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“Yes, off the ground and with one hand on my gun,” I said. “There's a thin line between intentionally stupid and accidentally suicidal, and I try not to cross it when I don't have to.”

“Whereas I play hopscotch with it,” said Jody. She didn't sound ashamed of herself. If anything, she sounded exactly the opposite. I couldn't blame her for that. Her videos were works of art. Occasionally terrifying works of art, sure—even I didn't like watching someone utterly defenseless and exposed for as long as she would sometimes sit, thinking—but beautiful all the same. “I realized we're all about the running and the screaming, and thought it might be nice to slow things down. Based on my ratings and merchandise sales, I wasn't the only one. I was just the first person to realize there might be money there.”

“Teach me your ways, o wise one,” I said, and Jody laughed, and Chase handed me a turkey dog in a whole wheat bun, and Karl aside, everything was perfect.

More Irwins drifted in. Some of them were with news sites that had come to cover the convention. Others were independents, traveling with their own Newsies. The majority were local or semilocal, and had come for the reason Irwins always came: because they knew that once this many of us were in one area, the party would inevitably begin. There must have been more than a dozen of us there, chatting, eating, and drinking alcohol-free beer, when my ear cuff began beeping rapidly. I put my bottle down on the nearest folding table and drifted toward the edge of the clearing, noting as I did that Karl and Jody, both with Blackburn, and Mo, with York, had done the same.

“You're go for Ash,” I said, activating the connection. “What can I help you with?”

“Where are you?” It was Audrey. She sounded… not tense, exactly, but tightly wound, like she might snap and start spilling kinetic energy everywhere at any moment.

“Out behind the convention center with essentially all the local Irwins, and a few who aren't so local. Karl is here. He doesn't say hello. He does say that I'm a stuck-up Irish bitch, so he hasn't changed a bit. Why? Are you all right? You sound odd.”

“I sound like the candidate announcement just happened,” said Audrey. She paused, long enough for my heart to sink. It was over, then. We were going home.

I'd never admit it, not in a million years, but part of me was relieved. No one tried to kill us when we were at home. We had our space and our things and our world around us, and we knew what we were up against. Let the politicians have their life-and-death struggles over the budget cap and whether people were allowed to keep ponies; I'd go back to my familiar little life, and while it might not be perfect, it was enough. Maybe it was even time to talk to Ben about that divorce. I could make an honest woman out of Audrey, and let her make a better woman out of me.

Audrey was saying something. I jerked back into the present. “I'm sorry, come again?” I said.

“I said, Governor Susan Kilburn of Oregon is the next Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States of America.” Audrey still sounded tense, but at least she also sounded amused. She was used to my woolgathering. “Blackburn came in a close second. Betting pools have shifted over to whether Kilburn is going to be offering her the VP slot, and if so, how long it's going to take her to say yes.”

“Tell Ben she has at least three people on her news team, and while I'm happy to take Jody and Eric—they're an Irwin and Newsie team, and I know Jody doesn't conflict with my area, not sure whether Eric would overlap with either Ben or Mat—we're only working with Karl if he reanimates, because I'd kill him.”

I was speaking too quietly for Karl to hear me from the other side of the clearing, but judging by his posture and the quick, angry looks he was darting in my direction, he didn't need to hear me to know what I was saying. He knew he'd burnt all his bridges with me years ago, and neither of us had any interest in rebuilding. I wondered whether he'd try anyway. This was a big job, and while there are always things for the Irwins of the world to do—people never get tired of watching us risk our necks—big jobs don't come along very often. When you get one, you hang on to it, whatever it takes.

“Karl? The one who said he'd stop making fun of your accent if you gave him a video of the two of us making out?”

“That's the one.”

“Flip him off for me.”

I solemnly swiveled toward Karl and raised my middle finger in silent salute. Then I froze, feeling my blood run cold in my veins. It was a terrible sensation. It wasn't as bad as what was yet to come. “Audrey, I need you to go find John or Amber. Tell them to lock down the governor and sound the alarms.”

