All the Pretty Little Horses

Book 0: Newsflesh

by Mira Grant

Genres: Horror; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Dystopian

Synopsis

A Newsflesh novella from the New York Times bestselling author that brought you Feed, Mira Grant.

Stacy and Michael Mason are among the most famous heroes of the zombie apocalypse. Stacy, however, has fallen into a deep depression after having to shoot their infected son. In the aftermath of the pandemic, they start publicly documenting the recovery effort, which Michael hopes will take Stacy's mind off of her trauma and help her recover.

As they film the rescue of an enclave of orphans and report on the orphanages that have sprung up to care for traumatized, parent-less children, they begin to consider the last, greatest step of recovery: adoption.

More from Mira Grant

Into the Drowning Deep

Newsflesh Short Fiction
Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box

Countdown

San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats

How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea

The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell

Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus

Newsflesh

Feed

Deadline

Blackout

Feedback

Rise: A Newsflesh Collection

Parasitology

Parasite

Symbiont

Chimera

Sample

 

The cleanup crews provided by the state of California were almost done with the city of Berkeley. They had been hauling away truckloads of bricks and broken boards and makeshift barriers for the past week; before that, they had been devoted to biohazard removal, digging up the bodies of the mercifully dead and cleaning out the basements that had been turned into makeshift morgues when nothing else was available. They were interchangeable in their orange biohazard suits, faceless behind their sheltering faceplates.

“I heard that a crew in Petaluma stumbled on a nest of zombies yesterday,” said Michael Mason, twitching the curtain aside as he watched the orange figures move across a neighbor’s yard. “They lost four people before the gunners could get to them, and two more from infection. It’s not a very well-organized program.”

He kept his voice light, conversational, like he was talking about the weather and not a major biohazard cleanup operation. He waited several minutes. There was no response.

With a sigh, Michael turned away from the window. There was a lump in the bed he shared with his wife—a lump of approximately her size, or at least the size she’d been when Judge Vernon had passed judgment on her case. Stacy Mason was not a murderess in the eyes of the law, or in the eyes of those who had survived the Rising. Everyone had a story like theirs, it seemed, decorated with the bodies of the loved and lost. Not many were mothers who had shot their only sons. Not many were women who had insisted that they be taken into custody and tried for what they’d done. In those regards, as in so many others, Stacy was special.

She had crawled into bed the day that she was found innocent, and she hadn’t emerged since, except to use the bathroom. She ate when he brought her food. She answered direct questions, when she couldn’t see a way around them. She was leaving him alone, and try as he might, Michael couldn’t find the way to bring her back.

“Stacy?”

There was no response from the bed. Michael sighed again before he walked over to sit down on the edge of the mattress, on his side of the bed. The space between them was a chasm filled with screaming, and with the wide-eyed face of a little boy who had died twice, once of a terrible virus, and once when his mother put a bullet through his brain. Phillip had deserved better. They had deserved better. Michael only hoped that they still did.

“Stacy, sweetheart, you’re going to have to get up soon. I’ve pulled as many strings as I could, but the cleanup crew is doing our side of the street tomorrow. We can’t stay here while they’re checking for contamination.” They shouldn’t have been allowed to stay for as long as they had. Michael had called in favors with the school administration, the mayor, and even the governor, who regarded the Masons as genuine heroes of the Rising.

The Masons had fortified their Berkeley neighborhood, turning it into a safe haven for survivors. The Masons had run complicated rescue operations that fanned out across Berkeley, Albany, and even Oakland, saving literally hundreds of survivors before the infected became too prevalent to allow for further attempts. The Masons had kept the lights on and the stomachs of their people full, thanks to good resource allocation and knowing how to work within their means. Out of all the small survivors’ enclaves found when the government was actually able to start stepping in and saving people, theirs had been among the largest, the most functional, and the least chaotic.

Through it all, Michael’s voice had been going out to the world every night, first over the Internet, and then over the radio, when the local ISPs went down. He had spoken to the city, and to anyone outside the city with a good enough antenna. He had promised them that they were stronger than this crisis. He had told them what to do. Stacy had been too busy during those dark days to do her own broadcasts, but he had included a segment called “Stacy’s Survival Suggestions” in every other show. The number of people who had come up to him since the barricades came down, to tell him that those survival suggestions had genuinely saved their lives…

It was staggering. Thousands of people were still alive because of him, and because of his brilliant wife, who had proven to be a genius where surviving the living dead was concerned. At least until the day the tanks and military convoys had rolled into Berkeley, and they had been ordered to stand down.

He would never forget watching Stacy take the reports from her scouts, who had been following the movement of their rescuers through the city. She had looked so confident then, square shouldered and tan under the cruel midwinter sun. Phillip had been in the ground for three years, buried deep, but never forgotten. Michael had looked at his wife, and then at the soldiers who were fanning out over the street, and thought, “We did it. We survived.”

Three months later, he was no longer quite so sure. Stacy’s strength had been the strength of a thing under immense pressure, so compacted that it could no longer show the cracks. When the pressure had been removed, she had fallen apart.

“Stacy, sweetheart, I need you to wake up now.” He reached over and touched her shoulder. “The car will be here to take us to our hotel in an hour. We’re staying at the Claremont. They cleared it out last week. Some of the rooms are off-limits, but the structure is sound. You always wanted to stay there.” They had even joked, during the early weeks of the Rising, about abandoning their comfortable encampment to take back the grand old resort hotel. It had been Stacy who eventually rejected the idea, saying “no one wants to wait out the end of the world in the Overlook Hotel.” She’d always been a fan of popular literature, and it was hard to get much more popular than Stephen King.

“Leave me here,” Stacy said. Her voice was thin from disuse. It still sent a wave of relief washing over Michael. She was listening. She might be doing a poor job of responding, but at least she was listening. “I can help them find the bodies.”

“Stacy…” Michael left his hand resting on his wife’s shoulder. He needed the contact more than she did, he suspected. “Stacy, the bodies aren’t here anymore.. . .