“Just wanted to be sure you were aware.” I nodded again to cut the connection and took a moment to pull my sleeve closed as best as I could before righting the bike and getting back on. It started easily. There went that excuse for staying behind. I could want to protect them, but I couldn’t lie to them.

“Well?” asked George, next to my ear. “Are you going to follow them, or what?”

“I’ll follow,” I said.

The van turned laboriously around on the narrow road, taillights gleaming red through the darkness as Becks hit the gas and started forward once again. I squeezed the throttle, whispered a prayer for swift amplification, and followed them.

We took a tour of the government zombie holding facility on Alcatraz today.

A lot of people don’t like having it there, even though it’s been scientifically proven that Romero was wrong about at least one thing: Zombies can’t survive without oxygen. Since they’re too uncoordinated to swim, and they don’t know how to operate boats, if there were ever an outbreak, it would be naturally confined. That doesn’t maer. “Not in my backyard” comes out loud and clear where the dead are concerned.

I looked through the safety glass into the pens, into the dozens of eyes that looked just like mine, and I searched them as hard as I could for a sign of something, anything that would tell me they were still human. There was nothing there. Only darkness.

If I pray for anything tonight, it will be that when Shaun eventually does something insane and gets himself bitten, I’ll be there to shoot him. Because I couldn’t live with myself knowing I’d allowed him to amplify. No one deserves to end up like that. No one.

—From Postcards from the Wall, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted June 24, 2034

Twenty-six

The building housing Dr. Abbey’s new lab must have started life as the local forestry center. The front looked like pure glass until you got close enough to see that it was backed with sheet metal. Better yet, the trees had been cut back on all sides, making room for a massive parking lot that provided clear sightlines for anyone trying to guard the building from the infected… or, as we pulled up to park near what looked like the front entrance, from us. There was even a structure on the roof that might have started out as an observatory but would make a damn good shooter’s nest, if necessity demanded.