The infected were moving through the trees, and if they were close enough for me to see them, they were also close enough for
them
to see
me
. But they weren't moaning, not yet. Just my luck. Another close encounter with the quiet ones.

Audrey was laughing. “Is he glaring at you? I bet he's glaring at you. Take a picture.” The true face of her tension was showing itself now. It wasn't concern or dismay: It was giddiness, delight at a job well done, and the belief that things were going to be better now. Even if Kilburn lost, we would have followed her all the way to the final bell. Our careers were made.

If we lived that long. “
Audrey
. Please, listen to me. I love you.” It was a random declaration, and one she'd heard before, if never with quite so much urgency and raw need. She stopped laughing. I stopped flipping Karl off and pointed to the trees behind him. He flipped me off. This was bad. “Contact security. Tell them a mob is emerging from the trees behind the convention center. Tell them… tell them…”

If she told them we were out here, would they try to save us, or would they treat us as a firebreak, something to burn when the zombies got too close? The dead were dead. We were the living, and the living, no matter how well trained they are, don't always respond well under pressure. If we were exposed, if we were
infected
, we could run the fences anyway, seeking another few seconds of life before we inevitably died. Irwins caught between a rock and a hard place got smashed. Just like everything else.

“Tell them we're here, Audrey. Tell them we're alive.” I pointed at the trees behind Karl again, more fiercely this time. He must have seen something in my expression, because he turned, and paled when he saw the zombies coming through the wood, and shoved his phone into his pocket before running back toward the others.

Good. I hiked the side of my skirt up and drew the pistol from my thigh holster. It was surprisingly heavy in my hand. I'd held that weapon a hundred times, and it had never seemed so
heavy
. “Tell them we want to come home. I love you.”

“Ash—” she began. Her voice cut off as I killed the connection.

Some people liked to stay on the phone with their friends and loved ones as they fought, thinking it was better to have the company. I had never wanted that. One day, I was going to die in the field. Maybe I was going to die in this one. If that happened, I wanted to be remembered smiling, not screaming. That was why I always ended my videos with a grin and a wink, no matter how tired I was. Every entry could be the one that went up on the Wall. I didn't want the last thing I did to be sad. Dying was sad enough without helping it along.

Gun in hand, I ran for the others. They were moving fast now, breaking down chairs and producing weapons. No one went for the fence. We all knew there was no point. The same security features that kept everyone inside feeling like they could enjoy being this close to the wilderness would condemn us all, because only the first person would have the time to clear the first gate. Even Karl wasn't enough of a bastard to say “I want you all to die for me,” and so he held his ground. We all did.

Putting the gate to our backs would have been putting ourselves into a kill zone. As soon as the zombies got close enough, the sniper turrets would start firing, and we'd be splattered. At that point, we'd become targets. I could have climbed a tree, gotten above the action, but that would have meant leaving the others behind. I wasn't ready to do that. Not yet.

Chase stepped up next to me, a shotgun in his hands. I didn't ask where he'd gotten it. It really didn't matter. “Assessment?” he asked. I shot him a sidelong look. He shook his head. “Karl came in screaming about how he'd seen them, but I know it wasn't him. Boy would've walked for the fence and said he was getting more beer if he was the only one who knew what was about to happen. So what did you see?”

The zombies were about twenty yards out. Close enough that we couldn't run—not without triggering them to do the same—but far enough away that we had a few seconds of breathing room. We were all professionals. We were going to take every breath the world allowed us, because we knew damn well that these could be our last.

“Five in the lead, unknown number in the back. No moan yet, but they're moving decisively in this direction, which implies that something caught their attention without fully registering as ‘food.' I'm sure that's coming.” Nothing in the world is as single-minded as a zombie that's started moaning. “Look at their clothes. They're clean. These people amplified within the last twenty-four hours.”

“So they're all fresh.” Chase grimaced. “Fuck me.”

