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  The lights on the top of the testing unit began to cycle, flashing green to amber, amber to red, and red back to green again. After five repetitions of that pattern, the red dropped out, until only the amber and green were left, flashing with increasing speed. Finally, the amber dropped out. The green flashed three more times and settled on a steady brightness. I pulled my thumb away and held the unit up, showing everyone in range the light.

  “I am not presently infected,” I said, in a clear, calm voice. Americans sometimes interpreted my accent as a slurring of my words, and so I enunciated each word with all the precision I could muster. Anything to keep them from deciding it was safer just to shoot me anyway. “I am standing with skinned knees in the middle of a biohazard zone, and I would really appreciate a change of scene right about now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Place the test unit in the bag. Press this to your neck.” John threw me another object. I caught it, looked down at my hand, and grimaced.

  “A dermal patch? Is this a sedative?”

  “In a sense,” said Amber. “It’s a sedative when it knocks you out cold, right?”

  I glared at her. She shrugged.

  “The governor is on the property, Ash. She’s not going to move until we have the situation in the garden cleaned up and under control. We can’t walk you past her when you might be contaminated. If we knock you out, we can roll you in sterile sheeting and carry you without risking exposure. It’s better this way for everyone.”

  Right. “Who’s going to be on cleanup?”

  “Not your concern. Take the patch, or we have to treat you as belligerent, and you know how that ends.” Amber looked genuinely concerned. “I promise you’ll be safe.”

  “And everyone knows that’s a promise that always gets kept.” I looked at the plastic box in my hand. The dermal patch inside was barely a scrap of flesh-toned tape, but I knew it would deliver a punch strong enough to put me under for hours. Otherwise, why bother?

  Ah, well. Anything was better than a bullet to the brain.

  “Tell Mat I dropped my mag somewhere around here. Maybe it can be sterilized.” I sat down on the path, cross-legged, smoothing my skirt over my bleeding knees. Then I popped the box open and removed the patch, peeling off the backing material before slapping it flat against my neck. “If not, I’m going to need a new one before we roll out. Oh, and make sure Ben knows that… that the zombies… they were crawling… out… of… the ground…” I was aware that my speech was slowing down, but I couldn’t seem to do anything about it. The world was getting fuzzy around the edges, filled with shadows that didn’t line up or make any real sense.

  I blinked, trying to make the dark spots at the edges of my eyes go away. It didn’t work. If anything, it did the opposite: When I opened my eyes again, the spots had tripled, chewing away at my vision like termites gnawing on a house.

  “This stinks,” I said, as clearly as I could, and closed my eyes again. I didn’t feel myself fall backward. I didn’t feel myself hit the ground. I didn’t feel much of anything that followed, which was probably a mercy.

  When I opened my eyes for the second time, John and Amber were gone, replaced by a clean white ceiling with domed lights, glowing beatifically, like the eyes of Heaven. I blinked. The ceiling remained. I sat up. Nothing restrained me or restricted my movement. That was good. The blanket that had been covering me fell away, and I looked down to see that my sundress was gone, replaced by a simple blue hospital shift.

  “You’re awake.” The voice was Audrey’s. I turned toward it. The face was Audrey’s as well. She was sitting in one of those hard plastic chairs that are standard issue for first aid stations all over the world, her hands clenched tight in her lap, white-knuckled and unmoving. She lifted her chin slightly, looking at me. “Say something to prove lack of compromised faculties.”

  “The burial tombs at Newgrange date back to the Neolithic era, and are maintained to this day by the National Heritage Foundation, even though tourism has been way, way down since zombies started using the tunnels as a place to hide from the elements,” I said. “Good place to spend a Sunday. Are we okay?”

  “Well, let’s see,” she said. “You snuck off to investigate an outbreak without notifying me or Ben. You took Mat, of all people. You know Mat only has their field certification because we insisted. You nearly got yourself eaten. You did get yourself grabbed.”

  I reached up instinctively to touch my hair, expecting to find that it had all been burnt off in the sterilization process. My relief when I found it intact must have shown in my eyes, because Audrey snorted, hard.

  “You’re lucky,” she said. “If I hadn’t insisted on being present while they decontaminated you, you would’ve woken up with a buzz cut, and it would have served you right. What were you thinking?”

  “That this was an important political event, and you didn’t need to be dragged away from it because I was bored and feeling jumpy.” My knees had been covered with a thin layer of spray skin, sealing them and keeping contaminants out of the scrapes. I bent them experimentally. The faux skin pulled but didn’t tear loose, feeling more like a very tight bandage than anything else. “I sure as hell didn’t expect a full-scale outbreak back there. I was thinking there’d be one, maybe two zombies at the most, wandered in from some trail we didn’t secure properly.” I froze. “The decon—did I manage to tell them to check the flower beds before I went under?”

  Audrey nodded sharply. “You said, and I quote, ‘they were crawling out of the ground.’ Everyone assumed you were high as a kite from the sedatives they’d slapped on you, but Amber passed your message on to Ben and me, and we insisted there be a ground check before they razed the place. I told them you’re foolhardy, not foolish, and that you know a security breach when you see one.”

