“Perfectly,” said Stacy, and smiled like it was Christmas morning.
After that, there was nothing Michael could do but go along with it.
4.
The drive to San Francisco was smooth, even pleasant. The roads had been clear for weeks, the wrecks and abandoned cars having been reclaimed by the cleanup crews. Some of them—the ones with less biological contamination—might be repaired and used as emergency vehicles. After three years sitting in the elements, often with doors and windows open, Michael doubted the numbers would be very high. The rest would be recycled, reduced to their component materials and then used to construct things that were needed more. Like blood testing units.
The thought of checking his viral load using something that had originally been a Prius was funny enough to make him snort, once. That earned him an odd look from one of the soldiers they were riding with, and he did his best not to do it again.
San Francisco was magnificent in vista without the smog of industry surrounding it. Stacy leaned out the window to take pictures of the bridge, which had been rebuilt less than a year before the Rising, and had somehow managed to endure without maintenance or repair for the duration of the crisis. It was still probably unsafe to drive there, and Michael tensed until they turned off onto solid ground.
A vessel—Michael couldn’t remember if it was considered a boat or a ship when it was big enough to hold fifty men and crewed by the Coast Guard; “vessel” seemed safely generic—was waiting for them at the dock, a line of men in naval blue standing at the rail, their guns at the ready. Lieutenant Collins hopped out of the front passenger seat while the transport was still rolling to a stop. His men were close behind him, rising and filing out with the sort of practiced military precision that it was best not to get in front of. Michael and Stacy remained where they were, waiting for the crush to pass before they grabbed their gear and followed.
The wind blowing off the sea was cool, and tasted faintly of decay. Michael started toward the dock, and stopped as one of the soldiers put out an arm, blocking him.
“Sir, no sir,” said the soldier. “We are to wait here until given clearance to approach.”
“I just wanted to see what’s making that smell,” said Michael.
“Sea lions,” said a woman in naval blue, strolling up to the pair. “We shot thirty yesterday, when we prepped the landing for your arrival, and another fifteen this morning. They seem to be attracted by the smell of their own dead. Poor bastards keep coming back to what they know, even though they don’t belong here anymore.”
Michael shuddered. “Sea lions, naturally. They used to be a tourist attraction.”
“And now they’re attracted to tourists, because they’re hungry as hell.” The woman’s smile was a razorblade slash across her raw-boned face. “There was a time when shooting these blubbery fuckers would’ve brought a hundred animal rights groups down on our heads, and now it’s just part of the daily routine. You Mason?”
“Michael Mason, yes.” He gestured to Stacy, who was about ten feet away and taking a picture of the broken pavement of the parking lot. He was sure she had a reason, something deeply symbolic that would get them another hundred readers. Honestly, as long as she was happy, he didn’t care. “My wife, Stacy. We’re accompanying the Santa Cruz mission for the purpose of documentation.”
“Oh, I know why you’re here,” said the woman. “I’m Commander Huff. This is my vessel. You’re going to be my guests for the duration of the trip. You will follow directions from my crew. You will not touch any part of the ship that you are not given permission to touch. You will not photograph the ship’s controls. You will not photograph any crew member who does not grant you explicit permission to do so. You with me so far?”
“I am,” said Michael. “I’ll tell my wife. If I may ask, however, your uniform…is everyone on this vessel a commander?”
“Good catch,” said Huff. “I was a field commission. Lots of people got turned or eaten during the Rising, and the ranks had to be filled. I’ll get a pretty uniform that says ‘hey, hey, the chick’s in charge’ to outsiders once there’s time to schedule a fitting. Cool by you?”
“Absolutely,” said Michael. “We are your guests.”
The commander looked pleased and faintly disappointed at the same time, as if she had been looking forward to the argument she had been sure was coming. “Well, all right, then,” she said. “Welcome aboard.”
