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“Are all Irwins this prickly, or is it just your friends, Ash?” asked Amber.

“It's all of us,” I said. “Answer her question.”

“Whee,” said Amber, deadpan. “Yes, ma'am, we're all clear, and believe me, I have no intention of altering anyone's footage. Also, I'm not the one in charge of the equipment decontamination, so while it's swell that you're making yourself clear, you're not doing yourself any good by being clear to
me
. Thankfully, I'm also not the person you'd be suing, so I don't feel too terribly worried. If you'd all move,
please
, we can get this show on the road, and we can get you back in decent clothes before your teammates beat down the doors demanding to know what's going on.”

The names of the dead would already have been released, of course; there was no reason to keep those quiet, since once someone amplified, they no longer had any right to either privacy or fair treatment under the law. Zombies weren't human anymore: They were less than corpses, afforded none of the protections once reserved against desecration of the dead. We all knew that. We also knew that our friends, teammates, and loved ones would be clawing at the walls for information, since we weren't transmitting anymore, and our names were not yet listed on the roll call of the dead. We moved.

I kept my steps slow and measured, avoiding the front of the pack, and gradually worked my way toward the back. When I reached the rear I matched pace with the man just in front of me, and said, in a conversational tone, “How much trouble do you reckon I'm in right about now?”

“I don't know,” said Amber. “What's your scale?”

“Oh, mild shouting all the way up to divorce and deportation.”

“Can you be deported now that you're a citizen?”

“I'm sure Ben could find a way to have me booted from the country, if he was mad enough. Might involve claiming we were never married in the first place, I suppose.” Which technically, we hadn't been. Despite efforts by the asexual and aromantic communities to have the “consummation” requirements removed from the definition of marriage in most states, there were still a lot of places where never having had sex could be taken as grounds for an annulment. I loved Ben like a brother. I'd never gone to his bed, and I was never intending to. Our relationship wasn't like that.

“Then you're somewhere in the middle,” said Amber. “Everyone's intending to yell at you, no one's planning to have you kicked out of the country, at least so far as I know. I've been wrong before.”

“Very reassuring, thanks,” I said.

“Oh, I'm part of the ‘everyone,'” said Amber cheerfully. “I should be slamming back mimosas and cheering for my continued employment right about now, not watching your freckled ass march toward the showers.”

“Which we are also required to take,” said John. “Since we had to go through the same biohazardous wasteland as the rest of you in order to rescue you from the zombie menace. I was looking forward to a day
without
bleach.”

“A day without bleach is like a summer without sunshine,” I said.

One of the other Irwins looked back over his shoulder, laughing. “Amen to that.”

We were still laughing when we reached the end of the maintenance tunnel. Plastic sheeting had been spread across the space, sliced into dangling ribbons to allow us all to pass. Three more guards in hazmat suits waited there, each holding a clipboard. They were calling names and forming us into lines, positioning us in front of the openings that would presumably lead to decontamination. There didn't seem to be any effort to separate us by gender or genitalia, which was nice: It was always good to have decontamination parties that didn't induce dysphoria in the guests.

I wound up in a line with both Jody and Amber, while John and the human sniper platform were in the next line over. I looked at Amber and grimaced, saying, “Joking aside, I'm sorry about the decontamination. And the mimosas. I could do with a good strong drink right about now.”

“Alcohol later, decontamination now,” said Amber, and passed through the dangling plastic ribbons. I followed her.

I'd been expecting a standard field decon setup—a chemical shower, a bunch of bleach, maybe some scowling men with guns to make sure we stayed behind the lines until we'd sloughed off the top three layers of our skin. There was a fine line between “clean enough for the people who set the safety standards” and “so clean that your skin began weeping blood,” which would take you back over the line into biohazardous. Most of us had been experts at walking that line long before we got our licenses.

Instead, we were walking into what looked like the most luxurious gym bathroom I'd ever seen. Individual Isolette stalls studded the wall; two of them were already engaged, the lights above them burning a pleasant blue to indicate that they were unavailable. A pile of fluffy towels wrapped in plastic waited at the center of the room, along with an assortment of scent tabs. There was even a smiling attendant, dressed entirely in white, her hair bleached to a brittle platinum that looked like it would snap off at the lightest of touches. She held up a towel, offering it to me as Amber moved off to one side and began to strip, dropping each piece of her armor into the waiting bins.

“Hello, and welcome to the Huntsville Convention Center,” said the attendant. “We're so very sorry that you've been exposed to a biohazard. Please, pick your preferred scent profile and drop the tab into your shower as you enter. Your shampoo and body wash selections will be set to match.”

“That's right kind of you,” I said bemusedly, taking a towel. The plastic crinkled under my fingers. I wondered whether there was a way to come back through here with a camera running. This was one of the more surreal things I'd encountered in the process of decontamination. “D'you have something in the fresh grass or clean cotton families?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” said the attendant, and positively beamed. Apparently, asking her for additional help was a good thing. “Select the all-white tablet for clean cotton. Select the green tablet with white spots for fresh grass and sunlight. Either will provide you with a pleasant, immersive cleaning experience that should wash away any unpleasant memories.”

I hesitated in the act of reaching for a green tablet, giving her a wary, narrow-eyed look. “There aren't drugs in these, are there? I've got work to do, and I've no interest in being given temporary amnesia by a shampoo bowl.”

The attendant's smile didn't waver. “Psychotropic drugs in shower products are extremely complicated, and can be delivered via spray only. They must be approved ahead of time by the event which you are attending. Currently, we have been cleared for THC and mild anxiolytics only. Neither is present in the tablets you have requested.” She might be smiling, but the skin around her eyes was tight, betraying her discomfort. She didn't like being this close to me when I'd just come from a hazard zone. She'd been watching me and just me since I approached her. I could still see the tiny movements in the muscles of her eyes as she struggled
not
to look at Amber, who was also in the room, and hence potentially also a danger.

