My GPS said that I was seventeen miles ahead of the van when I hit the freeway. I sped up, accelerating to the posted speed limit of eighty-five miles per hour. The van wouldn’t be able to go that fast—not unless they wanted to risk flipping over. I could reach the apartment, get through decontamination, and hole up somewhere before they had a chance to grab me and ask me to do a postrun interview. The last thing I wanted to deal with was some idiot asking me how I was feeling, even if it was an idiot who worked for me.
Cameras mounted atop the I-80 gun turrets swiveled to follow me as I blazed down the road. Just one more government service, keeping the world safe from infection, the living dead, and the terrifying risk of privacy. For my generation, the concept of personal privacy was one more casualty of the Rising—and not one that many people take the time to mourn.
The Rising: casual parlance for the mass amplification and outbreak following the initial appearance of the mutated Kellis-Amberlee viral strain. It started three years before my sister and I were born, during the hot, brutal summer of 2014. More people died during that summer than have ever been properly accounted for, and they kept dying for five years.
Before the Rising, zombies were the stuff of fiction and crappy horror movies, not things that you could encounter on the street. The Rising changed that. It changed the world forever.
Oh, the world didn’t change in the big, apocalyptic “tiny enclaves of people fighting to survive against a world gone mad” way most of the movies suggested it would, but it still changed. George used to say we’d embraced the culture of fear, willingly letting ourselves be duped into going scared from the cradle to the grave. George used to say a lot of things I didn’t really understand. I understood this much, anyway: Most people are scared of more than just the zombies, and there are other people who like them that way.
I rode I-80 to another checkpoint and another blood test, even though it would almost take a miracle to amplify on a closed freeway system. Only almost: It’s happened a few times. Spontaneous amplification is rare but possible, and that, combined with the culture of fear, keeps the checkpoints in operation. As I’d expected, my infection status hadn’t changed during my solitary, zombie-free drive; also as I’d expected, the guards eyed my stripped-down Jeep like it was some sort of rolling death trap and waved me through just as fast as federal regulations would allow. I offered them a brilliant smile, making their nearly identical looks of discomfort deepen, and drove off the freeway to the surface streets.
My crew’s apartment building is less than half a mile from the freeway, a quirk of location that makes it perfect for our needs and less desirable to the rest of the population, keeping the rent lower than it might otherwise be. We don’t even have our own parking garage. Instead, we share a secure “community structure” with half the other buildings on our block. Every local resident and business pays into a neighborhood fund that goes to pay for security upgrades and salaries for the guards. It’s definitely money well-spent. After the End Times regularly contributes extra cash, just to make sure things stay as close to top-of-the-line as possible.
I arrived to find James on duty at the guard station, his feet propped on the desk next to the monitor and the latest issue of Playboy open on his knees. He was studying the centerfold without shame, although he was paying enough attention to raise his head when I pulled up to the gate. Smiling, he hit the button for the intercom.
“Afternoon, Mr. Mason. Have a good day out there?”
“The best, Jimmy,” I said, returning his smile. “You want to buzz me through?”
“Well, that depends, Mr. Mason. How do you feel about passing me your residency card and sticking your hand in my little box?”
“Pretty damn lousy, Jimmy,” I said. Digging out my wallet, I produced my residency card and dropped it into the guard station’s miniature air lock. It would be disinfected before James ever touched it, and he’d still wear Teflon-coated gloves when he picked it up to run it through his scanner. Protocol. Gotta love it, because anything else would lead to madness.
While James ran my card through his system and checked it for signs of tampering, I stuck my hand into the guard station’s built-in blood test unit, gritting my teeth as the needles unerringly managed to hit right on top of my freshest puncture wounds. The worst thing about going into the field isn’t the zombies or the driving. It’s all the damn blood tests.
“Well, Mr. Mason, everything looks to be in order,” James said, still cheerfully. He dropped my card back into the lockbox. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks, Jimmy,” I said, withdrawing my hand. His welcome was the only confirmation that I’d actually passed my blood test. Unlike the private units, which have to show you your results, business units often display only to the people who need to know—that is, the ones whose job it is to kill you if you fail.