Deadline

Fourteen

According to the bike’s GPS, the drive from the Portland CDC to Maggie’s place should have taken a little over five hours on the main highway. It actually took us closer to eight. Since the chances that we were being tracked by the CDC had just gone way, way up, we stuck to the back roads, keeping our cameras off and avoiding checkpoints whenever we could. I won’t say we drove through the ass-end of nowhere, exactly, but we had to stop twice to gun down the zombie deer trying to chew their way through the fence between the road and the undeveloped land around us.

“I wish to God I could post this,” bemoaned Becks, shooting another infected herbivore squarely between the antlers.

“Yeah, well, I wish to God I had a cup of coffee,” I replied, and gunned the bike’s engine. “Come on.”

There was a time when I thought George was paranoid for asking Buffy to build a jammer into her bike’s tracking system. I’m over it, especially since that jammer allowed us to duck back onto the highway three times for fuel and twice more for caffeine. Becks kept scanning through the newsfeeds as I drove, listening for reports of the outbreak in Portland. “We can’t be too careful,” she said when we stopped for drinks and enough greasy snack food to get us to Maggie’s without crashing. I agreed with her. We’d come too far to die because we weren’t paying attention to the news.

None of the initial reports mentioned our presence. They were all bland, tragic, and carefully sanitized. We’d been on the road for about two hours when the “official record” began admitting that perhaps some journalists had been present for the outbreak, but they didn’t identify us by name and they didn’t try to pin things on us. That was good. That meant it would be a little longer before we needed to kill them all.

George stayed uncharacteristically quiet during the drive. She wasn’t gone—that would’ve left me too shaken to control the bike, especially after everything that had happened since Kelly’s arrival—but she wasn’t talking, either. She was just quiet, sitting at the back of my head and brooding over God knows what. I figured she’d tell me when she was through working it out for herself. Maybe it says something about my mental health that I didn’t find the idea even a little strange. We were too far away from normal for strange to have any meaning anymore.

The sun was hanging low in a mango-colored sky w turned onto Maggie’s driveway. I had to keep one foot on the ground to keep the bike upright while we navigated the various security gates, until my clutch hand was cramping and I started to feel like we would have made better time if we’d ditched the bike on the street and made the rest of the trip to the house on foot. Becks clearly shared my frustration. By the time we cleared the ocular scanner, she was all but twitching with the anxious need to be back in the safety of friendly walls.

The fifth gate was standing open, just like it was when we first arrived as refugees from the ashes of Oakland. A casual observer might have thought Maggie never closed the damn thing. They would have been proven wrong almost immediately, because as soon as I coasted to a stop, the gate slid slickly shut. The sound of the locks engaging was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard.

Becks barely waited for the bike to stop before she dismounted; my foot was still on the kickstand when she hopped off. She stayed where she was for a few brief seconds, jittering in place as she worked the feeling back into her legs. Then she grabbed her bag off the side of the bike, announced, “I’m going to go take a shower,” and took off for the kitchen door. I watched her go without commenting. She didn’t want to give the live breakdown on what happened at the CDC, and, since I was the boss, she was leaving that little luxury for me.

“She’s such a sweetheart,” I said dryly.

Be careful. George sounded concerned. I jumped. It wasn’t just the worry in her tone: She’d been quiet for so long that I’d almost forgotten she was there, like sitting in a room with someone who hasn’t spoken in hours, until they finally get up to leave. I don’t think you really understand what’s going on with her.

“What, are you saying she might be working with the CDC? I don’t think so. I’m usually better at reading people than that.”

Shaun… I could almost see the exasperated shake of George’s head, the way she’d be glowering at me behind her sunglasses. I don’t think Becks is a traitor, but you need to be careful with her. Okay? Can you do that for me?

“Sure, George.” I slid off the bike, stretching. The muscles in my calves and thighs protested the movement but were overruled by my ass, which was so sore from the drive that I doubted I’d ever sit down again. “Whatever you say.”

One nice thing about working with people who know how crazy I am: Maggie, Alaric, and Kelly were in the kitchen when I stepped inside, all three of them in easy view of the window, and not one of them commented on the fact that I’d stopped to talk to myself before following Becks into the house. It’s a lot easier to deal with people who are already used to me.

