by Mira Grant
It may be necessary to begin preparing the 8 line for release. I will continue to observe and study 7c, but do not believe that 7d would offer any substantial improvement in the problem areas.
—Taken from an e-mail sent by Dr. Matthew Thomas, July 23, 2041.
Preparations to separate the members of our group are nearly complete. Maggie keeps saying we shouldn’t split the party. Privately, I agree with her. This is madness. We will separate, and we will each of us die alone. And yet…
Something must be done. If Shaun’s paranoid ravings are correct, and the mosquitoes were engineered for release when a news cycle truly needed to be buried—one such as the cycle we were prepared to unleash when we left Memphis—then it is our responsibility to find a way to save the world from them. How arrogant that looks! “Save the world.” I’m not in the world saving business. I’m a journalist.
But it seems the world has other ideas. Maggie and I leave for Seattle tomorrow. I’m terrified that I will never see London, or my wife, again. And a small, traitorous part of me is elated. I thought we no longer lived in an age of heroes.
I was wrong.
—From Fish and Clips, the blog of Mahir Gowda, July 23, 2041. Unpublished.
Six
Deciding to hit the road took only a few seconds—the amount of time necessary for a thought to travel from my brain to my big mouth. Actually leaving took longer. Dr. Abbey wasn’t sending us out to die; if anything, she was sending us out not to die, something she took great pains to make sure I understood.
“This isn’t just about the mosquitoes, Shaun,” she’d said, while running yet another blood test and getting yet another negative result. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I showed you those distribution maps, or when I talked about the number of lives you could save by bringing me some live specimens. But it was never just about the mosquitoes.”
George had sighed in the back of my head then, sounding so tired it made my chest ache. She was dead. She shouldn’t have been tired anymore. But she was, and it was my fault, for refusing to let her go. She wants you to get exposed again.
“Are you fucking kidding?” I’d asked, too startled to remember to keep my voice down.
And Dr. Abbey had smiled, that bitter half twist of her lips that I normally saw only when she thought no one was looking, or when she murmured endearments to her huge black dog, the one with her dead husband’s name.
“Someday you’re going to have to explain how it is you’ve managed to create a subconscious echo that’s smarter than you are.” Still smiling, Dr. Abbey had looked me squarely in the eye and said, “I need to know if you can shrug off the infection a second time, outside lab conditions. If you can, that changes everything.”
Swell.
The next four days rushed past in a blur, with all of us preparing to do the one thing I’d sworn I’d die to prevent: We were getting ready to go our separate ways. After everything I’d done to keep us together, to keep us alive, I was going to scatter us to the winds, and pray everyone came home again. We started as a news site. Somewhere along the line, we became a family. Me, and George, and After the End Times. That was all I needed. I’d already lost George. Did I have to lose everyone else, too?
Alaric would be staying with Dr. Abbey; that hadn’t changed. He was our best technician. If it became necessary for the lab to move while we were still on the road, he’d be too useful for Dr. Abbey to just ditch, and he’d be able to keep the rest of us aware of its location. Besides, I didn’t trust him in the field when his sister’s safety was on the line. He was likely to do something impulsive and get himself hurt, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to force myself to stay on the road instead of running straight back to Dr. Abbey and her advanced medical facilities. Especially since by “advanced,” I meant “better than a first aid kit.” We were still off the grid. If one of us got messed up, the hospital wasn’t going to be an option.
Maggie and Mahir, meanwhile, were going to head farther up the coast, leaving the wilds of Oregon for the dubious safety of Seattle. Maggie’s plan was to go back on the grid as soon as possible, reclaiming her position as heir to the Garcia family fortune, and presenting Mahir as her latest boy toy. “People like their circuses when the news gets bad,” she’d said, a perverse twinkle in her eyes. “I’m a Fictional, remember? I’m going to tell them a story so flashy they won’t even think to ask where I’ve been.” Alaric wasn’t thrilled about the “boy toy” part, but it was solid. They would use her celebrity as a cover while they made contact with the Seattle underground, and located the man everyone called “the Monkey.” He could cook new IDs for my whole team, IDs that were good enough to let us disappear forever, if things came to that.
Most of us, anyway. Maggie came to see me on the fifth day after we began planning our departure. I was clearing my things out of the van. I’d been sleeping there most nights, preferring the illusory privacy of its familiar walls to the dubious comforts of the dormlike sleeping arrangements inside the Forestry Center. The garage wasn’t secure, but the van was, once the doors were locked.
She knocked once on the open rear door, and then just stood there, waiting.
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“You know we’re not getting me an ID from the Monkey, don’t you?” Her expression was a mixture of resignation and resolve. She looked like a heroine from one of the horror movies she loved so much, and in that moment, I really understood what Dave—one of the many teammates I’d buried since this whole thing started—and Alaric saw in her. She was beautiful.
And she was right. “Yeah, I do.” I put down the toolbox I was holding, moving to take a seat on the bumper. “You can’t disappear.”
