Deadline (57 page)

They stayed behind as we passed the last gate. One of them—Officer Weinstein, most likely—raised his assault rifle in salute. Then Becks hit the gas, speeding off down the road in answer to the instructions in the van’s GPS, and I had to gun the throttle in order to catch up. It took only a few seconds for the house to recede entirely out of sight. The view of the hill that it was on lasted for a little longer, slipping in and out of sight as we followed the curve of the road.

The lights from the house stayed visible even after the house itself was out of sight. They blazed up into the night, painting the clouds with tiered bands of light and shadow. I was relieved when they finally faded. They reminded me too much of everything that we were leaving behind.

The speaker in my helmet beeped to signal an incoming call. I nodded to activate it. “Go.”

“We’re heading for I-5 toward Portland,” said Becks, right in my ear. “We’re going to have to take the main highway for about forty miles, just to get past the worst of the forest.”

“Got it.” Under most circumstances, taking the highway would have been the safest thing to do. It was well-guarded, was well-maintained, and had access to multiple emergency services, including bolt holes we could flee to if things took a turn for the worse. It was also the single route most likely to be monitoed by anyone who was watching to see if we were on the move and, because of the nature of modern highway design, would be relatively easy to isolate from the rest of the grid. It was possible that some innocent bystanders
might be caught up in an attack designed to target the five of us… and after everything we’d been through, I no longer had any illusions that the people we were running from would care.

“Watch yourself out there,” said Becks. Then the connection was cut and the van sped up, racing away from the lights of Weed, racing into the darkness up ahead.

The only thing I could do was follow her.

I-5 was eerily deserted. Even the guard stations were dark, proving once again that, when faced with a true national emergency, no amount of “duty” is going to be sufficient to get people to leave their homes. Half the men who should have been guarding the road were likely to be charged with treason if they were caught, and right now, they had absolutely no reason to care. Treason wasn’t as bad as infection and death. At least treason was something you stood a chance of surviving. We took the automated blood tests and rolled on.

Every time the occupants of the van had to roll down a window, I stopped breathing, waiting for the screams to start. They never did. We were far enough outside the footprint of the storm that we were probably safe… but “probably” isn’t something I believe in banking on. Thank God for bug repellent.

With the road empty and both of us driving as fast as we dared, we cleared forty miles of highway driving in just under thirty minutes. From there, Becks led us onto a frontage road that paralleled I-5 but was mostly concealed by the concrete retaining wall meant to protect passing motorists. I guess if you were one of the people who lived in the tiny houses and aging trailer parks we passed, you were shit out of luck. That’s something almost everyone does their best to forget: The
world may have changed, but some people still can’t afford to come in out of the cold. The poor didn’t have advanced security systems or hermetically sealed windows, and now that Kellis-Amberlee had found itself a new vector…

It didn’t really bear thinking about.

We were passing Ashland, Oregon, when my helmet beeped again. “Go,” I said.

“Shaun?” Becks sounded uncertain. “The GPS just gave me our final destination.”

“And?”

“And it’s Shady Cove.”

I managed to keep control of the bike, but only because I had George to take care of the vital business of swearing like a madwoman at the back of my head while I focused on the road. “Are you
sure
?”

“I’m sure.” There was a long pause before she asked, “What are the odds that she’s driving us into a trap?”

“I don’t know. What are the odds that we have anywhere else to go?” She didn’t answer me. “I figured as much. We’re going to Shady Cove, Becks. Tell everybody to take off the safeties and keep their eyes on the mirrors.”

“I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Mason,” said Becks, and cut the connection.

“So do I,” I muttered. “So do I.”

A lot of small towns were declared uninhabitable after the Rising. They’re little dead zones scattered around the map of the world, places where no one goes anymore—no one but well-prepared, heavily armed Irwins looking for a story, and even then, we never go in at night. Going into a dead zone at night is like signing your own death warrant. Santa Cruz, California, is a dead zone. So is most of India. And so is Shady Cove, Oregon. It used to be a small but comfortable town of
about two thousand people, surrounded by woodlands, comfortably close to the popular tourist attraction of several state and county parks. They did okay.

Until the zombies came, and the very things that made it such a nice place to live turned Shady Cove into a deathtrap. The same thing could have happened to Weed, if not for the fisheries, and Shady Cove didn’t have anything that vital to the local economy. It just had people. We lost a lot of people in the Rising. A town that size was barely even a blip in the statistics.

This is bad,
said George.
We need to turn back.

“This makes perfect sense. If Dr. Abbey is trying to go off the grid, a dead zone is the best place to do it, and Shady Cove was never burned.” I forced a smile. “Besides, you only know the place exists because of the number of times I begged you to let me go there.”

There’s a reason I always said no.

“I know. But it’s not like we’ve been left with a whole lot of options.”

George didn’t have an answer to that one.

The frontage roads gave way to smaller frontage roads, which gave way in turn to roads that were barely even paved. The lights of the freeway guard walls stayed in view the whole time, almost taunting me with the idea of smooth surfaces and well-marked exit signs. We were still within Dr. Abbey’s time frame, and the GPS was clearly still feeding Becks directions, because she kept driving and didn’t stop to yell at me for getting us into this mess.

When I drove past a sign reading
SHADY COVE—5 MILES,
I actually started to believe that we might reach our destination alive.

Then the first zombie came racing out of the woods on my left.

It was moving with the horrible, disjointed speed that only the freshly infected can manage. A normal human will always be faster in a short sprint, but the freshly infected win every time in a long race. They don’t care about pain, and they don’t really notice when their lungs stop pulling in enough air. The uninfected will eventually stop chasing you. A zombie will run until it collapses from exhaustion, and there’s a good chance that even that won’t keep it down for long.

