Feed

Thirteen

The funeral services for Rebecca Ryman and her grandparents were held a week after the convention at the family ranch. The delay wasn’t for mourning or to allow family members time to travel; that’s how long it took for regional authorities to downgrade the ranch from a Level 2 hazard zone to a Level 5. It was still illegal to enter unarmed, but now at least nonmilitary personnel could enter unescorted. The area would return to its original Level 7 designation if it could go three years without signs of further contamination. Until then, even the kids would need to carry weapons at all times.

Most public opinion held that it wouldn’t matter how long it took for the hazard rating to drop; no family would choose to stay in a home and a profession—viewed by many as a dangerous, glorified hobby—that claimed the life of one of their children. They said the ranch would be long deserted by the time that happened.

I wish I could say that attitude was confined to the conservative fringe, but it wasn’t. Within six hours of Rebecca’s death, half the children’s safety advocacy groups were clamoring for tighter guidelines and attempting to organize legislation that would make the life led by the Rymans illegal. No more early riding classes or family farms; they wanted it shut down, shut down now, and shut down hard. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone but the Rymans, I think: Peter and Emily never attempted to map out the scenarios leading to the martyrdom of their eldest daughter, and so they’d never considered what a boon her death would be to certain organizations. Americans for the Children was the worst. Its “Remember Rebecca” campaign was entirely legal and entirely sleazy, although its attempts to use pictures of Jeanne and Amber had been quashed by the Rymans’ legal team. It didn’t matter. The images of Rebecca with her horses—and of postamplification horses attempting to disembowel the federal authorities putting them down—had already done their damage.

In the chaos and noise surrounding the outbreak at the ranch, it wasn’t really a surprise that Senator Ryman’s selection of a running mate barely made anyone’s radar, save for the hardcore politicos who couldn’t care less that people were dead… and me. I wasn’t surprised, although I must admit that I was more than slightly disappointed when it was announced that Governor Tate would accompany Senator Ryman on the ballot. It was a good, balanced ticket; it would carry most of the country, and it stood a good chance of putting Senator Ryman in the White House. The tragedy at the ranch had already put him twenty points up on his opponent in the early polls. The Democratic candidate, Governor Frances Blackburn, was a solid politician with an excellent record of service, but she couldn’t compete with a teenage heroine who sacrificed herself to save her sisters. This early in the race, people weren’t voting for the candidate. They were voting for his daughter. And she was winning.

My team and I offered to head back to California until after the services. While our contract with the senator said “constant access,” there’s a difference between honest reporting and playing the ghoul. Let the local news film the funeral. We’d do our laundry, give Buffy a chance to upgrade the equipment, and introduce Rick to the parents. Nothing says “crash course in working as a team” like starting with a major political convention, then moving on to meeting my mother on her home turf. Shaun can seem like a minor natural disaster sometimes, but Mom’s always a seven point five on the Richter scale.

That plan was scotched on the drawing board by Senator Ryman, who took me aside the day after the convention and informed me that it would mean a great deal to everyone if we would attend—and cover—the funeral. Rebecca loved our coverage of the elections, and given his position as the Republican Party candidate, he knew there would be reporters trying to get in to report on the funeral. This way, he’d know the press was reputable.

What was I supposed to say? Buffy can order most of what she needs online, and they have Laundromats everywhere. The only thing that might have been a sticking point was Rick, since he was still moving his personal belongings out of the hotel that had been the base camp for the Wagman campaign, but I didn’t anticipate it being much of a problem. He’d been forced to hit the ground running, and he’d done it without a murmur of complaint. His footage of Senator Ryman’s acceptance speech was top-notch, especially after we had cut it with the video feed of the assault on the ranch. Our viewer numbers have jumped more than eighteen percent since the convention, and they’re still climbing; I attribute it partially to adding Rick to the team. No one else got an exclusive on the Wagman pullout. Add that to the acceptance and the tragedy, and well…

Sometimes in the news, “luck” is just a matter of “capitalizing on someone else’s pain.”

March in Wisconsin is very different from March in California. The day of the funeral was gray and cold, with patches of snow dotting the struggling lawn of the O’Neil family cemetery. Emily’s family had been in the area long enough to have their own graveyard. If the old zombie flicks had been right about the dead clawing their way out of the ground, the funeral would have been a blood bath.

Fortunately, that’s one detail the movies got wrong. The earth was smooth beneath its uneven blanket of snow, save for the darker, recently dug patches in front of three headstones near the west wall. Folding chairs were set up on the central green and people sat close together, steadfastly not looking toward the displaced ground. A woman who bore a vague resemblance to Peter—enough that I was willing to tentatively place her as a cousin, if not a sister—murmured to her companion, “They’re so small.”

Of course. Cemeteries are an oddity in this modern world; since most bodies are cremated, there’s no need for them unless you’re fabulously wealthy, strongly religious, or clinging to tradition with both hands. When you do have an actual burial, you’re not looking at the iconic rectangles of disturbed earth that you find in pre-Rising movies. Modern graves are little circles in the grass, big enough to hold a handful of ash.

The mingled Ryman and O’Neil clans were dressed in the mourning editions of their Sunday best: all blacks and charcoal grays, with the occasional hint of off-white or cream in someone’s shirtfront or blouse. Even the little girls, Jeanne and Amber, were wearing black velvet. Shaun, Buffy, and I were the only attendees who weren’t related to the family; the senator’s security detail—a combination of the campaign agents and the new guys from the Secret Service—had stopped at the cemetery gates, guarding the perimeter without disturbing the ceremony. We were the privileged few, and everyone knew it. More than a few unpleasant looks had been tossed our way by the relatives as we moved into position.

Not that I cared. We were there for Peter, for Emily, and for the news. What the rest of the family thought didn’t matter.

“… and so we have come together, in the sight of God, to commend the mortal remains of His beloved children into His keeping, to be held in trust, no longer subject to the dangers of the world, until the day we may be reunited in the Kingdom of Heaven,” said the priest. “For His is the Kingdom, the life and the glory, and through His grace may we be granted everlasting life. Let us pray.” The family bowed their heads. So did Buffy, who was raised to a faith beyond “tell the truth, know the escape routes, and always carry extra ammunition.”

Shaun and I didn’t bow. Someone has to keep the lookout. After checking to make sure my shoulder cameras were still recording on an even keel, I turned my head, surveying the cemetery. It was completely indefensible; the low stone walls were more for delineation of boundaries than anything else and wouldn’t have kept a determined horde of zombies out for more than a few minutes. The gates were spaced widely enough to make the whole place little more than a big corral for humans. I shuddered.

Shaun caught the gesture and put a hand at the small of my back, steadying me. I flashed him a smile. He knows I don’t like being outside in poorly defended areas. He doesn’t feel the same way; open spaces just make him think something worth poking is bound to come along sooner than later.

The service was winding down. I schooled my expression back to grim serenity and turned to face forward as the priest closed his Bible. The family rose, many of them in tears. Most turned to head for the gates, where cars were waiting to take them to the reception at the funeral home. Nothing says “deeply in mourning” like canapés and free beer. A few remained, still looking toward the graves as if shell-shocked.

“I just feel so bad,” murmured Buffy. “How can things like this happen?”

“Luck of the draw?” Shaun shrugged. “Play with big animals, a little amplification is almost guaranteed. They’re lucky it waited this long.”

“Yeah,” I said, frowning. “Lucky.” Something wasn’t right about this whole setup. The timing, the scope—you need safety precautions on a scale most millionaires wouldn’t bother with to operate a horse ranch, even several miles from the nearest town, and you need to have them upgraded on a regular basis. If something went wrong, it would be contained in a matter of minutes. They might have to torch a barn, but they shouldn’t have lost anyone. Certainly not three family members and half the working staff. “Shaun, get Buffy back to the van, okay? I’m going to give my regrets to the family.”

“Shouldn’t we come, too?” asked Buffy.

“No, you go back to the van. Call Rick, make sure nothing’s caught fire while we were away from our screens.”

“But—”

Shaun reached around me to take Buffy’s arm. “C’mon, Buff. If she’s sending us away, it’s because she wants to poke something with a stick and see what happens.”

“Something like that,” I said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” said Buffy, letting Shaun guide her toward the cemetery gates. I turned to study the remaining members of the family. Peter and Emily were there, along with several other adults who looked enough like one another to be close relations. Emily had one arm around each of her two remaining daughters. She didn’t look like she’d slept for a week, and both Jeanne and Amber looked like they were finding their mother’s embrace more than a little smothering. Peter seemed older, somehow, his farm boy good looks strained by the speed and severity with which everything had gone wrong.

He caught the motion of my head as I looked toward them. He nodded slightly, indicating that it was safe for me to approach. I answered with a thin smile, beginning to pick my way across the slushy ground.

“Georgia,” said Emily, as I reached them. Letting go of Jeanne and Amber, she put her arms around me in a too-tight hug. The girls moved to stand behind an elderly woman who looked like she might be their paternal grandmother, blocking their mother from grabbing them again once she was done with me. I couldn’t blame them; Emily’s grief had given her a measure of hysterical strength that seemed likely to crack one of my ribs. “We’re so glad you came.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, patting her awkwardly on the back. “Buffy and Shaun send their regrets.”

“Emily, let the nice girl go,” said Peter, tugging his wife’s arm until she released me. I stepped quickly backward, and both Jeanne and Amber cast understanding glances my way. They’d been their mother’s targets since she ran out of the convention to get to them. “Georgia.”

“Senator Ryman.” He didn’t try to hug me. I appreciated that. “It was a beautiful ceremony.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” He glanced toward the churned-up earth. “Becky hated these things. Said they were morbid and silly. She would’ve stayed home, if she weren’t a required attendee.” He laughed, bitterly. “She really wanted to meet you.”

“I’m sorry she never got the chance,” I said, pushing my sunglasses up to shield my eyes from the light glinting off the patchy snow. “Would you mind if I took you aside for a moment? It won’t take long.”

“No, of course not.” He kissed Emily on the forehead, and said, “You just get back to the girls, all right, sweetheart? I’ll only be a moment.”

“All right,” said Emily. She managed to force a wavering smile, and said, “We’ll see you at the reception, won’t we, Georgia?”

“Of course, Mrs. Ryman,” I replied.

The senator and I walked until we were about eight feet from the group, far enough that they couldn’t hear us, but close enough to maintain visual contact. “Now, Georgia,” he said, without preamble. “What’s this all about?”

I tilted my chin up until I was looking directly at him, and said, “Senator, if you don’t mind, my team and I would like permission to go up to the ranch and take a look around.” He was silent. I continued: “If we walk the grounds and post our footage…”

“You think it’ll reduce trespassers looking for a little excitement?”

I nodded.

Senator Ryman looked at me for a long moment. Then, shoulders sagging, he nodded his acquiescence. “I hate this, Georgia,” he said, in a voice that was a million miles away from the proud, self-confident man I’d followed most of the way across the country. “This is supposed to be the start of the most exciting fight in my career, and instead I’m standing here consigning my eldest unto God when I just want to shake the bastard until he gives her back to me. It’s not fair.”

“I know, Senator,” I said. Glancing back to where Emily had managed to recapture her surviving children, I added, “But you’re not the only one it isn’t fair to.”

“Are you telling me to mind my family, young lady?” he asked, with a mirthless chuckle.

“Sometimes family is all we have, sir.”

“Very true, Georgia. Very true.” He followed my gaze back to Emily and the girls. “I’ll tell Em I’ve given you folks permission to go to the ranch. She’ll understand. The guards, now…”

“We have the proper licenses.”

“Good.” Raking his hair back from his forehead with one hand, he sighed. “Ain’t this just one hell of a mess?”

“Very much so,” I agreed.

We made our good-byes without much conviction; he needed to get back to the business of mourning, and I needed to get back to my team before Shaun decided to go hiking or Buffy took the wireless network off-line for upgrading. Rick hadn’t been with us long enough for me to know what I didn’t want him doing, but I was sure he’d come up with something. He was a journalist, after all, and we’re all incurably insane.

I walked toward the cemetery gates, tapping my ear cuff. “Shaun, what’s your twenty?”

“We’re parked behind the security vans,” Shaun said. Someone asked a question in the background, and he added, “Buffy wants to know if we need her or if she can go with Chuck. He’s pretty torn up, and she wants to get in some ‘couple time.’”

“Shaun Mason, you may be the only boy above the age of nine who still says ‘couple time’ like it was a dead rat.” I nodded to the guards as I passed through the gates and scanned the parking lot for the security vans.

“I do not,” said Shaun, sounding affronted. “I like dead rats.”

“Sorry. My bad. Tell Buffy she’s free to go, but I want her to have the field equipment ready, and she needs to be back for editing by nine.”

“The field equipment…?”

“I have Senator Ryman’s clearance. We’re heading for the ranch.” I grimaced at Shaun’s whooping and tapped my ear cuff again, cutting off the connection. The van was in sight; I could let him yell in my ear once I was inside, rather than putting up with it remotely.

Buffy was seated on a counter doing something arcane to a shoulder-mount camera when I stepped through the rear door. She’d changed out of her funeral clothes into something more comfortable, if still subdued, and when she looked up, it was obvious that she’d redone her makeup to match. “Hey.”

“Hey.” I looked around, starting to unbutton my jacket. “Where’s Shaun?”

“Up front checking his armor for holes.” She peered into the camera, blew lightly on the exposed circuitry, and snapped the cover back into place. “Chuck’s going to come pick me up, so you can leave me here when you head out. It’ll only take a few more minutes to review the field equipment.”

“Anybody call Rick?” I tossed my jacket onto a chair and started unbuttoning my dress shirt. I had a tank top under that; swap my skirt for jeans, add a Kevlar vest, my motorcycle jacket, and combat boots, and I’d be ready for a low-hazard field op. Most girls learn how to accessorize for dinner parties and dates. I learned to do it for hazard zones.

“He said he’d meet you at the ranch.” Buffy offered me the camera. “Here. This whole generation is on its last legs. We’re gonna need new ones sooner than later.”

“I’ll get it into the budget,” I said. Peeling off my shirt, I dropped it to the floor and took the camera, eyeing Buffy over my glasses. “Something on your mind, Buff?”

“No. Yes. Maybe.” She sat back on the counter, her gaze dropping to her hands. “You’re going to the ranch.”

“Yes.”

“It’s…”

“The area’s been downgraded. We have the licenses to enter, as long as we’re armed.”

Buffy’s head snapped up. “It’s disrespectful.”

Ah. The crux of the problem. “Disrespectful to whom, Buffy? To the dead?” She gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. “Buffy, the dead aren’t there. They’ve been buried.” After they were cremated to prevent their corpses from coming back to life and doing disrespectful things to the living.

“They died there,” she said, fiercely. “They died there, and now you’re going to turn it into more news.”

“We aired the attack.”

“That was different. That was something dangerous. This is just ghosts. Souls trying to sleep.” Her expression turned pleading. “Can’t we let them sleep? Please?”

“We’re not going to disturb them. If anything, we’re going so that they can sleep. The Rymans trust us to be respectful, and we will be, and by showing that there’s nothing of any interest in those buildings, we’ll keep less respectful journalists from breaking in looking for an ‘exposé.’” I might be wrong—journalists seeking a scoop will break into almost anything—but I needed to get in there, and I needed Buffy to stay calm. Without her to enhance any footage we got, we might well come up with less than nothing.

She sniffled. “You swear you’re not intending to upset their ghosts?”

“I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but I swear we won’t do anything to disturb any spirits that might be resting there.” I put down the camera she’d handed me and shook my head as I opened the van closet and pulled out the rest of my field gear. I always keep a few pairs of thick denim jeans on hand, the kind with steel fibers woven into the fabric. “Be prepared” isn’t just the Boy Scouts’ marching song anymore. “Zombies are enough. I don’t need to add poltergeists to the ranks of ‘things that want to kill me.’”

