“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 monitored 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.
“Time stamps can be forged,” said Maggie. Alaric, Kelly, and I all turned to look at her. She shrugged. “You just shouldn’t put too much faith in the time stamp. It’s not going to save you by itself. That’s what my family has lawyers for.”
“Thanks for that little ray of sunshine, Maggie.” I turned to Kelly. “So, Doc, was there any way to know that we were walking into a deathtrap? I mean, at this point, I trust the CDC about as far as George can throw you, but it still seems a little extreme, burning a whole installation to take out two reporters.”
Kelly frowned. “But Georgia is—oh.” She stopped midprotest, comprehension flooding her expression. “No. I didn’t. I’m starting to realize that my… my former employers”—she spat out the word “former” like it tasted bad—“may be capable of some pretty horrible things, but I never suspected they’d do anything like that. I wouldn’t have let you go if I knew.”
“The sad part here is that I bet they have more nasty surprises for us. Just wait.” I sipped my Coke, studying Kelly’s face for signs that she was fraying. The Doc was holding up better than I expected; all I saw in her eyes was exhaustion, both physical and mental. The rest of us were tired, but we were also trained for this sort of shit—or as trained as you can be for something that’s never supposed to happen. “Well, we got out alive. That’s something. Alaric, how’s our market share?”
“Up four points last time I checked, with the expected uptick in our closest competitors,” said Alaric, not missing a beat. “Three of them are crying hoax and two more are claiming that we’re endangering our licenses by behaving recklessly in hopes of increasing our ratings.”
I snorted. “Because ‘behaving recklessly’ is suddenly not in the job description? Amateurs. Let ’em find their own potentially fatal government conspiracies.”
“Can we not?” Maggie picked up a stack of plates and began putting them away in the cupboard. “I think one is more than enough at any given time, and since they have a tendency to spread, I’m not sure a second one wouldn’t wind up getting all over us, too.”
“Fair enough.” I tossed my empty can into the recycling bin. “You said there was a potpie?”
“Yes, and you said you’d tell us what happened.” Maggie put away the last of the plates before taking down the oven mitts and opening the oven, producing a covered ceramic dish that smelled like it was less than half a mile shy of Heaven. She set it down on one of the open spaces at the table.
“Caffeine, then food, then exposition.” I grabbed a fork from the dish drainer before moving to sit down. The potpie smelled even better up close. The bulldogs agreed: two promptly appeared from the next room, sitting by my feet in perfect, implacable begging positions. “Remind me again why we didn’t all move in with you years ago?”
“Because I live in the middle of nowhere, and that isn’t actually an asset for anyone who isn’t a pure Fictional.” Maggie went back to putting dishes away. “Now talk, or I’m going to take back your dinner.”
“Anything but that.” I stabbed my fork into the piecrust. “How much of the footage have you guys watched?”
“Enough,” said Alaric grimly.
I nodded. “Okay, then.” I took a bite of potpie, swallowed, and began talking, starting with the point where Becks and I drove away from the motel. Moes ur time at the CDC had been fairly well-documented by the cameras we carried, but they’d been simple recorders, not full-on field deployments. There were things they missed, like most of Director Swenson’s reactions, and everything in the emergency tunnels.
“Your recording feeds cut off as soon as you went through that second door,” said Alaric. “They picked up again once you were outside.”
“Really?” I g
lanced to Kelly. “Did you know that was going to happen?”
“No, but it makes sense. Those tunnels are heavily shielded, to prevent contamination if there’s ever need for an actual flush. We’re not even supposed to stay in them during drills, if we can help it.”
“Radiation?” asked Alaric.
Kelly shrugged. “I really don’t know. I’m sorry.”
I took advantage of their brief side-conversation to shovel another few bites of potpie into my mouth, barely chewing. Finally, I said, “Okay, so you didn’t get any of that footage. It wasn’t bright enough in there to get much worthwhile, but unless their shielding fried our electronics—” I glanced at Kelly. She shook her head, indicating that it shouldn’t have done anything of the sort. That made sense, since the CDC probably had recording devices of their own in the tunnels. They’d need to know what went wrong if there was ever an emergency purge. “You should be able to extract the audio track.”