  “And?”

  “And they found evidence that fifteen zombies had been buried in the rose beds that morning, with straws to let them breathe.” Audrey shook her head. “They were comfortable enough, and well-fed enough, that they didn’t start moving until they smelled food. From there, it was a short distance to setting up the moan. The rest of the zombies came out when they heard the dinner bell.”

  “Which means someone put them there.”

  Audrey raised an eyebrow. “Yes, because the rest of us were going on the assumption that a bunch of zombies could have buried themselves completely, under the roses.”

  “You don’t understand.” I shook my head, trying to clear away the last of the fuzziness from the dermal patch. I still felt too shaky to stand up, much less get as vehement as I needed to. “I know what a garden clean and cleanse looks like. I’ve done them. If those zombies had pulled themselves out and gone for the press conference without me stumbling into the middle of things, no one would have been able to tell what was preexisting damage and what had happened during the outbreak.”

  “What?”

  “Cleaning and decontaminating a garden, if you want to keep using it as a garden afterward, involves removing the first twenty-four inches of topsoil.” Which could be all the topsoil, and some of the hardpack underneath. It wasn’t uncommon for a garden that was going to be replanted after an outbreak to be made up entirely of imported dirt, new earth that had never known that land before. Bit by bit, we were re-creating the world. “If the zombies were buried shallowly enough that they could pull themselves out, they can’t have been down much below that. All the signs would have been eliminated in the decontamination process.”

  Audrey was quiet for a moment. Finally, she said, “You’re saying this wasn’t just planned, it was planned because no one would be able to know for sure that the zombies had been buried after the fact.”

  “Yup. It was a trap.” I finally ventured to stand up. My knees wobbled, but deigned to support my weight. That was nice of them. “I’m assuming they burned my clothes?”

  “Even your bra.”

  “Damn. I was still breaking it in.”

  “Fortunately, you have
a girlfriend who loves you very much.” Audrey reached under her chair and produced a green cloth bag, which she tossed past me onto the bed. “Bra, underpants, sundress. Shoes are under the bed.”

  “Have I told you recently that you’re an angel sent from Heaven to remind me of God’s love?” I opened the bag. She had packed a bleach-streaked sundress that had originally been printed with bright-winged macaws. They looked like ghosts now. That was a good thing. I kept a few damaged sundresses around as a way to project “I have been through hell” without actually wearing things that had been torn or shot. There was pleasantly shabby, and then there was a bullet hole revealing the color of my underpants.

  “No, but maybe you should consider it.” Audrey held herself perfectly straight for a moment more before she sagged, letting all her tension out. She stopped blinking back her tears at the same time. They ran unchecked down her cheeks, stopping me cold.

  “Oh, hey, aw, no, Audrey, no.” I dropped my clothes and stood again, crossing to her as quickly as my wobbly legs allowed. “Don’t cry. I’m fine. See? All my bits are still where they were when we got up this morning. I am a completely intact Aislinn. So don’t cry. Please?”

  “You weren’t supposed to run off and nearly get yourself killed at a garden party,” she said. When I was close enough she latched on, pressing her face into my shoulder. I didn’t resist or try to pull away. It took a lot to upset Audrey like this. When it happened, it was best just to let her ride it out. “You were supposed to be safe when we were working the political circuses. How the fuck do you do these things?”

  “It’s a natural talent that I’ve spent years honing,” I said. “Don’t cry, love, don’t cry. You knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up, and I’ll always do my best to sting my way back to you.”

  “Garden party,” she repeated, like those two words somehow summarized everything that was wrong with my approach to the world—and maybe they did, for her. In what should have been a perfectly safe setting, I had still managed to go charging off and find something dangerous to get involved with.

  Speaking of settings… I pulled back enough to look around us. The walls and ceiling were white, which was normal for medical facilities—supposedly the appearance of absolute cleanliness was good for people, made them feel safer, but it was really about making it easier to bleach the place down to its bones. The shape of the room beneath the paint, though, that was subtly wrong. The corners were curved.

  “Since I don’t think we’ve fallen into one of those old Lovecraft stories, I’m guessing we’re not actually inside a real building,” I said, looking back to Audrey. “Where are we, love?”

  “That took you longer than I expected it to, and you can stop calling me ‘love,’” she said, reaching up to wipe her eyes with the heel of her hand. “You only do that when you’re trying to make up for upsetting me.”

  “Or when you’re naked, don’t forget about the naked.” I stood, walking back to where I had abandoned my clothes. I’d feel better when I was dressed. Naked with Audrey was fun when we were alone. It wasn’t the ideal when I was in a place I didn’t know, at the mercy of people I couldn’t see. “Forgive me my quirks, and tell me where we are. Have a heart, love.”

  “If I didn’t have a heart, I would die when my blood stopped circulating through my body,” said Audrey. “We’re in the site’s private medical trailer. They have a lot of older folks who insist on coming here for their ‘constitutionals.’ Portland natives who came here before the Rising and say they’ll be damned before they let a bunch of zombies chase them away from something that they love.”

