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“So she could’ve liked me as an ex-wife.”
“I think she would have.” Ben slid our paid ticket into the waiting slot. There was no blood test required at this stage, thank God. Past a certain point, it stopped being security and became paranoia.
“That’s nice.” I tugged at my ruined skirt, frowning at the bleach stains cutting across my pretty flowers. “I was also thinking about that outbreak today. The infected used that man in the field as a decoy. I’m sure of it. Do we have our missing persons reports yet?”
“Let’s find out.” Ben cleared his throat before saying, slowly and precisely, “Dial Mat.”
“Dialing Mat,” said the car’s built-in phone system. It had a pleasant preprogrammed female voice, factory standard, designed to be as universally non-offensive as possible. According to Mat, it was based on the lead actress from some short-lived science-fiction show that had come to a crashing halt when basically the entire cast got eaten at the 2014 San Diego International Comic-Convention. This is the sort of weird trivia that permeates our lives, and makes our teammate the top-rated pub trivia competitor in the Bay Area.
There was a beep, followed by a click as Mat’s voice came over the car speakers. “What is your wish, o master?” Mat asked, voice light and eager.
“Missing persons reports,” said Ben. “What do you have?”
“Hi, Mat,” I said.
“The beauteous Ash speaks! My ears and fingers and other bits are blessed beyond measure!”
I rolled my eyes. “I am fully equipped to break several, if not all, of your bones without breaking a sweat or getting deported. I’m a citizen now. Threats of wanton violence are back on the table.”
“I’ve met you ever. Threats of wanton violence were never off the table.” Mat paused long enough to chuckle at their own joke before continuing, “I pulled all missing person reports filed in the last three months, basing my start date on the apparent spread of malnutrition and gangrene amongst the mob that swarmed you guys. It’s fascinating. Two or three people vanished in that area every two weeks during the sampled time frame. No universal factors—age, race, gender, occupation, it’s all over the map, with a few glaring omissions.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “No police, journalists, children under six, or caregivers.”
There was a pause before Mat said, “Okay, you are not allowed to be psychic. If you become psychic, I quit, and you can find yourselves a new pet genius. One who isn’t creeped out by the thought of the Midwich Cuckoos rummaging through their brain like it was a jewelry store bargain bin.”
I snorted.
“Mat, focus,” said Ben. “All these people disappeared in the same neighborhood, and no one noticed?”
“I didn’t say ‘neighborhood,’ I said ‘area.’ The difference is both scale and geography. I pulled from a three-mile radius, which crossed two municipal lines and included a stretch of unincorporated but occupied land, butting up on the Clayton exclusion zone. These people are living in the backyard of the zombie apocalypse. No one has lived out there for years, and coyote sightings still happen frequently enough that I’m not going to sleep tonight.”
“So we have some muddled geography, we have some bad police communication, we have some bad luck… all right, I’ll buy this,” said Ben. “Ash, what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking those zombies used happy boy in the field as a decoy,” I said, promptly. “He was supposed to hold our attention while the rest of them got close. That’s some pretty sophisticated thinking for a bunch of deadies, but not beyond what we’ve observed in clinical settings.” Zombie sheep were arguably smarter than the regular kind, as all their prey instincts switched over to making them better predators. “So they find a field, right? Maybe it started with someone who’d been infected and didn’t want to get shot before they converted, but didn’t want to hurt anyone either. They run to a place that seems enclosed enough to be safe. I figure there have to be gates. Mat?”
“On it,” said our techie. I could hear typing in the background, lightning fast. Mat never did anything slowly if they could help it. “All right, I’ve got a full blueprint of the location, and the most recent Google Earth map files. Looks like they photographed everything fresh about a month ago.”
“Perfect. Find the gates, and then start comparing the photographs of the fence around them to the ones taken oh, say, a year ago.”
“What am I looking for?”
I glanced at Ben. He was watching the road, but he was smiling: the small, satisfied smile he always wore when a plan was starting to come together. I loved that smile. It meant we were about to cash in on the world one more time, putting chicken in the pot and butter on the bread.
“You’re looking for differences in the shape of the fence,” I said. “It can’t be too obvious, or someone would have noticed by now. A few bars missing, a little rust—there should be distortion in the top bar, since it won’t be supporting the same weight as everywhere else.” Metal fences were a good start, but there were so many things that could damage them, ranging from vandalism to erosion. Being so close to the Clayton exclusion zone meant there was a large low-income population. Someone could have looked at that field and thought the metal was just going to waste. I couldn’t blame whoever’d done that for trying to protect themselves. I could blame them for not finding a way to call in an anonymous tip about vandalism to the local police. The police ignore graffiti but pay attention to things like broken fences, broken walls. Everything is connected. By making themselves safer, our hypothetical thieves had made the field less safe, and they had allowed that situation to endure.
Mat sounded awed as they said, “There are three breaks, all under the tree line; they aren’t visible during any of the spring or summer pictures, but they’re pretty plain during autumn and winter, if you’re looking for them. How did you know?”