Tormenting the minimum-wage employees is never fair, no matter how cranky I might be feeling. “Fresh grass is fine, then,” I said, grabbing one of the green tabs. “Thanks for all your help.”

“Service is a delight,” she said. “Thank you for your patronage.” Her smile was starting to look frayed around the edges. I headed for the nearest shower stall, dropping my green tab into the slot outside. The door opened, and I stepped inside.

The shower stall was small and pristine. A chute was open on one wall, waiting for my towel, which had apparently been intended only to cover my nakedness until I got inside. That made sense: The point of this shower was to boil the possible infection off of me. Letting me rub a towel I had touched before I was properly clean all over my body wasn't going to help with that process. I dropped the towel inside. A metal door slammed down with so much force that it would probably have taken off a finger if I had tried to put my hand inside. I jumped.

The shower lights came on. “Welcome, attendee,” said the pleasant voice of the bathroom. It sounded just like the attendant outside. I was suddenly very,
very
glad that I had been watching her eyes closely enough to see her twitching. I didn't need to be spinning myself horror stories about robot civil servants, thanks terribly.

“Hello, shower,” I said.

“I have accessed your medical records, and have determined your ideal temperature range. Do you have any injuries I should be aware of?”

Not on the outside. I was one of the lucky ones: I'd run through hell and come out without so much as a scratch. I'd be hearing the screams for weeks, echoing in my ears every time I let my focus drift, but my body was in fine condition. “No,” I said.

“Excellent,” said the shower. “Commencing cleansing cycle.”

The water came on, pouring not just from the showerhead in front of me, which would have been too mundane, and offered too much chance that part of me could go undrenched. Instead, it came from the entire ceiling, crashing down like the wrath of an angry god and soaking me through in an instant. I squeaked, too surprised to do anything else. That was when the water rose up from the floor, hitting my undercarriage with just as much force, and I full-out shrieked. My ego was salved a bit when an answering shriek came from the next stall over. Amber had also met the incredible wall of water.

The floor stopped shooting high-powered jets at me after only a few seconds, and the voice said pleasantly, “Bleach cycle beginning in five seconds. Please close your eyes and mouth. Please stand with your legs together. Please understand that the management is not responsible for any damage to your person caused by failure to heed these instructions. Please try not to breathe.”

The announcement ended just as the water from above was replaced by a dilute bleach solution—not dilute enough for my tastes, since studies had shown that most commercial bleach balances included substantially more bleach than was needed, and the stuff was murder on my hair. We'd all be blonde if the people who set the safety standards had anything to say about it, and then bald shortly after. The folks who'd bleached every last hair off of our heads would just shrug and open a wig factory if we complained. It was about profit margins as much as it was about safety, and
oh
, how the money rolled in.

I kept my mouth shut tight and my eyes shut tighter, counting down the seconds until the bleach was replaced with a citrus-scented rain that stung when it hit my skin, but would help to counteract the damage. There would be lotion on the other side of the shower to offer more intensive repair. Every Irwin I'd ever met had been soft and supple, and smelled faintly of lemons.

“Beginning bathing cycle,” said the shower. The ceiling switched off. The showerhead switched on. I opened my eyes to see three pumps extrude from the wall, helpfully labeled “shampoo,” “conditioner,” and “body wash.” A washcloth was hanging from the body wash handle. It was small, and white, and very, very new. It would probably be burnt after I used it. That was the way of the world: as disposable as possible, because only the very newest things were guaranteed to be as clean as people wanted them to be. You could boil a stone forever, and never get it all the way back to the condition it was in when it began.

Maybe that was a sign we needed to stop trying. Sadly, for a lot of folks, it was just a sign that we needed to find a way to make new stones.

The water ran long enough for me to shampoo and condition my hair and give myself a good once-over with the body wash, which smelled, true to the attendant's word, of fresh grass and sunshine. It was a bit odd, really. When I was done, I dropped the washcloth on the shower floor, and the water stopped.

“We hope you have enjoyed your bathing experience, and we hope you will enjoy your time here at the Huntsville Convention Center,” said the shower pleasantly. There was a click. The back wall swung open, revealing the locker room on the other side. Several of my fellow Irwins were already there, toweling off before slipping into the bathrobes that had been provided.

“Sometimes the world is damn weird,” I said philosophically, and stepped out of the shower. The door swung shut behind me, all but disappearing into the wall.

“Amen to that,” said Jody. She was already wearing her bathrobe. It was too big for her, and she vanished into it like a child. “Heard your candidate got the nod. Good for you.”

There was something almost indecent about standing here having this conversation when we'd just lost eight people. I nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

“I'm glad mine didn't.” She looked at me calmly. “I know you're going to be looking to expand, and that's great, that's good; you're going to need the extra bodies. But don't ask me, and don't ask Eric. We're going home. This has been more than enough adventure for me.”

“Why do you—”

“You know damn well that what happened today wasn't a coincidence, and it wasn't the first time, either. We had two ‘accidents' while Senator Blackburn was on the campaign trail, and both of them had totally credible explanations, and both of those explanations were total bullshit.”

That was the first I'd heard of this. I tried not to stare.

“Someone tried to kill us then, and someone tried to kill us
all
today,” continued Jody. Her expression was grim. The other Irwins in the locker room were nodding without saying anything. There really wasn't anything that needed to be said. “This is too dangerous, even for me. It should be too dangerous for you, too. Get out while you can, Ash. You're a good Irwin. You deserve better than the kind of death that turns you into a footnote in someone else's story.”