Deadline (30 page)

Call for help!

“What?” I gasped, still running. Becks shot me a look. I shook my head, and she returned her attention to the serious business of running for her goddamn life.

You have a phone!
Think,
Shaun!

It was hard to focus on running and think about what George was trying to tell me at the same time. She was always the smart one, and that’s held true even now that she’s nothing but a ghost in my machine. I struggled to make sense of her words, and nearly stumbled as it hit me.

“Oh, mother
fuck,
” I said, causing Becks to shoot me another sharp look. “Becks, I need you to buy us some time. Don’t worry about the interest rates.”

“Got it,” she said, obedience winning out over confusion. She turned to face the direction of the moaning, still pacing me down the hall. If she tripped, it was all over, but that didn’t seem to bother her. Her hands
were steady as she pulled a ball-shaped object from her belt. The motion was followed by the distinctive sound of a pin being pulled, and then she flung the grenade in the direction of the moaning. She whipped around as soon as she let go, grabbing me by the arm. It was her turn to haul me down the hall, and she did it wne-chillindmirable force.
“Run!”

I ran.

The grenade Becks had thrown exploded about six seconds later. It wasn’t a big enough boom to come with a back draft but it was big enough to fill the hall briefly with light. I risked a glance back over my shoulder. The walls were burning. That should be enough to slow the infected for at least a little while. “Cover me,” I said.

Becks nodded, slowing enough to let me pull a few feet in front of her before speeding up again, holding a position about a foot and a half behind me. I felt like a total shit putting her between me and the danger we knew, but I needed the breathing space. It might be the one thing that could save us.

Fumbling an ear cuff from my jacket pocket without dropping my flashlight wasn’t easy, especially not at a dead run. Somehow, I managed. I slammed the ear cuff into place, pressing the Call button as I snapped, “Secure connection, command line ‘Hi, honey, I’m home,’ open channel to Alaric Kwong.”

The ear cuff beeped. For a long, undying moment, the only sounds were footsteps, harsh, exhausted breathing, the distant moans of the infected, and the overstrained beating of my heart. We couldn’t run forever. Eventually, the kill chute was going to close, and if we were in the wrong place when that happened…

The ear cuff beeped again as Alaric came on the line:
“Secure connection confirmed, please verify your identity before I hang up on you.”

“Fuck you, Alaric, I don’t have the
time
to remember some stupid code word.” That was a lie: “some stupid code word” was the current call sign. If the CDC was recording, which they probably were, this might make them think our security wasn’t as good as it really was. I could hope, anyway. “We’re in a little bit of trouble here. Is the Doc there?”

“Shaun? Why are you breathing like that? What’s—”

“I need you to put the Doc on the line
right fucking now,
Alaric, or you’re getting a goddamn field promotion! Am I making myself clear, here, or do I need to get footage of the zombies trying to eat our asses?”

“I’ll get her,” said Alaric. The line beeped again, going silent.

Becks pulled up almost even with me. Sweat was adding that new-penny shine to her cheeks. “What are you
doing
?”

“CDC installs are all built on the same basic floor plan, right?” Another T-junction came into view ahead of us, my flashlight barely illuminating it enough to give us warning before we hit the wall.

“Right, but—”

“Doc gets us out or we’re dead, Becks.” The moaning from behind us was still getting louder, and that wall was getting closer. “Keep running!”

The ear cuff beeped, and Kelly’s hesitant voice took the place of the silence, asking, “Shaun? Is that really you?”

“In a pickle, Doc! Zombies are chasing hrough the Portland CDC, and we need out before we’re on the menu! There’s a T ahead of us—which way do we go?”

I had to give Kelly this: She recovered damn fast to
what must have seemed like a totally random question. “Have you already passed a T-junction?”

“Yes! We went right!”

“You went—damn. Okay. At the T ahead, take the left, and try the third door you pass. Is the place in lockdown yet?”