The van swerved to avoid the zombie. I did the same. I was so busy trying to keep the bike upright that I didn’t see the other three infected lunging out of the shelter of the trees until one of them was scrabbling at the handlebargetting y bike, with absolutely no awareness of the sheer stupidity of attacking a man on a moving motorcycle. “Holy—”

I slammed on the brakes, sending the zombie tumbling away from me. The van was back on track, moving away at top speed. I twisted the throttle, starting after them, only to come up short as an arm was hooked around my neck and I was jerked off the bike.

The Kevlar jacket I was wearing absorbed most of the impact with the road, but it couldn’t save me from the hands that were pulling me down, uncoordinated fingers trying to find an opening in my body armor. I smacked them away, flailing to get free. If I could get to my guns, either of them, I would stand a chance of getting away from this. Not a good chance, but a chance.

My questing fingers found the grip of a pistol. I yanked it from the holster hard enough to break one of the snaps and fired it into the face of the first zombie without pausing to aim. The report was loud enough to make my ears ring, even through the still-sealed hel
met. The zombie fell back, leaving me with just enough leverage to push myself into a sitting position and shoot the zombie to my right. That left—crap. That left at least three, by a quick count, and all of them focused entirely on me. The bike was on its side up ahead. There was no way I’d be able to get it righted and running again unless I took all the zombies out, and the numbers were
not
on my side.

Don’t be an idiot. You’ve survived worse.

“Says you,” I muttered, and took another shot.

I was so focused on the zombies I could see that I forgot one of the first rules of dealing with any zombie mob larger than three: Remember that they’re smarter than you think they are. Surprisingly strong hands grabbed me from behind, jerking me back.

Maybe it was the fall I’d taken earlier, and maybe it was just a natural flaw in the construction of my body armor, but when the zombie pulled, I heard something tear. I whipped my head around, looking for a shot, and saw to my horror that the entire left sleeve of my jacket was ripped along the main seam, leaving my arm—protected only by a flannel shirt—exposed.

The infected who was holding me hissed, showing me his shattered, blackened teeth, and brought his head down as I brought my gun up. The bullet caught him in the crown of the head, blowing a jet of brain matter out onto the pavement. The zombie’s hands went limp, and he fell, a look of comic bewilderment on the remains of his face. More infected were coming out of the woods. For the moment, however, I wasn’t sure how much concern I could spare for them.

Most of my concern was for the new hole in my flannel shirt, and the blood welling up through the fabric. The pain hit half a second later, but the pain wasn’t
really that important. The blood had already told me everything I needed to know about the situation.

I grabbed the sleeve and yanked it back into place before running toward the bike, shooting as I went. The speaker in my helmet was beeping insistently. I didn’t know how long that had been going on. The encounter felt like it had started years ago, even if I was reasonably sure it had been only a few seconds. I nodded sharply.

g y—there? Shaun, please, are you
there
?”

“I’m here, Mahir.” I shot another zombie as it ran for me, and snickered. “Hey, did you know that rhymes? Where are you guys?”

“We’re coming back for you. Can you hold your position?”

“I can, but I gotta tell you, buddy, that’s not the best idea you’ve ever had.”

He took a sharp breath. “Shaun, please don’t tell me…”

“No test results yet, but I’m definitely bleeding.” The lights of the van blazed back into sight ahead of me. I groaned. “I told you not to come back!”

“Not in so many words, you didn’t, and if you think we’re leaving you without a test, you’re an arsehole. Now down!”

Mahir’s command was sharp enough that I obeyed without thinking, hitting the road on my hands and knees a second before bullets sprayed through the air where I’d been standing. The rest of the undead fell in twitching heaps. The gunfire stopped, leaving the night silent.

“Get on the bike and go,” said a voice in my ear. For a dazed second, I couldn’t tell whether it was George or Mahir. Then it continued: “We want the turnoff for Old Ferry Road.”

“Mahir, I really don’t think—”

“If you amplify before we get there, you’ll lose control of the bike. If you don’t, I’m sure Dr. Abbey will appreciate the chance to check your blood for signs that this is a new strain.” Mahir’s voice gentled. “Please, Shaun. Don’t make us leave you out here.”

“This is idiotic,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Just wanted to be sure you were aware.” I nodded again to cut the connection and took a moment to pull my sleeve closed as best as I could before righting the bike and getting back on. It started easily. There went that excuse for staying behind. I could want to protect them, but I couldn’t lie to them.

“Well?” asked George, next to my ear. “Are you going to follow them, or what?”

“I’ll follow,” I said.

The van turned laboriously around on the narrow road, taillights gleaming red through the darkness as Becks hit the gas and started forward once again. I squeezed the throttle, whispered a prayer for swift amplification, and followed them.

We took a tour of the government zombie holding facility on Alcatraz today.

A lot of people don’t like having it there, even though it’s been scientifically proven that Romero was wrong about at least one thing: Zombies can’t survive without oxygen. Since they’re too uncoordinated to swim, and they don’t know how to operate boats, if there were ever an outbreak, it would be naturally confined. That doesn’t maer. “Not in my backyard” comes out loud and clear where the dead are concerned.

I looked through the safety glass into the pens, into the dozens of eyes that looked just like mine, and I searched them as hard as I could for a sign of something, anything that would tell me they were still human. There was nothing there. Only darkness.

If I pray for anything tonight, it will be that when Shaun eventually does something insane and gets himself bitten, I’ll be there to shoot him. Because I couldn’t live with myself knowing I’d allowed him to amplify. No one deserves to end up like that. No one.

—From
Postcards from the Wall
, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted June 24, 2034