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earlier, they had a lot of people who actually knew how to
use
the guns.
    Oakland’s inner city fared better than almost any other heavily populated spot on the West Coast. When the dust of the Rising settled, the city was battered, bruised, and still standing—no small accomplishment for a city that most of the emergency services had already written off as impossible to save. It’s still a proud, heavily armed community today.
    It’s about fifty miles from Birds Landing to Oakland, and the safest route is even longer. Thankfully, having a journalist’s license means never having to explain why you didn’t want to take the safe way. I hit the first of the checkpoint entrances to I-80 after about twenty miles on the rocky, poorly maintained California back roads. According to pre-Rising records, the checkpoints used to be called toll booths, and they actually accepted currency, rather than automatically deducting usage fees from your bank account. Also, they didn’t have armed guards or require a clean blood test for passage. Road trips must have been pretty boring before the zombies came.
    Despite the ongoing decrease in personal travel—the number of miles logg the average American goes down every year, with many people telecommuting and ordering their groceries delivered so that they’ll never even need to leave their homes—we still need freeways for things like truckers and journalists. I-80 is actually fairly well-maintained, assuming you like your roads with concrete walls and fences all around them. Most accidents are fatal, not because of the other cars but because spinning out and hitting one of those walls doesn’t leave much of a margin for recovery. It also doesn’t leave much of a margin for reanimation. That’s probably the point.
    My GPS said that I was seventeen miles ahead of thevan when I hit the freeway. I sped up, accelerating to the posted speed limit of eighty-five miles per hour. The van wouldn’t be able to go that fast—not unless they wanted to risk flipping over. I could reach the apartment, get through decontamination, and hole up somewhere before they had a chance to grab me and ask me to do a postrun interview. The last thing I wanted to deal with was some idiot asking me how I was
feeling
, even if it was an idiot who worked for me.
    Cameras mounted atop the I-80 gun turrets swiveled to follow me as I blazed down the road. Just one more government service, keeping the world safe from infection, the living dead, and the terrifying risk of privacy. For my generation, the concept of personal privacy was one more casualty of the Rising—and not one that many people take the time to mourn.
    The Rising: casual parlance for the mass amplification and outbreak following the initial appearance of the mutated Kellis-Amberlee viral strain. It started three years before my sister and I were born, during the hot, brutal summer of 2014. More people died during that summer than have ever been properly accounted for, and they kept dying for five years.
    Before the Rising, zombies were the stuff of fiction and crappy horror movies, not things that you could encounter on the street. The Rising changed that. It changed the world forever.
    Oh, the world didn’t change in the big, apocalyptic “tiny enclaves of people fighting to survive against a world gone mad” way most of the movies suggested it would, but it still changed. George used to say we’d embraced the culture of fear, willingly letting ourselves be duped into going scared from the cradle to the grave. George used to say a lot of things I didn’t really understand. I understood this much, anyway: Most people are scared of more than just the zombies, and there are other people who like them that way.
    I rode I-80 to another checkpoint and another blood test, even though it would almost take a miracle to amplify on a closed freeway system. Only almost: It’s happened a few times. Spontaneous amplification is rare but possible, and