The Wall
From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, May 16th, 2039
Number of Kellis-Amberlee Conversions to Date
Uninfected Population
Infections in your zone
Recent Conversions
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Alice StokolBorn: 03/13/2010
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LeShaun HanksBorn: 05/08/2021
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Susanna ShawBorn: 11/23/2005
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More Recent Conversions
Paige H. Chen, Chicago
Sherri E. Melton, San Francisco
Gretchen I. Hill, San Diego
Karen U. Puckett, Philadelphia
Patrick O. Song, Orlando
Elsie A. Hamilton, Miami
Hazel E. Bender, Jacksonville
Malcolm A. Wagner, St.Louis
Dolores C. McLaughlin, Cincinatti
Francis C. McNamara, Cleveland
Sandy A. Raynor, Phoenix
Marion O. Moon, Tucson
Beth O. Woodard, Kansas City
Julia E. Desai, Detroit
Jerome A. Wallace, L.A
Neal A. Lawrence, New York
Everyone has someone on the Wall.
No matter how remote you may think you are from the events that changed the world during the brutal summer of 2014, you have someone on the Wall. Maybe they’re a cousin, maybe they’re an old family friend, or maybe they’re just somebody you saw on TV once, but they’re yours. They belong to you. They died to make sure that you could sit in your safe little house behind your safe little walls, watching the words of one jaded twenty-two-year-old journalist go scrolling across your computer screen. Think about that for a moment. They died for you.
Now take a good look at the life you’re living and tell me: did they do the right thing?
—From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, May 16th, 2039.
The “real” media was bound by rules and regulations, while the bloggers were bound by nothing more than the speed of their typing.
We were the first to report that people who’d been pronounced dead were getting up and noshing on their relatives. We were the ones who stood up and said “yes, there are zombies, and yes, they’re killing people” while the rest of the world was still buzzing about the amazing act of ecoterrorism that released a half-tested “cure for the common cold” into the atmosphere. We were giving tips on self-defense when everybody else was barely beginning to admit that there might be a problem.
The early network reports are preserved online, over the protests of the media conglomerates. They sue from time to time and get the reports taken down, but someone always puts them up again. We’re never going to forget how badly we were betrayed. People died in the streets while news anchors made jokes about people taking their zombie movies too seriously and showed footage they claimed depicted teenagers “horsing around” in latex and bad stage makeup. According to the time stamps on those reports, the first one aired the day Dr. Matras from the CDC violated national security to post details on the infection on his eleven-year-old daughter’s blog. Twenty-five years after the fact his words—simple, bleak, and unforgiving against their background of happy teddy bears—still send shivers down my spine. There was a war on, and the ones whose responsibility it was to inform us wouldn’t even admit that we were fighting it.
But some people knew and screamed everything they understood across the Internet. Yes, the dead were rising, said the bloggers; yes, they were attacking people; yes, it was a virus; and yes, there was a chance we might lose because by the time we understood what was going on, the whole damn world was infected. The moment Dr. Kellis’s cure hit the air, we had no choice but to fight.
We fought as hard as we could. That’s when the Wall began. Every blogger who died during the summer of ’14 is preserved there, from the politicos to the soccer moms. We’ve taken their last entries and collected them in one place, to honor them, and to remember what they paid for the truth. We still add people to the Wall. Someday, I’ll probably post Shaun’s name there, along with some lighthearted last entry that ends with “See you later.”
END TRANSMISSION. From FEED, CHAPTER 3.
