Maggie walked calmly over to me, slapped me hard across one cheek, and then, while I was still staring at her in confusion, throwing her arms around my shoulders. “We thought you were dead,” she hissed, through gritted teeth. “You didn’t call, and you didn’t call, and we thought you were dead. You ass**le. Next time, find a way to send a f**king message.”
“How about there’s not a next time? Can we do that, instead?” Maggie wa clothed. I essentially wasn’t, which was making this hug even more awkward than it would normally have been. I extricated myself from her embrace, looking around the room again. “I know we said to close the windows, but I didn’t mean you had to go quite this far.”
“Wait—what?” Alaric pulled away from Becks, looking utterly bemused. “What do you mean? After you told us to close the windows—don’t you know what’s going on out there?”
Maggie studied my face for a moment, horror dawning in her expression. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You really don’t know. You have no idea, do you?”
“No idea about what?” I shook my head. “We haven’t seen anyone since Kansas, but we thought it was just the storm keeping people inside—”
“It’s not just the storm.” Alaric walked across the room with sharp, jerky motions and grabbed the television remote, turning the TV on. He hit another button and the infomercial that had been playing disappeared, replaced by CNN.
The picture showed a flooded street, helpfully labeled “Miami—Live Footage.” A newscaster was speaking in a low, anxious tone, saying something about death tolls and tracking survivors. I didn’t really hear him. I was transfixed by the picture, my brain refusing to accept what my eyes were telling me.
As always, it was George who grasped the reality of the situation first, and her understanding allowed me to understand. Oh, my God… she said, horrified.
I couldn’t argue.
The street was choked with debris and abandoned cars, brown-and-white water swirling everywhere as it tried to force itself down clogged sewer drains. They should have been cleared before the flooding could get this bad, and the city had tried to clear them; that much was obvious from the number of people in fluorescent orange shirts who were shambling down the street, moving jerkily along with the rest of the mob. I had never seen that many infected in one place. I counted fifty before my brain shut down, refusing to process any more.
“—we repeat, the federal government has declared the state of Florida a hazard zone. Uninfected citizens are urged to stay in your homes and await assistance. Anyone found on the street may be shot without warning. Anyone leaving their home will be assumed infected and treated with the appropriate protocols. Please stay in your homes and await assistance. Please…” The newscaster faltered, losing the rhythm of his carefully prepared statement. The footage of the flood was silent. Even recorded moaning can bring zombies to your position.
Recovering himself, the newscaster said, “Reports of similar outbreaks are coming in from Huntsville, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Houston. We don’t have numbers yet, but the death tolls are estimated to be in the thousands, and are climbing steadily.” He paused again, longer this time, before saying, “Some sources are referring to the event as the second Rising. God forgive me, but I’m not so sure they’re wrong. God forgive us all.”
There was a rattling noise, like someone putting a microphone down, and then the sound of footsteps. The silent footage of the flood, and the infected, continued to play.
“That’s what’s going on,” Alaric said. His voice was toneless, and I remembered with a start that his family lived mostly in Florida. “The second Rising. You drove right through the middle of it, and you didn’t notice.”
“Oh, my God,” I whispered, echoing George’s earlier statement. The picture on the TV jumped, the label at the bottom changing to “Huntsville.” The newscaster didn’t return. “Is this for real?”
“It’s real,” said Maggie.
It’s the end of the world, said George, and I silently agreed.
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
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.