“We had troubles back home with people raiding National Heritage sites, looking for materials they could use to shore up their own homes.” Ireland was a developed nation like any other: We had our cities, our small towns, and our villages. But we also had a long history of isolated homes, of burial mounds and carefully preserved henges. Some people had ridden out the Rising far from any other living human, and they’d done it by learning to improvise their defenses from whatever they could find.
“So someone steals a few bars, and someone in the process of converting makes it inside the fence before they fully go over,” said Ben, picking up the thread. “Where did the rest of the zombies come from?”
“Well, you’re starting with two here: the biter and the bitee,” said Mat. “When you only have one zombie, they want to multiply more than they want to feed.”
“And a fully converted one probably couldn’t figure out how to get into the field,” I said, thoughtfully. “You have one zombie in a field, one zombie outside of a field. The one outside is hunting, it tries to hide. The one inside has nowhere to hide. Someone stops to stare, thinking they’re safe and can report the trapped zombie later—”
“And the zombie outside the field grabs them,” said Ben. “They have a hunting strategy.”
“They would have needed to replace the zombie inside the field at least once if they weren’t feeding it,” said Mat. “The infection doesn’t leave you alive long enough to account for some of these missing person reports.”
“We know zombies can herd,” I said. “Zombie sheep are worse than collies. When their friend behind bars started getting peckish and unwell, they just brought him a cup of recently slaughtered soup. As to why I asked about the groups I did, if any of them had been snagged, someone would have taken action. The zombies just got lucky in that they only took folks no one would go searching for.”
“Well, this is horrible,” said Mat. “I’m going to keep running the data I have here, see how much of this flight of fancy I can verify. How far out are you guys?”
“Just passing Lafayette,” said Ben. “We’ll be home inside the hour.”
Ben broke it first. “If they can find the facts, it’s my story and your quick report.”
“And if they can’t, it’s my story, since I’m allowed to fudge the details, and your quick report,” I countered.
“Deal,” said Ben, with a nod.
I grinned.
Ben and I met through a baby blogger site, an aggregator that paid aspiring journalists by the page hit for their best work. It also took a ludicrous number of rights, including the right to repost in perpetuity, reverting only when the site chose to purge their archives. Since they’d had a few of their babies go on to become pretty big names in the world of Internet journalism, they were notorious for never purging their archives. They would hold on to every crumb for as long as they could, waiting for the day when the byline underwent an alchemical transformation and turned to gold.
The pay was crap, the management was corrupt, and everyone who wrote for them knew it going in, but none of us gave a damn, because we were making news. We weren’t just farting around on our own private blogs and web hosts: We were part of a real, respected family of sites, with the aggregator name branded on every report and lunatic stunt like some sort of badge of honor. We also knew the one good thing about the aggregator’s fame-chasing ways: They’d never try to keep us after we said we were ready to move on to bigger and better things. They wanted us to move on to bigger and better things. That way, they could milk our time with them for all that it was worth.
Ben had been part of the Factual News division, writing dry, insightful, biting pieces on the state of poverty in America, and the way many of the systems that were beneficial to the rich and invisible to the middle class were genuinely ruinous to the poor. No matter how much the world changes—cancer is cured, the dead walk, and the news passes into the hands of the people, where it maybe should have been all along—the poor will always be getting screwed by somebody.
I’d been part of the Action News division, the few, the proud, the willing to do suicidally foolish things in the name of driving up ratings. I was the girl who snuck into Newgrange to watch the solstice sunrise light up the burial chamber of an ancient king, and nearly got eaten and arrested—in that order—for my trouble. I volunteered for the spring sheep shearing, normally an activity reserved for people who’d committed crimes against the government. My willingly exposing myself to animals of amplification weight was considered grounds for committal by my parents, who’d tried hard to make it stick. The fact that I was nineteen at the time had worked in my favor; the fact that I’d still been living under their roof had worked against it. In the end, the judge had decided for them, and I’d been transferred from my jail cell to a nice facility where everyone spoke softly and carried firearms all the time. When I’d started refusing my pills, they had responded by switching to patches and injections—things I couldn’t say no to.
The whole time I’d been locked up, Ben had been fighting for me. We hadn’t been close friends before that, more acquaintances who occasionally waved to each other in the contributor chat rooms before he went back to dissecting some obscure bit of American history and I went off to race a zombie pit bull for the nearest tree. But he was a good guy, and when the news of why I’d dropped off the web reached him, he’d gone to work. He hadn’t hesitated. He hadn’t said “Well, a judge is okay with it, so she must deserve it.” He’d just… gone to work.
Three months after my parents had me committed, the doors opened and I was free to go. When I’d stepped into the waiting room, unsure of my footing in shoes that had laces and actually gave me ankle support, there had been a slim black man waiting for me, smiling nervously. He did that a lot, I would come to learn: It was one of the ways you could tell that he was anxious.
As soon as he’d seen me, his smile had disappeared, replaced by the neutral expression that meant he was actually relaxed. “Aislinn North?” he’d asked.
