The hand reaching out of the bushes to my left struck like a snake, grabbing a hank of my hair before I had a chance to react. I twisted away as hard as I dared, trying to make a split-second decision about the best way to go. I could fall backward into the roses, but I didn’t know whether there was another zombie behind me, or whether my grabby friend had scratched himself on the thorns. I could infect myself in my efforts to get away.
He was definitely going to infect me if I gave him the time to reel me in and get me within reach of his teeth. I only had a few seconds to react, and I took the option that might mean one or both of us made it out of this little patch of hell alive.
“Close your eyes!” I shouted. I didn’t wait to see whether Mat had listened to me. I just jammed the barrel of my gun against the zombie’s forehead and pulled the trigger, turning my face away at the last moment in case of splatter.
The gunshot rang across the garden like an alarm bell. The zombie’s fingers released my hair. I turned back just in time to see him collapse backward, hitting the ground in a heap—and to see his four friends come shambling through the bushes.
“Aw, balls,” I said. “Mat?”
“Yes?” The Newsie’s voice was a pained squeak. I felt bad about that. I’d feel a lot worse if we both got eaten.
“Run,” I said. We turned and fled, moving through the roses as fast as we dared now that we knew they were a transmission vector. One good thing about being among the living: We could still move faster than the dead.
I see I’ve picked up a bunch of new readers since my makeup tutorials were featured on CNN (that is a sentence I am allowed to write now, what is this strange new world), so I thought I should give you the rundown before we go any further. Hi, I’m Mat Newson, and this is my op-ed slash diary column. I babble here. This is the babbling place. The opinions and thoughts and things I can’t always support with hard data or wipe away with a makeup sponge place. It is not required reading for the rest of the site, or even for the rest of my material. It is the place for finding out what’s new with me, for keeping track of my public appearances, and yes, for getting first crack at any giveaways I host. This is also where you suggest topics for future makeup tutorials. I love you all, but those comment threads are like kudzu! I can’t keep them trimmed enough to be useful.
As for me, I’m twenty-seven years old, genderfluid, and prefer “they/them” pronouns. Some of you will probably scowl right about now and mutter “but ‘they’ is always plural” to yourselves. And to you I say that Shakespeare disagrees. “They” has always been used as a generic singular when the gender of the person being spoken of was unknown. Since my gender is unknown from moment to moment, unless I have personally, specifically, and recently told you differently, the singular “they” is my preference.
One of my blog- and housemates, Ash, is from a pretty conservative part of Ireland. She had never encountered anyone who publicly identified as genderfluid before she met me (although, since she had the Internet, she had heard of the concept). She slipped up a lot when we first met. She always apologized, and she always tried. That’s all I’m asking any of you to do, all right? Just try, and keep trying. You’ll get there someday.
I believe in you.
—From Non-Binary Thinking, the blog of Mat Newson,
February 5, 2040
Six
We ran and the zombies pursued, because that’s what zombies were designed by an accident of science to do. A world where zombies didn’t chase wouldn’t be all that compelling, I guess. Mat demonstrated a previously unknown talent for running like their ass was on fire, pulling quickly out in front of me and racing for the presumptive safety of the governor’s security staff. I focused less on speed and more on avoiding the various obstacles in my path, the reaching rose briars and the bumps in the pavement. The last thing I wanted to do was run into a kill box with an open wound. They’d shoot before they saw that it was a scratch, and they’d be entirely right to do it.
I glanced back. The zombies weren’t pursuing anymore. We’d run too fast, and there were closer, nonmoving targets available. The group—still not moaning—had turned, moving in silent unison through the roses and toward the governor.
My gunshot hadn’t been as loud as I had originally thought. The muzzle was designed to dampen noise, and the governor was in a carefully designed sound bubble, defined by her speakers and by the natural acoustics of the area. Which was all a fancy way of saying that they hadn’t heard us, and that they were about to be in serious danger.