“Becks tore through on the way to the shower,” said Maggie. She was next to the sink, drying the last of the dinner dishes. The kitchen smelled of savory pastry and fresh-cooked chicken. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that all I’d eaten since leaving Portland was some soy jerky, half a bag of potato chips, and a candy bar. The corner of Maggie’s mouth turned up in a smile. “There’s a potpie for each of you in the oven. We left them there so they’d stay warm.”

“Awesome.Thanks.” George was hovering at the back of my mind, casting a veil of anxiety over everything. I walked to the fridge and opened it. Someone had gone to the store while Becks and I were out; there was a twelve-pack of Coke on the bottom shelf, and what looked like sufficient fresh provisions for us to survive a siege, so long as no one cut the power.

I grabbed a can of Coke and swung the door shut, turning toward the table as I popped the tab. “Hey, guys,” I said, as amiably as I could manage. “So how were things while Becks and I were on location?”

“Mahir announced the hiring of ‘Barbara Tinney’ and helped Kelly get her first post up while I monitored the footage you were beaming out of the CDC,” said Alaric.

“Really? Cool. What was it about?”

“The psychological impact of isolationism on the development of human relationships,” said Kelly. I looked at her blankly. She amended: “Cabin fever makes people shitty roommates.”

“I’m sure it’s a real ratings grabber,” I said, after a suitable pause. “Alaric?”

He took the cue with grace, saying, “I was able to get about a dozen reports cobbled together after things went south, and we had them online before anyone else picked up on the outbreak. Mahir has every on-duty Newsie and about half the Irwins running follow-ups now. The CDC’s only comment so far called it ‘an avoidable tragedy,’ and said they were looking into possible failure of the airlock seals that are supposed to separate the treatment areas from the employee locker room.”

“Which is bullshit,” said Kelly. “Those air locks were designed to withstand a nuclear war. There’s no way they could just fail.”

“Good to know,” I said, sipping my Coke.

Ask whether any of the reports include the conference room, said George, with a sudden, strange urgency in her tone.

“Okay,” I muttered. More loudly, I asked, “Uh, hey, Alaric? Did any of the reports Mahir put together include footage of me and Becks sitting in the conference room waiting for the director to come back?”

Alaric blinked and nodded. “How did you know? That was the second one he put up. He said the time stamp was important to get out there in the public record.”

George started to explain. I cut her off, saying, “The time stamp on the conference room footage means they can’t try to pin the outbreak on us. There’s no way for us to have spent that much time sitting together, waiting, and be the ones who damaged the air lock seal.”

You’re learning, said George, approvingly.

“Time stamps can be forged,” said Maggie. Alaric, Kelly, and I all turned to look at her. She shrugged. “You just shouldn’t put too much faith in the time stamp. It’s not going to save you by itself. That’s what my family has lawyers for.”

“Thanks for that little ray of sunshine, Maggie.” I turned to Kelly. “So, Doc, was there any way to know that we were walking into a deathtrap? I mean, at this point, I trust the CDC about as far as George can throw you, but it still seems a little extreme, burning a whole installation to take out two reporters.”

Kelly frowned. “But Georgia is—oh.” She stopped midprotest, comprehension flooding her expression. “No. I didn’t. I’m starting to realize that my… my former employers”—she spat out the word “former” like it tasted bad—“may be capable of some pretty horrible things, but I never suspected they’d do anything like that. I wouldn’t have let you go if I knew.”

“The sad part here is that I bet they have more nasty surprises for us. Just wait.” I sipped my Coke, studying Kelly’s face for signs that she was fraying. The Doc was holding up better than I expected; all I saw in her eyes was exhaustion, both physical and mental. The rest of us were tired, but we were also trained for this sort of shit—or as trained as you can be for something that’s never supposed to happen. “Well, we got out alive. That’s something. Alaric, how’s our market share?”

“Up four points last time I checked, with the expected uptick in our closest competitors,” said Alaric, not missing a beat. “Three of them are crying hoax and two more are claiming that we’re endangering our licenses by behaving recklessly in hopes of increasing our ratings.”

