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I wanted to argue with her. I wanted to tell her she was wrong; that no matter how bad things were, they would never be as bad as
that
. I couldn't stop thinking about the eight Irwins who'd died outside the convention center. Six of them… I hadn't even known their names. The only one who'd been my friend was Chase; the only one to be elevated above the rank of spear carrier was Karl, and that was just because I'd hated him. The rest really
were
footnotes, at least for now, and even learning their names wasn't going to change that. She was right. She was so very right, and I should have been following her advice—I should have been turning and running for the hills, just as fast as my legs would carry me.

And I couldn't. Ben was committed, Mat was having the time of their life, and Audrey was loyal, and I couldn't leave them, or ask them to leave with me. No matter how much I might want to get the hell out of here, none of them would ever agree to go if even a single one of us was staying behind. That was good. That was as it should be. But that meant my hands were tied.

“Aw, it's not so bad as all that,” I said, trying for a smile that held the right balance of cockiness and regret. I didn't want to look too happy, not with the bodies still warm outside, but I didn't want to show how afraid I really was. “Maybe the trail had a few bumps and batters, but we're moving up now. Lots of controlled situations and televised debates, less wandering the countryside hoping for a miracle. I'm sure I'll be bored half to death before the election.”

Jody looked at me. Then she smiled a little. There was no balance in her expression: It was pure sorrow, from top to bottom, with no room for anything else. “I understand,” she said. “I'd stay too, if I had people I cared that much about who didn't want to go. Just be careful if you can, and save yourself if you have to.”

“Didn't you know?” I opened the nearest locker, pulling out the towel that hung inside, and started drying myself off. “I'm the last thing I'd ever want to save. I'll get them all out, and then I'll watch it all burn.”

“Then maybe you should start figuring out how to save them before you burn,” she said, and turned and walked away. There was a man at the door, holding a blood testing unit. As I watched, she slapped her hand down on it and, when he nodded, walked past him, out of this sterile, bleach-scented underworld, and back into the lands of the living.

“I smell like a cotton candy factory,” complained Amber, stepping up next to me and opening another locker. “I thought the pink ones were strawberry, not an ocean of sugar.”

“You'll know better for next time.” I wrapped my hair in the towel, wringing out as much of the excess water as I could. “Thanks for coming to get us. I know you didn't have to.”

“Are you kidding? I've met your girlfriend. She's a throat-puncher. Looks sweet as anything, talks about painting and urban cycling and the importance of composting, and then she's putting a fist right into your trachea and watching you writhe. It's John you should be thanking. He wanted to stay with the governor.” Amber's hair was shorter than mine, and only took a quick blitz with the towel to be effectively dry. “I basically dragged him out the door to pull your ass out of the field, and you owe that man a drink.”

“Noted.” The bathrobe provided for my use was soft and plush, and came with matching slippers. I stepped into them gratefully before slipping the robe on and tying it securely around my waist. “What do I owe you?”

Amber lowered her towel and looked at me, a moment of rare gravity settling over her face. “Something's really wrong,” she said. “You know it. I know it. I'm pretty sure your colleagues know it. Find out what it is, okay? I'd like to know that my aunt is safe, and that we're not all going to die out here.”

“I'll try,” I said, and started toward the exit.

The man at the door offered me a blood testing unit. I pressed my palm against the sensor, and was almost relieved to feel the needles biting in. They represented a return to normalcy; they told me I was still a person who could feel and understand pain.

The light flashed green. The door behind him opened, revealing the convention center hallway. Audrey, Ben, and Mat were all there. Ben and Mat were sitting in hard plastic chairs that matched the ones from the Oregon first aid station. Some things are found everywhere. Audrey was leaning up against the wall, head bowed, hair hanging to cover her eyes. None of them had reacted to the door opening. They hadn't seen me yet.

I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin, and stepped out to meet the reckoning.

Everything is transitory. Even continents die. The question is how much you can accomplish with the time that you have. The question is whether it can ever be enough.

—M
AT
N
EWSON

It's never going to be enough.

—A
ISLINN
“A
SH
” N
ORTH

I
learned the names of all the Irwins who'd died in the woods behind the Huntsville convention center. There were only eight of them, after all; it wasn't like I was being asked to memorize the phone book. And at the same time, eight was the largest number I had ever confronted. Eight felt like the population of the entire world.

Chase Hoffman, one of the best-known Irwins in Alabama, whose favorite stunt had involved setting up a barbeque in the middle of a hazard zone and preparing turkey burgers while gunning down the walking dead. Marguerite Gates, who'd made it all the way to the gates before stepping back, and whose daughters were both Irwins in their own right, working on the East Coast and mourning their mother with every passing second. David Tilman, who had also made it to the gates, and whose series on animal rescue and the importance of conservation was replaying on half the animal-rights blogs now that he was gone. He could have used the spike in viewership more when he was alive. We never got what we needed when we were still around to put it to proper use.

