San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats
Date: 2012-07-11 07:02:41+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Horror; Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Action & Adventure; Novella; Fantasy; Post Apocalyptic; Zombies; Short Stories; Young Adult; Dystopia
Description: A Newflesh novella from the New York Times bestselling author that brought you Feed, Mira Grant. It was the summer of 2014, and the true horrors of the Rising were only just beginning to reveal themselves. Fans from all over the world gathered in San Diego, California for the annual comic book and media convention, planning to forget about the troubling rumors of new diseases and walking dead by immersing themselves in a familiar environment. Over the course of five grueling days and nights, it became clear that the news was very close to home. . . and that most of the people who picked up the
Publisher: Orbit

SAN DIEGO 2014:

THE LAST STAND OF THE CALIFORNIA BROWNCOATS

MIRA GRANT

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www.orbitshortfiction.com

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If you are reading this, it is dedicated to you.

This world, and this war, has always been yours.

Prologue: Chasing the Story

The Rising is not a single narrative; there is no one true story that unifies that entire bloody summer, no one event which exemplifies the human experience. It is a piece of history like any other, a tapestry of lives which, viewed in total, may someday give us that rarest of commodities: We may, by looking at them all, someday discover the truth.

—Mahir Gowda

When I was a kid, people used to talk about living in the future. Well, I live in the future. I want to go back to living in the past.

—Lorelei Tutt
Captain, United States Coast Guard

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

Lorelei Tutt is a harshly attractive woman in her forties, tall and lean, with scars from her combat gear on her hands and elbows. Her naturally brown hair is streaked with natural gray and sterilization blonde, and she wears it in a short-cropped, almost military style that does nothing to soften the lines of her face. She walks with a subtle limp, the result of learning to walk on a prosthetic right leg at the age of twenty-five. Her left eye is shaped normally but filmed with cataract white from an old war injury. She moves with studied precision, and it is clear from her expression that she is not happy to see me.

The front room of her London flat is at odds with her appearance: The time she spent in the United States Coast Guard has left her seeming businesslike and cool, but her decor is that of a teenage member of the science fiction and fantasy subculture that thrived before the Rising. Books and assorted forms of recorded media pack her shelves, and the walls are covered in posters advertising long-canceled television shows, long-forgotten movies.

She indicates that I should sit. She does not do the same. Her accent is American: She may have left the country of her birth after she left the Coast Guard, but some things are not so easily forgotten.

LORELEI: You know, I don’t know why you people keep coming looking for me, sniffing around the graves like this. San Diego was thirty years ago. There’s no reason to keep dredging up what happened.

MAHIR: Actually, ma’am, that’s precisely why people are becoming interested again. Thirty years…that’s long enough for terror to fade and nostalgia to start taking over. Did you hear that there’s been talk of doing another convention? The city of San Diego has expressed a willingness to host it. They think it might help restore the tourist trade.

Lorelei freezes. I have never seen this happen so literally before: One moment I am speaking to a living, if cold, woman, and the next, I am sharing a room with a statue made of flesh. When she speaks again, what little human warmth her voice contained is gone.

LORELEI: This interview is over. Get out.

MAHIR: You never intended to speak with me today, did you? [silence from Lorelei] That’s your right, of course, but I have to ask you…why? Why did you let me come here if you weren’t intending to actually have a conversation about what happened?

LORELEI: You people have wasted so much of my time over the last thirty years—all you damn bloggers acting like you’re heroes because you stayed in your rooms and told each other about the zombie apocalypse. You people had been doing that since long before the zombies came. You weren’t heroes.

MAHIR: But your parents were. [again, silence from Lorelei] Isn’t that why you’re angry? Because your parents were true heroes of the Rising, and almost no one knows their names? It was very hard to track you down, Miss Tutt. You have no idea.

LORELEI: I thought I told you to leave.

MAHIR: Miss Tutt…I’ve lost people, too. Maybe not as many as you have, maybe not the way that you did, but I’ve lost them, and I can’t have them back. And I know that the only thing that would have made it even harder for me—the only thing that could have made the worst thing that ever happened to me even worse—would have been knowing that someone else was telling their stories, and telling them wrong. This story is going to be told. I can’t stop it. Neither can you. But what I can do, what I have the power to do, is to ask you if you’ll let me tell it the way you want it told. If you’ll let me tell the truth.

There is a long silence. I begin to think that I’ve lost her—and then Lorelei gestures for me to stand, beckoning me deeper into the flat.

LORELEI: I need to put the kettle on. If I’m going to tell you what happened, I’m going to want a cup of tea in front of me.

I nod, rise, and follow the last known survivor of the 2014 San Diego International Comic Convention out of the front room. She leads me to the kitchen, where she fills the electric kettle and sets the water to boil. She moves with nervous efficiency. She does not look at me. The time for looking at me is done.

LORELEI: I was just a kid when the Rising started. I didn’t think of myself that way—I was eighteen, I was a grown woman, I was not a child—but I was still just a kid. I had no idea how ugly the world could be, or how bad things could get. We’d heard the news. I mean, who hadn’t? But we didn’t think it was really happening, and even if it was, it wasn’t happening where we lived.
We did the con every year. It was one of the things we all looked forward to as a family. Me, and Mom, and Dad, rolling into San Diego like we were going home…

Preview Night

The trouble with saying “I would have done it differently” is that we’re always speaking from a position of knowing exactly what is about to go horribly wrong. The truth is, we’d be lucky to do half so well if the Rising began again today.

—Mahir Gowda

Get it in, get it up, get it done.

—Shawn Tutt,
Lt. Commander, United States Coast Guard (d. 2014)

The San Diego International Comic Convention was an annual event which drew hundreds of thousands of comic book, science fiction, fantasy, and horror enthusiasts from around the world. For a week every year, San Diego’s Gaslight District would be transformed into a strange new country, one with its own traditions, rules, and hazards. It was a golden age for what those enthusiasts called “fandom,” and as with all golden ages, it was not properly recognized until it was over.

It’s easy to look back on July of 2014 from our modern perspective, with our full knowledge of what was already happening to the world, and condemn the people who chose to attend that year’s comic book convention, or “Comic-Con.” We tell ourselves that they should have known better. But why should they have known better? It was a different time. It was a more innocent era. And the fans of the world were descending, as they always did, on San Diego, California.

The following narrative has been assembled from eyewitness accounts, security footage, social media updates, and various other sources that I am not currently at liberty to disclose. Some of the events described may not have happened in this exact fashion, but for once, I have put aside the goal of absolute truth in favor of a greater goal: understanding. To truly understand what it was like for those brave souls who died in the first major San Diego outbreak, we must first understand what it meant to be them…

—From San Diego 2014 by Mahir Gowda, June 11, 2044.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014: 10:24A.M.

The sky over San Diego was a beautifully pristine shade of blue, the sort of thing that triggered a thousand tourist snapshots and seemed impossible to anyone who hadn’t seen it with their own eyes. The streets were already beginning to fill with the early arrivals, the people who had come to town for whatever reason before the official start of the convention. Some were there to wait for the doors to open on Preview Night, hoping to snag early bargains or rare collectibles. Others were there to settle into their hotel rooms and prepare for the chaos to come. And still others—such as the California Browncoats, a nonprofit fan organization modeled around the protagonists of a canceled science fiction Western called Firefly—were there to set up their official booths.

“I know you don’t have much respect for authority, Dwight, but around here we respect the laws of physics,” said Rebecca, a petite brunette with a clipboard in one hand. She looked from her paperwork to the former Marine, who was trying, somewhat vainly, to hang the awning from their booth’s precarious piping-and-plywood frame. “That means that if you’re not careful, you’re going to plummet and crack your skull open on this lovely concrete floor. Can we try to not have any major injuries before the show opens this year? It would be a fantastic improvement over last year.”

“I’m not the one who injured myself last year,” Dwight shot back as he continued tinkering with the bolts that were supposed to hold the awning in place. “That honor goes to Leita, who doesn’t understand that you’re not supposed to pick up knives by the pointy end.”

“Hey!” Leita’s head popped up over the edge of the display case. She pouted prettily at Dwight, the studs beneath her lower lip poking upward at an angle. “It’s not my fault.”

“It never is,” Dwight said, and kept working.

Rebecca sighed. “Just please try not to fall and die before we’re finished setting up? I am begging you. This is my begging-you voice.”

“Do you need me to whip these heathens into shape?” demanded a voice from behind her, loud enough to command attention without shouting, the kind of voice that made cadets jump and crowds clear out of the way.

“Oh, thank God.” Rebecca turned, shoulders sagging in relief. “I thought you were never going to get here.”

“Traffic was worse than we expected. This year is going to be crazy.” Shawn Tutt—United States Coast Guard and designated booth organizer—walked over and gathered Rebecca into a firm hug. He was tall enough to tower over her, something that didn’t seem to bother either of them.

Shawn’s wife, Lynn, and teenage daughter, Lorelei, followed him to the booth, slowed by the large plastic tub that they carried between them. It was packed to capacity with T-shirts and rolled posters.

Lorelei cleared her throat. “Is there someplace we can set this down? My arms are getting tired.” She was almost as tall as her father, and her naturally brown hair was streaked with bright green.

“Let me.” Vanessa—a quietly pretty woman in a black T-shirt—put down her iPad and hurried to relieve Lynn and Lorelei of their burden. Before they had a chance to thank her she was gone, carrying the tub off to put it with the rest of the merchandise.

“The van’s stuffed,” said Lynn. She was shorter than Lorelei and taller than Rebecca, with short brown hair. “If we can get some people to help us unload it, we’ll be able to help set things up in here.”

“Of course.” Rebecca pulled away from Shawn. “Dwight…”

“I know, I know. Strong back, weak mind.” Dwight climbed down from the stepladder, putting the hammer he’d been using down on the nearest stack of boxes. “I’m on it.”

“Take some of the others with you. Anyone who looks like they’re not doing something absolutely vital is fair game.”

“I’ll start unpacking shirts,” said Lorelei.

“No, you won’t, but that was a nice try,” said Shawn. “You’ll empty the van with the rest of us.”

Lorelei sighed, managing to express in a simple exhale just how frustrated she was with the entire situation. “I’ve been cooped up in that van for hours, Dad. Why do I have to help you unload it?”

“Because everybody pitches in during setup,” said Shawn. “Come on. The faster we get started, the faster we’ll be finished.” He turned and walked back the way he’d come. Half the booth followed him, most of them looking relieved to have something else to do.

“Finally,” said Rebecca, and reached for the hammer. “Now we can get things done around here.” She climbed up on the stepladder, humming the theme from Doctor Who under her breath, and got to work.

* * *

11:00 A.M.

The parking garage attached to the San Diego Convention Center was reserved for “official vehicles” during the convention itself—people who were affiliated with one of the vendors or fan groups in the main exhibit hall, core convention staffers, and attending celebrities of sufficient importance that they couldn’t be expected to walk more than a few hundred yards out in the open, where enthusiastic fans might catch them. It was still early enough on Wednesday afternoon that almost a third of the spaces were empty. That wouldn’t last. Long before the convention really got underway, the garage would be full to the point of becoming a fire hazard, and the parking attendants would be on the prowl, looking for vehicles that didn’t belong. Anyone found without the appropriate tags and permits would be towed, no questions asked or warnings given.

The Tutts had traveled down the California coast from the Bay Area in a large white-panel van. The space that hadn’t been carved out for passengers was packed to the gills with the bins, boxes, and plastic tubs that contained the supplies for the booth. They weren’t the only people bringing items for the convention—that would have required three vans, and left no room for either driver or passengers—but they were definitely the most important, apart from Rebecca, who had driven down with a trailer that contained the actual booth structure. Without their stores of merchandise, decorations, and most important, snacks, the convention would have been a grim place for the Browncoats.

Shawn handed Robert—Leita’s skinny, long-limbed older brother—a flat of Coke. He stacked a flat of Diet Coke on top of it a few seconds later. “Think you can take two more, or is that your limit?”

Robert whistled. “First, I can take four more, but I won’t, because I don’t feel like showing you up. Second, are we preparing for a convention or a siege?”

“You weren’t here last year, were you?” asked Dwight. He clapped Robert on the shoulder, sending the slimmer man staggering forward a step and nearly causing him to drop the soda. Robert shot him a wounded look. “The only difference between a Comic-Con and a siege is whether or not they’re actually trying to kill you. And sometimes these ones try to kill you anyway, just to keep things interesting.”

“Don’t scare him away before his shift, Dwight,” said Shawn.

Lorelei scowled as she dug a plastic bin out of the back of the van and hefted it in front of her, her knuckles going white from the strain. “What if we all tried doing our jobs and getting this over with before they open the doors?” she asked sourly. “I know it’s not the fun, free-wheeling party that we’re having right now, but it might make for an interesting change.”

“Lorelei—” Lynn began.

She was too late: Her teenage daughter had already turned on her heel and was stalking away, back toward the entrance to the show floor. She sighed.

“I know she loves Comic-Con, but her attitude is going to be the death of me,” she said.

“She’s been in the car since this morning,” said Shawn. “Let’s get the van unloaded, and then I’ll talk to her.”

“She always listens to you,” said Lynn. She didn’t sound happy about that.

Shawn kissed the top of her head and went back to unloading the van.

The other Browncoats looked uneasily at anything but the Tutts while all this was going on. They might regard themselves as one big family—a crew of people joined by common interests and uncommon hobbies—but there was something about seeing a mother getting angry with her child that reminded them all of their own childhoods. Some experiences are nearly universal, and no more pleasant when viewed from the outside.

The easy camaraderie was gone as they finished unpacking the van, loading boxes and crates onto a pallet loader that Dwight requisitioned from the custodial staff. Then they went trudging back into the increasingly crowded hall. Fun was fun, but it was time to get to work.

* * *

2:00 P.M.

The damn Browncoats were nearly done setting up their booth, which was a relief to anyone who had to set up near them. It wasn’t that they were bad neighbors—they weren’t, and they always had plenty of supplies, which could be a godsend when things got really crazy. But they were also loud, and enthusiastic, and had a tendency to break into song with little to no provocation. Sometimes Marty suspected that oxygen was all the provocation they needed. It wouldn’t be so bad once the convention got underway. Once the halls were crammed with fans, the Browncoats could host a live concert in their booth and it wouldn’t make a dent in the overall noise levels. Hell, at previous conventions, the Browncoats had hosted live concerts, and Marty had been aware of them only after the fact.

“How’s that shelving coming, Eric?” he called, forcing himself to stop glaring at the plywood wall behind him. The noise of the laughing Browncoats drifted through from the other side. At least someone was having fun.

After ten years of Comic-Con, fun was no longer Marty’s top priority, if it ever had been. He was here to work. He wiped a smear of chalk off his dark brown skin, waiting for Eric’s response.

Eric held up a wire basket. “I’m almost done. I just need to get the plush hangers in place, and then we can start unboxing the merchandise.” Eric had been Marty’s assistant for three years. He was a tall, skinny man, with gawky good looks that seemed to pull the women toward the booth. It was good for profits, even if Eric wasn’t for sale.

“We have four hours before those doors open and the hordes descend,” said Marty. He picked up a box of graphic novels, beginning to stack them neatly on one of the already constructed bookshelves. God bless Ikea in all its many forms. “Where’s Pris?”

“She’s on the lunch run,” Eric replied. “I figured we should get some actual food before the insanity begins.”

“Trust me. By the end of this weekend, you’re going to be ranking food well under sleep and alcohol on your personal scale.” Marty continued stacking graphic novels. “Did you give her money?”

“I told her you’d reimburse her when she got back.”

“Of course you did.” Another burst of raucous laughter came from the direction of the Browncoats. Marty grimaced. “Do you think she’ll be smart and bring back beer?”

“Probably not this early in the convention.”

“No, probably not. She’ll learn. Now finish getting those shelves up.”

Eric grinned and snapped off a quick salute. “Aye-aye, Skipper.”

All around them, other merchants, artists, and exhibitors were in the process of finalizing their booths, getting their walls up and their artwork hung as they turned the convention center floor into a labyrinth of tiny, temporary spaces. Some not so tiny: The movie studios, television networks, and larger comic companies had booths that were easily the size of large retail stores, each one flashier than the last. The network that produced Space Crime Continuum had even constructed a full-sized replica of the precinct headquarters where their intrepid Time Police did their jobs and smiled for the cameras. Banners with row numbers dangled from the ceiling to help people figure out where they were actually going. Thanks to the annually shifting design of the booths, even old hands could get lost during the first few days of Comic-Con.

By day three, the floor would be so jammed with bodies that getting lost wouldn’t be nearly as much of a concern as getting crushed, or being swept three rows past your destination by people who were packed together too tightly for you to fight your way free. It hadn’t always been that way, but since Hollywood had discovered Comic-Con, the people had come in increasing numbers every year. Tickets had been sold out for months. Only the lucky would be getting through those doors, and the lucky would number in the thousands.

“Another day, another battle for survival,” Marty muttered.

* * *

4:30 P.M.

“I can’t believe we’re actually here! This is going to be so much fun!” Patty flung herself backward onto the hotel bed, arms and legs splayed like she was going to start making snow angels on the industrial-grade duvet. “My first Comic-Con! I’ve wanted to go since I was twelve. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did,” said Matthew, unpacking his duffel bag into the top drawer of the room’s small dresser. “Five times during the ride from the airport alone. Also, you need to stop using so many exclamation points when you speak. That can’t be healthy.”

“You just say that because you’re British,” said Patty.

Matthew paused in the process of tucking a shirt into the drawer, squinting at her. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know. I just figured it would make you stop ragging on me about the way I talk.” Patty sat up and stuck her tongue out at him. “We’re at Comic-Con. We’re newlyweds. This is a time for geek love and geekier lust. Now stop putting your clothes away and come take some of my clothing off of me.”

“I wish I could do that, you poorly punctuated enchantress, but all it will do is make you angry.” Matthew continued unpacking.

“What? Why would you ravishing me make me angry? I’m pretty sure that being ravished is in my newlywed contract.”

“Because the doors will open for Preview Night in a little over an hour, and you wanted to be on the show floor first thing. I assure you, while I’m able to resist your allure by staying over here and dealing with my trousers, if I begin the ravishing process, I won’t be finished after a mere hour.”

Patty folded her arms. “I hate it when you make sense.”

“If you hate it when I make sense, you should have married a politician, not a scientist. Scientists make sense because we can’t imagine a world where there would be any point to doing anything else.”

“I think you enjoy it.”

“That, too.” Matthew gestured toward Patty’s suitcase. “Why don’t you unpack? You’ll feel better if you’re doing something, and as soon as you’re done, we can head for the convention center and queue up to get our badges.”

“Comic-Con.” Patty heaved a happy sigh, her sulk already forgotten. “Can you believe we’re really here?”

This was a familiar loop: They’d been around it dozens of times since the plane that carried them from London to San Diego began its initial descent. Matthew smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I rather do believe I can.”

* * *

5:30 P.M.

Elle Riley, star of the moderately well-rated science fiction drama Space Crime Continuum, waited not-so-patiently for the man who was supposed to be escorting her around the convention to get his goddamn act together already. He’d been arguing with the convention center security for the better part of twenty minutes—no, twenty-five minutes, according to her phone—about whether they could use the service tunnels. If he didn’t work things out soon, she was going to be late for her first panel. Not that SCC was that big of a deal, or it wouldn’t have been one of the first shows presenting at the convention. Still, they had two panels this weekend, one on Preview Night and one on Sunday afternoon, and she didn’t want to mess things up for the rest of her cast. She was already going to make the panel a living hell. She could at least be on time.

Some actors were chosen because of raw talent, or because of the kind of drive that could be used to power the time ships her franchise was built around. Elle was smart enough to know that she hadn’t been cast for either of those reasons. She could read a script, she could give a reasonably nuanced performance, and she could deliver technobabble explanations of hackneyed plot twists with the best of them. But none of those things were responsible for her continued employment. No matter what the blogs sometimes implied about her, Elle Riley was too smart to think that she got work when better actresses didn’t because she was somehow more deserving.

She got work when better actresses didn’t because she was pretty, and because she had big green eyes that she could widen with the right degree of confusion and awe when someone told her she was looking at a time anomaly on the green screen, and most of all, because the ratings went up every time the writers found a good reason for her character—the fetching chronoforensic analyst Indiction “Indy” Rivers—to take a deep breath. And all of this meant that when she sat on a panel, at least half the questions from the audience would be thinly veiled excuses to tell her how pretty she was.

At least the convention-supplied moderators managed to block the marriage proposals and offers of private dinners. Mostly. When they didn’t stop the questions from being asked, the moderators hurried the questioner away before he—or sometimes she, although that was rarer, which was amusing, all things considered—could expect an answer. And all of that was secondary to the fact that they were about to be late.

Elle cleared her throat, trying to be polite about it, and aware that no matter how polite she was, there was a good chance she would be interpreted as another spoiled starlet trying to throw her weight around. “Um, excuse me?” The two men continued arguing. “Excuse me?” They still gave no sign that they’d noticed her. Elle sighed before stepping forward and tapping her handler on the shoulder. “Hello?”