I snorted. “Because ‘behaving recklessly’ is suddenly not in the job description? Amateurs. Let ’em find their own potentially fatal government conspiracies.”

“Can we not?” Maggie picked up a stack of plates and began putting them away in the cupboard. “I think one is more than enough at any given time, and since they have a tendency to spread, I’m not sure a second one wouldn’t wind up getting all over us, too.”

“Fair enough.” I tossed my empty can into the recycling bin. “You said there was a potpie?”

“Yes, and you said you’d tell us what happened.” Maggie put away the last of the plates before taking down the oven mitts and opening the oven, producing a covered ceramic dish that smelled like it was less than half a mile shy of Heaven. She set it down on one of the open spaces at the table.

“Caffeine, then food, then exposition.” I grabbed a fork from the dish drainer before moving to sit down. The potpie smelled even better up close. The bulldogs agreed: two promptly appeared from the next room, sitting by my feet in perfect, implacable begging positions. “Remind me again why we didn’t all move in with you years ago?”

“Because I live in the middle of nowhere, and that isn’t actually an asset for anyone who isn’t a pure Fictional.” Maggie went back to putting dishes away. “Now talk, or I’m going to take back your dinner.”

“Anything but that.” I stabbed my fork into the piecrust. “How much of the footage have you guys watched?”

“Enough,” said Alaric grimly.

I nodded. “Okay, then.” I took a bite of potpie, swallowed, and began talking, starting with the point where Becks and I drove away from the motel. Moythiur time at the CDC had been fairly well-documented by the cameras we carried, but they’d been simple recorders, not full-on field deployments. There were things they missed, like most of Director Swenson’s reactions, and everything in the emergency tunnels.

“Your recording feeds cut off as soon as you went through that second door,” said Alaric. “They picked up again once you were outside.”

“Really?” I glanced to Kelly. “Did you know that was going to happen?”

“No, but it makes sense. Those tunnels are heavily shielded, to prevent contamination if there’s ever need for an actual flush. We’re not even supposed to stay in them during drills, if we can help it.”

“Radiation?” asked Alaric.

Kelly shrugged. “I really don’t know. I’m sorry.”

I took advantage of their brief side-conversation to shovel another few bites of potpie into my mouth, barely chewing. Finally, I said, “Okay, so you didn’t get any of that footage. It wasn’t bright enough in there to get much worthwhile, but unless their shielding fried our electronics—” I glanced at Kelly. She shook her head, indicating that it shouldn’t have done anything of the sort. That made sense, since the CDC probably had recording devices of their own in the tunnels. They’d need to know what went wrong if there was ever an emergency purge. “You should be able to extract the audio track.”

“Don’t forget the pretty amber lights. Those are probably worth a screenshot or two.” We all turned toward the sound of Becks’s voice. She was wearing one of Maggie’s bathrobes, knotted loosely around her waist, and her hair was still half-wet, tousled from the postshower drying. “Is there another potpie, Maggie? I’m hungry enough to eat a dog.”

“Please don’t,” said Maggie. “It’s hard enough to socialize them without making them think that people will decide to randomly eat them. Your potpie is in the oven.”

“You’re an angel.” Becks arrowed for the oven, dismissing the rest of us in favor of food.

I stabbed my fork into my own potpie, spearing a chunk of chicken as I focused my attention back on Kelly. “So, Doc, that was a good job you did, getting us to the tunnels. Pretty quick thinking, too.”

“We do evacuation drills and infection simulations every month in order to minimize the loss of life in case of an outbreak,” said Kelly. “There are differences between offices, but they’re reasonably minor, and the central floor plan doesn’t change. Plus, they shuttle us to different offices once a year to run evacuation trials there, to make sure we don’t get too hung up on familiar landmarks.”

“What, like the white door, the white door, or, that old favorite, the white door?”

Kelly cracked a slight, brief-lived smile. “Something like that. It’s amazing how much two identical halls can differ when you work in them every day for a year or more. We have to learn to strip them down to nothing but the architecture.”

“Dhat mean you have entire installations memorized?” asked Alaric, suddenly interested. Kelly nodded. “Could you draw a map if I gave you some basic drafting software?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Because that may not be our last trip into the CDC, and I’d rather we didn’t need to count on an open phone line to get us out next time,” I said. Kelly’s attention switched back to me. “Alaric, get her that drafting software and see if you can find some public databases to check her work against.”

