by Mira Grant
“I think I know that better than you do.” A thin smile tilted her lips up. That, combined with the ponytail, made her look briefly, heartbreakingly like Buffy. I’d seen the resemblance when Kelly first showed up in Oakland, and now here it was again, at the worst possible time.
I guess they have more in common than we thought, said George.
Kelly shrugged out of her lab coat, letting it fall. The blood on the floor began to soak through the cotton almost instantly, but she didn’t seem to notice. She just kept talking as she bent to pick up Dr. Wynne’s gun. “At my body weight, you have approximately eleven minutes before I become a danger. That’s long enough for you to get out of here, and that gives me long enough to make sure the security team has a really, really bad morning. Exit, take a left, and head for the end of the hall. Security will be coming from the other direction. Turn left again when you reach the T-junction, and open the fourth door you see. That should put you—”
“Same place as before?” I asked.
She nodded. Her smile faded slowly, and her lower lip quavered for a moment before she said, “The security systems in the evacuation tunnels are independent of the rest of the building, in case of malfunction or… or something like this. As long as you can test clean, you can get out, no matter what else is happening in here.”
“I remember.” I took a step back, away from her. “Becks, Mahir, come on.”
“Yeah.” Becks hesitated before asking, “You got enough bullets?”
Kelly smiled again, this time directing it at Becks. It was a small thing, and it hurt to see, because it might be the last smile she’d ever wear. At least this one didn’t make her look like Buffy. “I do. Thank you.”
“If you decide you can’t do this—if you want to die remembering who you are—just make sure you save one for yourself.”
“I will.” Kelly sighed, looking at the gun in her hands. “Under the circumstances, I think my grandfather would want me to do this. He thought the truth was important… and so do I. I really didn’t know Dr. Wynne was sending me to hurt you. And I’m sorry. I didn’t want any of this.”
“I know,” said Becks.
I took a breath, letting it out slowly before I tried to speak. “Thanks, Doc.” A whisper at the back of my mind brought a sad smile to my lips. “George says thanks, too. She’s sorry she didn’t trust you.”
“You’re welcome—and tell her it doesn’t matter.”
Kelly’s smile faded. She stepped back, bracing herself against the cabinet before sinking to the floor. That was my last image of her, just sitting there with her knees drawn up to her chest, staring at Dr. Wynne’s unmoving body like she expected it to tell her some sort of a secret—to say something that would magically make everything she’d been through start making sense.
The three of us who were still standing left the office at a walk that turned rapidly into a run and left us with no time for dwelling on what had just happened. We were too busy racing for the exit, looking for an escape from what I was raised to believe was the safest place on the planet.
We were halfway to the end of the first hall when the alarm started to blare, flashing amber lights snapping on at the top of every wall. Mahir sped up, passing us both to take the left. Becks reached back to grab my elbow, hauling me around the corner and out of sight just before the sound of running footsteps filled the hall, coming hard and fast enough to be audible under the alarm. Security was finally on the way.
“You need to keep up,” she hissed. I could barely hear her; it was mostly the shape of her lips that told me what she’d actually said.
“Yeah, I know.” Becks started to let go of my arm. I grabbed her hand. “Come on, you two. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Neither of them argued. We started moving again, traveling at a pace that was just short of a run as we followed a dead woman’s instructions to freedom. Kelly was true to her word; she kept security busy in Dr. Wynne’s lab. The sound of gunfire started as we were making our way into the evacuation grid, only to be cut off when the hidden door swung shut behind us. The secure tunnels were silent and dark, just like before.
We didn’t see a soul during our escape. I still barely bthed until the outside door swung open to let us out on the far edge of the parking lot, half-hidden from the building by a short fence made of steel strips. It took me a moment to realize what it was for: If the facility had been taken by the infected, the metal would hide us from view and might give us the time to either run like hell or go back underground to wait for rescue. It was a nifty idea. Too bad “escape” didn’t mean anything but getting the hell off the grounds before we were spotted.
I waited for gunshots as we ran to Maggie’s van, crouched to minimize our visible profiles, with guns in our hands and ready to fire. They never came. Security was still inside, searching for Kelly’s phantom guests. No one had checked the logs showing the evacuation tunnels, possibly because they hadn’t compared notes with Portland, possibly because they didn’t think we’d get that far. My heart hammered against my ribs, George making soothing, incoherent noises at the back of my head to try and keep me calm. It did, barely. I didn’t really start breathing until we were safe inside the van with the doors closed against the outside. Then I was slamming the key into the ignition, and we were racing away into the brittle golden light of morning, leaving the CDC—and Kelly Connolly, who was naive, but never bad—behind.
We’ve left too many people behind. And somehow, the running never seems to end.
The sweetest summer gift of all
Is knowing spring gives way to fall
And when the winds of winter call,
We’ll answer as we must.
Persephone chose to descend
Into the night that has no end,
In Hades’ hands she goes to spend
Her nights amidst the dust.
For Hades holds his loved ones dear,
Away from life, away from fear,
And so when death is drawing near,
In Hades’ hands we trust.
