I stayed where I was for a seemingly endless moment, staring into the cab of the truck. Chuck remained slumped and unmoving. I wanted to find something, anything, I could use to explain the blood away. A scalp wound, maybe, or a nosebleed that started when he hit his head and didn’t stop until he reanimated. There was nothing. Just one small, sad body, and bloodstains on the passenger seat that didn’t match to any visible wounds.
I turned to Buffy, numbly unsurprised to see that Shaun had his pistol out. My feet crunched on the glass as I walked over to her. “Buffy? Can you hear me?”
“I’m dead, not deaf,” she said, and lifted her head. Tears had left clean trails through the soot staining her cheeks. “I hear you just fine. Hi, Georgia. Is everyone all right? Is… is Chuck…?”
“Chuck’s resting now,” I said, crouching down. “Shaun, radio Rick. Tell him to come back here, and to bring a field kit.”
“George—”
“Do it.” I kept my eyes on Buffy and felt, rather than saw, Shaun’s angry stare. I was too close to her. Her body weight was too low, and I was too close; if she was undergoing amplification, I might not be able to move back fast enough. And I didn’t care. “Buffy, are you hurt at all? There’s some blood we can’t identify. I need you to show me if you’re hurt.”
Buffy smiled. It was a small, utterly resigned expression, one that turned wry as she rolled up her right sleeve and turned her arm toward me, showing the place where a chunk had been bitten out of her forearm. Bone showed through the red. “You mean like this? I must’ve hit my head on the roof when the truck rolled, because I woke up when Chuck bit me.”
The bleeding was already starting to slow. Rapid coagulation of blood; one of the first, classic signs of the Kellis-Amberlee virus going into amplification. I swallowed, saying in a soft, sickened tone, “That would probably account for it.”
“I heard the gunshot, you know. If Chuck’s ‘resting,’ it’s the sort of rest you don’t get better from.” Buffy rolled her sleeve primly back down. “You should shoot me now. Take care of things while they can still be tidy.”
“Rick’s on his way with the field kit,” said Shaun, stepping up next to me. He had his gun trained on Buffy the whole way. “She’s right, you know.”
“He’d just turned when he bit her. There’s a chance his saliva hadn’t gone live yet,” I said, glancing at him over my shoulder. I was lying, to no one more than to myself, but he’d let me. Just for a few minutes, he’d let me. “We wait for the test.”
“I was never any good at tests,” said Buffy. She shifted on the ground, pulling her knees up against her chest in an unconsciously childlike gesture. “I always failed them in school. Hi, Shaun. Sorry about this.”
“Not your fault,” he said. His tone was gruff; anyone who didn’t know him as well as I do might not have realized how upset he was. “You’re taking this pretty well. Considering, y’know. The circumstances.”
“Not much we can do about it now, is there?” Her tone was light, but her eyes were beginning to brim with tears. One escaped, running down the channel already cleaned by its peers. “I’m not happy about this. But I’m not going to take it out on you. I have faith that God will reward me for my forbearance.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said, softly. The Catholic church declared all victims of zombie attack martyrs fifteen years ago, to deal with the messy little issue of last rites; it’s hard to conduct them when death is fast, unexpected, and filled with teeth.
“I’ve got the kit!” shouted Rick, jogging up to the three of us. He had the shotgun tucked underneath his arm and a standard blood testing kit in his left hand. He came to a stop as he spotted Buffy, paling. “Please, please, tell me this isn’t for you, Buffy.”
“Sorry,” she said and held up her hands. “Toss it here.”
Eyes gone wide in his bloodless face, he tossed her the kit. She caught it with ease, sliding her right hand, the one nearest the bite, into the kit’s opening. Then she closed her eyes, not watching the lights as they cycled green to red, green to red.
