Blackout

  “I couldn’t have done it,” I said, closing my eyes.

  “Done what?”

  “What you did. Kept things going. I wouldn’t have—couldn’t have—done it. I would have fallen apart.”

  “I did fall apart,” he noted, in a tone that was almost comically reasonable. “I went nuts. I’ve been talking to you since Sacramento, and you’ve been talking back.”

  “I thought it might be something like that. You never did do ‘alone’ very well.”

  “Neither did you.”

  “That’s why I would have killed myself by now.”

  Silence fell, and stretched out for almost a minute before Shaun said, “Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing I’m the one who got out of Sacramento, huh? Which is kind of funny if you stop to think about it.”

  I put the laptop aside on the bed and pushed myself up, twisting around to look at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Dr. Wynne died because Kelly—the Doc, that’s what I called her while she was with us—stabbed him with a scalpel while he was in the middle of a big-time bad-guy soliloquy. I mean, I don’t know if there’s an Evil Fucker 101 class that they all take, but between him and Tate, I’m about ready to slap the next person who wants to tell me about his evil plan.” Shaun’s eyes were haunted. “The Doc was a good person. Maybe the only good person left in the CDC. I don’t know. I never had time to find out.”

  I thought of Gregory and Dr. Kimberley, both of whom had chosen the EIS over the CDC. “Maybe you’re right,” I admitted.

  “Anyway, before Dr. Wynne died, he as good as said that whoever shot you wasn’t aiming for you. The needle was supposed to be mine.” He brushed my hair away from my cheek. “You were supposed to shoot me, not the other way around. Then Tate would give you his big bad guy speech, and you’d think it was over, because you believed in black and white.”

  My stomach felt like a solid ball of pain. “They knew how to beat us.”

  “Yeah. But the cold equations fucked them up, because the math doesn’t care. They subtracted the wrong half of the equation, and I’ve been kicking them in the ass ever since. For you.” He looked at me earnestly. “I was doing it all for you.”

  I sighed, folding my hand over his before I scooted closer. “I know.”

  Some time later—once the laptop had been put back on its charger, and the “do not disturb” light had been lit on the door—we slept, both sprawled on top of the covers. Shaun kept one arm around me as we drifted off, clinging like he was afraid I’d vanish before he woke up. I’ve never been the world’s cuddliest person, and that didn’t seem to be one of the things that dying and coming back had changed, but for once, I didn’t mind. Anything that kept me from waking up and thinking I was back in CDC custody was okay by me.

  We’d been asleep for a few hours when a gentle chiming noise filled the room, followed by the voice of the Agora saying, “I do hope you’ve enjoyed your rest. Miss Garcia would like to remind you that you have an appointment that cannot be rescheduled.”

  “Huh?” I sat up, wiping the sleep from my eyes with one hand and fumbling for my sunglasses with the other. It’s amazing how quickly habits reassert themselves, even when they’re not really needed anymore.

  “She means it’s time to go see the Monkey.” Shaun leaned over to grab his shirt off the floor before sitting up.

  “The who?”

  “I’ll explain on the way. Come on.”

  Having just the one set of clothes made getting dressed to go substantially easier than it used to be. Not that I ever spent that much time thinking about what to wear, but when you own ten identical pairs of black pants, you sometimes have to spend a few minutes figuring out which ones are clean. We were both ready in half the time it would have taken before I died. Shaun led the way to the door, where he paused, looking back at me.

  “I was tired of being a haunted house,” he said. “Thank you for coming home.” Then he stepped out into the hall, not leaving any space for my response. Maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe this was one of those things that didn’t need to be responded to. I followed him out of the room. The door swung shut behind me, the locks engaging with a muted “click.”

  Mahir, Maggie, and Becks were already in the lobby, standing near the entrance to the airlock. Mahir paled when he saw me, looking for all the world like he’d just seen a ghost. In a weird way, I guess he technically had.

