Elle’s smile remained fixed in place as she turned toward the speaker, a sweet-faced woman with a slight Kentucky drawl and hair that cascaded to her shoulders in a series of artificially copper curls. She was wearing a shirt that proclaimed her to be a member of the Time Police. That didn’t necessarily make her a fan—lots of shows and stories about time travel had time police in them—but it definitely shifted the odds toward fandom.
“I am,” she said. “And you are…?”
“Patty! I mean…I’m Patricia Meigs. This is my husband, Matthew.” She took the arm of the man beside her, who was more mundanely dressed in a sweater vest and gray slacks. He was wearing a bow tie, at least, which was a nod to the geekier elements in the wardrobes around him. That, or he was one of those poor, misguided souls who actually believed that bow ties were “cool.”
“Hello,” said Matthew. He had a mild British accent. Elle amended her assessment of his bow tie: It probably marked him as a Doctor Who fan, which meant that the tie was most definitely cool. “It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Riley.”
“Thanks,” Elle said. “I’m supposed to be on a panel right now, but I guess we judged the traffic wrong, and…” She shrugged a little.
Matthew’s eyebrows went up. “You’re trying to get to a panel by going right down the middle of the hall? Was that entirely wise?”
“Hey, I wanted to cut down the back to Artist’s Alley and make our escape that way, but I’m not the one calling the shots here.” Elle gestured toward her handler’s unmoving back. “He’s supposed to deliver me where I’m going, and I think he’s planning to tackle anything that gets in our way.”
“That’s going to be quite a lot of tackling,” said Matthew.
“I can hear you, you know,” said the handler.
“You really have been here before!” said Patty. The other three turned to face her, even the handler, who put his back to the crowd in order to stare at Patty. She reddened, shrugging. “I read a lot of blogs. There’s a whole debate about you saying that…um…” She stopped, apparently realizing that what she was about to say could be construed as insulting.
Elle sighed. “I know. There’s a whole debate between the people who say I’m being coached on what to say in order to build up my ‘fandom street cred’ and the people who remember seeing me haunting the fan tables back when I was an awkward teenager trying to convince the cast members from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to give me acting tips. One side says I’m a liar; the other side says I’m part of the family. I’m with the second side, naturally. This would be my sixteenth Comic-Con, if I were actually allowed to attend at all. But since this is probably as much as I’m going to see of the show floor, I’m trying not to think about it too hard.”
“Wow,” said Patty, in a voice that was suddenly very small. “Love of fandom got you into the business, and now the business is keeping you away from the thing you love. That’s so sad.”
Privately, Elle thought the girl was being melodramatic, but that didn’t make her wrong. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” she said. She glanced at the crowd, which was still forbidding forward movement—more than she would have expected, actually. Something must have been going on toward the front of the hall. “What brings the two of you to San Diego?”
“It’s our honeymoon,” said Matthew. He smiled fondly at Patty. “We got married in London and hopped onto the next flight to San Diego. We landed about four hours ago.”
“No window for jetlag at all?” asked Elle.
“‘Jetlag is just another lie time tells, and I can’t stand liars,’” said Patty. Then she paused, cheeks reddening again. “Uh. I bet it’s considered gauche to quote your character’s lines at you, huh?”
“Not really,” said Elle, and was surprised to realize that she meant it. “I mean, people quote Indy at me all the time, but it’s usually the catchphrases, not the actual dialog. It’s not like I get a lot of that. It’s sort of flattering.”
“Geeky but flattering,” said Matthew, and grinned. “I’d take it if I were you, Patty. That’s a good way to be viewed.”
Patty opened her mouth to respond, and stopped as someone at the front of the convention center screamed. It wasn’t a playful scream. A playful scream wouldn’t have been able to cut through the rest of the ambient noise. All of them turned instinctively toward the sound, their shoulders going tense as they tried to calculate the respective virtues of fighting and fleeing. None of them were aware of those calculations: They were carried out by a part of the brain older and more focused on survival than anything conscious could be.
“What’s going on?” asked Elle. “Did someone get hurt?”
“Ms. Riley, I’m afraid I’m going to need to ask you to wait here,” said her handler—but his brisk words couldn’t conceal the fear in his eyes, and somehow, that just made everything worse.
“What? No! You’re not supposed to leave me alone on the show floor!”
“Stay with your friends, and stay in this immediate vicinity,” said her handler. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I’ve assessed the situation.” Then he was gone, plunging into the suddenly unmoving crowd, heading toward the sound of screams.
Elle stared numbly after him. “But I just met them…” she said weakly.
“This strikes me as one of those ‘can’t possibly be good’ situations,” said Matthew.
Patty worried her lip between her teeth, and for once, she didn’t say anything. The three of them stood, looking out into the crowd, and waited for someone to come on the intercom and tell them what was going on.
* * *
6:52 P.M.
