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Seven

The civic center had been prepared for Senator Ryman’s visit with row upon row of folding chairs and video screens angled to broadcast his image all the way to the rear of the cavernous room. Speakers were mounted every fifth row to make sure his words remained crystal clear as they fell upon the ears of the twenty or so brave souls who had actually dared to come hear him speak. The attendees were clustered in the front four rows, leaving the back of the room for the senator’s entourage, security folks, and, of course, the three of us. Put together, we outnumbered the voting public almost two to one.

Not that this was a unique occurrence. We’d seen this scene play out in nearly two dozen states and more than three times as many locations in the six weeks since we had left California. People don’t come out to “press the flesh” the way they used to, not even for the primaries that determine which candidates will be making it all the way to the presidential elections. They’re too worried about contagion and too afraid that the weird guy who keeps muttering to himself isn’t actually insane—there’s always a chance that he’s going through massive viral amplification and will take a chunk out of someone at any moment. The only safe people are the ones you know so well that they can’t surprise you with the personality changes the virus causes during replication. Since few people have enough close personal friends to fill an auditorium, most folks don’t come out.

That doesn’t mean that things have been going unobserved. Judging by the ratings, page hits, and downloads, the campaign has been maintaining some of the highest viewer numbers since Cruise versus Gore in 2018. People want to know how it’s going to turn out. There’s a lot riding on this election. Including, incidentally, our careers.

Shaun’s always said that I take things too seriously; since the start of the campaign, he’d started saying my sense of humor had been surgically removed to make room for more anal-retentiveness. Anyone else who said that would probably have gotten slapped, but from Shaun, I had to admit to an element of truth. Still, if I left things up to him, we’d be living with our parents and pretending we didn’t mind the lack of privacy until we died. Someone has to watch the bottom line, and someone has pretty much always been me.

Glancing to Buffy, I stage-whispered, “How do our numbers look?”

She didn’t look up from the text scrolling rapidly across her phone. The data feed was moving so fast I didn’t have a prayer of following it, but it obviously meant something to Buffy because she nodded, with a small smile on her lips as she said, “We’re looking at a sixty percent local audience on the video feed, and we just hit top six percent on the Web. The only candidate getting a higher feed ratio is Congresswoman Wagman, and she’s lagging in the actual polls.”

“And we know why she’s getting the feeds, now, don’t we children?” drawled Shaun, continuing to test the links in his favorite chain-mail shirt with a pair of lightweight pliers.

I snorted. Word on the blog circuit is that Kirsten “Knockers” Wagman had serious breast augmentation surgery before she went into politics, acting under the assumption that in today’s largely Internet-based demographic, looking good is more important than sounding like you have two brain cells to knock together. That worked for a while—it got her a seat in Congress, partially because people enjoy looking at her—but it isn’t going to get her very far in a presidential race. Especially not now that she’s up against folks who understand the issues.

Senator Ryman didn’t appear to have noticed the emptiness of the hall or the nervous expressions on his few actual, physical attendees. Most were probably local politicians coming out to show that they believed in the safety of their community, since several of them looked like they’d explode if you snuck up behind them and said “boo” in a commanding tone of voice. Most, not all. There was one little old lady, at least seventy years old, sitting dead center in the front row. She held her purse primly in her lap, lips set into a thin, hard line as she watched Senator Ryman go through his paces. She didn’t look nervous at all. If any zombies tried to invade this political event, she’d probably wind up giving them what-for and driving them back outside to wait their turn.

The senator was winding down. You can only give your political platform in so many ways, no matter how much practice you have at saying the same thing from sixteen different angles. I adjusted my sunglasses, settling in my chair as I waited for the real fun to begin: the question-and-answer period. Most of the questions people come up with have something to do with the infected, as in, “What are you going to do about the zombies that the other guys haven’t tried already?” The answers can get seriously entertaining, and honestly, so can the questions.

Most questions are e-mailed in by the home audiences and asked by the polite, slightly bland voice of the senator’s digital personal assistant, which has been programmed to sound like a well-educated female of indeterminate age and race. Senator Ryman calls it “Beth” for no reason anyone has been able to get him to explain. I intend to keep trying. The best questions are the ones that come from the live audiences. Most of them are scared out of their minds after being out of the house for more than half an hour, and nothing loosens the tongue like fear. If I had my way, all questions would be asked by people who had just taken a trip through a really well-designed haunted house.

“—and now I’d like to take a few questions from our audience—both those watching this event through the electronic methods provided by my clever technicians,” Senator Ryman chuckled, managing to telegraph his utter lack of understanding of such petty details as “how the video feeds work,” “and the good people of Eakly, Oklahoma, who have been good enough to host us this evening.”

“Come on, lady, don’t let me down,” I murmured. Sure enough, the lady in the front row had her hand in the air almost before the senator finished speaking, arm jutting upward at a fierce, near-military angle. I settled back in my chair, grinning. “Jackpot.”

“Huh?” Buffy looked up from her watch.

“Live one,” I said, indicating the lady.

“Oh.” Suddenly interested in something other than the data feed, Buffy sat forward. She knows potential ratings when she sees them.

“Yes—the lady in the front row.” Senator Ryman indicated the woman, whose tight-lipped face promptly filled half the monitors in the room. Buffy tapped two buttons on her phone, directing her cameras to zoom in. The senator’s tech team is good, and even Buffy admits it; they understand camera angles, splicing footage, and when to go for a tight shot. Thanks to Chuck Wong, who does all their planning and design, they’re probably near the top of their field. But Buffy is better.

The lady in question lowered her hand, fixing the senator with a stern gaze. “What is your stance on the Rapture?” Her voice was as clipped and thin as I’d expected. The sound system picked it up clear as a bell, reproducing every harsh edge and disapproving inflection flawlessly.

Senator Ryman blinked, looking nonplussed. It was the first time I’d seen a question take him completely by surprise. He recovered with admirable speed, though, saying, “I beg your pardon?”

“The Rapture. The event in which the faithful will be elevated to the Heavens, while the unfaithful, sinners, and infidels will be left to suffer Hell on Earth.” Her eyes narrowed. “What is your stance on this holy, foreordained event?”

“Ah.” Senator Ryman continued to look at her, thoughtfulness clearing away his confusion. I heard a faint clink and glanced to my left; Shaun had put down his chain mail and was watching the stage with open interest. Buffy was staring at her phone, furiously tapping buttons as she angled her cameras. You can’t edit or pause a live feed, but you can set up the data to give you the best material to work from later. And this was the sort of material you just can’t stage. Would he bow to the religious nuts who have been taking over more and more of the party in recent years? Or would he risk alienating the entire religious sector of the voting public? Only the senator knew. And in a moment, so would we.

Senator Ryman didn’t break eye contact with the woman as he stepped out from behind his podium, walked to the edge of the stage, and sat, resting his elbows on his knees. He looked like a schoolboy approaching confession, not a man jockeying for the leadership of the most powerful country on the planet. It was a well-considered position, and I applauded it inwardly, even as I began to consider an article on the showmanship of modern politics. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Suzanne Greeley,” she said, pursing her lips. “You haven’t answered my question, young man.”

“Well, Ms. Greeley, that would be because I was thinking,” he said, and looked out at the small gathering, a smile spreading across his face. “I was taught that it’s rude to answer a lady’s question without giving it proper thought. Sort of like putting your elbows on the table during dinner.” A ripple of laughter passed through the crowd. Ms. Greeley didn’t join in.

Turning back toward her, the senator continued: “You’ve asked me about my position on the Rapture, Ms. Greeley. Well, first, I think I should say that I don’t really have ‘positions’ on religious events: God will do as He wills, and it isn’t my place or my position to judge Him. If He chooses to lift the faithful into Heaven, He will, and I doubt all the politicians in the world saying, ‘I don’t believe you can do that’ would stop him.

“At the same time, I doubt He’s going to do anything like that, Ms. Greeley, because God—the God I believe in, anyway, and as a lifelong Methodist, I feel I know Him about as well as a man who doesn’t devote his life to the Church can—doesn’t throw good things away. God is the ultimate recycler. We have a good planet here. It has its troubles, yes. We have overpopulation, we have pollution, we have global warming, we have the Thursday night television lineup,” more laughter, “and, of course, we have the infected. We have a lot of problems on Earth, and it might seem like a great idea to hold the Rapture now—why wait? Let’s move on to Heaven, and leave the trials and tribulations of our earthly existence behind us. Let’s get while the getting’s good, and beat the rush.

“It might seem like a great idea, but I don’t think it is, for the same reason I don’t think it’s a great idea for a first grader to stand up and say that he’s learned enough, he’s done with school, thanks a lot but he’s got it from here. Compared to God, we’re barely out of kindergarten, and like any good teacher, I don’t believe He intends to let us out of class just because we’re finding the lessons a little difficult. I don’t know whether I believe in the Rapture or not. I believe that if God wants to do it, He will… but I don’t believe that it’s coming in our lifetime. We have too much work left to do right here.”

Ms. Greeley looked at him for a long moment, lips still pressed into a thin line. Then, so slow that it was almost glacial, she nodded. “Thank you, young man,” she said.

Those four words couldn’t have been sweeter if they’d been backed by the hallelujah choir.

“Internet share just jumped to top three percent,” Buffy reported, raising her head. Her eyes were very wide. “Georgia, we’re getting a top-three feed.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I murmured, leaning back in my chair, “I do believe we’ve got ourselves a presidential candidate.”

Top-three feed. The words were, if you’ll pardon the cliché, music to my ears. The world of Internet percentages and readership shares is complicated. It all comes down to server traffic. There are thousands of machines dedicated to calculating the flow of data, then reporting back which sites are getting the most access requests from outside sources, and which subsidiaries are attracting the biggest number of hits. Those turn into our ratings, and those are what the advertisers and financial backers base their investments on. Top three was the top of heap. Anything more would require adding click-through porn.

The rest of the question-and-answer period was pretty standard stuff, with a few hardballs thrown in just to keep things interesting. Where did the senator stand on the death penalty? Given that most corpses tended to get up and try to eat folks, he didn’t see it as a productive pursuit. What was his opinion on public health care? Failure to keep people healthy enough to stay alive bordered on criminal negligence. Was he prepared to face the ongoing challenges of disaster preparedness? After the mass reanimations following the explosions in San Diego, he couldn’t imagine any presidency surviving without improved disaster planning. Where did he stand on gay marriage, religious freedom, free speech? Well, folks, given that it was no longer possible to pretend that any part of the human race was going to politely lie down and disappear just because the majority happened to disagree with them, and given further the proof that life is a short and fragile thing, he didn’t see the point of rendering anyone less free and equal than anybody else. When we got to the afterlife, God could sort us out into the sinner and the saved. Until we got there, it seemed to him that we were better off just being good neighbors and reserving our moral judgments for ourselves.

After an hour and a half of questions, more than half of which originated in the auditorium—a campaign first—the senator stood, wiping his forehead with the handkerchief he’d produced from a back pocket. “Well, folks, much as I’d like to stay and chat a while longer, it’s getting on late, and my secretary has informed me that if I don’t start cutting off these evening discussions, I’m going to seem a little dull to the folks I’m visiting in the morning.” Laughter greeted this comment. Relaxed laughter; sometime in the previous hour, he’d managed to ease the audience out of their fear and into the sort of calm most people don’t experience outside of their homes. “I want to thank you for having me, and for all your questions and viewpoints. I sincerely hope I’ll have your vote when the time comes, but even if I don’t, I have faith that it will be because you managed to find someone who was better for this great land.”

“We’re following you, Peter!” shouted someone from the back of the room. I twisted around in my seat and blinked, realizing that the shouter wasn’t someone from the campaign; it was a woman I’d never seen before, holding up a hand-painted Senator Ryman for President sign.

“The campaign has groupies,” observed Shaun.

“Always a good sign,” said Buffy.

The senator laughed. “I certainly hope that you are,” he said. “You’ll have the chance to make me put my money where my mouth is soon enough. In the meantime, good night, and God bless you all.” Waving to the audience, he turned and walked off the stage as “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play from speakers around the room. The applause wasn’t exactly thunderous—there wasn’t enough audience for that—but it was enthusiastic. More so than it had been at the last engagement, and that one had been more enthusiastic than the one before it, and so on, and so on. Maybe you couldn’t tell by looking at it, but the campaign was gathering steam.

I stayed where I was, observing the audience as they rose, and, surprisingly, began to talk among themselves rather than fleeing the hall for the safety of their cars. That was a new development, just like the applause. People were talking. Face-to-face, real-time talking, inspired by the senator and the things he had said.

More and more, I was beginning to feel like we were following a president.

“Georgia?” said Buffy.

“Go ahead and check the backstage feeds,” I said, and nodded toward the knot of chattering attendees. “I’m going to go see what the buzz is.”

“Make sure you’re recording,” she said, and started for the stage, gesturing for Shaun to follow. Grumbling good-naturedly, he snagged his chain mail and went.

I walked toward the group of attendees. A few of them glanced over at my approach, took note of my press pass, and went back to talking. The news is either invisible or something to be avoided, depending on what’s going on and how many cameras the people around you can see. Since I didn’t have any visible recording equipment, I was just part of the scenery.

The first cluster was discussing Senator Ryman’s stance on the death penalty. That’s one that’s been going around since the dead first started getting up and walking. If you’re killing someone for the crime of killing people, doesn’t it sort of contradict the spirit of the thing if their corpse is going to get up and immediately start killing more people? Most death-row inmates stay there until they die of natural causes, at which point the government seizes their shambling corpses and adds them to the ongoing research on the cure. Everybody wins, except for the unlucky prisoners who get eaten by the newly deceased before they can be recovered.

The next group was talking about the potential candidates. Senator Ryman was definitely getting a favorable reception, since they were calling his closest competition respectively “a cheap show-biz whore”—that would be Congresswoman Wagman—and “an arrogant tool of the religious right”—that would be Governor Tate, originally of Texas, and currently the single loudest voice claiming the zombies would only stop eating good American men and women when the country got back to its moral and ethical roots. Whether this would stop the zombies from eating people of different national backgrounds never seemed to come up, which was a pity, since I liked the idea of zombies checking your passport before they decided whether or not they were allowed to bite down.

Satisfied that I wasn’t likely to hear anything new in this crowd, I started casting around for a conversation worth joining. The one nearest the doors looked promising; there was a lot of scowling going on, and that’s usually a sign that interest is warranted. I turned, walking close enough to hear what was going on.

“The real question is whether he can keep his promises,” one man was saying. He looked to be in his late fifties, old enough to have been an adult during the Rising and part of the generation that embraced quarantine as the only true route to safety. “Can we trust another president who won’t commit to an all-out purge of the zombie population of the national parks?”

“Be reasonable,” said one of the women. “We can’t simply wipe out endangered species because they might undergo amplification. That kind of rash action isn’t going to do anything to make the average man safer.”

“No, but it might keep another mother from burying her children after they get attacked by a zombie deer,” countered the man.

“Actually, it was a moose, and the ‘children’ were a group of college students who crossed a proscribed stretch of the Canadian border looking for cheap weed,” I interjected. All heads turned my way. I shrugged. “That’s a Level 1 hazard zone. It’s forbidden to almost everyone outside the armed forces and certain branches of the scientific community. Assuming you’re talking about the incident last August and I didn’t somehow miss an ungulate attack?” I knew I hadn’t. I religiously follow animal attacks on humans, filing them under one of two categories: “We need stricter laws” and “Darwin was right.” I don’t think people should be allowed to keep animals large enough to undergo amplification, but I also don’t believe wiping out the rest of the large mammals in the world is the answer. If you want to go foraging into the wilds of Canada without proper gear, you deserve what you get, even if that happens to include being attacked by an undead moose.

The man reddened. “I don’t think I was talking to you, miss.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Still, the facts of the event are pretty well documented. Again, assuming I didn’t miss something.”

Looking mildly amused, one of the other men said, “Well, come on, Carl, did the young lady miss an attack, or are you referring to the incident with the moose?”

He didn’t need to answer; his glare was answer enough. Turning his back pointedly on the three of us, he moved to join a vigorous condemnation of the senator’s stance on the death penalty that was going on just a few feet away.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him deflated with facts before,” said the woman, and offered her hand. “I’ll have to remember that. Rachel Green. I’m with the local SPCA.”

“Dennis Stahl, Eakly Times,” said the remaining man, flashing his press pass in a brief show of solidarity.

Relieved that my sunglasses would cover the more subtle points of my expression, I took Ms. Green’s hand, shook once, and said, “Georgia Mason. I’m one of the bloggers covering Senator Ryman’s campaign.”

