Blackout

distant glow of streetlights providing more than sufficient light. Mahir lagged at first, but found a pace that kept him between me and Becks, all three of us tromping over the broken ground as quickly and quietly as we could.

The quarter-mile between the van and the CDC was mostly open fields. We hunched over as we crossed them, running low through the tall grass. No floodlights came on to mark our trails, and no alarms went off that we could hear. Arrogance was working in our favor once again—the CDC’s, not ours. They’d been heroes since the Rising, and anyone who tried breaking into one of their installations wound up on trial for treason, if they were lucky. We’d always come in via legitimate entrances, whether we were supposed to be there or not. It had been so long since their external security was tested that they weren’t prepared for a small group of people who really wanted to get inside.

The fence was only a few yards farther away than I expected; our map was accurate, if not precise. That was a good sign for the rest of the job. I tossed one of the bridging cords to Becks, jerking my chin toward the fence. She nodded, and we approached together, waving for Mahir to stay back. He didn’t argue.

I told you he was a smart guy when I hired him, said George.

I held up one finger toward Becks. She nodded, holding up two fingers of her own. When we were both holding up three fingers, we leaned forward and snapped the bridging cords into place. A bright blue spark arced through them, and the air was suddenly filled with the hot, burning tang of ozone. Becks squeaked, and all the hair on my arms stood on end.

Slowly, I reached forward and wrapped my fingers through the links of fence between the cords. Nothing happened. Our bridge was successful; the current was no longer routing through this patch of fencing. I gestured for the others to come closer and pulled a pair of wire cutters out of my coat pocket.

It took only a minute, maybe less, for me to cut through the fence separating the Seattle CDC from the abandoned fields behind it. Then we were onto the manicured expanse of their lawn, running for the building, waiting for the sirens to start going off.

They never did.

I never thought of myself as a coward before all this. I actually thought I was kinda brave. Choosing to live in the middle of nowhere, where I could be attacked at any moment. But I was lying to myself. I was never brave at all.

I also wasn’t nearly as stupid as the people I love tend to be. So I suppose that’s something to reassure me as I wave from the window while they all march off to die. God, Buffy, why did you have to hire me? I could have worked for some other site. I would never have gone through any of this. And if you had to hire me—if God insisted—why did you have to go off and leave me to deal with all of it alone?

—From Dandelion Mine, the blog of Magdalene Grace Garcia, August 1, 2041. Unpublished.

Hey, George. Check this out.

—From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, August 1, 2041. Unpublished.

Twenty-one

Either Dr. Kimberley and her team were monitoring me or their timing was uncannily good, because no one came into the room until I was done crying. I was drying my tears on the sleeve of my shirt when two of the technicians stepped through the door, arguing with each other in low, urgent voices. Neither of them looked in my direction.

“Hi,” I said, just in case they didn’t know I was there.

“Hello, Miss Mason,” said the female technician, waving. I still couldn’t see her face, but I recognized her voice. Kathleen. “Is everything all right?”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but things have been worse.” I stood, the muscles in my calves protesting the movement. I’d been sitting still for too long. Everything had started to stiffen up. “Ow, damn.” I bent double, kneading the muscle of my left calf with both hands.

That’s probably why the first bullet missed me.

The shooter was using a silencer. There was a muted bang, too soft to be a proper gunshot, and the technician who entered with Kathleen staggered back, slamming into the wall. A red stain was already spreading across the chest of his formerly pristine white lab coat. He looked down at it before raising his head and looking at me, mouth forming a word he couldn’t quite push all the way out into the world. It was George.

It took the sound of his body hitting the floor to make me start moving. In my experience, once a person goes down, they don’t stay down for long, and when they get back up, they tend to be more interested in eating the flesh of the living than they are in finding out who shot them. I darted forward, grabbing Kathleen’s wrist and yanking her away from the body.

“Come on!” I shouted.

“What?” She looked toward me, eyes wide and terrified. “George—”

“Is dead! Now, let’s get out of here before he decides to wake up and make us dead, too! I’ve been dead; you wouldn’t enjoy it!” I dragged her toward the door on the opposite side of the room, somehow managing to babble and shout at the same time.

The second shot was as quiet as the first. Kathleen suddenly collapsed, the dead weight of her body pulling her hand out of mine. I turned, looking back at her, and at the hole in the middle of her forehead like a third, unseeing eye. Unlike George, she wouldn’t be rising. A shot to the head kills humans and zombies the same way: stone dead.

Suddenly aware of how exposed I was—and how alone I was—I drew my own gun and ran out of the room as fast as my legs would carry me. Gregory was in the hall outside, running toward the room that I was running away from.

“They’re both dead!” I shouted. “What’s going on?”

“We’re blown!” He put on a burst of speed, closing the distance between us. He grabbed my wrist, turned, and ran back the way he’d come, hauling me the way I’d been hauling Kathleen right before she was shot.

Sick terror lanced through me as I struggled to keep up. “Is it my fault?”

“Not unless you called down a full security team while you were trying to get through to the outside world.” Gregory didn’t slow down. “Save your breath. I don’t know how long we’re going to need to run.”

I didn’t answer. I just ran. Terror had my body flooded with enough adrenaline that I wasn’t in danger of falling down from a cramp in the immediate future. That was the good part. The bad part—aside from the unidentified shooter or shooters—was that I wasn’t out of shape so much as I had never been in shape. My mind remembered hours of exercise, both in the gym and in the field. My body had less than two months of experience. Not the sort of thing that builds endurance. My lungs were already starting to burn, signaling worse things to come.

A door slammed open ahead of us, and Dr. Kimberley appeared, signaling frantically with one hand. The other hand was out of sight. “This way!” she hissed. Her normally perfect hair was in disarray, and there were spots of blood on the sleeve of her lab coat. Whether it was hers or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell.

Gregory changed angles, still hauling me along. She stepped to the side, letting us run past her into the narrow hall on the other side of the door. As soon as we were through, she stepped back and pulled her hand away from the sensor to the left of the doorframe. The door promptly slammed, the light above it switching from green to red.

“Report,” she said briskly, turning toward the wall. She pried open what looked like a section of paneling to reveal a control panel. Not looking at us, she started typing.

“At least two shooters, at least three technicians down.”

“Kathleen and George,” I panted. I slumped against the wall, bracing my hands on my knees. There was blood on my slippers; Kathleen’s blood. I kicked them off, shuddering. “They’re both down.”

“Dammit.” Dr. Kimberley kept typing. “They’ve been with me for years—how many people do we still have in