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Thirty

It took three months for the CDC to release Georgia’s ashes. It would normally have taken longer, given the way she died. Lucky me, my sister died an international celebrity. That sort of thing gets you friends in high places. Even inside the CDC itself, which has been preoccupied with internal reviews as it tries to find the source of Tate’s anonymous “donors.” When Dr. Wynne went to his superiors and petitioned them for the right to let us have Georgia’s ashes, they listened. Guess they didn’t want to risk being our story of the week. No one does, these days. That’ll fade with time—Mahir says we’re losing percentages daily, as people move on to newer things—but we’re always going to have a certain cachet after everything that went down. “After the End Times: So dedicated to telling you what you need to hear that they’ll die to do it.” I’d probably be a lot more disgusted by the whole thing if it weren’t for the part where it let us bring George home.

Dr. Wynne brought the box containing her ashes to me himself, accompanied by a fresh-faced, yellow-haired doctor I remembered from Memphis. Kelly Connolly. She’s the one who gave me the pile of cards, handwritten by CDC employees from all over the country, and said they had three more as large from the WHO and USAMRIID. Her eyes were red, like she’d been crying. Buffy died, and we got accused of trying to hoax the world. George died, and that same world mourned with me. Maybe that should have been a comfort, but it wasn’t. I didn’t want the world to mourn. I just wanted George to come home.

She would have needed a forwarding address to find me. I came back from the campaign trail battered, exhausted, and ready to collapse, and discovered that home wasn’t home anymore. My room was connected to George’s room, and George wasn’t there. I kept finding myself standing in her room, not sure how I got there, waiting for her to start yelling at me and tell me to knock first. She never did, and so I started packing my things. I wanted to get away from the ghosts. And I wanted to get away from the Masons.

George died, and the world mourned with me, sure. All the world but them. Oh, they did the right things in public, said the right things, made the right gestures. Dad did a series of articles on personal versus public responsibility and kept invoking the “heroic sacrifice” of his beloved adopted daughter, like that somehow made his platitudes more relevant. Guess it did, because it got him the highest ratings he’d had in years. George died a celebrity. Can’t blame a man for capitalizing on that. Except for the part where I can. Oh, believe me, I can.

George and I’ve had our last wills and testaments filed since before we were required to, and even though we both always assumed I’d go first, we both still filed with predeceasement clauses. If I went first, she got everything I had, including intellectual property, published and unpublished. If she went first, I got the same. We both had to die before anyone else had a shot at our estates, and even then, we didn’t leave them to the Masons. We left them to Buffy, and, in the event that she hadn’t survived whatever event managed to kill us both—since we always figured the only way we’d die together was something like the van breaking down in the middle of an outbreak—it all rolled to Mahir. Keep the site going. Keep the news in the right hands. The Masons haven’t been in the chain of inheritance since we were sixteen. Only they didn’t seem to have realized that because I hadn’t been home for three days before they started harassing me to sign over George’s unpublished files to them.

“It’s what she would have wanted,” Dad said, doing his best to look solemn and wise. “We can take care of things and leave you free to build a career of your own. She wouldn’t have wanted you to put your life on hold to take care of what she left behind.”

“You’re one of the top Irwins in the world right now,” Mom added. “You can write your own ticket. Whatever you want to do, you can do it. I bet you could even get a pass to visit Yosemite—”

“I know what she wanted,” I said, and I left them sitting there at the kitchen table, not quite certain how they’d failed. I moved out the next morning. Two weeks couch-surfing with local bloggers who knew the score, and then I was in my own apartment. One bedroom, security controls so far out of date that the place would have been condemned if it hadn’t been in such a well-certified hazard zone, and no ghosts or opportunistic parents waiting to ambush me in the halls. George followed me, of course, in the form of all her things, tucked into neat cardboard boxes by the movers that I’d hired… but she’d never been there while she was alive, and so sometimes, I was able to forget she wasn’t there anymore. For minutes at a time, even, it seemed like the world was the way it was supposed to be.

Doctors Wynne and Connolly cut the delivery of George’s ashes pretty close; they didn’t bring them until the day before the funeral. I wouldn’t have scheduled it at all, not until I had her back in hand and maybe had a little time to come to terms with things again, but circumstances didn’t leave me much of a choice. It was the only day Senator Ryman could make it, and he’d asked that we hold the service when he could attend. I might still have put it off, except for the part where our team couldn’t come out of the field if the senator—who was fighting, and apparently winning, an increasingly vicious battle for his political position—was still out there. Magdalene, Becks, and Alaric deserved their chance to say good-bye to George, too. Especially since they’d taken over where she and I, and Buffy, had to leave off.