“Do you mean ‘Are the lights all fucking out, and did half the doors go amber before the power failed’? Because then yeah, we’re in lockdown!” I grabbed Becks by the wrist, hauling her along as I veered left. “What kind of door?”

“Same size as the rest, but it should open when you push it.”

One door flashed by on our right, followed about six feet later by a second door, this one on the left. I slowed to keep from overshooting the third door and grabbed for the knob, all too aware of the advantage I was throwing to our opponents if Kelly was wrong. The zombies weren’t going to slow down just to keep the playing field even.

The knob turned without any resistance and the door swung inward, nearly spilling me—and by extension, Becks—into a pantry-sized room with glowing amber tubes running all along the edges of the ceiling, like supersized versions of the portable field light. I recovered my balance and stumbled fully into the room, thrusting Becks behind me before slamming the door shut. There were three old-fashioned deadbolts on the inside, the kind of things that can never go down, not even in a power failure. I slid all three of them into the closed and locked position before I’d even finished processing the impulse to do it.

“Shaun?” Kelly’s voice was strident enough to make me wince. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

“We’re in some sort of weird closet.” I backed away from the door, keeping my pistol trained just above the knob. If the infected started trying to batter their way inside, I’d make them pay for every inch they gained.

“Are the lights red, yellow, or green?”

“Yellow.” It was close enough to the truth, and closer than either of the other options.

Kelly sighed in obvious relief. “That means the security system is engaged, but you’re not in one of the sections already locked down. The door is soundproof, scent-proof, and splatter-proof, so as long as everyone inside is clean, you should be okay.”

“As long as we don’t mind dying like rats in a cage, you mean. How do we get
out
of here, Doc?”

“There should be a door directly opposite the one you came in through.”

The wall was blank and featureless. “No door.”

“Touch the wall.”

“What?”

not iJust do it.”

If Kelly was trying to kill us, she wouldn’t have given us a bolt hole. I nodded toward the far wall, saying, “Doc wants us to touch it.”

“Touch it?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything’s better than going back out there.” On this philosophical note, Becks slapped her left palm flat against the wall—which immediately wavered and turned translucent, revealing a second wall behind it. There was a door at the center, twin to the one we’d entered through.

Becks yanked her hand away, swearing loudly. In my ear, Kelly said, “I hear shouting. Do you see the real wall now?”

“You could’ve warned us!” The newly revealed wall included three testing panels, all with reassuringly green lights shining next to them.

“I wasn’t sure it would be there,” said Kelly. Her tone was sincere; either she really meant it, or she was a much better actress than she’d been letting on. “Put your hands against the test panels. You’re going to need to check out as clean if you want the glass to lift. If you’re not…”

If we weren’t, we’d never get out of this room. “Are you sure the tests will work?”

“It’s a secondary system. It doesn’t run off the main grid. If the screen was still in place and the interior lights are on, it should work.”

“I’m trusting you on this one, Doc. Don’t fuck us.” I holstered my pistol and walked over to join Becks at the wall, slapping my hand against one of the testing units. She lifted her eyebrows. I nodded to her, and she mimicked the motion. From her grimace, the needles bit into both of us at the same time. These tests were built for crude effectiveness, not reassurance. They didn’t waste time with any of the niceties like stinging foam or pretest hand sterilizer—or full-sized needles. The feeling of the test engaging was like brushing my palm across the surface of a cactus, all tiny pinprick stings that didn’t hurt because they didn’t last long enough to totally register. They just itched like a sonofabitch.

“Step away from the testing center,” intoned a pleasant female voice.

Becks and I exchanged a look as we took a long step backward. “Doc, the room’s talking,” I reported.

“That’s normal,” she said. Somehow I didn’t find that particularly reassuring.

