by Mira Grant
We all looked toward the windshield.
There was a short, slim woman standing in front of the van. The top of her head probably wouldn’t have come higher than my shoulder. That didn’t really matter. The assault rifle she was aiming at the windshield more than made up for any lack of size.
“Ah,” said Mahir. “I believe we’ve found the right place.”
“That, or we’ve found the local loony bin.” I put my hands on the dashboard. “Everybody do what she says. We’re going to go along with this for now.”
“Good call!” chirped the tablet.
“Mason—” said Becks.
“Just chill, okay? They knew we were coming. Let’s do things their way and see what happens.”
One by one, the rest of my team did as we’d been told. Becks was the last to move, sullenly putting her gun down and lacing her fingers behind her head. She glared at me in the rearview mirror the entire time.
Once we were all in position, the girl with the gun half walked, half skipped over to the van, stopping next to the driver’s-side door. She beamed through the glass, blue eyes wide and bright as a kid’s on Christmas morning. Her hair destroyed any illusion of childishness, despite her size. Most kids have bleach-blond hair these days, a sign that their parents are properly respecting security protocols. Her hair was so red it was almost orange, and only the last six inches had been bleached, ending in about an inch of inky black, like the tipping on a fox’s tail.
She tapped the barrel of her gun against the window, gesturing for me to open the door. I did so, moving slowly in case she decided to take offense at the fact that I was moving at all.
“Hi!” she said, once the door was open. She removed her right hand from the gun stock long enough to reach over and tap the skin behind her ear, presumably turning off the transmitter she’d been using to speak through Mahir’s tablet. “I’m the Fox. Welcome to the Brainpan.”
“Uh,” I said slowly. “Nice to meet you?”
“Oh, that’s probably not true,” she said, still with the same manic good cheer. “Why don’t you come inside? The Cat baked bread this morning, and I don’t think it’s poisoned or anything! Also, leave your guns in the car, or I’ll not only kill you, I’ll fuck up your corpses so bad that even DNA testing won’t be able to figure out who you were.” She flashed us one last, bright-toothed smile and started walking backward down the path to the porch. She kept her gun leveled on us all the way. Only when she reached the porch did she turn, bounding up the stairs and vanishing through the open door.
“Oh, great,” said Becks, in a faint voice. “I was wondering how we were going to fill our daily quota of bat-shit crazy.”
“Maybe we can make quota for the rest of the month.” I unbuckled my belt and slid out of the van. Once I was clear, I removed the guns from my waistband, setting them on the seat. “Everybody drop your weapons and come on. We came to them. We may as well play by their rules.”
“Yes, because allowing the crazy people to set the rules is absolutely always the way to ensure one’s survival in a hostile situation.” Mahir managed to sound almost amused, even though he scowled as he removed his own pistol from the holster beneath his arm.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said amiably. He had the good grace to look abashed. I leaned back in through my open door and punched him in the arm. “Don’t worry. The lunatics have been running the asylum around here for a long time. We’ll fit right in.”
Becks had to shed six guns before she got out of the van, and even then, I was reasonably sure she was holding back at least a couple of knives. Maggie didn’t need to remove anything. That made me grimace a little.
She really isn’t field ready at all, is she?
“No, she’s really not,” I murmured, and slammed the van door.
The four of us walked together down the broken concrete pathway leading to the Brainpan porch. As we got closer to the house, I started spotting the security enhancements and architectural tweaks hidden among the general disorder and decay. All of them were subtle, and from what I could see, all of them were designed to be effective. That meant they were recent. If they’d been done immediately post-Rising, when most of the improvements—such as they were—were being made to this neighborhood, they would have been flashy. These had no flash at all. They weren’t here to show off how secure the house was. They were here to secure it.
“Look,” I said, elbowing Becks in the side before nodding toward a camera mostly hidden beneath one of the shingles edging the roof.
She followed my gaze. “Not very well concealed.”
