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  Alaric frowned. “Boss—”

  “Go ahead and use the company card. When I get the bill, I’ll tell me that I authorized it, and I’m sure I’ll be willing to let the charge stand.” I offered him a bright, disingenuous smile and brushed quickly past as I left the convenience store, heading for the fueling stations.

  The sun was dipping lower in the sky; we’d be making most of the drive to Weed in full darkness. Even in today’s safety-oriented society, there aren’t lights on most of I-5; just around the exits to inhabited areas. Those are also the places where the guard stations are actually staffed, and where nice men with guns will be happy to “help” if you go and get yourself infected. Good Samaritans, every single one of them. Thanks to the laws regarding infection, they don’t even have to be certain before they shoot; anything that can stand up as reasonable doubt in a court of law is enough to excuse them putting a bullet through your skull. The farther into the wild you go, the less reasonable that doubt has to be.

  “Night-riding,” I said, sipping my coffee again. “Gosh. That’s just what I was hoping I’d be doing tonight. Driving down a deserted highway in the dark is always superfun.”

  I’d do it for you if I could.

  “I know,” I said. Alaric was coming out of the convenience store, practically staggering under his load of junk food and bottled sodas. I tossed my half-full coffee cup into the nearest trash can and pulled my helmet over my head, offering him a quick salute as I kicked one leg over my bike. The faster I made for the gate, the less time we’d have to talk about what happened. There’d be time for talking when we got to Maggie’s place. We wouldn’t be able to help it. For now, all I wanted to do was drive, and I didn’t even particularly feel like doing that.

  I had my bike pulled out from the pump and idling by the time Alaric reached the van. He dumped the supplies into the passenger seat and waved to me, a questioning expression on his face. I’ve learned to recognize the “Do you want to talk about it?” look—God knows I got it enough after George died. I shook my head, jerking a thumb toward the gate.

  My team knows my signals as well as I know theirs. Alaric nodded, getting into the van. A moment later, Becks flashed me the thumbs-up signal out the driver’s-side window and started the engine. The van pulled away from the pump and stopd behind me, waiting for my sign.

  “Amateurs,” I muttered, and gunned the engine.

  The rest of the drive to Weed was the sort of uneventful that leaves every nerve on full alert, ready to freak out at the slightest provocation. Pre-Rising horror movies used to build suspense before a big scare by making the audience wait. They’d do something horrible, maybe kill off a few protagonists, and then make people sit around waiting for the next terrible thing to come along. They called it “setting up a jump scare.” Well, the drive to Weed felt exactly like that. We blasted down the abandoned length of I-5, and with every mile that passed without something going wrong, the paranoia grew.

  It was almost eleven when we pulled off the freeway and onto the surface streets of Maggie’s hometown. Floodlights lit a billboard located near the city center, large block letters proclaiming CONGRATULATIONS JAMES! WEED’S CITIZEN OF THE MONTH!

  There’s something in the mentality of small towns that I’ll never understand. Shaking my head, I signaled for the others to follow as I turned onto the frontage road leading to Maggie’s.

  Houses took on a distinctly utilitarian feel after the Rising, as people suddenly figured out that maybe being able to withstand the zombie apocalypse was more important than having a showy picture window. I’ve always had a soft spot for pre-Rising buildings. Sure, they’re basically death traps and most of them should be torn down before something goes horribly wrong, but they’re death traps with style. Pre-Rising houses are the Irwins of the architectural world. Maggie’s place, well… it could easily win a Golden Steve-o just for existing.

  We turned off the lackadaisically maintained frontage road and onto the smooth pavement of Maggie’s two-mile driveway, which wound like a ribbon through the trees to make an almost perfect circle around the house. Less impractical than you might think: Every segment of the driveway was surrounded by automatic sensors and motion trackers, right up until you hit the wall, which looked like stone but was actually specially treated polymer over a steel core. The gates were set to slam shut in less than half a second, and they were guaranteed to shear straight through anything short of a tank. The twisting driveway sliced the surrounding woods into sectors, and each sector contained a series of trip wires and cameras that would make sure nothing ever snuck up on Maggie or her guests.

