Deadline

Twenty-three

Yes, I’ll hold,” snarled Mahir, and continued pacing. I barely noticed. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the television, where CNN continued to faithfully record the worst disaster to strike the human race since the summer of 2014, when the dead first decided to get up and nosh on the living.

Maggie sat next to me on the couch, even more fixated on the news than I was. Her interest in the situation was a little more proprietary than mine; Garcia Pharmaceuticals owned three factories and a research center in the affected area, and with the fatality reports updating every few seconds, a moment’s inattention could mean missing the deaths of people she’d known her entire life.

Alaric and Becks had retired to the kitchen after the first hour. Alaric was trying to get the wireless up and running, while Becks was cleaning her guns and checking the catches on the windows—just in case. It was a sentiment I could appreciate, even if I couldn’t find it in myself to move.

That’s enough, said George abruptly. The television was showing a school bus packed refugees being besieged by the living dead. The people inside were screaming; I could see their faces through the windows. As long as they were screaming, they were still essentially human. They were past saving. I hoped that infection took them quickly, or that someone had enough bullets to—

Shaun! George’s shout was enough to shock me out of my stupor. It’s amazing how loud something like that can seem when it’s coming from inside your head.

I turned to glare at the air to my left. Maggie, sunk deep in her own fugue state, didn’t appear to notice. “What?” I demanded.

George folded her arms and glared back. “You’re not doing anyone any good sitting there like a media consumer, you know. You need to be finding out what the hell is going on.”

“And how do you suggest I do that, huh?” I spread my arms, indicating the television and Mahir—still pacing and snarling into his phone—with the same gesture. “Things are sort of shitty right now, George, in case you failed to notice.”

“Oh, trust me, I noticed, I just don’t see where I need to care.” George grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet. “Come on. You’ve got work to do.” Giving me a slow look, she added, “And some clothes to put on. God, Shaun, are you really sitting around watching television in your boxers? That’s just sad.”

“If there’s all this work, why don’t you do it?”

“Because I’m dead, remember?” She kept hold of my wrist as she spoke, pulling me toward the kitchen. “You need to ask Alaric whether Maggie moved our van into the garage before things locked down.” Catching my blank expression, she sighed. “Come on, Shaun, try to keep up for, like, thirty seconds while you’re losing your mind, okay? If we can get to the van without going outside, we can get to our emergency wireless booster.”

My eyes widened. “Crap, you’re right. We still have that thing, don’t we?”

“Unless you threw it away in a moment of unrepeated sanity and then didn’t tell me about it, yeah, we do.”

Being on a news team with Buffy Meissonier meant dealing with a girl who was occasionally twenty pounds of crazy crammed into a ten-pound sack, and who eventually sold us out to the government conspiracy that got George killed. It also meant working with the best espionage technician I’ve ever encountered, either in the private sector or working for the government. She could make computers do things I’m not sure even science fiction considers possible, and she did it all while wearing holo-foil butterflies in her hair and T-shirts claiming that some dude named Joss was her master now. People say Buffy was good. They’re wrong. Buffy was great.

Mahir was still shouting at the phone when George pulled me past him. He gave me a harried glance and nodded, eyes skipping straight past George. That made sense, I guess, since it’s not like she was really there.

“I’m pretty sure this represents a whole new level of fucked-up crazy,” I muttered, as George yanked me into the kitchen.

“I’m he cause of your psychotic break; I’m just a symptom,” she replied waspishly, and shoved me toward Becks and Alaric.

Becks, like Mahir, had managed to dress while I was staring at the television and was wearing combat boots, a black tank top, and camouflage pants—the Irwin equivalent of a uniform. She and Alaric were sitting at the table, him with his laptop pulled as close to his body as it would go, leaving the rest of the space for her. She had what looked like a small armory spread out in front of her, and was in the process of reassembling a semiautomatic handgun that had yet to be legally cleared for private ownership. They looked up when they heard my footsteps.

“What’s the update?” asked Becks. She snapped the magazine into place with a click that echoed through the kitchen, eliciting a startled yip from one of the bulldogs sprawled next to the sealed-off door.

