of the news feeds for a while, because it was such a huge event: the world’s largest remaining zoo and wild animal conservatory, bombed by activists who believed Mason’s Law should be used to shut down every facility in the world that kept animals capable of undergoing viral amplification. The same fringe group, in other words, that supports lifting the bans on big-game hunting across the world, and wiping out North America’s large indigenous mammals. They call themselves “pro-life,” but what they really are is pro-genocide. Their proverbial panties get wet just thinking about the opportunity to go out and slaughter something under the illusion of following the law. Hundreds died in San Diego because of what they did, and I’m not just talking about the animals. We got a lot of firsts out of that stunt. “First confirmed Kellis-Amberlee transmission through giraffe bite” wasn’t the weirdest.

Senator Ryman nodded, lips pressed into a thin line. “I have three daughters. All of them are at the ranch with their grandparents, waiting for their mother to rejoin them.”

“Trying to avoid making them a target?”

“That’s unavoidable, unfortunately. It’s the nature of modern politics. But I can keep them out of the spotlight for as long as I can.”

I kept my sunglasses pulled down, studying him. Unlike most people, he met my eyes without flinching. Having a wife with retinal KA probably helped with that. Finally, I slid my glasses back into place and nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He offered a quick, boyish smile, his relief showing clearly. “Thank you, Miss Mason. Don’t let me keep you any longer. I’m sure you’re anxious to check the state of your vehicles.”

“If your goons scratched my bike, I’ll have to get bitchy,” I cautioned, and left the room, following the path Shaun and Buffy had taken to the yard. Leaving Emily out of things would be relatively easy. The way the kitchen was lit meant we could limit footage of her without changing the overall tone of the afternoon, and without being too blatant—looking like you’re hiding something is the fastest way to bring the vultures down. I’d have to leave it up to Buffy, of course. She’s our graphics wiz.

The interesting part was that he was willing to ask for it at all. Senator Ryman knew he’d only get to ask us to leave things out so many times before we started resisting, and once that happened, he wasn’t going to be a happy man. So why introduce us to Emily at all, if the introduction meant he’d have to use one of his limited “get out of jail free” cards to keep her out of a puff piece about meeting the candidate over some good old-fashioned fish tacos? It was possible he was just trying to play on our sympathies—“Golly, my wife doesn’t like to be seen on camera, and it could endanger the kids, so you’ll be good to us, right?”—but that didn’t seem likely. It seemed a lot more realistic to me that she’d wanted the chance to meet us, and he was willing to go along with it, as long as it kept her happy with him. I’ve learned to trust my hunches, and they were telling me now that the senator and his wife were generally good folks, with the bad taste to choose politics and horse breeding as their respective careers.

Our vehicles were parked out front. The van had been scrubbed until it gleamed, and even the relay towers were clean. All the chrome on my bike had been buffed until it was almost too bright to contemplate, even through my sunglasses. “I don’t think that thing’s been this clean since before I bought it,” I said, shoving my glasses back up my nose. The sunset was on the way, and as far as I was concerned, it was taking a little too much of its own sweet time about things.

Shaun stuck his head out of the van’s rear door and waved, calling, “Hey, George! They got the fruit punch stain out of the upholstery!”

“Really?” I couldn’t help being impressed. That stain had been in the van since three days after the parents gave it to us, and that was on our eighteenth adoption day. “Class A license means Class A equipment,” Dad said, and that—well, that, and roughly three hundred hours of back-breaking work—was that.

“And they moved all Buffy’s wires around,” he said, with a certain degree of sadistic glee, before retreating back into the van.

I smothered a smile as I started toward the van, pausing to run one hand down the sleekly polished side of my bike. If the security crew had scratched the paint, they’d also buffed the scratch clean without leaving a trace. It was impressive work.

