“There’s an outbreak in Oakland, Shaun. And you’re right in the f**king middle of it.”

The formation of the modern health-care system was an organic process, guided almost entirely by the stresses imposed by the Rising and by the panic of the general populace. Given the death rates at hospitals during the worst of the outbreak, it wasn’t a surprise that people would be afraid of them. Given thrisk of amplification, it wasn’t a surprise that people would need medical attention more than ever. The answer was complex, involving the restoration of house calls and private care, increased access to home medical technology… and the sudden semi-autonomy of the CDC and the World Health Organization. If they couldn’t do what needed to be done, when it was needed, there was the risk that none of us would live long enough to make a better choice about how things should be handled.

The CDC enjoys relative freedom from all ethical medical laws and local restrictions. The WHO enjoys absolute freedom in almost every nation in the world. Maybe it’s time we stopped and thought about that a little more.

—From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, April 15, 2041

Five

I dropped my phone and lunged for the window, swearing. The sirens were making it difficult to focus on anything but the noise. Outbreak alarms are supposed to get your attention and make you focus on the problem at hand. They work well for the first, and not so much for the second. Behind me, Alaric and Becks were shouting at Dave to shut the damn thing off already, while he shouted at them to be quiet, he was trying, and they were making it harder for him to concentrate.

Only Kelly seemed to realize that my reaction meant something was seriously wrong. She clenched her hands together, stress-whitened knuckles resting against the underside of her jaw, and watched me with eyes that seemed suddenly too large for the rest of her face.

I jerked the window as far open as it would go before leaning out over the fire escape and looking down at the street. The siren in the apartment stopped shrieking as Dave finally managed to crack the case and yank out the wires, but with the window open, the neighborhood sirens were right there to take its place—and so was the screaming.

At least the sirens took the edge off the screams. At least the sound of gunfire meant that someone was still standing.

At least.

Oh, f**k me, said George.

“My thoughts exactly,” I muttered. “Guys?”

“What?” asked Alaric.

“I think it’s time for an evacuation. Nice, easy, and oh, say, yesterday.” I pushed away from the window. “I hate to say it, but this is not a drill.”

There was a moment of relative silence as everyone stared at me, trying to rationalize what I’d just said. Then they exploded into motion, Becks and Alaric lunging for the weapons cache in the closet, Dave lunging for his keyboard. Only Kelly stayed where she was, hands still clenched beneath her chin.

Shaun—

“I’m on it,” I said, and started for the server rack.

It had been almost fifteen years since the last major outbreak in Oakland. You want the recipe for a relatively zombie-free existence? It’s easy. Take an armed population, give them an ingrained bunker mentality, and tell them they can’t depend on anyone outside the community. They’ll police their borders so well that you’ll probably never need to worry about them again. Trouble is, that sort of border patrol can wind up hurting as much as it helps. Sure, Oakland had all the security features you’d expect to find in a major urban center, but most people didn’t know exactly how they worked or how to take full advantage of them. They could handle their home defense systems. The public defenses were a little more difficult.

At least half the storefronts I’d seen during my brief survey of the street had been standing open, with their emergency gates fully retracted. Some of the blast shutters had managed to descend, but not nearly enough of them to make a difference, especially when the doors weren’t locked. Sealed blast shutters on a building whose doors were standing open wouldn’t save anyone. They’d just make sure no one could get out once the infected got in.

About half the unsealed windows had been broken—shatterproof glass is a much more academic concept when the infected are involved. They don’t have any functioning pain receptors to slow them down, and they’ll keep beating themselves against the glass until something gives way. When you’re talking about civic-use storefronts in a relatively low-income neighborhood, it’s going to be the glass that gives. There had been blood splashed all around the sidewalk, and there wasn’t much screaming coming from our immediate vicinity. For most of the locals, it was long past too late.

I stepped up to the server rack and started to disconnect drives and flip the switches to transfer as much of our data as possible to secured off-site backups. There are some files we try never to keep live on an out-facing network, including most of the research we’ve done into the conspiracy that killed my sister. Even that data gets backed up daily, both to the drives I was shoving into my pockets and to other, off-site drives, stored in safety deposit boxes, hidden caches, and stranger places all over the Bay Area. I feel I’ve earned my paranoia.

I could hear the reassuring sound of Becks loading her rifle behind me, underscored by the equally reassuring sound of Alaric emptying the contents of the primary weapons locker onto the apartment floor. He might not be a field man, but he’s one of the most well-informed weapons geeks I’ve ever met. That’s not a contradiction in terms. Being comfortable on the firing range doesn’t mean you’ll have a damn clue what to do when a zombie comes at you. The belief that the two skill sets translate directly gets a lot of people killed.