All the Pretty Little Horses

by Mira Grant

  Michael was beginning to think that they might make it through this unscathed when they reached the mouth of the Natural Bridges State Park. It was the site of the annual monarch migration, when thousands of black-and-orange butterflies would descend from the heavens and turn the eucalyptus groves into a living cathedral of fanning wings and fluttering bodies before they continued on their way. A ranger station had been built there to monitor the butterflies. There was also a small educational center filled with souvenirs and snacks for the children. He remembered taking Phillip there once, before things had gone so terribly wrong. He had looked forward to coming back every year until his son was too old to enjoy that sort of day trip with his parents.

  Phillip was gone now, and Michael was finally back at Natural Bridges. There were no zombies in evidence as the squad made its way carefully up the path leading to the educational center. The soldiers on the edges of the group watched the woods as they walked. Human zombies were less of a concern than infected animals this close to a wooded area. An infected human could do a lot of damage, but it couldn’t bite through Kevlar. An infected dog, on the other hand, could potentially rip off limbs.

  “Michael, look.” Stacy’s voice was hushed. He followed the angle of her hand as she pointed.

  There was a line of Christmas lights on the roof of the educational center.

  It was too high to be noticed by casually roving zombies, and there had been no indications that they were attracted by light: They weren’t moths. The fact that it was still lit up meant that there was electricity inside, and more, that someone wanted people to know that they were still inside.

  “I see it,” said Commander Huff, and motioned for her people to split up and surround the building. Lieutenants Collins and Lambert did the same. Michael and Stacy tried to keep moving, remaining protected without interfering with the operation.

  Commander Huff was the first to reach the door. She knocked twice, quick, sharp sounds. Michael winced. He winced again as she called, loudly enough to be heard by the people inside, “This is the United States Coast Guard. We understand that you folks were hoping for a rescue.”

  The door opened. The barrel of a shotgun appeared. All around the Masons, safeties clicked off and rifles swung up, ready to fire. The shotgun’s owner remained out of sight, obscured by the wall of the educational center.

  “Good tactical thinking,” murmured Stacy. Michael could only nod in agreement.

  “Prove it,” said a high, terrified voice—the voice of a teenage girl who had been suddenly cast into an unwanted, unbearable position of authority. Assuming she wasn’t alone in there, which she very well might have been. Michael tried to remember what he knew about the interior of the building: how it was laid out, how many rooms there were. Mostly what he remembered was a small kitchenette area, supplied with the sort of snacks that tired children would whine for, an assortment of teas, and a hot water canteen. Not enough to keep many people alive during a zombie apocalypse. Really, it was a miracle that it had been enough to save the girl.

  Commander Huff waved for her people to lower their weapons. “My name is Fiona Huff,” she said, in a voice that was softer and gentler than anything Michael had heard from her thus far. “I’m a commander with the Coast Guard, and I am very much hoping that we can find a way to get you out of there without anyone else being hurt. Now, I know that you’re smart enough to know that the infected don’t talk. Why don’t you open that door a little wider, and you can see that I’m not injured?”

  “What if you’re here to raid us?”

  On the word “us” Stacy glanced to Michael, her eyes wide and alight with the possibilities that had suddenly opened in front of them. Maybe the teenager had been a better protector than any of them had guessed. Maybe she still had a child or two alive in there with her, and what could have been just another tragedy was about to become a beautiful story of hope and perseverance in the face of adversity.

  “I assure you, we are not here to raid you,” said Commander Huff. “We are here to offer aid and get you out of this place. The choice is yours. You can open the door and find out whether I’m telling you the truth, or you can close it, and we can go.”

  There was a long pause, pregnant with fear and uncertainty, all of it radiating from the girl on the other side of the door. Michael couldn’t imagine what she’d been through. Keeping even one child alive for three years must have been a nightmare that consumed her every waking moment, and now that rescue was at hand, it was too much for her to let herself believe.

  He had experienced similar feelings when he’d watched the drab olive troop carriers come rolling up their street, spilling out soldiers in tactical body armor, their weapons cocked and ready to put the infected down. It had been too much to believe, and so he—and all the others—had simply turned their faces away. After you’d been ground down for long enough, hope ceased to be the thing that got you through the day. Hope became the thing that got you killed.

  Finally, a hand snaked around the opening in the door, just below the barrel of the shotgun, and pulled it cautiously open.

  The girl on the other side was somewhere in her mid to late teens. It was difficult to say just how old, as short and skinny as she was, and Michael realized with a start that her growth would almost certainly have been stunted by three years of isolation and poor nutrition. His little enclave in suburban Berkeley had been lucky on so many levels that none of them had been in a position to recognize until it was all over…assuming it would ever really be over.

  She was dark-skinned and wary, with her hair cut close to her scalp and curling softly upward in a natural puff. It was the only soft thing about her. Her clavicle showed clearly through her skin, which was stretched as tight across her skeleton as the head of a drum.

  “Do you have any ID?” she asked, in a voice that was filled with cautious prayer.

