Deadline

by Mira Grant

  “It made you run all thirty-eight?” I asked, punctuating the question with a low whistle. “That’s impressive.” Also terrifying, since I was willing to bet the designers hadn’t considered all the possible loopholes in that model. Maggie’s security system made us each lean out the window long enough for a blood test, but it didn’t actually make us get out of the car and walk through an air lock while everyone else was tested. It would be entirely possible for someone to test clean opgo into amplification while the rest of the group was still being checked out. The ocular scan at the next gate would catch them—probably—but it would increase the number of potential infected from one to everyone in the group.

  Maggie smiled blithely, missing the subtext of my comment. That was probably for the best. “It’s the best on the private market.” She stuck her hand out the window as she spoke, pressing it down against the passenger-side testing panel.

  “It’s not on the private market,” said Kelly. I twisted to look at her as I slapped my hand down on my own testing panel. She shrugged, sticking her hand out the window, and said, “This technology isn’t supposed to be available outside of government agencies for another two years.”

  “Oopsie,” said Maggie. She flashed a smile at Kelly and pulled her hand back into the van as the green light next to the testing unit flashed on. “I guess Daddy must have pulled some strings.”

  Again, added George dryly. I swallowed a chuckle.

  “He did an excellent job,” said Mahir. The light next to his testing panel flashed green. Withdrawing his hand, he slumped in his seat and closed his eyes again. “Good lord, this nation is enormous. Wake me when there’s coffee.”

  “You’ll need to open your eyes for the ocular scan in a minute,” said Maggie.

  Mahir groaned.

  I glanced at him in the rearview mirror, taking in the fine stress lines etched around his eyes. Those weren’t there a year ago. George’s death was almost as hard on him as it was on me—something I wouldn’t have believed possible for almost anybody else. Mahir had been her beta blogger, her colleague, and her best friend, and sometimes I got the feeling he would have tried to be more if they hadn’t lived on different continents. At least I had the constant reassurance of going crazy. He just had the silence, and now, thanks to me, the strain of whatever it was he’d learned that was bad enough to drive him out of England.

  “Hope this was worth it,” I muttered, and started the engine again.

  The ocular scanners were calibrated to test only two people at a time; it took us nearly five minutes to clear the fourth gate. Mahir and I went first—me because safety protocols say to clear the driver as fast as possible, him because I was afraid he’d actually fall asleep if we made him wait too long. His exhaustion was becoming more obvious by the moment. I wasn’t going to insist he stay awake long enough to tell us everything he knew, but I wanted to know if we were looking at another Oakland. Last time we let an unexpected visitor have time to calm down before telling us everything, our apartment building got blown up, Dave died, and we wound up running for our lives. I’d like to avoid having that happen again if I get any say in the matter.

  Maggie’s bulldogs were waiting on the front lawn, and they mobbed our feet as soon as we got out of the van. Mahir backpedaled frantically, winding up sitting on the armrest of the passenger seat with his feet drawn up, out of reach of inquisitive noses. This didn’t stop them from jumping at his shoes, yapping in their oddly sonorous small-dog voices. “Good lord, dont you keep these things leashed?”

  “Not when they’re at home,” Maggie replied. “Bruiser, Butch, Kitty, down.” The three dogs that had seemed the most intent on getting to Mahir dropped to all fours and trotted over to Maggie, tongues lolling.

  “They grow on you,” I said, leaning past Mahir to grab his bag. It was deceptively heavy. I’d been expecting it to weigh maybe twenty pounds, but it was heavy enough to throw me off balance for a moment. “Jeez, dude, what’s in this thing, bricks?”

  “Computer equipment, mostly. I hope you have a few shirts I can borrow. It seemed like a poor idea to travel with more than I could fit in a single bag.” Mahir watched the dogs warily as he slipped out of the van and edged toward the house. The dogs, for their part, stayed clustered around Maggie, looking up at her with adoring eyes.

  “You can borrow my shirts, my man, but you’re going commando before you’re borrowing my boxers.” I slung my arm around his shoulders and started walking toward the kitchen door. “Coffee awaits, unless you’d rather have tea. You look like shit, by the way.”

  “Yes, I’ve gathered,” said Mahir wearily. “Tea sounds fantastic.”

  He kept trudging onward as I glanced back at Maggie. Kelly had emerged from the van and was standing next to her, frowning thoughtfully. Maggie nodded, signaling her understanding. I answered her nod with a brief, relieved smile. I needed a few minutes alone with Mahir before he fell into an eight-hour coma, and Maggie was telling me she’d keep Kelly out of the way until I was ready for her.

  The kitchen was empty. Alaric and Becks were still off-site, and all the bulldogs were outside, probably harassing Maggie into playing catch with them. I guided Mahir to a seat at the table. “You have a tea-based preference? Maggie has something like five hundred kinds. I think they all taste like licking the lawnmower, so I really can’t make recommendations.”

  “Anything that isn’t herbal will be fine.” Mahir collapsed into the chair, his chin dipping until it almost grazed his chest. “Soy milk, no sugar, please.”

