Deadline (18 page)
Authors: Mira Grant
Tags: #Fiction, #Horror, #Dystopian, #Science Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #FIC028000
“I don’t understand.” She shook her head, looking perplexed. “This is our chance to go to ground. Why aren’t we doing it?”
“And where would we go? Canada? We’re not going to get any answers there. I trust Maggie’s system to keep us off the grid, and whoever arranged to have Oakland deleted is going to have trouble sweeping it under the rug if they pull it a second time. I know my job, okay?” I tapped the side of my head, smile fading. “I’ve got a few brain cells still working up here.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t start. My mood stays better if you don’t start.” I turned to the keyboard. The terminal turned itself on as soon as its sensors “saw” me looking at it, and I typed my password to unlock the home network.
“Noted,” she said. She didn’t sound like she approved, but at the moment, that was at the bottom of my priority list.
“Good.” All Maggie’s computer equipment was top of the line. Having parents with money and Buffy Meissonier as your original technical consultant will do that. “I spent a few hours after the rest of you went to bed going through those files you brought us last night. Didn’t understand half of what I was reading, but George managed to explain some of it for me.”
Kelly’s expression went very still, like she was fighting an inner battle to keep herself from pointing out that George couldn’t explain anything, because, guess
what, George was dead. I’ve seen that look a lot since the funeral. As long as she could keep herself from saying anything, I could keep myself from getting angry that she’d want to.
“Really,” she said finally, in a neutral tone that could have meant just about anything.
Good enough for me. “Really,” I confirmed. “What I’m curious about is the list of labs. How many of those are going to be safe for us to visit? Where can we go to get the fieldwork side of the equation?” Kelly’s files gave us numbers, but they didn’t give us the rest of the picture. If we were going to understand, we needed to talk to someone who could confirm or contest the data—and if the CDC had been steered away from researching the reservoir conditions for as long as Kelly said, the labs on our list might have pieces of the puzzle we didn’t even know existed yet.
“All the labs on list A are ones with head researchers a member of the team worked with directly at some point, either before or after they went into the private sector,” she said, sounding much more relaxed now that she was dealing with verified facts instead of crazy reporters. “List B contains the labs where someone had personal experience with the supporting researchers, but not the head of the lab, and list C is made up of the labs where we had only secondhand information on the people working there. Reputations, credentials, whether or not they bothered to check their sources…”
“What about list D?” My hands were moving as we spoke, spewing out line after line of borderline coherent claptrap. It was the day after a death. We’d be expected to update—nothing was going to get us out of that, not even actually dying; George’s blog may have changed names when she died, but her backlog of files meant
she missed less than a week. That didn’t mean we were expected to be profound.
“Ah.” Kelly’s tone was disapproving enough that I actually glanced toward her. Her lips were pursed into a tight moue of distaste. “That would be the labs where the researchers have been confirmed as following less than ethical paths in their research.”
“What, vivisection? Human test subjects?” I pressed Post on my first entry of the day, switched from my own feed to the administrative, and started typing again as I asked, “Full-body cloning?”
“It’s different when the CDC does it,” she said sharply. “We have a dispensation.”
“So?” I shrugged, continuing to type. “That doesn’t make it right. Hnt siany of the labs on list D would have been on list A if you weren’t being judgmental?”
Kelly sighed. “Two, at most.”
“Okay. Either of them anywhere near here?”
There was a horrified pause as she realized what I was asking. “Shaun, you don’t understand! These people were blacklisted from reputable scientific circles for a lot of reasons, and not all of them were as petty as you seem to think! These are not the secret heroes of some underground resistance against the evil CDC—they’re bioterrorists and crazy people, and they’re
dangerous
. We could get seriously hurt if we go to them. We could get
killed
.”
“And we could get killed if we stay here. I’m not seeing a difference in results.” I picked up George’s Coke and took another swig. “Your objections are noted. Can any of these people be trusted? At all? Or do I just pick one at random and hope they aren’t on the Frankenstein end of the ‘mad doctor’ scale?”
Kelly swallowed, throat working as she struggled
against some clear inner impulse not to answer. Finally she said, “Dr. Abbey. I read some of the work she did on reservoir conditions before she went off the grid. I think she’d be able to help us.”
“Fine. Where is she?”
She sighed. “Portland, Oregon.”
“That’s a five- or six-hour drive if we take the direct route,” I said, sipping again from the can. “Annoying, but manageable. What was the big crime that got them blacklisted?”
“Unethical experiments involving the manipulation of the viral structure of Kellis-Amberlee. None involving human subjects, thank God, or she and her staff would be in federal prison for the rest of their lives.”
“I’m surprised they aren’t in federal prison anyway. How much blackmail material did she have?”
“Enough.” Kelly shook her head. “I don’t know much—it was all before my time—but she worked for Health Canada. Joint research team, theirs and ours. Some bad things happened, and she quit. Ever since then, she’s been pretty careful about who she lets get anywhere near her or her research.”
“Better watch out, Doc. That sounded almost like respect.”
“I like people who are serious about their work.” She shrugged. “Dr. Abbey was devoted to figuring out Kellis-Amberlee.”
“Somebody has to be.” I swung back around to the keyboard. “Better go see if Maggie’s got something you can wear, Doc. We’re going on another road trip.”