“Ms. Riley?” The handler turned to face her. He’d been doing this job long enough to be very good at hiding his irritation, but Elle had been doing her job long enough to catch it anyway, reading his displeasure in the way the muscles tensed around his eyes. Still, his tone was completely professional as he asked, “Is there a problem?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, and I really appreciate the way you’re trying to take care of me, but we’re going to miss my panel if we don’t start moving about five minutes ago.” Elle grimaced apologetically. “I think they sort of want me to be there.”

Her handler’s eyes widened as he looked down at his own watch. Then he swore—too softly for her to make out the exact words, but the tone was enough to make his meaning clear—and said, “Ms. Riley, if you don’t mind, I think we need to start moving if we want to get you to your panel on time.”

Elle bit back several caustic responses before settling on a neutral, “Yes, that’s probably a good idea. Are we taking the service halls?”

Her handler nodded. The convention center security guard shook his head. Her handler frowned, but appeared to realize that it was long past the time to stop arguing and start moving. “No, ma’am, we’re not. It’s late enough that we need to cut through the convention center floor. If you’d just follow me, I’ll get you to your panel before they even start seating your costars.”

Privately, Elle doubted that this was physically possible, especially if they were taking the route through the middle of the main floor. It might be Preview Night, but if the doors had opened while her handler was arguing with the security guard, there would be literally thousands of comic book and television aficionados crammed into the single cavernous room. Once upon a time, before Space Crime Continuum had come into her life, a girl named Elle Riley would have been out there with the rest of them. And given how her teenage self would have reacted to a real live television star suddenly popping into view, this would be like trying to play through the final boss level of a modern-day version of Frogger. Only this game would have autograph chasers in place of alligators, and large clots of fans taking pictures of a woman dressed like slave-girl Princess Leia in place of trucks.

And there was absolutely no point in arguing about it, because they were out of time. Elle put on a sunny smile. “Well, then,” she said. “Let’s get moving.”

* * *

5:45 P.M.

“Ladies and gentlemen—and Browncoats who refuse to tie themselves down to a single option—I declare the 2014 California Browncoats booth open for business!” Rebecca flung her arms open in a gesture that would probably have been more triumphant than threatening if she hadn’t still been holding a hammer. Dwight swore and ducked. Shawn laughed. Rebecca blinked at them before turning to look at the tool clutched in her hand. With a sigh, she put it down on the nearest flat surface. “As I was saying…”

“Time to get to work!” said Shawn. This elicited cheers and nervous laughter from the members of the group who were just glad that Rebecca wasn’t waving the hammer around anymore.

Only Lorelei didn’t cheer or chuckle. She folded her arms, scowling at the ground. Her mother tapped her on the shoulder.

“What’s your problem?” Lynn asked. “I thought your father spoke to you.”

“About my ‘attitude’? Yeah.” Lorelei rolled her shoulder away, taking a step to the side at the same time. “I’m being a team player. See? I’m here.”

“What I see is that you’re being dead weight. You need to do your part for this crew.”

Lorelei turned her glare on her mother. “I’ve been working all day. My head hurts. Don’t you make it sound like I haven’t done anything to help this crew.”

“Hey.” Shawn was suddenly there, stepping up and putting himself between them. “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”

“She started it!”

“Someone has to. Lorelei, if you’re so tired, why don’t you go back to the room and take a nap until your head feels better? We can hold things together here until you feel up to coming back.”

“Shawn—” Lynn began. She stopped as she realized that Lorelei was nodding, a relieved expression on her face.

“Okay, Daddy. I’m sure I’ll feel better after I just lie down.”

“Make sure you take your phone charger. I want to be able to reach you.” The cell coverage inside the hall was notoriously spotty, but the Tutts, like many others, had found a way to work around it. Their phones were also designed to function as walkie-talkies, tuned to other phones on the same plan, with a range that was good up to a mile. The technology involved using short-wave radio, rather than strictly sticking to wireless or cell towers, and meant they could communicate even through the thick concrete walls of the convention center.

“Okay,” said Lorelei again. “I’ll call as soon as I get to the room.”

“Good girl. Love you.”

“Love you, too,” said Lorelei, and hugged him impulsively. She paused long enough to hug her mother in turn, and then she was gone, running through the growing crowd to get to the outside door before the waiting throngs came pouring in and all hell came busting loose.

* * *

6:00 P.M.

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand people were waiting outside the sprawling convention center complex by six o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. Another thirteen hundred were already inside, getting their booths and fan tables ready for the onslaught.

According to security footage of the convention center lobby and front sidewalk—what was recovered from the remains of the disaster, which wasn’t much; the destruction was too complete, and the recovery had to wait for quite some time, given the events that followed—the last person to leave before the doors opened was Lorelei Tutt, a member of the California Browncoats fan organization. Preview Night officially began six minutes later.

The first events of Preview Night were mostly small: announcements from minor comic companies and interviews with the convention’s lower-profile guests. One television program was presenting their sneak preview of the season to come at six thirty: Space Crime Continuum, which ceased production permanently following the convention. Four thousand people packed themselves into a midsized ballroom to see their favorite stars up close and personal.

We may never know which of those four thousand was infected, or how the outbreak began. Perhaps the outbreak’s Patient Zero had been bitten by something—human or animal, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the Rising—on the way to the convention and had chosen good seats over seeking medical care. Perhaps a heart attack or stroke claimed a life and left a husk for the virus to reanimate and control. Perhaps it was a case of spontaneous amplification, rare in the modern day, but substantially more common during the Rising, when the human body was still adapting to the infection that would become known as “Kellis-Amberlee.” However the infection entered the building, it entered, and once it was inside, there was no way it could be forced to leave.

At 6:30 P.M., July 23, 2014, the first major panel of the convention began. The cast of Space Crime Continuum—minus their leading lady, the lovely Elle Riley, who was mysteriously absent from the green room—began filing onto the stage. Convention security staff waved more and more people into the hall, until there were no seats left empty. That was when the doors swung closed, and what happened from there, in that room, in that dark, empty space, is lost to history.

Given the nature of the things we did not lose, perhaps this is a mercy.

* * *

6:43 P.M.

Elle Riley struggled to keep up with her handler as he shoved his way through the convention center, fighting against the tides of eager fans rushing for the delights of the booths against the back wall. There were less congested routes, but she hadn’t realized her handler meant it literally when he said they’d be going through the middle of the floor, and by the time she understood that he was planning to go the worst way possible, it was too late for her to tell him it was a bad idea. Not that he would have listened if she’d tried. No matter how many interviews she gave where she mentioned her past as a rabid fan of shows like Star Trek, Buffy, and Doctor Who—which was the reason she’d auditioned for a time-travel procedural in the first place—people kept assuming she was another pretty face who didn’t know a damn thing about the way the geek world functioned. Even though it was her knowledge of the geek world that told her not to try cutting between the Marvel and DC booths in order to exit the main hall at Comic-Con.

“We’re almost there, Ms. Riley,” announced her handler, loudly enough that another half-dozen heads turned in their direction. Elle bit back a groan and forced herself to keep on smiling. This was her public, after all; she couldn’t afford to look ungracious.

Great, more autographs and pictures and questions, she thought. Just what I needed. Maybe if she was lucky, they’d make it to the panel in time for the question-and-answer session. Or maybe she’d be even luckier, and they wouldn’t make it to the panel at all. She’d look flaky but not inconsiderate if she missed the panel because she was signing autographs. She’d look like a stuck-up diva extraordinaire if she waltzed in for the last fifteen minutes and forced everyone else to listen to the inevitable stream of comments about her appearance masquerading as questions. As if she could possibly enjoy that sort of thing. As if anyone could possibly enjoy it.

Now they weren’t even moving, forced into a holding pattern by the people shoving past in front of them. That meant there was no good reason for the fans to stay away, since it wasn’t like she was trying to get anywhere. Sure enough, a timid voice at her elbow said, “Excuse me, are you Elle Riley?”

Elle’s smile remained fixed in place as she turned toward the speaker, a sweet-faced woman with a slight Kentucky drawl and hair that cascaded to her shoulders in a series of artificially copper curls. She was wearing a shirt that proclaimed her to be a member of the Time Police. That didn’t necessarily make her a fan—lots of shows and stories about time travel had time police in them—but it definitely shifted the odds toward fandom.

“I am,” she said. “And you are…?”

“Patty! I mean…I’m Patricia Meigs. This is my husband, Matthew.” She took the arm of the man beside her, who was more mundanely dressed in a sweater vest and gray slacks. He was wearing a bow tie, at least, which was a nod to the geekier elements in the wardrobes around him. That, or he was one of those poor, misguided souls who actually believed that bow ties were “cool.”

“Hello,” said Matthew. He had a mild British accent. Elle amended her assessment of his bow tie: It probably marked him as a Doctor Who fan, which meant that the tie was most definitely cool. “It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Riley.”

“Thanks,” Elle said. “I’m supposed to be on a panel right now, but I guess we judged the traffic wrong, and…” She shrugged a little.

Matthew’s eyebrows went up. “You’re trying to get to a panel by going right down the middle of the hall? Was that entirely wise?”

“Hey, I wanted to cut down the back to Artist’s Alley and make our escape that way, but I’m not the one calling the shots here.” Elle gestured toward her handler’s unmoving back. “He’s supposed to deliver me where I’m going, and I think he’s planning to tackle anything that gets in our way.”

“That’s going to be quite a lot of tackling,” said Matthew.

“I can hear you, you know,” said the handler.

“You really have been here before!” said Patty. The other three turned to face her, even the handler, who put his back to the crowd in order to stare at Patty. She reddened, shrugging. “I read a lot of blogs. There’s a whole debate about you saying that…um…” She stopped, apparently realizing that what she was about to say could be construed as insulting.

Elle sighed. “I know. There’s a whole debate between the people who say I’m being coached on what to say in order to build up my ‘fandom street cred’ and the people who remember seeing me haunting the fan tables back when I was an awkward teenager trying to convince the cast members from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to give me acting tips. One side says I’m a liar; the other side says I’m part of the family. I’m with the second side, naturally. This would be my sixteenth Comic-Con, if I were actually allowed to attend at all. But since this is probably as much as I’m going to see of the show floor, I’m trying not to think about it too hard.”

“Wow,” said Patty, in a voice that was suddenly very small. “Love of fandom got you into the business, and now the business is keeping you away from the thing you love. That’s so sad.”

Privately, Elle thought the girl was being melodramatic, but that didn’t make her wrong. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” she said. She glanced at the crowd, which was still forbidding forward movement—more than she would have expected, actually. Something must have been going on toward the front of the hall. “What brings the two of you to San Diego?”

“It’s our honeymoon,” said Matthew. He smiled fondly at Patty. “We got married in London and hopped onto the next flight to San Diego. We landed about four hours ago.”

“No window for jetlag at all?” asked Elle.

“‘Jetlag is just another lie time tells, and I can’t stand liars,’” said Patty. Then she paused, cheeks reddening again. “Uh. I bet it’s considered gauche to quote your character’s lines at you, huh?”

“Not really,” said Elle, and was surprised to realize that she meant it. “I mean, people quote Indy at me all the time, but it’s usually the catchphrases, not the actual dialog. It’s not like I get a lot of that. It’s sort of flattering.”

“Geeky but flattering,” said Matthew, and grinned. “I’d take it if I were you, Patty. That’s a good way to be viewed.”

Patty opened her mouth to respond, and stopped as someone at the front of the convention center screamed. It wasn’t a playful scream. A playful scream wouldn’t have been able to cut through the rest of the ambient noise. All of them turned instinctively toward the sound, their shoulders going tense as they tried to calculate the respective virtues of fighting and fleeing. None of them were aware of those calculations: They were carried out by a part of the brain older and more focused on survival than anything conscious could be.

“What’s going on?” asked Elle. “Did someone get hurt?”

“Ms. Riley, I’m afraid I’m going to need to ask you to wait here,” said her handler—but his brisk words couldn’t conceal the fear in his eyes, and somehow, that just made everything worse.

“What? No! You’re not supposed to leave me alone on the show floor!”

“Stay with your friends, and stay in this immediate vicinity,” said her handler. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I’ve assessed the situation.” Then he was gone, plunging into the suddenly unmoving crowd, heading toward the sound of screams.

Elle stared numbly after him. “But I just met them…” she said weakly.

“This strikes me as one of those ‘can’t possibly be good’ situations,” said Matthew.

Patty worried her lip between her teeth, and for once, she didn’t say anything. The three of them stood, looking out into the crowd, and waited for someone to come on the intercom and tell them what was going on.

* * *

6:52 P.M.

Kelly Nakata was near the doors when the screaming started. She’d been studying a booth display of replica weapons, some of which looked impressively sturdy. Her head whipped around at the first sound of trouble. She didn’t see everything, but she saw enough that she was immediately convinced of the danger, even if she wouldn’t understand the true scope of it until it was far too late for anything to be done. If she’d seen a little more, maybe she would have run for the lobby before the doors closed; maybe Kelly Nakata would have joined Lorelei Tutt among the survivors of the San Diego outbreak, rather than joining so many others among the lists of the dead.

What Kelly saw:

The doors were propped open for Preview Night, allowing throngs of fans to stream past the already visibly bored security guards hired by the convention center. The crowd ranged from people in T-shirts and jeans to others in full-body costumes, all of them wearing the little laminated badges that marked them as attendees. Superheroes and monsters, characters from movies and books, all walked side by side through Comic-Con’s welcoming doors. Amidst all that color and variety, the man in the blood-soaked shirt didn’t stand out at all—at least not until he turned, grabbed a half-naked woman dressed as a character from a popular horror comic, and bit a chunk out of her shoulder. The woman screamed. The man bit her again.

That was when the other people in bloody clothing began staggering through the doors. Some of them were missing chunks from their arms, hands, or even necks, although those were rare; most of them looked like they’d been wounded only superficially. And all of them were biting.

Kelly reached behind her, grabbing the first thing her hands hit—a large staff with a decorative spearhead on the end. She assumed a fighting stance, holding the staff out in front of her. The owner of the stall, who had been considering objecting to having her grab things she hadn’t paid for, quickly changed his mind; if the crazy girl wanted to defend him from the crazier biting people, he wasn’t going to tell her to stop.

“What the fuck, man?” demanded Kelly, of no one in particular.

“It’s that zombie virus thing that was on the news!” shouted a man in a Starfleet uniform. It was Next Generation command red, but he was running away from the danger, not toward it. Maybe that was how the command crew stayed alive. “They’ll eat you if you stay here!”

“They can try,” said Kelly grimly, and braced her feet. She felt like some sort of modern-day warrior princess standing there with her staff and her steely determination, like she was Buffy, or Xena, or Indy Rivers. As long as she kept thinking of the situation like that—like it was a story, something she was watching on television, and not something that was actually happening around her—she’d be fine. She hoped.

It wasn’t like she had a choice. At this point, running wasn’t an option.

The stall’s owner screamed, adding his own little bit of noise to the din, and cowered behind his register. Kelly was privately starting to think that this might be a good idea. Then the people in the bloody clothes were on top of her, and there wasn’t time to think about anything but fighting for her life. She swung her staff first with military precision and then with wild panic, hitting bodies that barely seemed to notice the impact.

It wasn’t until their greedy, grasping hands bore her to the floor that she added her own voice to the screams around her, and by then, it was too late for anyone to come to her defense. For Kelly Nakata, the convention seemed to be over before it properly began.

* * *

7:01 P.M.

The California Browncoats were set up toward the back of the hall, far from the open doors and the sound of screaming. Still, the commotion eventually filtered back to them. Dwight jumped onto a stack of boxes so he could peer over the booths, which were mostly the same height. “Some sort of commotion near the doors,” he reported. “Security’s moving in.”

“Actual security or our security?” asked Rebecca. It was an important distinction. The actual convention center security would be dressed in the normal rent-a-cop array, and wouldn’t do much to quell a fannish riot. The con’s private security force, on the other hand, was a mixture of Dorsai Irregulars and people in full-body armor dressed as Imperial stormtroopers. They could stop a bunch of pissed-off fans with a stern look and a waggled finger.

“Both,” said Dwight. He paled, still staring at the doors. “The people who’re coming in from outside don’t look good.”

“Don’t look good how?” asked Shawn.

“Bloody. Biting.” Dwight turned to face the other Browncoats. “I don’t really feel like describing what’s happening right now. But I think maybe we should start looking for another door.”

That was when the lights went out on the convention center floor and the screaming began in earnest. The Rising had come to San Diego.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

Lorelei’s voice is a soft monotone as she recites the events of July 23, 2014; she does not look up from her teacup.

LORELEI: The lights were a mistake. Some stupid rent-a-cop thought it was just an ordinary riot, and decided people would calm down if they couldn’t see anything. I wish I knew his name. I’d like to go and spit on his grave.

MAHIR: Who turned them back on?

LORELEI: The Klingons. One of them saw him do it, and they were fighting to hold the lobby, so he went after the guy. Do you even have Klingons anymore?

MAHIR: They were the villains of a pre-Rising science fiction drama, weren’t they? One of the Star Trek spinoffs.

LORELEI: Not quite, but I guess that’s close enough. The Klingons I’m talking about weren’t aliens; they were people wearing heavy costumes and silly latex heads, and somehow they figured out what was going on. I don’t know how; maybe one of them knew someone who’d already encountered Kellis-Amberlee outside of San Diego. They were the ones who realized that most of the infected weren’t in the main hall yet. If they closed the doors, the people inside might have a chance.

MAHIR: So they closed the doors?

LORELEI [nodding]: Yeah, and then they got the lights back on. There were already some zombies inside, but they were figuring that the people in the hall would find a way to hold them off until help arrived.

MAHIR: The people inside? What about the Klingons?

LORELEI: They stayed in the lobby. It was the only way they could get the doors to close. They even barricaded them, to keep the other infected from breaking through. They must have held out for a while. They managed to lock almost all the doors between the convention center and the street before they weren’t in a position to keep fighting. There’s this thing they used to say, about good days to die. I guess that day was a good one for them. Because they all died, every last one of them. The worst part is, they thought they were doing the right thing…

Lorelei Tutt, last survivor of the 2014 San Diego outbreak, begins to cry into her tea. There is nothing for me to say, and so I say nothing at all.

The Siege Begins

We have lost a great deal since the Rising. Perhaps the deepest of these losses is one that we barely notice today: our innocence. We are incapable of imagining a return to a world where we could abandon all care and spend a week living in a fantasy. But that’s exactly where these people died.

—Mahir Gowda

Time is a tool. Once you learn how to use it properly, you’ll find that paradox is no more problematic than a broken pipe—and you’re the one with the wrench.

—Chronoforensic Analyst Indiction Rivers,
Space Crime Continuum, season two, episode five

It is difficult to grasp the sheer variety of the fan groups that existed in realspace before the events of the Rising pushed such activities into a primarily virtual setting. Hundreds of “fandoms” met in person, their adherents dressing in everything from normal street clothing to full battle armor. Some of their costumes were practical, easy to move in or even fight in, while others…weren’t. The outbreak in San Diego began on the first night of the convention, when most attendees were wearing street clothes, rather than the more elaborate attire they had packed for later in the weekend. This may have saved many of them when the outbreak began, as they were able to run from their attackers. Even so, the few surviving images we have of the San Diego outbreak show men in medieval gear and teenage girls with rainbow-streaked hair and bloodstained wings strapped to their backs. Whatever fandom held their allegiances before the dead rose, they all fought the same battle in the end.

—From San Diego 2014 by Mahir Gowda, June 11, 2044.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014: 7:08 P.M.

“What the fuck was that?” demanded Vanessa, jabbing a finger toward the front of the hall. The Browncoats had reacted with instinctive speed when the lights cut out, all of them forming a circle inside the boundaries of their booth. Dwight was still standing on his lookout point when the lights came back on. Shawn was standing so as to block the one access point from the aisle, a two-by-four in his hands and a menacing expression in his eyes. Even Lynn didn’t like to cross him when he looked like that. Maybe it was that look—like he knew exactly what was going to come next and was willing to do it, no matter how little he liked it—but all the others turned to him, waiting to hear what they were going to do next.

All except for Dwight. He kept watching the front of the hall. There was still screaming, but it was dying down, losing its immediacy; this sounded less like people who were wounded and more like people who were scared, confused, and being set off by the screams of those around them.

“Dwight?” said Shawn sharply. “Report.”

“The doors are closed,” Dwight said. “The biting seems to have stopped—the ones who were doing the biting have pulled back. They’re blocking access to the doors and snapping at people who approach them, but otherwise, they’re not moving.”

“What the fuck?” repeated Vanessa.

It was a sentiment the rest of the Browncoats not-so-secretly shared. Shawn pulled out his phone, checking for service. As he’d expected, there were no cell bars. He’d have to hope the radio signal would get through. “Start securing the booth,” he commanded. “Assume that if we’re not under attack right now, we will be soon. I’m going to see if I can call for help.”

“The police?” asked Rebecca.

“The Marines?” asked Dwight.

“My daughter,” said Shawn.

* * *

7:15 P.M.

