Deadline

by Mira Grant

  “Hush, you,” I said vaguely. “Working now.”

  Becks and Alaric exchanged a glance, but didn’t say anything. That was probably the best thing they could have done.

  Buffy built all her own equipment. That would have been fine—a lot of people build their own equipment—if it weren’t for the fact that her idea of what equipment should look like was almost completely defined by pre-Rising television. She could put more wires, switches, and buttons on a single remote than anybody else I’ve ever met, and each one had a specific purpose. She also understood that by her standards, she worked with a bunch of ham-handed techno-illiterates. After the fifth time George tried to reboot a server by putting her foot through it, Buffy started putting idiot buttons on everything. They wouldn’t provide access to the more complicated functions, but they’d get things going.

  “Red,” I mumbled. “Red, red, red…” Red buttons used to be common. They were visible, hard to miss, and universally understood as important. After the Rising, red took on another meaning: It became the color of infection, the color of danger… the color of death. Red buttons were installed on things that needed the capacity to self-destruct, and they represented the things that you should never, under any circumstances, touch. So of course Buffy, with her perverse sense of humor and pre-Rising aesthetic, made all the really good stuff red.

  The center button on the booster’s control panel was a glossy shade of strawberry red. Becks and Alaric knew Buffy by reputation and through staff meetings, but she was dead before they joined the standing office team. They never learned some of her little quirks. So it wasn’t really surprising to see Alaric come halfway to his feet when I hit the button. Becks managed not to stand. She did have to stop herself before she grabbed my arm, but hey, at least she stopped herself.

  I took my finger off the button. The wireless booster made a cheerful beeping sound as it started scanning the local network, looking for exploitable cracks in the security. I looked from Becks to Alaric, smiled, and stood.

  “Give it five minutes,” I said. “I’m going to get myself a Coke. Either of you want anything?”

  Neither of them did.

  The wireless booster clicked to itself, occasionally beeping as it verified some part of the network structure to its own satisfaction. It had been running for three of the five minutes I’d requested when Mahir came into the kitchen, rubbing his face with one hand. His glasses were propped up on his forehead, and he looked exhausted. Seeing the beeping, blinking box on the kitchen table, he slid his glasses back down and frowned. “What in bloody hell is that thing supposed to be, and what is it doing?” he asked.

  “Hey, Mahir.” I took a swig of Coke before saluting him with the can. “The embassy get you a connection?”

  “No.” He scowled. “All international lines are locked down until the cause of this incident can be determined. The damned government’s thinking terrorist action, naturally. I’ve just had an offer of extraction back to Britain. As if the United States could hold an Indian citizen against his will.”

  “If this is declared an act of terrorism, I think they can,” said Alaric.

  Mahir paused. “You may be right,” he said finally. “I’ll try to avoid thinking about that for the moment. Now, does someone want to tell me what that thing is supposed to be?”

  The wireless booster beeped, louder this time, and the lights along the top turned a bright sunshine yellow. I pushed away from the counter. “Hey, Alaric, check your connection.”

  “On it, boss.” He tapped his keyboard. Then he punched the air, thrusting his arms up in a victory salute. “We have Internet!”

  “Girl was a genuine genius.” I finished my Coke and tossed the empty can into the sink. “That ‘thing’ is the original Georgette Meissonier wireless Internet booster and satellite access device. I have no clue how it works. I don’t care how it works. All I know is that you have no signal, you plug it in, you get it to turn on, and then it finds you a signal. It—”

  None of them were listening to me anymore. Alaric was typing furiously, while Becks and Mahir were in the process of hauling out their own laptops and setting to work. I looked around and shook my head.

  “Thank you, Shaun. We really appreciate your getting us back into contact with the rest of the world, Shaun. You’re awesome, Shaun,” I said dryly.

  Becks flipped me off.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and walked out of the kitchen.

  My laptop bag was on the couch next to Maggie, who was still staring, transfixed, at the television. Her lap was full of bulldogs. I hadn’t noticed that before. I touched her shoulder. She didn’t react. “Hey. Maggie?” Still no response. “Maggie, hey, come on. You need to stop looking at that now. It’s not doing you any good, and I think it’s probably doing you a lot of bad.” She still didn’t react. “George…”

  Just do it.

  “Gotcha.” The remote was on the arm of the couch. I picked it up and switched off the television before stuffing the remote into my pocket, where no one would be able to get it without my knowledge.

  Maggie’s protest was immediate. “Hey!” she exclaimed, looking blindly around for the missing remote control. “I was watching that!”

  “And now you’re not,” I replied. “We have Internet again.”

  “We do?” Brief hope suffused her face. “Are things… did we…?”

  “I dug Buffy’s semilegal wireless booster out of storage. We’re probably tapped into a Department of Defense satellite or something, but I think there’s a good chance your parents own the satellite, so I don’t give a shit. If they get pissed, you can bat your eyelashes at them and say we’re sorry. Alaric’s already online, Becks and Mahir are in a footrace to join him, and I figured you might want to log in and check your Fictionals. Make sure they’re okay.” Or as close as anyone was likely to be, under the circumstances.

