Blackout: Book 3 of The Newsflesh Trilogy Read online

  “There’s only one person left,” I said, feeling suddenly numb. A zombie lurched forward. I put a bullet through its skull. It fell. “Fuck.”

  “It always comes down to the cold equations,” said George.

  “Fuck!” I fired again. This time, I missed.

  “Next!” shouted Steve.

  “Go,” said Becks, nodding to George. “Both of you, go. You need to get out of here.”

  “We’re not leaving you.”

  “You’re not leaving him, either.” The last of the Secret Service agents was running for the airlock. “You’re not going to leave her, and she’s not going to leave you. We can’t ask your big friend to stay behind, not when he may be the most muscle we have left. That leaves me. Now get out of here.” Becks held up Alaric’s PDA with the hand that wasn’t holding her gun. “We’re at ninety percent. I’ll make sure the news is waiting for you when you hit the surface.”

  “Rebecca—”

  Becks shot me a venomous glance. “I don’t have her nose for news. I don’t have your total lack of regard for my own safety. What I have is a family that doesn’t want me, and a job that I know how to do. And that job says I stand here and let you get out, because you’re the ones who can do the best job telling this story. Now go!”

  “Shaun, come on.” George took a step backward, still firing.

  “I don’t want to do this,” I said quietly.

  So don’t, said George, in the space behind my eyes. Her voice was soft, cajoling. She would never ask me to do something I didn’t want to do. She would never try to convince me to leave a teammate behind.

  She would let me die here, and take everything we’d fought and bled for with me.

  “Shaun! Go!” shouted Becks. She shoved the PDA into her pocket, and called, “Hey, big guy! How sturdy are those doors?”

  “Sturdy enough,” rumbled Steve. “Georgia, come on.”

  “Coming.” She kept shooting as she backed away, until she had to turn and press her hand against the test unit, and shooting ceased to be an option.

  “Good.” Becks dug her hand into a different pocket, producing a small round object that I recognized, after a few seconds, as a concussion grenade. “Then I’m taking no prisoners.”

  “You had a grenade in your pocket?” I asked, unsure whether to be impressed or horrified.

  “Dr. Abbey gave it to me. She swore it was stable.”

  “Dr. Abbey isn’t stable!”

  “Doesn’t matter now.” Becks grinned, still firing. Gunpowder streaked her cheeks and forehead, mixed with sweat and cleaned in narrow tracks by the tears I wasn’t sure she was aware of shedding. “Get out of here, Mason. We had a good time, didn’t we? It wasn’t all bad.”

  The zombies were getting closer all the time. I kept firing. “We had a great time. You were amazing. You are amazing.”

  “Same to you, Mason. Now go.”

  “Shaun!” shouted Steve.

  I took a deep breath, fired twice more into the throng, and ran.

  Steve and Becks covered me while the airlock cycled. By the time I was through, there was a distance of barely ten feet between the leading wave of zombies—slowed by bullets, sickness, and the bodies of their own fallen—and the airlock door. Steve was the next one through, Becks covering him by herself. She fired faster than I would have thought possible, and almost every shot was a good one. Still, she was outnumbered, and the zombies were nearly on top of her when Steve stepped out into the parking garage with the rest of us.

  Becks stopped firing. She turned to face the glass, a smile on her face, zombies looming up hard and fast behind her. We couldn’t hear them moaning anymore, or the sound her gun made when it hit the ground. She raised her free hand in a perfect pageant wave, seemingly oblivious to the hands reaching out to grab her hair. Then she went over backward, vanishing into the teeming river of infected flesh.

  The blast came a few seconds later. There was no sound, only a sudden red rain as the detonation destroyed everything it came in contact with. There was nothing of Becks in that redness—there was everything of Becks in that redness—and so I let George pull me away from the flames that were beginning to consume the hall, leading me toward the motorcade idling in the middle of the parking garage. Alaric was standing next to the lead car. He was crying, silently but steadily, his eyes fixed on the flames now starting to show through the streaks of blood on the glass. The hall was burning. Depending on how many alarms had been disabled before the zombies were released, the whole building might go with it.

