Feed (Newsflesh Trilogy #1)(24)
Author: Mira Grant

I nodded, taking Shaun’s arm. “Senator, if you don’t mind, my brother and I should be getting to work. We’re a bit behind after last night.”

Shaun blinked at me. “What?”

“Of course.” The senator smiled, not bothering to conceal his relief. “Miss Mason, Mr. Mason, thank you for your time. I’ll have someone notify you before we’re ready to check out and move on.”

“Thank you,” I said, and left the room, hauling the still-bewildered Shaun along in my wake. The boardroom door swung closed behind us.

Shaun yanked his arm out of my hand, subjecting me to a sharp sidelong gaze. “Want to tell me what that was all about?”

“The man just found out his camp was sabotaged,” I said. “They’re not going to come up with anything useful until they finish panicking. That’s going to take days. Meanwhile, we have reports to splice together and update, and Buffy’s dumping her footage to server four. We should take a look.”

Shaun nodded. “Got it.”

“Come on.”

Back in our hotel room, I turned the main terminal over to Shaun while I plugged my handheld into the wall jack and settled down to work. We couldn’t both record voice feeds at the same time, but we could edit film clips for our individual sections of the site and we could write as much text as we needed. I skimmed the reports Buffy authorized while Shaun and I were on cleanup. All three of the betas had done excellent jobs. Mahir, especially, had done an amazing amount with his relatively straightforward video feed, and I saw from the server flags that both the footage and his voice tracking had already been optioned by three of the larger news sites. I tapped in a release, authorizing use of the footage under a standard payment contract that would give Mahir forty percent of the profits, with clear credit for the narrative. His first breakout report. He’d be so proud. After a pause, I added a note of congratulations, directed to his private mailbox. He and I have been friends outside of work for years, and it never hurts to encourage your friends to succeed.

“How’re things in your department?” I asked, pulling up the raw footage of the attacks and setting it to run sequentially on my screen. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I had a hunch, and I’ve learned to follow my hunches. Buffy knows visual presentation, and Shaun knows shock value, but me? I know where to find the news. There had been sabotage. Why? When? And how had our saboteur been able to cut those wires without coming into the range of Buffy’s cameras?

“I’m taking Becks away from you,” he said. I glanced over. Shaun’s screen was dominated by the footage of the two of us against the fence, holding off the last of the zombies. The audio was being fed directly to him via the earpiece plugged into his left ear. His expression was serious. “She wants to go Irwin. She’s been begging for weeks. And this report—this isn’t a Newsie report, George. You know that.”

I scowled, but it wasn’t like the request was a surprise. Good Irwins are hard to come by because the death rates during training are so damn high. You don’t have time for a learning curve when you’re playing with the infected. “What are her credentials?”

“You’re stalling.”

“Humor me.” The footage on my screen was set to play in real-time, which meant some of the feeds would pause to let the others catch up again. The gate cameras had chunks missing from their narrative, while the attack at the fence was almost complete. I couldn’t help wincing when I saw one of the women from the political rally come staggering up, clearly among the infected. I didn’t need the dialogue tracks to tell me what Tyrone was saying: He was telling her to halt in her approach, back off, and present her credentials. But she just kept coming.

“Rebecca Atherton, age twenty-two, BA in film from New York University, Class A-20 blogging license, upgraded from a B-20 six months ago, when she passed her final marksmanship tests. She’s testing for an A-18 next month.”

An A-18 license would mean she was cleared to enter Level 4 hazard zones unaccompanied. “If you take her, my side of the site retains a six percent interest in her reports for the next year.” The infected girl was sinking her teeth into Tyrone’s left forearm. He screamed soundlessly and fired into the side of the zombie’s head. Too late. The damage was done.

“Three percent,” Shaun countered.

“Done,” I said, not taking my eyes off the screen. “Draft an offer letter. If she agrees, she’s yours.” Tyrone was staggering in circles, clutching his arm against his body. I could see Tracy barking orders; Carlos turned and ran for the convoy, presumably to get reinforcements. That’s why he survived—because he ran away. How must that kind of thing sit with a man like him? I can’t imagine that it sits very well.

“George? What’s up? I expected you to fight me more than that.”

Instead of answering, I pulled the headphone jack out of my machine and let the sound start broadcasting to the room.

“Oh God Tracy oh God oh God,” Tyrone was babbling. The moaning in the background was low and constant; the infected were coming, and the gate in the convoy fence was standing open.