“Don’t forget the pretty amber lights. Those are probably worth a screenshot or two.” We all turned toward the sound of Becks’s voice. She was wearing one of Maggie’s bathrobes, knotted loosely around her waist, and her hair was still half-wet, tousled from the postshower drying. “Is there another potpie, Maggie? I’m hungry enough to eat a dog.”
“Please don’t,” said Maggie. “It’s hard enough to socialize them without making them think that people will decide to randomly eat them. Your potpie is in the oven.”
“You’re an angel.” Becks arrowed for the oven, dismissing the rest of us in favor of food.
I stabbed my fork into my own potpie, spearing a chunk of chicken as I focused my attention back on Kelly. “So, Doc, that was a good job you did, getting us to the tunnels. Pretty quick thinking, too.”
“We do evacuation drills and infection simulations every month in order to minimize the loss of life in case of an outbreak,” said Kelly. “There are differences between offices, but they’re reasonably minor, and the central floor plan doesn’t change. Plus, they shuttle us to different offices once a year to run evacuation trials there, to make sure we don’t get too hung up on familiar landmarks.”
“What, like the white door, the white door, or, that old favorite, the white door?”
Kelly cracked a slight, brief-lived smile. “Something like that. It’s amazing how much two identical halls can differ when you work in them every day for a year or more. We have to learn to strip them down to nothing but the architecture.”
“Dhat mean you have entire installations memorized?” asked Alaric, suddenly interested. Kelly nodded. “Could you draw a map if I gave you some basic drafting software?”
“I think so. Why?”
“Because that may not be our last trip into the CDC, and I’d rather we didn’t need to count on an open phone line to get us out next time,” I said. Kelly’s attention switched back to me. “Alaric, get her that drafting software and see if you can find some public databases to check her work against.”
“The public databases won’t have the emergency access tunnels,” said Kelly.
“It’s still never a bad idea to have a backup plan.” I flashed her a toothy smile. “Besides, the public databases will have full blueprints of the general-access areas, and that should be enough to jog your memory. It’s not that I don’t trust you to tell us the truth as you see it, Doc. It’s just that after what we learned from Dr. Abbey, I don’t trust you not to leave things out if you think they’re too sensitive for us.”
Her expression hardened. For a moment, I thought she was going to challenge my authority. The others saw it, too: Alaric pushed his chair back from the table by a few inches, while Maggie and Becks both stopped moving around the kitchen, their attention going solely to Kelly. The house seemed to hold its breath. Finally, grudgingly, Kelly shook her head.
“Fair enough. We’re in this together, whether we like it or not. I guess we’re all going to need to learn how to trust each other.”
“There’s the spirit,” I said.
“I just have one question,” said Alaric. “How do we know the CDC isn’t going to run an audio comparison on your call and figure out that Kelly’s still alive? The last thing we need is another major raid.”
“No, the last thing we need is them figuring out where we are. Them figuring out that the Doc’s still breathing is second to last, at best.” I pushed my half-eaten potpie away and stood. “I guess we’ll need to keep an eye on the news feeds, see whether anything comes through accusing us of identity theft.”
“Can you steal your own identity?” asked Kelly.
“Guess we’ll find out.” Becks moved to take my seat as I stepped away. “Becks, you need to update as soon as you finish eating. I’m going to go and get the untransmitted footage loaded to the server. Alaric, I want you cleaning and screenshotting inside the hour.”
“Got it,” said Alaric.
“I’ve got a few poems and a bunch of garden pictures to put up,” said Maggie. “I’m officially still in mourning for Dave, which is why I’m all alone here in my big, spooky old house.”