  “Everything fit?” asked Maggie, as we walked into conversational distance.

  “Like a dream,” I said. “Even the shoes are perfect. Thank you. You have no idea how good it feels to be dressed again. They wouldn’t even let me have a bra while I was under observation.”

  Maggie shuddered at the thought of that indignity. Becks kept eyeing me, expression not giving away what she might be thinking about the whole situation.

  “We were thinking you might not feel completely clothed just yet,” said Mahir, shaking off his shock. He dipped a hand into his pocket, pulling it out with the fingers curled around some small object. “If you would be so kind?”

  Blinking blankly at him, I held out my hand. He dropped an ear cuff into it.

  It was a small thing, barely weighing a quarter of an ounce, but it felt like the heaviest, most valuable thing in the entire world. I raised my free hand to my mouth, suddenly doubly glad for the familiar screen of my sunglasses. They would keep everyone else from seeing the tears in my eyes.

  “Oh, God, Mahir, thank you.” I blinked the tears away as firmly as I could. More rose to take their place. “Thank you so much.”

  “It only has three numbers in its address book,” said Becks, tone still tight with suspicion. “Tap it once for Shaun, twice for Mahir, and three times for me. Don’t try to reprogram it. There’s a safety lock on the controls. You mess with the directory, the whole thing will short out, and we’ll know.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Seriously, thank you all. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

  Maggie smiled. “I think I might have a bit of a clue.”

  I smiled back before reaching up and delicately affixing the ear cuff to the shallow outside curve of my ear. It pinched the skin in a way I remembered from high school, back when I started wearing the portable contact devices on a regular basis. I’d have raw spots and blisters for at least a week while I got used to it. And I didn’t really give a damn.

  “If we’re all prepared to wander gaily off to our dooms, we should really get moving,” said Mahir, tearing his eyes away from my face. “I’m sure our gracious hosts would prefer the doom not find us early.”

  “You are always such the little ray of golden sunshine, Mahir, you know that?” Shaun grinned. “Let’s roll.”

  Joey—

  What the fuck do you mean, “Danika was just in touch with you”? Danika hasn’t been in touch with anybody in years. She’s still on crazy safari in the crazy jungle, looking for the crazy magical herbal cure to the walking dead. Seriously, that woman is so much crazy crammed into a small space that she’s practically a crazy singularity. Have you been sticking your dick in the crazy singularity? Because that’s how you catch the really good social diseases.

  My coordinates are attached. They’re good for another four days. Then I’m cutting bait and we’re getting ourselves to higher ground. The floods are coming, my friend. Try to disengage from the crazy long enough to get the fuck out of their way.

  —Taken from an e-mail sent by Dr. Shannon Abbey to Dr. Joseph Shoji, August 3, 2041.

  I’m not sure which is worse: the fact that Shaun was willing to accept this woman as his dead sister, or the fact that I’m beginning to believe it might be true.

  Georgia Mason had a certain way of reacting to things—a kinesthetic language, rather than a verbal one. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could fake without years of practice. If this woman is an imposter, she hasn’t had years… and she moves like Georgia. She has all the little ticks and twitches down cold. When
she came out of that elevator dressed, with those sunglasses on… I was ready to call her Georgia and ask what we were going to do next. And that’s not a good thing.

  If she’s the real deal, then awesome, the laws of science have been twisted even further away from what they were intended to be. Bully for the laws of science. And if she’s not the real deal…

  If she’s not the real deal, I’m pretty sure she’s going to get us all killed.

  —From Charming Not Sincere, the blog of Rebecca Atherton, August 3, 2041. Unpublished.

  SHAUN: Twenty-eight

  There was no handy text-based adventure game to guide us back to the Brainpan, which meant I had to drive, since I was the one who’d driven us there the first time. I didn’t appreciate being separated from George. I’ve never been clingy—codependent, sure, according to every psychologist I’ve ever talked to, but not clingy. That didn’t mean I appreciated having her out of arm’s reach now that she was alive again.

