Blackout n-3

by Mira Grant

  “Words have power,” I said.

  “True.” She shook her head. “Well. This way, please.” She began to walk briskly down the hall, heels cracking hard against the tile.

  Kathleen and George exchanged a look. “Excuse me, Doctor?” called Kathleen.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “Do you want us to come with you, or do you want us to initiate cleanup procedures in lab bay two? You’re going to need it later tonight.”

  Dr. Shaw paused, head tilted at what was clearly a contemplative angle, even when viewed from behind. Finally, she nodded. “Yes; that sounds like the correct course of action. Georgia, come with me. We really do need to get started.” She started walking again, not looking back. I hurried after her.

  We passed through three more doors, each of which Dr. Shaw opened with a swipe of her key card. The second door also required a fingerprint check; the third was equipped with a retinal scanner. This was starting to look less like a Level 3 biosafety facility, and more like some sort of maximum security prison for the infected. The distant, steady hiss of the negative pressure filters just made that thought more difficult to shake off.

  I was getting distinctly uneasy by the time we reached the fourth door. This one was flanked by blood test units that looked disarmingly like the ones we had in the garage back in the house in Berkeley. “You’ll need to provide a sample for analysis,” said Dr. Shaw. “It’s just a technicality, at this point in the facility, but it came with the security system, and we couldn’t disarm it without deactivating several other functions.”

  “What functions?” I asked, moving toward the testing unit on the left.

  “All will be made clear shortly.” She slapped her palm flat against the right-hand testing unit, cleared her throat, and said, “Identification, Danika Michelle Kimberley, authorization beta alpha zeta nine four nine two three. Designation, investigative physician. Affiliation, Epidemic Intelligence Service.” Her accent was suddenly British, softer than Mahir’s, with a rolling edge that I’d heard only from bloggers who lived and broadcast near the Welsh border.

  I stared at her. “What—?”

  “You are accompanied,” said a bland, pleasant male voice from a speaker set somewhere above the door. “Please identify your associate.”

  “This is Georgia Carolyn Mason, version 7c. Designation, electronic journalist, human clone, presently listed as deceased in the main network. Affiliation, Epidemic Intelligence Service.” Dr. Shaw—Dr. Kimberley—sounded calm, and slightly bored, like she was reciting a shopping list. “Georgia, put your hand on the panel, if you would? I’d rather not be standing here when the security system decides we’re a threat and floods the hall with formalin.”

  “Uh. No. That would be bad.” I pressed my hand against the flat testing panel, feeling the brief sting as the needles bit into my palm. A cool blast of antiseptic foam was released through a slit in the metal, cooling the small wounds the needles had left behind, and the light above the door began to flash, red to yellow to green and back again. The light stabilized quickly on green, and the door unlocked with a click.

  “Ah, good,” said Dr. Kimberley. “Come along, Georgia.” She pulled her hand away from the test panel and pushed the door open, revealing yet another standard-issue CDC lab.

  Well. Standard issue except for the three technicians who were standing just inside with guns in their hands, aiming them at the door. I recognized the one in the middle as James, from Dr. Shaw’s—Dr. Kimberley’s—other lab. The others were new to me.

  Dr. Kimberley sighed. “Oh, yay,” she said, deadpan. “This is quite my favorite part. Is it Tuesday? It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Dr. Kimberley,” confirmed the technician on the left, a curvy, medium-height girl with a riot of carroty-red curls barely confined by her headband.

  “Brilliant. In that case…” Dr. Kimberley pointed to the girl. “Matriculate.” She turned and pointed to James. “Alabaster.” She turned again, pointing to the tall, dark-skinned man on the end. “Polyhedral.”

  All three technicians lowered their guns. “Glad to have you back, Dr. Kimberley,” said James. “Did you encounter any trouble?”

