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“Mat, it's Ben,” said Ben, talking a little too fast and a little too excitedly. “We've got an infected man in the field next to the funeral home—what? Yes, I'm still at the funeral home. Ash and I were getting ready to head for a milkshake when Rosie called. Yes, my sister. No, she didn't want to talk to Ash. We buried our mother today, that didn't change her mind about anything. Look, can you check local missing persons and infection alerts, see if you can figure out who our walking dead boy might be? It'd be nice if we could get a march on this. Thanks. You're a peach.”

He kept talking after that, but I was in no position to listen: As always, everything was starting to happen at once.

Our infected man was still moaning, now walking at a remarkably brisk pace for a zombie. The moan meant he'd spotted us, and was now sounding the dinner bell for all his zombie friends. That could be a major problem for us if he had friends on
this
side of the fence—or really, even if he didn't. Zombies were stupid in isolation, shambling husks of the people they'd once been, hollowed out by sickness and by instincts the human body wasn't wired to deal with. Trouble was, zombies somehow got smarter in larger groups. Put enough of them together, and they'd start to plan. They'd start to figure out things like ambushes.

Or distractions. That field was totally enclosed. How had our shambling man appeared in the middle of it so quickly? He'd started out just close enough to catch and hold my attention, but far enough away not to seem like a threat. There was a word for something like that.

Bait.

I swore loudly before grabbing Ben's arm and jerking him toward the statue I'd been perching on for most of the afternoon. It was a trio of abstracted bronze people, the metal slippery and not designed for climbing.

Ben nearly dropped his recorder, breaking off in the middle of whatever he'd been saying to demand, “Ash, what the hell? Let me go!”

“No can do, up you get, I'll explain why later, come on, come on, no time to dilly or dally or do anything but
climb
.” I shoved him toward the statue, looking anxiously around me as I did. When did the street get so damn still? Where were the pigeons, where were the squirrels, where were the little scraps of urban wildlife that hung around the fringes of man's world and signaled safety by not giving a fuck about anything that wasn't unnatural and wrong? Gone, all of them, even the crows, which had vanished from the funeral home lawn somewhere between my spotting the man in the field and right now.

Ben looked like he wanted to argue. Then he started climbing. We'd been colleagues and friends before we got married, and he knew how much attention I paid to my environment. Can't be an Irish Irwin without building a strong degree of situational awareness, after all; the sheep will take you out in a heartbeat if you don't pay attention to the world around you.

“Aren't you coming?” he asked.

“Too narrow; I'd knock you off. Climb faster,” I said, scanning the area again. My mag was still set to magnify. That's why, when I turned to look behind me, it looked like the zombies were inside of grabbing range.

I did not scream. I do not scream. I am not a screamer. I may have… yelped a bit. In surprise, not terror. I took a step backward, adrenaline flooding my veins, only for my non-augmented eye to inform me that I was being silly; the mob of infected now running toward me full tilt was in fact at least eighteen feet away.

Not so much better, really. But better enough to make all the difference in the world. “Dispatch, are you still on the line?” I asked, keeping my voice bright and upbeat and cheerful. We could edit out the yelp. Pitch-shifting the rest of my dialogue would be harder, and would start verging into falsifying the news, rather than just reporting it. I wasn't
against
a little doctoring of the facts if it got me a better story, but there was only so far that could be pushed before people started getting pissed.

“Yes, I'm still here.” The woman sounded much more focused and businesslike now. Shouting in someone's ear will do that. “Are you in distress?”

“I'm about to be. I have a closing mob of what looks like eleven infected, all about two weeks baked, judging by the state of their clothes and hair; I can transmit visual data directly, if you want to open me a loop into your system.” Mat would be watching for that by now. If the police decided to open a door, our resident techie would be inside in a blink, scooping up everything that could be of use before getting the hell out of Dodge. Mat was good like that.

“What?”

I didn't sigh or roll my eyes. It wasn't nice to taunt people who were just trying to do their jobs, and more importantly, I didn't have the time to waste. “I said, eleven infected, not in the field,
on the street
, closing fast. You have eyes on the area—they've been watching me this whole damn time. Adjust the feeds to point at my line of sight, or let me into your systems, but either way, get someone out here before we wind up on the evening blog rolls in a posthumous sense.”