“Aw, fuck,” I said, with all the sincerity I could muster. I came skidding to a stop, cupped my hands around my mouth, and shouted, “Mat! Run faster! Tell security we’ve got a situation—and ask them not to shoot me, all right?”
Mat cast a terrified look over their shoulder, eyes widening as they realized what I was about to do. But they didn’t argue. They didn’t try to tell me I was being stupid. They just nodded, and kept on running.
The roses were planted far enough back from the paths that I was able to run full tilt for most of the way, dodging between briars when necessary. The last thing I wanted to do was create a secondary biohazard while I was trying to deal with the first one—although that did beg the question of where the first had come from. I’d been recording since I stepped into the garden. I tapped my mag as I ran, setting it to wide panorama. Maybe the camera would catch something I’d missed, some point of access for the infected. Because I couldn’t believe the governor’s advance team had managed to miss something as huge as a zombie mob in the middle of the rose test garden. It didn’t make sense.
And then it didn’t matter if it made sense or not, because I was on top of the remaining zombies, and I had more important things to worry about. “Hey undead fuckos!” I shouted, sliding to a stop about six feet behind them. Close enough to be able to call my shots, far enough away to be out of grabbing range. It was still closer than I liked, especially without body armor and a face shield, but there were too many people on the other side of those bushes for me to get picky.
Those high school kids were going to be going back to their teacher with a much bigger story than anyone could have anticipated—assuming I was quick enough on the draw to give security time to react. If we all got eaten, nobody was going to be writing the official reports.
The zombies turned at the sound of my voice. Even a smart mob isn’t intelligent; the quirk of the viral structure that gives them more brains in a bigger group can’t work miracles, thank God. Hearing a human within plausible reach was pretty much always going to supersede the chance of a human on the other side of a bunch of prickly bushes. Zombies don’t feel pain the way unconverted people do, but they understand concepts like “the path of least resistance.” Zombies, like shit, will always flow downhill.
The lead zombie made a questioning sound that was halfway to being a moan. I smiled encouragingly.
“That’s it. You’re getting the idea. Come on, big boy, moan for Ash. Make a big wide sound so that nobody back at base thinks this is some sort of a hoax.” I shifted my aim slightly, pointing the muzzle of my gun at the zombie behind the lead zombie. I wanted to lure them away. That meant not slowing them down any more than I had to.
I’m not the best marksman in the world. I don’t compete on an international or even regional level. But I am a trained Irwin, and at any sort of close range, I’m lethal. Like military snipers and big game hunters before us, we learn to set our adrenaline and our emotions aside before we pull the trigger, because to do otherwise would be to waste a bullet and maybe get ourselves killed. In the words of a pre-Rising author, I do not aim with my hand. I aim with fifteen years of hard training and solid experience, and I very rarely miss.
I pulled the trigger. A hole appeared in the center of the zombie’s forehead. She had time to look puzzled, like this hadn’t been on her calendar for the day, and then she was falling backward, nearly knocking over the zombie behind her. I followed that shot with another, this time aiming stra
ight up into the sky. All the built-in muffling couldn’t stop that one from ringing like a bell over the rose garden. Feedback squealed from the speakers. The governor must have jerked forward when she heard the sound, getting too close to the mic and setting up a following alarm.
Good. I was going to need the backup.
The lead zombie didn’t like being shot at. He finally opened his mouth and set up a moan, low and cold and chilling. There was something about the way zombies moaned that hurt the mammalian ear, some deep, ancient note that spoke of bloody seas and dangerous jungles. What was worse, the moan of a zombie could—and would—attract more zombies, turning a small mob into a big one faster than you could say “George Romero was right.”
On the plus side, nothing living can moan like a zombie, even if someone was fool enough to try. It’s not possible. So anyone who heard this would know I was in serious trouble. I was hearing it. I knew very, very well just how much trouble I was in.