—From Dandelion Mine, the blog of Magdalene Grace Garcia, June 23, 2041
Twenty-one
I kept my foot slammed down on the gas as we blazed along a frontage road, taking one of the morobscure ways out of town. Mahir rode in the passenger seat with a smartphone in his hand, entering alterations to our route every few minutes as he received updates from the GPS satellites. Every change had to be registered with the Highway Commission, but our credentials were in order, and unless there was a stop order out on our vehicle, registering our route was less dangerous than dealing with the smackdown if we got caught crossing state lines without the proper paperwork in place.
Our weird little hopscotch of twists and turns wasn’t the fastest way to get where we were going, even if I don’t think we ever dropped under eighty miles per hour, but it was definitely the most confusing. I wouldn’t have been able to track us—not without an actual tracking device planted somewhere on the van, and if the CDC was that deep into our shit, we were already dead. Hacking the highway registry wouldn’t give them any of the vehicles known to be registered to our site or its employees, and I seriously doubted they had a full catalog of vehicles registered to Garcia Pharmaceuticals.
Becks rode in the rear with a rifle clutched in her hands, waiting for the moment when an unmarked car would come roaring up behind us and she’d have to start shooting. Maybe we were being paranoid, but I seriously doubted it. The CDC has had a lot of power for a long damn time now. Our deaths wouldn’t register on anybody’s radar, except for maybe Maggie’s, and there wouldn’t be too much even she could do about it. Her parents had money, political pull, and a lot of patience. That didn’t mean she’d be able to convince them to take on the CDC, even if she could convince them that the research we’d collected was the real deal.
I allowed the shuddering van to drop back to a more reasonable sixty miles per hour after we passed the halfway point between Memphis and
Little Rock. There was still no visible pursuit. “Becks? How’s the road looking?”
“Clear.” I could see her in the rearview mirror. All her attention was focused on the road, shoulders tense as she waited for the moment when the ambush would be sprung. “Not a soul since we passed that tour bus.”
“With your driving, the poor bastards probably thought we were running from an outbreak,” said Mahir. There was a smothered chuckle in his tone. I knew that edge of hysteria better than I wanted to, although I hadn’t heard it that clearly in a long time. It went away after you’d spent enough time in the field. Hysteria takes too much energy to be maintained forever. “They likely turned around as soon as they found a wide enough spot in the road.”
“As long as their turn didn’t take them in our direction, I don’t care where they went.” Becks managed to sound like she was muttering even while pitching her voice to be heard at the front of the van. It’s a trick from the basic Irwin handbook: The lower and more urgent your tone, the more exciting and dangerous the situation will seem to the people at home. It’s just a matter of learning to whisper as loudly as some people shout, to make sure the cameras can pick you up. I knew exactly what she was doing. I was still impressed. She was damn good at it.
“We have enough gas to get us past Little Rock—after that, I want to get freaky,” I said. “Mahir, get us a route that doesn’t involve the roads we used to reach Tennessee. Try to get a whole new set of states if you can.”
“Why are you asking me?” Mahir asked peevishly. He started tapping a staccato pattern on the screen of his phone, calling up a more sophisticated GPS mapping program. “I’m the only one in this car not native to this damn continent.”
“Great. That means you won’t have any stupid preconceptions about what to avoid.”
“What, bad neighborhoods?”
“I was thinking more like Colorado, but sure, whatever.” I made a sharp turn onto yet another frontage road, causing Becks to whack her shoulder against the window. She swore, but didn’t yell at me. Our escape was too important to interrupt for silly things like fighting amongst ourselves. “Becks, we still clear?”
“Unless the CDC has invisible cars, yes,” she snarled.
“Good enough for me.” I pulled a disposable ear cuff out of my pocket and snapped it on, tapping the side to trigger the connection. “This is Shaun Mason activating security protocol Campbell. The bridge is out, the trees are coming, and I’m pretty sure my hand is evil. Now gimme some sugar, baby.”
Mahir stared at me with undisguised confusion. “What the fuck was all that about?”
“Single-use phone. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t activate it by mistake.” The ear cuff beeped as the connections were made, routed through half a dozen dummy servers and half a dozen more firewalls.
Fire-and-forget phones are about as secure as it gets, providing you don’t mind spending a few hundred bucks to make one call. That call can’t last for more than six minutes, and it has to end with the total destruction of the phone you used to make it. But yeah, it’s secure.
“Well, that’s definitely one thing no one’s going to say on bloody accident!”
“Exactly. Now get back to finding us a rabbit hole to dive down.”
The beeping stopped, and Alaric’s voice came down the line, asking, “Shaun? Is that you? Where are you?”
“That’s a good question, and no matter how secure I think this line is, it’s one I’m not going to answer. We have a maximum of six minutes talk time before we become traceable, so I want you to get Maggie and set your phone to speaker. Got me?”
“She’s right here,” said Alaric. There was a clicking sound. When he spoke again, his voice was tinny and a little distant, like it was coming down a tube. “Go.”
“Right. Wynne sold us out. I don’t know if he was always dirty or if they got to him after the election, but I’m not sure it matters. He’s dead. So’s Kelly.” I winced as I realized that there was one more unexpected tragedy to her death. “Shit. We can’t even put her on the Wall. She officially died months ago, and it wasn’t because of the infected.”
