One, said George. Two, three…
“Four, five,” I added, and kept running.
The first grenade went off with a low crumping sound, muffled enough to tell me that it had been buried by a substantial number of bodies when it exploded. The other three went off in rapid succession, each of them a little louder and less cushioned by the weight of the bodies on top of it. I kept running. When Becks came into sight ahead of me, I stepped to the side, giving her a clear line of fire, and pulled two of the guns from my waistband.
“God, I wish we had cameras on this,” I said… and then the infected who’d managed to survive my little party tricks came shambling and running down the hall, and I forgot about cameras in favor of keeping us both alive.
They were a sorry-looking bunch, even for zombies. It’s true that you can kill a zombie with trauma to the body; once they lose enough blood, or a sufficient number of major internal organs, they’ll die like everybody else. The trouble is that they don’t feel pain like uninfected humans do, and they can keep going long after their injuries would have incapacitated a normal person. Some of the zombies making their way down the hall were missing arms, hands, even feet—those stomped along on the shattered remains of their ankles, shins, or knees, giving them a drunken gait that was somehow more horrifying than the normal zombie shuffle. One had a piece of grenade shrapnel stuck all the way through his cheek, wedged at an angle that would make it impossible for him to bite even if he managed to grab us. That wasn’t going to stop him from trying.
“Becks? You clear?”
“Clear!” came the shout from behind me.
“Great,” I said, and opened fire.
The bad thing about setting up a kill chute like the one we were in is that it can just as easily turn into a “die” chute. The good thing about setting up a kill chute—the reason that people keep using them, and have been using them since the Rising—is that as long as your ammo holds out and you don’t lose your head, you can do a hell of a lot of damage without letting the dead get within more than about ten feet of you.
The injuries to our mob were extensive enough that most of them weren’t moving very quickly, and the ones who’d been shielded from the worst of the blast by the bodies of their companions were hampered in their efforts to move forward by those same bodies. The fast zombies got mired in the slow zombies, and their efforts to break free of the mob just slowed everything down a little more. Becks and I didn’t bother aiming for the fast ones. We just went for the head and throat shots, and kept on knocking them down.
“Shaun!” called Becks. “Dr. Abbey just called! They’re opening the lab door!”
“Awesome!” I shouted back, barely a second before gunfire started from the direction of the lab. I fell back several yards, pulling another gun from my waistband and holding it out behind me. “Reload?”
“Thanks.” Becks snatched the pistol from my hand, taking aim on another of the infected. “So this is fun. This is a fun time.”
“Sure.” I fired twice, taking down two more zombies. I was about to shoot a third one when Joe came bounding into my line of fire. He grabbed a zombie by the leg, shaking so hard that the entire leg came off. The gunfire continued behind him, but for Joe, the party was all out here in the hall.
It probably says something about Dr. Abbey that she named her massive black English mastiff after her dead husband and used him for illegal medical experiments. I’m not sure what it says, exactly. I just know that Joe is now functionally immune to Kellis-Amberlee—he can get sick, but he can’t go into conversion—and that meant that the enormous, angry carnivore now spreading zombie guts around the hall was on our side. Thank God for that.
“That’s disgusting,” said Becks, and shot a zombie who was continuing to advance on our position, ignoring the chaos behind him. “Oh, jeez. Is that a spleen?”
“I think that’s a spleen, yes.” I fired one more time, taking down a zombie that had gotten a little too close for comfort. Joe looked toward the sound of the shot, ears perked up questioningly, and barked once. “It’s cool, Joe. We’re not hurt.”
“How cute. The giant dog is concerned.”
“Someone’s got to be.” I leaned against the rail, watching Joe work. The gunshots from behind him were starting to taper off. Only three zombies that I could see were still making any real progress, and all of them were badly wounded. Becks raised her gun to fire. I pushed her arm gently down again. “Let him have his fun. He’s had a long day, and he deserves the chance to kill some things.”
“If you say so.” Becks looked at me, seeming to tune out the sounds of slaughter coming from the hall in front of us. She frowned. “You have blood in your hair. And on your face.”
“Great. I’ve been exposed. Dr. Abbey will be thrilled.”
The gunshots from the hall had stopped. Becks and I exchanged a look, nodded, and waited where we were for a few more minutes before starting to make our way in that direction. Joe barked again as we approached him, the sound only slightly garbled by the fact that he had most of a human throat in his mouth.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I told him. He dropped the throat, chuffing happily, and fell into step beside us. I patted his blood-tacky head with one hand. “Good dog.” There was no possible way of minimizing my exposure at this point. I might as well just go with it.
Dr. Abbey, Alaric, and four of her technicians were in the hall, their faces covered by ventilator masks and eye protectors. “You made it,” she said, sounding unsurprised. “Are we secure?”
“Not quite. There are at least three shamblers on the ground floor, Mahir’s in the van, and Maggie’s locked in a storage room,” I replied. “Alaric? You okay, buddy?”
“Shaken, but intact,” he said.
“Good.” I looked to Dr. Abbey. “I’ve been exposed.”