The lights next to the two units we’d used began to flash through the familiar red-green pattern as the units themselves filtered our blood looking for live viral bodies. There was still no sound from the hall outside, which wasn’t helping. Sure, we knew that we weren’t going to be eaten in the next thirty seconds, but the entire infected staff of the Portland CDC could be out there, and we’d have no idea. Not the sort of thing I really wanted to be thinking about.

Breathe,
said George.

I took a deep breath as the lights nex tin testing units turned a uniform, steady shade of green. “Thank you,” said the female voice. “You may proceed.” The glass slid to one side, vanishing into a groove in the far wall.

“This is your fucking fault, Mason,” growled Becks, starting for the now-accessible door.

“How are you coming to that conclusion?”

“You’re the one who said this was like a pre-Rising video game.”

I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. I didn’t really want to give Kelly any reason to doubt our infection status—not when I still needed her to guide us to safety. “Okay, Doc, the clear wall’s open now. There’s a door. What do you want us to do?”

“Listen closely: You’re in one of the secondary escape corridors. They’re designed to get essential staff out if at all possible, even during an outbreak. They aren’t public, and they’re never used for the transport of biological materials, just evacuations. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

My skin crawled. “They’re set to autosterilize if there’s any sign of contamination, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are. My suggestion?” Kelly paused before
finishing, grimly, “Go as fast as you possibly can. Follow the yellow lights. They’ll lead you to an exit. As long as your infection status hasn’t changed, it’ll let you out.”

“And if it has?”

“If anyone in the escape corridor goes into conversion, the autosterilize initiates.”

“Fuckin’ swell. Okay. Tell Alaric I’ll call back if we’re not dead.” I cut the connection over her protests, yanking the ear cuff off and shoving it into my pocket as I turned to Becks. “We’re pulling a last run. Once this door is open, you haul ass, and if the lava comes down while we’re inside, it was nice knowing you.”

“Got it,” said Becks, with a small, tight nod. It wouldn’t actually be lava. It would be a highly acidic chemical bath, followed by flash irradiation, followed by another chemical bath, until everything organic in the corridor had been reduced to so much inert slime. That sort of thing can’t really happen in places where humans are expected to be on a regular basis, since it tends to render the environment permanently toxic, but for a rarely used, last-ditch exit, it made perfect, if horrible, sense.

I hesitated, and then offered her my hand. “It was nice knowing you, Rebecca,” I said.

“The same, Shaun. Believe me, the same.” She laced her fingers into mine and smiled wistfully. “Maybe when we get out of this alive, you and me can go for coffee or something.”

“Sure,” I said. She didn’t let go of my hand, and I didn’t pull away. Leaving our fingers tangled together like computer cables, I reached for the second door and pulled it open. An amber light clicked on across from us. Becks and I exchanged one final look before step
ping through the doorway, into the relative darkness on the other side.

e door swung shut as soon as we were through, hydraulics engaging with a loud hiss that was almost reassuring. It meant all systems were go; even if those systems got us dissolved, they’d be doing so while fully operational. Another amber light clicked on to the left of the first one, and another, and another, until a line of tiny glittering beacons led the way deeper into the dark.

There was no other way to go, and Kelly’s instructions said to follow the light. We’d trusted her this far. The worst that trusting her the rest of the way could get us was dead. “Come on,” I said. We started in the direction indicated by the lights, moving as fast as we dared.

Distances always seem longer in the dark. The greater the darkness, the longer the distance. The amber lights were meant to guide us, not show us where we were going, and even my flashlight wasn’t enough to beat back the shadows. We probably traveled no more than a few hundred yards, but it felt like ten or twelve times that. Our breath was impossibly loud in the confines of the tunnel, and my toes kept catching on the floor, which wasn’t completely level. After the third time I almost tripped, I realized we were running across the floor of an enormous shower, complete with drains every ten feet. They’d be essential if the CDC ever needed to sluice the place down—say, after melting a few unwanted guests. I sped up, pulling Becks along with me. She didn’t argue. She was smart enough to want out of there as badly as I did.