“Damn,” whispered Alaric. The seconds were ticking away from us, but we still fell silent for a moment, considering the magnitude of the tragedy in front of us. The Wall is a virtual monument to the people who’ve died because of Kellis-Amberlee. It started during the Rising with bloggers and doctors, college students, and soccer moms—anyone and everyone who came out on the losing end of the zombie apocalypse. We’ve kept it up since then. The blog community views it as a public service and a vital reminder that none of us is safe; that it never really ended. Maybe the infected don’t roam the streets the way they did once, but they’re still here. They’re never going away. And names keep going up on the Wall.
George’s name is up there. So is Buffy’s, and Dave’s, since he died during an outbreak. Hell, even Tate’s name is on the Wall. He killed my sister, but the Wall doesn’t judge. George used to call it the ultimate monument to truth, a universally accepted model of the world as it is, not as we want it to be. There was no way we could pretend Kelly died because of any reason other than Kellis-Amberlee… and because of that goddamn clone, she was never going to go up on the Wall.
I guess there’s nothing in the world that can’t lie to us, said George, sounding subdued. I think I’m glad I died before I found that out.
There was nothing I could say to that. I cleared my throat, shattering the silence. “We’re on our way home. I can’t tell you how we’re going to be coming—it’s not safe, and I’m not sure—but I want you to stay inside, lock yourselves down, and don’t go out for anything. I mean anything.”
“The dogs—” started Maggie.
“That’s what you have security for! Call them out of the woods and make them take the little crap factories out for walkies. Dammit, Maggie, I don’t think you understand how deep the shit is right now. Alaric, start backing up our databases everywhere you possibly can. Send encrypted copies to everyone in the employee database, everyone who’s ever been in the employee database, your ex-girlfriend, your ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, everyone.”
“Everyone?” asked Alaric.
I hesitated.
Do it, said George.
“Yeah—everyone,” I said. “Make the flat-drop. Encrypt the files first, to slow things down, but make it. We’ll deal with it later, assuming there is a later. Both of you, make sure your wills are up-to-date. Maggie, tell your Fictionals to stay the fuck home until further notice. I don’t want anyone coming within a hundred miles of Weed if they have a choice in the matter.”
“All right, boss,” said Alaric, quietly.
“Turn left at the next intersection,” said Mahir.
“Got it.” I slowed slightly as I took the turn. There were still no other cars in sight. “I’m dead serious here, guys. We’re on lockdown until further notice. Treat every door and window as a sealed air lock, and open them only if your lives depend on it. Your lives probably do depend on keeping them closed, since these assholes have clearly demonstrated that they wouldn’t know a scruple if it bit them on the ass. Mahir, how’s our network security?”
“Iave no fucking idea, Shaun. If you’ve got a way of bringing Buffy back from the dead, maybe she could tell you. The only thing I can tell you is that you’ve got a right turn coming up in a block and a half.”
“Right. Well, the dead are walking, boys and girls, but they’re not doing it in our favor, so for right now, we’re on our own. I don’t have a safe way of transmitting our files to you.”
Maggie broke in. “I’ll tell my Fictionals I’ve had another problem with the plumbing, and keep anything more detailed to the secure servers. Will you be able to call in again at all?”
“Maybe,” I hedged. “I’m not going to promise anything, but I’ll try. For the moment, assume you won’t be hearing from us until we arrive, and that we won’t be staying long before it’s everybody out. We wouldn’t be com
ing back at all if there was anywhere safer to go.” The CDC would figure out that we’d been staying at Maggie’s place, eventually. I was just praying that their fear of her parents would keep them from doing anything drastic before we had time to grab our shit and hit the road. “Pack a bag and be ready to move.”
“On it.”
“Good. This shouldn’t be more than a three-day drive, and that’s assuming we actually stop to sleep. If we’re not there inside of the week—”
“If you’re not here in a week, don’t bother coming,” she said. “We won’t be here when you arrive.”
“That’s the right answer.” I glanced over at Mahir. His attention was still focused on the phone in his hand. “Mahir? You want to send a message for your wife?”
“No.” He looked up, offering me a strained smile. “She knew where I was going. She knew I might not come back. It’s best if we don’t complicate that further, don’t you think?”
I didn’t really know what to say to that. I shook my head and checked the rearview mirror. Becks was still in watch position, expression grim as she scanned the windows. “Becks? Any messages you wanted to send?”
“Fuck that shit.” Her narrowed eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, almost daring me to argue. “We’re going to make it home, and then we’re going to take them all down.”
“Sounds like a plan to me. Alaric? Maggie? You’ve got your marching orders. Now march. We’ll check in if we can, and if we can’t, just keep the porch light burning until our time runs out.”
“It’s been good working with you, boss,” said Alaric.
“Same here, buddy, but it’s not over yet.”
“Your lips to God’s ears,” said Maggie. “All of you, stay safe, and don’t pull any stupid heroics. I don’t want to flee to the Bahamas with nobody but Alaric for company.”
“Truly a fate worse than death,” deadpanned Mahir.
“We’ll do our best,” I said. “Stay safe.”