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Chapters (50)
  1. Book 2 of The Newsflesh Trilogy
  2. MIRA GRANT
  3. BOOK I
  4. Point of Infection
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. BOOK II
  11. Vectors and Victims
  12. Six
  13. Seven
  14. Eight
  15. Nine
  16. Ten
  17. BOOK III
  18. The Mourning Edition
  19. Eleven
  20. Twelve
  21. Thirteen
  22. Fourteen
  23. Fifteen
  24. Sixteen
  25. Seventeen
  26. BOOK IV
  27. Immunological Memory
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-one
  31. Twenty-two
  32. BOOK V
  33. The Rising
  34. Twenty-three
  35. Twenty-four
  36. Twenty-five
  37. Twenty-six
  38. Coda: Living for You
  39. Twenty-seven
  40. Acknowledgments
  41. extras
  42. meet the author
  43. introducing
  44. BOOK I
  45. From the Dead
  46. One
  47. Contents
  48. BY MIRA GRANT
  49. Praise for Feed
  50. Copyright
Document

Maggie was crying without any sign of shame, tears running down her cheeks. Her nose was chapped; she’d been crying off and on for a while. She reached for my hand, and I didn’t pull away, letting her lace her fingers through mine. Becks moved to stand next to Alaric, and he took her in his arms again, holding her against his chest. All five of us stood transfixed, staring at the television.

Staring at the end of the world.

BOOK V

The Rising

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The one thing I have absolute faith in is mankind’s capacity to make things worse. No matter how bad it gets, we’re all happy to screw each other over. It’s enough to make me wonder if we should have let the zombies win.

—SHAUN MASON

I believe in the truth. I believe in the news. And I believe in Shaun. Everything else is extra.

—GEORGIA MASON

Shaun had a close call today.

He won’t tell me exactly what happened; I wouldn’t even know anything had happened if it weren’t for the glitches in his video feed, the places where the picture cut out and picked back up again a few hundred seconds later. The footage he posts from the field is usually seamless, smooth and easy and effortless looking. Not this. This is amateur-hour stuff, and that tells me more clearly than anything else possibly could that whatever happened out there, it was bad.

He came home stinking like bleach and rank terror-sweat, the kind that comes after the adrenaline fades, and he didn’t stop hugging me for almost ten minutes. I stopped laughing and trying to get away when I felt his shoulders shaking. My own shoulders started shaking when I realized what that sort of fear from Shaun—Shaun! Who once called a zombie in our backyahe best present I’d ever given him—actually meant.

Maybe life was always fragile and easy to lose, and maybe all those people who talk about how good things were before the Rising are full of crap, but we don’t live in that world; we live in this one. And in this world, it takes only one slip, one unguarded moment, to lose everything. I don’t know how close I came to losing him today. He won’t tell me, and maybe this makes me a coward, but I’m not going to ask. This is one truth I have no interest in knowing. There are some truths we’re better off without.

I don’t know what I’d do without him. I really don’t. I’d never tell him to stay out of the field—I know how much it means to him—but one day, the close call is going to cross the line into “too close,” and after that… I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

—From Postcards from the Wall, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted June 24, 2041

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