by Mira Grant
“I’m still a bit in shock,” he said. “I’m sorry to say it, Shaun, because I know the wounds are still raw for you, but it’s like Georgia all over again.”
Shit, hissed George.
“George?” I said, automatically.
Luckily for me, Dr. Wynne was one of the few people I knew who hadn’t received the “Shaun has lost his marbles” memo. Him and my parents. “The way we lost her was just so damn sudden,” he said, continuing our conversation without missing a beat.
He’s saying it was an emergency evacuation, you idiot, said George. She may not know it, but he got her out to save her life. God, I wish there was a way you could ask if he was sure she wasn’t bugged.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “It really was. Was there any way anyone could have predicted this was coming?”
“I don’t think so,” said Dr. Wynne, quickly. Not quickly enough. I could hear the hesitation in his voice, that split second of uncertainty that told me everything I’d been hoping I didn’t really need to know. Did he think he’d managed to get Kelly out clean? Yeah, because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have risked sending her to us. But was he absolutely one hundred percent sure that he’d succeeded?
No, he wasn’t.
“Let us know if there’s anything we can do over here, but you may have to wait a little while for a response,” I said. “The team and I are going on location for a little while. I’m not sure when we’ll be back.”
“Really?” There was deep reluctance in his voice as he asked the natural next question: “Where are y’all heading?”
The reluctance was the last piece of evidence I needed to support the idea that Kelly might not have gotten out as cleanly as she thought she had. Dr. Wynne didn’t want to ask in case I was serious about the trip; he didn’t want me to tell him the truth about where we were going. “Santa Cruz,” I lied. “Alaric’s testing for his field license soon, and we want to get some footage of him on his provisional to build into a supporting report. We’re trying to up his merchandise sales among the female demographic, and our focus groups agree that the best way to do that involves getting him shirtless in a pastoral setting. Danger is just a bonus.” Alaric shot me a confused look. I waved him down.
“You kids,” said Dr. Wynne, with a forced chuckle. “Y’all be careful out there, all right?”
“As careful as you can be when you’re looking for the living dead,” I said. “Take care of yourself, Dr. Wynne.”
“You, too, Shaun,” he said, and disconnected the call.
I took a second to just stand there with my phone in my hand, closing my eyes and listening to George swearing in the back of my head. “Here we go again,” I said, voice barely above a whisper.
“What?” asked Dave.
“Nothing.” I opened my eyes, slamming the phone into my pocket before stalking back into the kitchen for a fresh Coke. I popped the tab and downed half the can in one large, carbonated gulp. The frozen sweetness made my molars ache and snapped the world back into a semblance of focus. “I need you to tear down your workstations, and then get started on everybody else’s,” I said, returning to the living room. “Dave, where are you with that list?”
“It’s encoded. I need—”
“Forget what you need. Upload it to the main server and the mirrors; pack the physical drive.”
“Boss?” asked Alaric, uncertainly.
“Gear up like you’re never going to see this place again. Alaric, as soon as Becks confirms that there’s nothing standard on the Doc, I need you to take over. Do a second scan of everything she brought with her. You find anything that looks like it might be related to something that might be a bug, kill it.” I raised a hand before he could protest. “Don’t study it, don’t dissect it, don’t try to subvert it, kill it. We don’t have time to risk the sort of heat that might be coming after her.”
“But—”
I turned away from him to open the closet door. The shelf on the right was crammed with ammo boxes. I started grabbing them three at a time. “He said it was like George, Alaric. Not like Buffy, who was actually unexpected; not like Rebecca Ryman, or any of the other people he and I wound up having in common.”
“So what?”
Go easy on him, said George. He wasn’t there. He doesn’t really understand.
“I know,” I muttered darkly. More loudly, I said, “So there were people at the CDC who were involved with what happened to her, and we never caught them. George had a reservoir condition. I thought you were the Newsie here. Do I have to draw you a picture?”
My favorite hunting rifle was leaning against the closet wall. I grabbed it, relaxing slightly as its satisfying weight fell into my hand. Letting it rest against my shoulder, I went back to grabbing ammo.
“Fuck,” muttered Dave.
“My thoughts exactly,” I said. “Go tell Becks she needs to hurry it up; we’re getting out of here. Any bugs she can’t find without a subdermal sweeper, she’s not going to find with an extra ten minutes.”
“On it,” said Dave, and trotted out of the room.
We got to work, Alaric dismantling the equipment that wasn’t needed for final uploads, while I emptied and packed down the contents of the closet. Dave came back and started helping Alaric break things down. I was filling a backpack with protein bars and spare laptop batteries when the bedroom door opened and Becks emerged, followed by a rumpled-looking Kelly.
“She’s clean,” Becks announced, tossing Kelly’s briefcase to Alaric. He caught it and turned back to what remained of his workstation, reaching for a scanner.
“Good. We roll in twenty. Grab whatever you think you’re going to need, and pack like we’re not coming back.”
“Where are we going?” asked Becks.
“Maggie’s,” I replied. She nodded, looking relieved. Even Dave and Alaric relaxed a little. If we were heading for Maggie’s, they knew that we were at least going to wind up someplace safe.
