Deadline

Eight

Maggie 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 dical blonitor next to mine. “I don’t think she wanted to leave them alone together.”

“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.

With my posts done, Alaric working, and Becks and Maggie sequestered with Kelly, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I settled for sitting at the kitchen table with my fresh can of Coke, waiting for something to happen. My patience was rewarded about fifteen minutes later, when something happened.

Footsteps descended the stairs and Becks appeared in the kitchen doorway, hands raised in a warding gesture. Not the best sign. “Okay, Shaun, before you freak out, this was the best way to do it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a really shitty elevator pitch, and I would never buy your project based on that. Just so you know.”

“I’m just saying, don’t freak out.” She finished stepping into the kitchen, looking back over her shoulder. “Come on, Kelly.”

“I feel like an idiot,” said Kelly. She moved into view, Maggie half a step behind her.

I stared.

Buffy left a lot of her shit to me and George when she died. Her parents gave us even more. We were her best friends, and they couldn’t think of anything else to do with her collection of gaudy jewelry and hippie skirts. The fact that I’m not a cross-dresser and George wouldn’t have been caught dead in that sort of thing didn’t matter: They were grieving parents, we were Buffy’s friends, and we got it all. Only we didn’t have much room in the apartment, and the idea of getting rid of her things left me feeling sick. So we stored them at Maggie’s.

Becks was looking at me with rare anxiety, clearly waiting for me to say something. I swallowed the lump that was blocking my throat and said the first thing that came to mind:

“Wow. That’s… different.”

Kelly was wearing a multicolored broomstick skirt, a white peasant blouse, and a patchwork vest with little mirrors sewn all over it. They twinkled when she moved, not quite as gaudily as the dozen or so bangle bracelets crusted with LED “jewels.” There were matching “jewels” on the straps of her sandals, which looked entirely impractical. I knew better. Buffy was an idealist and sort of an idiot, but she knew the importance of being prepared, and she didn’t own a single pair of shoes she couldn’t run in.

God, I miss her, said George, almost too quietly for me to hear.

“Me too,” I murmured, just as softly.

Georgette “Buffy” Meissonier was the original head of the Fictional News Division. She designed almost all of the After the End Times network and computer systems. She was one of the only people I ever met who could make George smile on a reliable basis. She was sweet, and she was funny, and she was smart as hell, and she was an enormous geek, and every time her name comes up, I have to remind myself that she didn’t do any of the things she did on purpose. Sure, she let Tate’s men into our system, and sure, a lot of people got killed because of that, but she had the best intentions.

Buffy died because of what she did. On the days when I’m really getting my crazy on, that seems like sufficient payment. Of course, those are the days when I can convince myself that George isn’t dead, just, I don’t know, mysteriously intangible and pissed off about it. Most of the time, well…

I’m just a little bit bitter.

Either Maggie or Becks—I was betting on Maggie—had hacked off most of Kelly’s hair, leaving her with a spiky mess that stuck up in all directions. I’d never been so glad a woman was blonde in my life, because that was exactly the way George always wore her hair—too short for the zombies to grab, long enough to be controllable with a minimum of effort—and if Kelly had been a brunette, I think I would have screamed.

“Well?” asked Maggie.

“Right.” I swallowed several more possible responses, starting with “dead friend’s clothes, dead sister’s haircut, good job” and going downhill from there. “She definitely looks, uh, really different.” That seemed insufficient, so I added, “Good job.”

Becks grinned, looking unaccountably pleased.

Kelly, meanwhile, reached up to touch her hair with one hand, saying, “I haven’t kept my hair this short since I was a little kid. I don’t even know what to do with it.”

“Better cropped than arrested for hoaxing the CDC, Doc,” I said.

Kelly sighed. “I wish I could argue with that.”

“I wish a lot of things,” I said, and stood. “Come on, gang. Let’s get moving.”