Commander Huff turned and walked back toward her vessel, where Lieutenant Collins was waiting. The pair saluted each other, following whatever rules of military conduct covered encounters such as this one—Michael made a mental note to do some research before he wrote up the experience—and then walked, side by side, onto the deck. The men who had come in the troop transport followed. Michael and Stacy brought up the rear, Stacy taking pictures of the approach, the water below, and yes, the piles of dead sea lions littering the shore.
Then they were all aboard, and the vessel was casting off, starting the long, cold trek toward Santa Cruz.
If he had been asked later what the best part of the day had been—sincerely asked, in private, not publicly asked by one of his fans, who got much more sanitized, less personal answers—he would have said the trip from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, with the ocean below them and the sky overhead, and nothing to force him to think about the dead. At least not until Stacy sat down next to him and started happily burbling on about how the harpoon guns were intended to be used if a zombie whale attempted to take out the vessel, and that was perfect too, because it meant that she was just as happy as he was. They were both out in the world, both enjoying it for what it was, and they were together. This was how things should always be. He would move heaven and earth if he had to, to keep it like this.
The smell of smoke presaged their arrival in Santa Cruz. They sailed around a curve in the coastline and there it was, college town and jewel of the Pacific, burning. Not all of it: just the eucalyptus trees above one of the beaches. But they burned so bright, and with such ferocity, that for a moment Michael believed the entire city was aflame.
“We weren’t planning to make land there anyway,” said one of the soldiers, and another laughed nervously, while Stacy aimed her camcorder at the burning trees. There were dark specks on the beach, writhing toward the water. Seals, Michael realized, with a sort of horrified fascination. They were seals—infected seals, from the way that they were moving—fleeing from the fire.
“Commander says we’re going to swing a little further up the coast, park at the marina,” said another man, this one wearing blue. “Most of the boats are gone. People either tried to sail for safety, or they abandoned them and then the weather took care of the rest.”
“This is so exciting,” said Stacy, turning to beam at Michael.
“Yes,” he said. He couldn’t quite stop his stomach from churning. They were heading toward the unknown, and while this had seemed like an excellent idea when he was safe at home, it was seeming less clever by the minute. Stacy was alive here, in the field, but what about him? “Exciting.”
They arrived at the marina fifteen minutes later. As the sailor had predicted, most of the boats that had once harbored there were long since gone, leaving empty, half-collapsed docks behind them. The Coast Guard vessel seemed immense when compared to those narrow wooden paths across the water. It sailed straight and true for the shore, paying no heed to the lines of the collapsed docks. Wood vanished beneath the prow, and was spat out again in the white foam of their wake.
“All right, men, listen up.” Commander Huff appeared at the rail as the vessel stopped moving forward. “We can’t trust the docks, so we’re going ashore in the RIBs—that’s ‘rigid-hulled inflatable boats,’ for our guests.” Laughter broke out as the sailors and soldiers turned to look at Michael and Stacy. “Ten to a boat, we’re sending our best gunners first, then medics, then we start going through ranks. Those of you who are not going ashore will assist with monitoring fro
m the water. If we need to do a rapid evacuation, you will be the ones responsible for saving our asses, and you will be explaining it to the brass if we all die mysteriously. If it shambles, shoot it. I don’t care what it’s wearing.”
Michael raised his recorder and murmured, “Note to self, report on impossibility of ‘friendly fire’ in a situation where loyalty changes with a single drop of blood.”
Commander Huff shot him a look, apparently preparing to yell at him for defaming the military before she realized what he had actually said. Her face softened, and she nodded, once. Then she turned back to her crew.
“We will be fast. We will be stealthy. We will be without mercy to the infected, and we will be angels to the living. Are there any questions?”
