circumstances. “Here’s the truth: I’m finished. Now give me some guns. Let me buy you a little more time. Let me do something. Please.”
The raw need in my voice, heavy with all the things I didn’t have a way of saying, must have finally gotten through to her. George sniffled as she nodded, once. Then she disappeared into the van, reappearing a few seconds later with a shotgun and a box of ammunition. She tossed them to me. I caught the gun, and allowed the box to land on the pavement at my feet.
“Shaun—”
“I love you, Georgia Mason. Now shut that door.”
She looked at me. Rick was still there, but he didn’t matter anymore; all that mattered was Georgia, and me, and the distance between us, which we would never be able to close again. Those bastards had taken her away from me with a single needle, and nothing was ever going to give her back. I smiled at her, trying to keep my chin up. If anyone needed me to be brave, it was Georgia.
Then I turned my back on her.
The sound of moaning was starting in the distance, as the people who’d been caught in the blast from our exploding trailers got up and discovered that they were no longer among the living. I’d be with them, soon enough. For now, I had a line to hold, and George had work to do.
“I love you, too.” Her words were barely loud enough to hear over the rest of the surrounding noise. Maybe I imagined them. If I did, I didn’t care; they were all I needed to take with me into the dark.
The van doors slammed shut. I racked the slide on my shotgun, and waited for the dead to come to me.
If you want an easy job—if you want the sort of job where you never have to bury somebody that you care about—I recommend you pursue a career in whatever strikes your fancy… just so long as it isn’t the news.
Two: Georgia
Rick was the one who actually closed the van doors. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move. Shaun’s back was to me, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to leave a story untold—I wanted to jump down and run to him, like one of those brainless heroines in Buffy’s stories, and go with him into the dark.
If she were still alive, I’d have to apologize to her for calling those characters unrealistic, I thought distantly. I didn’t move as Rick flipped the dead-bolts on the rear doors, and then pushed past me to do the same on the movable wall that shut the driver’s cabin off from the rest of the vehicle. With those latches thrown, we were effectively cut off from the rest of the world. Nothing could get in, and unless we opened the locks, nothing could get out. Barring heavy explosives, we were as safe as it was possible to be.
We were safe, and Shaun was outside with the dead, guaranteeing himself a place on the Wall. That was what he’d always claimed to want. I looked at the closed doors, and wondered whether he’d finally changed his mind.
“Georgia?” Rick’s voice intruded on my thoughts. I turned to face him, blinking as I realized that he was still there. Somehow, I’d already been starting to think of myself as alone. “When was the last security sweep?”
“I… I don’t know.” I took a seat at the main console, glad to be doing something as I brought up the security recordings for the last day. The scanner came up clean, showing no attempted break-ins or unauthorized contact with the van’s exterior during that time. “It looks like Shaun ran one while you were at the event. I don’t know whether it was successful or not.”
“He didn’t start swearing.”
“So we’re probably clean.” My fingers itched to turn on the exterior cameras. I wanted to see Shaun one more time.
I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him convert. I wanted to remember him as Shaun, not as one more member of a mob of shambling undead. I put my hands in my lap, folding them tightly.
I sat there in silence for several minutes, waiting for something to change. It was Rick who forced my hand, asking the one question I most needed to hear:
“What do we do now?”
We. Me and Rick; we were what was left. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat, suddenly tired. “I don’t know what you do next, Rick. I wish I did. Maybe you should write something, or call Steve for an evac, or… I don’t know. But I need to post. I need to…”
I needed to write down what happened. I needed to make sure people understood what this cost us, what we paid, what we thought we would be paying. This wasn’t what we signed up for, but it was what we died for. It was what we felt we had to do.
We never asked to be heroes. I certainly didn’t. No one ever gave me the opportunity to say I didn’t want this, that I was sorry, but they had the wrong girl; I just wanted to take Shaun and go home. No. Wait. That wasn’t quite true.
I opened my eyes, sitting up, and pulled the keyboard toward me as Rick looked on.
I wanted to tell the truth, and let people draw their own conclusions from there. I wanted people to think, and to know, and to understand. I just wanted to tell the truth. In the van that had carried us across a country, and through the last months of my brother’s life, with all hell ready to break loose outside, my hands came down, and I wrote.
Was it worth it?
God, I hope so.
My name is Georgia Mason. For the past several years, I’ve been providing one of the world’s many windows onto the news, chronicling current events and attempt-ing, in my own small way, to offer context and perspective. I have always pursued the truth above all other things, even when the truth came at the cost of my own comfort and well-being. It seems, now, that I pursued the truth even when it would mean the loss of everything I held dear, although I was unaware of it at the time.
My name is Georgia Mason. I was adopted as an infant to be raised as part of a set, alongside Shaun Mason, a fellow orphan of the Rising. He was my best friend. He was my brother. He was quite possibly the only person I have ever loved in any meaningful way.
No: that’s wishy-washy and dishonest. He was the only person I have ever loved in any meaningful way. He was my family. He was my home. And right now, he is standing outside the van where I am writing this, waiting for the virus that is in the process of taking over his cells to finish its work. I tell you this so you’ll understand that this isn’t a hoax, this isn’t some sophomoric attempt to increase ratings or site traffic. This is real. Everything I am about to tell you is the truth. Believe me, understand, and act, before it is too late.
If you’re viewing this from the main page of After the End Times, you’ll see a download link labeled “Campaign_Notes.zip” on the left-hand side of your screen. Possession of the documents behind that link may be considered treason by the government of the United States of America. Please. Click. Download. Read. Repost to any forum you can, any mes-sage board or photo sharing site or blog that you can reach. The data contained in
