Mira Grant is an open pseudonym for fantasy writer Seanan McGuire. Under the McGuire byline, she is the author of Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, and An Artificial Night. Seanan is also a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. As Mira Grant, she is the author of the Newsflesh trilogy, the first of which, Feed, came out in May. She describes the Newsflesh books as “science fiction zombie political thrillers” that focus on blogging, medical technology, and the ethics of fear. Our next story is set in the same milieu, during a time called “the Rising,” the event that changed everything.
Steve Irwin was the host of the extremely popular Australian TV show The Crocodile Hunter. Irwin, who had been wrestling crocodiles since early childhood, took over his parents’ zoo, and married a woman who had attended one of his shows. (They didn’t wear wedding rings, as these might pose a hazard to them or the animals.) He was criticized for once holding his infant son in his arms while feeding a crocodile, though Irwin maintained that the child had been in no danger. Danger was something he lived with daily. A television ad he appeared in joked about him dying of snakebite after not choosing the fastest delivery service. He eventually did die after being attacked by a stingray while snorkeling at Great Barrier Reef. Later, several stingrays were found dead on local beaches, their tails chopped off, presumably by vengeful Steve Irwin fans.
Our next tale is also about danger, death, and wild creatures. The author says, “This story is about the inevitability of natural selection. And it’s about alligators. I’ve always had a passion for reptiles and virology, which gets you looked at sort of funny when you’re a perky little blonde girl. I have been bitten by multiple kinds of venomous reptile, and one of the most chilling things I’ve ever done was go into the Florida Everglades to see the gators. That really makes you realize that Nature has things much more efficiently designed to survive than we are. We’re just blinks of an eye to the alligator.”
The smell hanging over the broken corpse of the campus is rich, ripe, and green—the heavy reptile smell of swamplands and of secrets. It teases its way past sealed windows and in through cracks, permeating everything it touches. Across the empty expanse of the quad, the green flag suspended from the top window of the Physics building flutters in the wind. It marks the location of survivors, waiting for a rescue that may never come. I wonder if they smell the swamp as clearly there, tucked inside their classrooms full of quiet air, where the search for the secrets of the universe has been replaced by the search for simple survival.
Something darts across the pathway leading toward Shattuck Avenue. I twitch the telescope in that direction quickly enough to see a large black cat disappearing under the Kissing Bridge. I haven’t seen anything larger than a stray dog in the two hours of my watch. That doesn’t mean it’s safe to stop looking. Alligators are invisible until they strike, a perfect match for their surroundings. In this dead world, the zombies are even harder to see. From A to Z in the predator’s alphabet.
This is California, a world away from Florida, but that makes no difference now; the Everglades are here. I lean back against the windowsill, scanning the campus, and breathe in the timeless, tireless smell of the swamp.
I was eight and Wes was twelve the last time we visited our grandparents in Florida. True to family form, Grandma and Wes promptly vanished to spend their time on the sunny beaches, exchanging hours for sandy shoes and broken seashells, while I dove straight for Grandpa’s tobacco-scented arms. Grandpa was my secret conspirator, the man who didn’t think a passion for snakes and reptiles was unusual for a tow-headed little girl from Ohio. Our visits were wonderful things, filled with trips to zoos, alligator farms, and the cluttered, somehow sinister homes of private collectors, who kept their tanks of snakes and lizards in climate-controlled rooms where the sunlight never touched them. My parents saw my affections as some sort of phase, something that would pass. Grandpa saw them for what they were: a calling.