“Yeah, but it’s also a dummy. You know, for dummies.” The Fox bounced back into the open doorframe, beaming at us. “If you think that’s the only camera, you’re a dummy, and I get to shoot you.”
“That’s an entirely reasonable and understandable mechanism for judging one’s guests,” said Mahir smoothly. “Might we come inside now?”
“Oh, sure. Just take off your shoes. The Cat gets a little crazy when you track mud on her floors.” She disappeared back into the house.
Becks and I exchanged a look. “I’m not sure what’s worse,” she said. “The fact that she just implied someone else might be crazy, or the fact that everyone here has a name that starts with the word ‘the.’ ”
“Just pretend they’re all comic book villains and it starts to make sense.” Maggie took off her sandals, swinging them casually from one hand as she climbed the porch steps and entered the house.
“I’m Batman,” deadpanned Mahir, and followed her. Becks was half a step behind him, and I brought up the rear, looking back over my shoulder for signs of pursuit as I stepped inside. There were none. For better or for worse, we were alone with the people we had come to find.
I expected the door to swing shut itself as soon as I was over the threshold. Instead, it remained open until an aggravated female voice shouted, “Shut the damn door!” from somewhere at the end of the hall.
I shut the door.
It took a moment for me and Becks to undo the laces on our boots. Mahir and Maggie waited for us to finish, and we walked down the short entry hall to the living room together.
The house was constructed on one of the pre-Rising open-space models, with the living room, dining room, and kitchen essentially blending together to form one large space. There were multiple windows, which must have provided a lot of natural light before they were sealed up and boarded over. Now they were just plywood rectangles set into the walls, barely visible behind the banks of computer equipment and monitor screens. The place looked like a combination of a server farm and a college student’s dorm room, with one big exception: It was scrupulously clean. There might be a futon on the floor, but there were no pizza boxes or takeout containers; there was clutter, but no trash. It managed to be sterile and lived-in at the same time.
“Bizarre,” muttered Becks.
“Awesome,” I countered.
“Expensive, so don’t touch anything,” said a voice. I turned toward the kitchen, where a brown-haired woman was standing, arms crossed, a stern expression on her face. She was wearing jeans and a tank top, and her hair was cropped short, leaving nothing for a zombie mob to grab hold of. She looked more like a normal human than the girl from the driveway, who was now sitting on the counter, drumming her heels against a cabinet. Somehow, that made her more difficult to trust. Nothing that looked normal in this place could possibly be what it seemed.
Mahir had turned along with the rest of us. He recovered quickly, stepping forward and offering his hand. “I’m Mahir Gowda. It’s a pleasure to—”
“You’re not here to meet me,” said the brunette, in the same disapproving tone. “No one comes here to meet me. You’re here for the Monkey. Well, he’s not sure he wants to talk to you just yet. Who sent you?”
“No one sent us. We came—”
“Whoops! Wrong answer!” The Fox was suddenly holding a pistol in each hand. I hadn’t even seen her draw. “Somebody told you
who to look for, and somebody told you where to look. So who sent you?”
“Alaric Kwong. He said the Monkey was the best in the business,” said Becks.
The brunette blinked. Then, to my surprise, she smiled, a little wistfully. “Alaric? Really? You’re the people he’s been working with?”
The four of us stared at her for a moment. Slowly, I nodded. “Yeah. He’s part of my crew. I’m Shaun Mason, After the End Times.”
“I know you,” she said, smile fading as fast as it came. “I’m the Cat. You’ve met the Fox.”
“ ‘Met’ is a word,” I agreed. The Fox lowered her guns. “Do we pass the security check?”
“For the moment.” The Cat turned, picking up a bread knife from the counter. “Why did Alaric send you?”
We could have tried for diplomacy. We could have tried for plausible deniability. In the end, that seemed like too damn much trouble, and I did what Georgia taught me to do: I went for the truth. “There’s a good chance we’re going to need to run for the border pretty soon, since the CDC is trying to kill us—”
“—we think,” Becks interjected.