Eric and Marty stood at the doorway to their booth, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Eric held the crowbar he’d used to open the heftier book boxes, keeping it loose, ready to swing. Marty held a baseball bat. Neither Eric nor Pris had asked him where he’d gotten it; at the moment, neither of them was inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. They’d all heard the doors slam shut after the screaming began, and what little they’d been able to learn from people fleeing for the back of the hall was…not good. That was putting it mildly.

It might not have been so bad if the screams had stopped, or if they’d been continuous. But there were patches of silence long enough to let them think that the worst had passed, and then the screaming would start up again, as loud and terrified as ever. It made it impossible to stop jumping, waiting for the screams to be their own. Maybe paranoid fear was the right emotion when locked in a huge building filled with dangerous strangers. That didn’t mean that it was easy on the heart.

Marty could hear the Browncoats—he could always hear the Browncoats, and for once, he found that comforting. They were hammering on something, probably shoring up the walls of their booth, and using call-and-response games to keep track of each other whenever they had to move out of direct sight. “Marco” and “Polo” seemed to map to moving forward or backward in the hall, while “Hidey” and “Ho” mapped to movement to the left or right. They were an organized group. He’d have to congratulate them on that, if they survived.

“How’s it looking back there, Pris?” Marty asked, as loudly as he dared. He might admire the Browncoats for their organization, but he was also concerned about all the noise that they were making. If they attracted the attention of whatever was attacking the convention, he didn’t want it coming after his crew, too.

“Whoever killed the lights took out the wireless signal at the same time, and they didn’t come back up. I’ve got no cellular signal. The best I can do is an emergency convention center service band that has about a thousand warnings on it telling me I’m not allowed to log in under penalty of being escorted from the premises and never allowed to come back for as long as I live.”

Marty snorted. “Right now, kid, I’d take that as a blessing from God. Go ahead and log on. We need help, and we need it about fifteen minutes ago.”

“On it,” said Pris, and began typing again.

In the distance, people screamed, and the Browncoats continued whatever strange things they were doing. Eric glanced anxiously at Marty.

“I’ve been hearing things on the Internet, you know,” he said. “Like people saying that the flu everybody says is going around isn’t flu at all—it’s something we made in a lab. Something to do with that cure for the common cold thing that was on the news a couple of weeks ago.”

“That was a hoax,” said Marty. “You can’t cure the common cold. You’d need something that could take out a million different germs in order to do its job, and that would be a superbug. No one’s stupid enough to make a superbug.”

“I don’t know,” said Eric. “People do some pretty stupid things because they want to see what will happen.”

Marty paused. His employee sounded pretty shaken up, and who wouldn’t be? They were apparently under some sort of attack. Crazy locals looking for fat geek wallets, most likely, but whatever it was, they couldn’t get out of the hall. All they could do was stand their ground. “All right, I’ll humor you for a second,” he said. “If it’s not the flu, what is it?”

“Zombies,” said Eric grimly.

Marty stared at him and didn’t say anything. It should have been funny. It should have been an excuse to laugh out loud. But somehow, with the sound of screaming coming from the front of the hall and Pris typing frantically away behind him, it wasn’t funny at all.

Pris got up, moving to stand between the two men. She kept her tablet clutched to her chest.  “I spammed every port I could find asking for help,” she said. “Now what do we do?”

“We wait,” said Marty grimly. “That’s about the only choice we have.”

* * *

7:15 P.M.

At the same time, on the far end of the hall, Kelly Nakata was beginning to believe that she had somehow offended God.

The people who’d attacked her were disorganized, unlike the mob of men in Jedi robes who’d come to haul them off of her. She’d been able to roll under the nearest table in the confusion, scrambling to get herself as far away from danger as she possibly could. And then the lights had gone out—only for a few minutes, but long enough that when they came back on again, nothing was the same.

The Jedi were gone, or mostly; some of them were in pieces on the convention center floor. Others staggered, wounded, and were ignored by the people who’d been attacking them before. It was like they didn’t care about their targets anymore, not once they’d been bitten. It didn’t make any sense.

Bitten… Kelly paled, beginning to do a quick inventory of her limbs. No bite marks. The mob had come at her from all sides at once, and they’d managed to block one another from getting a really good shot at her. She was bruised, and her back felt like it was seriously rug-burned from where she’d hit the floor, but she wasn’t bitten. Kelly had no real idea what was going on around her. She still knew enough to know that when people who were acting like they had some kind of rabies tried to bite you, your best move was to not get bitten.

“Miss? Are you all—”

Kelly whirled, slapping her hand over the stall owner’s mouth before she could really consider the inanity of a move like that immediately after she’d been thinking about teeth. Luckily, the scared little man who was now staring at her didn’t seem inclined to attack. Faint, maybe. “Shhh,” she hissed. “Don’t attract attention.” She glanced over her shoulder, in case even that much noise might have reminded her former attackers that she existed.

Once again, luck was on her side. The convention hall presented a target-rich environment, and with so many people screaming and running madly from place to place, there was little chance of a whispered conversation standing out. As Kelly watched the chaos, a chilling new factor introduced itself: One of the Jedi who had previously been sprawled on the carpet, eyes open, unblinking, and staring into nothingness, was back on his feet. That wasn’t a bad thing…except that he had the same slack expression as the people who’d attacked her. His eyes still seemed empty—until a screaming girl dressed as Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony ran too close. Then he reached out with surprising speed, grabbing the girl and dragging her into biting range.

“I gotta get out of here,” whispered Kelly. She turned back to the stall owner. “I’ll take you with me if you let me take whatever I think we’ll need.”

“It’s a deal,” said the stall owner, eyes flicking to the girl in the Pony costume. The Jedi was gnawing on her throat now, and she was twitching helplessly. “Just get me the hell away from these freaks.”

“All right,” said Kelly. “Here’s the plan…”

* * *

7:20 P.M.

“Are they gone?” whimpered Patty.

“Where are we?” asked Matthew. He looked around the shabby little room in confusion, trying to figure out how they’d gone from the madness of the convention center floor to this…this office. There were desks and everything. It made no sense.

Elle mirrored his glance. Then, much to his surprise and dismay, she started to giggle.

“Do you mind telling me what’s so funny?” he asked.

Her giggles turned into full-blown laughter, which she did her best to smother against the heel of her hand. Finally, shaking her head, she managed, “We’re in my precinct.”

“She’s right!” said Patty. Her fear was gone, replaced by sudden delight. It was remarkable how quickly that woman could bounce back. Then again, that was part of what had attracted him to her in the first place. “We’re in the Time Police Paradox Control Unit headquarters! Oh my gosh, that’s Indy’s desk! I mean, your desk. I mean…”

“The network built a full-scale replica for fans to tour and have their pictures taken in,” said Elle. “We’re supposed to do some video interviews here with bloggers later in the weekend. I just ran for the nearest door.”

“Well, let’s see. On the plus side, we now have four walls between us and the crazy people,” said Matthew.

“On the minus side, those walls are made of plywood,” Elle shot back. “At least the shades are closed. As long as we keep those down and don’t make too much noise, they may not realize that we’re in here. If they do, we’re sitting ducks. There’s nowhere left for us to run.”

“Come on, Elle,” said Patty. She smiled hopefully at the actress, every line of her body broadcasting the message that they were friends now, good friends even, since they were going through adversity together. “Indy would find a way out of this.”

Elle bit back her first response, which would have been far harsher than the other woman deserved. “I know,” she said. “But Indy has scriptwriters and a director to help her out. We don’t have that.”

“We have each other,” said Matthew. “We’re going to be fine.”

Outside their artificial shelter, someone screamed.

* * *

7:20 P.M.

In her family’s room at the small hotel reserved for visiting military personnel and their families, Lorelei Tutt slept and dreamt of the perfect convention. Every fan was enthusiastic and wide-eyed with wonder, not rude and shoving other people out of their way. The exclusives were plentiful, and freebies and swag flowed like water. It was wonderful. It was the kind of convention that could never exist in the real world but that a fan could spend her whole life dreaming of. It was…

It was…

It was slipping away as consciousness came oozing around the edges of her mind. Lorelei scowled, trying to force herself to stay asleep. It was no use; she was on the downhill side of waking up now, and momentum was taking over.

“—respond. I repeat, Lorelei, if you can hear me, please respond.”

“Daddy?” Lorelei opened her eyes, squinting groggily into the dim hotel room as she tried to reconcile the dream she’d been having with the note of panic in her father’s voice. He wasn’t in the room; she was alone.

Lorelei sagged back into the mattress. “Stupid dream,” she mumbled, and closed her eyes, getting ready to go back to her perfect convention.

“Lorelei Jezebelle Tutt, if you are anywhere near your phone, you will pick it up right now.”

Lorelei’s eyes snapped open. This time, there was no mistaking her father’s voice for part of the dream: It was too loud and too tense to be anything but reality. And it was coming from her jeans, which she’d left discarded on the floor when she crawled into bed.

“Daddy?” Lorelei lunged for her jeans, forgetting the blankets that were tangled around her legs. They pulled tight and she went sprawling, smacking her elbow in the process. She yelped, pausing for a few seconds to rub her injury before she grabbed her pants and fumbled her phone out of the front pocket. She had no missed calls, but several missed walkie-talkie connections. A feeling of inexplicable dread built in her chest as she raised the receiver to her mouth, pressed the walkie-talkie button, and said, “This is Lorelei Tutt. Mom? Dad? Are you there?”

There was no pause before she got her answer. As soon as she released the “transmit” button her father’s voice was there, demanding, “Lorelei? Are you all right? Where are you? Are you hurt?”

“What?” Lorelei sat on the floor of her hotel room and blinked at the phone, utterly puzzled. “What are you talking about? I’m in our hotel room. I was taking a nap.”

When she released the button, she thought she heard her mother sobbing in the background. Her father took a shaky breath and said, “I don’t want you to worry too much, sweetheart, but we have a bit of a situation over here at the convention center.”

“What kind of situation?” Lorelei finally boosted herself up onto the bed, grabbing her jeans at the same time. “Do you need me to come over there?”

“No!” The answer came from both her parents at the same time and was delivered with such immediate vehemence that Lorelei nearly dropped her phone. There was a pause while her father took another shaky breath. Then he said, “This isn’t the kind of situation that gets better by adding you. It would get worse, because then your mother and I would be worrying about you when we need to be worrying about the entire crew.”

The dread was solidifying now, turning into something concrete and real. “Daddy, what are you talking about?”

“I need you to be brave for me now, Lorelei. Can you do that? You’ve always been one of the strongest people I know—you’ll never understand how proud of you I am for being so strong—and right now I need that strength more than ever. So can you be brave for me?”

“Daddy, you’re scaring me.”

Her father laughed unsteadily. That just scared her worse. Her father might say that she was strong, but she’d learned it from him. He had always been the rock in her life, and right now he sounded like he was on the verge of crumbling.

“I’m scared, too, Lorelei,” he said. “Remember those blog posts you tried to make me read? The ones about the people going rabid and attacking each other?”

“You mean the ones about the zombies?” whispered Lorelei.

“I’m not quite ready to use the Z word, but yes, those are the ones. Honey, something like that is going on here. Some people managed to lock the doors to the exhibit hall before too many sick folks could get inside, but we’re sort of stuck now, and we don’t know how much trouble we’re in. I want you to do me a huge favor. It’s going to mean keeping it together and staying calm for me. Can you do that?”

“Yes, Daddy.” Lorelei was still whispering. She couldn’t seem to make her voice get any louder.

“I need you to go down to the base office and tell them that we have a situation here at the convention center. I’m not in any position to contain it; I have to worry about our people. If they ask why I didn’t call this in myself, tell them that some idiot tried to play hero and shut off our wireless. None of us have signal. If we hadn’t paid for the walkie-talkie feature, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

Shawn sounded totally calm. Somehow, all that did was make Lorelei feel even worse. She licked suddenly dry lips before asking, “Is—is Mom okay?”

“Your mother’s fine, or as close to fine as any of us can be right now. She’s currently helping Leita and Robert get the edges of our booth secured. The people next to us hadn’t shown up when the doors locked, so we’re expanding into their space for the time being, getting things settled while we’re relatively calm.”

Lorelei took a sharp breath. She knew what it sounded like when her father was getting ready to go on a dangerous mission; there was a certain tension in his voice that spoke of knowing that he might be just a man doing a job, but that job could still turn deadly. “Daddy…”

“We’re going to be fine, Lorelei. I promise. Now just go tell base that we need assistance here, and then get back to your room. I want you to stay put until all this is taken care of. You understand me?”

“But I could—”

“Stay away from the convention center. That is an order, Lorelei. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. She finally pulled on her jeans. “I’ll get your message to base. Be careful. I don’t want to pay for this hotel room out of my allowance.” The comment was made jokingly, but there was an air of desperation behind it, as much a part of the conversation as Shawn’s tension.

“We’ll be fine,” said Shawn. “Call me as soon as you’ve spoken with base. I need to go help Rebecca.”

“Daddy—”

But it was too late. He was already gone.

* * *

7:27 P.M.

Shawn lowered his phone, looking at it with a stomach-churning mixture of panic and pride. Thank God she was already outside the hall when things went bad. Thank God she was going to be okay. Even if the rest of them wound up stuck inside for days—and at the moment, that was the worst scenario he was willing to entertain—Lorelei would be safe at the hotel, running up a big room service bill and getting mad about being left out. She’d be fine.

“Shawn…” He turned to see the tears streaming down Lynn’s normally calm face. “Did I hear that right? She made it back to the hotel? She’s okay?”

Lynn’s worst fear—Shawn’s too, although Lynn had been more vocal about it—had been Lorelei getting distracted on her way out and somehow winding up trapped in the lobby. She would have had no way to get back into the exhibit hall, and if those doors were locked, the doors to the street were probably locked as well.

But they didn’t need to worry about that. Lorelei was safe. They could worry about everything else, like how to keep themselves safe, now that they knew they didn’t have to worry about her. “She’s in her room,” Shawn said. He put a hand on Lynn’s shoulder, trying to block out the distant sounds of screaming. “She’s fine. She didn’t even know we were having problems over here. She was taking a nap when I called.”

“Oh, thank God,” whispered Lynn.

“Lorelei is on her way to the base office now to notify them of the issue here. Assuming local law enforcement isn’t already on the way, it may help if they know that we have some military personnel inside.”

“Did you tell her to stay on the base?” Lynn’s eyes widened. “Please tell me you told her to stay on the base. Please tell me she isn’t going to try coming back here.”

“I told her to stay put, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to do it.”

Lynn sighed. “I know.”

Shawn squeezed her shoulder before pulling his hand away. “It’s going to be okay, Lynn. She’s a smart girl. She won’t come back here unless it’s safe, and we’ll all be back at the hotel getting on each other’s nerves before you know it.”

“Maybe faster than that,” said Dwight from behind him. Shawn turned. The ex-Marine was holding a heavy Maglite-brand flashlight, the sort that could be used just as easily as a club when the situation demanded it. He smirked a bit at the look on Shawn’s face. “It’s not the size that counts; it’s how hard you’re willing to swing it.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Lynn.

“Rebecca and I are going to go check the parking garage. All the locks here are manual, and whatever shit’s going down started at the front of the hall. We may be able to get out the back if we’re real careful about it.”

Shawn straightened. “That’s a great idea. I’ll get Robert and—”

“No, boss. This is a scouting mission. We don’t know whether the garage has been compromised, or what might be going on back there. It’s best if we don’t risk the entire crew on something that might not pan out.” Dwight’s smirk faded into something much grimmer. “You know shit in here is going to get worse before it gets better.”

Someone in the distance screamed, punctuating his words. The screams seemed to be getting less frequent. None of them knew whether this was a good thing. None of them wanted to be the one who guessed wrong.

“All right,” said Shawn finally. They all knew that his consent was just a formality—his leadership was always conditional on the other members of the group wanting to do what he told them to do, and getting a bunch of fans to do anything was a lot like herding cats—but formalities can help a lot, when you let them. “Take Rebecca and anything you think you might need. Report back here.”

“All right. And, boss?”

“Yeah?”

“If we don’t come back in half an hour, don’t send anyone looking for us. Either we’ve made it out and we’re coming back with help, or we didn’t make it and we’re not coming back at all. There’s no sense in you throwing good people into a meat grinder for our sakes.”

For a long moment, Shawn didn’t say anything. Then he nodded and saluted the other man. “Good luck, soldier.”

“Oorah,” replied Dwight solemnly as he returned the salute. Somehow, the strangeness of the moment did nothing to rob the traditional battle cry of the United States Marines of its efficacy. Then he turned and walked away, off to find Rebecca.

Lynn Tutt stepped up next to her husband, watching Dwight go. “Is it silly of me to be afraid that we’re never going to see him again?” she asked.

“No,” said Shawn. “You’re not the only one.”

“Oh, good. I’d hate to be silly right now.”

Shawn took her hand, and the two of them stood there for a moment, and neither of them felt silly in the least.

* * *

7:30 P.M.

“The worst of it is, Unis, I don’t even know how we got up here.” Lesley Smith, British journalist and sudden shut-in, gave the chair she was perched on a little kick. It spun in another lazy circle, carrying her with it. Her view of the room remained the same: almost total blackness, broken here and there by smears of light. “It’s a bloody joke.” Her chair drifted to a stop. She didn’t kick it again.

Unis lifted her head off her paws, ears cocked inquisitively upward. The Woman was speaking. The Woman was using her name. Perhaps that meant that something was about to be requested of her—but no, the Woman had returned to scowling at the big flat place. As long as the Woman wasn’t scowling at Unis, all was right with the world. Unis yawned and put her head back down.

The big flat place that Lesley was scowling at was a control panel of some kind. She’d been able to work that much out by feel, running her fingers over the dials and buttons with labels she couldn’t read. As for what it controlled…no one had thought to label anything in braille. Why would they? It wasn’t like there was any chance a woman with severely impaired vision would ever be locked in their little control room, unable to figure out how to turn the damn lights on. That would just be silly.

The room they were in had two large glass windows looking out over the convention center’s main exhibit hall. Thousands of people were locked in down there, and Lesley was locked in up here, along with her guide dog, half a bottle of water, and a granola bar. And no bathroom. And no lights.

“I’m so glad I came to Comic-Con,” Lesley muttered bitterly, giving the control panel another spiteful glare. She could still hear the madmen who’d chased her up the stairs milling about in the convention center outside. The door between them was thick enough that she wasn’t worried about anyone breaking in—well, she wasn’t worried much, and that was the best she could say at the moment.

Unis thumped her tail once against the floor, acknowledging that she’d heard the Woman speaking, but didn’t otherwise move. Unis was resting. Unis had already had a long day.

If Unis had been able to speak, she could have told the Woman how they reached the small, safe room with no other people in it, the one with the door that could be shut, and locked, to make safety where there had been only danger. She could have told the woman that when she’d been given the command to get away from the bad people who smelled like blood and sick—and “Unis, away!” was such a rare command, a danger command, that she obeyed it even more fervently than she obeyed all the others—when she’d been given that command, she had followed it to the letter. She had led the Woman to this safe place, this good place, because she, Unis, was a good dog.

Unis let her tail smack the floor again. Lesley glanced over toward the flat-coated retriever and smiled despite her anxiety.

“Silly dog,” she said. Then she went back to glaring at the control board.

* * *

8:03 P.M.

It had taken longer for Dwight and Rebecca to reach the back of the hall than they had expected. Preview Night had barely begun when the doors closed, but thousands of people had still managed to cram themselves inside, and many of them had fled for the walls when the chaos began. Several of the display booths looked more like armed encampments now. The jokingly named “webcomic district”—three half aisles of semi-affiliated booths manned by the teams from popular online comic strips—was already completely shut off to outside traffic. A surprising number of webcomic artists turned out to be pretty good with tools; they had constructed barriers over the mouths of the aisles in record time and were in the process of shoring them up with chairs and sheets of plywood scavenged from the booths at the center of their territory. It would have been impossible for anyone to get in without a crowbar. Anyone who wanted to use a crowbar would find themselves facing some stringent resistance from the assembled artists and their respective staffs, all of whom watched passersby with wary, narrowed eyes.

“It’s starting to look like a Mad Max film in here,” said Rebecca, as they finally reached the wall. Between the detour around the sealed-off webcomics district and the detour around the seating area in front of the snack bar—which had turned into an impromptu babysitting crèche and gathering place for the wounded—they had already been gone longer than either one of them wanted to be.

Dwight nodded grimly. “It’s just going to get worse from here, you know. If we don’t find a way out….how many of these people do you think remembered to bring food or water? How many people with medical conditions didn’t bring an extra dose of their medication?” He hooked a thumb toward the snack bar, still being manned by anxious-looking employees. “If those people had a brain in their heads, they’d lock up and run. There’s going to be a riot when folks start getting hungry, and this place is going to be the epicenter.”

“We have food,” said Rebecca, looking shaken.

“We also have a lot of people who’ve got each other’s backs. Besides, Leita and Shawn have got everybody continuing the fortifications while we’re away. We’re going to come back to an impenetrable fortress. Just you watch.”

Rebecca sighed. “I’d just like it if we made it back.”

