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  “Must be nice to be a pigeon,” I said, taking another swig of Coke and making a face. “You sure can’t sell you on the idea of coffee? Nice, bitter, hot coffee that doesn’t taste like going down on a hooker from Candyland?”

  You never objected to me drinking Coke before, George replied.

  “Yeah, George, but you didn’t live inside my head before. You can use this stuff to clean car batteries. Car batteries, George. You think that’s doing anything good to my internal organs? Because I’d bet good money that it’s not.”

  Shaun, said George, in that all-too-familiar, all-too-exasperated tone, I don’t live anywhere. I’m not alive. Remember?

  “Yeah, George,” I said, taking one last drink from the can of Coke before tossing it, still half full, off the edge of the roof. It sprayed soda in an impressively large arc as it fell. I leaned backward against the building’s air-ventilation shaft and closed my eyes. “I remember.”

  As I’ve mentioned several times, I have a sister. An adopted sister, to be precise, fished out of the state system by Michael and Stacy Mason after the Rising left us both without our biological parents. That was George. She’s the reason I got into blogging, and the reason we wound up running a site of our own. She was never meant to be one of nature’s followers. And technically, I guess the tense is wrong there, because it ought to be “I had a sister.” The death of Georgia Carolyn Mason was registered with the Centers for Disease Control on June 20, 2032. Her official cause of death is recorded as “complications from massive amplification of the Kellis-Amberlee virus,” which means, in layman’s terms, “she died because she turned into a zombie.”

  It would be a lot more accurate to say that she died because I shot her in the spine, spraying blood all over the interior of the van that we were locked in at the time. It might be even more accurate to say that she died because some bastard shot a needle full of the live Kellis-Amberlee virus into her arm. But the CDC says she died of Kellis-Amberlee, and hey, we don’t argue with the CDC, right?

  If I ever find out who fired that needle, their official cause of death is going to be Shaun Mason. That’s the thought that keeps me going. I sleepwalk through my job, I pretend I’m administrating our site while Mahir does all the work, I delete calls from my crazy parents, I hold conversations with my dead sister, and I look for the people who had her killed. I’ll find them someday. All I have to do is wait.

  See, when the zombies came, it was an accident. Researchers in two totally unconnected facilities were working on two totally unrelated projects that involved genetically engineering “helper viruses”—new diseases that were supposed to make life better for the whole damn world. One of them was based on a really fucking nasty hemorrhagic fever called Marburg, and was designed to cure cancer. The other was based on a strain of the common cold, and was supposed to get rid of colds forever. Enter Marburg Amberlee and the Kellis Flu, two beautiful pieces of viral engineering that did exactly what they were supposed to do. No more cancer, no more colds, just happy people all over the world celebrating the dawn of a new age. Only it turns out the viruses were just like the people who made them in at least one sense, because when they met, through the natural chain of transmission and infection, it was basically love at first sight. First old love, then comes marriage, then comes the hybrid viral strain known as “Kellis-Amberlee.” It swept the planet before anyone knew what was happening.

  And then people started dying and getting back up to munch on their relatives, and we figured out what was happening damn fast. People fought back, because people always fight back, and we had one advantage the characters in zombie movies never seem to have: See, we’d seen all the zombie movies, and we knew what was likely to be a bad idea. George always said the first summer of the Rising was possibly the best example of human nobility that history had to offer, because for just a few months, before the accusations started flying and the fingers started pointing, we really were one people, united against one enemy. And we fought. We fought for the right to live, and in the end, we won.

  Sort of, anyway. Look at the movies from before the Rising and you’ll see a whole different world from the one that we live in; a world where people go outside just because they think that, hey, going outside might be fun. They don’t file paperwork or put on body armor. They just go. A world where people travel on a whim, where they swim with dolphins and own dogs and do a hundred thousand things that are basically unthinkable today. It seems like paradise from where I’m sitting, a generation and a couple of decades away. If you ask me, that world was the single biggest casualty of the Rising.

  The Rising didn’t just showcase the nobler side of human nature; it was a war, and as long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers. There’s always somebody willing and waiting to make a buck off somebody else’s pain. I’m not sure most of them meant to do what they did—I’m sure most of them really meant to do the right thing—but somehow, an entire world full of people who had managed to take arms against an enemy that was straight out of a Romero flick was convinced that what they really wanted was fear. They put down their guns, they locked their doors, they went inside, and they were grateful for all the things that they were scared of.

  I used to think the Irwins were great warriors in the ongoing fight to live a normal life in our post-Rising world. Now I’m starting to suspect that we’re just tools of some greater plan. After all, why leave your house when you can live vicariously through a dumb kid willing to risk his life for your amusement? Bread and circuses. That’s all we are.

  You’re getting bitter, George observed.

  “I got reason,” I said.

