Blackout

Subject 7c continues to respond to stimulus, and has begun questioning the conditions of her containment. She—and it truly is impossible to avoid assigning a gender, and even an identity, to a subject that has been awake and interactive for this length of time—continues to adhere closely to the registered template. Her responses are well within the allowable parameters. Perhaps too well within the allowable parameters; early concerns about cooperation and biddability were not unfounded.

It may be necessary to begin preparing the 8 line for release. I will continue to observe and study 7c, but do not believe that 7d would offer any substantial improvement in the problem areas.

—Taken from an e-mail sent by Dr. Matthew Thomas, July 23, 2041.

Preparations to separate the members of our group are nearly complete. Maggie keeps saying we shouldn’t split the party. Privately, I agree with her. This is madness. We will separate, and we will each of us die alone. And yet…

Something must be done. If Shaun’s paranoid ravings are correct, and the mosquitoes were engineered for release when a news cycle truly needed to be buried—one such as the cycle we were prepared to unleash when we left Memphis—then it is our responsibility to find a way to save the world from them. How arrogant that looks! “Save the world.” I’m not in the world saving business. I’m a journalist.

But it seems the world has other ideas. Maggie and I leave for Seattle tomorrow. I’m terrified that I will never see London, or my wife, again. And a small, traitorous part of me is elated. I thought we no longer lived in an age of heroes.

I was wrong.

—From Fish and Clips, the blog of Mahir Gowda, July 23, 2041. Unpublished.

Six

Deciding to hit the road took only a few seconds—the amount of time necessary for a thought to travel from my brain to my big mouth. Actually leaving took longer. Dr. Abbey wasn’t sending us out to die; if anything, she was sending us out not to die, something she took great pains to make sure I understood.

“This isn’t just about the mosquitoes, Shaun,” she’d said, while running yet another blood test and getting yet another negative result. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I showed you those distribution maps, or when I talked about the number of lives you could save by bringing me some live specimens. But it was never just about the mosquitoes.”

George had sighed in the back of my head then, sounding so tired it made my chest ache. She was dead. She shouldn’t have been tired anymore. But she was, and it was my fault, for refusing to let her go. She wants you to get exposed again.

“Are you fucking kidding?” I’d asked, too startled to remember to keep my voice down.

And Dr. Abbey had smiled, that bitter half twist of her lips that I normally saw only when she thought no one was looking, or when she murmured endearments to her huge black dog, the one with her dead husband’s name.

“Someday you’re going to have to explain how it is you’ve managed to create a subconscious echo that’s smarter than you are.” Still smiling, Dr. Abbey had looked me squarely in the eye and said, “I need to know if you can shrug off the infection a second time, outside lab conditions. If you can, that changes everything.”

Swell.

The next four days rushed past in a blur, with all of us preparing to do the one thing I’d sworn I’d die to prevent: We were getting ready to go our separate ways. After everything I’d done to keep us together, to keep us alive, I was going to scatter us to the winds, and pray everyone came home again. We started as a news site. Somewhere along the line, we became a family. Me, and George, and After the End Times. That was all I needed. I’d already lost George. Did I have to lose everyone else, too?

Alaric would be staying with Dr. Abbey; that hadn’t changed. He was our best technician. If it became necessary for the lab to move while we were still on the road, he’d be too useful for Dr. Abbey to just ditch, and he’d be able to keep the rest of us aware of its location. Besides, I didn’t trust him in the field when his sister’s safety was on the line. He was likely to do something impulsive and get himself hurt, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to force myself to stay on the road instead of running straight back to Dr. Abbey and her advanced medical facilities. Especially since by “advanced,” I meant “better than a first aid kit.” We were still off the grid. If one of us got messed up, the hospital wasn’t going to be an option.

Maggie and Mahir, meanwhile, were going to head farther up the coast, leaving the wilds of Oregon for the dubious safety of Seattle. Maggie’s plan was to go back on the grid as soon as possible, reclaiming her position as heir to the Garcia family fortune, and presenting Mahir as her latest boy toy. “People like their circuses when the news gets bad,” she’d said, a perverse twinkle in her eyes. “I’m a Fictional, remember? I’m going to tell them a story so flashy they won’t even think to ask where I’ve been.” Alaric wasn’t thrilled about the “boy toy” part, but it was solid. They would use her celebrity as a cover while they made contact with the Seattle underground, and located the man everyone called “the Monkey.” He could cook new IDs for my whole team, IDs that were good enough to let us disappear forever, if things came to that.

Most of us, anyway. Maggie came to see me on the fifth day after we began planning our departure. I was clearing my things out of the van. I’d been sleeping there most nights, preferring the illusory privacy of its familiar walls to the dubious comforts of the dormlike sleeping arrangements inside the Forestry Center. The garage wasn’t secure, but the van was, once the doors were locked.

She knocked once on the open rear door, and then just stood there, waiting.

I looked up. “Yeah?”

“You know we’re not getting me an ID from the Monkey, don’t you?” Her expression was a mixture of resignation and resolve. She looked like a heroine from one of the horror movies she loved so much, and in that moment, I really understood what Dave—one of the many teammates I’d buried since this whole thing started—and Alaric saw in her. She was beautiful.

And she was right. “Yeah, I do.” I put down the toolbox I was holding, moving to take a seat on the bumper. “You can’t disappear.”

“If it weren’t for the fact that my bio-tracker is still registering with my parents, I wouldn’t even be able to stay underground for this long.” Maggie touched the skin above her collarbone. Her parents had implanted a subdermal bio-tracker beneath the bone when she was still in diapers. It didn’t come with a “trace” function— Maggie’s misguided teenage years before she discovered journalism were proof that they’d been telling her the truth about that—but it enabled them to sleep soundly at night, serene in the knowledge that their only child was still alive.

“We could have it removed.”

“If anything would switch this thing from transmitting my vitals to actively giving them a location, that would do it.” Maggie sat down next to me. “It’s too risky.”

I looked at her levelly. “It’s too risky, and you don’t really want to disappear, do you?”

“It’s not that! It’s just… it’s…” She took a breath, stopping herself before she could go any further. Finally, reluctantly, she nodded. “You’re right. I don’t want to disappear. I don’t want to do that to my parents, and I miss my house. I miss my dogs. I miss my Fictionals. They have to be so worried. I’ve never done this to them before, not once. Alaric and I talked about this. He’s not happy, but… it’s what has to happen.”

Tell her you understand, said George.

“I understand,” I said, and even if I had to be prompted into the words, I meant them. Maggie had already given up a lot to stay with us this long, more than any of my team members except for maybe Mahir. Alaric’s family would have been in Florida no matter where he worked. Becks hadn’t spoken to her family in years. She was a lot like Georgia that way; both of them found the news and ran for it with open arms, not caring what got left behind in the process. But Maggie wasn’t like that. Maggie was different.

Maggie was looking at me hopefully, like she could barely bring herself to believe I was really saying the words she was hearing. “I know I’m letting you down.”