( U ) P R I S I N G
RISE UP WHILE YOU CAN
I. THE RISING Nothing is impossible to kill. It's just that sometimes after you kill something, you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving. And that's really sort of neat when you stop to think about it.
IV. POSTCARDS FROM THE WALL If you asked me now "Was it worth it? Were the things you got, the things you wanted?" I'd tell you "no," because there isn't any other answer. So I guess it's a good thing that nobody's ever going to ask. They never ask the things that really matter.
IV. BURIAL WRITES I've spent my whole life imagining worlds other than the one I was born in. Everybody does. The one world I never imagined was a world without a Georgia. So how come that's the world I have to live with?
CODA. DYING FOR YOU The next person who says "I'm sorry" is going to get punched in the nose. Because "I'm sorry" doesn't do a damn thing except remind me that this can't be fixed. This is my world now. And I don't want it.
January 2, 2039 (p. 16)
Zombies are pretty harmless as long as you treat them with respect. Some people say you should pity the zombie, empathize with the zombie, but I think they? Are likely to become the zombie, if you get my meaning. Don't feel sorry for the zombie. The zombie's not going to feel sorry for you when he starts gnawing on your head. Sorry, dude, but not even my sister gets to know me that well.
If you want to deal with zombies, stay away from the teeth, don't let them scratch you, keep your hair short, and don't wear loose clothes. It's that simple. Making it more complicated would be boring, and who wants that? We have what basically amounts to walking corpses, dude.
Don't suck all the fun out of it.
September 19, 2039 (p. 75)
My friend Buffy likes to say love is what keeps us together. The old pop songs had it right, and it's all about love, full stop, no room for arguing. Mahir says loyalty is what matters---doesn't matter what kind of person were, as long as you were loyal. George, she says it's the truth that matters. We live and die for the chance to tell a little bit of truth, maybe shame the Devil just a little bit before we go.
Me, I say all those are great things to live for, if they're what happens to float your boat, but at the end of the day, there's got to be somebody you're doing it for. Just one person you're thinking of every time you make a decision, every time you tell the truth, or tell a lie, or anything.
I've got mine. Do you?
April 7, 2037 (pp. 94-95)
My sister has retinal KA syndrome. That's where the filovirus does this massive replication thing in the ocular fluid---there's some more advanced technical term for it, but personally, I like to call it "eye goo," because it pisses George off---and the pupils dilate as wide as they can and never close down like they do in a normal person.Mostly only girls get it, which is a relief, since I look stupid in sunglasses. Her eyes are supposed to be brown , but everyone thinks they're black, because of her pupils being broken.
She was diagnosed when we were five, so I don't really remember her without her sunglasses. And when we were nine, we got this really dumb babysitter who took George's glasses, said, "You don't need these," and threw them into the backyard, thinking we were spoiled little suburban brats too afraid of the outdoors to go out after them. So it was pretty plain that she was about as bright as a box of zombies.
Next thing you know there's me and George digging through the high grass looking for her sunglasses when suddenly she freezes, eyes getting all wide, and says "Shaun?" And I'm like, "What?" And she's all, "There's somebody else in the yard." And then I turn around, and wham, zombie, right there! I hadn't seen it because I don't see as well in low light as she does. So there are some advantages to having your pupils permanently dilated. Besides the part where they can't tell if you're stoned or not without a blood test when you're at school.
But anyway, zombie, in our backyard. So. Fucking. Cool.
You know, it's been more than a decade since that evening and that is still probably the best present the best present she's ever gotten for me.
February 11, 2040 (pp. 156-157)
Cleanup is the worst thing about a small-scale outbreak. For many people, this part of the rising is pretty much invisible. Anyone without a hazard license is confined outside the contaminated zones until the burials, burnings and sterilizations are done. When the cordons come up, life goes back to normal and this sort of this is routine enough that, unless you know the signs, you could even fail to realize there was an incident. We've had a lot of practice at cover-ups.
That changes if you have to be involved. Part of getting your hazard license is going along on a cleanup run, just to make sure you understand what you're getting into. George and I both threw up when we made our first cleanup run and I almost passed out twice. It's horrible, messy work. Once a zombie's been shot through the head, it doesn't look like a zombie anymore. It just looks like someone who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and I hate the whole process.