“The public databases won’t have the emergency access tunnels,” said Kelly.

“It’s still never a bad idea to have a backup plan.” I flashed her a toothy smile. “Besides, the public databases will have full blueprints of the general-access areas, and that should be enough to jog your memory. It’s not that I don’t trust you to tell us the truth as you see it, Doc. It’s just that after what we learned from Dr. Abbey, I don’t trust you not to leave things out if you think they’re too sensitive for us.”

Her expression hardened. For a moment, I thought she was going to challenge my authority. The others saw it, too: Alaric pushed his chair back from the table by a few inches, while Maggie and Becks both stopped moving around the kitchen, their attention going solely to Kelly. The house seemed to hold its breath. Finally, grudgingly, Kelly shook her head.

“Fair enough. We’re in this together, whether we like it or not. I guess we’re all going to need to learn how to trust each other.”

“There’s the spirit,” I said.

“I just have one question,” said Alaric. “How do we know the CDC isn’t going to run an audio comparison on your call and figure out that Kelly’s still alive? The last thing we need is another major raid.”

“No, the last thing we need is them figuring out where we are. Them figuring out that the Doc’s still breathing is second to last, at best.” I pushed my half-eaten potpie away and stood. “I guess we’ll need to keep an eye on the news feeds, see whether anything comes through accusing us of identity theft.”

“Can you steal your own identity?” asked Kelly.

“Guess we’ll find out.” Becks moved to take my seat as I stepped away. “Becks, you need to update as soon as you finish eating. I’m going to go and get the untransmitted footage loaded to the server. Alaric, I want you cleaning and screenshotting inside the hour.”

“Got it,” said Alaric.

“I’ve got a few poems and a bunch of garden pictures to put up,” said Maggie. “I’m officially still in mourning for Dave, which is why I’m all alone here in my big, spooky old house.”

“Good,” I said. “Doc, work with Mahir and get started on another post about whatever the hell psychology crap you’re writing about. See if you can come up with a plausible excuse for why we don’t have a picture of you. I don’t want anyone getting overzealous and looking for you in the public broadcast footage.”

“All right.”

I grabbed another Coke from the fridge and went back to the living room, where the computer wouldn’t argue with me, ask me questions, or do anything but help me clear my head. George was still quiet, her normally constant presence numbed to a dull ache at the back of my skull. It didn’t hurt, precisely. It just felt weird as hell.

The computer woke at the touch of a finger. I navigated the company log-in menus to reach my mailbox, which was comfortingly overfull of spam, date offers, naked pictures, suggestions of things that would make good articles, and the seemingly obligatory elevator pitches on places I should go and dead things I should bother. Sometimes it seems like the entire world is out to get me back into the field. What they don’t understand—and I can’t tell them—is that I’ve lost one of the integral traits of a good Irwin: I’m not having any fun. When I wind up in the field, it’s a chore to be survived, not an adventure to be relished. Without that little spark of gosh-golly-wow to drive me on, I’m essentially a dead man walking. Don’t think I don’t see the irony. George is the one who stopped breathing, but I’m the one who gave up on living.

The forums were as big a mess as I’d expected from Alaric’s report. The moderators were trying to be six places at once, and failing pretty spectacularly. I sat back for a few minutes sipping my Coke and watching the message notifications as they popped up next to thread after thread. The team currently on duty were all beta bloggers, trying to prove their credentials by doing the sort of shit job that George and I used to do back when we were still bylines on the Bridge Supporters site. In those days, we couldn’t think of anything we wanted more than to be out on our own, telling the stories we wanted to tell, not answering to anybody but ourselves.

“Look at where that got us,” I muttered, leaning forward in the chair and reaching for the mouse. “Stay where you are, guys. You’ll be a hell of a lot happier in the long run.”

George didn’t say anything, and kept not saying anything as I went back to my in-box and started skimming, looking for messages that actually needed my attention. I needed to start editing footage. I needed to post and let people know that I was still alive, but most of all, and first of all, I needed to calm down a little bit. My heartbeat was starting to speed up as my body realized that the running away was over—we’d reached our destination, and now it was finally safe for me to freak out.

