by Mira Grant
I was halfway through the neighborhood when a door opened in answer to my knocking. The technician on the other side—a slim, dark-skinned woman with black hair and long-boned hands that were currently occupied in clutching a sheet around her body—blinked at me. I blinked back.
“Er, Sal, yeah?” she said. “Please don’t tell me there’s another chemical fire. I just got the smell of the last one out of my hair.”
“It’s not a chemical fire,” I said. I hadn’t been expecting to find anyone, even though I probably should have been: The night shift would have had no reason to be in the building. I just didn’t know how big the night shift was. “Um, Heina, right?”
“You remembered,” she said, sounding pleasantly surprised. Her smile was quick, bright, and filled with teeth. “Wasn’t sure you would. We’ve met a few times, but I get up around the time you’re going to bed, and you always look like you’re dead on your feet.”
“Sorry about that,” I said. I tried to keep talking, to tell her what had happened to our friends and colleagues. My lips refused to move. “I guess I’m sort of a morning person most of the time. I. Just. I…” I took a deep breath, and then spilled it all out in one great, indigestible chunk: “Sherman and his people raided the bowling alley, they took Dr. Cale and Adam and all the equipment and all her research, they’re probably planning to use it to make the worms in the water even better at doing what they do, and then we’re all going to be in big, big trouble, no matter what we are, so Fishy, Fang, and I are going to USAMRIID to tell Colonel Mitchell what’s going on and try to convince him to join forces with us and make Sherman stop. Only I came here to see if anyone from the night shift had managed to miss the whole thing, and it seems like you did, so now I guess I have to ask you whether you want to come with us or stay here and hold down the fort.”
Heina blinked. Slowly, once, twice, and then a third time, the animation draining from her face more with each small motion. By the time she was done, she looked like a brown wax figure of a woman, perfectly still, filled with waiting.
“They got everything?” she asked.
I nodded.
“There’s a transmitter just under the roofline. Did they take it? Do you remember seeing it after they came through?”
“I… where would it have been?”
“Near the front door.” Heina took a step forward, eyes suddenly intense. “It would have been tucked next to the sign, where it wouldn’t have been super obvious to someone who didn’t know the place. Taking it down would have probably required breaking the sign away from the wall. Was the sign broken?”
That question I could answer with confidence. “No. The door was off its hinges, but the sign was still intact.”
“Did they cut the power?”
Tansy’s life support had continued to operate throughout the entire fight. “No,” I said again.
Then, to my surprise, Heina smiled. It was nothing like her quick, easy expression when I’d remembered her name. This smile was slow, and dark, and filled with the simple joy of a techie who had managed to get one over on the world. I’d seen a similar smile on Fishy, usually right before he did something irresponsibly dangerous. “Then I’ll stay here. I’ll get the rest of my team on it.”
“On what?” I asked.
“Sal, please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve never struck me as the most tech-savvy person around. Is that accurate?” Heina waited for me to nod before she continued: “That antenna was feeding everything from the servers in the bowling alley into the cloud, which is local and sustained by machines in the spare room of this apartment and in the entire floor space of the apartment underneath me. If the local network was disrupted, then those machines I just mentioned? They sucked everything out of the cloud, and turned it into solid, stored, salvageable data. And if Sherman’s men were unplugging things all willy-nilly? Oh, poor them.”
“Why?” I asked blankly.
“Because they just carted off a bunch of empty hard drives with nothing interesting for them to look at.” Heina’s smile was virtually feral, and seemed to contain more teeth than a single human head could hold. “As soon as those machines were uncoupled from the network without appropriate protocols, they started wiping themselves. It was a counterespionage measure we decided to put in place when it became clear that Dr. Cale didn’t know jack about computer security. As long as everything turned on when she told it to, she was perfectly happy to carry on with minimal backups and no off-site. Love her to death, but that woman is lucky she made it this far.”
“I don’t understand.”
Heina’s smile grew broader still. “I’m saying we have all her data—everything—and that Sherman may have our people, but he only has the research they bothered to print out.”
I blinked again. “Oh,” I breathed. Then: “Can you come with me? We need to tell Fang about this.”
“Can I put some clothes on first?” asked Heina.
I nodded.
Fang was back with the truck by the time I returned to the bowling alley with Heina. It would have taken longer, but she had promised to finish going through the apartments, since she knew which ones were supposed to be occupied. “Besides, Princess,” she’d said, once she was clothed and willing to step outside. “We’re all fun-and-frisky folks, and you don’t know us well enough to be walking in on some of those scenes.”
Modesty about nudity and sexual situations was a human trait, one I had learned how to mimic reasonably well, but had never quite managed to internalize. Still, it seemed somehow important to Heina that she be shocking me, so I did my best to look embarrassed. Mostly, I think I just managed to look anxious, which nicely matched my actual mood.
Fang turned at the sound of footsteps, his shoulders locked in the way that usually meant someone was about to get punched. When he saw me, he relaxed. When he saw Heina, he actually brightened. “You found someone!” he said, jumping down from the truck’s rear bumper. “Heina, you old goat. I should have realized you’d still be asleep at this unreasonable hour of the afternoon.”