The kid with the polearm was named George—George Lyman. He'd had his license for just under six months. The girl who'd been pulled down while we were running was Alyson, with a “y,” no last name attached to any of her reports. She'd mostly done local color pieces. Hannah Woodyard was a political bloodhound who had been considering switching sides to the Newsies. Hal Peters—who almost made it to safety—was a botanical reporter who liked to go out into hazard zones looking for rare flowers and making sure people knew that nature was still out there, still going and still growing, even if we no longer liked to think about it the way that we used to.

Karl Conway, who'd been a bastard and a bully, yet had still deserved better. They'd all deserved better. It was hard to even settle on a tense when I was thinking about them: They were dead, past tense, gone forever, and yet I was watching many of their reports for the first time, introducing myself to the parts of them that had mattered most and had put the strongest stamp upon the world. They were being created anew for me with every link I clicked and essay I devoured, and I couldn't think of them as gone. Not when I was reading their reports.

Reading was about the only thing that took my mind off things. Audrey wasn't speaking to me except when she had to. I'd scared the crap out of her when I went and got myself pursued through the Alabama woods by an army of the dead. Worse, I'd hung up on her when my life was in danger, and worst of all—most damning of all—I'd refused to put myself before the people I was with. I hadn't been willing to climb a damn tree, even if it could have meant saving myself, because it would have meant leaving them in more danger. My reasons had been good. That didn't matter, not really. In all the time we'd been together, I'd never come that close to dying, not even in the rose garden. Before Alabama, on some level, it had been possible to pretend that I was invincible. That couldn't happen anymore.

While I couldn't fully blame her for pulling away, I felt her absence in everything I did. Every morning I woke up hoping that this would be the day when she forgave me. It hadn't happened yet.

Being crammed into a single RV while we followed the governor across the country wasn't helping. Audrey had been finding any excuse she could to ride in the security convoy, leaving me, Mat, and Ben alone with our thoughts—and our security observer, since the governor no longer liked to leave us alone, given the way I kept blundering into trouble. It was understandable, even if having John riding with us meant that we needed to sleep in shifts. I didn't mind sharing a small sleeping area with Ben. It was purely platonic, and if we occasionally dropped into an already-occupied bunk, well. That had happened before when we were on the road. John was another matter. He was a nice enough fellow, but the last thing I wanted was to wake up and learn that I'd become the little spoon for a man twice my size, who I barely knew outside of work.

Mat had been taking solace in driving. Out of the four of us, they were the only one who really understood or cared about cars. I drove because I had to; Ben drove because he had been taking care of his mother for the last several years of her life, and it was easier to get her to her doctor's appointments when he had a car. Audrey avoided driving whenever she could. But Mat…

Mat understood what the little clicking noises a cooling engine made could mean, and how to track them to their source. Mat knew how to rebuild a transmission and improve an engine. Without Mat, we would all have been driving electric cars, because none of us had the patience for hybrid engines, no matter how much more economically sound they were. Mat didn't mind being our live-in mechanic; in fact, they were thrilled by the excuse to work on so many different vehicles.

“Look,” they'd explained to me once, wiping grease off their hands, “everyone looks at the fact that I do makeup tutorials and goes ‘ah, she's secretly a girl.' And then they look at the fact that I love to tinker with cars, and they go ‘oh, he's secretly a boy.' Really, I'm just a person with diverse interests, like everybody else on the planet.”

Mat was happy, the rest of us were happy, and best of all, no one else had to do any of the driving unless they really, really wanted to.

Ben had unfolded the breakfast table from the wall while I slept. We were seated at opposite sides, him tapping away at his latest report, me playing back muted footage of the attacks. I'd been reviewing it for the last week, playing it alongside video reports by the Irwins who'd died there. It looked like I was wallowing. I knew that perfectly well, even as I knew that I didn't have a choice in the matter. I had to know. I had to see.

I had seen. Finally, after days upon days of searching, I had seen. “Ben, on a scale of sterile environment to that motel in Dublin with the bedbugs, how buggy would you say this vehicle is?” I asked pleasantly.

“Mat swept it last night, and I swept it this morning,” he said, glancing up from his computer. “There shouldn't be any bugs that don't have six legs and wings. Why?”

“Because I found it. Slave me a window?”

“Hang on.” Ben tapped his keyboard. A blank window popped up on my screen, and I dragged the video I'd been watching into it. Ben frowned at his screen. “What am I looking at?”

“The zombies that attacked us in the woods? Some of them were wearing name tags. None of us managed to capture any full names, just fragments.” It turned out that running headlong through the woods to avoid being eaten didn't exactly line up perfect shots every time. Maybe there were hackers out there who could have digitally enhanced our footage until it was clearer than reality, but we didn't have one of those. We had Mat, who'd been able to run a few simulations and confirm that there'd been two separate mobs, introduced into the woods at two distinct points—neither of which was remote enough to have been an accident. We had a bunch of different camera angles, which made facial reconstruction possible, even when reading their name tags wasn't. And I had a whole lot of stubborn, all of which had been turned upon my latest project.

Eight dead Irwins. An unknown number of dead bystanders. This wasn't the sort of thing that I could just walk away from. It never had been.

“I'm aware,” said Ben. He didn't sound angry, just confused. Out of everyone on our team, Ben was the one who'd known me longest, and was the most aware that I was always going to be what I was: the sort of person who walked, open-eyed, into danger. Maybe this had been an ambush, but if I had been outside the attack zone, I would have been the first to run toward the sound of screams. “What's your point?”