  Commander Huff touched the name tag on her breast. “I’m afraid I don’t have my wallet with me,” she said.

  The girl’s eyes began to fill with tears. “You really came.” She lowered her gun. Then, to the surprise and confusion of the people who were watching her, she looked over Commander Huff’s head to the trees, and called, “Stand down!”

  A series of clicks sounded from the direction of the tangled wood behind the troops. A few of the men looked wildly around. Then one of them pointed.

  “There!” he exclaimed.

  Michael turned in time to see a wiry teenage boy unbuckle the belt he’d been using as a stabilizer and drop out of the trees. The boy recovered quickly from his controlled fall and ran for the educational center, weaving through the massed soldiers like they weren’t even there. He slid past Commander Huff and took up a position behind the girl, watching everyone around him warily.

  Two more teens appeared a few seconds later: a boy and a girl, both with short-cropped black hair and matching, rounded features. This pair stopped at the edge of the building, balancing on the balls of their feet, ready to run.

  All three were carrying long-barreled rifles.

  “I see you’ve been doing all right for yourselves,” said Commander Huff. “We received your distress signals.”

  “All right?” said the first boy, eyes going wide. “You think we’ve been all right? We’ve been dying out here, and you didn’t come. We thought you were going to come. My parents—”

  He started to take a step forward. The first girl’s arm across his chest stopped him where he was. “Stuart, no,” she said firmly. “They’re here now.” She looked to Commander Huff. “Are you here to take us home?”

  “I am here to take you someplace safe,” said Commander Huff, sidestepping the question of “home.” For these kids, if they were from Santa Cruz, home didn’t exist anymore. Until their names and identities were confirmed, there was no way of knowing whether they had families to go back to.

  “So we’re done?” The girl’s voice was beginning to thicken with tears. “We’re finished? We’re off
duty, and we can go?”

  Commander Huff frowned. Stacy gasped. It was a small sound, but enough to pull the attention of the group to her. Commander Huff’s frown deepened.

  “Ms. Mason?”

  “I’m sorry, Commander, I know we’re supposed to be observing, not interfering, but I couldn’t—I mean, I—” Stacy took a step forward, suddenly radiating motherly concern. Her attention switched to the girl. “You don’t know me, but I know this place. I brought my son here once. How many of them have you been taking care of?”

  That was the trigger; that was the phrase that finally broke the girl who’d been willing to face down the Coast Guard with nothing but her shotgun and her snipers. Tears rolling down her cheeks as she silently sobbed, she pushed the door all the way open.

  Michael and the others gazed in dismay at the children who were clustered behind them, their day camp counselor turned den mother. It’s like Peter Pan and Wendy, he thought, only half nonsensically.

  That night, when he was safe in his home, with the walls between him and the wolves of the world, he would sit at his keyboard and tease out that thought into the first of a series of essays on the children he called “orphans of the Rising.” It was an off-the-cuff label, but it would stick, as would the images of hollow-cheeked, huge-eyed children clustered in the shadows of the educational center, waiting for the return of parents who had left them behind three years previously, and who had never made it back to them.

  “Fifteen,” whispered the girl, and cried, garnering surprised, concerned looks from her teenage lieutenants.

  One of the children stepped forward: a little girl, no more than six years old. She looked at the guns without fear, finally focusing on Stacy, and asked, in a sweet, faintly lisping voice, “Did you bring food?”

  Stacy’s laughter was heavy with tears. She produced a granola bar from inside her vest, and the children—who were alive, gloriously alive—swarmed over her like the infected adults that they had been hiding from for the past three years.

  6.

  Fifteen children and four teenagers had been loaded onto the boat for the return ride to San Francisco. It would get them back to civilization, and to proper medical care, sooner than the caravan through the Santa Cruz Mountains. Michael and Stacy had watched as the kids were given their first-ever blood tests, the lights on the units switching one by one from red to green. It was no real surprise. Only the teens were above amplification weight, and even that was questionable: they were skin and bones and sinew, worn down by the world until there was almost nothing left.

  But they had held the line. All four teens had been weeping unreservedly by the time they reached the water, so relieved by the release of their burdens that they didn’t even seem to realize that they were being rescued too. The children would survive. The four day-camp assistants who had been on duty the day that the world changed forever would be able to start the long, slow process of moving on.

  “Imagine what they must have been through,” said Michael, taking his seat next to Stacy on the truck that would carry them back down the mountain, out of the danger zone. Half of the troops would be staying to continue searching the city for survivors. This would be the dirty, gritty side of the job, and the fact that what they had already done was regarded as the “clean” part meant that Michael had no regrets about leaving.

  “Hmm?” Stacy looked up from her camera’s viewport. Footage from the educational center flickered there, bright and silent. Even though there had been no infected in the woods—something that concerned Michael a little; how had the children been able to hold the line for so long, in what should have been a perfect hunting ground?—it was still safest to review any exterior recordings with the sound off. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I wasn’t listening. Do you think I sounded maternal enough when we found out about the children? I wish you had a camera of your own. It would have been so nice to have some second-person footage to splice in.”

