CALAIS AND THE OTHERS (NOT to mention Bobby Baltimore’s producers, before she’d left home) had promised that although the act of hunting ferals in Yosemite was a high-risk experience by nature, Alice would be perfectly safe as long as she stuck with the crew. During the pop-up horror show that had just occurred, the camera operators had never flinched even when Alice realized she may have been screaming. They’d merely hung a few paces back, waiting. Apparently, spring-ups like that happened all the time — and, in fact, were highly coveted action sequences that viewers loved. While Alice had been on her back, mentally making her will, much of the crew had been silently cheering.
The trick was to stay back from the frontline hunters. Yosemite had a lot of terrific hiding spots. It was even a selling point for the family and friends of those who needed to be briefed: during the grazing period, their loved ones, who’d still have some of their right minds, would have plenty of places to stay low and out of sight. Nothing would get those people before their time, and hunters were only allowed to shoot what came at them. And when they turned and lost most of their interest in hiding? Well … at that point, they weren’t really people anymore, no matter what they looked like.
So Alice hung with the unarmed civilians. From back here, things were tolerable, though only barely. Maybe the crew had grown used to being in the hot zone, but to Alice it was as if the air itself was soaked in adrenaline. Deadheads might not try to hide, but there were enough obstacles that they did it accidentally all the time. As the group moved around, hunters in a wide outer perimeter and unarmed citizens in the center, surprises kept happening. Most were macabre discoveries: forgotten corpses from previous hunters who hadn’t cleaned their messes, deadheads who’d been devoured by animals, detached limbs and occasionally heads that refused to stop moving. But a few were targets, and the cameras grabbed more for their precious broadcast minutes.
Mostly, though, the hunt was tense but uneventful. Despite Alice’s early start, the time change meant she’d barely reached Yosemite by lunchtime, and Bobby’s group seemed to have saved what promised to be the more interesting hours for Alice to witness, record, and report. On the surface, she tried to be a pro: taking photos, taking video that could later be supplemented by his crew’s video, scribbling notes, asking questions when the mood didn’t seem to call for quiet. But deep down, Alice never unclenched. Every moment was life or death — or, depending on how you saw Yosemite’s residents, perhaps somewhat dead or more dead.
When they were high up with land sprawling below, Bobby identified vast herds of ferals roaming like wolf packs below them. They occasionally stopped, but never appeared to rest. There were three reasons for their breaks: They got bored by a zombie’s definition of ennui or forgot where they were going, they found something to tear apart, or they simply got stuck. That’s what had happened with the three who’d attacked earlier. They were in a small dip in the land with slippery sides to the rear, and had only found their way out when the approaching humans had called their attention to the dip’s other side, where egress was easy.
“The trick,” Bobby told Alice as they walked in the open, “is to outsmart them.”
“Okay.” That sounded somewhere between a platitude and a ridiculously obvious truism.
“It’s not hard. They’re only feral once they have virtually no brain left. You know that kids game, where you stick out your thumb and pretend you’ve grabbed the kid’s nose?”
Alice nodded.
“That would work on a deadhead. Except with one difference.”
“What’s that?”
“They don’t care if it’s their own nose; they’d want to eat it anyway. Come on. I want to show you something.”
They crossed a rise. Once upon a time, Alice supposed much of what they were traversing must have been spectacular hiking ground. Now it was a fenced-in reserve for mad dogs needing to go madder. There was debate — particularly within higher-functioning levels of the SP-positive (or “necrotic”) community — whether euthanasia would be more humane than the Yosemite solution. For necrotics, it wasn’t an entirely hyperbolic discussion; before Necrophage, they’d have been shipped to Yosemite as well. But the problem with euthanasia always came down to the same sticky issue: Clarifiers (or perhaps doctors) would need to look still-coherent human beings in the eye and tell them it was time to die. They’d need to inform friends and family that Cousin Joe, who everyone had figured was curable and could still play backgammon, needed to be put down like a dog. There would be footage, if things went that way, of SP-terminal patients who disagreed with their clarification and had to be dragged, screaming, to their executions.
As places to go slowly insane before dying went, Yosemite wasn’t bad. And to think: after you died, you got to keep on going … until you rotted in the sun, freezer-burned in the cold, or a hunter ended you for good.
“Jesus,” Alice said when they reached the lip of a rise.
Below, in a shallow valley, was a collection of rudimentary lean-tos cobbled from fallen limbs and covered with pine branches. Some of the structures were elaborate, as if they’d taken months to construct and perfect. Milling between the makeshift shelters were twenty or thirty people who looked like they had palsy. All were slow and shambling but otherwise mobile, passing one another with acknowledgements and greetings. Even from high up, Alice could see intelligence on their faces through her binoculars.
“We call this Purgatory Valley,” Bobby said. “There’s a large, flat, clear space over there where they drop off new arrivals, and a kind of delta in the land funnels them in this direction. For some reason, there aren’t many ferals around here, and they leave the new arrivals alone anyway, though you’d never know it from the way newbies spend all their time looking around, trying to build barriers to defend against nothing.”
Alice scanned the group with the binoculars, feeling sad.
“It’s like a little village,” she said. “The houses are so … elaborate?”
Bobby nodded. “The shelters have been here almost from the beginning. Each new wave takes them over and makes them a little bit better. This is where they hide at first, a lot of them, hoping for something to save them.”
“Three weeks,” Alice said mostly to herself, remembering Bobby’s earlier words.
“They’ll stay one week at most,” Bobby said. “After that, the highest logic seems to leave, and they stop thinking of society and start thinking only of a more primitive form of self-preservation.”
“What’s that?”
“Going somewhere else. Then they turn. And then they die.”
Alice watched the small group of ramshackle structures. One of them seemed to be significantly taller than the others, as if it were the village’s center.
“Is that Town Hall there in the middle?”
“That’s Golem’s house,” Bobby said with something like wonder in his voice. He sat up straighter and, as if cued by Alice’s question, scanned the horizon. Behind him, the crew started to mumble as if anticipating what was coming and not liking it even a little.
“We don’t have time today, Bobby,” said the severe-looking woman in the gray suit. She still looked ready to attend a board meeting, and here was Alice, covered in crusting blood and guts.
“What’s Golem?” Alice asked as Bobby sighed, disappointed.
The woman answered, her voice thick with eye-rolling indulgence. “Golem is Bobby’s white whale.”