“There’s a shocker.” She shook her head, shoulders slumping. She looked tired. That wasn’t normal. Not for Dr. Abbey. “Help with the cleanup, and I’ll get blood test kits for both of you. Shaun—”
“I know, I know,” I said. “I’ll be donating a few more vials to the cause of science.”
“We’re still leaving in the morning,” said Becks. I turned to blink at her. She shrugged. “There’s always something, isn’t there? We have to go. It’s never going to stop long enough for there to be a good time.”
“She’s right,” said Alaric. “Alisa can’t wait.”
“Well, then, I guess we’re leaving in the morning,” I said. “Let’s get this place cleaned up, and figure out what happened with the security. Oh, and can someone go let Maggie out before she kills us all?” I looked at the mess surrounding us, and sighed inwardly.
It was going to be a long night.
We lost over a dozen techs, Joey—people who’ve been working with me for years, people who trusted me to keep them safe. And for what? So I could learn some more things we already knew? This was my fault. Half the people who were bitten knew better than to engage the infected the way they did, but they believed the treatment I’ve been working on could protect them, and they weren’t careful enough. Looking into Laurie’s post-conversion eyes… it was enough to break my heart. Shaun Mason may hold the answer to this pandemic, but if he does, I haven’t found it yet.
I know you don’t think I should send them to Florida. I have to. We need to know what they used when they built those mosquitoes—and I need to know who built them. If I can pick apart their genetic structure, we may stand a chance in hell.
—Taken from an e-mail sent by Dr. Shannon Abbey to Dr. Joseph Shoji at the Kauai Institute of Virology, July 24, 2041.
I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I don’t know how much longer I can keep convincing my team that I can do this. I don’t know how much longer I can trust myself to keep them alive.
And I don’t know if I could live with myself if I didn’t keep trying.
We’ve been frozen here, just like we were frozen in Weed, back when th
e world seemed a lot less fucked up. It’s time to start moving again, and I’m terrified, and I’m so damn relieved. I don’t think I’ll be coming out of this alive. I’m going to go out there, find out what really happened to George, make sure the whole damn world knows what she died for, and then I’m going to come home, and I’m going to go to where she is. I don’t know how much longer I can do this, but that’s okay, because I’m not going to be doing it for much longer.
—From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, July 24, 2041. Unpublished.
Nine
Gregory motioned for silence as we left my room. I nodded, for once grateful for my lack of shoes. My socks didn’t squeak against the tile. Somehow, he managed to walk so that his shoes didn’t make any noise, and we passed through the darkened CDC building like ghosts.
The door at the end of the hall was open, the light above it glowing a steady amber. Alarm lanced through me. Green lights mean there’s no danger; red lights mean the danger is near. Amber lights mean something has gone wrong.
Gregory’s hand landed on my shoulder, stopping me before I could do more than stiffen. “It’s part of our window,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Come on. We’re almost there.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, taking his words as license to break my own silence. He led me through the door and into another hall, one I’d seen only in passing, when they were taking me from one lab to another.
“Someplace they’d rather you didn’t see,” he said. He didn’t need to tell me who “they” were. “They” were the people who’d brought me back from the dead, and who gave Dr. Thomas his marching orders. “They” were the people behind all of this.
“So it’s something that’s going to cause me some of that stress they’re so interested in minimizing,” I guessed, more for the comfort of speaking than out of any serious desire to have my thoughts validated.
“You could say that,” Gregory said. We reached a corner. He raised a hand, signaling me to stop, and stepped around it alone. “We’re clear. Come on.”
I came.
We walked to another door with an amber light above it. This one led to a hall I hadn’t seen before. It was less pristine than the others. There were whiteboards on the walls, scribbled with notes about cafeteria menus and security sweeps. There were even a few flyers taped up, advertising cars for sale or asking if anyone knew a good tutoring service for high school biochemistry. It looked so much more real than the place I’d been since I woke up, so much more human, that it almost made my chest hurt. The world still existed. I’d died and come back, and the whole time I was gone, the world continued.
Gregory started walking faster, saying, “We’re almost there. We allowed six minutes transit each way, which gives us fifteen minutes at our destination. I’m going to need you calm at the end of that time. I can’t drag you down these halls if you’re not working with me.”
“Meaning what?” I asked, trying to sound like my stomach wasn’t balling itself into a small, hard knot of fear.
“Meaning that if you lose it, I’ll leave you.” The words were kindly spoken—he wasn’t trying to be cruel, just stating a fact. If I couldn’t control myself, he’d leave me. The other half of that statement didn’t need to be spoken: The EIS couldn’t afford to have his cover blown because I couldn’t keep myself calm. If he left me, he probably wouldn’t be leaving me alive.
“I understand.”
“Good,” he said. He stopped at a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, producing a thumb drive from his pocket. He plugged it into the side of the blood testing unit. The unit beeped twice, and the light above the door went out. Gregory put his hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it. Instead, he looked at me gravely and asked, “Are you ready?”
“No,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never been ready for anything that had to be prefaced with that question. Now open the door.”
A small smile crossed his lips. “That’s the answer I wanted to hear,” he said, and opened the door, revealing a darkened lab. A dim blue glow filled the back third of the room. I looked back at Gregory, raising my eyebrows. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go on.”
