Deadline

  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?”

  “Why did you become an Irwin?” I waved a hand at the windshield, indicating the storm. “Worrying about what may or may not be going on out there isn’t going to get us to Weed any faster. Now tell me why you became an Irwin while I try to get enough caffeine into my system to be safe behind the wheel.”

  “Right. I—right.” Becks took a deep breath, drumming her fingers against the wheel. “How come you never asked me this before?”

  “We were already busy when you hired on with the site, and then the Ryman campaign kicked into overdrive and there wasn’t time. After that… I don’t know. After that, I guess I was too busy being an asshole to realize it was something I needed to ask about. I’m sorry. I’m asking now.”

  “Okay.” Becks shook her head a l
ittle. “Okay. You know I’m from the East Coast, right?”

  “Yeah. Westminster, like the X-Men.”

  “No, Westchester, in New York. No mutants. Lots of money. Old money.” She glanced my way. “My parents aren’t in the same weight class as the Garcias, but they’re well-off enough that my sisters and I had what must have looked like a fairy-tale childhood. Dance lessons at three, riding lessons at five—yes, on actual horses. That may have been the only dangerous thing my parents ever approved of. I was supposed to go off to school, get a degree in something sensible, and come home to marry a man as well-bred and well-mannered as I was.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I went to Vassar. My concentration was in English, with a minor in American history. Wound up getting interested in the way the nation has changed, and realized that what I really wanted was to go into the news.” Becks slowed as she swerved to avoid a fallen tree branch that spanned half the road. “So I told my parents I wanted to study politics at New York University, transferred, and went for a degree in film, with a journalism minor. My parents disowned me when they found out what I was really doing, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” I echoed, disbelieving.

  Becks continued like I hadn’t spoken. Maybe that was for the best. “I’d been freelancing for about eight months when I saw the job posting for the Factual News Division at your site. I was doing Action News, I was doing Factual News… I was doing everything but supporting myself. I was living in a walk-up in Jersey City, eating soy noodles for every meal. I applied almost as a Hail Mary. And I got the job.”

  “George was really excited about your application,” I said.

  “Thanks.” Becks smiled a little. “I knew the Newsies weren’t for me after my second press conference. I kept wanting to slap people until they got off their asses and did something. So I started trying to transfer. I just wanted… I don’t know. I guess I wanted to do something fun for a change. I wanted to have a life before I died.”

  “Cool.” I finished my Coke in one long swallow before wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and tossing the bottle into the back. “Thanks for telling me. I’m ready to drive, if you want to pull over.”

  “Yeah, well, I figure we’re past the point of keeping secrets, right?” Becks began to slow. “Which reminds me. What’s the flat-drop you told Alaric to do?”

  I grimaced.

  She shot a sharp look in my direction as she pulled the van to a stop on the shoulder of the road. “Hey, I answered yours.”

  “I know, I know. It’s not that I don’t want to answer. It’s just that it’s complicated.” I unfastened my belt as I spoke and moved to slide between the seats, creating the space for Becks to move to the passenger side. “So. You know the situation with the Masons, right? The whole thing where they adopted George and me after their biological son died in the Rising?”

  “I’ve read Georgia’s essays on the adoption process,” said Becks carefully, as she moved to take the seat I had so recently vacated.

  “Yeah, well, after she died, they tried to take her files away. We even went to court over her estate. They lost. George had a really solid will. But they weren’t happy about it.”

  “So the flat-drop—”

  “Was to the Masons.” I fastened my seat belt and resettled the seat, adjusting it to my height before taking the wheel. “Once those ratings-hounds get involved, there’s no way this story is getting buried again. Hell, maybe we’ll get lucky, and if anybody else needs to die, it’ll be them.”

  “That’s a pretty horrible thing to say about your parents.”

  “If they were my parents, I might feel bad about it.” I looked over at Becks. “Get some sleep. I’ll get us home from here.”

  She nodded, an expression I couldn’t identify on her face. It might have been understanding. Worse, it might have been pity. “Okay.”

  I didn’t look at her again as I pulled away from the shoulder and back onto the highway. The rain made the asphalt slick and a little hazardous, but it had been rainats, clong enough that most of the oil had washed away, and the very structure of the highway was working in our favor. Roadwork got a lot more dangerous after the Rising, and the American highway system wound up getting some adjustments that hadn’t been necessary before zombies became an everyday occurrence. In areas where flooding was a risk, the roads were slightly raised, and the drainage was improved over pre-Rising standards. It would take a flood of Biblical proportions to knock out any of the major roads, and that included the one that we were on. Let it pour. We’d still make it home.