  “…that’s true,” said Michael, after a pause. “I was just saying that they must have been through a lot.”

  “I can’t believe they survived. They must have been living on blackberries and frogs.” At Michael’s blank look, Stacy shook her head, and explained, “There’s a little swamp not thirty yards away from that building. Frogs can’t carry the virus. If they went hunting for amphibians, they could have kept some protein in their diets without getting sick. Protein is important for growing children. Do you think Lieutenant Collins could arrange for me to interview the counselors, once they’ve had time to be medically cleared? I could potentially help them find their families, by publicizing their situation…”

  “Stacy.” Michael put a hand on her knee. She turned to look at him, eyes wide and filled with the scars of old wounds. “I don’t think we should push these kids. They’ve been through a lot.”

  “Everyone’s been through a lot, Michael. If their families are still out there, there’s no guarantee the government knows where they are. And if their families didn’t make it through the Rising, a little positive media attention could make the difference between languishing in one of the facilities the state has been setting up, and finding a new home. A real home, with people who will love them, and take care of them, and not push them away because they’re a little bit broken.” Stacy’s eyes had drifted back to her viewfinder while she spoke. On the tiny screen, the rescued children poured out of the educational center, throwing their arms around the legs of soldiers, stuffing their faces with whatever snacks the troops had concealed in their vests.

  Sounding distant now, she said, “There are a lot of kids whose parents didn’t make it through the Rising. A lot of kids who aren’t ever going to get to go home. I know it seems self-serving, and maybe it is, a little bit. Maybe I can’t be anything but self-serving anymore. And I don’t care. If I can help one child—just one—find their way to a home, it’ll be worth it. I’ll take it.”

  Michael said nothing. He just squeezed her knee and settled back in his seat, watching the trees scroll by outside the window.

  The wheels were already starting to turn deep in his mind, although they wouldn’t reach their inevitable conclusion for some time. Perhaps it would have been better if the universe had interrupted him; perhaps it would have been kinder if he’d been jarred from his contemplation by an infected deer bounding from the shadows, or a tire going flat. But none of that happened.

  The cars rolled on, and Michael Mason thought about the future.

  Chapter 3: What We Gave Away

  I have found the Masons to be trustworthy, reliable, and eager to carve out a place in our changed and changing world. Given their history, I still cannot endorse this course of action. I do not believe it will be healthy for any of the parties involved.

  —Lieutenant Bernard Collins, August 6, 2018

  We were only supposed to be in charge for a little while. There were adults in the beginning. They went to get help. They never came back.

  —Smita Gupta

  1.

  “Did you get the viewership numbers for the weekend?” Stacy didn’t look up from her tablet. She was stirring something on the stove, something red and sticky that smelled like spaghetti sauce and herbs, and Michael was struck all over again by how beautiful she was. How beautiful, and how fragile, for all that she was the stronger of the pair of them. He was just better at keeping her from seeing where the breaks were.

  Maybe that was what marriage was really all about, he mused, as he walked over to the island at the center of the kitchen and set down his computer. It was about being able to break in different ways, so that someone was always covering the weak spots. She had covered for him during the Rising. He was happy to cover for her now. No, not happy—honored. It meant she still needed him.

  “I haven’t had time,” he said.

  Stacy looked up from her sauce, a line forming between her eyebrows as she looked at him in confusion. “What do you mean, you haven’t had time?” she asked. “I know you weren�
��t on campus all morning. I got the alert when you passed through security.”

  “That’s the stupidest of the many stupid security systems I’ve seen recently,” he said. “How are people supposed to react to email telling them that so-and-so has just cleared a blood test, when they’re getting that email six and eight times a day? It becomes white noise. White noise is how things get missed.”

  “You should do a report on that, and tell your wife what you meant by ‘I haven’t had time,’” said Stacy firmly. She was like a dog with a bone sometimes. It was what made her such a good…whatever it was that they were becoming. Some people had started calling them “journalists.” They were even getting imitators, as their videos and articles spread wider and wider. It felt good. If people were copying you, that meant that you were doing something right.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” he said, apologetically enough that Stacy’s shoulders unlocked a bit. “I’ve been talking to Lieutenant Collins.”

  Now her demeanor changed completely, becoming sunny and open. It was like looking back in time to the woman she’d been before the Rising, and he wanted nothing more in the world than to make her stay like this. “How is Bernie? What’s he been up to?”

  “He’s been running rescue and recovery missions all up and down the coast. Lots of children hiding out in attics and basements. They even got a couple off of a yacht anchored in the middle of a reservoir. No one’s sure how those kids survived. He says it would be a miracle, if they weren’t all being loaded into a system that’s already overtaxed to the point of breaking down. As it stands, it’s just one more tragedy.” Michael looked at her levelly, hoping she would come to the conclusion he was trying so hard to lead her to. “They’re opening an orphanage just up the highway, in Sacramento.”