Deadline (31 page)

The amber lights winked out about thirty seconds after we passed them, winking on ahead of us at the
same rate. After the second time I looked back into the encroaching darkness, I forced myself to stop looking. It wasn’t doing a damn bit of good, and it was doing damage to my nerves that I really couldn’t afford.

I’m here,
said George.

I squeezed Becks’s hand and kept going.

The amber lights led us around a corner and into a narrower hallway with lights lining the walls on either side. They were still small, but they were plentiful enough to show the outline of Becks’s face and shoulders. Being able to see her walking beside me lowered my stress levels like nothing else. I saw her head turn toward me, and I felt her fingers relax around mine as the same wave of relaxation washed over her. Maybe it was going to be okay.

The lights continued lighting up in front of us, finally circling a door frame directly ahead. Becks and I broke into a sprint at the same time, heading for the exit at full speed. I got there half a step before she did, purely by virtue of having longer legs, and I grabbed the door handle with my free hand. Needles stung my palm, biting deep and then—unlike every other blood test I’d ever taken—staying where they were as the light above the door flashed between red and green. The light stopped on green, and then went out, replaced by a single green bulb off to the left. The needles withdrew. The door didn’t open.

“Oh, those slick bastards,” I muttered, pulling my hand away. “Your turn, Becks. They’re not going to let us out of here until we’re both clean.”

“Yippee,” she deadpanned, and stepped up to take my place. The lights repeated their flickering dance, and a second green bulb came on next to the first. The latch released and the door swung inward, knocking us
both back a sep. Cool air rushed into the hallway like a benediction. I took a deep breath, glorying in the taste of clean air, and let Becks pull me for a change, hauling me into the light.

Kelly’s emergency exit let out on the edge of the employee parking lot. About a dozen people were already there, most wearing lab coats… and there, off to one side, was Director Swenson. He was standing in a small cluster with two of the people in lab coats and Miss Lassen, the receptionist. She was the first to see us. Her shoulders went stiff as she straightened, whispering something urgently to the director. He turned his head in our direction, and his eyes widened before he could compose himself.

Becks squeezed my hand. I hadn’t even realized she was still holding it. “Don’t,” she whispered. “We have what we need. The recorders were running the whole time. This story will end him. We have everything we need.”

I nodded curtly as I pulled my hand away. Then I smiled. “Director Swenson!” I called, raising my arms and waving them overhead like I was signaling a plane to land. “Good to see you made it out! What happened, dude?”

“Mr. Mason—Ms. Atherton,” said the director. He’d managed to compose his face, but there was still a quaver in his voice. The bastard really didn’t think we’d make it out. “I’m so glad to see you both. I was so afraid you wouldn’t realize what had happened in time to make it to an exit.” His eyes flickered toward the door that we’d emerged through. “I had no idea that you knew about the evacuation tunnels.”

Which explains why he didn’t have them purged while you were still inside,
said George. She sounded furious. No one threatened me and got away with it.

“We’ve done our homework.” I kept smiling. It was that or punch him in the face, and that seemed a hell of a lot less productive, if a hell of a lot more fun. “So seriously, dude, what happened? Was it pit bulls again? Another illegal breeding program like the one in Oakland?”

“I—we’re not quite sure yet.” Director Swenson’s eyes darted toward the door again. He clearly hadn’t prepared a cover story. Why should he have bothered? We weren’t intended to survive. “There will be a press release as soon as we have a better idea of what went wrong.”

“Cool. Make sure we get a copy. Oh, and also, that documentation you said you had, the stuff that related to Georgia’s research? I’ll expect copies, since we couldn’t, y’know, go over it together. I guess if I don’t get it, I’m going to have to assume you’ve got something to hide.” I turned, still smiling, and started for the visitor parking area.

“Wait—where are you going?”

I turned back to Director Swenson long enough to flash him the biggest shit-eating grin I could muster. It felt more like I was baring my teeth. Maybe it looked that way, too; he took an involuntary step backward, eyes going wide. “We’re going to do what we’re paid to do,” I said. “We’re going to go and tell everybody the news.” I waved to the rest of the survivors of the Portland CDC and kept on walking, with Becks following close behind me. Neither one of us looked back as we got to the bike, stowed our gear, put on our helmets, and drove away.

A
ccording to the bike’s GPS, the drive from the Portland CDC to Maggie’s place should have taken a little over five hours on the main highway. It actually took us closer to eight. Since the chances that we were being tracked by the CDC had just gone way, way up, we stuck to the back roads, keeping our cameras off and avoiding checkpoints whenever we could. I won’t say we drove through the ass-end of nowhere, exactly, but we had to stop twice to gun down the zombie deer trying to chew their way through the fence between the road and the undeveloped land around us.

“I wish to God I could post this,” bemoaned Becks, shooting another infected herbivore squarely between the antlers.

“Yeah, well, I wish to God I had a cup of coffee,” I replied, and gunned the bike’s engine. “Come on.”

There was a time when I thought George was paranoid for asking Buffy to build a jammer into her bike’s tracking system. I’m over it, especially since that jammer allowed us to duck back onto the highway three times for fuel and twice more for caffeine. Becks kept
scanning through the newsfeeds as I drove, listening for reports of the outbreak in Portland. “We can’t be too careful,” she said when we stopped for drinks and enough greasy snack food to get us to Maggie’s without crashing. I agreed with her. We’d come too far to die because we weren’t paying attention to the news.