“I was getting my beauty rest while you were all getting shot.” Heina scanned the front of the bowling alley, looking sad when her eyes skated over the bodies lying in the gravel. She brightened at something, and I assumed that meant her transmitter was still in place, doing whatever it was that hidden transmitters were supposed to do. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
“I’m not,” said Fang firmly. “If you had been, you’d have been shot along with everyone else, and I’d have missed your smiling face.”
I was starting to wonder whether there might be something more than workplace friendliness between the two of them. That would have been nice. Fang needed more people he actually liked well enough to relax around. Still, this wasn’t the time to deal with that. “Heina says she has cloud backups of all the data from the bowling alley.”
“They didn’t knock out my transmitters,” she said in a tone that implied confirmation of what I had just said. “Amateurs. Evil amateurs, which is the worst kind. Couldn’t we have had the villains we deserved?”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t sit around wishing for more competence on the part of the people who killed Daisy,” said Fang. “Can you prepare a quick sampler platter of data? Not enough to give our location away to someone who doesn’t already have it, but enough to make it clear that we have some valuable information to barter with?”
“Sure, but why?” asked Heina.
“Because we’re going to USAMRIID,” said Fang.
“Even if all those computers wiped themselves, Sherman still has Dr. Cale, and Nathan, and everybody,” I said. Juniper, he has Juniper, he’s going to see what she means for everything, and then he’s going to take her apart. The thought was a constant chant at the back of my mind, almost dismissible when it wasn’t allowing myself to focus on it. “He’s going to be able to re-create their work, and do work of his own, until he figures out how to make the DNA do what he wants it
to do. We have to get Colonel Mitchell’s people on our side.”
And then there was Tansy. I didn’t want to look in the back of the truck and see whether Fang had already transferred her over. I couldn’t hear the beep of the heart monitor or the whistling hiss of the intubation, so I supposed that she was probably still inside. Without a full team to monitor her around the clock, she wasn’t going to be able to stay alive for much longer.
Without someone to drive the bus, neither would Joyce. They would both die, both of them broken beyond repair by bad people and bad science. But together, they might stand a chance. If we could get Tansy to Oakland before she gave up. If I could convince Sally’s father that my life honored hers, and didn’t shame her death. It was a lot of “if.” It was all that we really had left.
Fishy came trotting out of the bowling alley with his arms full of small firearms and large pieces of metal rebar. He stopped when he saw Heina. Then he brightened, and called, “Hey, Bonus Player! You didn’t die! That’s awesome.”
“Hello, Fishy,” Heina replied. “Fang tells me you’re heading for USAMRIID? You sure that’s a good idea?”
I wanted to rankle over how quickly she had dismissed me from the decision-making process, but I couldn’t: not really. These three were coworkers, and I was someone who just happened to live there, and more, had accidentally become a miracle of science. That didn’t mean I’d let her undermine me—if she started really trying to convince them that we shouldn’t go, I’d step in—but it meant that she would take this better if she heard it from one of the people whose work she actually respected.
“Nope, but Sal’s the main PC of this run, so I’m going along with her,” said Fishy. Then he paused, and straightened, his posture shifting so completely that for a moment, it was almost like I was looking at an entirely different person. “It’s a bad situation, Heina, and it’s going to get worse from here. USAMRIID has men, they have resources, and they have the sort of firepower we can only dream of. So we go to them, because it’s the last good option we have. Maybe we’re all going to get gunned down. Maybe we’re going to be arrested for crimes against the US government. I don’t know. But it’s better than sitting here and waiting for the world to fall down.”
“You get the network stable, and shift everything over into the apartments,” said Fang. “Have your people feed the sleepwalkers, but don’t do anything else around this shopping center. If Sherman sends a crew back to check for stragglers, I want them to think that they killed us all.”
“That means we can’t bury the dead,” I said quietly. The other three turned to look at me. Fishy and Heina both looked shocked. Fang looked almost relieved, like he had been hoping someone else would come to that conclusion before he had to be the one to say it. I wanted to be angry at him for that, but I couldn’t. These had been his friends and colleagues long before they had been mine. He could seem stoic sometimes, but his situation was just as bad as everyone else’s.
“What do you mean?” demanded Heina. “We can’t leave them out here to rot.”
“They won’t,” I said. “There are coyotes around here, and raccoons, and feral cats. The bodies won’t last very long once night falls.”
That didn’t seem to help much. Heina scowled, and even Fishy looked faintly nauseated. Only Fang’s face remained neutral. I was saying things he’d already considered, and while that didn’t mean he had to like them, it did mean there were no surprises hiding in my words.
“That’s disrespectful and unhygienic,” said Heina. “How are we supposed to work with a bunch of bodies rotting outside the door?”
