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“I guess you're right,” said Ben. “Again. Stop being right. Twice in one morning is creepy, and I don't like it.”

“Sorry, buddy. I'm planning to be right for the foreseeable future.” I toasted him with my orange juice carton. “Something's going to come along and change the world for us. You'll see. Something always does.”

Ben didn't say anything, but he was smiling as he bent back over his keyboard. It was a small victory. Sometimes, that has to be enough.

M
y predictions were naturally correct, because I am a genius: The Masons announced they were forming their own blog site, the aggregators fell all over themselves begging for something they could syndicate, and a little judicious editing allowed us to bring our story of municipal neglect and zombies in supposedly secure fields to the prominence it deserved—middle of the road, nothing that was going to fund a new mortgage, but it spiked into the top twenty a couple of times, which made Ben happy, and it got me a bunch of new subscribers, thanks to my suicidal good cheer in the face of the undead. Mat did a series of patriotic makeup tutorials inspired by the major candidates for President. The Congresswoman Wagman design was surprisingly tasteful, even though it involved a distressing amount of feathering, while the Governor Blackburn design had been immediately added to my bag of tricks.

The less said about the design for Republican candidate Governor Tate, the better.

It had been almost two weeks since we buried Ben's mother, and I was enjoying a lazy afternoon of lounging on a high branch in Briones State Park with a fishing pole in one hand, trawling for zombies. It wasn't that hard: All I'd needed to do was put a chunk of rotting chicken on the hook and cast off into the brush. The Kellis-Amberlee virus couldn't thrive in poultry, but the smell still attracted the infected, whose need for protein to rebuild their bodies was sometimes strong enough to overwhelm the virus's single-minded need to spread.

My ear cuff beeped. Since my cameras were rolling, I forced myself to keep smiling as I tapped it to activate, and said, “Little busy here. Surrounded by sweet boys who want my hot bod.”

There was a brief pause while Audrey parsed this. Then she asked, “How many zombies are we talking here?”

“Four so far. I heard movement in the bushes, so I'm hoping to flush one more out before I start shooting.” There had also been some tech employed before I came into the area. I wasn't saying that on the record. My ratings would be better if people thought I'd gone in blind.

There was another pause. “Ash, are you in a tree again?”

“I am, yes,” I confirmed. “It's a very nice tree. Very supportive.”

“Don't you remember what I told you about zombie raccoons?” Audrey sounded more worried than annoyed. That was nice. I didn't need her yelling at me while I was in a tree surrounded by zombies. Call me paranoid, but it didn't seem like the sort of thing that would make me
safer
.

“Yes,” I said obligingly. “You told me they can climb trees and eat my delicious brains from above. I have yet to see one. I am disappointed in your dangerous Californian wildlife. Next time I emigrate, I'm moving to Australia.”

“It's illegal to shoot zombie koalas.”

“It might as well be illegal to shoot zombie raccoons, for as many of them as I've actually seen.” I cast my carcass-on-a-string into another patch of underbrush and reeled it slowly back toward me, bringing one last zombie shambling into view. According to the infrared mapping I'd done before climbing my tree, there were no more large infected creatures in the area—and my tree, while connected to the forest, was separate enough that any zombie raccoons drawn in by the noise would have needed to approach from the ground. Was this going to stop me from teasing my girlfriend about her excessive paranoia? Nope. Teasing made for good audio, and the trouble with solo missions is the lack of people to torment. But as always, I had every intention of making it home again. Making it home was practically my specialization in the field.

“Look, okay, I don't want to think about this too hard, so when you finish doing whatever it is you're doing right now, can you please come back? Ben's calling an all-hands meeting, and for once it's not because somebody clogged the shower drain and left it for the next person to deal with.”

“Be still my beating heart. Be home in an hour.” I tapped my ear cuff to break the connection and pulled a knife from my dress pocket, leaning forward to cut the line on my fishing pole. It had been contaminated by contact with the dead; disposable things are never worth the effort of cleaning them. Maybe that's not the most environmentally friendly attitude to take, but anyone who had a problem with it could go get my fishing gear back from the zombies if they were that displeased. It was going to be no skin off my nose either way.