Herding everyone out of the house was more difficult than it should have been, since Kelly was exhausted and wanted to stay behind, leading to loud protests on Maggie’s part. She said she didn’t trust people alone with her dogs. What Kelly was supposed to do to a pack of epileptic bulldogs wasn’t entirely clear to me, but Maggie was firm: No one was staying home unsupervised—and, apparently, the enormous army of security ninjas lurking in the bushes didn’t count as supervision. To complicate matters further, Maggie refused to stay behind.

“I just lost Dave,” she said. “I’m not letting you drive off and leave me here. If I’m going to lose everyone, I’m going to go with you.”

I couldn’t really bring myself to argue with that.

After a lot of shouting, some plea bargaining, and an outright threat to leave Alaric sitting by the side of the road, we wound up with Becks driving the van, Alaric manning the forums from the passenger seat, and Kelly riding in the back. I drove the bike, Maggie riding pillion. She insisted, probably because she didn’t trust herself in an enclosed space with Kelly. Dave’s death wasn’t the Doc’s fault. Maggie would realize that eventually. I hoped.

I’d never driven any real distance with a passenger—not unless you counted George, who didn’t actually change the way the bike was balanced, or make it necessary for me to compensate for additional weight. Oh, I’d been a passenger on the bike often enough, back when George was doing the driving, but it wasn’t the same thing by a long shot. It didn’t help that Maggie wasn’t used to riding a motorcycle and didn’t know to shift her weight to help me keep us balanced. If we’d encountered any real problems, we would have been screwed.

There aren’t many real problems along I-5. The combination of tight security, large stretches with little to no human habitation, and most motorists being unwilling to drive more than a few miles has done a lot to make distance travel safer for those of us crazy enough to attempt it.

Buffy died during a long-distance road trip, when a sniper shot out the wheels of the truck she was riding in. But beyond little things like that, it’s perfectly safe.

Safe. Now there’s a laugh.

Nearly six hours and fifteen security checkpoints later, we were approaching Eugene. I-5 is the fastest route to damn near any major city on the West Coast, but it has its downsides, like the constant barricades. We had to stop every time we drove into or out of a city, or even too close to one, by whatever the local definition of “too close” happened to be. It was always the same song and dance: Where are you going? Why? Can we see your licenses? Can we see your credentials? Would you like to submit to a retinal scan? Do you really think you have a choice?

The CDC had no reason to be tracking our movement—not yet, anyway. Our papers were in order, and every checkpoint wound up waving us through, but the stops still made me nervous. I was being paranoid. After the past twenty-four hours, I figured it was justified.

The orange light in the corner of my visor started blinking, signaling an incoming call. “Answer,” I said.

“Hey, boss.” There was a note of tension underscoring Alaric’s normally laid-back tone. “We’re an hour and a half out of Portland, according to the GPS. You going to give us the actual address soon, or are we going to play guessing games with the surface streets?”

“We’re not going to Portland,” I said. Becks started swearing in the background. I almost laughed. “Tell Becks to keep her panties on. We’re going to a town near Portland. It’s called Forest Grove. We’re heading for an old business park that got shut down during the Rising and never officially reopened. The address is in the GPS. I uploaded it under the header ‘Shaun’s secret porn store.’ ”

Charming, commented George.

“Ew,” said Alaric. “Okay, accessing coordinates now. Ihere anything else we need to know?”

“You know what I do, and you can pump the Doc for information if you need to.” I swerved to avoid a pothole, feeling Maggie’s arms tighten around my waist. She was staying amazingly calm for a woman who almost never left her house. I was starting to wonder exactly what was in that “herbal tea” she drank right before we left. “We’re heading for an illegal biotech lab to talk to somebody the CDC is too afraid of to fuck with. What could possibly go wrong?”

There was a long silence before Alaric said, “I’m hanging up on you now.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

“You’re fucked in the head.”

“That’s probably true. See you in Forest Grove.” The amber light flicked off. I allowed myself a grim chuckle and hit the gas. Our little road trip of the damned was well under way.