  “You got it.” I kept one eye on him as I filled the electric kettle and got down a mug.

  He’s worn out.

  “I got that,” I muttered. Mahir raised his head enough to blink at me. I offered an insincere smile. “Sorry. I was just—”

  “I know what you were doing. Hello, Georgia. I hope your ongoing haunting hasn’t driven your brother too far past the edge of reason to justify this visit.”

  There’s no such thing as ghosts, said George, sounding peevish.

  The idea of getting into that particular argument was too ludicrous to consider, especially given my position. I got the soy milk from the fridge instead, answering, “George says hey. Your tea will be ready in just a minute. Want to tell me why you decided to be a surprise? We could’ve at least made up the couch for you, if we’d known that you were coming.”

  “I didn’t want to broadcast it anywhere,” Mahir said, with a calm that was actually chilling. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I hadn’t really expected it would be, but still, the tone of his voice, combined with the exhaustion in his face, made me want to put away the tea and break out the booze. “I purchased a flight from Heathrow to New York via an actual travel agency, rather than online, and flew from there to Seattle, where I switched from my own passport to my father’s and caught a flight to Portland. From there, I took a private flight to Weed. The gentleman who owns the plane took payment in cash, and his manifest will show that I was a young woman of Canadian nationality visiting the state for a flower show.”

  “How much did that cost?”

  “Enough that you should be deeply grateful I’m paid in percentage of overall site income, rather than drawing a salary, or you’d owe me quite a bit of money.” Mahir removed his glasses in order to scrub at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I’m not going to be useful much longer, I’m afraid. I’ve been awake damned near a day and a half as it is.”

  “I sort of figured.” The kettle began to whistle. I turned it off, dropping a teabag from Maggie’s disturbingly large collection into a mug and covering it with water before walking the mug and soy milk over to Mahir. “Give me the short form. How bad is it?”

  “How bad is it?” Mahir took a moment to doctor his tea, not speaking again until he was settled with both hands wrapped firmly around the mug. Looking at me steadily, he said, “I took the data you gave me to three doctors I was reasonably sure were reputable. One laughed me out of his office. Sa
id if anything of the sort were going on, he’d have heard about it, since the trending evidence would be virtually impossible to overlook. Further said that if anything of the sort were going on, the national census would reflect it. I challenged him to prove that it didn’t.”

  “And?”

  “He stopped taking my calls three days later. I’d wager because the national census reflected exactly what he said it wouldn’t.” Mahir sipped his tea, grimaced, and continued: “When I went to confront him about this in person, he was gone—and he didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

  Well, shit, said George.

  “I had more luck with the second doctor I approached—largely, I think, because he was Australian and didn’t really give two tosses what the local government thought of his work. He said the research was sound, if a bit overly dramatic, and that he’d rather like a chance to test its applications in a live population.”

  “It had applications?” I asked, mystified.

  “In the sense that… Well, look, it’s sort of like the research they were doing on parasites at the turn of the century. They found quite a few immune disorders that could be controlled by the introduction of specialized parasites, because the parasites provided a sufficient distraction for the immune system as a whole. They kept the body from attacking itself. Part of what makes Kellis-Amberlee so effective is that it acts like a part of the body—it’s with us all the time, so our immune systems don’t ng . There’d be no point; they’d rip us apart trying to kill it. The trouble is that when the virus changes states, the body still doesn’t think of it as an enemy. It still regards it as a friendly component.”

  I frowned. “You lost me.”

  “If the body regards the sleeping virus as a part of itself, it isn’t prepared to fight the virus when it wakes. But people who somehow survive a bout with the activated virus—those who get exposed when they’re too small to amplify, for example, or those with a natural resistance—can ‘store’ a certain measure of the live virus in themselves, like a parasite. Something that teaches the body what it’s meant to be fighting off.”

  “So this dude wanted to, what, go expose a bunch of kangaroos and watch to see what happened as they got bigger?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “What happened with him?”

  “He got deported on charges of tax evasion and improper work permits.”

  Silence stretched between us as I considered what he was saying—and what he wasn’t. Even George was quiet, letting me think. Finally, I asked, “What about the third guy?”

  “His files are in my bag.” Mahir looked at me levelly as he sipped his tea. “He read the files. Three times. And then he called me, told me his conclusions and where he’d sent his data, hung up the phone, and shot himself. Really, I’m not certain he had the wrong idea.”

  “What… what did he say?”

  “He said that were we braver and less willing to bow to the easy path, we might have had India back a decade ago.” Mahir put his cup down and stood. “I’m tired, Shaun. Please show me where I can sleep. You can read what I’ve brought you, and we’ll discuss it later.”

  “Come on.” I stood and started for the hallway. “You can use my room. It’s not huge, but it’s quiet, and the door latches, so you shouldn’t wake up with any surprise roommates.”

  “That’s a relief,” he said, following me up the stairs. His presence, strange as it was, felt exactly right, like this was exactly what had to happen before we could finish whatever it was we’d started.

  We were all refugees now. None of us would stop running until all of us did.

  BOOK IV

  Immunological Memory

  It’s better to go out with a bang and a press release than with a whimper and a secret.

