“Ash, where are you?” Her voice was tight as a plucked bowstring, drawn taut and ready to snap. “We just got a sympathy note from the CDC.”
“Who’s with you?” Please don’t say the governor, please don’t say the governor…
“Governor Kilburn, Amber, and Governor Blackburn.”
All the people who might know about what was going on, from the wrong direction. The only one I was even half-sure wasn’t working with John’s true employers was Governor Kilburn. I had a choice to make, and I didn’t have much time to make it. “I’m going to have Mat send you our coordinates,” I said. “Back off, wait an hour, and then come for us. Bring whoever you think we can trust. I’ll trust you to make the right call. We need to talk. All of us. I love you.”
This time when I cut the connection, she didn’t call back. We kept running. Ben was to my left, Mat was to my right, and the crumbling shape of the rest stop was ahead of us, all broken windows and neglected brick. I began to think we were going to make it.
The blast from the explosion when the CDC blew up our van reached all the way to our location. A hot concussion wave hit me from behind, driving me to my knees on the broken ground. My head hit the concrete, and everything went quiet.
People are going to tell you we’re dead. They’re lying.
People are going to tell you we’re terrorists. They’re lying.
People are going to tell you we’re trying to draw attention to ourselves, that we resent the fact that our ratings aren’t at the top of the charts, that we’re angry about the way our candidate and her accomplishments have been shunted aside by the drama happening on the Republican side of the house. People are going to tell you a lot of things. People are going to expect you to believe them. Don’t.
You don’t have to believe me either. After all, I clearly have a lot to gain if you don’t listen to them. I have my life, and the lives of my friends, to gain. I have a future to gain. And if you don’t believe me, I have everything to lose. But really. Which of us is telling the more believable story here? Me, or the people who tell you that I’m the enemy?
It’s time to pick a side. I genuinely hope you’ll pick the correct one.
—From That Isn’t Johnny Anymore, the blog of Ben Ross,
April 25, 2040
Fourteen
I don’t think I ever fully lost consciousness: That would have required a harder blow, a softer head, and a weaker constitution. I wasn’t put together to be a fainting flower. I pushed myself up from the concrete with trembling hands, mind racing to catalog the scrapes, bruises, and cuts on my palms. There was a first aid kit in one of my bags, complete with pseudoskin sealant. If the ground wasn’t contaminated, I might still be all right. The others, however…
Ben was a Newsie. He never did anything outdoors if he could avoid it, and he was soft from spending most of his life in the glow of his computer screen. Not that he wasn’t brave—he was; I’d known that from the moment he hopped onto a plane and came to bail me out of Ireland—but bravery doesn’t count as much as sturdiness when you’re actually out in the world. All the bravery there is won’t stop a bullet, or block the shock wave of a CDC-triggered explosion. Mat was a little more fit, because Mat needed to be able to lift heavy equipment when there were repairs to be done, but again, that might not be enough.
Both of them were sprawled facedown on the concrete. My hands and knees were bleeding; if I flipped my friends over to see whether they were bleeding, I might infect them. Any zombies in the area would be moving toward the sound of the explosion, drawn by the noise. I couldn’t hear moans. I couldn’t hear flames crackling, either, just a distant ringing that made me suspect my ears had been damaged by the blast. Not badly enough to rupture an eardrum, since I couldn’t feel anything running down my neck, but badly enough that I was temporarily deaf, while also temporarily exposed and contending with two motionless people I couldn’t touch without endangering.
“If only this had been planned, I might get a Golden Steve-O out of this,” I muttered, mostly for the comfort of hearing something, even if it was just my own voice echoing through bone conduction.
Bone conduction. That was the answer. I tapped my ear cuff three times, triggering it to call Ben. It beeped: He wasn’t picking up. Well, I’d been expecting that, hadn’t I? I tapped it again, signaling the software to treat this as an emergency and kick off Ben’s screamer. It wasn’t a privilege I abused, largely because his phone was implanted inside his head: bone conduction, rather than ordinary communication. He could never take it off or put it down, and when I forced a connection open, he had to deal with it.