  I put a hand on Alaric’s shoulder. “She got the news out,” I said.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “Good.”

  There was nothing else that anyone could say. We climbed into the waiting cars, pulled the doors shut, and drove away into the darkness.

  This is where I’m supposed to say something mealymouthed and meaningless, like “we regret” or “we are sorry to say.” That’s what you do at a time like this. But the thing is, there was never anything meaningless about Becks. She was one of the most calculated people I ever knew—and I don’t mean that in a bad way. She always knew her angles; she always knew where the light was. I guess in another world, she was probably Miss America or something, one of those women who lived and died by the light. But we didn’t live in that world, and so she grew up to be something else.

  Something better.

  Rebecca Atherton was a reporter before she was anything else. She was a crack shot with any ranged weapon you’ve ever heard of, and a few you probably haven’t. She was honest and she was faithful and she was strong and she helped me kill a zombie bear.

  She’s also dead. So this is where I say we’d better live up to her sacrifice, because there’s nothing in the world that can ever replace her. Good night, Becks.

  You told the truth.

  —From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, August 8, 2041.

  GEORGIA: Forty-one

  True to Steve’s word, the zombies came surging in as soon as the parking garage doors were open. Their grasping hands and gaping jaws were no match for an armored presidential motorcade. We mowed them down in droves, their viscera splattering the windshield until Steve activated the wipers and cleaned the gore away. It was surreal, like driving into a bloody red rain. The barrier between the front and back of the car remained down the whole time, which was a mixed blessing. We could see what was going on… but being able to see meant, in some way, that we couldn’t look away.

  Alaric, Shaun, and I had been hustled into the same car, along with Steve and Rick. President Ryman, the rest of the Secret Service agents, and Gregory were in the other car. Presumably, Gregory was giving directions to the nearest EIS safehouse. Maybe, if we were lucky, we’d even make it there in one piece.

  I wasn’t feeling lucky.

  My phone rang shortly after we were clear of the parking garage and its signal-suppressing architecture. I clipped my ear cuff on and tapped it, saying tightly, “Georgia. Go.”

  “Did you just blow up the bloody White House?” demanded Mahir, loudly enough that everyone in the back of the car turned and looked at me.

  “Yeah, Mahir. We kind of did. Although technically, that’s not entirely true. Becks kind of did.”

  There was a pause as he thought through that statement. Then, slowly, he asked, “Georgia, did Becks…?”

  “Shaun was her immediate superior, so I believe he’ll be making the official announcement, but I am sorry to say that, as of August 7, 2041, Rebecca Atherton’s name has been added to The Wall.”

  Mahir breathed out slowly. Several seconds passed in silence before he said, “Maggie is doing better. She’s taken to swearing at the nurses.”

  “I’m sure everyone will be glad to hear that.”

  “Georgia…?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you kill the president?”

  I glanced toward the red-streaked windshield. We were through the last line of zombies, and
I could see President Ryman’s car ahead of ours. The whole back window was blocked out by blood and chunks of flesh. Decontamination of our vehicles was going to be a massive undertaking.

  “No,” I said. “We just kidnapped him a little. Technically, I suppose he kidnapped himself. I guess that’s one for the courts.”

  There was a long pause before Mahir said, “I’m suddenly glad to have remained in Seattle.”

  “It’s conveniently close to the Canadian border, in case you need to make a run for it. Mahir, I need you to gather all the betas and moderators we have—wake people up if you need to—and get them online. We’re about to have a massive fire drill.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hang on.” I turned to Alaric. “Where did you upload those files?”

  “They were set to upload to my private folder. Mahir has the administrative password.” Alaric’s voice was dull, like all the life had been leeched out of it. He didn’t lift his head.