Things were less peaceful inside the van. Shaun was sprawled in a chair, cleaning his crossbow, while Buffy was flat on her back under one of the desks, heels drumming against the floor as she yanked wires out of their current, incorrect locations and jammed them into new holes. Every time she yanked a wire, one or more of the van’s monitors would start to roll or be consumed by static, turning the scene into something abstract and surrealistic, like a bad B-grade horror movie. She was also swearing like a merchant marine, displaying a grasp of profanity that was more than a little bit impressive.

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” I asked, stepping over the spools of discarded cabling and taking a seat on the counter.

“Look at this!” She shoved herself out from under the desk and into a kneeling position, brandishing a fistful of cables in my direction. I raised my eyebrows, waiting. “All of these were connected wrong! All of them!”

“Are they labeled?”

Buffy hesitated before admitting, “No.”

“Do they follow any sort of normal, sane, or predictable system?” I knew the answer to that one. Shaun and I did most of the electrical work, but the actual wiring is all Buffy’s, and she thought most people were too conservative with the way they managed their inputs. I’ve tried to understand her system a few times. I’ve always come away with a migraine and the firm conviction that, sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

“They didn’t have to unplug everything,” Buffy muttered, and crawled back under the desk.

Shaun pulled back the string on his crossbow with one finger, checking the tension, and said, “You can’t win. Logic has no power over her when her territory has been invaded by the heathens.”

“Got it,” I said. The monitor next to me rolled to static before it began displaying a video feed of the yard outside. “Buffy, how long before we’re fully operational again?”

“Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. I haven’t checked the wires on the backup consoles yet, so I don’t know how big of a mess they made there.” The irritation in her voice was unmasked. “No data loss so far, but none of the van’s exterior cameras got anything but static for over an hour, thanks to their stupid monkeying.”

“I’m sure we can live without an hour’s recordings of the security team,” I said. “Shaun, get the lights?”

“On it.” He put his crossbow aside and rose, moving to drop the shade over the van’s window and pull the rear door closed. Buffy made a small grunt of protest, and he flicked the switch to turn on the interior lights. The area was promptly bathed in a soft, specially formulated light designed to be gentle on sensitive eyes. The bulbs cost fifty bucks each, and they’re worth it. They’re even better than the black lights I use in my room at home. They don’t just prevent headaches; sometimes, they cure them.

I removed my glasses with a sigh, massaging my right temple with my fingertips. “All right, folks, we have our first official, on-the-record encounter. Impressions?”

“Like the wife,” said Shaun. “She’s photogenic, and a definite asset. I still need a handle on the senator. He’s either the biggest Boy Scout ever to make it past the local level, or he’s playing us.”

“The fish tacos were good,” said Buffy. “I like Senator Ryman, actually. He’s nice even when he doesn’t have to be. This could be a pretty fun gig.”

“Who cares about fun as long as it brings in the green?” asked Shaun, with a philosophical shrug. “We’re made when this is over. Everything else is gravy.”

“I agree with both of you, to a degree,” I said, still massaging my temple. I could already tell I was going to need painkillers before we wrapped for the night. “Senator Ryman can’t be as nice as he wants us to think he is, but he’s also nicer than he has to be; it’s not entirely a put-on. There’s a degree of sincerity there that you can’t fake. I’ll do a pull-and-drop profile on him tonight, something like ‘First Impressions of the Man Who Would Be President.’ Puff piece, but still. Buff, how long is it going to take you to splice our footage?”

“Once everything is ready to run again, I’ll need an hour—two, tops.”

“Try for an hour. We want to hit the East Coast while they’re still awake. Shaun, care to do a review of the security precautions? Hit up a few of the guards, find out what sort of ordnance they’re carrying with them?”

His face split in a wide grin. “Already on it. You know the big blond guy? Built like a linebacker?”

“I did notice the presence of a giant on the security team, yes.”

“His name’s Steve. He carries a baseball bat.” Shaun made an exaggerated swinging motion. “Can you imagine him hitting one out of the park?”