“Shut up and help me close this thing,” Tracy snarled, grabbing the gate with both hands. After a moment’s hesitation, Tyrone ran over and joined her, placing his hands well away from hers. It was a good way of dealing with things. As long as she didn’t encounter any of the live virus, she wouldn’t begin amplification, and in someone Tyrone’s size, full conversion would take longer than was needed to close a simple gate, even one that heavy. Once it was shut, she could wave him off to a safe distance and put a bullet through his brain. It wouldn’t be pretty, but elimination of contagion rarely is.

The tape jumped. Tyrone was on the ground in a spreading pool of his own blood while Tracy screamed and struggled against the zombie gnawing at the side of her neck. The gate was closed, and yet there were six zombies on the screen, one chewing on Tracy, three closing, and the other two lurching onward, toward the convoy.

Shaun frowned. “Pause the feed.”

I tapped my keyboard. The image froze.

“Rewind to the jump.”

I tapped my keyboard again and the image ran backward to the blank spot. I left it there, frozen, and looked to Shaun for further instructions.

He wasn’t looking at me at all. “Start it up again, half-speed.”

“What are you—”

“Just start the feed, George.”

I tapped my keyboard. The image began to move again, much more slowly now. Shaun scowled, and snapped, “Freeze!”

The frozen image showed Tracy screaming, the zombies shambling, and Tyrone dead on the ground. Shaun’s finger stabbed out like an accusation, indicating the leg of Tracy’s suit. “She didn’t run because she couldn’t,” he said. “Someone shot out her kneecap.”

“What?” I squinted at the screen. “I don’t see it.”

“Take out your damn contacts and try again.”

I leaned back, blinking my right contact free and removing it with the tip of my index finger. After a moment to let my eye adjust, I closed my left eye and considered the screen again. With my low-light vision restored, it was much harder to miss the wetness of Tracy’s leg, or the way the blood on the snow around her fanned out from her body, rather than falling straight down as I would have expected.

I sat up straight. “Someone shot her.”

“During the missing footage,” Shaun agreed, voice tight. I glanced to him, and he turned his face away, rubbing a hand across his eyes. “Christ, George. She was just doing this because it looked good on her résumé.”

“I know, Shaun. I know.” I put a hand on his shoulder, staring at my frozen video display, where Tracy battled for a life that was already lost. “We’ll find out what’s going on here.

“I promise.”

* * *

they come to us, these restless dead,

Shrouds woven from the words of men,

With trumpets sounding overhead

(The walls of hope have grown so thin

And all our vaunted innocence

Has withered in this endless frost)

That promise little recompense

For all we risk, for all we’ve lost

—From Eakly, Oklahoma,

originally published in By the Sounding Sea, the blog

of Buffy Meissonier, February 11, 2040

Ten

We were approaching the polls on Super Tuesday, and the mood in the senator’s camp was grim. People should have been nervous, elated, and on edge; we were hours away from finding out whether the gravy train was about to take off like a rocket or come grinding to a halt. Instead, a funereal atmosphere ruled the camp. The guards continued to triple-check every protocol and step, and no one was willing to go out without an assigned partner. Even the interchangeable interns were beginning to get antsy, and they didn’t notice much beyond their duties. It was bad.

The convoy was holding a position three blocks from the convention center, parked in what used to be a high school football field before the Rising rendered outdoor sports too dangerous. It was a good location for our purposes, providing power, running water, and sufficient clear ground for the perimeter fence to be established without anything—either physical or visual—obstructing the cameras. The number of people packed into Oklahoma City for the festivities necessitated running secure buses to the convention center every thirty minutes. Each of them was equipped with state-of-the-art testing units and armed guards.

We had received the final confirmation that Tracy McNally was shot through the right kneecap during the attack two days after Shaun and I first reviewed the tape and brought it to the attention of the senator’s security team. This, on top of the cut wires in the perimeter screamers, had provided absolute confirmation that the attack had been a poorly managed assassination attempt. The convoy had been preparing to leave Eakly at the time, and it felt like we’d left the last of our high spirits behind.

It was Shaun who first identified the assassination attempt as poorly-managed. When the senator asked him to defend his position, he shrugged and said, “You’re alive, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a comforting point, but it was a good one. A few more zombies in the original wave or a few more guards taken out like Tracy and the convoy could have been overrun rather than suffering a few casualties. Either it hadn’t been a full-fledged assassination attempt, or it was an incredibly badly planned one. The former seemed unlikely. They used infected humans.

The attraction of attempting to weaponize the infected has decreased exponentially since the Raskin-Watts trail of 2026, when it was officially declared that any individual who used live-state Kellis-Amberlee as a weapon would be tried as a terrorist. What’s the point of using a sloppy, difficult-to-manage weapon if even failure means you’re likely to be one of the few lucky souls to still qualify for the death penalty?