Kelly Nakata was near the doors when the screaming started. She’d been studying a booth display of replica weapons, some of which looked impressively sturdy. Her head whipped around at the first sound of trouble. She didn’t see everything, but she saw enough that she was immediately convinced of the danger, even if she wouldn’t understand the true scope of it until it was far too late for anything to be done. If she’d seen a little more, maybe she would have run for the lobby before the doors closed; maybe Kelly Nakata would have joined Lorelei Tutt among the survivors of the San Diego outbreak, rather than joining so many others among the lists of the dead.
What Kelly saw:
The doors were propped open for Preview Night, allowing throngs of fans to stream past the already visibly bored security guards hired by the convention center. The crowd ranged from people in T-shirts and jeans to others in full-body costumes, all of them wearing the little laminated badges that marked them as attendees. Superheroes and monsters, characters from movies and books, all walked side by side through Comic-Con’s welcoming doors. Amidst all that color and variety, the man in the blood-soaked shirt didn’t stand out at all—at least not until he turned, grabbed a half-naked woman dressed as a character from a popular horror comic, and bit a chunk out of her shoulder. The woman screamed. The man bit her again.
That was when the other people in bloody clothing began staggering through the doors. Some of them were missing chunks from their arms, hands, or even necks, although those were rare; most of them looked like they’d been wounded only superficially. And all of them were biting.
Kelly reached behind her, grabbing the first thing her hands hit—a large staff with a decorative spearhead on the end. She assumed a fighting stance, holding the staff out in front of her. The owner of the stall, who had been considering objecting to having her grab things she hadn’t paid for, quickly changed his mind; if the crazy girl wanted to defend him from the crazier biting people, he wasn’t going to tell her to stop.
“What the fuck, man?” demanded Kelly, of no one in particular.
“It’s that zombie virus thing that was on the news!” shouted a man in a Starfleet uniform. It was Next Generation command red, but he was running away from the danger, not toward it. Maybe that was how the command crew stayed alive. “They’ll eat you if you stay here!”
“They can try,??
? said Kelly grimly, and braced her feet. She felt like some sort of modern-day warrior princess standing there with her staff and her steely determination, like she was Buffy, or Xena, or Indy Rivers. As long as she kept thinking of the situation like that—like it was a story, something she was watching on television, and not something that was actually happening around her—she’d be fine. She hoped.
It wasn’t like she had a choice. At this point, running wasn’t an option.
The stall’s owner screamed, adding his own little bit of noise to the din, and cowered behind his register. Kelly was privately starting to think that this might be a good idea. Then the people in the bloody clothes were on top of her, and there wasn’t time to think about anything but fighting for her life. She swung her staff first with military precision and then with wild panic, hitting bodies that barely seemed to notice the impact.
It wasn’t until their greedy, grasping hands bore her to the floor that she added her own voice to the screams around her, and by then, it was too late for anyone to come to her defense. For Kelly Nakata, the convention seemed to be over before it properly began.
* * *
7:01 P.M.
The California Browncoats were set up toward the back of the hall, far from the open doors and the sound of screaming. Still, the commotion eventually filtered back to them. Dwight jumped onto a stack of boxes so he could peer over the booths, which were mostly the same height. “Some sort of commotion near the doors,” he reported. “Security’s moving in.”
“Actual security or our security?” asked Rebecca. It was an important distinction. The actual convention center security would be dressed in the normal rent-a-cop array, and wouldn’t do much to quell a fannish riot. The con’s private security force, on the other hand, was a mixture of Dorsai Irregulars and people in full-body armor dressed as Imperial stormtroopers. They could stop a bunch of pissed-off fans with a stern look and a waggled finger.
“Both,” said Dwight. He paled, still staring at the doors. “The people who’re coming in from outside don’t look good.”
“Don’t look good how?” asked Shawn.
“Bloody. Biting.” Dwight turned to face the other Browncoats. “I don’t really feel like describing what’s happening right now. But I think maybe we should start looking for another door.”
That was when the lights went out on the convention center floor and the screaming began in earnest. The Rising had come to San Diego.
LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044
Lorelei’s voice is a soft monotone as she recites the events of July 23, 2014; she does not look up from her teacup.
LORELEI: The lights were a mistake. Some stupid rent-a-cop thought it was just an ordinary riot, and decided people would calm down if they couldn’t see anything. I wish I knew his name. I’d like to go and spit on his grave.
MAHIR: Who turned them back on?
LORELEI: The Klingons. One of them saw him do it, and they were fighting to hold the lobby, so he went after the guy. Do you even have Klingons anymore?
MAHIR: They were the villains of a pre-Rising science fiction drama, weren’t they? One of the Star Trek spinoffs.
LORELEI: Not quite, but I guess that’s close enough. The Klingons I’m talking about weren’t aliens; they were people wearing heavy costumes and silly latex heads, and somehow they figured out what was going on. I don’t know how; maybe one of them knew someone who’d already encountered Kellis-Amberlee outside of San Diego. They were the ones who realized that most of the infected weren’t in the main hall yet. If they closed the doors, the people inside might have a chance.