“Right, we think. Anyway, they probably released bioengineered death mosquitoes and accidentally wiped out the Gulf Coast trying to get us, so they’re a little pissed right now. That means we need IDs the CDC won’t be watching for.”
“Why?” asked the little redhead, guilelessly.
I hesitated. I could give the answer we’d been giving everyone else—so we could get out, so we could run and escape and live—or I could tell the truth. I looked toward my team. Mahir was still watching the two women, the redhead drumming her heels, the brunette slicing obviously home-baked bread. Becks and Maggie were watching me, waiting to see what I would say. I took a breath.
“Mahir needs a new passport to get him into Canada, so he can get back to Europe alive. Becks needs an identity that can get her out of the country, wherever it is she wants to go. Alaric needs IDs for him, and for his sister, Alisa. We’re going to get her out of Florida. Maggie—”
“Is paying for all this,” said Maggie.
The Cat turned to me, knife still in her hand. Raising an eyebrow, she asked, “And what about you? What are you planning to get out of this deal?”
“Assuming this dude is as good as Alaric thinks he is, I’m going to get an ID that doesn’t set off any alarms. I’m going to stay low until we finish finding the people who killed my sister. And then I’m going to walk right in their front doors and shoot them in their fucking faces.”
“I like this one,” said the Fox, giggling. “He’s funny.”
Maggie was staring at me, clearly aghast. Becks and Mahir, on the other hand, didn’t even look surprised. Becks looked a little sad; Mahir just looked accepting, like he’d been waiting a long time for those words to leave my lips.
Seeing them like that made me feel slightly ashamed, and more determined than ever to set things right. I all but glared at the Cat. “So? Are those reasons good enough for you people, or do we need to find someone else to help us?”
“You’re doing this out of a suicidal need for revenge, even though it may not change anything,” said the Cat coolly.
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Pretty much.”
You’re an idiot, muttered George. I ignored her.
“Okay,” said the Cat.
I blinked. “What?”
“I said okay. The Fox likes you, and I think you’re a suicidal idiot with friends who will pay to let you kill yourself in an interesting fashion. She”—she gestured toward Maggie with her knife—“can give us obscene amounts of money without thinking about it, and the other two are nonoffensive enough not to matter. Besides, you work with someone that I owe a favor.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Alaric Kwong.” She smiled at our expressions. “He doesn’t know I ended up here. Probably break his heart if you told him. I may as well pay him back by passing you through.”
“A favor? For what?” asked Becks.
The Cat smirked. “I broke up with him when our Quest Realm guild was in the middle of a raid, and then I kept making him heal me without answering any of his whiny whispers about why, Jane, why would you break up with me, I loooooooove you. So we’ll get you your IDs. Cost is fifty thousand each, up-front, before you leave here today… and a favor.”
“A favor?” Becks frowned, suddenly suspicious. Given how on edge she’d been since we arrived, that wasn’t much of a transition. “What kind of favor are we talking about here?”
“Nothing you’d lose any sleep over. We need you to break into the local CDC building and drop a little something off for us,” said the Cat. She resumed slicing bread.
“Define ‘a little something,’ ” I said. “We’re not blowing anything up. That’s their game, not ours.”
“Nothing like that. Their main storage facility isn’t online. We want access. So we have a pressure-point hotspot that we just need you to get into the proper place and switch on. Then you come back here and get your shiny new identities, and with them, the warm satisfaction of knowing we’re going to screw the CDC over in some fun ways that you don’t need to know anything about.” She put her knife down, resting her hands on the counter as she looked at us calmly. “Do we have a deal?”
Looking into her calm, cold eyes, I realized the Fox wasn’t the only crazy person living in this house. She was just the one who had the honesty to wear her crazy on her sleeve.
“Yeah,” I said. “We have a deal.”