  I stopped the bike just shy of the first gate, shifting to neutral and activating my helmet’s intercom. “Uh, Becks? Did anybody call Maggie to tell her we were coming?”

  A long pause greeted my question before Becks said, “No. I thought you did.”

  “Slipped my mind.” I sighed, starting forward. “Let’s see if her security system kills us, shall we?”

  The first two gates were set to open for anyone with After the End Times credentials. The third required a blood test—you could get into the kill chute after you were infected, but you’d be stopping there in a hurry. The fourth performed a mandatory ocular scan. George never had the occasion to visit, which was a pity. It would have been fun to watch the hard-coded security system try to deal with her retinal KA. Maggie might have needed to actually call some of the live guards out of the woods where they usually lurked unseen.

  We could see the house after we passed the third curve in the drive. Every window was lit, and the yard was illuminated by floodlights concealed in the carefully manicured garden. It was practically bright enough to be daylight. The light led us the rest of the way up the hill. I started to relax after we’d passed the fourth gate without anything coming out of the trees to kill us all. The fifth gate—the final gate—was standing open. I drove through to the yard, parking to the side in order to leave the van with plenty of space to pull in past the gate.

  The front door opened while I was taking off my helmet and Becks was parking the van. A small flood of furry bodies poured out into the yard, Maggie walking at the center of the rollicking, barking pack. I had to smile. I couldn’t help it.

  The barrier weight for Kellis-Amberlee amplification—that is, how heavy something has to be before it won’t just die, but will also come back from the dead and have a go at eating Grandma—is forty pounds. That seems to be a reasonably hard cut-off point; some things may not reanimate under fifty pounds, but nothing reanimates under forty. Logically, you’d think this would mean the dog fanciers of the world would go, “Gosh, aren’t teacup poodles nice?” Logic has never been the human race’s strong suit. Breeding programs sprang up the minute the risk of apocalypse was past, with people all over the world trying to miniaturize their favorite canine companions.

  George used to say it was disgusting, and that people should get over themselves. Me, I’ve always found Maggie’s miniature bulldogs endearing, in a fucked-up, epileptic sort of a way. The miniature bulldog’s tendency to develop epilepsy is actually the reason rescues like Maggie’s exist, since a surprising number of families wanted a dog “just like Grandpa’s,” but didn’t read the new breed specs.

  “Hey, Maggie,” I said, shifting my attention from the sea of bulldogs to their owner. “Are we too late for dinner?”

  “Not if you like emu meatloaf,” she said, with a forced attempt at a smile. Her eyes were red and slightly swollen, like they’d been wiped too many times in the past few hours. “I assume you guys are planning to stay for a while?”

  “If that’s all right with you.” She looked miserable, standing there in the midst of her little swarm of rescue dogs and trying to seem like nothing was wrong. I wanted to comfort her. Only I didn’t have any idea how.

  I was better with that sort of shit when George was alive, because I had something to protect. She didn’t like touching people, so I touched them for her. She didn’t lik
e emotional displays, so I took up the slack. Only without her around to give me an excuse, it was like I didn’t even know where I was supposed to start.

  We always figured she was the one whose emotional growth got stunted by the way we were raised. It was sort of weird to realize that the damage extended to cover both of us.

  Alaric saved me from needing to figure out what I was supposed to do. He was out of the van almost before Becks had the engine off, running toward Maggie with total disregard for the dogs surounding her. Luckily, miniature bulldogs are smart enough to get out of the way when they’re about to be stepped on, and he made it to her without incident. Putting his arms around her shoulders, he pressed his face into her shoulder. She did the same to him, and they simply held each other. That was all. That seemed to be enough.

  Breathe, George said.

  “I’m trying,” I murmured. Watching Maggie and Alaric embrace felt weirdly like spying. I turned away.