I took a step backward, adjusting my aim again. This time, I was focusing on the lead zombie. The others had taken up his moan, and were reorienting themselves on me. At any moment, the rush would begin, and zombies can be dismayingly fast at short distances. That whole “not feeling pain” thing again. They didn’t care if they were running on blown kneecaps and shattered ankles. They kept coming until their bodies gave out and dropped them on their faces, and even then, they’d do their best to crawl.
I pulled the trigger. The zombie lurched forward at the last instant, and my bullet went whizzing off past his head, vanishing uselessly into the bushes. He was still moaning, and I could hear other moans coming from elsewhere in the garden. We weren’t alone. I did the only sensible thing.
I turned and ran again, and this time I didn’t look back.
More zombies appeared from the rosebushes as I flew past, their hands reaching for me, their faces clotted with dirt and bits of ground cover. Adrenaline had turned me into a lean, mean, running-like-hell machine, and I was intending to keep going for as long as I possibly could.
Maybe I should have spent a little more attention on where I was going. My toe caught a bump in the path and I went sprawling, hitting the ground with enough force to knock the air out of my lungs and slap the mag off my face. It flew another three feet or so before wedging in one of the neighboring rosebushes. My knees were on fire. I was more than relatively sure that I’d skinned them, and depending on where the zombies had been walking—depending on where the hazard zones in this bucolic little setting were hidden—those scrapes might be the end of me.
There wasn’t time to dwell on that. There wasn’t time to get my breath back, either. I rolled over, lifting my shoulders off the path, and opened fire on the advancing zombies, grouping my bullets around their heads and throats. I was missing as often as I was hitting, but there weren’t that many of them. I might still have a chance.
Assuming, that was, that the cavalry arrived before the zombies crawling out of the flower beds around me managed to grab hold. I fired again and again, until the hammer clicked on empty. It had taken less than ten seconds. My lungs were still aching from my impact with the pavement, and I didn’t have to be a genius to know that my body wasn’t ready to run. Not yet. Not soon enough.
The remaining zombies moaned as they advanced. I struggled to sit up, hoping that my mag had landed so that I was still on camera. I wanted my entry on the Wall to document something awesome, and not just an incoherent scream fading into silence.
“Well come on, me boyos,” I said, in my most exaggerated accent. My American audience would be delighted. My family back home would be mortified. It seemed like the right note to go out on, all things considered. “I haven’t got all day.”
Then the skies opened up behind me, and thunder rained down on the zombies.
The hail of bullets was thick and fast, and so plentiful that the smell of gunpowder overwhelmed the smell of roses in under a second. I curled into a tight ball, lacing my hands behind my neck as I protected my mucous membranes by pressing my face hard against my thighs. I remembered my skinned knees too late to get into any sort of defensive position; I would just have to hope that my sundress would keep them safe from any back splatter. It was a small, vain hope, but it would keep me from freaking out until someone could produce a blood testing unit and clear me.
The gunfire stopped. I raised my head.
Zombies littered the path ahead of me. The rosebushes looked distinctly moth-eaten, with branches blown off and leaves shredded into virtual confetti. The bodies sprawled on them didn’t help. There must have been at least fifteen zombies scattered around the place, some out in the open, others still half-buried in the soil they’d been dredging themselves out of. Which didn’t make any sense. Zombies never waited long enough to reanimate for burial to occur, and why would anyone have buried their loved ones in the rose test garden, anyway?
The only way these zombies could have been where they were was for someone to have put them there, on purpose. And that opened a whole new horrible line of thought that I didn’t want to dwell on just yet.
“Aislinn North, please remain where you are,” said a voice from behind me. I recognized it as belonging to John, Audrey’s drinking buddy. That was good. If someone had to shoot me, I wanted it to be someone who wasn’t actually a part of my team. Ben would never have recovered, and Audrey…
That wasn’t how I wanted Audrey to remember me.
“Remaining,” I said amiably. My gun was already on the path. I pushed it away with my toe, showing that I was unarmed.
