The Rising didn’t just showcase the nobler side of human nature; it was a war, and as long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers. There’s always somebody willing and waiting to make a buck off somebody else’s pain. I’m not sure most of them meant to do what they did—I’m sure most of them really meant to do the right thing—but somehow, an entire world full of people who had managed to take arms against an enemy that was straight out of a Romero flick was convinced that what they really wanted was fear. They put down their guns, they locked their doors, they went inside, and they were grateful for all the things that they were scared of.

I used to think the Irwins were great warriors in the ongoing fight to live a normal life in our post-Rising world. Now I’m starting to suspect that we’re just tools of some greater plan. After all, why leave your house when you can live vicariously through a dumb kid willing to risk his life for your amusement? Bread and circuses. That’s all we are.

You’re getting bitter, George observed.

“I got reason,” I said.

Bread and circuses is what got George killed. We—her, me, and our friend Georgette “Buffy” Meissonier—were the original After the End Times news team, and we got hired by President Ryman to follow his campaign. He was Senator Ryman then, and I was a dumb, optimistic Irwin who believed… well, a lot of things, but mostly, that I’d die before George did. I was never going to be the one who buried her, and I was sorry that she was going to bury me, but we’d both made our peace with that years before. We were chasing the news, and we were chasing the truth, and we were on the adventure of our lives. Literally, for George and Buffy, because neither one of them walked away from it. Turns out there were people who didn’t want Ryman to make it to the White House. Oh, they were happy to have him elected. They just didn’t want him to be president. They were backing their own candidate.

Governor David Tate. Or, as I prefer to think of him, “the fucking asshole pig that I shot in the head for being part of the conspiracy that killed my sister.” He admitted it before he died. Well, before he injected himself with a huge quantity of live Kellis-Amberlee and forced me to shoot him. During the after-investigation, I got asked why I thought he’d decided to pull the classic super-villain rant before he killed himself. I got asked a lot of other questions, too, but that was the one I had an answer for.