Blackout: Book 3 of The Newsflesh Trilogy Read online

  Shaun glared at her. Becks ignored him.

  “If I may?” Dr. Shoji looked from Shaun to Dr. Abbey, and finally to me. “As I was saying, I work with the Kauai Institute of Virology. I’ve been consulting with their Kellis-Amberlee research division for the past seven years, which is fairly impressive, considering they think I’m on loan from the CDC.”

  I paused before saying slowly, “But you don’t work for the CDC, do you?”

  “No. I believe you’ve already met some of my associates, Drs. Kimberley and Lake? They spoke very highly of you, even before they were sure you’d be able to make it out of the facility. They certainly thought you were the most promising subject—forgive me for using that word; it’s an ugly word, but it’s the only one I have—to arise from Project Shelley. We were all rooting for you from the start.” He was smiling again. It was such a kind smile. What was my life going to be like if I didn’t trust people who looked kind?

  Probably a lot like it was before, when I didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t on my team. “You’re with the EIS.”

  “What?” said Becks.

  “What?” said Shaun.

  “That was quicker than I expected,” said Dr. Abbey. She gestured toward Alaric, who was still lying on the hallway floor. “One of you, get him up. I don’t want an intern coming along and shooting him before he can wake up and tell them he’s not dead.”

  “Giant dog,” I said.

  She sighed. “Fine. Joe, down.” The dog abandoned its watchful position, lumbering back to its feet and trotting to stand next to Dr. Abbey, tail wagging wildly. She placed a hand atop its head. “Happy?”

  “Not really, but I’m not seeing much of an alternative here.” I stepped closer to Shaun, still watching the dog warily. “Why is it here?”

  “Joe is, like, a super-long story, and I’m a little more interested in the story that makes you meet Mr. Hawaii here and jump straight to him being with the EIS,” said Shaun. “Does that mean he’s working for the people who were holding you captive?”

  “No,” said Dr. Shoji. “It means I’m working with the people who helped her escape, and it means I’m here to make sure you get her where she needs to be—where you both need to be. The man who funded most of Project Shelley needs you. This is what he was hoping for all along.”

  “Who?” demanded Becks.

  I didn’t need to ask. A quiet certainty was growing in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it had been since Dr. Shoji showed up, and I realized that everything—everything—was connected, whether we wanted it to be or not. There was no running away from the past. Alive or dead, it was going to catch up with us in the end.

  Alaric groaned, starting to stir. I looked at Dr. Shoji and said calmly, “Rick. He paid to bring me back, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Shoji. “And now he needs your help.”

  I sighed. “Right. Let’s peel Alaric off the floor and get him up to speed, guys. I think we’re heading for Washington D.C.”

  Oh, of course. Georgia isn’t dead. Or, well, she was dead, but now she’s not, because the CDC is running an underground cloning lab, and the best thing they could think of to clone was a dead journalist who was a pain in their asses when she was alive the first time. And ninety-seven percent memory transfer? That isn’t science fiction, that’s science lying-through-your-teeth. Either she’s not as perfect as she thinks, or there have been a lot of scientific advances that no one’s bothered to share with the rest of us.

  And then I think… Kellis-Amberlee in mosquitoes. Someone killing all the people with reservoir conditions. Dr. Wynne trying to kill half the team. That Australian scientist. All that census data. All the things that don’t add up, that never added up, that have been not adding up since before… well, since before Dr. Matras hijacked his daughter’s blog and told the world the dead were walking. All the things that never added up at all. And I think. Well.

  Maybe this isn’t so impossible after all. And that scares the pants off me.

  Thank God Alisa’s safe with the Masons. And if that’s a sentence that I can write without irony, maybe nothing is impossible anymore.

  —From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, August 6, 2041. Unpublished.

  Dear Alaric.