My hand was shaking. I sat perfectly still, waiting for the tremors to pass. I didn’t have time for another breakdown. One a month is about my limit, and since this one was unlikely to come with the extra-bonus “full visual hallucinations of your dead sister,” I didn’t see the point of doing it again. Eventually, the shaking stopped, and I started again.

I hit Important when I was halfway down my in-box. It was buried in thread updates, private messages from the moderators, and random posts from my mailing lists, and I almost didn’t click because I didn’t recognize the sender’s e-mail address. “Who the fuck uses ‘TauntedOctopus’ for a handle, anyway?” I asked myself. It wasn’t entirely a rhetorical question. I was hoping the sheer stupidity of it would be enough to make George speak up.

Instead, it was enough to make me stop, swear, and open the message. Who uses “TauntedOctopus” as a handle? Probably a woman who wears T-shirts telling you not to do it. Dr. Abbey.

From: TauntedOctopus@redacted.cn.com

To: Shaun.Mason@aftertheendtimes.com

Subject: Aren’t you a busy boy?

I admit I was surprised when I heard that the Portland CDC had been overrun by the infected less than twenty-four hours after you left me. You don’t waste time, and I respect that. Then again, it’s not like you have much time to waste. You’re not the only one who knows how to operate a camera, and I bet you dollars to donuts that somebody got footage of you and your little band of Merry Men on the trek out here. It’s just a matter of time before somebody figures out we were in contact, and then the shit you’re in will be so deep that it’ll make your current shit look like chocolate pudding. Don’t come back. We started tearing down the lab as soon as you left, and by the time you get this message (assuming you live long enough to get this message, which is by no means guaranteed), we’ll be on our way to a new location. The little “arrangement” I have with the CDC depends on a certain status quo, and you’re playing in dangerous enough waters that I can’t count on it right now. So hurry up and get your answers or get yourselves killed, will you?

The attachments on this message contain everything I’ve done to date involving mapping the structure of Kellis-Amberlee against the autoimmune oddities that cause the formation of stable reservoir conditions. I don’t have a mechanism for reversing them, or a reliable way to induce them in adult subjects, but there’s more than enough to prove that reservoir conditions are the result of the immune system beginning to learn to cope under supposedly impossible conditions. Most of the research won’t make any sense to you, but it’ll make perfect sense to the little CDC flunky who introduced us. Make sure she sees it. Tell her it all goes public if you think she’s holding out on you. See what she has to say after that.

You’re a brave idiot, Shaun Mason, and I’m sorry I never got to meet your sister. Almost as sorry as I am that you never got to meet my husband. Give my regards to the Merry Men, and tell them to sleep with one eye open, because you’re well on the way to pissing off some pretty damn important people. Good for you. Keep doing what you’re doing. Somebody has to.

Best wishes, and stay the fuck away from me,

Dr. Shannon L. Abbey

A flare of guilt rose, washed over me, and died as I contemplated the fact that talking to us cost Dr. Abbey her lab. She knew what she was doing when she let us through her door. Maybe she didn’t invite us to come for a visit, but once we were there, she was perfectly happy to tell us what she knew. If she wasn’t going to blame us for showing up, I wasn’t going to feel bad for doing it.

The attachments on her message downloaded clean, and they opened to reveal huge, detailed medl charts and graphs that made about as much sense as abstract art. I recognized some of the labels, but that was about it. That was okay because Dr. Abbey was right: It didn’t matter if her research made sense to me. What mattered was that her research would make sense to Kelly, and once she’d seen it, maybe she’d know where we needed to look next. Given the situation we were in, every little bit was about to start counting, big time.

I forwarded Dr. Abbey’s message to Alaric and Mahir with a priority flag, printed copies of the attachments, and returned to cleaning out my in-box. Nothing else was nearly as interesting as that message, which wasn’t much of a surprise. “Here’s my Kellis-Amberlee research, enjoy” was a pretty hard act to follow.

According to the site log, Mahir was logged in, which meant that either he was awake or I had reasonable cause to think he might be. That was good enough for me. Leaning back in my chair, I dug my phone out of my pocket and snapped it open.

