And they’re a way of delivering diseases. Infected blood was the most common: Gather a bunch of samples the old-fashioned way, with syringes and razorblades. Mix it together, and then set up a bunch of needles preloaded with death. Anyone who used the unit would find themselves going into full amplification, and it only took one. A single zombie was a better delivery mechanism for Kellis-Amberlee than any needle array could ever have hoped to be.
The governor was still on-site, since she couldn’t get to the parking lot any more than the rest of us. She could have sent for a helicopter, being the one in charge and all, but she’d elected not to; with her security staff around her, she was as safe here as it was possible for anyone to be, and this way anyone who asked would be told that she hadn’t run out on her people. It was a sensible political choice, and I respected her for making it, since she wasn’t putting anyone in danger by staying. If her presence had been increasing the risk for anybody else—especially anybody from my team—I would have been shoving her ass onto the nearest air transport, and screw anyone who wanted to argue with me.
Governor Kilburn beckoned me over when she saw me prowling toward her. “Do we know what the mechanism was intended to do yet?” she asked.
“Not in detail, but it was a good match to the metal; we weren’t supposed to see it. And it definitely came with its own needle array. We have to assume whoever put it there was planning to do some damage. We just don’t know what kind.” I scanned the fence line. “What’s the camera coverage like in here? Is there any chance we got this asshole on film? Because it may be my fabled redhead’s temper speaking, but I’ve the great and burning desire to smash some fingers with a hammer.”
“Please don’t smash any fingers with a hammer,” said Amber, coming out of a deep huddle with some of her fellow security staffers long enough to shoot a meaningful glance in my direction. “If you smash their fingers, we don’t get to have any fun with them. You want us to have fun, don’t you, Ash? You want us to have lots and lots of fun.”
“Amber, we’ve talked about this,” said Governor Kilburn. “You sound like a serial killer when you say things like that. If someone who’s not a part of our dedicated media team hears you sounding like a serial killer, you won’t be able to stay with the campaign.”
Amber flashed her a quick, not entirely professional smile. “I never say anything where the public can hear me,” she said, and returned to her huddle.
Governor Kilburn signed. “Sometimes I wonder why I decided to go for this gig. What do you think, Ash? Should we be considering this more terrorist action, or should we be looking at it as a prank?”
“The unit’s a standard Apple model, so creating a new shell wouldn’t be as hard as we’d all like to pretend it is, but nobody does that sort of false front in a weekend, or because they think it’s funny,” I said. “The thing was properly installed, and connected to the baseplate with the right model of screws. If this was a prank, it was overkill.”
“All right, I need to ask this, and please don’t take it as an attack of any sort—I’m too tired and strung out right now to deal with this,” said Governor Kilburn. “Everyone I’ve spoken to has stressed how well designed the false front was, and how lucky we are that it was spotted. Now, I know your team had nothing to do with the zombies in the garden.”
“Thanks for not assuming we’d risk our lives, and my life in specific, to liven up a political event,” I said dryly, feeling my eyebrows climb toward my hairline. “What’s your point?”
“Did you, or someone from your team, install the false front on the testing unit to make me appreciate your presence?” Governor Kilburn looked at me solemnly. “After the day we’ve had, I’m sure you understand why I have to ask.”
I stared at her for a moment before saying, “After the day we’ve had, I’m sure you understand why I have to tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“I do,” said the governor. She sounded serious.
Good. “Go fuck yourself,” I said, with a sharp shake of my head. “Do it twice if you need to, just to drive home how incredibly offensive and unnecessary and… and stupid that question was. We’re professionals. We don’t falsify the news, because we don’t need to. We can make string interesting if we have to, because it’s our job. We do our jobs. That’s why you hired us in the first place. If you’d wanted people who would need to pull bullshit like planting a false face to make a story, you would have found them. You would have gone to them. But you came to us.”
“So how did you know not to follow normal protocol?” The question was calm, even relaxed, but I knew as soon as it was asked that my answer mattered. My answer mattered a lot. The small huddle of security guards hadn’t moved, but they had stopped talking, going very still as they waited to hear what I had to say.
“The edges were almost perfect. They lined up exactly.” I crossed my arms, looking at her coolly. “This site is used daily by tour groups, therapeutic excursions, gardening associations, and the staffers who work here. A conservative estimate puts a hundred people through that gate every single day. Seems a bit unbelievable, if you ask me. Most of you Americans are about as willing to go outside where the fresh air lives as you are to gargle with live spiders, but hell, what do I know? I’m just the bloody foreigner who saved all your arses today. Twice. Clearly, I don’t count.”
“Last numbers put the test gardens at an average of a hundred and fifteen visitors per day,” said the governor. She sounded grudgingly impressed, like she hadn’t expected me to perform this well. The urge to punch her in the stomach a few times was rather strong.
Violence is not always the best solution to problems, but it’s usually a good start. Especially when the problems involve human beings. “Right, so a hundred and fifteen visitors a day. Most blood testing units have an internal cleaning system that keeps their panels and needles in tip-top shape, so you don’t have to worry about tetanus or any of those other fun things. Interesting fact about machines with internal cleaning systems: Most people will tend to assume they’re taken care of. No need to do anything to shine them up, they’re already shipshape.”