She studied me for a moment before she nodded, offering a small smile. “All right. It just seems ghoulish to go there on the day of the funeral.”

“I know, but time is sort of important right now,” I said. A horn honked outside. I glanced over my shoulder toward the door. “Sounds like your ride’s here.”

“That didn’t take long.” Buffy slid off the counter. “Your kits are packed. I didn’t review the auxiliary batteries, but you’d only need those if everything else failed. Technically, they’re not even required.”

“I know,” I said. “Get out of here. Have a nice evening with Chuck, and I’ll see you at the hotel at nine for editing and data consolidation.”

“Work, work, work,” she complained, but she was almost laughing as she stepped outside. I caught a glimpse of Chuck waving from his rental car before the van door banged shut, blocking them from view.

“Have a nice date, Buffy,” I said to the closed door and pulled on my jacket before moving to assess the field kits.

Normally, Buffy would have done all the checks before she went anywhere. Normally, where she was going was “back to the van” or “home to her room,” not out with her boyfriend. It’s not like she’s never dated; she’s had at least six boyfriends since we met, and unlike a large percentage of our generation, they’ve all been face-to-facers, not virtuals. She doesn’t date people she meets online unless they live locally and are willing to meet in the flesh, with all the security checks and blood tests that entails, and even then, she likes to keep her romantic relationships as off-line as possible. Partly because she likes the interaction—it’s a change from the amount of time she spends online—but I think it’s partly been to keep them untraceable. She’s never been comfortable with the fact that Shaun and I won’t talk about why we don’t date. She eventually gave up trying to hook us up with people she knew, but Chuck is still the first of her boyfriends who we’ve been allowed to spend any real time around, and I suspect it’s only because they met on the campaign trail.

Everyone has their own little quirks. My brother and I avoid romantic entanglements, and Buffy runs hers like acts of international espionage.

Checking the field kits took about five minutes. Shaun emerged from the front of the van carrying a crossbow and moving with a slight stiffness that signaled how much body armor he was wearing. Straightening, I tossed him his pack.

“Light,” he said, hefting it. “Did we decide to skip the cameras this time?”

“Actually, I decided to skip the weapons.” Picking up the other two kits, I brushed past him on my way up front. “If we meet any zombies, we’ll pacify them with Hostess snack cakes.”

“Even the living dead love Hostess snack cakes.”

“Precisely.” I hooked open the door between the sections of the van with my foot and tossed Rick’s field kit back to Shaun. “I’m driving.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said, with a mock annoyed look. Following me, he settled in the passenger seat and asked, “So what are we really doing?”

“Really doing? We’re really visiting the scene of a tragic accident to determine whether it was caused by gross human negligence or a simple series of unavoidable events.” I sat and pulled my seat belt across my lap. “Buckle up.”

He did. “You aren’t implying what I think you’re implying.”

“What am I not implying, Shaun?”

“They had to torch and burn the infection. Don’t you think someone would have noticed if things weren’t right?”

“Repeat the first part of your statement again.”

“They had to torch and…” He stopped. “You’re not serious.”

“Shaun, the O’Neils have been raising horses for generations. They didn’t even take a break after the Rising.” I pulled out of the lot and started down the road. The countryside around us was wide, flat, and relatively unbroken by anything as plebian as signs of human habitation. Not the best hunting territory for the living dead. “They don’t make mistakes on the level of allowing a massive outbreak that kills nearly half the hired help. It just doesn’t happen. So either somebody screwed up big time—”

“—or someone cut the screamers,” Shaun finished, hushed. “Why wouldn’t anyone have found anything?”

“Was anyone going to look? Shaun, if I say, ‘A big animal amplified and killed its owners,’ do you think, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ or do you think, ‘It was bound to happen sometime’?”

Shaun was quiet for several minutes as we drove toward the ranch. Finally, in a pensive tone, he said, “How big is this, George?”

I tightened my hands on the wheel. “Ask Rebecca Ryman.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“We’re going to tell the truth.” I glanced toward him. “Hopefully, that’s going to be enough.”

He nodded, and we drove on in silence.

Fourteen

Rick was a good match for our team in more ways than one: He had his own transport, and he didn’t leave home without it. I’d heard about the armor-plated VW Beetles—they’re in a lot of Mom’s antizombie ordnance reports, which she tends to leave lying all over the house—but I’d never actually seen one before Rick’s. It looked like a weird cross between an armadillo and a pill bug.

An electric blue armadillo.

With headlights.

He was parked outside the ranch gates, leaning against the side of his car and typing something into his PDA’s collapsible keyboard. He lifted his head as we drove up, folding the keyboard and stowing the entire unit in his pocket.

Shaun was out of the van before we’d stopped moving, pointing to Rick. “You do not lower your eyes in the field!” he snapped. “You do not split your attention, you do not focus on your equipment, and you especially do not do these things when you’re alone at an off-grid rendezvous point!” Rick blinked, looking more confused than anything else.

I stopped the van, leaning over to close Shaun’s door before opening my own. A lot of people don’t think my brother has a temper. It’s like they assume I somehow sucked up the entire quota of “cranky,” and now Shaun’s perpetually cheery and ready for a challenge while I glower at people from behind my sunglasses and plot the downfall of the Western world. They’re wrong. Shaun has a bigger temper than I do. He just saves his fits of fury for the important things, like finding one of our team members acting like an idiot in the vicinity of a recent outbreak.

Rick was realizing he had a problem. Putting up his hands in a placating gesture, he said, “The area was cleared, and they did a full disinfect. I looked it all up before I came out here.”

“Did they get a one hundred percent scratch-and-match between mammals meeting the KA amplification barrier, known victims, registered survivors, and potential vector points?” Shaun demanded. He knew they hadn’t, because there’s never been a one hundred percent return on the Nguyen-Morrison test array, not even under strict laboratory conditions. There’s always the chance something capable of carrying the virus, either in its own bloodstream or by carrying tainted blood or tissue on its person, got away.

“No,” Rick admitted.

“No, because it doesn’t happen. Which means you? Have basically been standing naked in the middle of the road, waving your arms and shouting, ‘Come get it, dead guys, I wanna be your next snack.’” He flung Rick’s field kit at his chest. Rick caught it and stood there, blinking as Shaun spun on his heel and stalked off toward the gates. I let him go. Someone needed to start the process of presenting our credentials to the guards on duty, and it would calm him down. Bureaucracy generally did.

Rick stared after Shaun, still looking shell-shocked.

“He’s right, you know,” I said, squinting at him through my sunglasses. The glare outside the van was bad enough to make me wish it were safe to take painkillers in the field. It’s not; nothing that dulls your awareness of your body and what it’s doing is a good idea. “What made you get out of your car?”

“I thought it was safe,” Rick stammered.

I shook my head. “It’s never safe. Get your pack on, activate your cameras, and let’s go.” I started along Shaun’s path to the ranch gates. Getting out of the car alone was a rookie mistake, but Rick’s record wasn’t heavy on field work. His reporting was good, and he knew enough to stick with the senior reporters in an area. He’d learn the rest if he lived long enough to get the chance.

If getting out of the car was a rookie mistake, going into the ranch on foot was blatant stupidity, but we didn’t have any real choice. Not only would our vehicles have been impossible to fit into any of the standing structures, we wouldn’t have been able to avoid getting hung up in potholes or in the ruts opened by the government cleaning equipment. Better on foot and paying attention than sucked into a false sense of security and taken out by hostile road conditions.

Shaun was outside the guard station, where two wary, clean-shaven men watched from behind thick sheets of safety glass. Both were wearing plain army jumpsuits. From the looks on their faces, this was their first outbreak, and we didn’t fit their expectations of the sort of folks who would walk into a sealed-off hazard zone, even one that was due to be unsealed within the next seventy-two hours and had been the scene of a complete Nguyen-Morrison testing, including bleach bombs and aerosol decontamination. If it’d been the sort of ranch that grew crops instead of livestock, they’d have been forced to shut it down for at least five years while the chemicals worked their way out of the soil. As it was, they’d be importing feed and water for eighteen months, until the groundwater tested clear again.

The things we’re willing to do to avoid the possibility of exposure to the live virus are sometimes awe inspiring. “Any trouble?” I asked, stopping next to Shaun and casting a tight-lipped smile toward the army boys. “My, don’t they look happy to see us?”

“They were happier before I showed them we had Senator Ryman’s permission to be here and the proper clearances to enter the property. Although I think they were kind of relieved when they realized our clearance levels mean they don’t have to come in with us.” Shaun grinned almost maliciously as he handed me and Rick the metal chits that served as our passes into the zone. Any hazard seals would react to the ID tags on the chits, opening to let us pass. “Somehow, I don’t think the boys want to meet a real live infected person of their very own. It’s amazing that they passed basic training.”

“Don’t tease the straights,” I said, pressing the chit against the strap of my shoulder bag. It adhered to the fabric with a nearly unbreakable seal, turning on and beginning to flash a reassuring green. “How long’s our clearance?”

“Standard twelve-hour passage. If we’re inside the zone when the chits run out, we’ll have to call for help and hope help answers.” Shaun pressed his own chit to the collar of his chain-mail shirt. It flashed before dimming to standard metallic gray.

“Any recent signs of movement in or around the zone?” Rick asked. His chit was clinging to the earpiece of his wireless phone, where its green flashes contrasted with the blinking yellow LED.

“Not a one.” Shaun jerked his up, indicating the guards. “Shall we move on before they book us for loitering outside a hazard zone?”

“Can they do that?” asked Rick.

“We’re within a hundred yards of a recent outbreak,” I said. “They can do just about whatever they want.” I walked toward the gates. The chit on my bag flashed and they swung open, letting me enter the ranch grounds. There were no blood tests on this side of the hazard zone. If I wanted to enter a known infection site when I was already infected, I’d just finish my transition behind a pre-established barrier. Not exactly what most people would consider a loss.

The gates shut behind me, only to open again as Shaun approached, and a third time for Rick. Only one person was allowed to pass at a time. If they’d followed standard procedure, the gates would also be electrified, with a current set to increase exponentially if anything grabbed hold. It wouldn’t do much to stop a horde of zombies that really wanted to get through, but it was better than nothing.

“Dropping the first fixed-point camera, setting the feed to channel eight, and activating screamers,” Shaun said, planting a small tripod. It extended an antenna, flashing yellow as it caught the local wireless. It would record everything it saw and feed it to the databases in the van. We wouldn’t get anything useful unless there was an outbreak while we were on the grounds, but it never hurts to cover your bases. More important, it would sound the alarm if it detected any motion not connected to one of the team’s identifying beacons. “George, we have a map?”

“We have a map,” I confirmed, pulling out my PDA and unfolding the screen to its full extension. “Buffy pulled it down before she left.” God bless Buffy. No team is complete without a good technician, and the word for an incomplete team is usually “fatality.” “Cluster round, guys.” They did.

The Ryman family ranch was laid out in the pre-Rising style, with a few adjustments to account for the increased security required by the senator’s political career and the possibility of invasion by the rampaging undead. Most of the buildings were unconnected, with four separate horse barns—one for foaling, one for yearlings, one for older horses, and the last, constructed in isolation and using modern quarantine procedures, for the sick. The main house had more windows than any sane person would be comfortable with, but that had apparently suited the Rymans just fine.

Shaun studied the map before asking, “Do we have the outbreak grid?”

“We do.” I started tapping. “Either of you boys care to place a bet as to where the outbreak started?”

“Isolation ward,” Rick said.

“Foaling,” said Shaun.

“Wrong.” I hit enter. A grid appeared, crisscrossing the map with streaks of red. The largest red zone surrounded the yearling barn, covering the entire building and extending out in all directions. “The first outbreak was in the yearling barn. Where the strongest, healthiest, most resistant horses were housed.”

Shaun frowned. “I don’t know much about horses, but that seems a little funny to me. We have a full match-up on the index case?”

“Ninety-seven percent certainty on the Nguyen-Morrison,” I said, pulling up a picture of a pale gold horse with a white streak down its nose. “Ryman’s Gold Rush Weather. Yearling male, not gelded, clean vet reports every three months since birth, and a clean blood test registered every week for the same time period. No history of elevated virus levels. If you were looking for the cleanest horse on the planet, epidemiologically speaking, you’d have trouble going wrong with this one.”

“And he’s our index?” said Rick. “That’s bizarre. Maybe something bit him?”

“They logged every movement these horses made, all day, every day.” I closed the files, snapping the screen of my PDA into its collapsed formation before slipping it into my shoulder bag. “Goldie went out for a run the night before the outbreak, was rubbed down, and checked out clean, with no wounds or scratches. He didn’t leave the barn again before things went south.”

“None of the other horses top out in the Nguyen-Morrison?” Shaun reached into his own bag, pulling out a collapsible metal rod that he began uncollapsing as the three of us moved, by unspoken accord, toward the side of the ranch where the barns were clustered. If there was evidence to be found, it would be in the barns.

“The closest is the horse in the stall next to his, Ryman’s Red Sky at Morning, which tested out at a ninety-one and had visible bite marks. Six percent pretty much says Goldie’s our index.”

“The only way that could happen is spontaneous amplification,” Shaun said, with a deep frown. He snapped the last segment of the rod into place and hit a button on the handle, electrifying the metal. “No chance of heart attack or other natural death?”

“Not in a place like this,” Rick said. We both looked toward him. Shaking his head, he said, “I did a piece on modern ranching a few years back. They have those animals so monitored that if they just up and die—a heart stops, or they suffocate on a piece of feed, or whatever—someone will know immediately.”

“So you’re saying the people on duty would have received some sort of notification that the horse had died, and they’d have been able to get there before he got up and started biting the other horses,” I said, slowly. “Why didn’t they?”

“Because when you convert instead of reanimating, there’s no interruption in your vital signs,” said Shaun. He was starting to sound almost excited. “One minute you’re fine, the next minute, bang, you’re a shambling mass of virus-spreading flesh. The monitors wouldn’t catch a spontaneous conversion because a machine wouldn’t be able to tell that anything was wrong.”

“And people say modern technology doesn’t do enough to protect us,” I deadpanned. “All right, so if the horse checked out clean at a seven o’clock rubdown and went into spontaneous amplification in the night, the monitors wouldn’t have caught it. That still doesn’t tell us why it happened.”

Spontaneous amplification is a reality. Sometimes, the virus sleeping inside a person decides it’s time to wake up, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Roughly two percent of the recorded outbreaks during the Rising were traced back to spontaneous amplifications. It usually hits only the very young or the very old, as the virus reacts to their rapidly changing body weight by making some rapid changes of its own. I’d never heard of spontaneous amplification occurring in livestock, but it’s never been proven that it couldn’t happen… and it seemed way too pat. The index case for equine spontaneous amplification happened to be in Senator Ryman’s barn, on the day he was confirmed as the next Republican candidate for president? Coincidences like that don’t exist outside of a Dickensian tragedy. They certainly don’t wander around happening in the real world.

“I don’t buy it,” said Rick, voicing my thoughts. “It’s too cut-and-dried. Here’s a horse, the horse is healthy, now the horse is a zombie, lots of people die, isn’t that tragic? It’s what I would write if you asked me to pen a front-page human interest story that would never happen.”

“So why isn’t anyone digging deeper?” Shaun stopped in the courtyard between the four barns, looking first at Rick, then at me. “Not to be rude or anything, but Rick, you’re new on this beat, and George, you’re sort of professionally paranoid. Why isn’t anyone else punching holes in this crap?”

“Because no one looks twice at an outbreak,” I said. “Remember how pissed you got when we had to do all that reading about the Rising back in sixth grade? I thought you were going to get us both expelled. You said the only way things could’ve gotten as bad as they did was if people were willing to take the first easy answer they could find and cling to it, rather than doing anything as complicated as actually thinking.”

“And you said that was human nature and I should be thankful we’re smarter than they are,” Shaun said. “And then you hit me.”

