“You know that isn’t true.”
“Do I?”
Mahir paused before saying, “I was actually pleased to see you out there. If you don’t mind my saying so, Shaun, you looked more like yourself than you have in quite some time. You might want to consider making this the beginning of a true… well, revival, if the word isn’t in poor taste. You could do with something beyond spending all your time in an office.”
“I’ll take that under consideration.”
No, you won’t.
“No, you won’t,” said Mahir, in eerie imitation of George.
“Now you’re ganging up on me,” I muttered.
“What?”
Sometimes Mahir was a little too sharp for my own good. “Nothing,” I said, more loudly. “I’m signing off now, Mahir. I need to concentrate on the drive.”
“Shaun, I really think you should—”
“Tell the management I won’t call back until it’s a decent hour in your part of the world. Say, five minutes before the alarm clock?”
“Shaun, really—”
“Later.” I hit the manual switch on the dashboard, cutting Mahir off midsentence. The silence that followed was almost reassuring enough to distract me from the fact that I was still apparently being filmed. I raised a hand and amiably flipped off the van.
Not nice, chided Georgia.
“George, please.”
She fell sullenly quiet. For a change, I didn’t mind. A sulking sister is better than a scolding sister, especially when I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that the world wants me back in the field on a regular basis. One dead Mason just isn’t enough for some people.
To distract myself, I hit the gas, sped up, and passed the van. It was a deviation from our standing driving formation, but not enough of one that it was likely to cause any real distress with the occupants of the van. With our viewing audience, maybe—especially the percentage that was hoping to see me fight off a horde of the infected through the rearview cam—but the staff would understand.
Hitting the gas harder, I sped off toward Alameda County, and home.
Prior to George’s death, the two of us lived with our adoptive parents in the genteel Berkeley house where we were raised, a former faculty residence sold by the university after the Rising. I went back there initially, and quickly found that I couldn’t take it. I could handle having George’s ghost in my head, but I couldn’t deal with the years of memory in those halls. More important, I couldn’t watching the Masons hover around looking for ways to capitalize on the death of their adopted daughter. We always knew what they were to us and what we were to them, but it took George dying to really make me realize how unhealthy it was. I moved out as soon as I could manage it, renting a crappy little apartment in downtown El Cerrito. I moved again six months later, after the site really started pulling in the bucks. Oakland this time, and one of the four apartments in the same building that we’d rented under the name of After the End Times. One apartment for the office; one apartment shared by Alaric and Dave, who spent half their time as best buddies and half their time as mortal enemies; one apartment open for visiting staffers who needed a place to crash.
One apartment for me and George, who didn’t take up any physical space but was so much a part of every room that sometimes I could fool myself into thinking she had just stepped out for some fresh air. That she’d be right back, if I were just willing to wait. If I were still seeing a psychiatrist, I’m sure I’d be getting lectured on how unhealthy my attitude is. Good thing I fired my shrink, huh?
Oakland’s a pretty awesome place to hang your hat, whether or not you’ve got a dead sister to deal with. Twenty-five years ago—roughly, I’m not big on math—Oakland was an urban battlefield. They had a gang problem in the early nineteen-eighties, but that cleared up, and they were fighting a different war by the time the Rising rolled around. Oakland had become the site of an ongoing conflict between the natives who’d lived there for generations and the forces of gentrification that really wanted a Starbucks on every corner and an iPod in every pocket. Then the zombies showed up, and gentrification lost.
More things we learned from the Rising: It’s hard to gentrify a city that’s on fire.
The new folks turned tail and ran for the hills—the ones who lived long enough, anyway. But the people who’d grown up in Oakland knew the lay of the land, and they knew what it meant to fight for what’s yours. Maybe they didn’t have the advantages some of the richer cities started out with, but they had a lot of places they could hole up, and they had a lot of guns. Maybe most important of all, thanks to that gang violence I mentioned earlier, they had a lot of people who actually knew how to use the guns.
Oakland’s inner city fared better than almost any other heavily populated spot on the West Coast. When the dust of the Rising settled, the city was battered, bruised, and still standing—no small accomplishment for a city that most of the emergency services had already written off as impossible to save. It’s still a proud, heavily armed community today.
It’s about fifty miles from Birds Landing to Oakland, and the safest route is even longer. Thankfully, having a journalist’s license means never having to explain why you didn’t want to take the safe way. I hit the first of the checkpoint entrances to I-80 after about twenty miles on the rocky, poorly maintained California back roads. According to pre-Rising records, the checkpoints used to be called toll booths, and they actually accepted currency, rather than automatically deducting usage fees from your bank account. Also, they didn’t have armed guards or require a clean blood test for passage. Road trips must have been pretty boring before the zombies came.
Despite the ongoing decrease in personal travel—the number of miles logg the average American goes down every year, with many people telecommuting and ordering their groceries delivered so that they’ll never even need to leave their homes—we still need freeways for things like truckers and journalists. I-80 is actually fairly well-maintained, assuming you like your roads with concrete walls and fences all around them. Most accidents are fatal, not because of the other cars but because spinning out and hitting one of those walls doesn’t leave much of a margin for recovery. It also doesn’t leave much of a margin for reanimation. That’s probably the point.