Do you have a plan? asked George.

“You know better,” I replied. I wasn’t worried about Maggie hearing me talk to myself; the roar of the wind would keep my voice from reaching her. Weird as it might seem, George and I actually had a measure of privacy, despite having another human being with her arms wrapped around my waist. If Maggie had been driving, I might have actually been able to fool myself into thinking everything was the way it was supposed to be, even if the illusion would only last until the bike stopped.

George laughed. I smiled, relaxing, and kept on driving. Next stop: Forest Grove.

The Caspell Business Park was located at the edge of town, in what was probably considered an area ripe for expansion before the dead decided to get up and walk around. It was built on a model popular before the Rising, all open spaces and broad pathways between the buildings. I’d be willing to bet that more than half those buildings had automatic doors at one point, totally unsecured against the shambling infected. It was no wonder the local authorities hadn’t bothered trying to reclaim the place; if there was anything remarkable about it, it was that it hadn’t been burned to the ground.

According to the Doc’s instructions, the place we were looking for was in the old IT complex, where the buildings had been constructed according to much more sensible schematics: airtight, watertight, no windows, no real danger of contamination if you remembered to lock the damn doors. Georgia and I went to preschool in a pre-Rising IT complex, and we were just as secure as we could possibly be. Locating the lab in that sort of structure made a lot of sense, especially with the rest of the business park providing excellent, if hazardous, cover. Not even the bravest Irwin was going to stumble on the place by mistake, and the ones who were dumb enough to think it was a good idea would all be eaten before they arrived.

The parking garage had developed a worrying leftward tilt. I eyed it, shook my head, and kept driving. The last thing we needed was to get a parking garage dropped on our heads, or worse, dropped on our vehicles while we were inside the building. On the other hand, we’d be dead if the garage fell on us, and we wouldn’t have to worry about this shit anymore.

You’re in a fabulous state of mind today, said George.

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” I said, and continued to blaze a trail through the deserted business park. Maggie clung a little tighter every time we hit a bump, but she didn’t jerk around enough to make me lose my balance. That was a good thing. The broken pavement was littered with rusted metal, broken glass, and other debris; if we went sprawling, we’d be lucky to get away with just a tetanus shot.

The loading dock behind the IT complex was clear and showed signs of semirecent upkeep. That was promising. I pulled up and killed the engine, waiting for Maggie to dismount before deploying the kickstand and sliding to the relatively unbroken pavement. My thighs ached from too many hours on the road, but my head was clearer than it had been in weeks. Knowing that I’m actually doing something has that effect on me.

The van pulled up a few yards away. The side door was open before the wheels had fully stopped turning, and Alaric jumped down, fumbling his field pack on as he trotted toward us. I pulled off my helmet and smirked at him. “Did you have a nice drive?”

“I hate you,” he said flatly.

“That’s nice,” said Maggie. Alaric shot her a look, and she smiled, removing her helmet. Her pupils were slightly enlarged—not in the exaggerated manner that would indicate a live infection, but in a softer, more relaxed manner that I recognized from dealing with high-strung reporters at press conferences. Her herbal tea definitely contained a few extra ingredients.

I considered pulling her aside for a talk about taking psychoactive substances before going into the field and decided to let it pass. It wasn’t like she was a combatant. She and Kelly were so much dead weight if we got attacked. She might as well be pre-anesthetized dead weight, in case things went poorly. As it was, she was only legal to be with us because the town zoning regulations made this place technically safe. Very technically.

Becks was the next out of the van, her own field pack already in place. Her scowl looked like it had been permanently affixed to her face. “You owe me,” she said, coming to a stop next to Alaric.

“Me or Maggie?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. The only way to keep her quiet was to keep the radio turned to the medical news channel. If I’d been forced to spend another minute listening to the exciting new developments in the world of pharmaceuticals, I would have taken her head and—”

Kelly’s hesitant emergence saved us from the details of what Becks would have done to her. She gave the parking lot a horrified look before hurrying toward us, demanding, “What are we doing here?”