“Ah,” I said, dryly. “The classics. Grab a few cameras, harass the locals until you get what you want. Which brings us to my last order of business—we have a request from the senator.”

Buffy slid out from under the desk again, another bundle of wires in her hands, and gave me a curious look. Shaun scowled.

“Don’t tell me we’re being censored already.”

“Yes and no,” I said. “He wants us to keep Emily out of things as much as we can for right now. Minimize her inclusion in the lunch footage, that sort of thing.”

“Why?” asked Buffy.

“San Diego,” I said, and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. Shaun doesn’t feel as strongly as I do about the universal application of Mason’s Law, but he still follows the debate. Expression changing from one of incomprehension to complete understanding, he said, “He’s afraid somebody’s going to target her at the ranch if we make too big a deal of things.”

“Exactly.” I switched my massaging to my other temple. “Their kids are out there with their grandparents, and he sort of wants the family alive. A little risk is unavoidable, but he’d like to keep them low-profile as long as he can.”

“I can manage the footage edits,” said Buffy.

“She wouldn’t feature in my piece at all,” said Shaun.

“And I’ll sidebar her. So we’re in agreement?”

“Guess so,” said Shaun.

“Great. Buffy, let me know when we’re back to live-feed capacity on all bands. I’m going to step outside for a few minutes.” I slid my sunglasses back on and stood. “Just getting a little air.”

“I’ll get to work,” said Shaun, and stood as I did, exiting the van a few steps ahead of me. He didn’t stop or look back as I came out; he just kept going. Shaun knows me better than anyone else in the world. Sometimes I think he knows me better than I do. He knows I need a few minutes by myself before I can start working. Location doesn’t matter. Just solitude.

The afternoon light had dimmed without dying, and my bike wasn’t quite as painful to look at. I walked over and leaned against it, resting my heels on the driveway as I closed my eyes and tilted my face up into the dying light. Welcome to the world, kids. Things were moving now, and all we could do was make sure that the truth kept getting out, and getting where it needed to be.

When I was sixteen and told my father that I wanted to be a Newsie—it wasn’t a surprise by that point, but it was the first time I had said it to his face—he pulled some strings and got me enrolled in a history of journalism course at the university. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Hunter S. Thompson, Cameron Crowe… I met the greats the way you should meet them, through their words and the things they did, when I was still young enough to fall in love without reservations or conditions. I never wanted to be Lois Lane, girl reporter, even though I dressed like her for Halloween one year. I wanted to be Edward R. Murrow, facing down corruption in the government. I wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson, ripping the skin off the world. I wanted the truth, and I wanted the news, and I’d be damned before I settled for anything less.

Shaun’s the same, even if his priorities are different. He’s willing to let a good story come before the facts, as long as the essential morals stay true. That’s why he’s so good at what he does, and why I double-check every report he writes before I release it.

One thing I did learn from those classes is that the world is not, in any way, what people expected thirty years ago. The zombies are here, and they’re not going away, but they’re not the story. They were, for one hot, horrible summer at the beginning of the century, but now they’re just another piece of the way things work. They did their part: They changed everything. Absolutely everything.

The world cheered when Dr. Alexander Kellis announced his cure for the common cold. I’ve never had a cold, thanks to Dr. Kellis, but I understand they were pretty annoying; people didn’t enjoy spending half their time sniffling, sneezing, and getting coughed on by total strangers. Dr. Kellis and his team rushed through testing at a pace that seems criminal in retrospect, but who am I to judge? I wasn’t there.

What’s really funny is that you can blame this whole thing on the news. One reporter heard a rumor that Dr. Kellis was intending to sell his cure to the highest bidder and would never allow it to be released to the man on the street. This was ridiculous if you understood that the cure was a modified rhinovirus, based on the exact virulence that enabled the common cold to spread so far and so fast. Once it got outside the lab, it was going to “infect” the world, and no amount of money would prevent that.