“Mason,” said Ms. Green. “As in…?”

I nodded.

She winced. “Oh, dear. Is this going to be unpleasant?”

“Not unless you’re in the mood for a debate. I’m here to record reactions to the senator’s agenda, not forward my own. Besides,” I nodded to Carl’s back, “I’m not as hard-line as some. I just have strong opinions about large animals being kept in urban areas, and I think we can agree to disagree on that point, don’t you?”

“Fair enough,” she said, looking relieved.

Mr. Stahl laughed. “Rachel gets a lot of flack from the local media for what she does,” he said. “How’s the campaign trail treating you?”

“Are you saying you haven’t been reading our reports?” I asked the question lightly, but I wanted to hear the answer. Journalistic acceptance is one of the last things any blog gets. We may be accepted inside the community, but it’s not until the traditional news media starts to take our reports seriously that a new feed can honestly be said to have established itself.

“I have,” he said. “They’re good. A little rough, but good. You care about what you’re reporting, and it shows.”

“Thanks,” I replied, and glanced to Ms. Green. “Did you enjoy the presentation?”

“Is he as sincere as he seems?”

“I haven’t seen any signs that he’s not,” I said, and shrugged. “Illusions of journalistic objectivity aside? He’s a nice guy. He has good ideas, and he presents them well. Either he’s the best liar I’ve ever met, or he’s going to be our next President. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but still.”

“Mind if I quote you on that?” asked Mr. Stahl, with a sudden predatory intensity that I recognized quite well from my peers.

I smiled. “Go right ahead. Just make sure to give your readers a link to our site, if you would be so kind?”

“Of course.”

The three of us chatted for a bit longer, eventually exchanging pleasantries and going our separate ways. I resumed moving from group to group, now mostly listening, and was amused to see that Carl—no last name given or requested—continually moved away from me, as if afraid that I’d taint his ranting with more of my unfortunate facts. I’ve encountered his type before, usually at political protests. They’re the sort who would rather we paved the world and shot the sick, instead of risking life being unpredictable and potentially risky. In another time, they were anti-Semitic, antiblack, antiwomen’s liberation, anti-gay, or all of the above. Now, they’re antizombie in the most extreme ways possible, and they use their extremity to claim that the rest of us are somehow supporting the “undead agenda.” I’ve met a lot of zombies. Not as many as Shaun and Mom have, but I’m not as suicidal as they are. In my experience, the only “undead agenda” involves eating you, not worming their way into public acceptance and support. There will always be people for whom hate is easier when it’s not backed up by anything but fear. And I will always do my best to hoist them by their own petards.

The hallway lights dimmed once before returning to their original brightness, a sign that moving along was requested by the management. I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. Most zombie attacks occur between the hours of ten and two. Allowing people to gather during the “high risk” period can triple your insurance rate, especially if you live in an area with recently documented outbreaks. That includes much of the Midwest, where coyotes, feral dogs, and farm animals create a constant low-grade threat.

It doesn’t take much to get most people moving after they realize they’ve managed to stay out past the unspoken world curfew. The conversational groups broke up as people grabbed their coats, bags, and traveling companions and turned to head for the doors. All of them had someone to walk with, even Carl. We are a nation equally afraid of gathering together and being alone. Is it any wonder that the average American is in therapy by the age of sixteen?

My ear cuff beeped, signaling a call. I reached up and tapped it on. “Georgia.”

“You coming to join the party soon, or should I drink this beer by myself?” I could hear laughter in the background. The senator’s entourage was celebrating another series of political minefields navigated with grace and charm. They were right to celebrate. If the numbers we’d been getting were anything to go by, Senator Ryman was a shoo-in for the Republican Party nomination once the convention rolled around.

“Just finishing out here, Shaun,” I said. The hall lights began coming up from their ambient “event” setting, heading for the blazing fluorescents that would keep things lit for the cleaning crew. I squinted my eyes closed, turning to walk toward the stage exit. “Let folks know I’m coming through?”

“On it,” he said. My ear cuff beeped again, signaling disconnection. I’m not much for jewelry, but disguised cellular phones are another matter. They’re more convenient than walkie-talkies and have a longer battery life, with an average talk time of fifty hours before the battery gives out. Once the batteries go, it’s cheaper to buy a new phone than it is to pay to have the case cracked and a new battery installed, but we all have to pay the price of progress. I have at least three phones on me at any given time, and only Shaun has all the numbers.

Two of the senator’s security guards were waiting by the door, dressed in identical black suits, with sunglasses covering their eyes and blotting out most of their expressions. I nodded to them. They nodded back.

“Steve, Tyrone,” I said.

“Georgia,” said Tyrone. He produced a portable blood testing unit from his pocket. “If you would?”

I sighed. “You know they’re just going to test me again before they let me into the convoy.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that a clean result now would be a clean result after the five-minute walk to the buses.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re still going to make me prick my damn finger, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I hate protocol.” My ritual grumbling finished, I extended my hand, pressing my index finger against the contact pad. The lights on the top of the box flashed in the familiar red-green pattern, settling on a steady, uninfected green. “Happy?”

“Overjoyed,” Tyrone replied, a faint smile on his lips as he withdrew a biohazard bag from his other pocket and dropped the test kit into it. “Right this way.”

“How gracious,” I said. Steve smothered a wider smile, and I smiled back, starting across the parking lot toward the distant lights of the convoy. The bodyguards fell into step beside me, flanking me as we walked. Being escorted through every open area we encountered had been a little annoying at first, but I was getting used to it.

The senator’s crew—Shaun, Buffy, and I included—had been traveling in a convoy consisting of five luxury RVs, two buses, our van, and three converted military transport Jeeps, which were ostensibly for scouting runs before entering open territory but were mostly used for off-road rallies in whatever fields presented themselves. There were several smaller vehicles, ranging from my bike to the more substantially armored motorcycles favored by the bodyguards. With as much equipment as we need to carry to meet legal safety standards, it wouldn’t make sense to break camp and check into hotels for anything less than a four-day stay, and so we often found ourselves spending a lot of nights “roughing it” in mobile homes that were better outfitted than my room back home.

Shaun, Buffy, and I had been assigned to share one of the RVs, although Buffy usually slept in the van with her equipment, claiming that the perpetual gloom of my special lights gave her, quote, “the heebie-jeebies.” The senator’s crew had been taking it as another sign that our resident techie is a little bit unhinged, and Shaun and I hadn’t been making any efforts to discourage them, even though we knew that it was less of an obsessive-compulsive desire to protect the cameras and more of an ongoing quest for something resembling privacy. Unlike most of our generation, Buffy is an only child, and life in the convoy had been getting on nerves she may not have known she had.

Life in the convoy was also creating a new issue: her religion, and our lack thereof. Buffy prayed before she went to sleep. Buffy said grace before she ate. And Shaun and I… didn’t. It was better to avoid the conflict by letting her have a little space. Besides, that gave Shaun and me the sort of privacy we were accustomed to—the kind that never actually leaves you alone, but doesn’t put people in your personal space when you don’t want them there, either.

Two more guards waited at the perimeter gates. Unlike Steve and Tyrone, who kept their pistols concealed beneath their jackets, these two openly held autofeed rifles I vaguely recognized from Mom’s magazines. They could probably hold off the average zombie mob without outside assistance.

“Tracy, Carlos,” I said, and extended my hand, palm down. “I’m tired, I’m filthy, and I’m ready to get drunk with the rest of the good boys and girls. Please confirm my uninfected status so that I can get on with it.”

“Bring me a beer later, and it’s a deal,” Carlos replied, and shoved one of the tester units over my hand, while Tracy did the same for Steve. Tyrone stepped back, waiting his turn. These were midrange units, performing a more sensitive scan and taking a correspondingly longer time to return results. It would be possible for the finger-prick test to declare someone clean and for the full-hand unit to revoke that status less than five minutes later.

My results came back clean, as did Steve’s. Tyrone stepped up to start his own tests and waved us off, toward the third RV in the chain. I could claim that my finely honed journalistic instincts told me which way to go, but they didn’t have nearly as much to do with my choice of destinations as with the fact that it was the only RV with an open door, and was definitely the source of the pounding rock music that was assaulting our ears. The Dandy Warhols. The senator is a man who loves his classics.

Senator Ryman was standing on a coffee table inside the RV with his shirt half-unbuttoned and his tie draped over his left shoulder, saluting the room with a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. People were cheering too loudly for me to tell what he was saying, but from the look of things, I’d just walked into the middle of a toast. I stopped by the door, stepping out of the way to let Steve get inside behind me, and took a wine cooler offered by one of the interns. I’ve given up trying to keep them straight; this was one of the brunette ones, which made her a Jenny, a Jamie, or a Jill. I swear, they should come with name tags.

Shaun pushed through the crowd, nodding to Steve before settling next to me. “Word?”

“Generally positive. People like our boy.” I nodded to the senator, who had pulled a Jenny up onto the table with him. The audience cheered louder. “I think we might be able to ride this one all the way.”

“Buffy said the same thing,” Shaun agreed, taking a swig from his beer. “Ready to review tonight’s footage?”

“What, and miss the bacchanal? Let me think…yes.” I shook my head. “Get me out of here.”

The first postappearance party was fun. So was the third. And the fifteenth. By the twenty-third, I had come to recognize them as a clever method of controlling the locals: let the peons blow off some steam, reinforce the idea that you’re just “one of the gang,” and get down to the real business after most of the campaign had gone to bed. It was cunning, it was productive, and I salute Senator Ryman for thinking of it. All that being what it is, I saw no reason to spend any more time in an overly bright, overly crowded RV drinking crappy wine coolers than I absolutely had to.

Steve smiled wryly as we turned to push past him. “Leaving so soon?”

“I’ll be back for the midnight football game,” Shaun promised, and propelled me out the door with a solid push to the middle of my back. The dimness outside was like a benediction.

“Midnight football?” I asked, giving him a sidelong look as we moved away from the raucous RV, heading for our much quieter van. “Do you sleep?”

“Do you?” he countered.

“Touché.”

Shaun spends his time moving, planning to move, and coming up with new ways to move, many of them involving heavy explosives or the undead. I spend my time writing, thinking about writing, and trying to come up with new things I can write about. Sleep has never been high on the priority list for either of us, which is probably a blessing in disguise. We kept each other amused as kids. If one of us had actually wanted to get some rest, we would have made each other crazy.

The van lights were on and the back door was unlocked. Buffy looked up as we entered, her expression remaining distracted even as she made note of our arrival. Once she was sure that we weren’t being pursued by a rampaging horde of zombies, she turned back to her keyboard.

“Working on?” I asked, putting the wine cooler down next to my station.

“Splicing the footage from tonight and synchronizing the sound feeds. I’m thinking of doing a music video remix once it’s all finished. Pick something retro and rock the house. Also, I’m chatting with Chuck. He’s going to let me access his campaign footage to date and see if I can’t put together a sort of retrospective.”

I raised an eyebrow as I grabbed a Coke from the fridge. “Because you couldn’t get at that footage without help?”

Buffy’s cheeks reddened. “He’s being helpful.”

“Buffy has a crush,” Shaun sing-songed.

“Play nice,” I said, and sat, cracking my knuckles. “I need to hit the op-ed sites, see who’s saying what, and start prepping the morning headlines. It’s going to be a fun night, and I don’t need you starting a fight and spoiling it.”

Shaun rolled his eyes. “Riiiiight. You girls feel free to stay cooped up in here screwing around all night—”

“It’s called ‘making a living’, dumb-ass,” I said, flicking the screen on and entering my password.

“Like I said, screwing around all night. I’m going out with the boys. We’re going to find some action, and I’m going to fuck with it, and tomorrow, we’ll have a ratings bonanza like you’ve never seen.” Shaun spread his hands, framing his illusionary triumph. “I can see it now: ‘Flagging News Site Saved by Intrepid Irwin.’”

“Get glasses,” said Buffy.

I snickered.

Shaun gave Buffy his best wounded look, opening his mouth to rebut.

Whatever he was going to say was drowned out by the gunshots from outside.

Eight

Shaun didn’t hesitate. Putting his beer on the nearest counter, he grabbed a crossbow off the wall and ran for the door. I was only a few feet behind him, Coke in one hand. Unlike my idiot brother, I have no intention of becoming a footnote on the Wall, but that doesn’t mean I can’t watch from a safe remove.

“Georgia!” There was enough anxiety in Buffy’s voice to make me turn. She lobbed a handheld camera in my direction. I caught it, raising my eyebrows in question. “Better picture quality and sixty hours of battery life.”

And audiences love a little hand-shot footage, as long as you cut to the smoother computer-operated stuff before they get motion sickness. “Got it,” I said, and followed Shaun, opening my soda as I went.

The encampment was ablaze with activity. Guards swarmed everywhere I turned, weapons out and ready. I couldn’t blame them for their excitement. Anyone who goes into private security in this day and age is likely to be a lot like Shaun, and he’d slowly been going nuts from the lack of dangerous things to pester.

More gunshots sounded from the south. I turned in that direction, flipping on the camera, and tapped my soda twice against the pressure pad on my belt. My ear cuff beeped. A moment later, Shaun’s slightly breathless voice was in my ear: “Kinda busy, George. What gives?”

“Need a position if you want this on film.” Distant moaning was audible as a whisper on the wind. Buffy’s microphones are pretty sensitive. If she could get any sort of audio track, she’d be able to intensify it and play it back with the report, twice as loud and ten times as chilling.

“Location?”

“Just outside the van.”

“Northwest. I’m at the fence.”

That was directly away from the loudest signs of combat. “You sure about that?”

“Hurry and get over here!” he snapped, and clicked off. Shrugging, I turned toward the northern fence, breaking into a trot. I’ve learned not to argue with Shaun where zombies are concerned; he knows more about their behavior than I can imagine wanting to, and if he says “north,” he’s probably right. Gunshots continued to sound as the moaning, faint as it was, began getting louder.

The glare from the perimeter lights confused my night vision; I heard Shaun before I saw him. He was swearing merrily, using language that would make a longshoreman blush, as he taunted the infected closer to the fence. There were five of them, all fresh enough to look almost human, assuming you discounted the extreme dilation of their pupils and the slack, hungry way they stared at my brother as their fingers clawed against the fence. They’d died within the past few hours. I raised the camera, zooming in on their faces.

Shaun didn’t even realize I was there until my soda hit the pavement. He stopped taunting the infected, stepping clear of the fence as he turned to stare at me. “George? What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I have.” I indicated one of the zombies. Before amplification, she’d been a slender young woman, no heavier than Buffy. The wound that killed her the first time stood out livid and red against the still-pink flesh of her throat, and the fabric of her pale gray University of Oklahoma sweatshirt was stained bloody. “Recognize her?”

“Should I?” Shaun leaned closer to the fence. The zombie bared her teeth and hissed, increasing her attempts to break through. “She’s definitely not one of my exes, George. I mean, she’s cute, but way too dead for my tastes.”

“Like you have any exes?” Shaun has dated as much as I have, which is to say “not at all.” Buffy usually has five or six paramours at any given time, but Shaun and I haven’t ever bothered. Other things keep getting in the way.

“Well, if I did have exes, they wouldn’t look like her. Fill me in?”

“She was the cheering section at the senator’s presentation.” She’d looked a hell of a lot better when she was alive. I didn’t remember seeing her after the Q&A broke up. If she left promptly and got caught on the street… given her body mass, she’d have had plenty of time to reach full amplification and rise again. It wasn’t a difficult scenario to imagine. A young college student comes alone to a risky meeting in a public place and leaves the same way. No one would have been there to help her. A single bite is a death sentence, and not everyone has the guts to call the police and request a bullet to the brain before it gets too late to avoid rising.

Whoever she was, she died alone, and she died stupid. I couldn’t help feeling bad for her.

“Oh, jeez, you’re right.” Shaun leaned closer still, moving well out of what most people would call the safe zone. All five zombies were clustering around the same stretch of fence now, hissing and snarling at him. “That was fast.”

“This isn’t the primary pack. They’re too fresh.” The most decayed of the zombies would still have been able to pass for human in a dark alley, assuming he could keep himself from trying to eat anyone in range. “Something had to bite them.”

“Or one of ’em dropped dead of a heart attack,” Shaun said. “You’re right. The rest are south, harassing the guards.” He gave the fence an assessing look. “I’d put this at what, twelve feet?”

