Blackout

Eighteen

The polite voice of the hotel roused me from my bed shortly before sunrise. I sat up, blinking in disorientation at the opulent room around me—it would have been a suite in any other hotel—before I remembered where I was, swore softly, and got moving.

My clothes were scattered near the bathroom door, under the panel with the light controls. I’d spent almost ten minutes the night before just playing with them, cranking them up to mimic natural sunlight for the seasonally depressed, shifting them into the UV spectrum for the sake of people with retinal Kellis-Amberlee. In the end, I’d gone to sleep with the black lights on and the white-noise generator turned to full. It was almost like being back in Berkeley, before everything changed.

I hadn’t slept that well in a year. Being woken, even gently, felt like a betrayal.

There’d been no discussion of how we’d be getting to the Monkey’s: We just assembled at the van, like all of us being together again was the way things were supposed to be. Mahir got into the front passenger seat, balancing his tablet on his knee. Maggie and Becks took the back, and in the rearview mirror I could see Becks sitting sentry, watching out the rear window for signs of pursuit.

“Where to?” I asked, as I buckled my seat belt.

“I’ve got the directions,” said Mahir, and held up the tablet, showing me a black window with a blinking green cursor in the upper right corner.

I blinked. “What the fuck is that?”

“Our map.” He lowered the tablet, swiping a finger across the bottom to make the keyboard appear. He typed the words “find Monkey” with quick, efficient taps before pressing the ENTER key. The cursor dropped to the next line.

Maggie was peering over the seat at us. I frowned at the tablet, which Mahir was watching with absolute focus. Minutes ticked by.

“Okay,” I said finally. “This is officially stupid. In case you were wondering whether it had the ‘Shaun thinks this is stupid’ seal of approval, it does. Is there a plan B?”

“Yes.” Mahir held up the tablet, showing it to me again. A second line of text had appeared beneath his, with the cursor blinking on a third line now.

EXIT GARAGE, it said.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I grumbled, and started the engine.

“It’s based off a pre-Rising computer game,” said Mahir. “So primitive it’s invisible to most monitoring systems.” He began typing. “At the end of the drive, wave to the guards and turn left. You’ll come to an intersection with a 7-Eleven. When you get there, turn right.”

“Fucking. Kidding. Me,” I said.

At the base of the driveway, we all waved to the guards as we waited for the gate to open. They waved back, apparently accustomed to strange behavior from their eccentric, wealthy clientele.

“Are you sure this is necessary?” I asked, still waving.

“If the directions say to do it, we do it,” said Maggie. “That’s what everyone says. If you don’t listen to the Monkey, he doesn’t meet with you.”

“Let’s hope the directions don’t tell us to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” I muttered, and pulled out onto the street.

The directions did not tell us to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. They did tell us to drive down dead alleys, only to turn around and go back the way we’d come; to drive in circles through residential neighborhoods, probably setting off dozens of security alerts; and to get on and off the freeway six times. It was incredibly annoying. At the same time, I had to admire the Monkey’s style. None of the neighborhoods we drove through had gates or manned security booths. None of the freeway exits we used required blood tests. We might be driving like idiots, but we were driving like idiots without leaving a definite record of where we’d been, or why we’d been there.

We were crossing a bridge that actually floated on the surface of a lake—thankfully, the Monkey hadn’t requested we do anything stupid, like drive into the lake; I would have refused, and then I might have had a mutiny on my hands—when Mahir looked up, eyes wide. “Shaun?”

“What?” I asked. “Are we being followed?”

“No. The directions…” He cleared his throat, looked at the screen, and read, “ ‘Turn on your jamming unit. Tune it to channel eight, or these instructions will cease.’ We don’t have a jamming unit, do we?”

“Actually, funny story—hey, Becks!” I looked at the rearview mirror. She turned, the reflection of her eyes meeting mine. “Put the jammer’s batteries back in and turn it on, will you? The text-based adventure wants us to get scrambled.”

“On it, Boss,” Becks called, and put down her gun.

I hadn’t wanted us to kill the jammer in the Agora parking garage—no matter how upper-crust they were, there were bound to be some things that would upset them. We’d settled for checking it for obvious bugs and removing the battery pack before heading into the hotel. Now I was glad we’d taken that approach. If the Monkey knew we had the jammer, he would probably have been pissed if we’d killed it.

