“Never steal another reporter's story; never take the last of another reporter's ammo; never mess with another reporter's computer. Those are the rules, unless you work for a tabloid, where they replace "never" with "always"...”

“One thing I did learn from those classes is that the world is not, in any way, what people expected thirty years ago. The zombies are here, and they’re not going away, but they’re not the story. They were, for one hot, horrible summer at the beginning of the century, but now they’re just another piece of the way things work. They did their part: They changed everything.”

“Hot, short, thorough," I said. I hesitated before adding, "Please." It never pays to insult computers that are smart enough to form sentences. Not when they're in control of the locks, and especially when they have the capacity to boil you in bleach."Absolutely," said the shower.”

“Why can't you just say 'don't breathe the water' like a normal person?""Because I'm a doctor, and they teach us never to use little words where big ones will do.”

“There's only one thing we never wrote down. You know what it was.”

“I heard all three bolts click home. Even if I screamed, they’d never let me back inside. That’s the protocol when you’re in the field. No matter how loudly you yell, they never let you in. Not if they want to live, anyway.”

“And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid.”