By the time Buffy picked up her phone, I had actually managed to find a dark gray tweed skirt that not only fit, but that I was willing to wear in a public place. I was digging for a top when the line clicked, and she said, peevishly, “I was writing.”
“You’re always writing, unless you’re reading, screwing with something mechanical, or masturbating,” I replied. “Are you wearing clothes?”
“Currently,” she said, irritation fading into confusion. “Georgia, is that you?”
“It ain’t Shaun.” I pulled on a white button-down shirt, jamming the hem under the waistband of my skirt. “We’ll be there to pick you up in fifteen. ‘We’ being me, Shaun, and the ’rents. They’re taking the whole crew to dinner. It’s just them trying to piggy-back on our publicity for some rating points, but right now, failing to care.”
Buffy isn’t as slow on the uptake as she sometimes seems. Her voice suddenly tight with suppressed excitement, she asked, “Did we get it?”
“We got it,” I confirmed. Her ear-splitting shriek of joy was enough to make me wince, even after it had been reduced by the phone’s volume filters. Smiling, I pulled a crumpled black blazer out of my drawer and shrugged it on before grabbing a fresh pair of sunglasses from the stack on the dresser. “So we’re picking you up in fifteen. Deal?”
“Yes! Yes, yes, deal, hallelujah, yes!” she babbled. “I have to change! And tell my roommates! And change! And see you! Bye!”
There was another click. My phone announced, “The call has been terminated. Would you like to place another call?”
“No, I’m good,” I said.
“The call has been terminated,” the phone repeated. “Would you like—”
I sighed. “No, thank you. Disconnect.” The phone beeped and turned itself off. With the strides they’ve been making in voice-recognition software, you’d think they could teach the stuff to acknowledge colloquial English. One step at a time, I suppose.
Mom, Dad, and Shaun were in the living room when I came breezing down the stairs, shoving my handheld MP3 recorder into the loop at my belt. The backup recorder in my watch has a recording capacity of only thirty megabytes, and that’s barely enough for a good interview. My handheld can hold up to five terabytes. If I need more than that before I can get to a server to dump the contents, I’d better be bucking for a Pulitzer.
Mom was wearing her best green dress, the one that appears in all her publicity shots, and Dad was in his usual professorial ensemble—tweed jacket, white shirt, khaki slacks. Put them next to Shaun, who was wearing a button-down shirt with his customary cargo pants, and they looked just like the last family publicity picture, even down to Mom’s overstuffed handbag with all the guns inside it. She takes advantage of her A-5 blogging license in ways that boggle the mind, but it’s the government’s fault for leaving the loopholes there. If they want to give anybody with a journalist’s license ranked Class A-7 or above the right to carry concealed weapons when entering any zone that’s had a breakout within the last ten years, that’s their problem. At least Mom’s responsible about it. She always secures the safety on any gun that she’s planning to take into a restaurant.
“Buffy’s going to be ready in fifteen,” I said, pushing my sunglasses more solidly up the bridge of my nose. Some of the newer models have magnetic clamps instead of earpieces. They won’t come off without someone intentionally disengaging them. I would have been tempted to invest in a pair if they weren’t expensive enough to require decontamination and reuse.
“The sun’s going down; you could wear your contacts,” Dad said, sounding amused. He’s good at sounding amused. He’s been sounding professionally amused since before the Rising, back when he used his campus webcast to keep biology students around the Berkeley area paying attention and doing their homework. Eventually, that same webcast let him coordinate pockets of survivors, moving them from place to place while reporting on the movement of the local zombie mobs. A lot of people owe their lives to that warm, professional-sounding voice. He could’ve become a news anchor with any network in the world after the dust cleared. He stayed at Berkeley instead, and became one of the pioneers of the evolving blogger society.
“I could also stick a fork in my eye, but where would be the fun in that?” I walked over to Shaun, offering a thin smile. He studied my skirt and then flashed me a thumbs-up sign. I had passed the all-judging court of my brother’s fashion sense, which, cargo pants aside, is more advanced than mine will ever be.
“I called Bronson’s. They have a table for us on the patio,” Mom said, smiling beatifically. “It’s a beautiful night. We should be able to see the entire city.”
Shaun glanced at me, murmuring, “We let Mom pick the restaurant.”
I smirked. “I can see that.”
Bronson’s is the last open-air restaurant in Berkeley. More, they’re the last open-air restaurant in the entire Bay Area to be located on a hillside and surrounded by trees. Eating there is what I imagine it was like to go out to dinner before the constant threat of the infected drove most people away from the wilderness. The entire place is considered a Level 6 hazard zone. You can’t even get in without a basic field license, and they require blood tests before they let you leave. Not that there’s any real danger: It’s surrounded by an electric fence too high for the local deer to jump over, and floodlights click on if anything larger than a rabbit moves in the woods. The only serious threat comes from the chance that an abnormally large raccoon might go into conversion, make it over the fence before it lost the coordination to climb trees, and drop down inside. That’s never happened.
Not that this stops Mom from hoping to be there when it near-inevitably does. She was one of the first true Irwins, and old habits die hard, when they die at all. Shouldering her purse, she gave me a disapproving look. “Could you at least pretend to comb your hair?” she asked. “It looks like you have a hedgehog nesting on your head.”
“That’s the look I was going for,” I said. Mom is blessed with sleek, well-behaved ash blonde hair that started silvering gracefully when Shaun and I were ten. Dad has practically no hair left, but when he had it, it was a muted Irish red. I, on the other hand, have thick, dark brown hair that comes in two settings: long enough to tangle, and short enough to look like I haven’t brushed it in years. I prefer the short version.
Shaun’s hair is a little lighter than mine, but still brown, and when he keeps it short, no one can tell that his is straight and mine wants to curl. It helps us get away with just saying we’re twins, rather than going into the whole messy explanation.
Mom sighed. “You two realize the odds are good that someone already knows you got the assignment, and you’re going to get swarmed tonight, yes?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I said. “Someone” probably received a quick phone call from one or both of our parents, and “someone” was probably already waiting at the restaurant. We grew up with the ratings game.
“Looking forward to it,” said Shaun. He’s better at playing nice with our parents than I am. “Every site that runs my picture tonight is five more foxy ladies around the country realizing that they want to hit the road with me.”
“Pig,” I said, and punched him in the arm.
“Oink,” he said. “It’s all right, we know the drill. Smile pretty for the cameras, show off my scars, let George and Dad look wise and trustworthy, pose for anyone who asks, and don’t try to answer any questions with actual content.”
“Whereas I don’t smile unless forced, stay behind my sunglasses, and make a point of how incisive and hard-hitting every report I approve for release is going to be,” I said, dryly. “We let Buffy babble to her heart’s content about the poetic potential of traveling around the country with a bunch of political yahoos who think we’re idiots.”
“And we make the front page of every alpha site in the country, and our ratings go up nine points overnight,” Shaun said.
“Thus allowing us to announce the formation of our own site early next week, just before heading out on the campaign trail.” I slid my sunglasses down my nose, ignoring the way the light stung as I offered a brief smile. “We’ve thought about this as much as you have.”
“Maybe more,” Shaun added.
Dad laughed. “Face it, Stacy, they’ve got it covered. Kids, just in case there isn’t another chance for me to tell you this, your mother and I are very proud of you. Very proud of you, indeed.”
Liar. “We’re pretty proud of us, too,” I said.
“Well, then,” Shaun said, clapping his hands together. “This is touching and all, but come on—let’s go eat.”