  Maggie isn’t the sort of person who falls apart often, or for long. Her eyes cleared when I mentioned her Fictionals, and she nodded. “I’m not sure how many of them will have connectivity, but the ones who do will be worried sick.” She lifted the bulldogs from her lap and set them on the couch. Two jumped down to the floor and went trotting off on unknowable bulldog errands. The third one made a fussy grunting noise, curled up, and went back to sleep.

  I’ve never envied a dog before.

  “The cities must still be online,” I said. “If they knocked San Francisco off the network, they’d have riots to go with their zombies. I figure we lost connection because we’re too far out in the boonies for anyone to give a shit about what happens to us.”

  These cold equations, said George, with a sigh.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  Maggie pretended not to notice as she stood, brushed the dog hair from her legs, and said, “If we have Internet, we have VOIP again,” she said. “I’m going to go call my parents.”

  I blinked. Maggie was generally happy to spend her family’s money, but I’d never heard her say she was going to contact them. That was a part of her life that the rest of us really weren’t invited into. “Really?”

  “Really.” She gave me a wry look. “Unless you want a private army descending to extract me.”

  “Go call your parents.”

  Half the dogs followed Maggie out of the living room, leaving the other half sprawled around in various stages of repose. I sat down on the couch, bracing my elbows on my knees and dropping my head into my hands as I tried to figure out our next move. No pressure or anything. It was just the end of the world.

  I went through a science fiction phase when I was in my teens, around the time George was having her American history and angry beat poetry phase. We always shared the best stuff, so she learned a lot about ray guns, and I learned a lot about revolutions. There was this one story—I don’t remember who the author was—about a dude who was flying a bunch of vaccine to a sick planet. The fuel was really precisely calculated, because fuel was expensive and the ship was pre
tty small. And this teenage girl who didn’t understand stowed away on his ship. She wanted to get to her brother. Only there wasn’t enough fuel to get them both to the sick planet, and she didn’t know how to land the ship or deliver the vaccine. If she lived, everybody died. That was the cold equation. How many lives is one person, even a totally innocent person, going to be worth? We used to argue about that, more for fun than anything else, but we never managed to get that equation to equal anything but death.

  If the outbreak was bad enough, they’d start diverting all but the most essential services to the big cities. Cold equations again: An outbreak in Weed would have a limited amount of fuel to feed it, and be geographically isolated enough to mop up without too much secondary loss of life. An outbreak in Seattle or San Francisco would kill millions, and then spill out of the city to kill millions more. We were the stowaways on this ship, and there was only enough fuel to get one person safely to the other side.

  “You should call a staff meeting,” said George, sitting down next to me and resting her head against my shoulder. She was affectionate like that only when we were alone, even when we were kids. She never wanted the Masons to see.

  “I know.” I left my head in my hands. “Maggie’s crew won’t be the only worried ones.”

  “Did we have anyone in Florida?”

  “Not Florida, but we had a Newsie in Tennessee, and I think a couple of Irwins in Louisiana. They were doing the bayous.” Their faces flashed behind my eyes, still photos that would have looked totally natural up on the Wall. I was grimly afraid they’d be going up there soon. Alana Cortez, who loved reptiles and had been bitten by more venomous snakes than any person has a right to survive encountering, and Reggie Alexander, a walking mountain of a man whose biggest claim to fame was the time that he punched a zombie and survived to brag about it. They were both solid, well-trained, and on the way to having lucrative careers in the news. But they’d been in Louisiana. And Louisiana wasn’t there anymore.

  “That makes calling a meeting even more important. If we’ve lost anyone, people are going to be convincing themselves that we’ve lost everyone.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

  George put a hand on the back of my neck. Maybe I should have been disturbed by the fact that I could feel it, but I just couldn’t work up the energy. I was too busy being grateful that she was there at all.

  “Hey, George?”

  “What?”

  “That stuff I said before… before.” Before Kelly died, before Dr. Wynne turned on us, before we fled the CDC hours ahead of a disaster of Biblical proportions—before everything. Before the world changed.

  “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t mean it. I really, really didn’t mean it.” I lifted my head and she was there, looking at me with open anxiety, alien eyes grave. “Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. I can’t do this without you, and if you try to make me, I don’t think I’m going to be okay.”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Her smile was sad, and her hand continued to rest against the back of my neck, feeling solid and warm and alive. If this was crazy, God, I wasn’t sure I was capable of wanting anything else. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Good,” I whispered. I sat on the couch with my dead sister, listening to the voices from the kitchen, and wondered just how the fuck I was going to get us through this one in one piece.

  … fuck it. I don’t have the energy to be profound right now. Turn off your goddamn computer and go spend some time with your family before the world decides to finish ending. That’s about the only profound thing that I have left.

  We ran out of time, and we didn’t even know that it was being metered.

  —From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, June 24, 2041

  What he said.

