hour” and “late for dinner.”
Lois yowled the whole way, while Shaun made a vague, disinterested show of trying to pick the lock on his side of the car. My brother’s good with locks; the car’s security was better. He’d made no progress by the time we pulled off the freeway and turned toward the hotel, and he put away his lock picks with a silent expression of disgust.
The Downtown Houston Plaza was one of those huge, intentionally imposing buildings built just after the Rising, when they still hadn’t figured out how to walk the fine architectural line between “elegance” and “security.” It looked like a prison coated in pink stucco and gingerbread icing. Palm trees were planted around the exterior, where they utterly failed to blunt the building’s harsh angles. There were no windows at ground level, and the windows higher up the building were the dull matte of steel-reinforced security glass. The infected could batter on them for years without breaking through. Assuming they somehow made the intellectual leap necessary to figure out how to use a ladder.
Shaun eyed the building as we circled. It wasn’t until the car pulled off at the parking garage entrance that he offered his professional opinion: “Death trap.”
“Many of the early ‘zombie-proof’ buildings were.” I adjusted my sunglasses. The garage doors creaked open as Steve waved a white plastic fob in front of the sensors, and we drove on into relative darkness. “What makes this one so deadly?”
“All that froufrou crap on the front of the building—”
“You mean the trim?”
“Right, the trim. It’s supposed to be ornamental, right? Doesn’t matter. I bet it would bear my weight. So if I get infected but I haven’t converted, I can use the trim to climb the building looking for shelter. There are plenty of handholds. So I can get to the roof. And if this place followed the standard floor plan for the time period, there’s a helicopter pad up there, and multiple doors connecting it to the interior, so any survivors could use it to evacuate during an outbreak.” Shaun shook his head. “Run for the roof, it’s covered in the people who ran there before you. And they’re not looking for a rescue. They’re looking for a snack.”
“Charming,” I said. The car pulled into a parking space and the engine cut off. “I guess we’re here.”
The front driver’s-side door opened. Steve emerged, heading across the garage floor to the air lock. I tried my own door, but it was still locked; the safety latches hadn’t disengaged.
“The hell—? Shaun, try your door.”
He did, and scowled. “It’s locked.”
The car intercom clicked on. Andres’s voice, distorted by the speakers, said, “Ms. Mason, Mr. Mason, if you could be patient for a moment. My colleague is going to pass through the air lock and will wait for you on the other side. The lock on the right will be disengaged as soon as he’s tested clean, and Ms. Mason will be permitted to proceed. Once Ms. Mason has passed through the air lock, Mr. Mason will be permitted to go.”
Shaun groaned. “Oh, you have
The intercom clicked again. “Standard safety precautions.”
“You can take those safety precautions and shove ’em sideways up your—” Shaun began, pleasantly. I put a hand on his arm. He stopped.
“Mr. Rodriguez, it looks like Steve’s made it through,” I said, keeping my voice level. “If you’d unlock my door now, please?”
“Very well.” My door unlocked. “Mr. Mason, please remain seated. Ms. Mason, please proceed toward the— hey! What are you doing? You can’t do that!”
Ignoring the shouts from the intercom, Shaun finished sliding out of the car, blowing a kiss back toward the agitated shape of Andres before slamming the door and following me to the air lock. True to expectations, Andres remained seated, mouth moving as he swore at us through the glass.
“Nobody who cares that much about security is going to come out into the open with a possible infection,” I said, taking Shaun’s hand in my left, swinging Lois’s carrier in my right. She yowled, punctuating the statement. “We’re dangerous.”
“Man thought he could make us do this separately,” said Shaun. Taking the still-yowling Lois from me, he slid the carrier into the luggage hatch. The sensors would record the fact that the box contained a living thing, but they would also record its weight. Lois was too small for amplification and would slide straight through. “Man’s an idiot.”
“No, he’s an amateur,” I said, moving into position in front of the blood testing panel. I raised my right hand. Shaun stepped into position next to me and raised his left. “One…”
“Two.”
We pressed our palms flat.
Steve was waiting on the other side of the air lock, shaking his head. “You probably just scared Agent Rodriguez out of a year of his life,” he scolded, without conviction.
“Given that Agent Rodriguez just annoyed me out of a year of
“And our van,” Shaun said. “You promised me our van.”
“Your van is in the parking garage, along with Georgia’s bike,” Steve said. Fishing two small plastic rectangles out of his jacket pocket, he passed them to us. “Shaun, you’re in room two-fourteen. Georgia, you’re in room two-seventeen.”
We exchanged a look. “Those don’t sound adjoining,” I said.
“Originally, you were going to be sharing a room with Ms. Meissonier, Georgia, while Shaun and Mr. Cousins shared a room down the hall,” Steve said. “It seemed best to let you keep your privacy, given recent… events.”
“Right.” Shaun handed his key back to Steve. “I’ll just stalk along with George until you can get me my own key. Rick and Lois can have some valuable alone time to re-bond after their separation.” As if on cue, Lois yowled.
Steve’s eyebrows arched upward. “You two would rather share a room?”
His expression was a familiar one. We’ve been seeing it from teachers, friends, colleagues, and hotel concierges since we hit puberty. It’s the “you’d rather share a room with your opposite-gender sibling than sleep alone?” face, and it never fails to irritate me. Social norms can bite me. If I need to have someone guarding my back when the living dead show up to make my life more interesting than I want it to be, I want that someone to be Shaun. He’s a light sleeper, and I know he can aim.
“Yes,” I said, firmly. “We two would rather share a room.”
For a moment, Steve looked like he might argue. Then he shrugged, dismissing it as none of his business, and said, “I’ll have them send up a second key and get your luggage moved. Georgia, all your things and the equipment that you had marked as vital are already in your room.”
That meant they’d been searched—standard security—but I didn’t particularly care. I make it a rule never to keep sensitive data unencrypted where other people might get at it. If Senator Ryman’s security detail wanted to waste their time looking for answers in my underpants, they could be my guests. “Excellent. We’ll just head for our room, then, if you don’t mind? Assuming you don’t feel the need to accompany us.”
“I’m going to trust the two of you not to get yourselves killed between here and the elevator,” said Steve.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. Shaun snapped a salute and we walked away, Lois still yowling, to follow the wall-mounted signs leading us to the elevators in the lobby.
The hotel was old enough that the elevators still ran up and down in fixed shafts. It would have been an interesting novelty if I hadn’t been so wired and exhausted. As it was, I stared at the mirrors on the walls, trying to ignore my growing headache and the increasingly fevered pitch of Lois’s complaints. She wanted out of the box, and she wanted out
Our hotel room was as old as the elevator, with hideous wallpaper striped in yellow, green, and brown, and a steel-reinforced window looking out over the central courtyard. Sunlight reflecting off the pool three floors down turned the water into a giant flare of light, shining directly through our window. I whimpered involuntarily, whipping my face around and squeezing my eyes shut. Shaun shoved past me to close the blackout curtains, and I stumbled blind into the room, letting the door swing closed.