Five zombies milled around my tree. Two were busy ripping the rotten chicken apart and shoving it into their cavernous maws. They both looked up at the sound of my rifle barrel snapping into place. One had the hook dangling from his cheek, like the latest in punk accessories for the modern zombie. Both had dead, expressionless eyes. Looking at them was more like looking at sharks than people: cold killing machines, living only to consume. That was what Kellis-Amberlee did to the human brain. The virus wiped the mind clean, replacing human emotion and intellect with hunger and raw need. It was a set of primitive instincts that must have still been lurking in every one of us, waiting for the virus to come along and let them out.

My gun's internal silencer kept my first shot from being
too
loud, but nothing portable can actually silence a gun like they do in the movies. Flocks of crows and pigeons launched themselves into the air from the trees all around me as soon as I pulled the trigger. The cameras mounted in the upper branches would catch the flurry of wings; I'd use that footage for the “child-safe” version of my report, which would drive up hits on both videos, as people wanted to pretend they cared more about artistry and adventure than they did about gore. Everyone knew that wasn't true. But the hits went up, and the money rolled in, and the bills got paid. As long as those things happened, we could all be happy.

Shooting five zombies who were in the preliminary stages of a mob was no trouble, especially not with my marksmanship scores. I almost felt bad about it. Here they'd been going about their undead business in a secluded park, sucking down squirrel guts like they were spaghetti, and I had to come along and ruin all their fun. I was a big meanie. I still clicked clear pictures of all five zombies in addition to my moving footage. There were survivors' organizations that would sometimes pay for confirmation that a loved one was finally resting in peace, and the California Forestry Department had a standing bounty for zombies of any species killed within the bounds of a state park. I might be able to get paid twice for every one of those kills, in addition to the money from my reports. That was part of my motivation for shooting where I did, in both senses of the word.

Being an Irwin meant shouldering a greater percentage of the financial burden than Ben. Audrey made more than I did. Mat and I were close to parity, thanks to their makeup tutorials and fondness for setting things on fire to prove how sturdy they were. Mat was more of a Bill Nye Newsie than a Michael Mason: They still told the truth at the exclusion of all else, but they did it by getting down in the dirt and
proving
it. It was a rarer exemplar of the breed, and wow did it hold people's attention.

I was unhooking my rig and preparing to climb down from my tree when something waddled out of the bushes, moaning in an odd, guttural tone. My eyes widened with delight.

“No
way
.”

The zombie raccoon heard me. It looked up, bloody saliva dripping from its jaws, and made a chittering sound that still managed to come across as a moan.

“Hey, audience,” I said brightly, glad I was wearing my mag, and hadn't yet retrieved my cameras from the neighboring trees. “I give you the finest example I've seen of California wildlife: the undead, uncommon raccoon. Say hello to Mr. Stripy. Now say good-bye to Mr. Stripy's head.”

A bullet designed to kill an infected human did a number on the skull of an infected raccoon. It was certainly impressive, and would have been enough to turn my stomach only a few years ago. Fieldwork hardens a person fast. It's that, or get killed because you were busy barfing in the bushes when you should have been watching your back. As my friend the raccoon had just demonstrated, no matter how well you thought you knew the terrain around you, it was always going to hide a few surprises.

It took about ten minutes to tear down all my non-disposable equipment and get the plastic booties over my shoes and tied off at the knee. Carefully, so as not to rip them, I dropped to the contaminated ground. Bits of bone and brain matter were everywhere. I'd need to call in the incident to the rangers so they could come out with hoses and sterilize the site as best as they could. They couldn't bleach the soil without killing the forest—something they were loath to do, although that was changing, generation on generation, as people forgot what it was to view large green spaces as anything other than death traps. They could still remove the bodies and keep the crows from carrying off the carrion, which could lead to secondary infections. Poor crows. They lived in a world that was basically a walking buffet, and half the time they were denied the best bits.