  —From Charming Not Sincere, the blog of Rebecca Atherton, June 24, 2041

  Twenty-four

  The feeling of George’s hand against the back of my neck eventually faded. I looked up to find myself alone. Even the usual soft sense of her at the back of my mind was gone. That didn’t worry me the way it would have, once; I’d had plenty of time to adjust to the idea that her presence came and went depending on how stressed I was, how much pressure I was under, and I guess how sane I was feeling at any given moment. If she wasn’t there, that must mean I was feeling better.

  In the kitchen, Mahir and Alaric were typing furiously, while Becks was finishing the reassemy of what looked like her last gun for the day. Maggie was wearing a wireless headset and sitting in front of her laptop, chattering in a rapid mixture of English and Spanish. She sounded calmer. That was good, since the speed of her responses implied that whomever she was talking to wasn’t calm in the least.

  I hooked my thumb in her direction as I walked toward the coffee machine. George being out of the picture for the moment meant I could down a cup of real caffeine before I had to go back to caffeinated sugar water. “Who’s on the line?”

  “Her folks,” said Becks, glancing up. “They’ve been talking for half an hour.” The subtext—that I’d been sitting by myself in the living room for half an hour—wasn’t subtle. Somehow, I didn’t really care.

  “Good job with the wireless booster.” Mahir kept typing as he spoke, his head bowed in what could have been either concentration or prayer. “I believe Mr. Garcia was on the edge of commanding an armed extraction when she was finally able to get through and notify them as to her continuing safety.”

  “I could do with a little armed extraction.” I took a large gulp of coffee, letting it sear the back of my throat before adding, “As long as they were willing to stay and be our private army. You think they’d stay and be a private army?”

  “No,” said Alaric tonelessly.

  Mahir did look up at that, shooting a worried glance toward Alaric before turning to me and saying, “Internet journalists have been largely expelled from the impacted areas, and those attempting to take pictures or live blog from inside have been cited with practicing journalism without a license.”

  “What?” I straightened. “That’s not legal.”

  “Becoming a blogger requires only that one establish a blog, and not necessarily even that, if one is willing to exist solely through commentary on the blogs of others. Becoming a journalist requires that one take the licensing exams, take the marksmanship exams, pass accreditation, and possess a license sufficient to allow entry to any given hazard zone, lest fines and possible charges be applied.”

  “Well, yeah, Mahir. Everybody knows that. What does that have to do with—”

  “The individuals involved were in established hazard zones, taking actions of the sort that journalists must be properly licensed to perform.” Mahir shook his head, light glinting off his glasses. “They’re being held while charges are brought against them.”

  I gaped at him. “Wait—so—what, they’re saying that when you combine ‘has a blog’ with ‘is inside a hazard zone,’ you automatically become a journalist?”

  “Poof,” muttered Becks.

  “That’s insane!”

  “Insane, and very, very clever, as it’s going quite a long way toward reducing the number of unapproved reports making it out of the impacted areas.” Mahir’s gaze skittered toward Alaric. Just for a moment, but long enough for me to see where he was looking. “Reduction doesn’t mea

  “Some things always do,” I said, putting my mug down. I wasn’t thirsty anymore. “Alaric? You okay, buddy?”

  “The updates to the Wall started this morning,” he said. Tears ran down his cheeks as he turned to look at me. He didn’t bother wiping them away. Maybe he knew that drying his face wouldn’t be enough to make the crying stop. “My little sister posted for our parents and our brother. Dorian shot our parents, and Alisa shot Dorian, after he’d started to turn. I always knew getting her shooting lessons for her birthday was a good idea, even if Mother wanted her to take dance classes.”

  I winced. “Fuck, Alaric, I’m—”
>
  “Did it help you when I said I was sorry George died?”

  Everyone said they were sorry when George died, even the Masons. And not a single apology had made a damn bit of difference. “No. It didn’t help.”

  “Then don’t say it.” He looked back to his computer. “The forums are exploding. We’re one of the only major sites that has people actually responding to queries.”

  “That’s because we don’t know anything.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” said Mahir. “We know the outbreak started when Tropical Storm Fiona made landfall—and that it spread with the storm. Only with the storm.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “All the index cases have matched up with the initial footprint of the storm.”

  I stared at him. What he was saying didn’t make sense. An outbreak starting when a major storm hit was reasonable, if horrifying. Storms cause devastation, they cause injuries, and they can cause a hell of a lot of cross-contamination. There have been documented cases of someone being injured in a major storm, only to have the wind carry their infected blood onto a bystander before anyone knew what was happening. But that outbreak would be geographically contained, and even though it would be horrible, it wouldn’t be anything unique enough to cause the sort of devastation they were showing on the news.

  If the live state of the virus had gone airborne, it would be reasonable to assume that it would spread with the storm. It would also spread without the storm, and while its initial footprint might have been defined by Fiona, it wouldn’t stay that way. If this was a purely airborne outbreak, it should have been breaking out of any containment not defined through a complete absence of uninfected bodies.

  “Wait…” I said again, slow dread worming its way into my stomach. I hadn’t realized I still had the capacity to be frightened. Somehow, it wasn’t a welcome discovery. “Alaric, your sister. You said she posted to the Wall. Is she all right?”