“I just sent you a video Jody took of a Blackburn rally she and her team attended.” Blackburn was in fact Kilburn's choice for Vice President: The two of them formed the first all-female team from a major political party to make a run for the presidency. People were already saying they didn't have a chance, and Chuck was having a field day coming up with fire-related campaign slogans based around the word “burn.” Fire was cleansing, after all. There were worse images for a post-zombie campaign to build on.

“It's on my screen,” he said. “What am I looking at?”

He sounded so matter-of-fact that I wanted to throw my arms around him and hug him until he couldn't breathe. No matter what else was going on in the world, I could always count on Ben to look at the facts of the situation before he made up his mind. “Third row back from the camera, see the woman in the bright orange blazer? Bad perm, looks like she's wearing one of Mat's eye shadow designs?”

“Got her.”

“Now look at this.” I dragged and dropped another video, splicing it into the space next to the first. “Blazer's gone, but she's got the same makeup on, see? It's just smudged. She must have used the stuff that doesn't come off unless you use paint thinner on your face.”

Ben's eyes widened in slow horror. “This is the same woman.”

“Not just her. I've identified almost all the zombies from the first mob as being part of that rally—sixteen total, which means some of the others probably were as well. It was held three days before the convention. One of their buses never reported back. I think someone hijacked and infected them, then released them out into the woods. Look at the zombies. It took me a while to see it, because I wasn't looking right. You see a zombie and that's it, it's a zombie, it's a problem but it's not a person, yeah? You're not trying to figure out their story. You already
know
their story.”

“Ash, I don't understand what you're getting at.”

“None of them are missing any pieces,” I said. “Look at their arms and throats and faces. Those are the spots most often bitten during initial attacks, but none of these people have been bitten. We have some scratches and bruises, which are consistent with infected individuals being held in an enclosed space. They're also consistent with roaming around in the woods. There's one male with a piece missing from his shoulder, but it looks like a feeding bite—they didn't have enough to eat, so a stronger zombie took a chunk out of him. There's no defensive tearing. He didn't fight back, because he was already dead when that happened. There is no visible reason for these people to have become infected. I'll give you one heart attack victim in a group that size. Sixteen? No. That strains credulity.”

“What about the other zombies?” asked Ben.

“You mean mob number two? Dropping you another video.” I dragged, released, and said, “Chase took this one. It's a political protest about fracking in Athens-Limestone County. Seems some people want to see what they can get out of the ground, but doing so would destroy the last community pumpkin patch in Alabama. They take their Halloweens very seriously there, hence the declaration of a
gourd farm
as a historical landmark, which allows them to operate it independent of the public health and safety laws that shut all the other pumpkin patches down. They still trick-or-treat in Athens. It's a major tourist destination, because it's the last ‘all-American Halloween experience' in the country. Again, look at their faces, and then compare them to this video footage of mob number two.”

I dropped the file into the window. I waited. Ben stared, first at his screen and then at me.

“Same situation?”

“You mean the lack of obvious infection points? Yeah. And again, the protest was held a few days before the convention, and a bus full of protestors disappeared on the way back to the lot where they'd stowed their cars.” I shook my head. “Local police were looking, but not very hard. They had the whole Democratic National Convention rolling into town. They had bigger things to worry about, things that would mean tax dollars and tourism and positive media attention for their city. Some people who didn't know how to read a map barely rated a search party.”

“So you're saying two busloads of people were abducted, infected, held for at least two days, and then released into the woods to spoil your party. Aislinn, I know you're upset about what happened, and I know all this business with Audrey is making you tense, but don't you think you might be stretching a bit?” Ben frowned. “I absolutely buy that these attacks are a setup, but this one would require way too much work to put together.”

“They buried the dead in Portland, and left them for us to find,” I said doggedly. “They spiked the pancake makeup at Wagman's fund-raiser, and when I was talking to Jody—one of Blackburn's Irwins—after the attack, she mentioned that they'd had trouble, too. Something's going
on
, Ben. Something bad. This isn't me being paranoid, although if I were going to start, I might point out that several of these attacks have focused on taking out the candidate's media team as well as the candidate. Social media and Internet news are not friends of people who want things to stay hidden. We never have been. If I were trying to kill someone without getting caught, I'd absolutely focus on killing the people standing nearby with cameras. It would be the only way to have half a prayer of keeping things secret.”

“You're connecting several attacks with no obvious common threads,” said Ben.

“Senator Ryman's family farm was the site of an outbreak as he was accepting the nomination to run for his party,” I said. “Governor Kilburn doesn't have any family to go after. There's nothing to use to make her sympathetic the way that losing a daughter makes him sympathetic. But killing a bunch of Irwins outside? Especially when I'm there, and I have a track record that involves scrambling fast responses to bad situations? The attack
makes her look good
. Either she loses a member of her team, or that team member scrambles a response that gets people out alive. It's win-win for public approval.”

“She was genuinely upset when she heard what was going on, Ash. Surely you're not implying—”