“You need to read my notes,” she said, in a voice so tightly controlled as to be a model of reasonableness and calm. “They’re stored on the server under my private directory. Log-in ID is the one I use for my poetry uploads, password is ‘February dash four dash twenty-nine,’ capital ‘F’ in ‘February.’ I don’t have time to explain everything, so just read them.”
February 4, 2029, was the day the United States government finally acknowledged that Alaska was too well-suited to the undead and would never be able to come below a Level 2 hazard zone. As that made it illegal for anyone without a very special and difficult to obtain license to even enter Alaska, much less live there, that was the day they began evacuating the last of the state’s residents. Including Buffy’s family. Like a lot of the displaced, they never got over losing Alaska.
“You’re going to be fine,” I said, watching the lights. They were still cycling, still measuring the viral payload of her blood, but the cycle was becoming irregular, hanging on red for six seconds before flashing back to green. The test results were being confirmed, and they were not in Buffy’s favor.
“You’re too attached to the truth, Georgia,” she said. Her voice was serene, at peace with itself. “It makes you a crappy liar.” The tears were falling faster now. “I swear I had no idea they were going to do those things. No idea at all. If I’d known, I would never have agreed to it. You have to believe me, I wouldn’t have.”
The lights had settled on a steady red, as damning as any doctor’s report. The viral load Buffy picked up from Chuck’s saliva might have been small, but it had been enough. That wasn’t the only thing making me go cold. I stood, stepping back next to Shaun, and pulled the gun from my belt. “You wouldn’t have agreed to what?”
“They said the country was drifting away from God. They said that we were losing sight of His desires for the nation, and that was why things are the way they are now. And I believed them.”
“They who, Buffy?”
“They didn’t give me a name. They just said they could make sure things went the way they needed to go. The way they had to go for this country to be great again. All I had to do was let them access our databases and follow the Ryman campaign.”
Voice gone suddenly hard, Rick said, “When did you figure out what they were using that information to do, Buffy? Before or after Eakly?”
“After!” she said, opening her eyes and turning a plaintive look his way. “After, I swear it was after. It wasn’t until the ranch that I realized… I realized…”
My hand shook, sending my aim wavering as I realized what she was saying and what it meant. “Oh, my God. With access to our databases, they’d known exactly where the senator was going to be, what sort of security he’d have, what times we had booked for any given location—”
“It gets worse,” said Shaun. His own voice was flat. “She had our databases cued to the senator’s databases. Didn’t you, Buffy?”
“It seemed practical at the time, and Chuck said it wouldn’t hurt anything as long as we stayed out of the more sensitive areas. It made things easier…”
“Lots of things,” I said. “Like knowing when the ranch would be most vulnerable. You cut them off, didn’t you? Told them you wouldn’t be giving them anything else.”
“How did you know?” She closed her eyes again, shuddering.
“Because they’d have no other reason to try to kill us all.” I glanced toward Rick and Shaun. “We stopped being useful. So Buffy’s ‘friends’ tried to take us out.”
“My notes,” said Buffy, with an air of desperation in her tone. Her tears were stopping. Another classic sign. The virus doesn’t like to give moisture away. “You have to read my notes. They’ll tell you everything I knew. I didn’t know their names, but there are time stamps, there are IPs, you can try to… try to…”
“How could you
do this, Buffy?” demanded Shaun. “How could you possibly have done this? To the senator? To us? People have died, for God’s sake!”
“And I’m one of them. It’s time to shoot me. Please.”
“Buffy—”
“That’s not my name,” she said, and opened her eyes. Her pupils had dilated until they were as large as mine. She turned those unnaturally dark eyes toward me, shaking her head. “I don’t remember my name. But that isn’t it.”
Shaun started to swing his pistol into place. I raised my hand, stopping him. “I hired her,” I said, quietly. “It’s my job to fire her.”
I stepped forward, putting my left hand over my right to steady my grip on the gun. Buffy continued looking up at me, her expression calm. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” she replied.
“Your name is Georgette Marie Meissonier,” I said, and pulled the trigger.