“Shaun Phillip Mason, you are not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“Sure as hell am. Keep ’em distracted, okay?” He didn’t wait for a reply before backing up, getting a running start, and launching himself at the fence. His fingers caught well above the reach of the tallest of the zombies. His toes didn’t fare quite as well, but that didn’t matter much—steel-toed combat boots are too tough for even the infected to gnaw their way through. Laughing at their moans, Shaun began pulling himself up toward the top of the fence.

“Next up, we have my brother, committing suicide,” I muttered and focused the camera on him, tapping the pad at my belt again to dial Buffy. “Don’t fall, asshole, or I’m telling Mom you did it for love of the dead girl.”

“Bite me,” Shaun called back. He swung his leading leg over the top of the fence and stood astride it, with one foot hooked into the chain on either side. Unhooking the crossbow from his belt, he loaded the first quarrel.

“Not while I’m breathing, oh brother mine.”

“Buffy here,” said Buffy’s voice in my ear.

“Buffy, you getting the feeds on this? I want any positive IDs you can pull on our friends. You can cross-reference the one in the sweatshirt with footage from the—”

“I’m on it. Her name was Dayna Baldwin, age twenty-three, political science major at the University of Oklahoma. I’m running lookups on the other four. I have a few possible matches, but there’s nothing confirmed.”

Shaun pulled back the catch, taking careful, almost affectionate aim on the nearest of his admirers. I directed the handheld camera toward the mob as a crossbow bolt appeared in the center of their leader’s forehead. He fell and two of the remaining four were suddenly distracted with cannibalizing his remains, leaving two to menace Shaun. The virus that drives the infected is only in it for the meat. Zombies generally choose the living over the dead, but something that won’t put up a fight is always better than nothing at all.

“Keep looking,” I said. Shaun reloaded his crossbow, moving with calm, unhurried precision. I have to give my brother this: He’s damn good at what he does.

“Of course,” said Buffy, sounding affronted. She hung up, presumably to focus on her cameras. We’d get a clearer picture of everything that had happened once Shaun finished having his fun and we could get back to the van. If there’s a square inch of convoy that Buffy can’t get on film, I’ll eat my sunglasses.

Shaun was taking aim on the third zombie when I realized there was something wrong with the quality of the moans. They were getting louder and moving against the prevailing wind. I dropped the camera, hearing its case crack as it hit the ground, and turned to look behind me.

The leader of the zombies—another familiar face, opinionated Carl from the after-meeting—was ten feet away and closing fast, moving at that horrible, disconnected half-run that only the freshest zombies can sustain for long. He must have died even more recently than Dayna, because he’d been up and moving around less than an hour before. That implied multiple bites and a group attack, possibly by the pack that Shaun was in the process of dispatching.

Six more zombies followed the ill-fated Carl, moving at speeds ranging from a half-run to a shamble. Pulling the pistol from my belt, I shot Carl twice in the head, turning to aim at the zombie behind him. I didn’t have enough bullets. Even if I were as good of a shot as Shaun, which I’m not, eight bullets and seven zombies didn’t leave me in a position with much of a margin for error. I was already down below the one-for-one divide, and that made survival a lot less likely. I pulled the trigger and the second zombie fell.

The sound of gunshots attracted Shaun’s attention. I heard his sharp intake of breath as he turned, surveying my attackers. “Holy—”

“We’re past saying it and all the way to doing it,” I snarled, and fired again. The shot went wild. Four bullets and only two zombies down; the odds were not in my favor. “Buffy!”

Buffy never sends out a camera without a two-way sound pickup. She says she doesn’t trust us to manage our own levels, but really, I think she just likes being able to eavesdrop without leaving the van. Her voice emerged from the speaker a moment after I called her name, coming through crackly and distorted. “Sorry for the delay—distracted. We’ve had a perimeter breech on the south fence. One of the gates went down and they’re reporting casualties. How’re you two faring?”

“Let’s just say that if you have a broadcast point near some unoccupied men with heavy weaponry, now would be a swell time to use it.” I fired twice more. The second bullet hit its target. Six bullets and three zombies down, while the remaining four continued to approach. I fired at the new leader of the pack and missed. A crossbow bolt whizzed by my shoulder and the zombie toppled, the end of the bolt protruding from its forehead. Three zombies. “I didn’t come out here expecting to actually fight anything—I’m only carrying a pistol, and I’m about to be out of bullets. Shaun?”

“Three bolts left,” he called. “Think you can make it up this fence?”

“No.” I’m a decent sprinter and I can gun a motorcycle from zero to suicidal in less than ten seconds, but I’m not a climber. I nearly washed out of the physical section of my licensing exams, twice, thanks to my lack of upper-body strength. If I was lucky, I’d be able to cling to the fence until the zombies grabbing my ankles hauled me down and ate me. If I wasn’t, I’d just fall.

The speaker crackled. “There’s a group of guards on the way,” Buffy said. “They’re having some problems, but they said they’d be there as fast as they could.”

“Hope it’s fast enough,” I said. I started backing up toward Shaun and the fence. My father has always had just one piece of advice about zombies and ammunition, one he’s drilled into my head enough times that it’s managed to stick: When you have one bullet left and there’s no visible way out of the shit you’re standing in, save it for yourself. It’s better than the alternative.

Two more crossbow bolts whizzed by, and two more zombies fell, leaving just one to shamble toward us, still moaning. There were no answering moans, either from the sides or from behind. Shaun’s pack was down, and there didn’t seem to be any further reinforcements coming.

“Fire any time now, Shaun,” I said tightly.

“Not until I know that there aren’t more coming,” he said.

I kept backing up until I hit the fence and stopped, keeping my gun in front of me, muzzle aimed toward the shambler. Between the two of us, we had the ammo to take it down… as long as that was all there was. “It figures,” I said.

“What figures?”

“We finally crack the global top five, so of course we’re going to get eaten by zombies that same night.”

Shaun’s laughter managed to be bitter and amused at the same time. “Are you ever not a pessimist?”

“Sometimes. But then I wake up.” The zombie was continuing to advance, moaning as it came. There were no answering moans. “I think it’s alone.”

“So shoot, genius, and we’ll see.”

“I may as well.” I steadied my hands, lining up on the zombie’s forehead. “If it eats me, I hope you’re next.”

“Always gotta go first, don’t you?”

“You know it.” I fired.

My shot whizzed past the zombie, punching a barely visible hole in the nearest RV. Still moaning, the zombie raised its arms in the classic “embracing” gesture of the undead, moving slightly faster now. No one’s ever figured out how the zombies can tell when their victims are unarmed, but they manage somehow.

“Shaun…”

“We have time.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. The zombie was still twelve feet away, well out of attack range, but it was closing on us. “I hate you.”

“It’s mutual,” Shaun said. I risked a glance up at him, and saw that he was aiming for the zombie’s forehead, waiting for the perfect shot. One bolt, one chance. Maybe that sounds like the odds he’d been playing before, but it wasn’t. It’s easier to get a bull’s-eye when there’s nothing actually at risk.

“Just so we’re clear,” I said, and closed my eyes.

The gunfire came from two directions at the same time. I opened my eyes to see the last zombie mowed down by a hail of chain-fed bullets being fired by no fewer than four of the guards, two closing on either side. Above me, Shaun gave a loud war whoop.

“The cavalry has arrived!”

“God bless the cavalry,” I muttered.

Our tense stand-off was over in a matter of seconds. I ignored the fallen camera as I pushed away from the fence and strode toward the nearest pair of guards. The camera was a write-off. Buffy had the footage downloaded by now, and they were going to insist on destroying the damn thing anyway, since it had almost certainly been spattered with blood when the guards started firing. The electronics were too delicate to survive a full decontamination. That sort of thing is why we keep our insurance paid up.

Steve was there, scowling at the fallen infected like he was challenging them to get up and let him kill them again. Sorry, Steve, the virus only reanimates a host once. His partner was a few feet away, scanning the fence. It wasn’t Tyrone. I paused, starting to get the vaguest idea of how the zombies had broken through the fence.

Ideas never drew ratings without confirmation. “What happened?”

“Not now, Georgia,” said Steve, with a tight shake of his head. “Just… not now.”

I considered pressing the matter. If this were a normal zombie attack, one of the hit-and-run outbreaks that can happen anywhere, I probably would have. It’s always best to question the survivors before they can start deluding themselves about the reality of what they just went through. After the adrenaline fades, half the people who survive a zombie attack turn into heroes, having gunned down a thousand zombies with nothing but a .22 and a bucket of guts, while the other half deny that they were ever close enough to the undead to be in any actual danger. If you want the real story, you have to get it fast.

But Steve was a professional bodyguard, and that made him less likely than most men to lie to himself. Factor in the fact that unless he left the convoy after the paperwork was completed, I’d have to continue interacting with him on a regular basis, and getting the scoop wasn’t worth alienating the large, potentially violent man who managed a lot of my blood tests. Shaking my head, I took a step back.

“Sure, Steve,” I said. “Just let us know if there’s anything we can do.”

There was a clatter as Shaun jumped down from the fence. I didn’t turn, and he trotted to a stop beside me, eyes narrowing as he took note of the attending guards. “Christ, Steve, where’s Tyrone?” he said.

Shaun has done more to get close to the guards than I have. A little friendliness is unavoidable, but he’d actually gotten out there and made friends. Maybe that’s why Steve answered his question with a quiet, “Conversion was confirmed at twenty-two hundred hours, twenty-seven minutes. Tracy put him down, but not before he was able to pass on the infection.”

Shaun whistled, long and low. “How many down?”

“Four casualties from the convoy and an as-yet-undetermined number of locals. The senator and his aides are being moved to a secure location. If you’ll gather your things and collect Miss Meissonier, we’ll take the three of you to decontamination before relocating you as well.”

“Are all the zombies down?” I asked.

Steve frowned at me. “Miss Mason?”

“The zombies. Shaun and I just eliminated the better part of two packs,” ignoring the part where one of us nearly got eaten in the process, “and you seem to have handled the mess at the gates. Are all the zombies down?”

“Channels are showing a negative on infected activity within the area.”

“Channels are not a one hundred percent guarantee,” I said, keeping my tone reasonable. “You’re down hands, and we’ve already been in primary contact, which means we’ll need the same decon you will. Why not let Shaun and me stay and help? We’re licensed, and if you have ammo, we’re armed. Remove Buffy, but let us stay.”

The guards exchanged uneasy glances before looking to Steve. Whatever he said would go. Steve frowned down at the bodies littering the tarmac, and finally said, “I hope you both understand that I won’t hesitate to shoot either one of you.”

“We wouldn’t go out with you if we thought you’d hesitate,” said Shaun. He held up his crossbow. “Anybody got bolts for this thing?”

Nine

I collapsed onto our bed at the local four-star hotel a little after dawn, my aching eyes already squeezed shut. Shaun was a bit steadier on his feet and he stayed upright long enough to make sure the room’s blackout curtains were drawn. I made a small noise of approval and felt him pulling my sunglasses off my face a moment later. I swatted ineffectually at the air.

“Stop that. Give those back.”

“They’re on the bedside table,” he said. The bedsprings creaked as he sat down, taking the side of the bed that was closer to the window. Rustling followed as he removed his shoes and slumped sideways. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know what he was doing. We shared the same room until puberty hit, and since then we’ve never been more than a closed door away from one another. “Christ, George. That was a clusterfuck.”

“Mmm,” I replied, and pulled the covers over my head. I was still wearing my shoes. The staff was paid to wash the sheets after every visit, and by the point we left the field, I’d dressed and undressed so many times in the course of decontamination that I never wanted to remove my clothes again. I’d just wear them until they dissolved, and then spend the rest of my life naked.

“How the hell did we get an outbreak that close to the convention hall? Primaries are coming up. We didn’t need this, even if it’s going to be great for ratings. Think Buffy has the initial edits up? I know you hate it when she releases footage without your say-so, but cleanup ran long. She probably won’t wait. Waiting could mean we get scooped.”

“Mmm.”

“Bet this spikes us another half-point. More when I can get my POV stuff edited together. Think there were faults in the fencing? Maybe they broke through. Steve wasn’t clear on where the attack started, and we lost both guards stationed on the gate.”

“Mmm.”

“Poor Tyrone. Jesus. Did you know he was putting his teenage son through college with this gig? Kid wants to be a molecular virologist—”

Somewhere in the middle of explaining the hopes, dreams, and character failings of the fallen guards, Shaun’s voice trailed off, replaced by the soft, rhythmic sound of his breathing. I sighed, rolling over, and followed him into sleep.

The curtains were pulled away from the window some unknown length of time later, allowing sunlight to stream into the room and jerk me unceremoniously back into awareness. I swore, fumbling for the nightstand I vaguely remembered Shaun mentioning in conjunction with my sunglasses. My hand hit the side of the bed, and I squinted my eyes more tightly closed, trying to ward off the light.

Shaun was less restrained in his profanity. “Fuck a duck, Buffy, what are you trying to do, blind her?” My sunglasses were thrust into my hand. I unfolded them and slid them into place, opening my eyes to see Shaun, clad only in his boxer shorts, glaring at an unrepentant Buffy. “Knock next time!”

“I did knock, three times,” she said. “And I tried the room phone, twice. See?” Both Shaun and I glanced toward the phone. The red message light was blinking. “When you kept not answering, I rerouted the locks to make them think your room was my room and let myself in.”

“You didn’t just shake us because?” I mumbled. A splitting headache was rushing in to fill the void left by my disrupted REM cycle.

“Are you kidding? You two sleep armed. I like having four limbs and a head.” Seeming oblivious to the hostility in the room, Buffy activated the terminal on the wall, pulling down the foldable keyboard. “I’m guessing you guys haven’t seen the daily returns, huh?”

“We haven’t seen anything but the insides of our eyelids,” Shaun said. He wasn’t making any effort to hide his irritation, which was only increasing as Buffy ignored it. “What time is it?”

“Almost noon,” Buffy said. The hotel start-up screen came up and she began typing, shunting the connection to one of our own server relays. The logo of After the End Times filled the screen, replaced a moment later by the black-and-white grid of our secure staff pages. “I let you guys sleep for, like, six hours.”

I groaned and reached for the phone. “I am so calling room service for a gallon of Coke before she can do any more talking.”

“Get some coffee, too,” said Shaun. “A whole pot of coffee.”

“Tea for me,” said Buffy. The screen shifted again as she pulled up the numerical display that represents our feed from the Internet Ratings Board. It measures server traffic, unique hits, number of connected users, and a whole bunch of other numbers and factors, all of them combining to make one final, holy figure: our market share. It’s color-coded, appearing in green if it’s more than fifty, white for forty-nine to ten, yellow for nine to five, and red for four and above.

The number at the top of screen, gleaming a bright, triumphant red, was 2.3.

I dropped the phone.

Shaun recovered his composure first, maybe because he was more awake than I was. “Have we been hacked?”

“Nope.” Buffy shook her head, grinning so broadly that it seemed like the top of her head might fall off. “What you’re seeing is the honest to God, unaltered, uncensored Ratings Board designation for our site traffic over the past twelve hours. We’re running top two, as long as you discount porn, music download, and movie tie-in sites.”

Those three site types make up the majority of the traffic on the Internet—the rest of us are just sort of skimming off the top. Rising unsteadily, I crossed the room and touched the screen. The number didn’t change.

“Shaun…”

“Yeah?”

“You owe me twenty bucks.”

“Yeah.”

Turning to Buffy, I asked, “How?”

“If I attribute it to the graphic design, do I get a raise?”

“No,” said Shaun and I, in unison.

“Didn’t think so, but a girl has to try.” Buffy sat down on the edge of my bed, still beaming. “I got clean footage from half a dozen cameras all the way through both attacks. No voice reports, since someone went and volunteered to help with cleanup—”

“Not that going through decon without helping would have left me able to record,” I said dryly, retreating back toward the phone. Incredible ratings or not, I needed to kill this headache before it got fully established, and that meant I needed something caffeinated to wash down the painkillers. “You know that wipes me out.”

“Details,” said Buffy. “I spliced together three basic narrative tracks—one following the outbreak at the gate as closely as possible, one following the perimeter, and one that followed the two of you.”

I glanced in her direction as I waited for room service to pick up. “How much of our dialogue did you get?”

Buffy beamed. “All of it.”

“That explains some of the jump,” Shaun said dryly. “We always get a point spike when you say you hate me in a published report.”

“Only because it’s true,” I said, quashing the urge to groan. It was my own fault for leaving Buffy alone with the unedited footage. She had to put something up. A news blackout doesn’t heighten suspense; it just loses readers.

Shaun snorted. “Right. So you had three tracks, and…?”

