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the door leading to the roof-access stairs. As if the infected were going to be mounting a top-down attack? That stopped happening when the mass outbreaks stopped driving the wounded to the rooftops to wait for rescue that never came. The manager periodically realizes that the lock is missing and replaces it, and someone on my staff comes along and cuts it off the next day. That’s thecircle of life around here. Nothing stays locked away forever.
    You’re depressing today.
    “It’s a depressing sort of day,” I said. George quieted, and I climbed the stairs in something that was chillingly close to solitude.
    I don’t deal well with being alone. Maybe that’s why I decided to go crazy instead.
    My crew’s been working on converting the roof to suit our needs since we took over the third floor. It’s one of those projects that’s never going to be finished; there’s something new every time I go up there. Dave has what he calls his “outdoor theater,” a little grouping of folding chairs and a collapsible movie screen under a pavilion he bought at the Wal-Mart in Martinez. He brings out a projector on warm nights and shows pre-Rising horror movies. I think he’s trying to lure Maggie out of her house and into the city by competing with her grindhouse parties, and if he keeps it up, he just may succeed.
    Becks has a small firing range with targets designed for everything from basic handguns to her personal favorite weapon, the wrist-mounted crossbow. That girl reads too many comic books. Still, I have to say, the sight of a zombie’s head catching fire after it gets hit with one of her trick arrows isn’t something I’m going to forget anytime soon. Neither are our viewers.
    And me? I have a corner of the roof where no one does anything else, where I can go and sit and drink a Coke and watch the clouds chase themselves across the sky, and where I don’t have to be the boss for a little while. I can just be me. When I go up there, my staff’ll move heaven and earth to keep anyone from following me, because they know I need the escape. They’vemostly gotten over treating me like I’m made of eggshells, but there are exceptions.
    A pigeon was sitting on the edge of the roof when I walked up, cooing contentedly to itself. It looked at me suspiciously, but waited to see what I would do before going to the trouble of flying away. When I just sat, it resumed its cocky back-and-forth strut without a second thought.
    “Must be nice to be a pigeon,” I said, taking another swig of Coke and making a face. “You sure can’t sell you on the idea of coffee? Nice, bitter, hot coffee that doesn’t taste like going down on a hooker from Candyland?”
    You never objected to me drinking Coke before,
George replied.
    “Yeah, George, but you didn’t live inside my head before. You can use this stuff to clean car batteries.
Car batteries
, George. You think that’s doing anything good to my internal organs? Because I’d bet good money that it’s not.”
    Shaun,
said George, in that all-too-familiar, all-too-exasperated tone,
I don’t
live
anywhere. I’m not alive. Remember?
    “Yeah, George,” I said, taking one last drink from the can of Coke before tossing it, still half full, off the edge of the roof. It sprayed soda in an impressively large arc as it fell. I leaned backward against the building’s air-ventilation shaft and closed my eyes. “I remember.”
    As I’ve mentioned several times, I have a sister. An adopted sister, to be precise, fished out of the state system by Michael and Stacy Mason after the Rising left us both without our biological parents. That was George. She’s the reason I got into blogging, and the reason we wound up running a site of our own. She was nevermeant to be one of nature’s followers. And technically, I guess the tense is wrong there, because it ought to be “I
had
a sister.” The death of Georgia Carolyn Mason was registered with the Centers for Disease Control on June 20,