?See you tomorrow!? she said, and waved to Shaun through the van?s front window before she turned to head for the guard station where she?d spend the next five minutes being checked for contamination. Shaun waved back and restarted the engine, backing the van away from the gate. That was my cue. I flashed a thumbs-up to show that I was good to go as I kicked my bike into a turn, leading the way back to Telegraph Avenue and into the tangled warren of suburban streets surrounding our house.
Like Santa Cruz, Berkeley is a college town, and we got swarmed during the Rising. Kellis-Amberlee hit the dorms, incubated, and exploded outward in an epidemic pattern that took practically everyone by surprise. ?Practically? is the important word there. By the time the infection hit Berkeley, the first posts about activity in schools across the country were starting to show up online, and we had an advantage most college towns didn?t: We started with more than our fair share of crazy people.
See, Berkeley has always drawn the nuts and flakes of the academic world. That?s what happens when you have a university that offers degrees in both computer science and parapsychology. It was a city primed to believe any weird thing that came across the wire, and when all those arguably crazy people started hearing rumors about the dead rising from their graves, they didn?t dismiss them. They began gathering weapons, watching the streets for strange behavior and signs of sickness, and generally behaving like folks who?d actually seen a George Romero movie. Not everyone believed what they heard? but some did, and that turned out to be enough.
That doesn?t mean we didn?t suffer when the first major waves of infection hit. More than half the population of Berkeley died over the course of six long days and nights, including the biological son of our adoptive parents, Phillip Mason, who was barely six years old. The things that happened here weren?t nice, and they weren?t pretty, but unlike many towns that started out with similar conditions?a large homeless population, a major school, a lot of dark, narrow, one-way streets?Berkeley survived.
Shaun and I grew up in a house that used to belong to the university. It?s located in an area that was judged ?impossible to secure? when the government inspectors started getting their act together, and as a result, it was sold off to help fund the rebuilding of the main campus. The Masons didn?t want to live in the house where their son had died, and the security rating of the neighborhood meant they were able to get the property for a song. They finalized the adoptions for the two of us the day before they moved in, an ?everything is normal? ratings stunt that eventually left them with a big house in the scary suburbs, two kids, and no idea what to do. So they did what came naturally: They gave more interviews, they wrote more articles, and they chased the numbers.
From the outside, they looked devoted to giving us the sort of ?normal? childhood they remembered having. They never moved us to a gated neighborhood, they let us have pets that lacked sufficient mass for reanimation, and when public schools started requiring mandatory blood tests three times a day, they had us enrolled in a private school before the end of the week. There?s a semifamous interview Dad gave right after that transfer, where he said they were doing their best to make us ?citizens of the world instead of citizens of fear.? Pretty words, especially coming from a man who regarded his kids as a convenient way to stay on top of the news feeds. Numbers start slipping? Go for a field trip to a zoo. That?ll get you right back to the top.
There were a few changes they couldn?t avoid, thanks to the government?s anti-infection legislation?blood tests and psych tests and all that fun stuff?but they did their best, and I?ll give them this much: A lot of the things they did for us weren?t cheap. They paid for the right to raise us the way that they did. Entertainment equipment, internal security, even home medical centers can be bought for practically nothing. Anything that lets you outside, from vehicles to gasoline to gear that doesn?t cut you off completely from the natural world? that?s where things get expensive. The Masons paid in everything but blood to keep us in a place where there were blue skies and open spaces, and I?m thankful, even if it was always about ratings and a boy we never knew.
The garage door slid open as we pulled into the driveway, registering the sensors Shaun and I wear around our neck. In case of viral amplification, the garage becomes the zombie equivalent of a roach motel: Our sensors get us in, but only a clean blood test and a successful voice check gets us out. If we ever fail those tests, we?ll be incinerated by the house defense system before we can do any further damage.