He kept his voice light, conversational, like he was talking about the weather and not a major biohazard cleanup operation. He waited several minutes. There was no response.
With a sigh, Michael turned away from the window. There was a lump in the bed he shared with his wife—a lump of approximately her size, or at least the size she’d been when Judge Vernon had passed judgment on her case. Stacy Mason was not a murderess in the eyes of the law, or in the eyes of those who had survived the Rising. Everyone had a story like theirs, it seemed, decorated with the bodies of the loved and lost. Not many were mothers who had shot their only sons. Not many were women who had insisted that they be taken into custody and tried for what they’d done. In those regards, as in so many others, Stacy was special.
She had crawled into bed the day that she was found innocent, and she hadn’t emerged since, except to use the bathroom. She ate when he brought her food. She answered direct questions, when she couldn’t see a way around them. She was leaving him alone, and try as he might, Michael couldn’t find the way to bring her back.
“Stacy?”
There was no response from the bed. Michael sighed again before he walked over to sit down on the edge of the mattress, on his side of the bed. The space between them was a chasm filled with screaming, and with the wide-eyed face of a little boy who had died twice, once of a terrible virus, and once when his mother put a bullet through his brain. Phillip had deserved better. They had deserved better. Michael only hoped that they still did.
“Stacy, sweetheart, you’re going to have to get up soon. I’ve pulled as many strings as I could, but the cleanup crew is doing our side of the street tomorrow. We can’t stay here while they’re checking for contamination.” They shouldn’t have been allowed to stay for as long as they had. Michael had called in favors with the school administration, the mayor, and even the governor, who regarded the Masons as genuine heroes of the Rising.
The Masons had fortified their Berkeley neighborhood, turning it into a safe haven for survivors. The Masons had run complicated rescue operations that fanned out across Berkeley, Albany, and even Oakland, saving literally hundreds of survivors before the infected became too prevalent to allow for further attempts. The Masons had kept the lights on and the stomachs of their people full, thanks to good resource allocation and knowing how to work within their means. Out of all the small survivors’ enclaves found when the government was actually able to start stepping in and saving people, theirs had been among the largest, the most functional, and the least chaotic.
Through it all, Michael’s voice had been going out to the world every night, first over the Internet, and then over the radio, when the local ISPs went down. He had spoken to the city, and to anyone outside the city with a good enough antenna. He had promised them that they were stronger than this crisis. He had told them what to do. Stacy had been too busy during those dark days to do her own broadcasts, but he had included a segment called “Stacy’s Survival Suggestions” in every other show. The number of people who had come up to him since the barricades came down, to tell him that those survival suggestions had genuinely saved their lives…
It was staggering. Thousands of people were still alive because of him, and because of his brilliant wife, who had proven to be a genius where surviving the living dead was concerned. At least until the day the tanks and military convoys had rolled into Berkeley, and they had been ordered to stand down.
He would never forget watching Stacy take the reports from her scouts, who had been following the movement of their rescuers through the city. She had looked so confident then, square shouldered and tan under the cruel midwinter sun. Phillip had been in the ground for three years, buried deep, but never forgotten. Michael had looked at his wife, and then at the soldiers who were fanning out over the street, and thought, We did it. We survived.
Three months later, he was no longer quite so sure. Stacy’s strength had been the strength of a thing under immense pressure, so compacted that it could no longer show the cracks. When the pressure had been removed, she had fallen apart.
“Stacy, sweetheart, I need you to wake up now.” He reached over and touched her shoulder. “The car will be here to take us to our hotel in an hour. We’re staying at the Claremont. They cleared it out last week. Some of the rooms are off-limits, but the structure is sound. You always wanted to stay there.” They had even joked, during the early weeks of the Rising, about abandoning their comfortable encampment to take back the grand old resort hotel. It had been Stacy who eventually rejected the idea, saying “No one wants to wait out the end of the world in the Overlook Hotel.” She’d always been a fan of popular literature, and it was hard to get much more popular than Stephen King.
“Leave me here,” Stacy said. Her voice was thin from disuse. It still sent a wave of relief washing over Michael. She was listening. She might be doing a poor job of responding, but at least she was listening. “I can help them find the bodies.”
“Stacy…” Michael left his hand resting on his wife’s shoulder. He needed the contact more than she did, he suspected. “Stacy, the bodies aren’t here anymore. He’s not here. His body was removed weeks ago, remember? They took him away while your trial was going on. They wanted to see if your accounting of what had happened had been accurate.”
It hadn’t been, of course. As soon as the apocalypse was… not over, exactly, but no longer occupying the entire world, Stacy had fallen apart and started calling herself a murderer. She had killed her son, according to her; she had been startled by him playing a game, and had pulled the trigger without thinking about it. She needed to be punished.
Michael would never stop thinking about the day they’d buried Phillip. It had been so early in the crisis. They hadn’t known yet that they needed to be careful with the animals. They had wrapped his little body in some of their precious plastic sheeting and buried him deep, where nothing could dig him up again. Three years in the ground without embalming wasn’t kind to anyone, but Phillip had been so lovingly prepared for his burial that the technicians who examined him had been able to take the samples that they needed. They had been able to find the marks of Marigold’s teeth, and the Kellis-Amberlee virus still slumbering in his flesh.