  “None that couldn’t be handled.” Dr. Kimberley turned to me, offering a small, almost apologetic smile. “I was able to depart with what we needed, and that’s what matters. In the meanwhile… Georgia, I do apologize.”

  “What?” I blinked at her. Maybe it was everything I’d been through in the past few days, but I was suddenly afraid I’d trusted the wrong people. “What are you talking a—”

  And then the syringe bit into the back of my arm, and the world, such as it was, fell away, leaving me in darkness.

  Acquisition of the subject has been successful. We will begin analysis immediately. If Gregory is correct, and she is truly close enough to the original to be viable for our purposes, well…

  I can only hope she’ll find it in her heart to forgive us for what we must do. Expect further communication as soon as possible.

  —Taken from a message sent by Dr. Danika Kimberley, July 31, 2041. Recipient unknown.

  Ms. Hyland is gone. All the chaperones are gone. It’s just us kids now, and I don’t know how much longer the food will last… us kids, and the soldiers outside. They don’t let us out of the building, even during the day, even if we promise to wear lots and lots of bug spray. There isn’t any hot water. Some of the soldiers are going away. I don’t know what’s going on. I just know that I’m scared. Hurry, Alaric. Please, hurry.

  I don’t know how much longer this can last. But I don’t think it’s going to be long enough, if you don’t hurry.

  My batteries are dying. I may not be able to write for much longer.

  Hurry.

  —Taken from an e-mail sent by Alisa Kwong to Alaric Kwong, July 31, 2041.

  Sixteen

  The drive from Berkeley to Seattle takes fourteen hours if you use major roads and avoid serious traffic. It takes twenty-three hours if you stick to back routes and frontage roads. We split the difference, risking our cover several times in order to eke out a few hundred miles on I-5 before returning to the shadows, and made it from city to city in just under nineteen hours.

  We didn’t stop in Shady Cove. Tempting as it was, there was too good a chance that we were being followed—and too good a chance that if we stopped there, we’d never leave again. Dr. Abbey tried to send us to the Florida hazard zone, and we failed. Fine. Barring another way to do the same thing, she’d probably insist we stay and start looking for a way to evacuate us all to someplace that was guaranteed to stay mosquito-free.

  “I hear Alaska’s nice this time of year,” I muttered.

  “What’s that?” George looked up, blinking still-unfamiliar brown eyes at me in honest confusion.

  “Just wondering where we could run when this is over. The mosquitoes are going to be pretty damn hard to kill.”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged, returning to her study of the jamming unit. A lock of her hair—it was starting to need a trim—flopped forward, falling in front of one eye. I resisted the urge to lean over and brush it aside. Unless I was having a really crazy day, she’d just vanish if I tried to touch her, and I needed the company too much to have her leave again. Becks had been asleep in the back since we crossed the border into Washington. Without my hallucinatory sister, I would be totally alone, and I wasn’t sure how much longer my own wakefulness would last.

  “What do you mean, ‘maybe’?” I asked.

  “Like Dr. Abbey said, an insect vector for Kellis-Amberlee didn’t just happen. They’re probably the product of some lab like hers, full of scientists who think ‘I wanted to see what would happen’ is a perfectly valid justification for doing anything they want.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  George looked up again, brushing the hair out of her eyes with a quick, economical wave of one hand. This time, she looked almost annoyed. “Shaun. You know this. There’s nothing I can tell you that y
ou don’t already know. Why are you pretending you need me to say it?”

  “Because I’m not pretending.” I shrugged, trying to keep my attention focused on the road. I didn’t want to get so wrapped up in arguing with her that I needed to pull over; not only would that potentially attract attention, but it would annoy the hell out of Becks if she woke up before we started moving again. “Maybe you can’t tell me things I don’t know, but I need you to be the one who says them. That lets me believe in them.”

  “You are a strange, sick little man, Shaun Mason.” George sighed. “The mosquitoes were made. Man’s creation, just like Kellis-Amberlee. If you were going to build killer bugs to spread the zombie plague, wouldn’t you put in a little planned obsolescence?”

