Mira Grant - Feed

I see men and women like you and me, people trying to live their lives without making any mistakes that will come back to haunt them later. I don’t see sinners or people who have called down some sort of righteous plague. So stop. Stop trying to make people even more afraid than they already are by implying that, somehow, this is just a taste of the torments to come. I’m tired of it, and if there’s a God, I bet He’s tired of it, too.

Shaun didn’t hesitate. Putting his beer on the nearest counter, he grabbed a crossbow off the wall and ran for the door. I was only a few feet behind him, Coke in one hand. Unlike my idiot brother, I have no intention of becoming a footnote on the Wall, but that doesn’t mean I can’t watch from a safe remove.

“Georgia!” There was enough anxiety in Buffy’s voice to make me turn. She lobbed a handheld camera in my direction. I caught it, raising my eyebrows in question. “Better picture quality and sixty hours of battery life.”

And audiences love a little hand-shot footage, as long as you cut to the smoother computer-operated stuff before they get motion sickness. “Got it,” I said, and followed Shaun, opening my soda as I went.

The encampment was ablaze with activity. Guards swarmed everywhere I turned, weapons out and ready. I couldn’t blame them for their excitement. Anyone who goes into private security in this day and age is likely to be a lot like Shaun, and he’d slowly been going nuts from the lack of dangerous things to pester.

More gunshots sounded from the south. I turned in that direction, flipping on the camera, and tapped my soda twice against the pressure pad on my belt. My ear cuff beeped. A moment later, Shaun’s slightly breathless voice was in my ear: “Kinda busy, George. What gives?”

“Need a position if you want this on film.” Distant moaning was audible as a whisper on the wind. Buffy’s microphones are pretty sensitive. If she could get any sort of audio track, she’d be able to intensify it and play it back with the report, twice as loud and ten times as chilling.

“Location?”

“Just outside the van.”

“Northwest. I’m at the fence.”

That was directly away from the loudest signs of combat. “You sure about that?”

“Hurry and get over here!” he snapped, and clicked off. Shrugging, I turned toward the northern fence, breaking into a trot. I’ve learned not to argue with Shaun where zombies are concerned; he knows more about their behavior than I can imagine wanting to, and if he says “north,” he’s probably right. Gunshots continued to sound as the moaning, faint as it was, began getting louder.

The glare from the perimeter lights confused my night vision; I heard Shaun before I saw him. He was swearing merrily, using language that would make a longshoreman blush, as he taunted the infected closer to the fence. There were five of them, all fresh enough to look almost human, assuming you discounted the extreme dilation of their pupils and the slack, hungry way they stared at my brother as their fingers clawed against the fence. They’d died within the past few hours. I raised the camera, zooming in on their faces.

Shaun didn’t even realize I was there until my soda hit the pavement. He stopped taunting the infected, stepping clear of the fence as he turned to stare at me. “George? What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I have.” I indicated one of the zombies. Before amplification, she’d been a slender young woman, no heavier than Buffy. The wound that killed her the first time stood out livid and red against the still-pink flesh of her throat, and the fabric of her pale gray University of Oklahoma sweatshirt was stained bloody. “Recognize her?”

“Should I?” Shaun leaned closer to the fence. The zombie bared her teeth and hissed, increasing her attempts to break through. “She’s definitely not one of my exes, George. I mean, she’s cute, but way too dead for my tastes.”

“Like you have any exes?” Shaun has dated as much as I have, which is to say “not at all.” Buffy usually has five or six paramours at any given time, but Shaun and I haven’t ever bothered. Other things keep getting in the way.

“Well, if I did have exes, they wouldn’t look like her. Fill me in?”

“She was the cheering section at the senator’s presentation.” She’d looked a hell of a lot better when she was alive. I didn’t remember seeing her after the Q&A broke up. If she left promptly and got caught on the street… given her body mass, she’d have had plenty of time to reach full amplification and rise again. It wasn’t a difficult scenario to imagine. A young college student comes alone to a risky meeting in a public place and leaves the same way. No one would have been there to help her. A single bite is a death sentence, and not everyone has the guts to call the police and request a bullet to the brain before it gets too late to avoid rising.

Whoever she was, she died alone, and she died stupid. I couldn’t help feeling bad for her.

“Oh, jeez, you’re right.” Shaun leaned closer still, moving well out of what most people would call the safe zone. All five zombies were clustering around the same stretch of fence now, hissing and snarling at him. “That was fast .”

“This isn’t the primary pack. They’re too fresh.” The most decayed of the zombies would still have been able to pass for human in a dark alley, assuming he could keep himself from trying to eat anyone in range. “Something had to bite them.”

“Or one of ’em dropped dead of a heart attack,” Shaun said. “You’re right. The rest are south, harassing the guards.” He gave the fence an assessing look. “I’d put this at what, twelve feet?”

“Shaun Phillip Mason, you are not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“Sure as hell am. Keep ’em distracted, okay?” He didn’t wait for a reply before backing up, getting a running start, and launching himself at the fence. His fingers caught well above the reach of the tallest of the zombies. His toes didn’t fare quite as well, but that didn’t matter much—steel-toed combat boots are too tough for even the infected to gnaw their way through. Laughing at their moans, Shaun began pulling himself up toward the top of the fence.

“Next up, we have my brother, committing suicide,” I muttered and focused the camera on him, tapping the pad at my belt again to dial Buffy. “Don’t fall, asshole, or I’m telling Mom you did it for love of the dead girl.”

“Bite me,” Shaun called back. He swung his leading leg over the top of the fence and stood astride it, with one foot hooked into the chain on either side. Unhooking the crossbow from his belt, he loaded the first quarrel.

“Not while I’m breathing, oh brother mine.”

“Buffy here,” said Buffy’s voice in my ear.

“Buffy, you getting the feeds on this? I want any positive IDs you can pull on our friends. You can cross-reference the one in the sweatshirt with footage from the—”

“I’m on it. Her name was Dayna Baldwin, age twenty-three, political science major at the University of Oklahoma. I’m running lookups on the other four. I have a few possible matches, but there’s nothing confirmed.”

Shaun pulled back the catch, taking careful, almost affectionate aim on the nearest of his admirers. I directed the handheld camera toward the mob as a crossbow bolt appeared in the center of their leader’s forehead. He fell and two of the remaining four were suddenly distracted with cannibalizing his remains, leaving two to menace Shaun. The virus that drives the infected is only in it for the meat. Zombies generally choose the living over the dead, but something that won’t put up a fight is always better than nothing at all.