“This guy must think he’s the goddamn Wizard of Oz,” I muttered. “I don’t like being spied on.”

“We’re off to see the Wizard,” chanted Maggie, in a gleeful singsong voice.

“Before you start killing people with joyous abandon, you might like to know that the next batch of directions has arrived,” said Mahir dryly. “Maggie, please don’t antagonize him; he’s had a hard week, and he’s liable to bite.”

“Spoilsport,” said Maggie.

“Thank you,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“At the end of the bridge, turn right,” said Mahir.

There was no joking around after that. Whatever test we’d been taking, we’d apparently passed, because the directions sent us along a straightforward series of increasingly smaller streets, until we were driving down a poorly maintained residential road in one of the oldest parts of Seattle. This was a million miles from the cultivated opulence of the Agora, or even from the reasonably well-maintained Berkeley streets where I grew up. This was a neighborhood where half the houses burned years ago and were never rebuilt, and where the remaining homes were surrounded by the kind of ludicrous fencing that was popular immediately after the Rising, when people were frantically trying to protect themselves from the next attack.

“People still live in places like this?” asked Maggie. Her levity was gone. She stared out the window with wide eyes, looking baffled and horrified at the same time.

I shrugged. “Where else are they gonna go?” The question sounded rhetorical. It wasn’t. There were patches like this in almost every city, tolerated despite their sketchy adherence to the safety requirements, because there was nowhere else to put the people who lived in those slowly collapsing houses. Eventually, they’d all be condemned and razed to the ground. Until that day came, people would do what they always had. They would survive.

“Take the next driveway on the right,” said Mahir. “To be more specific, it says ‘Turn right at the serial killer van.’ ”

“You mean the big white one that looks like it was set on fire at some point?”

“One presumes.”

“One right turn, coming up.” I leaned on the wheel, sending us bumping down a driveway that was, if anything, even less well maintained than the street. It felt like my nuts were going to bounce all the way up to my shoulders. I gritted my teeth, clenching my hands on the wheel as I steered us to a stop in front of the one house on the cul-de-sac that looked like it might still be capable of sustaining life. “Now what?”

“Erm.” Mahir looked up. “Now you and I are to put our hands on the dashboard, and Maggie and Rebecca are to put their hands behind their heads.”

“What?” demanded Becks.

“That’s what it says—oh, wait, there’s another line. ‘Do it, or else Foxy will shoot you until you are very, very, very, exceedingly dead.’ ” He frowned. “That sounds unpleasant.”

“Yeah, and it’ll hurt, too,” said a chipper female voice. It sounded like it was coming from the speaker on Mahir’s tablet. He and I exchanged an alarmed look. The tablet chirped, “Hi! Look in front of you!”

We all looked toward the windshield.

There was a short, slim woman standing in front of the van. The top of her head probably wouldn’t have come higher than my shoulder. That didn’t really matter. The assault rifle she was aiming at the windshield more than made up for any lack of size.

“Ah,” said Mahir. “I believe we’ve found the right place.”

“That, or we’ve found the local loony bin.” I put my hands on the dashboard. “Everybody do what she says. We’re going to go along with this for now.”

“Good call!” chirped the tablet.

“Mason—” said Becks.

“Just chill, okay? They knew we were coming. Let’s do things their way and see what happens.”

One by one, the rest of my team did as we’d been told. Becks was the last to move, sullenly putting her gun down and lacing her fingers behind her head. She glared at me in the rearview mirror the entire time.

Once we were all in position, the girl with the gun half walked, half skipped over to the van, stopping next to the driver’s-side door. She beamed through the glass, blue eyes wide and bright as a kid’s on Christmas morning. Her hair destroyed any illusion of childishness, despite her size. Most kids have bleach-blond hair these days, a sign that their parents are properly respecting security protocols. Her hair was so red it was almost orange, and only the last six inches had been bleached, ending in about an inch of inky black, like the tipping on a fox’s tail.

She tapped the barrel of her gun against the window, gesturing for me to open the door. I did so, moving slowly in case she decided to take offense at the fact that I was moving at all.

“Hi!” she said, once the door was open. She removed her right hand from the gun stock long enough to reach over and tap the skin behind her ear, presumably turning off the transmitter she’d been using to speak through Mahir’s tablet. “I’m the Fox. Welcome to the Brainpan.”

