“Didn’t they already open one in Dublin last week?” asked Stacy.
Michael nodded. “Lots of kids, Stace. Lots of parents who didn’t come home after they locked the doors.”
Stacy’s smile faded, replaced by a sad, stricken look. She leaned back against the counter. “Those poor kids,” she said. “I always thought…I thought we were going to be a world of parents in mourning. Not a world of orphans.”
“They’re expanding the foster care system. Loosening the background check requirements—not that we could have performed them with any accuracy. Too many records got deleted during the early days, when online activist groups decided to ‘balance the scales’ by wiping out people’s prison records.” Prison records, and the sex offenders registry, and a remarkable number of bank accounts, since apparently “balancing the scales” also meant “lining your pockets in whatever ways you possibly can.”
A lot of the records that had been lost had been related to small things, unfair things, like felony convictions for marijuana possession, or disproportionate jail terms which had been summarily canceled when the prisons began burning down. But there were still killers, and rapists, and hardened criminals now walking the world with no records to tie them to their past lives, and not all of them were going to take this second chance as a reason to change their ways.
“Oh,” said Stacy softly.
“Lieutenant Collins has agreed to let us come and do a feature on the orphanages. I reminded him of what you did for those kids from Santa Cruz. They all have homes now, you know.” All but two had been orphans, as it turned out: their parents were buried in unmarked graves, or still shambling with the infected in the forests and deserted streets of Santa Cruz and Gilroy. But there had been people who were willing to open their homes after they saw those children’s faces.
Maybe it could be done again, on a slightly wider scale. Stranger things had happened, after all, in a world where the supposedly dead could get up and walk.
“That’s very kind of him,” said Stacy. Her voice had taken on that distant, almost mechanical tone that meant that she was thinking.
Hopefully, she was thinking the same things he was—or would be able to adjust her thinking once she saw the children. “It would be a day at each facility, with travel passes to allow us to drive ourselves, and then a third day for any follow-up interviews or footage we felt we needed. What do you say, Stacy? Want to help some kids?”
Stacy looked at her husband, struggling not to frown. He would take it as a rejection of him, and his idea: She’d been married to the man long enough to know that, just like she knew that he had some ulterior motive for arranging this story. Maybe it was about their ratings. The folks at BlogLife were still trying to figure out how to measure traffic and merchandise sales in a single quantifiable way, and she lived in constant fear that they would refine their math only to decide that the Masons weren’t worth the cost of their insurance.
She didn’t know what she would do if someone took her camera away from her. It was still a relatively new part of her life, and yet she increasingly felt naked and isolated without it in her hands. She needed the news, the sensationalism and spectacle of it all, to keep herself from losing her grasp on the world.
“Do you think it would be good for ratings?” she asked, finally.
Michael nodded.
“All right.” Stacy took a deep breath before forcing a smile. “Let’s help some orphans.”
2.
Dublin was the closer of the two centers, being only about an hour up the road. It would have been a longer drive once, before the state increased the speed limits on the highways and cracked down on the need for travel permits outside the cities. Michael kept his hands on the wheel and raced down the road, trying to pretend that the armored cars parked every two miles or so weren’t intimidating, and that he wasn’t afraid of the potential that something might shamble out of the ruins of Lafayette or Moraga and fill its stomach with his flesh.
Stacy squealed like a much younger woman and pointed out the window, calling, “Michael, look! Wild turkeys! A whole flock of them! They must be having an amazing surge in their population, with the reduction in traffic.”
“And coyotes,” he said. “Not so many of those around these days.” The interchange for Walnut Creek was coming up ahead. Once there, they would go through a military checkpoint that would test their blood and review their travel passes. Michael was almost looking forward to that. He hadn’t been through a checkpoint without Lieutenant Collins in weeks, and it would be nice to see how the current security procedures were applied to the common traveler.
“Do you think the ecosystem will recover from losing the big predators?”
“I think we’ve introduced something new and much larger to take their place,” said Michael. “Infected dogs, bears, even people—they’ll all be happy to play the role the coyotes have played until now. The feral cat population is exploding in some places.”
Stacy, who had encountered the sharp end of more than a few formerly pampered felines, grimaced. “You don’t have to remind me,” she said. “I never knew Persians could be so vicious.”
“We never domesticated the cat. We just convinced it to stop attacking us when we started feeding it regularly,” said Michael. “We stopped feeding the cats, they stopped keeping up their side of the bargain.”
“I never want another pet,” said Stacy.
Michael said nothing.
They passed through the security checkpoint with a minimum of trouble. The guards on duty didn’t even question why Stacy was filming them the whole time, allowing Michael to do the majority of the talking. Recording the police had been legal since well before the release of Kellis-Amberlee, and everyone had their own way of coping with the ways in which the world had changed. A video camera and a little silence was nothing compared to some of the things Michael had seen since the Rising.
They were passing the Dublin city limits when Stacy said, very softly, “I feel like this is some sort of ploy on your part, and I don’t really know what it is. Are you hoping to make me see that we’re better off without kids to hold us back?”
