Deadline

by Mira Grant

  Maggie stayed on the lawn as we drove away, waving at first, and then just standing there, a small figure surrounded by a teeming sea of tiny dogs. Her image dwindled in the rearview mirror, disappearing and reappearing as we went around the curves in the driveway, until finally she was out of sight for good. Sanctuary was behind us, and we were well and truly on our way.

  The plan called for us to drive down the length of California before cutting across through Arizona, New Mexico—the desert states. It wasn’t the most efficient route, but it took good advantage of one of the bigger weaknesses of the infected: the heat. We had to cede Alaska because frostbite doesn’t do much but slow a zombie down until it becomes fatal. The deserts, on the other hand, were one of the first things we managed to take back completely. The human host of the active virus still needs water, still needs shade, still collapses with heatstroke and sunstroke, still putrefies, and maybe even dies from the bite of a rattlesnake or the sting of a scorpion. There are no resident zombie mobs in the deserts of America, and while even the driest desert can sustain life, very little of that life is big enough to cross the Kellis-Amberlee amplification barrier. If we encountered any real threats, they’d be fresh ones, and that limited their potential numbers.

  The relative safety of the desert made our route less suspicious, even as it meant that we’d need to stop regularly for water and watch the van to be sure it didn’t overheat. It was a small price to pay for potentially making it to Memphto live. Most of the checkpoints just waved us through, the guards too anxious to stay cool to do more than the most cursory of tests. That suited our needs perfectly.

  Becks and I did the driving in shifts, six hours on, six hours off. After the first two shifts, the one who’d just finished a shift would move to the backseat to sleep, while one of the passengers would move up front to keep the driver from passing out. Mahir didn’t have a license to drive in the USA, and while Kelly could drive, she didn’t have her field license, and was too jumpy to drive safely. So it was just the two of us, and that meant taking turns.

  Mahir and I worked on our strategy—such as it was—when Becks slept, using Kelly as a sort of a sanity check. “It’s not that I’m not willing to die for this story,” Mahir said, reasonably. “It’s just that I’d rather not be martyred and leave the tale half-told if there’s any other option.” Even George had to admit that this was a sound approach, and so the four of us put our three heads together and tried to come up with something that wouldn’t get us all killed for good. It was harder than it sounded, which was impressive, since it sounded pretty damn difficult. Finally, we decided to go with what we had: surprise, and the threat of going public without letting the CDC tell their side of the story.

  The farther we got from Maggie’s house, the dumber our makeshift plan looked… and the more obvious it became that there wasn’t another way. When the corruption seems to go all the way to the end of the world, the only good approach is through the front door with a gun in each hand. No one was going to help us take on the CDC, not with our resources and reputation, and not with the radio silence coming out of the White House. That meant we needed to play to our strengths, and our strengths came from lifelong training in shoving microphones at danger and demanding that it explain itself. It wasn’t much. It was going to have to be enough.

  We stopped at a seedy motel in Little Rock, Arkansas, the night before we got to Memphis. They took cash and didn’t look too hard at our IDs. No matter how high-tech the world gets, there will always be places designed for people who are looking to slip between the cracks. This was one of them. The man behind the desk didn’t know who we were, and better, he didn’t want to know. Becks and I checked in together, letting Mahir and Kelly wait in the van until the necessary transactions had been completed. The man was disinterested. He was also a modern American, which meant he might have seen Kelly’s face on the news, and might well wonder what a dead woman was doing wandering around Arkansas with a couple of disreputable-looking types like me and Becks.

  After the better part of two days spent driving down empty highways and eating out of truck-stop diners, all four of us smelled like road trip—that funky mix of stale corn chips, sweat, dirty hair, and ass that seems to show up any time you drive more than a couple hundred miles in one stretch. We had two rooms, which meant two of us could shower at once, after all four of us had cleared the blood test required to get inside.

