Blackout: Book 3 of The Newsflesh Trilogy Read online

  “Yes, Shaun,” said the Agora.

  “Awesome,” I said, and proceeded on. The “pants” were drawstring cotton, purple with the Agora logo over the hip, like they were advertising a high school pep team. The bathrobe that went with them was a few shades darker, with the same logo. I pulled everything on, checked to be sure the ties were tight, and stepped out the door in the far wall.

  George was waiting in the hall, tugging anxiously at the sleeves of her own bathrobe. Her feet were bare, the legs of her sweatpants pooling over their tops, and her sunglasses were gone. Without a medical condition to make them mandatory, she could have them confiscated at every sterilization checkpoint we encountered. Another EMT was standing nearby, using that weird gift that some people in service industries seem to possess, and basically blending into the furniture.

  I ignored her, focusing on George. “Hey,” I said. “All clean?”

  “All clean.” She sighed, giving up on tugging her sleeves into place. “Do you think that after we see how Maggie’s doing, we can get me a can of Coke?”

  “We can get you a gallon of Coke,” I said.

  “Good.” She looked to the EMT. “Where to now?”

  “This way,” said the EMT. She started down the hallway and we followed, only lagging by a few steps. The hall ended at a pair of sliding glass doors, which opened to reveal a small but well-appointed hospital waiting room. There was even an admissions desk, with a woman sitting behind it, tapping away at her computer.

  “The Masons are here for Miss Garcia,” called the EMT, as she led us past the desk. The other woman nodded, looking up with a smile. Her fingers kept moving the whole time, and her eyes snapped quickly back to the screen.

  “Do you get many medical emergencies here?” asked George.

  “The Agora is proud to provide hospital services to our guests, both past and present,” said the EMT. “We have patients most days, seeing our private doctors. It offers a guarantee of privacy and discretion that is unfortunately not present in many more public hospitals.”

  “Better care for rich people, right?” I said. “Figures.”

  George didn’t say anything. She just looked thoughtfully around as we followed the EMT past a row of unlabeled doors, finally pausing at one that looked like all the others.

  “A moment, please,” said the EMT, and pushed the door open, vanishing inside. Only a few seconds passed before she pushed the door open again, this time holding it to let us through. “Miss Garcia will see you now.”

  “Awesome,” I said, and stepped past her into the room. I stopped dead just past the threshold, too stunned to speak.

  George ducked in behind me. After a few startled seconds, she said, “Remind me to come here the next time I decide to get hurt.”

  “You and me both,” I said.

  The halls of the Agora’s medical center might look like the ones you’d find at any other upscale hospital, but the patient rooms were something completely different, at least if Maggie’s was anything to go by. The walls were painted a warm amber, and there was actual carpet on the floor—easy-clean industrial carpet, sure, but a world of luxury away from normal hospital tile. The only medical equipment in sight was a flat-screen display that flickered periodically between images, apparently doing the work of multiple monitors.

  Maggie was lying in the middle of a comfortable-looking bed with a wine red comforter and more pillows than anyone needs, sick or not. She was too pale, especially for her. An IV was connected to her left arm, and there were sensor patches on her collarbones, but apart from that, she could have been taking a nap. Mahir was sitting to one side of the bed; Becks was standing near the wall. They both turned to look at us.

  There was a moment of awkward silence before Mahir said, “If Maggie were awake and mobile, this is doubtless the point where she would leap to her feet, announce how worried she’d been, and run to embrace you. Please forgive me if I choose to take all that as written, and move straight to asking what the bloody hell we’re meant to do now.”

  I nodded. “Forgiven. How is she?”

  “The bullet went clean through. That’s about the only good thing I can say about it.” Becks didn’t look at Maggie as she spoke. She didn’t really look at us, either; her gaze was fixed on the wall, preventing anything uncomfortable, like eye contact. “Several of her internal organs were damaged, and her liver was nicked. She lost a lot of blood.”