“I tossed them up in their raw form, tapped some beta Newsies to throw down narrative tracks, got straight bio files on the confirmed casualties, and wrote a new poem about how fast everything can fall apart.” Buffy cast an anxious glance my way, smile slipping. “Did I do it right?”

Room service confirmed that the assorted drinks were en route, along with an order of dry wheat toast. I hung up the phone. “Which betas?”

“Um, Mahir for the gate, Alaric for the perimeter, and Becks for the attack on the two of you.”

“Ah.” I adjusted my sunglasses. “I’m going to want to review their reports.” It was a formality, and from the look on her face, Buffy knew it; she’d selected the same betas I would have chosen. Mahir is located in London, England, and he’s great for dry, factual reporting that neither pretties things up nor dumbs them down. If I have a second in command, it’s Mahir. Alaric can build suspense almost as well as an Irwin, fitting his narration and description into the natural blank spots in a recording. And Becks would have been a horror movie director if we weren’t all practically living in a horror movie these days. Her sense of timing is impeccable, and her cut shots are even better. Of the betas we’ve acquired, I count my Newsies as the best of the bunch. They’re good. They’re hoping to ride our success to alpha positions of their own, and that makes them ambitious. Ambition is worth more than practically anything else in this business, even talent.

“Of course you will,” Buffy said, clearly waiting for me to break down and say the words.

I smiled, faintly, and said them: “You did good.”

Buffy punched the air. “She shoots, she scores!”

“Just don’t get cocky,” I said. There was a knock at the door. This hotel must have the fastest room service in the Midwest. “Remember, one successful set of executive decisions does not prepare you to take my—”

I opened the door to reveal Steve and Carlos. They were impeccably dressed, matching black suits so crisply pressed that you’d never have guessed they’d been in the field incinerating the bodies of their fallen comrades less than eight hours previous. I stood there in my slept-in clothes, with my uncombed hair sticking up in all directions, and stared at them.

“Miss Mason,” said Steve. His tone was flat, even more formal than it was on our first encounter. Dipping a hand into his pocket, he produced the familiar shape of a handheld blood testing unit. “If you and your associates would care to come with us, a debriefing has been scheduled in the boardroom.”

“Couldn’t you have called first?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows. “We did.”

Shaun and I really had been sleeping like the unrisen dead. I pressed my lips into a thin line, and said, “My brother and I have only been awake for a few minutes. Can we have time to make ourselves presentable?”

Steve looked past me into the room, where Shaun—still clad only in his boxers—offered a sardonic wave. Steve looked back to me. I smiled. “Unless you’d prefer we came as we are?”

“You have ten minutes,” Steve said, and shut the door.

“Good morning, Georgia,” I muttered. “Right. Buffy, get out. We’ll see you in the boardroom. Shaun, put clothes on.” I raked a hand through my hair. “I’m going to wash up.” One good thing about going to bed straight from a cleanup operation: Even after six hours of sleeping and sweating into my clothes, they were still cleaner than they’d been when I bought them. After you’ve been sterilized seven times for live virus particles, dirt doesn’t stand much of a chance.

“Georgia—” Buffy began.

I pointed to the door. “Out.” Not waiting to see whether she obeyed me—largely because I was pretty certain she wasn’t going to—I grabbed my overnight bag off the floor by the foot of the bed and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind me.

There’s only one way to prevent a migraine from the combination of too little sleep and too much light from fully establishing itself, and that’s to wear my contacts. They come with their own little complications, like making my eyeballs itch all damn day, but they block a lot more light than my sunglasses. I pulled the case out of my bag, popped off the top, and withdrew the first of the lenses from the saline solution where they customarily floated.

Normal contact lenses are designed to correct problems with the wearer’s eyesight. My eyesight is fine, except for my light issues, which the lenses can compensate for. Unfortunately, while normal contacts enhance peripheral vision, these ones kill the greater part of mine by covering the iris and most of the pupil with solid color films that essentially create artificial surfaces for my eyes. I’m not legally allowed to go into field situations while wearing contacts.

Tilting my head back, I slipped the first lens into place, blinking to settle it against my eye. I repeated the process with the other eye before lowering my head and looking at myself in the mirror. My reflection gazed impassively back at me, eyes perfectly normal and cornflower blue.

The blue was my choice. When I was a kid they got me brown lenses that matched the natural color of my eyes. I switched to blue as soon as I was old enough to have a say. They don’t look as natural, but they also don’t make me feel like I’m trying to lie about my medical condition. My eyes aren’t normal. They never will be. If that makes some people uncomfortable, well, I’ve learned to use that to my own advantage.

I straightened my clothes, tucked my sunglasses into the breast pocket of my shirt, and ran a brush through my hair. There, that was as presentable as I was going to get. If the senator didn’t like it, he could damn well refrain from allowing any more late-night attacks on the convoy.

Buffy was gone when I emerged from the bathroom. Shaun handed me a can of Coke and my MP3 recorder, wrinkling his nose. “You know your contacts creep me out, right?”

“That’s the goal.” The soda was cold enough to make my back teeth ache. I didn’t stop gulping until the can was empty. Tossing it in the bathroom trash, I asked, “Ready?”

“For hours. You girls always take forever in the bathroom.”

“Bite me.”

“Not without a blood test.”

I kicked his ankle, grabbed three more Cokes from the room service tray, and left the room. Steve was waiting in the hall, blood test unit still in his hand. I eyed it.

“Isn’t this going a bit far? We went from cleanup to bed. I doubt there was a viral reservoir in the closet.”

“Hand,” Steve replied.

I sighed and switched my pilfered sodas to my left hand, allowing me to offer him the right. The process of testing me, and then Shaun, took less than a minute. Both of us came up unsurprisingly clean.

Steve dropped the used units into a plastic bag, sealed it, and turned to walk down the hall, obviously expecting us to follow. Shaun and I exchanged a glance, shrugged, and did exactly that.

The boardroom was three floors up, on a level you needed an executive keycard to access. The carpet was so thick that our feet made no sound as we followed Steve down the hall to the open boardroom door. Buffy was seated on a countertop inside, keying information into her handheld and trying to stay out of the way of the senator’s advisors. They were moving back and forth, grabbing papers from one another, making notes on whiteboards, and generally creating the sort of hurricane of productive activity that signals absolutely nothing happening.

The senator was at the head of the table with his head in his hands, creating an island of stillness in the heart of the chaos. Carlos flanked him to the left, and as we crossed the threshold, Steve abandoned us to cut across the room and flank Senator Ryman to the right. Something must have alerted the senator to Steve’s presence because he raised his head, looking first toward the bodyguard and then toward us. One by one, the bustling aides stopped what they were doing and followed the direction of the senator’s gaze.

I raised a can of soda and popped the tab.

The sound seemed to snap the senator out of his fugue. He sat up, clearing his throat. “Shaun. Georgia. If the two of you wouldn’t mind taking your seats, we can get things started.”

“Thanks for holding the briefing until we got here,” I said, moving toward one of the open chairs and setting my MP3 recorder on the table. “Sorry we took so long.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, waving a hand. “I know how late you were out with the cleanup crews. A little sleep is hardly repayment for going above and beyond the call of duty like that.”

“In that case, I’d like some groupies,” said Shaun, settling in the chair next to mine. I kicked him in the shin. He yelped but grinned, unrepentant.

“I’ll see what we can do.” The senator rose, rapping his knuckles against the table. The last small eddies of conversation in the room died, all attention sliding back to him. Even Buffy stopped typing as the senator leaned forward, hands on the table, and said, “Now that we’re all here… how the hell did that happen?” His voice never rose above a conversational level. “We lost four guards last night, three of them at our own front gate. What happened to the concept of security? Did I miss the meeting where we decided that zombies weren’t something we needed to be concerned about anymore?”

One of the aides cleared his throat and said, “Well, sir, it looks like there was a power short on the anterior detection unit, which resulted in the doors failing to shut fast enough to prevent the incursion from—”

“Speak English at this table or I will fire you so fast you’ll wind up standing at the airport wondering how the hell you got from here to there without any goddamn pants on,” the senator snapped. The aide responded by paling and dropping the papers he’d been holding. “Can anyone here tell me what happened and how, in simple English words of two syllables or less?”

“Your screamer wasn’t working,” said Buffy. Every head in the room turned to her. She shrugged. “Every perimeter rig has a screamer built in. Yours didn’t switch on.”

“A screamer being…?” asked one of the aides.

“A heat-sensitive motion sensor,” said Chuck Wong. He looked anxious—and with good reason. Most of his job involves the design and maintenance of the convoy’s automated perimeter defenses. If there’d been a mechanical failure, it was technically his fault. “They scan moving objects for heat as well as motion. Anything below a certain range sets off an alert of possible zombies in the area.”

“A really fresh one can fool a screamer, but the packs we saw last night were too mixed for that. They should have set off the alerts, and they didn’t.” Buffy shrugged again. “That means we had a screamer failure.”

“Chuck? Care to tell us why that happened?”

“I can’t. Not until we can arrange for a physical inspection of the equipment.”

“It’s arranged. Carlos, get three of your men and take Chuck for an inspection run. Report back as soon as you have anything.” Carlos nodded, heading for the door. Three of the other bodyguards moved away from the walls and followed, not waiting to be asked.

“I’ll need my equipment—” Chuck protested.

“Your equipment should be with the convoy, and since that’s where you’re going, I’m sure you’ll have everything you need,” the senator said. There was no arguing with his tone. Chuck obviously saw that. He stood, thin-boned hands twitching by his sides as he turned toward the door.

“Mind if I go along?” asked Buffy. The room looked at her again. She flashed her most winning smile. “I’m pretty good at seeing why field equipment decided to fry. Maybe I could be a second opinion.”

And maybe she could get us some footage for a follow-up report. I nodded, and caught the senator watching the gesture before he, in turn, began to nod. “Thank you for volunteering, Miss Meissonier. I’m sure the group will be glad to have you along.”

“I’ll ring back,” Buffy said, and hopped off the counter, trotting out the door after Chuck and the bodyguards.

“There she goes,” Shaun muttered.

“Jealous?” I asked.

“Tech geeks trying to figure out why a screamer broke? Please. I’ll be jealous if she comes back saying there were actual dead guys to play with.”

“Right.” He was jealous. I folded my arms, returning my attention to the senator.

He wasn’t looking his best. He was leaning forward with his hands braced against the table, but it was clear even in that well-supported position that he hadn’t had nearly as much sleep as Shaun and I. His hair was uncombed, his shirt was wrinkled, and his collar was open. He looked like a man who’d been faced with the unexpected, and now, after a little time to consider the situation, was getting ready to ride out and kick its ass.

“Folks, whatever the cause of last night’s catastrophe, the facts are this: We lost four good men and three potential supporters right before the first round of primaries. This does not send a good message to the people. This sort of thing doesn’t say ‘Vote Ryman, he’ll protect you.’ If anything, it says ‘Vote Ryman if you want to get eaten.’ This isn’t our message, and I refuse to let it become our message, even though that’s the way my opponents are going to try to spin it. What’s our game plan?” He glared around the room. “Well?”

“Sir, the bloggers—”

“Will be staying for this little chat. We try covering it up, they’ll report it a lot less kindly when they manage to root it out. Now please, can we get down to business?”

That seemed to be the cue the room had been waiting for. The next forty minutes passed in a blaze of points and counterpoints, with the senator’s advisors arguing the finer aspects of spin while his security heads protested any attempts to categorize their handling of the campaign to date as “lax” or “insufficient.” Shaun and I sat and listened. We were there as observers, not participants, and after the argument had a little time to develop, it seemed as if most of the room forgot we were there at all. One camp held that they needed to minimize media coverage of the attack, make the requisite statements of increased vigilance, and move on. The other camp held that full openness was the only way to get through an incident of this magnitude without taking damage from other political quarters. Both camps had to admit that the reports released on our site the night before were impacting their opinions, although neither seemed aware of exactly how much traffic those reports had drawn. I opted not to inform them. Observing the political process without interfering with it is sometimes more entertaining than it sounds.

One of the senator’s advisors was beginning a rant on the evils of the modern media when my ear cuff beeped. I rose, moving to the back of the room before I answered. “Georgia here.”

“Georgia, it’s Buffy. Can you patch me to the speakerphone?”

I paused. She sounded harried. More than that, she sounded openly nervous. Not frightened, which meant she probably wasn’t being harassed by zombies or rival bloggers, but nervous. “Sure, Buff. Give me a second.” I strode back to the table and leaned across two of the arguing aides to grab the speaker phone. They squawked protests, but I ignored them, yanking off my ear cuff and snapping it into the transmission jack at the base of the phone.

“Miss Mason?” inquired the senator, eyebrows rising.

“Sorry, this is important.” I hit the Receive button.

“…testing, testing,” said Buffy’s voice, crackling slightly through the speaker. “Am I live?”

“We can hear you, Miss Meissonier,” said the senator. “May I ask what was so important that it required breaking in on our conference?”

Chuck Wong spoke next; apparently, ours wasn’t the only end on speakerphone. “We’re at the perimeter fence, sir, and it seemed important that we call you as quickly as possible.”

“What’s going on out there, Chuck? No more zombies, I hope?”

“No, sir—not so far. It’s the screamer.”

“The one that failed?”

“Yes, sir. It didn’t fail because of anything my team did.” Chuck didn’t keep the relief out of his tone, and I couldn’t blame him. Carelessness can be a federal offense when it applies to antizombie devices. No one has managed to successfully charge a security technician with manslaughter—yet—but the cases come up almost every year. “The wires were cut.”

The senator froze. “Cut?”

“The screamer shows detection of the zombies we saw last night, sir. The connection that should have set off the perimeter alarms wasn’t made because those wires had been cut before the alarm was sounded.”

“Whoever did it did a pretty good job,” Buffy said. “All the damage is inside the boxes. Nothing visible until you crack the case, and even then you have to dig around before you find the breaks.”

The senator sagged backward, paling. “Are you telling me this was sabotage?”

“Well, sir,” said Chuck, “none of my men would have cut the wires on a screamer protecting the convoy that they were inside. There’s just no reason for it.”

“I see. Finish your sweep and report back, Chuck. Miss Meissonier, thank you for calling. Please, call again if you need anything further.”

“Roger. Georgia, we’re on server four.”

“Noted. Signing off now.” I leaned over and cut the connection before pulling my ear cuff out of the jack and sliding it back onto my ear. Only when this was done did I glance back up at Senator Ryman.

The senator looked like a man who’d been hit, hard and unexpectedly, from behind. He met my gaze, despite the alien appearance of my contacts, and gave a small, tightly controlled shake of his head. Please, that gesture said, not right now.

I nodded, taking Shaun’s arm. “Senator, if you don’t mind, my brother and I should be getting to work. We’re a bit behind after last night.”

Shaun blinked at me. “What?”

“Of course.” The senator smiled, not bothering to conceal his relief. “Miss Mason, Mr. Mason, thank you for your time. I’ll have someone notify you before we’re ready to check out and move on.”

“Thank you,” I said, and left the room, hauling the still-bewildered Shaun along in my wake. The boardroom door swung closed behind us.

Shaun yanked his arm out of my hand, subjecting me to a sharp sidelong gaze. “Want to tell me what that was all about?”

“The man just found out his camp was sabotaged,” I said. “They’re not going to come up with anything useful until they finish panicking. That’s going to take days. Meanwhile, we have reports to splice together and update, and Buffy’s dumping her footage to server four. We should take a look.”

Shaun nodded. “Got it.”

“Come on.”

Back in our hotel room, I turned the main terminal over to Shaun while I plugged my handheld into the wall jack and settled down to work. We couldn’t both record voice feeds at the same time, but we could edit film clips for our individual sections of the site and we could write as much text as we needed. I skimmed the reports Buffy authorized while Shaun and I were on cleanup. All three of the betas had done excellent jobs. Mahir, especially, had done an amazing amount with his relatively straightforward video feed, and I saw from the server flags that both the footage and his voice tracking had already been optioned by three of the larger news sites. I tapped in a release, authorizing use of the footage under a standard payment contract that would give Mahir forty percent of the profits, with clear credit for the narrative. His first breakout report. He’d be so proud. After a pause, I added a note of congratulations, directed to his private mailbox. He and I have been friends outside of work for years, and it never hurts to encourage your friends to succeed.

“How’re things in your department?” I asked, pulling up the raw footage of the attacks and setting it to run sequentially on my screen. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I had a hunch, and I’ve learned to follow my hunches. Buffy knows visual presentation, and Shaun knows shock value, but me? I know where to find the news. There had been sabotage. Why? When? And how had our saboteur been able to cut those wires without coming into the range of Buffy’s cameras?