“That’s still your answer: human nature.”

“Give people something they can believe, especially something like a personal tragedy and a teenage girl being heroic to save her family, and not only will everyone believe it, everyone will want to believe it.” Rick shook his head. “It’s good news. People like to believe good news.”

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

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

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

“Clear,” I said, pulling out my .40.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You kiss our mother with that mouth?”

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

“Which are where?”

“Left-hand vest pocket.”

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

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

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

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

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

Rick’s shoulder bag was moving.

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

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

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

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

“It’s a cat.”

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

“A cat.”

“She tests clean, George,” Shaun said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

“That. On your count, Shaun!”

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

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

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

“Ready,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good.”

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

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

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

Something crunched under his feet.

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

“Shaun? Report.”

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

“Wait!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gotcha.”

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

“Yes, ma’am.”

Using the rake to turn over the straw where Shaun had stepped uncovered several more chunks of plastic, and a long, bent piece of snapped-off plastic in a familiar shape. Behind me, Shaun breathed in sharply. “George…”

“I see it.” I continued stirring the straw.

“That’s a needle.”

“I know.”

“If there’s no reason for the plastic to be in there, why is there a needle in there?”

“For no good reason,” said Rick. “Georgia, try a little bit to the right.”

I glanced toward him. “Why?”

“Because that’s where the hay is less crushed. If there’s anything else to find, it’s more likely to be intact if it’s off to the right.”

“Good call.” I turned my attention to the right-hand side of the stall. The first three passes found nothing. I had already decided the fourth pass would be the last in that area when the tines pulled an intact syringe into view. Not just intact: loaded. The plunger hadn’t been pushed all the way home, and a small amount of milky liquid was visible through the mud-smeared glass. The three of us stared at it.

Finally, Shaun spoke. “George?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think you’re a paranoid freak anymore.”

“Good.” I gingerly used the rake to pull the syringe closer. “Check the sharps bin and see if there are any isolation bags left. We need to vacuum seal this before we take it out of here, and I don’t trust our biohazard baggies.”

“Why?” Rick asked. “They did the Nguyen-Morrison.”

“Because there’s only one thing I can think of that someone would inject into a perfectly healthy animal that then turns around and becomes the index case for an outbreak,” I said. Just looking at the syringe was making me feel nauseous. Shaun could have stepped on that. He could have put his foot down wrong and…

New thought, Georgia. New thought.

“Syringes are watertight,” Shaun said, as he turned to head for the sharps bin. “Bleach wouldn’t have been able to get inside.”

“You mean—”

“Unless I’m wrong, we’re looking at enough Kellis-Amberlee to convert the entire population of Wisconsin.” I smiled without a trace of humor. “How’s that for a front-page headline?

“Rebecca Ryman was murdered.”

Fifteen

It turns out that calling a United States senator from inside a quarantined biohazard zone to report that you’ve found a live cat and a syringe containing what you suspect to be a small but terrifying amount of live Kellis-Amberlee is a great way to get the full and immediate attention of both the army and the Secret Service. I’ve always known radio and cellular transmissions out of quarantine zones were monitored, but I’d never seen the fact so clearly illustrated. The words “intact syringe” were barely out of my mouth before we were surrounded by grim-faced men carrying large guns.

“Keep filming,” I hissed to Rick and Shaun. They answered with small nods but were otherwise as frozen as I was, staring at the many, many guns around us.

“Put the syringe and any weapons you may be carrying on the ground and raise your hands above your heads,” boomed a dispassionate voice, distorted by the crackle of a loudspeaker.

Shaun and I exchanged a look.

“Uh, we’re journalists?” called Shaun. “On Class A-15 licenses with the concealed carry allowance? We’ve been following Senator Ryman’s campaign? So we’re carrying a lot of weapons, and we’re sort of uncomfortable with this whole ‘syringe’ thing. Do you really want to wait while we take off everything?”

“God, I hope not,” I muttered. “We’ll be here all day.”

The nearest of the armed men—one of the ones in army green rather than Secret Service black—tapped his right ear and said something under his breath. After a long pause, he nodded and called, in a much less intimidating voice than the one from the loudspeaker, “Just put down the syringe and any visible weapons, raise your hands, and don’t make any threatening moves.”

“Much easier, thanks,” said Shaun, flashing a grin. At first, I couldn’t figure out why he was wasting the energy to show off for the crowd, which was probably pretty high-strung and might be trigger-happy. Then I followed his line of sight and had to swallow a smile. Hello, fixed-point camera number four. Hello, ratings like you wouldn’t believe, especially with Shaun doing his best to keep it interesting.

I stepped forward and placed the syringe on the ground. It was safe inside its reinforced plastic bubble, which was safe inside a second plastic bubble. A thin layer of bleach separated them. Anything that leaked out of that syringe would die before it hit the open air. Still moving with extreme care, I put my gun a few feet away, followed by my Taser, the pepper spray I keep clipped to my shoulder bag—there are dangerous things out there other than the infected, and most of them hate getting stinging mist in their eyes—and the collapsible baton Shaun gave me for my last birthday. Holding up my hands to show that I didn’t have anything else, I began to step back into the line.

“The sunglasses too, ma’am,” said the soldier.

“Oh, for crying—she’s got retinal KA! You have our files from when we came in here, you should know that!” Shaun’s earlier grandstanding was gone, replaced by genuine irritation.

“The sunglasses,” repeated the soldier.

“It’s all right, Shaun; he’s just doing his job,” I said, gritting my teeth and squeezing my eyes closed before tugging off my sunglasses and dropping them. Again, I moved to step back into the line.

“Please open your eyes, ma’am,” said the soldier.

“Are you prepared to provide me with immediate medical attention?” I asked, not bothering to conceal my own anger. “My name is Georgia Carolyn Mason, license number alpha-foxtrot-bravo-one-seven-five-eight-nine-three, and like my brother said, you have my file. I have advanced retinal Kellis-Amberlee. If I open my eyes without protection, I risk permanent damage. Again, we’re journalists, and I will sue.”

There was another pause as the soldier conferred with whoever was giving him his orders. This one took longer; they were presumably calling up my file and confirming that no one was attempting to use a pair of sunglasses and some big words to conceal my impending conversion. “Return to your group,” he said, finally. I stepped backward, letting Shaun’s hand on my elbow guide me to a stop.

It took nearly ten minutes for Shaun and Rick to finish putting their weapons down and move back into place beside me, Shaun’s hand going to my elbow in case we needed to move. I’m basically blind in daylight without my glasses. Maybe worse, since a real blind person doesn’t have to worry about migraines or damaging their retinas just because there’s no cloud cover.

“Under whose authority have you entered these premises?” asked the soldier.

“Senator Peter Ryman,” said Rick, speaking with a calm that clearly said that he’d done more than his share of dealing with the authorities. “I believe it was Miss Mason’s call to the senator that you intercepted?”

The soldier ignored his barb. “Senator Ryman is aware of your current location?”

“Senator Ryman gave full consent for this investigation,” said Rick, stressing the word ‘senator.’ “I’m sure he’ll be very interested in our findings.”

There was another pause as the soldier conferred. This one was interrupted by a crackle of static, and Senator Ryman’s voice came over the loudspeaker, saying, “Give me that thing. What are your people doing? That’s my press corps, and you’re acting like they’re trespassers on my land—you don’t see something wrong with that?” Another voice mumbled contrition outside the range of the speaker’s microphone, and Senator Ryman boomed, “Damn right, you didn’t think. You folks all right? Georgia, have you gone mental, girl? Get your glasses back on. You think a blind reporter’s going to be much good at uncovering all my dirty little secrets?”

“These nice men told me to take them off, sir!” I called.

“These nice men with all the guns,” Shaun added.

“Well, that was very neighborly of them, but now I’m asking you to put them back on. Georgia, you got a spare set?”

“I do, but they’re in my back pocket—I’m afraid I’ll drop them.” Never go out without a spare pair of sunglasses. Preferably three. Of course, that anticipates contamination, not army-induced flash-blinding.

“Shaun, get your sister her glasses. She looks naked without them. It’s creeping me out.”

“Yes, sir!” Shaun let go of my elbow and reached into my pocket. A moment later, I felt him pressing a fresh pair of glasses into my palm. I let out a relieved sigh, snapped them open, and slid them on. The glare receded. I opened my eyes.

The scene hadn’t changed much. Shaun and Rick were still flanking me, the armed men were still surrounding us, and fixed-point camera number four was still transmitting the whole thing back to the van on a band so low that it would look like white noise to most receivers. Buffy stays on top of what’s happening in the field of wireless technology for just that reason; the more she knows, the harder it is to jam our signals. I didn’t know whether our higher-band cameras were being blocked—probably, considering the army—but our low-band was going to be fine.

“Are your eyes all right, Georgia?” asked the senator. Shaun was giving me a look that asked the same question, in fewer words.

“Absolutely, sir,” I called. That wasn’t entirely true. My migraine was reaching epic proportions and would probably be with me for days. Still, it was close enough for government work. “We need to talk when these nice men are done, if you have time.”

“Of course.” There was a tension in the senator’s voice that belied his earlier friendliness. “I want to know everything.”

“So do we, sir,” said Rick. “For one thing, we’d very much like to know what’s in this syringe. Unfortunately, we lack the facilities to test its contents.”

“The item in question is now in the custody of the United States Army,” said the first voice, reclaiming the loudspeaker from Senator Ryman. “What it does or does not contain is no longer your concern.”

I straightened. Shaun and Rick did the same.

“Excuse me,” Rick said, “but are you saying that potential proof that live Kellis-Amberlee was used to cause an outbreak on American soil, on the property of a candidate for President of the United States of America, is not the concern of the people? Of, to be specific, three fully licensed and accredited representatives of the American media, who located that proof after being invited to perform an investigation that the armed forces had neglected to carry out?”

The soldiers surrounding us stiffened, and their guns were suddenly at angles that implied that accidents can happen, even on friendly soil. The Secret Service men frowned but remained more relaxed; after all, the original investigation hadn’t been under their control.

“Son,” said the original voice, “I don’t believe you want to imply what you’re implying.”

“What, that you’re saying we don’t get to know what we found, even when we have a worldwide audience that really, really wants to know?” Shaun asked, folding his arms and sliding into a hip-shot pose that seemed casual, if you didn’t know him well enough to see how pissed off he was. “That doesn’t scream ‘freedom of the press’ to me.”

“It won’t say ‘freedom of the press’ to our readers, either,” I said.

“Miss, there are things called ‘nondisclosure forms,’ and you’ll find that I can have all three of you signing them before you take step one outside of this property.”

“Well, sir, that might work if we hadn’t been streaming our report live all along,” I replied. “If you don’t believe me, hit our Web site and see for yourself. We have a live feed, a transcript, the works.” There was a pause before the sound of muffled swearing drifted through the loudspeaker. Somebody looked online. I allowed myself to smile. “If you wanted this kept secret, you shouldn’t have left it for the journalists to find.”

“And what I’d like to know,” said Senator Ryman, in a voice that was suddenly colder than it had been before, “is what gives you the authority to seize materials found on my property without giving full disclosure to me, as the owner. Especially if said materials may have been involved in the death of my daughter and her grandparents.”

“All sealed hazard zones—”

“Remain the property of the original owners, who must continue to pay taxes but will not benefit from any natural resources or profitable development of the land,” said Rick. I gave him a sidelong look. Smiling serenely, he said, “Secor v. the State of Massachusetts, 2024.”

“That aside, covering up evidence is rarely smiled upon in this country,” Senator Ryman said. “Now, I believe what you intended to tell these nice folks was that they were free to leave the zone as soon as they’ve passed their mandatory blood tests, and that you’ll be contacting me and them with an analysis of the contents of that syringe, given as how they found it and it was found on my property.”

“Well—”

Senator Ryman cut him off. “I hope you understand that arguing with a senator—especially one who intends to be president, if only so he can make you realize what an imbecilic move this was—is not the best way to further your career.”

There was a longer pause before the first voice spoke again, saying carefully, “Well, sir, I think perhaps you’ve gotten the wrong idea about this situation…”

“I hoped that was the case. I assume my people are free to go?”

Now falsely jovial, the first voice said, “Of course! My men are just there to escort them to their blood tests. Men? Get those citizens out of the field!”

“Sir, yes sir!” barked the soldiers. The Secret Service just looked faintly disgusted with the entire situation.

The soldier who asked me to remove my sunglasses consulted with the speaker on his shoulder before saying, reluctantly, “If the three of you would retrieve your weapons and follow me, I’ll take you to the gate for testing and release. Please don’t attempt to touch the article you removed from the outbreak site.”

Rick looked like he was going to contest the phrase “the article” by bringing up the fact that we’d removed more than one thing from the outbreak site. Since I didn’t think the cat would be happy to be dissected by army scientists, I kicked Rick in the ankle. He glared at me. I ignored him. He’d thank me later. Or the cat would.

Picking our weapons back up took longer than putting them down, since all the safeties had to be checked. The area was certified as clean as was reasonable under the Nguyen-Morrison—as clean as any area where you found a syringe full of potential live-state Kellis-Amberlee could be—but shooting yourself in the foot in the vicinity of a recent outbreak still strikes me as an all-around rotten plan. Our escort waited as we armed ourselves and then walked with us in lockstep to the gates, where, I was pleased to see, Steve and two other men from Senator Ryman’s security detail were waiting with the blood test units.

I caught my breath as I saw the boxes. Leaning over slightly, I nudged Shaun with my elbow. He followed my gaze and whistled. “Pulling out the big guns, there, Steve-o?”

Steve cracked a thin smile. “The senator wants to be certain you’re all right.”

“My brother’s never been all right, but Rick and I are clean,” I said, holding out my right hand. “Rock me.”

“My pleasure,” he said, and slid the box over my hand.

Blood testing kits range from your basic field units, which can be wrong as often as thirty percent of the time, to the ultra-advanced models, which are so sensitive that they’ve been known to trigger false positives as they pick up the live Kellis infection harbored by nearly every human on Earth. The most advanced handheld kits are the Apple XH-237s. They cost more than I care to think about, and since they’re field kits, they can only be used once without replacing the needle array, a process that costs more than most independent journalists make in a year. Once is more than enough. Needles so thin they can barely be felt, hitting at sites on all five fingers, the palm, and the wrist. Viral detection and comparison mechanisms so advanced that the Army supposedly bought the right to use several of Apple’s patents after the XH-237 came out.

Shaun and I carry one—only one—in the van. We’ve had it for five years. We’ve never felt rich or desperate enough to use it. You only use the XH-237 when you need to be sure, right here and now, with no margin for error. It’s a kit for use after actual exposure. The army didn’t wonder what was in that syringe. Somehow, they knew. The implications of that were more than a little disturbing.

Steve activated the kit. The lid locked down, flattening my palm until I felt the tendons stretch. There was a moment of pain. I tensed, but even waiting for it, I couldn’t feel the needles as they began darting in and out of my hand and wrist. The lights atop the unit began to cycle, flashing red, then yellow, and finally settling, one by one, into a steady, unblinking green. The entire process took a matter of seconds.

Steve smiled as he dropped the unit into a biohazard bag. “Despite all natural justice, you’re still clean.”

“That’s one more I owe to my guardian angel,” I said. A glance to the side showed me that Shaun’s unit was still cycling, while Rick’s test was just getting started.

“Yeah, well, stop making that angel work so hard,” said Steve, more quietly. I looked back to him, surprised. His expression was grave. “You can leave the zone now.”

“Right,” I said. I walked to the gate, where two blank-faced men in army green watched me press my forefinger against the much simpler testing pad. Another needle bit deeply, and the light switched from green to red to green again before the gate clicked open. Shaking my stinging hand, I stepped out.

