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the blog of Buffy Meissonier, August 3, 2039

Shaun and I never arten student during the Rising, and he survived the initial wave thanks to our parents, who pulled hi to public schools as a they could to protect him from the threat of infection Everyone assumed he’d be one of the lucky ones

The people next door had two golden retrievers, each weighing well over forty pounds, putting thee where amplification becomes possible One of thean conversion No one saw it co because it had never happened before Phillip Anthony Mason was the first confirmed case of human Kellis-Amberlee conversion initiated by an aniht

I aislation is not popular People love dogs, people love horses, and they want to continue to keep them in private homes I understand this I also understand that animals want to be free, and that sick anio looking for co to bite” I support the Biological Mass Pet Ownership Restrictions, as do ht feel different But he’s not

—Froia Mason, Novehborhood doesn’t allow nonresident vehicles to enter without running blood tests on all passengers, so we dropped her at the gate where she could get tested and head inside on foot I don’t like prickingat a second blood test e reached the house We live in an open neighborhood—one of the last in Alameda County—but our parents have to meet certain requirements if they want to keep their home-owner’s insurance, and until we can afford to

“I’ll upload the footage as soon as I finish cleaning it up,” Buffy promised “Drop me a text when you hit the house, let me know you made it okay?”

“Sure, Buff,” I said “Whatever you say”

Buffy’s a great techie and a decent friend, but her ideas about safety are a little skewed, probably thanks to growing up in a high-security zone She’s less worried in the field than she is in supposedly protected urban environments While there are more attacks on an annual basis in cities than in rural areas, there are also a lot et away from the creeks and the cornfields Given a choice between the two, I’ to take the city every tih the van’s frontbefore she turned to head for the guard station where she’d spend the next fivechecked for conta the van away froate That was o as I kicked raph Avenue and into the tangled warren of suburban streets surrounding our house

Like Santa Cruz, Berkeley is a college town, and we got swar Kellis-Amberlee hit the dorms, incubated, and exploded outward in an epidemic pattern that took practically everyone by surprise “Practically” is the important word there By the time the infection hit Berkeley, the first posts about activity in schools across the country were starting to show up online, and we had an advantage e towns didn’t: We started with more than our fair share of crazy people

See, Berkeley has always drawn the nuts and flakes of the academic world That’s what happens when you have a university that offers degrees in both coy It was a city pri that cauably crazy people started hearing ruraves, they didn’t dis the streets for strange behavior and signs of sickness, and generally behaving like folks who’d actually seen a George Romero movie Not everyone believed what they heard but soh

That doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer when the first major waves of infection hit More than half the population of Berkeley died over the course of six long days and nights, including the biological son of our adoptive parents, Phillip Mason, as barely six years old The things that happened here weren’t nice, and they weren’t pretty, but unlike e homeless population, a major school, a lot of dark, narrow, one-way streets—Berkeley survived

Shaun and I grew up in a house that used to belong to the university It’s located in an area that was judged “ietting their act together, and as a result, it was sold off to help fund the rebuilding of the main campus The Masons didn’t want to live in the house where their son had died, and the security rating of the neighborhoodThey finalized the adoptions for the two of us the day before they s stunt that eventually left the house in the scary suburbs, two kids, and no idea what to do So they did what caave more interviews, they wrote more articles, and they chased the nu us the sort of “nor They never hborhood, they let us have pets that lacked sufficient mass for reani mandatory blood tests three times a day, they had us enrolled in a private school before the end of the week There’s a seht after that transfer, where he said they were doing their best to make us “citizens of the world instead of citizens of fear” Pretty words, especially coarded his kids as a convenient way to stay on top of the news feeds Nuet you right back to the top