Feed n-1

by Mira Grant

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Trying to avoid making them a target?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Are they labeled?”

  Buffy hesitated before admitting, “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why?” asked Buffy.

  “San Diego,” I said, and waited.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Guess so,” said Shaun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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