by Mira Grant
“It’s cool,” I said.
The receptionist didn’t say anything. She leaned slightly forward, shoulders hunched as she focused her attention on her computer. It was obvious that she couldn’t entirely dismiss our presence as a bad dream—we were a little too solid for that—and it was equally obvious that she was giving it the old college try. I rocked back on my heels, content to let her ignore us. There’s pushing the envelope of polite behavior to get what you want, and then there’s just plain being mean. I try not to cro the line when it can be avoided.
We’d been waiting less than five minutes when the sound of crisp footsteps echoed through the lobby and an immaculately groomed man in a white lab coat stepped around a corner and into view. He was dressed like a generic midlevel bureaucrat at any corporation in the country, assuming you could overlook the lab coat: gray slacks that were probably some sort of insanely expensive natural fiber, white button-up shirt, sedate blue-and-green tie, and immaculately polished black shoes. Even his lab coat looked like it was tailored for him, rather than being the standard off-the-rack lab wear. If the CDC was running in the red this season, his wardrobe definitely wasn’t feeling the pinch.
Neither was his plastic surgeon. His hair was thick and well-styled, but still uniformly silver, and his unwrinkled skin had the characteristic tightness of a man in his late fifties paying through the nose to maintain the illusion that he was a well-preserved thirty-seven or so. He walked to the receptionist’s desk with the calm assurance of a man who knows himself to be in absolute control of his environment, extending a hand in my direction. “Shaun Mason, I presume?”
“The same.” I took his hand and shook it. Even with all the training I’ve had to desensitize me to the necessity of occasional contact with strangers, the gesture felt wrong. You aren’t supposed to touch people you don’t know. Not unless they’ve just demonstrated their infection status with a successful blood test, and maybe not even then. “This is my colleague, Rebecca Atherton. She works with our action news division.”
“Ah, an Irwin,” said the man, reclaiming his hand and turning to study Rebecca. His gaze started at her face, swept down her body, and returned to her face again, all without a trace of hesitation or shame. “You know, I’ve always liked that term. Irwin, for the late, great Steve Irwin. He died in the field, you know. Just the way he would have wanted to go.”
“No shit, asshole,” muttered Becks.
“Actually, sir, I’m pretty sure the way he would have wanted to go was in his sleep, sometime in his late nineties, but that’s beside the point.” Something about him was putting my hackles up. Maybe it was the way he looked at Becks. Maybe it was his tone, which was slick enough to grease a rusty chainsaw. “I’m guessing you’re Director Swenson.”
“Precisely so. I apologize for making you wait. Next time, please be sure to call ahead. That will allow us to avoid these little delays.”
Yeah, because we’ll never get past security again.
I forced my expression to remain composed as I said, “I’ll keep that in mind. If you don’t mind, though, my colleague and I were in the area and had some questions we wanted to ask you—in person, hence the dropping by. Is there a place where we could talk?”
A flash of discomfort crossed his face, there and gone before I could blink. “Of course,” he said, smoothly. “If you’d both come with me, I believe one of the conference rooms is available. Miss Lassen, as you were.”
The receptionist—Miss Lassen—nodded, looking deeply relieved as Director Swenson turned wenson.”gan retracing his steps, leaving the front lobby behind. She might not have been able to keep us out, but at least we weren’t going to be her problem anymore. Becks and I exchanged a look, shrugged, and followed the director to the back of the lobby, around a corner, and into a nondescript hall that seemed to stretch on for the better part of a mile.
Director Swenson walked past three identical doors before stopping at a fourth and pressing his thumb against a small sensor pad. The light above the door changed from red to green, and the door swung open. “Past this point, you’ll need blood tests as well as someone with the proper clearances to open any doors, including the restrooms,” he said, sounding self-indulgently amused. “I recommend not wandering off unescorted.”
“I’ll keep that in mind if I need to pee,” muttered Becks. I gave her a speculative look, which she met with a glare.
Funny, normally you’re the one pissing off the natives, said George.
I bit my lip to keep myself from answering as we followed Director Swenson through the door and into one of the long, featureless white hallways characteristic of CDC installations everywhere. It’s like they’re afraid to spend money on interior decorating when there’s such a good chance of the place needing to be hosed down with bleach at any moment. We didn’t pass any doctors, although we did walk past several large glass “windows” looking in on empty patient rooms. White walls, white beds, white floors—white everything. I woke up in one of those rooms once, after the CDC team picked us up outside of Memphis. I thought I’d died and gone to the sterilized afterlife.
Director Swenson stopped in front of a door that looked exactly like every other door in the place, except for the larger, more elaborate-looking testing unit built into the wall next to it. “The cycle takes approximately fifteen seconds,” he said, pressing his palm flat against the test pad. “Once I go through, the door will close and the unit will reset. Please don’t try to follow without a clean test. I’d really rather not send the entire facility into lockdown today.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “We know how to do our jobs.”
The light over the door turned green and the door swung open with a hydraulic hiss, saving Director Swenson the trouble of answering me. Instead, he raised an eyebrow and stepped through the doorway before the door swung closed again.
