There was a long pause, during which I tucked my PDA between my shoulder and my ear, freeing my hand, and mouthed a silent “one, two” at Shaun. On two, we both rammed our forefingers down on the unit the other held. The prick of the needle puncturing my thumb made me wince, nearly dislodging the PDA.
Finally, while the lights were blinking red to green and back again, the senator said, “Georgia… is Chuck…?”
I closed my eyes, blocking those ever-hateful lights, and said, “I’m sorry, Senator.”
He paused again. “Georgia…”
“Yes, Senator?”
“Buffy. Wasn’t she…”
“I’m afraid that when the truck rolled, we were unable to save either of the occupants.”
“Oh, Christ, Georgia, I’m sorry.”
“So am I, sir; so am I. Can you arrange for another truck and driver to be sent to our location, and alert the rest of the convoy that we’re being unavoidably delayed? We’re just outside Memphis. You should be able to pull us up on the team GPS.”
“I’ll have someone on the way inside the next ten minutes.” The third pause was longer than the other two, and when he spoke again, he sounded more exhausted than I’d ever heard him, even after we received the news of Rebecca’s death. “Georgia, have the rest of you… have you…”
“The tests are running now. If anything changes, we’ll call you.”
“Thank you. I suppose I should let you get to it.”
“That would be best.”
“God save you, Georgia Mason,” he said, and ended the call before I could say good-bye.
Lowering the PDA, I opened my eyes, looking to Shaun’s face and avoiding the lights entirely. “He’s sending help,” I said.
“Good,” he replied. “We’re not infected.”
I allowed myself to glance down to the field kits, whose lights had settled on a steady green. I took a single shallow breath, followed by another deeper one, and nodded. “Better.” Turning, I looked at Rick. “Rick, we need a blood test.”
“What?” He raised his head, eyes wide and blank.
“A blood test. The field kit is next to you. The biohazard team won’t approach until we’re either checked out clean or dead.” I pulled my finger free, feeling the antiseptic tingle in the pinprick wound, and shook my hand briskly before depressing the signal button at the base of the kit. That would activate the built-in wireless transmitter, uploading the results into the CDC mainframe. A manual upload is only necessary in the event of a negative; the CDC doesn’t care, under normal circumstances, about the fact that someone isn’t about to turn into a zombie. Buffy’s results uploaded themselves the second the lights settled on red. Once you’ve tested positive, the CDC knows. Disabling the upload functionality of a blood testing unit is a federal offense.
Shaun mirrored my actions. He held out his hand and I passed him his test kit, which he dropped into one of the plastic bags he pulled from his belt. My test kit went into a separate bag, which he handed to me. Again in semi-unison, we pressed down the pressure seals, leaving our respective thumbprints on the corners of our bags. If they were tampered with in any way, the seals would turn scarlet and the kits inside would become worse than useless; they would become suspect.
“I… I’m not sure I can,” said Rick, swallowing. “Buffy…”
“Buffy’s dead, and so is Chuck. We need to know if you’re clean.” I handed the bag back to Shaun and moved to crouch next to Rick, picking up his test unit and popping off the plastic cover to reveal the pressure pad and needle inside. “Come on. You know the drill. It’s just a little pinprick.”
“What if the lights go red?”
“Then we’ll sit with you until the CDC gets here; they have better units than we do, and they’re on their way,” I said, keeping my voice as reasonable as I could. I felt like crying. I didn’t dare. Rick looked like he was barely holding himself together; if I started to cry, his control might shatter. “Unless you actually start to convert, we’ll take no actions.”
“If the lights go red, you’ll take action immediately,” he said, and his voice was suddenly cold, devoid of hesitation. “I want that bullet in my brain before I know what’s going on.”
“Rick—”
He leaned forward, jamming his thumb down on the needle’s point. “I’m not upset that you shot her, Georgia. I’m upset that she had to go that far before you could.” He tilted his face upward, looking to Shaun, then to me. “My son converted before he died. Please do me the great kindness of letting me die while I remember his name.”
“Of course,” I said and straightened, stepping back to my customary place beside Shaun. He raised his right hand, placing it against the middle of my back, while his left hand moved to rest, ever so lightly, on the holster of his pistol. If we lost a second teammate today, the bullet wouldn’t be mine. Sometimes you have to spread the guilt around.
“I didn’t know you had a kid, Ricky-boy,” said Shaun, his tone almost jovial. “What else haven’t you been telling us?”
“I wear women’s underwear,” Rick said. Then, very slightly, he smiled. “I’ll show you his picture sometime. He just… he’s the reason I left print media. Too many people there remembered him, and too many of them had known his mother. Too many people looked at me differently after I lost them. I still loved the news. But I didn’t want to be the news. So I found another way to get the story out there.”
The lights were flashing, red to green to red. “What was your son’s name, Rick?” I asked.
“Ethan,” Rick said, his smile growing more sincere and coloring with sorrow. “Ethan Patrick Cousins, after my father and his mother’s grandfather. Her name was Lisa. His mother, I mean. Lisa Cousins. She was beautiful.” He closed his eyes. “He had her smile.”
The lights stopped flashing.
