Deadline

people Dr. Wynne was working with had to know he’d sent Kelly to infiltrate us—he couldn’t have triggered the outbreak in Oakland remotely, and he certainly couldn’t have called in an air strike without somebody to approve it. Finding Kelly dead in his lab might confuse the legit members of the CDC, but the corrupt ones would know exactly who must have brought her back to Memphis, and they’d be watching the roads. So where were they?

This is too easy.

“I know.” I took a breath, scanning what little of the road was still visible through the darkness and the pounding rain. I almost wished there was someone else out there. At least a second pair of headlights would have broken up the black a little bit. “I think we fucked up, George. I think we fucked up big.”

We should have come up with a better plan. There has to have been another way. Her voice turned bitter. If anyone should have known better, it was me.

I didn’t argue with her. George was stubborn even when she was alive. Dead, she was basically impossible to convince of anything she didn’t agree with. “So now we head home, we regroup, and we head someplace where we can be invisible. We can’t stay with Maggie anymore. It’s not safe.”

We can’t leave her there alone, either. I could almost see the resignation on her face as she added, in an intentional echo, It’s not safe.

“Fuck,” I whispered, and settled against the seat, eyes still on the road.

Maggie never needed to be a blogger. She never needed to be anything. She had her parents’ money and could have spent her entire life doing nothing as ostentatiously as possible. I’ve never been sure how she and Buffy met. It never really mattered. They were friends when Maggie joined the site, and they stayed friends right up until the day that Buffy died. She was our only real choice to take over the Fictionals, and she’d done an amazing job from day one… and she never needed to. Most people come to the news because there’s something driving them, somethng that they need to find a way to cope with. Maggie was just looking for something to do with her time. She did it well, she did it professionally, and now she was in just as much danger as the rest of us.

She knew the job was dangerous when she took it, George said. She was trying to be reassuring. She was failing.

“Really?” I asked. “Because Buffy didn’t.”

Not even George had an answer to that one.

“Shaun?” Mahir pitched his voice just short of a shout to be heard above the roaring wind. “The wireless has gone out. We’ve no more GPS connection from here, so we’re going to need to pray for clarity of road signs.”

“That’s awesome,” I called back, as deadpan as I could manage. “What’s our last known position?”

“We crossed into Colorado about twenty minutes ago,” shouted Becks. “I’m going to go around Denver—cut through Centennial and skip Wyoming entirely. You can have the wheel when we hit Nevada.”

“Deal.” I crawled over the back of the seat, turning to face the front of the van. “But I have to get some sleep before I drive again. Mahir, can you watch the back? Just scream if anything looks funny.”

“I think I can manage that,” said Mahir, unbuckling his belt.

I stretched out on the middle seat as he worked his way past me. A bag of cheap potato chips from the first convenience store made a decent, if funky-smelling, pillow, and my jacket was a better blanket than I’ve had in some motels. I closed my eyes, listening to the howling wind and the sound of modern country drifting from the radio. George’s phantom fingers stroked my forehead, soothing some of the tension away, and the world faded out as I slipped into a shallow doze.

I woke up several hundred miles and five and a half hours later. Mahir was asleep in the rear seat of the van, and the radio was blasting—not that you could really tell. The cloud cover seemed lighter here, allowing a few traces of what might have been sunlight to cut through. The wind was still committed to playing storm, screaming even louder than it had been when I went to sleep. I sat up groggily, rubbing the grit from my eyes, and swallowed twice to clear my throat before I rasped, “Where are we?”

“About thirty miles into Nevada,” said Becks. She sounded exhausted. I was going to ask how she was still awake when I noticed the drift of Red Bull cans covering the floor. Those hadn’t been there when I went to sleep.

I rubbed my eyes again. “Another supply run?” I guessed.

“Sort of.” Becks met my eyes in the rearview mirror, and I realized with a start that she was on the verge of panic. “The wireless is still out. I can’t get a decent radio signal. I stopped for gas about twenty minutes ago, and the place was deserted. Open, but there was no one there. I grabbed what I could, filled the tank, and ran.”

“Did you grab anything but Red Bull?”

“Generic donuts, enough Coke to get you through Nevada, and some salmon jerky.” She returned her attention to the road. “I don’t think we should stop again if we don’t have to. Something’s really wrong out there.”

“How do you mean?” I dug around between the seats until I found the bag with the Cokes. I grabbed one of those and a box of donuts, the kind so cheap that they may as well have been dipped in faintly chocolate-flavored plastic. Then I half stood and made my way to the front passenger seat, dropping down next to her.

“I haven’t seen another person since Burlington,” Becks said. Her hands were clenched on the wheel hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “The streets were pretty normal there, people trying to get home before the storm really hit, people trying to stock up on the things they didn’t keep in the house—about what you’d expect. We rolled through Centennial so late that it wasn’t weird that the streets were empty, but the sun’s been up for an hour now. There should be cars. There should be commuters, even all the way out here. So where the fuck is everybody?”

“Maybe it’s a holiday?”

“Or maybe something’s really, really wrong.” Becks pressed the radio scan button, scowling as it skipped through a dozen channels of static before settling back on the canned modern country station she’d been listening to the night before. “All my live news is off the air. There’s nothing running but the preprogrammed music channels. I’d kill for an Internet connection right now, I swear to God. Something’s really wrong.”

“Have you tried to call anyone?” Making a call on an unsecured phone line could potentially blow our position. It was a last resort. With what Becks was saying, I wouldn’t have questioned the choice.

She exhaled slowly, and nodded. “I did.”

“And?”

“And I couldn’t get a connection.” Her hands clenched even tighter on the wheel. “The circuits were all full. I couldn’t even get through to nine-one-one. Nobody’s home, Shaun. Nobody’s home anywhere in the country.”

“Hey.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “Take a deep breath, okay? I’m sure there’s a totally reasonable explanation for all this. There usually is.”

“Really?” asked Becks.

Really? asked George.

“No,” I said. “But we’ve got a long way to go before we get back to Maggie’s, so let’s try to stay calm until we get there. I’d like to avoid having a fatal accident, if that’s cool with you.” I glanced back at Mahir, who was still flopped in the rear seat with his eyes closed. He was using one of Kelly’s sweaters as a blanket. I guess there was no reason for him not to. It’s not like she was going to be wearing it again.

Becks sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

“You know I’m right. It’s the most annoying thing about me.”

She actually smiled a little at that one. >

“When did Mahir go down?”

“Half an hour or so outside of Centennial. I figured there wasn’t any harm in it. The only thing that’s going to kill us on a road this empty is an air strike, and it’s not like he could watch for that. Besides, he was falling asleep anyway. I just gave him permission to stop pretending he wasn’t.”

“Poor guy. He’s really not used to field conditions.”

“Shaun, no one is used to this kind of field condition. Zombie mobs, abandoned malls, skateboarding through ghost towns, sure, we’re trained for that. Going up against the Centers for Disease Control in order to figure out who’s behind a global conspiracy? Not so much. That’s not why I became an Irwin.”

“So why did you?”

She blinked at me, surprised. “What?”