Two weeks in Houston. Two weeks of sending Rick on every assignment we could get away with sending him on, while Shaun and I locked ourselves in our hotel room and planned for a war we’d never signed up for, against an adversary we’d never volunteered to fight. Whose side was Ryman on? I was guessing he wasn’t a part of Tate’s plan; no sane man would sacrifice his daughter like that. Then again, Shaun and I were adopted to satisfy the Masons’ desire to prove the zombie war had been won by the living, and they’ve never stopped us from walking into the jaws of death—if anything, they’ve encouraged it, living for the ratings, because when they lost Phil, the ratings were all they had. So who are we to judge the sanity of parents? We sat up until almost dawn every night, working through the darkness, making plans, making contingencies for those plans, looking for a way out of a maze we didn’t see before we were already lost inside it.

Shaun pretended he didn’t know I wasn’t sleeping, and I pretended not to hear him punching the bathroom walls. Caffeine pills and surgical tape; that’s what I’ll always think of when I think of Houston. Caffeine pills and surgical tape.

I tried to talk to Ryman twice; he tried to talk to me three times. None of our attempts synchronized. I couldn’t trust him when I didn’t know whether or not he was working with Tate; he couldn’t understand why we’d pulled away, or why we were overworked and snarly with exhaustion. Even Shaun was visibly withdrawn. He’d stopped going out in the field with Steve and the boys when he didn’t need to file reports, and while he was still meeting his contracted duties, he wasn’t doing it with anything like the flair and enthusiasm Ryman had come to expect from him. From all of us. There wasn’t anything we could do about it. Until we knew if we could trust him, we couldn’t tell him what was going on—what we suspected, what we knew, anything. And until we told him what was going on, we couldn’t be sure we could trust him. It was a Möbius strip of a problem, endlessly twisting back on itself, and I couldn’t see a way out of it. So we pushed him away and hoped he’d understand the reasons when things were over.

After Houston, it was time to get back on the road, rolling across the country like nothing had ever gone wrong. Not nothing; Chuck was gone, replaced by a pale-faced drone who scuttled around doing his job and avoiding anything that resembled socialization. Our security detail tripled while we were moving, and Shaun was no longer allowed to ride out unescorted. He took an almost malicious glee in forcing his babysitters to follow him into the nastiest, most dangerous terrain he could find, and some of the footage he got out of it has frankly been amazing. The Irwin community has been buzzing about putting him up for a Golden Steve-o award this year, and I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t win.

We spent a month glad-handing our way across the western half of the country while the other candidates stayed in the air and the major cities, assuming major metro areas would have better anti-infection measures. Tell that to San Diego. The devil-may-care approach was winning Ryman big percentage points, enough to keep him in the news even as the media flurry kicked up by this latest tragedy died down. “Man of the People Keeps the World Grounded”—human interest gold. A few outlets made the requisite noises about how Ryman’s insistence on an old-fashioned campaign had dogged him with tragedy from the beginning, but the facts of Rebecca and Buffy’s deaths were enough to pretty much silence them. Maybe you could blame the senator for Eakly if you reached, but you couldn’t blame him for terrorist action or assassination attempts. America is the land of the free and the home of the paranoid, and yet, blessedly, we haven’t fallen that far. Yet.

Six weeks after Memphis, we were overworked, overtired, and about to hit the crowds in one of the country’s toughest, most essential markets: Sacramento, California.

You’d think Shaun and I would be excited about a stop in our state’s capital, being California kids bred and raised. You’d be wrong. California is essentially a bunch of smaller states held together by political connections, water rights, and the stubborn refusal of any segment to cede the cash-cow name “California” to any of the others. The California secessionist movement has been around since before the Rising—not the state quitting the country, but the various parts of the state quitting each other. Sacramento has no love for the Bay Area. We get the good weather, the good press, and the big tourism dollars, and they? They get the state government and a lot of hard to defend farmland. To say that there’s a little resentment there is to understate the case just a little. Whatever fellow-feeling Sacramento had for the rest of the state died when it stopped hosting the annual state fair and started hosting the annual “everybody hide in their houses and pray they don’t die”-a-thon in its place.

The air was hot and so dry it seemed to suck the moisture out of my throat as we stepped out of the Sacramento Airport and onto the partitioned-off loading zone where we’d be meeting the senator’s convoy. It was late afternoon, and the sun was bright enough to stab at my eyes through the lenses of my sunglasses. I staggered, catching myself on Rick’s shoulder. He shot me a questioning glance. Silent, I shook my head. We were all feeling the strain, Shaun as much as any of us, and if Rick said anything, Shaun would spend the rest of the afternoon fussing over me. There was too much to do for me to let him do that.

Senator Ryman had flown in the day before, along with Governor Tate and most of the senior staff. We were supposed to be right behind them, flying commercial air rather than via private jet; unfortunately, a medical emergency grounded our plane in Denver, forcing us to wait on the tarmac with a hundred terrified passengers to see whether our aircraft was about to be declared a closed quarantine zone. I’ll admit, for a few guilty moments, I was almost hoping it would be. At least then we’d be able to get some sleep before heading back to our home state. I was really starting to worry about Shaun. It had gotten to where he only went to bed when I put him there.