the blog of Buffy Meissonier, August 3, 2039

Shaun and I never met our parents’ biological son. He was a kindergarten student during the Rising, and he survived the initial wave thanks to our parents, who pulled him out of class as soon as the data started pointing to public schools as amplification flash points. They did everything they could to protect him from the threat of infection. Everyone assumed he’d be one of the lucky ones.

The people next door had two golden retrievers, each weighing well over forty pounds, putting them in the range where amplification becomes possible. One of them was bitten—it was never determined by what—and began conversion. No one saw it coming because it had never happened before. Phillip Anthony Mason was the first confirmed case of human Kellis-Amberlee conversion initiated by an animal.

This honor does not help my parents sleep at night.

I am aware that my stance on pet ownership legislation is not popular. People love dogs, people love horses, and they want to continue to keep them in private homes. I understand this. I also understand that animals want to be free, and that sick animals are twice as likely to slip their restraints and go looking for comfort. Eventually, “comfort” becomes “something to bite.” I support the Biological Mass Pet Ownership Restrictions, as do my parents. Were my brother alive today, he might feel different. But he’s not.

—From Images May Disturb You,

the blog of Georgia Mason, November 3, 2039

Three

Buffy’s neighborhood doesn’t allow nonresident vehicles to enter without running blood tests on all passengers, so we dropped her at the gate where she could get tested and head inside on foot. I don’t like pricking my fingers, and we were already looking at a second blood test when we reached the house. We live in an open neighborhood—one of the last in Alameda County—but our parents have to meet certain requirements if they want to keep their home-owner’s insurance, and until we can afford to move out on our own, we have to play along.

“I’ll upload the footage as soon as I finish cleaning it up,” Buffy promised. “Drop me a text when you hit the house, let me know you made it okay?”

“Sure, Buff,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

Buffy’s a great techie and a decent friend, but her ideas about safety are a little skewed, probably thanks to growing up in a high-security zone. She’s less worried in the field than she is in supposedly protected urban environments. While there are more attacks on an annual basis in cities than in rural areas, there are also a lot more large men with guns once you get away from the creeks and the cornfields. Given a choice between the two, I’m going to take the city every time.

“See you tomorrow!” she said, and waved to Shaun through the van’s front window before she turned to head for the guard station where she’d spend the next five minutes being checked for contamination. Shaun waved back and restarted the engine, backing the van away from the gate. That was my cue. I flashed a thumbs-up to show that I was good to go as I kicked my bike into a turn, leading the way back to Telegraph Avenue and into the tangled warren of suburban streets surrounding our house.

Like Santa Cruz, Berkeley is a college town, and we got swarmed during the Rising. Kellis-Amberlee hit the dorms, incubated, and exploded outward in an epidemic pattern that took practically everyone by surprise. “Practically” is the important word there. By the time the infection hit Berkeley, the first posts about activity in schools across the country were starting to show up online, and we had an advantage most college towns didn’t: We started with more than our fair share of crazy people.

See, Berkeley has always drawn the nuts and flakes of the academic world. That’s what happens when you have a university that offers degrees in both computer science and parapsychology. It was a city primed to believe any weird thing that came across the wire, and when all those arguably crazy people started hearing rumors about the dead rising from their graves, they didn’t dismiss them. They began gathering weapons, watching the streets for strange behavior and signs of sickness, and generally behaving like folks who’d actually seen a George Romero movie. Not everyone believed what they heard but some did, and that turned out to be enough.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer when the first major waves of infection hit. More than half the population of Berkeley died over the course of six long days and nights, including the biological son of our adoptive parents, Phillip Mason, who was barely six years old. The things that happened here weren’t nice, and they weren’t pretty, but unlike many towns that started out with similar conditions—a large homeless population, a major school, a lot of dark, narrow, one-way streets—Berkeley survived.

Shaun and I grew up in a house that used to belong to the university. It’s located in an area that was judged “impossible to secure” when the government inspectors started getting their act together, and as a result, it was sold off to help fund the rebuilding of the main campus. The Masons didn’t want to live in the house where their son had died, and the security rating of the neighborhood meant they were able to get the property for a song. They finalized the adoptions for the two of us the day before they moved in, an “everything is normal” ratings stunt that eventually left them with a big house in the scary suburbs, two kids, and no idea what to do. So they did what came naturally: They gave more interviews, they wrote more articles, and they chased the numbers.

From the outside, they looked devoted to giving us the sort of “normal” childhood they remembered having. They never moved us to a gated neighborhood, they let us have pets that lacked sufficient mass for reanimation, and when public schools started requiring mandatory blood tests three times a day, they had us enrolled in a private school before the end of the week. There’s a semifamous interview Dad gave right after that transfer, where he said they were doing their best to make us “citizens of the world instead of citizens of fear.” Pretty words, especially coming from a man who regarded his kids as a convenient way to stay on top of the news feeds. Numbers start slipping? Go for a field trip to a zoo. That’ll get you right back to the top.