Feed

even through dark glasses. “You want the fun part?”

“Yes, Shaun,” I said. “I’ve been asleep for ten hours, and I want the fun part.”

“Fine. Here’s the fun part: Our deaths hit the wires at the same time.”

My eyes widened. “What?”

“We were all reported dead,” Shaun said. “Half the news sites had the story before anyone could contradict it, and half of them are still listing you as deceased.”

I looked to Rick, who nodded.

“Whoever called the CDC made sure the call was ‘accidentally’ made on a channel that several local news sites monitor for gossip,” he said. “We all got listed as dead before we even made it to Memphis. They printed a retraction about Shaun when he posted to complain about the CDC coffee, and about half the sites did the same for me when I threw up the DAR blurb.” He quirked a smile. “I’m not interesting enough to spread as quickly as a Mason.”

“And me?” I asked, too annoyed not to.

“Still dead,” said Rick. “They’ve got some great conspiracy theories going, too, about Shaun and me concealing your death until we can prove you weren’t doing something forbidden by your licensing.”

“Thus invalidating my life insurance,” I said, putting a hand over my face. “Is there any more good news?”

“Only Buffy made it to the Wall,” Shaun said. “She’s the only one whose death has actually appeared in the public CDC database.”

I bit back a groan. “How many people think we faked our own deaths to up ratings?”

“A lot,” Shaun said, voice going grim. “On the plus side, if we’d really been doing that, it would’ve worked. We gained another three points of market share while people waited for the grisly details to pop up.”

“And have they?”

“On us? No. On Buffy? Yeah. It’s all over the place. Somebody broke into our main camera upload and —”

“I get the picture. I’ll get our official report up tonight so we can put these damn hoax rumors to rest and let people know I’m still breathing. Buffy deserves better than to have her death tarred with some publicity stunt we didn’t pull.”

“How official is this official report going to be?” asked Rick.

“You mean, ‘am I going to include the call the CDC got?’” I asked. He nodded. So did I. “Yes, I am.”

“Is that—”

“Wise? Safe? A good idea? No, on all three counts, but I’m going to do it anyway.” I pulled up my e-mail and started scanning the list of senders, looking for Mahir’s name. “Somebody who’s depending on secrecy wants us out of the way. So screw ’em. We’re taking that secrecy away.”

“And when they start shooting?”

“Who says they’ve stopped?” Even with Buffy’s astonishingly well-constructed filters, the amount of spam that had managed to get through was daunting. I began deleting. “That reminds me. We need to hire a new head for the Fictionals.”

Rick shot me a sharp look. “Doesn’t that seem a little abrupt? Buffy just died.”

“Buffy’s death was abrupt; this is necessary. The Fictionals aren’t like the Newsies or the Irwins. They won’t keep working just because they don’t know how to hold still. They need management, or it turns into a million works in progress and nothing that actually progresses. Unless we want to start getting angry letters from people wanting to know where the next installment of some fifty-part serial romance is, we need a new division head.”

Shaun blinked. “Buffy didn’t name anyone?”

“Buffy thought she was immortal. Talk to Magdalene; even if she won’t do it, she can probably suggest somebody who will.” Suddenly tired again, I set my spam purge to run on auto and minimized the window, pulling up the staff LW&T directory. That archive contained a current copy of the last will and testament of every employee currently on the After the End Times payroll, including details on the dispensation of their intellectual property. Properly filed and witnessed wills are legally required for all businesses whose normal routine brings them into contact with federally established hazard zones, the infected, or members of the working press. Journalists: as dangerous as zombies under modern American law. According to the directory time stamps, Buffy’s file hadn’t been updated since we left California.

I entered my password to open the file. Both Shaun and I possess the legal authority to access all files stored on our servers, just in case of situations like this. The document flashed open. It was a read-only copy of the actual document, which was being held, according to the header information, by the Meissonier family lawyer back in Berkeley. For our purposes, it was more than sufficient.

Shaun slid out of his chair and stepped up behind me, resting a hand on my shoulder. Buffy left the bulk of her personal possessions to her family, her written works and literary estate to the site as a whole, and her nonfiction—which is to say, her personal files—to Shaun and me. We had the right to use her data however we saw fit. There was no mention of a successor, but that didn’t matter because that last rider told me everything we needed to know.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “She knew she was going to die over this. And she knew she was doing the wrong thing, even if she didn’t want to admit it to herself. She knew.”

“How can you say that?” asked Rick.

Shaun answered for me, saying, “She left us her personal files. Why would she do that if she didn’t know we’d need something that’s in them? Maybe she felt like she had to do this, but that doesn’t mean she managed to convince herself that it was right. George…”

“Rick, I need you to find a new head for the Fictionals.” I hit Print and closed the file. “That’s your assignment for right now. Well, that and the DAR report. Shaun, I’m going to need to do a news report on what happened, but—”

“But the bulk of it’s an Irwin thing. Got it.” Shaun squeezed my shoulder before returning to his own machine. “What about Buffy’s files? The server she told us to access?”

“I’d really like that camera footage Mahir has; I was hoping to get that out of the way first. But yeah, the files. I’ll head over there now.”

“George—”

“Just be quiet while I deal with this,” I said, almost more curtly than I’d meant to, and began to type.

After the End Times maintains two file servers for employee use. One, the so-called “public” server, is open to uploads and downloads by every blogger we employ, as well as every blogger even remotely affiliated with the site. If you do any work for us at all, we open an account for you on the public server, and those accounts are rarely revoked unless there’s active abuse. There’s just no point, especially since we have a tendency to reuse freelancers. Why burn goodwill on a server purge? More important, why waste time by forcing your IT person to set up the same accounts more than once? When we’re a little bigger—if we live that long—we’ll need to reconsider that policy, but it’s served us well so far.

The private server is a lot more locked down. There are presently seven people whose accounts include access to that server, and one of them is dead. Me, Mahir, and Rick from the Newsies; Buffy and Magdalene from the Fictionals; Shaun and Becks from the Irwins. That’s where we keep the important things, from private financial records to stories about the campaign that still need to have their facts verified. That server is as hack-proof as it can be because one unverified story leaked under my byline would be enough to seriously cripple, if not kill, the news section of our site.

The news is serious business. If you’re not willing to treat it that way, you shouldn’t be anywhere near it.

I opened an FTP window and fed in the address for our secure server. When it prompted me for a user name and password, I typed in soundingsea, followed by the password February-4 -29. Shaun and Rick abandoned their workstations and moved to stand behind me, watching as the screen flickered once, twice, and then rolled as a video player seized control of my machine. Tapping the Escape key did nothing to stop the program from opening, and so I settled back in my seat, comforted by the presence of my team. We weren’t much, and we were dwindling by the day, but the three of us were all that we had left.

The screen stopped rolling as the much-beloved face of Buffy Meissonier became clear. She was seated