The governor looked at me with an expression of dawning horror on her face. I smiled coldly and pressed on.
“The fence around the testing panel showed no signs of bleach-blasting or any other form of aggressive cleaning. The pavement under our feet had no discoloration; I’d say it was last cleaned about a month ago, using nothing more penetrating than a hose. The whole area was in decent repair, sure, and there was nothing about it that should have triggered a deep decontamination—not before today, anyway, and that happened in the garden, not at the gate—but the testing panel? Not a speck of dust. That thing was as pristine as if it had been installed yesterday, which, as it turns out, it had been.” I continued to smile. Sometimes, that was the only thing I could do. And sometimes, smiling when I clearly didn’t want to was the best way to get my point across. “I stopped because I noticed how damn clean that thing was, and that made me look closer. When I looked closer, I saw that the screws didn’t match the metal fittings around them. Faux bronze instead of faux copper.”
“You could tell the screws were wrong because they were the wrong color?” Amber moved away from the huddle, moving to stand next to the governor. I couldn’t tell from her expression whether she was impressed or dubious. To be honest, in that moment, I didn’t care.
“It’s a very distinctive color,” I said. “Anyone who’s made a study of these testing units would have been able to catch it, if they’d taken the time to look.”
“I assume this means you’ve made a study of these testing units,” said the governor.
“They use an earlier version of this same model on all the National Heritage Sites in Ireland,” I said. “I saw a lot of them when I was in the early stages of my career and why are we still talking about this bullshit? You know I didn’t plant the false front. Amber’s checked her wrist display five times while I’ve been standing here,
so I know that by now you know exactly what was loaded into that damn machine. We’re still not writing our reports or posting our stories, which means we’re losing hits, we’re losing revenue, and we’re losing our primary reason to stay with you. Your campaign was supposed to be good for us, remember?”
“My campaign wasn’t supposed to get anyone murdered, and look how well we’re doing with that,” said Governor Kilburn. For a moment—just a moment—her veil of professional control flickered, and I saw the woman underneath the politician, even more clearly than I’d seen her when she was sitting in my kitchen. She looked tired. She looked done with all of this. But most of all, she looked like a real person, as confused and frightened and out of her depth as the rest of us.
Maybe that should have made me more forgiving. Since my life—and the lives of my loved ones—were probably still in danger, it just made me want to punch her even more.
“She’s right about one thing: I know what was in the false front.” Amber’s face was grim. That wasn’t encouraging. “The needles were loaded with small doses of live-state Kellis-Amberlee virus. Enough to cause almost instant amplification in even the largest adult human.”
Governor Kilburn’s hand flew to cover her mouth, a look of sick horror filling her eyes.
I cocked my head to the side. “Does the rest of my team know that?”
“Your hubby’s still filming his piece on finding the thing; I figure they’ll tell him when he turns the camera off,” said Amber. “The makeup kid’s working the uploads, and your girlfriend… okay, she probably knows, since she’s with John, and he’s with the team that was taking the thing apart.”
Which meant Audrey was somewhere nearby, without a protective suit, in the presence of live-state Kellis-Amberlee. A cold needle of fear pricked the back of my neck, making the hair stand on end. “Please ping me if anything happens that I, or any member of my team, ought to know about,” I said, and turned on my heel and fled, racing back across the pavement toward where I’d last seen Audrey.
The security team that had been so dedicatedly disassembling the testing unit was gone. So was Audrey. Ben was still there, lit by his camera’s lamp, speaking quickly into his microphone. When he saw me he stopped, reached out with one long arm, and caught hold of my elbow.
I did not punch him in the throat, which showed both excellent reflexes and admirable restraint on my part. Instead, I came skidding to a halt, feeling the gravel turn under my feet, and looked at him without saying a word.
Ben let go. “Ash. I was hoping you’d come back. The team that was tearing down that false front you found up and left a few minutes ago, and they took Audrey with them. Mat’s monitoring the security feeds, but there hasn’t been anything to tell us what’s going on. Do you know what’s happening?”
Amber hadn’t asked me to keep mum about the virus, and frankly, even if she had, I wouldn’t have listened. We were journalists. We were here to report the news.
I turned toward the point Ben had been speaking to, flipping my hair expertly back over my shoulder. I didn’t smile. A large part of my video persona was built on knowing when to smile and when to look as serious as the grave, and this moment was most definitely the latter. “Are we live?” I asked.
“Three-second delay,” said Ben. “Mat’s patching the feed as quickly as it spools, so that we can lose anything that really doesn’t work.”
“Good. Mat, patch me in here.” I took a breath, focused on the camera, and said, “The false front was used to hide a secondary needle array that some clever, horrible folks set up and tipped with Kellis-Amberlee. If we’d put our hands on the thing, we’d have gone into conversion before the lights stopped flashing.”
My throat tightened at the thought. The adrenaline rush—my second of the day—was wearing off, and as always, the crash was threatening to be a bad one. There was a reason I didn’t linger in the field after the immediate danger had passed. No sensible Irwins did. I forced myself to keep speaking, secure in the knowledge that I was too well trained for anyone to have seen my misery in my face.
