I would trust our staff with my life, and had, on several occasions. But we couldn’t take them all with us, and that meant they couldn’t know where we were going. More cold equations. If someone came looking, it was important there be no one who could give our location away.
Mahir was clearly doing the same math I was because he looked stricken before he nodded. “I’ll get them to report in, and I’ll pass the word about the staff meeting. How long do you think we need?”
“Tell ’em to be online in fifteen minutes. Anyone who isn’t there when we get started can join late and try to catch up as best they can.” I paused. “Also… tell them I’m not my sister. I’m not going to pull a grand gesture like she did. But if they want to quit without consequences, now would be the time to do it.”
George called a staff meeting when we first started to realize the size of the conspiracy we were facing. She made sure everyone was connected—and fired them all. Anybody who wanted to stay on could stay, but they had to sign another contract first. They had to understand what they were getting into. It was a big deal. It was incredibly important. And there just wasn’t time for that kind of theater. They’d stay or they wouldn’t. Anyone who’d signed on during the meeting with George knew the score, and so did anyone who’d signed on since.
“All right,” said Mahir. He was already moving toward the house terminal, my printout clutched in one hand.
I leaned over and pluckedt from his grasp, offering a wan smile in his direction before I turned and started for the kitchen. It was time to get everybody on the same page, get Maggie to start packing, and get ready to go on the run.
Bet you wish we’d never signed up for the Ryman campaign, huh?
“The thought has crossed my mind,” I admitted. “When you said, ‘Hey, Shaun, let’s be journalists,’ I’m pretty sure this part wasn’t in the brochure.”
Would it have made any difference?
I paused with my hand raised to push the kitchen door open. Mahir and Buffy, Maggie, Alaric, and Becks, we knew them all because of what we’d chosen to do with our lives. More important, they were our lives, not mine. If I’d said no, that I wanted to be something else when I grew up, George would still have become a blogger, and I would have lost her long before I actually did.
“Not a bit,” I said, and stepped into the kitchen.
I am a poet, and I am a storyteller, and it is with these two callings in mind that I make the following statement, which comes from my heart, my soul, and my middle fingers:
Fuck you people and the horses you rode in on. You better watch yourselves, because we are done screwing around, and we are going to take your bitch asses down.
This is for Dave.
—From Dandelion Mine, the blog of Magdalene Garcia, June 24, 2041
The world has gone insane, and you can’t get a decent pint of lager anywhere in this bloody country. I think I can safely say that my schoolmates were correct when they predicted my eventual destination, and I am now in hell.
—From Fish and Clips, the blog of Mahir Gowda, June 24, 2041
Twenty-five
The staff meeting went better than I was afraid it would. That’s about the only good thing that I can say about it. Everyone was scared, and everyone was expressing that fear in a different way. The Irwins were restless and pissed off about being forbidden to go into the field. The Newsies were split into two distinct camps—the ones who wanted to grab an Irwin, get outside, and find out what the hell was going on out there, and the ones who were happy to stay as far away from the disaster zone as possible but wanted information to flow freely while they stayed indoors. That’s the kind of Newsie attitude that’s always pissed me off, since it seems to come with a blanket assumption that the Irwins are overjoyed to be risking their lives for the benefit of the Newsies’ careers.
The Fictionals, on the other hand, were uniformly glad to be staying inside, but were all scared out of their minds and spent half the call going off on tangents that required all business to come grinding to a halt while Maggie calmed them down. She was good at her job, maybe better than I ever realized, and not even she could keep them on track for more than a few minutes at a time. After twenty minutes, I was ready to kill someone—and I wasn’t all that picky about who.
Mahir saved everyone’s asses. He took over the call and led it with calm and grace, pausing when Maggie needed to play kindergarten teacher, and otherwise keeping us moving forward. He fielded every question that was tossed his way, somehow prompting the rest of us to speak up just often enough that no one forgot we were there. If he’d wanted to go into event planning instead of journalism, he probably could have made a fortune.
The whole time the call was going, Alaric and Becks were packing up supplies and moving them to the back of the kitchen, just outside the closed garage door. Maggie and Alaric had done a lot of packing before the rest of us got there, but neither of them was an Irwin, and Becks felt the need—probably rightly—to go through everything and make sure that we had enough supplies to reach our destination in one piece.
“All right, folks,” I said, breaking into the fifth near-identical argument over who was getting more screwed by the current embargos, the Newsies or the Irwins. “I’m glad we’re all on the same page now, but the wireless booster is about to shut down from lack of juice, so I figure we should wrap this up. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they get our little slice of the Internet back online. In the meantime, everybody has their assignments, and we have our temporary department heads. Are there any questions?”