“Nothing that’s good,” I replied. George had released my wrist when she got me where she wanted me, and I realized without surprise that she was gone again. That was okay by me. Her appearing and physically hauling me around the house represented a whole new level of crazy, and I wanted to avoid thinking about it for as long as possible. “Forever” seemed like an excellent place to start. “They’ve declared martial law in the areas that haven’t been officially marked as hazard zones, and it’s starting to look like they’re going to mark the entire damn Gulf Coast as a Level 1 hazard.”

Alaric paled. “They can’t do that.”

“Yes, they can.” Becks put down the gun she’d been working on. “In case of an outbreak confirmed to impact more than sixty percent of the population in a given area, USAMRIID and the CDC will both recommend that a Level 1 designation be applied for the protection of the surrounding area. The government reserves the right to take their recommendation.” A smile that looked more like a grimace twisted her lips upward. “Our parents voted that little jewel into law, and we never repealed it, because why should we? Outbreaks are tiny things. Bad things. It’s better if we can let fifteen people die and save five thousand, right?”

“Only this time, we’re going to let fifteen million die,” I said. “That sounds a little different, don’t you think? Alaric.”

He turned to me and blinked. He was pale and stunned looking, like he still couldn’t believe what was happening. That was understandable. I couldn’t believe it either. “What?”

“Where’s the van?” His expression didn’t change. I took a careful breath, and amended, “Where’s our van? Did Maggie have you move it to the garage after we left, or is it still parked out back?”

If the van was parked outside, there was no way I’d be able to get at it. Maybe one of Maggie’s security ninjas—but that would mean trying to talk them through finding the wireless booster, and I wasn’t sure my memory was good enough for that.

“I…” Alaric stopped, frowning. “It’s in the garage. It was out back until you called—Maggie wanted to keep the garage open for her Fictionals when they came through—but she got spooked when you told us to hole up, and she had me move it inside, where it wouldn’t be visible to satellite surveillan”

“God bless justified paranoia,” I said fervently, and started toward the garage door. The bulldogs lifted their heads and whined, watching me.

“Where are you going?” asked Becks, half-rising.

“The van.” I looked between them, noting their matching blank looks, and explained, “I’m pretty sure Buffy’s old wireless booster is still out there. If I can get it running—”

“—we can get back online,” said Alaric, his eyes widening in comprehension. “I forgot all about that thing!”

“We haven’t exactly needed to use it in the last year.” I started walking again. “I’ll be right back. If I’m not right back, well… fuck, I don’t know. If I’m not right back, throw some gas grenades into the garage and call for the security dudes to come and shoot me until I stop bleeding.”

“We’ll shoot you ourselves,” said Becks, causing Alaric to shoot her a distressed look. She ignored it. You learn to shrug that sort of thing off after you’ve been in the field for a while. That, or you stop trying to talk to people who aren’t Irwins.

“Thanks.” I opened the garage door, shoving a bulldog aside with my foot before it could sneak by me, and slipped through.

The garage lights were motion-activated white fluorescents. They clicked on as soon as the door to the kitchen swung shut, filling the enclosed space with an even, sterile glow. I scanned the area, automatically assessing the load-bearing capacity of the shelves lining the walls and the security of the pipes connecting to the water heater and emergency backup generator. Maggie used the garage primarily for storage, cramming most of the shelves with boxes and using the ones nearest the door as an extension of the pantry. One entire floor-to-ceiling shelving unit was dedicated to bags of dried dog food. At least the bulldogs wouldn’t be going crazy with hunger anytime soon.

Our van was sitting at the center of the room. It had been washed before it was put away, and its paint almost gleamed in the antiseptic light. I took a step toward it.

“Hello, Mr. Mason,” said the voice of the house. It managed to sound chiding, which was a nice trick, since it didn’t have normal human intonations. I stopped where I was, looking vainly for the speaker. “I am afraid the house is presently in a sealed state. You will be unable to exit, and should return to the interior.”

“That’s cool. I’m not trying to get out.” I forced myself to relax, one inch at a time. “I just need to get something from the van.”