  The need to have her where I could touch her would fade, given time. I was sure of it. Or at least I hoped I was sure of it, and not just lying to myself.

  You’ve had a lot of practice lying to yourself, commented Georgia. She didn’t sound angry. Just resigned.

  “Quiet,” I mumbled.

  Maggie, who was sitting in the passenger seat, gave me a sidelong look but didn’t say anything. I appreciated that. I had absolutely no idea what I would have said in return.

  In the back of the van, Mahir and Becks—mostly Mahir—were quizzing George, trying to feel out the limits of what she knew. She fielded most of their questions without hesitation. I stopped breathing a little bit every time they asked her something and she didn’t answer right away, waiting for the sound of Becks taking the safety off her gun, but George recovered every time. If there were questions she wasn’t going to get right, they weren’t the kind of questions the two of them would think to ask.

  I didn’t care what answers were hidden in the three percent of herself she’d lost by dying and coming back to life again. She’d already given me all the answers I needed.

  Maggie surreptitiously hit the button to seal the doors as we drove through the neighborhood leading to the Brainpan. Her worried glances out the window confirmed the reason why. Even after visiting and surviving once, the decay of the buildings disturbed her.

  “It’ll be okay, Maggie,” I said. “I doubt anyone lives here except the crazy people we’re on our way to visit. And sure, they may decide to shoot us and store our bodies in the freezer or something, but at least that’s a normal thing, right?”

  She muttered something in sour-sounding Spanish before saying, “It was never normal before I started traveling with you.”

  “See? It’s like I always say. Travel is broadening.”

  Maggie showed me a finger.

  I clucked my tongue. “Really? You’re going to flip me off? I mean, jeez, Maggie. In the last twenty-four hours, I’ve broken into the CDC—”

  “Again,” called Becks from the backseat. “Don’t forget Portland.”

  “—okay, point, broken into the CDC again, which, PS, kind of blew up while I was still there, seen my sister come back from the dead, and had a lot of coffee. It’s going to take more than a middle finger to upset me.”

  Maggie raised both hands, backs to me, and showed me two fingers.

  I nodded agreeably. “Much better. Hey, look! There’s the serial killer van!” It seemed a little odd to use a burned-out pre-Rising van as a landmark, but it made a certain amount of sense. In a neighborhood as decrepit as this one, you couldn’t exactly use paint colors or house numbers to navigate, and saying “turn at the house that looks like it was painted to blend in with viscera” would probably inspire even less confidence than “turn at the serial killer van.”

  “Goodie,” said Maggie.

  “You don’t sound excited.”

  “That’s because I would rather be home, with my dogs, writing porn,” she said.

  I glanced over at her. “Soon you will be.”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that.

  The van bumped and jounced down the driveway to the Brainpan. I parked outside the garage and killed the engine, waiting.

  George poked her head up between the seats. “Is there a reason we’re just sitting here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that reason would be…?”

  “The house is full of crazy people who would love an excuse to shoot us in one or more of our extremities—probably more—so we’re going to wait in the car until they tell us we’re allowed to go inside.” Said aloud, it sounded even more ridiculous than it really was. That wasn’t enough to make me move.

  “Crazy people like that one?” asked George, pointing toward my window.

  I turned.

  The Fox was perched in one of the half-dead trees still clinging to the soil around the edges of the yard. She’d somehow managed to become almost unnoticeable, despite her tricolored hair and rainbow leg warmers. She raised one hand in a jaunty wave when she saw us looking her way. Then she jumped easily down to the cracked dirt of what used to be lawn, sauntering toward the van.

  I had the driver’s-side window rolled down by the time she reached us. My hands were resting on the dashboard, clearly visible.

  “Hi!” she said, peering past me to George. There was a large gun in her hands. I was reasonably sure it hadn’t been there when she jumped out of the tree, and I knew I hadn’t seen her draw it. My conviction that this woman was not just crazy, but very, very dangerous, grew. “What’s your name? You weren’t here before.”

