I’d be bored out of my skull if I was stuck behind a desk all the time, and I’d lose a lot of the qualities that actually make me as smart as I claim to be. I’m not the greenest hill in the field when I’m locked in a room and told to write down the world. Put me outside with a weapon in my hand and a problem to solve, and I’m Ada Lovelace.
The convention center backed up on a large swath of undeveloped land. That wasn’t a safety hazard: This was Alabama, and it seemed like even the squirrels carried assault rifles in their cunning little paws. Any zombies that wandered this close to town would find themselves reduced to a fine mist and bleached out of existence before they could do any real damage. On some level, I suspected that was why this site had been chosen for the convention center, which was a post-Rising, tornado-proof structure designed to withstand anything short of a direct nuclear blast. It could be used as a shelter for the entirety of Huntsville, if necessary. By putting it where they had, the city planners had made the point that no one here was living in fear. Anticipation of getting to shoot some infected deer, maybe, but not fear.
It was a pretty piece of fiction, and as I slid down the soft embankment behind the building, braking with the sides of my feet like a skier to keep from going too fast, I wished them the best with it. If they really hadn’t been afraid of what might come wandering out of the trees, they wouldn’t have surrounded their convention center with six layers of fencing and a state-of-the-art auto-sniper system. The black boxes atop the fencing contained miniaturized rifles, each capable of delivering six shots with terrifying pinpoint accuracy. Very impressive, if you didn’t mind all the local birds being shot out of the sky for crossing the fence lines without submitting to the proper blood tests first.
Several of the black boxes swiveled to look at me with their cold, blank eyes as I reached the maintenance gate in the first fence. I checked the blood testing unit for signs of tampering and, finding none, pressed my thumb against the open panel. A small, unobtrusive light half-covered by a half dome came on, flashing red, then yellow, and finally green. I wrinkled my nose, signaling my mag to take some burst photos of the process. It would make good filler for whatever I wrote about the day. More importantly, it would let me study this particular security setup at my leisure, when I wasn’t in the field and paying attention to my surroundings. I’d never seen a hooded light before. It would keep my test results private from the people around me, which was good, but could potentially allow me to lie about them, which wasn’t.
The unit beeped—an audio cue was even odder than a half-concealed light. Half the time it feels like people are making tweaks to their security setups just so they can say they did it. The gate unlocked. I pulled my hand away from the unit and stepped through. My questions could wait. I had five more gates to clear.
The openings were staggered, forcing the person who wanted to get in or out to walk anywhere from five to fifteen feet along the fence line before they reached the next testing unit. It was a cognitive test, intended to see whether someone was beginning to amplify and hence losing the ability to figure out where to go next. It was utterly, patently pointless, and had probably gotten a couple of people killed. If you checked out clean on one station, you needed to be able to dive through, slam the door, and hit the next checkpoint, not screw around looking for where you were supposed to go. The staggering would give the infected time to spit or bleed on the people trapped inside the fences, turning the living into virtual rats in a cage.
There were no zombies to harry me as I made my way through. Just six pinpricks in quick succession, leaving my thumb feeling bruised despite the cooling foam that accompanied every needle. The last door unlocked, and the black boxes swiveled away from me, no longer interested now that I was moving away from the convention center. It was a small compromise between the “safety first” people and the “seriously, we’re running out of wildlife, can you not” activists: Anything that tried to move toward the center without going through the proper testing protocols would be gunned down, but anything that was moving away would be cheerfully ignored.
Getting back in was going to be fun. I looked forward to documenting it.
The scrubby grass and small weeds crunching underfoot were largely unfamiliar, growing as they were in Southern soil the color of dried blood. I wondered idly how many people had moved out of state because they couldn’t stand the color of the ground anymore, now that we lived in a world where blood was the enemy and biological waste was a death sentence. Maybe no one had left, and all the people who lived and loved and died in Alabama thought the rest of us were too easily shocked by the world. It was hard to say. But the day was beautiful and the air was sweet, so it didn’t really matter.