“You’re not supposed to be working in the bowling alley at all, remember?” I was so tired. I needed to be moving, running, racing against time to get my people back, and instead I was standing here arguing about the dead. How much time were we going to spend arguing about the dead before we started to understand how unimportant they were compared to the living? The dead were nothing. They were food for worms that had never been uplifted by science. The living, the survivors… that was what we needed to be concerned about. “You’re going to shift everything to the apartments, and you’re going to leave the bodies here.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” said Heina.
“Why not?” I asked. “I’m the last chimera standing. I’m the boss’s genetically engineered daughter, and I’m the one who’s marrying her biological son. No matter how you slice it, I’m technically in charge now that she’s gone, and I say we’re wasting time.”
“Cat’s got claws,” said Fishy. He sounded surprised and pleased, like this was the best possible outcome.
“Sal is correct,” said Fang, not giving the argument a chance to continue. “We need to leave if we’re going to reach USAMRIID before the sun goes down. Heina, you have to get the equipment transferred over, and more importantly, you have to leave the bodies where they are. They’re essential camouflage.”
“But they’re our friends,” she said softly.
“I know,” said Fang, his tone echoing hers. “I am going to miss them forever. But they wouldn’t want us to die because we were unwilling to let them protect us one last time. Leave their bodies where they fell. They’ll keep you safe by keeping the wolves away.”
“How did it come to this?” asked Heina.
Fang shook his head. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
Working together, the four of us had been able to transfer Tansy and her life-support equipment into the back of the truck without jostling her more than was absolutely necessary. Her heart monitor beeped once, signaling an increase in her resting vitals, before calming again.
Fishy had managed to secure a generator in the corner of the truck, small enough to be unobtrusive, large enough to power the machines that were keeping Tansy’s host—and hence Tansy herself—alive. One by one, he plugged in her life-support components, swapping them from the lab extension cord with a speed and grace that spoke to a lifetime spent doing similar work, albeit with less potentially fatal consequences.
We had food for a day, in case we got held up on the way to USAMRIID; small weapons enough to get us through whatever dangers we encountered; and all the medical supplies Fishy and Fang had been able to scrounge from the bowling alley. If anything went wrong during transport, we’d be in the best possible position to try to put Tansy back together. Not that it was ever going to work completely. Until she got a new host, this persistent vegetative state was the most that we would have to hope for.
Heina was going to take care of my dogs until we got back. I didn’t like the idea of leaving them with a virtual stranger, but I liked the idea of taking them with us even less. There were no animals inside the quarantine zone, save for the ones that had been there before USAMRIID moved in and hadn’t been hunted down and euthanized yet. Beverly might have been okay with the trip. Minnie wouldn’t have been. And I wouldn’t have been okay with the stress of looking out for either one of them. Better to leave them here, where they would be safe, even if they would also be lonely. It wasn’t like I needed them to detect sleepwalkers for me anymore. My pheromones had evolved. I could detect the sleepwalkers for myself.
I sat on the truck’s back bumper, watching the sky and wishing we were already in motion. The waiting was killing me. Sherman wasn’t waiting. Whatever he was going to do to our people, he had probably already started. Maybe he hadn’t realized yet how special Juniper was; maybe he thought Dr. Cale had just decided to implant one of her babies in an actual baby and see what happened. But Sherman was smart, and if he didn’t know already, he was going to figure it out. He had to figure it out. Once that happened…
The clock was ticking, and we needed to move.
There was just one problem: We were the good guys. We were the ones who were still trying to hold on to empathy and compassion—things that it would be easier to call “humanity,” but I had them too, and I wasn’t human. Sherman could roll in and roll out like a hu
rricane, destroying whatever happened to be standing in his way. Colonel Mitchell could run the world like it was an extension of his army, letting everything be sacrificed in the name of a “greater good” that many would never live to see. Even Dr. Banks had his excuses. He’d never cared about anyone but himself, so why should he start now?
We couldn’t do that. If we wanted to hold on to the only things that made us better than they were, we had to take the time to say good-bye to our people, no matter how much I wanted to be moving. We had to remember that everyone mattered. That was going to keep us from losing sight of ourselves.
But oh, how I wanted to move.
Fishy walked into my frame of view, boosting himself up onto the truck’s bumper next to me. “Fang and Heina are almost done,” he said. “I’m driving. Will you ride up front with me? I know you’re not super big into cars and all that, but you’re the only one who’s actually been to USAMRIID before. I figure you can give me directions.”
“They might also be less likely to shoot first and ask questions later if they see me in the front seat with you,” I said.
“So very, very true,” said Fishy amiably. “Fang can monitor all the beeping things in the back. He’s good at that. Way better than I am. I’m an engineer, not a neurosurgeon.”
“Yeah,” I said. I hesitated and then asked, “Fishy? Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
“Honestly, Sal, I think ‘the right thing’ sort of fell by the wayside when the cities started burning,” said Fishy. He looked morosely out over the parking lot. His eyes fell on one of the corpses, and he flinched, looking away. “At this point, we’re doing the best that we can. USAMRIID has bigger guns and better resources. If we get them on our side, we’ll be in a much better position to take on Sherman. If we can’t, we’ll figure something out.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said.