“Benjamin Ross, this is your courtesy wake-up call,” I said quietly, counting on bone conduction to do the amplifying for me. “I recognize you’re probably enjoying the pain-free haze of your recent concussion, and do not wish to wake up. Bollocks to that, we may be eaten if we do not get under cover, and I’m bleeding, so I need help if I’m going to get our things to the main building without contaminating them. Again, Benjamin Ross, this is your courtesy wake-up call. Now wake up, before I start kicking you in the kidneys.”
Ben groaned. I couldn’t hear it, but I saw his mouth move. My stomach knotted. The classic Kellis-Amberlee moan comes with a very distinctive mouth motion, accompanied by an overall slackness in the face and an emptiness in the eyes. With Ben still facedown against the concrete, I couldn’t tell whether there was any tension left in him. If he’d hit the ground wrong, if he’d broken something, the virus would have done its best to wake him up again. That was what Kellis-Amberlee did. It would have been a pretty poor zombie virus if it hadn’t.
The average time from contact with contaminated fluids to amplification varied according to the height and weight of the person who’d been bitten or spat on, which was why smaller people always seemed to be the first to go. Mat was in more danger than I was, and I was in more danger than Ben. But if a person died, disrupting their body’s electrical field in the process, amplification and resurrection were just this side of instant. I took a step backward.
Ben lifted his head, tracking me. One arm of his glasses was bent, the titanium frames hanging off his face at an awkward angle. His mouth moved, forming words I didn’t understand.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sort of temporarily deaf from the blast, and I don’t read lips. I know you can hear me because of the bone conduction. Can you understand what I’m saying right now?”
Ben nodded.
“Good. Very good. Look.” I held up my hands, showing him my skinned and shredded palms. “I need medical care before I touch anything. How are your hands? We’ve got to wake Mat and get under cover before the CDC circles back.”
Ben gave me an exaggeratedly confused look. I sighed.
“Big explosions draw the infected, because it’s a huge, unfamiliar sound that might mean food. Standard protocol after you blow a compromised site is to wait fifteen minutes before circling back and taking out all the zombies you’ve flushed out of hiding. Sometimes you get nothing, sometimes you get great whopping mobs and make the whole county safer. But I don’t know how long we’ve been out. They could be here any second.”
Ben nodded, looking alarmed, and showed me his unscathed palms before turning and starting to shake Mat by the shoulder. There was an impressive scrape on his shoulder, but since it was more oozing than actively gushing blood, that wasn’t as much of an issue as my hands. I moved to start collecting bags, trying to slip my fingers through the straps without actually touching them.
At first, Mat didn’t respond. Then, laboriously, their body began to twitch. I blew out a gust of air, relieved. “Get up, Mat,” I called, and grabbed the last of the bags.
Mat’s head lifted, revealing the blue-black bruise spreading across much of their forehead. It looked like they’d cracked their skull when they fell. Mat’s mouth opened. And while I still couldn’t hear, it turned out I didn’t need to, because that mouth shape was so perfectly characteristic that sound was
not needed. I knew what I would have heard, and I was suddenly, painfully grateful I didn’t have to. No matter what happened next, I would go to my grave never having heard my friend and teammate moaning.
Ben danced backward, eyes wide and cheeks ashen. It would have been comic under any other circumstances. Considering where we were standing and what was going on around us, it wasn’t funny at all.
“Grab the bags and run!” I shouted, letting the duffel I’d just picked up fall back to the ground before yanking the gun from my thigh holster. One more thing to sterilize when this is over, said the small voice of practicality and heartlessness, which was sometimes the loudest thing in the entire world. I wanted to hate myself for having thoughts like that, but I knew they were necessary: They were the still, cold place that I could go to when my job turned bleak. Without them, I would have been lost long before I had come to America. I would never have survived to make it out of Ireland.
