Deadline

“I’m clearly out of my mind, and I’m going to regret this for the rest of my life, and my wife is probably going to leave ut yes, I’ll do it. Someone has to. I’m going to have to involve my local beta bloggers. This is a rather large project.”

“Whatever you need, but keep it limited to people you know and can trust, okay? We can’t risk this getting out early.”

“Silence is expensive.”

“That’s not a problem. I’m sure if we shake the merchandising hard enough, the money will fall out.” If nothing else, I had a standing offer to print a book of George’s posts from the campaign trail. I’d been refusing— somehow that felt more like making money off her corpse than continuing to run her blog did—but it would be a good way to make some reasonably quick cash. And then there was Maggie’s trust fund. Normally, I wouldn’t think of going there. These were some pretty special circumstances.

“Oh, believe me, I wasn’t intending to worry about the budget, and if I’m still married when this is over, you’re financing the second honeymoon it’s going to take for me to stay that way.”

“Totally fair. Thank you. Really, thank you. You’re a good guy.”

“Your sister had excellent taste in men. Now update your damn blog, Shaun. Half the readership thinks you’re dead, and I’m entirely out of the passion it takes to refute conspiracy theories.” The sounds of distant traffic cut off as Mahir killed the connection, leaving me listening to nothing but the sound of my own breath. I clicked the phone shut and slid it back into my pocket, staring thoughtfully at the computer screen. Dr. Abbey’s research looked back at me like the world’s deadliest abstract art. The lines of it were strangely soothing when I looked at them long enough. They reminded me of the faint traceries of iris surrounding George’s pupils, little lines of brown that no one got to see unless they got close enough to look past her glasses.

Lifting my hands, I tugged the keyboard toward me and begin to write.

I like to think of myself as a reasonable man. I suppose that’s true of everyone. Even the people we’d paint as the villains of the piece, given leave, doubtless consider themselves reasonable. It’s a part of the human psyche. Still. My needs are simple. I have my flat, which is paid for. I have my work, which I enjoy and do reasonably well. I have a beautiful wife who tolerates the strange hours and stranger company I keep. I love the city I live in, its sights and sounds and brilliant culture, which has managed to not only recover but to thrive under adversity. London is the only place I have ever truly wished to be, and I am privileged beyond all measure to call it home.

I like to think of myself as a reasonable man. But I have buried too many friends in the too-recent past, and I have seen too many lies go unquestioned, and too many questions go unasked. There is a time when even reasonable men must begin to take unreasonable actions. To do anything else is to be less than human. And to those who would choose the safety of inaction over the danger of taking a stand, I have this to say:

You bloody cowards. May you have the world that you deserve.

—From Fish and Clips, the blog of Mahir Gowda, April 20, 2041

Fifteen

Writing up the events of the day was enough to leave me utterly exhausted. I just wanted to go upstairs, shower, go through a proper decontamination cycle, and crash for six to eight hours before something else demanded my attention. If I did that, though, my post would go up in plain text and I’d have eager beta bloggers flooding my in-box with offers to “help.” Their “help” would probably end in tears—theirs, after I dismissed them from the site for pissing me off beyond all hope of recovery. It was easier to force myself to stay where I was and go combing through the footage of the day, looking for suitable clips and screenshots.

There are times when I miss Buffy. I mean, I always miss her—she was one of my best friends, right up until she sold us out—but there are times when I really miss her. I could have handed her my report and told her to make it pretty, and she would have had a multimedia extravaganza ready to go almost before I could finish making the request. She was the best at what she did. Everything she did, which was sort of the problem, since in the end, what she did included betraying us and getting a lot of people killed. She said she was sorry when she came clean. I believed her then, and I believe her now. Sometimes people make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are the sort that don’t allow for second chances.

Doesn’t make her any less dead, or make me miss her any less.

In the end, I chose three short film clips and ten stills and called it a day, slapping them into my article in the places where they’d have the most impact, or at least look like they were there for a reason. I dropped a note in the mod forum to let folks know I’d be going off-line for a few hours and that I was only to be disturbed if the world was ending. Even then, they were supposed to get clearance from Mahir before they called me. That wouldn’t guarantee I’d be left alone, but it would slow people down. Sort of like setting a snooze button on reality.

It wasn’t until I stood that I realized how sore I was. I stretched until something in my shoulders popped. That was the cue for half the muscles in my body to start complaining, while the other half seemed to turn to jelly. “Fuck. I’m not getting any younger,” I said, and walked toward the kitchen.

Alaric was gone, probably off doing his time on the message boards. I’d say better him than me, but I’ve done that gig more times than I can count, and it’s not something I’d wish on anybody. Becks and Maggie were still sitting at the table, watching the uncomfortable-looking Kelly the way cats watch mice. She turned toward me when I entered the kitchen, expression going pathetically relieved. If I was her idea of salvation, things must have been really nasty while I was in the other room.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m going to go upstairs and get a shower.”

Kelly’s look of relief died. “Don’t you want to finish your potpie?”

“No, I’m good. Maggie, can you take care of any comments I get for the nex few hours? I need to catch some sleep or I’m going to be useless tomorrow.”

“Absolutely.” Maggie smiled. “Now go. You’re running yourself too hard.”

“You’re probably right.” I paused, a thought hitting me. “Maggie, tell Alaric to check on the bug we planted in the conference room. It should be showing up on the live index now, and I want to know the second it picks anything up.”

“Decontamination will take a few days,” said Kelly. If she had opinions about the legality of bugging CDC installations, she was keeping them to herself. “You won’t be getting anything until that’s done.”

“Well, then, I guess I’ll have plenty of time to catch up on my beauty sleep. All of you, good night, and try to get some rest.”

“I will,” said Becks, giving me a thoughtful look as I turned to go.

Making it up the stairs took more effort than it should have. I was so damn tired. It seemed like too much trouble when I could sit down and sleep perfectly well on the steps. I knew I needed to shower. Strict field protocols said I should have showered the second I got to the house, like Becks did. It can really screw up your insurance if you don’t go through proper decontamination after every logged trip into the field, but there are loopholes to the law, if you know how to use them. We didn’t log the trip to Dr. Abbey’s lab, and CDC offices are counted as some of the few public places not considered hazard zones. My failure to scrub up like a good little boy was strictly legal, and I was aware enough of my exposure risks to know that I hadn’t been dangerously close to anything infectious. I just didn’t want to go to bed feeling like I’d never be clean again.

The showers in Maggie’s house are another amazing example of what you can achieve if you have enough money and don’t care how much of it you spend. The showers in the Oakland apartments were bare-bones, consisting of air locks, computer-controlled water sprays, and simple blood test panels. Using them was like getting scrubbed down by industrial robots that didn’t give a damn whether you were comfortable with the process. They didn’t quite perform involuntary enemas, but God, they came close. Maggie’s place, on the other hand… When her parents set her up with a place of her own, they took “spare no expense” seriously. Some of the bells and whistles she had were things I’d seen only in magazines and in articles about people with more money than sense.

The entire bathroom was decorated in pre-Rising tile, with genuine porcelain fixtures, the kind that can get broken or splinter, thus becoming infection risks and requiring full replacement. It was easy to miss at first glance