  Somehow, even though one room was supposed to be for the men and one for the women, Becks and Kelly managed to snag the first showers. It was like a magic trick. I asked “Does anybody want a shower?” and they were gone, disappearance punctuated only by the steady hiss of the water.

  Mahir and I settle in the room where Kelly was taking her shower, again, just in case. We were too close to her home ground for us to want her left alone. The motel security could be worked around, and I didn’t trust her to shoot her way out of a paper bag if something happened while she was unguarded.

  I sat on the edge of one of the two queen-sized beds, rubbing my face with one hand like I could wipe the exhaustion away. It never worked. “So the Doc says most folks get to work around nine. The janitorial staff arrives at seven. That gives us two hours to evade one of the best security systems in the world, get inside without taking any blood tests that would announce our presence, and make our way to Dr. Wynne’s lab.”

  “Correct,” said Mahir. Paradoxically, he looked less tired than he did when he first arrived in Weed. The bastard. I hadn’t been able to get any real sleep in the van—too many years of training telling me never to let my guard down in the field—but he’d been out like a light every time he didn’t need to be working on something. The rest had been good for him. He was going to need it.

  “Is it just me, or is this essentially fucking impossible?”

  “If they haven’t changed the timing of the security sweeps since Dr. Connolly’s death, it’s going to be bloody difficult, but no, I wouldn’t call it ‘fucking impossible.’ Fucking impossible requires rather more in the way of, I don’t know, ninjas.” Mahir smiled. It was a small thing, half-buried in stubble and his own natural restraint, but it was there. “I’m not sure where one goes about ordering ninjas.”

  “Same place you get the submarines.” I looked toward the bathroom door, listening to the sound of running water for a moment before I asked, “Does this shit ever end, Mahir? I mean, really, is there a point where we get to say ‘enough’ and let things go back to normal?”

  “No.”

  I blinked at him.

  He shrugged, smile fading. “Your sister trained me, and she never stood for liars. No, Shaun, I don’t think this ever ends, not for us, not until we’re dead. Maybe not even then. You’re a haunted house pretending to be a man these days, and Georgia may be dead, but she’s still not out of the game, is she?”

  Bet your ass I’m not, said George. Her tone was grimmer than I’d ever heard it.

  Mahir looked at my face and nodded. “I thought not. You get distant when you’re listening to her. Either you’re truly haunted, or you’re the most reasonable madman I’ve ever known, and it doesn’t much matter either way: The end result’s the same, and she’s not going to be resting in peace anytime soon.”

  “What if we all die here?”

  “What makes you think we won’t find people of our own to haunt?” Mahir dug into his pocket, producing a slim nylon wallet. He flipped it open and passed it to me. “My wife, Nandini. Nan. You never once asked to see a picture of her. You realize that? You called at all hours of the night, you drove her mad with your nonsense, and you never asked me a damn thing about her.”

  I took the wallet, too abashed to know what else to do. It was open to a picture of a slim, sharp-eyed woman with dark hair that she must have dyed regularly, to keep the bleach from showing. She was wearing a cowl-necked sweater the color of cherry cola, and frowning at the camera.

  The resemblance wasn’t perfect. Her skin was too dark and her c
lothing was too impractical and her nose was a little bit too long. But something in the way she held herself, something about the expression in her eyes…

  “She looks like George.”

  “Yes.” Mahir leaned over and plucked the wallet from my hand. I didn’t fight him. “It was an arranged marriage, but she wasn’t the first bride they offered me, or even the fifteenth. She was just the first one I fancied enough to have a go with. Traditional enough to suit my family, but fierce enough to be worth fighting with. I’m not sure whose parents were more relieved, hers or mine.” He gave the picture a fond look, snapped the wallet shut, and slid it back into his pocket. “I told her to divorce me when I bought my tickets out of London. She’s not much for listening—still, I’ve no doubt she listened this time, for spite if nothing else.”