Luck was with me: Mahir, not his wife, answered the phone. “Shaun. Thank God.”

“Hey, Mahir. There a reason you always feel the need to invoke the divine when I call you? Is that just how they’re saying hello in London these days?”

“It’s four o’clock in the bloody morning, Shaun, and I’m awake to take your call. That might tell you a little something about how worried I’ve been.” A door closed in the background, and the sound of distant traffic filtered through the phone. “Try remembering that I’m eight hours off your time zone and give me the all-clear a little sooner next time, won’t you?”

“Hey, sorry, dude. I figured Alaric would keep you posted.” One of the London magazines did a profile on Mahir after the Ryman election—he was a local boy involved in a huge American political scandal, which was sort of a big deal. The picture they ran with the article was of him standing on the wide balcony outside his apartment, looking out over the Thames River with the sort of serious “I am an intellectual artist” expression that George and I always used to make fun of. That was the scene I pictured now, listening to the traffic rushing past behind him: Mahir on the balcony, surrounded by the weight of the London night, while cars packed with paranoid commuters went whizzing past below.

“He did. So did Magdalene. But at the end of the day, Shaun, the only person I trust to tell me your condition is you.”

“I’d feel flattered if I didn’t know that you expected me to die.”

“Isn’t that your intention?”

I stopped for a moment, suddenly and sharply aware of George’s silent presence at the back of my head. Lying to Mahir would border on impossible, even if George was willing to let me, and in the end, I didn’t bother trying. “Eventually, yeah. But not until after we’ve found the people who killed George. Did you get those files I sent you?”

“I did,” Mahir admitted. “How much of them did you understand?”

“Not enough. I’m guessing you understood a little bit more.”

“Enough to make me think I’ll never sleep again.”

“That’s good—means the files are what Dr. Abbey said they were. I need you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Find a virologist with nothing left to lose and get them to check her work.”

Now it was Mahir’s turn to fall briefly silent. Finally, tone wary, he asked, “Do you understand what you’re asking me to do?”

“Yeah, I do. I feel like a total ass for doing it, but I do.”

Mahir went silent again. Honestly, I couldn’t blame him.

North America lost a lot during the Rising. Big chunks of Canada and the lower parts of Mexico have never been reclaimed from the infected. We held the line in Alaska as long as we could, but in the end, the infection was too strong and we had to let the entire state go. Almost every part of the United States has its little dead zones, places that are too damn dangerous to take back. None of that can hold a candle to what India lost. Because what India lost… was India.

The conditions in pre-Rising India formed a perfect model for pandemic spread of Kellis-Amberlee. We studied it in school as part of the standard epidemiology curriculum: Combine highly concentrated populations with large stretches of rural farmland, a polluted water supply, and large, unconfined animals, and you were basically setting up the ideal conditions for losing everything. According to the reports—the ones that made it out of India, anyway; there aren’t many—the virus first started showing up in Mumbai, where it went from zero to chaos in the streets in less than thirty-six hours. While India was throwing all its resources at trying to save the city, the infection was taking hold in the country, claiming villages and small towns so quickly that no one had time to sound the alarm. By the time anyone realized that the quarantine couldn’t possibly have held, it was way too fucking late to do anything but evacuate.

The first handheld blood testing unit was invented by an Indian scientist named Kiran Patel. Dr. Patel had isolated his family when the first signs of trouble started to show; thanks to his quick thinking and willingness to use lethal force against the infected, he managed to keep his entire apartment building clean of the live virus during a six-day siege that should have left them all casualties. When he wasn’t standing watch, Dr. Patel was modifying his own diabetes kits to look for something a little more crucial than blood sugar. By the time the UN soldiers fought their way into that sector of Mumbai, he had a crude but reliable way of proving someone’s infection status in minutes. The whole building checked out. Two of the troops who’d come to their rescue didn’t. Acceptable losses for a piece of technology that no one else had even taken the time to think about, much less put together.

Dr. Patel went into a diabetic coma on the helicopter that airlifted him and his family out of the city. He never made it out of India. His widow went to the UN and demanded refuge for the survivors of her country in exchange for her husband’s notes. She got everything she asked for. The people who made it out of India were allowed to settle anywhere they wanted, bypassing all the normal citizenship requirements. The Indian consulates staye open and issued passports to the children of the survivors; as far as I know, they still do. When the disease is defeated, they say, they’ll be ready to go home.