I tapped my ear cuff to kill the connection. No sense in letting things drag out and letting her think that the situation wasn't urgent. She had the IP for my mag, and Mat would be watching like a hawk, waiting for her to open her system for my feed. As for me, I had other things to worry about. I turned. Ben was high enough up now that I could climb after him without knocking him off the structure. I grabbed the first chunk of statue I could get a grip on and started pulling myself up.

A yellow light came on at the bottom of my mag lens: the police dispatcher was plugging into my feed. It was followed a second later by a second yellow light, as Mat seized the open connection and started pilfering the police computer for missing persons reports and local disturbances.

I knew the dispatcher would want facial shots of the zombies. I turned as best I could to look back at the mob without losing my grip on the statue. They were closing fast on my location, and would be in a position to start doing the old grab-and-yank routine in a matter of seconds.

“Sorry, lady, that's all you get,” I muttered, turning my attention back to climbing. Ben had reached the top of the statue and was clinging to its head, terror and fascination in his face. I stuck out a hand. “Little help?”

“Sorry.” He grabbed me and pulled, hauling me upward just as I felt the wind generated by a reaching zombie's hand as it tried to grasp my ankle. I jerked my foot up, away, before the zombie could get a grip on me.

There was barely sufficient room atop the statue for the two of us. Ben sat loosely, all splayed limbs and absolute lack of situational awareness, while I produced a pistol from my purse and aimed carefully at the lead zombie.

“We're surrounded,” said Ben.

“Yup,” I agreed.

“We're going to have to go through full decontamination.”

“Again, yup.”

“I liked that dress.”

“I liked it too,” I said. “Pity about all the bleach it's about to soak up.” The fabric would probably survive, but the pattern would be destroyed. My closet was full of lovely dresses that were no longer suitable for wearing on camera, thanks to random bleach-spotting.

“We're surrounded by zombies.”

“Yup.” My initial, adrenaline-fueled count had been correct: There were eleven of them, not counting our friend in the field and anyone who had yet to join the party. I had eight bullets in my primary gun, and another six in my secondary. I normally wouldn't have left the house that poorly armed, but I hadn't expected the funeral of Ben's mother to turn into an outbreak exercise. That would show me.

“Are you about to start shooting?” Ben made the question sound almost academic, like it was perfectly reasonable, and not at all a function of our ridiculous situation.

“Not just now. You don't have ear protection, I only have fourteen bullets, and we're inside the potential splatter range if I'm shooting down with my eyes open. If they find reinforcements somewhere, I'll reassess. Right now, I'm all for sitting tight and waiting for the cavalry.”

“Makes sense.” Ben paused. Then he started laughing helplessly.

I gave him a sidelong look. “What?”

“My mother would be so offended right now. How dare I get attacked by zombies at her funeral? I should have had the decency to do it tomorrow.”

“Technically, you're not at the funeral anymore. The funeral ended when the last of the mourners went home.”

Ben shook his head. “Nope. I'm supposed to go home, eat casserole, and be sad.”

“Oh, I'm
so
sorry, I didn't know.” I looked down at the zombies. “You hear that? You're getting in the way of casserole!”

The zombies moaned. Ben laughed. We waited for the police to arrive.

All in all, just part of a day's work.

I
t took over two hours for the good people of the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department to organize a police response, get us down from the statue, put us through a thorough decontamination process, take our statements, put us through
another
thorough decontamination process when Ben reminded them that he'd been inside the funeral home before the zombies showed up, refuse to cancel decontamination number two when I pointed out the fact that he'd needed a blood test to get out of the place and I had never gone inside to begin with, refuse to answer our questions, and finally tell us we were free to go.

They did not give us a ride back to our car. That would have been too much like being decent human beings, which was apparently not a part of their mission statement. The sun was long since down by the time we reached the antechamber of the long-term parking garage near the funeral home.

Ben paid the taxi while I paid the ticket machine, verifying the credit card with yet another blood test. There had been some issues recently with people who'd been infected—well, technically, people in whom the Kellis-Amberlee virus was amplifying, which just so happened to make them technically dead in the eyes of the law—maxing out their cash withdrawals at as many ATMs as they could before they fully turned. That way they could pay someone to put them down rather than calling in a police executioner or notifying the CDC. It was an understandable decision. I thought it might be quite nice to be shot by someone who would tell me they were sorry before they pulled the trigger. But once someone's dead, they're not supposed to be making withdrawals, and the banks were starting to get pissy about it. Hence the additional blood tests now impacting the middle class. If you were poor, they figured you didn't have enough for them to give a damn about, and if you were rich, you could buy a few less needle pricks in your lifetime. Only a few. We wouldn't want to start seeming
humane
, now, would we?

