Feed (Newsflesh Trilogy #1)(15)
Author: Mira Grant

Things were less peaceful inside the van. Shaun was sprawled in a chair, cleaning his crossbow, while Buffy was flat on her back under one of the desks, heels drumming against the floor as she yanked wires out of their current, incorrect locations and jammed them into new holes. Every time she yanked a wire, one or more of the van’s monitors would start to roll or be consumed by static, turning the scene into something abstract and surrealistic, like a bad B-grade horror movie. She was also swearing like a merchant marine, displaying a grasp of profanity that was more than a little bit impressive.

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” I asked, stepping over the spools of discarded cabling and taking a seat on the counter.

“Look at this!” She shoved herself out from under the desk and into a kneeling position, brandishing a fistful of cables in my direction. I raised my eyebrows, waiting. “All of these were connected wrong! All of them!”

“Are they labeled?”

Buffy hesitated before admitting, “No.”

“Do they follow any sort of normal, sane, or predictable system?” I knew the answer to that one. Shaun and I did most of the electrical work, but the actual wiring is all Buffy’s, and she thought most people were too conservative with the way they managed their inputs. I’ve tried to understand her system a few times. I’ve always come away with a migraine and the firm conviction that, sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

“They didn’t have to unplug everything,” Buffy muttered, and crawled back under the desk.

Shaun pulled back the string on his crossbow with one finger, checking the tension, and said, “You can’t win. Logic has no power over her when her territory has been invaded by the heathens.”

“Got it,” I said. The monitor next to me rolled to static before it began displaying a video feed of the yard outside. “Buffy, how long before we’re fully operational again?”

“Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. I haven’t checked the wires on the backup consoles yet, so I don’t know how big of a mess they made there.” The irritation in her voice was unmasked. “No data loss so far, but none of the van’s exterior cameras got anything but static for over an hour, thanks to their stupid monkeying.”

“I’m sure we can live without an hour’s recordings of the security team,” I said. “Shaun, get the lights?”

“On it.” He put his crossbow aside and rose, moving to drop the shade over the van’s window and pull the rear door closed. Buffy made a small grunt of protest, and he flicked the switch to turn on the interior lights. The area was promptly bathed in a soft, specially formulated light designed to be gentle on sensitive eyes. The bulbs cost fifty bucks each, and they’re worth it. They’re even better than the black lights I use in my room at home. They don’t just prevent headaches; sometimes, they cure them.

I removed my glasses with a sigh, massaging my right temple with my fingertips. “All right, folks, we have our first official, on-the-record encounter. Impressions?”

“Like the wife,” said Shaun. “She’s photogenic, and a definite asset. I still need a handle on the senator. He’s either the biggest Boy Scout ever to make it past the local level, or he’s playing us.”

“The fish tacos were good,” said Buffy. “I like Senator Ryman, actually. He’s nice even when he doesn’t have to be. This could be a pretty fun gig.”

“Who cares about fun as long as it brings in the green?” asked Shaun, with a philosophical shrug. “We’re made when this is over. Everything else is gravy.”

“I agree with both of you, to a degree,” I said, still massaging my temple. I could already tell I was going to need painkillers before we wrapped for the night. “Senator Ryman can’t be as nice as he wants us to think he is, but he’s also nicer than he has to be; it’s not entirely a put-on. There’s a degree of sincerity there that you can’t fake. I’ll do a pull-and-drop profile on him tonight, something like ‘First Impressions of the Man Who Would Be President.’ Puff piece, but still. Buff, how long is it going to take you to splice our footage?”

“Once everything is ready to run again, I’ll need an hour—two, tops.”

“Try for an hour. We want to hit the East Coast while they’re still awake. Shaun, care to do a review of the security precautions? Hit up a few of the guards, find out what sort of ordnance they’re carrying with them?”

His face split in a wide grin. “Already on it. You know the big blond guy? Built like a linebacker?”

“I did notice the presence of a giant on the security team, yes.”

“His name’s Steve. He carries a baseball bat.” Shaun made an exaggerated swinging motion. “Can you imagine him hitting one out of the park?”

“Ah,” I said, dryly. “The classics. Grab a few cameras, harass the locals until you get what you want. Which brings us to my last order of business—we have a request from the senator.”

Buffy slid out from under the desk again, another bundle of wires in her hands, and gave me a curious look. Shaun scowled.

“Don’t tell me we’re being censored already.”

“Yes and no,” I said. “He wants us to keep Emily out of things as much as we can for right now. Minimize her inclusion in the lunch footage, that sort of thing.”

“Why?” asked Buffy.

“San Diego,” I said, and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. Shaun doesn’t feel as strongly as I do about the universal application of Mason’s Law, but he still follows the debate. Expression changing from one of incomprehension to complete understanding, he said, “He’s afraid somebody’s going to target her at the ranch if we make too big a deal of things.”

