Deadline

The light went green before she uld say anything. That was probably for the best. She still glared as she stepped through the door, and flipped me off as it slid shut again behind her.

Mahir sighed as he pressed his hand against the panel. “I do wish you wouldn’t taunt her while we’re in the field.”

“She wouldn’t know what to do with me if I didn’t.”

“I suppose not,” said Mahir, and stepped through the newly open door, leaving me alone in the hall.

Not entirely alone. Your turn, said George.

“Yours, too,” I said, and pressed my hand down.

The lab on the other side of the door was standard-issue CDC: equipment I didn’t understand, refrigerator full of things I didn’t want to know about, desk heaped with paperwork that was probably several weeks overdue. A dry-erase board, covered in what looked like meaningless gibberish, took up most of one wall. Kelly was staring at it, transfixed.

“He’s figured out the settlement problem,” she said, as much to herself as to the rest of herself. “I don’t know how, but he’s figured out the settlement problem in the immune response. This whole thing, it’s so simple, it’s so…”

“It’s elegant,” said Mahir.

Kelly smiled. “Yes, it is.”

“Good for it,” I said, stepping up behind her. “Want to explain it to the rest of us?”

“Oh! Well, this here—” She waved a hand at a segment of the board and began to talk, medical jargon flowing from her lips too fast for me to follow. That didn’t matter. I didn’t need to follow it live; I never go anywhere without half a dozen active cameras running, and I could review the recording at my leisure. Assuming we all got out of here in one piece. Since we couldn’t transmit, I couldn’t make backups. If we died inside the CDC, it was all for nothing.

I pushed that grim thought aside. Kelly was still talking, and at least Mahir seemed to understand whatever the hell she was saying. He interjected periodically, asking questions and restating things that had been particularly confusing when she said them.

“I love having a smart guy around,” I said to Becks, sotto voce.

“Me, too,” she said, and grinned, all that familiar field excitement filling her face. Irwins are never more alive than when they’re five minutes away from getting slaughtered.

Kelly finished her explanation fifteen seconds before we heard the door unseal itself. It was barely louder than a whisper, but we were all so on edge that it felt like we could have heard a pin drop a mile away. I signaled to Becks, who nodded, and the two of us moved smoothly into position, flanking the doors while Mahir pulled Kelly back, out of immediate view. The door slid open and a tall man in a white lab coat stepped through, attention fixed on the clipboard he was carrying.

The door slid closed again, and Becks and I moved o stand shoulder to shoulder, pistols raised until their muzzles barely pressed against the back of the man in the lab coat. He froze. Smart guy.

“Hello, Dr. Wynne,” I said amiably. “We figured you might like to know how things have been going, so we swung by to say hello.”

“Shaun?”

“Last time I checked.” I took a half step forward, digging the muzzle of my gun in a little harder. “How about you? How’s it been going for you?”

“I—ah. I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

“We didn’t think you would be,” said Mahir, stepping into Dr. Wynne’s line of sight. Kelly hung back, face still hidden in the shadows. “I saw you at the funeral, but I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.”

“Mahir Gowda, replacement head of the Factual News Division at the After the End Times,” said Dr. Wynne, not missing a beat. “I’ve been keeping up with the site. I must admit, I didn’t expect to see you, either. Ever.”

“We’re full of surprises tonight,” said Becks, and nudged him forward with her gun. “Move away from the door. Center of the room, hands at your sides. Please don’t make any sudden moves. I’d really hate to have to shoot you.”

“It’s true, she would,” I said. “We told her she’d have to mop up any messes she made while we were here, and Becks hates cleaning.”

Dr. Wynne shook his head as he followed her instructions, walking to the middle of the floor before turning to face me. “Shaun, what are you doing here? You shouldn’t have come.”

“There was too much that didn’t add up. We needed you to check our math.”

Ask him about the strains.

“I’m getting to that,” I muttered.

“What?” asked Dr. Wynne.

“Nothing.” I flashed him a glossy photo-op smile. “Doc? You want to say hello?”

“Happily.” Kelly stepped out of the shadows, heels clicking against the floor. Dr. Wynne went white. “Hello, sir. How have you been?”

“I… you…” He stopped for a moment, composing himself, and said, “Shaun told me you died in Oakland.”

“The dead have a tendency to come back these days, remember?” She looked at the whiteboard. “You solved the immune response issue. I recognize some of these figures. Every time I posited them, you said I was off base. But it looks like it worked.”

“Kelly, how did you—”

She turned back to us, giving me a small nod.

That was my cue. I offered Dr. Wynne another smile, and said, “We’ve been doing some digging, and we didn’t have a way of reang you that wouldn’t send up too many red flags, especially since the Doc wanted to be involved. We figured you’d want to know what we’d managed to find.”

“And the guns were what? Just a precaution?”

“Pretty much.” I lowered my gun. “You can’t be too careful these days.”

“You let me think Dr. Connolly was dead.”

“That’s true,” I said agreeably. “Mahir?”

“On it.” Mahir produced a handheld reader from inside his coat and walked around to offer it to Dr. Wynne. “The information you’ll want to see is presently up on the screen. Read carefully. The implications can be rather unpleasant.”

“When I sent Dr. Connolly to you, I expected you to disappear immediately,” said Dr. Wynne, running one big hand through his thinning hair as he looked at the screen. “It would have been the smart thing to do. If you’d dropped off the grid as soon as she got there, you could have been safe.”

“You know we’ve never worked that way,” I said, surprised by the apologetic note creeping into my tone. I really was sorry. If we were wrong, and he only wanted to protect us—

Shaun, said George. Shaun, stop a second. You need to stop.

Dr. Wynne nodded as he scrolled through the material we’d collected. “This is some very good work. How difficult was this to find?”

“Not terribly,” said Mahir, before I could speak. He looked at Dr. Wynne neutrally, and added, “It’s amazing how much of this was out there, floating around, and simply needed to be put together in the correct order.”

Shaun—

“Wait a second, George,” I said softly, watching Dr. Wynne’s expression. He was frowning with concentration, studying the data. “I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Was any of it commissioned?” Dr. Wynne glanced up. “Is there anything here that you needed a lab or special access to find?”

All Dr. Abbey’s research was conducted in a lab, and I didn’t know how much of it was available to the general public. We’d released some of it in the process of getting the rest of the data, but not everything, and not in a collected format. I opened my mouth to tell him that… and stopped, frowning.

George spoke into the silence: He lost track of Kelly as soon as the building blew and destroyed her ID—the ID he gave her. He never questioned her death. He must have known. Shaun—