If I ever find out who fired that needle, their official cause of death is going to be Shaun Mason. That’s the thought that keeps me going. I sleepwalk through my job, I pretend I’m administrating our site while Mahir does all the work, I delete calls from my crazy parents, I hold conversations with my dead sister, and I look for the people who had her killed. I’ll find them someday. All I have to do is wait.
See, when the zombies came, it was an accident. Researchers in two totally unconnected facilities were working on two totally unrelated projects that involved genetically engineering “helper viruses”—new diseases that were supposed to make life better for the whole damn world. One of them was based on a really fucking nasty hemorrhagic fever called Marburg, and was designed to cure cancer. The other was based on a strain of the common cold, and was supposed to get rid of colds forever. Enter Marburg Amberlee and the Kellis Flu, two beautiful pieces of viral engineering that did exactly what they were supposed to do. No more cancer, no more colds, just happy people all over the world celebrating the dawn of a new age. Only it turns out the viruses were just like the people who made them in at least one sense, because when they met, through the natural chain of transmission and infection, it was basically love at first sight. First wn of a love, then comes marriage, then comes the hybrid viral strain known as “Kellis-Amberlee.” It swept the planet before anyone knew what was happening.
And then people started dying and getting back up to munch on their relatives, and we figured out what was happening damn fast. People fought back, because people always fight back, and we had one advantage the characters in zombie movies never seem to have: See, we’d seen all the zombie movies, and we knew what was likely to be a bad idea. George always said the first summer of the Rising was possibly the best example of human nobility that history had to offer, because for just a few months, before the accusations started flying and the fingers started pointing, we really were one people, united against one enemy. And we fought. We fought for the right to live, and in the end, we won.
Sort of, anyway. Look at the movies from before the Rising and you’ll see a whole different world from the one that we live in; a world where people go outside just because they think that, hey, going outside might be fun. They don’t file paperwork or put on body armor. They just go. A world where people travel on a whim, where they swim with dolphins and own dogs and do a hundred thousand things that are basically unthinkable today. It seems like paradise from where I’m sitting, a generation and a couple of decades away. If you ask me, that world was the single biggest casualty of the Rising.
The Rising didn’t just showcase the nobler side of human nature; it was a war, and as long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers. There’s always somebody willing and waiting to make a buck off somebody else’s pain. I’m not sure most of them meant to do what they did—I’m sure most of them really meant to do the right thing—but somehow, an entire world full of people who had managed to take arms against an enemy that was straight out of a Romero flick was convinced that what they really wanted was fear. They put down their guns, they locked their doors, they went inside, and they were grateful for all the things that they were scared of.
I used to think the Irwins were great warriors in the ongoing fight to live a normal life in our post-Rising world. Now I’m starting to suspect that we’re just tools of some greater plan. After all, why leave your house when you can live vicariously through a dumb kid willing to risk his life for your amusement? Bread and circuses. That’s all we are.
You’re getting bitter, George observed.
“I got reason,” I said.
Bread and circuses is what got George killed. We—her, me, and our friend Georgette “Buffy” Meissonier—were the original After the End Times news team, and we got hired by President Ryman to follow his campaign. He was Senator Ryman then, and I was a dumb, optimistic Irwin who believed… well, a lot of things, but mostly, that I’d die before George did. I was never going to be the one who buried her, and I was sorry that she was going to bury me, but we’d both made our peace with that years before. We were chasing the news, and we were chasing the truth, and we were on the adventure of our lives. Literally, for George and Buffy, because neither one of them walked away from it. Turns out there were people who didn’t want Ryman to make it to the White House. Oh, they were happy to have him elected. They just didn’t want him to be president. They were backing their own candidate.