Deadline (26 page)

“My thoughts exactly,” said Dr. Abbey.

An outbreak is never good, but an outbreak on a sealed campus is close to a worst-case scenario. The healthy would be locked in with the infected until someone could come and let them out, and the mop-up would probably take weeks, if not months, after which the school would almost certainly be decommissioned for several years while they waited for the hazard level to go down again. “What was the student body size?”

“About eleven thousand,” said Dr. Abbey. “It was a larger school before they closed it to nonresident students. Add another three hundred or so for the faculty and staff.”

“How many got out?” asked Maggie.

“None,” whispered Kelly.

“None,” echoed Dr. Abbey. “See, the outbreak started near the school walls, and they were located on a hill that made it difficult to get to the campus any way but via the main road. Whoever was in charge that day—whatever genius was at the switch—decided that it was too dangerous to try for an evacuation. That the infection was already too close to breaking out. So they called down the wrath of fucking God on that little school.”

“I remember that,” said Becks, sounding faintly awed. “We studied it when I was in training. Almost all the security footage went missing, even the stuff that should have been beamed straight into the Health Canada and CDC databases. It was just gone.”

“Except for the pieces that somehow ended up on private servers,” said Alaric. “I’ve seen some of the footage. It’s clearly an outbreak, but it doesn’t look…”

“It doesn’t look that bad,” said Dr. Abbey. She seemed to have regained a bit of her composure. She looked challengingly around at our little group before she continued: “It looks like the sort of thing you handle with an insertion team and a general quarantine. Not by ordering a firebombing on Canadian soil. My
husband
was in that school. He called me fifteen minutes before they hit the news, and he was
laughing
. He said there was ‘a little ruckus’ near the track, and that he’d be home in time for dinner. Told me to get an ice pack ready for the bruises left by all those blood tests
they insisted on running. Everything was fine, and that was
after
the outbreak started. But they treated it like the end of the goddamn world.”

“So you went rogue?” I asked.

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Dr. Abbey shook her head. “I tendered my resignation immediately. They refused it. Three times. Said that I was a ‘valuable researcher,’ and that they’d be happy to give me the time I needed to get my affairs in order before I returned to work. So I got my affairs in order. I packed my things, I emptied out my lab, and I left while they were still congratulating themselves on being so understanding in my time of need.”

“You quit,” said Kelly.

“You never started,” countered Dr. Abbey. “Don’t you look at me like that, you little Barbie girl with your big moral ideals that go out the window as soon as think you know best. My husband died because a bomb was cheaper than a cleanup squad. That’s the simple truth of things. Joe died because somebody didn’t want to pay the bill. His sister,” she jabbed her finger at me, “died because you people won’t do the research into the reservoir conditions that needs to happen if we’re going to survive this damn virus. As a species, and as a society. You may think you’re doing the right thing, and hell, you may even be right, but when you don’t let anyone watch over your shoulder, how the fuck are the rest of us supposed to know?”

Kelly took a slow breath, visibly calming herself before she said, “I wouldn’t be here if I was still willing to play by their rules.”

“And again bullshit.” Dr. Abbey slid off the desk, taking a quick step forward. “You don’t make them, but you’re sure as shit defending them, and it’s time to
stop. Because if you’re far enough off the reservation to be sitting here, they’re not going to let you come back. It’s cheaper to drop the bomb than it is to offer medical assistance, remember?” She leaned in until her face was almost up against Kelly’s, and said, voice suddenly soft, “I was you, once upon a time. Remember that. I was
you
, and the organization you still believe in made me who I am now. They’ll do the same to you, if you don’t get smart in a hurry.”

Kelly gaped at her. Before any of us could formulate a response, Dr. Abbey was turning and striding off down the hall. Joe lumbered to his feet and went trotting after her, nearly knocking Maggie over in the process. The rest of us joined Kelly in gaping.

We were still staring when she shouted back, not turning, “I want you people out of my lab in ten minutes!” Then she was gone.

I glanced at Alaric. “I think I like her.”

I think I do, too,
said George.

Becks eyed the rest of us with poorly restrained impatience. “Well?” she asked. “Now what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

“That part’s easy.” I smiled, slowly. “We have a conspiracy. Let’s go bust this fucker open and see what comes tumbling out.”

M
ost major cities have their own CDC offices, although three out of four are just satellites, built mostly to keep people calm. The big offices are rarer, and they’re the ones with the real resources—they’re the ones where things get
done
. The nearest big office was smack in the middle of Portland, which conveniently put it less than an hour’s drive from Dr. Abbey’s lab.

Less conveniently, we couldn’t exactly pull up stakes and go running straight to the CDC to start shaking them down for answers. “They’re a government agency,” said Becks. “It’s their
job
to make things confusing.”

