Blackout

The man from the CDC kept on talking; to be honest, I had pretty much stopped listening. Alaric and Becks were paying attention and periodically asking questions that seemed at least vaguely connected to the things coming out of his mouth, so I figured no one would notice—or care—if I checked out for a little bit. As long as I didn’t start to drool, they’d probably figure I was just being a big, dumb Irwin and letting the smart people talk. That’s the useful thing about being a figurehead. Nobody cares if you’re an idiot, as long as you’re a useful one.

They’re never going to give her back to you, murmured Georgia. There was a faint echoing quality to her words, and I knew that if I turned my head she’d be there, watching me, waiting for me to admit that she was right. That scared me almost more than the things she was saying. I used to welcome the hallucinations, viewing them as the only way I could see her anymore. Now… I knew I wasn’t going to go un-crazy as fast as I went crazy. But the idea of being left alone with a voice in my head and the occasional delusional vision was suddenly terrifying. I got her back. Why the hell wasn’t the world going to let me keep her?

You don’t need to worry about their little replacement. The world will let you keep me, she said. Just you and me, forever. That’s what you said you wanted, isn’t it? You volunteered to be a haunted house.

“Shut up,” I muttered, trying to keep my voice low enough that no one else would notice.

It didn’t work. “What was that?” asked the doctor, attention swinging back around to me.

Uh-oh. “Uh…” I began.

“He talks to himself,” said Becks, matter-of-factly. “I’m actually impressed that this is the first time he’s done it. Just ignore him and keep telling us why immune response in babies is enough to cause reservoir conditions, but not enough to avoid spontaneous amplification when they cross the sixty-pound threshold.”

“He talks to himself?” The doctor frowned at me like I had suddenly become an exciting new medical mystery. I wondered how he’d feel if he knew I was immune to the Kellis-Amberlee virus. He’d probably start asking whether he could dissect me—assuming he cared about asking. George had already proven that people were now a matter of crunch all you want, we’ll make more. Maybe he already had Shaun II baking in one of their cloning tanks, ready for his triumphant decanting.

Fuck. That.

“Turns out being forced to shoot the one person in the world you thought would outlive you in the head sort of fucks with your sense of reality,” I said coldly. “I mean, my choices were a nice, mellow psychotic break with talking to myself and the occasional voice in my head, or climbing the nearest cell tower and playing sniper until somebody came and gunned me down. I figured option A would be better for my long-term health, if not my sanity.”

“And you still listen to him? You still do what he says?” asked the doctor, his attention swinging back to Becks and Alaric.

Alaric shrugged. “Sure. He’s the boss.”

“Fascinating.” The man from the CDC shook his head as he turned toward President Ryman. “You see the power of trust? Once you believe a person won’t mislead you, you keep believing it, even after you realize they’ve gone insane. This plan may actually work.”

“Or maybe not,” said George. “It’s a little bit of a coin toss right now, if you ask me.”

The doctor whipped around, eyes widening. “What are you doing?”

His reaction made me realize she was really here, rather than speaking into the dark inside my head. I turned to see George standing in the doorway, an unfamiliar gun in her hands. She had it aimed squarely at the doctor’s chest. Rick was behind her, expression grim, standing next to a man I didn’t recognize. Steve was nowhere to be seen.

“If you so much as twitch, I swear, I will shoot you,” said George.

The doctor ignored her, reaching for his pocket. The sound of the safety clicking off was very loud. He froze. “You’re making a mistake,” he said.

“Maybe your mistake was focusing so hard on my replacement that you forgot to give me an off switch,” replied George.

“No, they gave you one,” said the stranger. “We just took it out before they had the chance to use it.”

“Oh, right,” said George. “Silly me. I always forget about the excruciatingly painful nonelective surgeries.”

The doctor’s eyes got even wider, if that was possible. “Dr. Lake?” he demanded, looking toward the unfamiliar man.

The stranger smiled, the expression bordering on a snarl. “I resign,” he said.

“So this is mutiny.” The man from the CDC slanted his eyes toward President Ryman and his remaining agents. “This is treason.”

None of the Secret Servicemen were reaching for their guns, and the look on President Ryman’s face wasn’t shock or outrage—it was relief, like this was what he’d been waiting for all along. “You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?” he asked. I’d never heard him sound so bitter. “Treason? That’s something you at the CDC have been experts on for quite a while.”

The man from the CDC’s eyes widened in exaggerated shock. “I don’t understand what you’re implying, Mr. President.”

“Emily’s safe,” said George. “The EIS has her. Steve’s getting the kids out of the building. They can’t hold your family over you anymore.”

“Do you think it’s that simple?” asked the man from the CDC. “We’ve had a long time to get to where we are today. You’re making a large mistake. People have died for less.”

“People have died for nothing,” George shot back. “And no, I don’t think it’s that simple. But I do think you made one major tactical error when you invited us here.”

The man from the CDC sneered. “What’s that?”

“We’re the ones that people listen to… and we’re the ones who learned about backups from Georgette Meissonier.” George smiled. “Anybody here who doesn’t have six cameras running, raise your hand.”

Not a single member of my team raised their hand. Becks grinned. Alaric smirked.

And the man from the CDC, perhaps realizing that he was finished, moved. Jamming his hand into his pocket, he pulled out the pen he’d been holding before, aiming it at the president. The Secret Servicemen shouted something, grabbing Ryman’s shoulders. Not fast enough. There was no way they’d be able to get him clear fast enough. I didn’t think. I just jumped, putting myself between the man from the CDC and President Ryman half a second before I heard the sound of Georgia’s gun going off.

The man from the CDC froze, looking slowly down at the spreading red patch in the middle of his chest. The pen dropped from his hand and he fell, crumpling to the floor. The last sound he made was a hollow thud when his head hit the tile. It was almost comic, in a weird way.

No one was laughing. They were all staring at me. Becks had a hand covering her mouth, and Alaric looked like he was about to be sick. Only Georgia didn’t look distraught; mostly, she looked confused. Lowering her gun, she asked, “What is that?”

I looked at the needle sticking out of my chest, anchored in the flesh a few inches to the right of my sternum. It hurt a little, now that I was thinking about it. It would probably hurt more once the adrenaline washed out of my system.

“Oh,” I said, my words almost drowned out by the sound of one of the Secret Servicemen emptying his gun into the man from the CDC’s head. “That’s a problem.”

You know what’s awesome? Assholes who do all their research, and have all the pieces of the puzzle, and can’t be bothered with anything that doesn’t fit the picture they’ve decided they’re putting together. You know. Idiots. The kind of stupid you can manage to achieve only by being really, really smart, because only really, really smart people can reach adulthood without having any goddamn common sense.

Seriously. Thank you, smart people, for being absolute idiots. I appreciate it.

—From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, August 7, 2041. Unpublished.