It took me fifteen minutes to complete standard decontamination procedures and get myself into some clean clothes, leaving the old ones in a biohazard-secure bin for later sterilization. I checked the GPS readout on my watch. According to the van’s tracking coordinates, the rest of the team was just now reaching the guard station and getting their chance to check out Jimmy’s substandard taste in porn. Good. That meant I still had time to square myself away. Grabbing a clean jacket off a stack of survivalist magazines, I started for the door, swerving almost as an afterthought to pass through the kitchen and snag a Coke from the fridge.
Thanks, said George, as I stepped out into the hall.
“No problem,” I murmured, cracking open her soda and taking a long drink before heading toward the door to the roof-access stairs. In most buildings, tromping around on the roof is likely to get you shot. Just another advantage of living where I do: Mrs. Hagar can’t even hear us up there unless we’re setting off land mines, and we’ve done that only once, for quality control purposes.
There used to be a padlock on the door leading to the roof-access stairs. As if the infected were going to be mounting a top-down attack? That stopped happening when the mass outbreaks stopped driving the wounded to the rooftops to wait for rescue that never came. The manager periodically realizes that the lock is missing and replaces it, and someone on my staff comes along and cuts it off the next day. That’s the circle of life around here. Nothing stays locked away forever.
You’re depressing today.
“It’s a depressing sort of day,” I said. George quieted, and I climbed the stairs in something that was chillingly close to solitude.
I don’t deal well with being alone. Maybe that’s why I decided to go crazy instead.
My crew’s been working on converting the roof to suit our needs since we took over the third floor. It’s one of those projects that’s never going to be finished; there’s something new every time I go up there. Dave has what he calls his “outdoor theater,” a little grouping of folding chairs and a collapsible movie screen under a pavilion he bought at the Wal-Mart in Martinez. He brings out a projector on warm nights and shows pre-Rising horror movies. I think he’s trying to lure Maggie out of her house and into the city by competing with her grindhouse parties, and if he keeps it up, he just may succeed.
Becks has a small firing range with targets designed for everything from basic handguns to her personal favorite weapon, the wrist-mounted crossbow. That girl reads too many comic books. Still, I have to say, the sight of a zombie’s head catching fire after it gets hit with one of her trick arrows isn’t something I’m going to forget anytime soon. Neither are our viewers.
And me? I have a corner of the roof where no one does anything else, where I can go and sit and drink a Coke and watch the clouds chase themselves across the sky, and where I don’t have to be the boss for a little while. I can just be me. When I go up there, my staff’ll move heaven and earth to keep anyone from following me, because they know I need the escape. They’ve mostly gotten over treating me like I’m made of eggshells, but there are exceptions.
A pigeon was sitting on the edge of the roof when I walked up, cooing contentedly to itself. It looked at me suspiciously, but waited to see what I would do before going to the trouble of flying away. When I just sat, it resumed its cocky back-and-forth strut without a second thought.
“Must be nice to be a pigeon,” I said, taking another swig of Coke and making a face. “You sure can’t sell you on the idea of coffee? Nice, bitter, hot coffee that doesn’t taste like going down on a hooker from Candyland?”
You never objected to me drinking Coke before, George replied.
“Yeah, George, but you didn’t live inside my head before. You can use this stuff to clean car batteries. Car batteries, George. You think that’s doing anything good to my internal organs? Because I’d bet good money that it’s not.”
Shaun, said George, in that all-too-familiar, all-too-exasperated tone, I don’t live anywhere. I’m not alive. Remember?
“Yeah, George,” I said, taking one last drink from the can of Coke before tossing it, still half full, off the edge of the roof. It sprayed soda in an impressively large arc as it fell. I leaned backward against the building’s air-ventilation shaft and closed my eyes. “I remember.”
As I’ve mentioned several times, I have a sister. An adopted sister, to be precise, fished out of the state system by Michael and Stacy Mason after the Rising left us both without our biological parents. That was George. She’s the reason I got into blogging, and the reason we wound up running a site of our own. She was never meant to be one of nature’s followers. And technically, I guess the tense is wrong there, because it ought to be “I had a sister.” The death of Georgia Carolyn Mason was registered with the Centers for Disease Control on June 20, 2032. Her official cause of death is recorded as “complications from massive amplification of the Kellis-Amberlee virus,” which means, in layman’s terms, “she died because she turned into a zombie.”
