Blackout

SHAUN: Forty

We fell into a ragged formation with President Ryman at the center. Alaric was almost as well protected; he’d never passed his field certifications, and none of us was particularly enthused by the idea of him firing a gun in an enclosed space. The next ring was made up of Secret Servicemen—all of them except Steve, who was on the outer ring with me, Gregory, and the rest of my team… including Rick, who’d taken a pistol from one of the agents and was walking next to Becks. None of them objected to the vice president endangering himself. Either they were giving up, or they figured they’d be lucky if they managed to get any of us out alive, much less both of the elected officials.

“You people still know how to throw a party,” he said nervously.

“Practice. Alaric!” I didn’t turn to face him; my attention remained on the hall ahead of us. Steve was on point, since he was the one who actually knew the way, but I wasn’t going to let him hit the first wave—if there was a first wave—alone. “How are you doing with bouncing a signal out of this loony bin?”

“I’m still trying to get a clean connection!”

“Well, keep trying. We need to get this footage to Mahir before we get ripped to pieces by the living dead.”

“You’re always such an optimist,” muttered George.

I slanted a grin her way. “Like I said. Practice.”

“Is that also where you learned to be such an asshole?”

“Yup. How’m I doing?”

“Good.”

The halls were eerily silent. That would have been a good thing—moaning usually means you’re about to become a snack food—but we didn’t know whether or not the zombies were inside. Eventually, even the nervous banter stopped. The only sounds were breathing, footsteps, and the occasional soft beep as Alaric tried and failed to make a connection with the outside world. I wanted to be comforted by the fact that George and I were walking into danger together, but I couldn’t manage it. I kept thinking about how fragile she was, how breakable… how easily killed. She might have gotten better the first time, but now? In a new body, with a new immune system that never learned to coexist with the virus? She’d die, and this time, the CDC wouldn’t be standing by to miraculously resurrect her. She’d stay gone.

“Fuck,” I muttered.

No one said anything. At a time like this, me talking to myself was the least of our worries.

Steve led us to a T-junction and paused. “We can’t take the elevator back up to the public garage; we’re going to need to use the private vehicle pool. It’s the only way to be sure we haven’t been compromised.”

“It’s too quiet,” said Rick.

George grimaced. “Why do people say that? Wouldn’t it be quicker to just ask if that noise was the wind?”

Something moaned down the corridor to our right. I sighed. “That wasn’t the wind.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Steve tightly.

“But how—” began Alaric.

“Questions later, running now,” said Becks.

We ran.

The Secret Servicemen fell back until they were running behind the rest of us, moving at that strange twisted half jog men use when they want to cover the ground behind them as they run. Becks and Rick moved to flank the noncombatants—Alaric was still frantically slapping his PDA, trying to get a solid connection even as we were fleeing for our lives—while George and I took the front, running close on Steve’s heels.

The moaning behind us continued, now getting louder. The zombies were fresh; they had to be, if they were gaining on us that fast. “I hate the fucking CDC,” I snarled.

“Save your breath!” George advised.

We ran.

The hall seemed like it might be endless, right up until the moment where we turned a corner, and it ended, terminating in a set of clear glass doors leading into an airlock. There was a red light on above the door.

“It’s gone into security lockdown,” shouted Steve. “We’re going to have to check out clean one at a time.”

One of the Secret Servicemen moved through the group to slap his palm against the testing panel. The other agents were close behind him, dragging a protesting President Ryman in their wake. His safety was their job; ours wasn’t. And the moaning was getting louder.

The light turned green. The first agent took his hand off the testing panel and stepped through the now-open door, letting the airlock cycle around him as he stepped out into the parking garage. Nothing attacked him immediately. He turned back to the rest of us, signaling for the second agent to send the president through.

“Got it!” said Alaric, his delight sounding almost obscene, considering the circumstances. The rest of us stared at him. He held up his PDA. “Upload established. I’m transmitting.”

“Finally,” breathed George, a certain tension slipping out of her shoulders. “Get those files up as fast as you can.”

“Working on it.”

“Even death doesn’t change your priorities, does it?” asked Rick, tiredly amused.

“Not really, no,” said George. She grinned at him, gun still aimed toward the unseen zombies.

