Blackout

  “What?” said President Ryman.

  “What?” said Gregory.

  “Can I get a biohazard bag over here?” said Shaun. He grimaced again. “And maybe some gauze or something? This really stings.”

  “This is impossible,” said one of the Secret Service agents. He leveled his handgun on Shaun. “Sir, we need to get you out of here.”

  “No,” said President Ryman. We all turned to look at him, even Shaun, who still looked perfectly lucid. Conversion takes time, but he should have been showing some of the outward signs of infection after being shot with that large a dose of virus.

  “Sir?” said the Secret Service agent.

  “I said no. We brought these people here because we were looking for a Hail Mary. If they’re going to give us one, we’re not going to turn our backs on them.” President Ryman’s gaze settled on Gregory. “I’m sorry, son. I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Dr. Gregory Lake, sir. EIS.” Gregory produced a testing kit from his lab coat pocket, tossing it to Shaun. “If I may be so bold, this might help keep these nice gentlemen from shooting you before we can get out of here.”

  “Practical and prepared. That’s what I like to see in a public servant.” President Ryman turned to Shaun. “Shaun…”

  “I know, I know. Prove that this isn’t just preamplification crazy.” Shaun sighed as he popped the lid off his testing kit. “You know, George, if you’d just listened when I said I wanted to skip the presidential campaign and petition to go to Yellowstone instead, none of this would have happened.” He stuck his thumb into the opening.

  I managed to smile. It wasn’t easy. “But imagine all the fun we’d have missed. Meeting Rick, that town hall in Eakly…”

  “Burying Buffy. Burying you. I would have been okay with missing the fun.” The lights on his test unit seemed to be confused. They were flashing, returning to yellow over and over again. Finally, the green light stopped flickering, and the red and yellow began to oscillate, like the unit was trying to make up its mind. The Secret Servicemen drew their guns.

  I could see what came next as clearly as if it had already happened. Blood on the floor; Shaun falling, and no handy CDC madmen to bring him back to me. “Stop!” I shouted, putting both my hands up in front of me. “It hasn’t stopped yet!”

  It hadn’t stopped. The light was still flashing between red and yellow—and as I watched, the green came back into the rotation. The flash began holding there, a little bit longer each time. “Fascinating,” murmured Gregory.

  “You can’t dissect him,” I said.

  “No, but can we have some blood? Say, a gallon? For starters?”

  “We’ll see.” The light wasn’t flashing red at all anymore; instead, it was flickering between yellow and green. Then the yellow cut out entirely, and it was just green, uninfected, safe. I let out a slow breath, only then feeling the terror that had been burning in my veins the whole time. Shaun was safe. Shaun was going to be okay.

  Shaun was holding up the green-lit test unit with an expression of vague amusement on his face as he asked, “Well? Does that clear me? Or do I need to do a little dance, too?”

  “A little dance is never amiss,” said Alaric, straight-faced.

  I started to move toward Shaun. Gregory grabbed my shoulder, stopping me. “Don’t.”

  “What?” asked Shaun and I, in unison.

  Gregory shook his head, not letting go. “He may be immune, but you’re not. If the virus on his clothing is live, it could cause you to amplify.”

  “This gets better and better.” Becks glared at the body of man from the CDC. “I should have taken the headshot.”

  “Maybe next time,” said Shaun.

  “In the meantime, Mr. President, your wife and children are safe,” said Rick. “We can get out of here. We can find a way to make this right.”

  “It’s going to be a little harder than we thought.”

  The sound of Steve’s voice was a surprise. We turned to see him standing in the door, with plaster on the shoulders of his formerly immaculate black suit and the bin holding our equipment in his arms.

  “Steve?” said Shaun.

  “The building is surrounded,” said Steve. He moved to put the bin on the table. “I took the liberty of retrieving your weapons. We may be shooting our way out.”

  “Surrounded?” asked Becks, as she moved to rummage through the bin. “By what, political protestors?”

  “No,” said Steve. “Zombies.”

  “It’s always zombies,” complained Shaun. No one laughed. He frowned. “Tough crowd.”

  “What is it about you two and massive outbreaks?” asked Steve. “We were outbreak-free until you got here.”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” I said. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “With Dr. Shoji. I doubled back when I saw the moaners on the lawn.”

  At least something was going right. The Secret Service agents with President Ryman looked stunned, although whether it was at the zombies or our flippancy, I couldn’t have said. They weren’t with us on the campaign trail. They didn’t understand that this was how we coped.

  “Can’t we get out through the tunnels?” asked Rick.

  “Only if you enjoy being zombie-chow,” said Steve.

  “The CDC is nothing if not efficient.” Shaun took his gun from Becks, careful not to touch her hand. “Is there any route out of here that doesn’t get us eaten?”

  “We go through the parking garage to the covered motorway,” said Steve. “We may still get eaten, but we’ll have a better shot at getting out alive.”

  President Ryman was starting to look distinctly unhappy. Poor guy. Leader of the free world—and unwilling tool of an international conspiracy—one minute, potential zombie-food the next. “How did this happen?” he demanded.