  The people I am with, the Masons, say I should send this e-mail and tell you I promise I won’t e-mail again for a while, because I won’t be able to check mail and I don’t want you to feel bad when you send messages that aren’t answered. I can check e-mail again when we get back to Berkeley, but we aren’t there yet.

  Mr. Mason is nice, but he stares into space sometimes, and it scares me a little. Ms. Mason isn’t so nice, I don’t think, but she’s trying hard, and I know that should count. Anyway, they said you sent them, and I should go with them, and they had pictures of those people you work with, the cute guy and the dead girl, and so I figured it would be okay. Please don’t be angry. I needed to get out of there before the mosquitoes got in, and I was so scared, and you said you’d send someone.

  Thank you for sending the Masons. I’ll see you soon. I love you.

  —Taken from an e-mail sent by Alisa Kwong to Alaric Kwong, August 6, 2041.

  SHAUN: Thirty-two

  The engines of the Kauai Institute’s private jet hummed smoothly, just loud enough that we could be confident that we were still on the plane and not, I don’t know, sitting in a really funky modular living room. It didn’t help that we were practically alone on the plane. Becks and Alaric were sitting on one side, reading through the files Dr. Abbey had loaded onto their phones before we left. Dr. Shoji was at the front of the plane, monitoring the autopilot and giving us a little privacy in the last few hours before we landed. That left me and George, and she’d been asleep for the better part of an hour, head pillowed on her arm, mouth relaxed from its normal hard line to something softer and more vulnerable. I kept glancing over to make sure she was still there, but I couldn’t look at her for more than a few seconds when she was like that. It felt like I was stealing something. George was never that vulnerable, not even for me.

  According to the little trip monitor at the front of the cabin, we were approximately two hours outside of Washington D.C., where presumably, Dr. Shoji would find a way of getting us out of the private airfield we were aiming for without anyone getting shot in the head. If you had to fly, there were worse ways than hopping from one private airfield to another in a fully outfitted corporate jet. Of course, there were better ones, too. Ones that didn’t mean we were going in essentially blind, on the word of a man who just happened to know the people responsible for cloning my sister.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and groaned. “Things were a lot simpler when all I had to worry about was what I was going to poke with a stick today,” I muttered.

  George didn’t stir.

  Becks looked up, waving a hand until she caught my attention. Then she beckoned me to their side of the plane. I shrugged and stood, picking up my half-empty cup of in-flight coffee before walking over to join them. The coffee was lukewarm. I didn’t care. Just being able to drink it without feeling guilty made it the best cup of coffee in the world.

  “What do we know?” I asked, plopping down next to Becks. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt. Alaric was. That, right there, tells you most of what you need to know about both of them.

  “The clone tech they used for…” Alaric cast an uneasy glance toward George, seeming to lose the thread of the sentence.

  When several seconds ticked by without him continuing, I nudged him with my foot. Just a nudge, but he jumped like I’d kicked him. I sighed. “The clone tech they used to bring Georgia back,” I prompted. “What do we know?”

  “They force-grew her body with a lot of chemicals, a lot of hormones, a lot of radiation, and a lot of luck,” said Alaric slowly. “It only worked because they didn’t need to worry about getting a clone with cancer. She probably was cancerous by the time they finished maturing her, and they just let the Marburg Ambe
rlee part of Kellis-Amberlee do the mop-up when she was exposed to the virus.”

  “She mentioned that she wasn’t the only one,” said Becks. “What I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know is that she wasn’t even one of ten.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “No?”

  “Try more like one out of ten thousand, if you’re starting from the zygote level and then moving up to full-on vat-grown humans. Most of them never made it out of their petri dishes. The ones that did… I don’t understand half this science, except to understand that I don’t like it. It was technically ethical, or would have been, if they hadn’t been growing bodies with functioning brains, but the fact that the CDC can do this at all disturbs me.” Becks shook her head. “I mean, what next? The military starts force-cloning soldiers?”

