Deadline

Ten

The outside air slapped me hard across the face as the door to Dr. Abbey’s lab clanged shut behind me. I stumbled to a stop, realizing two things at the same time—first, that I was alone in the middle of a mostly abandoned industrial park, and second, that while I had my standard field arms, I wasn’t wearing any armor beyond my basic motorcycle gear. It was like a recipe for suicide, and while it might have been acceptable when I was too out of it to realize what I was doing, that moment had passed. I let my gaze flick wildly around my surroundings, looking for signs of movement. I didn’t find any. What I did find was the van, sitting like an island of serenity among the ruins.

I took another step forward, barely aware that I was going to do it until it was already done. The van. That’s where I was going when I ran away. To the van, where George and I saved each other’s lives a thousand times… where I pulled the trigger and killed the woman who was my sister, my best friend, and my only real family, all with a single bullet.

She would have gotten better, whispered Kelly’s voice, in the black space behind my eyes where only George was supposed to speak. The world blanked out again.

The sound of the van door slamming forced me back into my surroundings for the second time. My index finger was slightly numb, with the deep, subcutaneous ache that meant I’d taken—and passed—a blood test to open the doors. No amplification for me. Not yet, anyway. I looked dully around the van’s interior, eyes flicking toward the ceiling in an automatic check for the Rorschach test that was formed by George’s blood immediately after I pulled the trigger. For a moment, I could see it, streaks of red trending into a dozen shades of brown as it dried. Then I blinked, and the blood was gone, replaced by pristine white paneling.

“Breathe, Shaun,” said George. Her voice came from behind me, rather than from inside my head. It was calm, soothing, even slightly amused; she was just talking me down from a panic attack. Nothing important, all part of a day’s work. I’ve never been terribly prone to that kind of episode, but when you spend your days playing with dead things, one or two flip-outs are bound to come with the territory. “You’re going to give yourself an aneurysm.”

“Didnt you hear her?” I demanded, clenching my hands into fists. The urge to look toward the sound of her voice was nigh irresistible. I kept looking at the ceiling instead, waiting for the blood to repeat its flickering appearance. “You would have gotten better.”

“Says her,” George said. The amusement vanished, replaced by the barely chained irritation that was practically her trademark. “The test results were locked in—the CDC knew I was dead. If you’d walked away, something would have happened, and you know it. Worst-case scenario, you would have been treated to the delightful sight of men in hazmat suits dragging me into the open while I screamed for them to take another test. My last post might not have gone out. The truth might not have gone out.” She paused before delivering what I was sure was meant to be the killing blow: “Tate might have walked away clean.”

“You don’t know,” I said. “We could have claimed there was something wrong with the test. It’s happened before.”

“How often?”

I didn’t answer her.

George sighed. “Three times, Shaun. With a top-of-the-line test, three times. In all three cases, there was proof of mechanical failure—and in two of the cases, the people were killed anyway. Their families won their suits on the basis of secondary testing units. We both know what a secondary test would have shown in my case. There’s no point in pretending that we don’t.”

That was too much. The blood flickered back into visibility a second before I spun around, feeling my fingernails cutting into my palms as I shouted, “For fuck’s sake, Georgia, there was a chance!” The empty chair would fix it. I’d see the empty chair, and she’d go back to being a voice in my head, just a voice in my head, because she was dead, I killed her. I just had to see the empty chair.

Instead, I saw George.

She was sitting in her customary place at the counter, her chair turned to face me. The computer monitor behind her framed her head like a technological halo, and the position, the lighting, all of it was so familiar that I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh, scream, or thank God that I’d finally gone all the way insane. She was wearing her usual fashion-impaired ensemble: black jacket, white dress shirt, black slacks. Only her face was wrong—no, not even her entire face; just her eyes. Her sunglasses were missing, and her eyes were the clear, undistorted coppery-brown that I remembered from the years before the progression of her retinal Kellis-Amberlee turned her irises into outlines.

I stared at her. She ignored it, the way she always did when she wasn’t willing to wait for me to catch up. “Was,” George agreed. “Not is. There was a chance. But we’re past that now, aren’t we? We’re way, way past that.”

My mouth went dry, and the room, already unsteady, started to spin. “George…?”

“Glad to see you haven’t suffered any major head injuries lately,” she said, wistfully, and smiled.

