by Mira Grant
Fishy smiled and nudged me with his elbow. “Sure it is. You managed to get away from them twice, right? Three times, if we count that horrifying story Dr. Cale tells about you and your sister and the Colonel back before shit got real. We’ll just follow you, and you’ll know what to do.”
I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t want to disillusion him when we were already getting ready to march into danger. So I just smiled thinly and didn’t say anything.
Fang came walking around the corner of the truck. “Heina has gone to wake the others and start her work. We should go, if we don’t want to be stuck here while we explain everything again.”
I slid down off the bumper. “Let’s get moving.”
“Yes,” said Fang, swinging himself up into the truck and moving toward the back to check on Tansy. “Let’s.”
He was bending over her cot when Fishy pulled the truck’s door down, and cut Fang off from view. Together, Fishy and I walked around to the cab, and climbed in. I fastened my seat belt. Fishy didn’t. Maybe believing that life was a video game made personal safety seem less important.
I watched out the window as we drove out of the parking lot and back onto Willow Pass Road. No one watched us go.
No one but the dead.
Sherman and his people had taken advantage of the relatively clear road outside the bowling alley to make their approach. They would have needed to move very little aside in the way of blockages: While Dr. Cale’s people had worked to keep the area looking realistically deserted, they had also needed to rearrange the crashes and abandoned vehicles to make it possible for supply runs and scavenging parties to move freely. We were using those same streets now, following them back to I-4. We didn’t dare clear a new route. Like the bodies outside the bowling alley, the unmoved vehicles littering the streets would make it seem like we had never passed through here.
Fishy took it slow, moving around the blockages and swerving to avoid spills, all while trying to keep the ride steady enough that it wouldn’t jostle Tansy and Fang more than absolutely necessary. I admired the artistry of it all, even as I tried to focus on the drums pounding in my ears, forbidding myself to listen to the small, gnawing voice of my own panic. I had no reason to be afraid of riding in cars. There was no traffic to contend with. There was no way Fishy was going to lose control of the truck. All I had to fear was fear itself, and honestly, I didn’t have time for that.
“I miss the radio,” said Fishy after taking a quick scan through the available frequencies and confirming that everything was off the air. “I used to have this old junker I inherited from my dad. It was a piece of rust that drove like a car, you know? Actual ferrous frame, weighted like a personal tank. It had a CD player instead of a proper satellite radio hookup. Man, I hated that thing. If I wanted music, I either had to play it through my phone or remember to grab a bunch of actual discs before I got in the car. I guess the joke’s on me, though. I’d kill for a CD player now.”
I didn’t even know what a CD player was. I stayed quiet.
“It’s weird how technology changes everything, isn’t it?” Fishy drove around an overturned semi. “Once, there were CD players everywhere. Before that it was tape decks, and before that it was these weird things called eight-tracks that looked like video game cartridges from the eighties and only held like two songs. But every time, it was a revolution. More control, more content, more choices. And now here we are, back to silence, because we got rid of all the physical media and then we lost the radio.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I admitted.
“That’s cool,” said Fishy. He smiled, and there was something terribly sad about the expression, like he had always known that he was speaking into the void. “Sometimes I just talk so I’ll know I still exist, you know?”
“That, I know,” I said quietly.
The landscape outside the truck windows was oddly blasted. It had been a low-rain year—normal enough, although according to the Mitchells, California used to experience heavy rains during December and January, back when we were the greatest produce supplier in the United States. The climate had shifted since then, enough that rain was rare and fires were common. Enough that the brown, dry hills around us didn’t seem so unusual, although they were more overgrown than they used to be, thanks to the relative absence of cows. Oh, there were a few here and there, dotted around the hills like bruises on a banana. Horses were more plentiful. They were smarter, and didn’t have the same milking requirements. Even more important, they were better at getting out of their stalls.
In a similar vein, goats were more common than sheep, and cats were more common than dogs. Birds of prey roosted atop telephone poles, watching us pass with their cold avian eyes. They wouldn’t care if we never managed to resolve this conflict. Sherman could kill us all, and the hawks and falcons and crows would inherit everything.
“Sorry, birdie, but we’re not ready for that,” I muttered as we rolled under yet another red-tailed hawk. Fishy shot me a faintly confused look, but didn’t say anything. I suppose he was so accustomed to being the one who didn’t make sense that he was willing to let me take a turn.
“The freeways are open this way, you said?” he asked.
“They should be, unless things have changed since Carrie and I got out of the Coliseum,” I said. “Did anyone see which direction Sherman’s people came from? I wouldn’t put it past them to have collapsed some wrecks over their path, just for cover.” In this context, “anyone” could only mean Fang, since Fishy and I had both been inside the Kmart when everything went wrong.
Fishy shook his head. “Not enough survivors, and there wasn’t time to check the security footage. You think we’re going to catch up to them?”
“No. They’d have to be holed up in Albany or Emeryville if they drove down this road to reach us, and neither of those has anything like the big abandoned mall Sherman was using as his headquarters. I’m almost positive.” Almost wasn’t good enough—had stopped being good enough before I was engineered in the SymboGen lab that made me—but it was all we had left, and I was clinging to it as tightly as I could.