  Bread and circuses is what got George killed. We—her, me, and our friend Georgette “Buffy” Meissonier—were the original After the End Times news team, and we got hired by President Ryman to follow his campaign. He was Senator Ryman then, and I was a dumb, optimistic Irwin who believed… well, a lot of things, but mostly, that I’d die before George did. I was never going to be the one who buried her, and I was sorry that she was going to bury me, but we’d both made our peace with that years before. We were chasing the news, and we were chasing the truth, and we were on the adventure of our lives. Literally, for George and Buffy, because neither one of them walked away from it. Turns out there were people who didn’t want Ryman to make it to the White House. Oh, they were happy to have him elected. They just didn’t want him to be president. They were backing their own candidate.

  Governor David Tate. Or, as I prefer to think of him, “the fucking asshole pig that I shot in the head for being part of the conspiracy that killed my sister.” He admitted it before he died. Well, before he injected himself with a huge quantity of live Kellis-Amberlee and forced me to shoot him. During the after-investigation, I got asked why I thought he’d decided to pull the classic super-villain rant before he killed himself. I got asked a lot of other questions, too, but that was the one I had an answer for.

  “Easy,” I said. “He was a smug fucker who wanted us to know how awesome the world would have been if we’d let him take it over, and he was stalling for time, because he knew that if he managed to inject himself, we’d never find out whom he was working with. He wanted us to think he was the mastermind. It was all him. But it wasn’t. It never could have been.”

  They asked me why not.

  “Because that asshole was never smart enough to kill my sister.”

  They didn’t have any questions after that. What could they have asked? George was dead, Tate was dead, and I’d put the bullets in both of them. Before the Rising, a statement like that would have been an invitation to a murder charge. These days, I’m lucky no one tried to give me a medal. I think Rick probably convinced then-Senator Ryman that even the suggestion would result in me assaulting a federal official, and nobody wanted to deal with that. Although I might have welcomed the distraction.

  Speaking of distractions, there was something poking me in the knee. I cracked one eye open and found th
e pigeon was now industriously pecking at my jeans. “Dude, I’m not a breadcrumb vending machine.” It kept pecking. “Has Becks been putting steroids in your birdseed or something? Because don’t think I don’t know she’s been feeding you. I found the receipt from the last time she hit the pet store.”

  “Since I haven’t made any attempts to hide it from you, it would be a little bit upsetting if you didn’t know,” said Becks, from about three feet behind me. “As it is, you noticed the receipt and not the twenty-pound bags of birdseed in the office coat closet. That doesn’t say much about your powers of observation.”

  “But it says a lot about my attention to detail.” I twisted around to face her, sending the pigeon fluttering off to find a safer place to perch. “Is there a reason the sanctity of the roof has been violated?”

  Becks crossed her arms across her chest in a gesture that was only semidefensive. I don’t know why she looks at me that way. I’ve never hit her. Dave a few times, and I broke Alaric’s nose once, but never her. “Dave says you’ve been up here for three hours.”

  I blinked. “I have?”

  I thought you needed the sleep, George said.

  “Gee, thanks,” I muttered. You’d think having my dead sister living inside my head might have some helpful side effects, like, say, insomnia, but no such luck. I get all the negatives of being insane, with none of the bonuses.

  “You have,” said Becks, with a small nod. “We’ve been going o gesture tthe footage. We got some great shots, especially from the sequence where Alaric was holding the crowbar. Before everything got bad, I mean.”

  “You checked your license allowances before you let him do that, right?” I asked, levering myself to my feet. My back was stiff enough to confirm that whole “three hours” thing; I’d been sitting in one position for way too long.

  “Of course,” she said, sounding affronted. “As long as I stayed within five feet and he was in no immediate nonconsensual danger, I was totally within my legal rights as a journalism teacher. What do you think I am, some sort of field newbie?” She sounded even more offended than the question would justify, because there was another question underneath it: When did you stop being any fun? Becks hired on as a Newsie under George and switched to my department almost before the ink on her contract was dry. She’s one of nature’s born Irwins, and she and I worked together really well. That’s why I gave her my department when I stepped down. And that’s probably also why she seems to really believe, deep down, that all she needs to do is find me a stick and a hole to poke it into and I’ll be fine.

  It’s really a pity that I don’t think it’s ever going to work that way for me. Because damn, it would be nice.

  “I don’t think you’re a field newbie, Becks, I just think there are some people who’d love to have an excuse to slap us with more violation charges. I mean, how much did we pay to get those ‘standing too close to a goat’ charges off Mahir’s record? And he’s in England. They still like goats over there.”

  “All right, fair enough,” she admitted. “But still, Alaric did really well out there today. I think he’s almost ready for his exams.”

  “Well, good.”

  “He just needs a senior Irwin to sign off on him.”

  “So sign.”

  “Shaun—”

  “Was that the only reason you came up here to poke at me? Because it doesn’t seem like enough.”

  You’re trying to distract her.

  I gritted my teeth and didn’t answer. No one heard George but me; everyone heard me when I talked to her. Not exactly the fairest deal I’ve ever been a part of, but, hey, I’m the one who gets to keep breathing, so I probably shouldn’t complain all that much. George wouldn’t complain if our positions were reversed. She’d just glare at people, drink a lot of Coke, and write scathing articles about how our judgmental society called her crazy for choosing to maintain a healthy relationship with a dead person.

