Alaric ignored my conversation with the air. He learned the hard way that sometimes it was best to turn a blind eye. During our first few months in the office, he asked who I was talking to every time I forgot and answered George aloud, and he pointed out that she was dead more than once. He stopped after I finally lost my temper and introduced my fist to his face, resulting in skinned knuckles on my part and a broken nose on his. He still flinches if I move too fast. Guess I can’t blame him. If my boss were a potentially crazy man with a mean right hook, I’d probably be a little jumpy, too.

The title of one of the threads caught my eye. I leaned forward, tapping Alaric’s screen. “There. Can you expand that thread?”

“Sure.” He clicked the header line: CDC Safety Precautions Insufficient? “I don’t see what it has to do with—”

“Just scroll.”

“Right,” he said, and started scrolling.

The thread started as a discussion of the break-in at the Memphis CDC and devolved into a discussion of CDC security precautions over the course of half a dozen posts. As I’d hoped, the posters quickly started naming names, citing every CDC doctor, intern, affiliate, and publicity person to have died during the last eighteen months. “Alaric, can you grab the names of the deceased and start calling up obituaries and circumstance-of-death reports? If anyone looks at you funny, you can say you’re basing a report off this thread.”

“Sure,” he said, warming to the idea as he saw where I was going with it. “I can do you one better. I still have a few of Buffy’s old worms live and functional. I’ll set one of them digging for connections between the deceased employees, Kelly Connolly, Joseph Wynne, and any other unusual or unexplained deaths in their circle of friends.”

“Just don’t get caught or traced and you can do whatever you want.”

“Awesome.” Alaric bent d, starting to type. He had the same focus I’ve seen from George, Rick, and every other Newsie I’ve ever met. I could probably have danced naked on his desk without getting him to do more than grunt and shove me out of the way of his screen. Content that I’d done something useful, I got up and walked to the kitchen. A fresh Coke would keep me from thinking too hard about the tools he was using to do the job.

There are people who say that Kellis-Amberlee and its undead side effects are going to bring about the end of the human race. I tend to disagree with this perspective. I’m pretty sure that if the zombies were going to destroy humanity, they would’ve done it back in 2014, when they first showed up. I think that if anything destroys the human race at this point, it’s going to be the human race itself.