Our van and Rick’s car had been joined by a third vehicle: a large black van with mirrored windows that gleamed with the characteristic patina of armor plating. The top bristled with enough antennae and satellite dishes to make our own relatively modest assortment of transmitters look positively sparse. I stood, considering it, as Shaun and Rick made their own exits from the ranch and moved to stand beside me.

“That look like our friendly order-giver to you?” Shaun asked.

“Can’t imagine who else it would be,” I said.

“Well, then, let’s go up, say hello, and thank them for the welcome. I mean, I was touched. A fruit basket might have been more fitting, but an armed ambush? Definitely a unique way to show that you care.” Shaun went bounding for the van. Rick and I followed at a more sedate pace.

Shaun banged on the van door with the heel of his hand. When there was no reply, he balled his hand into a fist and resumed banging, louder. He was just starting to get a good rhythm going when the door was wrenched open by a red-faced general who glared at us with open malice.

“I don’t think he’s a music lover,” I commented to Rick. He snorted.

“I don’t know what you kids think you’re doing—” began the general.

“Pretty sure they were looking for me,” said Senator Ryman, stepping up behind him. The general cut off, shifting the force of his glare to the senator. Ignoring him, Senator Ryman moved around him and out of the van and clasped Shaun’s hand. “Shaun, good to see you’re all right. I was a bit concerned when I heard that transmission had been intercepted.”

“We got lucky,” Shaun said, with a grin. “Thanks for getting us through the red tape.”

“My pleasure.” Senator Ryman looked back at the glowering general. “General Bridges, thank you for your concern for the well-being of my press pool. I’ll be speaking to your superiors about this operation, and I’ll make sure they know your part in it.”

The general paled. Still grinning, Shaun waggled his fingers at him.

“Nice to meet you, sir. Have a nice day.” Turning back to Rick and me, he slung his arms around our shoulders. “So, my beloved partners in doing really stupid shit for the edification of the masses, would you say I bought us another three percent today? No, that’s too conservative, for I am a God among men and a poker into unpokeable places. Make that five percent. Truly, you should all worship me in the brightness of my glory.”

I turned my head enough to glance at the Senator. He was still forcing himself to smile, but the expression wasn’t reflected in his eyes. That was the face of a man under considerable strain.

“Maybe later,” I said. “Senator Ryman? Did you drive out here?”

“Steve was listening to your report,” the senator said. “When he heard you’d found something, he called me, and we came out here immediately.”

“Thank you for that, sir,” said Rick. “If you hadn’t, we might have had a few issues to contend with.”

“Permanent blindness,” said Shaun, looking at me.

“An all-expenses paid stay at a government biohazard holding facility,” I countered. “Sir, did you want us to follow you back to the house and give you the details on what we found?”

“Actually, Georgia, thank you, but no. Right now, I’d like the three of you to return to your hotel and do whatever it is you need to do. Go do your jobs.” There was something broken in his expression. I’d thought he looked old at the funeral, but I was wrong; he looked old now. “I’ll call you in the morning, after I’ve had time to explain to my wife that our daughter’s death wasn’t an accident, and to get very, very drunk.”

“I understand,” I said. Looking to Rick, I said, “Meet us at the hotel.” He nodded and turned to head for his car. I didn’t want him to ride with us and leave it here. We’d just annoyed the army. A little accidental “vandalism” wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. “You’ll call if you need anything, sir?”

“You can count on it.” The senator’s voice was mirthless. So was his expression as he walked over to his government-issue SUV. Steve was already standing next to the passenger-side door, holding it open. I couldn’t see any other security guards, but I knew they were there. They wouldn’t be taking any chances with a presidential candidate this close to a recent hazard zone. Especially not after the things we’d just learned.

I watched the senator climb into the car. Steve shut the door behind him, nodded toward us, and got into the driver’s side, pulling out. Rick’s little armored VW followed a few minutes later, rumbling down the road toward civilization.

Shaun put his hand on my shoulder. “George? We okay to get going before the jerks in power come up with a reason to detain us? Other than the cat. Rick took the cat with him, so if there’s going to be detention, it’ll just be him. Beating erasers, getting electrodes strapped to sensitive parts of his body…”

“Huh?” I twisted around to look at him. “Right, leaving. Yeah, I’m ready to go.”

“You feeling okay?” He peered at me. “You’re pale.”

“I was thinking about Rebecca. You drive? My head hurts too much for it to be safe.”

Now Shaun was really starting to look concerned. I don’t like to let him drive when I’m a passenger. His idea of traffic safety is going too fast for the cops to catch up. “You sure?”

I tossed him the keys. Usually, I don’t like to be in the car when he’s behind the wheel, but usually, I don’t have a bunch of dead people, a distraught presidential candidate, and a splitting headache to contend with. “Drive.”

Shaun gave me one last worried look and turned to head for the van. I followed and climbed into the passenger seat, closing my eyes. Showing rather uncharacteristic concern for my well-being, Shaun opted to drive like a sane human being, pulling out at a reasonably sedate fifty or so miles per hour, and actually acknowledging that the brakes could be used in situations other than “band of zombies blocking the road ahead.” I settled deeper into my seat, keeping my eyes closed, and started to review.

When I said that the facts on the outbreak at the ranch didn’t add up, I’d been half-expecting to find some sign of human neglect or possibly of an intruder who kicked off the whole mess and managed to get overlooked in the carnage, leaving it to be blamed on the horses. Some small thing that was nonetheless enough to trigger my sense of “something isn’t right here.” In short, a blip, a little bit of nothing that didn’t change anything.

Rebecca Ryman was murdered.

This changed everything.

We’d known for weeks that Tracy’s death—and thus probably the entire Eakly outbreak, although there wasn’t anything conclusive that could be used to prove it—wasn’t an accident, but we’d had no real proof that it was anything more than some lunatic taking advantage of an opportunity to cause a little chaos. Now… the chances of two random acts of malicious sabotage happening to the same group of people were small to nil. They just got smaller when you stopped to consider that the man who connected both incidents was one of the current front-runners for the office of President of the United States of America. This was big. This was very, very big.

And it was also very, very bad, because whoever was behind it thought nothing of violating Raskin-Watts, and that meant they’d already crossed a line most people don’t even realize is there. Murder is one thing. This was terrorism.

“George? Georgia?” Shaun was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes, squinting automatically before I realized that I was facing blessed dimness. Cocking an eyebrow, I turned toward him. He smiled, looking relieved. “Hey. You fell asleep. We’re here.”

“I was thinking,” I said primly, unbuckling my belt before admitting, “and maybe also dozing a little bit.”

“It’s no big. How’s the head?”

“Better.”

“Good. Rick’s already here, and your crew is driving him up a wall—he’s called three times to find out when we’d be on site.”

“Any word from Buffy?” I grabbed my bag and opened the door, sliding out of the car. The parking garage was cool and fairly full. Not surprising; when the senator booked our rooms, he put us in the best hotel in town. Five-star security doesn’t come cheap, but it comes with perks, like underground parking with motion sensors that keep constant track not only of who’s where, but how long they’ve been there and what they’re doing. Stay down here walking in circles for a while, and Shaun and I could get a whole new view of hotel security. That might have been appealing if we hadn’t already been working a story that was almost too hot to handle. I was starting to miss the days when toying with rich people’s security systems was enough to make our front page.

“She’s still at Chuck’s, but she says the servers are prepped to handle whatever load we ask them to and that the Fiction section won’t have a response for a day or two anyway; we should go ahead and run without her.” Shaun slammed his door, starting toward the elevators that would let us into the main hotel. “She seemed pretty shaken up. Said she’d probably sleep over there tonight.”

“Right.”

Like most of the senator’s men, Chuck was staying at the Embassy Suites Business Resort, a fancy name for a series of pseudo-condos that offered less transitory lodgings than our own high-scale but strictly temporary accommodations. His place came with a kitchen, living room, and a bathtub a normal human being could actually take a bath in. Ours came with a substantial array of cable channels, two queen-sized beds that we’d shoved together on the far side of the room in order to make space for the computers, and a surprisingly robust electrical system. We’d only managed to trip the circuit breakers twice, and for us, that’s practically a record.

The elevators were protected by a poor-man’s air lock. The sliding glass doors opened at our approach, then slid closed, sealing us into a small antechamber. A second set of glass doors barred us from the elevator. Being a high-end hotel, they were configured to handle up to four entrances at a time, although most people wouldn’t be foolish enough to take advantage of that illusionary convenience. If anyone failed to check out as clean, the doors would lock and security would be called. Going into an air lock with someone you weren’t certain was uninfected was a form of Russian roulette that few cared to indulge in.

Shaun took my hand, squeezing before we split up. He took the leftmost station while I took the one on the right.

“Hello, honored guests,” said the warm, mock-maternal voice of the hotel. It was clearly designed to conjure up reassuring thoughts of soft beds, chocolates on your pillow every morning, and no infections ever getting past the sealed glass doors. “May I have your room numbers and personal identifications?”

“Shaun Phillip Mason,” said Shaun, grimacing. Our usual games worked on the security system at home, but with a setup this advanced, there was too much potential that the computer would mistake “messing around” for “confused about your own identity” and call security. “Room four-nineteen.”

“Georgia Carolyn Mason,” I said. “Room four-nineteen.”

“Welcome, Mr. and Ms. Mason,” said the hotel, after a fifteen-second pause to compare our voice prints to the ones on file. “Could I trouble you for a retinal scan?”

“Medical dispensation, federal guideline seven-fifteen-A,” I said. “I have a registered case of nonactive retinal Kellis-Amberlee and would like to request a pattern recognition test, in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

“Hang on while I check your records,” said the hotel. It fell silent. I rolled my eyes.

“Every time,” I muttered.

“It’s just trying to be thorough.”

“Every time.”

“It only takes the system a few seconds to find your file.”

“How many times have we gone through this garage now?”

“Maybe they figure that if you were infected, you’d forget that stupid federal guideline.”

“I’d like to forget your stupid—”

The speaker clicked back on. “Ms. Mason, thank you for alerting us to your medical condition. Please look at the screen in front of you. Mr. Mason, please proceed to the line marked on the floor, and look at the screen in front of you. Tests will commence simultaneously.”

“Lucky disabled bitch,” muttered Shaun, placing his toes on the indicated line and opening his eyes wide.

My screen flickered, resetting from scanning to text mode, and displayed a block of text. I cleared my throat and read, “Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December, and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow, vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow.”

“Please hold,” said the hotel. The black plastic doors on two of the test panels slid upward, revealing the metal testing panels. “Mr. and Ms. Mason, please place your hands on the diagnostic panels.”

“Don’t you love how it doesn’t tell us whether we’ve passed or not?” said Shaun, putting his hand flat on the first panel. “They could be calling security right now and just stalling us until they get here.”

“Gee, thanks, Mr. Optimism,” I said. I pressed my hand to the second panel, feeling the brief sting of a needle against the base of my palm. “Got any other cheery thoughts?”

“Well, if Rick’s frantic, Mahir may have experienced spontaneous human combustion by now.”

“I hope somebody got it on film.”

“Mr. and Ms. Mason, welcome to the Parrish Weston Suites. We hope you enjoy your stay; please let us know if there’s anything we can do to make you more comfortable.” The hotel finished delivering its sugar-soaked greeting as the doors between us and the elevator slid open, allowing us to proceed. They closed as soon as we were through, locking us out of the air lock. “Thank you for choosing the Weston family of hotels.”

“Same to you,” I said, and hit the Call button.

The science of moving people from point to point has improved over the past twenty years, since the infected have done a lot to discourage the once-natural human desire to linger alone in dark, poorly defended places. The Weston had nine elevators sharing a series of corridors and conduits. They were controlled by a central computer that spent the day dispatching them along the most efficient, collision-free routes. It took less than five seconds for the elevator doors to open. It promptly skidded sideways twenty yards once we were inside, beginning the rapid ascent to the elevator access closest to our hotel rooms.

“Priorities?” asked Shaun, as the elevator shot upward.

“Clear the message boards, perform a general status check-in, and debrief,” I said. “I’ll get my crew online if I have to haul them out of their beds. You get yours.”

“What about the Fictionals?”

“Rick can handle them.” If Buffy wanted to skip out on what might be the most important scoop the two more realistic sections of the site ever had, that was her prerogative, but she’d have to cope with us rousing her junior bloggers. Her department didn’t get to hang up the blackout curtains just because she wanted to get laid.

Shaun grinned. “Can I tell him?”

The elevator slowed as it approached our floor, dumping inertia at such a rate that you’d never guess it had just been traveling in excess of twenty miles per hour. The doors slid open with a ding. “If it’ll make you happy, by all means, tell him. Make sure he knows Magdalene is his to abuse. That should help things a bit.” I approached our room, pressing my thumb against the access panel. It flashed green, acknowledging my right to enter. Shaun opened the door and shoved past me, leaving me standing in the hall. I sighed. “After you.”

“Don’t mind if I do!” he called back.

Rolling my eyes, I followed him.

When the senator booked our rooms, he gave us a pair of adjoining suites, assuming Buffy and I would take one room while Shaun and Rick took the other. It didn’t work out that way. Buffy refuses to sleep without a nightlight, which I can’t tolerate for obvious reasons; Shaun tends to respond violently to unexpected noises in the night. So Rick and Buffy wound up in one room, while Shaun and I were in the other with all the computers, turning it into our temporary headquarters.

Rick was at a terminal when we came in. The cat he’d saved was curled up in his lap, purring. I’d be purring, too, if I’d just eaten the better part of a tuna fish sandwich from room service.

“Lucky cat,” I commented.

“Oh, thank God,” said Rick, looking up. “Everyone wants to know what we’re doing next. The raw footage has been downloaded so many times I thought we were going to blow up one of the servers, Mahir won’t stop pinging me, and the message boards are—”

I interrupted him with a wave of my hand. “What are the numbers like, Rick?”

“Ah…” He recovered quickly, glancing to the top of his screen. “Up seven percent in all markets.”

Shaun whistled. “Wow. We should uncover terrorist conspiracies more often.”

“We haven’t uncovered it yet; we’ve just found out that it existed,” I said, and sat down at my own terminal. “Hit your boards and start pinging your people. We’re doing the debrief in thirty, and then we start to edit and recap for the evening reports.”

“On it.” Shaun grabbed a chair and looked to Rick, adding carelessly, “You get to ping the Fictionals. Buffy isn’t coming.”

“Oh, great,” said Rick, wrinkling his nose. He was already pulling up his IM lists as he asked, “Why do I get the honor?”

“Because you kept the cat,” I said. “Kick Magdalene. She’ll help you. Hush now. Mommy’s working.” He snorted but turned back to his computer. Shaun and I did the same.

It took thirty minutes to beat the message boards into something that looked less like a combination of a forest fire and a conspiracy theorist convention. No one had quite reached the point of linking the outbreak at the Ryman family ranch with the initial release of the Kellis cure and the death of JFK, but they’d have gotten there before much longer. As I’d expected, everyone in my department was already up, online, and doing their best to moderate the mess, and from the crossover threads, it looked like the same was mostly true for the Irwins and the Fictionals. Behold the power of the truth. When people see its shadow on the wall, they don’t want to take the time to look away.

“My boards are clear,” Shaun called. “Ready when you are.”

“Same,” Rick said. “The chat relay is humming nicely, and the volunteer mods have things under control.”

“Excellent.” Since the volunteers weren’t technically employees of After the End Times, they didn’t need to be included in the debriefing. I pulled up the employee chat and typed, Log on now. “Turn on your conference functions, boys. We’re about to see the swarm.”

“Logged on.”

“Logged on.”

“Logging on now. Room eleven, maximum security.” Our conferencing system is half the standard Microsoft Windows VirtuParty setup—allowing people to share real-time socialization through web-cams and a common server—and half Buffy’s own homebrew. All eleven of our channels have varying degrees of security, from the base three, which clever readers can break into with relative ease, to eleven, which has never been successfully violated. Not even by the people we’ve paid to try.

