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“I am never going to sleep again,” announced Mat.

“Whoever did this needs more resources than York has, and needs to be free to move around,” said Wagman. “Much as I'd like to point the finger at that guy—I
hate
that guy—I don't think he's the one.”

“Neither do I,” said Kilburn. “Whatever's fueling this conspiracy, it's bigger than one candidate.”

“So what do we do about it?” asked Rick. No one said a word, and silence reigned as we all looked uncomfortably at each other. There were no easy answers. Somehow, that was the worst part of all.

C
ars and tour buses packed the streets of Huntsville, Alabama, turning the place into a virtual parking lot. The Space Center was open twenty-four hours a day during the convention, hoping to lure politicians and policy makers into their brightly lit embrace and convince them to open their checkbooks a little wider. I didn't have a checkbook to open, exactly. That wasn't stopping me. I'd already been on two of the tours and was planning to go back for the paid docent experience, which included a ride in the giant centrifuge. It was all tax deductible, since I could call it a business expense—reporting on space was slightly outside my normal purview, not forbidden—but to be honest, I would have done it without the deductions. Space was
fun
. I hoped they'd be able to operate NASA for a year off these people.

Ben and Mat had been inside the convention center all morning, sending out occasional blip updates and loading their reports directly onto the server. Mat was doing makeup demos near the governor's booth, showing attendees how to get the look that would tell their chosen candidates how much support they had—and because Governor Kilburn was awesome, there were no restrictions on
which
candidate. Mat had done mostly Susan Kilburns, but there had been a few Frances Blackburns, and even a smattering of Eliot Yorks. All of them were free advertising for Mat's services, and hence for Governor Kilburn's booth. It was a good exchange. I was glad I wasn't the one making it. I would've shoved a mascara wand into someone's eye by now.

Ben's activities were less colorful and more cerebral. He'd been moving from interview to interview, think tank to think tank, all morning long. I could track his movement by calling up his feed and watching the updates, blog entries, and GPS data stream by. My busy bee. I didn't give two shits about most of what he was doing, save in the abstract “it makes him happy and makes us more valuable to the campaign, so carry on, mighty hero of the news, carry on” sense. Later, he'd try to explain it all to me, and I would smile and nod and remember only what I wanted to, because I had him and Audrey to remember it completely.

Irwins aren't stupid. That's a common misconception about the breed. People think we went into Action News, rather than Factual or Fictional, because we're not smart enough to be on the other side of the desk. I guess maybe that's true for a couple of people, although I can't imagine anyone saying “I don't like to use big words, guess I'll go risk my life for fun” and being any
good
at it. Being an Irwin is hard as hell, and it requires different kinds of intelligence. Kinesthetic intelligence. The ability to look at a situation, spin it in your mind, and have the solution before the dead guys who are shambling rapidly toward their next meal wind up on top of you. Quick intelligence, instead of slow, because out in the field, slow is the thing that gets you dead.

I'd be bored out of my skull if I was stuck behind a desk all the time, and I'd lose a lot of the qualities that actually make me as smart as I claim to be. I'm not the greenest hill in the field when I'm locked in a room and told to write down the world. Put me outside with a weapon in my hand and a problem to solve, and I'm Ada Lovelace.

The convention center backed up on a large swath of undeveloped land. That wasn't a safety hazard: This was Alabama, and it seemed like even the squirrels carried assault rifles in their cunning little paws. Any zombies that wandered this close to town would find themselves reduced to a fine mist and bleached out of existence before they could do any real damage. On some level, I suspected that was
why
this site had been chosen for the convention center, which was a post-Rising, tornado-proof structure designed to withstand anything short of a direct nuclear blast. It could be used as a shelter for the entirety of Huntsville, if necessary. By putting it where they had, the city planners had made the point that no one here was living in fear. Anticipation of getting to shoot some infected deer, maybe, but not
fear
.