“There’s an invitation to die for,” I said, and stepped across the threshold. The overhead lights clicked on immediately, starting low and climbing to a normal level of illumination. I appreciated that small courtesy. I may not be as photosensitive as I used to be, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy being blinded.
Gregory stepped in behind me, closing the door. “Here we are,” he said.
“Where is ‘here,’ exactly?” I asked, squinting as I looked around the room. It looked like it had been cast on the same mold as all the other CDC labs I’d visited, with undecorated walls, stain-proof linoleum floors, and lots of equipment I didn’t recognize. My heart leapt a little at the one thing I did recognize: a computer terminal.
Gregory followed my gaze and grimaced, looking genuinely sorry as he said, “I can’t let you get on the Internet from here, Georgia. It’s not safe.”
“But—”
“That’s not why we’re here.” He nodded toward the back of the room. The blue glow was less evident now that the lights were on, but it was still there.
“Right,” I muttered, and turned to look in that direction. From where I was, it looked like a fish tank filled with luminescent blue liquid. I frowned and started toward it, trying to figure out what it was, and why it was important enough for Gregory to risk both our lives by bringing me here.
I think, on some level, that I knew what it was even before I saw it; I just had to put off understanding for as long as possible if I wanted to be able to handle what I was about to see. But maybe that’s hindsight, me trying to justify things to myself. I don’t really know. What I do know is this:
The blue liquid wasn’t fully opaque; it just looked that way from a distance. It cleared as I approached, and by the time I reached the tank, I could see the outline of a human figure through the blue. I squinted, but couldn’t make out any real details beyond the fact that it was female, and surrounded by a forest of tangled cords.
Gregory stepped up behind me and leaned to my left, pressing a button at the top of a control panel I hadn’t noticed until then. The glow brightened, and the liquid began turning transparent, small lines of bubbles marking the spots where filters were cleansing some element out of the mix. In only a few seconds, I could see the figure floating in the tank.
She was naked, in her mid-twenties, and curled in a loose fetal position, like she had never needed to support her own limbs or head. Her hair was dark brown and badly needed to be cut. It was long enough that the movement of the liquid around her made it eddy slowly, wrapping around her neck and arms. Sensors were connected to her arms and legs, running up to join with the main cable. Her mouth and nose were exposed—she was breathing the liquid; I could see her chest rise and fall—and a thicker tube was connected at her belly button, presumably providing her with oxygen and nutrients. I stared at her, watching the way her fingers twitched and her eyes moved behind the thin shields of her eyelids.
Gregory waited, watching me watch her. The room seemed to be holding its breath, both of us waiting to see what I would do, whether I would be able to look at what was in front of me without snapping. For a moment, I didn’t know the answer.
The moment passed. I took a shaky breath, followed it with another, and asked, “How many of us are there?”
“At the moment, three.” Gregory turned his attention to the tank where another Georgia Mason floated. Her hair had never been bleached, and was still the dark brown that mine was supposed to be. I felt a brief flare of jealousy. She looked more like me than I did. “This is subject number 8c. It’s the last member of the subject group following yours.”
“Wait—subject group?” I turned my back on the tank, unsure of my ability to keep my cool while I watched my own silent doppelganger floating in the blue. “What does that mean?”
“Your desi
gnation is ‘subject 7c.’ Subject 7a didn’t mature properly; 7b went into spontaneous amplification during the revivification process.” He gestured at the tank. “Subject 8a was shut down due to issues with spinal maturation at about this stage.”
“And 8b?” He wasn’t using names for any of the other subjects, I noticed—he wasn’t even giving them genders. They were just things to him, at least until the moment they woke up and turned into people. That was actually reassuring, because he treated me like a person. I wasn’t the same as them.
I wasn’t.
“Subject 8b is part of why we’re here. Subject 8c is just the backup, in case something goes wrong.” Gregory looked at me carefully. “Are you ready to proceed?”
“You mean, do I want to scream and throw things and maybe vomit, but can I keep myself together a little longer? Yes, and yes.” I shook my head, taking comfort in the fact that I could feel the air against my ears. I might have started out like that girl in the tank, but I wasn’t her anymore. I was awake, and alive, and my hair had been cut. We have to take our comforts where we can find them.
“All right,” said Gregory. “Follow me.”
He led me to a large metal rectangle on the far wall. He tapped a button on a control panel next to it, and stepped back as a whirring sound began to emanate from the wall itself. The metal rectangle slid slowly upward, revealing the room on the other side of the thick, industrial-grade glass. He tapped the control panel again, and the lights came on.
The walls of the room were featureless and white. The only thing that even resembled furniture was a narrow hospital bed with white sheets, surrounded by IV drips and beeping monitors. Thick black straps secured the room’s single occupant to her bed, holding her in place. Unlike the girl in the tank—unlike me, when I first woke up—her hair was cut short, in a precise replica of the haircut I’d worn since I was twelve. I touched the close-shorn hair at the back of my neck without realizing I was going to do it, feeling how uneven the strands were. Dr. Shaw had done her best, but she was no hairdresser.