“Scale of one to ten, how stupid is this?” asked Becks, pressing her own palm against the testing panel.
Ten, said George.
“Oh, five, tops,” I said, and smiled brightly. “Don’t worry about it. We’re just here to ask the scientists some questions about science. Scientists like that sort of shit.”
“Right,” said Becks dubiously as the light turned green and the door hissed open again. She stepped through.
“Hey, George,” I muttered, flattening my hand against the testing panel. “Check this out.”
This is what I do know: A lie, however well-intended, can’t prepare you for reality or change the world. The accident victim will die whether they’re promised recovery or not, but the parent told that their child is dying may have time to prepare, and may be able to treasure those final days together even more. To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods. If these truths mean the world is less comforting than it might have been, it seems like a pretty small price to pay.
It seems to me we owe the world—more, we owe ourselves—the exchange of comfort for the chance that maybe the truth can do what people always say it can. The truth may, given the opportunity, set us free.
—From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, April 16, 2041
We had another meeting with the senator today. We’re about to head out, and he wants to be sure that we all understand our roles in the campaign. I don’t think he trusts us to have our heads in the game right now, and frankly, neither do I. Shaun is barely talking to anyone, including me, and Buffy simply isn’t talking. I keep running the footage of the attacks so far over and over again, looking for something that we might have missed, looking for some clue to who is responsible for all of this.
When I sent in the application for this position, I thought I was doing us a favor. I thought I was giving us the opportunity to make a name for ourselves, and that we could change the world by telling the truth. I thought I was doing the right thing. But now I watch Shaun punching the walls, and I wake up as tired as I was when I went to
bed, and I just wish that I could take it back. I wish I could take it all back. I’m tired, and I want to go home.
But oh, God, I’m so afraid that we’re not all going to make it home alive.
—From Postcards from the Wall, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted April 18, 2041
Thirteen
The CDC conference room lived up to the design aesthetic I was coming to expect from them: white on white on white. It was like they’d looked at the uniforms American nurses wore during World War II and said “Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about.” Maybe they bleached the place on such a regular basis that they didn’t want to deal with paying to have all the furnishings re-dyed. Whatever the motivation, the combination of white walls and white carpet with a glass-topped conference table and white faux-leather chairs was enough to make me feel grubby and unwashed. CDC employees probably took a lot of showers, just to keep themselves from feeling like they were too dirty to be allowed to touch the furniture.
Director Swenson walked the full length of the conference table to sit at the head. Alpha male posturing if I’d ever seen it. The gesture was designed to say “This is mine and I am in charge here”—I was sort of surprised he didn’t lift his leg and piss on something. Urine’s a natural bleaching agent, right? It would explain how they kept everything so damn white.
Becks and I trailed along behind him like good little peons, finally sitting down next to each other on the left-hand side of the table. Becks took the seat closer to the director. Sure, I was technically in charge of our little fact-finding expedition, but of the two of us, I was the one more likely to launch myself for his throat, and we wanted to avoid that if at all possible. Attacking high-ranking CDC officials isn’t really the best way to get what you want.
“Now, then,” said the director, gracing us with a fatherly smile as warm as it was artificial. “What can I do for the two of you? I’ll admit, I was a bit surprised that you didn’t phone ahead. That’s standard for most representatives of the media.”
“Yeah, we’re really sorry about that,” I said, not bothering to inject the slightest note of apology into my tone. “See, we’d usually call ahead, only I managed to leave my address book—where did I leave that again, Becks?”
“In your office,” said Becks promptly. She knows her cues. With as long as we’ve been working together, she’d better.
“Right, in my office.” I bared my teeth at Director Swenson in an approximation of his smile. The corners of his mouth twitched downward, confusion flickering in his eyes. That was good. I wanted him off balance. “That’s sort of the problem, since my office is—my office was, I guess—in Oakland, basically right at the center of the zone that got firebombed. We were out camping when the quarantine came down, but not all my people made it out.”
“I see.” Director Swenson leaned back in his chair, expression smoothing into careful neutrality. The confusion in his eyes faded, replaced by wariness. “You’re very fortunate. That outbreak was particularly bad.”
“Yeah, how did that happen as fast as it did? Isn’t the CDC supposed to prevent things like that?” asked Becks. I shot her a sharp look. She ignored me, attention focused on Director Swenson like a sniper focuses on a target.
She had friends inside the blast zone, said George. Not just Dave. Civilian friends.
It was all I could do not to wince. I’d been withdrawn since George died, which meant I never really bothered getting to know the neighbors in our bucolic little part of Oakland. Becks was a hell of a lot more gregarious. She probably knew everyone on our block, not just in our building, and could recite the names of the deceased without cross-referencing the Wall. And now we knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the CDC was involv in something nasty. Put it all together, and I’d basically primed her to go off. The question was whether being stuck in the blast radius was going to be a good thing or a bad thing.