Those are the facts, but this guy didn’t care about the facts. He cared about the scoop and being the first to report a great and imaginary injustice being perpetrated by the heartless medical community. If you ask me, the real injustice is that Dr. Alexander Kellis is viewed as responsible for the near-destruction of mankind and not Robert Stalnaker, investigative reporter for the New York Times. If you’re going to lay blame for what happened, that’s where it belongs. I’ve read his articles. They were pretty stirring stuff, condemning Dr. Kellis and the medical community for allowing this to happen. Mankind, he said, had a right to the cure.

Some people believed him a bit too much. They broke into the lab, stole the cure, and released it from a crop duster, if you can believe that. They flew that bastard as high as it would go, loaded balloons with samples of Dr. Kellis’s work, and fired them into the atmosphere. It was a beautiful act of bioterrorism, conducted with all the best ideals at heart. They acted on a flawed assumption taken from an incomplete truth, and they screwed us all.

To be fair, they might not have screwed things up as badly as they did if it hadn’t been for a team working out of Denver, Colorado, where they were running trials on a genetically engineered filovirus called “Marburg EX19,” or, more commonly, “Marburg Amberlee.” It was named for their first successful infection, Amanda Amberlee, age twelve and a half. She’d been dying of leukemia and considered unlikely to see her thirteenth birthday. The year Dr. Kellis discovered his cure, Amanda was eighteen, finishing her senior year of high school, and perfectly healthy. The folks in Denver took a killer, made a few changes to its instructions, and cured cancer.

Marburg Amberlee was a miracle, just like the Kellis cure, and together they were primed to change the course of the human race. Together, that’s what they did. No one gets cancer or colds anymore. The only issue is the walking dead.

There were ninety-seven people in the world infected with Marburg Amberlee when the Kellis cure was released. The virus never left the system once it had been introduced; it would kill off cancerous cells and go dormant, waiting. All those people were quiet, noninfectious hot zones, living their lives without a clue of what was about to happen. Amanda Amberlee wasn’t among them. She died two months earlier, in a car crash following her senior prom. She was the only one of the Marburg Amberlee test cases not to reanimate; she provided the first clue that it was the interaction of the viruses and not Marburg Amberlee itself that caused the apparently dead to rise.

The Kellis cure swept the globe in days. Those responsible for the release were hailed, if not as heroes, then at least as responsible citizens, cutting through red tape to better the lives of their fellow men. No one knows when the first Marburg Amberlee test subjects came into contact with the cure or how long it took from exposure to mutation. How long for the formerly peaceful filovirus to seize on the newly introduced rhinovirus and begin to change? Best estimates say that within a week of the introduction of the Kellis cure to Marburg Amberlee, the two had combined, creating the airborne filovirus we know as Kellis-Amberlee. It went on to infect the world, hopping from person to person on the back of the virulence coded into the original Kellis cure.

There is no index case for viral amplification. It happened in too many places at the same time. We can only pinpoint things to this degree because of what the movies got wrong: Infection wasn’t initially universal. People who died before getting dosed with Kellis-Amberlee stayed dead. Those who died after infection didn’t. Why it brings its hosts back to literal, biological life is anyone’s guess. The best theories hold that it’s an enhanced version of normal filovirus behavior, the urge to replicate taken to a new and unnatural level, one that taps into the nervous system of the host and keeps it moving until it falls apart. Zombies are just sacks of virus looking for something to infect, being “driven” by Kellis-Amberlee. Maybe it’s true. Who knows? Whether it is or not, the zombies are here, and everything has changed.

That includes the shape of the political world, because a lot of the old issues shifted once the living dead were among us. The death penalty, animal cruelty, abortion—the list goes on. It’s hard to be a politician in this world, especially given the xenophobia and paranoia running rampant through most of our more well-off communities. Senator Ryman was going to have a long, hard fight to the White House, assuming he could get there at all. And we’d be with him every step of the way.

I sat with my face toward the sun, ignoring the way my head was throbbing, and waited for Buffy to tell me that the time had come to begin.