She fell without another sound. Shaun put his arms around my shoulders, and we stood there, frozen in the night.
Nothing would ever be the same.
BOOK IV
Postcards from the Wall
Alive or dead, the truth won’t rest. My name is Georgia Mason, and I am begging you: Rise up while you can.
—GEORGIA MASON
If you asked me now “Was it worth it? Were the things you got, the things you wanted?” I’d tell you “no,” because there isn’t any other answer. So I guess it’s a good thing that nobody’s ever going to ask. They never ask the things that really matter.
—SHAUN MASON
It is the unfortunate duty of the management of After the End Times to announce that the maintainer of this blog, Georgette Marie “Buffy” Meissonier, passed away this past Saturday night, April 17, 2040, at approximately eight-fifteen P.M. Buffy was involved in an automotive accident that led, tragically, to her being bitten by her boyfriend, Charles Wong, who had died and reawakened only a few moments previously.
Please do not mistake the professional tone of this memo for a lack of compassion or mourning on the part of the staff here at After the End Times. Rather, take it for what it is, a sign of our respect and dismay over her sudden loss.
Buffy’s family has been notified, and her entry has been transmitted to the Wall. Her blog and its archives will be maintained in her honor for the lifetime of this site.
Buffy, you will be missed.
—A message from Georgia Mason, originally published in By the Sounding Sea, the blog of Buffy Meissonier, April 18, 2040
Eighteen
My aim has never been as good as Shaun’s, but it didn’t matter at close range: Head shots get a lot easier when there’s no real distance between you and your target. Even so, I kept my gun raised for several minutes, as much waiting to feel something as waiting for her to move. She was part of my team, part of our inner circle, and she was gone. Shouldn’t I have felt something? But there was nothing beyond a vague sense of loss and a much stronger sense of onrushing dread.
The sound of Rick retching snapped me out of my fugue. I leaned back against Shaun’s arm, sliding my sunglasses back on and feeling their familiar weight settle against my face before I lowered my gun and turned toward the other surviving member of our team. “Rick, what’s your status?” He made more retching noises. I nodded. “About what I figured. Shaun, head for the van and get three more field kits.”
“And you’ll be doing what, exactly, as I leave you alone in the middle of nowhere with the dead things and Captain Vomit?”
I unzipped the pocket of my jacket and pulled out my PDA, holding it up. “I’ll be standing here, keeping an eye on Captain Vomit and calling for help. We’ll need to provide clean test results before they’ll approach us with anything more useful than bullets. We’re going to need a full biohazard squad out here; we have two corpses, we have a contaminated truck, we have Buffy’s blood on the ground—”
Shaun froze, going white as he looked from the slivers of glass embedded in the knees of my jeans to my hands, which were red and raw from where the door handle had stripped the skin from my palms. “And we need clean test results,” he said, in a voice that bordered on numb.
“Exactly,” I said. He looked scared. I distantly wished I could find it in me to be scared, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t making it past that damned numbness. “Go.”
“Going,” he said, and wheeled, breaking into a run as he headed for the van.
Rick was still on his hands and knees making soft retching sounds, but the actual vomiting had stopped. I moved to stand beside him, attempting to comfort with my presence as I tapped in an emergency channel call on my PDA. Opening a broad emergency channel while standing near a state highway would broadcast my message to every police scanner, hospital hazmat department, and federal agency within the receiving range. If there was help to be had, we’d have it.
“This is Georgia Carolyn Mason, license number ABF dash one-seven-five-eight-nine-three, currently located between mile markers seventy-seven and seventy-eight on southbound Interstate 55 with a hazard zone upgrade for the vicinity and a priority-A distress call. Status is stable, awaiting test results on surviving party members. Request acknowledgment.”
The reply was immediate. “This is the Memphis CDC. A biohazard team is being dispatched to your location. Please explain your presence in the hazard zone.”