A cluster of people had formed around a portable Foreman grill in a clearing past the tree line. This wasn’t proper forest—more like an orchard that had been allowed to grow out of control when people lost interest in handpicking their own apples. As such, there were wide spaces and clearings everywhere, making it seem like a video-game level, instead of an actual wilderness. Most of the people sat in folding chairs. A few stood, and one was sitting cross-legged on the ground, her eyes closed and her hands resting on her knees.
One of the standers waved as he saw me approaching. “Well, as I live and breathe,” he said, in an exaggerated Irish brogue that bore about as much resemblance to my accent as it did to a banana. “If it’s not the lovely and talented Aislinn Ross. Top of the morning to you, Ms. Ross.”
“Last name’s North, as well you know, Karl,” I said. I was trying to sound like I was above his taunts, and I mostly managed it. Mostly. Karl Conway had been a pain in my ass since I’d applied for my U.S. blogger’s license. He’d been part of the group that attempted to keep me from certification, claiming my being a foreign national meant both that I shouldn’t be taking work from American Irwins and that I wouldn’t know how to deal with the unique dangers of the American landscape. It had been the Canadian government, oddly enough, that had come to my rescue; they’d replied to his petition by saying he made excellent points about journalists working on foreign soil, and that they’d be reexamining all those tourist licenses they issued to Americans. Karl had withdrawn his complaint without missing a beat. I’d been licensed, and I’d been ready to let it drop.
He hadn’t been. Nothing I did, from hard news to naturalization, could make him stop beating his jingoistic drum and demanding I get the hell out of his country. If ever a man could force my hand to murder, it was going to be him.
“See, where I’m from, a woman takes her husband’s name when she marries him,” said Karl. “It’s a sign of respect.”
“Ah, yes, the infamous ‘respect,’” I said. “Given your name to any lovely ladies lately?”
Karl scowled. The other Irwins laughed, some ruefully, others with a distinct note of triumph. Karl was about as popular with our community as a bad case of fleas. He was annoying, he was a bully, and he didn’t understand when it was time to back off. He was also tenacious and virtually impossible to kill without using a hammer. Everyone knew he was going to be around for a long, long time. Nobody liked it, but most of us were pretty good at learning to live with what we couldn’t change.
“Afternoon, Ash,” said the man at the grill. He lifted his head and grinned, his somewhat questionable dentistry doing nothing to detract from the brightness of his smile. A lot of people are scared of the dentist, and with good reason. Even basic cleanings require mild sedation, and a hundred people spontaneously amplify in the dentist’s chair every year. It’s a very well-paid profession, since it’s both essential and incredibly dangerous. For some people, painkillers and a little discoloration are a small price to pay to avoid the needle and the silence. “We’re having chicken and tofu skewers. You in?”
I hoisted my bag. “I brought supplies.”
His grin broadened. “Excellent.” Chase Hoffman was one of the best Irwins in Alabama, and this was really his party, since we were guests on
his patch: His family had been in Huntsville for the past fifteen generations, and it was going to take more than a zombie apocalypse to move them. The South reminded me a lot of Ireland in that regard. What mattered was how long you’d been there, setting roots into the land. What mattered was where your people were from, where they’d been born and died and where the bodies were buried. Everything else was just the present, and everyone knew the present was only a blink of an eye when set against the great and constant walls of history.
The rest of the Irwins greeted me as I walked over and began unpacking my offering of turkey hot dogs, chicken breasts, and asparagus spears onto the waiting trays. Some of them I knew, by reputation if not by actual acquaintance; others were unfamiliar, and required more attention while I fixed their faces in my memory. It’s never good to be introduced to someone I’ve already met. It made me seem flighty, when really, it was just a matter of my having better things to pay attention to than what face went with which name. The world is made of dangerous things. Hurt feelings are among them, but hurt feelings are unlikely to rip my throat out with their teeth. I prefer to focus on the things that could kill me, not just say nasty things behind my back.