“Attempts to break the isolation seals will be met with necessary force.”

“Necessary force” was a polite way of saying that the house security system would shoot me where I stood if I looked like I was trying to get the doors open. “Noted,” I said. “I’m not trying to get out, I swear. The van is right there, and I won’t even be turning on the engine. Promise.”

“Your compliance is appreciated,” said the house, and went silent. I wted a few seconds to see if it was going to try to evict me from the garage. Nothing happened. I started for the van, moving faster this time—if the house decided I was dawdling, it might decide I was planning to escape, and then things could get really messy, really fast. Use of lethal force by private security systems has been authorized since some jackass in Arizona loaded his house guns with dummy bullets and got himself ripped apart by a pack of starving infected. His estate tried to sue the security firm that managed his defenses, and the security firm turned right around and sued the state, saying they hadn’t been allowed to do the things they had to do if they wanted to keep their client alive.

“Mangum v. Pierce Security v. the State of Arizona,” supplied George. She reached the van a few steps ahead of me, folding her arms as she leaned against the door. “Do you remember where Buffy kept the booster?”

“Hi, George. Nice to see you.” I pressed my thumb against the scanner, letting the van identify me as an authorized driver. The locks clicked open. “So does this mean I’m finally going really crazy?”

She shrugged. Her face still looked wrong without her sunglasses, alien and familiar at the same time. “I think it means you already have a way of coping with things that are too big for you to handle. So Maggie goes into vapor lock, and Mahir shouts at the embassy trying to get a call through to his wife, and you…”

“I see dead people walking around and giving me orders. Great.” I offered her a pained smile as I pulled the van door open. “At least I like having you here. This would get old damn fast if you were Mom.”

George grimaced exaggeratedly. “There’s a bright side to everything.”

“Really? What’s the bright side for Florida? Because I’m really not seeing one.” Our field equipment was piled haphazardly around the van’s interior, stacked on counters and taking up most of the floor space. It would take an hour, maybe more, to get the thing ready for an excursion. I couldn’t blame Maggie and Alaric for putting it away in this condition—they weren’t expecting to leave the house without a lot of notice, and they weren’t field operatives—but I still had to grit my teeth when I saw that the weapon racks hadn’t been properly secured. If we had to run for any reason, we’d all wind up getting killed by our own carelessness.

“If you’re not seeing one, I can’t see it either. You know that.”

I bit back the urge to swear at her. Fighting with George used to be one of my best ways of blowing off steam. I’ve mostly tried to avoid it since she’s been gone; it doesn’t seem fair to start something when neither of us can really leave the room. Besides, in my saner days, I was always afraid I’d say something unforgivable and she’d leave me alone with the dark behind my eyes, and no more George, ever. I wasn’t so much afraid of that anymore. We just didn’t have time to fight.

“Hey, George, do me a favor, will you? Either go away, or stop pointing out how you’re just a figment of my imagination and help me find the damn booster. I can’t handle having you hanging around calling me crazy. I get enough of that from everybody else.”

“Your wish is y command,” she deadpanned, before climbing up to join me in the van. She couldn’t touch anything, naturally, but her feet still made soft echoing sounds when they hit the floorboards, and her shadow on the walls moved just the way that it was supposed to. I had to admire the realism of my hallucinations, even though I knew that probably wasn’t what most people would consider to be a good sign.

“Really? ’Cause right now, what I’m wishing for is a tank.” I paused. “Maybe two tanks. Becks will probably want one, too, and I don’t want to be greedy.”

“Always thinking of others, that’s you.” Her fingers brushed the back of my neck as she moved past me. I shivered. “The last time I saw the booster, Buffy was stowing it back here, with the rest of the backup network hardware.”

“We moved that around Valentine’s Day, when Becks did her ‘romantic places to take an Irwin’ article series.” I snapped my fingers. “The lockboxes!”

George leaned against the counter to watch as I dropped to my knees, rolled back the industrial rug covering the van floor, and pried up the trapdoor it had been concealing. We don’t have a complete second floor in the van—the weight would have been prohibitive, not to mention the structural instability it would have introduced—but we had a few extra storage compartments built in for a rainy day during the first major retrofit. They made good hiding spots for contraband when we were doing certain types of articles, and the rest of the time, they were a convenient place to hide snack foods… or excess hardware.