It isn’t technically illegal to drive the federally maintained highways—people still have to get from place to place—but it’s unusual unless you’re a trucker, and even they have to file routes stating exactly where they expect to be at each step along the way. Caravans are held to many of the same restrictions. When the rulings first went into effect, some people complained that the government was limiting personal freedom, but they quieted when it was pointed out, rather harshly, that this wasn’t as much a matter of tracking the movements of individuals as it was a matter of charting the mobility of potential outbreaks. Most people shut up as soon as “we just want to know where the zombies are going to be” came into the equation.
“Route registry forty-seven dash A, designation Ryman/Tate equipment caravan, registered drivers present at the scene are Georgia Carolyn Mason, Class M license; Shaun Phillip Mason, Class A license; Richard Cousins, Class C license; Charles Li Wong, Class A license. Registered passengers Georgette Marie Meissonier, Class C license. Purpose of trip registered as movement of heavy equipment from Parrish, Wisconsin, to Houston, Texas. Registered duration, four days, allowing for reasonable rest stops and sleeping periods for the available drivers. Two of our trucks are still on the road; I’m not sure of their status. If you give me your network key, I can transmit our precise route.”
The man’s tone was gentler when he spoke again; my information had been fed into his computer and was checking out clean. “That won’t be necessary, Ms. Mason. Why are y’all calling for a hazard team?”
“Someone shot out the tires on three of our vehicles. We’re down a car, with possible injuries to the driver. The rear equipment truck flipped. The driver, Charles Wong, was killed in the impact and reanimated before we were able to reach the vehicle. He infected his passenger, Georgette Meissonier. Her test results are recorded in a standard field test unit, manufacturer Sony, model number V dash fifteen dash eleven dash A, and were registered via wireless upload with the CDC mainframe at the time of confirmation. Due to the possibility of inaccurate positive with that model number, we did not take immediate action but maintained a safe distance until Ms. Meissonier began to experience pupil dilation and memory loss. Once her infection was confirmed, she was put down honorably.” There was the grief and outrage, at last, beginning to chip away at the edges of my numbness. “We have hot blood in the cab of the truck and on the ground outside the truck, as well as two hot corpses in need of removal and disposal.”
“The team will not approach until preliminary test results for the surviving members of your party have been uploade
d, and they will not offer direct physical assistance until you’ve been tested again on the CDC field units they provide,” the man cautioned, some of the warmth leeching from his tone. Two bodies and a lot of hot blood on the road outside Memphis could spell an outbreak much larger than our little team. We both knew it. Now we had to contain it.
“Understood.” My PDA started beeping, signaling an incoming call. “Sir, may I ask, what is your name?”
“Joseph Wynne, Ms. Mason. Stand tight; our team will be there soon.”
“Thank you, Joe,” I said.
“God be with you,” he said. The line clicked off.
Shifting my PDA to my other hand, I pressed the Receive button. “Georgia.” Shaun was running toward me, the field kits clutched against his chest. I raised my free hand, and he lobbed one at me. It was more than a simple game of catch; there are a hundred small tests and checks for infection that don’t depend on medical science. If he could throw, and I could catch, the odds were better that we were both clean. I saw him relax when I caught the kit, even though he didn’t slow down.
Senator Ryman’s voice came through the receiver, made sharp and tight by panic: “Georgia, what’s this I’m getting on the scanner about an accident? Is everyone all right out there?”
“Senator.” I nodded to Shaun. He put Rick’s testing kit down next to him, and the two of us popped the lids off our respective kits in comforting unison. Routine is the most reassuring thing there is. “I’m afraid I have to answer in the negative, sir, but the CDC is dispatching a biohazard team to our location. Once we have an all-clear, we’re going to need a fresh truck and a team to move the equipment.” I hesitated before adding, “We’re also going to need a new driver. Rick doesn’t have his Class A license, and I don’t want to leave my bike behind.”