Deadline

truly spicy young Bruce Campbell—yum—is menaced by demons, evil trees, and his own hand. I’ll be opening the chat room at eight Pacific, and live blogging the whole movie for those of you whose attention spans won’t tolerate anything longer than a few hundred characters.

I hope to see you all online, and remember, last person to log on owes me a drink.

—From Dandelion Mine, the blog of Magdalene Grace Garcia, April 20, 2041

Sixteen

I woke sprawled buck-ass naked on the guest room bed, surrounded by the furry mounds of sleeping bulldogs. Groaning, I pushed myself up onto my elbows. The door was open about a foot—just enough to explain my unwanted guests. I scrubbed at my face with one hand, trying to wake up enough to start worrying about my clothes. “Guess it’s time to deal with another fucking morning, huh, George?”

Ringing silence answered me. I pulled my hand away from my face and sat all the way up. “George?” Still no answer. “You’re starting to freak me out here, George. What did I do to earn the silent treatment? I’m doing what you asked me to do. I’m actually stepping up to the plate. So could you stop fucking around?”

She didn’t stop fucking around. She was still there—I remember what sane felt like, and this wasn’t it; sane didn’t come with the constant low-grade awareness of George sitting at the back of my head—she just wasn’t talking. I scowled.

“Fine. If you want to play silent treatment, we’ll play silent treatment. See how you like it.” I scooched my butt along the mattress, eventually gettin to the point where my feet hit the floor. Every muscle in my legs ached. I could already tell I was going to be applying Icy-Hot and gulping aspirin like M&Ms all day. I guess that’s what you get when you go and outrun an outbreak.

“And yet somehow better than the alternative,” I muttered.

The mystery of how the door got open was answered by the stack of clothing and crap on the bookshelf just inside. I sent a silent thanks to Maggie’s in-house laundry service—silent because with her computer systems, I was vaguely afraid the program in charge of the laundry service might respond if I thanked it out loud—and began getting dressed. Even the things I’d left in the bathroom were clean, down to the rust on my ancient Swiss army knife. I shook my head. Sometimes it’s possible to be a little too efficient. It was unnerving to think of the house sending out tiny cleaning devices and using them to polish my thumb drive and pocket change to a mirror sheen.

At least nothing was missing. I shoved things into their respective pockets, fastened my belt, and sat down on the bed to put my boots on. That’s when the reality of my position finally filtered through my sleep-addled, George-less brain:

I was the only person in the room. Where the hell was Becks? I looked back at the bed, which didn’t offer any answers. From the way I’d been sprawled when I woke up, there was nothing to prove that anyone else had been in the bed to begin with. That was a little worrisome. If I’d gone even further over the edge and started hallucinating being seduced by random members of staff, the time remaining before I went totally insane was probably pretty low.

With that cheerful thought at the front of my mind, I started trying to get my boots on. The process was complicated by the dogs, who thought attacking the laces was a fantastic game. The main difference between dogs that size and cats seems to be that cats, while crazy, are at least meant to be little, whereas the process of shrinking dogs seems to drive them insane. “At least we have that much in common,” I muttered, and stood, stretching for a final time before walking out of the room. I left the guest room door open. No point in depriving the bulldogs of a nice warm bed.

Alaric was sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop, tapping industriously away. A half a pot of coffee sat in front of him, wafting the delicious smell of hot caffeine toward me as I entered. I stopped to sniff appreciatively. The sound got his attention; he looked up, nodded briefly, and looked back down again. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said. I grabbed a mug from the counter and poured myself a cup of hot black coffee. Morning is the only time I normally get coffee without complaining from my inner peanut gallery. If George wanted to sulk, maybe I could get a second cup in before going back to Coke.

A pang of guilt followed on the heels of the thought, although it wasn’t enough to stop me from taking a mouthful of throat-searing liquid. I’d rather have George than all the coffee in the world. Still, if focusing on self- caffeination distracted me from the question of her silence, it was worthwhile. Alaric kept typing as I sat down across from him, seeming to ignore me completely. I sipped my coffee. He typed. George didn’t say anything.

This went on for a few minutes before I ct blaed my throat and asked, “So what have I missed? Other than the sunrise and, apparently, breakfast?”

Alaric raised his head. “Maggie took Becks and the Doc into town to go grocery shopping. Something about us eating her out of house and home.”

The image of that particular trio tackling the Weed supermarket was fascinating. I paused for a moment to ponder it. I’ve seen pictures of pre-Rising grocery stores. They were weird, cramped things, with narrow aisles filled with milling consumers—and of course, when the zombies came, they turned into effective little death traps, full of places for the infected to hide. Even the sprinkler systems they used to run over the vegetables worked to spread the outbreak, since all it took was a few drops of blood getting into the water system and, bam, you were literally misting live infection throughout the produce aisle. It didn’t help that people kept freaking out and running for places where they could try to hole up until it was all over—like the nearest warehouse megastore. The body counts at Costco and Wal-Mart were nothing short of stratospheric.

For a few years post-Rising, everyone bought their groceries online. Some people still do that, preferring a small delivery charge to the inherent risks of going out among the rest of the population. Unfortunately for them, not everything lends itself to the online model. Fresh fruit and vegetables, meat—fish and poultry, anyway, those being the meats still sold for eating—and anything with the word “bulk” attached to it are much better bought in person. The rise of the modern grocery store has been a reflection of people’s twin needs to eat and not get eaten. The layout is closer to the old megastores than anything else, but only a certain number of people are allowed in each department at any one time. Groups cycle through according to the store’s floor plan, with air locks and blood testing units between each distinct part of the store. The process takes hours. Grocery shopping is not an activity for the faint of heart.

I paused. “Isn’t Maggie afraid they’ll be spotted?”

“I’m pretty sure her parents own the store.”

“Oh, that’d do it. Has the Doc ever actually been in a grocery store?” I asked. My coffee was starting to cool down. I took a longer swallow, letting comforting bitterness cover the back of my throat. It was weird, drinking coffee without apologizing to George or asking permission before doing it. I took another drink, almost daring her to comment.

She didn’t.

“I don’t think so,” said Alaric. “She turned sort of white when Maggie told her where they were going.”

“God, I hope somebody’s got a camera running.” Or four, or five, or maybe an even dozen. We couldn’t use the footage for anything, but seeing Kelly confronted with an actual fish counter would be comedy gold.

“I’m sure they do,” said Alaric. “They know their jobs.”

“True.” I refilled my mug. “Anything else going on?”

“Not really.”

“Huh. Okay. How are the overnights?”

“Good.”

“Not great?”

“Really good.” Alaric seemed to realize I wasn’t going anywhere. He pushed his laptop to one side and reached for his own mug. “Your report got a ridiculous number of downloads. I mean, really ridiculous. Every time you go anywhere near the field, we see a ratings spike of insane proportions.”

“Yeah, well, every time I go anywhere near the field, I wind up not sleeping for a month, so I guess it evens out in the end. Has the CDC said anything about what happened in Portland?”

“There’s no official statement yet, but Talking Points managed to get an interview with Director Swenson