Mira Grant - Blackout

[IMAGE:The camera returns to Georgia.]

GEORGIA:Before I died, I told you all that someone was trying to keep you afraid. Someone was trying to keep you from realizing that you were being controlled through unnecessary security and exaggerated fear. I begged you to rise. I begged you to stop them. Unfortunately, words are cheap, even today, and actions are expensive. I did not change the world by dying. All I did was die.

But you still have the opportunity to change things—and that opportunity is greater and more immediate than any of us could have known. Kellis-Amberlee is not the scourge we have been led to treat it as. It is a living thing, and like any living thing, it seeks to evolve, to find a balance with its hosts. Kellis-Amberlee has been trying to adapt to us, and we have been trying to adapt to it. But our government, believing that it has the right to decide for everyone, has not allowed that adaptation. They have been killing those individuals who represented our best chance of finding peace with this disease. For more information, download the file labeled “reservoir condition fatality rates.”

[DOWNLOAD FILE HERE.]

GEORGIA:You may already be hearing reports that we are terrorists. That we have destroyed a part of the nation’s capital, and either killed or kidnapped the president. These reports are untrue. One of our reporters, Rebecca Atherton, was killed in the process of rescuing the president from those same individuals who had me brought back from the grave—those same individuals who had me killed in the first place.

[IMAGE:At this point in the video recording, a five-second clip of Rebecca Atherton, filmed a year previous, plays. She is wearing khaki, her hair is loose, and she is shooting a zombie with a paintball gun. Each paintball appears to be filled with acid. She is laughing. Her face goes to still frame, and the image returns to Georgia.]

GEORGIA:And why did they kill me? Why did they arrange a set of circumstances that resulted in Rebecca’s death, and the death of countless others? Because there are things they didn’t want you to know. This is one of them: The virus is changing. I repeat, the virus is changing. But there are people who wanted to control those changes, no matter how many lives it cost. They believed that only by keeping us afraid could they keep us under control. But we have had time to learn and grow since the Rising. We are smarter now. We have adapted.

There are things we cannot tell you, because there are answers we do not have. But we have more information than we did, and please believe me when I say the information that is left unshared is only that which must be studied further before it is safe to reveal. The EIS will be working with the government to codify that information. In time, you will know everything.

The CDC’s motivation for resurrecting me, as opposed to any of the others they could have chosen, was simple: They thought you would listen to me. They thought you would accept my words as truth. Let’s prove them right. Believe me. Believe the contents of these files… and believe your president.

[IMAGE:President Peter Ryman walks into the frame, followed by Vice President Richard Cousins. Georgia Mason moves to the side, and President Ryman takes her place. Vice President Cousins stands to his other side.]

PRESIDENT RYMAN:I am speaking now, not only to the citizens of the United States of America, but to the citizens of the planet Earth. Because Kellis-Amberlee is a global issue, not a national one, and the conspiracy in which I have been engaged over this past year is thus also global in its scope. Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that I have been held against my will, with my family as hostages to ensure my cooperation. The individuals responsible for this have a simple goal in mind: to continue to forward their control of the American public through manipulation of the Kellis-Amberlee virus.

I regret to state that, during my time in office, I have approved immoral, unethical, and illegal scientific experimentation, resulting in the murder of both American and international citizens. I have signed papers approving the weaponization of Kellis-Amberlee. I was present when the decision was made to release a modified strain of mosquito capable of carrying the Kellis-Amberlee virus into the sovereign nation of Cuba. The fact that I did these things under duress does not absolve me, or ameliorate the nature of my actions. I have betrayed my country. I have dishonored my office. I have betrayed myself.

Read the files accompanying this report. Read the comprehensive articles I am sure these and other reporters will shortly present to you. Realize that you have been betrayed. Realize that you have been misled. And heed the words of a very wise woman, who spoke from a place of genuine need when she addressed you a year ago. My name is Peter Ryman, and I am begging you.

Rise up while you can.

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Rise up while you can .

—GEORGIA MASON

It’s the oldest story in the world. Boy loves girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back thanks to the unethical behavior of megalomaniacal mad scientists who never met a corpse they wouldn’t try to resurrect. Anyone coming within a hundred yards of my happy ending had better pray that they’re immune to bullets .

—SHAUN MASON

We did the best we could with what we had, and when what we had wasn’t enough, we found ways to make it work. We told the truth, even when it hurt us, even when it killed us, even when it set the wolves at our doors. I can’t speak for the dead. But I think the living will agree that anything we did, we did because we felt we had to. History will judge us. The future will decide whether what we did was right, or wrong, or without meaning. In the here and now…

This is as close as we could get to an ending. The world goes on. Zombies or no zombies, political conspiracy or no political conspiracy, the world goes on.

I think I like it that way.

—From Living Dead Girl , the blog of Georgia Mason II, May 17, 2042.

Who wants to see me wrestle a zombie moose?

—From Hail to the King , the blog of Shaun Mason, May 17, 2042.

MAHIR: Forty-two

The phone rang at half-three in the morning, waking both Nan and Sanjukta from a sound sleep. Nandini glared as she levered herself from the bed and left the room, following our infant daughter’s wailing. I swore, rolling over and grabbing my cell off the bedside table, bringing it to my ear before I was done sitting up.

“This had best be bloody important, or I’m letting my wife give you what-for,” I snarled.

“Mr. Gowda, this is Christopher Rogers, from the All-Night News. I apologize if I woke you—I thought I had calculated the time difference between London and San Francisco correctly.”

Smug bastard. I could hear it in his voice, the vague self-congratulatory tone of a reporter who thinks he’s put his subject off balance. “How did you get this number?”

“Mr. Gowda, I have a few questions, if you don’t—”

“I bloody well do mind. This is an unlisted number, and I know what you’re calling about. You want to know where the Masons are, don’t you?”

Silence greeted my question. That was a sufficient answer in and of itself.