by Mira Grant
“Rebecca Atherton, age twenty-two, BA in film from New York University, Class A-20 blogging license, upgraded from a B-20 six months ago, when she passed her final marksmanship tests. She’s testing for an A-18 next month.”
An A-18 license would mean she was cleared to enter Level 4 hazard zones unaccompanied. “If you take her, my side of the site retains a six percent interest in her reports for the next year.” The infected girl was sinking her teeth into Tyrone’s left forearm. He screamed soundlessly and fired into the side of the zombie’s head. Too late. The damage was done.
“Three percent,” Shaun countered.
“Done,” I said, not taking my eyes off the screen. “Draft an offer letter. If she agrees, she’s yours.” Tyrone was staggering in circles, clutching his arm against his body. I could see Tracy barking orders; Carlos turned and ran for the convoy, presumably to get reinforcements. That’s why he survived—because he ran away. How must that kind of thing sit with a man like him? I can’t imagine that it sits very well.
“George? What’s up? I expected you to fight me more than that.”
Instead of answering, I pulled the headphone jack out of my machine and let the sound start broadcasting to the room.
“Oh God Tracy oh God oh God,” Tyrone was babbling. The moaning in the background was low and constant; the infected were coming, and the gate in the convoy fence was standing open.
“Shut up and help me close this thing,” Tracy snarled, grabbing the gate with both hands. After a moment’s hesitation, Tyrone ran over and joined her, placing his hands well away from hers. It was a good way of dealing with things. As long as she didn’t encounter any of the live virus, she wouldn’t begin amplification, and in someone Tyrone’s size, full conversion would take longer than was needed to close a simple gate, even one that heavy. Once it was shut, she could wave him off to a safe distance and put a bullet through his brain. It wouldn’t be pretty, but elimination of contagion rarely is.
The tape jumped. Tyrone was on the ground in a spreading pool of his own blood while Tracy screamed and struggled against the zombie gnawing at the side of her neck. The gate was closed, and yet there were six zombies on the screen, one chewing on Tracy, three closing, and the other two lurching onward, toward the convoy.
Shaun frowned. “Pause the feed.”
I tapped my keyboard. The image froze.
“Rewind to the jump.”
I tapped my keyboard again and the image ran backward to the blank spot. I left it there, frozen, and looked to Shaun for further instructions.
He wasn’t looking at me at all. “Start it up again, half-speed.”
“What are you—”
“Just start the feed, George.”
I tapped my keyboard. The image began to move again, much more slowly now. Shaun scowled, and snapped, “Freeze!”
The frozen image showed Tracy screaming, the zombies shambling, and Tyrone dead on the ground. Shaun’s finger stabbed out like an accusation, indicating the leg of Tracy’s suit. “She didn’t run because she couldn’t,” he said. “Someone shot out her kneecap.”
“What?” I squinted at the screen. “I don’t see it.”
“Take out your damn contacts and try again.”
I leaned back, blinking my right contact free and removing it with the tip of my index finger. After a moment to let my eye adjust, I closed my left eye and considered the screen again. With my low-light vision restored, it was much harder to miss the wetness of Tracy’s leg, or the way the blood on the snow around her fanned out from her body, rather than falling straight down as I would have expected.
I sat up straight. “Someone shot her.”
“During the missing footage,” Shaun agreed, voice tight. I glanced to him, and he turned his face away, rubbing a hand across his eyes. “Christ, George. She was just doing this because it looked good on her resume.”
“I know, Shaun. I know.” I put a hand on his shoulder, staring at my frozen video display, where Tracy battled for a life that was already lost. “We’ll find out what’s going on here.
“I promise.”
* * *
… they come to us, these restless dead,
Shrouds woven from the words of men,
With trumpets sounding overhead
(The walls of hope have grown so thin
And all our vaunted innocence
Has withered in this endless frost)
That promise little recompense
For all we risk, for all we’ve lost…
—From Eakly, Oklahoma, originally published in By the Sounding Sea, the blog of Buffy Meissonier, February 11, 2040
Ten
We were approaching the polls on Super Tuesday, and the mood in the senator’s camp was grim. People should have been nervous, elated, and on edge; we were hours away from finding out whether the gravy train was about to take off like a rocket or come grinding to a halt. Instead, a funereal atmosphere ruled the camp. The guards continued to triple-check every protocol and step, and no one was willing to go out without an assigned partner. Even the interchangeable interns were beginning to get antsy, and they didn’t notice much beyond their duties. It was bad.
The convoy was holding a position three blocks from the convention center, parked in what used to be a high school football field before the Rising rendered outdoor sports too dangerous. It was a good location for our purposes, providing power, running water, and sufficient clear ground for the perimeter fence to be established without anything—either physical or visual—obstructing the cameras. The number of people packed into Oklahoma City for the festivities necessitated running secure buses to the convention center every thirty minutes. Each of them was equipped with state-of-the-art testing units and armed guards.
