Deadline (44 page)

George’s answer, when it came, was thoughtful and slow.
Are you asking because you’re scared of losing me, or because you’re hoping I’m going to go away one day?

“Yes. No. I mean… I mean I don’t know, George, and I sure as shit need you right now, but I have to wonder sometimes if this is my life. If this is the rest of my life.”

I think I’m here as long as you keep me here, Shaun. I think one day you’re going to look at a mountain and say “I should climb that,” or hell, look at a pretty girl and say the same thing. I think when that happens, I’ll go.
She laughed a little, and added,
But what do I know? I’m just the dead girl in your head.

“You know everything, George. You always did.” I put my hand flat against the steamed-up mirror. If I squinted a little, and didn’t let myself really look, I could pretend it was her looking back at me and not my own blurred reflection. “I miss you.”

I know. But that won’t keep me here forever.

The others were waiting for me in the girls’ room. Mahir was in the process of towel drying his hair, and
Kelly was back in street clothes. The CDC costume was for tomorrow, when we’d storm the gates or die trying. The hair extensions were gone, and she had a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes to hide her features from any bored bloggers taking pictures for background color. Becks had put her rifle away. She was leaning against the wall next to the door, expression one of bland detachment.

“Hey,” I said, stepping inside. “Who feels up for pizza?”

“What took you so long?” asked ecks.

I shrugged, smiling a little. “I had to talk something out with myself before I could come over here. That’s all.”

“Well, I’m starving,” said Mahir, dropping the towel and grabbing his jacket off the bed. Kelly and Becks followed. I brought up the rear, pausing to close and lock the motel room door.

George didn’t say anything as we walked toward the van… but in the back of my head, I was pretty sure I could feel her smiling.

I
’m not sure any of us slept that night. We were on an Internet blackout while s
tationary: no uploads, no message forums, nothing that could be traced to prove we were ever here. That also meant no phone calls, since turning on our phones could activate their GPS chips. We’d been scrupulously careful since leaving Weed. We just had to hope we’d been careful enough.

It was the blood tests that worried me. You can’t survive in America without at least one blood test a day, and possibly—probably—more than that. We’d been taking blood tests at toll booths and convenience stores all the way across the country, and if the CDC was somehow tracking clean results, we were screwed.

Oh, the CDC swears they don’t track clean results, only the ones that come back positive for a live infection, but no one knows for sure. Legally, they’re not
allowed
to track clean results. It’s considered an invasion of privacy. If there’s nothing to indicate that a person is at risk of amplification, you can’t use their tests for anything. Not tracking, and not medical profiling—which is why we have that handy little ruling to depend on.
See, the insurance companies would love an excuse to analyze the blood of every person in the country, looking for pre-existing conditions. Ironically, the insurance companies may have the sort of big pockets that can normally shove something like blood test tracking through, but the pharmaceutical companies makthem look like paupers, and the pharmaceutical companies didn’t want to lose their customer base because people couldn’t afford coverage anymore. That’s one more thing we can thank Garcia Pharmaceuticals for.

We left the motel at four-thirty in the morning. The sky was still pitch-black, and the streets were deserted. We planned to arrive at the CDC about fifteen minutes before the janitorial staff, stash the van in the maintenance parking lot, and enter through a side door while the grounds were still mostly deserted. It was a risky approach, but it was no worse than any of the other ideas we’d come up with, and it was way better than some of them. Maggie’s van was generic enough to be ignored, without crossing into the overly generic “plain white van with blacked-out window.” That sort of thing attracts attention by virtue of being designed to be ignored.

Kelly and I were the only ones awake in the van for the first hour of the drive. She sat next to me in the passenger seat—another risky approach, since her death was big news for weeks in the Memphis area. “Local hero doctor dies in the saddle” is the sort of headline that has legs. Newsies like stories like that; they can go back to that well again and again when things get slow, milking them until they go dry. At the same time, Kelly was the one who could steer me down the frontage roads and through the shortcuts only a local would know. The thing that made her a possible danger also made her a major asset.

Then again, hadn’t that been the case all along?

The sun was starting to burn a smoky line along the horizon when we hit the outskirts of Memphis. I clicked the radio on, cranking the volume as the scrambler grabbed the nearest station and blasted Old Republic through the van. “Classic rock!” I shouted to Kelly. I had to shout or she wouldn’t have been able to hear me. “That’s awesome! I hate this shit!”

Judging by the loud swearing now coming from behind me, Becks and Mahir hated it even more. “Turn that crap off!” shouted Becks, smacking me hard on the back of the head.

I grinned as I turned the volume down. “Good morning, sunshine.” Kelly was hiding a smile behind her hand. That was good. The more relaxed we all were going into this, the better our chances of getting out alive. “Sleep well?”

“I should shoot you in the bloody head, dump you on the side of the road, and go back to the motel for another six hours of not being in this van,” said Mahir.

“That’s a yes. Water’s in the cooler. Who needs caffeine pills?”

Everyone needed caffeine pills. Kelly handed them out, three to a person. We all gulped ours, me with Coke, Mahir and Kelly with water, and Becks dry. I didn’t say anything. Some people blast pre-Rising rock music, some people put on lab coats, and some people try to prove they’re the biggest badass around. If it made her feel better, I didn’t have a problem with it.