Whether that’s true or not, London has one of the largest Indian communities on the planet, second only to Silicon Valley—although Toronto is a pretty close third. Mahir was born in London. He’s never been to India, and as far as I know, he’s never wanted to go. That’s not true for everyone. A lot of people want to reclaim their heritage. They may like living where they are, but they want it to be a choice, not an exile. There are doctors and scientists in the Indian community who answer only to the government of a nation that currently doesn’t exist, pursuing research whose only motive is “get us home.” But racism doesn’t die just because the dead start walking, and there are some folks who watch the displaced communities carefully for signs that they might be “turning against us.” If Mahir did what I was asking him to do—if he went to one of the virologists who was working out of his home, rather than out of a government lab, and asked him to explain Dr. Abbey’s work—he was putting them both at risk of a terrorism charge.

Finally, Mahir said, “I’m going to ask a question that sounds insane, Shaun, and you’re going to answer. Refuse, and I hang up, and we both pretend this conversation never happened.”

That sort of thing never works. Once you’re past the age of five, you can’t make something unhappen just by refusing to think about it. “Sure,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

“All right.” He laughed, a little unsteadily, and asked, “What does Georgia have to say about this plan?”

Mahir had never questioned the fact that George still talks to me, but he’d never gone out of his way to address her, either. Maybe my crazy was starting to rub off on the people around me. Is crazy contagious? “Hang on. I’ll ask her.” George, I thought, if you’re just being quiet because you’re pissed or something, I could really use your help right about now…

Sorry. I was thinking. Tell him… She hesitated. Tell him that if this research means what I think it means, the world has a right to know, and without his help, we might not be able to tell them. This is for everybody.

“… okay.” I cleared my throat. “She says that if this research means what she thinks it means, the world has a right to know, and that if you’re not willing to help, we might not be able to figure out enough to know what to tell them. She says this is for everybody.” I paused before adding, “And I say it looks like they were willing to blow up Oakland and infect an entire CDC facility to keep the news from getting out without it looking like they were trying to hide something. I want to get at least part of the work off this continent, so somebody can keep on going after they drop the bomb on Maggie’s place.”

“I swear, I’m going to move to San Francisco just to make you people stop using me as your off-site backup.” Mahir sighed deeply. “Fine.”

“Fine? You mean you’ll do it?”

“I’m clearly out of my mind, and I’m going to regret this for the rest of my life, and my wife is probably going to leave ut yes, I’ll do it. Someone has to. I’m going to have to involve my local beta bloggers. This is a rather large project.”

“Whatever you need, but keep it limited to people you know and can trust, okay? We can’t risk this getting out early.”

“Silence is expensive.”

“That’s not a problem. I’m sure if we shake the merchandising hard enough, the money will fall out.” If nothing else, I had a standing offer to print a book of George’s posts from the campaign trail. I’d been refusing—somehow that felt more like making money off her corpse than continuing to run her blog did—but it would be a good way to make some reasonably quick cash. And then there was Maggie’s trust fund. Normally, I wouldn’t think of going there. These were some pretty special circumstances.

“Oh, believe me, I wasn’t intending to worry about the budget, and if I’m still married when this is over, you’re financing the second honeymoon it’s going to take for me to stay that way.”

“Totally fair. Thank you. Really, thank you. You’re a good guy.”

“Your sister had excellent taste in men. Now update your damn blog, Shaun. Half the readership thinks you’re dead, and I’m entirely out of the passion it takes to refute conspiracy theories.” The sounds of distant traffic cut off as Mahir killed the connection, leaving me listening to nothing but the sound of my own breath. I clicked the phone shut and slid it back into my pocket, staring thoughtfully at the computer screen. Dr. Abbey’s research looked back at me like the world’s deadliest abstract art. The lines of it were strangely soothing when I looked at them long enough. They reminded me of the faint traceries of iris surrounding George’s pupils, little lines of brown that no one got to see unless they got close enough to look past her glasses.

Lifting my hands, I tugged the keyboard toward me and begin to write.