I was waiting at the gate when Ben came over to join me. “All sorted?” he asked.

“All sorted,” I replied, holding our parking ticket up for him to see. I liked that it was still paper, a prehistoric artifact in a world of apps and plastic and everything digital. I had a collection of folded paper animals made from parking tickets gathered in garages from Galway to San Francisco. It was like a souvenir that didn't cost me anything—well, didn't cost me anything
more
, anyway—and that was a miracle all on its own. “What took you so long?”

“The driver knew we'd been there during the outbreak, wanted to know if we had any thoughts on how it might have started.” The parking garage proper had two doors, one for the driver, one for the passengers. Ben took up his position on the driver's side. As a passenger, my test results would clear me—or not—a few seconds behind him. That way, if I was infected and he wasn't, he'd be able to get to the car. Forget “women and children first”: Like most security systems, the garage just wanted to know that we were going to get our car out of their precious parking space before we were eaten.

“And what did you say?”

“I gave him my URL, told him to swing by later tonight for more details.” Ben turned his head just enough for me to see the bright slash of his smile as he brought his thumb down on the testing pad. “Nothing like driving those ratings a little bit higher when you have the chance, huh?”

“You're the one who understands the bloody system,” I said. “I just point and click and go where I'm told.”

“The day you go where you're told is the day I join the priesthood, because clearly there has been a divine intervention.” The door clicked as Ben's blood test came through clean. “See you on the other side, trashmouth.”

“Not if I see you first,” I said. He stepped through, and he was gone.

The testing panel hummed softly as it cycled, presenting me with a clean surface to press my thumb against. There'd been some sort of problem with the systems that did the cleaning about oh, five or six years ago, which had resulted in a whole bunch of people being infected. The company that made the cleaning systems went out of business, the families of the dead sued the government for a truly staggering amount of money, and all parties involved hushed it up as much as they possibly could. Even the braver reporters I knew had stayed away from
that
story. It was a one-time manufacturing glitch; it happened because sometimes bad things happen in the world; destroying people's ability to trust the protocols that kept them safe was only going to lead to worse down the road. The party line was good because it was true, and all the Newsies had stayed quiet, and all the Irwins had followed their lead.

Sometimes I wonder whether the real difference between us and the pre-Rising news figures we like to sneer at and claim to despise is a matter of scale. They belonged to big corporations, with all the advantages and disadvantages that came with that position. They made their own rules, sure, but they did it while someone else held the reins. We'll never be too big to fail, and so we get to make our own choices, tell our own stories… until someone big enough to buy and sell us a thousand times over comes along and shuts us down.

The disadvantage of being independent is the way you're never going to have a safety net. All you can do is fly until you fall—and falling is inevitable. Everybody falls, if you give them enough time.

I pressed my thumb against the testing zone. A hole opened, and a needle bit into my flesh, quick as a whisper. Seconds passed before the door clicked, unlocking itself, a small light set into the frame flashing green. It was meant to be discreet, hopefully preventing a panic if someone turned up positive for Kellis-Amberlee while there was a crowd surrounding them. As if that would ever happen. Even in this brave new world twenty years after the creation of the “zombie virus,” people are afraid of dying. Call it a quirk of mammalian biology, which is the result of millennia of being the ones who survived to pass their genes along, but people tend to become extremely upset when a machine tells them their lives are over. If someone came up positive in a place like this, they wouldn't step calmly aside and let the rest of the commuters get to their cars while they awaited their inevitable execution. They'd freak right the fuck out, and with good reason.

I stepped through. Ben, who was waiting on the other side, frowned.

“You have that pensive look again,” he said. “Ash, what's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong,” I said. “I am a paragon of cheer and pith, like a busty leprechaun imported from the land of sexy accents to boost your site ratings.”

Ben snorted. “Now I
know
you're upset about something. You only go full Irish when you're trying to distract me from the way you're actually feeling. What's wrong?”

“No, wait, I want to unpack one of those phrases before we get all touchy-feely.” We started walking, passing rows of parked cars. Many of them were in long-term storage, paid for by the month and marked with blue stickers on their rear taillights. A lot of them were pre-Rising “classics,” the kind of thing that looked great on a movie set or a garage floor, but didn't add much protection against the living dead. “What do you mean by ‘full Irish'? Am I only half-Irish when I'm eating cereal and drinking orange juice? Does beer activate additional Irish? What about soda bread?”