  “But she didn’t amplify,” I said.

  “No. She’s going to be fine. They’re transfusing her with scrubbed plasma and filtering as much of the viral load out of her bloodstream as they can, but she never started to amplify.”

  “What Rebecca isn’t saying is that Maggie came very, very close to crossing that line, and she can’t be moved.” Mahir dropped his head into his hands, voice muffled as he said, “She can’t be moved, and you can’t stay here. This is a disaster.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. For a moment—just a moment—I wished the George who only existed in my head would speak up and tell me what to say. Then I glanced to the George who was standing beside me, alive and breathing and as lost as the rest of us, and the moment passed. “Maggie can’t be moved, but she’ll be safe here. The Agora would never let anything happen to her, and she wasn’t involved with the actual break-in at the CDC, so it’s not like she can be accused of anything more criminal than letting herself get shot.”

  “Harboring fugitives,” said Becks.

  “Criminal negligence—she should never have left the van,” said Mahir.

  “Being a journalist,” said George. The rest of us turned to her, startled. She shook her head, expression grim. “I read as much of the last year’s site archive as I could before we left to get shot at. Whoever’s running this game, they don’t like journalists, and they’re not discriminating between the branches. To them, a blogger’s a blogger.”

  “She’s right,” whispered Maggie.

  Mahir raised his head. Becks whipped around to face the bed. Maggie’s eyes were still closed, but there was a tension in her that hadn’t been there when we entered the room, a tension that spoke of consciousness.

  “You know… they’re targeting the bloggers,” whispered Maggie. Every word seemed heavy, like it was being dragged out of her. “Martial law in Florida. Arrests all over the country. They’re… hiding something.”

  “Hey. Hey. Don’t try to talk, honey. You need to save your strength.” Becks moved to crouch down next to Mahir. Looking at the three of them, I felt suddenly left out, like they had formed a unit I wasn’t meant to be part of. Then George touched my elbow with one hand, the sort of quick, subtle contact that had always been the limit we allowed ourselves in public, and I realized they’d formed their unit because they understood—probably before I did—that they were never really going to be a part of mine.

  I was always going to be a haunted house. The only difference was that now my ghost wore flesh and held me when I needed her. Somehow, that made it better… but it didn’t stop the realization from hurting.

  “No. Need to talk.” Maggie struggled to open her eyes, managing a single blink before they closed again. “Shaun, you have to… you have to take Georgia and go. Go back to Dr. Abbey. She’ll know another way to hide you.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  The ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “I am going to lie here until I can feel my toes. And then I’ll ask the concierge to call my parents so I can tell them that the CDC is being naughty.”

  Mahir actually laughed. “Well, that’ll certainly complicate things in our favor.”

  “You have to stay with her,” said Becks.

  “What?” Mahir twisted to face her, eyes narrowing. “I don’t believe I heard you correctly.”

  “I’m staying out of this,” I murmured to George. She nodded, not saying anything.

  “One of us has to stay here and make sure Maggie keeps breathing until her parents get here—and that if she stops, there
’s someone ready to tell them the real story.” Becks grimaced. “Sorry, Maggie.”

  “It’s okay,” Maggie said, another ghostly smile crossing her face. “Medical family, remember? I don’t kid myself about things like this.” The smile faded, replaced by a grimace. “Could’ve done without getting shot, though.”

  “And I’m volunteered to remain behind precisely why?” Mahir demanded.

  “Shaun’s crazy, Georgia’s a clone, and I’m prepared to shoot them both if they so much as look at me funny. Whereas you have virtually no field experience, and have never shot someone you care about.”

  “I’ve had field experience,” said Mahir.

  “Was any of it voluntary?” asked George.

  He grimaced. “No,” he admitted. “But I don’t care one bit for being the one who gets sidelined. It seems that’s always what you lot do right before you kick off the endgame. Remember Sacramento?”

  “Bet I remember it better than you do,” said George quietly.

