“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Keep walking.”
“My name’s Stuart.”
Kelly winced. “Oh.”
“What’s your name?”
If she told him, she’d be admitting that he was a person, too; she’d be making him real. In a way, she’d be making this whole crazy situation real, because real people didn’t show up in dreams. She’d definitely be making it harder to turn her back on him when the time came—and the time was going to come; she was absolutely sure of that. This was a zombie apocalypse. The time always came.
Kelly sighed. “My name’s Kelly,” she said. “Now keep walking.”
They kept walking.
* * *
8:45 P.M.
Exhaustion and panic had finally carried the day: Patty was asleep. She was draped half-over the authentic reproduction of Indiction Rivers’s desk, her head propped up on one arm, snoring softly. Elle paused in her attempts to peer through the blinds at the exhibit hall outside, shaking her head.
“How is she doing that?” she asked. “I can’t imagine sleeping before someone comes to get us out of here.” At least the screams had stopped, or at least faded back into the greater noise of the crowd. Even that seemed more subdued, as if people were getting quieter as they realized they couldn’t escape. That would change soon, she was sure: Panic would make a reappearance, and then their hidey-hole would become even more essential.
Matthew smiled. “It’s a fairly impressive skill, I admit. She actually fell asleep on me the very first time we met. It was at a Doctor Who convention in Chicago. I’d flown out for the con. We wound up standing next to each other in the autograph line, and got to chatting. From there, we took our conversation to the bar, and I thought, ‘This is splendid; this is a splendid girl.’ Only next thing I knew, she was snoring on her stool, and it was, well, ‘Right, then. You’ve blown another one.’”
Elle smiled a little. “And you hadn’t blown it at all.”
“Not a bit. My Pat just sleeps when she’s tired, that’s all. It’s like convenient narcolepsy. I envy her a bit. We’ll all want to be well rested come tomorrow, and she’s going to be the only one standing up straight.”
“As long as we have a tomorrow, I’m happy.” Elle took another peek out the window. “I admit, I was wishing I’d have an excuse to spend some time in the exhibit hall without being rushed along by a handler, but this isn’t what I meant.”
“So you miss it, then? The convention scene?”
“It’s different when you’re a professional. Even when you wish it weren’t.” Elle stepped away from the window. “I can’t really tell what’s going on out there, but I don’t think going out to check would be a good idea.”
“In that, we are agreed.”
“That’s a relief.” Elle put her hands on her hips and studied the room. It both was and wasn’t like the set where she spent her workdays: For one thing, it had all four walls, rather than being an open sound stage. They had a complete precinct room, but they very rarely filmed there. Too hard to get all the cameras inside.
Working together, the three of them had managed to shift the filing cabinets up against the room’s single door, effectively locking it, and three of the four windows were completely covered with leaning sheets of plywood that Matthew had discovered being used to prop up the “chrono monitor” behind Indy’s desk. Leaving the fourth window uncovered was a calculated risk. It left them vulnerable to attack, but covering it would have meant cutting off all contact with the main room. For the moment, the window was more valuable as it was.
“Patty’s quite excited to have met you, you know,” said Matthew. “I hope it’s not too forward to say this, but Space Crime Continuum is one of our favorite shows. We watch it together, and we both enjoy it quite a bit.”
Elle blinked at him. Then, slowly, she said, “We’ve been fortifying a replica of my fictional office against attack together because we’re afraid of I don’t even know what, and you’re worried about me deciding you’re being forward because you like my work?”
Matthew paused. “When you put it that way, it does sound a bit silly, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, just a bit.” Elle leaned up against the nearest desk. “I just wish there was something else we could be doing. I don’t like just standing around.”
“It’s too bad Patty left her knitting back at the hotel, then.”
Elle blinked at him before she snorted laughter, and said, “Even if I could knit, which I can’t, I don’t think I’d feel right knitting while I was potentially in mortal danger. It would just seem a little weird.”
“Has anything about this day not been a little weird?” asked Matthew.
“Fair enough.” Elle sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just tense. I wish we had cell service in here. I was supposed to be back at the hotel as soon as my panel ended.”
“Have you got someone waiting?” Matthew blanched almost as soon as the words were out. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business. I was just making conversation.”
“No, it’s all right—I brought up the hotel; it’s a reasonable question.” Elle shrugged. “I do have someone waiting, and I hate being inconsiderate like this.” She was hedging, she knew she was hedging, but she’d been doing it for so long that it was almost second nature. Pretense came with the job.
“Ah,” said Matthew. “Well, I’m sure he’ll understand.”
Screw pretense. “I’m sure she will,” Elle agreed. Sigrid had always been so very understanding. Understanding when the producers said she couldn’t show up on set, as their viewership was made up almost entirely of heterosexual males and Indy Rivers was supposed to be their newest geek sex goddess. Understanding when Elle took her male costar to the Spike Awards. Understanding when she didn’t get to come to Comic-Con to see Elle’s panels.
Then again, maybe that last bit of understanding was enough to balance out some of the others, because Sigrid was safely back at the hotel, far away from all the chaos at the convention center, while Elle was trapped inside the building while all hell was breaking loose. Maybe the universe had been testing them, and Sigrid had passed while Elle hadn’t.