Dwight smiled, nudging her in the ribs with his elbow. “Come on. This is Comic-Con. How dangerous can it be?”

In the distance, someone screamed. Rebecca raised an eyebrow, and just looked at him. They kept walking.

“Do you really think it’s the zombie apocalypse?” asked Rebecca, after they’d traveled another fifteen yards or so through the crowded hall. At least most of the people near the wall were relatively nonviolent unless approached too quickly, and very few of them had visible injuries. Rebecca paled every time she saw someone with blood on their shirt, but managed not to keel over. There were times when a fear of blood became a genuine inconvenience, and this was one of them.

“I don’t know.” Dwight shook his head. “There’s been some really weird stuff on the Internet lately. I just wish we could get online from in here.”

“The wireless will come back eventually. It has to.” The exhibit hall security officers who were supposed to be flanking the door to the garage were gone. Fortunately, it looked just like every other locked door in the center.

Unfortunately, it was just as locked as the rest of them.

Dwight gave the bar one last, futile shove. “This is hopeless,” he said. “We should get back to the others and tell them we’re stuck in here.”

Rebecca smiled. “Oh, ye of little faith.” She dug her hand into her messenger bag, coming up with a Swiss Army Knife. “My dad didn’t believe in leaving a key under the mat. He said it was a security risk, even if I was supernaturally skilled in the area of losing my keys.” She pushed Dwight to the side, crouching down in front of the lock.

Dwight blinked, watching her. “I take it you decided to find other avenues for getting into the house after you’d been locked out.”

“If by ‘other avenues,’ you mean ‘taught myself to pick locks out of an old Boy Scout manual I found at the library,’ you’re totally right.” Rebecca carefully inserted the thinnest blade on her Swiss Army Knife into the keyhole and began to twist. “Dad was actually really proud of me for that. He said it showed initiative. And then he grounded me for a month for picking locks without permission.”

“You have a weird family, Rebecca,” said Dwight.

“Oh, you have no idea.” There was a soft click as the lock turned. Rebecca withdrew her knife and turned to beam up at Dwight as she straightened. “But my weird family just got us into the parking garage. Let’s go.”

“Ladies first,” said Dwight, and clicked his Maglite on.

* * *

8:05 P.M.

The lights were off inside the parking garage, but that didn’t matter as much as it could have. It was summer in San Diego. The sun had only recently gone down, and every light outside the convention center was turned on full-watt, as if that could make up for the hour. Even so, Dwight’s Maglite provided much-needed extra illumination as the pair began walking carefully through the maze of close-packed cars. It seemed even more deserted after the chaos inside the convention center.

“We should cut around the marina,” whispered Rebecca. “That way, we get cell signal and can call for help, but we don’t get caught up in the crowds out front.”

“Agreed,” whispered Dwight. The doors had closed early enough that there were probably almost as many people outside as there were inside. Thousands of them, crammed onto the sidewalks, trying to get into a sealed convention center. Even if the riots had spread, new fans would have been arriving almost constantly. Why—

Dwight stopped walking, heart sinking as he fully thought through the possible ramifications of the Comic-Con crowd. Rebecca kept going for a few more steps. Then she stopped as well, turning back and frowning at him.

“Dwight? What’s wrong?”

“What if this is the zombie apocalypse?” he asked, voice still kept low. “Do you really think we managed to lock them all inside?”

Rebecca’s eyes widened, visible even through the gloom. Then she nodded. Just once; once was enough. Dwight turned, and together they ran for the door back into the exhibit hall.

They didn’t run fast enough.

There weren’t many infected in the garage. Maybe a dozen, all fully amplified and demonstrating the common infected tropism toward dark, shadowy places. They were well fed and had left the pursuit of food to other, hungrier individuals. But Dwight and Rebecca had come too close and had triggered the need to hunt. As they ran, the infected pursued, moving with the graceless speed of the freshly seroconverted.

The infected caught Dwight first, bearing the former Marine down to the garage floor with the weight of their bodies. The Maglite flew from his fingers and went skittering across the concrete. “Rebecca!” he shouted, all efforts at subtlety forgotten. “Keep running!”

Rebecca looked back and screamed. The infected were already tearing into Dwight. Blood spurted across the concrete like oil. A wave of dizziness washed over her, costing her a few precious steps. She managed to swallow it, fighting it back, and resumed her flight toward the door.

She knew before she got there that she was never going to make it. The infected were too close, and she was outnumbered. All she could do was lead them into the unprotected rear of the convention center, where a bunch of scared people were trying to hide. It wouldn’t be a fair fight. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do. So Rebecca Safier became one of the first heroes of the Rising with one simple gesture: When she reached the door, she stopped running.

And she turned the dead bolt, locking both herself and the infected out of the convention center. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Then they were upon her, and she didn’t say anything else. After that, there was only screaming…and eventually, silence.

* * *

8:24 P.M.

“They’re not coming back, are they?” asked Vanessa. “They should have been back by now. They’re not coming back.”

“Shawn?” asked Lynn.

Shawn didn’t have an answer. He put his arm around Lynn’s shoulders and looked away, out over an exhibit hall that had gone from familiar ground to enemy territory in a single evening. There was nothing left for any of them to say, and so, for once, none of them said anything.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

We have finished our first cups of tea. Lorelei is preparing another round, less out of thirst than from the simple need for something to do. It is an understandable impulse. I wish I had something to do with my hands as well.

LORELEI: We know more about what actually happened to Dwight and Rebecca than we do almost anyone else. It’s all supposition with the inside of the exhibit hall, but there were cameras running in the garage. I’ve seen her locking the door a thousand times. She didn’t have any other choice. There was nothing they could have done.

MAHIR: She was very brave. She could have sacrificed a lot of lives in the effort to save her own, and she didn’t.

LORELEI: No, she couldn’t have. Not Rebecca, and not Dwight, either. They were my friends. They were good people. They were heroes.

MAHIR: Yes, they were.

LORELEI: I was down at the base office while all of this was happening, trying to get somebody to listen to me. It turns out that teenage girls trying to report secondhand riots aren’t at the top of anyone’s priority list. I did get them to listen, eventually. It was too late by then—but I mean really, it was too late when Dad called me. It was probably too late by the time I left the convention center.

MAHIR: Everyone was doing the best they could with their understanding of the situation.

LORELEI: I wish they’d understood the situation just a little bit faster. More of my friends might have managed to get out alive. Or any of them.

The Second Act

Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been defined by tales of heroism. It is meant to represent humanity at our very best, willing to oppose all odds in order to protect the side of good. The Rising gave all people the opportunity to become heroes. Only a few rose to the challenge. Sadly, even fewer are remembered by name.

—Mahir Gowda

I always knew my father was a hero. I never needed him to prove it.

—Lorelei Tutt,
Captain, United States Coast Guard

8:37 P.M.

No one paid attention to the time. The people who were locked inside the hall had other things to worry about—like why the people who’d started the emergency by attacking their fellow attendees had stopped fighting and retreated to the doors. Anyone who tried to approach them was likely to find themselves bitten, or worse; but if the blank-eyed, bloody-garbed aggressors were left alone, they didn’t bother anyone.

Kelly Nakata didn’t know much about what was going on, but she knew that once a dog starts biting for no good reason, it doesn’t tend to stop. She made her way quickly away from the front of the exhibit hall, the owner of the booth where she’d originally taken shelter sticking close by her side. She didn’t know his name. She didn’t want to. With as quickly as things had gone sour, she wasn’t willing to go forging any lasting bonds. He was a good guy, and he’d equipped her pretty well for the fight she was sure they were walking into. She was still going to leave him behind if he turned into dead weight. It wasn’t the compassionate thing to do. Screw compassion. People in the middle of the zombie apocalypse couldn’t afford it.

“Zombie” wasn’t a word she would have brought into things on her own. It was a cliché, dead things and girls in lingerie and Elvira on a velvet love seat making cracks about impractical shoes. Still, it was an unavoidable idea, especially here, where every other person seemed to be a self-proclaimed expert on zombie culture. There were booths boasting every possible kind of zombie-themed goodie, from books and movies to artwork and couture. There was even a magazine called Chicks with Corpses that had decided to focus on the lingerie and impractical shoes over the carnage and destruction of mankind. The word “zombie” was everywhere, and it was as good a label as any for the psychos who were clustered at the front of the hall.

What some people didn’t seem to be taking into account was that zombies made more zombies. Kelly had seen it happen with her own eyes when the zombies turned on her Jedi-costumed rescuer. He wasn’t the only one who’d been bitten, and unless the zombie virus was selectively transferrable—which never seemed to be the case with zombie viruses, so it was a little too much to hope for in this situation—a whole lot of people were going to go rabid in the next few hours. Kelly was grimly sure that was why the first wave of zombies had withdrawn. They were waiting for their reinforcements to get hungry.

“Where are we going?” asked the booth owner.

“Back of the hall,” said Kelly. “Where there are exits. They usually have security mooks guarding them, but I figure a bunch of psychopaths biting people at the front doors takes priority. We may be able to get out that way.” And if they couldn’t, they would at least put some ground between themselves and the next big bite-a-thon.

“What if we can’t?”

“We start looking for a fire door. There’s bound to be some sort of an emergency exit in this place. We just have to find it.” Find it, and pray that it wasn’t already a solid wall of impassable meat thanks to other people with the same idea.

Giving up wouldn’t do either of them any good. Kelly tightened her grip on her borrowed staff and kept on walking. Maybe they could find someone who was selling armor—Kevlar would be best, but she’d take leather, or even hardened canvas, if that was what she could get—and convince them to join their merry band. Like The Wizard of Oz, only with zombies instead of flying monkeys.

“I didn’t catch your name.”

“Keep walking.”

“My name’s Stuart.”

Kelly winced. “Oh.”

“What’s your name?”

If she told him, she’d be admitting that he was a person, too; she’d be making him real. In a way, she’d be making this whole crazy situation real, because real people didn’t show up in dreams. She’d definitely be making it harder to turn her back on him when the time came—and the time was going to come; she was absolutely sure of that. This was a zombie apocalypse. The time always came.

Kelly sighed. “My name’s Kelly,” she said. “Now keep walking.”

They kept walking.

* * *

8:45 P.M.

Exhaustion and panic had finally carried the day: Patty was asleep. She was draped half-over the authentic reproduction of Indiction Rivers’s desk, her head propped up on one arm, snoring softly. Elle paused in her attempts to peer through the blinds at the exhibit hall outside, shaking her head.

“How is she doing that?” she asked. “I can’t imagine sleeping before someone comes to get us out of here.” At least the screams had stopped, or at least faded back into the greater noise of the crowd. Even that seemed more subdued, as if people were getting quieter as they realized they couldn’t escape. That would change soon, she was sure: Panic would make a reappearance, and then their hidey-hole would become even more essential.

Matthew smiled. “It’s a fairly impressive skill, I admit. She actually fell asleep on me the very first time we met. It was at a Doctor Who convention in Chicago. I’d flown out for the con. We wound up standing next to each other in the autograph line, and got to chatting. From there, we took our conversation to the bar, and I thought, ‘This is splendid; this is a splendid girl.’ Only next thing I knew, she was snoring on her stool, and it was, well, ‘Right, then. You’ve blown another one.’”

Elle smiled a little. “And you hadn’t blown it at all.”

“Not a bit. My Pat just sleeps when she’s tired, that’s all. It’s like convenient narcolepsy. I envy her a bit. We’ll all want to be well rested come tomorrow, and she’s going to be the only one standing up straight.”

“As long as we have a tomorrow, I’m happy.” Elle took another peek out the window. “I admit, I was wishing I’d have an excuse to spend some time in the exhibit hall without being rushed along by a handler, but this isn’t what I meant.”

“So you miss it, then? The convention scene?”

“It’s different when you’re a professional. Even when you wish it weren’t.” Elle stepped away from the window. “I can’t really tell what’s going on out there, but I don’t think going out to check would be a good idea.”

“In that, we are agreed.”

“That’s a relief.” Elle put her hands on her hips and studied the room. It both was and wasn’t like the set where she spent her workdays: For one thing, it had all four walls, rather than being an open sound stage. They had a complete precinct room, but they very rarely filmed there. Too hard to get all the cameras inside.

Working together, the three of them had managed to shift the filing cabinets up against the room’s single door, effectively locking it, and three of the four windows were completely covered with leaning sheets of plywood that Matthew had discovered being used to prop up the “chrono monitor” behind Indy’s desk. Leaving the fourth window uncovered was a calculated risk. It left them vulnerable to attack, but covering it would have meant cutting off all contact with the main room. For the moment, the window was more valuable as it was.

“Patty’s quite excited to have met you, you know,” said Matthew. “I hope it’s not too forward to say this, but Space Crime Continuum is one of our favorite shows. We watch it together, and we both enjoy it quite a bit.”

Elle blinked at him. Then, slowly, she said, “We’ve been fortifying a replica of my fictional office against attack together because we’re afraid of I don’t even know what, and you’re worried about me deciding you’re being forward because you like my work?”

Matthew paused. “When you put it that way, it does sound a bit silly, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, just a bit.” Elle leaned up against the nearest desk. “I just wish there was something else we could be doing. I don’t like just standing around.”

“It’s too bad Patty left her knitting back at the hotel, then.”

Elle blinked at him before she snorted laughter, and said, “Even if I could knit, which I can’t, I don’t think I’d feel right knitting while I was potentially in mortal danger. It would just seem a little weird.”

“Has anything about this day not been a little weird?” asked Matthew.

“Fair enough.” Elle sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just tense. I wish we had cell service in here. I was supposed to be back at the hotel as soon as my panel ended.”

“Have you got someone waiting?” Matthew blanched almost as soon as the words were out. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business. I was just making conversation.”

“No, it’s all right—I brought up the hotel; it’s a reasonable question.” Elle shrugged. “I do have someone waiting, and I hate being inconsiderate like this.” She was hedging, she knew she was hedging, but she’d been doing it for so long that it was almost second nature. Pretense came with the job.

“Ah,” said Matthew. “Well, I’m sure he’ll understand.”

Screw pretense. “I’m sure she will,” Elle agreed. Sigrid had always been so very understanding. Understanding when the producers said she couldn’t show up on set, as their viewership was made up almost entirely of heterosexual males and Indy Rivers was supposed to be their newest geek sex goddess. Understanding when Elle took her male costar to the Spike Awards. Understanding when she didn’t get to come to Comic-Con to see Elle’s panels.

Then again, maybe that last bit of understanding was enough to balance out some of the others, because Sigrid was safely back at the hotel, far away from all the chaos at the convention center, while Elle was trapped inside the building while all hell was breaking loose. Maybe the universe had been testing them, and Sigrid had passed while Elle hadn’t.

Matthew, meanwhile, was looking at her with that wide-eyed expression of sudden comprehension that she’d been seeing on the faces of straight men since the first time she explained that no, she really wasn’t interested, ever. “Sister?”

“No.”

“Friend?”

“Significant other. Six years. We’re going to get married as soon as I’m well established enough that it won’t kill my career.” Elle crossed her arms defensively, and hated herself for it. This wasn’t supposed to be an issue anymore. It wasn’t her fault that she’d been called to a profession where people still cared, at least if you were a woman new enough to be trading on tits and ass. “Are we going to have a problem?”

“Not a bit of it. I’m just surprised is all.”

“Why? Because I’m gay?”

“Because you’ve managed to hide the existence of a significant other from the blogs. I don’t care if you’re involved with a man, a woman, or a sapient pear tree. You ought to go into international espionage. I never even heard a rumor.”

Elle blinked at him before laughing again. “I’ll have to tell Sigrid you said that.”

“You do that,” he said, and smiled.

“Heck, if we get out of here soon, you can tell her yourself. I figure this is the sort of experience that justifies buying you dinner, if anything will.”

Matthew nodded. “I’d like that. I think that will elevate you to some form of godhood in my lovely wife’s eyes.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a god,” said Elle.

Patty sighed a little in her sleep, snuggling up against the replica of Indiction Rivers’s stapler. For the moment, everything seemed to be calm. There was no way the moment was going to last.

* * *

9:16 P.M.

Terror makes you tired. Marty and the others were taking turns sleeping, one of them retreating to the back of the booth and curling up in a makeshift bed of plush toys and wadded-up newspaper while the other two stood watch. They’d decided on three-hour shifts as the most efficient, allowing them to get through one deep REM cycle—maybe; it was Eric’s idea, and he wasn’t totally clear on the science—before they had to get up and let someone else have a turn. At the moment, it was Eric curled up in the back, while Marty watched the aisles for signs of trouble.

Pris, who was supposedly standing guard with him, was actually seated at the register, tapping madly away at her tablet. She didn’t look like she was even remotely aware of her surroundings. Marty found himself envying her, and he didn’t interrupt. What she was trying to do was just as important as what he was doing—maybe more. After all, he might be keeping them alive, but she was going to be the one who got them out.

The sounds of humanity had grown softer as the minutes ticked by and rescue didn’t come. Marty could see people sleeping in the aisles, pressed up against the edges of the booths. The lucky ones who’d remembered to bring a sweater or coat into the convention center were hugging them around themselves, as much to be sure that they wouldn’t be stolen as for warmth. They had nowhere else to go. Marty felt bad for them, even as he patrolled the edges of his own booth every fifteen minutes or so, shooing away squatters. No matter how bad he felt, he wasn’t going to compromise his already fragile security by allowing people to get too close.

He had people of his own to protect. Pris and Eric were his responsibility, and by God, he was going to get them out of here in one piece.

“Marty?”

“What is it, Pris?”

There was a note of excitement in her voice that he wasn’t expecting. It seemed almost obscene, given the rest of the situation. “I got an answer.”

“What?” Marty actually took his eyes off the aisle as he turned to face her. “From who?”

“Convention center management. They finally noticed that I was pinging their private channels, and they decided to answer me.”

“Well? What did they say? Is someone coming to get us the hell out of here?”

Pris grimaced. “Not quite. They say there’s a problem outside. Some sort of riot is blocking the doors—they can’t get in to let us out.”

“Fuck.”

“They say that it’s pretty ugly. We should be glad that we’re in here.” Somewhere in the distance, someone screamed. Pris grimaced more. “I think they wouldn’t be saying that if they were actually in here.”

“Did they have anything useful to say?”

“Yes.” Pris held up her tablet, and smiled. “They told me how we can get the wireless back on. That’s something, right?”

Marty frowned. No food, no water, no exit…but they could get the Internet back on. Somehow, that didn’t seem quite as valuable. On the other hand, they were in a convention center full of geeks. Maybe getting the Internet back up would distract everyone else, keep them from making things worse—and maybe they would be able to find a way out once they had access to the outside world. “What do we need to do?” he asked.

“There’s a control room on the main concourse,” said Pris. “All we have to do is get to one of the house phones, call up, and tell whoever’s in there which switches to press.”

“How do we even know that there’s someone inside?”

Pris gestured with her free hand, indicating the convention center. “Look around. There’s no way someone had the opportunity to get into a secure room with a lock on the door and didn’t do it.”

Marty looked at her. She looked back, a challenge in the tilt of her chin. Pris wasn’t a girl who enjoyed sitting idle; once she had a thing that could be done, she wanted to do it. Getting the wireless back on was something she could do, and that meant that she wanted to be doing it.

As bad as things were, they could get a lot worse. This wasn’t the time to start trouble with the people he needed watching his back. “Wake Eric up,” Marty said gruffly. “We’re going to get the wireless back on.”

* * *

9:25 P.M.

Shawn’s phone beeped softly, snapping him out of his light doze and into a state of almost instant awareness. The phone beeped again. He hit the button to activate the walkie-talkie function, and Lorelei’s voice said uncertainly, “Dad? Are you there?”

“Lorelei?” He smiled as he raised the phone to his mouth. “I’m here, honey. What’s going on?” Around him, the convention center slept, or tried to. Dwight and Rebecca had never come back from their trip to the parking garage. Their absence had created an uneasy divide among the Browncoats. Half of them were firmly convinced that Dwight and Rebecca had managed to find a way out and would be coming back with emergency services. The other half believed that Dwight and Rebecca were never coming back at all.

After spending most of his adult life in the Coast Guard, Shawn knew better than to pin all his hopes on empty wishes. Dwight was a Marine. If he’d been able to come back, he would have done so, leaving Rebecca to organize a rescue party while he told everyone else what was going on. He hadn’t come back. That meant he couldn’t come back…and anything that could stop a Marine who didn’t want to be stopped was probably stopping that Marine permanently.

“I finally got them to listen to me at the office. Lieutenant Farago said to let you know that he’s working on getting cell service into the hall, but nobody would tell me what was actually happening.” There was a note of panic in Lorelei’s voice that Shawn didn’t like. At the end of the day, she was his daughter, and she shared his tendency to go running toward danger as fast as her legs could carry her when she felt like the people she loved were at risk. “Are you okay?”

“Well, honey, we’ve had to redefine the local standards for ‘okay,’ but none of us is hurt right now.” Not unless you included Dwight and Rebecca, and that was just a possibility, not a definite fact. “So they think they can get our phones to start working? That’s a good thing.” It would have been better if it had happened faster. Most of the people in the convention center probably weren’t carrying chargers. Shawn could see outlets and universal connectors becoming the start of the next big fight.