“It appears that someone in the area had been illegally breeding American pit bull terriers for use in dogfights,” said Director Swenson, smoothly as you please. “From what we’ve been able to reconstruct, one of the dogs became infected and attacked the others. The pack attacked their handler when he came to see what all the noise was about. The dogs were able to escape, and those large enough to amplify went on to infect individuals all around the area. It became too large to contain shortly after.”
It was a textbook example of a no-win infection scenario. That was the problem. Textbook examples almost never happen in the real world. I saw Becks opening her mouth, probably to say just that. I clamped my hand down on her thigh under the table, squeezing hard. The pressure was enough to cut her off. She shot me a confused look. I tried to look like I was ignoring her, and cleared my throat.
“Would’ve still been nice if you’d sent, I don’t know, a rescue helicopter or something for folks inside the blast radius, but that’s beside the point,” I said smoothly, keeping my hand clamped on Becks’s thigh. “Anyway, I’m sure you understand why we couldn’t call ahead, having lost your number in the explosion and all.”
The explosion didn’t wipe the CDC’s phone number off the Internet, but that didn’t really matter; my excuse was plausible enough that Director Swenson couldn’t get away with calling me a liar, and artificial enough that we both knew I was lying. His nostrils flared slightly from the strain of keeping his expression neutral. I smiled.
“Yes, absolutely,” said Director Swenson. “Now, to what do we owe the honor of this visit?”
“To get a little background, make sure we’re on the same page and everything, you remember my sister, Georgia Carolyn Mason?” Becks winced at the sound of George’s name, probably thinking of my recent tendency to fly off the handle whenever George came up in conversation. In the back of my head, George snorted with brief amusement but didn’t say anything. This was my party. She was going to let me be the one to send out the invitations.
Director Swenson nodded. “I’ve seen her file. Her death was—any death is tragic, but what she accomplished, even after the point of initial amplification, was—it was amazing. You must be very proud.”
“She died in the field,” I said, as flatly as I could. “Just the way she would have wanted to go.”
“I’m sure that must be a great comfort to you.” He sounded like he meant it, too. My hand clenched tighter on Becks’s thigh. It took every inch of self-control I had to peel my fingers away. She didn’t make a sound, even though the way I was squeezing must have hurt.
“To be honest, I’d rather have her alive and pissed off than dead and happy,” I said, putting my hands flat on the table before I could grab hold of Becks again. “If you’ve seen her file, you must know she suffered from retinal Kellis-Amberlee.”
“Yes, I saw that. It’s amazingshe accomplished so much, given her disability.”
I somehow managed to smile at him. I may never know how I did that. “She did a lot with her life, it’s true. Now I’ve got to soldier on and take care of the things she wasn’t able to finish.”
“Oh?” Director Swenson gave me an attentive look. “What was she working on?”
“Reservoir conditions. See, she knew a lot of people through her support groups and mailing lists—”
Support groups? asked George, sounding horrified. I never joined a support group in my life.
I ignored her. “—and she started noticing this crazy pattern.” Was it my imagination, or was Director Swenson going still? “It was like her friends died faster than anybody else’s. I mean, even faster than my friends, and most of my friends are Irwins, which is sort of like waving a big red flag in the face of Darwinism. So she started to dig.”
“Funny, I don’t remember seeing any received queries in her file,” said Director Swenson. His voice had gone completely blank, neither excited nor cold. The voice of a man in the process of disconnecting.
“She didn’t query the CDC,” said Becks, before I could open my mouth. I decided to let her take the
conversation and run. Her training was better for this bluff than mine was. “She figured that if there wasn’t a pattern, she didn’t want to bother you, and if there was…” She let the sentence trail off before lifting her shoulders in a “What are you going to do?” shrug, and said, “It was a pretty big scoop. If the reservoir conditions were that dangerous, and somebody was going to break the story, why couldn’t it be her?”
“I suppose her notes were lost along with your address book,” said Director Swenson, looking at me.
“Oh, no, not at all,” I replied. “I’ve been studying them, actually. I mean, they’re a little outside my reading level, but hey, what’s life without learning? She’s right, too. The death rate is, like, crazy. Some of these people, statistically, should have lived to see their great-grandkids. Which means either the overall mortality rates for the country need to be recalculated, because we’re calibrating something really, really wrong, or folks with reservoir conditions are dying at a really accelerated rate.” I gave him my best big-dumb-Irwin face, and asked, “Which do you think it is?”
“Well, now that you bring it up, there is some documentation to support your sister’s conclusions. I only wish she’d brought them to us before she died. It would have been a real pleasure working with her.” Director Swenson stood, motioning for Becks and me to stay where we were. “If you two will excuse me for just a moment, I’ll go and get the files that relate to this particular issue. I think you’ll find them very enlightening.”
“We’ll chill here,” I said, offering him a half-salute. Director Swenson mustered a wan smile and turned, walking quickly out of the conference room. He shut the door as he exited. Probably another of those crazy CDC security precautions… or he wanted us to think so, anyway.
Rxing in my chair, I pulled out my phone and fiddled with it, saying carelessly, “It’s cool that he’s going to share his research, huh?” as I texted Becks with He’s up to something. Watch yourself.