“Heh,” said Ben, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. I beamed at him. His smile died instantly, replaced by something far more familiar: regret. “You know, my mama would have been happy to have you at the funeral.”
I stopped beaming. “Ben, don’t.”
“She liked you. I know she always said she didn’t, but she didn’t mean it. She didn’t like what you represented, that was all. She knew you didn’t mean me any harm. Sometimes she even said you were a gift from God, since you gave me an excuse for good Christian charity.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation.” Not in public: not where some asshole with a camera could come along and turn us into the news. Everyone in the business knew what our deal was. I’d talked about it on my blog more than once. That didn’t mean that some people wouldn’t be happy to come along and start muckraking, trying to prove that we had never even been friends; that everything about our relationship was a business arrangement, and not true, if platonic, love.
Ben’s face fell. “Ash…”
“Milkshakes. Come on. Milkshakes, and distance, and time. I’m sorry about your mother, we all are. We want you to take the time you need to get all the way better. We can cover for you for at least a week before anyone notices, if that’s what it takes. Mat says they can spoof your email address and handle all of the merch orders, if you want them to. We’re just waiting on your word. I’ll even talk about your mother with you, if that’s what you want me to do, but please, not here. Not on the street, not where we don’t know who’s listening. Please.” I gave him my best pleading look.
I’m good at pleading. I’ve had a lot of practice at pleading. Pleading with his image over the Internet, trying to convince him to help me get the hell out of Ireland before I lost my mind. Pleading with the agents at border control on both sides—America to let me in, but not before I’d pled with Ireland to let me out. Our population was never the highest. After the Rising, when the Catholic majority really got to work grinding out the hellfire and brimstone, a lot of people chose to leave. Between that and the zombie sheep, it was no wonder the government started limiting immigration out of the country, while simultaneously opening the doors to anyone with Irish heritage who wanted to come home, live under a religious hegemony, and produce oodles of fat Irish babies. Fun for the whole family!
And all of that had only been the warm-up to pleading with his mother not to contest our marriage, which had offended her all the way down to the marrow of her bones. Her youngest son had been the light of her life, the last piece she had of the good, clean world before the Rising. She’d been waiting for years for him to find a wife and start giving her grandchildren. Instead, he’d come home from an unannounced trip overseas with an Irish expatriate who was only marrying him for the citizenship, and who had no intention of either sleeping with him or bearing his children, even via artificial insemination. I’d been a real shock to her system, and if there was one good thing about this situation, it was that we’d been married for so long that I was pretty sure I hadn’t killed her.
Well. Mostly sure. She had rather been counting on us getting divorced once I had citizenship, and when that hadn’t happened, her disapproval had been a bit difficult to bear.
Ben sighed, shoulders drooping. “I should be crying,” he said. “I should be a soggy mess in a corner somewhere, going through tissues and confessing all my sins. Instead, I’m standing here with you, talking about ice cream. Don’t you see how not right this is? I should be mourning more than I am. I should be sadder.”
“None of this means you didn’t love her, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“But—”
“How many times did you tell her that there’s no right way to love? Well, this is the flip side of that. There’s no right way to be sad, Benny-boy. Maybe you’re going to stop sleeping, or cry every night for the next year. Or maybe you’re going to return to business as usual, until one day you turn around and someone’s wearing her favorite color, or carrying a bouquet of her favorite flowers, and it breaks you.” I put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. “The only right way to mourn someone is to remember them. The rest is just trappings.”
Again he smiled, although the expression came nowhere near his eyes. “How do you know so much about mourning?”
“My mother was a banshee and my father was the cold North wind,” I said. I took my hand off of his shoulder. “Now come on, what do you say we go and get that milkshake? It’s my treat. You can have whatever you want.”
“I say—” Ben paused. “I say hold on a moment.” He raised a finger, signaling me to wait, before he reached up and tapped the skin behind his left ear, activating his bone-implant phone. Not as disposable as a burner or as attractive as an ear cuff, but no one could take it away from him, and the only way to permanently disable it would be surgical. Better yet, because it was made of lab-grown bone matrix, it didn’t show up on most equipment sweeps. Even if the rest of us were stripped of our gear, he’d have a way of reaching the outside world. That was worth its weight in bullets.
I crossed my arms, rolling my eyes extravagantly as he walked a few feet away, lowering his voice. That meant the call was private enough for him to not want me listening in. Rare, annoying, and a good opportunity to sweep the area. I stepped back into my original position in front of the statue and started my scan.
The funeral home was empty, the shuttered windows dark and the parking lot deserted. There was a red dot above the main window, attached to a small black box; a Devlin security system, most likely, hardwired into the local police department’s computers. Funeral homes are no more dangerous than any other business that regularly admits large groups of people, and are probably a lot less dangerous than some. That doesn’t stop their insurance rates from climbing every time someone gets a bad feeling about them, which has meant some heavy investments in security. The average funeral home is better protected than most banks.
If the red light was on, there was no one left inside: Even the staff had gone home. I switched my attention to the surrounding buildings.