“Yes. But getting the phones working won’t get you out right now.”

“I understand that, honey.”

Lorelei paused for a long moment before she asked, “Doesn’t that worry you?”

“Yes,” admitted Shawn. He couldn’t think of any good reason for the relative peace that had settled over the hall. After the screaming and hysterics that had accompanied the beginning of the siege, he was expecting all-out chaos, not this strange and sudden lull. “But worrying about what we can’t change won’t do us any good. You tell Lieutenant Farago that we need an exit strategy as soon as he can get us one. Things are calm right now. I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”

“Okay, Daddy,” said Lorelei. “I love you.”

“I love you too, sweetheart. Just keep flying, okay? Everything’s going to be just fine. You’ll see.”

Lorelei didn’t answer him.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

Our tea is cold. Lorelei doesn’t seem to notice, and I don’t feel that pointing it out to her would be beneficial. Her gaze is far away. Sometime during the most recent part of her story, she left the present behind and slipped into a time and place that I have never seen. She is back in San Diego, back in the first summer of the Rising, and I begin to understand why she never wanted to tell her story.

LORELEI: We didn’t know how the infected behaved yet. Fuck. We didn’t even know for sure that they were infected. Maybe if we’d had more information… [she stops for a long moment; when she speaks again, her voice is even more distant] It wouldn’t have made any difference at all. Those doors were already locked. What was going to happen was already a foregone conclusion. All that could have changed is the details.

MAHIR: Sometimes, it’s the details that matter the most of all.

LORELEI: The people who’d been infected were skulking around the edges of the hall, waiting for the lights to dim. They weren’t hungry yet. They had enough to eat, and they were in the incubation phase. Once in a while they’d grab someone from the edges of a group, but my dad didn’t know that.

MAHIR: Kellis-Amberlee had a longer incubation in the early days of the Rising. Today, it’s all through our bodies even before we begin to amplify. One bite triggers a cataclysmic chain reaction. For them, back then…how quickly they lost control would have been determined by a dozen factors. Prior exposure, general health, height, weight… It’s simpler now.

LORELEI: Yeah. If you can ever call the zombie apocalypse “simple.” Anyway, our booth was set up toward the back of the hall, and the infection was self-containing at that stage. I think sometimes that it would have been kinder if it had been like the movies, you know? One zombie gets in, everyone’s bitten or dead inside of an hour.

MAHIR: Life rarely concerns itself with being kind, I’m afraid. If it did, we would all be much more content.

LORELEI: Ain’t that the truth?

She appears to notice her tea for the first time in almost an hour. She pushes the cup aside, and stands.

LORELEI: I’m going to need something stronger for what comes next. You game?

MAHIR: All things considered, yes. I believe that I am.

10:06 P.M.

It shouldn’t have taken an hour and a half to reach the back of the hall. Not with the amount of space available and the relatively small number of people who had been able to cram themselves inside for Preview Night before the doors were closed. But that was a reflection of Comic-Con B.E.—Before Emergency—and this was travel through Comic-Con now. Walkways that should have been open were barricaded, some with as little as caution tape and “Keep Out” signs, others with full-on walls that had been constructed from cannibalized booth displays. Of the people Kelly and Stuart encountered outside the barriers, it seemed like everyone knew someone who had been attacked.

One girl had confessed in a whisper that she and her boyfriend had been right up front when things turned ugly, probably right near where Kelly herself had been attacked. “He got bit by this guy who ran away right after, like it didn’t even matter,” she said. “He seemed fine for like, ages, and then he started getting sort of shaky. And then he flipped out and bit me and ran away. Just like that other guy. Just like the guy by the door.”

Kelly and Stuart hadn’t said anything as the girl rolled up her sleeve and showed them the bite marks scored deep into her lower arm. Her boyfriend’s teeth had clearly broken the skin.

The girl had looked calmly between them as she rolled her sleeve back down. “I know what this is,” she’d said. “It’s the zombie apocalypse. We’re all going to die in here, because this is the zombie apocalypse. I’ll die before you do. I’ve already been bitten.” Then she’d turned and wandered away, like they didn’t matter anymore.

The barriers made a lot more sense as Kelly and Stuart resumed their slow passage toward the back of the hall.

They were almost through the last of the truly congested areas when three people came around a blind corner and stopped in the middle of the aisle, eyeing Kelly and Stuart warily. Kelly and Stuart stopped in turn, eyeing the trio right back. It was two men—one older, one in his mid-twenties—and a woman, clutching a tablet to her chest like it was the only handle she had left on reality.

“You don’t want to go that way,” said Kelly, breaking their small bubble of silence. “There’s nothing that way but scared people building cardboard walls and talking about the zombie apocalypse.”

“Which may be actually happening,” added Stuart.

“Which may be actually happening,” allowed Kelly, in a resigned tone. “Anyway. It’s not safe that way.”

“Maybe not, but we think we have a way to get the wireless turned back on,” said the woman.

Leave it to the geeks of the world to prioritize Internet access over staying alive. “The convention center is full of zombies, victims, and proto-zombies,” said Kelly slowly. “Maybe you should go for option number four, and walk away from the carnage, not toward it.”

“Or maybe we should make it easier for emergency personnel to coordinate with people inside the hall and keep everyone a little bit calmer by enabling their Facebook updates,” countered the younger of the two men. “Who are you, anyway? We’re not stopping you from going anywhere you want to go.”

“I’m Stuart; this is Kelly,” said Stuart helpfully.

Kelly groaned. “You just love introducing yourself to people, don’t you? You have to stop that.”

“I’m Pris,” said the woman with the tablet. “This is Marty and Eric. We appreciate the warning, but we really do need to get the wireless working again. It may be the best shot we have at getting out of here.”

For a brief moment, all Kelly could think of was the pale-faced girl with the bite on her arm and the resignation in her eyes. That girl had known what the real score in the convention center was. She had known that the time for hope was long over.

Somehow, Kelly couldn’t bring herself to make the same leap. “Fine,” she said. “You’ve convinced me—and since we just came from the front of the center, we can show you which way not to go. Let’s go turn the Internet back on.”

The older of the two men, the one Pris had identified as Marty, eyed Kelly suspiciously. “Not to sound like I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth, but why should we trust you, young lady?”

“Because I have a spear and you don’t, and right now, that means I’m a lot more likely to stay alive than you are,” said Kelly, in what she hoped was a reasonable tone of voice. She wanted to yell. She just wasn’t quite sure at whom. “Look, listen to me, don’t listen to me, it’s no skin off my nose. But if you really want to fix the wireless, you probably shouldn’t go sneering at anybody who’s actually willing to help you.”

“Besides, she hasn’t stabbed me or anything yet,” said Stuart, in what was probably intended as a helpful tone. “She sort of saved me, actually, when those freaks first came breaking into the hall. You know. Before we realized that they were zombies.”

“We still don’t know that ‘zombie’ is the right word to use here,” said Kelly.

Eric rolled his eyes. “You’re not one of those people who calls it ‘the Z word’ and refuses to say it, are you? Look: If what we’re dealing with here is that disease people have been whispering about in the blogosphere for the last few weeks, then ‘zombie’ is the best word there is. Are they alive? Yeah. But they weren’t at one point, and if they get hold of you, you won’t be for long. That’s zombie enough for me.”

“Semantic arguments won’t turn the wireless on,” said Marty.

“Then let’s go,” said Pris, and started walking. Marty and Eric followed her.

Kelly and Stuart exchanged one last look. Then they fell into step beside the trio, starting back the way they’d come.

* * *

10:10 P.M.

Patty was still asleep, slumped against the replica of Indy Rivers’s desk. Matthew had joined her, slipping reluctantly into a light doze. Only Elle remained awake, sitting with her back to the room’s thin plywood door and listening to the sounds of the convention center outside. Lacking anything better to do, she had her phone out and was using the memo function to type out a message.

Sigrid—

If you have this, it’s because someone has given you my personal effects. (That may be wrong. I can never remember the difference between ‘effect’ and ‘affect.’ That’s your job.) I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you alone. I’m sorry I didn’t come home. But I’m not sorry that you aren’t with me, because I’m scared, Sig. I’m scared enough that having you here would just scare me more. I’d be so afraid of losing you that I wouldn’t be able to breathe. It’s better this way. Really.

You’re probably watching this on the news by now. Comic-Con is a pretty big deal, and something like this happening to it has got to be a headline. I’m sorry if you’re scared for me. If it helps at all, I’m scared for me too. That probably doesn’t help. I wouldn’t want to know that you were scared. I’d want to be there to hold you, and to take the fear away.

Patty stirred in her sleep, making a small protesting noise as she rolled over. Elle looked up, eyes narrowed. Patty didn’t move again, and Elle went back to tapping laboriously away.

I love you, Sigrid. I haven’t always been as good at showing that as I should have been, but it’s true. If I make it out of here, everything’s going to change. No more letting agents or focus groups run my life—run our life. I promise you. I am so scared, but I have never seen things as clearly as I do right now.

Yours always, Elle.

Elle hit “save” and put her phone back into her pocket, slumping against the door. She felt better for having written the letter, even if the odds were good that Sigrid would never see it. It was the sort of thing people did in horror movies, usually right before they got eaten. She’d always thought they were idiots for attracting the attention of whatever force controlled the narrative. Now, though, she finally understood why they did it.

They did it because it felt like closure, and when you already felt like you were going to die, closure was just about the only thing left to aspire to. She closed her eyes, picturing Sigrid’s face, tight with concentration or lit up from within as she laughed. Elle smiled a little. Sigrid was always beautiful, even when she was angry.

Holding the image of Sigrid’s face firmly in her head, Elle relaxed against the door and finally let herself drift into sleep.

* * *

11:11 P.M.

It took only an hour to get back to the front of the hall. It was faster partially because Kelly and Stuart knew the lay of the land now—where the blocked halls were, where the clusters of scared or wounded people had built up—and partially because they were going against the flow of traffic. Almost everyone was heading for the back, where the bathrooms and the food court were, and where there weren’t any bloodstains on the carpet.

Yet.

Kelly found herself eyeing the shadows with her hands clenched tight around her spear, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Pris and Eric walked almost carelessly, not seeming to realize how much danger they were in. Even Stuart seemed more relaxed now that they were in a larger group, like that was going to make any difference to people crazy enough to attack with their teeth. Only Marty seemed to understand how dire the situation really was. He walked quietly, with his bat swinging ready at his side.

It was hard to really focus on watching for an attack. Even with most of the people in the hall busy moving toward the rear, there were enough of them around to make it difficult to know whether something was dangerous or not. Some enterprising souls had turned to looting, either through smash-and-grabs, or simply by strolling up to booths that had been abandoned and starting to fill their complimentary Comic-Con bags. Stuart grimaced every time they passed a looter, probably thinking of his own unguarded wares. His life was worth more than all the weapons on his table, and he seemed to know that, because he didn’t say anything about going back. Privately, Kelly hoped he did get looted. Maybe if a few more people had been armed when all this started, they wouldn’t be locked inside now.

When they reached the last broad open space before entering the maze of narrower aisles leading to the locked doors at the front of the hall, Kelly stopped. “All right,” she said. “Where, exactly, are we going?”

“There.” Pris pointed up to the large glass windows that overlooked the convention center floor. “There’s supposed to be an access panel on the wall under them. We can use that to see whether anyone’s in the control room, and if not, we can try to do this manually from down here.”

“Why can’t we do that anyway?” asked Stuart.

“Because if there is somebody up there, we don’t want them to start hitting switches randomly when the alarms go off. And trying to turn the wireless on manually will trigger a bunch of alarms, at least according to the instructions I have.”

Kelly looked at their destination and sighed. “Right.”

From an architectural standpoint, Pris’s goal made perfect sense. It was a natural recess between two of the large doors leading to the lobby. There were usually trash cans and small kiosks set up there, reducing the chances of people wandering over and prying open the access panel out of simple curiosity. It was a great place to put a backup system. It was also shadowed, providing no clear line of sight, and close enough to the doors that the biting people had probably taken refuge there.

“It looks dark and stupid,” said Stuart dubiously. “I’m not really sure we should be going anywhere near there.”

“We probably shouldn’t, but we have to if we want to get the wireless on,” said Pris. She straightened up, mouth set in a thin, hard line of determination. “People need to be able to communicate with the outside world. As bad as things are, they could get worse. We need to have hope.”

Hope. What a funny idea that was. Kelly looked from Pris, so determined, so convinced that this was worth whatever it cost her, to Stuart, so scared, so ready to run back to his booth and hide from whatever was coming. Dammit. This was Comic-Con. It wasn’t supposed to be hard on anything except her bank account. “Supposed to” never changed anything. This was how things were, and what came next was up to her.

Kelly Nakata had always wondered what it felt like to truly understand that she was going to die. But here and now, in this place…

If this was the zombie apocalypse, no one was coming to let them out. They were already compromised, already potentially infected, and no sane person would open those doors ever again. If this wasn’t the zombie apocalypse—but ah, that was the problem, wasn’t it? There was nothing else that this could really be. It made too much sense. It fit the facts too well, and that meant that everyone inside the building was going to die there. They could die scared and hiding, doing nothing. Or they could try to make things a little better in whatever way they possibly could.

Kelly gave her spear an experimental twirl. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered, before saying, more loudly, “All right. Marty and I are the best-armed, so we should go in first, in case of trouble. Pris, you’re next. Eric and Stuart, you bring up the rear, make sure nothing comes up from behind us to try getting in the way.”

“What do we do if something does come up behind us?” asked Stuart.

“Hit it until it stops coming,” said Kelly. “Pris, you do whatever it is you need to do to get the wireless back online.” The few people who were in earshot were turning toward them, suddenly interested in what they were hearing. It figured that mentions of a working Internet would be enough to get people’s attention, no matter what other crap was going on at the time. “This is where we start moving, or we’re going to get mobbed.”

“Who died and put you in charge?” asked Marty, sounding half-amused.

“My Jedi master,” said Kelly dryly. Then she started walking, heading toward the shadowy nook where Pris claimed the wireless access panel was located. The rest of the group followed her. At this point, what else were they supposed to do?

* * *

11:13 P.M.

The first bloody-lipped man came lunging out of the darkness as soon as Kelly and Marty stepped off the carpet and out of the protection of the overhead lights. Kelly didn’t make a sound. She just swung her borrowed spear low and hard, hitting the man across the stomach. He moaned, a sound that was chillingly familiar, thanks to a hundred zombie movies. Kelly froze.

And Marty brought his baseball bat down solidly on the man’s skull, which caved in with a horrific crunching sound. The man stopped lunging for Kelly and fell, leaving chunks of bloody gore on Marty’s bat. For a moment, everyone was silent, each of them trying to wrap his or her mind around what had just happened. Either zombies were real, or Marty had just killed a man. Either Marty was a murderer, or he was a savior. The contradiction was too big to be absorbed, and so without saying a word, they all dismissed it.

“Let’s move,” said Kelly.

They were almost to the wall when the second pair came charging out of the dark, just as silently as the first one—but unlike the first one, they started moaning before they were hit. One grabbed for Pris, who screamed, a short, startled sound. The other went for Kelly.

Moving fast, Kelly whirled and slammed the butt of her spear into the man who was reaching for Pris. He staggered back a step, but otherwise didn’t seem to notice. That was when Kelly flipped the spear around and thrust the point into the man’s throat, pinning him in place long enough for Eric to slam his crowbar into the back of the man’s head.

That was when the third man sank his teeth into Kelly’s shoulder. Kelly screamed and swore at the same time, trying to wrench herself free. She succeeded, briefly, but that was long enough for Marty to close the distance and beat the man off her with his baseball bat. Kelly clamped her hand over her wounded shoulder, staggering a few feet away before she turned to look back at the carnage.

The man kept moaning even as he died. It wasn’t until his skull cracked that the sound stopped, replaced by limpness and eerie silence.

“Kelly?” Stuart hesitantly touched her uninjured shoulder. “Are you okay?”

No, you asshole. I’m bitten, and we both know what that means; we’re not idiots here. Kelly forced herself to look toward him, smile wanly, and lie. “Fine,” she said. “It’s just a flesh wound.”

Not one of them believed what she was saying. But Stuart nodded with quiet resignation, like he understood why she needed to lie, and that seemed to speak for the whole group. “Good. Let’s get moving. I think we’re almost there.”

Nothing else attacked them as they finished crossing the distance to the wall. Kelly was half-expecting there to be no access panel at all, and was quietly relieved when she saw it, industrial gray steel creating a patch of darker shadow on the wall.

Pris walked to the hatch and pried it open with her fingernails. There was a red emergency phone inside. She lifted the receiver, checked her tablet one last time, and hit the “0.”

All that was left to do after that was wait.

* * *

11:16 P.M.

Lesley jumped when the phone rang, nearly toppling out of the office chair where she’d been dozing. On the floor, Unis lifted her head off her paws before climbing to her feet, tail wagging cautiously. Sometimes the phone meant it was time to go Out. Unis thought that Out would be a lovely idea. The Woman had been still for too long, and the smells from outside were not the comforting kind, not grass or food or home. Outside the door smelled like blood and fear and peeing, and Unis wanted to get The Woman away from here if she could.

“What in the world…?” said Lesley. She fumbled around the large control board until her hand hit what felt like a phone receiver. The ringing stopped when she picked it up. She brought it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Hello!” said a female voice, half-laughing with relief. The voice grew distant for a moment as it said, “Guys! Guys, I got somebody! There’s somebody there!”

“Thank God,” said a male voice. “Tell them we’re stuck in here.”

“I’m stuck, too, and I can hear you,” said Lesley. “Who’s this?”

“My name is Pris Garrison. I’m here with some of my friends in the hall. Please, do you work for the convention center? We’re locked in. Can you let us out?”

“I’m afraid not, Ms. Garrison. My name’s Lesley Smith. I’m a journalist from the UK. I flew out to cover the convention, and when things went pear-shaped, I somehow found myself locked up in here. I was sort of hoping you’d called because you were about to rescue me.”

A soft choking sound came through the receiver. After a moment, Lesley realized that it was Pris, laughing.

“What?” she asked sharply. “I assure you, this isn’t funny.”

“I know! I know. That’s why I’m laughing. Look, I’m sorry we can’t save you, but maybe you can still help us. Do you see a big gray button labeled ‘wireless controls’? It should be on the left side of the main control panel.”

Lesley abruptly understood why Pris had been laughing. Sometimes the universe was so cruel as to become comic. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you with that, Ms. Garrison.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because I’m legally blind. I can see well enough to get myself around, with the help of my dog—she’s here with me—but I can’t read a label on a switch in this light, and I don’t think you want me to start flipping things at random.”

There was a moment of silence before Pris said, “Okay. That’s…okay. I can get things back online from down here, but I need you to not touch anything, no matter what starts beeping or flashing. Can you do that? We’re hoping that if we can get the wireless back on, we might be able to call for help.”

“I’m blind, not stupid,” said Lesley. “I can manage to keep my hands to myself while you do whatever needs to be done.”

“Sorry,” said Pris, sounding abashed. “I didn’t mean…anyway, thank you. It’ll just take me a second. Thanks for your time.”

Suddenly, the thought of being left alone in the little locked room was unbearable. “Is there anyone else with you?” asked Lesley. “I’d like to talk to them, please. If you don’t mind.”

“Um, sure. Hang on.” Pris’s voice got distant for a moment as she said, “She wants to talk to somebody else.”

There was a scuffling sound, and a male voice came on the line, saying, “Hello?”

“Hello. My name’s Lesley. I’m locked in the control room at the moment, although I’m afraid I won’t be able to help Ms. Garrison with getting the wireless back on. What’s your name?”

“Marty,” said the man. “There are three other people here, besides me and Pris. Stuart is helping Kelly bandage her shoulder. Eric’s keeping watch.”

“One of you has been hurt, then?”

“Yeah. Kelly got bit pretty bad getting to this phone. She’s not bleeding as much as she was, but even a little bleeding is too much when you’re trapped in a big-ass convention center with no medical supplies.”

It was ironic. Lesley’s tour of the convention center had included the locations of all the first aid and disability assistance checkpoints…and they were all outside the central hall. With the doors locked, everyone was stuck. “I hope she’s all right.”

“Ma’am, not to be rude, but I don’t think any of us is all right at this point.”

“I’m afraid that might be true.” Something started beeping. Lesley turned toward the sound and saw that a large red light had snapped on in the middle of the center control panel. “Whatever Ms. Garrison is doing, it appears to be having some effect. There’s a red light on up here—no, wait. It’s just gone yellow, and now it’s flashing.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“I hope so. What were you hoping for this Comic-Con, Marty? If I may be so bold.”

“I’m a vendor. I was hoping for some good sales, and maybe a bargain or two if I got time to do any shopping for myself.” Marty chuckled darkly. “Well, the stores are open. Too bad there’s nobody to take my money.”

“No one taking money at Comic-Con? Truly, it is the end of the world.” It was meant to be a lighthearted joke. Somehow, it didn’t quite come out that way. Lesley cleared her throat. “The light’s gone green now, if that helps anything.”