“How’s your candidate?” asked Karl, apparently unwilling to let me off the hook with light mockery. Swell. “She ready to concede?”
“I could ask you the same, you know, with a side order of ‘how did you convince Blackburn to hire you in the first place,’” I said. “You seem more like a York man to me. Reactionary, reclusive, slightly misogynistic…”
“She’s got you dead to rights,” said the cross-legged woman, opening her eyes and smiling benevolently up at him. She turned to me, and extended one hand. “Hi. I’m Jody. I’m also with the Blackburn campaign.”
“She has two Irwins?” I asked, leaning down to shake.
“I came as a package deal with her Newsie, Eric,” she said. “He does stunning exposés, I meditate in dangerous places. He’s also over there, helping with the barbeque, because sometimes he comes as a package deal with me.”
Suddenly, I understood where I recognized her from. “You’re Peaceful Demolitions! I’ve seen some of your videos.”
Jody grinned. “I am, and I’ve seen some of yours. You do good work.”
“So do you! So original.” My gushing over Jody was making Karl scowl more. I decided not to stop. “How’d you come up with the notion? I love a good risk as much as the next girl, but I’m not sure I could voluntarily close my eyes and think about the world while zombies were clawing at the windows.”
“Liar,” said Chase. “I’ve seen those nap videos you did. You sleep in trees, on purpose, in hazard zones.”
“Yes, off the ground and with one hand on my gun,” I said. “There’s a thin line between intentionally stupid and accidentally suicidal, and I try not to cross it when I don’t have to.”
“Whereas I play hopscotch with it,” said Jody. She didn’t sound ashamed of herself. If anything, she sounded exactly the opposite. I couldn’t blame her for that. Her videos were works of art. Occasionally terrifying works of art, sure—even I didn’t like watching someone utterly defenseless and exposed for as long as she would sometimes sit, thinking—but beautiful all the same. “I realized we’re all about the running and the screaming, and thought it might be nice to slow things down. Based on my ratings and merchandise sales, I wasn’t the only one. I was just the first person to realize there might be money there.”
“Teach me your ways, o wise one,” I said, and Jody laughed, and Chase handed me a turkey dog in a whole wheat bun, and Karl aside, everything was perfect.
More Irwins drifted in. Some of them were with news sites that had come to cover the convention. Others were independents, traveling with their own Newsies. The majority were local or semilocal, and had come for the reason Irwins always came: because they knew that once this many of us were in one area, the party would inevitably begin. There must have been more than a dozen of us there, chatting, eating, and drinking alcohol-free beer, when my ear cuff began beeping rapidly. I put my bottle down on the nearest folding table and drifted toward the edge of the clearing, noting as I did that Karl and Jody, both with Blackburn, and Mo, with York, had done the same.
“You’re go for Ash,” I said, activating the connection. “What can I help you with?”
“Where are you?” It was Audrey. She sounded… not tense, exactly, but tightly wound, like she might snap and start spilling kinetic energy everywhere at any moment.
“Out behind the convention center with essentially all the local Irwins, and a few who aren’t so local. Karl is here. He doesn’t say hello. He does say that I’m a stuck-up Irish bitch, so he hasn’t changed a bit. Why? Are you all right? You sound odd.”
“I sound like the candidate announcement just happened,” said Audrey. She paused, long enough for my heart to sink. It was over, then. We were going home.
I’d never admit it, not in a million years, but part of me was relieved. No one tried to kill us when we were at home. We had our space and our things and our world around us, and we knew what we were up against. Let the politicians have their life-and-death struggles over the budget cap and whether people were allowed to keep ponies; I’d go back to my familiar little life, and while it might not be perfect, it was enough. Maybe it was even time to talk to Ben about that divorce. I could make an honest woman out of Audrey, and let her make a better woman out of me.