“Yeah,” I agreed grimly.

Kellis-Amberlee preserved the human body before amplification, keeping us safe from colds and cancer. After amplification, it destroyed everything in its path. Infected individuals generally divided into two camps: newly infected, or “fresh,” and those who'd amplified long enough ago to start really showing the signs of their illness. Zombies still had the physical limitations they'd had before amplification. They just didn't pay attention to them anymore. They would run on broken ankles and pursue their prey for hours despite bad cases of asthma. The longer they lived with their disease, the more damage they did to themselves, until they virtually neutralized their potential to do harm. Only virtually. There was no such thing as a “safe” zombie, and even one that was missing all four limbs and most of its teeth could spit or bleed on an uninfected person, starting the cycle over again. It never ended. It never needed to.

Fresh zombies could run, sometimes faster than the living, because they didn't notice when they broke their toes, blistered their feet, or twisted their ankles. They'd just keep coming, and if the damage they did in the process resigned them to the back of the mob in short order, that was a cold comfort to the people they'd chased down. Fresh zombies could grasp. They no longer understood even simple tools, but their fingers hadn't stiffened and lost manual dexterity, and they knew how to lock them around wrists or tangle them in hair. No zombies were good, but fresh zombies were the worst of a bad lot.

“Think this is a setup?” asked Chase.

“Nope,” I said. “I know it is.”

Then the zombies were close enough to smell us. The moan went up, and all hell broke loose.

There are a few things all successful Irwins have in common. We know how to defend ourselves. We know the state-mandated firearms well enough to pass our licensing exams, and we know our chosen weapons just as well, if not sometimes better. We know the risks we take every time we go out into the field, and even if most of us secretly believe we're going to live forever, we still accept the fact that this time, this adventure could be our last. We make our peace with that every time we press the “record” button, because a scared Irwin is a stupid Irwin, and a stupid Irwin isn't going to be around for very long.

That's where the commonalities end. There's no set of standards or guidelines that we all agree to live by, and most Irwins are fierce individualists, convinced that
our
way of doing things,
our
ideas about the world and the dead and the living are more important than anyone else's. A few Irwins choose to work in pairs, or even triplets, but they're rare, and most of us don't understand how they're able to function. We're too busy grandstanding for the camera and enjoying our independence. Which is great for ratings, but not so good when you're trying to fight off a mob of zombies that has a better grasp of teamwork than you do.

There were fourteen of us and an unknown number of them: at least twenty, and probably more, since they were still flowing out of the trees like a terrible river. They were all so
fresh
. How the hell had the people who were targeting us been able to grab so many without being caught? Had we started taking disappearances for granted, viewing them as the dreadful background noise of a life lived in a world full of the dead? And it didn't matter,
couldn't
matter now, no matter how much I wanted it to, because they were closing in on us, and they weren't going to stop long enough for me to get a better look.

Chase's shotgun spoke in thunder, and the zombies answered in moans. Every time he pulled the trigger a head disappeared, vaporized past identification by the bullet. I was grateful for my mag, even as my own smaller weapon opened holes in foreheads and in throats. We'd be able to find out who those people had been, assuming any of us made it out of here.

Jody, the woman who'd made her name with pacifism, produced a lethal-looking assault rifle from her things and began picking off zombies with military precision, making me wish I knew more about her background. The front rank of the dead was denuded within seconds, reduced to so many corpses that wouldn't be getting up a second time. The trouble was, the zombies behind them just kept coming. That was what zombies
did
. They kept coming.

We kept shooting. That was what
Irwins
did, and as the second rank of zombies fell, it began to look like we might be able to win this one. The zombies were too fresh to have tapped fully into the odd, inexplicable hive-mind that powered large groups of the infected, and they moved with jerky, dogged persistence, not splitting up or trying to confuse us. If they'd been a little more advanced in their infections, they could have done all sorts of things to make our lives a living hell. As it was, they didn't have the intelligence for tactics, and we had plenty of bullets.