“I’m taking Becks away from you,” he said. I glanced over. Shaun’s screen was dominated by the footage of the two of us against the fence, holding off the last of the zombies. The audio was being fed directly to him via the earpiece plugged into his left ear. His expression was serious. “She wants to go Irwin. She’s been begging for weeks. And this report—this isn’t a Newsie report, George. You know that.”

I scowled, but it wasn’t like the request was a surprise. Good Irwins are hard to come by because the death rates during training are so damn high. You don’t have time for a learning curve when you’re playing with the infected. “What are her credentials?”

“You’re stalling.”

“Humor me.” The footage on my screen was set to play in real-time, which meant some of the feeds would pause to let the others catch up again. The gate cameras had chunks missing from their narrative, while the attack at the fence was almost complete. I couldn’t help wincing when I saw one of the women from the political rally come staggering up, clearly among the infected. I didn’t need the dialogue tracks to tell me what Tyrone was saying: He was telling her to halt in her approach, back off, and present her credentials. But she just kept coming.

“Rebecca Atherton, age twenty-two, BA in film from New York University, Class A-20 blogging license, upgraded from a B-20 six months ago, when she passed her final marksmanship tests. She’s testing for an A-18 next month.”

An A-18 license would mean she was cleared to enter Level 4 hazard zones unaccompanied. “If you take her, my side of the site retains a six percent interest in her reports for the next year.” The infected girl was sinking her teeth into Tyrone’s left forearm. He screamed soundlessly and fired into the side of the zombie’s head. Too late. The damage was done.

“Three percent,” Shaun countered.

“Done,” I said, not taking my eyes off the screen. “Draft an offer letter. If she agrees, she’s yours.” Tyrone was staggering in circles, clutching his arm against his body. I could see Tracy barking orders; Carlos turned and ran for the convoy, presumably to get reinforcements. That’s why he survived—because he ran away. How must that kind of thing sit with a man like him? I can’t imagine that it sits very well.

“George? What’s up? I expected you to fight me more than that.”

Instead of answering, I pulled the headphone jack out of my machine and let the sound start broadcasting to the room.

“Oh God Tracy oh God oh God,” Tyrone was babbling. The moaning in the background was low and constant; the infected were coming, and the gate in the convoy fence was standing open.

“Shut up and help me close this thing,” Tracy snarled, grabbing the gate with both hands. After a moment’s hesitation, Tyrone ran over and joined her, placing his hands well away from hers. It was a good way of dealing with things. As long as she didn’t encounter any of the live virus, she wouldn’t begin amplification, and in someone Tyrone’s size, full conversion would take longer than was needed to close a simple gate, even one that heavy. Once it was shut, she could wave him off to a safe distance and put a bullet through his brain. It wouldn’t be pretty, but elimination of contagion rarely is.

The tape jumped. Tyrone was on the ground in a spreading pool of his own blood while Tracy screamed and struggled against the zombie gnawing at the side of her neck. The gate was closed, and yet there were six zombies on the screen, one chewing on Tracy, three closing, and the other two lurching onward, toward the convoy.

Shaun frowned. “Pause the feed.”

I tapped my keyboard. The image froze.

“Rewind to the jump.”

I tapped my keyboard again and the image ran backward to the blank spot. I left it there, frozen, and looked to Shaun for further instructions.

He wasn’t looking at me at all. “Start it up again, half-speed.”

“What are you—”

“Just start the feed, George.”

I tapped my keyboard. The image began to move again, much more slowly now. Shaun scowled, and snapped, “Freeze!”

The frozen image showed Tracy screaming, the zombies shambling, and Tyrone dead on the ground. Shaun’s finger stabbed out like an accusation, indicating the leg of Tracy’s suit. “She didn’t run because she couldn’t,” he said. “Someone shot out her kneecap.”

“What?” I squinted at the screen. “I don’t see it.”

“Take out your damn contacts and try again.”

I leaned back, blinking my right contact free and removing it with the tip of my index finger. After a moment to let my eye adjust, I closed my left eye and considered the screen again. With my low-light vision restored, it was much harder to miss the wetness of Tracy’s leg, or the way the blood on the snow around her fanned out from her body, rather than falling straight down as I would have expected.

I sat up straight. “Someone shot her.”

“During the missing footage,” Shaun agreed, voice tight. I glanced to him, and he turned his face away, rubbing a hand across his eyes. “Christ, George. She was just doing this because it looked good on her résumé.”

“I know, Shaun. I know.” I put a hand on his shoulder, staring at my frozen video display, where Tracy battled for a life that was already lost. “We’ll find out what’s going on here.

“I promise.”

Ten

We were approaching the polls on Super Tuesday, and the mood in the senator’s camp was grim. People should have been nervous, elated, and on edge; we were hours away from finding out whether the gravy train was about to take off like a rocket or come grinding to a halt. Instead, a funereal atmosphere ruled the camp. The guards continued to triple-check every protocol and step, and no one was willing to go out without an assigned partner. Even the interchangeable interns were beginning to get antsy, and they didn’t notice much beyond their duties. It was bad.

The convoy was holding a position three blocks from the convention center, parked in what used to be a high school football field before the Rising rendered outdoor sports too dangerous. It was a good location for our purposes, providing power, running water, and sufficient clear ground for the perimeter fence to be established without anything—either physical or visual—obstructing the cameras. The number of people packed into Oklahoma City for the festivities necessitated running secure buses to the convention center every thirty minutes. Each of them was equipped with state-of-the-art testing units and armed guards.

We had received the final confirmation that Tracy McNally was shot through the right kneecap during the attack two days after Shaun and I first reviewed the tape and brought it to the attention of the senator’s security team. This, on top of the cut wires in the perimeter screamers, had provided absolute confirmation that the attack had been a poorly managed assassination attempt. The convoy had been preparing to leave Eakly at the time, and it felt like we’d left the last of our high spirits behind.

It was Shaun who first identified the assassination attempt as poorly-managed. When the senator asked him to defend his position, he shrugged and said, “You’re alive, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a comforting point, but it was a good one. A few more zombies in the original wave or a few more guards taken out like Tracy and the convoy could have been overrun rather than suffering a few casualties. Either it hadn’t been a full-fledged assassination attempt, or it was an incredibly badly planned one. The former seemed unlikely. They used infected humans.

The attraction of attempting to weaponize the infected has decreased exponentially since the Raskin-Watts trail of 2026, when it was officially declared that any individual who used live-state Kellis-Amberlee as a weapon would be tried as a terrorist. What’s the point of using a sloppy, difficult-to-manage weapon if even failure means you’re likely to be one of the few lucky souls to still qualify for the death penalty?

The screamers were the only piece of the convoy’s equipment that seemed to have been sabotaged. Reviewing the cameras at the gate confirmed that the blank spots were caused by a localized EMP burst—something focused enough that it took out only the cameras within a certain range and didn’t attract the attention of most of Buffy’s sensors. You can get that sort of tech at RadioShack. It’s portable, disposable, and entirely untraceable, unless you happen to have the make and model of the unit, which we don’t. The senator’s men had been going over every scrap of available evidence since the incident, and they were still no closer to finding answers. If anything, they were further away, because the trail had time to get cold.

Who would want to kill Senator Ryman? Try “practically everyone,” and you’d be off to a good start. Senator Peter Ryman started out as a long shot, and somehow became a front-runner in the presidential race. Everything could change before the official party conventions, but there was no denying that he’d been doing well in the polls, that he’d been performing solidly across a wide spectrum of potential voters, and that his views on the issues tended to appeal to the majority. Being the first candidate to open his campaign to the blogging world certainly didn’t hurt—he’d enjoyed a substantial boost in awareness among voters aged thirty-five and below. The other candidates took too long to realize that they might have missed a trick, and they’d all been scrambling to catch up. Two of our betas received invitations to follow competing politicians in the week immediately after Eakly. Both refused the offers, citing conflict of interest. When you’ve got a good thing going, you don’t shoot it before you have to.

Beyond Senator Ryman’s standing lead, he was photogenic, well-liked, and well-placed in the Republican Party, with no major scandals in his background. No one makes it that far in politics and stays completely clean, but he’s about as close as they come. Literally, the biggest scandal I’ve been able to find on the man is that his oldest daughter, Rebecca, was either three months premature or was conceived out of wedlock. That’s it. He’s like a big, friendly Boy Scout who just woke up one day and decided to become the President of the United States of America.

He doesn’t even seem to belong to any of the major special-interest groups. Despite his wife’s horse ranch, he supports the enforcement of Mason’s Law, which means he’s not in the pocket of the animal rights organizations, but he also opposes wide-scale hunting and deforestation, which means he doesn’t belong to the militant antinature groups. He neither preaches damnation nor asserts that secular humanism was the only answer for a post-Rising world. I haven’t even been able to find proof that his campaign received funding from the tobacco companies, and everyone’s campaign receives funding from the tobacco companies. Once lung cancer stopped killing their customers, they rapidly became the number one contributors to most political campaigns. There’s big money to be had in cigarettes that don’t give anybody cancer.

A lot of people would benefit if Peter Ryman turned up dead. So maybe it’s no surprise that things were fairly bleak around the convoy as the primaries approached. The playful atmosphere that had dominated the campaign for the first six weeks was gone, replaced by blank-faced, by-the-book bodyguards who sometimes seemed to think they should demand blood tests after you used a public toilet. Buffy was handling things pretty well, largely by spending her time either inside the van or with Chuck and his team over in the senator’s equipment rig, but it was driving Shaun and me out of our minds.

We both have our own ways of dealing with crazy. That’s why Super Tuesday found Shaun off with every other Irwin who’d shown up to cover the convention, looking for dead things to irritate, while I was packed onto a bus with six dozen other deeply uncomfortable-looking reporters, heading for the convention center. I didn’t know why they looked so uneasy; I had to get my press pass scanned three times and my blood tested twice before they’d even let me board. The only way anyone was going into conversion before we hit the convention center was if they suffered from cardiac arrest from the strain of being surrounded by other human beings.

A tense-looking man whose shirt was deformed in a way that telegraphed “I am wearing poorly fitted Kevlar” got onto the bus, and the driver announced, “We are at capacity. This bus is now departing for the convention center.” This garnered a smattering of applause from the riders, most of whom looked like they were rethinking their choice of careers. No one ever told them that being a reporter would mean talking to people!

If it seems as if I have little respect for the other members of my profession, that’s because it’s true: I frequently don’t. For every Dennis Stahl who’s willing to go out and chase down the story, you have three or four “reporters” who’d rather edit together remotely taped feeds, interview their subjects by phone, and never leave their homes. There’s a fairly popular news site, Under the Lens, that makes that one of their selling points: They claim they must be truly objective, because none of their Newsies ever go into the field. None of them have Class A licenses, and they act like this is something to brag about, like being distanced from the news is a good thing. If the paparazzi clouds serve one purpose, it’s keeping that attitude from spreading.

Fear makes people stupid, and Kellis-Amberlee has had people scared for the last twenty years. There comes a point when you need to get over the fear and get on with your life, and a lot of people don’t seem to be capable of that anymore. From blood tests to gated communities, we have embraced the cult of fear, and now we don’t seem to know how to put it back where it belongs.

The ride to the convention center was almost silent, punctuated only by the various beeps and whirrs of people’s equipment recalibrating as we passed in and out of the various service zones and secure bands. Wireless tech has reached the point where you’d practically have to be in the middle of the rain forest or standing on an iceberg in uncharted waters to be truly “out of service,” but privacy fields and encryption have progressed at roughly the same rate, which frequently results in service being present but unavailable unless you have the security keys.

No one’s supposed to interfere with the standard phone service channels. This doesn’t stop overenthusiastic security crews from occasionally blanking everything but the emergency bands. It was amusingly easy to spot the freelance journalists in the crowd: They were the ones hitting their PDAs against their palms, like this would somehow make the proper security keys for the convention center access points appear. Fortunately for the security techs of the world, this approach has yet to work for anyone, and the freelancers were still quietly abusing their equipment when we reached the convention center.

The bus stop was located in the underground parking garage, in a clear, well-lighted area equidistant from both the entrance and exit. The bus approached, the entry gate rose; the bus entered the garage, the gate descended. Assuming it was a standard security setup, there were circuit breakers in place to prevent the entry and exit gates from opening at the same time, and sounding the internal alarm would cause them both to descend and lock. In modern security design, “death trap” isn’t always a bad phrase. The idea is minimizing casualties, not preventing them entirely.

Blank-faced security men approached the bus as the doors opened, each holding a blood testing kit. I bit back a groan as I exited and approached the first free guard, adjusting the strap of my shoulder bag before extending my hand toward him. He slipped the unit over my hand and clamped it down.

“Press pass,” he said.

“Georgia Mason, After the End Times.” I unclipped the pass from my shirt and offered it to him. “I’m with Senator Ryman’s group.”

He fed the pass into the scanner at his waist. It beeped and popped the pass out again. He handed it back and glanced at the testing unit, which was showing a flashing green light. He frowned. “Please remove the glasses, Ms. Mason.”

Lovely. Some of the extremely sensitive units can get confused by the elevated levels of inactive virus particles caused by retinal KA. I didn’t exactly want to expose my eyes to the harsh lights of the parking garage, but I didn’t feel like getting shot as a security precaution either. I removed by sunglasses, fighting the urge to squint.

The guard leaned forward, studying my eyes. “Retinal Kellis-Amberlee,” he said. “Do you carry a med card?”

“Yes.” No one with naturally elevated virus levels goes out without a med card if they enjoy breathing. I withdrew my wallet and produced the card, handing it over. He slotted it into the back of the testing unit. The green light stopped flashing, turned yellow, and finally turned a solid green, apparently having satisfied itself that my virus levels were within normal parameters and nothing to be concerned with.

“Thank you for your cooperation.” He returned my card. I replaced it in my wallet before sliding my glasses back on. “Will your associates be joining us?”

“Not today.” The scan of my press pass would have told him everything there was to know about our organization: Our work history, what our ratings share was like, any citations we’d received for sloppy reporting or libel, and, of course, how many of us were traveling with the senator and his group. “Where can I find—”

“Information kiosks are inside, up the stairs, and to your left,” he said, already turning toward the next of the waiting journalists.

Assembly-line hospitality. Maybe it’s not that welcoming, but it gets the job done. I turned to head through the glass doors into the convention center proper, where I could hopefully locate a bathroom in short order. The light had left dazzling spots dancing in front of my eyes, and the only way I was going to make them go away was by swallowing some painkillers before the migraine had time to finish developing. It was a small hope, but as I didn’t exactly relish the idea of spending the day mingling with politicians and reporters while suffering from a headache, it was the best one I had.

The air conditioning inside was pumping full volume, ignoring the fact that it was February in Oklahoma. The reason for the arctic chill was evident: The place was packed. Despite the xenophobia that’s gripped the world since the Rising, some things still have to happen face-to-face, and that includes political rallies. If anything, the rallies have gotten larger, growing as the smaller events dwindled. There’s always the chance of an outbreak when you gather more than ten or twenty people in one place, but man is by his very nature a social animal, and once in a while, you just need an excuse.

Before the Rising, Super Tuesday was a big deal. These days, it’s a three-ring circus. Beyond the expected political factions and special-interest groups, the convention center has exhibit halls and even a temporary mini-mall of service and sales kiosks. Place your vote for the next presidential candidate and buy a new pair of running shoes! You know everyone in here has been screened for signs of viral amplification, so have a ball!

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

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

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

That’s me. The eternal optimist.

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

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

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

“Because I’m a newspaperman?”

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

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

“Sorry. Don’t smoke.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just a bottled water, thanks.”

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

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

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

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

“Got any juicy details for an old friend?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I smirked. “Interrupt your poker game?”

“Actually, we were watching a movie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right. Near the Starbucks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The senator and his team were in a plushly appointed boardroom about halfway down the hall. A placard on the wall identified the room’s inhabitants as “Senator Ryman, Rep., WI,” but I still knocked before trying the door, just in case something was going on that I wasn’t meant to interfere with.

“Come in,” called a brisk, irritated voice. I nodded, satisfied that I wasn’t interrupting, and stepped inside.

When I first met Robert Channing, the senator’s chief aide, my initial impression was of a fussy, egotistical man who resented anything that might get in his way. After a few months of acquaintanceship, I haven’t been forced to revise that impression, although I’ve come to understand that he’s very good at what he does. He doesn’t travel with the convoy. He’s usually at the senator’s office in Wisconsin, arranging bookings, setting up the halls where Senator Ryman speaks, and coordinating outside news coverage, since “three amateur journalists with a vanity site doesn’t exactly constitute wide-scale exposure.” Oddly, much of my respect for him comes from the fact that he’s willing to say things like that to my face. He’s been very upfront about everything that affects the senator’s chances at the White House from day one, and if that means stepping on a few toes, he’s okay with that. Not a nice guy, but a good one to have on your side.