“We’ll remember their names for you, if it ever comes to that,” I said, “but it won’t be today. You’re clean, Rick.”
“Clean?” He opened his eyes, looking at the test kit like it was some alien thing he’d never seen before. Then, slowly, he removed his finger from the needle and pressed the transmission button. “Clean.”
“Which is a damn good thing because there was no way I was taking care of your mangy cat,” said Shaun.
“He’s right,” I said, moving to offer a hand to Rick, to help him off the ground. “Shaun would have tossed her out the window at the first truck stop we passed.”
“Now, George, don’t be silly,” chided Shaun. “I would’ve waited for one that had a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign. It wouldn’t do for Lois to not have any friends.”
Rick and I exchanged a startled look before we burst out laughing. I started to cry at the same time, and pulled Rick to his feet before slinging my arms around his shoulders and using him to steady myself. Shaun walked over and put his arms around the both of us, joining our laughter and smashing his face into my hair to hide his own tears. I knew they were there; Rick didn’t need to. Some secrets don’t need to be shared.
We stayed that way until the sound of tires alerted us to the approach of the biohazard convoy. Hastily, we pulled apart, trying to get ourselves into something that approached composure; Rick wiped his face with one hand, while Shaun dried his cheeks and I raked my fingers through my hair before shoving my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose. Looking to Shaun, I nodded and started toward the sound of the approaching vehicles, carrying my bagged test in one hand, digging my license beacon out with the other.
The convoy stopped about twenty yards away from the forerunning vehicle; my poor, abandoned motorcycle. The Memphis CDC didn’t play around. They’d sent a full unit: two troop carriers with their standard Jeep-style frames surrounded by steel-reinforced clear plastic armor, a white medical van nearly twice the size of ours, and, most ominously, two of the vast armored trucks media pundits call “fire trucks.” They were huge, painted safety orange with
red biohazard signs blazoned on all sides, and their hoses didn’t squirt water; instead, they delivered a nasty high-octane variant on napalm mixed with a concentrated form of insecticide. Once a fire truck sprays something down, it’s sterile. The soil would be dead for decades, and anything that happened to be in the radius and alive when the trucks came wouldn’t be breathing afterward, but the area would be clean.
One of the men in the foremost troop carrier raised a microphone as we approached, and the loudspeaker at the front of the car blared, “Put down your testing units and step back. Clean units will be put in their place. Do not approach personnel. Failure to comply with instructions will result in termination.”
The headlights of the convoy were almost blinding, even through my sunglasses. I raised the hand with my license to shield my eyes, and squinted at the troop carrier. “Joe? Is that you?”
“Got it in one, darlin’,” the voice replied, less formally. “Just go ahead and set those units on down, if you’d be so kind?”
“I’m leaving my license beacon with the test,” I called. “It includes important medical data.” If these people made me take my glasses off, the glare from their headlights would probably blind me.
A new voice, female and substantially more clinical, came over the loudspeaker. “We know about your retinal condition, Ms. Mason. Please comply with instructions.”
“We’re complying, jeez!” shouted Shaun, dropping his bagged testing unit and putting his license beacon on top. I bent to put mine down, somewhat more gently, and Rick did the same. The three of us then started backing away.
We made it about twenty feet before Joe’s voice came over the speaker again, saying, “That’s far enough, darlin’. You three hold tight, now.” The door of the medical van opened and three technicians in biohazard containment suits emerged. I could hear the chugging of their positive pressure unit as it cycled the air, keeping outside particles from entering their sterile zone.
Moving with the sort of grace that implied hundreds, if not thousands, of hours spent in the bulky suits, the technicians walked over to collect our test kits and beacons, putting three sealed kits in their place. With this accomplished, they retreated, and Joe’s voice called, “Please approach, open the testing units, and stay where you are until you’ve checked out clean.”
“It’s like playing Simon Says,” muttered Shaun as we started forward.
“Where I grew up, Simon didn’t usually have a truck full of napalm pointed at you,” said Rick.
“Pansy,” said Shaun.
The testing units left by the CDC technicians were Apple XH-229s, only slightly less advanced than the top of the line. Shaun whistled low under his breath.
“Wow. We really are a threat.”
“Something like that,” I said. I picked up the first kit and broke the seals with my thumbnail before removing the plastic lid. It was designed to cover my whole hand, all the way to the base of my wrist. There were at least fifteen visible points of contact. Grimacing, I rolled my sleeve up and slid my hand inside.
The mist of antiseptic across my skinned palm was deceptively soothing, a feeling that lasted only a second before needles drove themselves into my already damaged flesh, starting to sift through my blood looking for active viral bodies. The lights began to cycle, moving from red to yellow to green as the more advanced medical processes kicked in.
I was so intent on the lights and what they could mean about my future that I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me over the drone of the positive pressure units, or feel the hypo until it was pressed against my neck. A wash of cold flowed over me, and I fell.
The last thing I saw was a row of lights, settling on a steady green. Then my eyes closed, and I didn’t see anything at all.
* * *
… the question I have been asked most frequently since my transition from the traditional news media to the online world is “Why?” Why would I want to give up an established career to strike out into a new field, one where my experience would not only be laughed at, but would actually work against me? Why would any sane man—and most people regard me as a sane man—want to do something like that?