“It might. Pris! Try the Wi-Fi.”

There was a pause, and then Lesley heard the voice from before, whooping in triumph. Someone else laughed. Whatever Pris had done, it must have worked, then. Not that it did her any good at all. She was still alone with her dog, sitting in the dark, and feeling increasingly unsure that any rescue was coming.

“Marty? Are you still there?”

“I am, yeah. Thanks for all your help, Lesley.”

Don’t hang up; don’t leave me alone up here in the silence, thought Lesley frantically. Clearing her throat, she said only, “It was nothing, really. All I had to do was sit still and not touch anything. Fortunately for you, that happens to be a talent of mine.”

“Still, we appreciate it. If this gets taken care of before the end of the convention, come look me up. I’m at Marty’s Comics and Games, in row 2100. I’d like to meet you in person.”

“I’d like that, too,” said Lesley quietly. Goodbyes would have felt too final—and given the circumstances, they probably would have been. So she said nothing more as she took the phone from her ear and dropped it back into the cradle, cutting off their conversation.

Alone in the silence once more, Lesley Smith put her hands over her face and wondered when it was going to end. If it was ever going to end.

* * *

11:30 P.M.

“How’s your shoulder feeling?” Stuart took a step backward, wiping his bloody palms against the seat of his pants. There’d been so much blood. He wasn’t sure how much blood was safe for a person to lose. He was deathly afraid that he was about to find out.

Kelly offered him a small smile. She could feel the bloody fabric of her shirt sticking to her skin, and she knew the situation wasn’t good. “It hurts like hell,” she said. “I’m glad we got the wireless back on.”

“Me, too. I’d hate to have waded back into this mess for nothing.”

Kelly’s smile strengthened. It was good, she decided, that he’d introduced himself without being prompted; it was good that she’d gotten to know him, even if it was only a little, before things went all the way wrong. “Hope’s not nothing. Remember that, okay?”

“What?” Stuart blinked, expression turning alarmed. “Why are you talking like that?”

“I got bit, Stuart. You remember what that girl said. I’m as good as dead.”

“No, you’re not. The real world doesn’t work like that. The real world—”

“She’s not wrong.” Pris’s voice was very soft. Kelly looked past Stuart to the other woman, realizing as she did that she hadn’t even noticed when the cheering stopped. Pris was pale, and the hand that held her tablet was shaking. “It’s all over Facebook and Twitter. People are calling this the zombie apocalypse. Actual people, who aren’t trapped inside here. They’re saying it’s an outbreak. The government didn’t lock the doors, but they’re not going to let anybody unlock them because we’re all already written off as dead. Infected.”

“See? It’s the zombie apocalypse, and in the zombie apocalypse, once somebody gets bitten, they’re not your friend anymore.” Kelly held out her spear, waiting for Stuart to take it. “Go. Find a back door, find a way out of here, and go. Tell people we got the Internet up. Maybe if we make enough noise from inside, they’ll have to open the doors.”

“Kelly, we’re not leaving you.”

“Yes, we are.” Marty stepped up behind Pris, who shot him a relieved look. “I’m sorry as hell that you got bit helping us out. I’d take it back if I could.”

“Would you take my place?” asked Kelly.

Marty looked away. They should kill her; all the zombie movies he’d ever seen told him that they should kill her. And he couldn’t. That would be the final step toward making this all real, and he couldn’t.

“I didn’t think so.” Kelly sighed. “Stuart, please. You saved my ass by setting up shop where you did, even if you don’t have a damn clue how to use the weapons you were selling. Let me save yours. Get the hell out of here.”

“I don’t want to go without you,” said Stuart quietly. He reached out as he spoke, and took the spear gently from her hand.

Kelly smiled. “I don’t give a fuck what you want.” Somehow, the words sounded like an endearment. Her attention swung to Marty. “Look out for Stuart. He needs a lot of looking after.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Marty.

Pris sniffled, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and said, “I’ll make sure everybody knows what you did. How brave you were.”

“You do that,” said Kelly. “Now go.”

She stayed where she was, tucked into the shadowy nook off the main wall, and watched as the other four turned and walked away. Stuart glanced back at her several times. She forced herself to keep watching until they vanished around a corner and were gone. Then she sighed, all the straightness going out of her spine as she sank, cross-legged, to the floor. Her shoulder ached. Her feet hurt. She was so tired. So, so tired. Maybe she’d just stay there forever, she thought. Maybe that would be for the best.

Kelly Nakata closed her eyes, letting her head list forward, and waited to stop caring about what was going to happen next. She was small. She’d lost a lot of blood.

It didn’t take as long as she might have thought.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

The rum is sweet and burning at the same time. It makes it a little easier to discuss the events inside the convention center. Kelly Nakata and the others restored the record of what happened during the siege of Comic-Con; without their attempts to turn the wireless back on, we might never have known as much as we do. Lorelei was right when she said she’d need something stronger for what came next. So did I.

LORELEI: It’s funny. I mean, there’s this whole story that has nothing to do with my family, happening at the same time that my family was fighting to survive. But without it, I’d never have known what happened to them. Was the whole Rising like that, do you think? Just layers and layers of tangle, so that you can never really tell where one thing ends and the next one begins?

She seems more human now, and more lost. I put my cup down and push it carefully away. I need to be sober for the remainder of this interview. No matter how much I want not to be.

MAHIR: I believe so, yes. Everyone has his or her own story to tell. The San Diego Outbreak was unique only in that so many people were confined in such a small space. Their stories were almost forced to overlap.

LORELEI: I spent a lot of time after the Rising going through all the social media feeds from that outbreak, looking for…something. I don’t know. Something that would make it all start making sense. Not linear sense. Just…

MAHIR: You wanted something to make it fair.

LORELEI: Yeah. That’s it, exactly. I wanted something that would make it fair for my parents to have died in there. I wanted something that would make it fair for me to have lived when they didn’t. I know—I know—that they were both glad I made it out of the hall before the doors closed. But that doesn’t make it right. And it doesn’t make it fair.

MAHIR: I don’t think “fair” ever entered into it.

LORELEI: Yeah, I guess not. That was never part of the equation. You know, I met Kelly Nakata’s brother a couple years ago. He came to one of the Equality Now film screenings that I helped put together. He was a really nice guy. He wanted to meet me.

MAHIR: I can understand why.

LORELEI: We’re almost to the end. Do you think we can get through this tonight?

MAHIR: I would like that.

LORELEI: Yeah. So would I. Let’s finish this.

Everything Must Go

The heroes of the Rising took many forms. Some of them fought. Some of them hid. Some of them just left artifacts for us to find after they were gone. But all of them died, and all of them, whether they knew it or not, were mourned.

—Mahir Gowda

Me? Oh, I’m just your ordinary time-traveling badass with a badge. Now freeze, dirtbag. You’re going to Paradox Prison for a long, long time.

—Chronoforensic Analyst Indiction Rivers,
Space Crime Continuum, season one, episode three

11:30 P.M.

“Holy crap—Shawn! The wireless just came back on!” Robert waved his phone like it would illustrate the point. “I’ve got connection!”

“Me, too,” said Leita, holding up her own phone. “Maybe this means they’re finally getting ready to break us out of here.”

“Maybe,” said Shawn, with an utter lack of conviction. He didn’t want to discourage the others in their hoping—at this point, hope was about the only thing they had going for them, and he’d rather it lasted—but he couldn’t work up any excitement for something as small as the Internet coming on. Not unless it was accompanied by an announcement that the National Guard was on the way. He paused. The National Guard… “Shit.”

“What is it?” asked Vanessa. She was holding her iPad again, fiddling nervously with her new video editing software. Maybe later, she could edit together a video about their Comic-Con adventure. Assuming they all survived.

“We need to get back to work on the barricades. Break time’s over.” Shawn grabbed a hammer. “I want this place so fortified that we could live in it.”

“What?” Vanessa’s eyes widened. “Why? Didn’t you hear Robbie? They’re going to come and rescue us soon!”

“No, they’re not.” Shawn shook his own phone at her. “You hear that? Silence. Lorelei’s at the Coast Guard right now, and what I’ve got is silence. That means she hasn’t managed to get them moving yet, and if the Coast Guard isn’t moving, neither is anybody else. We’re not being saved just because we can check our e-mail again. And when people realize that, they’re going to lose what little serenity they had left. The shit’s about to hit the fan in here, and all that’s standing between us and the chaos is the hull on this ship.”

“It’s a booth, Shawn,” said Lynn quietly, stepping up next to her husband.

“Right now, it’s our ship, and it’s the only way we’re flying safely out of this.” Shawn thrust the hammer at her. She took it. “Get to work, all of you. We don’t have much time.”

“I hope you’re wrong, Shawn,” said Lynn, and leaned up to kiss his cheek before walking briskly toward the other side of the booth.

Shawn sighed. “So do I.” He glanced around at the others, finally settling on Robert. “Hey. I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” asked Robert, putting down the box that he’d been lifting.

“Come here.” Shawn beckoned him closer. Robert came, and when he was close enough, Shawn murmured, “I want you to get online and start looking for anyone who has outside eyes on this place. We need to know what’s going on. We need to know how bad things are going to get. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” said Robert. He had to fight to ignore the sudden churning in his stomach. This wasn’t how his Comic-Con was supposed to go. Not a bit of it. “Is there anything I should be watching for, in specific?”

“Yeah,” said Shawn. “Look for people talking about the zombie apocalypse. I need to know whether this is the end of the world.”

Wisely, Robert didn’t say anything else. He just moved to one of the booth’s folding chairs, sat down, and started to search. Shawn watched him go. Then he picked up another hammer, and turned to his work.

* * *

11:30 P.M.

Elle’s phone pinged, signaling that her e-mail had successfully been sent. It was a familiar enough sound that it didn’t wake her. Sleeping sitting up with her back braced against a door wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but she was tired enough and wrung-out enough from her day that she didn’t care anymore. On the other side of the replica office, Matthew and Patty slept sunk deep into their own respective dreamlands. Patty seemed almost entirely boneless, a limp puddle across the model of Indiction Rivers’s desk. Matthew was slightly more upright, but only slightly, with one arm curved protectively around her back.

Then the phone rang, and all three of them snapped awake. Matthew was on his feet before his brain and his body fully caught up with each other. Patty sat up, blinking bemusedly. And Elle, who knew that ring tone better than she knew almost anything else in the world, was simply reaching for the phone. It was reflex. If she’d been awake and able to think about what she was doing, she might not have answered…but she was half-asleep, and sleep can make you careless. The phone was almost to her ear before she realized what she was doing, and by then it was too late.

“Sig?”

“Elle?” The edge of panic on her girlfriend’s voice was painful. Elle winced.

Sigrid demanded, “What the hell is this e-mail I just got? What’s going on in there?”

“I’m sorry. I set my memo function to auto-send, and someone must have managed to turn the wireless in here back on. You weren’t supposed to see that.” Not while I was still breathing, anyway.

“The police have cleared and cordoned off the Gaslight District. The hotels were evacuated almost an hour ago.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m still in our room. I tried to go down to the convention center when I realized you were stuck there, but there are police blocking all the access roads. They’re not letting anyone near.” Common sense dictated that “the talent” stay as close to the convention center as possible, to make sure that they could get to and from their panels quickly and easily. Sigrid and Elle were staying at a very nice B&B almost two miles off-site. If Sigrid couldn’t enjoy the convention, she could at least enjoy their accommodations—and it made it less likely that there would be a public slip where one of Elle’s fans might see.

Elle had never been so grateful for her paranoia. “I’m glad,” she said quietly. “I don’t want you anywhere near here.”

“Are you hurt?” The edge of panic was spreading, saturating Sigrid’s tone. “Elle, are you alone in there?”

“No, no, honey, I’m fine. I’m here with two friends, Matthew and Patty. We managed to get to cover before the lights went out. None of us is hurt. We’re all fine.”

“I kinda need to pee,” said Patty, and promptly blushed a brilliant red, adding, in a mutter, “I don’t believe I just said that in front of Elle Riley.”

“Where’s your handler?” asked Sigrid. “Isn’t there someone who can get you out of there?”

“No, there’s not. I lost him when the screaming started, and I haven’t seen him since. Maybe he made it out of the hall.” Or maybe he got caught up in the riot at the front, and was out there somewhere, looking for her. Elle couldn’t manage to muster any compassion for his possible plight. He was the one who’d run away and left her with two strangers in the middle of the exhibit hall.

“That letter—”

“I meant it. I meant every word of it. I’m done pretending.”

“Why would you write that if you thought you were coming home? What would make you do that?”

Elle sighed, shoulders slumping. “Sigrid…”

“Are you coming home to me?”

Elle looked across the room to Matthew and Patty, who were watching her, not saying a word. She couldn’t see through the blocked-off windows, but she didn’t need to; she knew what the exhibit hall looked like. There would have been screaming if things had already started going downhill. It was probably only a matter of time.

“Yes,” said Elle calmly. She was an excellent actress, no matter what the critics said; she’d gotten her job because she knew how to do it, not just because she looked good in a bikini. “I’m coming home. I promise.”

“Elle—”

“I have to go, Sigrid. I love you. I’ll see you soon. I promise.”

“I love you,” Sigrid whispered.

Elle lowered her phone, hitting the button to disconnect the call at the same time. Then she just sat there, staring at it. Minutes ticked by.

Finally, hesitantly, Patty asked, “Are you okay?”

“I never lied to her before.” Elle raised her head, smiling sadly. “I’m not sure I want to make it out of here. I never wanted to know that I could lie to her.”

Outside the plywood walls of their room, someone screamed.

* * *

11:43 P.M.

Kelly Nakata opened her eyes.

Slowly, with none of her former grace, she clambered to her feet. She used both arms to push herself upright, not shying away from putting pressure on her wounded arm. Anyone looking into her eyes would have found a curious absence of pain, considering how much blood covered her skin and drenched her clothing. When she stood, she left behind a broad dark splotch on the carpet. But Kelly Nakata didn’t care. She was back on her feet, and unlike the zombies who had entered when the siege began—the ones who were well fed and seeking to expand the size of the pack—she was freshly risen, weak from blood loss, and hungry.

So hungry.

The exact mechanics of the Kellis-Amberlee virus were not yet known on that hot July night, but that did nothing to stop them from working as nature and genetic engineering had intended. Kelly Nakata was no longer in her right mind, and the virus controlling her body knew what it needed to do. It needed to spread. It needed to nourish itself. It needed to feed.

As Kelly began walking toward the sound of living food—moving not with the characteristic lurch of the long-infected, but with a smooth, almost fluid gracelessness, like all her joints had lost their tension—other infected emerged from the shadows and followed her. It was as if she had provided some final tipping point to their number, taking them from the need to grow and leading them into the need to hunt.

Somewhere in the middle of the slowly expanding pack, one of the infected began to moan. The rest echoed it, until the entire mass of stiff-limbed people with glazed eyes and bloody hands was moaning in near-unison. Together, they half-shambled, half-walked down the aisle, heading for the unmistakable sounds of the living.

* * *

11:45 P.M.

“We shouldn’t have left her,” said Stuart, shifting Kelly’s spear from one hand to the other. “This is just crazy. Things like this don’t really happen.”

They weren’t moving as fast as Marty wanted them to be. Pris was distracted by poking at her tablet, and Stuart had been dragging his feet ever since they walked away from Kelly. Only Eric seemed to understand how important it was that they make it back to the fortified safety of the booth, where they might have a chance in hell of keeping themselves alive until rescue came. “It’s happening, and we need to deal with it,” Marty snapped. “Kelly knew the score. She’s the one who told us to leave her behind. Now keep on moving. We have a long way to go before we get back to where we need to be.”

“Facebook is going nuts,” said Pris, eyes still glued to her screen. “There’s a lady over in Artist’s Alley who says her best friend flipped out and ate her husband. Like, actually ate him. And there’s a bunch of interns holed up in one of the big toy company booths using boxes of action figures as barricades. They’re freaking out because people keep stealing pieces of their walls.” She snorted. “I guess it’s never too bad for people to want their exclusive swag.”

“Is anyone saying anything about a rescue?”

“Lots of rumors on the inside—jeez, it’s like half the convention was just waiting for the chance to get online and start screaming—and some people on Twitter are talking about the military moving in around the convention center. Maybe they’re coming to break us out of here.”

“Yeah,” said Marty gruffly. “Maybe that’s what they’re doing. Just keep moving, okay? I want us all back where we know the territory as fast as possible.”

“What’s that sound?” Much to Marty’s disgust, Eric stopped walking and turned to look back in the direction they had just come from. “Do you hear that?”

“All I hear is a convention center full of geeks who finally have their e-mail back, which means this is our best shot at getting back to the booth without anyone stopping us,” said Marty. “Now move.”

“It sounds like someone’s hurt or something. They’re moaning.”

“We are in the middle of what looks increasingly like the zombie apocalypse,” said Marty, stressing his last two words as hard as he could. “Moaning people don’t need help. Moaning people are intending to eat us.”

To illustrate his point, Kelly came around the corner of the aisle they had just walked down, with half a dozen more blood-drenched people shambling along behind her. Kelly was leading the others straight for her former companions.

“Kelly?” said Stuart uncertainly.

“Kelly’s dead,” said Marty. Any doubts he’d had about the nature of their predicament vanished when he saw Kelly’s blank face, mouth half-open as she moaned with the others. He grabbed Stuart’s arm before the other man could do anything they were all going to regret. “That’s not Kelly anymore. Now move.”

Much to his surprise, the other man moved. Hauling Stuart along with him, Marty ran. Eric and Pris followed…and the zombies, as one, followed them.

After hours of waiting, the chase was finally on.

* * *

11:51 P.M.

The screaming was getting louder and more frequent. Patty pressed herself against Matthew, moaning slightly with fear. It was a living, vital sound, very different than the soft, insistent moans that Elle could hear under the panicking crowd outside their hidey-hole. She slid off the desk where she’d been sitting, taking a long step backward.

“I don’t think that’s the cavalry,” she said.

“Matthew, I’m scared,” wailed Patty.

“I know, love.” He put his arms around her, looking grimly at the door. In that moment, he wished he’d never heard of the San Diego Comic Convention, or allowed himself to consider it as a location for his honeymoon. He held his wife as tightly as he could, and wondered whether he was ever going to see England, or his family, again. “Just hold fast. Rescue is coming.”

“We’re as secure in here as we’re going to get,” said Elle. “We—” Her words dissolved into a yelp of fear as someone started banging on the door, sending it shuddering. It wasn’t constructed to stand up to any sort of pressure, after all; it was only intended as a replica.

“Let us in!” shouted a male voice, very real, and very much alive. “We can hear you in there!”

“Please!” added a second voice—female this time, and very clearly terrified.

Matthew and Elle exchanged a look. They didn’t say anything. In a moment like this, there was nothing to be said. Matthew let go of Patty, pressing a kiss to the top of her head as he stood to help Elle move the filing cabinets. As soon as they were out of the way, Elle stepped forward and opened the door.

“Get in here,” she said to the small group of people clustered in the aisle outside. “Now.”

“Thank you,” said their leader, an older African-American man with a death grip on an aluminum baseball bat. He turned and started gesturing for his people to get into the building: two other men, both younger than he was, one Asian, one white, and a pale-faced woman with a mop of wild, uncombed curls. Once all three of them were in, he followed, and Elle slammed the door behind him.

“Matthew, the filing cabinets,” she said.

“On it,” he replied. To his surprise and mild relief, the newcomers hastened to help him. With all of them working together, they had the door blocked in a matter of seconds.

“Good,” said Elle. The moaning outside was getting louder. “I guess this means help isn’t on the way, huh?”

“Not quite yet,” said the older man.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

The wild-haired girl was staring at Elle. “Aren’t you…”

“I used to be,” Elle replied. “Hi. I’m Elle. This is Matthew, and Patty. They’re on their honeymoon. I have no idea why I thought it was important to tell you that, but I did, so there you go. The censors are officially off duty for the duration of this convention.”

“I’m Marty,” said the older man. “These two are Pris and Eric.”

“I’m Stuart,” said the Asian man. He was holding a spear like he didn’t really know what to do with it but was terrified of what would happen if he put it down.

“Nice to meet you all,” said Elle briskly. “Now, what sort of danger did you people lead to our door?” She realized she was falling into the speech patterns she used for Indiction Rivers—and well, so what if she was? Indy Rivers got things done. Maybe she was a fictional character, but they were in a fictional place, in a fictional situation. There were worse things to be than fictional.

Fictional people cried only when the story told them to.

“Well, ma’am, I don’t know how to break this to you, exactly, but I’m afraid we’re in the middle of the zombie apocalypse here,” said Marty. “One of our friends got bitten. She’s outside now, leading a whole mob of them after us.”

“And you came here?” cried Patty, standing. “Why would you do that? We were doing just fine before you came crashing in here! Now we’re probably going to die, and it’s going to be all your fault!”

“Patty.” Matthew put his hand on her shoulder. “Patty, sweetheart, hush. It’s not their fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

“That asshole who decided to cure the common cold, maybe,” said Eric.