Windows began spawning on my screen, each containing the small, pixelated face of one of our bloggers. Shaun, Rick, and I appeared first, followed almost immediately by Mahir, who looked like he hadn’t slept in several days, Alaric, and Suzy, the girl I’d hired to replace Becks after she jumped ship to the Irwins. Becks herself appeared a moment later, along with a trio of Irwins I only vaguely recognized. Five more faces followed them as the Fictionals logged in; three of them were sharing one screen, proving that Magdalene was hosting another of her infamous grindhouse parties.

When all was said and done, we were only missing Dave—one of Shaun’s Irwins, who was on a field trip in the wilds of Alaska and probably couldn’t get to a conferencing setup—and Buffy. I looked from face to face, studying their expressions while the initial quiet still held. They looked worried, confused, curious, even excited, but none of them looked like they had anything to hide. This was our team. This was what we had to work with. And we had a conspiracy to break.

“All right, everyone,” I said. “This afternoon, we led an expedition onto the Ryman family ranch. You’ve seen the footage by now. If you haven’t, please log out, watch it, and come back. Here’s the topic at hand: ‘What happens next?’”

Sixteen

The discussion lasted late into the morning. People dropped off the conference one by one, until it was just Rick, Mahir, and me. Shaun had long since passed out at his terminal, leaning back in his chair and snoring. Rick’s newly acquired cat was curled up on his chest with its tail tucked over its nose, occasionally opening an eye to glare at the room.

“I don’t like this, Georgia,” said Mahir, worry and exhaustion blurring his normally crisp English accent into something much softer. He ran his hand through his hair. He’d been doing that for hours, and it was sticking up in all directions. “The situation is starting to sound like it isn’t exactly safe.”

“You’re on the other side of the planet, Mahir. I don’t think you’re going to get hurt.”

“It’s not my safety I’m concerned with here. Are you sure we want to continue to pursue the situation? I’d rather not be reporting your obituary.” He sounded so anxious that I couldn’t be angry with him. Mahir’s a good guy. A little conservative, and generally inclined to avoid taking risks, but a good guy and a fabulous Newsie. If he couldn’t understand why we were pursuing things, I just needed to make them clearer.

“Everyone who died at the ranch was murdered,” I said. His image winced. “The people who died in Eakly were murdered, too, and that set of casualties nearly included me and Shaun. There’s something connected to this candidate and this campaign that someone wants to see destroyed, and they’re not above causing a little collateral damage. You want to know if we want to continue pursuing the situation. I want to know what makes you think we can afford not to.”

Mahir smiled, reaching up to adjust his glasses. “I was assuming you’d say something along those lines, but I wanted to be certain of it. Rest assured that you have the full support of everyone here. If there’s anything I can do, all you have to do is say so.”

“You know, Mahir, your support is something I never worry about. I may have something for you very soon,” I said. “Although if you play ‘test the boss’ again, I may kill you. For now, it’s almost four in the morning, and the senator’s going to want to talk before much longer. I hereby declare this discussion over. Rick, Mahir, thanks for sticking it out.”

“Any time,” said Rick, voice echoing as the relay raced to keep up with him. His window blinked out.

“Cheers,” said Mahir, and logged off. I closed the conference, standing. I was so stiff that it felt like my spine had been replaced with carved teak, and my eyes were burning. I removed my sunglasses and rubbed my face, trying to relieve some of the tension. It wasn’t working.

“Bed?” asked Rick.

I nodded. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but—”

“Get out. I know. Wake me when it’s time to go?”

“I will.”

“Good night, Georgia. Sleep well.” Rick opened the adjoining door with a faint creak. I opened my eyes, turning to wave as he slipped out.

“You too, Rick,” I said. Then the door was closed, and I staggered to the bed, shedding clothes as I went. When I was down to T-shirt and panties, I abandoned the notion of looking for nightclothes and crawled under the covers, closing my eyes again as I sank into blessed darkness.

“Georgia.”

The voice was vaguely familiar. I pondered its familiarity for a moment, and then rolled over, deciding I didn’t need to give a damn.

“Georgia.”

There was more anxiousness to the voice this time. Maybe I needed to pay attention to it. It wasn’t the sort of anxiousness that said “Pay attention or something is going to eat your face.” I made a faint grumbling noise and didn’t open my eyes.

“George, if you don’t wake up right now, I’m going to pour ice water over your head.” The statement was made in an entirely matter-of-fact manner. It wasn’t a threat, merely a comment. “You won’t like that. I won’t care.”

I licked my lips to moisten them and croaked, “I hate you.”

“Where’s the love? There’s the love. Now get out of bed. Senator Ryman called. You slept through me talking to him for, like, the whole time I was getting dressed. How late were you up last night?”

I opened my eyes and squinted at Shaun. He was wearing one of his bulkier shirts, the ones he puts on only when he needs to cover body armor. I pushed myself unsteadily into a sitting position, holding out my left hand. He dropped my sunglasses into it. “Sometime around four. What time is it?”

“Almost nine.”

“Oh, my God, kill me now,” I moaned, and rose, shuffling toward the bathroom. The hotel had been happy to switch our standard light bulbs for lower-wattage soft lights that wouldn’t hurt my eyes, but management didn’t have a way to swap out the built-in bathroom fluorescents. “What time will he be here? Or are we going to him?”

“You’ve got fifteen minutes. Steve’s picking us up.” There was a distinctly amused note in Shaun’s voice as he relayed this piece of information. “Buffy’s pissed. She and Chuck are already with the Rymans, and she didn’t have spare clothes with her. I got the world’s angriest text message while I was on the phone.”

“She wants to have her night on the town, she can take the walk of shame the day after.” The bathroom lights were searingly bright, even through my sunglasses. I looked in the mirror and groaned. “I look like death.”

“Cute journalistic death?”

“Just plain death.” I was washed-out and sallow, and it had been too long since I had my hair trimmed; it was getting long enough to tangle. My head wasn’t throbbing, but it would be soon. The light seeping in around the edges of my glasses was telling me that. There was a way I could avoid that, if I was willing to deal with the inconvenience. Muttering under my breath, I grabbed my contact case off the sink and clicked the bathroom lights off. Even with as little as I voluntarily wear my contacts, the nature of my medical condition means I need to be able to put them in despite near or total darkness. Doing otherwise means risking retinal scarring, and I have things to do that require having eyes.

Shaun’s feet shuffled on the carpet as he crossed to the bathroom door. “George? What are you doing in there in the dark?”

“Putting in my contacts.” I blinked, and felt the first slide into place. “Find me clean clothes.”

“What do I look like, your maid?”

“Nah, she’s way better looking.” I blinked my second lens into place before clicking the bathroom lights back on. Harsh white light flooded the room. I squinted slightly, studying my blue-eyed reflection before I turned to the important matter of brushing my hair and teeth. “Any time now, Shaun. I can’t go see the senator in my undies.”

“Hunter S. Thompson would go see a senator in his undies. Or your undies, for that matter.”

“Hunter S. Thompson was too stoned to know what undies were.” The bathroom door opened. I turned, catching the clothes Shaun pitched in my direction. “There, now, was that so hard? Go grab our gear. I’ll be there in a second.”

“Next time, I’ll let you sleep in,” he grumbled, backing up. “And those contacts make you look like an alien!”

“I know,” I said, and shut the bathroom door.

Ten minutes later, Shaun and I were back in the elevator. I was running the final diagnostic checks on my equipment, and Shaun was doing the same, fingers tapping over the screen of his PDA in a series of increasingly complex patterns. This wasn’t a field op, and odds were that Senator Ryman would request a privacy screen on anything we recorded, but that didn’t matter. Leaving the hotel without our cameras and recorders set and primed to go would have been like leaving naked, and neither of us was up for that.

Some of my cameras were starting to show signs of misalignment, and the memory in my watch was almost full. Making a note to have Buffy take a look at things, I stepped out into the lobby with Shaun half a beat behind.

“Thank you for choosing the Parrish Weston Suites as your home away from home,” the hotel chirped as we approached the air lock. “We know you have many choices, and we are grateful for your business. Please place your right hand—”

“That’s enough,” I said, slamming my palm down on the test panel as soon as it finished opening. Getting out of the hotel requires nothing but a clean blood test. They don’t care if you want to go into massive viral amplification as long as you have the common courtesy to do it outside, preferably after you’ve paid your bills.

Shaun and I checked clean and the outer doors slid open, allowing us to exit while the automated voice of the hotel chirped pleasantries to an empty antechamber. It was cold and bright outside; a perfect Wisconsin day. There was only one car idling in the passenger pickup lane.

“Think that’s us?” asked Shaun.

“That, or there’s a pro-wrestling convention in town,” I said. We started toward it.

When the senator sends a car, he doesn’t screw around. Our intended transport was a solid-looking black SUV. The windows were tinted, and I would have placed bets on their being bulletproof. Possessing a personal fortune has its perks. Shaun nudged me and whistled, pointing to the inset gunner’s windows on the back windshield.

“Even Mom doesn’t have those,” he murmured.

“I’m sure she’ll be jealous,” I said.

Steve was standing by the rear passenger door, holding it open for us—as much, I’m sure, as a reminder that we weren’t allowed to ride up front as a gesture of civility. His eyebrows rose when he saw my contacts. To his credit, he didn’t comment on them; he just held the door open a little wider. “Shaun. Georgia.”

“I see you drew the short straw this morning,” I said, hoisting myself into the SUV and scooting over to make room for Shaun. Rick was already inside. I offered him a small wave, which he dolefully returned.

“The senator prefers this meeting be conducted in a more secure location and thought you might appreciate the chance to take a break from driving.” Steve glanced toward the parking garage and tapped his earpiece. I frowned. They thought our van had been bugged? It was possible—without Buffy running a full diagnostic on our systems, there was no way to tell—but it seemed a little paranoid.

I stopped that line of thought. Rebecca Ryman was murdered by someone who was willing to use live-state Kellis-Amberlee in an uncontrolled situation to achieve their goals, whatever they happened to be. There was no such thing as paranoia anymore.

“Looking good, Steve-o,” said Shaun, slapping the security agent a high five as he slid into the car.

“One day you’re going to call me that, and I’m going to punch your head clean off,” said Steve, and slammed the door. Shaun laughed. The sound of Steve’s footsteps moved around the car, where the driver’s-side door opened and closed again. A sheet of one-way glass separated the front seat from the passenger compartment. He could see us, but we couldn’t see him. How encouraging.

“He probably means that, you know,” said Rick.

“As long as I get it on film, I’ll be happy,” said Shaun. Folding his hands behind his head, he stretched out on the seat and propped his feet in my lap. “This is awesome. We’re being driven to a clandestine meeting with a man who wants to be president. Anybody else feel like James Bond right now?”

“Too female,” I said.

“Too aware of the fact that I’m not immortal,” said Rick.

“You realize you’re both wimps, right?” scolded Shaun.

“Yes, but we’re wimps with a life expectancy, and I have to respect that,” I replied.

“I’ll trade my life expectancy for a cup of coffee and a nice dark room,” said Rick.

I craned my head to look at him. He was rubbing his eyes. He looked groggy, and I wasn’t entirely sure he’d changed his shirt. “Didn’t sleep well?”

“Cat kept me up all night,” he said. Dropping his hands from his face, he did a classic double-take, eyes going wide. “Georgia? What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Contacts,” I said. “They irritate the shit out of my eyes, but at least this way, I can’t have some hopped-up asshole with a megaphone take my sunglasses away.”

He tilted his head, studying me. “That really upset you, didn’t it?”

“What, you mean the part where the nice guys with the big guns demonstrated over a live feed that I can be incapacitated by taking my glasses away? That didn’t bother me a bit.” I shoved Shaun’s feet off my lap. “Sit up. This isn’t a cruise.”

“Behold the bitchiness of George when she hasn’t had her beauty sleep,” said Shaun, pushing himself upright. Twisting around to face Rick, he said, “So, Ricky-boy, you seen your ratings? Because I have some ideas to spice things up. Let’s start with nudity—” And he was off and running, offering a plethora of insane suggestions as my overwhelmed fellow Newsie looked on in dismay.

Grateful for the save, I pulled out my PDA and started scrolling through the headlines. There’d been another outbreak in San Diego; that city hasn’t had a break since the Rising, when bad timing and worse luck caused amplification to occur during the annual International Comic Convention, an event that drew over a hundred and twenty thousand attendees. The results were less than pleasant. In other news, Congresswoman Wagman had been asked to leave the floor for showing up in an outfit more suitable for a Vegas showgirl. Another nutcase in Hong Kong was claiming that Kellis-Amberlee had been engineered specifically to undermine those religions that depended on ancestor worship. In other words, a pretty quiet day… if you cut out the headlines that directly referenced or connected back to our expedition to the Ryman family ranch. At a rough glance, I estimated that sixty to seventy percent of the news sites were carrying us as their top story. Us.

I tapped my ear cuff. There was a pause as the connection was made; then Buffy was on the line, sounding irritated from her first curt “Go.”

“Buffy, I need numbers. We’re everywhere, and I have to know whether I’m hauling Mahir’s ass out of bed to start manning the walls.”

“Sec.” We all have live feeds, but Buffy’s are the most up-to-date. I need special equipment to get the data she pulls as a matter of course. That’s why she’s the techie, while I’m just in charge.

There was a long pause. Longer than I’m used to; Buffy can normally give me numbers in a matter of seconds. “Buffy?” Shaun stopped talking as both he and Rick turned toward me. I held up my hand, signaling for quiet. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here. I, uh… I think I’m here, anyway.” She sounded a little bit scared. “Georgia? We’re number one, Georgia. We have more current hits, references, link-backs, and quotations than any other news site on the planet.”

My entire body seemed to go numb. I licked my lips. “Say that again.”

“Number one, Georgia.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.” There was a pause before she said, plaintively, “What do we do now?”

“What do we do now? What do we do now? Wake them up, Buffy! Call your people and wake them up!”

“Senator Ryman—”

“We’re on our way! Ignore him! Get your people on the phone, and get them on the damn site!” I hit my ear cuff to kill the connection and twisted to face the others. “Shaun, start dialing. I want your entire team updating, ten minutes ago, and that means Dave, too. They have phones in Alaska. Rick, check your in-box, start clearing out any merchandise queries that got routed to you by mistake.”

“George, what—”

“We have the ratings, Shaun. We have the top slot.” I nodded at his stunned expression. “Yeah. Now get them on the phone.”

The rest of the ride was a blur of telephone calls, text messages, e-mails, and rousing person after person out of their well-earned rest in order to throw them back into the fray. Most of my crew was too disoriented by lack of sleep to argue when I ordered them out of bed and to their terminals, where the freshly updated site message that appeared as each of them logged in read “Number One News Site IN THE WORLD” in flashing red letters. If that wasn’t enough to jolt them into consciousness, they were probably already dead.

Mahir put it best: When I called him, he responded first with stunned silence, then by swearing a blue streak and hanging up on me so he could get to his computer. I love a man who keeps his priorities straight.

All three of us were so engrossed in work that we missed the rest of the drive to the senator’s “secure location.” I was in the process of giving Alaric and Suzy their marching orders when the car doors opened, filling the back seat with light and nearly spilling Shaun—whose feet were braced against the left-hand passenger window—into the parking lot.

“We’re here,” said Steve. The three of us continued frantically typing on our various handheld PDAs and output screens. Rick was managing to type on his Palm and his phone at the same time, using his thumbs for data entry. Steve frowned. “Uh, guys? We’re here. The senator is waiting.”

“Sec,” I said, freeing one hand long enough to hold it up to him in the universal “stop” gesture. While he gaped at me, I finished tapping out the instructions Alaric and Suzy would need to keep their portions of the site functional until I could get back online. I wasn’t confident they’d survive the day, but Mahir would back them up as much as he could, and he had most of the same administrative permissions as Shaun and I; it would have to do. I lowered my PDA. “All right. Where do we go?”