At the moment, he was looking at me with narrowed eyes, and it was clear that whoever’s side he was currently on, it wasn’t mine. His tie was askew, and his jacket had been tossed over a nearby chair. That, more than the senator’s unbuttoned jacket and missing tie, told me they’d been having a rough day. Senator Ryman is quick to shed the trappings of propriety, but Channing only takes his jacket off when the stress is too much to tolerate in tweed.

“Thought I’d come see how things were going at the fort,” I said, closing the door behind myself. “Maybe get some decent reaction quotes as the numbers come down.”

“Miss Mason,” acknowledged Channing stiffly. Several of the interchangeable interns were occupied at the back of the room, taking notation from the various monitors into their handhelds and PDAs. “Please try not to get underfoot.”

“I’ll do my best.” I sat in the first unoccupied chair, folding my hands behind my head as I stared in his direction. Channing is one of those people who can’t stand the fact that my sunglasses make it hard for him to tell whether I’m actually looking at him.

He met my stare with a disgruntled glower before grabbing his jacket and striding for the door. “I’m getting coffee,” he said, and stepped out into the hallway, slamming the door as he went.

Senator Ryman didn’t bother to conceal his amusement. Instead, he roared with it, as though my driving his chief aide out of the room was the funniest thing he’d seen in years. “Georgia, that wasn’t nice,” he said, finally, between gusts of laughter.

I shrugged. “All I did was sit down,” I said.

“Wicked, wicked woman. I assume you’re here to find out whether you still have a job?”

“I have a job whether you have a campaign or not, Senator, and I can monitor the public polls from the convoy just as well as I can monitor them from here. I wanted to get an idea of the mood around the camp.” I looked around the room. Most of the people present had shed their jackets, and in some cases their shoes. Empty coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches littered random surfaces, and the whiteboard was largely dedicated to a series of tic-tac-toe grids. “I’m going with ‘guardedly optimistic.’”

“We’re ahead by twenty-three percent of the vote,” the senator said, with a short nod. “ ‘Guardedly optimistic’ is an accurate assessment.”

“How are you feeling?”

He frowned at me. “How do you mean?”

“Well, sir, at some point in the next,” I made a show of checking my watch, “six hours, you find out whether you have a shot at the party nomination, and hence the presidency, or whether you’re looking at the second-banana consolation prize, or worse, nothing at all. Today begins the process of winning or losing the election. So, bearing all of that in mind, how are you feeling?”

“Terrified,” the senator said. “This is a long way from turning to my wife and saying, ‘Well, honey, I think this is the term when I make a run for the office.’ This is the real deal. I’m a bit anticipatory, but not that much. Whatever the polls say, the people will have spoken, and I’ll just have to abide with what they have to say.”

“But you’re expecting them to speak in your favor.”

He fixed me with a stern eye. “Georgia, has this just turned into an interview?”

“Maybe.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Warnings aren’t in my job description. Did you need me to repeat the question?”

“I hadn’t realized it was a question,” he said, tone suddenly wry. “Yes, I’m expecting them to speak in my favor, because you don’t make it as far as I have without developing an ego, and I’m of the opinion that the average American is an intelligent person who knows what’s best for this country. I wouldn’t be running for office if I didn’t think I was the best man for the job. Will I be disappointed if they don’t pick me? A bit. It’s natural to be disappointed when you don’t get chosen for this sort of thing. But I’m willing to believe that if the American public is smart enough to choose their own president, then the American public is smart enough to know what they want, and if they don’t choose me, I need to do some serious self-examination to see where I got it all wrong.”

“Have you given any thought to your next steps, assuming you show strongly enough in today’s polls to continue with the campaign?”

“We’ll keep taking the message to the people. Keep getting out there and meeting people, letting them know that I won’t be the sort of president who sits in a hermetically sealed room and ignores the problems plaguing this country.” His dig at President Wertz was subtle but well-deserved. No one’s seen our current president set foot outside a well-secured urban area since before he was elected, and most critiques of his administration have centered around the fact that he doesn’t seem to realize not everyone can afford to have their air filtered before it gets to them. To listen to him talk, you’d think zombie attacks only happened to the careless and the stupid, rather than being something ninety percent of the people on the planet have to worry about on a daily basis.

“How does Mrs. Ryman feel about this?”

Senator Ryman’s expression softened. “Emily is as pleased as can be that things are going so well. I’m on this campaign with the full support and understanding of my family, and without them, I’d never have been able to make it half as far as I have.”

“Senator, in recent weeks, Governor Tate—who many view as your primary in-party opponent—has been speaking out for stricter screening protocols among children and the elderly, and increased funding for the private school system, on the basis that overcrowding in the public schools only increases the risk of wide-scale viral incubation and outbreak. How do you stand on this issue?”

“Well, Miss Mason, as you know, all three of my daughters have attended the excellent public schools in our home town. My eldest—”

“That would be Rebecca Ryman, age eighteen?”

“That’s correct. My eldest will be graduating high school this June and expects to start at Brown University in the fall, where she’ll be studying political science, like her old man. Supporting a free and equal public school system is one of the duties of the government. Which does mean increased blood screening for children under the age of fourteen, and additional funding for school security, but it seems to me that taking money from our public schools because they might be threatened at some point in the future is a bit of burning down the barn to keep the hay from going bad.”

“How do you speak to the criticisms that your campaign depends too heavily on the secular issues facing our nation, while ignoring the spiritual?”

Senator Ryman’s lips quirked in a smile. “I say when God comes down here and helps me clean my house, I’ll be more than happy to help Him with cleaning His. Until then, I’ll trouble myself with keeping people fed and breathing, and let Him tend the parts I can’t do anything to help.”

The door opened as Channing returned, balancing a tray of Starbucks cups on his outstretched arms. The interchangeable interns promptly mugged him. An open can of Coke was somehow deposited in front of me in the chaos that followed. I acknowledged it with a grateful nod, picked it up, and sipped before saying, “If the campaign ends today, Senator, if this is the culmination of your work to date… was it worth it?”

“No,” he said. The room went quiet. I could almost hear heads turning toward him. “As your readers are no doubt aware, an act of sabotage committed at my headquarters earlier this month led to the deaths of four good men and women who were dedicated to supporting this campaign. They signed on to draw a paycheck and maybe, along the way, help an ideal find a place in this modern world. Instead, they passed on to whatever reward may be waiting for us—for heroes—in the next world. If those men and women had lived, then yes, I could have walked away from this a little sadder, a little wiser, but convinced that I’d done the right thing, I’d done my best, and next time, I’d be able to make that run all the way to the end of the road. At this point?

“Nothing I do is bringing them back, and if there were something I could do to change what happened in Eakly, I would have done it ten times over. From where I sit, there’s only one thing left that I can do, and that’s win. For the ideal they died supporting, and for the sake of their memories. So if I lose, if I have to go home empty-handed, if the next time I contact their families it’s to say, ‘Sorry, but I couldn’t make it after all’… then no, it wasn’t worth it. But it was the only thing I knew to do.”

There was a long, stunned pause before the room erupted in applause. Most of it came from the interchangeable interns, but the technicians were applauding as well—and so, his hands devoid of coffee cups, was Channing. I noted this with thoughtful interest before turning back to the senator and nodding.

“Thank you for your time,” I said, “and best of luck in today’s primaries.”

Senator Ryman flashed a practiced grin. “I don’t need luck. I just need the waiting to be over.”

“And I just need the use of one of your data ports, so that I can clean this up and transmit it over for upload,” I said, pulling out my MP3 recorder and holding it up to the room. “It’ll take me about fifteen minutes to do the surface edits.”

“Will we be permitted to review your report before release?” asked Channing.

“Down, boy,” said the senator. “I don’t see where we need to. Georgia’s been square with us so far, and I don’t see where that’s going to change. Georgia?”

“You can review it if you’d like, but all that’s going to do is delay release,” I said. “Leave me to work, and this hits my front page before the polls have closed.”

“Go to it,” said the senator, and indicated a free space on the wall. “You have all the data ports you need.”

“Thanks,” I said, and took my Coke, moving over to the wall to settle down and set to work.

Editing a report is both easier and harder for me than it is for Shaun or Buffy. My material rarely depends on graphics. I don’t need to concern myself with camera angles, lighting, or whether the footage I use gets my point across. At the same time, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in today’s era of instant gratification and high-speed answers, sometimes people aren’t willing to deal with all those hard words when a few pictures supposedly do the job just as well. It’s harder to sell people on a report that’s just news without pictures or movies to soften the blow. I have to find the heart of every subject as fast as I can, pin it down on the page, and then cut it wide open for the audience to see.

“Super Tuesday: Index Case for a Presidency” wouldn’t win me any awards, but once I cleaned up my impromptu interview with Senator Ryman and intercut the text with a few still shots of the man, I was reasonably sure that it was going to catch and hold an audience, and tell the truth as I understood it. Anything beyond that was more than I had a right to ask.

With my report uploaded and turned in, I settled to do what a lifetime of reporting the truth has equipped me for best of all: I settled to wait. I watched the interchangeable interns come and go, watched Channing pace, and watched the senator, aware that his fate was already determined, holding calm and implacable sway over them all. He just didn’t know what that determination was.

The polls closed at midnight. Every screen in the room was turned to the major media outlets, a dozen talking heads conflicting with one another’s words as they tried to string the suspense out and drive their ratings just a few degrees higher. I couldn’t blame them for it, but that didn’t mean that I had to be impressed with it.

My ear cuff beeped. I tapped it.

“Go.”

“Georgia, it’s Buffy.”

“Results?”

“Senator Ryman took the primary with a seventy percent clean majority. His position jumped eleven points as soon as your report went live.”

I closed my eyes and smiled. One of the talking heads had just revealed the same information, or something similar; whoops and cheers were filling the room. “Say the words, Buffy.”

“We’re going to the Republican National Convention.”

Sometimes, the truth can set you free.

Eleven

Georgia! Shaun! It’s so lovely to see you!” Emily Ryman was all smiles as she approached, arms spread wide in an invitation to an embrace. I glanced at Shaun and he stepped forward, letting her hug him while he blocked her from reaching me. I don’t like physical contact from semistrangers, and Shaun knows it.

If Emily noticed the deliberate way we positioned ourselves, she didn’t comment. “I never quite believe you’re alive after those reports you do, you foolish, foolish boy.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Emily,” Shaun said, and hugged her back. He’s much easier with that sort of thing than I am. I blame this on the fact that he’s the kind of person who believes in shoving his hand into the dark, creepy hole, rather than sensibly avoiding it. “How have you been?”

“Busy, as usual. Foaling season kept us hopping, but that’s mostly over, thank God. I lost two good mares this year, and neither managed to reanimate on the grounds, thanks to the help being on the ball.” Emily detangled herself from Shaun, still smiling, and turned to offer her hand. Not a hug, just her hand. I gave her a nod of approval as I took it. Her smile widened. “Georgia. I can’t thank you enough for your coverage of my husband’s campaign.”

“It hasn’t just been me.” I reclaimed my hand. “There are a lot of reporters keeping a close eye on the senator. Word on the street is he’s receiving the party nomination tonight.” The other political journalists were starting to smell “White House” in the water and were gathering like sharks, hoping for something worth seizing on. Buffy spent half her time disabling cameras and microphones set up by rival blog sites. She spent the other half writing steamy porn about the senator’s aides and hanging out with Chuck Wong, who’d been spending a disconcerting amount of time in our van recently, but that was her business.

“Yes, but you’re the only one I’ve met who’s reporting on him, rather than the interesting things his campaign drives out from beneath the rocks, or the fictional affairs of his office aides,” Emily said, wryly. “I know I can trust what you say. That’s meant a lot to me and the girls while Peter was on the road, and it’s going to mean a lot more from here on out.”

“It’s been an honor.”

“What do you mean, ‘it’s going to mean a lot more’?” asked Shaun. “Hey, George, are you finally going to learn to write? Because that would be awesome. I can’t carry you forever, you know.”

“Sadly, Shaun, this doesn’t have anything to do with how well your sister can write.” Emily shook her head. “It’s all about the campaign.”

“I understand,” I said. Glancing to Shaun, I continued, “Once he accepts the nomination—assuming he gets nominated—this gets real. Up until now, it’s been a weird sort of summer vacation.” After the nominations, it would be campaigning in earnest. It would be debates and deals and long nights, and she’d be lucky to see him before the inauguration. Assuming all that work didn’t turn out to be for nothing; assuming he could win.

“Exactly,” said Emily, expression going weary. “That man is lucky I love him.”

“Statements like that make me wish that I didn’t have quite so much journalistic integrity, Emily,” I said. The statement was mild, but the warning wasn’t. “You, expressing unhappiness with your husband? That’s about to become sound-bite gold for both sides of the political fence.”

She paused. “You’re telling me to be careful.”

“I’m telling you something you already know.” I smiled, changing the subject to one that would hopefully make her look less uncomfortable. “Will the girls be joining you? I still need to meet them.”

“Not for this silly convention,” she said. “Rebecca is getting ready for college, and I didn’t have the heart to drag Jeanne and Amber away from the foals to get their pictures taken by a thousand strangers. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

“Understandable,” I said. The job of a candidate’s spouse at the party convention is simple: stand around looking elegant and attractive, and say something witty if you get a microphone shoved in your face. That doesn’t leave much time for family togetherness, or for protecting kids from reporters itching to find something scandalous to start chewing on. Everything that happens at a party convention is on the record if the press finds out about it. Emily was doing the right thing. “Mind if I drop by later for an interview? I promise not to bring up the horses if you promise not to throw heavy objects at my head.”

Emily’s lips quirked up in a smile. “My. Peter wasn’t kidding when he said that the convention had you feeling charitable.”

“She’s saving up her catty for her interview with Governor Tate,” Shaun said.

“He’s agreed to an interview?” asked Emily. “Peter said he’d been putting you off since the primaries.”

“That would be why he’s finally agreed to an interview,” I replied, not bothering to keep the irritation from my voice. “Doing it before now was dismissible. I mean, what was I going to say about the man? ‘Governor Tate is so busy trying to get elected that he doesn’t have time to sit down with a woman who speaks publicly in support of his in-party opposition’? Not exactly a scathing indictment. Now we’re at the convention and if he doesn’t talk to me when he’s talking to everyone else, it looks like censorship.”

Emily considered me for a moment. Then, slowly, she smiled. “Why, Georgia Mason, I do believe you’ve entrapped this poor man.”

“No, ma’am, I’ve merely engaged in standard journalistic practice,” I said. “He entrapped himself.”

An exclusive six weeks before the convention would have been something he could bury or buy off: No matter how good it was, unless I somehow got him to confess to a sex scandal or drug abuse, it wasn’t going to be enough to taint the shining purity of his “champion of the religious and conservative right” reputation. Senator Ryman is moderate leaning toward liberal, despite his strong affiliation to and affection for the Republican Party. Governor Tate, on the other hand, is so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the world. Few people are willing to stand for both the death penalty and an overturning of Roe v. Wade these days, but he does it, all while encouraging loosening the Mason’s Law restrictions preventing family farms from operating within a hundred miles of major metro areas and encouraging tighter interpretation of Raskin-Watts. Under his proposed legislation, it wouldn’t be a crime to own a cow in Albany, but it would be considered an act of terrorism to attempt to save the life of a heart attack victim before performing extensive blood tests. Did I want a little time alone with him, on the record, to see how much of a hole he could dig for himself when faced with the right questions?

Did I ever.

“When’s your interview?”

“Three.” I glanced at my watch. “Actually, if you don’t mind Shaun escorting you from here, that would be a big help. I need to get moving if I don’t want to make the governor wait.”

“I thought you did want to make the governor wait,” said Shaun.

“Yes, but it has to be on purpose.” Making him wait intentionally was showing strategy. Making him wait because I didn’t allow enough time to get to his office was sloppy. I have a reputation for being a lot of things—after the article where I called Wagman a “publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change,” “bitch” has been at the top of the list—but “sloppy” isn’t among them.

“Of course,” said Emily. “Thank you for coming out to meet me.”

“It was my pleasure, Mrs. Ryman. Shaun, don’t make the nice potential First Lady poke any dead things before you deliver her to security.”