“Who wants to know?” It wasn’t the most graceful response, especially given what he’d just done for me, but I hadn’t known that; not then. To me, he’d been a Yank and a virtual stranger, and I hadn’t wanted to waste the brief minutes of my unexpected freedom on him. I knew my parents wouldn’t have agreed to this voluntarily, and there was going to be hell to pay as soon as they got the judge back in their pocket. I was an unmarried woman of childbearing age with no fertility problems, and we were a country that desperately needed its babies.
“Oh, I’m sorry. We hadn’t actually… I mean, you probably saw my picture, but it was the size of a postage stamp. Newsies don’t show up in our reports as often as you Irwins do.” He’d smiled again, this time with relief. “I’m Ben. Benjamin Ross? I thought you might need a friend right about now. A friend who’s really, really good at badgering public officials.”
I had blinked. I had stared. And then I had matched his smile with my own.
“Oh, I think we’re going to get along really well,” I’d said.
His stay in Ireland had lasted two weeks: long enough to see me settled in a new place above a friend’s house, and to see my parents slapped with every judicial restriction we could come up with, and a few I was fairly sure he’d invented out of pure pique. They weren’t allowed to make decisions about my medical care or mental health; they weren’t even allowed to contact me unless I contacted them first. I had my life back, and I had someone new in it.
My girlfriend had given up on me during my second month of incarceration, recognizing the genuine danger she’d be in if she pushed things too far: After all, my parents were demonstrating a new, fascinating way of dealing with a lesbian daughter who insisted on putting herself into mortal danger. The last time I ever heard from Kylie was a week after I moved into my new flat, when I got a card saying “I’m sorry,” and giving no return address. It had been easier, after that, to let her go. They say the course of true love never does run smooth, and I can’t blame her for wanting to protect herself, but once I’d been free, she could have come back to me, and she hadn’t been willing to take the risk. That wasn’t true love. It was better for both of us if it stopped.
Ben and I had remained close, and when we’d left the aggregator to go freelance, we’d done it together, plotting all the while to get me the hell out of Ireland. Three years later, I had moved to America as his blushing bride, and now, six years after that, I was a citizen. I would trust him with my life. I did, on a near-daily basis.
We turned off the freeway and onto the rough, pothole-riddled road that ran up the backside of Albany to our home neighborhood. Well, calling it a “neighborhood” might have been overly generous, since we were the only ones who lived there. It wasn’t condemned or considered a hazard zone or anything like that; we would have been risking our licenses by living in a place that wasn’t cleared for human habitation. It was just that anyone with money had moved to places with better security, and most people without money hadn’t been able to afford a house there before things got bad. Since the rich still weren’t selling—maybe someday we’d beat back the zombies, and they’d be able to return to their precious Victorians, live under their scalloped roofs, and resume feeling better than all the rest of us—that left most of those homes sitting empty, rescued from the elements only by the yearly efforts of well-paid maintenance crews who came in like the thunder, blasting away grime and repairing slumping porches before vanishing again. They never stayed past dark. No one could pay them well enough for that.
In a land of beautiful, empty shells, our house was unique, because it was a home. It had belonged to Ben’s grandparents. His grandfather had been a dentist, and had bought the place with cash back when that sort of thing still happened. Now, with them gone and his mother having chosen a safer life in Berkeley, behind walls that had been enough to keep the monsters out, it was our rent-free do-it-yourself paradise. We paid property taxes, sure, but they were nothing compared to what we’d have been paying if
we actually needed to find someplace else to live.
Ben brightened as we turned up the driveway, coasting toward the waiting garage. He hadn’t grown up here, but he might as well have, and most of his life’s happy memories featured this house in one way or another. There was no better place for him to go after a terrible day.
The house had been built long before modern safety standards had been in place, which had necessitated a few modifications and workarounds to keep abreast of new security regulations. It was a good thing Ben and I were married in name only: Trying to bring the place up to code for raising a school-age child would have required us to sell it just to raise the money. The open garage door revealed a space large enough to park two midsize vehicles, assuming we weren’t concerned about potential damage to the paint. There was no room to store anything else. Mat kept their bicycle in the front hall, where we all tripped over it constantly. Audrey would have parked her car on the street if we’d let her, but that would have opened us to the risk of tickets and spot inspections, since the authorities didn’t like cars being left out in the open.
The garage door lowered as soon as we were inside. Ben looked at me.
“We’re about to get the grilling of our lives as to why we were still outside the funeral home when the zombies showed up.”
“This is true.”
“And then Audrey’s going to remember that we buried my mama today and get all awkward about the fact that you’re still my wife, and have an obligation to me under circumstances like this.”
“This is also true.”
“I just want to say thank you before all of that happens.”
I blinked. “Thank you for what?”
Ben’s shrug was brief, and slight enough that I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking directly at him. “For coming with me and then standing back. For being there. I knew that if it got to be too much, all I had to do was call, and that kept it from becoming too much. I understand why you didn’t come into the funeral home, and I appreciate it. A few of her friends knew about our situation and kept quiet out of respect for her. If they’d started in on you… I might have punched someone, and you know I have delicate hands.”