“You sure you don’t need a few more minutes to check your e-mail or anything?”

I glanced to Shaun. “I think he’s making fun of us.”

“I think you’re right,” Shaun said, and slid out of the car, offering me his hands. “Ignore the philistine and get out here. We have government officials to annoy.”

We were parked in a covered garage less than a quarter the size of the one at the hotel. The lights were bright enough that I hadn’t even noticed the transition from real to artificial illumination. I used Shaun’s hands for balance as I stepped out of the car, sliding my PDA into the carrier on my belt before turning to help Rick down. He glanced to me, and I nodded.

That was his cue. Rick goggled, sparing Shaun and me the trouble of playing hick, before asking, “Where are we?”

“The senator considers it wise to keep a second local residence for meetings of a sensitive nature,” said Steve.

I gave him a sharp look. “Or meetings with people who didn’t feel comfortable being around the horses?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t be qualified to speak to that, Miss Mason.”

That meant yes. “Fine. Where do we go?”

“This way, please.” He led us to a steel-reinforced door, where I was surprised to see a lack of the customary blood testing units. There also wasn’t a doorknob. Shaun and I exchanged a glance as Steve tapped his earpiece, saying, “Base, we’re at the west door. Release.”

Something clicked, and a light above the door frame flashed green. The door slid open. There was a soft outrush of air as the hall on the other side was revealed; it was a positive-pressure zone, designed to force air out rather than allowing it to flow in and cause a contamination risk.

“No wonder they don’t need blood tests.” I followed Steve into the hall with Shaun and Rick close behind me. The hallway door slid shut behind us.

The lights in the hall were bright enough to hurt my eyes even through my contacts. I squinted, stepping closer to Shaun and letting the blurry motion of his silhouette guide me toward the door at the far end, where two more guards waited, each holding a large plastic tray.

“The senator would prefer this meeting not be broadcast or recorded,” Steve said. “If you would please place all nonessential equipment here, it will be returned to you at the end of the meeting.”

“You have got to be kidding,” said Shaun.

“I don’t think he is,” I said, turning toward Steve. “You want us to walk in there naked?”

“We can put up an EMP privacy screen if you don’t think we can trust you to leave your toys behind,” said Steve. His tone was mild, but the tightness around his eyes said he knew exactly how much he was asking and he wasn’t happy about it. “The choice is yours.”

An EMP privacy screen sufficient to secure an area would fry half of our more sensitive recording devices and could do serious damage to the rest. Replacing that much gear would kill our operating budget for months, if not the rest of the year. Grumbling, all three of us began stripping off our equipment—and in my case, jewelry—and dumping it into the trays. The guards stood there impassively, waiting for us to finish.

Dropping my ear cuff into my hand, I looked to Steve. “So do we have to be totally radio silent, or are we allowed to keep our phones?”

“You can keep any private data recorders that will be used solely for the purposes of taking personal notes, and any telecommunications devices that can be deactivated for the duration of the meeting.”

“Swell.” I dropped my ear cuff into the tray and slipped my PDA back onto my belt. I felt strangely exposed without my small army of microphones, cameras, and data storage devices, as if the world held a lot more dangers than it had a few minutes before. “How’s Buffy taking this?”

Steve smirked. “They said they wouldn’t cut her off until we got here.”

“So you’re telling me your men are in there, right now, trying to take Buffy’s equipment away?” Shaun said, and looked toward the closed door with a sort of wary fascination. “Maybe we should stay out here. It’s a lot safer.”

“Unfortunately, Senator Ryman and Governor Tate are waiting for you.” Steve nodded to the guards. The one on the left leaned over and took the tray from the one on the right, who opened the door. There was another inrush of air as the hallway’s positive-pressure zone met the house beyond. “If you don’t mind?”

“Tate’s here?” My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, Tate’s here?”

Steve walked through the open door without answering me. Eyes still narrowed, I shook my head and followed, with Rick and Shaun close behind me. Once the last of us was through the door, the guards closed it, remaining outside in the garage.

“What,” muttered Shaun, “no blood test?”

“Guess they figure there’s no point,” said Rick.

I kept my mouth shut, busying myself with studying the house. The décor was simple but refined, all clean, sleek lines and well-lit corners. Overhead lighting provided a steady level of illumination, with no visible dimmer switches or controls; it was either light or darkness, with nothing in between. It was less glaring than the hallway lights, but I still grimaced. The lights answered one question—this was nothing but a show home, intended for meetings and parties, but never for living in. Emily, with her retinal KA, couldn’t possibly have lived here.

There were no windows.

We walked through the house to the dining room, where a brisk-looking security guard in a black suit was finishing the process of taking Buffy’s equipment away. If looks could kill, the way she was glaring would have left us with an outbreak on our hands.

“We about done here, Paul?” asked Steve.

The guard—Paul—shot him a harried look and nodded. “Miss Meissonier has been quite cooperative.”

“Liar,” said Shaun, so close to my ear that I don’t think anyone else heard him.

“Buffy,” I said, swallowing my smile. “What’s the sitrep?”

“Chuck’s in there with the senator and Mrs. Ryman,” Buffy said, as she continued glaring at Paul. “Governor Tate just got here. They didn’t tell me he was coming, or I would’ve warned you.”

“It’s all right.” I shook my head. “He’s a part of this campaign now, like it or not.” I looked to Steve. “We’re ready when you are.”

“This way, please.” He opened a door on the far side of the room, holding it as the four of us filed through. When Rick stepped through the doorway, Steve closed the door behind him. The lock slid home with a final-sounding “click.”

We were standing in a sitting room decorated in stark blacks and whites, with stylized white art deco couches flanked by glossy black end tables and carefully arranged spotlight lamps illuminating tiny pieces of art that probably cost more individually than our operating budget for the year. The only spots of color came from the faces of the senator and his wife, both red-cheeked from crying, and from Governor Tate, who was wearing a tailored dark blue suit that screamed “money” in a politely subdued way. All three turned toward us, and the senator rose, tugging his suit jacket down before offering his hand to Shaun. Shaun shook it. I looked past them to where Governor Tate was endeavoring to cover his own expression of disgust.

“Thank you for coming,” said Senator Ryman, releasing Shaun’s hand and reclaiming his seat. Emily’s eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. She mustered a tiny smile as she folded her hands around her husband’s. He tugged her closer, seemingly unaware of the gesture. He didn’t have much strength to offer, but what he did have was hers without question. That’s the kind of guy we need running this country.

“We had a choice?” asked Shaun, dropping onto one of the couches and sprawling with intentional untidiness. He’d clearly caught Tate’s look, too; that, combined with the confiscation of our equipment, had him primed and ready to offend. Good. It’s always easier to seem reasonable when my brother is providing a handy contrast.

“We were glad to come, Senator, but I’m afraid I don’t understand why our equipment had to be confiscated. Some of those cameras are delicate, and I’m not comfortable leaving them with anyone who’s not a member of our staff. If we’d been informed of the need for privacy before we left the hotel, we could have left them behind.”

Tate snorted. “You mean you could have brought cameras that were easier to hide.”

“Actually, Governor, I meant what I said.” I turned to look him in the eyes, unblinking. One of the few handy side effects of retinal KA is the lack of a need for repeated ocular lubrication—or, in layman’s terms, I don’t blink much. Being stared at by someone with retinal KA can be very unnerving, at least according to Shaun. “I’m aware that you’re a recent addition to this campaign, and may not be used to working with members of the reputable news media. We can make allowances for that. I would, however, appreciate it if you could also keep in mind that we’ve been working with Senator Ryman and his staff for some time now, and not once have we broadcast or distributed material we were asked to withhold. Now, I’ll admit that part of that can be attributed to the fact that we’ve never been asked to withhold information without good reason. I still believe it establishes that we’re capable of behaving ourselves with tact, propriety, and, above all, the patriotism inherent in the duty of serving as media corps of a major political campaign.”

“Well, missy,” said Tate, meeting my eyes without a flinch, “those are a lot of pretty words, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I’ve been burned a few times by the media before landing here, and I prefer to proceed with caution.”

“Well, sir,” I replied, “you’ll forgive me if I believe that our track record should count for something, given that we’ve never been anything other than appropriate in our dealings with sensitive information; further, if I might be so bold, there’s a chance that the media has ‘burned’ you so many times because you persist in treating honest people like they’re waiting for the opportunity to be criminals. For a man who says he’s standing for American values, you’re sure devoted to the suppression of media freedom.”

The governor’s eyes narrowed. “Now see here, young lady—”

“My name is neither ‘young lady’ nor ‘missy,’ and I think I see all too well.” I turned to the others. “Shaun, get up. Rick, Buffy, come on.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Tate.

“Back to our hotel, where we’ll cheerfully explain to our many readers that we have no news for them today because—after uncovering an act of criminal bioterrorism on United States soil—we were unable to attend a conference with our candidate since, oopsie, the new man on the ticket thinks the media can’t be trusted.” I smiled. “Won’t that be fun?”

“Georgia, sit down,” said Senator Ryman. He sounded exhausted. That was no surprise. “You, too, Shaun. Buffy, Rick, you can sit or not, as you prefer. And you, David, will please try to remember that these folks are the only ones who cared enough to really look at the ranch rather than writing it off as a simple outbreak. You’ll be courteous, and we’ll trust them to keep on being as they have been: perfectly reasonable and willing to work with us.”

“There’s still the matter of our recording devices, Senator,” I said, staying still.

“That was a bad decision, and I’m sorry. That being said, I’m going to stand by it for now, and ask that you allow me to conduct this meeting.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And what do we get?”

Governor Tate sputtered, growing red in the face. Senator Ryman waved him down, looking at me squarely, and said, “An exclusive interview with me, no editing, regarding what you found yesterday.”

“No deal,” said Shaun. The senator and I looked toward him, surprised. My brother was sitting up, suddenly alert. “No offense, sir, but you’re not that impressive anymore. Our readers know you. They respect you, and if you keep on the way you have been, they’ll elect you, but they won’t be razzled and dazzled by the fact that we managed to get you.”

The senator ran a hand through his hair, looking pained. “What do you want, Shaun?”

“Her.” He nodded to Emily. “We want an interview with her.”

“Absolutely n—”

“Yes,” said Emily. Her voice was weary but clear. “I’m happy to. I only wanted to be left out of things for the sake of… for the sake of my family.” Her voice broke. “That’s not a concern anymore.”

“You aren’t worried about the safety of your younger daughters?” I asked.

“They aren’t at the ranch. They have the best security in the world. They’re safe. If I can prevent people from going out and killing other people’s pets because of what happened to Rebecca and my parents, well.” She managed to muster a smile. “It’ll be worth the strain.”

Senator Ryman reached for her arm. “Emily…”

“Accepted.” I sat next to Shaun, ignoring the senator’s stricken look. “We’ll be setting up interview times with both of you later this afternoon. Now, I assume there’s a reason we’re all here?”

“The senator would like to discuss the tragic evidence of tampering that your crew discovered at his family ranch, Miss Mason,” said Governor Tate smoothly, all traces of his earlier aggravation gone. The man was a natural politician; I had to give him that, even if I wasn’t willing to let him have anything else if I could help it. “Now, I realize this may seem as if I’m questioning your journalistic integrity—”

“Hey, Rick, ever notice how dickheads only say that when they’re about to question your journalistic integrity?” asked Shaun.

“Oddly, yes,” Rick said. “It’s like a nervous twitch.”

The governor shot them a glare and continued. “Please understand that I don’t ask this for personal reasons, but simply because we need to determine the truth of the situation.”

I looked at him. “You’re wondering if somehow, to drive up our ratings, we smuggled evidence of terrorist activity through the checkpoints and managed to plant it while our own cameras were broadcasting over a live feed to an audience that can be conservatively estimated, judging by yesterday’s ratings, as being somewhere in the millions.”

“I wasn’t intending to put it in quite those—”

I held up my hand to cut him off, turning to face Senator Ryman. “Senator, you know I’ll ask this again when I’m permitted to film the exchange, but in the interests of killing this line of questioning here and now, I’m going to sacrifice spontaneity in favor of clarity. Have the lab results come back on the syringe?”

“Yes, Georgia, they have,” said the senator, jaw set in a hard line.

“Can you tell us what those results were?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant to the original question,” said Tate.

“Senator?” I said.

“The contents of the syringe were determined to be a suspension of ninety-five percent live-state virus, common designation ‘Kellis-Amberlee’ or ‘KA’, isolated in iodized saline solution,” the senator said. “We’re waiting on additional information.”

“Like the viral substrain?” I asked. “Right. Governor Tate, my crew and I were several hundred miles from the ranch at the time of the outbreak at the Ryman family home, and security records will support this. Further, with the exception of Mr. Cousins, we were all traveling with the campaign for months prior to the outbreak. Mr. Cousins was traveling with the convoy of Congresswoman Wagman, who should be able to vouch for his whereabouts. I’m not a virologist, but I’m fairly sure it takes special equipment to isolate the live virus without risking infection, and that said special equipment would not only be delicate, but would require special training to operate and maintain. Do you see where I’m going with this, Governor Tate, or should we draw you a diagram?”

“She’s right,” said Emily. Governor Tate looked toward her, eyes narrowing. She met his gaze and said, “I took virology courses at college; they’re required for an animal husbandry degree. What Peter is describing is lab quality. You’d need a clean room and excellent biohazard protections just to isolate it, much less load it into any sort of a… a weapon. They just didn’t have the resources. You’d need something a lot more secure than a pressure cooker in a hotel room to do something like this.”

“Furthermore,” I said, cutting Tate off before he could speak again, “even assuming we could somehow come up with the resources to do something like this, and had some sort of ‘silent partner’ we could get out to the ranch while we were occupied at the convention, we’d have to be idiots to turn around and be the ones who found the proof that the outbreak was man-made. So now that you’ve insulted our patriotism, our sanity, and our intelligence, how about we move on?”

Governor Tate leaned back in his seat, eyes narrowed. I kept my own eyes wide, playing off just how disturbing the unbroken, too-too-blue of my contacts is to most humans. He looked away first.

Satisfied, I turned toward Senator Ryman. “So now that we’ve had that little throwdown, what else did you feel needed to be handled behind a firewall?”

To his credit, he looked embarrassed as he said, “We were wondering, given the circumstances, if, well… if it might not be the best idea for the four of you to go home.”

I gaped at him. Rick did the same. Buffy, who had been uncharacteristically silent through the entire exchange with Tate, continued staring at her hands.

In the end, it was Shaun who spoke, slamming his feet flat against the floor as he stood up and demanded, “Are you people fucking insane?!”

“Shaun—” said Senator Ryman, raising both hands in a placating gesture. “If you’d just be reasonable here—”

“Pardon me, sir, but you gave up your right to ask me to do that when you suggested we run out on the story,” Shaun snapped, voice tight. Out of everyone in the room, I was the only one who understood how much that degree of self-control was costing him. Shaun’s temper doesn’t show itself often, but when it does, “duck and cover” is the best approach. “Don’t you think we owe it to our viewers to finish what we started? We signed up for the long haul! We don’t get to cut our losses and run as soon as things start getting a little bit uncomfortable!”

“My daughter died, Shaun!” said the senator. He was suddenly on his feet, leaving Emily abandoned and looking lost on the couch. “Do you understand that this is more than a story to us? Rebecca is dead! Telling the truth isn’t going to bring her back to life!”

“Neither is telling a lie,” said Rick, his tone so calm that it seemed almost out of place among the heated exchanges. We all turned to look at him. His head was up, his expression clear as he looked from Senator Ryman to Governor Tate. “Senator, believe me when I say I understand your pain more than you can know. And I understand that concern is making you listen to bad advice,” he glanced toward the governor, who had the grace to redden and scowl, “that says we’re civilians, and you should get us out of harm’s way. But, sir, it’s too late for that. This is news. If you send us away, you’re just going to get other reporters sniffing around, looking for a story. Reporters who, if you’ll allow me to beg your pardon, you can’t control. Now, we have a working relationship, and you know we’ll listen to you. Can you honestly expect that from anyone else who might be attracted to this scoop?”

