How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: A Newsflesh Novella by Mira Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

worry about a damn thing. You were the one with the tornado in your corner.”
    “I’ve heard you talk about her before,” said Jack casually. “I think everyone has, if they’ve listened to more than one of your interviews. But I’ve never heard you talk about her like that . I think Australia’s getting to you, mate. You’re starting to look out the window and tell yourself stories.”
    “If I can’t tell myself stories here, where can I?” I shrugged. “Besides, Georgia would have wanted me to be straight with you. You’re part of the site. That means you’re family, even if you’re distant cousins. Family deserves the truth whenever possible.”
    “You always talk about her in the past tense,” said Jack. “Isn’t she alive right now? It’s confusing. Dead people are supposed to stay dead.”
    “Georgia Mason had too much indignation for a single lifetime,” I said. “She had to come back, if only so she could correct the accounts of her death. I refer to her in the past tense because she died. My friend died. That she came back was a miracle. She did not come back the same person, and in a way, that’s a very good thing.”
    “Why’s that?” asked Olivia.
    “Because the original Georgia Mason could never have gone quietly off to live a life that no one was ever going to write down,” I said. “The woman that the CDC made with her face…she’s a friend, too, and a good one, and I miss her, but I don’t begrudge her the life she’s chosen, even as I am fully aware that it is a life that would have driven the original Georgia summarily insane.”
    Olivia laughed. “I think I like this version of original-recipe Georgia better than the saintly one you normally talk about in interviews.”
    I smiled. “Yes. Me, too.”

Small Planes, Large Fences, and a Rather Daunting Number of Zombie Kangaroos, Because That Is Exactly What This Day Needed
      
    Every kind of Irwin wants you to think they have the most dangerous possible environment. Urban Irwins sneer at wilderness Irwins and so on down the line. I have Australia. I win.
    —Jack Ward
      
    I was unaware that Darwinism was a race.
    —Mahir Gowda

1.
    We talked for a while longer about the early days of After the End Times—that brief, beautiful period between the beginning of Peter Ryman’s campaign to become President of the United States and the point at which people started actively trying to kill us—before Jack and Olivia seemed to be satisfied by my answers. They quieted, and I turned back to my typing.
    Running a site the size of After the End Times means there’s always something to do, even if it’s just checking moderator forums and clearing out spam filters. Sometimes it also means admitting that you’re several time zones away from home, and that there’s a reason you have a staff. I yawned, closed my laptop, and put my head against the window, and that was the last that I knew of the world for several hours.
    When I awoke, Olivia was shaking my arm, an amused expression on her face. “Does everyone from England go to sleep the minute you load them into a car, or is that something that’s uniquely you?” she asked. “Because I have to say, I don’t think much of it as a survival mechanism.”
    “Jet lag is a cruel mistress,” I said piously, before yawning and stretching as best I could while still strapped into my seat. “Where are we?”
    “Adelaide,” said Olivia. “Welcome to the Gretchen Monroe Memorial Airfield.” Seeing the confusion written wide across my face, she added, “Gretchen Monroe was the manager here when the Rising started. She kept the gates open and the fuel pumps live long enough to get twenty-three planes into the air—virtually every craft they could find that was capable of flight—before the infected swarmed and she went down. She was a hero.”
    “She certainly sounds like one,” I said, making a private note to look up her information once we were finished with the fence. A