“Or maybe not,” said Elle. “I don’t think ‘blame’ is what we should be looking for here. Survival is. If those zombies are behind you, this is where we start shoring up the walls, and we get ready to make our last stand. Are you with me?”

Marty nodded. “Just tell us what to do.”

Elle told them.

* * *

11:57 P.M.

“Daddy!” Lorelei’s voice came through the phone in a wail, terror and heartbreak warring with fury for dominance.

Shawn snatched his phone from his belt and depressed the walkie-talkie button as he raised it to his mouth. “Lorelei, what’s wrong?”

She was crying; he could hear it even before she spoke again. Little hitching sobs that she was trying, and failing, to hold back. She’d cried that way since she was a little girl. “D-Daddy, they’re…I just heard them saying…”

“Slow down. Breathe. Are you all right?”

“They’re going to blow up the convention center!” This was less a wail, and more a scream. Shawn went cold, his fingers clenching on the phone as she continued: “They didn’t know I could hear them when they started talking about it. They said there was no safe way to do an extraction. There are too many z-z—” She broke down and started crying in earnest before she could even get the word out.

“Zombies,” said Vanessa quietly, stepping up next to Shawn. “There are too many zombies for them to get us out.”

“Damn,” whispered Shawn. Then he raised his phone again and said, “Okay, honey. I need you to breathe deep and stay calm, and listen to me. Do not try to get off the base. Do not try to get over here. Whatever’s going to happen, I don’t want you in the middle of it. Do you hear me? You stay where you are. Your mother and I need to know that you’re safe.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Lorelei wasn’t screaming anymore. She was barely even whispering. “They’re going to blow it up. The whole thing. They’re going to kill you.”

“And I wish that wasn’t going to happen, but, sweetheart, what matters here is that you’re safe. You’re not in this building. You’re going to be fine.” Shawn closed his eyes. He didn’t want to risk seeing his wife’s face. Once she started crying, there was no way he’d be able to keep from doing the same. “It’s going to be hard. Everything’s changing. But you got out. That means we won.”

Someone was crying; he could hear them, even with the screaming that was starting to get closer and closer to their position, even with the sound of distant moans. It didn’t matter. What mattered was Lorelei’s whispered reply: “I don’t want you to die.”

“I don’t want to leave you. We all have to do things we don’t want to do. Can you keep flying for me, baby girl? Please? Because all I need to know right now is that you can do that.”

“I’ll try,” whispered Lorelei.

“That’s all I’ll ever ask of you.” Shawn opened his eyes and turned to his right, where he knew Lynn would be waiting. The tears were running down her cheeks, but her expression was calm. She knew what was coming next. “Honey, I’m going to give the phone to your mother now. You need to talk to her before we lose connection. I love you, Lorelei. Don’t ever forget. Promise me that you won’t.”

“I won’t, Daddy. I love you.”

“Good,” said Shawn. He handed the phone to Lynn before he could say anything else—before he could stretch it out any further, before he could insist that she keep talking to him until it was too late to say anything else. He’d said what needed saying. Everything else would just be self-indulgent, and they were past the time for things like that. He had work to do.

Vanessa and Robert followed him to the far side of the booth. “Tell us what to do, and we’ll do it,” said Vanessa.

“If they’re going to blow this place to Kingdom Come, we’ve got two choices,” said Shawn. “First, we sit here and wait for the boom. Odds are we wouldn’t feel anything. That sort of thing tends to happen pretty damn fast.”

“And our second choice?” asked Robert.

Shawn smiled grimly. “We get the fuck out of here.”

Vanessa nodded. “Sounds good to me. Lead the way.”

* * *

12:02 A.M.

Unis lifted her head off her paws, attention fixing on the door. Her ears pricked forward and her nostrils flared. The smell coming through the door wasn’t a good smell. It was Bad. It was a Bad Smell, bad enough to stand out against all the other smells in the world. A low growl started in her chest, shaking her body as she got slowly to her feet. The Bad Smell was getting stronger. But she was a Good Dog. She wouldn’t let the Bad Smell reach The Woman. No. That wouldn’t happen while she was standing guard.

“Unis? What’s wrong?”

Unis kept growling. She knew that her duty was to The Woman—and yes, usually that meant answering to her name, because The Woman might need something. But Unis knew that The Woman’s nose wasn’t as good as hers. The Woman didn’t know that there was a Bad Smell. It was up to Unis to protect her.

“Unis.” This time, Lesley’s voice cracked with command. Unis’s growl wavered, losing focus for a moment as instinct warred with training. In the end, instinct and loyalty won: No amount of training could have pulled her attention away from that door.

For her part, Lesley was becoming alarmed. She knew her dog. Unis was the best service dog she’d ever had, and if Unis was ignoring her, that meant that something was seriously wrong.

“This isn’t good,” she whispered, and wished, not for the first time, that she wasn’t locked in alone with her dog, who might be excellent company but had never quite mastered the art of conversation.

Unis continued growling. It was getting louder now. It still couldn’t quite block out the new sound that was coming from the other side of the door: human voices, moaning.

“Here!” said Lesley, sitting up a little straighter. “Whoever you are, you can just go away! You’re frightening my dog! We don’t want any!”

The moaning didn’t stop. If anything, it increased, and someone began banging on the door. Several someones, from the sound of it.

“Go away!” shouted Lesley.

They didn’t go away.

Unis stopped growling and began barking wildly when the door started caving inward. By then, it was too late to do anything about the infected who were smashing their way into the control room—but really, it had been too late since they were locked in. Lesley screamed.

Unis, who was a very good dog, fought to the end to defend her mistress, and died knowing that The Woman was safer because she had been there. Out of everyone who fell during the siege of San Diego, she may well be the only one who died at peace, knowing that she’d done her best.

The same cannot be said of Lesley Smith. Her last thought was of Unis, whose frenzied barking had stopped a few seconds before. Worrying about her dog made it a little easier to endure the teeth biting into her flesh—and then there was only pain, and darkness, and then there was nothing at all.

No one on the convention floor noticed what was happening in the control room. By that point, they all had problems of their own.

* * *

12:09 A.M.

Lynn came to join the group as they were preparing to move. Shawn’s phone was in her hand. She offered it to him, saying quietly, “The battery died. She said to tell you that she loves you.”

“Thank you,” said Shawn, and took the phone, clipping it to his belt.

Lynn nodded and looked around at the remains of their group. The screaming from the front of the hall was getting louder, but it wasn’t quite on top of them. Yet. “Where are we going?”

“The food court,” said Shawn. “The parking garage clearly isn’t a viable exit, or Dwight and Rebecca would have contacted us by now. That means we need another way. There might be an employee door at the back of their little café—and if not, there’s the freezer. It could survive the bombing.”

“And it’s better than sitting here waiting to be blown up,” said Leita.

“Leita’s right,” said Lynn. “But if we’re going to move, it needs to be now. If we stand here too long, we’re not going anywhere.”

“Then let’s go,” said Shawn.

The five of them left the booth together, holding what weapons they could improvise or scrounge from the toolbox. Each of them knew that they would never be coming back, and carried what they thought was important: a backpack, a tote bag filled with merchandise, the cash box, the signed picture of Joss Whedon from the charity drawing. Shawn knew that some of the things people had chosen to carry would slow them down, but he didn’t say anything about it. There would have been no point. They were more likely to die trying to escape than they were to make it out of the building. If people felt better because they died holding their laptops or their favorite shirts, he wasn’t going to be the one who told them no.

As for Shawn himself, he brought his phone, the hammer he’d been holding off and on since arriving at the convention center, and his wife. His daughter was already safe. Nothing else could possibly have mattered to him in that moment.

Together, the last of the California Browncoats walked deeper into the hall, heading for the food court, hoping for a miracle.

They weren’t going to get one.

* * *

12:11 A.M.

The moaning outside was getting softer as the zombies moved away, pursuing easier prey along the aisles of the convention center. Elle realized she was giggling under her breath. She clapped a hand over her mouth. That just made it worse. She folded double, laughing and crying at the same time, struggling with the need to do both as quietly as possible.

“What’s so funny?” asked Marty. He didn’t sound belligerent, just tired. They were all tired.

“A friend of mine has—” Elle caught herself. If the lying was going to stop, the lying was going to stop right here and now. “My girlfriend has this shirt that says, ‘In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I don’t have to run faster than the zombies. I just have to run faster than you.’ I guess it’s more accurate than we ever thought.”

Marty chuckled once, eyes narrowed. “I guess that’s true. But it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to do next.”

“How bad is it out there?” asked Matthew. “We’ve been shut in here since the lights went out. We don’t really know what’s happening on the floor.”

“It’s bad,” said Stuart unsteadily. “It’s really bad. Kelly…”

“One of our friends got bitten, and then she became one of those things,” said Pris, a little unsteadily. She was still clutching her tablet. She looked down at it, blinking. She hadn’t realized that she still had it; she’d assumed it was lost during their flight down the aisles. Then she realized that she didn’t remember much about what happened when the zombies came. First Kelly was coming around the corner, and then the rest of them were running through the open door of the makeshift little house.

“So we know it’s contagious,” said Elle. “What does that mean for us? Do we stay in here and keep hoping for rescue, or do we start trying to get the hell out of here?”

The others started talking, some of them on top of one another, all trying to put forth the best idea for what came next. Matthew and Stuart were both in favor of staying put, since there was no way they could be locked inside forever, and at least they had a door that shut. Eric and Patty were in favor of getting the hell out. Elle and Marty were doing their best to get everyone to discuss things calmly.

No one was looking at Pris.

She put her tablet down on the nearest desk—realizing only in that moment that they were in a replica of the precinct office from Space Crime Continuum—and took a step toward the wall, turning her back to the group. Then she rolled up her sleeves and looked at her arms. There were no bite marks. She relaxed marginally.

“Oh thank God,” she muttered, and turned back to the others.

They were all watching her. “Pris? Was there something you needed to tell us?” Marty’s tone was gentle, almost sad.

She shook her head. “I’m not bit. I blacked out a little bit during the run, but I’m not bit.”

“Thank God,” said Eric.

Pris smiled. “My sentiments exactly.”

“I don’t feel so good,” said Stuart, and sat down on the edge of a nearby desk, bloody hands tightening around his borrowed spear. “And no, I’m not bit, either. I just don’t like blood and dying and running for my life.”

“No one does,” said the little British man—Matthew, that was his name. Matthew. “Can we get back to the business of sorting out what happens next?”

“I think we should stay here,” said Pris. “We have the wireless back on. We can keep transmitting our position to the authorities, and you guys are right; having walls between us and the rest of the hall is a luxury we can’t afford to give up.”

The argument resumed. This time, it was Stuart who didn’t join in. He let his head loll forward, trying to figure out why he felt so dizzy. It had been coming on in waves since they left Kelly alone by the front wall, and the dizziness was just getting worse as time passed.

None of them understood the Kellis-Amberlee virus: Understanding was something for the future, for the survivors of the Rising and the heroes at the CDC who would begin their multi-decade fight against an elegant work of accidental genetic engineering. But they understood zombies, and they knew that a bite, under these circumstances, could very well mean death.

None of them considered that bloody hands carelessly touching the face, brushing against the mucus membranes of the nose and mouth, wiping tears away from vulnerable eyes, could be just as dangerous as a bite, if slightly slower-acting. They were smart people. By the standards of their time, they were well equipped to survive. But none of them had the knowledge they needed to understand what was going on inside Stuart’s body. Kellis-Amberlee was already with them in their little sanctuary; it had entered via the front door, and it was not leaving.

Stuart clutched his spear a little tighter, and waited for the room to stop spinning.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

The rum is gone. Lorelei stopped drinking shortly after I did, and now stares into her empty cup like she expects it to start offering answers. I have barely needed to prompt her through the last segment of her story. Now that the floodgates are open, it is all rushing out.

LORELEI: Vanessa had this program on her iPad. It was a little video recorder thing. She had it set to transmit everything to the server, so that even if she lost the physical tablet, she’d still have the recordings. I think it was supposed to be some sort of crime-prevention thing. Like if the iPad got stolen and the thief hit the wrong button, he’d find himself on Candid Camera. She turned it on when they left the booth. Everything recorded. Everything uploaded. And I watched it all.

MAHIR: Do you still have the footage?

LORELEI: I’ve tried to delete it a thousand times. I can’t. It’s my parents. It’s the last time they were alive anywhere in the world. They were less than ten miles away from me, and they were on camera, and I wasn’t there. I should have been there. I should have stayed. But I had to be a pissy little bitch and get myself sent to the hotel. I—

MAHIR: Do you really think they would have held things together any better if you’d been in danger with them? My daughter is very young, Ms. Tutt. She’s not even walking yet, much less sulking off because she’s tired of me. And I’d sooner die than see her in danger. As a parent, I can assure you that your absence was the greatest gift you could possibly have given them.

Lorelei looks at me, startled. Her eyes are very wide, and for a moment—only a moment, but it’s real—I can see the teenager she must have been, innocent enough to enjoy a weekend at a comic book convention with her parents, naive enough to think that nothing bad would ever happen to her. My heart breaks a little in that moment. Not for Captain Lorelei J. Tutt, United States Coast Guard, but for the Lorelei who might have been, the girl that was on that hot summer day at the beginning of the Rising. She died there as surely as her parents did, in everything but flesh.

Finally, she speaks.

LORELEI: Would you like to see the footage?

MAHIR: Yes. I very much would. If you don’t think it would be too difficult for you.

LORELEI: It will be. But it’s something I need to do. Come with me.

She rises and leads me back to the living room, where she opens a cabinet beneath the television to reveal a stack of old-style DVD cases. She doesn’t need to look for what she wants: It’s right at the top. Without saying another word, Lorelei opens the case, extracts the disk, and slips it into the DVD player. The press of a single button turns on the television, and the video begins to play.

The tall, bald man with the hammer in his hand and the broad shoulders must be her father, Shawn Tutt. A glance at Lorelei’s face confirms this; there are tears in her eyes, and when he says, “Come on, people. We need to pick up the pace,” her lips move along with the words.

The other people with him both do and do not look like I pictured them. The short brunette woman with the determined eyes must be Lynn Tutt, Lorelei’s mother. I thought she’d be taller; Lorelei must get her height from her father’s side of the family. Leita is younger than I expected, with pale skin and dyed black hair. Her brother is younger still, clearly afraid, just as clearly determined that he will not be the first to break. Only Vanessa herself walks unseen, the woman behind the camera.

I have friends who would have appreciated that role.

“Are we sure this is the right way?” Leita is asking, a ragged edge of exhaustion and fear in her voice. “I don’t want—”

12:15 A.M.

“—to get stranded down a blind alley because nobody had a damn map.”

“We get to the back wall, and then we walk toward the far end of the hall until we come to the food court,” said Shawn grimly. “Once we’re there, we deal with whatever gets in our way.”

“What do you mean ‘deal with’?” asked Robert. He sounded nervous. They were all terrified; he was just the only one who couldn’t seem to stop himself from showing it.

“I mean we deal with it,” said Shawn, hand tightening on the handle of his hammer.

Leita put a hand on her brother’s arm. “Let it go,” she murmured. “This isn’t the time to start questioning the chain of command.”

“I should have stayed home and played video games all weekend,” Robert muttered, and kept walking.

“Vanessa? Are you all right back there?” Lynn twisted around to look at Vanessa, who was bringing up the rear.

“I’m fine,” said Vanessa. “I’m just checking the news sites. I want to see if there’s anyone talking about the bombing. Maybe we can find out how long we have.”

“Just watch your step,” said Shawn, after a very brief pause. He wanted her paying attention. He wanted information even more.

“I’m watching,” said Vanessa, and kept tapping.

Lynn paced alongside her husband, her own makeshift weapon—a length of timber that was intended to be part of the booth’s main structure—clutched tightly in her hands. She didn’t say anything at all. At this point, she didn’t want to tell lies, and she didn’t want to hear them, either. All the pretty reassurances and mealymouthed platitudes in the world wouldn’t change their situation. So they just walked on.

The blockades around the webcomic district stopped them. “Now what?” asked Robert. “Do we go around?”

“Not if we can help it.” Shawn stepped forward, rapping his hammer against the nearest makeshift wall. “Hey. We’re clean. We need to get to the wall. Let us through.”

Silence answered.

Shawn rapped again, a little harder. “Hey! We need to get to the back wall, and we don’t have time to go around you! Let us through!”

This time, there was an answer from the other side: a single soft moan that made the hairs on the back of Lynn’s neck stand on end. She grabbed Shawn’s elbow before he could rap a third time, pulling him backward.

“Shawn,” she hissed. “They’re not going to let us in, and I don’t think we want them coming out.”

Shawn hesitated. Then, slowly, he nodded. “All right,” he said. “We go around.”

The zombies trapped inside the carefully constructed borders of the webcomics district gathered by the barrier and moaned as the Browncoats turned and walked away. But they didn’t break through, and for the moment, it seemed like escape might still be possible.

* * *

12:37 A.M.

A consensus had finally been reached, after a great deal of argument and some uncalled for swearing: They would stay put, monitor the social media feeds, and wait for rescue. Looking quietly relieved, Matthew sank down into one of the desk chairs, with Patty standing somewhat sulkily next to him. Elle sat back down on the replica of the precinct captain’s desk, head bowed in a combination of resignation and simple exhaustion. None of them had eaten, visited a bathroom, or really slept for hours. Pris, Eric, and Marty gathered together near one of the other desks, unconsciously illustrating the ongoing divide between the two groups.

Only Stuart didn’t move. Stuart hadn’t moved for a while, sitting on the edge of a desk, resting most of his weight on the spear he’d taken from Kelly.

Stuart didn’t feel good. And by that point, he knew that something was seriously wrong. He made a small sound, somewhere between a grunt and a moan. It had been long enough since he’d made any sounds at all that the others turned toward him, somehow hearing him above the screaming from outside.

“Stuart?” said Eric. “You okay, buddy?”

“You need…to go,” said Stuart. Forcing out the words seemed like more work than it should have been. He raised his head. That was even harder than speaking had been.

Patty’s eyes widened. “Your nose is bleeding.”

“You need…to go,” repeated Stuart. “What Kelly had. Think she gave it…to me. You can’t. Stay.”

“Oh, God,” whimpered Patty, and plastered herself against Matthew.

“Please,” said Stuart. “Please.”

“But she didn’t bite him!” said Eric. “How the fuck did he get sick, huh?”

“Does it matter?” asked Matthew. He got to his feet, tugging Patty along with him. “Come on, sweetheart. We need to go.”

“There are more out there than there are in here,” said Marty. “I think the odds are still better if we stay put.”

“And get blood everywhere, when we’ve just shown that the damn stuff is indirectly transmissible?” snapped Matthew. “No. If we’re going to be fucked no matter what we do, I’d rather be fucked running than sitting still.”

Stuart moaned, the spear falling from his hands. And then he lunged.

Maybe it was the setting. The precinct was the office of the Time Police, after all; it was the place where Indiction Rivers fought the forces of evil, prevented paradoxes, and always had perfect hair, even in the middle of a firefight. Maybe it was instinct. Or maybe it was simply that Elle had put herself in charge of her little accidental group of refugees, and when they were put in danger, she had to react. Whatever the reason, she flung herself from the desk where she’d been seated and grabbed Stuart by the back of the neck before he could reach the shrilly screaming Patty.

Whirling, Elle slammed Stuart against the nearest wall, using every technique she’d learned in her self-defense courses and in training for her role with the show to keep him pinned. “Go!” she shouted. “Get moving!”

“We’re not leaving you!” said Marty.

“You won’t have to! I’ll let him go when I have a clear shot at the door—but I’m not doing it before! Now move it!”

The others moved.

Stuart squirmed. Elle shoved him harder against the wall. “You seemed like a nice guy,” she said. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

The techniques Elle had learned were designed to restrain people without harming them, and worked partially because most people would not hurt themselves to get loose. They were never intended for use on people who no longer cared about pain. She was still holding Stuart in place when he twisted himself at an angle that dislocated his shoulder with an audible popping sound and sank his teeth into her upper arm.

Elle screamed. Matthew, who had been escorting the others out the door, turned and stared at her in horror.

“Go!” she shouted. “Just go!”

Matthew hesitated. Only for a second. Then he nodded, mouthed the words “Thank you,” and stepped out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

Elle Riley, who would be remembered by most of history for her portrayal of Indiction Rivers, Time Police, and by a woman named Sigrid Robinson for everything else, closed her eyes. And then she let the zombie go.

If she screamed, no one heard it. Elle Riley died bravely, and when she died, she died alone.

Outside, the others moved into the aisles, heading away from the sound of screaming, heading toward the unknown dangers lurking in the darkness along the back wall.

* * *

1:09 A.M.

“We don’t have long,” said Vanessa, scrolling through Twitter as she walked. “People outside are reporting that they’re being moved even farther from the convention center. It looks like there’s a half-mile perimeter being established.”

“If it’s only a half-mile, they’re not using anything radioactive,” said Shawn, walking a little faster. The rest of the group matched his pace. “That’s good. That means we have a much better chance of getting the hell out of here.”

“How much farther?” asked Robert.