Michael nearly lost control of the car. If there had been anyone else on the road, he would probably have caused an accident; as it was, he looked around frantically once he had them back in their own lane, waiting for a police car to come zooming out of nowhere and demand a second blood test. Loss of motor control was an early sign of conversion. When no such interception appeared, he reduced speed and pulled over, leaving the hazard lights flashing like a bloody reminder that there were people here, living people; don’t shoot, don’t stop, just drive on by. The age of the Good Samaritan was, at long last, most conclusively over.
“I would never try to make you see that, because it’s not true,” he said at last, twisting in his seat to face his wife. She was still so beautiful, but it had never just been about her beauty; beauty faded, tarnished, changed based on what happened around it. It had always been about the person behind the beauty, the smiling, laughing, brilliant woman who had somehow been tricked into marrying him. He could see her still, a little frayed around the edges, a little damaged, but present and aware and not too far away from him. Not yet.
Stacy looked at him gravely. He leaned over and grabbed her free hand in his, and she didn’t pull away. She didn’t put down the camera, either. He honestly couldn’t have said whether or not that was a good thing.
“I miss him every day, Stacy; every day. I keep expecting him to come barreling around a corner, shouting about the monsters under his bed and how much he wants to go to the park. He was our son, Stacy. Our son.” The depth of longing in the word surprised even Michael. It hung between them like a stone dropped into thick tar, not falling, not fading, but preserved and terrible, forever.
“So what are we doing here?” asked Stacy. “What’s your game?”
“It’s not a game,” said Michael. “It’s our life. In Santa Cruz, when yo
u saw those kids, and after, when you were interviewing them—it was like you were awake again. Your camera brought you halfway back to me. Those children brought you the rest of the way.” She’d been so animated, so alert, so Stacy—it had been like looking back through time to a moment before the Rising, when he had believed that the world could be fair.
Stacy’s eyes widened as his meaning sunk in. Then, violently, she began to shake her head.
“No,” she said. “No, Michael, no, you can’t be serious. You can’t mean that. I’m in no condition to take care of a child. I’ve been a mother once. I’m never going to be a mother again. You know that.”
“Maybe these children don’t need a mother,” said Michael. “Maybe they just need an adult who’ll care enough to teach them how to stay alive. The orphanages are overloaded, and getting worse every day. Can you honestly say that being with us would be worse than being part of a system that doesn’t even know how it operates yet?”
“Yes,” whispered Stacy. “Yes, I can.”
Michael sighed. “Sweetheart, I promise you, we are not going to do anything that you don’t want to do. I haven’t committed us to anything. This is the sort of decision that everyone needs to have a say in. You, me—”
“And the child,” said Stacy. “How would we tell a kid that they were living with a murderess? It’s better if we don’t have to.”
“You’re not a murderess,” said Michael. “The courts cleared you.”
That was the wrong thing to say. Stacy’s expression twisted, crumpling in on itself, until she finally looked away from him, choosing to look instead at the camera in her hands. She turned it over once, until she was facing the lens: a confessional, a moment taken in isolation and held up as the whole of the situation.
“The courts can clear me a hundred times, if they want to,” she said. There was a light, almost reflective quality to her voice. “It doesn’t matter. They can’t force me to clear myself. That’s what would need to happen before it would mean anything. And I know what I did, Michael. I held the gun. I pulled the trigger. I watched my little boy die, and I didn’t even…I couldn’t even hold him. I wrapped his body in plastic, and I didn’t kiss him good night, and I didn’t tuck him in. I buried him like he was garbage.” Her lip twisted as she spat the last word into the car, condemning herself with her own voice.
“You saved the people who were depending on you,” said Michael. “Stacy…you love the documentation of the world as it is, but you’ve never cared about the science. That’s always been my job. Don’t you think I read all the studies I could get my hands on, the second that the CDC declassified them? Don’t you think I’ve been following all the research, private and public and fringe? Phillip was gone. He was gone the second that damn dog bit him. You didn’t kill our son. You set him free.”
Stacy turned away from her camera and stared, instead, at her husband. Michael nodded very slightly.
Stacy dropped the camera.
No police came along as the two of them clung to one another and sobbed. That was for the best. Michael wasn’t sure how he would have explained the situation, or even whether he would have been able to find words. In that moment, in that time, there was nothing but Stacy’s arms around him, and the tears burning down his cheeks, cleansing and confining them both forevermore.
3.
The orphanage system was still too new to be keeping very precise time. The Masons pulled up in front of the old office park gates thirty minutes after their appointment, only to be waved through by the haggard-looking guards after a quick, perfunctory blood test. Stacy, who was still trying to repair the damage her tears had done to her makeup, barely noticed.
