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“So we can all come together to help?” asked Rick.

“So the rest of us have time to get away,” I said. “Cameras on, people, and look alive; this is not a drill. This is the news.”

Splitting up made the most sense: All four barns were involved in the outbreak, but it started in a single place. We’d search the other areas individually, get some good atmospheric shots for background, and then get back together where we might actually find something. That didn’t stop my heart from racing as I opened the door to the foaling barn feed room and stepped inside. The barn was dark. I removed my glasses and the burning in my eyes stopped almost immediately, pupils abandoning their futile efforts to contract and relaxing into full expansion as I walked into the main barn. This unvaried twilight was the sort of light they’re best suited to. I saw in it the way the infected did, and like the infected, I saw everything.

The ranch was clearly a state-of-the-art establishment, on top of all the latest developments in animal husbandry. The stalls were spacious, designed to maximize the comfort of all parties involved. It was actually possible to ignore the federally mandated hazmat suits hanging from one wall and the yellow-and-red biohazard bins that marked the barn’s four corners.

The smell of bleach was harder to ignore, and once I admitted it was there, the rest came clear. The stains on the walls that weren’t paint or spilled feed. The way the straw in the stalls was matted down with the remains of some thick, tacky liquid. They hadn’t finished the biohazard cleanup in here yet. That’s standard operating procedure. First you remove all infected bodies and any… chunks… that were left behind. Then you seal the building as well as you can and fill the air with bleach. Finally, you set off the aerosol disinfectants and formalin bombs. Formalin is a formaldehyde-based compound that can kill almost anything, including the mobile infected, and standard decontamination procedures call for five waves of the stuff, releasing a new batch as the previous one is depleted by the organic materials around you. It’s only after the area has been bleached so thoroughly that anything living is pretty much toast and has been allowed to sit long enough for all fluids to dry to a splatter-free state that it’s considered safe to start removing and incinerating potentially infected materials, like the straw in the stalls.

My shoulder cam was already recording. I activated three more cameras, one attached to my bag, one at my hip, and one concealed in my barrette, and began to make my first slow turn, looking around the barn.

A pile of dead cats was under the hayloft, their multicolored bodies twisted from the brutal abdominal hemorrhaging that killed them. They’d survived the outbreak and the chaos that followed, but they couldn’t outrun the formalin. I spent several seconds standing there, looking at them. They looked so small and harmless… and they were. Cats don’t reach the Mason barrier. They weigh less than forty pounds. Kellis-Amberlee isn’t interested in them, and they don’t reanimate. For cats, dead is still dead.

I made it almost to the wall before I threw up.

It was easier once the initial wash of disgust was out of my system. My first pass brought up nothing. There were no signs that anything unusual had happened; it was just the site of an outbreak, tragic and horrible, but not special. Here was the place where one of the infected horses kicked its way inside, knocking the barn’s sliding door off its rails. It would have hit the nursing mares in the first three stalls without slowing down, and the humans on duty were probably totally undefended. They had no idea anything was wrong until it was too late. If they were lucky, they died fast, either bleeding out or ripped to pieces before the virus had a chance to take hold and start rewriting them into another iteration of it. That was sadly unlikely. A fresh mob wants to infect, not devour.

It was easy to picture infected horses rampaging through the place, biting everything in sight and rushing on to bite still more. It was a nightmare image; it’s how we almost lost the world at the beginning of the century, and it was probably accurate. We know how this sort of outbreak goes, even though we wish we didn’t. The virus is dependable, not creative.

It took me twenty minutes to sweep the barn. By the time I was done, I was in such a hurry to get out of there that I forgot to put my sunglasses on before rushing out into the sunlight. The sudden glare was more than I could take. I staggered and caught myself against the barn door, eyes squinting shut.

“This is how we can tell she hasn’t converted,” Shaun commented to my left. “Real zombies don’t get flash- blinded by sunlight when they forget their sunglasses.”

“Fuck you, too,” I muttered, as Shaun got his arm around me and hoisted me away from the barn.

“You kiss our mother with that mouth?”

“Our mother and you both, dickhead. Give me my sunglasses.”

“Which are where?”

“Left-hand vest pocket.”

“I’ve got it.” That was Rick’s voice, and it was Rick who pressed my glasses into my hand.

“Thanks.” I snapped the glasses open, continuing to lean against Shaun as I pushed them on. Both their cameras were catching this. I really didn’t care. “Either of you find anything?”

“Not me,” said Shaun. For some reason, he sounded like he was… laughing? His barn couldn’t have been any better than mine; if anything, it should have been worse, since more of the medical staff would have been on duty overnight. “Looks like Rick’s the only one who got lucky.”

“I’ve always had a way with the ladies,” said Rick. Unlike Shaun and his evident amusement, Rick sounded almost embarrassed.

I clearly needed to see whatever was going on to understand it. Wary of the light, I opened first one eye, and then the other. There was Shaun, his arm still around me, holding me upright as best he could; my eyes are a lot of why I’m so leery to go into live field situations, and no one understands that better than him. And there was Rick, standing just a few feet away, his expression a mixture of anxiety and confusion.

Rick’s shoulder bag was moving.

I jerked upright, demanding, “What is that?”

“ ‘That’ would be Rick’s new lady friend,” Shaun said, snickering. “He’s irresistible, George. You should’ve seen it. He came out of that barn and she was all over him. I’ve seen clingy girlfriends before, but this one doesn’t just take the cake, she takes the entire bakery.”

I eyed the junior member of my reporting staff warily. “Rick?”

“He’s right. She latched on once she realized I was in the barn, not aiming a bleach gun at her face, and not planning to hurt her.” Rick opened the flap of his shoulder bag. A narrow orange-and-white head poked out, yellow eyes regarding me warily. I blinked. The head withdrew.

“It’s a cat.”

“All the others were dead,” Rick said, closing his bag. “She must have managed to burrow farther under the hay than they did. Or maybe she was outside when the cleaners came through and somehow got trapped inside when they left.”

“A cat.”

“She tests clean, George,” Shaun said.

Mammals under forty pounds can’t convert—they lack some crucial balance between body and brain mass— but they can sometimes carry the live virus, at least until it kills them. It’s rare. Most of the time, they just shrug it off and carry on, uninfected. In the field, “rare” isn’t something you can gamble on.

“How many blood tests?” I asked, looking toward Shaun.

“Four. One for each paw.” He held up his arms, anticipating my next question. “No, I didn’t get scratched, and yes, I’m sure the kitty’s clean.”

“And he already yelled at me for picking her up before I was certain,” Rick said.

“Don’t think that means I’m not planning to yell at you, too.” I pushed away from Shaun. “I’ll just do it when we’re back inside. We have three clean barns and one live cat, gentlemen. Are we ready to proceed?”

“I’ve got nothing better planned for the afternoon,” Shaun said, his tone still cheerful. This was Irwin territory. Very little makes him happier. “Cameras on?”

“Rolling.” I glanced at my watch. “We have clean feeds and more than enough memory. You going to grandstand?”

“Do I ever not?” Shaun backed away until he was standing at the proper angle in front of the remaining barn, backlit by the afternoon sun. I had to admire his flare for the theatrics. We’d do two reports on the day’s events— one for his side of the site, playing up the dangers of entering an area that had suffered such a recent outbreak, and one for my side, talking about the human aspects of the tragedy. My opening spiel could be recorded later, when I