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  There were no signs of a struggle here. Ancient vending machines were tucked discreetly away near the interior entrance to the restrooms, and they too were intact, even though everything inside them was probably long since spoiled. The water might still be safe to drink, but the sodas and juices would be sour and flat, and the candy and chips would be stale. Even so, their presence was a good sign that this place was secure.

  The bathroom doors were shut. I nudged the women’s-room door open with my foot, revealing the dark space beyond. The ringing in my ears was still there, but sound hadn’t quite come back yet, apart from that. I watched the gloom, waiting for movement. None came. Finally, I pulled my foot away and let the door swing shut again. If there were zombies in here with us, we’d deal with them after we were patched up and capable of rational thought again.

  Fear and panic can make zombies of us all. We act without consideration for the consequences. We run, and we don’t look back. Which is why it’s interesting how much investment this world has in keeping us afraid.

  I repeated my check with the men’s room before I turned and walked back toward the door. “We’re clear,” I said. “I’ve mostly managed not to bleed on things, but I need medical care, and we’re going to need a lot of bleach.”

  Ben stepped into the visitor’s center, stopping long enough to force the doors shut again before turning to face me. I put my gun carefully down on the shelf that had once been covered in visitor’s brochures and maps of the area before I held up my hands, mutely showing him my bloody, shredded palms. They were mostly numb by this point, too angry with my treatment of them to communicate with the rest of the body. That was a bit of a relief. I didn’t need to feel them to know that they were damaged.

  ‘Okay,’ mouthed Ben, and went for the bag that held our first aid kit. He made a show of checking it for traces of blood, more to reassure me than anything else. I was grateful. The icy bands around my heart were beginning to crack under the pressure, and I could feel the tears threatening to fall. When they started, I wasn’t going to be any good to anyone for quite some time. It was important that we get this taken care of before I turned useless.

  Ben pulled out the familiar white box of our first aid kit, motioning for me to take a seat in one of the hard plastic chairs studded around the room. There was something obscurely comforting about settling myself on the cold plastic, feeling it press against the strip of skin between the end of my skirt and the end of the chair, and holding my hands out for Ben to repair. He put on a pair of gloves before he touched me, and that was when I finally started crying. Not out of shame or rejection, but out of relief. If he was wearing gloves, it was because he didn’t believe himself to be infected yet. He thought he could still walk away from this, alive and capable of fighting the good fight. That was reassuring beyond words. One of us could still walk away.

  I wasn’t so sure about myself. My heart hurt. I couldn’t stop thinking of the look on Mat’s face after I had pulled the trigger—that expression of blank nothingness that all zombies shared. Mat had been my friend, and they hadn’t even been able to recognize themself when they died. Sometimes I hated the world that we lived in more fiercely than I would have thought possible.

  Pain snapped me back into the moment. I bit my lip and hissed, realizing belatedly that I could hear the air whistling through my teeth; the ringing was dying down, and the world was coming back into the place it left behind. That was good. I needed to hear if I was going to keep Ben safe.

  Speaking of Ben: He was using a pair of sterile tweezers to dig bits of gravel out of my hand, dropping them, one by one, into a waiting biohazard bag. The chunks were irregular and jagged, and most of all, small; it wasn’t worth the time or effort it would take to scrub them clean. Instead, they would go to a waste disposal site and be incinerated, burnt at a temperature high enough that everything—bone, rock, metal—was destroyed. I watched the bits of gravel fall, biting my lip and trying not to think about how much of the natural world we were stripping away, year upon year, in our efforts to stay safe.

  “We should move to Australia when this is over,” I said. My voice was starting to return to normal as my ears resumed their normal function. It was nice to hear myself properly, and not just through bone conduction. “We could get a nice place on the beach, watch the zombie whales harass the sharks. Maybe even learn how to surf. They still know how to have fun in Australia. Think they’d let us in?”

  “Probably not,” said Ben, and while his voice was distant and thin, I heard it. I could have wept with joy, and probably would have, had I not already been weeping with sadness. “You, maybe. They like expatriates. But the immigration process is hard to get started, much less survive, and they don’t like Americans very much. They never want to let us in.”

  “Who can blame them? You’re all dreadful.”

  He had finished digging the rocks out of my skin. Ben looked up and flashed me a quick, strained smile before holding up a sterilizing wipe. He was making sure I knew what was about to happen, and I appreciated that, even as I wanted to slap the wipe out of his hand and say that no, I was fine, I was great and dandy, I was anything that kept that stinging shit away from me. I didn’t. I just nodded, and ground my teeth together. What came next… I deserved this. Mat had died on my watch. I deserved whatever happened to me, and no matter what it was, I probably deserved ten times worse.

  In this case, it was just a caustic antiseptic that removed the blood from my skin and helped to protect me against infection. It could have been formulated to be just this side of painless: We had the technology to do things like that. But most people don’t want painlessness. Oh, they say they don’t enjoy being hurt. They just don’t mean it. The prick of a needle during a blood test or the sting of a sterilizing chemical mean the same things to the people who feel them: They mean “you are alive.” They mean “you can feel this, and the dead can’t, so you’re better than they are. You’re still in the percentage of the population that gets to feel pain, that gets to bleed and cry and laugh and live.” Pain is important to the people who never left their rooms to see how bad the world was—or how beautiful.