The first compartment held nothing but weird-looking cartoon porn and Russian girlie magazines. I smiled despite myself. “Damn, Dave. You had smarts and you had guts, but what you did not have was taste.”

“He was pretty much in love with Magdalene,” said George.

I amended: “Most of the time, what you didn’t have was taste. Sometimes, you were spot on.” I pried open the second compartment. A metal box with half a dozen antennae welded to the sides was nestled in the bottom, padded by wads of duct tape. I reached down to wriggle it loose, lifting it carefully out of its cradle. “There we go.”

“Remember, there’s supposed to be a detached battery pack that goes with it.”

“Right.” I stuck my hand into the welter of duct tape, rummaging for a moment before pulling up a small metal square with a power adapter at one end and a USB port at the other. “Got it!” I held it up, turning to show her.

George was gone. Again.

I stopped for a second, looking at the space where she’d been—hadn’t been—had appeared to be—only a moment before. Then I sighed, lowering the battery pack as I picked the wireless booster back up and pushed myself to my feet. “This stage of the crazy is going to get real old, real fast, you know.”

Sorry. But you’re still too sane to sustain that sort of breakdown for very long.

“Guess this means that whole ‘not forever’ thing we talked about before is sort of moot, huh?” My hads moved automatically as I spoke, pulling a bag from under the counter and sliding the wireless booster inside.

I think that depends on you, said George apologetically. I’m not the one who needs to move on. I’m the one who’s here because you still need me.

“Yeah, well, right now? Right now, I think being crazy may be the only thing that’s keeping me sane. Come on.”

I closed the van door and made my way back across the garage. The house security system didn’t say anything. I guess it was smart enough to recognize that I hadn’t gone near any of the exits. That, or it just wasn’t in the mood to argue with me. I didn’t care either way.

Alaric and Becks were still at the kitchen table, in the exact positions they were in when I went into the garage. There was one difference: Half of Becks’s guns were gone, making room for me to put down the bag. “Alaric, you got an extension cord?”

“In my laptop bag,” he said. As he bent to retrieve it, he asked, “Did you find the wireless booster?”

“I did. Got any idea how it works?”

“Not really.”

“That explains why we stopped using it. I guess we’re going to have to hope that my classic ‘smack it until it works’ approach can save the day.” I sat, unpacking the wireless booster and connecting it to the battery pack. Alaric passed me an extension cord. I hooked it to the battery, and Becks took the other end, plugging it into the wall.

Try not to break anything you can’t fix.

“Hush, you,” I said vaguely. “Working now.”

Becks and Alaric exchanged a glance, but didn’t say anything. That was probably the best thing they could have done.

Buffy built all her own equipment. That would have been fine—a lot of people build their own equipment—if it weren’t for the fact that her idea of what equipment should look like was almost completely defined by pre-Rising television. She could put more wires, switches, and buttons on a single remote than anybody else I’ve ever met, and each one had a specific purpose. She also understood that by her standards, she worked with a bunch of ham-handed techno-illiterates. After the fifth time George tried to reboot a server by putting her foot through it, Buffy started putting idiot buttons on everything. They wouldn’t provide access to the more complicated functions, but they’d get things going.

“Red,” I mumbled. “Red, red, red…” Red buttons used to be common. They were visible, hard to miss, and universally understood as important. After the Rising, red took on another meaning: It became the color of infection, the color of danger… the color of death. Red buttons were installed on things that needed the capacity to self-destruct, and they represented the things that you should never, under any circumstances, touch. So of course Buffy, with her perverse sense of humor and pre-Rising aesthetic, made all the really good stuff red.

The center button on the booster’s control panel was a glossy shade of strawberry red. Becks and Alaric knew Buffy by reputation and through staff meetings, but she was dead before they joined the standing office team. They never learned some of her little quirks. So it wasn’t really surprising to see Alaric come halfway to his feet when I hit the button. Becks managed not to stand. She did have to stop herself before she grabbed my arm, but hey, at least she stopped herself.