“This is the address your file said we should be at, Doc.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“Nope. Underground lab, underground facilities.” I tucked my helmet under my arm, looking at the low-slung buildings spread out around us. “Can anybody see the numbers on these things? We’re looking for eleven.”

“You can’t mean we’re actually going to go inside,” said Kelly.

“No, Doc, we just drove a couple hundred miles to pose on the sidewalk.” Becks shook her head before turning to stalk off toward the buildings, scanning for more signs of habitation.

Kelly sighed. “This day just gets better and better.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure that soon, we’ll be looking back on this moment as one of the good times.” I followed Maggie, Alaric close behind me. Kelly stayed where she was for a few moments, staring after us. I could see her out of the corner of my eye. It was all I could do to not start laughing—which would have been entirely inappropriate, true, but it would have felt so damn good.

Be careful, George cautioned. Push her too far and she’ll freak out. We need her to stay calm, stay cooperative, and keep talking.

“I thought she’d already told us everything,” I muttered, as Kelly started running to catch up. Alaric cast a glance in my direction, but didn’t say anything.

You’re not that dumb.

There was nothing I could say to that. I kept walking, assessing the buildings surrounding us as I moved. I wasn’t exactly expecting a big sign that said ILLEGAL VIROLOGY LAB HERE, but it would have been nice. The buildings in the IT complex seemed to be essentially identical, all square, boxy, and in reasonably good repair, as long as you weren’t judging by the paint jobs. The building closest to us even had its original set of cell tower repeaters bolted to the roof, their narrow antennae making a familiar lightning-jag outline against the afternoon sky.

I stopped in my tracks. Looking bemused, Alaric did the same. “What year did we go to block-by-block private cell towers? Anybody know?”

“Uh… two thousand twenty,” said Alaric, after a long pause to do the math inside his head. “I remember when they put ours in.”

“Uh-huh. This is a pre-Rising complex. So who installed that?” I jerked a thumb toward the antennae.

Alaric’s eyes went wide. “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Over here, guys.” I waved for the others to join us and started up the cracked pathway leading to the building door. Locked. No real surprise, that; if I were running an illegal biotech lab, I wouldn’t exactly want scavengers or thrill-seekers dropping in on me unannounced. I rapped my knuckles against the metal of the door itself, hearing the echoes they sent ringing dully into the space beyond.

No one answered. That really wasn’t a surprise, either. “Maybe we should shoot the lock out,” suggested Becks.

I gave her a dubious look. “Did you just suggest discharging a firearm into a door that may be attached to a lab? Like, ‘explosive chemicals and weird machinery and God knows what else’ lab?”

Becks shrugged. “At least we’d be ded something.”

“We are doing something. We’re getting inside.” I knocked again. After a several-second pause, I cleared my throat, and shouted, “This is Shaun Mason, from After the End Times. We’re here to speak to Dr. Abbey. Is she available? It’s about the reservoir conditions.”

The echoes of my knock were still ringing when the door swung open, revealing a short, cheerfully curvy woman with spiky brown hair streaked with bleach-white lines that looked more accidental than anything else. She was wearing an electric orange T-shirt that read DO NOT TAUNT THE OCTOPUS, jeans, and a lab coat, and was pointing a hunting rifle at the middle of my chest.

“Got any ID?” she asked. Her voice was light, even charming, with an accent I couldn’t quite identify. She followed the question with a pleasant smile that didn’t warm her eyes. This was a woman who wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger if she thought we were giving her reason.

Not the friendliest greeting ever, and yet, not the least friendly, either, said George. Kelly gasped, either in shock or indignation. I wasn’t sure which, and I really didn’t care; it gave me something to respond to that wouldn’t convince the woman with the large gun that I was insane right off the bat. That could come later, when she no longer had a weapon aimed at us.