  Despite the fact that George could only use words I knew the meaning of, I had to pause while I tried to remember what “obsolescence” meant. Sometimes it’s annoying having hallucinations that make me feel dumb. “You mean they’d be built to break down?”

  “Now you’re thinking. I have to wonder whether the mosquitoes are fertile. If someone built them as a biological weapon, why would they have given them the capacity to breed? All that’s going to do is increase the chances of them hurting the people you’re trying to protect.”

  “So how did they wind up in Cuba?”

  “Weapons test. Cuba did too well during the Rising. It was almost insulting to certain people. I’m sure they would have loved the opportunity to run a little fear-inducing trial on soil close enough to ours that they could look horrified and appalled when someone implied we might have had something to do with it.”

  “George…”

  “I’m not being nihilistic, Shaun. I’m being right, and you know it.”

  “Yeah.” I glanced out the window at the high concrete fence dividing the tiny back road we were on from the safe concrete river of I-5. “I just wish I’d stop reminding myself.”

  George was gone when I looked back. I shook my head, trying to clear the malaise brought on by her last statement, and turned the radio on, scanning channels until I found something with a catchy beat and simplistic lyrics. Then I switched to NPR.

  National Public Radio is a dinosaur in the modern age of podcasts and Internet radio stations, but that’s part of what makes it useful, because when you turn on NPR, you’re getting the thoughts and opinions of the part of the population that has not yet moved into a purely virtual format. Things still move a little slower there. Not predigitally slow—I’ve read the history books, I know how long a single story used to dominate the cycle—but slow enough that you can learn a thing or two, if you’re willing to listen.

  Two experts were arguing about ways to save the Everglades. One wanted to send in CDC teams in full-on moon suits to rescue as many noninfected animals as possible, and then dump enough DDT into the water table to sterilize the ecosystem for a hundred years. “We can breed them in preserves and exhibits until we confirm that the Everglades are safe, and then return them to their original environment,” was the gist of his argument, wedded to a firm belief that instinct would override generations of zoo-bound living and lead to an immediate, complete return to the wild as soon as the money ran out and somebody in accounting decided it was time to let the animals go.

  The other expert claimed this would result not only in the permanent loss of a major piece of America’s biological diversity, but render most of Florida uninhabitable whether we got rid of the mosquitoes or not, since pesticide would inevitably get into the human water supply. He was in favor of releasing thousands of insectivores into the impacted areas and letting them take care of things the natural way. And by “insectivores,” he meant “bats.” He wanted to gather as many bats as possible and dump them on the Everglades, where they could do their batty thing and eat all the mosquitoes. Because the people of Florida would, of course, be totally cool with this.

  At no point did either of them mention the idea that the mosquitoes had been made, rather than being a natural worst-case scenario. All their solutions started from the premise that the mosquitoes just happened, much like the storm that brought them to our shores. Somehow, that only made me more certain that George was right. Somebody made these mosquitoes, and somebody was going to have a way to deal with them. They were just waiting for the time to be right, just like they’d waited for the time to be right before letting the bugs out of the box in the first place.

  Becks climbed back into her seat right about the time the speakers got really involved in yelling at each other. Yawning and rumpling her hair with one hand, she squinted at the radio. “Do I wanna know?”

  “I can’t get a good wireless signal out here,” I said. “So we’re listening to the radio.”

  “Listening to the radio talk about what?”

  “Bats.”

  Becks frowned, still clearly half asleep. “Bats?”

  “Yeah. You know, flap flap, squeak squeak, works for Dracula? Bats. Because we need a vampire problem to go with our zombie problem.” I opened the cooler we had wedged between the seats, pulling out a can of Coke. “Here. You look like you could use the caffeine.”