  “Hey,” said Becks, stepping up beside me. Kelly was close behind her, clutching one of the spare blankets we kept in the back of the van around herself for warmth. They both looked exhausted, but of the pair, it was Becks who looked like she was going to be okay. The circles under Kelly’s eyes were deep enough to be alarming, and her face was pale.

  “Hey,” I replied. Nodding toward Kelly, I asked, “Doc get through the drive okay?”

  “I slept some,” said Kelly, in a distant tone.

  “No,” said Becks, half a second later.

  “Didn’t think so.” I glanced over to where Alaric and Magdalene were still clinging to each other, and said, “Maggie made emu meatloaf. It’s inside. Maybe we should join it.”

  “That sounds like an excellent idea to me,” Becks said. “I’ll get my bag.”

  Now Kelly began to look alarmed. “Wait—this is where we’re staying? Here?”

  “Yup,” I answered, turning to unhook the bike’s saddlebags and sling them over my shoulder. “Welcome to Maggie’s Home for Wayward Reporters and Legally Dead CDC Employees.”

  “But this isn’t—it’s not—” She waved her hands, encompassing the wide green lawn, the patches of tangled, seemingly untended greenery, and the trees outside the wall. “This isn’t safe!”

  Becks and I exchanged a look. Then, almost in unison, we started to laugh. It had the ragged, almost hysterical edge that always seems to come with laughter that’s halfway born from exhaustion, but still, it felt damn good to laugh about something. Just about anything would have been okay by that point.

  Kelly looked between us, eyes widening with alarm that turned quickly into irritation. “What?” she demanded. “What are you laughing at?” That made us laugh harder, until I was bent almost double, and Becks was covering her face with her hands. Even George was laughing, an eerie, asynchronous echo inside my head. Alaric and Magdalene ignored us, lost in the private world of their grief.

  Becks was the first to get control of herself. Wiping her eyes, she said, “Oh, Shaun, I don’t think anybody ever bothered to tell the Doc here exactly where it was that we were going.”

  “Apparently not,” I said, rolling my shoulders back and forcing my expression to sober as I turned to Kelly and said, “Doc, we are fortunate enough to enjoy the hospitality of Miss Magdalene Grace Garcia.”

  “Please don’t steal the silver,” added Becks.

  Kelly’s mouth dropped open.

  If Kelly’s family was responsible for many of the medical advancements of the past twenty-five years, it was Maggie’s family who made sure they had the equipment they needed to keep moving forward. Her parents were heavily into software before the Rising; their company had already made millions when the dead began to walk. They were savvy people, and they saw the writing on the wall: Either everybody was about to die, in which case money had just become an outdated concept, or we were going to beat back the infected, and folks were going to get real concerned about their health. They managed to shift most of their financial capital into medical technology before the markets froze. They didn’t make millions. They made billions, and that was after taxes.

  They weren’t only heavily into software: They were also heavily into philanthropy, and their contributions were a large part of what made saving Weed possible. Of course, that left them owning a controlling share in two of the town’s four major fisheries, as well as most of the hospital. We’re talking about the kind of people for whom a thousand dollars is a perfectly reasonable price for a bottle of wine. When Maggie turned twenty-one, they asked her what she wanted, said that the sky was the limit, nothing was too good for their precious little girl.

  She asked for the farmhouse that belonged to her grandparents, a military-grade security system, a private T1 line, and permanent access to the interest generated by her trust fund. Nothing else. And her folks, being the sort of people who try to keep their word, agreed. We might have been safer in an underground CDC bunker. Maybe. If it was protected by ninjas or something.

  “But…” Kelly said finally. “Shouldn’t she be doing something, I don’t know, important with herself?”

  “She is,” I said, and smiled. “She hosts grindhouse film festivals and writes for me. Come on. Last one to the table has to do the dishes.” I started for the door, skirting a wide circle around Alaric and Maggie. Kelly followed me, still looking confused, and Becks came after her. She left the front door standing open. The privileges of security are many, and not always visible.