We had received the final confirmation that Tracy McNally was shot through the right kneecap during the attack two days after Shaun and I first reviewed the tape and brought it to the attention of the senator’s security team. This, on top of the cut wires in the perimeter screamers, had provided absolute confirmation that the attack had been a poorly managed assassination attempt. The convoy had been preparing to leave Eakly at the time, and it felt like we’d left the last of our high spirits behind.
It was Shaun who first identified the assassination attempt as poorly-managed. When the senator asked him to defend his position, he shrugged and said, “You’re alive, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a comforting point, but it was a good one. A few more zombies in the original wave or a few more guards taken out like Tracy and the convoy could have been overrun rather than suffering a few casualties. Either it hadn’t been a full-fledged assassination attempt, or it was an incredibly badly planned one. The former seemed unlikely. They used infected humans.
The attraction of attempting to weaponize the infected has decreased exponentially since the Raskin-Watts trail of 2026, when it was officially declared that any individual who used live-state Kellis-Amberlee as a weapon would be tried as a terrorist. What’s the point of using a sloppy, difficult-to-manage weapon if even failure means you’re likely to be one of the few lucky souls to still qualify for the death penalty?
The screamers were the only piece of the convoy’s equipment that seemed to have been sabotaged. Reviewing the cameras at the gate confirmed that the blank spots were caused by a localized EMP burst—something focused enough that it took out only the cameras within a certain range and didn’t attract the attention of most of Buffy’s sensors. You can get that sort of tech at RadioShack. It’s portable, disposable, and entirely untraceable, unless you happen to have the make and model of the unit, which we don’t. The senator’s men had been going over every scrap of available evidence since the incident, and they were still no closer to finding answers. If anything, they were further away, because the trail had time to get cold.
Who would want to kill Senator Ryman? Try “practically everyone,” and you’d b
e off to a good start. Senator Peter Ryman started out as a long shot, and somehow became a front-runner in the presidential race. Everything could change before the official party conventions, but there was no denying that he’d been doing well in the polls, that he’d been performing solidly across a wide spectrum of potential voters, and that his views on the issues tended to appeal to the majority. Being the first candidate to open his campaign to the blogging world certainly didn’t hurt—he’d enjoyed a substantial boost in awareness among voters aged thirty-five and below. The other candidates took too long to realize that they might have missed a trick, and they’d all been scrambling to catch up. Two of our betas received invitations to follow competing politicians in the week immediately after Eakly. Both refused the offers, citing conflict of interest. When you’ve got a good thing going, you don’t shoot it before you have to.
Beyond Senator Ryman’s standing lead, he was photogenic, well-liked, and well-placed in the Republican Party, with no major scandals in his background. No one makes it that far in politics and stays completely clean, but he’s about as close as they come. Literally, the biggest scandal I’ve been able to find on the man is that his oldest daughter, Rebecca, was either three months premature or was conceived out of wedlock. That’s it. He’s like a big, friendly Boy Scout who just woke up one day and decided to become the President of the United States of America.
He doesn’t even seem to belong to any of the major special-interest groups. Despite his wife’s horse ranch, he supports the enforcement of Mason’s Law, which means he’s not in the pocket of the animal rights organizations, but he also opposes wide-scale hunting and deforestation, which means he doesn’t belong to the militant antinature groups. He neither preaches damnation nor asserts that secular humanism was the only answer for a post-Rising world. I haven’t even been able to find proof that his campaign received funding from the tobacco companies, and everyone’s campaign receives funding from the tobacco companies. Once lung cancer stopped killing their customers, they rapidly became the number one contributors to most political campaigns. There’s big money to be had in cigarettes that don’t give anybody cancer.
A lot of people would benefit if Peter Ryman turned up dead. So maybe it’s no surprise that things were fairly bleak around the convoy as the primaries approached. The playful atmosphere that had dominated the campaign for the first six weeks was gone, replaced by blank-faced, by-the-book bodyguards who sometimes seemed to think they should demand blood tests after you used a public toilet. Buffy was handling things pretty well, largely by spending her time either inside the van or with Chuck and his team over in the senator’s equipment rig, but it was driving Shaun and me out of our minds.
We both have our own ways of dealing with crazy. That’s why Super Tuesday found Shaun off with every other Irwin who’d shown up to cover the convention, looking for dead things to irritate, while I was packed onto a bus with six dozen other deeply uncomfortable-looking reporters, heading for the convention center. I didn’t know why they looked so uneasy; I had to get my press pass scanned three times and my blood tested twice before they’d even let me board. The only way anyone was going into conversion before we hit the convention center was if they suffered from cardiac arrest from the strain of being surrounded by other human beings.
A tense-looking man whose shirt was deformed in a way that telegraphed “I am wearing poorly fitted Kevlar” got onto the bus, and the driver announced, “We are at capacity. This bus is now departing for the convention center.” This garnered a smattering of applause from the riders, most of whom looked like they were rethinking their choice of careers. No one ever told them that being a reporter would mean talking to people!
