Deadline Read online

  Michelle Dockrey is a longtime editor of mine who chose to sit out Feed because it included zombies. Upon reading it, she promptly demanded the manuscript for Deadline, and just as quickly used her red pen and insightful eye for blocking to improve the book beyond all measure. (Also, I no longer need to worry about her trying to “sit this one out.” I win at proofreader.) Brooke Lunderville stepped up to become primary medical consultant on this volume, and her keen sense of what you should and shouldn’t do with a syringe can be seen on every page.

  Alan Beatts joined the proofing pool as my new weapons expert, and his patient efforts to make me understand why a shotgun isn’t the ideal zombie-fighting weapon did a lot to improve my combat scenes. I am incredibly grateful, especially given that it was really, really late in the process when I decided to say, “Hey, do you think you could…” Thanks also to Torrey Stenmark, Dave Tinney, and Debbie J. Gates for their well-timed, well-considered technical suggestions.

  The Machete Squad must also, and always, be thanked. Amanda Perry, Rae Hanson, Sunil Patel, Alison Riley-Duncan, Rebecca Newman, Allison Hewett, Janet Maughan, Penelope Skrzynski, Phil Ames, and Amanda Sanders were all on tap for general proofreading and plot consultation. Through their efforts is this book made incalculably better. Meanwhile, at Orbit, DongWon Song was applying a keen editorial eye to the text, Lauren Panepinto was rocking the cover design, and Alex Lencicki was just plain rocking. Thanks so much, guys. I couldn’t have done this without you.

  Finally, acknowledgment for forbearance must go to Kate Secor, Shaun Connolly, and Cat Valente, who put up with an amazing amount of “talking it out” as I tried to make the book make sense; to my agent, Diana Fox, who remains my favorite superhero; to Betsy Tinney, for everything; and to Tara O’Shea and Chris Mangum, the incredible technical team behind www.MiraGrant.com. This book might have been written without them. It would not have been the same.

  If you’re curious about the American yellow fever epidemic and mosquito-based vectors, check out The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, by Molly Crosby.

  Rise up while you can.

  extras

  meet the author

  Born and raised in California, Mira Grant has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. In college, she was voted Most Likely to Summon Something Horrible in the Cornfield, and was a founding member of the Horror Movie Sleep-Away Survival Camp, where her record for time survived in the Swamp Cannibals scenario remains unchallenged.

  Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

  Mira sleeps with a machete under her bed, and strongly suggests you do the same. Find out more about the author at www.miragrant.com.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed DEADLINE, look out for

  BLACKOUT

  BOOK 3 OF THE NEWSFLESH TRILOGY

  by Mira Grant

  BOOK I

  From the Dead

  People like to say things like “It wasn’t supposed to go this way” and “This isn’t what I wanted.” They’re just making noise. In the end, there’s no such thing as “supposed to,” and what you want doesn’t matter. All that matters is what really happened.

  —GEORGIA MASON

  I honestly have no idea what’s going on anymore. I just need to find something that I can hit.

  —SHAUN MASON

  My name is Georgia Carolyn Mason. I belong to the vast, unspoken class of people known as the Orphans of the Rising, individuals who were under two years of age when their parents were killed. Individuals who were too young to remember anything about where they came from. My biological family is presumably listed somewhere on the Wall, living eople transformed into one more simple footnote of a dead world. Their world died in the Rising, just like they did. They didn’t live to see the new one.

  My adoptive parents have raised me to question the world around me, understand the realities of my situation, and, in times of necessity, shoot first. They have equipped me with the tools I need to survive, and for that I am grateful. Through this blog, I will do my best to share my experiences and, yes, my opinions in as open and honest a way as I can. It is the best way to honor the family that raised me; it is the only way I have to honor the family that lost me.

  I’m going to tell you the truth as I understand it. You can take it from there.

  —From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, June 20, 2035

  So George says I have to write a “mission statement” for this blog, because apparently, our contract with Bridge Supporters says that I will. I am personally opposed to mission statements, since they’re basically one more way of sucking the fun out of everything. I tried telling George this, but all she said was that it’s her job to suck the fun out of everything. She then threatened physical violence of a type that I will not describe in detail, as it might unsettle and upset my theoretical readership. Suffice to say that here I am, writing a mission statement. So here it is:

  I, Shaun Phillip Mason, being of sound mind and body, do hereby swear to poke dead shit with sticks, do stupid things for your amusement, and put it all on the Internet where you can watch it over and over again. Because that’s what you want, right?

  Glad to oblige.

  —From Hail to the King, the blog of Shaun Mason, June 20, 2035

  One

  My story ended where so many stories have ended over the course of the last two decades: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood caused my body to betray me, transforming me from a living, thinking human being into something better suited for a horror movie. I remember the feeling of the hypodermic needle biting into my arm, and the cold, absolute dread as I watched the lights on the blood test unit as they went red, one after the other. I remember the look on Shaun’s face when he realized that this was it, this was really happening, and there wasn’t going to be any clever third-act solution that got me out of the van alive.