  I relayed this to Mahir, adding, “I need you to download, listen, and sort through the data. Get as many of the Newsies on it as you can; start cutting the data into coherent chunks, minimal editing, no two files the same size or length. We’re going to need to get them out without making them easy to suppress. Do not post anything until you receive my next transmission. I need you to match my information.”

  Shaun shook his head. “Times like this, I wish Buffy were here.”

  I put a hand over his, waiting for Mahir’s response. It came quickly: “Georgia… what is this?”

  “This is the end. This is the last story.” I sighed and closed my eyes, leaning until my head hit Shaun’s shoulder. I was suddenly tired. So tired. “This is where we tell the truth and get the fuck out of the way while the experts figure out what they’re supposed to do with it.”

  “I’ll download the files,” said Mahir. He took a breath. “After I tell Maggie about Becks, that is. I have to tell her.”

  “I know.”

  “Godspeed, Georgia Mason.”

  “Same to you, Mahir. Same to you.” I tapped my ear cuff without opening my eyes, cutting off the connection. “When this is over, I want to find a new profession. Something with fewer zombies.”

  “I could get behind that,” said Shaun, pushing me gently away. I opened my eyes, giving him a startled look. He indicated his shirt, where a spot of blood marked the needle’s entry point. “Still potentially hot. Sorry, but I’m not losing you again. Not over laundry.”

  The statement was so ridiculous that I actually smiled before sobering again. “We all checked out clean when we went through the airlock.”

  “Yup. I remain immune. Thanks for that. I mean, really. It sort of explains how I got out of so many close calls—and here I’d been attributing my survival to sheer awesomeness on my part—but I’m okay with that if it means I’m going to survive.” Shaun looked toward Alaric. “You okay? Not hurt?”

  “She’s gone,” Alaric whispered, voice barely audible above the sound of the engine. “Becks is gone. She was there, and now she’s just gone.”

  I exchanged a look with Shaun before saying, carefully, “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Will she come back? You came back. Will she?”

  We exchanged another look. This time, it was Rick who spoke, before Shaun or I could say anything. “I’m sorry, Alaric. What we did with Georgia was unethical, and it would have been impossible if Shaun’s shot hadn’t left her brain essentially intact. We might have been able to replicate her body, but we would never have been able to re-create her mind.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  Alaric sighed—a shaky, shuddering sound—and said, “I knew you were going to say that. I just needed to hear it.” He lifted his head, regarding us with tear-filled eyes. “This wasn’t worth it.”

  “It never is,” said Shaun.

  We rode in silence after that, blindly following the lead car down twisting back roads and half-hidden residential streets. The motorcade wasn’t running its lights, but it was still equipped with the transmitters that changed the lights in our favor and allowed us to dodge the random blood tests on certain streets. It was possible the CDC could also use those transmitters to track us. I put the thought out of my mind as firmly as I could. If we were being followed, there was nothing we could do about it. We were out of places to go.

  It felt like we’d been driving for an hour or more when we made a sharp left onto a private driveway. We had gone barely ten yards when a steel gate slid shut behind us, and blue guiding lights clicked on along the sides of the road.

  “Wherever it is we’re going, I think we’re just about there,” I said.

  “Think they’ll have cookies?” asked Shaun.

  “I think they’re more likely to have full-immersion bleach tanks,” said Alaric darkly.

  “Your optimism is duly noted,” said Steve. He cocked his head, apparently listening to something on his own earpiece, before adding, “Welcome to the EIS.”

  “So that’s a ‘yes’ on both the cookies and the bleach,” I said.

  We followed President Ryman’s car into a low parking garage that was better lit than the one we’d left. It was also substantially fuller. Dr. Shoji and Dr. Kimberley were standing in front of the doors to the main building, flanked on either side by orderlies with tranquilizer rifles. It said something about the past week that I found the sight extremely reassuring.