But oh, it burned to know that I was the sort of person who could worry about getting blood on my gun when someone I cared about was picking themselves up from the concrete, face slack and pupils gone wide and black as oil. Mat’s backpack was dangling by one strap. Their computer was inside, I knew; that would have their contact lists, and any data that hadn’t been backed up elsewhere. We might need it.
“Oh, fuck me,” I muttered into the strange silence, and bolted forward, switching my gun to my left hand as I reached out and snatched the backpack with my right. Mat’s arm bent under the pressure, offering no resistance: They didn’t understand what was happening anymore. That part of Mat was gone, forever.
Newly risen zombies still had intact joints and the potential to be both swift and dangerous. That was bad. At the same time, they were often disoriented, caught up in the process of being rewritten by the virus that had taken over and crystallized inside their brains. Mat had been dead for a very short time, and had been a zombie only shortly longer. Because of that, they weren’t moving quickly or reacting well. That was a good thing. That was maybe the only good thing left in the world.
I didn’t have my mag. I couldn’t record this, and on some level, I was glad. Mat deserved to be remembered laughing, brightly colored and gloriously alive, not moaning and shuffling toward me like an invalid. They weren’t reaching for me yet, but they would be. They would be. There was no love between us now. Only my love for Mat, undying and still burning bright as anything. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t something that could be taken back.
“First time I met you, I asked if you were a boy or a girl,” I said. “You laughed at me. Said I was a bit of a bigot, but I was a good-hearted one; you thought you could beat it out of me. I don’t know if you ever did, darling, but I like to think you got pretty far. I’m never going to forget you. I’m so, so sorry.”
Mat took another step toward me. This time it was a step, not a shuffle: They were adjusting to the changes in their body. It was time.
“Your name was Mat Newson, and you were brilliant. If there’s an afterlife, if there’s a God, you make sure you tell the old bastard that. Tell him Aislinn North said you were awesome, and you deserve the best of what’s on offer. The very, very best.”
Mat took another step toward me.
I dropped the backpack, switched the gun back to my dominant hand, and pulled the trigger.
The nice thing about close shots is that sometimes, the entry wounds are textbook, small and polite and almost unobtrusive. A hole appeared in the middle of Mat’s forehead, no larger than a nickel. I could have stopped it up with my thumb. Not that it would have changed anything. A thick runnel of blood dripped from the hole and ran down the bridge of Mat’s nose.
Mat blinked once. Then, gracelessly, they fell. I didn’t hear them hit the pavement. There were some small mercies about this day. Very small.
Grabbing Mat’s backpack and the rest of the supplies, I ran after Ben.
Once upon a time, the rest stop had been intended for weary truckers and families with overstuffed cars. Rusted, tilting signs entreated me to keep my dogs on their leashes and clean up after them. Ben was nowhere to be seen, but there was only one main structure still standing, a brick-walled, octagonal thing that had probably been the heart of the visitor’s center. All too aware that my temporary deafness was becoming more of a hindrance with every step I took toward the convenient hiding spots the walls and crannies represented, I kept going, looking for signs that Ben had been through here.
Someone had nailed plywood over the bathroom doors. It looked like it had been done from the outside. Shutting something in, or making sure nothing could get in? It was hard to say. I kept circling, trying to keep my gun in position without letting any of the things we’d worked so hard to save fall. It was odd, but I felt like losing Mat’s backpack now would be disrespectful to their memory, adding insult to the injury of their untimely death. The human mind is not always logical under stress, sadly. I was no exception.
Ben was behind the center, using a hammer from our portable repair kit to pry the nails out of another sheet of plywood. I stopped and frowned at him. He shook his head, pointing at the nail he’d just extracted. I continued to frown. He shoved the nail in front of me, pointing more fiercely, and I finally saw.
It was rusty. Deeply, thoroughly rusty, the sort of decay that only comes from being exposed to the elements for year after year, untouched and undisturbed. “Did you check for other ways in?” I asked, trusting the bone conduction to keep him hearing me, even if his ears were still stopped up.
He nodded vigorously, flashing a thumbs-up around the haft of the hammer. I nodded more slowly.