“I just got back from a consultation with the governor’s staff, during which we discussed their findings, and how I was able to spot the thing in the first place. No one was hurt, and it looks like we’re going to be all right.”
“How did you spot it?” asked Ben. There hadn’t been time to explain before, not with the false front sitting there like a snake about to strike, and the governor’s people closing in—at my request—to take over the scene.
I flashed him a tight-lipped smile. “Trade secret. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go check in with Audrey.” I ducked away before he had a chance to ask me any follow-up questions. He was already talking again as I stepped out of the light.
If I’d been someone who wanted to disrupt a political campaign, and I’d been aware that the campaign was traveling with a troop of professional journalists, I would still have wanted eyes directly on the ground, but I would absolutely have been monitoring all their public reports, announcements, and other updates. We were the enemy’s eyes in Governor Kilburn’s camp, just as surely as we were the eyes of the public, and that meant that certain things couldn’t be said on the air.
If the leak was in the governor’s security staff, keeping quiet wasn’t going to do us any good. But if it wasn’t, not saying things like “hey, we’d all be dead if you’d bothered to sling a little mud around” seemed ill-advised.
A tent had been set up in a corner of the parking lot, springing into existence while I was off talking to the governor. The flap opened as I was approaching, and there was Audrey, plastic scrubs over her clothing and booties over her feet. She moved purposefully toward me, pulling the gloves off her hands as she moved. I didn’t stop or slow down. A collision was just what we needed right now.
“We’re in trouble,” she said, once I was close enough for her to speak without shouting. There was a cold, hard note in her voice. It was the sound of her past rising up, threatening to overwhelm the soft suburban artist she’d been struggling to become. Not even I knew the details of where Audrey came from, but she knew more about police procedure than made sense for a Fictional, and she always wound up drinking with the people who had the biggest guns. Whatever that background was, it was going to come in handy soon. I could feel it down to my bones, and I hated it.
“I know,” I said, and took that girl in my arms, and held her, and hoped that the future would pass us by.
American hotels are deeply weird. I say this from a place of love, and a place of enjoying the way hotel management seems to assume that my truest, deepest desire involves drowning in an endless sea of hypoallergenic foam pillows.
Irish hotels come in two flavors, much like the rest of the country. Either they’re very old, built on stone foundations that will endure long past the fuss and bother over this silly “zombie apocalypse,” or they’re very new, rebuilt after the Rising by international hotel concerns that wanted to lure their guests back out of their homes and into the sweet, luxurious embrace of room service and Jacuzzi tubs. Most of our “modern” hotels that weren’t anymore after the dead learned how to walk around have long since been torn down and replaced.
But ah, America. Land of halls without auto-closing fire doors and stairwells that don’t actually go anywhere, creating exciting kill chutes for the unwary. Land of large plate-glass windows above the third floor, because there’s no possible way the dead will ever make it that far up, not even when the building is covered in climbable filigree or surrounded by trees.
Really, I think the American hotel summarizes everything you need to know about the state of post-Rising security in this country. Blood tests to get into the lobby, blood tests to use the elevator, even blood tests to get out of your room, but Heaven forfend we should rebuild the place to a reasonable standard. That would cost money, and the spending of money by those who have the most of it is a thing to be avoided at all costs.
You will never
find a stronger illusion of security, or a less supported reality, than in an American hotel. You will never find a better assortment of room service waffles, either.
Yum, waffles.
—From Erin Go Blog, the blog of Ash North,
February 10, 2040
Nine
We were still on lockdown at the Embassy Suites three days later.
It was better than it could have been. The governor’s staff had booked three rooms for the four of us, letting Ben and Mat sleep alone while Audrey and I enjoyed the seemingly endless supply of hot water in our shower. Our equipment was spread through all three rooms, and we all had key cards to each door. “Do Not Disturb” signs were respected like hazmat warnings. More than once, when I’d forgotten to take ours down, Ben had stayed stationary in the hall and called my phone rather than risk accidental nudity. So it wasn’t like we were being tortured or anything. Just being penned up and refused access to the rest of the world, where things were actually happening.
Ben was okay—he had plenty of news to filter through, exclusive interviews with the governor to unveil, and footage to comb—and Mat had done a series of elaborate makeup tutorials based on the victims of the rose garden attack. Even Audrey had gotten into the act, running profiles on each of the people who’d died there, stressing the fact that they were victims, they had been taken, and most of all, that they had names: names we shouldn’t allow ourselves to forget, not after everything that had happened. She was a demon at her keyboard, and every post she uploaded made me love her a little bit more. We were nearing the point of critical mass, and I didn’t know what was going to happen after that. My heart would probably explode or something.
But none of that gave me anything to do. I wasn’t the smart one—that was Ben. And I wasn’t the savvy one, or the creative one, or any of the other things my teammates brought to the table just by breathing. I was the pretty one, according to some of my viewers. I was the one who took brainless risks, dangling myself over crevices and hanging out in trees, and there was nothing for me to accomplish here.