I took my finger off the button. The wireless booster made a cheerful beeping sound as it started scanning the local network, looking for exploitable cracks in the security. I looked from Becks to Alaric, smiled, and stood.

“Give it five minutes,” I said. “I’m going to get myself a Coke. Either of you want anything?”

Neither of them did.

The wireless booster clicked to itself, occasionally beeping as it verified some part of the network structure to its own satisfaction. It had been running for three of the five minutes I’d requested when Mahir came into the kitchen, rubbing his face with one hand. His glasses were propped up on his forehead, and he looked exhausted. Seeing the beeping, blinking box on the kitchen table, he slid his glasses back down and frowned. “What in bloody hell is that thing supposed to be, and what is it doing?” he asked.

“Hey, Mahir.” I took a swig of Coke before saluting him with the can. “The embassy get you a connection?”

“No.” He scowled. “All international lines are locked down until the cause of this incident can be determined. The damned government’s thinking terrorist action, naturally. I’ve just had an offer of extraction back to Britain. As if the United States could hold an Indian citizen against his will.”

“If this is declared an act of terrorism, I think they can,” said Alaric.

Mahir paused. “You may be right,” he said finally. “I’ll try to avoid thinking about that for the moment. Now, does someone want to tell me what that thing is supposed to be?”

The wireless booster beeped, louder this time, and the lights along the top turned a bright sunshine yellow. I pushed away from the counter. “Hey, Alaric, check your connection.”

“On it, boss.” He tapped his keyboard. Then he punched the air, thrusting his arms up in a victory salute. “We have Internet!”

“Girl was a genuine genius.” I finished my Coke and tossed the empty can into the sink. “That ‘thing’ is the original Georgette Meissonier wireless Internet booster and satellite access device. I have no clue how it works. I don’t care how it works. All I know is that you have no signal, you plug it in, you get it to turn on, and then it finds you a signal. It—”

None of them were listening to me anymore. Alaric was typing furiously, while Becks and Mahir were in the process of hauling out their own laptops and setting to work. I looked around and shook my head.

“Thank you, Shaun. We really appreciate your getting us back into contact with the rest of the world, Shaun. You’re awesome, Shaun,” I said dryly.

Becks flipped me off.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and walked out of the kitchen.

My laptop bag was on the couch next to Maggie, who was still staring, transfixed, at the television. Her lap was full of bulldogs. I hadn’t noticed that before. I touched her shoulder. She didn’t react. “Hey. Maggie?” Still no response. “Maggie, hey, come on. You need to stop looking at that now. It’s not doing you any good, and I think it’s probably doing you a lot of bad.” She still didn’t react. “George…”

Just do it.

“Gotcha.” The remote was on the arm of the couch. I picked it up and switched off the television before stuffing the remote into my pocket, where no one would be able to get it without my knowledge.

Maggie’s protest was immediate. “Hey!” she exclaimed, looking blindly around for the missing remote control. “I was watching that!”

“And now you’re not,” I replied. “We have Internet again.”

“We do?” Brief hope suffused her face. “Are things… did we…?”

“I dug Buffy’s semilegal wireless booster out of storage. We’re probably tapped into a Department of Defense satellite or something, but I think there’s a good chance your parents own the satellite, so I don’t give a shit. If they get pissed, you can bat your eyelashes at them and say we’re sorry. Alaric’s already online, Becks and Mahir are in a footrace to join him, and I figured you might want to log in and check your Fictionals. Make sure they’re okay.” Or as close as anyone was likely to be, under the circumstances.

Maggie isn’t the sort of person who falls apart often, or for long. Her eyes cleared when I mentioned her Fictionals, and she nodded. “I’m not sure how many of them will have connectivity, but the ones who do will be worried sick.” She lifted the bulldogs from her lap and set them on the couch. Two jumped down to the floor and went trotting off on unknowable bulldog errands. The third one made a fussy grunting noise, curled up, and went back to sleep.

I’ve never envied a dog before.

