Feed (Newsflesh Trilogy #1)(9)
Author: Mira Grant

“Thrill as Buffy kisses ass,” Shaun said, deadpan. Buffy shot him a poisonous look, and he just laughed.

Content that all was right with the world, I settled back in my seat, folded my arms across my chest, and closed my eyes, letting the chatter in the van wash over me without registering it. It had been a long day, and it was nowhere near over.

When blogging first emerged as a major societal trend, it was news rendered anonymous. Rather than trusting something because Dan Rather looked good on camera, you trusted things because they sounded true. The same went for reports of personal adventures, or people writing poetry, or whatever else folks felt like putting out there for the world to see; you got no context on who created it, and so you judged the work on the basis of what it actually was. That changed when the zombies came, at least for the people who went professional. These days, bloggers don’t just report the news; they create it, and sometimes, they become it. Landing the position of pet bloggers for Senator Ryman’s presidential campaign? That definitely counts as becoming the news.

That’s part of why Shaun and Buffy keep me around. My journalistic integrity is unquestioned by our peers, and when we make the jump to alpha—the suddenly feasible jump to alpha—that’s going to cement our credibility. Shaun and Buffy will bring in the readers. I’ll make it okay for them to trust us. They just have to deal with my depressed personal ratings because part of what makes me so credible is the fact that my news is free from passion, opinion, and spin. I do op-ed, but for the most part, what you’ll get from me is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

So help me God.

Shaun elbowed me when we reached Bronson’s. I slid my sunglasses back into position and opened my eyes.

“Status?” I asked.

“A least four visible cameras. Probably twelve to fifteen, all told.”

“Leaks?”

“That many cameras, at least six sites already know.”

“Got it. Buffy?”

“Taking point,” she said, and straightened, putting on her best camera-ready smile. My parents exchanged amused looks in the front seat.

“It’s all uphill from here,” I said.

Shaun leaned over and opened the van door.

Before the Rising, crowds of paparazzi were pretty much confined to the known haunts of celebrities and politicians—the people whose faces could be used to sell a few more magazines. The rise of reality television and the Internet media changed all that. Suddenly, anybody could be a star if they were willing to embarrass themselves in the right ways. People got famous for wanting to get laid, a stunt men have been trying to achieve since the day we discovered puberty. People got famous for having useless talents, memorizing trivia, or just being willing to get filmed twenty-four hours a day while living in a house full of strangers. The world was a weird place before the Rising.

After the Rising, with an estimated eighty-seven percent of the populace living in fear of infection and unwilling to leave their homes, a new breed of reality star was born: the reporter. While you can be an aggregator or a Stewart without risking yourself in the real world, it’s hard to be an Irwin, a Newsie, or even a really good Fictional if you cut yourself off that way. So we’re the ones who eat in restaurants and go to theme parks, the ones who visit national parks even though we’d really rather not, the ones who take the risks the rest of the country has decided to avoid. And when we’re not taking those risks ourselves, we report on the people who are. We’re like a snake devouring its own tail, over and over again, forever. Shaun and I have done paparazzi duty when the stories were thin on the ground and we needed to make a few bucks fast. I’d rather go for another filming session in Santa Cruz. Something about playing vulture just makes me feel dirty.

Buffy was the first to flounce into the crowd, looking like a little glittering ball of sunshine and happiness before they closed ranks around her, flashbulbs going off in all directions. Her giggle could cut through steel. I could hear it even after she’d made it halfway to the restaurant doors, distracting the worst of the paparazzi in the process. Buffy’s cute, photogenic, a hell of a lot friendlier than I am, and, best of all, she’s been known to drop hints about her personal life that can be turned into valuable rating points when the stories go live. Once, she even brought out a boyfriend. He didn’t last long, but when she had him, Shaun and I could practically have danced na**d on the van without getting harassed. Good times.

Shaun stepped out of the van already smiling. That smile’s made him a lot of friends in the female portion of the blogosphere—something about him looking like he’d be just as happy to explore the dangerous wilderness of the bedroom as he is to explore the mysteries of things that want to make him die. They should know by now it’s a gimmick, given his continuing lack of a social life that doesn’t include the infected, but they keep falling for it. Half the cameras swung around to face him, and several of the chirpy little “anchorwomen”—because every twit who knows how to post an interview on the vid sites is an anchorwoman these days; just ask them—shoved their microphones into his face. Shaun immediately started giving them what they wanted, chattering merrily about our latest reports, offering coy, meaningless come-ons, and basically talking about anything and everything other than our new assignment.