  “Our extraction of your wife may have trigged some alarms,” said Gregory. “Between that and the situation here… the CDC is taking steps to resolve the matter. Congratulations. We are all expendable.”

  “Cheer up, everybody,” said Shaun, and grinned—the grin of a manic Irwin getting ready to shove his way into danger. “This is going to be great for ratings. Let’s go.”

  We went.

  The past thirty years bear a startling resemblance to the Greek myth of Pandora when looked at clearly, in the light. A box that should not have been opened; a plague of pains and pestilences loosed upon the world; and, at the end, hope. Hope that we refused, for many years, to allow ourselves to look upon with unshadowed eyes. What were we afraid of? Were we afraid hope would prove another phantom, slipping through our hands like mist? Were we afraid something worse was hidden in its wake?

  I think not. I think we were, quite simply, afraid to admit to hope because admitting to hope would mean admitting the world had changed forever. There is no return to the world we knew before the Rising. That world is dead. But as the Rising itself took such great pains to teach us…

  Even after death, life still goes on.

  —From Pandora’s Box: The Rising Reimagined, authored by Mahir Gowda, August 10, 2041.

  Look, Ma! I’m abducting the president! Aren’t you proud of your baby girl now?

  —From Charming Not Sincere, the blog of Rebecca Atherton, August 7, 2041. Unpublished.

  SHAUN: Forty

  We fell into a ragged formation with President Ryman at the center. Alaric was almost as well protected; he’d never passed his field certifications, and none of us was particularly enthused by the idea of him firing a gun in an enclosed space. The next ring was made up of Secret Servicemen—all of them except Steve, who was on the outer ring with me, Gregory, and the rest of my team… including Rick, who’d taken a pistol from one of the agents and was walking next to Becks. None of them objected to the vice president endangering himself. Either they were giving up, or they figured they’d be lucky if they managed to get any of us out alive, much less both of the elected officials.

  “You people still know how to throw a party
,” he said nervously.

  “Practice. Alaric!” I didn’t turn to face him; my attention remained on the hall ahead of us. Steve was on point, since he was the one who actually knew the way, but I wasn’t going to let him hit the first wave—if there was a first wave—alone. “How are you doing with bouncing a signal out of this loony bin?”

  “I’m still trying to get a clean connection!”

  “Well, keep trying. We need to get this footage to Mahir before we get ripped to pieces by the living dead.”

  “You’re always such an optimist,” muttered George.

  I slanted a grin her way. “Like I said. Practice.”

  “Is that also where you learned to be such an asshole?”

  “Yup. How’m I doing?”

  “Good.”

  The halls were eerily silent. That would have been a good thing—moaning usually means you’re about to become a snack food—but we didn’t know whether or not the zombies were inside. Eventually, even the nervous banter stopped. The only sounds were breathing, footsteps, and the occasional soft beep as Alaric tried and failed to make a connection with the outside world. I wanted to be comforted by the fact that George and I were walking into danger together, but I couldn’t manage it. I kept thinking about how fragile she was, how breakable… how easily killed. She might have gotten better the first time, but now? In a new body, with a new immune system that never learned to coexist with the virus? She’d die, and this time, the CDC wouldn’t be standing by to miraculously resurrect her. She’d stay gone.

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  No one said anything. At a time like this, me talking to myself was the least of our worries.

  Steve led us to a T-junction and paused. “We can’t take the elevator back up to the public garage; we’re going to need to use the private vehicle pool. It’s the only way to be sure we haven’t been compromised.”

  “It’s too quiet,” said Rick.

  George grimaced. “Why do people say that? Wouldn’t it be quicker to just ask if that noise was the wind?”

  Something moaned down the corridor to our right. I sighed. “That wasn’t the wind.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Steve tightly.

  “But how—” began Alaric.

  “Questions later, running now,” said Becks.

  We ran.

  The Secret Servicemen fell back until they were running behind the rest of us, moving at that strange twisted half jog men use when they want to cover the ground behind them as they run. Becks and Rick moved to flank the noncombatants—Alaric was still frantically slapping his PDA, trying to get a solid connection even as we were fleeing for our lives—while George and I took the front, running close on Steve’s heels.

  The moaning behind us continued, now getting louder. The zombies were fresh; they had to be, if they were gaining on us that fast. “I hate the fucking CDC,” I snarled.

  “Save your breath!” George advised.

  We ran.

  The hall seemed like it might be endless, right up until the moment where we turned a corner, and it ended, terminating in a set of clear glass doors leading into an airlock. There was a red light on above the door.

  “It’s gone into security lockdown,” shouted Steve. “We’re going to have to check out clean one at a time.”

  One of the Secret Servicemen moved through the group to slap his palm against the testing panel. The other agents were close behind him, dragging a protesting President Ryman in their wake. His safety was their job; ours wasn’t. And the moaning was getting louder.

  The light turned green. The first agent took his hand off the testing panel and stepped through the now-open door, letting the airlock cycle around him as he stepped out into the parking garage. Nothing attacked him immediately. He turned back to the rest of us, signaling for the second agent to send the president through.