Audrey was saying something. I jerked back into the present. “I’m sorry, come again?” I said.
“I said, Governor Susan Kilburn of Oregon is the next Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States of America.” Audrey still sounded tense, but at least she also sounded amused. She was used to my woolgathering. “Blackburn came in a close second. Betting pools have shifted over to whether Kilburn is going to be offering her the VP slot, and if so, how long it’s going to take her to say yes.”
“Tell Ben she has at least three people on her news team, and while I’m happy to take Jody and Eric—they’re an Irwin and Newsie team, and I know Jody doesn’t conflict with my area, not sure whether Eric would overlap with either Ben or Mat—we’re only working with Karl if he reanimates, because I’d kill him.”
I was speaking too quietly for Karl to hear me from the other side of the clearing, but judging by his posture and the quick, angry looks he was darting in my direction, he didn’t need to hear me to know what I was saying. He knew he’d burnt all his bridges with me years ago, and neither of us had any interest in rebuilding. I wondered whether he’d try anyway. This was a big job, and while there are always things for the Irwins of the world to do—people never get tired of watching us risk our necks—big jobs don’t come along very often. When you get one, you hang on to it, whatever it takes.
“Karl? The one who said he’d stop making fun of your accent if you gave him a video of the two of us making out?”
“That’s the one.”
“Flip him off for me.”
I solemnly swiveled toward Karl and raised my middle finger in silent salute. Then I froze, feeling my blood run cold in my veins. It was a terrible sensation. It wasn’t as bad as what was yet to come. “Audrey, I need you to go find John or Amber. Tell them to lock down the governor and sound the alarms.”
The infected were moving through the trees, and if they were close enough for me to see them, they were also close enough for them to see me. But they weren’t moaning, not yet. Just my luck. Another close encounter with the quiet ones.
Audrey was laughing. “Is he glaring at you? I bet he’s glaring at you. Take a picture.” The true face of her tension was showing itself now. It wasn’t concern or dismay: It was giddiness, delight at a job well done, and the belief that things were going to be better now. Even if Kilburn lost, we would have followed her all the way to the final bell. Our careers were made.
If we lived that long. “Audrey. Please, listen to me. I love you.” It was a random declaration, and
one she’d heard before, if never with quite so much urgency and raw need. She stopped laughing. I stopped flipping Karl off and pointed to the trees behind him. He flipped me off. This was bad. “Contact security. Tell them a mob is emerging from the trees behind the convention center. Tell them… tell them…”
If she told them we were out here, would they try to save us, or would they treat us as a firebreak, something to burn when the zombies got too close? The dead were dead. We were the living, and the living, no matter how well trained they are, don’t always respond well under pressure. If we were exposed, if we were infected, we could run the fences anyway, seeking another few seconds of life before we inevitably died. Irwins caught between a rock and a hard place got smashed. Just like everything else.
“Tell them we’re here, Audrey. Tell them we’re alive.” I pointed at the trees behind Karl again, more fiercely this time. He must have seen something in my expression, because he turned, and paled when he saw the zombies coming through the wood, and shoved his phone into his pocket before running back toward the others.
Good. I hiked the side of my skirt up and drew the pistol from my thigh holster. It was surprisingly heavy in my hand. I’d held that weapon a hundred times, and it had never seemed so heavy. “Tell them we want to come home. I love you.”
“Ash—” she began. Her voice cut off as I killed the connection.
Some people liked to stay on the phone with their friends and loved ones as they fought, thinking it was better to have the company. I had never wanted that. One day, I was going to die in the field. Maybe I was going to die in this one. If that happened, I wanted to be remembered smiling, not screaming. That was why I always ended my videos with a grin and a wink, no matter how tired I was. Every entry could be the one that went up on the Wall. I didn’t want the last thing I did to be sad. Dying was sad enough without helping it along.