  I didn’t need calibrated pain to remind me that I was still alive. The aching in my chest and the bruises on my knees did that better than a little antiseptic ever could. I endured Ben’s careful cleaning without pulling away, until he sprayed the pseudoskin over my palms and locked them away from the rest of the world. I raised my hands, flexing them carefully as the skin dried and hardened into place. There was no loss of sensitivity with this brand, but there could be a loss of flexibility if you didn’t move fast enough to show the sealant how your fingers were supposed to work. It was better for body wounds than it was for hands. It was what we had, and we were going to make the best of it.

  “Any cuts?” I asked, as I reached for the first aid kit with my clean hands and dug out another sterilizing wipe. My knees weren’t as bad off as my hands, but they needed attention, and I didn’t want Ben interacting with my injuries any longer than absolutely necessary. It’s hard for a body to infect itself. Not impossible, but… hard. It was safer for me to see to myself, now that I could.

  “Some scrapes, and I tore up my chest a little, but nothing major,” he said. “I was wearing pants, remember?”

  “So sorry that my fashion choices are sometimes inconvenient when it comes time to run for our lives,” I said. There was blood down my left shin. I scrubbed it away, switching to a new wipe as soon as my skin was clean. “To be fair, people aren’t usually blowing things up behind me and hitting me in the back with concussion waves.”

  “We’re lucky we made it as far as we did. Any closer, and we might have been hit with shrapnel.”

  I managed not to look up from my legs as I said, “Let’s go tell Mat how lucky we are, shall we? I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear it.”

  “Dammit, Ash, you know that isn’t what I meant.”

  “I know. I know.” I dropped my second wipe
into the biohazard bag and reached for the sealant. The idea of looking Ben in the eyes was somehow impossible to consider, and so I didn’t do it. I just kept working on my legs. “I’m glad we both survived, I really am. I’d be gladder if it had been the two of you. I’m supposed to be the one who keeps you all safe. Isn’t that what you have me for? Keep an Irwin nearby to draw fire, and everything will be all right. But I didn’t draw fire. I didn’t connect the dots quickly enough. Mat is dead, and we don’t know if anyone’s coming for us.”

  “Mat knew what they were doing when they took this job,” said Ben. “Aislinn, look at me.”

  Raising my head was one of the most difficult things I’d ever forced myself to do. Ben was still sitting on the floor in front of my hard plastic chair, a grim expression on his face.

  “You want to start slinging blame around? I’m the Newsie. I’m the one who should have started digging into where those people came from. I got wrapped up in the nominations process instead, and in documenting the campaign. That seemed more important to me than people who were already dead and gone. You think I’m proud of myself for leaving you to do what should have been my job? You’re smart, Ash, but you’re not a researcher. That isn’t what you do.”

  It was part of what I did, but I didn’t argue with him. This wasn’t the time for arguing.

  “If I’d realized what you were doing—if I’d listened when you tried to talk to me—we might have figured all this out days ago. We might have been able to get help. Mat… oh, God, Mat might be alive.” His voice broke on the last word. I found myself wishing that my hearing hadn’t recovered. Maybe then I wouldn’t have had to hear him on the verge of shattering. “This isn’t just on you. This is on all of us.”

  “Then it’s on all of us to make this right.” I stood. “I need to change my clothes. This dress is contaminated. We’ll have to burn it.” We’d sterilize the things that could be sterilized, and destroy the rest. That was standard protocol out here in the field. “I can change here with you, or I can find out whether the bathrooms are safe. Your call.”

  “Change here,” said Ben. “I can handle a little nudity better than I can handle you walking off alone.”

  “Cheers,” I said, and moved to start rummaging through my bag.

  Keeping most of my wardrobe in the RV’s main living space meant I had choices—a word that felt almost self-indulgent, under the circumstances. I didn’t deserve choices. None of us did. Mat should have had all the choices, and Mat was dead.

  Beating myself up about it wasn’t going to bring them back. I considered putting on trousers, and decided against it. If I was going to die out here—and there was a more than good chance that we were both going to die out here, facing one last disaster with whatever grace we could muster—I wanted to do it looking as much like myself as I could manage. Let the last pictures the world saw of me match the image I had worked so long and so hard to create.

  Let them choke on it.

  The sundress I pulled out was already bleach-damaged, pattered in mermaids with come-hither smiles. I draped it over the nearest chair and pulled my contaminated dress off, avoiding contact with the fabric as much as I possibly could. Which is why I was virtually naked when the sliding glass doors slammed open and three people in full body armor stormed into the room, their assault rifles aimed at my chest and their faces concealed by mirrored visors.

  Ben froze. I cocked my head to the side, making no effort to cover myself. It wouldn’t change anything. If this was how I died, well, so be it.

  “It was a good run,” I said, philosophically, before I raised my voice and said, “Well? If you’re here to shoot us, shoot us. That’s a much more neighborly thing than standing there, all silent and militant, and waiting for us to do something interesting.”