  None of the other Fictionals were evident in the large, bookshelf-lined living room, which was cluttered with boxes of dusty papers, dog beds, and comfortable-looking couches. That was unusual; Maggie was almost never home alone, having opened her house on a semipermanent basis to all the Fictionals working for the site, as well as a few of the Irwins and Newsies. She liked company, Maggie did. She grew up in a level of society where it was still possible to be a party girl, and even though she walked away from her roots in a lot of ways, she couldn’t walk away from everything she’d learned. Normal people like being alone. Being alone means being safe. Maggie got lonely.

  Kelly stuck close behind me, drinking in her surroundings with a coolly assessing expression that I recognized from watching Irwins sizing up hazard zones. Most homes are decorated for utility these days, resulting in a lot of sleek lines, brightly lit corners, and modernistic furniture that looks like it came from a pre-Rising horror movie, all of it designed to be easy to disinfect. Maggie decorated in antiques and homemade frniture, with clutter covering every surface, and dust covering all the clutter.

  I’ve always assumed that Maggie lives the way she does partially out of sheer contrariness. If everyone expects her to run around partying with the kids she grew up with, moving in a virtual bubble of overpaid security guards and the sort of safety that only money can buy, fine; she’ll live in the middle of nowhere with a pack of epileptic dogs instead of a purse poodle and a posse. If people expect her to have three brain cells to knock together, she’ll become a professional author and manage a crew of twenty more. The list goes on. She’s a fun girl, our Maggie, even if the way she lives implies that her sanity is somewhat dubious.

  The thought barely had time to form before George interrupted it, saying, You’re one to talk.

  I didn’t mind. At least she was talking to me. And she sounded amused, which is always nice. It’s good to know that I can still make my sister smile. “Hush, you,” I said.

  Kelly gave me a startled look. “I didn’t say anything,” she protested.

  “It was George,” I said, with a quick shake of my head.

  “You know,” said Kelly carefully, “if it’s anxiety that leads you to continue conversing with her, there are medications that will—”

  “New topic time,” I said pleasantly. “Continuing this topic is going to lead to somebody getting punched in the face. It could be you.”

  “Shaun has no compunctions about hitting girls,” said Becks.

  “You try growing up with George, see how m
any compunctions about hitting girls you come out with.” I led our motley little parade into Maggie’s kitchen. It was decorated like the rest of the house, in middle-class pre-Rising shabby. Maggie hadn’t been kidding about the meatloaf. It was sitting on the kitchen table, alongside a platter of sliced vegetables, a big bowl of mashed potatoes, and half a sponge cake.

  “I’ll get the plates,” said Becks.

  When Maggie and Alaric finally came in fifteen minutes later, they found the three of us seated around the kitchen table, stuffing our faces. Becks and I were stuffing our faces, anyway. Kelly was watching us with a sort of horrified bemusement, like she couldn’t believe her life had gone so terribly wrong in just one day. She’d catch on. If she lived long enough.

  Maggie and Alaric had clearly both been crying, although it showed more on her than it did on him; her eyes were puffy and her cheeks were even redder, whereas Alaric looked about as normal as he ever did. He tried to explain his consistently camera-ready appearance to me once, but I didn’t listen. Largely because I didn’t care.

  “Alaric tells me you’re the dead girl from the CDC,” said Maggie, arrowing in on Kelly with the laser-point accuracy that has made her editing skills feared throughout the Fictional world. “Nice trick. Explain it.”

  “Hello to you, too, Maggie,” I said brightly, reaching for the mashed potatoes. “Do you need antroduction to our guest, or do you prefer the tornado approach? Just so it’s said, she’s had a pretty shitty week, and I wouldn’t blame her if she freaked out on you. I mean, it’s been a shitty day for all of us, so I’d really appreciate it if you could take it easy on the Doc.”

  Maggie stiffened. I looked at her calmly, waiting to see which way the dam was going to break: raging flood or anguished trickle.