For the most part, I’ve replied with the pretty, expected lies: I wanted a challenge, I wanted to test myself, and I believe in telling the truth and telling the news. Only that last part is true, because I do believe in telling the truth. And that’s what I’m doing today.
I married young. Her name was Lisa. She was smart, she was beautiful, and, above all, she was as crazy in love with me as I was with her. We were still in college on our wedding day. I was going to be a journalist, and she was going to be a teacher—a career path that got put on hold when, three days after graduation, the pregnancy test came up positive. That was a test we passed, and gladly. It was the only test we passed.
Our son, Ethan Patrick Cousins, was born on April 5, 2028. He weighed eight pounds, six ounces. And routine testing of his bodily fluids and vital signs revealed a system crawling with the Kellis-Amberlee virus. His mother had condemned him without ever knowing it; further tests showed that the virus had set up camp in her ovaries, reproducing there without infecting her or changing her life in any way. Our son was not so lucky.
I was fortunate. I had nine good years with my son, despite the precautions and quarantines his condition entailed. He loved baseball. On his last Christmas, he wrote to Santa Claus and asked for a cure, so “Mommy and Daddy won’t be sad anymore.” He underwent spontaneous viral amplification two months and six days after his ninth birthday. Posthumous examination of his corpse displayed a final body weight of sixty-two pounds, six ounces. Lisa took her own life. And me? I found a new career.
One where I’m still allowed to tell the truth.
—From Another Point of True, the blog of Richard Cousins, April 21, 2040
Nineteen
I woke in a white bed in a white room, wearing white cotton pajamas, with the cloying white smell of bleach in my nose. I sat up with a gasp, screwing my eyes shut in an automatic attempt to keep them from being burned by the overhead lights before I realized that I’d opened my eyes while I was lying on my back. I looked directly into the lights, and it hadn’t hurt at all. A lack of sensitivity to pain is one of the many warning signs of early Kellis-Amberlee amplification. Was that why the CDC decided to attack us? Was I in some sort of fucked-up research facility? Rumors always abound, after all, and some of them just might be true.
Cautious now, I reached up to touch my face. My fingers found a thin band of plastic resting above my eyes, balanced to put next to no pressure on either the bridge of my nose or the sides of my head. I knew what it was when I felt it; they’ve been using polarized UV-blocker strips for hospital treatment of retinal KA for about fifteen years now. They’re expensive as hell—just one can add five hundred dollars or more to your bill, even after insurance, and they’re fragile, to boot—but they filter light better and less noticeably than any other treatment mechanism we’ve found so far. I relaxed. I wasn’t amplifying. I was just a CDC kidnap victim.
It says something about the situation that I was able to find this reassuring.
I began studying the room. It was empty, except for me, the white bed with its white sheets and white duvet and white pillowcases, a white bedside table with foam-padded edges that rendered it effectively useless as a weapon, and a large tinted “mirror” that took up most of the wall next to the door. I squinted at the glass, looking into the sterile hallway beyond. There was no one watching my room. That spoke well for my continued nonzombie status. They’d have had guards out there if I was infected, assuming they had some reason not to have just shot me already.
If it hadn’t been for my ocular condition, that “mirror” would have seemed like the real thing, allowing me the illusion of privacy while letting any attending physicians watch me from a distance. The days of beeping monitors and bulky machines are over; everything is streamlined now
, all micromesh sensors and carefully concealed wireless monitors. It’s as much for the protection of the doctors as it is for the comfort of the patients. After all, every reason to go into the room with someone who might go into viral amplification at any moment is another reason to stop practicing medicine and go into a safer profession. Like journalism.
Not that journalism seemed particularly safe at the moment. I closed my eyes. Buffy was right there waiting for me, looking up with virus-dark eyes as the infection took hold and the essential core of her dissolved. I got the feeling she always would be there. For the rest of my life, she’d be waiting.
Kellis-Amberlee is a fact of existence. You live, you die, and then you come back to life, get up, and shamble around trying to eat your former friends and loved ones. That’s the way it is for everyone. Given what my parents do and what happened to their son, it might seem like it’s had a huge impact on my family, but the fact is, all that happened before Shaun and I were old enough to understand. The virus is background noise to us. If it hadn’t existed, Shaun and I would have found something else to do with our spare time, something that didn’t involve poking zombies with sticks. Until Chuck and Buffy, it had never actually taken anyone away from me. It touched people I cared about. It killed acquaintances, like the security guards we lost in Oklahoma, or Rebecca Ryman, who I knew from pictures, if not from actual meetings. But it never touched me. Not until Memphis.
I opened my eyes. All the brooding in the world wasn’t going to bring Buffy and Chuck back, and it didn’t change the facts of the situation: The Memphis CDC had, for whatever reason, drugged us and transported us to a holding facility. I didn’t have my clothes, my weapons, or any of my recording equipment. My ears were bare; they’d taken my short-range cellular devices along with everything else. Even my sunglasses were gone, replaced by a UV blocker that, while doubtless more effective, left me feeling naked.