There were no questions. That was practically a goddamn miracle. Our three temporary department heads—Katie in Connecticut, for the Fictionals; Luis in Ohio, for the Newsies; and Dmitry in Michigan, for the Irwins—were nervous enough that their tiny digital pictures looked faintly ill. Still. We wouldn’t have asked them to do the jobs if we didn’t think they were ready. Not that anyone could really be considered ready to take over one-third of a major news site during a disaster this large, but they were about as prepared as the rest of us, and no one was shooting at them yet. That had to count for something.
“Okay, then, I’m going to shut this baby down before something manages to actually catch fire and we have to kill it with sticks.” I looked at my screen. The faces of After the End Times looked back at me, all filled with the same anxiety. The world might actually be ending. That was a bit more than we were used to dealing with on a normal workday.
Say something inspirational, prompted George. They need to hear it from you. You’re the leader.
That was a job I never applied for. I managed to bite back the words “Like what?” before they could quite escape, and cleared my throat instead, trying to think of a single damn thing to say. My mind was a blank. This was a threat way too big to prod with a stick.
You can do it, said George, quietly.
I cleared my throat again. “Guys…” Everyone loked at me expectantly. I faltered, losing my place for a second before I tried again: “This has been one hell of a year. For those of you who hired on with us after the campaign, I’m sorry. You’ve never seen me at my best. Hell, if it weren’t for the fact that we have the best damn administrative staff in the known universe, you would never have seen me at all, because we would have gone under a long time ago.”
“He’s quite right about that,” said Mahir.
Ignoring him seemed like the best idea, so I did. “And for those of you who’ve been with us since the beginning, I know this isn’t what you signed on for. Hell, it’s not what I signed on for, and you’d think I might have some say in what we do, right? But the thing is, regardless of when you came on with us, whether it was day one or yesterday, you have all done an amazing, amazing job. If I were asked to put together a team to record the end of the world, there’s not one of you who I wouldn’t want to have on board—and yeah, I don’t know all of you that well, but I know the people who recommended you, and since I would trust them with my life, I
figure you’re worth taking the gamble on.”
Laughter followed this statement, some nervous, most not. A few people were nodding. That was sort of unnerving.
“I don’t know how much worse things are going to get before they get better. We’re in the same place now that we were in twenty years ago—the dead are rising, the situation looks grim as hell, and no one really knows what’s going on. I won’t lie to you. If the first Rising is anything to go by, we’re not all going to live to see the end of this. Some of us will be going up on the Wall before this is over.” I paused, the litany of the dead running in the back of my mind. Buffy, Georgia, Dave, Kelly. The convoy guards in Eakly, Oklahoma. All our neighbors back in Oakland. Alaric’s family. Too damn many people. “Some of us already have. But see, the thing is, that isn’t what matters. What matters is that we’re going to keep doing what we do. We’re going to keep getting the news out. We’re going to keep telling the truth. And if we go up on the Wall, we’re by God going to know that we did the best we could—and that we’ve left behind as much information as we can for the ones who’ll tell the truth after us.”
There was a long pause. Well said, said George.
And then someone—one of the Irwins, I think, since we’re the ones trained to start making noise whenever we get the excuse—cheered. Several more people joined in, and the ones who didn’t clapped their hands, or just grinned. I stared at them, dumbfounded.
They like you.
I kept staring.
Mahir saved me by leaning forward and saying, “That’s the end of our motivational speaking for the day, and the end of our power supply, I’m afraid. Ladies and gents, it’s been fabulous chatting with you all, and we’ll do our best to keep updating you as things progress here, but for now, assume that we’re off-line for the foreseeable future. Ask your interim department heads if you have any questions or troubles, and stay safe.” He moved his mouse cursor to the button for Terminate Conference, and clicked.
The screen went black, all those little windows inking out in an instant. It felt weirdly final, like I’d never speak to any of these people again. In some cases, I probably wouldn’t. I coughed into my hand to clear the tightness in my throat, and straightened.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Packing the rest of the equipment took less than ten minutes. Maggie spent the time in the living room, feeding treats to the bulldogs and telling them how good they were. They were happy to receive the attention, if a little confused by all the fuss that she was making; people came and went all the time, after all, and she didn’t normally make such a big deal out of it. To their canine minds, this excursion didn’t look any different from the hundreds of others she’d taken. Maybe it was better that way.
While she was dealing with the dogs, I went upstairs to the guest room and changed into my body armor. I slathered Avon Skin-So-Soft over every inch of skin I had, even the skin that would be covered by three layers of Kevlar and leather. I was going to be as soft as a baby’s ass, and more important, I wasn’t going to get infected if I had any choice in the matter.
I paused in the doorway before heading back down to join the others, looking at the guest room. The bed was made, the nightstand was empty, and there was nothing to indicate that I’d ever been there at all.
“Will we ever stop just passing through?” I asked aloud.
George didn’t answer, and so I went back downstairs.
