by Mira Grant
“Time to get to work!” said Shawn. This elicited cheers and nervous laughter from the members of the group who were just glad that Rebecca wasn’t waving the hammer around anymore.
Only Lorelei didn’t cheer or chuckle. She folded her arms, scowling at the ground. Her mother tapped her on the shoulder.
“What’s your problem?” Lynn asked. “I thought your father spoke to you.”
“About my ‘attitude’? Yeah.” Lorelei rolled her shoulder away, taking a step to the side at the same time. “I’m being a team player. See? I’m here.”
“What I see is that you’re being dead weight. You need to do your part for this crew.”
Lorelei turned her glare on her mother. “I’ve been working all day. My head hurts. Don’t you make it sound like I haven’t done anything to help this crew.”
“Hey.” Shawn was suddenly there, stepping up and putting himself between them. “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”
“She started it!”
“Someone has to. Lorelei, if you’re so tired, why don’t you go back to the room and take a nap until your head feels better? We can hold things together here until you feel up to coming back.”
“Shawn—” Lynn began. She stopped as she realized that Lorelei was nodding, a relieved expression on her face.
“Okay, Daddy. I’m sure I’ll feel better after I just lie down.”
“Make sure you take your phone charger. I want to be able to reach you.” The cell coverage inside the hall was notoriously spotty, but the Tutts, like many others, had found a way to work around it. Their phones were also designed to function as walkie-talkies, tuned to other phones on the same plan, with a range that was good up to a mile. The technology involved using short-wave radio, rather than strictly sticking to wireless or cell towers, and meant they could communicate even through the thick concrete walls of the convention center.
“Okay,” said Lorelei again. “I’ll call as soon as I get to the room.”
“Good girl. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” said Lorelei, and hugged him impulsively. She paused long enough to hug her mother in turn, and then she was gone, running through the growing crowd to get to the outside door before the waiting throngs came pouring in and all hell came busting loose.
6:00 P.M.
Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand people were waiting outside the sprawling convention center complex by six o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. Another thirteen hundred were already inside, getting their booths and fan tables ready for the onslaught.
According to security footage of the convention center lobby and front sidewalk—what was recovered from the remains of the disaster, which wasn’t much; the destruction was too complete, and the recovery had to wait for quite some time, given the events that followed—the last person to leave before the doors opened was Lorelei Tutt, a member of the California Browncoats fan organization. Preview Night officially began six minutes later.
The first events of Preview Night were mostly small: announcements from minor comic companies and interviews with the convention’s lower-profile guests. One television program was presenting their sneak preview of the season to come at six thirty: Space Crime Continuum, which ceased production permanently following the convention. Four thousand people packed themselves into a midsized ballroom to see their favorite stars up close and personal.
We may never know which of those four thousand was infected, or how the outbreak began. Perhaps the outbreak’s Patient Zero had been bitten by something—human or animal, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the Rising—on the way to the convention and had chosen good seats over seeking medical care. Perhaps a heart attack or stroke claimed a life and left a husk for the virus to reanimate and control. Perhaps it was a case of spontaneous amplification, rare in the modern day, but substantially more common during the Rising, when the human body was still adapting to the infection that would become known as “Kellis-Amberlee.” However the infection entered the building, it entered, and once it was inside, there was no way it could be forced to leave.
At 6:30 P.M., July 23, 2014, the first major panel of the convention began. The cast of Space Crime Continuum—minus their leading lady, the lovely Elle Riley, who was mysteriously absent from the greenroom—began filing onto the stage. Convention security staff waved more and more people into the hall, until there were no seats left empty. That was when the doors swung closed, and what happened from there, in that room, in that dark, empty space, is lost to history.
Given the nature of the things we did not lose, perhaps this is a mercy.
6:43 P.M.
Elle Riley struggled to keep up with her handler as he shoved his way through the convention center, fighting against the tides of eager fans rushing for the delights of the booths against the back wall. There were less congested routes, but she hadn’t realized her handler meant it literally when he said they’d be going through the middle of the floor, and by the time she understood that he was planning to go the worst way possible, it was too late for her to tell him it was a bad idea. Not that he would have listened if she’d tried. No matter how many interviews she gave where she mentioned her past as a rabid fan of shows like Star Trek, Buffy, and Doctor Who—which was the reason she’d auditioned for a time-travel procedural in the first place—people kept assuming she was another pretty face who didn’t know a damn thing about the way the geek world functioned. Even though it was her knowledge of the geek world that told her not to try cutting between the Marvel and DC booths in order to exit the main hall at Comic-Con.
“We’re almost there, Ms. Riley,” announced her handler, loudly enough that another half-dozen heads turned in their direction. Elle bit back a groan and forced herself to keep on smiling. This was her public, after all; she couldn’t afford to look ungracious.