Maggie lives in the middle of nowhere and has the best security money can buy. Literally. Some of the systems on her house are military grade or better, and her parents make sure she gets the latest upgrades. Hell, sometimes I think the latest upgrades are designed specifically for her and then just shared with everybody else. She started out as one of Buffy’s friends—and Buffy had interesting friends.
The apartment buzzed with renewed activity as Dave and Alaric redoubled their work. Becks started picking up stray ammo boxes. Only Kelly stayed where she was, looking utterly confused. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“We’re leaving,” I informed her. “Which sort of brings up the next question on the table: Do you have a cover story that lets us take you with us, or are we going to be smuggling you out and then shipping you off to one of the Amish compounds to live a camera-free existence?”
“They always need trained medical personnel who don’t have a major addiction to electricity and running water,” said Becks sunnily. Kelly shot her an alarmed look before turning to me. She seemed to view me as the stable one in the room. I might have found that comic under better circumstances.
“I have a cover story,” she said. “A whole ID, even. Dr. Wynne paid to have it built for me. The files are on that card I gave you.”
“Who did he pay?” asked Dave, sounding suddenly wary. Alaric didn’t say anything; he just stiffened as both of them turned toward Kelly. They looked like they were waiting for something to explode.
Their reaction wasn’t surprising or as over the top as it might look. Dave and Alaric wound up taking over the bulk of the computer maintenance after Buffy died, at least until we could hire some permanent IT staff. They never approached Buffy’s level of competence—she was some kind of crazy computer virtuoso, and those don’t come around very often—but they’d learned a lot, and they hadn’t exactly started out as idiots. If anyone knew how easy it was to crack a cheap cover story, it was them.
“I don’t know who did the programming,” said Kelly, with increasing
annoyance. “Dr. Wynne mentioned ‘the Brainpan’ once, but that was all. Everything was done through electronic transfer and encrypted messages. I never saw a face.”
Dave and Alaric exchanged glances, saying, almost in unison, “The Monkey.”
“It’s creepy when you two do that, so stop.” I raised a hand. “Somebody want to share the reason this makes us not panic?”
“The Monkey is possibly the single best identity counterfeiter in the country.” Dave shook his head. “If you want an ID that can stand up to anything, you find a guy who knows a guy who might be able to put you in touch with one of the Monkey’s girlfriends, provided you’re willing to pay a deposit on faith.”
“How much ‘anything’ are we talking here?” I asked.
“Scuttlebutt says one of the news anchors at NBC has three felony convictions and an ID by the Monkey,” said Alaric.
“First, never say ‘scuttlebutt’ again,” I said. “Second, good to know. All right, Kelly, you’ve got an ID. So who, exactly, are you supposed to be?”
“Mary Preston,” she promptly replied. “Dr. Wynne’s niece.”
“Right. Alaric, can you—”
“Already on it,” said Alaric, turning to one of the computer terminals that had yet to be torn down.
“Good. So ‘Mary,’ does this mean you have a paper trail?” I turned back to Kelly, who was starting to nod. “How much of a paper trail?”
“Mary’s a real person, and she’s really Dr. Wynne’s niece,” said Kelly. “Born in Oregon, joined Greenpeace straight out of high school, and got her conservationist’s pass to move across the Canadian border five years ago. Last Dr. Wynne heard, she was working on one of the dog preservation farms and had no intention of ever coming back to the States.”
“So she’s disreputable enough to get along with journalists, and unlikely to come demanding her identity back when you’re still using it.” I looked over at Alaric. “Well?”
“Damn. I mean, just… damn.” He was staring at his screen in open admiration. The rest of us took that as an invitation and put down whatever we were holding as we clustered around to peer over his shoulders, leaving Kelly by herself. Alaric shook his head. “I’ve never had a confirmed piece of the Monkey’s work to look at. This is… it’s not just amazing; it’s elegant.”
I frowned. “What are we looking at?”
The entire screen was filled with pictures of Kelly. Kelly in elementary school. Kelly at what looked like her senior prom. Kelly holding up one end of a banner that read STOP SHARK FISHING in big yellow hand-painted letters. Pretty standard snapshots, the kind you’d find on anybody’s personal site or bias page.
Look again, prompted George, sounding exasperated.
I looked again, and actually saw what I was looking at. “Holy… are all those pictures fakes?”
“Yes and no,” Alaric said, pulling up another set of pictures, including what looked like a still frame from an ATM’s security camera and a shot where she was clearly drunk and flipping off the camera. “They’re not really pictures of the Doc,” he nodded toward Kelly, “but they’re real pictures. The Monkey must’ve taken every picture of Mary on the entire Internet and somehow forced Kelly’s physical isometrics over them. Seamless transition. Add the paperwork I’m finding, and—”
“No one ever knows the difference,” Becks finished. “Slick.”
“I’m glad you all understand what the fuck that means, because I don’t,” I said sharply.
“Magic computer pictures make old Mary go bye-bye, put pretty new Mary instead. Now pretty new Mary not get shot by CDC for failure to be her own dead clone,” said Dave, in the lilting voice of a children’s teaching-blog host.