Sterilization is horrific. You burn any vegetation that zombies came into contact with, and if they walked on any open ground, you drench it with a solution of chlorinated saline. If it's a rural or suburban area, you kill any animals you find. Squirrels, cats, whatever; if it's mammalian and can carry the virus in its live state, it dies, even if it's too small to undergo amplification. And when you're done, you shuffle back to the hazmat center that's been established for agent decon, and you go inside, and you spend two hours getting your skin steamed off, which is a nice way to prepare for the two weeks of nightmares that you're going to have to live through.
If you ever start to feel like I have a glamorous job, that maybe it would be fun to go out and poke a zombie with a stick while one of your friends makes a home movie for your buddies, please do me a favor: go out for your hazard license first. If you still want to do this crap after the first time you've burned the body of a six-year-old with blood on her lips and a Barbie in her hands, I'll welcome you with open arms.
But not before.
April 21, 2040 (pp. 408-409)
...first time I met Buffy. Man, I didn't even know I was meeting her, y'know? It was one of those types of things. Me and George, we knew we needed a Fictional if we wanted to get hired at one of the good sites because you can't just log in and be like "Yo, we're two-thirds of a triple threat, give us our virtual desks." We needed a wedge, something to make us complete. And that was Buffy. We just didn't know it yet.
They do these online job fair things in the blogging community, like Craigslist gone even more super-specialized. Georgia and I flagged our need for a Fictional at the next fair, opened a virtual booth, and waited. We were about to give up when we got a chat request from somebody who IDed herself as "B. Meissonier" and said she didn't have any field experience but was willing to learn. We talked for thirteen hours straight. We hired her that night.
Buffy Meissonier was the funniest woman I knew. She loved computers, poetry, and being the kind of geek who fixes your PDA before you know it's broken. She liked old TV and new movies, and she listened to all kinds of music, even the stuff that sounds like static and church bells. She played guitar really badly, but she meant every note.
There are people who are going to say she was a traitor. I'll probably be one of them. That doesn't change the fact that she was my friend. For a long time, before she did anything wrong, she was my friend and I was with her when she died and I'm going to miss her. That's what matters. She was my friend.
Buffy, I hope they have computers and cheesy television and music and people laughing where you are now. I hope you're happy on the other side of the Wall.
We miss you.
June 19. 2040 (pp. 492-493)
We were eleven when I first understood that we weren't immortal. I always knew the Masons had a biological son named Phillip. Our folks didn't talk about him much, but his name came up every time someone mentioned Mason's Law. It's funny, but I sort of hero-worshipped him when I was kid, because people remembered him. I never really considered the fact that they remembered him for dying.
George and I were hunting for Christmas parents when she found the box. It was in the closet in Mom's office, and we'd probably overlooked it a thousand times before, but it caught George's eye that day for some reason, and she hauled it out and we looked inside. That was the day I met my brother.
The box was full of photographs we'd never seen, pictures of a laughing little boy in a world where he'd never been forced to worry about the things we lived with every day. Phillip riding a pony at the state fair. Phillip playing in the sand on a beach with no fences in sight. Phillip with his long-haired, short-sleeved laughing mother, who didn't look anything like our mother who wore her hair short and her sleeves long enough to hide the body armor, whose holster dug into my side when she kissed me good night. He had a smile that said he'd never been afraid of anything, and I hated him a little because his parents were much happier than mine.
We never talked about that day. We put the pictures back in the closet and we never found our Christmas presents either. But that was the day I realized . . . if Phillip, this happy innocent kid could die, so could we. Someday we'd be cardboard boxes at the back of somebody's closet, and there wasn't a thing we could do about it. George knew it too; maybe she even knew it before I did. We were all we had, and we could die. It's hard to live knowing something like that. We've done the best we could.
No one gets to ask us for anything more. Not now, not ever. When history looks our way---stupid, blind history that judges everything and never gives a shit what we paid to get it---it better remember that no one had a right to ask us for this. No one.