Not many people will voluntarily live right next to a funeral home, despite the aforementioned excellent security. If I wound up in the neighborhood, I would have been asking about storing my valuables in the old embalming rooms. So it was no surprise that the curtains on the apartments to the left were shabby, repaired several times and then pulled tight across barred windows. There was a high fence around the whole structure, apparently wood, but with giveaway metal strips at the top and bottom. It was a steel-core oak model, and there was probably a switch in the manager’s office that would allow the whole thing to be electrified at the drop of a hat. Good choice. The only visible trees were eucalyptus, whose high branches and friable bark made them virtually impossible to climb. Even better choice.
The structure to the right was more of an absence: a green field surrounded by a cast-iron fence, allowed to grow wild and weedy. It was surprisingly lush; someone was still watering it, despite California’s perpetual drought conditions. That meant it was the property of either a church, a private school, or both. Churches could afford to water empty lots. They had a good income from their apocalypse-panicked parishioners, and their tax breaks meant that they were always looking for something else that they could write off. Private schools were sometimes more strapped, but almost all of them were playing on the idea of “normal someday.” As in “when we reach that normal someday and this all goes back to the way it used to be, we’ll have this beautiful, secure space for your children to play in, so give us money, or we might have to sell it.” It kept the donations coming in, and it kept the idea of the virus-free promised land alive in the minds of the rich.
Something was moving in the field. I frowned and took a step toward the street, pulling a mag from my pocket. It was a single lens mounted on a wire frame, like a pair of glasses that had been cut in half. It clamped to the bridge of my nose, amplifying my vision first by a factor of ten, and the
n, when I tapped the magnification switch on the side, by a factor of thirty.
There was a moment of disorientation as my brain adapted to the virtual split screen of seeing normally with one eye and at a distance with the other. The first several times I’d used the mag it had made me sick to my stomach, unable to cope with such dramatically different visual inputs. Mat had told me sternly that they hadn’t designed the system just to have it go to waste; they ordered me to keep trying. Now, I could use it as a sniper scope if I had to, taking the long shot without hesitation and rarely, if ever, missing.
My eyes adjusted. The movement in the field became a man: tall, dark-haired, wearing a brown suit that looked like it had seen better days. He was walking through the knee-high grass with an unsteady lurch that would have confirmed his status as one of the infected even if it hadn’t been for the drool on his chin.
I didn’t need to activate a camera. The mag was set to auto-record unless I told it otherwise, since anything interesting enough to be looked at in that particular manner was likely to be interesting enough to film. I zoomed in one more time, getting the gruesome details before I pulled the ear cuff out of my other pocket and clipped it to my ear. It pinched the skin a little. I wasn’t usually the big communicator of the group, on account of how I couldn’t be trusted in polite company.
Ah, well. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I pressed the side of the cuff with my thumb and said, sweetly and clearly, “This is Ash North, license number IQL-33972, requesting a connection to the Orinda Police Department. This is a high-priority request.”
There was a moment of silence, broken only by a soft buzzing, before a woman’s voice filled my ear, asking, “Ms. North, why are you still on the street? My records indicate that the funeral you were observing concluded nearly twenty minutes ago. Please advise your business in the area.”
“Hello to you too, ma’am, and I hope you’re having a right splendid day, there in your nice, secure police station.” The infected man was continuing to shamble across the field toward the fence. He had to be following the motion of Ben pacing on the sidewalk to my left. He wasn’t moaning yet; his mouth was slack, not tense with the effort of calling for his kin and kind. That meant we had a bit of time before the street became totally unsafe.
“It’s been better,” said the woman, biting her words off sharp and crisp, like they had somehow offended her. “Can I help you, Ms. North?”
“You know that big gated field next to the funeral home? I’m assuming something like that would have to be on the local police department’s records. Just guessing here, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d be allowed to overlook.” My zombie was picking up speed, shambling ever faster toward the fence. There was no mistaking the hunger in his eyes. Oh, he was going to be upset when he realized his way was blocked.
“Yes, we know the field.” The first traces of something other than disdain were creeping into her voice. She must have run my license number. I don’t have a history of crank calls to the police. I may treat most things like a game, but when the safety of civilians is on the line, I take things very, very seriously.
“Then you may be interested to know that there’s an infected man on the other side of the fence. Contained, but of course, we don’t know how he got in there. I’d say late forties, medium build, Caucasian, brown hair, eye color irrelevant, due to full retinal retraction, but probably brown, if you’re checking the missing persons lists. He’s currently alone, not yet in full moan, but he’ll get there.” The man’s mouth dropped further open, sudden tension tightening the muscles of his cheeks and throat. “Oops, I spoke too soon. He’s moaning. Let’s see what he flushes out of the field, shall we?”
Ben had finished his phone call. He moved to stand beside me, giving me a confused look. I tapped the mag with my index finger, and then extended my arms in front of me in the ASL for “zombie” before pointing to the field. His eyes widened.
‘How many?’ he signed.
‘One, so far,’ I signed back.