“Good,” I said. “Doc, work with Mahir and get started on another post about whatever the hell psychology crap you’re writing about. See if you can come up with a plausible excuse for why we don’t have a picture of you. I don’t want anyone getting overzealous and looking for you in the public broadcast footage.”
“All right.”
I grabbed another Coke from the fridge and went back to the living room, where the computer wouldn’t argue with me, ask me questions, or do anything but help me clear my head. George was still quiet, her normally constant presence numbed to a dull ache at the back of my skull. It didn’t hurt, precisely. It just felt weird as hell.
The computer woke at the touch of a finger. I navigated the company log-in menus to reach my mailbox, which was comfortingly overfull of spam, date offers, naked pictures, suggestions of things that would make good articles, and the seemingly obligatory elevator pitches on places I should go and dead things I should bother. Sometimes it seems like the entire world is out to get me back into the field. What they don’t understand—and I can’t tell them—is that I’ve lost one of the integral traits of a good Irwin: I’m not having any fun. When I wind up in the field, it’s a chore to be survived, not an adventure to be relished. Without that little spark of gosh-golly-wow to drive me on, I’m essentially a dead man walking. Don’t think I don’t see the irony. George is the one who stopped breathing, but I’m the one who gave up on living.
The forums were as big a mess as I’d expected from Alaric’s report. The moderators were trying to be six places at once, and failing pretty spectacularly. I sat back for a few minutes sipping my Coke and watching the message notifications as they popped up next to thread after thread. The team currently on duty were all beta bloggers, trying to prove their credentials by doing the sort of shit job that George and I used to do back when we were still bylines on the Bridge Supporters site. In those days, we couldn’t think of anything we wanted more than to be out on our own, telling the stories we wanted to tell, not answering to anybody but ourselves.
“Look at where that got us,” I muttered, leaning forward in the chair and reaching for the mouse. “Stay where you are, guys. You’ll be a hell of a lot happier in the long run.”
George didn’t say anything, and kept not saying anything as I went back to my in-box and started skimming, looking for messages that actually needed my attention. I needed to start editing footage. I needed to post and let people know that I was still alive, but most of all, and first of all, I needed to calm down a little bit. My heartbeat was starting to speed up as my body realized that the running away was over—we’d reached our destination, and now it was finally safe for me to freak out.
My hand was shaking. I sat perfectly still, waiting for the tremors to pass. I didn’t have time for another breakdown. One a month is about my limit, and since this one was unlikely to come with the extra-bonus “full visua
l hallucinations of your dead sister,” I didn’t see the point of doing it again. Eventually, the shaking stopped, and I started again.
I hit Important when I was halfway down my in-box. It was buried in thread updates, private messages from the moderators, and random posts from my mailing lists, and I almost didn’t click because I didn’t recognize the sender’s e-mail address. “Who the fuck uses ‘TauntedOctopus’ for a handle, anyway?” I asked myself. It wasn’t entirely a rhetorical question. I was hoping the sheer stupidity of it would be enough to make George speak up.
Instead, it was enough to make me stop, swear, and open the message. Who uses “TauntedOctopus” as a handle? Probably a woman who wears T-shirts telling you not to do it. Dr. Abbey.
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Subject: Aren’t you a busy boy?
I admit I was surprised when I heard that the Portland CDC had been overrun by the infected less than twenty-four hours after you left me. You don’t waste time, and I respect that. Then again, it’s not like you have much time to waste. You’re not the only one who knows how to operate a camera, and I bet you dollars to donuts that somebody got footage of you and your little band of Merry Men on the trek out here. It’s just a matter of time before somebody figures out we were in contact, and then the shit you’re in will be so deep that it’ll make your current shit look like chocolate pudding. Don’t come back. We started tearing down the lab as soon as you left, and by the time you get this message (assuming you live long enough to get this message, which is by no means guaranteed), we’ll be on our way to a new location. The little “arrangement” I have with the CDC depends on a certain status quo, and you’re playing in dangerous enough waters that I can’t count on it right now. So hurry up and get your answers or get yourselves killed, will you?