… all attempts to culture a live infection in blood samples taken from Subject 139b have failed. More interesting, we induced amplification in a white-tailed deer, and injected it via dart with a serum derived from Subject 139b’s blood. The deer showed signs of improvement before dying of massive cerebral hemorrhage. The necropsy was inconclusive. Unfortunately, I think we’ll need to try this with a human subject before we can be sure of anything. My team is scouring the area for freshly infected individuals; thus far, we’ve had no luck.
No reports of mosquito-borne Kellis-Amberlee have come in from any of my sources in California, Arizona, or Nevada. It’s possible that we may be able to dodge this bullet. I don’t think so; we haven’t dodged any of the ones that came before it. But I’m starting to believe that there may be an answer. All I need is a little more time.
—Taken from an e-mail sent by Dr. Shannon Abbey to Dr. Joseph Shoji at the Kauai Institute of Virology, August 1, 2041.
Well, that’s that, then. We’re all going to die.
Charming.
—From Fish and Clips , the blog of Mahir Gowda, August 1, 2041. Unpublished.
Nineteen
Dr. Kimberley’s technicians didn’t have any street clothes in my size. They did manage to find me a pair of hard-soled slippers, which weren’t quite the shoes I’d asked for, but were several thousand times better than the socks I’d been wearing since I woke up.
Better yet—best of all—they brought me a computer. A sleek, hard-shelled little laptop, which Gregory set in front of me with the top closed. I reached for it. He pulled it back. Only a few inches, but far enough to make it clear that I needed to listen before I was going to get my hands on the machine.
“You have a connection, and a guest log-in routed through one of the administrative offices,” he said. “We can’t spoof it forever, but we should be able to get you about twenty minutes without raising any red flags. Please don’t run any open searches on phrases that might get the attention of our firewall.”
“Like what?” I asked. “Governmental corruption? Conspiracy to defraud the American people? Cloning?”
“Yes,” he said, without a trace of irony. “That’s a good initial list of things to avoid. Don’t log into any e-mail accounts with your name on them. Don’t—”
“I promise I’ve used other people’s networks before, and I’ve never managed to get anyone arrested when I wasn’t trying to,” I said, and reached for the laptop again. “We’re a
ll trying to trust each other here. For me, the last step to trusting you is seeing that I have a clear connection. For you, the last step to trusting me is seeing that I won’t abuse it. So I guess we both start getting what we want when you let me have that computer, huh?”
Gregory chuckled and pushed the laptop toward me. “You’re definitely feeling better if you’re trying to use logic against me.”
“That’s me. Only rational when I’m not being cut open and dissected for the amusement of others.” I took the laptop, breathing slowly through my nose to keep my hands from shaking as I opened it. The screen sprang to life, displaying a stark white background with the CDC logo in the center. I let my fingers rest against the keys, breathing unsteadily out. “Oh, wow.”
“Maybe we only trust you because we don’t have any other choice, but we do trust you, Georgia.” Gregory touched my shoulder, causing me to look up. He smiled. “Let’s try and earn it from each other.”
I nodded. “I’ll do my best,” I said. And then I bent my head and started to type, and Gregory didn’t matter anymore.
His warning about avoiding my e-mail was smart, if unnecessary: Anyone who’s never worked professionally in Internet news would probably assume the first thing a journalist would do was go for their inbox. He was right, in a way. He was also wrong. All the public-facing e-mail addresses—the ones that fed into the customary webmail interfaces—were basically dummy accounts, feeding their contents into the true inboxes behind the After the End Times firewall system that Buffy had designed. The only time we ever needed to use those boxes directly was when we were somewhere that didn’t allow for logging all the way into the system. Even if I only had twenty minutes, I had plenty of time to make it that far.
The first place I went was an online game site, the sort of thing that’s been killing productivity in offices everywhere since the first computer was invented. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised when the browser autofilled the URL after I’d entered only the first three letters. Not even the CDC is immune to the lure of brightly colored graphics and simplistic puzzles. The site presented a list of options, all with cute, easily marketed names and icons designed to catch the eye. I scrolled to the bottom.