MAHIR: So they closed the doors?
LORELEI [nodding]: Yeah, and then they got the lights back on. There were already some zombies inside, but they were figuring that the people in the hall would find a way to hold them off until help arrived.
MAHIR: The people inside? What about the Klingons?
LORELEI: They stayed in the lobby. It was the only way they could get the doors to close. They even barricaded them, to keep the other infected from breaking through. They must have held out for a while. They managed to lock almost all the doors between the convention center and the street before they weren’t in a position to keep fighting. There’s this thing they used to say, about good days to die. I guess that day was a good one for them. Because they all died, every last one of them. The worst part is, they thought they were doing the right thing…
Lorelei Tutt, last survivor of the 2014 San Diego outbreak, begins to cry into her tea. There is nothing for me to say, and so I say nothing at all.
The Siege Begins
We have lost a great deal since the Rising. Perhaps the deepest of these losses is one that we barely notice today: our innocence. We are incapable of imagining a return to a world where we could abandon all care and spend a week living in a fantasy. But that’s exactly where these people died.
—Mahir Gowda
Time is a tool. Once you learn how to use it properly, you’ll find that paradox is no more problematic than a broken pipe—and you’re the one with the wrench.
—Chronoforensic Analyst Indiction Rivers,
Space Crime Continuum, season two, episode five
It is difficult to grasp the sheer variety of the fan groups that existed in realspace before the events of the Rising pushed such activities into a primarily virtual setting. Hundreds of “fandoms” met in person, their adherents dressing in everything from normal street clothing to full battle armor. Some of their costumes were practical, easy to move in or even fight in, while others…weren’t. The outbreak in San Diego began on the first night of the convention, when most attendees were wearing street clothes, rather than the more elaborate attire they had packed for later in the weekend. This may have saved many of them when the outbreak began, as they were able to run from their attackers. Even so, the few surviving images we have of the San Diego outbreak show men in medieval gear and teenage girls with rainbow-streaked hair and bloodstained wings strapped to their backs. Whatever fandom held their allegiances before the dead rose, they all fought the same battle in the end.
—From San Diego 2014 by Mahir Gowda, June 11, 2044.
Wednesday, July 23, 2014: 7:08 P.M.
“What the fuck was that?” demanded Vanessa, jabbing a finger toward the front of the hall. The Browncoats had reacted with instinctive speed when the lights cut out, all of them forming a circle inside the boundaries of their booth. Dwight was still standing on his lookout point when the lights came back on. Shawn was standing so as to block the one access point from the aisle, a two-by-four in his hands and a menacing expression in his eyes. Even Lynn didn’t like to cross him when he looked like that. Maybe it was that look—like he knew exactly what was going to come next and was willing to do it, no matter how little he liked it—but all the others turned to him, waiting to hear what they were going to do next.
All except for Dwight. He kept watching the front of the hall. There was still screaming, but it was dying down, losing its immediacy; this sounded less like people who were wounded and more like people who were scared, confused, and being set off by the screams of those around them.
“Dwight?” said Shawn sharply. “Report.”
“The doors are closed,” Dwight said. “The biting seems to have stopped—the ones who were doing the biting have pulled back. They’re blocking access to the doors and snapping at people who approach them, but otherwise, they’re not moving.”
“What the fuck?” repeated Vanessa.
It was a sentiment the rest of the Browncoats not-so-secretly shared. Shawn pulled out his phone, checking for service. As he’d expected, there were no cell bars. He’d have to hope the radio signal would get through. “Start securing the booth,” he commanded. “Assume that if we’re not under attack right now, we will be soon. I’m going to see if I can call for help.”
“The police?” asked Rebecca.
“The Marines?” a
sked Dwight.
“My daughter,” said Shawn.
* * *
7:15 P.M.
Eric and Marty stood at the doorway to their booth, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Eric held the crowbar he’d used to open the heftier book boxes, keeping it loose, ready to swing. Marty held a baseball bat. Neither Eric nor Pris had asked him where he’d gotten it; at the moment, neither of them was inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. They’d all heard the doors slam shut after the screaming began, and what little they’d been able to learn from people fleeing for the back of the hall was…not good. That was putting it mildly.
It might not have been so bad if the screams had stopped, or if they’d been continuous. But there were patches of silence long enough to let them think that the worst had passed, and then the screaming would start up again, as loud and terrified as ever. It made it impossible to stop jumping, waiting for the screams to be their own. Maybe paranoid fear was the right emotion when locked in a huge building filled with dangerous strangers. That didn’t mean that it was easy on the heart.
Marty could hear the Browncoats—he could always hear the Browncoats, and for once, he found that comforting. They were hammering on something, probably shoring up the walls of their booth, and using call-and-response games to keep track of each other whenever they had to move out of direct sight. “Marco” and “Polo” seemed to map to moving forward or backward in the hall, while “Hidey” and “Ho” mapped to movement to the left or right. They were an organized group. He’d have to congratulate them on that, if they survived.