Besides, Sherman was smart. Smart enough to know that Dr. Cale, when driven out of Vallejo, would have gone back to familiar ground; smart enough to check the bowling alley. He had been smart enough to build an army of chimera under everyone’s noses. He must have hid the disappearances in an untold number of counties, burying the Missing Person alerts in a dozen local news reports. He wouldn’t have stayed in a hideout that was equidistant between his creator and his enemies at USAMRIID. There was too much chance that one day Dr. Cale would go too far and bring the Army down on her head, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be in the path of that.
We drove amongst untouched hills, under the watchful eyes of hawks. For maybe the first time since this freeway was built, there was no roadkill anywhere; the pavement was free of blood. Cars sat on the shoulder, and glass glittered on the blacktop, but as far as the natural world was concerned, the age of man was over. It had come to an end when the last raccoon was struck by a car’s bumper, when the last deer was left to rot on the median.
Speaking of deer… a whole family raised their heads from cropping the grass by the side of the road, watching us go by. I had seen deer before, but never so many of them, and never so bold. I pressed my face against the glass and watched them until they were out of sight. None of them jumped into the road. We killed nothing, destroyed nothing, as we sailed down the black ribbon of the highway and into the devouring distance.
Clayton dropped far behind us, a forgotten dream of a place where we’d been happy, for a time; where we’d allowed ourselves to feel like we were safe. Other cities followed, until we were moving through the thicker traffic on the approach to Oakland. It wasn’t quite gridlock: There was space between the abandoned cars for Fishy to maneuver the truck, as long as he took it slow and didn’t worry about scratching the paint. We had just squeezed through an opening between two electric cars when I realiz
ed that I hadn’t felt the need to drop down into the hot warm dark once during this drive. I was getting better, or at least I was learning to swallow my fear more efficiently, leaving myself capable of riding in a motor vehicle without hyperventilating.
I guess after you’ve been in a car that was intentionally driven into the ocean, and raced the sunset to find your way home, normal vehicular transportation loses some of its sting.
The shape of the Oakland Coliseum loomed up ahead and to our left. Fishy looked toward me, eyebrows raised.
“Well?” he asked. “How do you want to play this?”
I took a deep breath. “Follow my lead,” I said.
We pulled up to the gate that blocked the Coliseum parking lots from the road. It was manned by four men in fatigues, each of them holding an assault rifle. My stomach unclenched when I realized that none of them had a cattle prod. This was going to be much easier if I wasn’t living in fear of being separated from myself.
One of them walked to Fishy’s window and rapped on it with his knuckles. Fishy obligingly rolled the window down, smiling his customary, toothy smile at the officer.
“Afternoon,” he said. “I guess maybe it’s technically evening? Sun looks like it should be going down any minute. How strict are we being with the day divisions now that most of the clocks are toast?”
“Sir, this is a restricted area,” said the officer. “We’re going to have to ask you to turn around.”
“Sorry, no can do. I’m here on a mission of medical mercy, and turning around would sort of go against the whole purpose of driving here. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be rounding up survivors like me and making sure that we’re comfortable in quarantine, not being snacked on by tapeworm-zombies all the damn time?”
The officer looked uneasy. That was the first inkling I had that things had gotten worse in Pleasanton after Paul’s death: that we might, in fact, have lost the entire quarantine zone.
I leaned forward, tucking my hair back behind my ears so that the officer who was talking to Fishy could see my face. Sally had always taken after her father: Her features were Colonel Mitchell’s, softened by genetics and estrogen into the face of a reasonably pretty woman. Now they were my features, and I was going to put them to good use.
“Hi,” I said. The officer went very still. “Can you tell my father that I’m back?”
Sherman has finally proven himself to be my son in truth as well as by circumstance of birth: He has taken us all. His people killed several of mine, and I will not forget that fact, no matter how hard he may try to convince me that it was an accident, no matter how much effort he may be willing to put into the idea that somehow, he can convince me to become a convert to his cause. He would have me become the monster that they have made of me, and he doesn’t understand why I wouldn’t want that.
I know you’re going to read this, Sherman. I know I have no hope of privacy, and that you’ll kill me before you let me go free. I also know that you will read what I have written in hopes of uncovering my secrets, while you would never listen as I said these things to you. My beautiful, clever, flawed boy.
You are my son, in every way that matters. I bought the body you now wear from its human wife, who couldn’t afford the medical bills. I cultivated the core of you in petri dish and agar, choosing the best genes, the best chances for survival. And maybe, in the end, I put too much of myself in you.
Sherman, my weakness has always been a lack of empathy. Whatever guides the mentality and emotions of normal humans was left out in making me, and I have had to live my entire life measuring myself against the people around me, which is why I have striven to be surrounded by those of high empathy and higher morals.
If I am surrounded only by you, what horrors will I unleash? Please, son, if you don’t care about the human world, care about me. Don’t make me into what you need me to be.
Let me go. Let your brothers go.
Live.