I could have kissed her. It would probably have been a good thing, since we were all about to be zombie-chow. Instead, I adjusted my position, calling over my shoulder, “A little speed in the carpool lane would be appreciated, guys. We’ve got incoming, and I didn’t bring enough limbs to share with everybody.”

“The system’s cycling as fast as it can,” said Steve reproachfully.

“Don’t really give a fuck how fast the system is cycling. Just don’t want to get eaten by zombies right after uncovering a mass conspiracy to deceive the American public. Seems a little anticlimactic, you know what I mean? Like getting empty boxes on Christmas morning.”

“You got empty boxes?” asked Becks. “Lucky bastard. I always got dresses.”

Alaric glanced up. “Dresses?”

“Frilly dresses,” she said with disgust. “Lacy frilly dresses.”

“Are all journalists insane, or did I just hit the mother lode?” asked Gregory.

“Yes,” said Rick and George, in unison.

We were still laughing—the anxious laughter of people who know they’re about to die horribly—when the first zombies came around the corner, and laughter ceased to be an option.

At least the sight of the zombies answered the question of where they came from. They were wearing White House ID badges, dressed in respectable suits and sensible shoes. Someone must have trigged an outbreak inside the building, opened the right doors, and let the feeding frenzy commence. Anyone who hadn’t been caught by the initial infection would have been taken out by the first wave of actual infected.

I’ll give my companions this: No one screamed. Instead, everyone but Alaric and Gregory braced themselves and opened fire, giving the people at the airlock time to cycle through. Alaric moved to put himself behind Becks and out of the line of fire, attention still focused primarily on the device in his hands.

“Forty percent uploaded!” he called.

“Not enough,” muttered George, and fired. Her shot went wild. With a wordless sound of frustration, she shifted the gun to her left hand and used her right to pull off her sunglasses and throw them aside. She resumed her stance and fired again. This time, she didn’t miss.

“Mr. Vice President!” Steve’s voice was anxious. “Sir, you need to go through the lock!”

Rick didn’t move.

“Go on, Rick,” I said, firing twice more into the seemingly endless tide of zombies. “Get out of here. Go be important. If we don’t get out, somebody who understands the news is going to need to interpret what Alaric’s putting online.”

Rick still didn’t move. He fired again; another zombie went down.

“Go on, Rick,” said George. “Mahir gets left behind, and you leave when we need someone to make it off the battlefield. That’s how this story goes.” She never looked at him. She just kept shooting.

Rick shot her a stricken look, and he went, turning and retreating toward the airlock. I stepped a little closer to her, closing a bit more of the distance between us, and kept shooting. We were all falling back now, just a little bit, just a few steps. There are people who’ll tell you the worst place to be in an outbreak is a narrow tunnel with a limited number of exits. They’re probably right. But a narrow tunnel with a limited number of exits is also the best place to be in an outbreak, because the zombies can only come at you so fast.

The airlock hissed. Rick was through. “Dr. Lake!” called Steve. “Come on!”

Gregory didn’t need to be told twice. He turned and ran, vanishing from my range of sight. My clip clicked on empty. I ejected it and slapped a new one into place, twisting the stock until I felt the clip snap home. George repeated the process two bullets later. By then, I was firing again, covering the hole she made. We still worked together well, even if neither of us was really the person we used to be. Even if neither of us was ever going to be that person—those people—again.

“If this is crazy, I don’t care,” I said, and fired. Another zombie went down. We were losing ground fast now, and still they kept coming.

“Neither do I,” said George, and kept firing.

“Alaric!” shouted Steve.

“Coming!” Alaric started forward, and froze, eyes widening as he looked at the screen of his little device. “There’s no signal there. I almost lost the connection.”

“Alaric, just go!” snapped George.

“I can’t! I have to get these files up before somebody hits us with an EMP screen!”

Becks took two long steps backward, firing all the while, and snatched the device from his hand. “I can manage an upload as well as you can,” she snarled. “Now go.”

Alaric stared at her. “Becks—”

“Go!”

He turned and fled. The zombies were still closing. There were five of us left now. Me, George, Becks, one of the Secret Service agents—I still didn’t know his name—and Steve, who was urging Alaric through the airlock as quickly as he could.

“You see the failure inherent in this model, don’t you?” asked George. She fired; a zombie went down. They were closing in.

“What are you talking about?”