“Hush,” I said, making sure to slant my eyes toward Kelly, to at least give the impression that I was talking to her. Looking back to the woman in the doorway, I asked, “May I reach into my jacket for my press pass? I promise to do it slowly.”

“Fine by me,” she said, still smiling. “Joe! Come over here, boy.” The largest dog I’d ever seen came ambling up behind her, its flapping jowls oozing strings of gooey white saliva. Its head looked like it was bigger than my chest. That may have been shock speaking, but there was no way I was going to volunteer to do the measurements. It didn’t help that the damn thing was solid charcoal black, making it look unnervingly like the classic hellhound.

Kelly drew her breath in again. This time, I didn’t blame her. Even Becks gasped, and I heard Maggie mutter something that sounded suspiciously like “Holy shit.”

“Joe, guard,” said the woman with the rifle. The massive canine obediently padded out onto the walkway, standing between her and the rest of us. It wasn’t growling, glaring, or doing anything else actively hostile; it was simply standing there, being enormous. That was more than enough.

Reaching slowly into my jacket, I asked the most sensible question I could come up with under the circumstances: “Lady, what the fuck is that?”

That’s right. Antagonize the woman who accessorizes with Cujo. I was tired of being the only dead one in this relationship.

I ignored her, choosing instead to focus on the woman who had the capacity to kill me. Call me single-minded. I tend to pay more attention to the immediate threats to life and limb, and leave the sarcastic dead people for later.

“That’s Joe,” said the woman, keeping the rifle aimed soidly at my chest. “He’s shown me his ID. He’s in no danger of getting himself shot.”

“He’s an English Mastiff,” breathed Maggie, almost reverently. She started to step forward, one hand outstretched in a gesture I’d seen her use on her video blog whenever she was adding a new rescue to her miniature pack. She froze midgesture, eyes darting toward the woman with the rifle. “Is he friendly?”

“He will be, once I’ve seen your ID.” Still, shotgun lady’s smile took on a slightly more honest edge. “Joe’s a good boy. He only eats the people I tell him to eat.”

“How encouraging,” I muttered, and held out my journalist’s license. “Here. All my credentials are on file. Just run the code.”

“And your people?” She jerked her chin toward the others, not bothering to take the license from my hand.

“Rebecca Atherton, head of the Irwins. Magdalene Garcia, head of the Fictionals. Alaric Kwong, he’s with the Newsie division; the actual division head lives in London and isn’t with us today. And this is—” For a sickening moment, I couldn’t remember Kelly’s alias.

Barbara Tinney, prompted Georgia.

“—Barbara Tinney,” I echoed. “She’s a social scientist on loan to the site for a few months. Getting some field experience.”

From the look on the woman’s face, she wasn’t buying it. “Uh-huh. What are you folks doing here? Take a wrong turn on the way to a real story?”

I had two choices. I could try to come up with a plausible lie or I could tell her the truth. Once, I would have gone straight for the lie, the more interesting the better. I’m not really comfortable with that sort of thing anymore. “We came to see Dr. Abbey,” I said, still holding out my license. “I have some files from the CDC that I need to have explained to me, and I thought she might be the person who could do it.” Her brows lifted slightly; she was interested. I decided to press my luck. “I don’t know if you follow the news, but my sister, Georgia Mason—”

“Retinal Kellis-Amberlee, wasn’t it? I remember her. That was a real tragedy. I was very sorry to hear about it.” The rifle wavered slightly. “I need a better reason for you to be here, and not at a ‘real lab’ somewhere.”

Tell her. George’s mental voice held a venom I rarely heard from her, even when she was alive. Then again, I couldn’t blame her. The CDC’s secret keeping might be the reason she was just a voice in my head.