  Becks was right about one thing: The roads were deserted. I didn’t see anyone else as we roared across Nevada. Even the usual police patrols were missing, which struck me as more disturbing than anything else, and every checkpoint had been set to run its blood tests on unmanned automatic. I expected the cars to come back when the rain tapered off, but they didn’t. Driving along an empty, sunlit road was even more disturbing than driving alone through the darkness. At least when the storm was hanging overhead, I could blame it for the sudden desertion of America.

  The radio remained mostly static, with a few stations playing preprogrammed playlists, and I couldn’t restart the wireless when I was the only one awake. I kept trying the phone, but the lines were all tied up. It didn’t change when we crossed the border into California, although Mahir woke up around that time, moving up to the middle seat before he asked, blearily, “Where are we?”

  “California, and we’re about to need to stop for gas. Becks got donuts. They’re crap, but they’re edible. In the bag behind me.”

  “Cheers.” Mahir fished out a box of donuts covered in something that claimed to be powdered sugar. I didn’t want to take any bets on what the covering really was. I also didn’t want to put it in my mouth. Mahir didn’t have any such qualms. A few minutes passed in relative silence before he asked, through a mouthful of donut, “’ow much ’ther?”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, dude. That’s disgusting. We’ve got about another five hours to go. There’s a truck stop ahead. I’ll fill up while you get the wireless working, cool?”

  He swallowed, and nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “Good.”

  I didn’t want to admit it, but I’d been afraid to stop the van with both the others asleep. Something about the world outside the van was just too eerie, and somehow, deep down, I knew that if I stepped into that emptiness alone, I’d never come back.

  The truck stop didn’t help with that impression. The diner was closed, metal shutters drawn over the windows and locked into place. There were no vehicles in sight. I kept one hand on my gun during the fueling process, and I didn’t mess around with wiping down the windows or checking the grill. Something about this whole thing was making my nerves scream, and you can’t be a working Irwin for more than a few months without learning to trust the little voice in the back of your head that tells you to get the fuck out of a bad situation.

  This is not good, said George.

  “You got that right,” I muttered, and got back into the van. Mahir, what’s the story with the wireless?”

  “No luck. All the local networks are either locked down tight or off-line. I think we’re running blind until we get home.”

  “Because we really needed this day to get worse.” I jammed the key into the ignition. The van started easily—thank God, car troubles were the one thing we hadn’t been forced to deal with—and we got back out on the road.

  We reached the base of Maggie’s driveway an hour before sunset. Becks was driving, and I was in the passenger seat, while Mahir sat in the back with his laptop plugged into the car charger, tapping relentlessly away. He’d been writing for about four hours, recording everything we’d seen or heard in true Newsie fashion. It was a comforting sound. George used to do the same thing, back when she still had fingers.

  The first two gates opened like they were supposed to, recognizing our credentials and letting us drive o
n through. “Looks like we’re home free,” said Becks. “Just a little farther and—holy shit!” She hit the brakes, hard. I slammed forward, my seat belt keeping me from hitting myself on the dashboard. There was a crash from the back as Mahir—who wasn’t wearing a seat belt—went sprawling.

  “Jesus, Becks, what the fuck?” I demanded.

  She didn’t answer me. She just raised one trembling finger and pointed to the driveway ahead of us. I turned to look where she was pointing, and stared.

  Normally, the third gate on Maggie’s driveway is the first one that requires authorized visitors to interact with the security system. The normal system wasn’t in operation today. Instead, the gate stood open, and three men in full outbreak gear stood to block the road, assault rifles at the ready. Their faces were concealed by the biohazard masks they wore, filtering their air and blocking them from all fluid or particle attacks. That, more than anything else, told me this wasn’t a drill. Those masks are hell to wear. Nobody would do that without good reason.

  One of the men beckoned for us to come closer. Becks crept forward until the same man waved for us to stop. He walked over to the van and tapped the muzzle of his rifle against the glass of my window. “Please lower the window, sir,” he said, in case his message hadn’t been clear enough.

  Swallowing hard, I did as I was told. “Uh, hey,” I said. “You’re one of Maggie’s security ninjas, aren’t you? I was starting to think you were a myth.”

  “Credentials.”

  “Right.” I dug out my wallet and handed him my license card.

  “All three of you.”

  “Got it. Becks? Mahir? A little help here?”

  “Here,” said Becks, shoving her card into my hand. Mahir followed suit.

  I passed both cards to the security ninja. “So does this have anything to do with the total disappearance of the population of the American Midwest? Because we’re a little creeped out right now, and I’d really li to get to the bathroom.” I was babbling to cover my sudden conviction that something, somehow, had happened to Maggie and Alaric. We were driving into a murder investigation. We had to be. It was the only thing that made sense.