“Exactly.” I switched my massaging to my other temple. “Their kids are out there with their grandparents, and he sort of wants the family alive. A little risk is unavoidable, but he’d like to keep them low-profile as long as he can.”

“I can manage the footage edits,” said Buffy.

“She wouldn’t feature in my piece at all,” said Shaun.

“And I’ll sidebar her. So we’re in agreement?”

“Guess so,” said Shaun.

“Great. Buffy, let me know when we’re back to live-feed capacity on all bands. I’m going to step outside for a few minutes.” I slid my sunglasses back on and stood. “Just getting a little air.”

“I’ll get to work,” said Shaun, and stood as I did, exiting the van a few steps ahead of me. He didn’t stop or look back as I came out; he just kept going. Shaun knows me better than anyone else in the world. Sometimes I think he knows me better than I do. He knows I need a few minutes by myself before I can start working. Location doesn’t matter. Just solitude.

The afternoon light had dimmed without dying, and my bike wasn’t quite as painful to look at. I walked over and leaned against it, resting my heels on the driveway as I closed my eyes and tilted my face up into the dying light. Welcome to the world, kids. Things were moving now, and all we could do was make sure that the truth kept getting out, and getting where it needed to be.

When I was sixteen and told my father that I wanted to be a Newsie—it wasn’t a surprise by that point, but it was the first time I had said it to his face—he pulled some strings and got me enrolled in a history of journalism course at the university. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Hunter S. Thompson, Cameron Crowe I met the greats the way you should meet them, through their words and the things they did, when I was still young enough to fall in love without reservations or conditions. I never wanted to be Lois Lane, girl reporter, even though I dressed like her for Halloween one year. I wanted to be Edward R. Murrow, facing down corruption in the government. I wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson, ripping the skin off the world. I wanted the truth, and I wanted the news, and I’d be damned before I settled for anything less.

Shaun’s the same, even if his priorities are different. He’s willing to let a good story come before the facts, as long as the essential morals stay true. That’s why he’s so good at what he does, and why I double-check every report he writes before I release it.

One thing I did learn from those classes is that the world is not, in any way, what people expected thirty years ago. The zombies are here, and they’re not going away, but they’re not the story. They were, for one hot, horrible summer at the beginning of the century, but now they’re just another piece of the way things work. They did their part: They changed everything. Absolutely everything.

The world cheered when Dr. Alexander Kellis announced his cure for the common cold. I’ve never had a cold, thanks to Dr. Kellis, but I understand they were pretty annoying; people didn’t enjoy spending half their time sniffling, sneezing, and getting coughed on by total strangers. Dr. Kellis and his team rushed through testing at a pace that seems criminal in retrospect, but who am I to judge? I wasn’t there.

What’s really funny is that you can blame this whole thing on the news. One reporter heard a rumor that Dr. Kellis was intending to sell his cure to the highest bidder and would never allow it to be released to the man on the street. This was ridiculous if you understood that the cure was a modified rhinovirus, based on the exact virulence that enabled the common cold to spread so far and so fast. Once it got outside the lab, it was going to “infect” the world, and no amount of money would prevent that.

Those are the facts, but this guy didn’t care about the facts. He cared about the scoop and being the first to report a great and imaginary injustice being perpetrated by the heartless medical community. If you ask me, the real injustice is that Dr. Alexander Kellis is viewed as responsible for the near-destruction of mankind and not Robert Stalnaker, investigative reporter for the New York Times. If you’re going to lay blame for what happened, that’s where it belongs. I’ve read his articles. They were pretty stirring stuff, condemning Dr. Kellis and the medical community for allowing this to happen. Mankind, he said, had a right to the cure.

Some people believed him a bit too much. They broke into the lab, stole the cure, and released it from a crop duster, if you can believe that. They flew that bastard as high as it would go, loaded balloons with samples of Dr. Kellis’s work, and fired them into the atmosphere. It was a beautiful act of bioterrorism, conducted with all the best ideals at heart. They acted on a flawed assumption taken from an incomplete truth, and they screwed us all.

To be fair, they might not have screwed things up as badly as they did if it hadn’t been for a team working out of Denver, Colorado, where they were running trials on a genetically engineered filovirus called “Marburg EX19,” or, more commonly, “Marburg Amberlee.” It was named for their first successful infection, Amanda Amberlee, age twelve and a half. She’d been dying of leukemia and considered unlikely to see her thirteenth birthday. The year Dr. Kellis discovered his cure, Amanda was eighteen, finishing her senior year of high school, and perfectly healthy. The folks in Denver took a killer, made a few changes to its instructions, and cured cancer.