“Great. So you’ve got an ID that’s unbreakable as long as some chick in Canada doesn’t get homesick, a bunch of numbers I don’t understand, and a bunch of dead researchers. Oh, and folks like George are dying way too fast for anything short of a massive conspiracy. Okay, people, can anyone come up with a way to make this day any worse?”
That’s when everything started to happen at once.
The building’s siren began blaring almost at the instant that my phone started screaming with Mahir’s emergency ringtone. I smacked it without taking it out of my pocket, triggering my headset to pick it up. “We’re having a situation here, Mahir,” I snapped. I could see Dave and Alaric out of the corner of my eye, rushing through the effort of tearing down our gear. “Sirens just started going off. We don’t know why yet.”
“Yes, well, I bloody well do!” he shouted. “Your building’s surrounded, you’ve got no evac routes, and the civic authorities are declaring a state of general emergency through the surrounding cities! I don’t know how you’re supposed to do it, but you need to get the hell out of there, and you need to do it now!”
“Wait—Mahir, what the fuck are you talking about?” Becks started to say something. I held up a hand for quiet. It was already hard enough to hear Mahir over the siren.
“Good God, man, you mean you didn’t know?” Mahir managed to sound horrified and unsurprised at the same time. It was a nifty trick, but I didn’t have long to appreciate it; his next words took all the appreciation out of the world:
“There’s an outbreak in Oakland, Shaun. And you’re right in the fucking middle of it.”
The formation of the modern health-care system was an organic process, guided almost entirely by the stresses imposed by the Rising and by the panic of the general populace. Given the death rates at hospitals during the worst of the outbreak, it wasn’t a surprise that people would be afraid of them. Given thrisk of amplification, it wasn’t a surprise that people would need medical attention more than ever. The answer was complex, involving the restoration of house calls and private care, increased access to home medical technology… and the sudden semi-autonomy of the CDC and the World Health Organization. If they couldn’t do what needed to be done, when it was needed, there was the risk that none of us would live long enough to make a better choice about how things should be handled.
The CDC enjoys relative freedom from all ethical medical laws and local restrictions. The WHO enjoys absolute freedom in almost every nation in the world. Maybe it’s time we stopped and thought about that a little more.
—From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, April 15, 2041
Five
I dropped my phone and lunged for the window, swearing. The sirens were making it difficult to focus on anything but the noise. Outbreak alarms are supposed to get your attention and make you focus on the problem at hand. They work well for the first, and not so much for the second. Behind me, Alaric and Becks were shouting at Dave to shut the damn thing off already, while he shouted at them to be quiet, he was trying, and they were making it harder for him to concentrate.
Only Kelly seemed to realize that my reaction meant something was seriously wrong. She clenched her hands together, stress-whitened knuckles resting against the underside of her jaw, and watched me with eyes that seemed suddenly too large for the rest of her face.
I jerked the window as far open as it would go before leaning out over the fire escape and looking down at the street. The siren in the apartment stopped shrieking as Dave finally managed to crack the case and yank out the wires, but with the window open, the neighborhood sirens were right there to take its place—and so was the screaming.
At least the sirens took the edge off the screams. At least the sound of gunfire meant that someone was still standing.
At least.
Oh, fuck me, said George.
“My thoughts exactly,” I muttered. “Guys?”
“What?” asked Alaric.
“I think it’s time for an evacuation. Nice, easy, and oh, say, yesterday.” I pushed away from the window. “I hate to say it, but this is not a drill.”
There was a moment of relative silence as everyone stared at me, trying to rationalize what I’d just said. Then they exploded into motion, Becks and Alaric lunging for
the weapons cache in the closet, Dave lunging for his keyboard. Only Kelly stayed where she was, hands still clenched beneath her chin.
Shaun—
“I’m on it,” I said, and started for the server rack.
m" >
It had been almost fifteen years since the last major outbreak in Oakland. You want the recipe for a relatively zombie-free existence? It’s easy. Take an armed population, give them an ingrained bunker mentality, and tell them they can’t depend on anyone outside the community. They’ll police their borders so well that you’ll probably never need to worry about them again. Trouble is, that sort of border patrol can wind up hurting as much as it helps. Sure, Oakland had all the security features you’d expect to find in a major urban center, but most people didn’t know exactly how they worked or how to take full advantage of them. They could handle their home defense systems. The public defenses were a little more difficult.
At least half the storefronts I’d seen during my brief survey of the street had been standing open, with their emergency gates fully retracted. Some of the blast shutters had managed to descend, but not nearly enough of them to make a difference, especially when the doors weren’t locked. Sealed blast shutters on a building whose doors were standing open wouldn’t save anyone. They’d just make sure no one could get out once the infected got in.
About half the unsealed windows had been broken—shatterproof glass is a much more academic concept when the infected are involved. They don’t have any functioning pain receptors to slow them down, and they’ll keep beating themselves against the glass until something gives way. When you’re talking about civic-use storefronts in a relatively low-income neighborhood, it’s going to be the glass that gives. There had been blood splashed all around the sidewalk, and there wasn’t much screaming coming from our immediate vicinity. For most of the locals, it was long past too late.