In for a penny, in for a pound. “Barbara Tinney is a cover ID for Dr. Kelly Connolly of the CDC. The researcher who was killed in a break-in recently—that was a full-body clone. The real Dr. Connolly wasn’t killed, and this is her.” This time, Kelly’s horrified expression was more than a bit betrayed. I did my best to ignore it. “She’s how we got the files, and those same files identified this lab as being disreputable enough that no one would suspect we’d go to you, while still having staff who know how to find their asses with both hands. It didn’t mention the giant dog, or we might have gone somewhere else. Now, are you or can you tell us where to find her? I’m getting a little uncomfortable standing out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” The spiky-haired woman lowered her gun, suddenly smiling with genuine sincerity. “I’m Dr. Abbey—you can call me Shannon—and it’s a pleasure to have guests. Especially guests with such interesting connections.” Her smile dimmed as her gaze fell on Kelly, who was too busy staring at me to notice. “How about you all come inside, and we’ll sort this out.”

Alaric managed to find his voice, swallowing hard before he asked, “Will—will the dog be coming?”

“Of course he will. Joe’s my lab manager, aren’t you, Joe?” The enormous canine responded with a bark loud enough to make my ears hurt, tail beating against the ground. Maggie looked like she was physically restraining herself from running over and throwing her arms around his neck. Catching the look, Dr. Abbey laughed. “He doesn’t bite. Joe, guest passes for all these folks. Got it?” The dog stood, tail still wagging.

“Does that mean I can pet him?” asked Maggie eagerly.

“Can you pet the moving legal violation after we get inside?” I asked.

“Come on.” Dr. Abbey stepped aside, waving a hand at the open door. “Ladies first.”

“That means us, princess.” Becks looped her arm through Kelly’s, tugging the reluctant doctor along with her as she went striding through the door to the lab. Maggie followed, still casting longing looks at the dog. Alaric gave me an uneasy glance and went after her, presumably unwilling to leave her alone in the company of a bona-fide mad scientist.

Dr. Abbey crooked an eyebrow, studying me. “Will you be joining us?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” I did my best to swagger as I walked toward the door, even going so far as to give her enormous pet a pat on the head as I passed him. “Good doggie.”

Joe made a deep buffing sound in the back of his throat. I hoped that meant he was happy, rather than planning to bite my hand off at the shoulder. The law forbidding urban ownership of any domestic animal large enough to undergo Kellis-Amberlee amplification was named after my family. That means I never got much experience with dogs beyond Maggie’s epileptic teacup bulldogs.

Dr. Abbey snorted with amusement and followed me inside. Joe padded after her, killing any lingering hope that I might have had about the big dog staying outside to, I don’t know, guard the sidewalk or something.

I was so busy watching what the dog did that I walked right into Becks, bumping her forward a half step. “Hey, watch it,” I began.

Shaun, hissed Georgia. Look.

I looked. And promptly understood why the rest of the team was standing frozen in their tracks at the end of the short entrance hall, staring into the gutted warehouselike depths of the former IT building. I’d been expecting a dingy little basement operation, something barely more technically advanced than a buh of kids running their own pirate news site out of their parents’ house. This was a functional lab, operating totally outside all sane safety precautions, but still equipped way beyond anything I might have anticipated.

All the interior walls not essential for structural support had been knocked out at some point, replaced with a maze of cubicles, portable isolation tents, and live animal cages. Racked computer servers stood side-by-side with rabbit hutches. Hydroponic beds studded the floor, growing healthy-looking crops of things I vaguely recognized from Maggie’s garden. The light was an even, brilliant white, and about half the people I could see moving around the computers were wearing either sunglasses or the clear plastic bands hospitals sometimes used to protect the eyes of individuals with reservoir conditions.

Kelly was staring at the scene with her lip curled upward, looking utterly disgusted. “This is… horrific,” she breathed, turning toward me. “We have to get out of here. This is an abomination. It’s a violation of so many medical and ethical regulations that I can’t even start to count them, and—”

“And it’s not under CDC control, which means it’s not okay to break the rules, is that it?” asked Maggie. Her tone was icy.