My GPS said that I was seventeen miles ahead of the van when I hit the freeway. I sped up, accelerating to the posted speed limit of eighty-five miles per hour. The van wouldn’t be able to go that fast—not unless they wanted to risk flipping over. I could reach the apartment, get through decontamination, and hole up somewhere before they had a chance to grab me and ask me to do a postrun interview. The last thing I wanted to deal with was some idiot asking me how I was feeling, even if it was an idiot who worked for me.
Cameras mounted atop the I-80 gun turrets swiveled to follow me as I blazed down the road. Just one more government service, keeping the world safe from infection, the living dead, and the terrifying risk of privacy. For my generation, the concept of personal privacy was one more casualty of the Rising—and not one that many people take the time to mourn.
The Rising: casual parlance for the mass amplification and outbreak following the initial appearance of the mutated Kellis-Amberlee viral strain. It started three years before my sister and I were born, during the hot, brutal summer of 2014. More people died during that summer than have ever been properly accounted for, and they kept dying for five years.
Before the Rising, zombies were the stuff of fiction and crappy horror movies, not things that you could encounter on the street. The Rising changed that. It changed the world forever.
Oh, the world didn’t change in the big, apocalyptic “tiny enclaves of people fighting to survive against a world gone mad” way most of the movies suggested it would, but it still changed. George used to say we’d embraced the culture of fear, willingly letting ourselves be duped into going scared from the cradle to the grave. George used to say a lot of things I didn’t really understand. I unders
tood this much, anyway: Most people are scared of more than just the zombies, and there are other people who like them that way.
I rode I-80 to another checkpoint and another blood test, even though it would almost take a miracle to amplify on a closed freeway system. Only almost: It’s happened a few times. Spontaneous amplification is rare but possible, and that, combined with the culture of fear, keeps the checkpoints in operation. As I’d expected, my infection status hadn’t changed during my solitary, zombie-free drive; also as I’d expected, the guards eyed my stripped-down Jeep like it was some sort of rolling death trap and waved me through just as fast as federal regulations would allow. I offered them a brilliant smile, making their nearly identical looks of discomfort deepen, and drove off the freeway to the surface streets.
My crew’s apartment building is less than half a mile from the freeway, a quirk of location that makes it perfect for our needs and less desirable to the rest of the population, keeping the rent lower than it might otherwise be. We don’t even have our own parking garage. Instead, we share a secure “community structure” with half the other buildings on our block. Every local resident and business pays into a neighborhood fund that goes to pay for security upgrades and salaries for the guards. It’s definitely money well-spent. After the End Times regularly contributes extra cash, just to make sure things stay as close to top-of-the-line as possible.
I arrived to find James on duty at the guard station, his feet propped on the desk next to the monitor and the latest issue of Playboy open on his knees. He was studying the centerfold without shame, although he was paying enough attention to raise his head when I pulled up to the gate. Smiling, he hit the button for the intercom.
“Afternoon, Mr. Mason. Have a good day out there?”
“The best, Jimmy,” I said, returning his smile. “You want to buzz me through?”
“Well, that depends, Mr. Mason. How do you feel about passing me your residency card and sticking your hand in my little box?”
“Pretty damn lousy, Jimmy,” I said. Digging out my wallet, I produced my residency card and dropped it into the guard station’s miniature air lock. It would be disinfected before James ever touched it, and he’d still wear Teflon-coated gloves when he picked it up to run it through his scanner. Protocol. Gotta love it, because anything else would lead to madness.
While James ran my card through his system and checked it for signs of tampering, I stuck my hand into the guard station’s built-in blood test unit, gritting my teeth as the needles unerringly managed to hit right on top of my freshest puncture wounds. The worst thing about going into the field isn’t the zombies or the driving. It’s all the damn blood tests.
“Well, Mr. Mason, everything looks to be in order,” James said, still cheerfully. He dropped my card back into the lockbox. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks, Jimmy,” I said, withdrawing my hand. His welcome was the only confirmation that I’d actually passed my blood test. Unlike the private units, which have to show you your results, business units often display only to the people who need to know—that is, the ones whose job it is to kill you if you fail.
Offering him a wave, which he amiably returned, I retrieved my card and drove on, leaving him to his comfortable Plexiglas box and his pornography.
Building underground in California isn’t strictly safe, but neither is walking on the streets. That’s the brilliant logic that led to the construction of underground tunnels connecting the community structures to their associated buildings. Our building’s tunnel is about the length of a football field. As I walked along it, I amused myself by pondering just how many zombies would be able to pack themselves inside if there were ever a lapse in security. I had just reached the conclusion that the tunnel could hold somewhere around two hundred infected bodies, assuming they were all of average size, when I reached the door, swiped my residency card through the scanner, and was home.