My car was parked at the top of a high ridge. It was a zippy little thing without most of the security features built into Ben's, surrounded by blinking hazard lights intended to notify any law enforcement who came by that there was a working Irwin in the area. Supposedly, that would keep me from coming back to find that my vehicle had been towed. In reality, if I'd pissed off the local cops badly enough, recently enough, my lights could “accidentally” wind up deactivated, and I could be walking home. There was a reason I tried to be reasonably well behaved when dealing with the police. Being arrested was one thing. Walking home without a large enough collection of bullets was another.

The lights—and the car—were intact when I got to the top of the ridge. I opened the trunk, tossed my gear into the waiting plastic bag, and slammed it closed before producing a blood test from my purse and jamming it against my thumb. The need to do this before I could get into the vehicle was never going to strike me as anything but stupid. If there had been zombies on my trail, stopping for a blood test would have gotten me killed. As it was, it meant thirty seconds spent stationary and exposed, unable to get to my guns, which were already in the trunk—and that was part of the regulation. Since my gear had been in the field, it needed to be isolated before I could check out clean. What if one of those bits of brain had ended up on my scope, and got on my hands
after
I'd taken my blood test? Nope. Too big a risk. Much safer if I stood around outside and unprotected, hoping not to die before I could get back into my car, where the clean guns were.

The lights on the test flashed green, the proximity unlocking the car doors. I flung myself into the driver's seat, slamming the door behind myself with sufficient force to rattle the glass. It was overdramatic, but it made me feel better, and that was what mattered.

I tapped my ear cuff. When Audrey answered, I said the three little words that mattered more than anything else in our world: “I'm coming home.”

“Good,” she said. “Hurry.” Then she killed the connection, and I hit the gas.

Traffic jams are a thing for the big highways on the major commute routes, not for the back roads that run too close to the state parks, and certainly not for the surface streets that lead into the low-income areas. I kept the needle at the speed limit the whole way, cruising comfortably past burned-out storefronts and fenced-off hazard zones.

It's interesting. The Bay Area balances havens for the rich next to blasted hellscapes for the poor, and no one ever seems to think it's strange for some people to have everything while others have to depend on a crumbling, unreliable public transit system just to afford the blood testing units required to let them keep going to work. The country has been in a state of high economic inequality since before the Rising. Some people have even gone so far as to say that it
caused
the Rising, since a lack of trust for authority and the media helped motivate the Mayday Army to release Dr. Kellis's yet-untested cure into the atmosphere. So it would have been reasonable to think that maybe after the dead walked, things would get better for the living poor.

Being reasonable doesn't make a thing true. Sadly.

The garage was open when I came around the corner. Mat must have activated the tracker in my car and used it to estimate when my route would get me home. It was a cute trick. Risky as hell, but cute, and I appreciated it for what it was. There were two black sedans parked in front of the house, and a black van parked across the street, in front of one of the empty houses. That gave me a little more pause than the open garage door, the first traces of concern spider-walking down my throat.

Audrey wouldn't have sounded so calm if the INS had decided to revoke my citizenship and toss me out of the country. We had several coded ways of saying “run,” just in case the need ever arose. She hadn't used any of those codes. And Ben hadn't tried to contact me, hadn't sent an email or pinged my phone. Whatever was going on, it wasn't about deportation. It couldn't be about eviction, either: His grandfather's will had been perfectly clear, and Ben owned the house, no strings attached. So what the hell was going on?

I pulled into the garage and killed the engine while the door was sliding closed behind me. There was nothing I could do to make the blood test that would let me into the house cycle any faster, but if there'd been a way to bypass it, I would have. My friends—my
family
, however dysfunctional—were in that house, and whatever was going on, they needed me.

The light flashed green. The door clicked open. I swung it wide, and froze as the two large, black-suited men in the hallway pointed their service pistols at me. One was aiming for my head; the other was aiming for my heart. It was a good cover pattern when dealing with the living, and that didn't make me feel
any
better about it, thanks.