  —GEORGIA MASON

  Fuck this. Let’s just blow some shit up.

  —SHAUN MASON

  George and I never technically knew our birthdays. The doctors could estimate how old we were and make some educated guesses about our biological parents, but it really didn’t matter. We knew we were born sometime in 2017, toward the end of the Rising, when most of North America had been taken back from the infected, because the doctors said so. We knew she was older by about six weeks. Everything else was details, and details weren’t important. Not to me. What was important was that I had her, and she had me, and we had each other, and that meant we could face anything the world threw at us. Sometimes I was even arrogant enough to think the Rising happened so we could be together.

  It’s as good an explanation as any.

  As of today, no matter when my birthday really is, I’ve had a birthday without George. As of today, I’ve spent a year going to sleep and waking up in a world she isn’t in, a world that seems meaningless because she’s never going to make it mean anything ever again. I was always sort of afraid she’d turn suicidal when I died. I asked her once if she ever worried about me like that.

  “You’re already suicidal, you asshole,” she said, and laughed. Only it turns out she was wrong, because losing her made me more careful about almost everything. I miss her every day. I miss her every minute. But if anything happens to me, she may never get the ending she deserves, and I refuse to be selfish enough to die before I’m finished taking care of the things she left behind.

  Happy birthday, George. You made me better than I could ever have been without you, and you hurt me worse than I could ever have been hurt by anybody else. I love you. I miss you. And I’m starting to get the feeling that I’ll see you pretty soon, because I’m starting to feel like, maybe, things are coming to an end.

  God, I miss you.

  —From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, June 20, 2041

  Anybody who messes with Shaun is messing with me. And of the two of us, I swear, I am the one you do not want to mess with. He’ll kill you. But I will make you sorry, and I will make you pay.

  Trust me. I’m a journalist.

  —From Postcards from the Wall, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted June 20, 2041

  Eighteen

  Alaric, what’s your twenty?” Silence answered me. I bit back a snarl and tried again: “Alaric, where are you?” Getting mad at him for not knowing the weird mix of military and ham radio pidgin used by the Irwin community was pointless. That didn’t stop me from doing it.

  This time he answered, his voice coming clear and easy through the phone: “I’m finishing up my edits while Becks does some final recon for her report.”

  “Not an answer.” I raked a hand through my hair, watching Maggie try to guide Kelly through the steps required to mix pancake batter. Either Kelly was the worst cook in the world or Maggie was really shitty at giving instructions. It could have gone either way. “Where are you, exactly?”

  “Down near Mount Shasta.” My silence must have told Alaric he needed to give me more information, because he added, “About an hour out. Why? Do you need us to stop at the store or something on our way back in?”

  Back when Buffy was alive, we could trust our network against anyone on the planet, including the CIA. Our security isn’t that stellar anymore, but thanks to upgrades cobbled from Maggie’s house system, Becks’s jury-rigging skills, and Alaric’s computer know-how, we’re pretty stable. Stable enough for what I was about to say, anyway: “Mahir’s here.”

  It was Alaric’s turn to go briefly silent. Finally, he said, “Mahir sent in a report?”

  “No, dumb-ass, Mahir’s here. Mahir is asleep upstairs in the guest room I’ve been using. He showed up with pretty much the clothes on his back and a suitcase full of research, and he looks like hammered shit.”

  Maggie looked over. “Is that Alaric? Tell him to stop by the House of Curries on his way home. I’m going to send in an order.”

  “Got it. Alaric, Maggie says—”

  “I heard her,” he said, managing to sound annoyed and astonished at the same time. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Mahir is actually here.”
>
  “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying.” Alaric began swearing. I listened, impressed. I hadn’t realized he knew that much Cantonese. I let him go for a few minutes, then interjected, “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  Play nice with my Newsies, or I swear I’m going to make you sorry, said George flatly.

  “I am being nice.”

  Luckily, Alaric was still swearing, finishing off an elaborate phrase that started in Cantonese and switched to English as he said, almost wonderingly, “—son of a chicken-fucking soy farmer and a diseased convention-center security guard. How did he get here? Is he all right? Are we going to need to move again?”

  “I’d rather wait and explain everything to you and Becks at the same time. Right now, he’s exhausted but I’m pretty sure nobody’s been shooting at him—yet, anyway—and that’s something else I’d like us all talk about at once. So when can you be here?”

  There was a clattering sound as Alaric shoved his keyboard away, knocking something to the van floor in the process. “Give me ten minutes to get Becks back here, and I’ll break a couple of dozen speed limits getting over to you.”

  “Don’t forget to pick up dinner,” called Maggie.

  “Maggie says—”

  “I heard her. Do you need anything else?”

  “Just drive safely, don’t get pulled over, and don’t crash into anything. If we’re going to die horribly, we’re all going to do it together.”

  “Great pep talk, boss. Very touching. I’ll always remember the day when you told me not to drive into a tree on the way home.” Alaric said something caustic sounding in Cantonese—what little I remembered from my course on field communications made me think he’d just called me a goat fucker—and hung up.