Michael parked in front of the main office—a small, dismayingly glass-fronted structure that had once been the business park’s convenience store, judging by the ghosts of old signage that clung to the stonework like pale reminders of a world now gone and buried. A cursory effort had been made to shore up the glass, making it more difficult for an infected hand to burst through, but in the end, it was just that: cursory. The small, poorly defended building wouldn’t last twenty minutes in a real outbreak. The only surprising thing about it was that all the glass appeared to be pre-Rising, having somehow come through the tragedy intact.
There was a single woman sitting inside, bent over her computer and typing with anxious rapidity. Stacy paused long enough to take a few seconds of footage, showing the woman through the glass as if to punctuate just how dangerous the whole setup was. Then she pushed the door open.
A bell rang. Not looking up, the woman said, “There was no one here during the Rising. The owners were smart enough to run while the running was good. We actually managed to track them down and pay them for the building, believe it or not. And zombies are stupid. They didn’t think to break the glass when there wasn’t anything inside that they wanted.” She finally raised her head, offering us a wan smile. “You must be Stacy and Michael Mason. Welcome to the East Bay Children’s Center.”
She had smooth, medium brown skin, with a spray of freckles across her nose, and a blue streak had been dyed down the right side of her naturally dark hair. Michael placed her accent as Southern California, and her ancestry as a mix of European and Chinese. All useless information now, when all anyone could ever really say they had come from was “before.” Before the dead rose; before half the world was devoured. Everything else seemed a little less important than it would have been, once upon a time.
“Director Song?” asked Michael.
The woman nodded. “No one else would sit here, believe me. You can call me Edie. Please, come in, sit down, try to pretend that you’re not surrounded by towering piles of paperwork that may collapse and bury us all forever.”
“I thought most offices were paperless,” said Stacy. She looked at the papers around her, not disapprovingly, but with the sort of vague confusion that she sometimes got when things refused to add up. “Why so many files?”
“Is that thing on?” Edie gestured toward the camera. When Stacy nodded, she said, “Go ahead and start shooting. I only want to explain this once, if I get a vote.”
Stacy frowned but raised the camera, tinkering with the focus until she had just the angle she wanted. Then she said, a little more slowly and a little more clearly, “With the push toward greener business and reducing waste, why are there so many paper files here? Are you trying to save money on insulation?”
“Well, you may not have been aware, but there’s been a lot of pulling back on the ‘Green California’ initiative since the zombie apocalypse,” said Edie. She sounded perfectly cheerful, like this was the only logical consequence. “Something about how we’d reduced greenhouse gas emissions by dying in droves. Anyway…” She sobered. It was an artful transformation. Michael began to realize that her appointment to the job might have been about more than her failure to run away fast enough.
In times like this, sometimes what you needed more than someone who knew how to do the job was someone who knew how to sell it. Edie leaned forward, resting her hands on the desk. In that moment, she transformed herself from a slightly dizzy woman who looked just like the interchangeable TAs who had once thronged in the halls of UC Berkeley into a serious, trustworthy administrator. The sort of person who could be trusted to want what was best for the children under her care, no matter how many of them there were.
“Because of the way the children come to us—found in abandoned buildings, trapped in shopping malls—it’s not always possible to know for sure what their status is. In order to verify that they are orphans and wards of the state, not just misplaced, we have to find everything we can about them. What you see here is all the documentation that we have been able to dig up on our kids. Birth certificates. Medical records. School files. We don’t have all the material we want on all of them, but we have enough on many of them to conclusively link them to their families.”
“How many of the children you have here have been confirmed as orphans of
the Rising?” Stacy’s question was calm. The phrase that Michael had coined and that had gained so quickly in popularity sounded only natural tripping off her tongue, especially here, in this little, glass-walled chamber packed with the last notes of a lost world.
Edie looked at her levelly. “There are four hundred and seventeen children in this facility alone, ranging in age from somewhere under a year to fifteen years of age. Children aged sixteen and up have been emancipated as a matter of necessity. We just don’t have the space to keep them.”
“That wasn’t—” began Stacy.
Edie kept on talking. “Of those four hundred and seventeen children, we have been able to find files confirming the identities of approximately two hundred and nine. Technically, that puts us one child over fifty percent. And all two hundred and nine of those children are unquestionably orphans. We have confirmed the death of one or both parents. In the cases where only one parent’s death could be confirmed, we have found sufficient evidence to show that the missing parent was eaten, frequently by the one we could find. As of the emergency session of the United States Congress which concluded last week, in cases where one parent is dead and the other is missing, all parental rights will be voided following our investigation, rendering any and all adoptions fully legal.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little harsh?” asked Michael. “Some people may still be in hiding, or trapped in infection zones.”
“That’s possible, yes,” said Edie. “It’s also staggeringly unlikely. I have over four hundred children here. Children in need of homes. Children who cannot stay in this facility forever. We’re not trying to create a Dickensian horror using American kids as the plucky orphans. We want these children to find homes and families, families who will help them through the trauma of surviving a zombie apocalypse. If that means we remove a few people’s parental rights, that’s a price that we’re willing to pay.”