“You don't like beer.”

“Yes, and that's one of the many reasons I felt the need to flee my fair homeland. It was a matter of self-preservation. What were you trying to say? I'm trying to sort out whether to be offended or amused.”

Ben flashed me a quick smile as he pulled the car keys from his pocket. “Which side of the fence are you coming down on so far?”

“Amused, with a small side order of ‘this is why I play to stereotypes sometimes, because it's fun to watch you squirm,'” I said. “Could still change, depending on your explanation. Grab a shovel, start digging, see how deep you get before you hit bottom.”

“What I meant was exactly what you just said: Sometimes you play to stereotypes, usually because you're annoyed or deflecting or trying to knock the person you're talking to off their game.” Ben stopped next to his car, a sturdy old Volvo that looked like a relic of an early era, and that had been completely rebuilt internally and externally, even down to the bulletproof glass in all the windows. We were safer in that car than we'd have been in a tank, according to Ben.

Personally, I would have liked the chance to do a little comparison shopping. Tanks get about two miles to the gallon—maybe more if you're running on biodiesel, but converted tanks are even harder to get your hands on than the original kind—and yet you're in a
tank
. You have a gun that can fire depleted uranium bullets like, half a mile. Seems to me that's worth a little fuel inefficiency.

“So ‘full Irish' means ‘talking about banshees and the Blarney Stone,' then?” I asked, as Ben unlocked the car and we both gripped our handles. This was our last blood test before we got home: needles set into the door locks bit into the heels of our hands, timed to within a fraction of a second. There were no lights. We knew that we were clean when the doors unlatched and we were able to get inside.

“That's right,” said Ben, sliding behind the wheel and clipping his recorder to the dashboard charger. “You used to do it more, you know. When we first got married.”

“I was a lot more nervous then.” I settled into my own seat, dropping my purse on the floor between my ankles before I fastened my belt. “I was leaving the world I'd always known behind, and going to live in a foreign country.”

“You make it sound like you were the little mermaid or something.”

“Might as well have been.” I let my head fall back against the headrest, staring up at the ceiling. “I was just thinking about your mum, that's all. I always wanted her to like me. I figured there'd be time. I'd been wearing her down. She'd almost started to believe that I was genuinely fond of you, not just taking advantage for a green card until I could go through the citizenship process. I figure I was one declaration of intent to divorce from us being friends. Maybe it's selfish of me. I don't know. But I can't help thinking it would have been good for her, too, knowing I really did have your best interests at heart, even if I never had any intention of crawling into your bed.”

Ben hesitated before reaching over and awkwardly patting my knee. It was a charming, pointless gesture, and I lifted my head enough to smile at him.

“She liked you,” he said, as he turned his attention to the windshield and started the engine. The car purred to life around us, silent as a breeze and solid as a boulder. There were advantages to hybrid tech. “She didn't understand a lot of things about you, like why you had to marry
me
—after I explained the situation, all she wanted to know was why you couldn't have found a nice girl to marry, and left me alone.”

“Because I wanted this to be a business transaction for the both of us,” I said. “You know that. I get U.S. citizenship, you get an E.U. passport, and we're both in a better position to do our jobs going forward, even after we divorce. Mixing business with pleasure would have just muddled things up, in every possible way.” That, and left whatever sweet girl I'd settled down with always asking herself whether I'd only wanted to marry her in order to get out of Ireland. No. It was better, by far, to be up-front about what I wanted; to treat every step as the mutually beneficial agreement that it was, and let it end without anyone's heart being broken. Ben and I loved each other. Always had. We just didn't love each other romantically, or as anything more than friends.

“I know,” said Ben, pulling out of the parking space. “She knew too, after I'd explained it to her a few times. She was trying with you, Ash. It was just that she couldn't figure out how she was supposed to treat you. If she acted like you were my wife, she got angry at you for not doing the things she thought a wife was ‘supposed' to do—for not loving me the way she wanted you to love me, for not giving her the grandchildren she wanted. If she acted like you were just another of my friends, she felt like she was downplaying our relationship and shaming you for being involved with me, since she wasn't acknowledging you as my wife. So she got confused, and she shut down. It would have happened. Maybe it would have happened the day after we signed our divorce papers, but it would have happened.”

“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?”