We made it out of Oakland alive. I’m still not sure how we did it, except that my team is made up of some of the best people I’ve ever known, and I don’t deserve them. I keep making it out of places alive. I think the universe is fucking with me.
I did something during the evacuation that yu shouldn’t ever do. I went back for George’s black box. I’d do it again, too. Because there’s already not enough of her left in this world, and I’m running out of things to hold onto.
Fuck, I miss her.
—From
Adaptive Immunities
, the blog of Shaun Mason, April 12, 2041. Unpublished.
Santa Cruz is gorgeous this time of year. I realize it’s a zombie-infested wasteland, but hell, at least the rents are good, right? Besides, there’s a reason this used to be one of the state’s most popular vacation destinations, and I doubt it had very much to do with their boardwalk, no matter what the old tourism brochures try to tell you.
We’re still working on getting Alaric ready for his field trials. Next up, Becks is going to take him down to the beach and see if they can find a zombie seal to poke at. Never a dull moment around here. Oh, well. It’s better than a desk job.
—From
Adaptive Immunities
, the blog of Shaun Mason, April 12, 2041
M
aggie didn’t look
happy
about being sent off to outfit the Doc, but she did it; that was really all I could ask of her. I stayed in the living room, getting a few posts up on the site and making it clear that we’d been nowhere near Oakland when the bombs came down. While I was at it, I surfed over to the medical blogs to see what they had to say about the “death” of Dr. Kelly Connolly. With the way they were going on about her—lost scion of one of the CDC’s proudest heritage families, rising young star of the virology world—you’d think she’d been on the verge of curing Kellis-Amberlee, not just slaving in the CDC salt mines with the rest of the peons.
That’s the power of good press,
said George dryly.
I chuckled, and got back to work.
Alaric came into the room with a half-eaten piece of toast in one hand as I was firing off an e-mail to authorize the continuing sale of Dave’s merchandise line. “Did you see the crime scene photos on the gossip sites?” he asked. I nodded. He continued: “This is, like,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
levels of scary. I always
knew cloning technology was better than we saw here on the fringes, but the CDC employs the best doctors in the world, and even they couldn’t tell it was a clone.”
“Could be worse.”
“How?”
“I have no idea. But it can always be worse.” I glanced toward the kitchen door. “Where’s Becks?”
“She’s helping Maggie with Dr. Connolly.” He took a bite of toast, sitting down at p>
“I always knew she was smart.”
Alaric grunted as he logged on and started working the message boards. I leaned over to “supervise,” which really meant “look over his shoulder, drinking a Coke and pretending to pay attention.” He ignored me. I took his tendency to shut me out while he worked personally at first, until George assured me that he’d always done the same thing to her. He was just one of those people who really liked to focus on his work.
I love how you ignore the inherent impossibility of me telling you something you didn’t already know,
George said.
“Don’t start with me,” I said, and took another drink of Coke. That’s normally enough to shut her up for a little while. When that doesn’t work, I zone out in front of the news feeds. Comforting for her, educational for me. Everybody wins.
It’s true.
“It’s a shitty thing to say and you know it.”
Alaric ignored my conversation with the air. He learned the hard way that sometimes it was best to turn a blind eye. During our first few months in the office, he asked who I was talking to every time I forgot and answered George aloud, and he pointed out that she was dead more than once. He stopped after I finally lost
my temper and introduced my fist to his face, resulting in skinned knuckles on my part and a broken nose on his. He still flinches if I move too fast. Guess I can’t blame him. If my boss were a potentially crazy man with a mean right hook, I’d probably be a little jumpy, too.
The title of one of the threads caught my eye. I leaned forward, tapping Alaric’s screen. “There. Can you expand that thread?”
“Sure.” He clicked the header line:
CDC Safety Precautions Insufficient?
“I don’t see what it has to do with—”
“Just scroll.”
“Right,” he said, and started scrolling.
The thread started as a discussion of the break-in at the Memphis CDC and devolved into a discussion of CDC security precautions over the course of half a dozen posts. As I’d hoped, the posters quickly started naming names, citing every CDC doctor, intern, affiliate, and publicity person to have died during the last eighteen months. “Alaric, can you grab the names of the deceased and start calling up obituaries and circumstance-of-death reports? If anyone looks at you funny, you can say you’re basing a report off this thread.”
“Sure,” he said, warming to the idea as he saw where I was going with it. “I can do you one better. I still have a few of Buffy’s old worms live and functional. I’ll set one of them digging for connections between the deceased employees, Kelly Connolly, Joseph Wynne, and any other unusual or unexplained deaths in their circle of friends.”
“Just don’t get caught or traced and you can do whatever you want.”
“Awesome.” Alaric bent d, starting to type.
He had the same focus I’ve seen from George, Rick, and every other Newsie I’ve ever met. I could probably have danced naked on his desk without getting him to do more than grunt and shove me out of the way of his screen. Content that I’d done something useful, I got up and walked to the kitchen. A fresh Coke would keep me from thinking too hard about the tools he was using to do the job.
There are people who say that Kellis-Amberlee and its undead side effects are going to bring about the end of the human race. I tend to disagree with this perspective. I’m pretty sure that if the zombies were going to destroy humanity, they would’ve done it back in 2014, when they first showed up. I think that if anything destroys the human race at this point, it’s going to be the human race itself.