  The car stopped, and one by one, we climbed out, squinting under the bright fluorescent lights. Shaun stood just out of reach, both of us turning to look toward our welcoming committee. Once everyone was out of both cars, Dr. Shoji stepped forward and said, “According to the news, there has been a terrorist attack on the White House, and both President Ryman and Vice President Cousins are missing, feared dead.”

  “Where is my wife?” asked President Ryman.

  “The clone died in the attack. The original is inside,” said Dr. Shoji. “She and the children are safe, and have been waiting for you. What do you intend to do?”

  President Ryman paused before turning to me and smiling that faintly off-kilter smile I’d seen so many times on the campaign trail—the one that promised he’d do his best to change the world, if only we’d be patient with him while he figured out exactly how to do it. “I think it’s time I gave a little State of the Union interview. If Miss Mason would be so kind?”

  I nodded. “It would be my honor, sir.”

  “Great,” said Shaun, clapping his hands together. “Let’s go through decon, get in there, and change the world. And then? Cookies.”

  “Cookies,” agreed Rick.

  I started toward the door. Alaric grabbed my arm before I took my second step, stopping me. I turned, blinking at him.

  “Was it worth it?” he asked.

  “God, I hope so,” I said.

  He let me go, and as a group—reunited at last, for whatever good it was going to do us—we walked into the building.

  RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION

  CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE ALERT LEVEL ALPHA SPREAD TO ALL NEWS SITES IMMEDIATELY

  REPOST FREELY REPOST FREELY REPOST FREELY

  FEED IS LIVE

  TRANSCRIPTION FOLLOWS

  [IMAGE: A woman who appears to be Georgia Mason (ref. The Wall, 6/20/40) stands in front of a podium bearing the logo of the Epidemic Intelligence Service.]

  WOMAN: My name is Georgia Mason. My name is Subject 7c. I died on June twentieth, 2040, during the Ryman for President campaign. I was resurrected earlier this year by the CDC, using illegal and unethical human cloning technology. If you are viewing this video or reading a transcription on a download-enabled site, you can verify my DNA structure by downloading the file labeled “G. Mason genetic profile.”

  [DOWNLOAD FILE HERE.]

  GEORGIA: I am here because the CDC wanted a more effective mechanism for lying to you, and believed I would provide a viable control for my brother, Shaun Mason, as well as
serving a potential role as a mouthpiece for their version of the truth. I am here because I was not allowed to rest.

  [IMAGE: The camera swings around to show Shaun Mason (ref. “After the End Times”) holding a whiteboard on which the date 8/7/41 has been written.]

  SHAUN: Listen to the dead girl. She’s telling you what you need to hear.

  [IMAGE: The camera returns to Georgia.]

  GEORGIA: Before I died, I told you all that someone was trying to keep you afraid. Someone was trying to keep you from realizing that you were being controlled through unnecessary security and exaggerated fear. I begged you to rise. I begged you to stop them. Unfortunately, words are cheap, even today, and actions are expensive. I did not change the world by dying. All I did was die.

  But you still have the opportunity to change things—and that opportunity is greater and more immediate than any of us could have known. Kellis-Amberlee is not the scourge we have been led to treat it as. It is a living thing, and like any living thing, it seeks to evolve, to find a balance with its hosts. Kellis-Amberlee has been trying to adapt to us, and we have been trying to adapt to it. But our government, believing that it has the right to decide for everyone, has not allowed that adaptation. They have been killing those individuals who represented our best chance of finding peace with this disease. For more information, download the file labeled “reservoir condition fatality rates.”

  [DOWNLOAD FILE HERE.]

  GEORGIA: You may already be hearing reports that we are terrorists. That we have destroyed a part of the nation’s capital, and either killed or kidnapped the president. These reports are untrue. One of our reporters, Rebecca Atherton, was killed in the process of rescuing the president from those same individuals who had me brought back from the grave—those same individuals who had me killed in the first place.