  “Oh, thank God. I thought I was going to have to deal with this without chemical assistance.” Becks popped the tab before downing half the soda in one long slug. She didn’t seem to realize what she was drinking until she lowered the can and blinked at the label. “Shaun… this is a Coke.”

  “I know.”

  “You gave me one of your Cokes.”

  “I know.”

  “Why did you…?”

  “Because you needed it.” I glanced her way, smiling just a little—just enough to show her I meant it. “If the Masons can let us go and agree to get Alisa out of Florida, I can be selfless enough to give you a can of Coke.”

  Becks’s expression sobered. “Do you really think they’ll go after her?”

  “I do, yeah.” The experts on NPR were still arguing. I leaned forward and turned the radio down. “I don’t think they’ve changed completely. I mean, knowing Mom, she’s probably already convinced herself I cheated by bringing up Phillip, and that she and Dad let us go out of the goodness of their hearts, not because it was the right thing to do. But rescuing a little girl from a refugee camp in an interdicted hazard zone? That’s the kind of ratings you can’t buy. It’s just gravy that they have that whole martial law thing going on over there, which gives Dad an excuse to trot out a bunch of old chatter about personal responsibility and freedom of the press.”

  “So they’re going to do it for the ratings.” Becks’s mouth twisted into a disapproving line. She took another large gulp of Coke, presumably to stop herself from saying anything she’d regret later.

  It didn’t matter. There was nothing she could say that I hadn’t heard before. Some of it I had heard from George. Some of it I had said myself. “There are worse reasons, and the fact that they’re always in the public eye means that if they get her back to Berkeley, they can’t mistreat her. They can be themselves, which is bad enough, but Alisa’s older than George and I were when they took us in. She’ll be fine until Alaric can get there and take her away from them.”

  “You’re willing to count on that?”

  “I don’t think we have much of a choice. We can’t head for Florida. We’d never make it past the barricades. We need to get to the rest of the team and regroup.”

  “How long before we reach Seattle?”

  “We’re about twenty miles out. I figure I’ll try calling Mahir right before we hit the city limits—if he picks up, we can go straight to where he is, and not need to keep the connection open.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Becks asked, taking a smaller sip of her soda.

  “I have no idea. I’m sort of making all this up as I go along, you know.”

  You’re doing an excellent job.

  “Thank you,” I said automatically, and winced.

  Becks politely ignored my slip. “I know you are. I don’t envy you the lead on this story.”<
br />
  “Hey, it’s worked so far. What are you going to do when we meet the Monkey? You could be anyone. What’s your new identity going to be?”

  “I think I’ll be an Internet journalist.” She smiled. “I understand they don’t need much in the way of training. Or brains. How about you?”

  “I’m going to ask for anything that lets me disappear.” I kept my eyes on the road. “This is going to end soon, Becks. It’s gone too far to last much longer. Too many people have died. So if I get through this story alive… I just want to be left alone.”

  “You want to be alone with George,” said Becks.

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t… Shaun, I…” Becks paused, taking a breath. “You know I love you, right? As a friend. I may have loved you as something more once, but that’s over now. You know that.”

  “I do.”

  “So it’s as a friend, and as a colleague, that I ask… are you sure? You’re not holding on that tightly as it is. Going off to be alone with the voices in your head—”

  “It’s not just voices anymore. I see her sometimes.” That stopped her. I continued. “She was sitting in that seat not long before you woke up. We were talking. If I get deep enough into the conversation, if I forget long enough, sometimes I can even feel her. I’m going to wind up alone with the voices in my head. The only question is whether or not I get the rest of you hurt in the process. Mahir was Georgia’s second. You’re mine. You know how badly I could fuck everything up if I refused to let go. So let me plan to let go. It might help me hold on a little longer.”

  Becks sighed. “You’re asking me to help you turn into a crazy hermit living in the mountains somewhere.”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  “As long as you realize it.” She slumped in her seat, giving the jamming device a light smack with the heel of her hand. “How does this damn thing work, anyway?”