Deadline (19 page)

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 under
scoring 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—”