Becks runs the Irwins now; I meant it when I said I didn’t have the stomach for it anymore. Site administration is enough excitement for me, at least for right now. Mahir and Magdalene are doing fine with their departments. Ratings have actually gone up for the Fictionals. Magdalene is better at staying focused than Buffy ever was, even if she doesn’t have a flair for technical things or espionage. And maybe that’s good, too. We’ve been down that road before.

Mahir’s flight from London landed at eleven the day of the funeral. I drove to the passenger collection zone at the edge of the airport’s quarantine border, hoping I’d be able to pick him out of the crowd. I didn’t really need to worry. His plane had been almost empty, and I would’ve known him anywhere, even if I hadn’t been seeing him on video screens for years. He had the same empty confusion in his eyes that I saw in my mirror every morning, that odd sort of denial that only seems to come when the world decides to jump the rails without warning you first.

“Shaun,” he said, and took my hand. “I’m so glad to finally meet you. I just wish it could have been under better circumstances.”

“This is from George,” I said, and pulled him into a hug. He didn’t hesitate. He just hugged me back, and we stood there, crying on each other’s shoulders, until airport security told us to clear out or be held in contempt of quarantine regulations. We left.

“What news?” Mahir asked, as we pulled onto the freeway. “I’ve been incommunicado for hours. Blasted flight.”

“Mail from Rick—Senator Ryman’s plane touched down about the same time yours did. They’ll be meeting us at the funeral home. Emily couldn’t make it, sends her regrets.” I shook my head. “She sent a pie last week. An actual pie. That woman is so weird.”

“How’s Rick handling the transition?”

“He’s taking it pretty well. I mean, he quit when the senator asked him to be the new VP candidate, and it doesn’t seem to be driving him crazy. Who knows? Maybe they’ll win. They’re definitely bread and circuses enough for the general populace.”

“American politics.” Mahir shook his head. “Bloody bizarre.”

“We work with what we’ve got.”

“I suppose that’s the way of the world.” He hesitated, looking at me as I turned off the freeway and onto the surface streets. “I’m so sorry, Shaun. I just… There’s nothing I can say that says how sorry I am. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know you cared about her a lot,” I said, shrugging. “She was your friend. You were hers. One of the best ones she ever had.”

“She said that?” he asked, wonderingly.

“Actually, yeah. All the time.”

Mahir wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “I never even got to meet her, Shaun. It’s just… it’s so damned unfair.”

“I know.” I didn’t bother wiping my own tears away. I stopped bothering weeks ago. Maybe if I let them fall they’d get around to stopping on their own. “It is what it is. Isn’t that how these things always go? They are what they are. We just get to cope.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“At least she got her story.” The parking lot of the funeral home was choked with cars. Packing the staff of multiple blog sites and a presidential campaign, as well as friends and family, into a single building will do that sort of thing. Their security must have been freaking out. The thought was enough to bring the ghost of a smile to my face, and the ghost of a chuckle from George in the back of my head.

Mahir glanced at me as I pulled into the last parking slot reserved in the “family” section of the lot. “I’m sorry, did I miss something? You’re smiling.”

“No,” I said, unlocking the door. There’d be men with blood tests at the funeral home doors, and mourners waiting to tell me how sorry they were, to share their tears like I could understand them when I could barely understand my own. “You didn’t miss anything at all, I guess. You got as much as I did.” I climbed out of the car, Mahir still looking at me strangely. And then I stood there, waiting, until he followed me. “Come on. There’s a whole bunch of people waiting for us.”

“Shaun?”

“Yeah?”

“Was it worth it?”

No, whispered George, and, “No,” I said. “But then again, when you get to the end, what really is?”

She told the truth as she saw it, and she died for it. I came along for the ride, and I lived. It wasn’t worth it. But it was the truth, and it was what had to happen. I tried to hold onto that as we walked into the funeral home to say as many of our good-byes as we could. It wouldn’t be all of them. It never could be. But it was going to have to be enough, for me, and for George, and for everyone. Because there wasn’t going to be anything more.

“Hey, George,” I whispered.

What?

“Check this out.”

We stepped inside.