Matthew, meanwhile, was looking at her with that wide-eyed expression of sudden comprehension that she’d been seeing on the faces of straight men since the first time she explained that no, she really wasn’t interested, ever. “Sister?”
“No.”
“Friend?”
“Significant other. Six years. We’re going to get married as soon as I’m well established enough that it won’t kill my career.” Elle crossed her arms defensively, and hated herself for it. This wasn’t supposed to be an issue anymore. It wasn’t her fault that she’d been called to a profession where people still cared, at least if you were a woman new enough to be trading on tits and ass. “Are we going to have a problem?”
“Not a bit of it. I’m just surprised is all.”
“Why? Because I’m gay?”
“Because you’ve managed to hide the existence of a significant other from the blogs. I don’t care if you’re involved with a man, a woman, or a sapient pear tree. You ought to go into international espionage. I never even heard a rumor.”
Elle blinked at him before laughing again. “I’ll have to tell Sigrid you said that.”
“You do that,” he said, and smiled.
“Heck, if we get out of here soon, you can tell her yourself. I figure this is the sort of experience that justifies buying you dinner, if anything will.”
Matthew nodded. “I’d like that. I think that will elevate you to some form of godhood in my lovely wife’s eyes.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a god,” said Elle.
Patty sighed a little in her sleep, snuggling up against the replica of Indiction Rivers’s stapler. For the moment, everything seemed to be calm. There was no way the moment was going to last.
* * *
9:16 P.M.
Terror makes you tired. Mar
ty and the others were taking turns sleeping, one of them retreating to the back of the booth and curling up in a makeshift bed of plush toys and wadded-up newspaper while the other two stood watch. They’d decided on three-hour shifts as the most efficient, allowing them to get through one deep REM cycle—maybe; it was Eric’s idea, and he wasn’t totally clear on the science—before they had to get up and let someone else have a turn. At the moment, it was Eric curled up in the back, while Marty watched the aisles for signs of trouble.
Pris, who was supposedly standing guard with him, was actually seated at the register, tapping madly away at her tablet. She didn’t look like she was even remotely aware of her surroundings. Marty found himself envying her, and he didn’t interrupt. What she was trying to do was just as important as what he was doing—maybe more. After all, he might be keeping them alive, but she was going to be the one who got them out.
The sounds of humanity had grown softer as the minutes ticked by and rescue didn’t come. Marty could see people sleeping in the aisles, pressed up against the edges of the booths. The lucky ones who’d remembered to bring a sweater or coat into the convention center were hugging them around themselves, as much to be sure that they wouldn’t be stolen as for warmth. They had nowhere else to go. Marty felt bad for them, even as he patrolled the edges of his own booth every fifteen minutes or so, shooing away squatters. No matter how bad he felt, he wasn’t going to compromise his already fragile security by allowing people to get too close.
He had people of his own to protect. Pris and Eric were his responsibility, and by God, he was going to get them out of here in one piece.
“Marty?”
“What is it, Pris?”
There was a note of excitement in her voice that he wasn’t expecting. It seemed almost obscene, given the rest of the situation. “I got an answer.”
“What?” Marty actually took his eyes off the aisle as he turned to face her. “From who?”
“Convention center management. They finally noticed that I was pinging their private channels, and they decided to answer me.”
“Well? What did they say? Is someone coming to get us the hell out of here?”
Pris grimaced. “Not quite. They say there’s a problem outside. Some sort of riot is blocking the doors—they can’t get in to let us out.”
“Fuck.”
“They say that it’s pretty ugly. We should be glad that we’re in here.” Somewhere in the distance, someone screamed. Pris grimaced more. “I think they wouldn’t be saying that if they were actually in here.”
“Did they have anything useful to say?”
“Yes.” Pris held up her tablet, and smiled. “They told me how we can get the wireless back on. That’s something, right?”
Marty frowned. No food, no water, no exit…but they could get the Internet back on. Somehow, that didn’t seem quite as valuable. On the other hand, they were in a convention center full of geeks. Maybe getting the Internet back up would distract everyone else, keep them from making things worse—and maybe they would be able to find a way out once they had access to the outside world. “What do we need to do?” he asked.
“There’s a control room on the main concourse,” said Pris. “All we have to do is get to one of the house phones, call up, and tell whoever’s in there which switches to press.”
“How do we even know that there’s someone inside?”
Pris gestured with her free hand, indicating the convention center. “Look around. There’s no way someone had the opportunity to get into a secure room with a lock on the door and didn’t do it.”
Marty looked at her. She looked back, a challenge in the tilt of her chin. Pris wasn’t a girl who enjoyed sitting idle; once she had a thing that could be done, she wanted to do it. Getting the wireless back on was something she could do, and that meant that she wanted to be doing it.
As bad as things were, they could get a lot worse. This wasn’t the time to start trouble with the people he needed watching his back. “Wake Eric up,” Marty said gruffly. “We’re going to get the wireless back on.”