Maggie had joined the others in the kitchen while I was getting changed. She offered me a nod, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand before turning to walk up to the back door. “House,” she said, clearly, “please contact Officer Weinstein. Tell him it’s time for the matter we discussed earlier.”
“All right, Magdalene,” said the house. Its tone was blandly pleasant as always.
“Thank you, house.” Maggie looked over her shoulder to me. “I warned Alex we might need to go, and that we’d need it to be as quiet as possible. He’s been waiting for my word.”
“And the house will let us out?” asked Becks.
“If the security crew outside says that we’re opening the isolation lock, even for a few minutes, the house won’t have a choice. My security logs are only uploaded if there’s an unapproved breach, so unless the infected take the house, no one will know for sure that we’re gone.” Maggie wiped her eyes again. “I hate this.”
“I know,” I said, quietly.
The house speaker crackled as someone switched to manual, and a man’s voice came through, asking, “Ms. Garcia? Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
Maggie smiled unsteadily at a point just above the door—probably the location of a hidden security camera. “No. But I’m sure it’s what I have to do. Please let us out, Alex.”
“Your father—”
“Sig your checks, but you work for me, remember? That was always the deal. Now please, just give us ten minutes to get out of here, and you can lock the place down again.”
He sighed heavily. “If anything happens to you, your father will have all our asses. You understand that, right?”
“I do.”
“Just checking. You have ten minutes. Now please, try not to make me regret this.”
The speaker crackled again as he hung up his end, and the house said, sounding almost perplexed, “The isolation order has been rescinded. Thank you for your patience. You are now free to leave the premises if you so choose.”
“Grab your gear, folks,” I said, picking up a duffel bag with one hand and my helmet with the other. “We need to get rolling.”
“On it,” said Alaric, grabbing the wireless booster.
Becks didn’t say anything. She just picked up a box filled with dry cereal and cans of soda and kicked the garage door open.
The van was inside, which was good. The bike was outside, which was not good. Working in tight tandem, the five of us were able to load the van in just under five minutes, cramming boxes and bags into every inch of available space. I didn’t question the amount of stuff that we were bringing. Since the odds of us coming back were pretty damn slim, we needed to take everything that was even potentially useful and assume that it was easier to throw shit away than it would be to find it once we were on the road.
We were halfway through the packing process when Alaric realized there wasn’t going to be room for everyone. “Wait,” he said. “We need to leave some of this. We’re filling the backseat.”
“It’s all good.” I raised my helmet. “I’m taking the bike.”
“But—”
“We need someone riding point. And besides,” I said and grinned, “you know I’m going to get the best footage.”
He gave me an uncertain look. “You’re going to be exposed.”
“We’ve all basically bathed in insect repellent—if they bite me, I probably deserve it. Now come on, finish packing the van. We have a pretty narrow time frame here, and we need to get out before it closes.”
Becks lobbed a duffel bag at him. He caught it with an oof, and gave me a wounded look before turning to resume packing the van. I didn’t really care if he thought I was being an idiot. Maybe I was. I was also being a realist.
When the last box was wedged into place and the last bag was stowed, the four of them got into the van, rolling the windows all the way up. I put on my helmet, sealing it tightly before nodding to activate the intercom. “How’s our connection?” I asked.
“Loud and clear,” Mahir replied.
“Great. Now le roll.”
The garage door rolled smoothly upward in answer to some unseen signal from Maggie, and the night air came flooding in, chilling me even through my leathers. It wasn’t the temperature so much as the uncertainty that the air represented: the risk of a kind of infection we’d never been afraid of before. Kellis-Amberlee was a known quantity; it was, for lack of a better phrase, a safe virus, something that could kill you, but which we understood. The thought of a new vector made it all terrifying again.
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Becks started up the van engine and turned on the headlights. I didn’t need them to see where I was going, since the exterior house lights were turned up so far that it practically looked like noon out in the yard. I walked over to the bike and swung my leg over it, balancing myself. “Go,” I said, into the microphone in my helmet. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The van pulled out of the garage. I let them get to the first gate before I started the ignition and followed.
The trip down the driveway was harrowing. We moved slowly enough that I had to walk the bike about two-thirds of the time. When that wasn’t possible, I had to coast, trying to keep from either overbalancing or stalling out. Neither would be good. And I’d be dealing with it alone either way, since there was no way I was letting the others stop the van to help me. That wasn’t part of the plan.
All the gates stood open, allowing us to keep moving through as we wound our way toward the street below. Maggie’s security guards flanked the open gates, their guns held at the ready. I’m not sure they really believed that we were going until we’d passed the third gate. That was when they started locking things down behind us, each gate sliding shut and sealing itself with a clang that was audible even through my helmet. The guards moved forward as the gates closed, reforming their ranks around each new opening.