Kelly stopped midtirade, taking a shaky breath. “You don’t understand,” she said, slowly. “This is… the things they could do here, with this sort of equipment, are practically unthinkable. That’s a genetic sequencer.” She indicated a machine I didn’t recognize. “They could build a whole new version of the virus, if they wanted to.”

“Let’s not antagonize the nice people, okay?” I asked. “You can be offended by their ethics later. When we aren’t outnumbered.” A lab this size would make body disposal distressingly easy. The last thing I wanted to do was give Dr. Abbey a reason.

The massive dog—Joe—ambled up and stopped beside me, panting amiably. Maggie promptly knelt down and offered her hand, knuckles first, like she was trying to attract the attention of one of her own, much less scary-looking, canines. Joe deigned to sniff it. A moment later, he was slobbering all over her palm, tail wagging with delight as she used her other hand to start scratching behind his ears.

“Most people are a lot less relaxed about Joe,” said Dr. Abbey, rejoining the rest of us. She’d shed her rifle somewhere between the door and the lab floor, but she was still wearing the lab coat. At least some of the overhead lights must have been using George’s beloved blacklight frequencies, because the fabric fluoresced slightly in the glare.

“Most people don’t like risking infection when they don’t have to,” said Kelly.

“Well, those people have sticks shoved half a mile up their asses,” said Dr. Abbey. “Besides, Joe’s no threat. He’s immune, aren’t you, sweetheart?” The mastiff looked around at the sound of his name, tail still wagging frantically back and forth.

The rest of us, with the exception of Maggie—who was still deeply involved in her dog-worshipping duties—turned to stare at her. Surprisingly, it was Alaric who found his voice first, asking, “Are you serious? Immune? But he’s got to weigh more than sixty pounds. How can he possibly be immune?”nt>

Dr. Abbey shrugged. “He’s got the canine forms of five reservoir conditions, and the initial signs of developing a sixth. He’s never going to be a daddy, since the fourth one he developed was testicular Kellis-Amberlee—I had to have him neutered after that, poor guy—but he’s never going to amplify fully, either. He’s immune.”

My thoughts raced as I tried to absorb her words. It didn’t help that George was shouting in my head, demanding answers and denying the possible truth of Dr. Abbey’s claims at the same time. Kelly turned to look at Dr. Abbey, her mouth moving silently as she tried to form a protest that wasn’t willing to come out. Even Becks was just staring, looking as surprised as I’d ever seen her. That was saying something, because Becks doesn’t do surprised. No one who’s done field time as both a Newsie and an Irwin goes around being easy to knock off balance.

Maggie looked up from her enthusiastic worship of Joe, a narrow line forming between her eyebrows as she considered Dr. Abbey. “Five reservoir conditions in one dog?” Dr. Abbey nodded. “But how? I’ve never heard of anything, canine or human, developing more than one.”

“Oh, that part was simple,” said Dr. Abbey, and beamed. This smile was pure professional pride. “I induced them.”

All of us fell silent at that, even George. Maggie’s hands stilled, dropping away from the dog. The distant beeping of the computers, the occasional squeal or bark from a lab animal, and the footsteps of the other technicians provided a strange sort of background music. Joe looked between the humans and let out a resonant, echoing bark.

Dr. Abbey reached down to pat him on the head. “Well, since we’ve obviously got a lot to talk about, why don’t you come to my office? There’s cookies and tea, and I can tell you all about how I’ve managed to pervert the laws of nature. Come on, Joe.” Waving for the rest of us to follow, she walked forward, into the bustling lab.

“Are we going with her?” asked Alaric.

“Got a better idea?”

“Nope,” he said, glumly.

“All right, then. Following the crazy lady to our deaths it is.” I shrugged and walked after her, trying to look nonchalant. The day was getting more interesting by the minute. I just had to hope it was the sort of interesting we’d live to talk about later.