Blackout (38 page)

The fence was only a few yards farther away than I expected; our map was accurate, if not precise. That was a good sign for the rest of the job. I tossed one of the bridging cords to Becks, jerking my chin toward the fence. She nodded, and we approached together, waving for Mahir to stay back. He didn’t argue.

I told you he was a smart guy when I hired him
, said George.

I held up one finger toward Becks. She nodded, holding up two fingers of her own. When we were both holding up three fingers, we leaned forward and snapped the bridging cords into place. A bright blue spark arced through them, and the air was suddenly filled with the hot, burning tang of ozone. Becks squeaked, and all the hair on my arms stood on end.

Slowly, I reached forward and wrapped my fingers through the links of fence between the cords. Nothing happened. Our bridge was successful; the current was
no longer routing through this patch of fencing. I gestured for the others to come closer and pulled a pair of wire cutters out of my coat pocket.

It took only a minute, maybe less, for me to cut through the fence separating the Seattle CDC from the abandoned fields behind it. Then we were onto the manicured expanse of their lawn, running for the building, waiting for the sirens to start going off.

They never did.

I never thought of myself as a coward before all this. I actually thought I was kinda brave. Choosing to live in the middle of nowhere, where I could be attacked at any moment. But I was lying to myself. I was never brave at all.

I also wasn’t nearly as stupid as the people I love tend to be. So I suppose that’s something to reassure me as I wave from the window while they all march off to die. God, Buffy, why did you have to hire me? I could have worked for some other site. I would never have gone through any of this. And if you had to hire me—if God insisted—why did you have to go off and leave me to deal with all of it alone?

—From
Dandelion Mine
, the blog of Magdalene Grace Garcia, August 1, 2041. Unpublished.

Hey, George. Check this out.

—From
Adaptive Immunities
, the blog of Shaun Mason, August 1, 2041. Unpublished.

E
ither Dr. Kimberley and her team were monitoring me or their timing was uncannily good, because no one came into the room until I was done crying. I was drying my tears on the sleeve of my shirt when two of the technicians stepped through the door, arguing with each other in low, urgent voices. Neither of them looked in my direction.

“Hi,” I said, just in case they didn’t know I was there.

“Hello, Miss Mason,” said the female technician, waving. I still couldn’t see her face, but I recognized her voice. Kathleen. “Is everything all right?”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but things have been worse.” I stood, the muscles in my calves protesting the movement. I’d been sitting still for too long. Everything had started to stiffen up. “Ow, damn.” I bent double, kneading the muscle of my left calf with both hands.

That’s probably why the first bullet missed me.

The shooter was using a silencer. There was a muted bang, too soft to be a proper gunshot, and the technician
who entered with Kathleen staggered back, slamming into the wall. A red stain was already spreading across the chest of his formerly pristine white lab coat. He looked down at it before raising his head and looking at me, mouth forming a word he couldn’t quite push all the way out into the world. It was George.

It took the sound of his body hitting the floor to make me start moving. In my experience, once a person goes down, they don’t
stay
down for long, and when they get back up, they tend to be more interested in eating the flesh of the living than they are in finding out who shot them. I darted forward, grabbing Kathleen’s wrist and yanking her away from the body.

“Come on!” I shouted.

“What?” She looked toward me, eyes wide and terrified. “George—”

“Is dead! Now, let’s get out of here before he decides to wake up and make
us
dead, too! I’ve been dead; you wouldn’t enjoy it!” I dragged her toward the door on the opposite side of the room, somehow managing to babble and shout at the same time.

The second shot was as quiet as the first. Kathleen suddenly collapsed, the dead weight of her body pulling her hand out of mine. I turned, looking back at her, and at the hole in the middle of her forehead like a third, unseeing eye. Unlike George, she wouldn’t be rising. A shot to the head kills humans and zombies the same way: stone dead.

Suddenly aware of how exposed I was—and how
alone
I was—I drew my own gun and ran out of the room as fast as my legs would carry me. Gregory was in the hall outside, running toward the room that I was running away from.

“They’re both dead!” I shouted. “What’s going on?”

“We’re blown!” He put on a burst of speed, closing the distance between us. He grabbed my wrist, turned, and ran back the way he’d come, hauling me the way I’d been hauling Kathleen right before she was shot.

Sick terror lanced through me as I struggled to keep up. “Is it my fault?”

“Not unless you called down a full security team while you were trying to get through to the outside world.” Gregory didn’t slow down. “Save your breath. I don’t know how long we’re going to need to run.”

I didn’t answer. I just ran. Terror had my body flooded with enough adrenaline that I wasn’t in danger of falling down from a cramp in the immediate future. That was the good part. The bad part—aside from the unidentified shooter or shooters—was that I wasn’t out of shape so much as I had never been
in
shape. My mind remembered hours of exercise, both in the gym and in the field. My body had less than two months of experience. Not the sort of thing that builds endurance. My lungs were already starting to burn, signaling worse things to come.

A door slammed open ahead of us, and Dr. Kimberley appeared, signaling frantically with one hand. The other hand was out of sight. “This way!” she hissed. Her normally perfect hair was in disarray, and there were spots of blood on the sleeve of her lab coat. Whether it was hers or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell.