None of the initial reports mentioned our presence. They were all bland, tragic, and carefully sanitized. We’d been on the road for about two hours when the “official record” began admitting that perhaps some journalists had been present for the outbreak, but they didn’t identify us by name and they didn’t try to pin things on us. That was good. That meant it would be a little longer before we needed to kill them all.

George stayed uncharacteristically quiet during the drive. She wasn’t gone—that would’ve left me too shaken to control the bike, especially after everything that had happened since Kelly’s arrival—but she wasn’t talking, either. She was just quiet, sitting at the back of my head and brooding over God knows what. I figured she’d tell me when she was through working it out for herself. Maybe it says something about my mental health that I didn’t find the idea even a little strange. We were too far away from normal for strange to have any meaning anymore.

The sun was hanging low in a mango-colored sky w turned onto Maggie’s driveway. I had to keep one foot on the ground to keep the bike upright while we navigated the various security gates, until my clutch hand was cramping and I started to feel like we would have made better time if we’d ditched the bike on the street and made the rest of the trip to the house on foot. Becks clearly shared my frustration. By the time we cleared the ocular scanner, she was all but twitching
with the anxious need to be back in the safety of friendly walls.

The fifth gate was standing open, just like it was when we first arrived as refugees from the ashes of Oakland. A casual observer might have thought Maggie never closed the damn thing. They would have been proven wrong almost immediately, because as soon as I coasted to a stop, the gate slid slickly shut. The sound of the locks engaging was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard.

Becks barely waited for the bike to stop before she dismounted; my foot was still on the kickstand when she hopped off. She stayed where she was for a few brief seconds, jittering in place as she worked the feeling back into her legs. Then she grabbed her bag off the side of the bike, announced, “I’m going to go take a shower,” and took off for the kitchen door. I watched her go without commenting. She didn’t want to give the live breakdown on what happened at the CDC, and, since I was the boss, she was leaving that little luxury for me.

“She’s such a sweetheart,” I said dryly.

Be careful.
George sounded concerned. I jumped. It wasn’t just the worry in her tone: She’d been quiet for so long that I’d almost forgotten she was there, like sitting in a room with someone who hasn’t spoken in hours, until they finally get up to leave.
I don’t think you really understand what’s going on with her.

“What, are you saying she might be working with the CDC? I don’t think so. I’m usually better at reading people than that.”

Shaun…
I could almost see the exasperated shake of George’s head, the way she’d be glowering at me behind her sunglasses.
I don’t think Becks is a traitor, but you need to be careful with her. Okay? Can you do that for me?

“Sure, George.” I slid off the bike, stretching. The muscles in my calves and thighs protested the movement but were overruled by my ass, which was so sore from the drive that I doubted I’d ever sit down again. “Whatever you say.”

One nice thing about working with people who know how crazy I am: Maggie, Alaric, and Kelly were in the kitchen when I stepped inside, all three of them in easy view of the window, and not one of them commented on the fact that I’d stopped to talk to myself before following Becks into the house. It’s a lot easier to deal with people who are already used to me.

“Becks tore through on the way to the shower,” said Maggie. She was next to the sink, drying the last of the dinner dishes. The kitchen smelled of savory pastry and fresh-cooked chicken. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that all I’d eaten since leaving Portland was some soy jerky, half a bag of potato chips, and a candy bar. The corner of Maggie’s mouth turned up in a smile. “There’s a potpie for each of you in the oven. We left them there so they’d stay warm.”

“Awesome.Thanks.” George was hovering at the back of my mind, casting a veil of anxiety over everything. I walked to the fridge and opened it. Someone had gone to the store while Becks and I were out; there was a twelve-pack of Coke on the bottom shelf, and what looked like sufficient fresh provisions for us to survive a siege, so long as no one cut the power.

I grabbed a can of Coke and swung the door shut, turning toward the table as I popped the tab. “Hey, guys,” I said, as amiably as I could manage. “So how were things while Becks and I were on location?”

“Mahir announced the hiring of ‘Barbara Tinney’ and helped Kelly get her first post up while I moni
tored the footage you were beaming out of the CDC,” said Alaric.

“Really? Cool. What was it about?”

“The psychological impact of isolationism on the development of human relationships,” said Kelly. I looked at her blankly. She amended: “Cabin fever makes people shitty roommates.”

“I’m sure it’s a real ratings grabber,” I said, after a suitable pause. “Alaric?”

He took the cue with grace, saying, “I was able to get about a dozen reports cobbled together after things went south, and we had them online before anyone else picked up on the outbreak. Mahir has every on-duty Newsie and about half the Irwins running follow-ups now. The CDC’s only comment so far called it ‘an avoidable tragedy,’ and said they were looking into possible failure of the airlock seals that are supposed to separate the treatment areas from the employee locker room.”

“Which is bullshit,” said Kelly. “Those air locks were designed to withstand a nuclear war. There’s no way they could just
fail
.”

“Good to know,” I said, sipping my Coke.

Ask whether any of the reports include the conference room,
said George, with a sudden, strange urgency in her tone.

“Okay,” I muttered. More loudly, I asked, “Uh, hey, Alaric? Did any of the reports Mahir put together include footage of me and Becks sitting in the conference room waiting for the director to come back?”

Alaric blinked and nodded. “How did you know? That was the second one he put up. He said the time stamp was important to get out there in the public record.”

George started to explain. I cut her off, saying, “The time stamp on the conference room footage means they can’t try to pin the outbreak on us. There’s no way for us to have spent that much time sitting together, waiting,
and
be the ones who damaged the air lock seal.”

You’re learning,
said George, approvingly.