—FROM THE NOTES OF DR. SHANTI CALE, JANUARY 2028
I did nothing to deserve this. I was a good wife. I was a better mother. I raised my girls with a sense of right and wrong, and if Sally was a little wild and Joyce was a daddy’s girl, well, that was all right. They were still my children, and I loved them more than anything. Loving them was all that I was meant to do. Being a mother was everything I had ever wanted in my life. I could have been a mother forever.
I am still a mother. My body remembers the little girls it made, shaping them one bone at a time in the safe haven of my womb. My arms remember the babies that they held. I will always, always be a mother. But now my babies are dead, and I don’t know what I’m going to do without them. Alfred tries to tell me that there’s a chance for Joyce, but I’m too smart for that lie. I wish I weren’t. It would be easier on both of us if I could make myself believe him. But I can’t.
What is a mother who has buried both her daughters? What, if not alive too long?
—FROM THE DIARY OF GAIL MITCHELL, JANUARY 2028
Chapter 15
JANUARY 2028
The soldiers at the gate had walked with the truck as they led us to the front of the Coliseum. They had looked surprised and only a little confused when Fishy led them to the back and opened the door to reveal Fang, bent over Tansy’s unmoving form and checking the connections on her ventilator. It must have been an odd sight, from their perspective: an unmoving woman with a shaven head, lying unconscious on a gurney, while a man in a white coat worked to make sure that she was still breathing.
Then Fang had straightened, and turned, and said—in his most polite, most congenial tone—“I suppose you’d like me to move away from the equipment now. Is one of you a trained medical professional? If not, is there any way I could convince you to let me keep working until we have my patient inside and stable? It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that we’ve brought her this far, and we’d rather not lose her now.”
The soldiers hadn’t known what to say. Dr. Cale’s people tended to have that effect.
Their leader had taken custody of me. I wasn’t making any effort to run away. I hadn’t strayed from his side since he’d pulled me out of the cab, wrapping his vast hand around my upper arm so that I felt small next to him, reduced to the child I had never been. We stood some feet away, watching as his men—still puzzled, and somehow taking orders from Fang, however temporarily—helped Fishy and Fang get Tansy’s gurney down from the back of the truck.
“I never thought we’d be seeing you again,” said the soldier who was watching me.
I shrugged as best I could with my right arm effectively locked into position. “I wasn’t planning on coming back. But we need your help, and I’m pretty sure you need ours too.”
“There’s nothing you could offer us.”
“How long ago did you lose the quarantine zone?”
His hand tightened on my arm, clamping down almost hard enough to become painful, and I knew that I was right. “That’s classified.”
“It was almost a war zone in there while I was confined. It wouldn’t have taken many of those unexpected conversions for things to get really ugly. Did everyone die, or were there riots? Were you able to get anyone out?” I tried not to think about the people I’d known by name while I was there, the ones who’d shared the house with me and Carrie and Paul. The teenage mother, the little girl who’d never had a name… was my desire to let Juniper be nameless until she could name herself partially an attempt to honor that child? I sort of thought it might have been.
The rest of the soldiers walked past, pushing the gurney, Fishy and Fang among them. My companions had been disarmed but not restrained. I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed that. I wondered whether this was some sort of silent challenge. Let them try to run: They’d just be taken again.
My captor pulled on my arm and started after his companions. We left the truck and walked across what remained of the parking lot, heading for the loading-bay door in the side of the Coliseum wall
. It wasn’t the door I’d escaped through twice before, thankfully: a building this size had multiple entrances and exits. Four more soldiers flanked the door, guarding it from interlopers. Each of them was holding a cattle prod.
My mouth went dry, and my feet stopped listening to my commands, instead digging into the gravel and trying to bring me to a halt. My captor ignored my stumbling as he dragged me forward, into range of those men.
One of them was my old “friend,” Private Larsen. He looked utterly surprised to see me, eyes going wide as the end of his cattle prod dipped toward the ground. I reached down deep and managed to muster a strained smile.
“Hi,” I said. “Long time no see.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked—less a demand and more an exclamation of sheer, confused surprise. “You stole a car! You escaped!”
“And now I’m back,” I said. “My friend needs medical assistance, and I need to see your boss.”
“Colonel Mitchell is not taking visitors,” snapped another of the door guards.
Private Larsen looked toward him, and said, “Don’t you know who this is? That’s Sally Mitchell, man. That’s the Colonel’s daughter.”
“The Colonel’s daughter is on life support, you goon.”
“That’s my little sister, Joyce,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady. I felt like I was channeling my Sally-mode again, but not as a lie: as a way of getting what I needed. It was surprisingly easy, and even more surprisingly comfortable. I didn’t have to pretend to be her to use the lessons I’d learned from my time in her shadow. “I’m the older daughter. The bad daughter, the runaway daughter, the one people blame for killing a bunch of soldiers, even though I didn’t do that. And right now, I’m the daughter who needs to see her father. So if someone could go and tell him that we’re here, that would be awesome.”
The three guards who weren’t Private Larsen readied their cattle prods, apparently prepared to zap the insolence right out of me. Private Larsen looked to the leader of the group of soldiers who had accompanied us from the gate.