“I’ll keep watch, then,” I said. “Get us inside.”
Ben went back to work.
The word “zombie” accurately describes the victims of Kellis-Amberlee. They rise from the dead, hungry for human flesh, if only because the virus that drives them wants so desperately to spread itself. They’re just as happy eating cows, or squirrels, or anything else hot and fast and mammalian enough for the virus to recognize. But here’s the part the movies got wrong: Our zombies are alive. They breathe and sneeze and shit and age. The oldest zombies still alive—“oldest” in terms of length of post-amplification existence, not in terms of chronological age—were bitten during the Rising and corralled on government research facilities all over the world. The main research center in Ireland collected mostly children, viewing them as easier to contain due to their small size. Some of those kids are still among the technically living. They’ve undergone puberty and entered adulthood since their hearts stopped for the first time. For all anyone knows, they’ll eventually die of old age.
They’d die a whole lot faster if they were denied access to food and water. Even the dead need to stay hydrated, and while they get most of their fluids from the people they devour, even zombies have been known to die of thirst. If there were no other entrances to this little stronghold, and the plywood had been in place for years, there would be no zombies inside to ambush us. There might be bodies, but we lived in a world where corpses were commonplace, barely more important than anything else. As long as those bodies were too dried up to ooze and no longer capable of independent movement, we’d be fine.
My ears were starting to ring, and more, they were starting to hurt. There was still no dampness on the sides of my face, so I was choosing to interpret that as my hearing coming back, and not anything worse or more disturbing. I kept my gun up and my eyes moving, scanning the surrounding trees for any sign that we were about to be attacked. It felt like someone had set iron bands around my heart, sealing it off from the rest of me. Mat’s death was going to hit me like a freight train once I had time to process it. I knew that, even as I knew this wasn’t the time. If I wanted to stay alive—if I wanted to keep Ben alive—I needed to stay as cold as I could. That was the only job I had now. To be cold, and to kill, and to hold my ground.
A hand touched my shoulder. I whipped around, and for one terrible mom
ent, I was doing the thing every firearms instructor screams at their students not to do: I was aiming a loaded gun at an ally, someone I had no intention of shooting. Ben’s eyes went wide, but he didn’t flinch away. He held his ground, waiting for me to lower my pistol and start breathing again.
The plywood had been removed from the broken door behind him, and it gaped like a toothless mouth, inviting us inside. I motioned for him to stay where he was and stepped past him, into the dark.
The dark didn’t last long. The plywood had been nailed over a little alcove—a smoking area, judging by the kicked-over ashtrays near the wall. It was no more than three feet deep, terminating at a pair of sliding glass doors that weren’t sliding anymore. Their power source had died long ago. “Ben, come inside and get these doors open,” I said. I didn’t want to pry the doors apart with my bloody fingers: the less contamination I was responsible for, the better. “First area’s clear.”
Ben’s head appeared around the rectangle of light that looked out on the rest of the world. Then he crept inside, moving slowly and cautiously even after I’d given the all clear. He brightened when he saw the closed, undamaged glass doors. If there had been a major battle here, they would have been shattered. Maybe we had managed to find a decent bolt-hole after all.
It took him almost three minutes to pry the glass doors open, finally wedging himself between them and pushing as hard as he could. I itched to help, even as I knew that I couldn’t. I didn’t dare. Finally, he stepped aside, and I entered the visitor’s center.
It was a mostly circular room: The octagonal walls of the exterior had been smoothed down and evened out by tricks of insulation and architecture, creating a pleasing, unbroken expanse of wall. It was surprisingly well lit, thanks to the skylights that made up most of the ceiling; one of them had broken, scattering glass across the tile floor and allowing leaves and other debris to drift in from outside, but as there was no blood in the mess, I guessed it had been a storm or other natural disaster, rather than a zombie raccoon out for a stroll. I paused long enough to drop the bags and Mat’s laptop against the wall, adjusted my grip on my pistol, and resumed my slow circuit.