  “Only if they feel like paying five million dollars for every functional model,” said Alaric. “That’s the cost of the cloning—the starting cost. It doesn’t include the cost of the subliminal conditioning, the synapse programming—”

  “Which is how she can actually remember things, like dying,” chimed in Becks.

  Alaric gave her a look that was half glare, half fond exasperation. “I would have gotten to that,” he said. “But yes. The synapse programming is why she remembers things. And then there was the physical therapy to keep her muscles developing, the immunizations, the process of getting her to maturity… you’re looking at thirty or forty million dollars of medical technology. Easy.”

  There was a pause while we turned to look at George. She shifted in her sleep, one foot kicking out a few inches before it was pulled back to nestle against the opposite ankle. I turned back to the others.

  “Well, I hope they don’t think they’re getting her back,” I said. “What else can you get out of those files?”

  You want to know if I’m going to die again. Georgia-in-my-head was talking less and less the longer there was a living, breathing George for me to hold on to, but that didn’t mean she was gone. It just meant my crazy was biding its time, waiting to strike when I was least prepared. You don’t go that far past the borders of Crazytown and come waltzing out unscathed.

  The worst part of it was that she—the dead girl’s voice in my head—was right, because she was always right. I wanted to know if George was going to die. There was no way I could survive that twice.

  Becks looked at me levelly. “She’s stable, Shaun. Those doctors from the EIS took out the CDC fail-safes, and they couldn’t actually build a human body that would self-destruct without help. The science isn’t that good.”

  “Yet,” said Alaric. He shook his head. “I believe in her now, Shaun. I mean, she’s right when she says she’s an imperfect copy—the Kellis-Amberlee kept turning her brain’s basic functions back on, but there was a little bit more tissue loss every time. That doesn’t mean she’s not who she says she is. She never had the chance to become anybody else.”

  “God.” Becks shuddered. “Headshots just became a hell of a lot more important to me.”

  I frowned, finishing off my lukewarm coffee before I asked, “Why?”

  “Because Miss Atherton has just realized one of the things the CDC would prefer the population not be aware of.” Dr. Shoji took the seat next to Alaric. “I hope you don’t mind my joining you. When I realized you were finally getting around to discussing the science, I thought you might like the opportunity to question someone who used to be involved with it.”

  My eyes narrowed. “You mean—”

  “No, no.” He put his hands up, motioning for me to stay calm. “I left that part of my life behind a long time ago. There were some ethical lines I couldn’t bring myself to cross, and at that point… I was still suited to work in the private sector—hence my work with the Kauai Institute—but I could no longer stomach the CDC.”

  “The cross-infection trials Kelly mentioned,” said Alaric.

  It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. When we first got to Dr. Abbey’s lab—what felt like a million years ago—we’d still been traveling with Kelly Connolly. In an effort to show us that the CDC wasn’t all rainbows and roses, Dr. Abbey asked her about some cross-infection trials using prisoners who “volunteered” to be injected with multiple strains of KA. All of them died.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Shoji. “Those men and women died horribly, and they didn’t have to. That was when I realized it had to end. I stopped working on things that we didn’t need to do—and forgive me, Shaun, but finding a new way of bringing back the dead wasn’t something that needed to be a priority. We’d already done that. It didn’t work out well.”

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  Slowly, Becks said, “Kellis-Amberlee ‘raises the dead’ by turning the body’s electrical impulses back on. It’s like a viral defibrillator that just keeps on working, and working, and working, until there’s nothing left to work with. If they got a clean brain scan off of Georgia after you shot her, that means her brain was turned on at the time. They took their scans off a living brain.”

  Dr. Shoji nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “That’s how the technology works. It was originally intended to be a treatment for Alzheimer’s, a way of calling back memories that were still present, but had become… clouded, let’s say. Misplaced somehow. Once we realized that it could be used on the victims of Kellis-Amberlee, there was hope that we’d be able to bring them back to themselves—that memory recall could be used as a form of treatment, that, combined with antivirals and proper therapy, they could be cured.”