Stacy Mason had been found innocent in every court except the court of her own mind. That was where she was being found guilty every hour of every day, and might be for the rest of her life.
“He’s not here anymore, Stacy,” Michael whispered, leaning a little closer. “I’m so sorry. I miss him so much. But he’s not here, and it’s time for us to go.”
“Go where?” Stacy rolled over. Any elation he might have felt died when he saw the blankness in her eyes. It was like looking into the eyes of a corpse. “We have nowhere to go. This is where we fought. This is where we failed him. We should stay here.”
“They’ll arrest us if we’re not off the property by tomorrow morning,” said Michael. “This is vital work. They need us not to be standing in the way.” Anything that lit up under their scanners would be removed, and destroyed. Michael didn’t like to think about how many of their possessions—how many of Phillip’s possessions—were going to be gone when they came back, assuming the whole house wasn’t burned down as a possible infection hazard.
In some perverse way, he hoped it would all be destroyed. Maybe then they could start over clean. They had hazard money from the state, rewards for staying and fighting and not clogging up the overtaxed, overpopulated “safe zones.” Considering how low property values had become in any urban area, Michael had faith that he could find them a new house, one that wasn’t filled with ghosts, without much effort. It might be good for Stacy. Maybe if she wasn’t living in a haunting, she’d be able to remember who she was.
“I don’t want to go.”
It was a small, straightforward admission, and it broke Michael’s heart. He touched the back of his fingers to his wife’s cheek, and said, “I know. But we have to. It’s time to start moving on.
I’ve already packed our things, and I’m sure I missed something. Do you want to check and see if there’s anything you want to take?” Anything they removed from the house would be scanned, of course, but the scans would be less broad, and more targeted. They’d overlook things like sweat and semen—things that could easily wind up on a favorite blanket, for example—and allow them to be kept. The government was trying to protect their people, not punish them for surviving.
“No,” said Stacy, sitting up and swinging her feet around to the floor. “I’ll do it, though. You were always terrible about remembering to pack enough underwear.”
Michael watched as she crossed to the dresser, and wished with all his heart that he could believe this was the beginning of her recovery.
2.
“All right, Stacy and Michael… Mason.” The desk clerk looked up from her screen in surprise. She was young, barely out of her teens, with two-tone hair and gauges in her ears. She would never have been able to get a job at the Claremont before the Rising. Maybe that was a good thing about the zombie apocalypse: Old, unnecessary societal standards were falling, replaced by a new normal that seemed far more reasonable. “Um. I’m sorry, this may be inappropriate of me, but are you the Michael and Stacy Mason? From the radio?”
“Yes, we are,” said Michael. Stacy didn’t say anything. She was leaning listlessly against the counter, looking around the refurbished lobby with vague disinterest.
The new owners of the Claremont had spared no expense in getting things “back to normal.” The chandeliers sparkled, the hardwood floors gleamed, and the whole room looked like a throwback to an earlier time, as long as you ignored the bars on the windows and the armed guards standing next to the doors. This, too, was the new normal. All the elegance, with a slightly higher cost of upkeep.
“Oh, wow. Um. I didn’t know that you’d be—are you in one of the cleanup zones?” The clerk reddened. “That was rude of me. I’m sorry. Can you wait here while I get my manager? I’ll be right back.” And then she was gone, vanishing with surprising speed through a door marked PRIVATE.
“What was that all about, do you think?” asked Michael.
“She probably doesn’t want to give a room to a pair of criminals,” said Stacy.
Michael blinked. This was the first time she’d called him a criminal. “What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“I mean I’m a killer, and you’re my accomplice. She’s going to get her manager so he can tell us that we can’t stay here.” Stacy finally turned to look at him, and the intensity in her eyes was hard to bear. “We’ll have to pay for what we’ve done eventually. We may as well start now, don’t you think?”
“Sweetheart…” Michael stopped. He honestly didn’t know what to say. She needed help. She needed a therapist, someone who knew how to talk her through her grief. But all the therapists who’d survived were currently being deployed by FEMA as part of an effort to rebuild a shattered population, and it would be months, if not years, before they were allowed to settle and reopen their practices. Stacy had refused to apply for government assistance, saying that her mental health was not the business of anyone but her and her family. There was no one to help her but him, and he was entirely unequipped for the job.
The desk clerk, breathless now, burst out of the door she’d vanished through, with a thin, well-groomed older woman behind her. Michael could see the signs of the Rising written clearly on the manager’s skin: the deep lines that no amount of foundation makeup would conceal, the short, blunt nails, to keep her from hurting herself when the nightmares came. Survivors learned how to recognize one another. Their scars were always different, but in some ways, they were always the same.
“Thank you for waiting,” said the clerk, staccato as a burst of gunfire. She didn’t retake her position at the monitor. Her manager did that, swiping a card quickly across the built-in reader as she updated the security restrictions on the machine.