“If it weren’t for the fact that my bio-tracker is still registering with my parents, I wouldn’t even be able to stay underground for this long.” Maggie touched the skin above her collarbone. Her parents had implanted a subdermal bio-tracker beneath the bone when she was still in diapers. It didn’t come with a “trace” function—Maggie’s misguided teenage years before she discovered journalism were proof that they’d been telling her the truth about that—but it enabled them to sleep soundly at night, serene in the knowledge that their only child was still alive.
“We could have it removed.”
“If anything would switch this thing from transmitting my vitals to actively giving them a location, that would do it.” Maggie sat down next to me. “It’s too risky.”
I looked at her levelly. “It’s too risky, and you don’t really want to disappear, do you?”
“It’s not that! It’s just… it’s…” She took a breath, stopping herself before she could go any further. Finally, reluctantly, she nodded. “You’re right. I don’t want to disappear. I don’t want to do that to my parents, and I miss my house. I miss my dogs. I miss my Fictionals. They have to be so worried. I’ve never done this to them before, not once. Alaric and I talked about this. He’s not happy, but… it’s what has to happen.”
Tell her you understand, said George.
“I understand,” I said, and even if I had to be prompted into the words, I meant them. Maggie had already given up a lot to stay with us this long, more than any of my team members except for maybe Mahir. Alaric’s family would have been in Florida no matter where he worked. Becks hadn’t spoken to her family in years. She was a lot like Georgia that way; both of them found the news and ran for it with open arms, not caring what got left behind in the process. But Maggie wasn’t like that. Maggie was different.
Maggie was looking at me hopefully, like she could barely bring herself to believe I was really saying the words she was hearing. “I know I’m letting you down.”
“You’re not.” I’m not a huggy person. I used to be more physically affectionate—not excessively so, but enough that I didn’t seem standoffish. That was George’s job. I took the hugs that were aimed at her. I haven’t felt like hugging people very often since she died. I still leaned over and put my arm around Maggie’s
shoulders, giving her a brief squeeze. The situation seemed to call for it.
“Really?” she whispered.
“Really. Your parents would tear down the world trying to find you if you stayed gone too long. That’s cool. That’s sort of awesome, if you think about it. Becks’s family hates her. Alaric’s family is dead. Mahir’s family is in England, and they probably think he’s insane. And the Masons…” I stopped, the sentence coming to a halt.
“It’s not your fault,” said Maggie, filling the space with the words she assumed I needed to hear. “They were broken a long time before you came to live with them. It’s not your fault you couldn’t fix them.”
“The flat-drop.”
“What?”
“The flat-drop!” I turned to face her, grabbing her shoulders in my excitement. “We sent them a copy of our files when we were on the run from Memphis. I mean, we were going to die, so someone needed to have the data, right? Only I told Alaric he could encrypt the fuck out of them if he wanted to, and since the Masons haven’t suddenly started ‘discovering’ lots of corruption inside the CDC, I guess he must have used a pretty damn good encryption.”
“You’re not making any sense,” said Maggie, eyes wide.
“No, see, this is perfect! I was worried about how Becks and I were going to get into the hazard zone without getting caught, but the Masons practically invented breaking into hazard zones! They’re pioneers in the field!” I laughed, mainly from relief. “All we have to do is show up on their doorstep and offer to crack those files in exchange for a low-risk route into Florida, and they’ll jump at it. They’ll have to.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Then I’ll shoot their kneecaps out.” I didn’t realize I meant it until the words were said. The Masons raised me. The Masons gave me the greatest gift anyone has ever given me: George. But they were never really my parents, because they never wanted to be, and if they were what stood between me and what I needed to do, then they needed to be moved.
“Um,” said Maggie. She pulled away from me and stood. “Well, okay, if that’s what works. Really, though. Thank you for understanding.”
“Thank you for being willing to go to Seattle with Mahir,” I replied. “You heading back inside?”
“Yeah. Will you be out here long?”
“Not too long.”
“If you’re not inside by dinner, I’ll send someone to get you.” She walked away, her long brown braid swaying with every step. It was hard to believe that she was planning to use “bored heiress” as her cover during the trip up the coast. It was harder to believe that the news media would probably buy it.
“You need to be careful what you say around people, asshole,” said George. I hadn’t felt the van settle when she sat down, because she wasn’t really there. I couldn’t keep myself from feeling vaguely disappointed all the same. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
“Sorry.” I turned to face my dead sister, offering her a small smile. “Hi, George. How’re you tonight?”
“Worried,” she said. “You need to be careful. Everyone’s already on edge without you going around talking about shooting people.”
“I haven’t hit anyone since we got here.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not waiting for you to start.” Her expression dared me to argue. I couldn’t, and so I just looked at her instead.
Maybe the fact that George sometimes appears to me is a symptom of the fact that I’m sliding farther and farther down the funhouse chute into insanity, but at moments like these, I can’t force myself to care. When she died—when I shot her—I thought that was it; I would never see her again, except in pictures, and in my dreams. Only it turns out that’s not true, thanks to my slipping grasp on reality. See? There are upsides to going crazy.
