Blackout (35 page)

“
Awesome
,” I countered.

“Expensive, so don’t touch anything,” said a voice. I turned toward the kitchen, where a brown-haired woman was standing, arms crossed, a stern expression on her face. She was wearing jeans and a tank top, and her hair was cropped short, leaving nothing for a zombie mob to grab hold of. She looked more like a normal human than the girl from the driveway, who was now sitting on the counter, drumming her heels against a cabinet. Somehow, that made her more difficult to trust. Nothing that looked normal in this place could possibly be what it seemed.

Mahir had turned along with the rest of us. He recovered quickly, stepping forward and offering his hand. “I’m Mahir Gowda. It’s a pleasure to—”

“You’re not here to meet me,” said the brunette, in the same disapproving tone. “No one comes here to
meet me. You’re here for the Monkey. Well, he’s not sure he wants to talk to you just yet. Who sent you?”

“No one sent us. We came—”

“Whoops! Wrong answer!” The Fox was suddenly holding a pistol in each hand. I hadn’t even seen her draw. “Somebody told you who to look for, and somebody told you where to look. So who sent you?”

“Alaric Kwong. He said the Monkey was the best in the business,” said Becks.

The brunette blinked. Then, to my surprise, she smiled, a little wistfully. “Alaric? Really? You’re the people he’s been working with?”

The four of us stared at her for a moment. Slowly, I nodded. “Yeah. He’s part of my crew. I’m Shaun Mason, After the End Times.”

“I know you,” she said, smile fading as fast as it came. “I’m the Cat. You’ve met the Fox.”

“ ‘Met’ is a word,” I agreed. The Fox lowered her guns. “Do we pass the security check?”

“For the moment.” The Cat turned, picking up a bread knife from the counter. “Why did Alaric send you?”

We could have tried for diplomacy. We could have tried for plausible deniability. In the end, that seemed like too damn much trouble, and I did what Georgia taught me to do: I went for the truth. “There’s a good chance we’re going to need to run for the border pretty soon, since the CDC is trying to kill us—”

“—we think,” Becks interjected.

“Right, we think. Anyway, they probably released bioengineered death mosquitoes and accidentally wiped out the Gulf Coast trying to get us, so they’re a little pissed right now. That means we need IDs the CDC won’t be watching for.”

“Why?” asked the little redhead, guilelessly.

I hesitated. I could give the answer we’d been giving everyone else—so we could get out, so we could run and escape and live—or I could tell the truth. I looked toward my team. Mahir was still watching the two women, the redhead drumming her heels, the brunette slicing obviously home-baked bread. Becks and Maggie were watching me, waiting to see what I would say. I took a breath.

“Mahir needs a new passport to get him into Canada, so he can get back to Europe alive. Becks needs an identity that can get her out of the country, wherever it is she wants to go. Alaric needs IDs for him, and for his sister, Alisa. We’re going to get her out of Florida. Maggie—”

“Is paying for all this,” said Maggie.

The Cat turned to me, knife still in her hand. Raising an eyebrow, she asked, “And what about you? What are you planning to get out of this deal?”

“Assuming this dude is as good as Alaric thinks he is, I’m going to get an ID that doesn’t set off any alarms. I’m going to stay low until we finish finding the people who killed my sister. And then I’m going to walk right in their front doors and shoot them in their fucking faces.”

“I like this one,” said the Fox, giggling. “He’s funny.”

Maggie was staring at me, clearly aghast. Becks and Mahir, on the other hand, didn’t even look surprised. Becks looked a little sad; Mahir just looked accepting, like he’d been waiting a long time for those words to leave my lips.

Seeing them like that made me feel slightly ashamed, and more determined than ever to set things right. I all but glared at the Cat. “So? Are those reasons good
enough for you people, or do we need to find someone else to help us?”

“You’re doing this out of a suicidal need for revenge, even though it may not change anything,” said the Cat coolly.

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Pretty much.”

You’re an idiot
, muttered George. I ignored her.

“Okay,” said the Cat.

I blinked. “What?”

“I said okay. The Fox likes you, and I think you’re a suicidal idiot with friends who will pay to let you kill yourself in an interesting fashion. She”—she gestured toward Maggie with her knife—“can give us obscene amounts of money without thinking about it, and the other two are nonoffensive enough not to matter. Besides, you work with someone that I owe a favor.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Alaric Kwong.” She smiled at our expressions. “He doesn’t know I ended up here. Probably break his heart if you told him. I may as well pay him back by passing you through.”

“A favor? For what?” asked Becks.

The Cat smirked. “I broke up with him when our Quest Realm guild was in the middle of a raid, and then I kept making him heal me without answering any of his whiny whispers about why, Jane, why would you break up with me, I loooooooove you. So we’ll get you your IDs. Cost is fifty thousand each, up-front, before you leave here today… and a favor.”

“A favor?” Becks frowned, suddenly suspicious. Given how on edge she’d been since we arrived, that wasn’t much of a transition. “What kind of favor are we talking about here?”

“Nothing you’d lose any sleep over. We need you to
break into the local CDC building and drop a little something off for us,” said the Cat. She resumed slicing bread.

“Define ‘a little something,’ ” I said. “We’re not blowing anything up. That’s their game, not ours.”

“Nothing like that. Their main storage facility isn’t online. We want access. So we have a pressure-point hotspot that we just need you to get into the proper place and switch on. Then you come back here and get your shiny new identities, and with them, the warm satisfaction of knowing we’re going to screw the CDC over in some fun ways that you don’t need to know anything about.” She put her knife down, resting her hands on the counter as she looked at us calmly. “Do we have a deal?”

Looking into her calm, cold eyes, I realized the Fox wasn’t the only crazy person living in this house. She was just the one who had the honesty to wear her crazy on her sleeve.