“Uh,” I said slowly. “Nice to meet you?”

“Oh, that’s probably not true,” she said, still with the same manic good cheer. “Why don’t you come inside? The Cat baked bread this morning, and I don’t think it’s poisoned or anything! Also, leave your guns in the car, or I’ll not only kill you, I’ll fuck up your corpses so bad that even DNA testing won’t be able to figure out who you were.” She flashed us one last, bright-toothed smile and started walking backward down the path to the porch. She kept her gun leveled on us all the way. Only when she reached the porch did she turn, bounding up the stairs and vanishing through the open door.

“Oh, great,” said Becks, in a faint voice. “I was wondering how we were going to fill our daily quota of bat-shit crazy.”

“Maybe we can make quota for the rest of the month.” I unbuckled my belt and slid out of the van. Once I was clear, I removed the guns from my waistband, setting them on the seat. “Everybody drop your weapons and come on. We came to them. We may as well play by their rules.”

“Yes, because allowing the crazy people to set the rules is absolutely always the way to ensure one’s survival in a hostile situation.” Mahir managed to sound almost amused, even though he scowled as he removed his own pistol from the holster beneath his arm.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said amiably. He had the good grace to look abashed. I leaned back in through my open door and punched him in the arm. “Don’t worry. The lunatics have been running the asylum around here for a long time. We’ll fit right in.”

Becks had to shed six guns before she got out of the van, and even then, I was reasonably sure she was holding back at least a couple of knives. Maggie didn’t need to remove anything. That made me grimace a little.

She really isn’t field ready at all, is she?

“No, she’s really not,” I murmured, and slammed the van door.

The four of us walked together down the broken concrete pathway leading to the Brainpan porch. As we got closer to the house, I started spotting the security enhancements and architectural tweaks hidden among the general disorder and decay. All of them were subtle, and from what I could see, all of them were designed to be effective. That meant they were recent. If they’d been done immediately post-Rising, when most of the improvements—such as they were—were being made to this neighborhood, they would have been flashy. These had no flash at all. They weren’t here to show off how secure the house was. They were here to secure it.

“Look,” I said, elbowing Becks in the side before nodding toward a camera mostly hidden beneath one of the shingles edging the roof.

She followed my gaze. “Not very well concealed.”

“Yeah, but it’s also a dummy. You know, for dummies.” The Fox bounced back into the open doorframe, beaming at us. “If you think that’s the only camera, you’re a dummy, and I get to shoot you.”

“That’s an entirely reasonable and understandable mechanism for judging one’s guests,” said Mahir smoothly. “Might we come inside now?”

“Oh, sure. Just take off your shoes. The Cat gets a little crazy when you track mud on her floors.” She disappeared back into the house.

Becks and I exchanged a look. “I’m not sure what’s worse,” she said. “The fact that she just implied someone else might be crazy, or the fact that everyone here has a name that starts with the word ‘the.’ ”

“Just pretend they’re all comic book villains and it starts to make sense.” Maggie took off her sandals, swinging them casually from one hand as she climbed the porch steps and entered the house.

“I’m Batman,” deadpanned Mahir, and followed her. Becks was half a step behind him, and I brought up the rear, looking back over my shoulder for signs of pursuit as I stepped inside. There were none. For better or for worse, we were alone with the people we had come to find.

I expected the door to swing shut itself as soon as I was over the threshold. Instead, it remained open until an aggravated female voice shouted, “Shut the damn door!” from somewhere at the end of the hall.

I shut the door.

It took a moment for me and Becks to undo the laces on our boots. Mahir and Maggie waited for us to finish, and we walked down the short entry hall to the living room together.

The house was constructed on one of the pre-Rising open-space models, with the living room, dining room, and kitchen essentially blending together to form one large space. There were multiple windows, which must have provided a lot of natural light before they were sealed up and boarded over. Now they were just plywood rectangles set into the walls, barely visible behind the banks of computer equipment and monitor screens. The place looked like a combination of a server farm and a college student’s dorm room, with one big exception: It was scrupulously clean. There might be a futon on the floor, but there were no pizza boxes or takeout containers; there was clutter, but no trash. It managed to be sterile and lived-in at the same time.

“Bizarre,” muttered Becks.

“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.”