Deadline

“Ew,” said Alaric. “Okay, accessing coordinates now. Ihere anything else we need to know?”

“You know what I do, and you can pump the Doc for information if you need to.” I swerved to avoid a pothole, feeling Maggie’s arms tighten around my waist. She was staying amazingly calm for a woman who almost never left her house. I was starting to wonder exactly what was in that “herbal tea” she drank right before we left. “We’re heading for an illegal biotech lab to talk to somebody the CDC is too afraid of to fuck with. What could possibly go wrong?”

There was a long silence before Alaric said, “I’m hanging up on you now.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

“You’re fucked in the head.”

“That’s probably true. See you in Forest Grove.” The amber light flicked off. I allowed myself a grim chuckle and hit the gas. Our little road trip of the damned was well under way.

Do you have a plan? asked George.

“You know better,” I replied. I wasn’t worried about Maggie hearing me talk to myself; the roar of the wind would keep my voice from reaching her. Weird as it might seem, George and I actually had a measure of privacy, despite having another human being with her arms wrapped around my waist. If Maggie had been driving, I might have actually been able to fool myself into thinking everything was the way it was supposed to be, even if the illusion would only last until the bike stopped.

George laughed. I smiled, relaxing, and kept on driving. Next stop: Forest Grove.

The Caspell Business Park was located at the edge of town, in what was probably considered an area ripe for expansion before the dead decided to get up and walk around. It was built on a model popular before the Rising, all open spaces and broad pathways between the buildings. I’d be willing to bet that more than half those buildings had automatic doors at one point, totally unsecured against the shambling infected. It was no wonder the local authorities hadn’t bothered trying to reclaim the place; if there was anything remarkable about it, it was that it hadn’t been burned to the ground.

According to the Doc’s instructions, the place we were looking for was in the old IT complex, where the buildings had been constructed according to much more sensible schematics: airtight, watertight, no windows, no real danger of contamination if you remembered to lock the damn doors. Georgia and I went to preschool in a pre- Rising IT complex, and we were just as secure as we could possibly be. Locating the lab in that sort of structure made a lot of sense, especially with the rest of the business park providing excellent, if hazardous, cover. Not even the bravest Irwin was going to stumble on the place by mistake, and the ones who were dumb enough to think it was a good idea would all be eaten before they arrived.

The parking garage had developed a worrying leftward tilt. I eyed it, shook my head, and kept driving. The last thing we needed was to get a parking garage dropped on our heads, or worse, dropped on our vehicles while we were inside the building. On the other hand, we’d be dead if the garage fell on us, and we wouldn’t have to worry about this shit anymore.

You’re in a fabulous state of mind today, said George.

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” I said, and continued to blaze a trail through the deserted business park. Maggie clung a little tighter every time we hit a bump, but she didn’t jerk around enough to make me lose my balance. That was a good thing. The broken pavement was littered with rusted metal, broken glass, and other debris; if we went sprawling, we’d be lucky to get away with just a tetanus shot.

The loading dock behind the IT complex was clear and showed signs of semirecent upkeep. That was promising. I pulled up and killed the engine, waiting for Maggie to dismount before deploying the kickstand and sliding to the relatively unbroken pavement. My thighs ached from too many hours on the road, but my head was clearer than it had been in weeks. Knowing that I’m actually doing something has that effect on me.

The van pulled up a few yards away. The side door was open before the wheels had fully stopped turning, and Alaric jumped down, fumbling his field pack on as he trotted toward us. I pulled off my helmet and smirked at him. “Did you have a nice drive?”

“I hate you,” he said flatly.

“That’s nice,” said Maggie. Alaric shot her a look, and she smiled, removing her helmet. Her pupils were slightly enlarged—not in the exaggerated manner that would indicate a live infection, but in a softer, more relaxed manner that I recognized from dealing with high-strung reporters at press conferences. Her herbal tea definitely contained a few extra ingredients.

I considered pulling her aside for a talk about taking psychoactive substances before going into the field and decided to let it pass. It wasn’t like she was a combatant. She and Kelly were so much dead weight if we got attacked. She might as well be pre-anesthetized dead weight, in case things went poorly. As it was, she was only legal to be with us because the town zoning regulations made this place technically safe. Very technically.

Becks was the next out of the van, her own field pack already in place. Her scowl looked like it had been permanently affixed to her face. “You owe me,” she said, coming to a stop next to Alaric.

“Me or Maggie?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. The only way to keep her quiet was to keep the radio turned to the medical news channel. If I’d been forced to spend another minute listening to the exciting new developments in the world of pharmaceuticals, I would have taken her head and—”

Kelly’s hesitant emergence saved us from the details of what Becks would have done to her. She gave the parking lot a horrified look before hurrying toward us, demanding, “What are we doing here?”

“This is the address your file said we should be at, Doc.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“Nope. Underground lab, underground facilities.” I tucked my helmet under my arm, looking at the low-slung buildings spread out around us. “Can anybody see the numbers on these things? We’re looking for eleven.”

“You can’t mean we’re actually going to go inside,” said Kelly.

“No, Doc, we just drove a couple hundred miles to pose on the sidewalk.” Becks shook her head before turning to stalk off toward the buildings, scanning for more signs of habitation.

Kelly sighed. “This day just gets better and better.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure that soon, we’ll be looking back on this moment as one of the good times.” I followed Maggie, Alaric close behind me. Kelly stayed where she was for a few moments, staring after us. I could see her out of the corner of my eye. It was all I could do to not start laughing—which would have been entirely inappropriate, true, but it would have felt so damn good.

Be careful, George cautioned. Push her too far and she’ll freak out. We need her to stay calm, stay cooperative, and keep talking.

“I thought she’d already told us everything,” I muttered, as Kelly started running to catch up. Alaric cast a glance in my direction, but didn’t say anything.

You’re not that dumb.

There was nothing I could say to that. I kept walking, assessing the buildings surrounding us as I moved. I wasn’t exactly expecting a big sign that said ILLEGAL VIROLOGY LAB HERE, but it would have been nice. The buildings in the IT complex seemed to be essentially identical, all square, boxy, and in reasonably good repair, as long as you weren’t judging by the paint jobs. The building closest to us even had its original set of cell tower repeaters bolted to the roof, their narrow antennae making a familiar lightning-jag outline against the afternoon sky.

I stopped in my tracks. Looking bemused, Alaric did the same. “What year did we go to block-by-block private cell towers? Anybody know?”

“Uh… two thousand twenty,” said Alaric, after a long pause to do the math inside his head. “I remember when they put ours in.”

“Uh-huh. This is a pre-Rising complex. So who installed that?” I jerked a thumb toward the antennae.

Alaric’s eyes went wide. “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Over here, guys.” I waved for the others to join us and started up the cracked pathway leading to the building door. Locked. No real surprise, that; if I were running an illegal biotech lab, I wouldn’t exactly want scavengers or thrill-seekers dropping in on me unannounced. I rapped my knuckles against the metal of the door itself, hearing the echoes they sent ringing dully into the space beyond.