I kept staring until she sighed and said, “It’s not like we have all day, you know. They’re going to come looking for you sooner or later—probably sooner—and you really don’t want them to find you like this.”

“They’re used to me talking to myself,” I said quietly.

“To yourself, yes; to me, no.” George shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong, we both know that I’m not really here. There’s no such thing as ghosts. But if you’re actually looking at me, they’re going to have a harder time taking you seriously, and you have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do.”

I decided against asking how “we” could do anything, if we both knew that she wasn’t really here. If I did that, she might decide to stop talking to me altogether, and then I really would go crazy. The kind of crazy that puts you in a rubber room, rather than chasing conspiracies and running a news site. I forced a smile of my own, wondering how believable it would be, and said, “It’s good to see you.”

“I’d say it’s good to be seen, but it’s not,” said George, looking at me steadily. “Just how crazy are you?”

“On a scale of one to ten?” I bit back a laugh. “Crazy enough that we’re having this conversation. How’s that for a starter?”

“Can you function?” She leaned forward, bracing her elbows against her knees. It was such a familiar gesture that my chest tightened, making it hard to breathe. “The way I see it, this is either where you man up and stop letting yourself freak out, or where you admit that you’re too cracked to do the job and hand things over to somebody else. It’s your call. You’re the one who isn’t actually dead.”

I winced a little at the word “dead.” “Can you not—?”

“Can I not what? Call myself dead? It’s true, you dumb-ass. You’re talking to me because I represent the part of you that still has a fucking clue how bad things are going to get. You’ve been fucking around since Tate decided to play martyr, and I’m tired of it. The team needs you. I need you. You can either step up, or you can step down, but you can’t keep treading water like this.”

She would have gotten better, whispered Kelly.

“Be quiet,” I muttered.

“You’re only saying that because you know I’m right,” said George implacably. Apparently, the voices in my head couldn’t hear each other. That was just another slice of crazy pie. “God, you never could take an honest critique. You would never have made it as a Newsie.”

“Then it’s a good thing I never tried to.” My knees were shaking. I sagged back against the counter on my side of the van, resting my weight on my hands. It was as much to keep myself from trying to grab hold of my hallucination as it was to keep from falling over. “How do you expect me to step up for something like this? This wasn’t the plan.”

“No, the plan was to make me do it.” She looked at me solemnly, alien eyes wide and grave in that familiar face. “We always knew one of us was going to be finishing things alone. Maybe we didn’t know why, exactly, but we always knew this would happen ect how.” Her solemnity broke, replaced by the half smile that meant she didn’t want to be as amused as she was. “I have to admit, even when I was being self-important, I never thought they’d put ‘assassinated to conceal a massive political conspiracy’ on my Wall entry. I always figured it’d be something less… I don’t know. Something less your department.”

“Yeah, well.” It was hard to swallow past the lump in my throat. It was the damn smile that did it. I knew she was a hallucination. I just didn’t care. “You zigged when you should’ve zagged.”

“What’s done is done. So are you up for this?”

I didn’t say anything.

More sharply: “Shaun? Are you even listening to me?”

“I miss you so much.” I looked down at my feet. I couldn’t keep looking at her, not if I wanted to hold on to what little was left of my sanity. “I mean, you know that, and I know I’ve been talking to you this whole time, but I also know it’s because I’m really not all here without you, so I’m talking to myself in order to pretend I can ever be all the way here again, and this isn’t even really a sentence anymore, so I’m going to stop now, but God, George, I miss you so much.” I stopped, and hesitated before adding, very softly, “I don’t think I know how to do this without you.”

“You have to.” I heard her stand, heard her footsteps as she crossed the van to stop in front of me. Her knees were on a level with my field of vision. If there’s a rating system for quality of hallucination, I can say I was definitely scoring pretty high; I could see the wrinkles in her slacks where they fell over her knees, and a bit of carpet lint sticking to the sole of one sensible shoe. “Shaun, look at me.”

I raised my head. This close, her eyes were even more alien… but they were still her eyes. It was still her behind them.

“Step up or step down,” she said, very quietly. “Those are the choices.”

I swallowed. “Do I get anything more than that? Step up or step down?”