“I think we should go,” said Buffy. I turned to her, eyes going wide. Still looking at her hands, she continued. “We didn’t sign up for this. Maybe Rick’s right, and maybe other people will come, but who cares?” She glanced up through the fringe of her hair and licked her lips. “If they want to come and die, that’s their problem. But I’m scared, and he’s right. We shouldn’t be here anymore. If we were ever supposed to be here at all.”

“Buffy,” said Shaun, sounding stung. “What are you talking about?”

“This is just a story, Shaun, and everywhere we’ve gone, horrible things have happened.” She raised her head, expression miserable. “Those poor people in Eakly. The thing at the ranch. Senator Ryman, I think you’re a wonderful man, but this is just a story, and we shouldn’t be in it. We’re going to get hurt.”

“That’s exactly why we have to stay,” I said. My disappointment didn’t show in my voice; I found that astonishing. I wanted to slap Buffy. I wanted to shake her and demand to know how she could be so blind to the importance of telling the truth after everything we’d been through together. Instead, I faced the room, and my voice stayed calm as I said, “Everything is ‘just a story.’ Tragedy, comedy, end of the world, whatever, it’s just a story. What matters is making sure it’s heard.”

“That attitude, young lady, is why it’s time for you to go,” said Governor Tate. “We can’t trust you to keep your mouth shut when you decide it’s time for the story to be told. Your judgment isn’t the yardstick here. National security is. And I don’t think you fully understand the dangers you could place us in.”

“Now, David—” said the senator.

“Nice stand for freedom there, Governor,” I snapped.

“Can you believe this bullshit?” demanded Shaun.

“On the plus side, ‘Faithful Reporters Fired from Campaign as Veil of Censorship Descends’ has a nice ring to it,” said Rick. “I figure that’s a rating spike, right there.”

“Ratings! All you concern yourself with—”

“Be quiet,” said Emily.

“—is your precious by God ratings!” Governor Tate was getting into it now, his face flushing with religious fire. He’d found his latest opponents, now that Senator Ryman was off the menu. Us. “A little girl dies, a family is shattered, a man’s run to the presidency may not recover, and what do you care about? Your damn ratings! Well, you can take those ratings, and—”

We never found out what we could do with our ratings. The sound of Emily’s palm striking Governor Tate’s cheek rang through the room like a branch breaking; the only thing that could have been louder was the silence that came after it. Governor Tate raised his hand to his cheek, staring at her like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. I couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing either, and I wasn’t the one who’d been slapped.

“Emily, what—” began Senator Ryman. She raised her hand for silence, and then slowly, deliberately, removed her sunglasses, eyes on Governor Tate the whole time. The unforgiving light flooding the room had caused her pupils to expand until her irises were entirely gone, drowning in blackness. I winced. I knew how much that had to be hurting her, but she didn’t flinch. She kept staring at Tate.

“For the sake of my husband’s political career, I will be pleasant to you; I will smile at you at public functions, and I will, whenever a camera or member of the undiscriminating press is present, endeavor to treat you as if you were a human being,” she said, in a calm, almost reasonable tone. “But understand this: If you ever speak to these people in that sort of manner in my presence again? If you ever behave as if they have no judgment, no compassion, and no common sense? I’ll make you wish you’d never joined this ticket. And if I come to believe that your attitude is in any way changing my husband—not damaging his oh-so-precious career, but changing who he is as a man—I will repudiate you, and I will end you. Do we have an understanding, Governor?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Governor Tate, sounding about as stunned as I felt. A glance to Shaun showed that he was probably feeling much the same. “I think you’ve made yourself clear.”

“Good.” Emily turned toward us. “Shaun, Georgia, Buffy, Rick, I hope you won’t let this unpleasant little scene sour you against my husband’s campaign. I speak for both of us when I say that I very much hope you’ll continue doing exactly what you’ve been doing for us.”

“We signed on for the good and the bad alike, Mrs. Ryman,” said Rick. “I don’t believe any of us are planning on going anywhere.”

Looking at Buffy, I wasn’t sure. “He’s right, Emily,” I said. “We’re staying. Assuming, of course, the senator wants us to…?” I looked his way, and waited.

Senator Ryman looked uncertain. Then, slowly, he nodded and rose, moving to put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “David, I’m afraid I’m going to have to vote with Emily on this one. I very much want them all to stay.”

“Well, Senator,” I said, “I think our partnership is still good.”

“Good,” he replied. Reaching out, he took my hand and shook it.

Seventeen

We spent three weeks in Parrish before it was time for the campaign to get back on the road. The voters would forgive the senator taking time to mourn for his daughter, but unless he got out there and made sure people remembered him as more than the victim of a senseless tragedy, he’d never make up the ground he was already losing. Voters are a fickle bunch, and Rebecca Ryman’s heroic death was already yesterday’s news. Instead, the news was buzzing with Governor Blackburn’s exciting plans for heath-care reform, her suggestions for increasing school security, and her proposed alterations to the animal husbandry and care laws. In some ways, her campaign was using Rebecca as much as the senator’s was, because when she said “tougher restrictions on keeping large animals,” it was Rebecca’s face people saw. The senator needed to get rolling or there wouldn’t be anywhere for him to roll to.

Unfortunately, our swift departure from Oklahoma City left the convoy of RVs and equipment trucks we’d been depending on to get us across the country several states behind us. This became an issue as we were preparing to set out from Wisconsin, especially since our newly tightened schedule didn’t leave time to go back and get them. How were we supposed to get ourselves, the senator, his staff, the security detail, and the equipment—some of which was new to the campaign, having joined us with Governor Tate—to our destination when we didn’t have a means of protected travel?

The answer was simple: We weren’t. Instead, the senator, his wife, the governor, their respective campaign managers, and the bulk of the staff flew ahead to our next stop in Houston, Texas, where they could meet up with the convoy and really get things started. The rest of us were left with the exciting task of getting ourselves and the equipment that hadn’t been abandoned in Oklahoma to Texas via the overland express. There was no train from Parrish to Houston large enough to haul the additional equipment, but that worked out since Shaun and I were unwilling to abandon our vehicles. One way or another, we were driving it.

We initially planned to make the drive alone: just the After the End Times crew, reconnecting with one another through the time-honored ritual of the road trip. This plan got shouted down on all fronts, starting with Senator Ryman and moving down the chain to Steve. The argument that we’d travel faster without a bunch of extra bodies didn’t hold water where they were concerned, but we managed to find a compromise after three days of shouting. We’d take a security team. We were exhausted enough after that fight to give in on the matter of Chuck, who needed to monitor the transportation of some of the more sensitive equipment. Besides, his presence might keep Buffy a little calmer, and we needed all the help we could get in that regard.

The tension between Buffy and the rest of us had been getting worse since our meeting with the Rymans and Governor Tate. None of us had expected her to endorse the idea that we should walk away. It was a betrayal of everything we worked for, and it came out of nowhere. Rick took it hardest. As far as I knew, he hadn’t spoken to Buffy since we got back to the hotel. Buffy looked at him sorrowfully, like a dog that knew it had done something wrong, and went back to the task of getting our equipment ready for the road. By the time we were ready to roll, I think she’d rebuilt every piece of camera equipment we owned at least twice, in addition to upgrading our computers and replacing the memory chips in my PDA.

Shaun and I didn’t have anything that practical to concern ourselves with. I managed to stay distracted by conducting remote interviews with every politician I could get my hands on, working with Mahir to update our merchandising, and cleaning up the message boards. Shaun lacked those outlets. The government had banned him from going back to the ranch during the investigation, and Parrish was otherwise short of things for him to poke at. He was restless, unhappy, and making me insane. Shaun doesn’t handle idleness well. Make him sit still too long, and he winds up silent, sullen, and, above all, touchy as hell.

Shaun’s crankiness, combined with everything else, was the reason for our caravan traveling arrangements. Rick was in his little blue armadillo with the barn cat, which he’d named “Lois” after it received a clean bill of health from the Ryman family veterinarian. Shaun was in our van, blasting heavy metal and brooding, while Buffy was riding with Chuck in the equipment truck at the rear of the convoy.

My own place in the driving order was a little less predictable since I was on my bike and unconstrained by the shape of the road. I kept my cameras running the whole time, privately hoping I’d find a shambler for Shaun to amuse himself with. That was all he’d need to bring his spirits up. We’d been driving for two days, with another two still ahead of us, and the silence was starting to wear on me.

My helmet speaker crackled. “On,” I said to activate the connection, following it with, “Georgia here.”

“It’s Rick. What do you think about dinner?”

“The sun went down an hour ago, and dinner is traditionally the evening meal, so I think dinner is logically our next stop. What are we looking at?”

“GPS says there’s a truck stop about two hours up the road that has a pretty decent diner.”

“Any record on their screening protocols?” We’d run into multiple truck stops where the security agents wouldn’t let us eat because their blood tests weren’t good enough to guarantee we wouldn’t have to worry about an outbreak between the coffee and the pie. I’d been driving all day. If we stopped, I wanted it to be for more than fifteen minutes and an argument.

“They’re government certified. All their licenses up to date, all their inspection scores posted.”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll see if I can rouse Shaun and let him know what the plan is. You call Steve and the guys, give them the address, and tell them we’ll meet there.”

“Deal.”

“Coffee’s on me. Georgia out.”

“Rick out.”

“Great.” I followed it with, “Disconnect and redial Shaun Mason.” The speaker beeped acknowledgment, and began to ring as it signaled my brother.

He never picked up the call. He didn’t have the time.

I didn’t hear the gunshots until I went back to review the tapes and turned the low-level frequencies up enough to undo the work of the silencers. Eight shots were fired. The first two trucks, the ones containing the campaign guards and lower-level personnel, passed by unmolested. They were rolling ahead of the rest of the crew and passed out of the shallow valley without incident. The gun didn’t start going off until Rick’s car pulled into the ideal position, halfway between the valley’s entrance and its exit.

Two shots were fired at Rick’s little blue armadillo, two more were fired at the van, and the two after that were fired at my bike. The last two shots were fired at the equipment truck at the back of the caravan, the one Chuck was driving, with Buffy riding shotgun. The shots were very methodical, one following the other as fast as the skill of the shooter would allow. I’d have been impressed if they hadn’t been aimed so effectively at me and mine.

The first shot fired at my bike punched a hole in my front tire, sending me weaving out of control. I screamed and swore, fighting with the handlebars as I tried to steady my trajectory enough to keep me from becoming a stain on the side of the road. Even with my body armor, falling wrong would kill me. I was focusing so hard on not toppling over that my driving became impossible to predict, and the second shot went wide. Maybe that’s why I was able to believe I’d blown a tire as I let momentum carry me off the edge of the road, rolling onto the uneven ground beyond the shoulder.

I finished steadying myself, dumped speed, and wrenched the bike to a stop twenty yards after I left the road. Panting, I kicked the stand down and unsealed my helmet before turning to stare at the carnage that had overwhelmed the road.

Rick’s car was still at the front of the pack, but now it was lying stranded on its back, wheels spinning in the air. The tires on the right-hand side were nothing but shredded rubber stretched over bent steel. The equipment truck was on its side fifty or so yards behind him, smoke oozing from its shattered cabin.

There was no sign of the van.

Suddenly frantic, I fumbled my ear cuff from my pocket and shoved it onto my ear with enough force to leave a bruise that I wouldn’t feel until later. “Shaun? Shaun? Pick up your goddamn phone, Shaun!”

“Georgia?” The connection was poor enough that his voice crackled in and out, but the relief was unmistakable; it would have been unmistakable even if the connection had been worse. He never called me by my full name unless he was angry, scared, or both. “Georgia, are you okay? Where are you?”

“Twenty yards off the road on the left-hand side, near some big rocks. I’m between the car and the equipment truck. There’s smoke, Shaun, has anyone else tried to—”

“Don’t make any more calls. I don’t know if they can trace them. You stay right there, Georgia. Don’t you fucking dare move!” The connection cut with a sharp, final click. In the distance, I heard tires squealing against the road.

Shaun had sounded panicked. Rick and Buffy were out of communication, the truck was on fire, my bike was down, and Shaun was panicking. That could only mean one thing: It was time to take cover.

Slamming my helmet back over my head, I ducked behind my bike and started surveying the surrounding hills. Short of a rocket launcher, there wasn’t much that stood a viable chance of killing me in my body armor. Hurting me, yes, but killing me, not really.

There was nothing. No lights, no signs of motion; nothing.

“—ia? Come in, Georgia?”

“Rick?” I nodded to the right, confirming the connection. “Rick, is that you? Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. Air bag stopped me from hitting the roof.” He coughed. “Chest’s a little banged up, and Lois is pissed as hell, but otherwise, we’re okay. You?”

“Didn’t dump the bike. I’m fine. Any word from Buffy?”

There was a pause. Finally, he said, “No. I was hoping she’d called you.”

“Did you try to call her?”

“No word.”

“Damn. Rick, what happened?”

“You mean you don’t know?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Georgia, somebody shot out my damn tires.”

“Shot? What do you mean, sh—” Shaun came blasting around the curve of the road and off the pavement, moving so fast that our hydraulically balanced and weighted van nearly rocked onto two tires. “Shaun’s here. We’ll be right there to get you. Georgia out.”

“Clear.” The connection clicked off.

I pulled my helmet back off and climbed to my feet, waving my hands in the air. Shaun spotted the motion and turned the van toward my location, screeching to a stop beside me. The doors unlocked, and Shaun was throwing himself out of the driver’s-side door, his heels slipping on the gravel-covered ground as he ran over to throw his arms around me. I let him crush me against his chest, taking a deep breath.

“You okay?” he asked, not letting go.

“You didn’t get a blood test before coming over here.”

“Don’t need one. If you were infected, I’d know,” Shaun said, and let me go. “I repeat, you okay?”

“I’m okay.” I climbed in the open van door, sliding over to settle in the passenger seat. Shaun got in behind me. “You okay?”

“Better now,” Shaun said, turning the engine back on and slamming his foot down on the gas. The van leapt forward into a wide curve, rocketing toward Rick’s car. “You hear the shots?”

“Bike was too loud. How many?”

“Eight. Two for each of us.” He glanced at me. For a brief moment, I saw the raw worry in his eyes. “If they’d nailed both your tires…”

“I’d be dead.” I leaned forward to open the glove compartment and pull out the .45 I keep there. Suddenly, being outside without a gun in my hand didn’t seem like a good idea. “If whoever did this had done their damn homework, you’d be dead, too, so let’s not dwell. Word from Buffy?”

“None.”

“Great.” I pulled back the slide, checking the chamber. Satisfied by my bullet count, I let the slide rack back into place. “So, is this enough excitement for you?”

“Maybe a bit much,” he said. For once in his life, he sounded like he meant it.

It was true, though. If our attackers had done their homework, Shaun wouldn’t have been driving; he’d have been dying. Normal tires blow when they take a bullet. Even armor plating won’t prevent that. But some vehicles are too damn valuable to lose just because you lose a tire, and most vehicles in that class are the sort likely to draw heavy gunfire. So scientists developed a type of tire that doesn’t give a damn about gunshots. They’re called run flats: You put a bullet in them, and they keep on rolling. I might have skipped them—I did skip them on my bike, where they made the ride unbearably choppy—but Shaun insisted. He bought a new set every year.

For the first time since we got the van, it didn’t seem like a waste of money.

Shaun focused on driving, and I focused on trying to page Buffy and Chuck, using every band and communications device we had. We knew communications weren’t being jammed; at least some of my messages should have made it through. There were no replies on any channel. I’d been terrified. That’s when I started to get numb.