“Please use your fingers to show me the following numbers. Six. Three. Four. Seven. Two.”
I followed instructions. I didn’t use my thumbs. It was important, when proving that you weren’t a zombie, to do exactly as you’d been told. He hadn’t said “use your hands,” he’d asked for fingers. Maybe ignoring that fine line wouldn’t have been sufficient to buy me a bullet, but I had taken enough risks already today. I didn’t feel like taking another one.
“Stand and turn. Keep your hands low. Do not make any sudden moves.”
I stood and turned, keeping my motions as slow and fluid as my skinned knees and bruised ribs would allow, resisting the urge to do a little pirouette. Yes, it would look good on camera, and yes, that was usually a major concern, but under the circumstances, I was fairly sure my audience would forgive me a moment of caution. Anything to keep myself from ending up on the Wall for a few minutes longer.
John and Amber were in front of me, their guns drawn and pointed in my direction. The barrels seemed to have expanded when I wasn’t looking, becoming sightless eyes large enough to swallow the world. I stood straighter, letting them look me over.
“Your knees,” said Amber. There was regret in her voice, but it was outweighed by professionalism. We were friends, of a sort. She still wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. “What happened?”
“I ate path,” I said. “Running too fast, hooked my foot, down I went. The infected were a considerable distance behind me at the time, and approaching via a different route. The odds of my having landed in a biohazard are slim.”
“Slim odds are still odds,” said John. He took a hand from his gun and dipped it into his pocket, producing a plastic-wrapped blood testing unit. “Catch.”
He lobbed the unit at me underhand, and for one heart-stopping moment, I couldn’t decide what I was supposed to do. If I didn’t catch it, I was showing reduced manual dexterity, and they might shoot me. If I caught it, I was moving quickly, and they might shoot me. No matter what I did, it seemed like “and they might shoot me” was remaining on the table.
At the last moment, instinct took over for intellect. My hand lashed out, grabbing the test unit before it could fly past me. The plastic crinkled under my fingers, cool and reassuring. This was what normalcy felt like. This was my ticket back to the land of the living.
The reassuring feeling lasted only for as long as it took for my eyes to find Audrey and Ben at the
back of the crowd that was growing on the garden’s edge. He looked terrified. She looked resigned, like this was something she had long since come to terms with. I wasn’t sure which was worse: the thought that I was about to break his heart, or the fact that I had apparently broken hers so long ago that she no longer felt the need to weep for me.
“Open the bag,” instructed John. “Remove the testing unit. If you check out clean, we will remove you to a secondary site for decontamination and further testing.”
This was all standard procedure, as was his not saying what would happen if I failed the test. No one who’d passed the exam to become a working journalist needed to be told what would happen if they couldn’t get a green light on one of these little boxes. “Just do me a favor, all right?” I said, as I removed the plastic and dropped it, still cool and crinkling, to the ground by my feet. “If you have to shoot me—and you shouldn’t have to shoot me, but we all know how much power ‘shouldn’t’ has in a place like this—can you clear the area first? I don’t want certain people to see it.”
“We’ll make sure they’re out of here, Ash,” said Amber. She nodded toward the unit in my hands. “Now do it.”
I sighed, popped the lid off the test, and jammed my thumb down on the sensor.
Kellis-Amberlee is a tricky asshole of a disease. The terms “infected” and “uninfected” are technically inaccurate, because we’re all infected, every mammal on the planet, from the moment that we take our first breath. It’s in the air. It would be better to say “active” and “inactive,” because that’s the real difference: Is the virus in your blood sleeping the sleep of the terrible and the just, or is it awake and breaking everything it finds? Except that sometimes active virus is a good thing. Marburg Amberlee was created to cure cancer, and it still does that, activating and taking out any cancerous cells as soon as they register with the virus. Do a blood test while your native viral load is busy taking apart a tumor, and you may get a false positive. You may also get a bullet to the head, because the people who have the guns don’t have time to worry about nuance. Nuance is for other people.