“This isn’t a news story, Shaun. The only reward you get for making it to the end is making it to the end—you get to know the truth, and that’s it. I don’t come back. The last year doesn’t unhappen. Life doesn’t go back to the way that it was; life never goes back to the way it was, no matter how hard we try to make it. But you’ll know. You’ll have the truth. You’ll have the pieces that we’re still missing.” She smiled again, despite the tears welling up in her eyes. I’d never seen her cry, even when we were kids. The retinal KA atrophied her tear ducts years before her eyes actually changed in a visible way. But she was crying now. “The only happy ending we can have is the ending where you take the bastards down and make them pay for what they did to us. Can you do it? Because if you can’t, I need you to call Mahir and tell him that he’s in charge now. Someone has to find the truth. Please.”

“I can do it,” I said. My voice was unsteady, but it was there, and that was really all that I could ask. “For you, I can do it.”

“Thank you.” She leand forward. My breath caught as she pressed a kiss against my forehead and stepped away again, leaving me with a clear path to the exit. “I miss you, too.”

I stood, glancing up as I did. The blood on the ceiling was gone. When I looked down again, so was George. I wiped my cheeks with the palm of my hand until it came away dry, still looking at the spot where George had been. She didn’t reappear. That was probably a good sign. “Love you, George,” I whispered.

She would have gotten better, hissed Kelly’s voice, but its power was gone. Oh, I was still going to have to deal with the reality of it, but I’m good at dealing with stupid shit. If the CDC wanted to play hardball, we’d play hardball. And we’d win.

I was unsurprised to find Becks standing outside the van with her pistol resting against her knee, lazily sipping from a bottle of water. She straightened when I stepped out onto the blacktop, asking. “Everything okay?”

“I think I just had a minor psychotic episode or maybe a breakdown or something, but it’s cool; I’m feeling basically okay now,” I replied, closing the van doors. “You?”

Becks blinked at me, momentarily thrown by the flippancy of my reply. Even after working with me for as long as she has, she hasn’t learned to take statements like “minor psychotic episode” in stride. I’ll give her this: She recovered fast, saying, “Well, I just watched my boss have a minor psychotic episode, and I thought I’d come out and make sure he didn’t get his damn fool ass eaten by a zombie before he settled down.” She hesitated, then added, “I didn’t shoot her. After you ran out of the room? I didn’t shoot her.”

I wasn’t sure whether she was looking for praise or expecting me to condemn her for showing mercy. I elected for the praise. “Good call,” I said, nodding. “We’re going to need that pretty little head of hers intact if we’re going to crack it open, pry out all its secrets, and use them to bring down the CDC.”

“Right,” said Becks, slowly. “Were you on the line to Mahir just now? Because I thought I heard voices in there.”

“Psychotic break, remember?” I shrugged. “Look, Becks—Rebecca—you know what you’re getting out of this team. We’re damaged goods, some more than others. I’m so damaged I’m practically remaindered. If you can cope with that, I can promise you the ride of your life. If you can’t, I have the feeling that when we go back in there,” I hooked a finger toward the door to Dr. Abbey’s lab, “you lose the last chance to cash in your ticket on the crazy train.”

“I like trains,” said Becks. Her expression sobered before she added, “And I loved your sister. She was the first person who gave me a chance to prove myself in the field. She was a damn good reporter. So if you’re a little nuts, so what? I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re all mad here.”

“Great,” I said. We were the only things that moved as we walked toward the door. “She didn’t want to let you go. I had to haggle like a bastard to get you away from the Newsies.”

“She recognized talent when she saw it,” said Becks, with a small smile.

“Yes, she did,” I replied, with utter seriousness. Becks blinked, smile fading as she saw the look on my face. “So did I. I’m about to ask all of you to go all-in—put up or shut up, because we’re done treading water.” I was echoing some of what George had said to me, but that was okay. She was a figment of my insanity, and she probably wouldn’t sue me for plagiarism. “Not all of us are going to walk away from this one alive.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Becks actually laughed out loud, the sound echoing through the empty structures around us. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned since I started working with you people, it’s that no one gets out alive.” She leaned over, kissing me lightly on the cheek and then speed-walking the rest of the way to the door. “No one,” she repeated, and was gone.

I stopped, touching my cheek and staring after her in bewilderment. “What the fuck was that?”

A complication, said George. She sounded amused. Also, a girl thing.

“Right.” I dropped my hand. “Glad to see you’re back where you belong.”

I’m right here. Until the end.

“Great.” I started forward again. “Come on, George. Check this out.”