Great, more autographs and pictures and questions, she thought. Just what I needed. Maybe if she was lucky, they’d make it to the panel in time for the question-and-answer session. Or maybe she’d be even luckier, and they wouldn’t make it to the panel at all. She’d look flaky but not inconsiderate if she missed the panel because she was signing autographs. She’d look like a stuck-up diva extraordinaire if she waltzed in for the last fifteen minutes and forced everyone else to listen to the inevitable stream of comments about her appearance masquerading as questions. As if she could possibly enjoy that sort of thing. As if anyone could possibly enjoy it.
Now they weren’t even moving, forced into a holding pattern by the people shoving past in front of them. That meant there was no good reason for the fans to stay away, since it wasn’t like she was trying to get anywhere. Sure enough, a timid voice at her elbow said, “Excuse me, are you Elle Riley?”
Elle’s smile remained fixed in place as she turned toward the speaker, a sweet-faced woman with a slight Kentucky drawl and hair that cascaded to her shoulders in a series of artificially copper curls. She was wearing a shirt that proclaimed her to be a member of the Time Police. That didn’t necessarily make her a fan—lots of shows and stories about time travel had time police in them—but it definitely shifted the odds toward fandom.
“I am,” she said. “And you are…?”
“Patty! I mean… I’m Patricia Meigs. This is my husband, Matthew.” She took the arm of the man beside her, who was more mundanely dressed in a sweater vest and gray slacks. He was wearing a bow tie, at least, which was a nod to the geekier elements in the wardrobes around him. That, or he was one of those poor, misguided souls who actually believed that bow ties were “cool.”
“Hello,” said Matthew. He had a mild British accent. Elle amended her assessment of his bow tie: It probably marked him as a Doctor Who fan, which meant that the tie was most definitely cool. “It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Riley.”
“Thanks,” Elle said. “I’m supposed to be on a panel right now, but I guess we judged the traffic wrong, and…” She shrugged a little.
Matthew’s eyebrows w
ent up. “You’re trying to get to a panel by going right down the middle of the hall? Was that entirely wise?”
“Hey, I wanted to cut down the back to Artist’s Alley and make our escape that way, but I’m not the one calling the shots here.” Elle gestured toward her handler’s unmoving back. “He’s supposed to deliver me where I’m going, and I think he’s planning to tackle anything that gets in our way.”
“That’s going to be quite a lot of tackling,” said Matthew.
“I can hear you, you know,” said the handler.
“You really have been here before!” said Patty. The other three turned to face her, even the handler, who put his back to the crowd in order to stare at Patty. She reddened, shrugging. “I read a lot of blogs. There’s a whole debate about you saying that… um…” She stopped, apparently realizing that what she was about to say could be construed as insulting.
Elle sighed. “I know. There’s a whole debate between the people who say I’m being coached on what to say in order to build up my ‘fandom street cred’ and the people who remember seeing me haunting the fan tables back when I was an awkward teenager trying to convince the cast members from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to give me acting tips. One side says I’m a liar; the other side says I’m part of the family. I’m with the second side, naturally. This would be my sixteenth Comic-Con, if I were actually allowed to attend at all. But since this is probably as much as I’m going to see of the show floor, I’m trying not to think about it too hard.”
“Wow,” said Patty, in a voice that was suddenly very small. “Love of fandom got you into the business, and now the business is keeping you away from the thing you love. That’s so sad.”
Privately, Elle thought the girl was being melodramatic, but that didn’t make her wrong. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” she said. She glanced at the crowd, which was still forbidding forward movement—more than she would have expected, actually. Something must have been going on toward the front of the hall. “What brings the two of you to San Diego?”
“It’s our honeymoon,” said Matthew. He smiled fondly at Patty. “We got married in London and hopped onto the next flight to San Diego. We landed about four hours ago.”
“No window for jet lag at all?” asked Elle.
“‘Jet lag is just another lie time tells, and I can’t stand liars,’” said Patty. Then she paused, cheeks reddening again. “Uh. I bet it’s considered gauche to quote your character’s lines at you, huh?”
“Not really,” said Elle, and was surprised to realize that she meant it. “I mean, people quote Indy at me all the time, but it’s usually the catchphrases, not the actual dialog. It’s not like I get a lot of that. It’s sort of flattering.”
“Geeky but flattering,” said Matthew, and grinned. “I’d take it if I were you, Patty. That’s a good way to be viewed.”
Patty opened her mouth to respond, and stopped as someone at the front of the convention center screamed. It wasn’t a playful scream. A playful scream wouldn’t have been able to cut through the rest of the ambient noise. All of them turned instinctively toward the sound, their shoulders going tense as they tried to calculate the respective virtues of fighting and fleeing. None of them were aware of those calculations: They were carried out by a part of the brain older and more focused on survival than anything conscious could be.
“What’s going on?” asked Elle. “Did someone get hurt?”
“Ms. Riley, I’m afraid I’m going to need to ask you to wait here,” said her handler—but his brisk words couldn’t conceal the fear in his eyes, and somehow, that just made everything worse.
“What? No! You’re not supposed to leave me alone on the show floor!”
