anxiety, alien eyes grave. “Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. I can’t do this without you, and if you try to make me, I don’t think I’m going to be okay.”
“Don’t worry about that.” Her smile was sad, and her hand continued to rest against the back of my neck, feeling solid and warm and alive. If this was crazy, God, I wasn’t sure I was capable of wanting anything else. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good,” I whispered. I sat on the couch with my dead sister, listening to the voices from the kitchen, and wondered just how the fuck I was going to get us through this one in one piece.
… fuck it. I don’t have the energy to be profound right now. Turn off your goddamn computer and go spend some time with your family before the world decides to finish ending. That’s about the only profound thing that I have left.
We ran out of time, and we didn’t even know that it was being metered.
—From
What he said.
—From
Twenty-four
The feeling of George’s hand against the back of my neck eventually faded. I looked up to find myself alone. Even the usual soft sense of her at the back of my mind was gone. That didn’t worry me the way it would have, once; I’d had plenty of time to adjust to the idea that her presence came and went depending on how stressed I was, how much pressure I was under, and I guess how sane I was feeling at any given moment. If she wasn’t there, that must mean I was feeling better.
In the kitchen, Mahir and Alaric were typing furiously, while Becks was finishing the reassemy of what looked like her last gun for the day. Maggie was wearing a wireless headset and sitting in front of her laptop, chattering in a rapid mixture of English and Spanish. She sounded calmer. That was good, since the speed of her responses implied that whomever she was talking to wasn’t calm in the least.
I hooked my thumb in her direction as I walked toward the coffee machine. George being out of the picture for the moment meant I could down a cup of real caffeine before I had to go back to caffeinated sugar water. “Who’s on the line?”
“Her folks,” said Becks, glancing up. “They’ve been talking for half an hour.” The subtext—that I’d been sitting by myself in the living room for half an hour—wasn’t subtle. Somehow, I didn’t really care.
“Good job with the wireless booster.” Mahir kept typing as he spoke, his head bowed in what could have been either concentration or prayer. “I believe Mr. Garcia was on the edge of commanding an armed extraction when she was finally able to get through and notify them as to her continuing safety.”
“I could do with a little armed extraction.” I took a large gulp of coffee, letting it sear the back of my throat before adding, “As long as they were willing to stay and be our private army. You think they’d stay and be a private army?”
“No,” said Alaric tonelessly.
Mahir did look up at that, shooting a worried glance toward Alaric before turning to me and saying, “Internet journalists have been largely expelled from the impacted areas, and those attempting to take pictures or live blog from inside have been cited with practicing journalism without a license.”
“What?” I straightened. “That’s not legal.”
“Becoming a blogger requires only that one establish a blog, and not necessarily even that, if one is willing to exist solely through commentary on the blogs of others. Becoming a journalist requires that one take the licensing exams, take the marksmanship exams, pass accreditation, and possess a license sufficient to allow entry to any given hazard zone, lest fines and possible charges be applied.”
“Well, yeah, Mahir. Everybody knows that. What does that have to do with—”
“The individuals involved were in established hazard zones, taking actions of the sort that journalists must be properly licensed to perform.” Mahir shook his head, light glinting off his glasses. “They’re being held while charges are brought against them.”
I gaped at him. “Wait—so—what, they’re saying that when you combine ‘has a blog’ with ‘is inside a hazard zone,’ you automatically become a journalist?”
“Poof,” muttered Becks.
“That’s insane!”
“Insane, and very, very clever, as it’s going quite a long way toward reducing the number of unapproved reports making it out of the impacted areas.” Mahir’s gaze skittered toward Alaric. Just for a moment, but long enough for me to see where he was looking. “Reduction doesn’t mea>
“Some things always do,” I said, putting my mug down. I wasn’t thirsty anymore. “Alaric? You okay, buddy?”
“The updates to the Wall started this morning,” he said. Tears ran down his cheeks as he turned to look at me. He didn’t bother wiping them away. Maybe he knew that drying his face wouldn’t be enough to make the crying stop. “My little sister posted for our parents and our brother. Dorian shot our parents, and Alisa shot Dorian, after he’d started to turn. I always knew getting her shooting lessons for her birthday was a good idea, even if Mother wanted her to take dance classes.”
I winced. “Fuck, Alaric, I’m—”
“Did it help you when I said I was sorry George died?”
Everyone said they were sorry when George died, even the Masons. And not a single apology had made a damn bit of difference. “No. It didn’t help.”
“Then don’t say it.” He looked back to his computer. “The forums are exploding. We’re one of the only major sites that has people actually responding to queries.”
“That’s because we don’t know anything.”
“That’s not entirely true,” said Mahir. “We know the outbreak started when Tropical Storm Fiona made landfall—and that it spread with the storm.
“Wait, what?”
“All the index cases have matched up with the initial footprint of the storm.”
I stared at him. What he was saying didn’t make sense. An outbreak starting when a major storm hit was reasonable, if horrifying. Storms cause devastation, they cause injuries, and they can cause a hell of a lot of cross- contamination. There have been documented cases of someone being injured in a major storm, only to have the wind carry their infected blood onto a bystander before anyone knew what was happening. But that outbreak would be geographically contained, and even though it would be horrible, it wouldn’t be anything unique enough to cause the sort of devastation they were showing on the news.
If the live state of the virus had gone airborne, it would be reasonable to assume that it would spread with the storm. It would also spread
“Wait…” I said again, slow dread worming its way into my stomach. I hadn’t realized I still had the capacity to be frightened. Somehow, it wasn’t a welcome discovery. “Alaric, your sister. You said she posted to the Wall. Is she all right?”
“She’s scared out of her mind, and she’s alone in the attic of the family condo, but she’s physically fine.” Alaric looked up, expression challenging me to say something as he added, “She’s using the company server to chat