The building consists of three floors and ten apartments: two on the first floor, four each on the second and third. My staff has three of the four third-floor apartments, and the fourth belongs to old Mrs. Hagar, who’s so deaf that she probably wouldn’t notice if we started holding weekly raves on the roof. Becks calls her “an old dear” and brings her cookies. In exchange, Mrs. Hagar no longer threatens to lob grenades at us every time we run into each other in the downstairs lobby. A few chocolate chips are a small price to pay to avoid getting vaporized while you’re picking up the mail.
The manager has one of the first-floor apartments. He’s almost never there, and we’re all pretty sure he has another residence somewhere outside of the city. Someplace safer. A lot of people think they’re safer in the country because there aren’t as many bodies capable of amplification. Not as many bodies means not as many guns, as George used to say. I’ll take my chances with the cities.
The other first-floor apartment is mine. It’s not much distance from the staff apartments, but it’s enough to let me feel like I have a little privacy. A little privacy can make all the difference in the world. I pressed my palm to the test pad for yet another blood test, unlocked the front door, and stepped inside, alone at last.
Alone? asked George, sounding dryly amused.
“My apologies.” Closing my eyes, I let my head tilt backward until it hit the door. “Apartment, give me lights in the living room, news scroll on mute on the main monitor, and prep the shower for a decontamination.”
“Acknowledged,” said the polite voice of the apartment’s computer system, following the word with a series of muted beeps as it activated the various requested utilities. I stayed where I was for a few more seconds, stretching out the moment. I could be anywhere in that moment. I could be in my apartment. Or I could be back in my bedroom in my parents’ house, the room that was connected to Georgia’s room, waiting for my turn at the shower. I could be anywhere.
I opened my eyes.
My apartment is never going to win any beautiful-home competitions. It consists of a living room full of boxes, computer equipment, and racks of weaponry; a bedroom full of boxes, computer equipment, and racks of weaponry; an office full of boxes, computer equipment, and racks of weaponry; and a bathroom where the floor space is almost completely consumed by a top-of-the-line shower and decontamination unit. No weaponry in there, at least—just ammunition. Bullets are waterproof enough these days that I could probably take them in the shower with me, if I were feeling particularly weird that day.
The air in the apartment always smells like stale pizza, gun oil, and bleach. Several people have said it doesn’t feel like anybody lives there, and what they don’t seem to understand is that I like it that way. As long as I’m not really living there, I never have to think about the fact that I’m living there alone.
It took me fifteen minutes to complete standard decontamination procedures and get myself into some clean clothes, leaving the old ones in a biohazard-secure bin for later sterilization. I checked the GPS readout on my watch. According to the van’s tracking coordinates, the rest of the team was just now reaching the guard station and getting their chance to check out Jimmy’s substandard taste in porn. Good. That meant I still had time to square myself away. Grabbing a clean jacket off a stack of survivalist magazines, I started for the door, swerving almost as an afterthought to pass through the kitchen and snag a Coke from the fridge.
Thanks, said George, as I stepped out into the hall.
“No problem,” I murmured, cracking open her soda and taking a long drink before heading toward the door to the roof-access stairs. In most buildings, tromping around on the roof is likely to get you shot. Just another advantage of living where I do: Mrs. Hagar can’t even hear us up there unless we’re setting off land mines, and we’ve done that only once, for quality control purposes.
There used to be a padlock on the door leading to the roof-access stairs. As if the infected were going to be mounting a top-down attack? That stopped happening when the mass outbreaks stopped driving the wounded t
o the rooftops to wait for rescue that never came. The manager periodically realizes that the lock is missing and replaces it, and someone on my staff comes along and cuts it off the next day. That’s the circle of life around here. Nothing stays locked away forever.
You’re depressing today.
“It’s a depressing sort of day,” I said. George quieted, and I climbed the stairs in something that was chillingly close to solitude.
I don’t deal well with being alone. Maybe that’s why I decided to go crazy instead.
My crew’s been working on converting the roof to suit our needs since we took over the third floor. It’s one of those projects that’s never going to be finished; there’s something new every time I go up there. Dave has what he calls his “outdoor theater,” a little grouping of folding chairs and a collapsible movie screen under a pavilion he bought at the Wal-Mart in Martinez. He brings out a projector on warm nights and shows pre-Rising horror movies. I think he’s trying to lure Maggie out of her house and into the city by competing with her grindhouse parties, and if he keeps it up, he just may succeed.
Becks has a small firing range with targets designed for everything from basic handguns to her personal favorite weapon, the wrist-mounted crossbow. That girl reads too many comic books. Still, I have to say, the sight of a zombie’s head catching fire after it gets hit with one of her trick arrows isn’t something I’m going to forget anytime soon. Neither are our viewers.
And me? I have a corner of the roof where no one does anything else, where I can go and sit and drink a Coke and watch the clouds chase themselves across the sky, and where I don’t have to be the boss for a little while. I can just be me. When I go up there, my staff’ll move heaven and earth to keep anyone from following me, because they know I need the escape. They’ve mostly gotten over treating me like I’m made of eggshells, but there are exceptions.
A pigeon was sitting on the edge of the roof when I walked up, cooing contentedly to itself. It looked at me suspiciously, but waited to see what I would do before going to the trouble of flying away. When I just sat, it resumed its cocky back-and-forth strut without a second thought.