Deadline (55 page)

“Some things always do,” I said, putting my mug down. I wasn’t thirsty anymore. “Alaric? You okay, buddy?”

“The updates to the Wall started this morning,” he said. Tears ran down his cheeks as he turned to look at me. He didn’t bother wiping them away. Maybe he knew that drying his face wouldn’t be enough to make the crying stop. “My little sister posted for our parents and our brother. Dorian shot our parents, and Alisa shot Dorian, after he’d started to turn. I always knew getting her shooting lessons for her birthday was a good idea, even if Mother wanted her to take dance classes.”

I winced. “Fuck, Alaric, I’m—”

“Did it help you when I said I was sorry George died?”

Everyone said they were sorry when George died,
even the Masons. And not a single apology had made a damn bit of difference. “No. It didn’t help.”

“Then don’t say it.” He looked back to his computer. “The forums are exploding. We’re one of the only major sites that has people actually responding to queries.”

“That’s because we don’t know anything.”

“That’s not entirely true,” said Mahir. “We know the outbreak started when Tropical Storm Fiona made landfall—and that it spread with the storm.
Only
with the storm.”

“Wait, what?”

“All the index cases have matched up with the initial footprint of the storm.”

I stared at him. What he was saying didn’t make sense. An outbreak starting when a major storm hit was reasonable, if horrifying. Storms cause devastation, they cause injuries, and they can cause a hell of a lot of cross-contamination. There have been documented cases of someone being injured in a major storm, only to have the wind carry their infected blood onto a bystander before anyone knew what was happening. But that outbreak would be geographically contained, and even though it would be horrible, it wouldn’t be anything unique enough to cause the sort of devastation they were showing on the news.

If the live state of the virus had gone airborne, it would be reasonable to assume that it would spread with the storm. It would also spread
without
the storm, and while its initial footprint might have been defined by Fiona, it wouldn’t stay that way. If this was a purely airborne outbreak, it should have been breaking out of any containment not defined through a complete absence of uninfected bodies.

“Wait…” I said again, slow dread worming its way
into my stomach. I hadn’t realized I still had the capacity to be frightened. Somehow, it wasn’t a welcome discovery. “Alaric, your sister. You said she posted to the Wall. Is she all right?”

“She’s scared out of her mind, and she’s alone in the attic of the family condo, but she’s physically fine.” Alaric looked up, expression challenging me to say something as he added, “She’s using the company server to chat with me.”

“Good. Make sure she has a log-in of her own. If she wants to coauthor reports with you on what’s going on out there, use your own discretion, but I say let her. It may take her mind off things until she’s evacuated. Can you ask her a question for me?”

Alaric eyed me suspiciously. “What do you want me to ask?”

“Ask whether any of them had been outside since the start of the storm.” The idea that was unfolding in the back of my head wasn’t a pleasant one. It also wasn’t one that I could categorically ignore.

Alaric frowned. “I don’t think—”

“Please.”

He hesitated, then turned back to his computer and began to type. Mahir and Becks looked up from their respective tasks, watching him. Maggie continued to chatter in the background for a few minutes more before saying her good-byes and walking over to stand beside me. “What’s going on?”

I gestured toward the still-typing Alaric. “Alaric’s asking his sister a question for me.”

“The one in Florida?” She gave me a sidelong look. “That seems a little…”

“I know how it seems. But it’s important.”

“All right,” said Alaric. “Alisa says Dad was the first
to… he was the first to get sick, and he went outside just after the storm started, to bring in the recycling bins before they could blow away.”

“Did she say whether anyone else went outside before they got sick?”

“No. I mean, no, no one else went outside. Mother was trying to make Dad feel better—no one really understood what was happening; Kellis-Amberlee doesn’t
transmit
like that—when he bit her. Dorian tried to separate them, and Dad bit him, too.”

“So only your father went outside, and only your father got sick without a recognizable vector?”

Alaric was starting to scowl. “
Yes
. I just told you that.”

Becks and Mahir kept looking at me blankly. It was Maggie—daughter of pharmaceutical magnates, fan of bad horror movies, the girl who’d grown up steeped in the medical community—whose eyes widened with a shocked horror that perfectly mirrored my own. “You can’t be serious.”