“Ma’am, no, ma’am!” exclaimed the crew, in perfect, practiced unison. Michael saw Stacy’s smile widen, and knew that she had managed to capture that moment on her camera, preserving it to stitch into her report. She didn’t have permission; she could get it later, if the shot was iconic enough. And it would be. He had to wonder how real the moment had actually been. Commander Huff had been expecting them, after all; she would have had plenty of time to script her speech to the crew, to find the best angle to hold her head for the morning light to find her features, making her look like something out of a recruiting video.
Even as he wondered, he realized that it was all academic: He didn’t really care. If Commander Huff wanted to craft her own truth, and preserve it forever on Stacy’s video camera, that was between the two of them. More and more, he was coming to see the truth as a moving flag, something malleable and self-made. Outright lies were wrong—the number of deaths that could have been avoided during the Rising was a testament to that—but sometimes truth was better when it was subjective. He would rather be a happily married man with a wife who was recovering, for instance, than whatever he would become if he stripped the little white lies and careful constructions away.
Reality was all about what you had in the camera’s viewfinder when you pressed “record” and allowed everything that wasn’t in the frame to be forgotten. That was what mattered. That was the truth that would be preserved.
“Mr. Mason?”
Michael didn’t recognize the sailor who had materialized at his elbow. He forced himself to smile anyway, trying to look wise and professorly, when really, he was just tired.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “I was just taking a moment to woolgather before we left the ship. Better to do it now than later, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir,” said the sailor, who from his expression, thought it would be better to do it never. This was a dangerous world, after all; it didn’t forgive the people who stopped to stare off into space, and it wasn’t likely to start any time soon.
Michael followed the sailor to the RIB that would be transporting them to shore. Stacy was already seated, her camera aimed at the distant shoreline. He knew she had an excellent zoom function on that thing; he had looked over the specs more than once, after all. Could she already see the infected through her lens, watching them shamble around the world that had once been theirs, and was now forevermore beyond them? He wanted to ask. He didn’t want to know.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said as he settled beside her. He pressed a quick kiss to her cheek. She smiled, but didn’t look away from the shore.
“We’re having an adventure,” she said, not bothering to conceal her glee.
“Yes, indeed we are,” he said, and the RIB dropped away from the ship, down onto the surprisingly hard surface of the sea, and it was too late to turn back, even if he’d wanted to. It had been too late to turn back for years.
5.
Santa Cruz was a city of ghosts.
The Rising had been too long to leave the buildings unscathed, and too short to have worn them fully into neglect and decay. Weather-treated flags still snapped from the tops of flagpoles; houses still wore their last coats of paint as if they hoped that maybe somehow a miracle would happen and their owners would come home. There were potholes in the roads, but the ongoing droughts had prevented them from becoming chasms. Santa Cruz had been a lovely, charming, tourist-oriented town before Kellis-Amberlee. Now it looked like a seaside dive, a place that had been largely forgotten by everyone except for its inhabitants, but which might still thrive under the right circumstances.
Nothing was thriving in Santa Cruz save for feral cats, seagulls, and the dead.
They had encountered their first zombies as they trudged up the beach toward the parking lot beyond. Three former college students had come shambling out of a copse of eucalyptus trees, their mouths slack. They hadn’t started moaning yet; Michael wasn’t even sure they’d had the time to realize that they were sharing their beach with the living. The sound of the waves was good cover for the sound of footsteps in the sand, and the wind was blowing out to sea. Regardless, the infected hadn’t had the opportunity to sound the alarm. The soldiers had drawn silenced rifles, shooting straight and clean, and all three of the former students had crumpled to the ground.
The expedition had given the spreading red patch around the fallen zombies a wide berth. It was better to avoid hot zones whenever possible—even when walking into a zone that was much larger and more dangerous than a little blood could ever be.
The parking lot at the head of the beach was still studded with cars, all of them showing the effects of having been parked in the sea air for years. It also contained a detachment of soldiers in Army green. Commander Huff saluted. Lieutenant Collins did the same. The woman at the head of the group returned their salutes, eyes flicking across the people gathered behind them. Her eyes narrowed slightly when she saw the Masons. She dropped her hand.