  Mahir grimaced again. “I’m sorry. But you take my point.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You lived. You’re staying here, Mahir, and Becks is coming with us. You’ll like Dr. Abbey, George. She’s probably clinically insane, but she’s good people, and that’s harder to come by than sanity these days.”

  Maggie made a thin choking sound that made us all freeze, until we realized she was trying to laugh. “You people,” she whispered finally. “You still think any of this is a choice. Get out of here. Get in your van, and get out of here, and finish it. Do you hear me? Finish it.” This time, she managed to force her eyes open for almost five whole seconds, glaring at us. “Finish it, or I swear, I will die, and come back, and haunt you.”

  “I’ve had enough of being haunted,” I said. “We’ll finish it. But only because you asked so nicely, Maggie.”

  “I can live with that,” she said, eyes drifting closed again. “Now go ’way. I want to sleep. Can’t do that with all you reporters here staring at me.”

  Mahir stood, pausing long enough to glare at me before he stalked out of the room. Becks walked back to Maggie, bending to kiss her on the forehead. Then she followed Mahir, leaving me and George alone with Maggie.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Wait,” whispered Maggie.

  We froze.

  “Tell her to come here.”

  I glanced at George, who stared back at me, eyes wide and somehow helpless. I nodded. She sighed, nodding back, and walked over to Maggie.

  “I’m here.”

  “Closer.”

  George leaned down until her ear was next to Maggie’s mouth. Maggie whispered something, expression as urgent as her voice was weak. George hesitated before replying, “I understand. And yes. I promise.”

  “Good,” said Maggie, loud enough for me to hear. “Now go.”

  George walked away from the bed, looking unsettled. She didn’t pause before leaving the room. I followed her, grabbing her arm before she could head for the admissions desk, where Mahir and Becks were speaking with the EMT.

  “Hey,” I said. “What did she say to you?”

  George turned to face me, her eyes meeting mine with a directness that her sunglasses had always prevented before. “She said that if I’m even a little bit Georgia Mason, I’ll kill myself before I’ll let the CDC use me to hurt you more than they already have. And I agreed.

  “I think I’m mostly me, Shaun. I really do. But I know that mostly isn’t entirely. If there’s any chance I’m less myself than I think I am—if I feel even the slightest bit like I might be slipping—I will take myself out of the picture.” Her smile was humorless. “I won’t be the one who stops you from avenging me.”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  We think we have an idea where she’s been, if not where she’s going. There was an explosion in one of the supposedly deserted neighborhoods; police found evidence of a massive amount of computer equipment there. It’s possible she and her friends were trying to buy themselves new identities when something went wrong. How things went wrong, I don’t know. We thought we’d removed all the tracking devices from her body. If we didn’t…

  If we didn’t, you may have to prepare yourself for the idea that all of this was for nothing. There’s nothing we can do now but wait and see what happens next.

  —Taken from a message sent by Dr. Gregory Lake to Vice President Richard Cousins, August 5, 2041.

  Alaric took less than kindly to the message that Maggie had been injured and I was remaining behind to tend her while the others returned to the lab. I didn’t mention Georgia. There’s complicating matters, and then there’s blowing up Parliament just so you can make a few adjustments to the seating chart. He’ll find out soon enough.

  Please God we all get out of this alive. Please God Maggie gets better. I want to go home. I want to see my wife again.

  I want this all to be over.

  —From Fish and Clips, the blog of Mahir Gowda, August 5, 2041. Unpublished.

  GEORGIA: Thirty-one

  We left the Agora shortly after sunset, when the cleanup crew declared the van road-serviceable and unlikely to infect and kill us all. Shaun took the wheel, since Becks wasn’t willing to let me drive. She said it was because I didn’t have a license; from the way she refused to meet my eyes while she was saying it, I suspected it was more an issue of her not quite trusting me yet. I couldn’t blame her. If I’d been in her position, and someone I’d already buried had come back… yeah. It was a miracle any of them trusted me at all. A miracle, or the kind of madness that was going to get us all killed.