  “Which probably doesn’t stop them from having nervous fits every time they hear a noise they can’t explain coming from the big, scary green world,” I said. I dressed quickly. There are people who like to say that female Irwins are just about eye candy, because we can’t possibly know what it’s like to prepare for the field: not with our breasts and our long hair and our girlish, girlish ways. Those people have never worked with a female Irwin. Half of us eschew the trappings of femininity, because not everyone is that kind of girl, and running around the wilderness harassing the legally dead tends to attract the girls who aren’t. The rest of us exaggerate those trappings for the camera, going with victory rolls in our hair and lace-up corsets around our waists. What the people at home never see is how those corsets have Kevlar in their seams, protecting us from the world. They don’t understand how we’ve learned to put ourselves together in under a minute, because sometimes the story won’t wait.

  Every Irwin is a badass in our own way. The job demands it. But if you want to know who the scariest person in the group is, look for the one who’s been fighting zombies without smearing her eyeliner.

  “I’d kill for a compact right about now,” I said, reaching behind myself to zip my dress.

  “Like this one?” asked Audrey, producing a clamshell from her pocket. “You’re going to need to apply foundation and walk at the same time. If you’re awake and well enough to be dressed, we should be joining the debriefing already in progress. Mat is probably starting to twitch by now. They don’t like answering questions they haven’t already scripted.”

  “And they probably don’t know all the answers; I was the one who saw the first zombie and took off running.” I took the clamshell from her hand and clicked it open, checking my makeup. My lipstick was a lost cause, but my eyes were good; I had a bit of a smoky lid thing going, probably from where I’d slammed into the garden floor. Decontamination always gave my skin a lovely glow. I snapped the clamshell shut and tucked it into my pocket. “Good enough for now. Let’s go ruin some days.”

  “You’ve already done an excellent job of that,” said Audrey. She held out her hand. I took it, and she used me to pull herself out of the chair, bouncing to her feet with the sort of enthusiasm that should be reserved for small children and cartoon tigers. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many people shouting at each other about nothing. It would have been impressive as all hell, if you hadn’t been sedated at the time.”

  Which meant Audrey had missed out on some primo people watching because she was busy worrying about me. “Sorry about that,” I said dolefully.

  “You are a walking natural disaster,” she said, and opened the trailer door.

  Outside was a parking lot. Not literally: There were no dividing lines to show the cars where to go. There was just a lot of pavement, stretching out in all directions until it encountered the square, boxy shapes of the park management buildings. There was also a crowd of security people, John among them, waiting for us.

  Audrey was the first one out, her usual mask of professional indifference firmly in place. It was always amazing to me, how quickly she could shut herself off from people she didn’t feel had earned the right to see her at anything but her best. Not that her cold, working face was really “her best”—it was her most practiced, maybe, but there were a dozen versions of her that I liked better, and most of them were smiling.

  I was smiling. I was smiling like my face was going to split in two, like I didn’t have a care in the world, because I knew my team. Even with me unconscious and Audrey attending, someone would have set up a camera, and I was going to want this footage to reflect the version of me that was acceptable to my public. I was just like Audrey, in my way. It was just that I was on the inside of my plastic smile, and I never had to look at it and feel it break my heart.

  “Miss Wen; Mrs. North,” greeted John, with a nod for first Audrey, and then me. He sounded like he’d been running hard since the garden, and didn’t expect to stop any time soon. “Can I get you both to take a blood test for me before I accompany you to the governor?”

  “One second,” I said. “How far away is the governor? Is she in one of those buildings over there?” I pointed to the structures on the other side of the parking lot.

  John nodded.

  “And are we going to have to take another blood test when we get there, to prove that we
haven’t become mysteriously infected between this door and that one?”

  John nodded again. It was hard to read his expression behind his glasses—I hate people who hide their eyes all the time, unless there’s a medical reason for them to do so—but I thought he was amused. That was a good thing, because I was about to balk.

  “Grand. Then we’re going to pass on the blood test now, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Several of the security personnel tensed. A few of them reached for their weapons. John raised a hand and they all stopped. Good: He was in charge here. That was going to help. “Why are you refusing basic precautions, Mrs. North?” he asked.

  “Because we just came out of a sterile medical facility. I passed a blood test before decon, and I know that means I passed another blood test after decon, because that’s how this sort of thing works. That means we know I’m not infected. Audrey was required to take a blood test before you let her go in there with me.” I didn’t know that part for sure, but it was an extremely safe bet. Putting someone unconscious in a room with someone whose infection status was unknown wasn’t just irresponsible, it was criminal in multiple states—including this one. “Since we didn’t get infected by stepping through the door, and we’re unlikely to become infected by talking to you, I’d rather keep a bit more of the blood inside my body, and only get tested once. If it’s cool with you.”

  John was silent for a moment—long enough for me to start to think that no, it wasn’t cool with him. Then the corners of his mouth twitched, betraying his amusement. “If either of you so much as blinks in a way I don’t like, you’re going to wish you’d taken the blood test,” he cautioned.

  “Probably not, since I’m pretty sure that was a threat, and people who’ve been shot don’t usually wish for much of anything,” I said amiably. “But sure, we’ll go with it. Our regrets will be many. Now can we get moving?”