“You never let me have any fun,” Shaun mock-grumbled, offering Emily his arm. “If you’d like to come with me, I believe I can promise an utterly dull, boring, and uneventful trip between points A and B.”

“That sounds lovely, Shaun,” said Emily. Her security detail—three large gentlemen who looked just like every other private security guard at the convention—fell in behind her as Shaun led her away down the hall.

When she’d e-mailed asking us to meet her, she said she’d be arriving at one of the delivery doors, rather than the VIP entrance. “I want to avoid the press” was her quixotic, but sadly understandable, justification. Despite the snide implications that have been made by some of my colleagues, my team and I aren’t the lapdogs of what will hopefully become the Ryman administration. We’re twice as critical as anyone else when the candidate screws up because, quite frankly, we expect better of him. He’s ours. Win or lose, he belongs to us. And just like any proud parent or greedy shareholder, we want to see our investment make it to the finish line. If Peter screws the pooch, Shaun, Buffy, and I are right there in the thick of things, pointing to the wet spot and shouting for people to come quick and bring the cameras… but we’re also the ones who won. We have no interest in embarrassing the senator by harassing his family or dragging them inappropriately into the spotlight.

An example: Rebecca Ryman fell off her horse during a show-jumping event at the Wisconsin State Fair three years ago. She was fifteen. I don’t understand the appeal of show-jumping—I don’t care for large mammals under any circumstances, and I like them even less when you’re stacking adolescents on their backs and teaching them to clear obstacles—so I can’t say what happened, just that the horse stepped wrong somehow, and Rebecca fell. She was fine. The horse broke a leg and had to be put down.

The euthanasia was performed without a hitch; as is standard with large mammals, they used a captive bolt gun to the forehead, followed by a stiletto to the spinal column. Nothing was hurt except the horse, Rebecca’s pride, and the reputation of the Wisconsin State Fair. The horse never had a prayer of reanimating. That hasn’t prevented six of our rivals from airing the footage from that fair for weeks on end, as if the embarrassment of a teenage girl somehow cancels out the fact that they didn’t make the cut. “Ha-ha, you got the candidate, but we can mock his teenage daughter for an honest mistake.”

Sometimes I wonder if my crew is the only group of professional journalists who managed to avoid the asshole pills during training. Then I look at some of my editorials, especially the ones involving Wagman and her slow political suicide, and I realize that we took the pills. We just got a small portion of journalistic ethics to make them go down more easily. Emily knew she was safe with us because, unlike our peers, Shaun and I don’t abuse innocent people for the sake of a few marketable quotes. We have politicians to abuse when we need that sort of thing.

I checked my watch as I strode down the hall toward the main entrance. A shortcut through the press pen would take me to the governor’s offices, where his chief of staff would be happy to stall me for as long as possible. My interview wasn’t for a guaranteed sixty minutes; I’d need a lot more pull if I wanted to achieve something like that. No, I just got whatever questions I could ask and have answered in the span of an hour, no matter what else came up during that time. I wanted to make him wait no more than ten minutes. That would make a point but still leave me the time to get the answers I both wanted and needed to have. His chief of staff would not only want to make me wait, he’d want to make me wait for at least half an hour, thus gutting the interview and proving once more exactly who was in control of the situation.

There are moments when I look at the world I’m living in, all the cutthroat politics and the incredibly petty, partisan deal mongering, and I wonder how anyone could be happy doing anything else. After this, local politics would seem like a bake sale. Which means I need to stay exactly where I am, and that means making sure everyone sees how good I am at my job.

People called greetings my way as I cut through the press pen. I waved distractedly, attention focused on the route ahead. I have a reputation for aloofness in certain parts of the press corps. I guess I deserve it.

“Georgia!” called a man I vaguely recognized from Wagman’s press pool. He shouldered his way through the crowd, drawing up alongside me as I continued toward the door to Governor Tate’s offices. “Got a second?”

“Not so much,” I said, reaching for the doorknob.

He put a hand on my shoulder, ignoring the way I tensed, and said, “The congresswoman just dropped out of the race.”

I froze, swinging my head around to face him before tugging my sunglasses down enough to allow me an unobstructed view of his face. The overhead lights burned my eyes. That didn’t matter; I could see his expression well enough to know that he wasn’t lying. “What do you want?” I asked, pushing my glasses back up.

He looked over his shoulder toward the rest of the gathered journalists. None of them seemed to have realized that there was blood in the water. Not yet, anyway. They’d catch on fast, and once they did, we were cornered.

“I bring you what I have—and there’s footage, too, lots of stuff, all the votes, details on where she’s throwing what’s left of her weight—and you let me on the team.”

“You want to follow Ryman?”

“I do.”

I considered this, keeping my face impassive. Finally, incrementally, I nodded. “Be at our rooms in an hour, with copies of all your recent publications, and everything you’ve got on Wagman. We’ll talk there.”

“Great,” he said, and stepped back, letting me continue on my way.

Governor Tate’s security agents nodded as I stepped through the doorway into the governor’s offices, holding up my press pass for their review. It passed muster; they didn’t stop me.

Governor Tate’s quarters looked just like Senator Ryman’s, and were, I’m sure, close to identical to Wagman’s. Since presidential hopefuls are packed into contiguous convention centers these days, the folks organizing the conventions go out of their way to prevent the appearance that they’re “showing favor” to any particular candidate. One of our guys was going to come away the Crown prince of the party while the other went begging for scraps, but until the votes were counted, they’d be standing on equal footing.

The office was full of volunteers and staffers, and the walls were plastered with the requisite “Tate for President” posters, but the atmosphere still managed to be quiet and almost funereal. People didn’t look frightened, just focused on what they were doing. I tapped the button on my lapel, triggering its internal camera to start taking still shots every fifteen seconds. There was enough memory to keep it doing that for two hours before I needed to dump the pictures to disk. Most of the shots would be crap, but there would probably be one or two that I could use.

I killed a few minutes pouring myself an unwanted cup of coffee and doctoring it to my supposed satisfaction before walking over to show my press pass to the guards waiting at the governor’s office door.

“Georgia Mason, After the End Times, here to see Governor Tate.”

One of them looked over his sunglasses at me. “You’re late.”

“Got held up,” I replied, smiling. My own sunglasses were firmly in place, making it difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether the smile was reaching my eyes.

The guards exchanged a look. I’ve found that men in sunglasses really hate it when they can’t see your eyes—it’s like the air of mystique they’re trying to create isn’t meant to be shared with anyone else, especially not a silly little journalist who happens to suffer from an ocular medical condition. I held my ground and my smile.

Late or not, they didn’t have a valid reason to keep me out. “Don’t do it again,” said the taller of the two, and opened the door to the governor’s private office.

“Right,” I said, and let my smile drop as I walked past them. They closed the door behind me with a sharp click. I didn’t bother to turn. I’d only get one first look at the private office of the man who stood the best shot at putting me out of a job. I wanted to savor it.

Governor Tate’s office was decorated austerely. He’d chosen to cover the room’s two windows; shelves blocked them almost completely, and the ambient light was provided by soft overhead fluorescents. Two massive flags covered most of the rear wall, representing, respectively, the United States and Texas. There were no other personal touches in evidence. This office was a stopping place, not a destination.

The governor himself was behind his desk, carefully placed so he was framed by the flags. I could imagine his handlers spending hours arguing about how best to create the image that he was a man who would be strong, both for his country and for the world. They’d done it; he looked perfectly presidential. If Peter Ryman was all boyish good looks and all-American charm, Governor David Tate was the embodiment of the American military man, from his solemn demeanor down to his respectable gray crew cut. I didn’t need to call up his service record; the fact that he had one while Senator Ryman didn’t has been the source of a lot of ads paid for by “concerned citizens” since the campaign cycle began. Three-star general, saw combat in the Canadian Border Cleansing of ’17, when we took back Niagara Falls from the infected, and then again in New Guinea in ’19, when a terrorist action involving aerosolized live-state Kellis-Amberlee nearly cost us the country. He’d been wounded in battle, he’d fought for his nation and for the rights of the uninfected, and he understood the war we fight every day against the creatures that used to be our loved ones.

There are a lot of good reasons the man scares the crap out of me. Those are just the beginning.

“Miss Mason,” he said, indicating the chair on the far side of his desk with a sweep of one hand as he rose. “I trust you didn’t get lost? I was beginning to think you weren’t intending to come.”

“Governor,” I replied. I walked over and sat down, pulling my MP3 recorder from my pocket and placing it on the table. The action triggered at least two video cameras concealed in my clothing. Those were the ones I knew about; I was sure Buffy had hidden half a dozen more in case someone got cute with an EMP pulse. “I was unavoidably detained.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, sitting back down. “Those security checks can be murder, can’t they?”

“They certainly can.” I leaned over to turn on the MP3 recorder with a theatrical flick of my index finger. Smoke and mirrors: If he thought that was my only recording device, he’d worry less about what was really going on the record. “I wanted to thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today and, of course, with our audience at After the End Times. Our readers have been following this campaign with a great deal of interest, and your platform is something that they’re eager to understand in more depth.”

“Clever folks, your readers,” the governor drawled, settling back in his seat. I glanced up without moving my head; the ability to see your interviewees when they don’t know you’re looking is one of the great advantages to living your life behind tinted glass.

It was easier to look than it was to avoid flinching at what I saw. The governor was watching me with undisguised blankness, like a little boy watching a bug he intended to smash. I’m used to people disliking reporters, but that was a bit much. Sitting up again, I straightened my glasses and said, “They are among the most discriminating in the blogging community.”

“Is that so? Well, I suppose that explains their unflagging interest in this year’s race. Been glorious for your ratings, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, Governor, it has. Now, your run for president was a bit of a surprise—political circles held that you wouldn’t be reaching for the office for another cycle. What prompted this early entrance into the race?”

The governor smiled, erasing the blankness from his eyes. Too late; I’d already seen it. In a way, the sudden life in his expression was even more frightening. He was on script now. He thought he knew how to handle me.

“Well, Miss Mason, the long and the short of it is that I’ve been getting a mite worried watching the way things have been going around here. I looked out at the field and realized that, unless I was on it, there just wasn’t anyone out there that I’d trust to watch after my wife and two boys when the dead decided it was time for another mass uprising. America needs a strong leader in this time of turmoil. Someone who knows what it means for a man to fight to hold what’s his. No offense against my esteemed opponent, but the good senator hasn’t ever fought for what he loves. He doesn’t understand it the way he would if he’d ever bled to keep it.” His tone was jovial and almost jocular, a father figure imparting wisdom on a privileged student.

I wasn’t buying it. Keeping my expression professional, I said, “So you see this as a two-man race—between yourself and Senator Ryman.”

“Let’s be honest here: It is a two-man race. Kirsten Wagman is a good woman with strong Republican values and a firm grasp of the morals of this nation, but she’s not going to be our next president. She isn’t prepared to do what’s needed for the people and the economy of this great land.”

Resisting the urge to point out that Kirsten Wagman believed in using her breasts in place of an informed debate, I asked, “Governor, what do you feel is needed for the people of America?”

“This country was based on the three Fs, Miss Mason: Freedom, Faith, and Family.” I could hear the capital letters in his voice; he said the words with that much force. “We’ve gone to great lengths to preserve the first of those things, but we’ve allowed the other two to slip by the wayside as we focused on the here and now. We’re drifting away from God.” The blankness was back in his eyes. “We’re being judged; we’re being tested. I’m afraid we’re coming direly close to failing, and this isn’t a test you get to take more than once.”

“Can you give me an example of this ‘failure’?”

“Why, the loss of Alaska, Miss Mason; a great American territory ceded to the dead because we didn’t have the guts to stand up for what was rightly ours. Our boys weren’t willing to put their faith in God and stand that line, and now a treasured part of our nation is lost, maybe forever. How long before that happens again, in Hawaii or Puerto Rico or, God forbid, even the American Heartland? We’ve gotten soft behind our walls. It’s time to put our trust in God.”

“Governor, you saw action in the Canadian Border Cleansing. I’d expect you to understand why Alaska had to be abandoned.”

“And I’d expect you to understand why a true American never lets go of what’s his. We should have fought. Under my leadership, we will fight, and we will by God win.”

I suppressed the unprofessional urge to shudder. His voice held all the hallmarks of a fanatic. “You’re requesting relaxation of Mason’s Law, Governor. Is there a particular reason for that?”

“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says a man can’t feed his family however he sees fit, even if that way isn’t exactly popular. Laws that limit our freedoms are needless as often as not. Why, look what happened when the Democrats stopped fighting for their unconstitutional gun control laws. Did gunshot deaths climb? No. They declined by forty percent the first year, and they’ve been dropping steadily ever since. It stands to reason that relaxation of other antifreedom legislation would—”

“How many of the infected are killed with guns every year?”

He paused, eyes narrowing. “I don’t see what bearing that has on our discussion.”

“According to the most recent CDC figures, ninety percent of the Kellis-Amberlee victims that are killed in clashes with the uninfected are killed by gunshot.”

“Guns fired by licensed, law-abiding citizens.”

“Yes, Governor. The CDC has also said that it’s virtually impossible to tell a murder victim killed by a shot to the head or spinal column from an infected individual put down legally in the same fashion. What is your answer to critics of the relaxed gun control laws who hold that gun-related violence has actually increased, but has been masked by the postmortem amplification of the Kellis-Amberlee virus?”

“Well, Miss Mason, I suppose I’d have to ask them for proof.” He leaned forward. “You carry a gun?”

“I’m a licensed journalist.”

“Does that mean yes?”

“It means I’m required to by law.”

“Would you feel safe entering a hazard zone without it? Letting your kids enter a hazard zone? This isn’t the civilized world anymore, Miss Mason. The natives are always restless now. Soon as you get sick, you start to hate the folks who aren’t. America needs a man who isn’t afraid to say that your rights end where the grave begins. No mercy, no clemency, and no limits on what a man can do to protect what’s his.”

“Governor, there have been no indications that infected individuals are capable of emotions as complex as hate. Further, they’re not dead. If rights end where the grave begins, shouldn’t they be protected by law like any other citizen?”

“Miss, that’s the sort of thinking you can afford when you’re safe, protected by men who understand what it means to stand strong. When the dead—sorry, the ‘infected’—are at your door, well, you’ll be wishing for a man who speaks like me.”

“Do you feel that Senator Ryman is soft on the infected?”

“I don’t think he’s ever been put into a position to find out.”

Nicely said. Cast doubt on Senator Ryman’s ability to fight the zombies and imply that he might be overly sympathetic to the idea of “live and let live”—a concept that gets floated now and then by the members of the far left wing. Usually for about fifteen minutes, until another lobbyist gets eaten. “Governor, you’ve spoken on wanting to do away with the so-called Good Samaritan laws that currently make it legal to extend assistance to citizens in trouble or distress. Can you explain your reasoning?”

“Simple as pie. Someone in distress likely got that way for a reason. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t feel terrible for anyone who winds up in that sort of a position, but if you rush to my aid when I’ve been bit, and you violate a quarantine line to do it, well, odds are good that you’re not saving me anyway, but you’ve also just thrown your own life aside.” The governor smiled. It might have seemed warm if it had come close to reaching his eyes. “It’s always the young and the idealistic who die that way. The ones America needs most of all. We have to protect our future.”

“By sacrificing our present?”

“If that’s what it takes, Miss Mason,” he said, smile widening and turning beatific. “If that’s what America requires.”

Twelve

“George?”

“Yeah?” I didn’t look up. Editing Governor Tate’s remarks into a coherent interview was easy, especially since I wasn’t forcing myself to be evenhanded. The man didn’t like me; there was no reason to pretend it wasn’t mutual. Compiling everything into a readable format took less than fifteen minutes, and we were already getting a satisfactory number of hits. It was the follow-ups that were taking time. Not only did I have a lot of photographs and video footage to wade through, but the phenomenal amount of gossip and hearsay posted about the man bordered on appalling. The folks running the convention were about to start calling the votes—we’d have a formal party nominee inside the hour—and I wasn’t anywhere near prepared to leave my computer.

“No, seriously, George?”

“What?”

“There’s a man.”

Now I did look up, squinting in the glare from the open office door before I reached for my sunglasses. The room faded into a comforting monochrome. Anyone who values colors has never had to deal with a KA-induced migraine. “You want to try that again? Because you almost told me something, and I’m thinking you might want to obfuscate your verbiage just a little more. Just for, y’know, giggles.”

“He says you invited him here.” Shaun leaned forward and smirked, his tone dripping with affected smarm. “Got a little election night itch you want scratched? I mean, he’s not completely hideous, although I didn’t think the corn-fed farm boys were your type—”

“Wait. Sandy brown hair, about your height, blue eyes, older than us, looks like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth?”