“I wish I weren’t.” I could feel George at the back of my head again, watching the proceedings. I moved to grab a Coke out of the fridge as I said, “Alaric, tell your sister to close all the windows she can get to, and not to open the door for
anyone
. How long is it to sunrise there? Another five hours or so?”

He nodded mutely.

“Okay. If I’m right—and let’s all hope I’m not—it should get a little safer after the sun comes up.” I started for the door back to the living room.

“Hey!” Becks hlf rose. “Where are you going?”

Maggie didn’t look at her. She just kept watching me, suddenly paler than I’d ever seen her. “He’s going to go send an e-mail, aren’t you, Shaun?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I am. Mahir, hold the fort, keep everybody working—and if anybody sounds off from the hazard zones, tell them to stay inside and close the windows. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

No one else spoke up as I left the kitchen; no one but George.
How sure are you?
she asked, voice tight.

“Sure enough to know that I’d give just about anything to be wrong.” I stepped over piles of bulldogs on my way to the house terminal, where I sat and tapped the keyboard to wake the computer from its slumber. “But I don’t think I am wrong. That’s the problem. I really don’t think I am.”

I’m sorry.

I laughed, a little wildly. “Times like this, I really wish you weren’t dead, you know. When you were alive, I could count on you to think of these things first. Then I got to sit back looking shocked, and let you do all the doom-saying.”

Sorry my deadness is inconveniencing you.

“Don’t worry about it. It was probably my turn to do the shit jobs.” I logged in and called up my e-mail client, ignoring the multiple messages flashing
Urgent
as I scanned for a single sender. She wasn’t there.

“Damn,” I sighed, and opened a new message window. I paused long enough to be sure that I wanted to do this and, when no other ideas presented themselves, began to type.

I clicked Send and sat back in my chair, leaving my hands resting limp against the keyboard. More mail was pouring into my client. The view refreshed every few seconds as things passed the filters and landed in my in-box, their subject lines screaming for attention. For the most part, I ignored them. I was waiting for an answer, not another death notice or demand for information.

You really think it’s insects?

“I don’t think anything else has this kind of distribution pattern.” One of the few saving graces of Kellis-Amberlee has always been the fact that it’s a very hands-on virus. Unless you’re in the unfortunate two percent of the population at risk for spontaneous amplification, you have to either die or get bitten by someone who’s been infected before you have a problem. Giving it any sort of a distance-based vector changed the entire game… but it was still a speed killer, taking over bodies and rewriting instincts in a matter of hours. With modern quarantine procedures and our constant, comfortable societal paranoia, even an airborne strain could be controlled.

But an insect vector changed everything. Just ask the people living in parts of the world where malaria is still a problem. Ten-dollar mosquito nets can save entire families from a slow, agonizing death—assuming they don’t get torn. Or stolen. Or left ever so slightly ajar one night, allowing one tiny bug to slip unnoticed through the mesh and deliver a stinging bite filled with microscopic death. But malaria’s a parasitic infection. That’s part of why it does so well with the whole mosquito gig. It’s little and it’s quick and it’s very well-suited to the life cycle it’s evolved for. Kellis-Amberlee is a huge, unwieldy virus, microscopically speaking,
and it doesn’t have the flexibility of malaria. Marburg Amberlee provided most of the structure when it combined with the Kellis flu strain, and it was a filovirus. They’re
big
. So I had to be wrong. I had to be totally off-base, taking swipes at shadows. I just needed Dr. Abbey to tell me that, so we could move on to looking for answers in someplace a little bit more realistic.

Shaun?
George sounded almost timid for a change. She didn’t like this theory any more than I did.
Check your mail.

I allowed my eyes to focus on the screen. The top item in my in-box was from an e-mail address I recognized all too well, and it was flagged
Urgent.
The little status marker was blinking bright red, which meant every possible “read this immediately” switch had been flipped, some of them maybe more than once. I took a breath, sent a silent prayer to anyone who might be listening, and opened the message.

For a long moment, everything was silent.

Oh,
said George, finally.
I guess that answers that.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it does.”