It was a pretty piece of fiction, and as I slid down the soft embankment behind the building, braking with the sides of my feet like a skier to keep from going too fast, I wished them the best with it. If they
really
hadn't been afraid of what might come wandering out of the trees, they wouldn't have surrounded their convention center with six layers of fencing and a state-of-the-art auto-sniper system. The black boxes atop the fencing contained miniaturized rifles, each capable of delivering six shots with terrifying pinpoint accuracy. Very impressive, if you didn't mind all the local birds being shot out of the sky for crossing the fence lines without submitting to the proper blood tests first.

Several of the black boxes swiveled to look at me with their cold, blank eyes as I reached the maintenance gate in the first fence. I checked the blood testing unit for signs of tampering and, finding none, pressed my thumb against the open panel. A small, unobtrusive light half-covered by a half dome came on, flashing red, then yellow, and finally green. I wrinkled my nose, signaling my mag to take some burst photos of the process. It would make good filler for whatever I wrote about the day. More importantly, it would let me study this particular security setup at my leisure, when I wasn't in the field and paying attention to my surroundings. I'd never seen a hooded light before. It would keep my test results private from the people around me, which was good, but could potentially allow me to lie about them, which wasn't.

The unit beeped—an audio cue was even odder than a half-concealed light. Half the time it feels like people are making tweaks to their security setups just so they can say they did it. The gate unlocked. I pulled my hand away from the unit and stepped through. My questions could wait. I had five more gates to clear.

The openings were staggered, forcing the person who wanted to get in or out to walk anywhere from five to fifteen feet along the fence line before they reached the next testing unit. It was a cognitive test, intended to see whether someone was beginning to amplify and hence losing the ability to figure out where to go next. It was utterly, patently pointless, and had probably gotten a couple of people killed. If you checked out clean on one station, you needed to be able to dive through, slam the door, and hit the next checkpoint, not screw around looking for where you were supposed to go. The staggering would give the infected time to spit or bleed on the people trapped inside the fences, turning the living into virtual rats in a cage.

There were no zombies to harry me as I made my way through. Just six pinpricks in quick succession, leaving my thumb feeling bruised despite the cooling foam that accompanied every needle. The last door unlocked, and the black boxes swiveled away from me, no longer interested now that I was moving away from the convention center. It was a small compromise between the “safety first” people and the “seriously, we're running out of wildlife, can you not” activists: Anything that tried to move
toward
the center without going through the proper testing protocols would be gunned down, but anything that was moving
away
would be cheerfully ignored.

Getting back in was going to be fun. I looked forward to documenting it.

The scrubby grass and small weeds crunching underfoot were largely unfamiliar, growing as they were in Southern soil the color of dried blood. I wondered idly how many people had moved out of state because they couldn't stand the color of the ground anymore, now that we lived in a world where blood was the enemy and biological waste was a death sentence. Maybe no one had left, and all the people who lived and loved and died in Alabama thought the rest of us were too easily shocked by the world. It was hard to say. But the day was beautiful and the air was sweet, so it didn't really matter.

A cluster of people had formed around a portable Foreman grill in a clearing past the tree line. This wasn't proper forest—more like an orchard that had been allowed to grow out of control when people lost interest in handpicking their own apples. As such, there were wide spaces and clearings everywhere, making it seem like a video-game level, instead of an actual wilderness. Most of the people sat in folding chairs. A few stood, and one was sitting cross-legged on the ground, her eyes closed and her hands resting on her knees.

One of the standers waved as he saw me approaching. “Well, as I live and breathe,” he said, in an exaggerated Irish brogue that bore about as much resemblance to my accent as it did to a banana. “If it's not the lovely and talented Aislinn Ross. Top of the morning to you, Ms. Ross.”

“Last name's North, as well you know, Karl,” I said. I was trying to sound like I was above his taunts, and I mostly managed it. Mostly. Karl Conway had been a pain in my ass since I'd applied for my U.S. blogger's license. He'd been part of the group that attempted to keep me from certification, claiming my being a foreign national meant both that I shouldn't be taking work from American Irwins and that I wouldn't know how to deal with the unique dangers of the American landscape. It had been the Canadian government, oddly enough, that had come to my rescue; they'd replied to his petition by saying he made excellent points about journalists working on foreign soil, and that they'd be reexamining all those tourist licenses they issued to Americans. Karl had withdrawn his complaint without missing a beat. I'd been licensed, and I'd been ready to let it drop.