  Becks gave me a sidelong look. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, teeth still gritted as I willed George to shut up until I’d managed to get Becks to go away. “Just stiff. And that didn’t answer my question. What else made you come up here?”

  “Ah, that. You have company.” Becks unfolded her arms, shoving her hands into the pocketsof her jeans. She’d changed her clothes, which only made sense; the clothing she’d worn in the field needed to be thoroughly sterilized before it was safe to wear again. The logical need to change didn’t explain why she’d put on new jeans and a flowery shirt that wouldn’t offer any protection in an outbreak, but girls have never made much sense to me. I never needed them to. George was always there, ready and willing to play translator.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Company? Define ‘company.’ Is this the kind of company that wants an interview? Or the kind of company I have a restraining order against?” Most people don’t think I’m handling Georgia’s death very well, what with the whole “hearing her inside my head even though she’s not here anymore” aspect of things. Well, if I’m not handling it well, the Masons aren’t handling it at all, since they’ve spent the last year alternately pleading with me to see reason and threatening to sue me for ownership of her intellectual property. I always knew they were vultures, but it took someone actually dying for me to understand just how appropriate that comparison really was. They’d started hovering around before the man who paid her killer was even cold, looking for a way to make a profit off the situation.

  I mean that literally. I checked the time stamps on the first e-mails they sent me. I don’t think they even took the time to pretend to grieve before they started trying to make sure they’d get their piece of the action. So yeah, I took out a restraining order against them. They’ve taken it surprisingly well thus far. Maybe because it’s done wonderful things for their ratings.

  “Neither,” said Becks. “She says she knows you from the CDC, and that she’s been trying to get hold of you for weeks—something about needing to talk to you about a research program that Georgia was involved with back when you were—Shaun? Where are you going?”

  I was halfway across the roof the moment the words “research program” left her lips, and by the time she asked where I was going, it was too late; I was already gone, hand on the doorknob, barreling back down the stairs toward the hallway.

  My line of work, combined with George’s virological martyrdom and my ongoing, if somewhat amateur, attempts to locate the people behind the conspiracy that killed her, has brought me into contact with a lot of people from the CDC. But there’s only one “she” who has my contact information and would even dare to bring up George around me.

  Dave was waiting outside the office apartment door, looking agitated. I stopped long enough to grab his shoulders, shake briskly, and demand, “Why haven’t I been seeing her e-mail?”

  “The new spam filters must have been stopping her,” he said, looking a little green around the edges. It appeared that I was scaring him. I was having trouble getting worked up about that when I was already so worked up about more important matters. “If she was using the wrong keywords—”

  “Fix them!” I shoved him backward, hard enough that he smacked his shoulders against the wall. Turning, I opened the apartment door.

  Alaric was in the process of handing my “company” a cup of coffee, making polite apologies about my absence. He stopped when I entered, turning to face me, and she half rose, a small, almost tim smile on her face.

  “Hi, Shaun,” said Kelly. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.”

  There were many would-be saviors during the Rising, but some stand above the rest. One such is Dr. William Matras, a virologist working out of the Centers for Disease Control’s Atlanta office. With a governmental decree forbidding any discussion of what they called “the Walking Plague,” the CDC was unable to warn the populace of the coming crisis. Dr. Matras co-opted the one channel of communication he knew to be unmonitored: the blog of his daughter, Wendy. He posted everythi
ng he knew about the epidemiology of the Walking Plague, and he armed a world against the disease.

  Dr. Matras was tried for treason, acquitted on all counts, and given a posthumous commendation for valorous service. His son, Ian Matras, is the current director of the WHO. His eldest daughter, Marianne Matras-Connolly, is an instructor at Georgetown University. Of his five grandchildren, three are in the family business, with the youngest, Kelly Connolly, currently studying under Dr. J. Wynne of the Memphis CDC.

  We owe this family a great debt for everything that they have done. Without men like Dr. Matras, the future of the human race would be much bleaker.

  —From Epidemiology of the Wall, authored by Mahir Gowda, January 11, 2041

  Three

  The last time I saw Kelly Connolly, she was delivering George’s ashes for the funeral. The time before that, she was at the Memphis CDC installation where George, Rick, and I were taken into quarantine after an anonymous call claimed we’d gone into amplification. Not exactly the sort of encounters that lend themselves to easy companionship. I’m never really sure how to deal with people who aren’t a part of my team and aren’t trying to either kill or interview me. My usual tactics—gunshots and punches to the face—just don’t seem to apply.

  Kelly was looking at me expectantly, the cup of coffee she’d taken from Alaric still held in front of her. I almost wished she’d throw it at me, just so I’d have some idea of what I was supposed to do.

  Say hello, George prompted.

  “Why—” I began, and caught myself, snapping my jaws closed on my tongue so hard I tasted blood. Talking to George in front of my friends and coworkers was one thing: It weirded them out a little, but they were essentially used to it. Talking to her in front of someone who was still practically a stranger was something else entirely. I didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with the questions it would inevitably raise.