“The Claremont is honored to have you with us, Mr. and Ms. Mason,” said the manager. “I’m Cynthia Norskog, and you saved my life several times over the last few years, although you’ve never met me before. I was holed up all by myself. If it hadn’t been for your broadcasts, I don’t think I would have made it.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard, selecting and updating. “You’re heroes. I feel so privileged to be able to meet you and thank you for everything that you’ve done.”
Stacy straightened a little as Cynthia praised her, tilting toward the other woman like a flower moving toward the sun. “Really? We really saved you?”
“I don’t know what I would have done without the sound of another human voice, a living human voice, coming into my apartment each night,” said Cynthia. “I was lucky. I lived above a bakery that had its doors locked and covered in metal sheeting when things got bad. We never lost power. I lived on crepes and lemon zest for three years. But really, I lived on a voice from the radio, and I practiced every technique you had him relay to us up on my roof. Just me, and my homemade spear, and the need to see this crisis to an end.”
Her machine beeped. She withdrew two key cards and held them out toward the Masons.
“Thank you,” said Cynthia. “This isn’t enough. Nothing I could do would ever be enough. But as long as I’m manager here, you’ll stay free at the Claremont, even when your house isn’t undergoing a government cleansing.”
“You’re welcome, and thank you,” said Stacy, taking the keys. It was the most animation Michael had seen out of her since the trial.
He watched her thoughtfully as she took a picture with the manager and clerk, and as she held the camera for his picture with the excited duo. Whatever spark she’d found lasted as they crossed the lobby to the elevator, and rode up to the very top of the building, where their keys unlocked a palatial suite larger than their first apartment. Enormous sliding glass doors made up almost half of one wall, looking out over the entire city of Berkeley.
“My God, the view,” he breathed.
Stacy didn’t answer. He turned to see her heading toward the bedroom, her shoulders beginning to slump again. Michael sighed. He knew how this ended: with her crawling into the bed, her clothes still on, and returning to the fugue state that seemed to consume most of her time these days. It hurt to see her like that, in ways he could never have imagined before everything had become so complicated.
But he’d seen a way out. He’d seen her break that shell and come back to the world of the living, even if it wasn’t quite as the woman she’d been before. He loved her with all his heart, no matter who she had to be in order to live with herself, and he more than half suspected that the original Stacy—the Stacy who’d danced with him on the college quad the night he asked her to marry him, the Stacy who’d been a mother to Phillip and a member of two local book clubs—was gone forever, another casualty of the Rising. He could live with that.
They lived in a world where the dead could walk, after all.
3.
True to his suspicions, Stacy had gone to bed without even removing her shoes. He had done that for her several hours later, when he finished making his phone calls and calling in his favors. The equipment was delivered to their room at seven the next morning.
“Stacy.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, putting a hand on her shoulder and shaking lightly. “Sweetheart, I know you need your rest, but I need you to wake up, please.”
“What?” Stacy opened her eyes. For a moment—just a moment—she looked like the woman she’d always been, and he felt his heart swell with love for her. Then she blinked, and the blankness came back, and the moment passed. “Michael, go away. Let me sleep.”
“I wish I could, but if you go back to sleep, we’ll miss the truck.”
Stacy frowned, waking up a little more as she peered at him. “What truck? Michael, what are you talking about?”
“I spoke to some friends of mine last night. The CDC is going to be cleaning out the Oakland Zoo today, and I thought it would be good to go along with the
m. Take some pictures, document the process of reclaiming our city—and do it in a place where most of the damage will have been to nonhuman subjects.”
For a moment, Stacy was silent, and Michael was afraid that he had misread the situation. Maybe the answer was keeping her far away from the zombie menace, insulating her until she could pretend that the world hadn’t changed… but if the world hadn’t changed, then she was a murderess, a mother who had killed her own son. He didn’t think she could live with herself, in that world. No, she needed to be part of a world where what she had done was justified and right, and the only choice she could possibly have made. She needed to be part of this world, even if he had to drag her into it.
Then, slowly, Stacy nodded. “All right,” she said. “Did you pack my camera?”
Michael smiled.
An hour later, when the CDC van pulled up at the Claremont Hotel gates, Michael and Stacy Mason were waiting outside. He had an MP3 recorder and a portable charging station, in case he wound up needing more juice. She had a camera slung around her neck, like a photojournalist getting ready to venture out into the jungle for the first time. The van’s driver looked them up and down before saying something to his passenger, who nodded and opened his door, hopping out.
“Morning, folks,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Collins. Under the circumstances, and as you’re outside the chain of command, you can call me ‘Bernie.’ I’d prefer that. It tells me that the screaming is coming from someone whose death I wouldn’t have to explain to the brass. Do you understand what it is we’re doing today?”
“The CDC is cleaning out the Oakland Zoo,” said Michael. “We’re coming with you as observers, and to document the process. The Rising is going to be our generation’s defining event. We need to get as many pictures and firsthand accounts as we can.”