“Yeah,” I said. “We have a deal.”

… all attempts to culture a live infection in blood samples taken from Subject 139b have failed. More interesting, we induced amplification in a white-tailed deer, and injected it via dart with a serum derived from Subject 139b’s blood. The deer showed signs of improvement before dying of massive cerebral hemorrhage. The necropsy was inconclusive. Unfortunately, I think we’ll need to try this with a human subject before we can be sure of anything. My team is scouring the area for freshly infected individuals; thus far, we’ve had no luck.

No reports of mosquito-borne Kellis-Amberlee have come in from any of my sources in California, Arizona, or Nevada. It’s possible that we may be able to dodge this bullet. I don’t think so; we haven’t dodged any of the ones that came before it. But I’m starting to believe that there may be an answer. All I need is a little more
time
.

—Taken from an e-mail sent by Dr. Shannon Abbey to Dr. Joseph Shoji at the Kauai Institute of Virology, August 1, 2041.

Well, that’s that, then. We’re all going to die.

Charming.

—From
Fish and Clips
, the blog of Mahir Gowda, August 1, 2041. Unpublished.

D
r. Kimberley’s technicians didn’t have any street clothes in my size. They did manage to find me a pair of hard-soled slippers, which weren’t quite the shoes I’d asked for, but were several thousand times better than the socks I’d been wearing since I woke up.

Better yet—best of all—they brought me a computer. A sleek, hard-shelled little laptop, which Gregory set in front of me with the top closed. I reached for it. He pulled it back. Only a few inches, but far enough to make it clear that I needed to listen before I was going to get my hands on the machine.

“You have a connection, and a guest log-in routed through one of the administrative offices,” he said. “We can’t spoof it forever, but we should be able to get you about twenty minutes without raising any red flags. Please don’t run any open searches on phrases that might get the attention of our firewall.”

“Like what?” I asked. “Governmental corruption? Conspiracy to defraud the American people? Cloning?”

“Yes,” he said, without a trace of irony. “That’s a
good initial list of things to avoid. Don’t log into any e-mail accounts with your name on them. Don’t—”

“I promise I’ve used other people’s networks before, and I’ve never managed to get anyone arrested when I wasn’t trying to,” I said, and reached for the laptop again. “We’re all trying to trust each other here. For me, the last step to trusting you is seeing that I have a clear connection. For you, the last step to trusting me is seeing that I won’t abuse it. So I guess we both start getting what we want when you let me have that computer, huh?”

Gregory chuckled and pushed the laptop toward me. “You’re definitely feeling better if you’re trying to use logic against me.”

“That’s me. Only rational when I’m not being cut open and dissected for the amusement of others.” I took the laptop, breathing slowly through my nose to keep my hands from shaking as I opened it. The screen sprang to life, displaying a stark white background with the CDC logo in the center. I let my fingers rest against the keys, breathing unsteadily out. “Oh, wow.”

“Maybe we only trust you because we don’t have any other choice, but we
do
trust you, Georgia.” Gregory touched my shoulder, causing me to look up. He smiled. “Let’s try and earn it from each other.”

I nodded. “I’ll do my best,” I said. And then I bent my head and started to type, and Gregory didn’t matter anymore.

His warning about avoiding my e-mail was smart, if unnecessary: Anyone who’s never worked professionally in Internet news would probably assume the first thing a journalist would do was go for their inbox. He was right, in a way. He was also wrong. All the public-facing e-mail addresses—the ones that fed into the
customary webmail interfaces—were basically dummy accounts, feeding their contents into the true inboxes behind the After the End Times firewall system that Buffy had designed. The only time we ever needed to use those boxes directly was when we were somewhere that didn’t allow for logging all the way into the system. Even if I only had twenty minutes, I had plenty of time to make it that far.

The first place I went was an online game site, the sort of thing that’s been killing productivity in offices everywhere since the first computer was invented. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised when the browser autofilled the URL after I’d entered only the first three letters. Not even the CDC is immune to the lure of brightly colored graphics and simplistic puzzles. The site presented a list of options, all with cute, easily marketed names and icons designed to catch the eye. I scrolled to the bottom.

“What are you doing?” asked Gregory.

“Not all computers have shell access these days, and any site that’s obviously designed to be secure might as well have a big red label on it, flashing ‘Oh, hey, look over here; people do things they don’t want you to know about when they’re over here,’ ” I said. The last icon on the list of games was a comparatively drab cartoon atom. I clicked on it. “So we have back doors, for those times when we need to get in, but don’t have access to the normal equipment.”

“And one of your back doors involves a game site?”

“Buffy designed their security.” I smiled as the “loading” bar appeared on my browser. “Buffy designed a lot of people’s security. She hid things all over the damn Internet.”

“Well, I wish she were here,” said Gregory.

“Yeah. So do I.” The menu appeared, giving a list of
options. I clicked a set of five that would have resulted in an unplayable game if I’d actually been trying to play, and hit
START
. The screen froze.

“Did it crash?” asked Gregory.

“Are you going to watch over my shoulder the whole time I’m online?”

“Yes. We’re still in the ‘earning trust’ phase, remember?”

“Right. No, it didn’t crash. This is what’s supposed to happen.” I tapped the space bar twice. “If I were a casual player who’d just chosen a bad set of options, this is where I’d reload and try again. Since I’m not, this is where we wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“Wait for that.” The browser flickered and vanished, replaced by blackness. A log-in window appeared, floating in the middle of the screen.

U
SER
N
AME
? it prompted.

N
ANCY
, I typed.

“Nancy?” asked Gregory.

“Remember how I said Buffy did our security programming? Well, Buffy was a pre-Rising media nut.”