  “I didn’t mean to… I mean, I didn’t know…”

  “What, that I loved your sister? Of course you didn’t, just like you had no idea Rebecca fancied you. You never had to go searching like the rest of us. She was haunting you a long time before she died, and if you’d been the one to go, you’d be haunting her the same way.” Mahir stood as the water turned off. “We’re all hauntings waiting to happen, Shaun. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll get past wondering when our normal lives will be starting up again.”

  He didn’t look back as he walked out of the motel room, letting the door swing gently shut behind him. I stayed where I was, listening to the silence inside my head and the soft sounds of Kelly drying herself off behind the bathroom door. We were all hauntings waiting to happen? Really?

  “I guess I can live with that,” I said, to the silence.

  “Live with what?”

  I turned to see Kelly standing in the bathroom door, wearing an outfit I hadn’t seen before. She must have bought it on one of her innumerable shopping trips with Maggie. Tan slacks, a white button-down blouse, and a pair of low, black heels. A starched white lab coat completed the illusion that she’d left the CDC only yesterday, not months before. I blinked and said the first thing that popped into my head: “What the hell happened to your hair?”

  Kelly reached up to self-consciously touch her long blond ponytail. It was the hairstyle she’d been wearing when she first arrived in Oakland, if maybe a shade or two lighter. “Maggie found it for me at a beauty supply shop. Don’t you like it?”

  “Shit, Doc, anyone who sees you is going to think they’re seeing a ghost.”

  Very funny, said George.

  “That’s the idea,” said Kelly, and smiled. There was a bitterness in that expression I don’t think she would have been capable of before she came to us. Even if she survived, the things she knew now had broken her, maybe forever. “Wiping my biometric information from the scanners would be expensive and time-consuming, and these people are arrogant bastards—I know, because I’m one of them. My profile will still be there. We won’t have any issues with the automatic doors. The night guards don’t really know any of the junior staff by name—we’re just faces to them, and with all the traveling we do, it’s not unusual for us to disappear for weeks at a time. As long as we don’t wander into a spot check, we’ll be fine.”

  “What about the part where we’ve been hiding you all the way across the country, on account of that whole ‘faking your own death’ thing? This seems risky as hell.”

  “It would be, if we were planning to deal with anyone but security, the janitorial staff, and Dr. Wynne. Security won’t stop anyone the scanner says is allowed to be there, and janitorial doesn’t care. We’ll get past them.”

  “That leaves us with only the automatic systems to navigate.” We’d gone over all of this before. I was so thrown by her appearance that my mouth was running on autopilot.

  “So we’d better hope the servers haven’t been updated.” Was that doubt in her voice? It could have been. It didn’t really matter either way. We were miles past the point of no return, and she was as committed as the rest of us.

  “Good.” I stood. “Let’s get you across the hall to Becks. If we’re going to invade the Centers for Disease Control, I want to do it while I’m at least remotely clean.”

  Kelly nodded and ducked back into the bathroom to grab her street clothes before following me to the room across the hall. It was the mirror image of the room we’d just left, with the exception of Becks. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of one of the room’s two beds, field-stripping a sniper rifle I hadn’t even been aware she had. I raised an eyebrow.

  Becks looked up, hands continuing their work as she glanced at Kelly and gave an encouraging nod. “That’s good. You look like a CDC flunky.”

  “Thank you?” said Kelly, raising an eyebrow.

  “That’s good,” I assured her. “A sniper rifle, Becks? Really?”

  “Better overprepared than totally screwed.”

  “Fair enough.” I took a step backward. “You’re on Doc duty until Mahir gets out of the shower. As soon as I’m done, we can regroup and get some grub.”

  “Good,” said Becks, and smiled. “I’m starving.”

  “Yeah,” I said, a little dumbly. Looking at her smile, I felt a small pang of regret. We could never have really been lovers, no matter how much she wanted it or how much I tried; that just wasn’t what I was wired for. But sometimes, when she smiled at me like that, I wished things could have been different.

  I realized I was staring. “Later, Doc,” I said, and left.