“Besides, if we just go charging in there, we’re all going to die,” added Alaric.

“I hate trying to argue with you when you use logic on me,” I said. The sun had dipped substantially lower in the sky while we were getting our Virology 101 from Dr. Abbey, and the shadows were long enough to have become menacing. Sunsets were considered beautiful before the Rising. Now they just mean night is coming, and staying out after dark is a good way to get
yourself killed. “We need to get in there. We need to plant some bugs and see if we can knock the CDC off balance enough to tell us anything.”

“This isn’t a good idea,” said Kelly. There was no room for disagreement in her tone. “The CDC has the right to shoot first and ask questions later. All they need to do is formulate a reasonable case for you having been hreat.”

“Then I guess we’d better not be threats, huh?” I looked at her and shook my head. “We’re going in there, Doc. We need to.”

Seeing that Kelly still wasn’t following me, Alaric said, “It’s like putting together an academic defense. Sometimes you need to look for negative results, as well as positive ones. If we don’t learn anything from the CDC, we get footage of them outright denying what everybody will eventually know is true. If we do learn something, we’ve made progress.”

“And I need to know how much of the CDC is involved.”

Kelly looked between us, frowning slightly. “You’re all insane,” she said.

“Yeah.” I unlocked the van doors. “But look at it this way: At least you don’t have to come.”

Kelly snorted and got in.

Sadly, I meant what I said. No matter how pissed I was at Kelly, she was the one who spoke their language, and having her with us would have made things infinitely easier. But with Dr. Wynne assuming she’d died in Oakland, and everyone else believing she’d died in Memphis, we couldn’t exactly march her into the office and expect to get actual answers. Shot at, yes, but answers, no.

Alaric was the one to come up with the obvious
solution: “It’s too late for us to do anything serious tonight. Why don’t we get a couple of hotel rooms, and then you can leave me and Maggie to babysit Dr. Connolly while you and Becks go off to wreak havoc.”

“I’m not normally in favor of splitting the party, but I have to say that Alaric’s plan is a good one. It also keeps those of us—namely, me—who don’t have much field experience from standing in the line of fire,” added Maggie. “I’d rather not have the CDC call my parents to report that I’ve come storming their castle.”

I nodded. “All right. Let’s get out of here. Of course, if there’s anyone who’d like to skip their all-expenses-paid ticket on the crazy train, you’re welcome to stay here. At that point, your options are going back to the lab and trusting Dr. Abbey not to turn you into her private Frankenstein, or staying out here and praying that whatever comes to find you is in a killing mood, rather than an infecting one.”

“Actually, Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster,” said Maggie. “Common misconception.”

“Way to ruin the moment, Maggie.” I walked over to the bike, picking up my helmet. “Everyone cool?”

“I still say this is a very poorly conceived idea,” said Kelly. “I mean, maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe the CDC will let you walk out alive. But I wouldn’t place bets on it.”

“Maybe
you’ll
get lucky and they’ll let us leave,” I corrected, gently. “Becks here may be the one voted most likely to point a gun at somebody’s head just for kicks, but Maggie…”

“They’ll never find the body,” said Maggie. Her tone was blithely chipper, like she was talking about the latest fund-raiser for the Bulldog Rescue Association. That made it worse. “Not that anyone’s going to be
looking, since you’re legally dead, but even if they looked for you, they’d never come close. All I’d need to do is call my father and tell him I finally had a problem he could fix. You could be the best Father’s Day present I’ve ever given him. He’s
so
hard to shop for.”

Kelly’s eyes widened, fear flickering in their depths. “Is she serious?”

“Almost certainly, but I wouldn’t worry about it just yet,” I said. “Come on, crew. Let’s find us a hotel.”

In the end, we wound up checking into the first hotel we found in downtown Portland, a nondescript little Holiday Inn whose front door boasted about their recent security upgrades. I was barely picking up any wireless frequencies, which meant “recent” was probably more like ten years ago, but that didn’t matter. Their clearances were up-to-date, and the local review sites said that the rooms were generally clean. We didn’t need five-star accommodations. We just needed a place to stash our semi-hostage and regroup without being attacked by zombies.

We got two rooms, one for the boys, one for the girls. If Alaric was uncomfortable about rooming with me—and hence with George—he didn’t say anything about it. He just started hooking up his equipment and plugging things in to recharge, while Becks marched Maggie and Kelly into the room across the hall with all the tenderness of a drill sergeant. Maggie took the barked orders gracefully, while Kelly just looked unsettled. I found myself feeling sorry for her, even after everything. After all, I liked her before she told me what the reservoir conditions really meant. It wasn’t like she designed the disease.