Shaun’s smoke screen gave me the opportunity I needed to slip out of the car and start worming my way toward the restaurant doors. Paparazzi gatherings are one of the few times you’ll see a crowd in public. I spotted nervous-looking Berkeley Police in riot gear around the edge of the crowd as I made my way toward the thinner concentration of bodies. They were waiting for something to go wrong. They’d just have to keep waiting. There’s only been one incident where an outbreak started from a gathering of licensed reporters, and it happened when a nervous celebrity—the real sort, a TV sitcom star, not one of the ones who built themselves celebrity out of boredom—freaked out, pulled a gun out of her purse, and started shooting. The jury found the TV star, not the paparazzi, at fault for the outbreak that followed.

One of the Newsies near the police offered me a sidelong nod, making no move to draw attention to my position. I nodded back, relieved by his discretion. He was just crowd-surfing, but it was a nice thing to do. I made a note of his face: If his site put in for an interview, I’d grant it.

Irwins get crowd-comfortable the easy way: When you live in the hope that an outbreak will happen where you can observe it, you don’t worry about avoiding them the way a sane person might. Fictionals go one of two directions: Some avoid crowds like everybody else. Others refuse to acknowledge that they could possibly get infected when they haven’t put it in the script and they go gaily bouncing hither and yon, ignoring the danger. Newsies tend to be more cautious because we know what could happen if we’re not. Unfortunately, the demands of our job make it hard for us to be total hermits, and so even those of us who don’t need the additional income or exposure from the paparazzi flocks join up with them from time to time, getting accustomed to the feeling of being surrounded by other bodies. The paparazzi flocks are our version of the obstacle course. Stand in them without freaking out and you might be ready for real field work.

My “skirt the crowd and keep your eyes on the door” technique seemed to be working. With Shaun and Buffy providing louder, more visible targets, no one was going for me. Besides, I have a well-established—and well-deserved—reputation for being the sort of interviewee who walks away leaving you with nothing you can use as a front-page quote or saleable sound byte. It’s hard to interview someone who refuses to talk to you.

Ten feet to the door. Nine. Eight. Seven

“—and this is my gorgeous daughter, Georgia, who’s going to be the head of Senator Ryman’s hand-selected blogging team!” Mom’s hand caught my elbow just as the gushing, ebullient tone of her voice caught my ears. Trapped. She swung me around to face the crowd of paparazzi, fingers digging into my arm. More quietly, through gritted teeth, she said, “You owe me this.”

“Got it,” I said, out of the corner of my mouth, and let myself be turned.

Shaun and I figured out early what our purpose was in our parents’ lives. When your classmates aren’t allowed to go to the movies because they might be exposed to unknown individuals, while your parents are constantly proposing wild adventures in the outside world, you get the idea that maybe something’s going on. Shaun was the first to realize how they were using us; it’s about the only place where he grew up before I did. I got over Santa. He got over our parents.

Mom kept an iron grip on my arm as she mugged and preened, re-creating her favorite photo opportunity, version five hundred and eleven: the flamboyant Irwin poses with her stoic daughter, polar opposites united by a passion for the news. I once sat down with the news aggregators and compared a public-image search to the collection of private pictures on the house database. Eighty-two percent of the physical affection I’ve received from my mother has been in public, in careful view of one or more cameras. If that seems cynical, answer this: Why has she reliably, for my entire life, waited to touch me until there was someone with a visible camera in shooting range?

People wonder why I’m not physically affectionate. The number of times I’ve been a rating-boosting photo opportunity for my parents should be sufficient answer. The only person who’s ever hugged me without thinking about the shooting angles and light saturation is my brother, and he’s the only one whose hugs I’ve ever given a damn about.

My glasses filtered camera flashes, although it wasn’t long before I had to close my eyes anyway. Some of the newer cameras have lights on them strong enough to take photographs in total darkness that seem to have been taken at noon, and there’s not an intelligence check associated with buying that sort of equipment. One of those suckers goes off in your face, you know you’ve been photographed. I was going to have a migraine for days thanks to Mom’s forced photo opportunity. There was no way I could have avoided it; it was give in before dinner or spend the entire meal being harangued about my duties as a good daughter, leading to a much longer photo session afterward. I’d rather kiss a zombie raccoon.

Buffy came to my rescue, slinking through the crowd with the sort of grace that only comes from the kind of practice most of our generation has avoided. Reaching out, she caught hold of my other arm and chirped, all dizzy good cheer, “Ms. Mason, Georgia, Mr. Mason says our table’s ready! Only if you don’t come now, they may release it, and then we’ll have to wait at least a half an hour for another table.” She paused before delivering the coup de grace. “An inside table.”