  I remember the gun pressing against my skin. It was cool, and it was soothing, because it meant that Shaun was going to do his duty. No one was going to get hurt—no one who hadn’t been hurt already. This was something we’d never planned for. I always knew that one day he’d push his luck too far, and I’d lose him. Neither of us ever dreamed that he’d be the one losing I wanted to tell him it would be okay. I wanted to lie to him. I couldn’t. There wasn’t time.

  I remember starting to write. I remember thinking that this was it; this was my last chance to say anything I wanted to say to the world. This was the thing I was going to be judged on, now and forever.

  I remember feeling my mind start to go. I remember the fear.

  I remember the sound of Shaun pulling the trigger.

  By all rights, I shouldn’t remember anything after that because that’s where my story ended. Curtain down, save file, that’s a wrap. Once the bullet hits the spinal cord, you’re out, you’re done, you don’t have to worry about this shit anymore. You definitely shouldn’t find yourself waking up in a room that looks suspiciously like a CDC holding facility, with no one to talk to but some unidentified voice on the other side of a one-way mirror. So what the hell did I do to get so lucky?

  The room was practically barren, containing nothing but a bed with white blankets and a rounded white bedside table—bolted to the floor, of course. Wouldn’t do to have the mysteriously resurrected dead journalist throwing things at the mirror that took up most of one wall. The only wall with a door, naturally. It was locked. I’d tried the knob, and then I’d searched the walls around it for a blood test unit, in the vain hope that checking ou
t clean would make the locks let go and release me. There weren’t any. That was chilling all by itself. I grew up in a post-Rising world, one where blood tests and the threat of infection are a part of daily life. I’m sure I’d been in sealed rooms without testing units before. I had to have been. I just couldn’t remember any.

  There was something else the room was lacking: clocks, or windows, or anything else that might let me know how much time had passed since I woke up, much less how much time had passed before I woke up. There was a voice from the speaker above the mirror when I first woke up, an unfamiliar voice that asked my name and what the last thing I remembered was. I’d answered him—“My name is Georgia Mason. What the fuck is going on here?”—and then he went away, cutting off communication without answering my question. That might have been ten minutes ago. It might have been ten hours ago. The lights overhead glared steady and white, not so much as flickering as the seconds went slipping past.

  That was another thing. The light was hard and white, the sort of industrial fluorescent lighting that’s been popular in medical facilities since long before the Rising. It should have been burning my eyes like acid by now. I was diagnosed with retinal Kellis-Amberlee when I was a kid, meaning that the same disease that causes the dead to rise had taken up permanent residence in my eyeballs. It gave me excellent low-light vision, and a tendency to get migraines if I so much as tried to watch normal television without my sunglasses on.

  Well, I wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and it wasn’t like I could dim the lights in a room with no light switches or computer controls. Even if it had been only ten minutes since I woke, that was long enough for me to risk permanently damaging my eyesight, if not destroying it entirely. But my eyes didn’t even itch. All I felt was thirsty, and a vague, gnawing hunger in the pit of my stomach, like lunch might be a good idea sometime soon. There was no headache. I honestly couldn’t decide wheter or not that was a good sign.

  My palms were starting to sweat as the anxiety really set in. I scrubbed them hard against the legs of the unfamiliar white cotton pajamas. Everything in this room was unfamiliar—even me. I’ve never been heavy—a life spent running after stories and running for your life doesn’t allow for carrying excess weight—but the girl I saw reflected in the one-way mirror was thin to the point of being wrung-out and scrawny. She looked like she’d be easy to break. Her hair was dark enough to be mine, but it was also too long, falling in thick curls to her shoulders. I’ve never in my life allowed my hair to get that long. Hair like that is a passive form of suicide when you do what I do for a living. And her eyes…

  When I looked at the face reflected in the mirror, I could see a ring of copper-brown all around her pupils. That, more than anything else, was making it all but impossible to think of the face as my own. Because I don’t have visible irises. I have pupils that fill all the space not occupied by sclera, giving me a black, almost emotionless stare. Those weren’t my eyes. But my eyes didn’t hurt. Which meant that either those were my eyes, and my retinal KA had somehow been cured, or Buffy was right when she said the afterlife existed, and this was hell.

  I stared at the unfamiliar eyes in my reflection for a moment more before I went back to what seemed to have become my primary activity: pacing back and forth and trying to think. The fact that I had to do it quietly, with no one to talk to or bounce things off, made it a hell of a lot harder. I’ve always thought better when I do it out loud, and this was the first time in my adult life that I’d been anywhere without at least one personal recorder running. I’m an accredited journalist. When I talk to myself, it’s not a sign of insanity; it’s just me making sure I don’t lose important material before I have the chance to get to a keyboard and write it all down.