  “Is either of you infected?” asked one of the soldiers. Their voice was distorted, probably by an air filter. No one’s ever found a way to make those fully operational without also making people sound like Darth Vader. Which may have been part of the point, now that I thought about it.

  “Not to the best of my knowledge,” I replied.

  “Has either of you been exposed?”

  I rolled my eyes. “We’ve all been exposed long since. We breathe air, remember? If you’re a mammal and you breathe air, you’ve been exposed. Ask a slightly less useless question.”

  “Dammit, Ash, can you be serious for once?” Audrey’s voice wasn’t distorted. She walked in from behind the soldiers, and she wasn’t wearing body armor, but she was wearing a black tactical suit, with a Kevlar vest over the top of it. She was holding the largest gun I’d ever seen in her hands. “This is not a good situation.”

  “No, it’s not,” I agreed. “Do you know what’s going on?” I felt strangely peaceful all of a sudden, like this made perfect sense—or, if not that, like this had crossed a line into making so little sense that I no longer had to worry about it. I was Alice down the rabbit hole, and madness had become the new sanity. There was something faintly reassuring about that. It meant I didn’t have to worry myself about the details anymore. The details could worry about themselves.

  “I do,” she said stiffly. “I’m sorry, but there’s something I have to do first.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

  She said possibly the last thing I would ever have expected to hear come out of my girlfriend’s mouth: “By the authority vested in me by the Epidemic Investigative Service, you are under arrest for falsification of test results and crimes against the government of the United States.” Audrey sounded calm, if mechanical, right up until the end, when she said, “All of you will be coming with me.”

  “I don’t—” I began, and then the tranquilizer dart hit me in the middle of my chest. This time, I lost consciousness. This time, I was glad.

  Ben’s already made his big, impassioned plea about not believing the bullshit people are going to pile up in front of you, making “yummy yum” noises and patting their stomachs as they try to get you to dig in. You should read it. He’s better at saying these things than I am, or at least he’s better at saying these things without swearing than I am, and sometimes that’s important. You can’t tell people they’re being fuck-headed assholes without them feeling a little judged. I’m not supposed to be judgmental in my op-eds. Apparently, that turns my opinion from “acceptable” to “cruel,” and then no one wants to listen.

  Fuck them.

  If you think this sort of thing is right, or just, or fair; if you think we deserve what’s been done to us for the crime of trying to tell you the truth, when that truth was being obfuscated and concealed at every turn; if you think we’ve turned strident and unacceptable, that this makes it all right to click over to a site where things are nicer, gentler, or at least more suited to whatever your opinions about the world happen to be, then fuck you too. I’ve run out of the strength it takes to be nice—and niceness is not an innate quality of the human race. It’s a façade we construct to make ourselves seem a little less terrible, a little less like wolves. We were never designed to be nice. We were made to be kind, when it suited us, and cruel, when it didn’t.

  I’m terribly afraid that kindness doesn’t suit me anymore, and that you’ll be dealing with the realities of that change. I hope you choke on me.

  —From Erin Go Blog, the blog of Ash North, April 25, 2040

  Fifteen

  Tranquilizer dreams are like nothing else in this world. There are people who say the best, most vivid dreams come from oxycodone and absinthe, and maybe they’re right about the “best” part, but the most vivid dreams? Those definitely come from high-test tranquilizers, the kind developed by the government to knock a person out before they can twitch. The kind that don’t just put you under, they shove you under with the force of a geologic shift. I ran through the unending dark for hours, pursued by the decaying phantoms of everyone I’d ever loved and lost. Mat was at the head of their cruelly rotted army, a sniper rifle in their hand
s and a cold expression in their eyes. Every time I slowed down, even a little, they would fire on me and howl, keeping the rest of the dead on my trail.

  I whipped around a corner and nearly slammed into Audrey, as dead and rotting as the rest of them. Like Mat, she still seemed to have human intelligence, because there was recognition in her eyes—recognition, and loathing. She looked at me like I was less than nothing.

  “You should have been the one who died,” she hissed, and hit me in the center of the chest, and I was falling, falling forever, down into the dark where I belonged.

  The thing about dreams is that no matter how vivid they are, they end. I woke up facedown on a soft surface, with my hands cuffed behind me and my legs zip-tied at the ankles. I made a small sound of protest when I realized what had been done to me, and another when my attempts to flip over caused the hem of my hospital gown to ride up, and I realized that someone had undressed and redressed me while I was knocked out.

  “Not all right with this,” I said, voice muffled by the fabric beneath me. Stretching my arms as far back as I could, I found the edge of the mattress. It was thin, covered with scratchy, industrial sheets. A cot, then, probably not anchored to its frame. I grabbed the edge, using it to anchor me while I pushed my legs in the opposite direction. They found empty air. I let go of the mattress and rolled, winding up stretched across the center of the cot and staring at the ceiling. From there, it wasn’t simple to sit up—“simple” would have implied it was easy, or enjoyable, and not harder than I cared to contemplate. Insult to injury, when I did finally get myself into a seated position, my hair was in my face, blocking the majority of my vision. I got the impression of an empty room, white walls, and industrial lighting.