“Stay with your friends, and stay in this immediate vicinity,” said her handler. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I’ve assessed the situation.” Then he was gone, plunging into the suddenly unmoving crowd, heading toward the sound of screams.
Elle stared numbly after him. “But I just met them…” she said weakly.
“This strikes me as one of those ‘can’t possibly be good’ situations,” said Matthew.
Patty worried her lip between her teeth, and for once, she didn’t say anything. The three of them stood, looking out into the crowd, and waited for someone to come on the intercom and tell them what was going on.
6:52 P.M.
Kelly Nakata was near the doors when the screaming started. She’d been studying a booth display of replica weapons, some of which looked impressively sturdy. Her head whipped around at the first sound of trouble. She didn’t see everything, but she saw enough that she was immediately convinced of the danger, even if she wouldn’t understand the true scope of it until it was far too late for anything to be done. If she’d seen a little more, maybe she would have run for the lobby before the doors closed; maybe Kelly Nakata would have joined Lorelei Tutt among the survivors of the San Diego outbreak, rather than joining so many others among the lists of the dead.
What Kelly saw:
The doors were propped open for Preview Night, allowing throngs of fans to stream past the already visibly bored security guards hired by the convention center. The crowd ranged from people in T-shirts and jeans to others in full-body costumes, all of them wearing the little laminated badges that marked them as attendees. Superheroes and monsters, characters from movies and books, all walked side by side through Comic-Con’s welcoming doors. Amidst all that color and variety, the man in the blood-soaked shirt didn’t stand out at all—at least not until he turned, grabbed a half-naked woman dressed as a character from a popular horror comic, and bit a chunk out of her shoulder. The woman screamed. The man bit her again.
That was when the other people in bloody clothing began staggering through the doors. Some of them were missing chunks from their arms, hands, or even necks, although those were rare; most of them looked like they’d been wounded only superficially. And all of them were biting.
Kelly reached behind her, grabbing the first thing her hands hit—a large staff with a decorative spearhead on the end. She assumed a fighting stance, holding the staff out in front of her. The owner of the stall, who had been considering objecting to having her grab things she hadn’t paid for, quickly changed his mind; if the crazy girl wanted to defend him from the crazier biting people, he wasn’t going to tell her to stop.
“What the fuck, man?” demanded Kelly, of no one in particular.
“It’s that zombie virus thing that was on the news!” shouted a man in a Starfleet uniform. It was Next Generation command red, but he was running away from the danger, not toward it. Maybe that was how the command crew stayed alive. “They’ll eat you if you stay here!”
“They can try,” said Kelly grimly, and braced her feet. She felt like some sort of modern-day warrior princess standing there with her staff and her steely determination, like she was Buffy, or Xena, or Indy Rivers. As long as she kept thinking of the situation like that—like it was a story, something she was watching on television, and not something that was actually happening around her—she’d be fine. She hoped.
It wasn’t like she had a choice. At this point, running wasn’t an option.
The stall’s owner screamed, adding his own little bit of noise to the din, and cowered behind his register. Kelly was privately starting to think that this might be a good idea. Then the people in the bloody clothes were on top of her, and there wasn’t time to think about anything but fighting for her life. She swung her staff first with military precision and then with wild panic, hitting bodies that barely seemed to notice the impact.
It wasn’t until their greedy, grasping hands bore her to the floor that she added her own voice to the screams around her, and by then, it was too late for anyone to come to her defense. For Kelly Nakata, the convention seemed to be over before it properly began.
7:01 P.M.
The California Browncoats were set up toward the back of the hall, far from the open doors and the sound of screaming. St
ill, the commotion eventually filtered back to them. Dwight jumped onto a stack of boxes so he could peer over the booths, which were mostly the same height. “Some sort of commotion near the doors,” he reported. “Security’s moving in.”
“Actual security or our security?” asked Rebecca. It was an important distinction. The actual convention center security would be dressed in the normal rent-a-cop array, and wouldn’t do much to quell a fannish riot. The con’s private security force, on the other hand, was a mixture of Dorsai Irregulars and people in full-body armor dressed as Imperial stormtroopers. They could stop a bunch of pissed-off fans with a stern look and a waggled finger.
“Both,” said Dwight. He paled, still staring at the doors. “The people who’re coming in from outside don’t look good.”
“Don’t look good how?” asked Shawn.
“Bloody. Biting.” Dwight turned to face the other Browncoats. “I don’t really feel like describing what’s happening right now. But I think maybe we should start looking for another door.”
That was when the lights went out on the convention center floor and the screaming began in earnest. The Rising had come to San Diego.
LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT, LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044
Lorelei’s voice is a soft monotone as she recites the events of July 23, 2014; she does not look up from her teacup.
LORELEI: The lights were a mistake. Some stupid rent-a-cop thought it was just an ordinary riot, and decided people would calm down if they couldn’t see anything. I wish I knew his name. I’d like to go and spit on his grave.