If it seems as if I have little respect for the other members of my profession, that’s because it’s true: I frequently don’t. For every Dennis Stahl who’s willing to go out and chase down the story, you have three or four “reporters” who’d rather edit together remotely taped feeds, interview their subjects by phone, and never leave their homes. There’s a fairly popular news site, Under the Lens, that makes that one of their selling points: They claim they must be truly objective, because none of their Newsies ever go into the field. None of them have Class A licenses, and they act like this is something to brag about, like being distanced from the news is a good thing. If the paparazzi clouds serve one purpose, it’s keeping that attitude from spreading.
Fear makes people stupid, and Kellis-Amberlee has had people scared for the last twenty years. There comes a point when you need to get over the fear and get on with your life, and a lot of people don’t seem to be capable of that anymore. From blood tests to gated communities, we have embraced the cult of fear, and now we don’t seem to know how to put it back where it belongs.
The ride to the convention center was almost silent, punctuated only by the various beeps and whirrs of people’s equipment recalibrating as we passed in and out of the various service zones and secure bands. Wireless tech has reached the point where you’d practically have to be in the middle of the rain forest or standing on an iceberg in uncharted waters to be truly “out of service,” but privacy fields and encryption have progressed at roughly the same rate, which frequently results in service being present but unavailable unless you have the security keys.
No one’s supposed to interfere with the standard phone service channels. This doesn’t stop overenthusiastic security crews from occasionally blanking everything but the emergency bands. It was amusingly easy to spot the freelance journalists in the crowd: They were the ones hitting their PDAs against their palms, like this would somehow make the proper security keys for the convention center access points appear. Fortunately for the security techs of the world, this approach has yet to work for anyone, and the freelancers were still quietly abusing their equipment when we reached the convention center.
The bus stop was located in the underground parking garage, in a clear, well-lighted area equidistant from both the entrance and exit. The bus approached, the entry gate rose; the bus entered the garage, the gate descended. Assuming it was a standard security setup, there were circuit breakers in place to prevent the entry and exit gates from opening at the same time, and sounding the internal alarm would cause them both to descend and lock. In modern security design, “death trap” isn’t always a bad phrase. The idea is minimizing casualties, not preventing them entirely.
Blank-faced security men approached the bus as the doors opened, each holding a blood testing kit. I bit back a groan as I exited and approached the first free guard, adjusting the strap of my shoulder bag before extending my hand toward him. He slipped the unit over my hand and clamped it down.
“Press pass,” he said.
“Georgia Mason, After the End Times.” I unclipped the pass from my shirt and offered it to him. “I’m with Senator Ryman’s group.”
He fed the pass into the scanner at his waist. It beeped and popped the pass out again. He handed it back and glanced at the testing unit, which was showing a flashing green light. He frowned. “Please remove the glasses, Ms. Mason.”
Lovely. Some of the extremely sensitive units can get confused by the elevated levels of inactive virus particles caused by retinal KA. I didn’t exactly want to expose my eyes to the harsh lights of the parking garage, but I didn’t feel like getting shot as a security precaution either. I removed by sunglasses, fighting the urge to squint.
The guard leaned forward, studying my eyes. “Retinal Kellis-Amberlee,” he said. “Do you carry a med card?”
“Yes.” No one with naturally elevated virus levels goes out without a med card if they enjoy breathing. I withdrew my wallet and produced the card, handing it over. He slotted it into the back of the testing unit. The green light stopped flashing, turned yellow, and finally turned a solid green, apparently having satisfied itself that my virus levels were within normal parameters and nothing to be concerned with.
“Thank you for your cooper
ation.” He returned my card. I replaced it in my wallet before sliding my glasses back on. “Will your associates be joining us?”
“Not today.” The scan of my press pass would have told him everything there was to know about our organization: Our work history, what our ratings share was like, any citations we’d received for sloppy reporting or libel, and, of course, how many of us were traveling with the senator and his group. “Where can I find—”
“Information kiosks are inside, up the stairs, and to your left,” he said, already turning toward the next of the waiting journalists.
Assembly-line hospitality. Maybe it’s not that welcoming, but it gets the job done. I turned to head through the glass doors into the convention center proper, where I could hopefully locate a bathroom in short order. The light had left dazzling spots dancing in front of my eyes, and the only way I was going to make them go away was by swallowing some painkillers before the migraine had time to finish developing. It was a small hope, but as I didn’t exactly relish the idea of spending the day mingling with politicians and reporters while suffering from a headache, it was the best one I had.
The air conditioning inside was pumping full volume, ignoring the fact that it was February in Oklahoma. The reason for the arctic chill was evident: The place was packed. Despite the xenophobia that’s gripped the world since the Rising, some things still have to happen face-to-face, and that includes political rallies. If anything, the rallies have gotten larger, growing as the smaller events dwindled. There’s always the chance of an outbreak when you gather more than ten or twenty people in one place, but man is by his very nature a social animal, and once in a while, you just need an excuse.
Before the Rising, Super Tuesday was a big deal. These days, it’s a three-ring circus. Beyond the expected political factions and special-interest groups, the convention center has exhibit halls and even a temporary mini-mall of service and sales kiosks. Place your vote for the next presidential candidate and buy a new pair of running shoes! You know everyone in here has been screened for signs of viral amplification, so have a ball!