  My shower was an exercise in minimalism. I spent no more time than was legally necessary under the spray of bleach and the steaming water that followed. If anyone checked the hotel’s records, they’d see that the rooms had been let to four occupants, and that all four had gone through proper decontamination procedures before leaving the grounds for any reason. That’s the sort of detail people don’t always think about, and that makes it the sort of detail you shouldn’t forget for any reason. Follow the rules whenever possible. That makes it a lot more surprising when you break them.

  The bleach was cheap as hell. It stung my eyes, and even after I rubbed myself down in citrus-based lotion—designed for swimmers pre-Rising, back when they were the only people bleaching themselves on a regular basis—my skin kept itching. “Isn’t this going to be an absolutely awesome night?” I muttered, yanking on a clean pair of khakis.

  Better than tomorrow, said George.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s true.” I hesitated. This seemed to be my night for heart-to-heart talks, maybe because I wasn’t entirely sure I’d still be alive in twenty-four hours. “George—”

  Yes?

  I swallowed. “How long is it going to be like this? I mean, how long am I going to be your haunted house, or are you going to be my imaginary friend, or whatever the fuck the cool kids are calling it these days? Is this forever?”

  George’s answer, when it came, was thoughtful and slow. Are you asking because you’re scared of losing me, or because you’re hoping I’m going to go away one day?

  “Yes. No. I mean… I mean I don’t know, George, and I sure as shit need you right now, but I have to wonder sometimes if this is my life. If this is the rest of my life.”

  I think I’m here as long as you keep me here, Shaun. I think one day you’re going to look at a mountain and say “I should climb that,” or hell, look at a pretty girl and say the same thing. I think when that happens, I’ll go. She laughed a little, and added, But what do I know? I’m just the dead girl in your head.

  “You know everything, George. You always did.” I put my hand flat against the steamed-up mirror. If I squinted a little, and didn’t let myself really look, I could pretend it was her looking back at me and not my own blurred reflection. “I miss you.”

  I know. But that won’t keep me here forever.

  The others were waiting for me in the girls’ room. Mahir was in the process of towel drying his hair, and Kelly was back in street clothes. The CDC costume was for tomorrow, when we’d storm the gates or die trying. The hair exten
sions were gone, and she had a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes to hide her features from any bored bloggers taking pictures for background color. Becks had put her rifle away. She was leaning against the wall next to the door, expression one of bland detachment.

  “Hey,” I said, stepping inside. “Who feels up for pizza?”

  “What took you so long?” asked ecks.

  I shrugged, smiling a little. “I had to talk something out with myself before I could come over here. That’s all.”

  “Well, I’m starving,” said Mahir, dropping the towel and grabbing his jacket off the bed. Kelly and Becks followed. I brought up the rear, pausing to close and lock the motel room door.

  George didn’t say anything as we walked toward the van… but in the back of my head, I was pretty sure I could feel her smiling.

  It has been a pleasure and a privilege blogging for you over these past few weeks. Thank you for your insightful questions and for your commentary in the forums, where I have learned a great deal about what does—and doesn’t!—work in this form of reporting. I promise to take these lessons, and this experience, with me in my future endeavors.

  Also, while I’m being sappy… thank you, all of you, for continuing to care as much as you do about the world. This is the only one we’re going to get, and I think it’s important that we continue to give a damn about every single part of it, even the ones that aren’t currently a part of our lives. You are the reason that someday, when this disease has been defeated, the amusement parks will become family fun lands once again, and people will laugh and live and love just the way they always have. Thank you for sharing yourselves with me.

  Thank you.

  —From Cabin Fever Dream, guest blog of Barbara Tinney, June 23, 2041

  Twenty

  I’m not sure any of us slept that night. We were on an Internet blackout while stationary: no uploads, no message forums, nothing that could be traced to prove we were ever here. That also meant no phone calls, since turning on our phones could activate their GPS chips. We’d been scrupulously careful since leaving Weed. We just had to hope we’d been careful enough.