  None of this was right. Even if they had some sort of experimental treatment that could reverse the effects of amplification, there would have been somebody there to explain things to me. Shaun would have been there. There it was: the reason I knew that this, whatever it was, was a long way from being right. I remembered him pulling the trigger. Even assuming it was a false memory, even assuming that never happened, why wasn’t he here? Shaun would move Heaven and Earth to be with me. I briefly entertained the notion that he might be off forcing the voices from the intercom to tell him where I was, and then regretfully dismissed it.

  Something would have exploded by now, if that was the situation.

  “Goddammit.” I scowled at the white wall in front of me, turned, and started walking in the other direction. The vague hunger was getting worse, and was accompanied by a new, more frustrating sensation: the need to pee. If someone didn’t let me out soon, I was going to have a whole new set of problems to contend with.

  “Run the timeline, George,” I said, trying to take some comfort in the still-familiar sound of my own voice. Everything else may have changed, but not that. “You were in Sacramento with Rick and Shaun, running for the van. Something hit you in the arm. One of those syringes like they used at the Ryman farm. The test came back positive. Rick left. And then… then…” I faltered, having trouble finding the words, even if there was no one else to hear them.

  Everyone who grew up after the Rising knows what happens when you come into contact with the live form of Kellis-Amberlee. You essentially go rabid, becoming a mindless slave to the virus and its needs. You become a zombie, and you do what every zombie exists to do. You bite. You infect. You kill. You feed. You don’t wake up in a white room, wearing white pajamas, and wondering how your brother was able to shoot you in the neck without even leaving a scar.

  Scars. I stopped in my tracks before wheeling and stalking back to the mirror, pulling the lids on my right eye apart while I studied its reflection. I learned how to look at my own eyes when I was eleven. That’s when I got my first pair of protective contacts. That’s also when I got my first visible retinal scarring, little patches of tissue that had been so scorched by the sun that they would never recover. We caught it in time to prevent there being any major vision loss, and I got a lot more careful after that. The scarring was there to remind me every day, creating small blind spots at the center of my vision. Nothing major. Nothing that prevented my working in the field. Just… little spots.

  My pupil contracted to almost nothing as the light hit it. The spots weren’t there. I could see clearly, without any gaps.

  “Oh,” I said, lowering my hand. “I guess that makes sense.”

  When I first woke up, the voice from the intercom told me that all I had to do was speak and someone would hear me. I looked up toward the speaker. “A little help here?” I said. “I need to pee really bad.”

  There was no response. I hadn’t honestly been expecting one. Turning my back on the mirror, I walked to the bed and settled into a cross-legged position atop the mattress, closing my eyes. And then I started waiting. There was still no mechanism in the room for marking time, but if anyone was watching me—and someone had to be watching me—this might be a big enough change in my behavior to get their attention. I wanted their attention. I wanted their attention really, really badly. Almost as badly as I wanted an MP3 recorder, an Internet connection, and a bathroom.

  After I’d been waiting for what felt like hours but, again, might have just been minutes, the need for a bathroom had crept substantially higher on that list, as had the need for a drink of water. The fact that the human body can demand both of these things at the same time is proof that evolution has no erase button.

  I was beginning to consider the possibility that I might need to somehow cover the mirror with one of the blankets while I used a corner of the room as a lavatory when the intercom clicked on again. “Miss Mason? Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” I said, without opening my eyes. “Do I get a name to call you by?”

  He ignored my question like it didn’t matter. Maybe it didn’t, to him. “I apologize for going silent before. We were a little surprised by your vehemence. We’d expected a slightly longer period of disorientation.”

&n
bsp; “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Oh, we weren’t disappointed,” the voice said, hurriedly. It was a male voice, with the faintest traces of a Midwestern accent. I couldn’t place the state, but I knew I’d never heard it before. “I promise you, we’re thrilled to see you up and coherent so quickly. It’s a wonderful indicator for your recovery.”

  “A glass of water and a trip to the ladies’ room would do a lot more to help my recovery than a bunch of apologies and evasions.”

  Now the voice sounded faintly abashed. “I’m so sorry, Miss Mason. We didn’t think… Just a moment.” The intercom clicked off again, leaving me in silence once again. I stayed where I was, and kept on waiting.

  A new sound intruded on my silence: the hiss of a hydraulic lock unsealing itself. I opened my eyes, turning my head to see a small panel slide open above the door, revealing a single red light. The hissing continued, and the door, at long last, swung inward, revealing a skinny, nervous-looking man in a long white lab coat. He was holding his clipboard against his chest like he thought it afforded him some sort of protection, and his eyes were wide behind the lenses of his glasses.