?Guess not.?
Alaric and Dave followed Becks through our systems, rebuilding the mess she made as she rooted out Buffy?s worms. Together they were almost up to the task of remaking the things Buffy had built alone, although it was starting to wear on them; they?d signed on as journalists, not computer technicians. ?Hire new field systems maintainer? was near the top of my to-do list, right under ?uncover massive political conspiracy,? ?avenge Buffy?s death,? and ?don?t die.?
And even with all of this going on, we still had a job to do. Multiple jobs, really. Not only did we need to keep following the Ryman-Tate Campaign?which continued to gather steam, now buoyed by not one, not two, but three major tragedies, earning us a lot of extra news cycles in the traditional media outlets, as well as online?we needed to keep our beta bloggers on-task and updating the rest of the site. The news marches on, whether you?re walking wounded or not. That?s one of the beautiful things about the news. It?s also one of the most frustrating.
Two weeks in Houston. Two weeks of sending Rick on every assignment we could get away with sending him on, while Shaun and I locked ourselves in our hotel room and planned for a war we?d never signed up for, against an adversary we?d never volunteered to fight. Whose side was Ryman on? I was guessing he wasn?t a part of Tate?s plan; no sane man would sacrifice his daughter like that. Then again, Shaun and I were adopted to satisfy the Masons? desire to prove the zombie war had been won by the living, and they?ve never stopped us from walking into the jaws of death?if anything, they?ve encouraged it, living for the ratings, because when they lost Phil, the ratings were all they had. So who are we to judge the sanity of parents? We sat up until almost dawn every night, working through the darkness, making plans, making contingencies for those plans, looking for a way out of a maze we didn?t see before we were already lost inside it.
Shaun pretended he didn?t know I wasn?t sleeping, and I pretended not to hear him punching the bathroom walls. Caffeine pills and surgical tape; that?s what I?ll always think of when I think of Houston. Caffeine pills and surgical tape.
I tried to talk to Ryman twice; he tried to talk to me three times. None of our attempts synchronized. I couldn?t trust him when I didn?t know whether or not he was working with Tate; he couldn?t understand why we?d pulled away, or why we were overworked and snarly with exhaustion. Even Shaun was visibly withdrawn. He?d stopped going out in the field with Steve and the boys when he didn?t need to file reports, and while he was still meeting his contracted duties, he wasn?t doing it with anything like the flair and enthusiasm Ryman had come to expect from him. From all of us. There wasn?t anything we could do about it. Until we knew if we could trust him, we couldn?t tell him what was going on?what we suspected, what we knew, anything. And until we told him what was going on, we couldn?t be sure we could trust him. It was a M?bius strip of a problem, endlessly twisting back on itself, and I couldn?t see a way out of it. So we pushed him away and hoped he?d understand the reasons when things were over.
After Houston, it was time to get back on the road, rolling across the country like nothing had ever gone wrong. Not nothing; Chuck was gone, replaced by a pale-faced drone who scuttled around doing his job and avoiding anything that resembled socialization. Our security detail tripled while we were moving, and Shaun was no longer allowed to ride out unescorted. He took an almost malicious glee in forcing his babysitters to follow him into the nastiest, most dangerous terrain he could find, and some of the footage he got out of it has frankly been amazing. The Irwin community has been buzzing about putting him up for a Golden Steve-o award this year, and I?ll be surprised if he doesn?t win.
We spent a month glad-handing our way across the western half of the country while the other candidates stayed in the air and the major cities, assuming major metro areas would have better anti-infection measures. Tell that to San Diego. The devil-may-care approach was winning Ryman big percentage points, enough to keep him in the news even as the media flurry kicked up by this latest tragedy died down. ?Man of the People Keeps the World Grounded??human interest gold. A few outlets made the requisite noises about how Ryman?s insistence on an old-fashioned campaign had dogged him with tragedy from the beginning, but the facts of Rebecca and Buffy?s deaths were enough to pretty much silence them. Maybe you could blame the senator for Eakly if you reached, but you couldn?t blame him for terrorist action or assassination attempts. America is the land of the free and the home of the paranoid, and yet, blessedly, we haven?t fallen that far. Yet.
Six weeks after Memphis, we were overworked, overtired, and about to hit the crowds in one of the country?s toughest, most essential markets: Sacramento, California.