Gregory changed angles, still hauling me along. She stepped to the side, letting us run past her into the narrow hall on the other side of the door. As soon as we were through, she stepped back and pulled her hand away from the sensor to the left of the doorframe. The door promptly slammed, the light above it switching from green to red.

“Report,” she said briskly, turning toward the wall. She pried open what looked like a section of paneling to reveal a control panel. Not looking at us, she started typing.

“At least two shooters, at least three technicians down.”

“Kathleen and George,” I panted. I slumped against the wall, bracing my hands on my knees. There was blood on my slippers; Kathleen’s blood. I kicked them off, shuddering. “They’re both down.”

“Dammit.” Dr. Kimberley kept typing. “They’ve been with me for years—how many people do we still have in there?”

“Seven,” said Gregory. I didn’t like the resignation in his voice. “At this point, they’re locked in with two armed hostiles and at least one risen infected. Sorry, Danika, but I think we have to call this mission compromised.”

“And it was going so
well
,” she said, with a note of mock peevishness. She stopped typing and pressed her palm against the control panel’s testing pad. “Do we know how they made us?”

“James didn’t report for his shift. Given the timing, we have to assume he was a mole, and had been waiting for the opportunity to report back. We’ve been too busy for the last several days for anyone to sneak away unnoticed.”

“Remind me to punch myself in the mouth for agreeing to take anyone who didn’t come with me from the Maryland lab,” said Dr. Kimberley. She pulled her hand away from the test pad. “They haven’t changed the biometrics yet. I’d move back if I were you.”

Not being a fool, I straightened and took a step backward. Gregory and Dr. Kimberley did the same. A
metal shield dropped from the ceiling between us and the door, slamming down with enough force that it was easy to picture anything caught between it and the floor getting smashed flat. “Decontamination procedures initiated,” announced a calm, robotic voice. “Decontamination commencing in ten… nine…”

“Run!” shouted Gregory. He grabbed my hand and we were off again, racing down the hall. Dr. Kimberley pulled up next to us, her high-heeled shoes swinging from her left hand. That was smart of her. She would never have been able to keep up with them on.

An alarm blared, drowning out the calmly counting voice of the security system. I barely heard Gregory swearing. My heart skipped a beat as I saw the red lights clicking on all along the hall in front of us.

“Dammit, Danika! You triggered a full lab decon!”

“I did no such thing! Someone’s playing silly buggers with the security protocols!” She sounded frantic. I didn’t blame her. I wasn’t sure what a full lab decon entailed, but I knew enough about CDC procedures to know it wouldn’t be anything good.

Gregory snarled something I couldn’t quite make out. It sounded profane, whatever it was. He let go of my hand, apparently trusting me to run on my own, and began removing his lab coat. He didn’t slow down. I stumbled a little, but kept running, aided by Dr. Kimberley’s hand on my back.

“Here!” Gregory turned, now running backward as he thrust the coat into my hands. “Danika! Give her your shoes!”

“Right!” Dr. Kimberley shoved her shoes at me. I took them without thinking about what I was doing. “If you make it out of here, get in touch with Dr. Joseph Shoji. He’ll help.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “We’re all getting out of here!”

Gregory smiled sadly. “No,” he said. “We’re not.” Then he stopped running, grabbing my arm and jerking me to a halt as he pulled the ID card from his pocket. He swiped it over the sensor pad of the nearest door, which slid immediately open.

“Override,” said Dr. Kimberley approvingly. “Nice one.”

“I thought so,” he said, and shoved me through the open door. Another of those metal shields slammed down a split second later, shutting them both from view. It was thick enough that it also cut off the sound of the alarms, leaving me in a sudden, almost shocking silence. I stared at the blank wall of steel in front of me for several precious seconds as I tried to process what had just happened.

There was a full decontamination cycle starting on the other side of that wall. And the only two people I knew were on my side were on the other side of it.

Okay, see the problem here? It’s one of scale. That’s all. It’s like math. Evil math. Take five bloggers, split them into three groups, and scatter them along the West Coast of the United States. Impose a radio silence. Start the apocalypse. Now, if Blogger A starts trying to contact Blogger B, using a secure DSL connection from Lab X, how long before Blogger A has a full-blown nervous breakdown?

Just wondering.

—From
The Kwong Way of Things
, the blog of Alaric Kwong, August 1, 2041. Unpublished.

RISE UP WHILE YOU CAN.

—Graffiti from inside the Florida disaster zone, picture published under Creative Commons license.

T
his isn’t right.” Becks watched the door, pistol drawn. “There should be more security.”

“Maybe there’s something going on.” I kept most of my attention on my phone. I had a scanner running, checking for security frequencies that might give away our location. “Mahir? How’s it looking?”

“The booster should be online in a few more seconds.” He was on his back on the floor, using magnetic clasps to affix the Cat’s equipment to the bottom of a server rack. “I still feel odd about this whole thing. I think this is the first actual
crime
I’ve committed for you people.”

“We’ll put it on your résumé,” Becks said dryly.

“And we’re good.” Mahir pushed himself away from the server rack and stood, dusting off his still-immaculate pants. “That should work until they find it. Which will be never if that woman is half as good as she believes herself to be.”