“The cities must still be online,” I said. “If they knocked San Francisco off the network, they’d have riots to go with their zombies. I figure we lost connection because we’re too far out in the boonies for anyone to give a shit about what happens to us.”

These cold equations, said George, with a sigh.

“Exactly,” I said.

Maggie pretended not to notice as she stood, brushed the dog hair from her legs, and said, “If we have Internet, we have VOIP again,” she said. “I’m going to go call my parents.”

I blinked. Maggie was generally happy to spend her family’s money, but I’d never heard her say she was going to contact them. That was a part of her life that the rest of us really weren’t invited into. “Really?”

“Really.” She gave me a wry look. “Unless you want a private army descending to extract me.”

“Go call your parents.”

Half the dogs followed Maggie out of the living room, leaving the other half sprawled around in various stages of repose. I sat down on the couch, bracing my elbows on my knees and dropping my head into my hands as I tried to figure out our next move. No pressure or anything. It was just the end of the world.

I went through a science fiction phase when I was in my teens, around the time George was having her American history and angry beat poetry phase. We always shared the best stuff, so she learned a lot about ray guns, and I learned a lot about revolutions. There was this one story—I don’t remember who the author was—about a dude who was flying a bunch of vaccine to a sick planet. The fuel was really precisely calculated, because fuel was expensive and the ship was pretty small. And this teenage girl who didn’t understand stowed away on his ship. She wanted to get to her brother. Only there wasn’t enough fuel to get them both to the sick planet, and she didn’t know how to land the ship or deliver the vaccine. If she lived, everybody died. That was the cold equation. How many lives is one person, even a totally innocent person, going to be worth? We used to argue about that, more for fun than anything else, but we never managed to get that equation to equal anything but death.

If the outbreak was bad enough, they’d start diverting all but the most essential services to the big cities. Cold equations again: An outbreak in Weed would have a limited amount of fuel to feed it, and be geographically isolated enough to mop up without too much secondary loss of life. An outbreak in Seattle or San Francisco would kill millions, and then spill out of the city to kill millions more. We were the stowaways on this ship, and there was only enough fuel to get one person safely to the other side.

“You should call a staff meeting,” said George, sitting down next to me and resting her head against my shoulder. She was affectionate like that only when we were alone, even when we were kids. She never wanted the Masons to see.

“I know.” I left my head in my hands. “Maggie’s crew won’t be the only worried ones.”

“Did we have anyone in Florida?”

“Not Florida, but we had a Newsie in Tennessee, and I think a couple of Irwins in Louisiana. They were doing the bayous.” Their faces flashed behind my eyes, still photos that would have looked totally natural up on the Wall. I was grimly afraid they’d be going up there soon. Alana Cortez, who loved reptiles and had been bitten by more venomous snakes than any person has a right to survive encountering, and Reggie Alexander, a walking mountain of a man whose biggest claim to fame was the time that he punched a zombie and survived to brag about it. They were both solid, well-trained, and on the way to having lucrative careers in the news. But they’d been in Louisiana. And Louisiana wasn’t there anymore.

“That makes calling a meeting even more important. If we’ve lost anyone, people are going to be convincing themselves that we’ve lost everyone.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

George put a hand on the back of my neck. Maybe I should have been disturbed by the fact that I could feel it, but I just couldn’t work up the energy. I was too busy being grateful that she was there at all.

“Hey, George?”

“What?”

“That stuff I said before… before.” Before Kelly died, before Dr. Wynne turned on us, before we fled the CDC hours ahead of a disaster of Biblical proportions—before everything. Before the world changed.

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t mean it. I really, really didn’t mean it.” I lifted my head and she was there, looking at me with open anxiety, alien eyes grave. “Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. I can’t do this without you, and if you try to make me, I don’t think I’m going to be okay.”

“Don’t worry about that.” Her smile was sad, and her hand continued to rest against the back of my neck, feeling solid and warm and alive. If this was crazy, God, I wasn’t sure I was capable of wanting anything else. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” I whispered. I sat on the couch with my dead sister, listening to the voices from the kitchen, and wondered just how the fuck I was going to get us through this one in one piece.