  With no real idea where we were going, and nothing I could do to help, I contented myself with pulling up the site archive on the local server and reading as we drove down the length of Washington State and into Oregon. This was a slower, more careful read than my earlier looting for information; I could take the time to really absorb what I was looking at, rather than just clicking the next report as quickly as possible. There was even a link to the site’s financials. I was somehow unsurprised to see that Shaun had maintained ownership of my files, and was using them to finance a large percentage of the site’s overhead. I was one of the higher-profile journalist deaths since the Rising. That made me fascinating, and made my previously unpublished op-ed pieces lucrative, even when they’d been written to parallel events that happened years before. That’s the human race. Always willing to slow down and look at the train wreck.

  Becks kept watch from the passenger seat while Shaun drove. The route he chose involved a disturbing number of frontage roads and narrow trails that were basically glorified footpaths. He drove them like they were familiar, and after everything that he and the others had been through since I died, they probably were. I stopped reading and leaned back in my seat, closing my eyes for just a moment, missing the familiar ache I used to get whenever I forced myself to look at a brightly lit computer screen for too long. I never thought I’d miss having retinal KA, but now it was just one more thing about my life that I was never going to get back.

  This was my fault. I was the one who pressured Shaun into agreeing to follow the Ryman campaign, and together we’d strong-armed Buffy into going along with us. If I’d just been willing to work my way up through the ranks the way everyone else did, taking it one step at a time instead of rocketing straight to the top—

  Then someone else would have died in my place, and in Buffy’s place, and someone else’s brother would be the one making this drive. This was all going to happen eventually. The only thing that made us special was the thing that has distinguished one journalist from another since the first reporter found a way to distinguish gossip from the real headline story: We were the ones on the scene when everything went down. We weren’t better. We weren’t worse. We were just the ones standing in the blast radius.

  Everything that happened from there was inevitable.

  That didn’t absolve us of blame—there’s always blame when the wrong stor
ies get told and the wrong secrets get out—but even if we weren’t innocent now, we were then. We really believed in what we were doing. It wasn’t our fault that we were wrong.

  I drifted off reading Alaric’s analysis of the political situation after Ryman’s election—situation normal, all fucked up, with some interesting developments in the regulation of larger mammals and a few changes to the rules for determining hazard zones, but nothing earth-shaking—and woke to see the first rays of false dawn painting the edge of the sky in shades of pollution pink and caution tape gold. Becks was driving. Shaun was asleep in the passenger seat, his head lolling back and his mouth hanging slightly open. He looked exhausted.

  Becks must have heard me stirring. She glanced at the rearview mirror, her reflected eyes meeting mine, and raised one eyebrow. That was all she needed to do; the message couldn’t have been easier to understand if she’d posted it on the front page of our news site.

  I nodded. I understood, and I wasn’t going to hurt him. Not if I had any choice in the matter.

  My mouth felt like the ass-end of a Tuesday morning. I cleared my throat and asked, “Where are we?”

  “Oregon. We’re almost there.”

  “There where?”

  “Shady Cove.”

  I paused, trying to convince myself I’d heard wrong. It didn’t work. Finally, I demanded, “What?”

  Shaun didn’t flinch. Becks replied, “Shady Cove, Oregon. Our friend Dr. Abbey has a lab there. Right now, anyway. She’ll probably move it soon. Possibly after she demands that we let her dissect you.”

  “In Shady Cove.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s nothing in Shady Cove.” Shady Cove, Oregon, was on the list of cities abandoned after the Rising, when the economic cost of rebuilding was determined too great to balance out the benefits. We’d take it back someday, when the great march of progress demanded we leave the dead with no country of their own. Until then, Shady Cove would stand empty, just like Santa Cruz, California, and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and Warsaw, Indiana, and a hundred other towns and cities around the world.