The maintenance lot was just as easy to access as Kelly said it would be. Only one blood test was required to pass the gate, and it was conducted by an unmanned booth. “Can’t say I think much of their security,” I said. “Portland was a lot harder to get into.”

“Portlad was also open when you went there,” Kelly said. “Trust me. It only gets worse from here.”

Somehow, I didn’t want to argue with her about that.

I parked as close to the building as I dared, maneuvering the van into a space tucked mostly behind a large steel generator cage. Becks was out before I’d even turned off the engine. She turned in a slow circle, pistol out and held low in front of her, where she wouldn’t be slowed by the process of trying to draw. Mahir followed her out, looking less immediately aggressive as he took up his position next to the van. I glanced to Kelly.

“You ready for this?”

“No,” she said, and got out of the van.

I sighed. “Am
I
ready for this?”

No,
said George.
But it’s too late to turn back now.

“I guess that’s fair.” I opened the ashtray and dropped the keys inside. If I didn’t make it out of the building, the others wouldn’t need to worry about trying to hotwire the van before they could escape. “Check this out.”

I opened the door and got out.

We must have made an odd sight as we made our way across the parking lot. Kelly took the lead for once, her white lab coat glowing like a banner in the dimness of the early-morning light. Becks walked close behind, covering her. She was wearing camouflage-print cargo pants, running shoes, and an olive-drab jacket with Kevlar panels sewn into the lining. She actually had her hair up, pulled back in a tight bun that would look lousy on camera but was less likely to get in her eyes than her usual waves. Mahir walked almost alongside Becks, his white running shoes the only thing keeping him from looking like a visiting professor from Oxford, and I brought up the rear in my usual steel-reinforced
jeans, cotton shirt, and tweed jacket. Not exactly the sort of group that normally goes parading into the Memphis CDC before the sun is all the way up.

The first door was locked with an actual, manual lock, the sort that requires a key to open. “No blood test to get in?” asked Becks, incredulous.

“Not at this stage,” said Kelly, digging in her purse. “If you’re going to amplify on the property, we’d much rather you did it in the clear zone between the parking lot and the labs. That way we can catch or kill you at our leisure, and you don’t eat the staff.” She produced a key.

“Practical,” said Mahir.

Kelly unlocked the door and we entered the CDC, Becks now taking point while I stayed at the rear. Our effective noncombatants would walk between the two of us for as much of the trip as possible. Our little formation wouldn’t stop a sniper, but it might give us a chance to react before they both went down.

Taking civilians into a fire zone,
said George.
What
would
your mother say?

“That I should keep the cameras rolling,” I muttered, and kept following Kelly.

That first door led to a narrow hallway, which opened after about ten feet into a wide concrete corridor that looked like it had been sliced from a pre-Rising bomb shelter. Turbines hummed in the distance. There were no windows and no natural light; instead, huge fluorescents glowed steadily overhead, protected by grids of steel mesh. Kelly kept walking, forcing the rest of us, even Becks, to hurry if we wanted to keep up.

“What is this?” asked Mahir, looking warily around.

“Isolation zone. If we lock down, this area goes airtight, and the negative-pressure venting system kicks
in. It can be flooded with formalin from the central control center, or manually from any of the booths along the walls. In case of an outbreak, the doors to the main building open and the security system starts trying to herd the infected here, where they can be kept until we decide what to do with them.”

“Ever hear of just shooting the damn things?” asked Becks.

“We have to get our test subjects somewhere.” The statement was matter-of-fact; this was, for Kelly, another part of what it meant to work for the CDC. “We all sign body release waivers when we accept our employment offers. As soon as you amplify, you become company property.”

“Because that’s not creepy.” I scanned the walls. “I don’t see any cameras.” What I did see was a series of sniper slits in the walls, probably leading to a second airtight corridor where the gunmen could be locked until their job was done and their blood tests were clean. This was a storage room. It was also a kill chute, and we needed to remember that. “Is there one of those nifty escape tunnels here, too?”

“Underground. It lets out on the other side of the property.” Kelly stopped at a door with a keypad and retinal scanner next to it. She started hitting buttons, narrating her actions, probably to keep one of us from getting trigger-happy and putting a bullet through her head. “I’m giving the system the visiting technician security code, along with the security code for Dr. Wynne’s lab, and telling it I have three guests with me. This level of security doesn’t distinguish between entry points. It’s a known hole, but we keep it open in case we need to bring people in the back way.”

“To avoid the media?” asked Mahir mildly.

Kelly reddened but kept tapping for several more seconds before she pulled her hand away. A panel opened in the wall, exposing four blood test units. “We all need to test clean before we can proceed.” She slapped her hand down on the first panel, starting her retinal scan at the same time. It was a good maneuver: It cut off any further questioning, and we had
plenty
of questions. Starting, at least for me, with “How the fuck are we planning on getting out of here?”

“Too late to back out now,” muttered Becks, and initiated her own blood test. Mahir and I shrugged and did the same. Becks was right; too late now.

The tests came back clean—no surprise, given that we’d only just arrived—and the door swung open, revealing a long white corridor that looked a lot more like what I expected from the CDC. Only about half the lights were on, filling the corners with shadows. A sign on the nearest door read
“All the comforts of home,” I said, following Mahir into the hall. I was the last one through; the door closed behind me, locks engaging with a hydraulic hiss that reminded me chillingly of Portland. The hairs along my arms and the back of my neck stood on end as I realized that we were well and truly locked in now.