“I don’t know,” said Shawn. “Those damn barricades…”

“Just keep moving,” said Lynn. “That’s all we can do. Keep moving.”

They hadn’t been attacked yet, but they all knew that it was coming. So when a single blood-encrusted figure stepped from behind a nearby booth, Shawn nearly bashed his head in with the hammer. Only the figure’s quick backward stumble and cry of, “No, don’t! I’m not gone yet!” held his swing.

“Who are you?” demanded Lynn, raising her board into a defensive position.

“Matthew. Matthew Meigs. Are you clean?”

“For the moment,” said Shawn, lowering his hammer. “You’re covered in blood.”

“None of it’s mine.” Most of it was Patty’s. Dear, sweet Patty, who had only ever wanted to be married, and to go to the San Diego Comic-Con, and to love him… Matthew shook his head, willing the thought away. “The back wall’s no better than the main floor, and in some ways, it’s worse. A lot of people fled there. My group among them.” All those hands, grasping, and all those teeth…

“That’s where the exit is, and we have to get out of here,” said Robert. “We don’t have a choice.”

“We’re all infected.” Matthew’s tone was soft, even resigned. “It’s in the blood.”

“You’re the only one with blood on you,” said Leita.

“For now. But if you fight your way back to that wall, even if you make it there, you won’t be clean anymore. You may not be bitten, but you won’t be clean. And then what? If you make it out, then what? You spread this? You take it out into the world?”

“It had to come from somewhere,” said Vanessa.

“That doesn’t mean we have to take it back there.” Matthew shook his head. “You’ll never walk away. You’ll just find yourself on the business end of a sniper rifle instead of dying in here with the rest of us. You’ve no cause to believe me. I know that. But you can save yourselves a great deal of pain by staying away from that wall.” He looked at his bloody fingers. “As for me, I got a drop in my eye when the bastards took my wife, before I turned and ran. I haven’t long. I’m going back to where I left a friend of mine, in a little room with a door that shuts. I think I’ll go inside and shut the door behind me. Elle deserves the company. It was nice to meet you all.”

With that, the blood-covered little British man turned and walked away, vanishing quickly into the maze of aisles.

“What a crock of shit,” said Robert. “Come on. Let’s move.”

None of the others moved at all. Shawn and Lynn were looking at each other.

“Do you think he was telling the truth?” asked Lynn.

“It’s possible,” said Shawn. “It seems probable, even, given the reaction we’ve seen so far.”

“So what do we do?”

“Lorelei,” said Shawn quietly. It was all he had to say. They couldn’t take this out of the convention center, not when their daughter was out there, not when she would run to them at the first chance she got. He turned and looked to the others. “I can’t tell you what to do. It’s not my place. But Lynn and I won’t be carrying this infection out into the world. We’re going back to the booth. Seems a fitting place to wait for what comes next.”

Leita reached over and took her brother’s hand. Robert looked down at the floor. “We’ll come with you.”

“Me, too,” said Vanessa. She smiled, just a little. “Never leave a man behind. That’s what it means to be part of a crew, right? Never, ever leave a man behind.”

“It was an honor,” said Shawn.

“Same, Captain,” replied Vanessa.

They turned, five people in a convention center given, now, mostly to the dead, and slowly made their way back to where they’d started.

* * *

1:24 A.M.

The dizziness was coming in waves by the time Matthew reached the precinct. He’d passed a few of the fully infected on the way—not many; most were at the back wall, but enough—and none of them had troubled him. They knew their own.

No sounds were coming from inside. Either Stuart had killed her after he turned or they were both in there waiting, silently, for escape. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered at this point.

“Hello, Elle. I came back to keep you company,” said Matthew, and opened the door.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

The Browncoats on Lorelei’s recording are singing. They began shortly after they reached their booth, and have continued since, asserting over and over that they’re still free. Lorelei is singing with them, tears running down her face, and she keeps singing when the white flash of the bombs hitting the convention center wipes the image away. She knows the words they never had the chance to say. There’s something beautiful in that, a sort of immortality for the people who died that day.

The screen goes from white to black. Lorelei goes silent. I keep watching the screen, giving her a chance to compose herself as we both pretend that I didn’t see her cry. Finally, when she’s ready, she speaks again.

LORELEI: So that’s what happened. That’s everything I know about what happened.

MAHIR: I have other pieces of the story. I was able to interview Sigrid Robinson. She knew more about what happened with that poor man who warned your parents off going to the rear.

LORELEI: I’ve always wondered. If they hadn’t met him…would they have made it out? The Rising happened. A few more people wouldn’t have changed anything.

I’ve seen the blueprints of the convention center as it was before it fell. I know the answer. I do not hesitate.

MAHIR: No. They would simply have died in a different place, and without making the right decision.

LORELEI: That’s good. That’s…good.

She turns to look at the poster behind the television set. It looks almost like a comic book cover, lovingly drawn: a group of people, some of whom I now recognize, standing against a field of stars. Their clothing looks something like the American West, something like what they wore in the video. They are looking off into the distance, staring forever toward a future they died before seeing.

Beneath them is written a simple epigram:

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, 2014

KEEP FLYING

MAHIR: Thank you for speaking with me today.

LORELEI: I miss them.

For once in my life, I have nothing to say, and so I don’t say anything at all.

* * *

Remember, when you talk about the Rising: The story you know is not the only one that contains the truth. We may never find all the pieces, and some of them may be broken beyond understanding. But we must all, in the words of a doomed man to his child, keep flying.

It is the only way left for us to honor the dead.

—Mahir Gowda

If you enjoyed SAN DIEGO 2014,
look out for

FEED

BOOK ONE OF THE NEWSFLESH TRILOGY
by Mira Grant

Chapter 1

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot—in this case, my brother Shaun—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens. As if we didn’t already know what happens when you mess with a zombie: The zombie turns around and bites you, and you become the thing you poked. This isn’t a surprise. It hasn’t been a surprise for more than twenty years, and if you want to get technical, it wasn’t a surprise then.

When the infected first appeared—heralded by screams that the dead were rising and judgment day was at hand—they behaved just like the horror movies had been telling us for decades that they would behave. The only surprise was that this time, it was really happening.

There was no warning before the outbreaks began. One day, things were normal; the next, people who were supposedly dead were getting up and attacking anything that came into range. This was upsetting for everyone involved, except for the infected, who were past being upset about that sort of thing. The initial shock was followed by running and screaming, which eventually devolved into more infection and attacking, that being the way of things. So what do we have now, in this enlightened age twenty-six years after the Rising? We have idiots prodding zombies with sticks, which brings us full circle to my brother and why he probably won’t live a long and fulfilling life.

“Hey, George, check this out!” he shouted, giving the zombie another poke in the chest with his hockey stick. The zombie gave a low moan, swiping at him ineffectually. It had obviously been in a state of full viral amplification for some time and didn’t have the strength or physical dexterity left to knock the stick out of Shaun’s hands. I’ll give Shaun this much: He knows not to bother the fresh ones at close range. “We’re playing patty-cake!”

“Stop antagonizing the locals and get back on the bike,” I said, glaring from behind my sunglasses. His current buddy might be sick enough to be nearing its second, final death, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a healthier pack roaming the area. Santa Cruz is zombie territory. You don’t go there unless you’re suicidal, stupid, or both. There are times when even I can’t guess which of those options applies to Shaun.

“Can’t talk right now! I’m busy making friends with the locals!”

“Shaun Phillip Mason, you get back on this bike right now, or I swear to God, I am going to drive away and leave you here.”

Shaun looked around, eyes bright with sudden interest as he planted the end of his hockey stick at the center of the zombie’s chest to keep it at a safe distance. “Really? You’d do that for me? Because ‘My Sister Abandoned Me in Zombie Country Without a Vehicle’ would make a great article.”

“A posthumous one, maybe,” I snapped. “Get back on the goddamn bike!”

“In a minute!” he said, laughing, and turned back toward his moaning friend.

In retrospect, that’s when everything started going wrong.

The pack had probably been stalking us since before we hit the city limits, gathering reinforcements from all over the county as they approached. Packs of infected get smarter and more dangerous the larger they become. Groups of four or less are barely a threat unless they can corner you, but a pack of twenty or more stands a good chance of breaching any barrier the uninfected try to put up. You get enough of the infected together and they’ll start displaying pack hunting techniques; they’ll start using actual tactics. It’s like the virus that’s taken them over starts to reason when it gets enough hosts in the same place. It’s scary as hell, and it’s just about the worst nightmare of anyone who regularly goes into zombie territory—getting cornered by a large group that knows the land better than you do.

These zombies knew the land better than we did, and even the most malnourished and virus-ridden pack knows how to lay an ambush. A low moan echoed from all sides, and then they were shambling into the open, some moving with the slow lurch of the long infected, others moving at something close to a run. The runners led the pack, cutting off three of the remaining methods of escape before there was time to do more than stare. I looked at them and shuddered.

Fresh infected—really fresh ones—still look almost like the people that they used to be. Their faces show emotion, and they move with a jerkiness that could just mean they slept wrong the night before. It’s harder to kill something that still looks like a person, and worst of all, the bastards are fast. The only thing more dangerous than a fresh zombie is a pack of them, and I counted at least eighteen before I realized that it didn’t matter, and stopped bothering.

I grabbed my helmet and shoved it on without fastening the strap. If the bike went down, dying because my helmet didn’t stay on would be one of the better options. I’d reanimate, but at least I wouldn’t be aware of it. “Shaun!”

Shaun whipped around, staring at the emerging zombies. “Whoa.”

Unfortunately for Shaun, the addition of that many zombies had turned his buddy from a stupid solo into part of a thinking mob. The zombie grabbed the hockey stick as soon as Shaun’s attention was focused elsewhere, yanking it out of his hands. Shaun staggered forward and the zombie latched onto his cardigan, withered fingers locking down with deceptive strength. It hissed. I screamed, images of my inevitable future as an only child filling my mind.

“Shaun!” One bite and things would get a lot worse. There’s not much worse than being cornered by a pack of zombies in downtown Santa Cruz. Losing Shaun would qualify.

The fact that my brother convinced me to take a dirt bike into zombie territory doesn’t make me an idiot. I was wearing full off-road body armor, including a leather jacket with steel armor joints attached at the elbows and shoulders, a Kevlar vest, motorcycling pants with hip and knee protectors, and calf-high riding boots. It’s bulky as hell, and I don’t care, because once you factor in my gloves, my throat’s the only target I present in the field.

Shaun, on the other hand, is a moron and had gone zombie baiting in nothing more defensive than a cardigan, a Kevlar vest, and cargo pants. He won’t even wear goggles—he says they “spoil the effect.” Unprotected mucous membranes can spoil a hell of a lot more than that, but I practically have to blackmail him to get him into the Kevlar. Goggles are a nonstarter.

There’s one advantage to wearing a sweater in the field, no matter how idiotic I think it is: wool tears. Shaun ripped himself free and turned, running for the motorcycle with great speed, which is really the only effective weapon we have against the infected. Not even the fresh ones can keep up with an uninfected human over a short sprint. We have speed, and we have bullets. Everything else about this fight is in their favor.

“Shit, George, we’ve got company!” There was a perverse mixture of horror and delight in his tone. “Look at ’em all!”

“I’m looking! Now get on!”

I kicked us free as soon as he had his leg over the back of the bike and his arm around my waist. The bike leapt forward, tires bouncing and shuddering across the broken ground as I steered us into a wide curve. We needed to get out of there, or all the protective gear in the world wouldn’t do us a damn bit of good. I might live if the zombies caught up with us, but my brother would be dragged into the mob. I gunned the throttle, praying that God had time to preserve the life of the clinically suicidal.

We hit the last open route out of the square at twenty miles an hour, still gathering speed. Whooping, Shaun locked one arm around my waist and twisted to face the zombies, waving and blowing kisses in their direction. If it were possible to enrage a mob of the infected, he’d have managed it. As it was, they just moaned and kept following, arms extended toward the promise of fresh meat.

The road was pitted from years of weather damage without maintenance. I fought to keep control as we bounced from pothole to pothole. “Hold on, you idiot!”

“I’m holding on!” Shaun called back, seeming happy as a clam and oblivious to the fact that people who don’t follow proper safety procedures around zombies—like not winding up around zombies in the first place—tend to wind up in the obituaries.

“Hold on with both arms!” The moaning was only coming from three sides now, but it didn’t mean anything; a pack this size was almost certainly smart enough to establish an ambush. I could be driving straight to the site of greatest concentration. They’d moan in the end, once we were right on top of them. No zombie can resist a good moan when dinner’s at hand. The fact that I could hear them over the engine meant that there were too many, too close. If we were lucky, it wasn’t already too late to get away.

Of course, if we were lucky, we wouldn’t be getting chased by an army of zombies through the quarantine area that used to be downtown Santa Cruz. We’d be somewhere safer, like Bikini Atoll just before the bomb testing kicked off. Once you decide to ignore the hazard rating and the signs saying Danger: Infection, you’re on your own.

Shaun grudgingly slid his other arm around my waist and linked his hands at the pit of my stomach, shouting, “Spoilsport,” as he settled.

I snorted and hit the gas again, aiming for a nearby hill. When you’re being chased by zombies, hills are either your best friends or your burial ground. The slope slows them down, which is great, unless you hit the peak and find out that you’re surrounded, with nowhere left to run to.

Idiot or not, Shaun knows the rules about zombies and hills. He’s not as dumb as he pretends to be, and he knows more about surviving zombie encounters than I do. His grip on my waist tightened, and for the first time, there was actual concern in his voice as he shouted, “George? What do you think you’re doing?”

“Hold, on,” I said. Then we were rolling up the hill, bringing more zombies stumbling out of their hiding places behind trash cans and in the spaces between the once-elegant beachfront houses that were now settling into a state of neglected decay.

Most of California was reclaimed after the Rising, but no one has ever managed to take back Santa Cruz. The geographical isolation that once made the town so desirable as a vacation spot pretty much damned it when the virus hit. Kellis-Amberlee may be unique in the way it interacts with the human body, but it behaves just like every other communicable disease known to man in at least one way: Put it on a school campus and it spreads like wildfire. U.C. Santa Cruz was a perfect breeding ground, and once all those perky co-eds became the shuffling infected, it was all over but the evacuation notices.

“Georgia, this is a hill!” he said with increasing urgency as the locals lunged toward the speeding bike. He was using my proper name; that was how I could tell he was worried. I’m only “Georgia” when he’s unhappy.

“I got that.” I hunched over to decrease wind resistance a few more precious degrees. Shaun mimicked the motion automatically, hunching down behind me.

“Why are we going up a hill?” he demanded. There was no way he’d be able to hear my answer over the combined roaring of the engine and the wind, but that’s my brother, always willing to question that which won’t talk back.

“Ever wonder how the Wright brothers felt?” I asked. The crest of the hill was in view. From the way the street vanished on the other side, it was probably a pretty steep drop. The moaning was coming from all sides now, so distorted by the wind that I had no real idea what we were driving into. Maybe it was a trap; maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it was too late to find another path. We were committed, and for once, Shaun was the one sweating.

“Georgia!”

“Hold on!” Ten yards. The zombies kept closing, single-minded in their pursuit of what might be the first fresh meat some had seen in years. From the looks of most of them, the zombie problem in Santa Cruz was decaying faster than it was rebuilding itself. Sure, there were plenty of fresh ones—there are always fresh ones because there are always idiots who wander into quarantined zones, either willingly or by mistake, and the average hitchhiker doesn’t get lucky where zombies are concerned—but we’ll take the city back in another three generations. Just not today.

Five yards.

Zombies hunt by moving toward the sound of other zombies hunting. It’s recursive, and that meant our friends at the base of the hill started for the peak when they heard the commotion. I was hoping so many of the locals had been cutting us off at ground level that they wouldn’t have many bodies left to mount an offensive on the hill’s far side. We weren’t supposed to make it that far, after all; the only thing keeping us alive was the fact that we had a motorcycle and the zombies didn’t.

I glimpsed the mob waiting for us as we reached the top. They were standing no more than three deep. Fifteen feet would see us clear.

Liftoff.

It’s amazing what you can use for a ramp, given the right motivation. Someone’s collapsed fence was blocking half the road, jutting up at an angle, and I hit it at about fifty miles an hour. The handlebars shuddered in my hands like the horns of a mechanical bull, and the shocks weren’t doing much better. I didn’t even have to check the road in front of us because the moaning started as soon as we came into view. They’d blocked our exit fairly well while Shaun played with his little friend, and mindless plague carriers or not, they had a better grasp of the local geography than we did. We still had one advantage: Zombies aren’t good at predicting suicide charges. And if there’s a better term for driving up the side of a hill at fifty miles an hour with the goal of actually achieving flight when you run out of “up,” I don’t think I want to hear it.

The front wheel rose smoothly and the back followed, sending us into the air with a jerk that looked effortless and was actually scarier than hell. I was screaming. Shaun was whooping with gleeful understanding. And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid. We hung in the air for a heart-stopping moment, still shooting forward. At least I was fairly sure the impact would kill us.

The laws of physics and the hours of work I’ve put into constructing and maintaining my bike combined to let the universe, for once, show mercy. We soared over the zombies, coming down on one of the few remaining stretches of smooth road with a bone-bruising jerk that nearly ripped the handlebars out of my grip. The front wheel went light on impact, trying to rise up, and I screamed, half terrified, half furious with Shaun for getting us into this situation in the first place. The handlebars shuddered harder, almost wrenching my arms out of their sockets before I hit the gas and forced the wheel back down. I’d pay for this in the morning, and not just with the repair bills.

Not that it mattered. We were on level ground, we were upright, and there was no moaning ahead. I hit the gas harder as we sped toward the outskirts of town, with Shaun whooping and cheering behind me like a big suicidal freak.

“Asshole,” I muttered, and drove on.

————

News is news and spin is spin, and when you introduce the second to the first, what you have isn’t news anymore. Hey, presto, you’ve created opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, opinion is powerful. Being able to be presented with differing opinions on the same issue is one of the glories of a free media, and it should make people stop and think. But a lot of people don’t want to. They don’t want to admit that whatever line being touted by their idol of the moment might not be unbiased and without ulterior motive. We’ve got people who claim Kellis-Amberlee was a plot by the Jews, the gays, the Middle East, even a branch of the Aryan Nation trying to achieve racial purity by killing the rest of us. Whoever orchestrated the creation and release of the virus masked their involvement with a conspiracy of Machiavellian proportions, and now they and their followers are sitting it out, peacefully immunized, waiting for the end of the world.

Pardon the expression, but I can smell the bullshit from here. Conspiracy? Cover up? I’m sure there are groups out there crazy enough to think killing thirty-two percent of the world’s population in a single summer is a good idea—and remember, that’s a conservative estimate, since we’ve never gotten accurate death tolls out of Africa, Asia, or parts of South America—but are any of them nuts enough to do it by turning what used to be Grandma loose to chew on people at random? Zombies don’t respect conspiracy. Conspiracy is for the living.

This piece is opinion. Take it as you will. But get your opinions the hell away from my news.

—From Images May Disturb You,
the blog of Georgia Mason, September 3, 2039

————

Zombies are pretty harmless as long as you treat them with respect. Some people say you should pity the zombie, empathize with the zombie, but I think they? Are likely to become the zombie, if you get my meaning. Don’t feel sorry for the zombie. The zombie’s not going to feel sorry for you when he starts gnawing on your head. Sorry, dude, but not even my sister gets to know me that well.

If you want to deal with zombies, stay away from the teeth, don’t let them scratch you, keep your hair short, and don’t wear loose clothes. It’s that simple. Making it more complicated would be boring, and who wants that? We have what basically amounts to walking corpses, dude.

Don’t suck all the fun out of it.

—From Hail to the King,
the blog of Shaun Mason, January 2, 2039

Meet the Author

Born and raised in California, Mira Grant has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. In college, she was voted Most Likely to Summon Something Horrible in the Cornfield, and was a founding member of the Horror Movie Sleep-Away Survival Camp, where her record for time survived in the Swamp Cannibals scenario remains unchallenged.

Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

Mira sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same. Find out more about the author at www.miragrant.com.

Also by Mira Grant

THE NEWSFLESH TRILOGY

Feed

Deadline

Blackout

WRITING AS SEANAN MCGUIRE

Rosemary and Rue

A Local Habitation

An Artificial Night

Late Eclipses

One Salt Sea

Discount Armegeddon

About Orbit Short Fiction

Orbit Short Fiction presents digital editions of new stories from some of the most critically acclaimed and popular authors writing science fiction and fantasy today.

Visit www.orbitshortfiction.com to learn more about our publishing program—and to join the conversation. We look forward to hearing from you.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Seanan McGuire
Excerpt from Feed copyright © 2010 by Seanan McGuire
All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

First eBook edition: July 2012

ISBN: 978-0-316-21896-2

Table of Contents

Title Page

Welcome Page

Dedication

Prologue: Chasing the Story

Preview Night

The Siege Begins

The Second Act

Everything Must Go

Bonus Material

Meet the Author

Also by Mira Grant

About Orbit Short Fiction

Copyright