Becks groaned, the sound similar to a zombie’s moan only in that it held no actual words. No zombie could have sounded that aggravated. “You can’t shoot while you’re going through the airlock. That means someone has to watch your back. One person to stand guard, one person leaving. Until eventually…”

“There’s only one person left,” I said, feeling suddenly numb. A zombie lurched forward. I put a bullet through its skull. It fell. “Fuck.”

“It always comes down to the cold equations,” said George.

“Fuck!” I fired again. This time, I missed.

“Next!” shouted Steve.

“Go,” said Becks, nodding to George. “Both of you, go. You need to get out of here.”

“We’re not leaving you.”

“You’re not leaving him, either.” The last of the Secret Service agents was running for the airlock. “You’re not going to leave her, and she’s not going to leave you. We can’t ask your big friend to stay behind, not when he may be the most muscle we have left. That leaves me. Now get out of here.” Becks held up Alaric’s PDA with the hand that wasn’t holding her gun. “We’re at ninety percent. I’ll make sure the news is waiting for you when you hit the surface.”

“Rebecca—”

Becks shot me a venomous glance. “I don’t have her nose for news. I don’t have your total lack of regard for my own safety. What I have is a family that doesn’t want me, and a job that I know how to do. And that job says I stand here and let you get out, because you’re the ones who can do the best job telling this story. Now go!”

“Shaun, come on.” George took a step backward, still firing.

“I don’t want to do this,” I said quietly.

So don’t, said George, in the space behind my eyes. Her voice was soft, cajoling. She would never ask me to do something I didn’t want to do. She would never try to convince me to leave a teammate behind.

She would let me die here, and take everything we’d fought and bled for with me.

“Shaun! Go!” shouted Becks. She shoved the PDA into her pocket, and called, “Hey, big guy! How sturdy are those doors?”

“Sturdy enough,” rumbled Steve. “Georgia, come on.”

“Coming.” She kept shooting as she backed away, until she had to turn and press her hand against the test unit, and shooting ceased to be an option.

“Good.” Becks dug her hand into a different pocket, producing a small round object that I recognized, after a few seconds, as a concussion grenade. “Then I’m taking no prisoners.”

“You had a grenade in your pocket?” I asked, unsure whether to be impressed or horrified.

“Dr. Abbey gave it to me. She swore it was stable.”

“Dr. Abbey isn’t stable!”

“Doesn’t matter now.” Becks grinned, still firing. Gunpowder streaked her cheeks and forehead, mixed with sweat and cleaned in narrow tracks by the tears I wasn’t sure she was aware of shedding. “Get out of here, Mason. We had a good time, didn’t we? It wasn’t all bad.”

The zombies were getting closer all the time. I kept firing. “We had a great time. You were amazing. You are amazing.”

“Same to you, Mason. Now go.”

“Shaun!” shouted Steve.

I took a deep breath, fired twice more into the throng, and ran.

Steve and Becks covered me while the airlock cycled. By the time I was through, there was a distance of barely ten feet between the leading wave of zombies—slowed by bullets, sickness, and the bodies of their own fallen—and the airlock door. Steve was the next one through, Becks covering him by herself. She fired faster than I would have thought possible, and almost every shot was a good one. Still, she was outnumbered, and the zombies were nearly on top of her when Steve stepped out into the parking garage with the rest of us.

Becks stopped firing. She turned to face the glass, a smile on her face, zombies looming up hard and fast behind her. We couldn’t hear them moaning anymore, or the sound her gun made when it hit the ground. She raised her free hand in a perfect pageant wave, seemingly oblivious to the hands reaching out to grab her hair. Then she went over backward, vanishing into the teeming river of infected flesh.

The blast came a few seconds later. There was no sound, only a sudden red rain as the detonation destroyed everything it came in contact with. There was nothing of Becks in that redness—there was everything of Becks in that redness—and so I let George pull me away from the flames that were beginning to consume the hall, leading me toward the motorcade idling in the middle of the parking garage. Alaric was standing next to the lead car. He was crying, silently but steadily, his eyes fixed on the flames now starting to show through the streaks of blood on the glass. The hall was burning. Depending on how many alarms had been disabled before the zombies were released, the whole building might go with it.

I put a hand on Alaric’s shoulder. “She got the news out,” I said.

He nodded. “I know.”

“Good.”

There was nothing else that anyone could say. We climbed into the waiting cars, pulled the doors shut, and drove away into the darkness.