had just reached the conclusion that the tunnel could hold somewhere around two hundred infected bodies, assuming they were all of average size, when I reached the door, swiped my residency card through the scanner, and was home.
The building consists of three floors and ten apartments: two on the first floor, four each on the second and third. My staff has three of the four third-floor apartments, and the fourth belongs to old Mrs. Hagar, who’s so deaf that she probably wouldn’t notice if we started holding weekly raves on the roof. Becks calls her “an old dear” and brings her cookies. In exchange, Mrs. Hagar no longer threatens to lob grenades at us every time we run into each other in the downstairs lobby. A few chocolate chips are a small price to pay to avoid getting vaporized while you’re picking up the mail.
The manager has one of the first-floor apartments. He’s almost never there, and we’re all pretty sure he has another residence somewhere outside of the city. Someplace safer. A lot of people think they’re safer in the country because there aren’t as many bodies capable of amplification. Not as many bodies means not as many guns, as George used to say. I’ll take my chances with the cities.
The other first-floor apartment is mine. It’s not much distance from the staff apartments, but it’s enough to let me feel like I have a little privacy. A little privacy can make all the difference in the world. I pressed my palm to the test pad for yet another blood test, unlocked the front door, and stepped inside, alone at last.
“My apologies.” Closing my eyes, I let my head tilt backward until it hit the door. “Apartment, give me lights in the living room, news scroll on mute on the main monitor, and prep the shower for a decontamination.”
“Acknowledged,” said the polite voice of the apartment’s computer system, following the word with a series of muted beeps as it activated the various requested utilities. I stayed where I was for a few more seconds, stretching out the moment. I could be anywhere in that moment. I could be in my apartment. Or I could be back in my bedroom in my parents’ house, the room that was connected to Georgia’s room, waiting for my turn at the shower. I could be anywhere.
I opened my eyes.
My apartment is never going to win any beautiful-home competitions. It consists of a living room full of boxes, computer equipment, and racks of weaponry; a bedroom full of boxes, computer equipment, and racks of weaponry; an office full of boxes, computer equipment, and racks of weaponry; and a bathroom where the floor space is almost completely consumed by a top-of-the-line shower and decontamination unit. No weaponry in there, at least—just ammunition. Bullets are waterproof enough these days that I could probably take them in the shower with me, if I were feeling particularly weird that day.
The air in the apartment always smells like stale pizza, gun oil, and bleach. Several people have said it doesn’t feel like anybody lives there, and what they don’t seem to understand is that I like it that way. As long as I’m not really living there, I never have to think about the fact that I’m living there alone.
It took me fifteen minutes to complete standard decontamination procedures and get myself into some clean clothes, leaving the old ones in a biohazard-secure bin for later sterilization. I checked the GPS readout on my watch. According to the van’s tracking coordinates, the rest of the team was just now reaching the guard station and getting their chance to check out Jimmy’s substandard taste in porn. Good. That meant I still had time to square myself away. Grabbing a clean jacket off a stack of survivalist magazines, I started for the door, swerving almost as an afterthought to pass through the kitchen and snag a Coke from the fridge.
“No problem,” I murmured, cracking open her soda and taking a long drink before heading toward the door to the roof-access stairs. In most buildings, tromping around on the roof is likely to get you shot. Just another advantage of living where I do: Mrs. Hagar can’t even hear us up there unless we’re setting off land mines, and we’ve done that only once, for quality control purposes.
There used to be a padlock on the door leading to the roof-access stairs. As if the infected were going to be mounting a top-down attack? That stopped happening when the mass outbreaks stopped driving the wounded to the rooftops to wait for rescue that never came. The manager periodically realizes that the lock is missing and replaces it, and someone on my staff comes along and cuts it off the next day. That’s the circle of life around here. Nothing stays locked away forever.
“It’s a depressing sort of day,” I said. George quieted, and I climbed the stairs in something that was chillingly close to solitude.
I don’t deal well with being alone. Maybe that’s why I decided to go crazy instead.
My crew’s been working on converting the roof to suit our needs since we took over the third floor. It’s one of those projects that’s never going to be finished; there’s something new every time I go up there. Dave has what he calls his “outdoor theater,” a little grouping of folding chairs and a collapsible movie screen under a pavilion he bought at the Wal-Mart in Martinez. He brings out a projector on warm nights and shows pre-Rising horror movies. I think he’s trying to lure Maggie out of her house and into the city by competing with her grindhouse parties, and if he keeps it up, he just may succeed.
Becks has a small firing range with targets designed for everything from basic handguns to her personal favorite weapon, the wrist-mounted crossbow. That girl reads too many comic books. Still, I have to say, the sight of a zombie’s head catching fire after it gets hit with one of her trick arrows isn’t something I’m going to forget anytime soon. Neither are our viewers.
And me? I have a corner of the roof where no one does anything else, where I can go and sit and drink a Coke and watch the clouds chase themselves across the sky, and where I don’t have to be the boss for a little while. I can just be me. When I go up there, my staff’ll move heaven and earth to keep anyone from following me, because they know I need the escape. They’ve mostly gotten over treating me like I’m made of eggshells, but there are exceptions.
A pigeon was sitting on the edge of the roof when I walked up, cooing contentedly to itself. It looked at me suspiciously, but waited to see what I would do before going to the trouble of flying away. When I just sat, it resumed its cocky back-and-forth strut without a second thought.
“Must be nice to be a pigeon,” I said, taking another swig of Coke and making a face. “You sure can’t sell you on the idea of coffee? Nice, bitter, hot coffee that doesn’t taste like going down on a hooker from Candyland?”
“Yeah, George, but you didn’t live inside my head before. You can use this stuff to clean car batteries.
“Yeah, George,” I said, taking one last drink from the can of Coke before tossing it, still half full, off the edge of the roof. It sprayed soda in an impressively large arc as it fell. I leaned backward against the building’s air- ventilation shaft and closed my eyes. “I remember.”
As I’ve mentioned several times, I have a sister. An adopted sister, to be precise, fished out of the state system by Michael and Stacy Mason after the Rising left us both without our biological parents. That was George. She’s the reason I got into blogging, and the reason we wound up running a site of our own. She was never meant to be one of nature’s followers. And technically, I guess the tense is wrong there, because it ought to be “I
It would be a lot more accurate to say that she died because I shot her in the spine, spraying blood all over the interior of the van that we were locked in at the time. It might be even more accurate to say that she died because some bastard shot a needle full of the live Kellis-Amberlee virus into her arm. But the CDC says she died of Kellis-Amberlee, and hey, we don’t argue with the CDC, right?
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.