It would be a lot more accurate to say that she died because I shot her in the spine, spraying blood all over the interior of the van that we were locked in at the time. It might be even more accurate to say that she died because some bastard shot a needle full of the live Kellis-Amberlee virus into her arm. But the CDC says she died of Kellis-Amberlee, and hey, we don’t argue with the CDC, right?
If I ever find out who fired that needle, their official cause of death is going to be Shaun Mason. That’s the thought that keeps me going. I sleepwalk through my job, I pretend I’m administrating our site while Mahir does all the work, I delete calls from my crazy parents, I hold conversations with my dead sister, and I look for the people who had her killed. I’ll find them someday. All I have to do is wait.
See, when the zombies came, it was an accident. Researchers in two totally unconnected facilities were working on two totally unrelated projects that involved genetically engineering “helper viruses”—new diseases that were supposed to make life better for the whole damn world. One of them was based on a really f**king nasty hemorrhagic fever called Marburg, and was designed to cure cancer. The other was based on a strain of the common cold, and was supposed to get rid of colds forever. Enter Marburg Amberlee and the Kellis Flu, two beautiful pieces of viral engineering that did exactly what they were supposed to do. No more cancer, no more colds, just happy people all over the world celebrating the dawn of a new age. Only it turns out the viruses were just like the people who made them in at least one sense, because when they met, through the natural chain of transmission and infection, it was basically love at first sight. First wn of a love, then comes marriage, then comes the hybrid viral strain known as “Kellis-Amberlee.” It swept the planet before anyone knew what was happening.
And then people started dying and getting back up to munch on their relatives, and we figured out what was happening damn fast. People fought back, because people always fight back, and we had one advantage the characters in zombie movies never seem to have: See, we’d seen all the zombie movies, and we knew what was likely to be a bad idea. George always said the first summer of the Rising was possibly the best example of human nobility that history had to offer, because for just a few months, before the accusations started flying and the fingers started pointing, we really were one people, united against one enemy. And we fought. We fought for the right to live, and in the end, we won.
Sort of, anyway. Look at the movies from before the Rising and you’ll see a whole different world from the one that we live in; a world where people go outside just because they think that, hey, going outside might be fun. They don’t file paperwork or put on body armor. They just go. A world where people travel on a whim, where they swim with dolphins and own dogs and do a hundred thousand things that are basically unthinkable today. It seems like paradise from where I’m sitting, a generation and a couple of decades away. If you ask me, that world was the single biggest casualty of the Rising.
The Rising didn’t just showcase the nobler side of human nature; it was a war, and as long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers. There’s always somebody willing and waiting to make a buck off somebody else’s pain. I’m not sure most of them meant to do what they did—I’m sure most of them really meant to do the right thing—but somehow, an entire world full of people who had managed to take arms against an enemy that was straight out of a Romero flick was convinced that what they really wanted was fear. They put down their guns, they locked their doors, they went inside, and they were grateful for all the things that they were scared of.
I used to think the Irwins were great warriors in the ongoing fight to live a normal life in our post-Rising world. Now I’m starting to suspect that we’re just tools of some greater plan. After all, why leave your house when you can live vicariously through a dumb kid willing to risk his life for your amusement? Bread and circuses. That’s all we are.
You’re getting bitter, George observed.
“I got reason,” I said.
Bread and circuses is what got George killed. We—her, me, and our friend Georgette “Buffy” Meissonier—were the original After the End Times news team, and we got hired by President Ryman to follow his campaign. He was Senator Ryman then, and I was a dumb, optimistic Irwin who believed… well, a lot of things, but mostly, that I’d die before George did. I was never going to be the one who buried her, and I was sorry that she was going to bury me, but we’d both made our peace with that years before. We were chasing the news, and we were chasing the truth, and we were on the adventure of our lives. Literally, for George and Buffy, because neither one of them walked away from it. Turns out there were people who didn’t want Ryman to make it to the White House. Oh, they were happy to have him elected. They just didn’t want him to be president. They were backing their own candidate.
Governor David Tate. Or, as I prefer to think of him, “the f**king a**hole pig that I shot in the head for being part of the conspiracy that killed my sister.” He admitted it before he died. Well, before he injected himself with a huge quantity of live Kellis-Amberlee and forced me to shoot him. During the after-investigation, I got asked why I thought he’d decided to pull the classic super-villain rant before he killed himself. I got asked a lot of other questions, too, but that was the one I had an answer for.