“Lieutenant Lambert,” she said. “Any trouble?”
“A few hostiles on the beach; nothing we couldn’t handle,” said Lieutenant Collins. “You?”
“We’ve been mowing them down like wheat since we got here,” she said. “Welcome to hell.”
“Any signs of the civilians we’re here to recover?” asked Commander Huff.
Lieutenant Lambert fixed her with a cold eye. “I have seen nothing living that doesn’t have wings or claws to defend itself. That SOS was a ghost.”
“Where have you been?”
Lieutenant Lambert began running down the list of places her men had cleared, or tried to clear. They hadn’t had any fatalities as yet, but part of that was on their movements: They had stuck to the outskirts, using silencers and air-propelled projectiles to cut down any hostiles they encountered. Zombies were drawn to noise. They didn’t fully understand that the death of one of their own meant that there were probably living people near.
“We need to press on, toward the university,” said Lieutenant Lambert. “We’ve just been waiting for you mooks to show up and give us the extra manpower to make it possible that we might survive.”
“Wait.”
It took Michael a moment to realize that Stacy had been the one to speak. Slowly, he turned to look at her. The soldiers were already staring at the civilian who had dared to open her mouth.
“Is there a problem, Ms. Mason?” asked Lieutenant Lambert. She stressed the “Ms.” just hard enough to make it clear, in a single syllable, how little she approved of the civilian presence on this mission. Whether it was because she had been hoping to keep whatever glory it produced to herself or because she was genuinely concerned about their safety, Michael couldn’t have said. He didn’t care to speculate, either. Fear clenched his stomach, cold and cruel and unforgiving.
Please don’t let them arrest us, he thought. All the ground Stacy had gained would be undone if she wound up in a jail cell: He knew that, even as he knew that their position had become suddenly precarious. One syllable and everything was changing.
“No problem, ma’am,” said Stacy. Her tone was suitably deferential. The magnitude of the situation wasn’t escaping her, and Michael was glad. She continued: “I just don’t think pushing on toward
campus will do us any good. Look, Berkeley was more urban, more defensible, and Berkley fell. All the survivors were off campus, because the school itself became a killing jar. UC Santa Cruz isn’t going to be any better. It’s almost certainly going to be worse. If you’re looking for survivors, you shouldn’t be looking on campus. That’s just going to rile up the locals and lose a bunch of good people in the process.”
“Where do you think we should be looking?” asked Lieutenant Lambert. “My apologies for not consulting you before. I was unaware that you were a Santa Cruz native.”
“I’m not,” said Stacy, who was smart enough to see when she was being baited. “But I’m a faculty wife in the UC system, and more importantly, I’m a mother. We used to come out to Santa Cruz all the time. I know where there’s a radio, a relatively secure facility, and a low human population. Assuming they could survive the deer, they’d be well positioned to come through the Rising alive.”
“Where?” asked Commander Huff, before her counterpart could speak.
Michael wished that he were the one holding the video camera as Stacy turned to look at Commander Huff. The sun was shining behind her, catching highlights off her hair, and her expression was grave, the face of a woman who saw an impossible task ahead of her and couldn’t wait to get started.
“Natural Bridges State Park,” said Stacy. “They have a full ranger station there. They’d have a radio, and they would have people who knew how to use it.”
Commander Huff nodded slowly. “We’ll start there.”
Lieutenant Lambert didn’t say anything at all.
Later, Michael would remember the trip across Santa Cruz like something out of a terrible dream. The two squads had merged until he no longer knew which soldiers had been on the boat and which had been patrolling the city with Lieutenant Lambert. No vehicles were quiet enough to use without attracting the attention of the infected, and so they had traveled on foot, sticking to the outskirts, cutting down zombies whenever they appeared. The science of killing the dead had advanced since the start of the Rising. After twenty zombies had appeared and fallen, there had been no fatalities among the team members.