He hadn't been. Nothing I did, from hard news to naturalization, could make him stop beating his jingoistic drum and demanding I get the hell out of his country. If ever a man could force my hand to murder, it was going to be him.

“See, where I'm from, a woman takes her husband's name when she marries him,” said Karl. “It's a sign of respect.”

“Ah, yes, the infamous ‘respect,'” I said. “Given your name to any lovely ladies lately?”

Karl scowled. The other Irwins laughed, some ruefully, others with a distinct note of triumph. Karl was about as popular with our community as a bad case of fleas. He was annoying, he was a bully, and he didn't understand when it was time to back off. He was also tenacious and virtually impossible to kill without using a hammer. Everyone knew he was going to be around for a long, long time. Nobody liked it, but most of us were pretty good at learning to live with what we couldn't change.

“Afternoon, Ash,” said the man at the grill. He lifted his head and grinned, his somewhat questionable dentistry doing nothing to detract from the brightness of his smile. A lot of people are scared of the dentist, and with good reason. Even basic cleanings require mild sedation, and a hundred people spontaneously amplify in the dentist's chair every year. It's a very well-paid profession, since it's both essential and incredibly dangerous. For some people, painkillers and a little discoloration are a small price to pay to avoid the needle and the silence. “We're having chicken and tofu skewers. You in?”

I hoisted my bag. “I brought supplies.”

His grin broadened. “Excellent.” Chase Hoffman was one of the best Irwins in Alabama, and this was really his party, since we were guests on his patch: His family had been in Huntsville for the past fifteen generations, and it was going to take more than a zombie apocalypse to move them. The South reminded me a lot of Ireland in that regard. What mattered was how long you'd been there, setting roots into the land. What mattered was where your people were from, where they'd been born and died and where the bodies were buried. Everything else was just the present, and everyone knew the present was only a blink of an eye when set against the great and constant walls of history.

The rest of the Irwins greeted me as I walked over and began unpacking my offering of turkey hot dogs, chicken breasts, and asparagus spears onto the waiting trays. Some of them I knew, by reputation if not by actual acquaintance; others were unfamiliar, and required more attention while I fixed their faces in my memory. It's never good to be introduced to someone I've already met. It made me seem flighty, when really, it was just a matter of my having better things to pay attention to than what face went with which name. The world is made of dangerous things. Hurt feelings are among them, but hurt feelings are unlikely to rip my throat out with their teeth. I prefer to focus on the things that could kill me, not just say nasty things behind my back.

“How's your candidate?” asked Karl, apparently unwilling to let me off the hook with light mockery. Swell. “She ready to concede?”

“I could ask you the same, you know, with a side order of ‘how did you convince Blackburn to hire you in the first place,'” I said. “You seem more like a York man to me. Reactionary, reclusive, slightly misogynistic…”

“She's got you dead to rights,” said the cross-legged woman, opening her eyes and smiling benevolently up at him. She turned to me, and extended one hand. “Hi. I'm Jody. I'm also with the Blackburn campaign.”

“She has two Irwins?” I asked, leaning down to shake.

“I came as a package deal with her Newsie, Eric,” she said. “He does stunning exposés, I meditate in dangerous places. He's also over there, helping with the barbeque, because sometimes
he
comes as a package deal with
me
.”

Suddenly, I understood where I recognized her from. “You're Peaceful Demolitions! I've seen some of your videos.”

Jody grinned. “I am, and I've seen some of yours. You do good work.”

“So do you! So original.” My gushing over Jody was making Karl scowl more. I decided not to stop. “How'd you come up with the notion? I love a good risk as much as the next girl, but I'm not sure I could voluntarily close my eyes and think about the world while zombies were clawing at the windows.”

“Liar,” said Chase. “I've seen those nap videos you did. You sleep in trees, on purpose, in hazard zones.”