He nodded and dug his hand recorder out of his pocket, moving far enough away that my ongoing conversation with dispatch wouldn’t muddle his notes. Mat would have to filter Ben’s narration out of mine if we both wanted clean audio, but that was nothing compared to the kind of crap we asked them to do on a regular basis. Once I’d demanded stabilized footage of a bungee jump past a zombie cougar that had managed to get itself stuck on a ledge. Mat had done it, although not without constant complaints. Good times.
“Mat, it’s Ben,” said Ben, talking a little too fast and a little too excitedly. “We’ve got an infected man in the field next to the funeral home—what? Yes, I’m still at the funeral home. Ash and I were getting ready to head for a milkshake when Rosie called. Yes, my sister. No, she didn’t want to talk to Ash. We buried our mother today, that didn’t change her mind about anything. Look, can you check local missing persons and infection alerts, see if you can figure out who our walking dead boy might be? It’d be nice if we could get a march on this. Thanks. You’re a peach.”
He kept talking after that, but I was in no position to listen: As always, everything was starting to happen at once.
Our infected man was still moaning, now walking at a remarkably brisk pace for a zombie. The moan meant he’d spotted us, and was now sounding the dinner bell for all his zombie friends. That could be a major problem for us if he had friends on this side of the fence—or really, even if he didn’t. Zombies were stupid in isolation, shambling husks of the people they’d once been, hollowed out by sickness and by instincts the human body wasn’t wired to deal with. Trouble was, zombies somehow got smarter in larger groups. Put enough of them together, and they’d start to plan. They’d start to figure out things like ambushes.
Or distractions. That field was totally enclosed. How had our shambling man appeared in the middle of it so quickly? He’d started out just close enough to catch and hold my attention, but far enough away not to seem like a threat. There was a word for something like that.
Bait.
I swore loudly before grabbing Ben’s arm and jerking him toward the statue I’d been perching on for most of the afternoon. It was a trio of abstracted bronze people, the metal slippery and not designed for climbing.
Ben nearly dropped his recorder, breaking off in the middle of whatever he’d been saying to demand, “Ash, what the hell? Let me go!”
“No can do, up you get, I’ll explain why later, come on, come on, no time to dilly or dally or do anything but climb.” I shoved him toward the statue, looking anxiously around me as I did. When did the street get so damn still? Where were the pigeons, where were the squirrels, where were the little scraps of urban wildlife that hung around the fringes of man’s world and signaled safety by not giving a fuck about anything that wasn’t unnatural and wrong? Gone, all of them, even the crows, which had vanished from the funeral home lawn somewhere between my spotting the man in the field and right now.
Ben looked like he wanted to argue. Then he started climbing. We’d been colleagues and friends before we got married, and he knew how much attention I paid to my environment. Can’t be an Irish Irwin without building a strong degree of situational awareness, after all; the sheep will take you out in a heartbeat if you don’t pay attention to the world around you.
“Aren’t you coming?” he asked.
“Too narrow; I’d knock you off. Climb faster,” I said, scanning the area again. My mag was still set to magnify. That’s why, when I turned to look behind me, it looked like the zombies were inside of grabbing range.
I did not scream. I do not scream. I am not a screamer. I may have… yelped a bit. In surprise, not terror. I took a step backward, adrenaline flooding my veins, only for my non-augmented eye to inform me that I was being silly; the mob of infected now running toward me full tilt was in fact at least eighteen feet away.
Not so much better, really. But better enough to make all the difference in the world. “Dispat
ch, are you still on the line?” I asked, keeping my voice bright and upbeat and cheerful. We could edit out the yelp. Pitch-shifting the rest of my dialogue would be harder, and would start verging into falsifying the news, rather than just reporting it. I wasn’t against a little doctoring of the facts if it got me a better story, but there was only so far that could be pushed before people started getting pissed.
“Yes, I’m still here.” The woman sounded much more focused and businesslike now. Shouting in someone’s ear will do that. “Are you in distress?”
“I’m about to be. I have a closing mob of what looks like eleven infected, all about two weeks baked, judging by the state of their clothes and hair; I can transmit visual data directly, if you want to open me a loop into your system.” Mat would be watching for that by now. If the police decided to open a door, our resident techie would be inside in a blink, scooping up everything that could be of use before getting the hell out of Dodge. Mat was good like that.
“What?”
I didn’t sigh or roll my eyes. It wasn’t nice to taunt people who were just trying to do their jobs, and more importantly, I didn’t have the time to waste. “I said, eleven infected, not in the field, on the street, closing fast. You have eyes on the area—they’ve been watching me this whole damn time. Adjust the feeds to point at my line of sight, or let me into your systems, but either way, get someone out here before we wind up on the evening blog rolls in a posthumous sense.”
I tapped my ear cuff to kill the connection. No sense in letting things drag out and letting her think that the situation wasn’t urgent. She had the IP for my mag, and Mat would be watching like a hawk, waiting for her to open her system for my feed. As for me, I had other things to worry about. I turned. Ben was high enough up now that I could climb after him without knocking him off the structure. I grabbed the first chunk of statue I could get a grip on and started pulling myself up.
A yellow light came on at the bottom of my mag lens: the police dispatcher was plugging into my feed. It was followed a second later by a second yellow light, as Mat seized the open connection and started pilfering the police computer for missing persons reports and local disturbances.