  Georgia looked at her coolly. The sunglasses helped. She was better at maintaining a neutral expression when her eyes couldn’t give her away. “Georgia Mason, journalist. You are?”

  “Me?” The Fox blinked at her, then cocked her head. “I’m Foxy. I used to be called Elaine, and everything was boring, and I was sad all the time. But things are better now. I wouldn’t ask that question again, if I were you.”

  George frowned. “No? Why not?”

  “Oh, because if you ask it where the Cat can hear you, she’ll tell me I should shoot you in the head a couple of times to teach you not to pry. And then I’ll probably do it, because she makes the best cookies, and I don’t like remembering that I used to be someone who was sad.” The Fox said this as if it were entirely reasonable. In her scrambled little head, it probably was.

  I broke in before George could say anything else. “Foxy, we’ve finished the errand we agreed to do. Can we come inside and talk about what happens next?”

  “Oh, sure.” The Fox smiled, taking two short hop-steps back from the van. “Come on in. I bet the Cat’s going to be thrilled to see you!”

  Behind me, I heard Becks mutter, “Only if she’s got a really good idea for ways to skin people alive.”

  “You heard the lady, gang,” I said, hoping the Fox hadn’t heard that. If she had, it didn’t seem to have bothered her. She was rocking back on her heels and looking at the sky, with the gun still in her hands and pointing at the car. I was pretty sure her crazy wasn’t an act, but her clueless definitely was. “Let’s get ourselves inside.”

  “Don’t forget to leave your weapons, or I get to shoot you all,” said Foxy blithely. “I’ll start with the shouty girl. She probably needs shooting more than all the rest of you combined.”

  “I do believe she likes you, Rebecca,” said Mahir.

  “Shut up,” snarled Becks, and began disarming.

  The Fox turned and wandered toward the house, apparently dismissing us. George, meanwhile, grabbed my shoulder and demanded, “Are we actually going to get out of this van without any weapons?”

  “That would be the plan.” I removed both guns from the waist of my jeans, putting them on the dashboard. George gasped a little. I paused, really looking at the guns for the first time in a long time. “Oh. I guess this one’s yours, isn’t it?”

  “She can get it back after we finish deali
ng with the happy neighborhood psychopath brigade, okay?” said Becks, dropping three clips of ammo onto the floor. “Right now, I want to get in, get what we came for, and get the hell out of here. Seattle is not a good place for us to be anymore.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” I opened the van door. Still looking unsure about the whole thing, George followed Mahir out the side door. Maggie walked around the van to meet us, and the four of waited as patiently as we could for Becks to finish disarming.

  “What are you carrying, an armory?” I called.

  “I’m prepared,” she shot back, and slid out of the van. Part of the reason it had taken her so long was revealed; she had already unlaced her combat boots, making them easier to remove. Seeing the understanding in my expression, she smirked. “See? Prepared. You should try it some time, Mason. You might discover that you like it.”

  Mahir snorted. “And swine may soar. Now come along.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Becks, in a lilting, half-mocking tone. She was still chuckling as we walked toward the house.

  I dropped back, letting Mahir and Maggie lead George as I asked Becks quietly, “You okay? You’re all… chipper… all of a sudden.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not, really. I feel like I’ve been put through seven kinds of emotional wringers in the last year, and I can’t even begin to imagine how you feel right now. Thing is? It’s not going to change, and it’s not going to stop, and it’s not going to go away. The dead are coming back to life, and this time, they want to give us a piece of their minds instead of taking a piece of ours away.” Becks nodded toward George, who was walking up the porch steps. “The more I talk to her, the more I think she’s for real. That’s terrifying. That’s my whole life, falling down, because my parents are the kind of old money that funds politicians who fund places like the CDC, and now the CDC is bringing back the dead, again. So no, I’m not okay. I just don’t have the energy left to be miserable about it all the damn time.”