  “Got it!” said Alaric, his delight sounding almost obscene, considering the circumstances. The rest of us stared at him. He held up his PDA. “Upload established. I’m transmitting.”

  “Finally,” breathed George, a certain tension slipping out of her shoulders. “Get those files up as fast as you can.”

  “Working on it.”

  “Even death doesn’t change your priorities, does it?” asked Rick, tiredly amused.

  “Not really, no,” said George. She grinned at him, gun still aimed toward the unseen zombies.

  I could have kissed her. It would probably have been a good thing, since we were all about to be zombie-chow. Instead, I adjusted my position, calling over my shoulder, “A little speed in the carpool lane would be appreciated, guys. We’ve got incoming, and I didn’t bring enough limbs to share with everybody.”

  “The system’s cycling as fast as it can,” said Steve reproachfully.

  “Don’t really give a fuck how fast the system is cycling. Just don’t want to get eaten by zombies right after uncovering a mass conspiracy to deceive the American public. Seems a little anticlimactic, you know what I mean? Like getting empty boxes on Christmas morning.”

  “You got empty boxes?” asked Becks. “Lucky bastard. I always got dresses.”

  Alaric glanced up. “Dresses?”

  “Frilly dresses,” she said with disgust. “Lacy frilly dresses.”

  “Are all journalists insane, or did I just hit the mother lode?” asked Gregory.

  “Yes,” said Rick and George, in unison.

  We were still laughing—the anxious laughter of people who know they’re about to die horribly—when the first zombies came around the corner, and laughter ceased to be an option.

  At least the sight of the zombies answered the question of where they came from. They were wearing White House ID badges, dressed in respectable suits and sensible shoes. Someone must have trigged an outbreak inside the building, opened the right doors, and let the feeding frenzy commence. Anyone who hadn’t been caught by the initial infection would have been taken out by the first wave of actual infected.

  I’ll give my companions this: No one screamed. Instead, everyone but Alaric and Gregory braced themselves and opened fire, giving the people at the airlock time to cycle through. Alaric moved to put himself behind Becks and out of the line of fire, attention still focused primarily on the device in his hands.

  “Forty percent uploaded!” he called.

  “Not enough,” muttered George, and fired. Her shot went wild. With a wordless sound of frustration, she shifted the gun to her left hand and used her right to pull off her sunglasses and throw them aside. She resumed her stance and fired again. This time, she didn’t miss.

  “Mr. Vice President!” Steve’s voice was anxious. “Sir, you need to go through the lock!”

  Rick didn’t move.

  “Go on, Rick,” I said, firing twice more into the seemingly endless tide of zombies. “Get out of here. Go be important. If we don’t get out, somebody who understands the news is going to need to interpret what Alaric’s putting online.”

  Rick still didn’t move. He fired again; another zombie went down.

  “Go on, Rick,” said George. “Mahir gets left behind, and you leave when we need someone to make it off the battlefield. That’s how this story goes.” She never looked at him. She just kept shooting.

  Rick shot her a stricken look, and he went, turning and retreating toward the airlock. I stepped a little closer to her, closing a bit more of the distance between us, and kept shooting. We were all falling back now, just a little bit, just a few steps. There are people who’ll tell you the worst place to be in an outbreak is a narrow tunnel with a limited number of exits. They’re probably right. But a narrow tunnel with a limited number of exits is also the best place to be in an outbreak, because the zombies can only come at you so fast.

  The airlock hissed. Rick was through. “Dr. Lake!” called Steve. “Come on!”

  Gregory didn’t need to be told twice. He turned and ran, vanishing from my range of sight. My clip clicked on empty. I ejected it and slapped
a new one into place, twisting the stock until I felt the clip snap home. George repeated the process two bullets later. By then, I was firing again, covering the hole she made. We still worked together well, even if neither of us was really the person we used to be. Even if neither of us was ever going to be that person—those people—again.

  “If this is crazy, I don’t care,” I said, and fired. Another zombie went down. We were losing ground fast now, and still they kept coming.

  “Neither do I,” said George, and kept firing.

  “Alaric!” shouted Steve.

  “Coming!” Alaric started forward, and froze, eyes widening as he looked at the screen of his little device. “There’s no signal there. I almost lost the connection.”

  “Alaric, just go!” snapped George.

  “I can’t! I have to get these files up before somebody hits us with an EMP screen!”

  Becks took two long steps backward, firing all the while, and snatched the device from his hand. “I can manage an upload as well as you can,” she snarled. “Now go.”

  Alaric stared at her. “Becks—”

  “Go!”

  He turned and fled. The zombies were still closing. There were five of us left now. Me, George, Becks, one of the Secret Service agents—I still didn’t know his name—and Steve, who was urging Alaric through the airlock as quickly as he could.

  “You see the failure inherent in this model, don’t you?” asked George. She fired; a zombie went down. They were closing in.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Becks groaned, the sound similar to a zombie’s moan only in that it held no actual words. No zombie could have sounded that aggravated. “You can’t shoot while you’re going through the airlock. That means someone has to watch your back. One person to stand guard, one person leaving. Until eventually…”