“Or anywhere else you wanted to shove it,” Shaun confirmed, eyes narrowing. “You mean you really did tell him to come here?”

“He’s a defector from Wagman’s press corp. She’s pulling out, and he’s bringing everything he’s got, providing it nets him a spot with us for the duration of Ryman’s campaign.”

Shaun’s eyebrows rose. “Public domain materials?”

“Or he wouldn’t be trying to bribe us with them. Buffy!” I hit Save and stood, looking toward the closet our resident Fictional had drafted as her private office. The door cracked open, and her head poked out. “Drop me all the personnel files you can pull on Wagman’s press corps and get out here. We have an interview to conduct.”

“Okay,” she said, and withdrew back into the closet. My terminal beeped a moment later, signaling receipt of the files I’d requested. We’re nothing if not efficient.

“Good.” I looked to Shaun. “Let’s find out whether the man’s wasting our time. Go get him.”

“Your wish, my command,” Shaun said, and turned, closing the door behind him.

Buffy emerged from her closet, moving to take the seat next to me. She had her hair skimmed back in a loose ponytail and was wearing a blue button-up shirt I was reasonably sure belonged to Chuck. She looked about as professional as your average fifteen-year-old, which was close to perfect: If this guy couldn’t handle us in our natural working environment, he didn’t really want to work with us.

“You really thinking of hiring this guy?” she asked.

“Depends on what he’s got and what his credentials say,” I said.

She nodded. “Fair enough.”

Further conversation was forestalled as the door swung open. Shaun stepped into the room, followed by the man from the press room. He was carrying a sealed folder under one arm, which he tossed to me as soon as he was clear of the door. I caught it and raised one eyebrow, waiting. Buffy sat up a little straighter, attention fixed on the newcomer.

“That’s everything,” he said. “Video, hardcopy, data files. Six months of following Wagman, plus the details on the deals she cut as she made for the door. Your boy’s getting confirmed tonight, and it’s going to be partially because of the amount of pull she tossed his way.”

“I doubt she shifted the balance,” I said. Handing the folder to Buffy, I said, “Run this. See if there’s anything we can use.”

“Got it.” She stood and paused, tossing a studied, impish grin toward the newcomer. “Hey, Rick. You’re looking all downtrodden and desperate.”

The newcomer—Rick—returned the smile with one that looked substantially more sincere, and even, I thought, slightly relieved. “Ah, Buffy,” he said. “You, meanwhile, look like you’re wearing your boyfriend’s clothes again. I hope this one is at least a Catholic?”

“That’s between me and my prayers,” she said, blowing him a kiss.

I turned to eye him, pulling my sunglasses far enough down my nose to make my expression plain. “I take it you two know each other?”

“No, I just call every strange blonde I see ‘Buffy.’ You’d be amazed how often I’m right.” He offered his hand. Buffy snorted, amusement evident, and retreated to her closet.

I could pursue that line of questioning later. “Well, you’ve tagged our Fictional, and I know you know who I am. Care to even the odds?” I took his hand and shook it.

His grip was firm, but not overly so. “Richard Cousins—Rick to my friends. Newsie, currently unaffiliated, although I’m hoping we’re about to change that; my biases are registered with Talking Points and Unvarnished Truth.”

“Huh,” I said, releasing his hand. Talking Points and Unvarnished Truth are two of the larger blogger databases; anyone can register a bias page with them and get it certified. Still, their signal-to-noise ratio is surprisingly good, largely because they self-police on a constant basis, looking for people who claim one set of biases while espousing another. “License level?”

“A-15. Wagman required it when she started aping your boy.” He produced a data pad from inside his coat. “My credentials are there and ready for link, along with my most recent medical records and blood test results.”

“Fabulous.” I slid the data pad into the docking slot on my terminal. Files promptly filled my screen. I skimmed them as I unhooked the pad and passed it back to him. “No publications before two years ago, but you’re already reporting at an A-15 level? I don’t know whether that’s impressive or suicidal.”

“I vote ‘blackmailed the license committee,’” contributed Shaun.

“Actually—” said Rick.

“Open the file on his print media pubs,” said Buffy, emerging from the closet. “That’ll explain everything. Won’t it, Ricky?”

“Print media?” Shaun’s eyebrows shot upward. “Like magazines?”

“Try newspapers,” said Buffy, eyes on Rick. I had to give him this much: He was taking her poking with good grace, and he wasn’t squirming. Yet. “That’s why he’s such a golden oldie.”

“Newspapers,” I repeated, disbelieving, and pulled up the next page in his file. The rest of his credentials filled the screen. I slid my glasses back up to cover my surprise. “Here we go—Buffy’s right. Staff writer, St. Paul Herald, five years. Field reporter, the Minnesota News, three years. How old are you?”

“My recertification to virtual media was fully processed eighteen months ago. I got on Wagman’s team fair and square,” said Rick, before adding, “And I’m thirty-four.”

“Fair and square means, what, you got on by waiting for her to realize Ryman had the right idea and then chasing her ambulance?” asked Buffy sweetly.

“All right, that’s enough.” Removing my glasses, I looked from Rick to Buffy and back. “What’s the story, you two?”

“Richard ‘Rick’ Cousins, Newsie, stated biases are left-wing Dem without crossing any lines into actual psychosis, solid writer, good with deadlines, not too adept at use of imagery, and the bastard beat me in an essay contest six years ago,” Buffy said.

“You can’t hold that against me,” Rick protested. “It wasn’t a teen competition. You were sixteen.”

“I can hold anything I want against you,” said Buffy, glowering at him before her face split in a wide grin. “You didn’t say you wanted the files on Rick, Georgia. Finally looking for a real story, you perverted ambulance chaser?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Buffy. Any story you’ve had your hands on can’t possibly be real,” Rick countered.

Shaun and I exchanged a look. “Think they know each other?” he asked.

“Getting the feeling. Buffy?”

She looked, briefly, like she didn’t want to explain. Then she shrugged and said, “After Rick beat me, we started writing. He’s a pretty cool guy, once you get past the part that he’s older than the dawn of time.”

“I choose to take that in the spirit in which it was offered,” said Rick. “Especially since it comes from someone who thinks Edgar Allen Poe is socially relevant.”

Buffy sniffed.

“Right, you know each other,” I said. “How’s his bribe? Do we hire him?”

“He’s got good footage of Wagman from the last six months, a couple exclusive interviews, and a full recording of her chief of staff making the resignation calls,” Buffy said.

I shot Rick a startled look.

He grinned. “He didn’t say I had to stop taping.”

“If I was interested in boys, I’d kiss you right now,” said Shaun, deadpan. “George, in Newsie-speak, what does that mean for ratings?”

“Three percent increase for starters, more if he can write well enough to sustain an audience. Rick, we can take you as a beta, you get your own byline but you run everything through me or my second, Mahir Gowda, no direct access to the candidate; if Ryman doesn’t get the nomination, you’re on a six-month base contract. I can e-mail you the legalese.”

“And if he does get the nomination?”

“What?”

“If he gets the nomination—which he will—what do I get?”

I smiled. “You get to stay with us until the bitter end, or until I fire your ass, whichever comes first.”

“Acceptable.” He held out his hand.

I shook it. “Welcome to After the End Times.”

Shaun clapped him on the back before he had a chance to let go. “More testosterone on the field team! My man! What do you think about poking dead things with sticks?”

“It’s a good way to get ratings and commit suicide at the same time,” Rick said.

I snorted. “All right. You can stay.”

There was a knock at the door. It opened before any of us had a chance to react, and Steve entered, sunglasses obscuring the majority of his expression. I stood.

“Is it time?” I asked.

Steve nodded. “Senator asked me to make sure you were ready.”

“Right. Thanks, Steve.” Grabbing my bag, I hooked a thumb toward our newest addition. “Rick, you’re with me; we’re on the floor. Buffy, I need you here, working the terminals. Hit my remotes and tell them we’re streaming raw footage starting in ten minutes, and they should be ready to start doing the forum-facing clean and jerk.”

“Editorial power?”

“Fact only, no opinions until I log on and start setting the baselines.” I was checking equipment as I spoke, hands moving on autopilot. My recorder was charged, and the readout on my watch indicated that all cameras were operating at seventy percent or above. “See if you can rouse Mahir, and yes, I know what time it is in London, but I need someone sane stomping on the trolls. Shaun—”

“Outside the convention hall with my skateboard and my stick, watching to see if the protestors and picketers do anything worth reporting on,” Shaun said, snapping an amiable salute. “I know my strengths.”

“Play to them, and don’t get dead,” I said, turning to head for the door. Steve stepped out of the way, giving me a sidelong look as Rick followed in my wake. “It’s okay, Steve. He’s on the squad.”

“They liked my backflip,” Rick said, looking up at Steve. There was a lot of “up” to look at. “You’re very tall.”

“You must be a reporter,” Steve said. He closed the door behind us, leaving Shaun and Buffy inside.

The convention center had seemed busy before. Compared to the madhouse that greeted us as we proceeded toward the main meeting hall, it was a mausoleum. People were everywhere. They ranged from staffers I recognized from the various campaigns to private security, members of politicians’ families, and reporters who’d somehow managed to get out of the press pit and into the wild. Soon, they’d go feral and start inventing scandals for the sake of their ratings.

Rick greeted the scene with calm professionalism, sticking close as I followed in Steve’s massive, crowd-clearing wake. Rick didn’t seem to have any problems taking orders from a woman ten years his junior, either, which can be an issue with guys trying to jump from the traditional news media to the blogging world. They don’t mean to bring their prejudices with them when they make the transition, but some things are harder to get rid of than an addiction to seeing your stories physically printed. If Rick continued to listen as well as he had been, things were going to be fine.

Steve steered a course through the back halls and into the screaming furor of the auditorium, where politicos and onlookers of every age, race, and creed were gathered for the solemn practice of screaming at the top of their lungs whenever they thought they caught a glimpse of one of the prospective candidates. A satisfying percentage of the crowd was sporting “Ryman for President” buttons. A group of clean-cut sorority girls in tight white T-shirts hung over one of the rails, shrieking with delight over the entire political process.

I elbowed Rick, indicating the girls. “See their shirts?”

He squinted. “ ‘Ryman’s My Man’? Who comes up with this stuff?”

“Shaun, actually. He’s got an amazing ear for doggerel.” I tapped my ear cuff. “Buffy, we’re in. How’s my signal?”

“Loud and clear, O glorious recorder of really jumbled footage. Try to get yourself to a clean shot, I’m only getting fifty percent signal off the stationary cameras.”

“You mean the stationary cameras that belong to the convention center and were installed for security purposes? The ones with the supposedly unbreakable signal feeds?”

“Those would be the ones. I won’t be able to use them for anything but pan shots, and the networks have the wall-mount cameras under exclusive coding that I can’t break through, so get something good!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Buffy out.”

The connection clicked off, and I turned to Steve. “Where are we?”

“Mrs. Ryman has said you can sit backstage with her if you’d like, or you can stay out here and film the crowd,” Steve said. “Either way, I need to head back there. We’re hitting the wire.”

“Got it.” I looked to Rick, unclasping the recording array from my left wrist. “Take this. Three cameras, direct feed back to Buffy in the closet—just lift it up, the lenses are set to autofocus.”

He took the wristband and snapped the Velcro around his own wrist. “You’ll be backstage?”

“Got it. Meet back in the office when the crowd disperses, and we’ll see where we’re going from there.” The footage I got backstage wouldn’t be as sensational, but it would be more intimate, and that sort of thing has a staying power that crowd shots lack. We’d hook readers with the screaming and keep them with the silence. Plus, this was a good opportunity to test Rick’s reactions in a field situation. The term “probationary period” doesn’t mean much in the news. He’d work out or he wouldn’t, starting tonight.

“Right.” He turned toward the stage, raising his arm to give the cameras the best view. Satisfied that he wasn’t going to screw around, I followed Steve along the edge of the hall toward the curtained-off area behind the stage.

You wouldn’t think one little canvas curtain could make that much of a difference. Most little canvas curtains aren’t equipped with enough private security to stop a full-scale invasion. The men at the entrance eyeballed our credentials but didn’t bother to stop us or ask for blood tests—once we were this deep into the convention center, either we were clean or we were all dead already. So we just sailed on through, out of the chaos and into the calm harbor on the other side.

Once upon a time, in a political process far, far away, the candidate selection results were known before they were announced to the general public. With necessary enhancements in security and increases in the number of delegates who chose to vote remotely, this has changed over the last twenty years. These days, no one knows who’s taking the nomination until the announcement is made. Call it part of a misguided effort to reinsert drama into a process that has become substantially more cut-and-dried as the years went by. Reality television on the grandest of scales.

Emily and Peter Ryman were sitting in a pair of folding chairs near the stage, his left hand clasped in both of hers as they watched the monitor that was scrolling current results. David Tate was pacing not far away; he shot me a poisonous look as I entered.

“Miss Mason,” he said. “Looking for more muck to rake?”

“Actually, Governor, I was looking for more facts to pass along,” I said, and continued for the Rymans. “Senator. Mrs. Ryman. I hope you’re ready for the results?”

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Georgia,” said the senator gravely. Then he laughed, releasing his wife’s hand and standing to grasp and shake mine. “Whatever the numbers say, I want to thank you and your crew. You may not have changed the race, but you made it a hell of a lot more fun for everyone involved.”

“Thank you, Senator,” I said. “That’s good to hear.”

“After Peter’s had a few weeks to rest, all three of you must come and visit the farm,” Emily said. “I know the girls would love to meet you. Rebecca’s very fond of your reports, especially. It would be a real treat for them.”

I smiled. “We’d be honored. But let’s not assume a break just yet.”

“Far from it,” said the senator, with a glance at Governor Tate. Governor Tate’s return look wasn’t a friendly one. “I think we’re going to go all the way.”

A bell rang as if to punctuate his words, and a hush fell over the convention. I stepped back, lifting my chin to bring the camera on my collar to a better angle.

“Let’s see if you mean that,” I said.

Over the loudspeaker, the voice of a third-rate celebrity who’d gone from bad sitcoms to convention announcements blared: “And now, the Republican Party’s man of the hour, and the next President of these fabulous United States of America—Senator Peter Ryman of Wisconsin! Senator Ryman, come on out here and greet the people!”

The cheers were almost deafening. Emily gave a little squeal that was only half-surprise, and wrapped her arms around the senator’s shoulders, kissing him on both cheeks as he lifted her off the ground in a hug. “Well, Em?” he said. “Let’s go make the people happy.” Beaming, she nodded her agreement, and he led her onto the stage. The cheers doubled in volume. Some of those people wouldn’t be able to talk at all the next day. Right then, I doubted any of them particularly cared.

Tate stayed where he was, expression blank. Before I moved toward the stage exit, still filming, I paused long enough to get a reaction shot of a man whose dreams had just been dashed. “Go, Pete, go,” I murmured, unable to keep from smiling. He had the nomination. That was our man out there on that stage, accepting the nomination.

We were going on the road.

My ear cuff beeped three times, signaling an emergency transmission. I tapped it, stepping away from the opening. “Shaun, what did you—”

Buffy’s voice cut me off. It was all business, and so cold I almost didn’t recognize it at first. “Georgia, there’s an outbreak at the farm.”

I froze. “What farm?”

“The Ryman farm. It’s on all the feeds, it’s everywhere. They think one of the horses went into spontaneous conversion. No one knows why, and they’re still digging in the ashes and setting the perimeter. No one knows where the… where the—oh, God, Georgia, the girls were in there when the alarms went off, and no one knows—”

Slowly, as if in a dream, I turned back toward the opening. Buffy was talking, but her words didn’t matter anymore. Senator Ryman had formally accepted the nomination and was standing there grinning, his beautiful wife holding his arm, waving to the crowd that chose him to bear their banner toward the highest office in the country. They looked like the happiest people in the world. People who had never known what a real tragedy was. God help them, they were about to learn.

“—you there? Mahir’s trying to control the forums, but he needs help, and we need you to find the valid news feed into all this, we—”

“Tell Mahir to contact Casey at Media Breakdown and arrange a fact-only feed-through of the situation at the farm; tell him we’ll trade an early release on my next candidate interview,” I said, tonelessly. “Wake Alaric, get him backing Mahir until Rick finishes on the floor, then throw him in there, too. He wanted to join the party? Well, here’s his invitation.”

“What are you going to do?”

Emily Ryman was laughing, hands clasped together. She had no idea.

Grimly, I said, “I’m going to stay here and report the news.”