  “So why didn’t it work?” I asked.

  “The virus didn’t give up that easily. Nothing we did resulted in anything but agitation in the subjects. Some researchers, myself included, were concerned that we might actually cause the infected to become self-aware. People with rabies are aware that they’ve done horrible things. They simply can’t prevent themselves from doing them. No one wanted that with Kellis-Amberlee, and so the project was suspended.”

  “Why didn’t you publish?” asked Becks.

  “For the same reason the government is shooting everybody with a reservoir condition,” said Alaric. “If they let it get out that people are still thinking, no one’s going to pull the trigger. And then there won’t be anyone left to do the curing, because we’ll all be zombies.”

  I frowned. “I’m not following.”

  “They’re saying that once someone is infected, the virus takes over, but they’re still in there.” The engines might be soft, but they were loud enough that I hadn’t heard George walking up until she spoke. I turned to see her standing beside me, hair still rumpled from sleep, sunglasses in her hand. She looked at Dr. Shoji and asked, “Do zombies think?”

  “No,” he said. “The virus does their thinking for them, thank God, because Alaric is right. If people stop shooting because they’re afraid of committing murder, we’re all going to die. But there’s a chance—not a huge chance, but a chance—that zombies dream.”

  George nodded, leaning against the seat next to me. “That’s what I thought you were going to say. How long before we land?”

  “We have about an hour before we begin our initial descent into Washington D.C.,” said Dr. Shoji. “How are you feeling?”

  “Exhausted. I need a Coke.”

  I was never going to get tired of hearing those words. “I’ll get you one,” I said, standing. “I needed to get another coffee anyway.”

  She slid into my seat, flashing me a quick, grateful smile. Then she leaned forward, posture making it clear that she was asking Dr. Shoji a question. Probably more things about zombies thinking. Whatever it was, they would fill me in later.

  I walked to the self-serve kitchenette at the back of the plane, pulling a can of Coke from the refrigerator unit before pouring myself a cup of blessedly hot coffee. There were wrapped cheese and turkey sandwiches in one of the cold drawers over the coffee machine. I took down three of those—one for me, one for George, and one for the first person who asked where their sandwich was.
We needed to keep our strength up if we were going to go take on the United States government. Which was, by the way, insane.

  You should know, said George.

  I didn’t reply. It felt weird, trying to reject that little inner voice when it was the only thing that had kept me even halfway functional in the months following the real Georgia’s death, but I couldn’t have them both, and given the choice, I’d take the George I could share with other people. That made her real. I needed real. I needed real to anchor me to the world, because otherwise I was going to slip right over the edge.

  Going all the way crazy seemed a lot less appealing now than it had a few weeks ago. I used to view a total break with reality as a sort of psychological permission to spend the rest of my life—however long or short it happened to be—with George, and maybe even be happy. Having a living, breathing woman with her face made me admit that it wouldn’t make me happy. The George in my head wasn’t the real thing. Neither was the clone, if you wanted to get technical, but I’ve never been a technical guy. I needed Georgia in my life. I chose the one who was sitting in the cabin, waiting for her Coke.

  Alaric had come around surprisingly quickly, after he finished yelling at us for not keeping him updated while we were in Seattle. Typical Newsie; he was less upset about the CDC raising the dead than he was about us not sending him regular reports. He’d spent about half an hour quizzing George on everything he could think of while Becks and I were getting us packed to go. She must have passed, because when he was done, he’d looked at me, said, “It’s her,” and started listening to her like she’d never died in the first place. If only it was going to be that easy for everyone.

  “What did I miss?” I asked, walking back over to the group. George stuck her hand out as soon as I was close enough. I passed her the Coke and a sandwich, and was rewarded with a brief smile. She was wearing her sunglasses again, even though she didn’t technically need them. We were all frankly more comfortable that way.