* * *
9:25 P.M.
Shawn’s phone beeped softly, snapping him out of his light doze and into a state of almost instant awareness. The phone beeped again. He hit the button to activate the walkie-talkie function, and Lorelei’s voice said uncertainly, “Dad? Are you there?”
“Lorelei?” He smiled as he raised the phone to his mouth. “I’m here, honey. What’s going on?” Around him, the convention center slept, or tried to. Dwight and Rebecca had never come back from their trip to the parking garage. Their absence had created an uneasy divide among the Browncoats. Half of them were firmly convinced that Dwight and Rebecca had managed to find a way out and would be coming back with emergency services. The other half believed that Dwight and Rebecca were never coming back at all.
After spending most of his adult life in the Coast Guard, Shawn knew better than to pin all his hopes on empty wishes. Dwight was a Marine. If he’d been able to come back, he would have done so, leaving Rebecca to organize a rescue party while he told everyone else what was going on. He hadn’t come back. That meant he couldn’t come back…and anything that could stop a Marine who didn’t want to be stopped was probably stopping that Marine permanently.
“I finally got them to listen to me at the office. Lieutenant Farago said to let you know that he’s working on getting cell service into the hall, but nobody would tell me what was actually happening.” There was a note of panic in Lorelei’s voice that Shawn didn’t like. At the end of the day, she was his daughter, and she shared his tendency to go running toward danger as fast as her legs could carry her when she felt like the people she loved were at risk. “Are you okay?”
“Well, honey, we’ve had to redefine the local standards for ‘okay,’ but none of us is hurt right now.” Not unless you included Dwight and Rebecca, and that was just a possibility, not a definite fact. “So they think they can get our phones to start working? That’s a good thing.” It would have been better if it had happened faster. Most of the people in the convention center probably weren’t carrying chargers. Shawn could see outlets and universal connectors becoming the start of the next big fight.
“Yes. But getting the phones working won’t get you out right now.”
“I understand that, honey.”
Lorelei paused for a long moment before she asked, “Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Yes,” admitted Shawn. He couldn’t think of any good reason for the relative peace that had settled over the hall. After the screaming and hysterics that had accompanied the beginning of the siege, he was expecting all-out chaos, not this strange and sudden lull. “But worrying about what we can’t change won’t do us any good. You tell Lieutenant Farago that we need an exit strategy as soon as he can get us one. Things are calm right now. I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”
“Okay, Daddy,” said Lorelei. “I love you.”
“I love you too, sweetheart. Just keep flying, okay? Everything’s going to be just fine. You’ll see.”
Lorelei didn’t answer him.
LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044
Our tea is cold. Lorelei doesn’t seem to notice, and I don’t feel that pointing it out to her would be beneficial. Her gaze is far away. Sometime during the most recent part of her story, she left the present behind and slipped into a time and place that I have never seen. She is back in San Diego, back in the first summer of the Rising, and I begin to understand why she never wanted to tell her story.
LORELEI: We didn’t know how the infected behaved yet. Fuck. We didn’t even know for sure that they were infected. Maybe if we’d had more information… [she stops for a long moment; when she speaks again, her voice is even more distant] It wouldn’t have made any difference at all. Those doors were already locked. What was going to happen was already a foregone conclusion. All that could have changed is the details.
MAHIR: Sometimes, it’s the details that matter the most of all.
LORELEI: The people who’d been infected were skulking around the edges of the hall, waiting for the lights to dim. They weren’t hungry yet. They had enough to eat, and they were in the incubation phase. Once in a while they’d grab someone from the edges of a group, but my dad didn’t know that.
MAHIR: Kellis-Amberlee had a longer incubation in the early days of the Rising. Today, it’s all through our bodies even before we begin to amplify. One bite triggers a cataclysmic chain reaction. For them, back then…how quickly they lost control would have been determined by a dozen factors. Prior exposure, general health, height, weight… It’s simpler now.
LORELEI: Yeah. If you can ever call the zombie apocalypse “simple.” Anyway, our booth was set up toward the back of the hall, and the infection was self-containing at that stage. I think sometimes that it would have been kinder if it had been like the movies, you know? One zombie gets in, everyone’s bitten or dead inside of an hour.
MAHIR: Life rarely concerns itself with being kind, I’m afraid. If it did, we would all be much more content.
LORELEI: Ain’t that the truth?
She appears to notice her tea for the first time in almost an hour. She pushes the cup aside, and stands.
LORELEI: I’m going to need something stronger for what comes next. You game?
MAHIR: All things considered, yes. I believe that I am.
10:06 P.M.
It shouldn’t have taken an hour and a half to reach the back of the hall. Not with the amount of space available and the relatively small number of people who had been able to cram themselves inside for Preview Night before the doors were closed. But that was a reflection of Comic-Con B.E.—Before Emergency—and this was travel through Comic-Con now. Walkways that should have been open were barricaded, some with as little as caution tape and “Keep Out” signs, others with full-on walls that had been constructed from cannibalized booth displays. Of the people Kelly and Stuart encountered outside the barriers, it seemed like everyone knew someone who had been attacked.