Shaun pulled up next to Rick’s car. “Think there’s still a shooter out there?”

“Doubtful.” I slid the gun into my pocket. “This was a targeted operation. They only took out our cars. If they’d been sticking around to make sure they killed us, you’d have kept taking bullets. And I made a damn good target when I first stopped my bike.”

“Hope you’re right,” said Shaun, and opened his door.

Rick watched our approach through the car window, waving his arms to show that he was still alive. He was half-pinned by the air bag and blood was dripping into his hair from a small cut on his forehead, but other than that he looked fine. Lois and her carrier were strapped into the seat next to his. I didn’t want to be the one to let that cat out of the box.

I knocked on the glass, calling, “Rick? Can you open the door?” Despite the urgency of the situation, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the structural integrity of his little car. It had to have rolled at least once before coming to a stop on its roof, and yet it wasn’t showing any dents: just scratches and a crack in the passenger-side window. The folks at VW really knew what they were doing.

“I think so!” he called back. “Can you get me out?”

Mirthlessly, I echoed, “I think so!”

“Not the most encouraging answer,” he said, and twisted in the seat, movements constrained by seat belt and air bag, until he could kick the door. On his second kick, I grabbed the handle and pulled. I didn’t have to pull that hard; despite the car’s inverted position and the beating it had taken, the door swung open easily, leaving Rick’s foot dangling in the air. He pulled it back into the car, saying, “Now what?”

“Now I get your belt, and you get ready to fall.” I leaned into the car.

“Hurry up, George,” said Shaun. “I don’t like this.”

“No one does,” I said, and unsnapped Rick’s belt. Gravity took over from there, sending Rick thumping against the roof of the car.

“Thanks,” he said, reaching over to unhook Lois’s carrier before climbing out. The cat hissed and snarled inside the box, expressing her displeasure. Straightening, Rick eyed his car. “How are we supposed to flip that back over?”

“Triple A is our friend,” I said. “Get in the van. We need to check on Buffy.”

Paling, Rick nodded and climbed in. Shaun and I were only a few feet behind him. I noted without surprise that Shaun had his own pistol—substantially larger than my emergencies-only .45—with specially modified ammo that did enough damage to human or posthuman tissue that it was illegal without a disturbing number of licenses, all of which Shaun obtained before he turned sixteen—out and at the ready. He wasn’t buying my glib assurances of our safety. That was fine. Neither was I.

Shaun took my assumption of the driver’s seat with just as little surprise and didn’t bother fastening his belt as I slammed the gas pedal down, sending the van racing across the hard-packed ground between us and the still-smoking equipment truck. The truck wasn’t likely to burst into flames; that only happens in the movies, which is almost a pity, given the number of zombies that arise from automotive accidents every year. Buffy and Chuck could die from smoke inhalation if we dawdled… assuming they weren’t dead already.

Rick braced himself against the seat. “Has there been any word from Buffy?”

“Not since the truck went down,” Shaun said.

“Why the hell didn’t you go for her first?”

“Simple,” I said, steering around a chunk of rubber torn from the truck’s tires. “We knew you were alive, and we might need the backup.”

Rick didn’t say anything after that until we pulled up alongside the equipment truck. Shaun reached between the seats and pulled out a double-barreled shotgun which he passed to Rick. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Rick demanded.

“You see anything moving that isn’t us, Chuck, or Buffy, you shoot,” Shaun said. “Don’t bother checking to see if it’s dead. It’ll be dead after you hit it.”

“And if I hit emergency personnel?”

“We’re stranded, and we’ve been the victims of a malicious attack in possible zombie territory,” I said, stopping the engine and opening my door. “Cite Johnston’s, and you’ll get a medal instead of a manslaughter conviction.” Manuel Johnston was a truck driver with several DUIs on his record, but when he gunned down a dozen zombies in highway patrolmen’s uniforms outside Birmingham, Alabama, he became a national hero. Since Johnston, it’s been legal to shoot people for no crime more defined than existing in rural hazard zones. We usually curse his name, since the precedent he set has gotten a lot of good journalists killed. Under the circumstances, he was a savior. “Shaun and I have the truck. You’ve got point.”

“Got it,” said Rick, grimly, and climbed out the van’s side door as Shaun and I got out and moved toward the still-smoking truck.

It was obvious that the equipment truck had taken the worst of the beatings. Lacking the maneuverability of my bike, the armor of Rick’s car, or the paranoia-fueled unstoppability of our van, it had taken two bullets to the front left tire and completely lost control. The cabin was half-smashed when the truck went over. The smoke had thinned without clearing, and that lowered visibility as we started toward the cab.

“Buffy?” I called. “Buffy, are you there?”

A piercing scream was the only answer, followed by a pause, a second scream, and silence. Zombies can scream. They just generally don’t.

“Buffy? Answer me!” I ran the rest of the way to the truck and grabbed the handle of the nearer door, wrenching it as hard as I could. I barely noticed removing a layer of skin from my palms in the process. It didn’t matter; the door was mashed in when the truck fell, and it wasn’t budging. I tried again, yanking even harder, and felt it shudder on its hinges. “Shaun! Help me over here!”

“George, we have to make sure we’re covering the area in case of—”

“Rick can do the goddamn covering! Help me while there’s still a chance that she’s alive!”

Shaun lowered his pistol, cramming it into the waistband of his pants and moving to put his hands over mine. Together, we counted, “One, two, three,” and yanked. My shoulders strained until it felt like I would dislocate something. The door groaned and swung open, creaking along the groove of the broken frame. Buffy tumbled out onto the glass-sprinkled pavement, coughing hard.

That cough was reassuring. Zombies breathe, but they don’t cough; the tissue of their throats is already so irritated by infection that they ignore little things like smoke inhalation and caustic chemical burns, right up until they render the body unable to function.

“Buffy!” I dropped to my knees next to her, feeling glass crunch through the reinforced denim of my jeans; I’d have to check for slivers before I put them on again. I put my hand against her back, trying to reassure her. “Honey, it’s okay, you’re okay. Just breathe, sweetheart, and we’ll get you away from here. Come on, honey, breathe.”

“Georgia…”

Shaun’s voice was strained enough that he sounded almost sick. I looked up, my hand still flat against Buffy’s back. “What—”

Shaun gestured for silence, attention fixed on the interior of the truck’s cab. His right hand was moving with glacial slowness to the gun shoved into the belt of his jeans. Whatever he was looking at was outside my range of vision, and so I stood, leaving Buffy coughing on the ground as I reached up to remove my sunglasses. The smoke wouldn’t irritate my eyes more than they already were, and I’d see better without them.

At first there seemed to be nothing but motion inside the cab of the truck. It was slow and irregular, like someone trying to swim through hardening cement. Then my pupils dilated that extra quarter-centimeter, my virus-enhanced vision compensating for the sudden change in light levels, and I realized what I was looking at.

“Oh,” I said, softly. “Crap.”

“Yeah,” Shaun agreed. “Crap.”

Buffy fell out of the cab when we opened the door; Buffy hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. Buffy never wore her seat belt. She liked to ride cross-legged in her seat, and seat belts prevented that. Chuck, on the other hand, was a law-abiding citizen who obeyed traffic regulations. He fastened his seat belt every time he got into a moving vehicle. He’d fastened it before the convoy pulled out that morning. He was still wearing it now that he was too far gone to remember how to work the clasp, or even what a clasp was. His hands moved against the air in useless clawing motions as his mouth chomped mindlessly, stimulated by the presence of fresh meat.

There was blood around his mouth. Blood around his mouth, and blood on the seat belt, and blood on the seat where Buffy had been sitting.

“Cause of death?” I asked, as analytically as I could.

“Impact trauma,” said Shaun. The creature that had been Chuck hissed at him, opening its mouth and beginning to moan. Unconcerned, Shaun raised his pistol and fired. The bullet hit the zombie square between the eyes, and it stopped trying to reach us, going limp as the message of its second, final death was transmitted throughout the body. Continuing as if he’d never paused, Shaun said, “It must have been instantaneous. Chuck was a small guy. Amplification would have been over in minutes.”

“Source of the blood?”

Shaun looked toward me, and then back to Buffy, who was still down on her knees in the broken glass, hugging herself and coughing. “He didn’t have time to bleed.”

I stayed where I was for a seemingly endless moment, staring into the cab of the truck. Chuck remained slumped and unmoving. I wanted to find something, anything, I could use to explain the blood away. A scalp wound, maybe, or a nosebleed that started when he hit his head and didn’t stop until he reanimated. There was nothing. Just one small, sad body, and bloodstains on the passenger seat that didn’t match to any visible wounds.

I turned to Buffy, numbly unsurprised to see that Shaun had his pistol out. My feet crunched on the glass as I walked over to her. “Buffy? Can you hear me?”

“I’m dead, not deaf,” she said, and lifted her head. Tears had left clean trails through the soot staining her cheeks. “I hear you just fine. Hi, Georgia. Is everyone all right? Is… is Chuck…?”

“Chuck’s resting now,” I said, crouching down. “Shaun, radio Rick. Tell him to come back here, and to bring a field kit.”

“George—”

“Do it.” I kept my eyes on Buffy and felt, rather than saw, Shaun’s angry stare. I was too close to her. Her body weight was too low, and I was too close; if she was undergoing amplification, I might not be able to move back fast enough. And I didn’t care. “Buffy, are you hurt at all? There’s some blood we can’t identify. I need you to show me if you’re hurt.”

Buffy smiled. It was a small, utterly resigned expression, one that turned wry as she rolled up her right sleeve and turned her arm toward me, showing the place where a chunk had been bitten out of her forearm. Bone showed through the red. “You mean like this? I must’ve hit my head on the roof when the truck rolled, because I woke up when Chuck bit me.”

The bleeding was already starting to slow. Rapid coagulation of blood; one of the first, classic signs of the Kellis-Amberlee virus going into amplification. I swallowed, saying in a soft, sickened tone, “That would probably account for it.”

“I heard the gunshot, you know. If Chuck’s ‘resting,’ it’s the sort of rest you don’t get better from.” Buffy rolled her sleeve primly back down. “You should shoot me now. Take care of things while they can still be tidy.”

“Rick’s on his way with the field kit,” said Shaun, stepping up next to me. He had his gun trained on Buffy the whole way. “She’s right, you know.”

“He’d just turned when he bit her. There’s a chance his saliva hadn’t gone live yet,” I said, glancing at him over my shoulder. I was lying, to no one more than to myself, but he’d let me. Just for a few minutes, he’d let me. “We wait for the test.”

“I was never any good at tests,” said Buffy. She shifted on the ground, pulling her knees up against her chest in an unconsciously childlike gesture. “I always failed them in school. Hi, Shaun. Sorry about this.”

“Not your fault,” he said. His tone was gruff; anyone who didn’t know him as well as I do might not have realized how upset he was. “You’re taking this pretty well. Considering, y’know. The circumstances.”

“Not much we can do about it now, is there?” Her tone was light, but her eyes were beginning to brim with tears. One escaped, running down the channel already cleaned by its peers. “I’m not happy about this. But I’m not going to take it out on you. I have faith that God will reward me for my forbearance.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said, softly. The Catholic church declared all victims of zombie attack martyrs fifteen years ago, to deal with the messy little issue of last rites; it’s hard to conduct them when death is fast, unexpected, and filled with teeth.

“I’ve got the kit!” shouted Rick, jogging up to the three of us. He had the shotgun tucked underneath his arm and a standard blood testing kit in his left hand. He came to a stop as he spotted Buffy, paling. “Please, please, tell me this isn’t for you, Buffy.”

“Sorry,” she said and held up her hands. “Toss it here.”

Eyes gone wide in his bloodless face, he tossed her the kit. She caught it with ease, sliding her right hand, the one nearest the bite, into the kit’s opening. Then she closed her eyes, not watching the lights as they cycled green to red, green to red.

“You need to read my notes,” she said, in a voice so tightly controlled as to be a model of reasonableness and calm. “They’re stored on the server under my private directory. Log-in ID is the one I use for my poetry uploads, password is ‘February dash four dash twenty-nine,’ capital ‘F’ in ‘February.’ I don’t have time to explain everything, so just read them.”

February 4, 2029, was the day the United States government finally acknowledged that Alaska was too well-suited to the undead and would never be able to come below a Level 2 hazard zone. As that made it illegal for anyone without a very special and difficult to obtain license to even enter Alaska, much less live there, that was the day they began evacuating the last of the state’s residents. Including Buffy’s family. Like a lot of the displaced, they never got over losing Alaska.

“You’re going to be fine,” I said, watching the lights. They were still cycling, still measuring the viral payload of her blood, but the cycle was becoming irregular, hanging on red for six seconds before flashing back to green. The test results were being confirmed, and they were not in Buffy’s favor.

“You’re too attached to the truth, Georgia,” she said. Her voice was serene, at peace with itself. “It makes you a crappy liar.” The tears were falling faster now. “I swear I had no idea they were going to do those things. No idea at all. If I’d known, I would never have agreed to it. You have to believe me, I wouldn’t have.”

The lights had settled on a steady red, as damning as any doctor’s report. The viral load Buffy picked up from Chuck’s saliva might have been small, but it had been enough. That wasn’t the only thing making me go cold. I stood, stepping back next to Shaun, and pulled the gun from my belt. “You wouldn’t have agreed to what?”

“They said the country was drifting away from God. They said that we were losing sight of His desires for the nation, and that was why things are the way they are now. And I believed them.”

“They who, Buffy?”

“They didn’t give me a name. They just said they could make sure things went the way they needed to go. The way they had to go for this country to be great again. All I had to do was let them access our databases and follow the Ryman campaign.”

Voice gone suddenly hard, Rick said, “When did you figure out what they were using that information to do, Buffy? Before or after Eakly?”

“After!” she said, opening her eyes and turning a plaintive look his way. “After, I swear it was after. It wasn’t until the ranch that I realized… I realized…”

My hand shook, sending my aim wavering as I realized what she was saying and what it meant. “Oh, my God. With access to our databases, they’d known exactly where the senator was going to be, what sort of security he’d have, what times we had booked for any given location—”

“It gets worse,” said Shaun. His own voice was flat. “She had our databases cued to the senator’s databases. Didn’t you, Buffy?”

“It seemed practical at the time, and Chuck said it wouldn’t hurt anything as long as we stayed out of the more sensitive areas. It made things easier…”

“Lots of things,” I said. “Like knowing when the ranch would be most vulnerable. You cut them off, didn’t you? Told them you wouldn’t be giving them anything else.”

“How did you know?” She closed her eyes again, shuddering.

“Because they’d have no other reason to try to kill us all.” I glanced toward Rick and Shaun. “We stopped being useful. So Buffy’s ‘friends’ tried to take us out.”

“My notes,” said Buffy, with an air of desperation in her tone. Her tears were stopping. Another classic sign. The virus doesn’t like to give moisture away. “You have to read my notes. They’ll tell you everything I knew. I didn’t know their names, but there are time stamps, there are IPs, you can try to… try to…”

“How could you do this, Buffy?” demanded Shaun. “How could you possibly have done this? To the senator? To us? People have died, for God’s sake!”

“And I’m one of them. It’s time to shoot me. Please.”

“Buffy—”

“That’s not my name,” she said, and opened her eyes. Her pupils had dilated until they were as large as mine. She turned those unnaturally dark eyes toward me, shaking her head. “I don’t remember my name. But that isn’t it.”

Shaun started to swing his pistol into place. I raised my hand, stopping him. “I hired her,” I said, quietly. “It’s my job to fire her.”

I stepped forward, putting my left hand over my right to steady my grip on the gun. Buffy continued looking up at me, her expression calm. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault,” she replied.

“Your name is Georgette Marie Meissonier,” I said, and pulled the trigger.

She fell without another sound. Shaun put his arms around my shoulders, and we stood there, frozen in the night.

Nothing would ever be the same.