Page 10 (1/1)

Thanks, said George, as I stepped out into the hall

"No proble drink before heading toward the door to the roof-access stairs In et you shot Just another advantage of living where I do: Mrs Hagar can’t even hear us up there unless we’re setting off land mines, and we’ve done that only once, for quality control purposes

There used to be a padlock on the door leading to the roof-access stairs As if the infected were going to bewhen thethe wounded to the rooftops to wait for rescue that never ca and replaces it, and so and cuts it off the next day That’s the circle of life around here Nothing stays locked away forever

You’re depressing today

"It’s a depressing sort of day," I said George quieted, and I clily close to solitude

I don’t deal ith being alone Maybe that’s why I decided to go crazy instead

My crew’s been working on converting the roof to suit our needs since we took over the third floor It’s one of those projects that’s never going to be finished; there’s soo up there Dave has what he calls his "outdoor theater," a little grouping of folding chairs and a collapsible ht at the Wal-Mart in Martinez He brings out a projector on war horror ie out of her house and into the city by corindhouse parties, and if he keeps it up, he just ets designed for everything frouns to her personal favorite weapon, the wrist-irl reads too ht of a zoets hit with one of her trick arrows isn’t soet anytime soon Neither are our viewers

Andelse, where I can go and sit and drink a Coke and watch the clouds chase themselves across the sky, and where I don’t have to be the boss for a little while I can just be o up there, my staff’llotten over treating shells, but there are exceptions

A pigeon was sitting on the edge of the roof when I walked up, cooing contentedly to itself It looked at oing to the trouble of flying away When I just sat, it resuht

"Must be nice to be a pigeon," I said, taking another swig of Coke anda face "You sure can’t sell you on the idea of coffee? Nice, bitter, hot coffee that doesn’t taste like going down on a hooker fro Coke before, George replied

"Yeah, George, but you didn’t live inside my head before You can use this stuff to clean car batteries Car batteries, George You think that’s doing anything good to ood e, in that all-too-familiar, all-too-exasperated tone, I don’t live anywhere I’ one last drink fro it, still half full, off the edge of the roof It sprayed soda in an iainst the building’s air-ventilation shaft and closed my eyes "I remember"

As I’ve mentioned several times, I have a sister An adopted sister, to be precise, fished out of the state syste left us both without our biological parents That was George She’s the reason I got into blogging, and the reason ound up running a site of our own She was never uess the tense is wrong there, because it ought to be "I had a sister" The death of Georgia Carolyn Mason was registered with the Centers for Disease Control on June 20, 2032 Her official cause of death is recorded as "complications from massive amplification of the Kellis-Amberlee virus," which means, in layman’s terms, "she died because she turned into a zombie"

It would be a lot more accurate to say that she died because I shot her in the spine, spraying blood all over the interior of the van that ere locked in at the tiht be even more accurate to say that she died because some bastard shot a needle full of the live Kellis-Amberlee virus into her arm But the CDC says she died of Kellis-Aht?

If I ever find out who fired that needle, their official cause of death is going to be Shaun Mason That’s the thought that keeps hour site while Mahir does all the work, I delete calls from my crazy parents, I hold conversations with my dead sister, and I look for the people who had her killed I’ll find them someday All I have to do is wait

See, when the zombies came, it was an accident Researchers in two totally unconnected facilities orking on two totally unrelated projects that involved genetically engineering "helper viruses"--new diseases that were supposed to make life better for the whole da nasty hened to cure cancer The other was based on a strain of the coet rid of colds forever Enter Marburg Aineering that did exactly what they were supposed to do No more cancer, nothe dawn of a new age Only it turns out the viruses were just like the people who h the natural chain of transht First wn of a love, then coe, then comes the hybrid viral strain known as "Kellis-Amberlee" It swept the planet before anyone kneas happening