She still looked almost exactly like she did on that last day in Sacramento, pale-skinned from her near-pathological avoidance of sunlight, with dark brown hair cut in a short, efficient style she sometimes maintained with a pair of craft scissors. She was frowning. Since that was the expression she wore most often when she was alive, that was right, too. Really, if it hadn’t been for the clear brown of her irises, she would have been indistinguishable from herself. If I could just convince my hallucination to put on a pair of sunglasses, the illusion would be perfect.
George frowned. “Shaun. Are you listening to me?”
“I am. I swear, I am.” I reached one hand toward her face, stopping just short of the point where my fingertips would have failed to brush her skin. “I always listen to you.”
“You just ignore what I have to say about half the time, is that it?” George sighed. I let my hand drop. As long as I didn’t try to touch her, I didn’t have to think of her as what she was. Dead. “Shaun—”
“It’s good to see you.”
“It’s bad that you can see me. You need to talk to Dr. Abbey. Maybe she can put you on antipsychotics or something until this is all over.”
“I’ll go psychotic if I go on antipsychotics, which sort of defeats the purpose, don’t you think?” I was trying to make it sound like a joke. We both knew I wasn’t kidding. The one time I’d tried to block her out, I’d nearly committed suicide. “I can’t take the silence, George. You know that.”
“You asked once if I was going to haunt you forever, remember?”
“That was before Florida.” I held up my left hand, showing her the faint scarring on my biceps. “That was before we found out that I’m immune to Kellis-Amberlee. That was before a lot of things.”
“You know you’re immune because we—”
“I know.” I sighed, letting my hand drop. “Things are all fucked up. I was supposed to be the one who died. I’m not equipped to deal with this shit.”
“You’re wrong.” Her voice was firm enough to surprise me. She met my eyes without flinching, and repeated, “You’re wrong. Dr. Wynne wasn’t kidding when he said that whoever’s behind this would have been able to get away with everything if you’d been the one who died. You know that, right? I would have believed Tate when he started ranting about how he was behind everything, just him, from the start. I would have been so eager for a black and white solution, for a villain I didn’t have to feel any conflict about… I would have believed him.”
“I believed him,” I whispered.
“Not all the way. If you’d believed him all the way—if you’d believed him the way I would have believed him—you would have done what we both know I would have done. You would have written your reports, held my funeral, gone home, and killed yourself.” She smiled faintly. “Probably by overdosing on everything in our field kit before blowing the top of your head off. You never were one for leaving things to chance.”
“What would you have done?”
“Slit my wrists in the bathtub,” she said matter-of-factly. “Even if I amplified before I bled out, the bathroom security sensors would never have let me out into the house. I would have been bleached to death. The Masons would have had to pay if they wanted to clear the outbreak off their home owner’s insurance, and you and I could have sat in the afterlife and laughed at them until we both cried.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “That sounds like something you’d do,” I agreed.
“But I didn’t get the chance.” She leaned over. This time, she was the one to reach for me, and when her fingertips grazed my skin, I felt it. Tactile hallucinations aren’t a good sign of mental health, but sometimes I feel like they’re the only things letting me keep body and soul together. “You got it. And you were stronger than I would have been. You’re stronger than you think you are. All you’ve ever needed to do was let yourself see it.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”
“Not too much longer, I’d wager,” said Mahir, from behind me. His normally crisp accent was blurred around the edges, like he was too tired to worry about being understood by the Americans. “How’s it coming?”
“About as we
ll as can be expected,” I said, stealing one last look at Georgia before I turned, casting an easy smile in his direction. I didn’t need to look back to know that George was gone. She generally disappeared as soon as I took my eyes off her. I was seeing her more often with every day that passed, and that was wonderful, because I missed her so much, and it was terrible, because it meant I was running out of time.
We can cure cancer. We can cure the common cold. But no one, anywhere, ever, has found a reliable cure for crazy.
“Maggie spoke with you?”
I nodded. “She wanted to make sure I knew she wouldn’t be coming back from Seattle.”
“And you were all right with that?” Mahir walked toward me, stopping when he was still a few feet clear of the van. Maggie was a much more touchy-feely kind of person than he was. I appreciated that. One hug per day was pretty much my limit.
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t want her to go. The rest of us… You’re going to be able to put your own name back on when you get home, but the rest of us, we’re done. We’ll be lucky if we don’t wind up hiding in Canada being chased by zombie moose for the rest of our lives.”
“There’s always the chance we’ll successfully manage to bring down the United States government somehow, and that will negate the need to flee to Canada,” said Mahir helpfully.
I gave him a startled look. He smirked, fighting unsuccessfully to keep himself from smiling. Somehow, that was even funnier than what he’d said. I started laughing. So did he. We were both still laughing five minutes later, when Becks came out to the garage with a can of soda in one hand and a perplexed look on her face.
“Did I miss something?” she asked.
“We’re going to topple the US government!” I informed her.