Deadline

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I am honored to dedicate this book to Brooke Amber Lunderville and Rae Hanson.

The Rising would have been very different without them.

O
ur story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiot—in this case, Rebecca Atherton, head of the After the End Times Irwins, winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undead—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens. Because, hey, there’s always the chance that this time, maybe things will go differently. I know I always thought it would be different for me, back when I was the one doing the poking. George always told me I was an idiot, but I had faith.

Too bad George was right.

At least Becks was being smart about her stupidity and was using a crowbar to poke the zombie, which greatly improved her chances of survival. She’d managed to sink the clawed end under the zombie’s collarbone, which was really a pretty effective defensive measure. The zombie would eventually realize that it couldn’t move forward. When that happened, it would pull away, either yanking the crowbar out of her hands or dislocating its own collarbone, and then it would try coming at
her from another angle. Given the intelligence of your average zombie, I figured she had about an hour before she really needed to be concerned. Plenty of time. It was a thrilling scene. Woman versus zombie, locked in a visceral conflict that’s basically ground into our cultural DNA by this point. And I didn’t give a damn.

The guy next to her looked a whole lot less sanguine about the situation, maybe because he’d never been that close to a zombie before. The latest literature says we’re supposed to call them “post-Kellis-Amberlee amplification manifestation syndrome humans,” but fuck that. If they really wanted some fancy new term for “zombie” to catch on, they should have made it easy to shout at the top of your lungs, or at least made sure it formed a catchy acronym. They’re zombies. They’re brainless meat puppets controlled by a virus and driven by the endless need to spread their infection. All the fancy names in the world won’t change that.

Anyway, Alaric Kwong—the dude trying not to toss his cookies all over Becks’s dead friend—had never been a field-situation kind of a guy. He was a natural Newsie, one of those people who are most comfortable when they’re sitting somewhere far away from the action, talking about cause and motivation. Unfortunately for him, he’d finally decided that he wanted to go after some bigger stories, and that meant he needed to test for his Class A journalism license. To get your Class A, you have to prove you can handle life in the field. Becks had ben trying to help him for almost a week, and I was rapidly coming to think that it was hopeless. He was destined for a life of sitting around the office compiling reports from people who had the balls to pass their exams.

You’re being hard on him,
Georgia chided.

“I’m being realistic,” I muttered.

“Shaun?” Dave looked up from his screen, squinting as he turned in my direction. “Did you say something?”

“Not a thing.” I shook my head, reaching for my half-empty Coke. “Five gets you ten he fails his practicals again.”

“No bet,” said Dave. “He’s gonna pass this time.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why are you so sure?”

“Becks is out there with him. He wants to impress her.”

“Does he now?” I returned my attention to the screen, more interested now. “Think she likes him back? It’d explain why she keeps wearing skirts to the office…”

“Maybe,” said Dave, judiciously.

On the screen, Becks was trying to get Alaric to take the crowbar and have his own shot at holding off the zombie. No big deal, especially for someone as seasoned as Becks. At least, it wouldn’t have been a big deal if there hadn’t been six more infected lurching into view on the left-hand monitor. I flipped a switch to turn on the sound. Not a thing. They weren’t moaning.

“… the fuck?” I murmured. Flipping another switch to turn on the two-way intercom, I said, “Becks, check your perimeter.”

“What are you talking about?” She turned to scan her surroundings, raising one hand to shield her eyes. “Our perimeter is—” Catching sight of the infected lurching closer by the second, she froze, eyes going wide. “Oh,
fuck
me.”

“Maybe later,” I said, standing. “Keep Alaric alive. I’m heading out to assist with evac.”

“Empty promises,” she muttered, barely audible. “Alaric! Behind me,
now
!”

I heard him swearing in surprise. The sharp report of Becks shooting their captive zombie followed immediately after. The more zombies you have in an area, the more intelligent they seem to get. If Becks and Alaric wanted to get out of there alive, they needed to reduce the number of infected as much as possible. I didn’t see her make the shot; I was already heading for the door, grabbing my rifle from the rack as I passed it.

Dave half-stood, asking, “Should I…?”

“Negative. Stay here, get the equipment secured, and get ready to drive like hell.”

“Check,” he said, scrambling from his seat toward the front of the van. I didn’t really pay attention to that, either; I was busy kicking open the doors and stepping out into the blazing light of the afternoon.

When you’re going to play with dead things, do it during the daylight. They don’t see as well in bright light as humans do, and they don’t hide as well when they don’t have the shadows helping them. More important, the footage will be better. If you’re gonna die, make sure you do it on camera.

The GPS tracker in my watch showed Becks and Alaric remaining in a stationary position roughly two miles away. Two miles is the federally mandated minimum distance between an intentional zombie encounter and a licensed traveling safe zone, such as our van. Not that the infected would avoid coming within two miles out of some sort of respect for the law; we just aren’t allowed to lure them any closer than that. I did some quick mental math. If they’d already attracted a group of six, and the infected weren’t moaning yet, that implied that we had enough zombies in the immediate vicinity to form a thinking mob. Not good.

“Right,” I said, and swung myself into the driver’s
seat of Dave’s Jeep. The keys were already in the ignition.

Unlike most field vehicles, Dave’s Jeep has no armor to speak of, unless you count the run-flat tires and the titanium-reinforced frame. What it has is speed—and lots of it. The thing has been stripped down to the bare minimum, rebuilt, and stripped down again so many times that I don’t think there’s a single piece left that conforms to factory standards. It offers about as much protection during an attack of the infected as a wet paper bag. A very fast wet paper bag. It’s evac only in hostile territory, and we haven’t lost a man yet while we were using it.

I braced my rifle between the seats and hit the gas.

Large swaths of California were effectively abandoned after the Rising, for one reason or another. “Difficult to secure” was one; “hostile terrain giving the advantage to the enemy” was another. My personal favorite applied to the small, unincorporated community of Birds Landing, in Solano County: “Nobody cared enough to bother.” They had a population of less than two hundred pre-Rising, and there were no survivors. When the federal government needed to appoint funds for cleanup and security, there was nobody to argue in favor of cleaning the place out. They still get the standard patrols, just because letting the zombies mob is in nobody’s best interests, but for the most part, Birds Landing has been left to the dead.