“Fuck you, bitch!” he shouted, and fired again.
He had to lower his arm to shoot, which meant it wasn’t as well braced in that brief second. I jumped, grabbed his elbow, and twisted until the gun was aimed directly at his throat. His face went pale, eyes widening to an almost comical degree.
“No,” I said. “Now give me the gun.”
John paused. For a moment, it was like he had just… just stopped. There was still resistance in his body; he wasn’t giving up. He just wasn’t moving, either. He was taking a breath. Then he moved his hand slightly, as far as my grip allowed, and pulled the trigger.
What shot out of the barrel wasn’t a bullet: It was a thick silver needle, maybe four inches in length, which embedded itself in his throat. He made a choking noise. I let go of his arm and grabbed the gun from his suddenly unresisting fingers. He stumbled backward. Not far; just a half step, just far enough that I saw my opening. I planted a foot at the center of his chest and shoved as hard as I could. He fell fully into the bedroom. I grabbed the door and slammed it shut.
There were a lot of things that could be delivered via dart. Drugs and poisons—and viruses. It didn’t take a genius to guess which of those things John was likely to have been shooting at us. “Ben?” I turned. “You okay?”
“He missed me,” said Ben, crawling out from under the table. One of the silver needles was embedded in the floor. Ben started to reach for it.
“No!” I shouted.
Ben stopped, pulling back his hand and giving me a bewildered look. “What do you mean, no? We need to know what this is.”
“It’s a hollow dart,” I said. “They’re used in animal conservation. You can drop a sedative payload into a deer from twenty feet away. You really think he came in here to shoot us with sedatives? Grab a hazmat kit and pick the damn thing up with a Kevlar sleeve if you must, but do not touch it with your hands.”
Ben’s eyes widened. He looked to the closed bedroom door and then back to me. “You’re not saying…”
“I’m not saying anything, but I’m implying one hell of a lot, and I think it’s time we get out of here. Whatever you had in the bedroom is a loss. Sorry about that, but I don’t think it’s going to survive decon.” The RV was small but the bedroom was smaller; most of our clothing and equipment was stored in the main living space. Thankfully. I tapped my ear cuff as I moved toward the nearest closet. “Mat, it’s Ash. Stop the vehicle, send out a distress call, and get the hell out. This is an evacuation. Anything you want, you tell me now, because I don’t think we’re coming back here.”
“Ash, what are you talking—”
“John just tried to kill us both. I’m pretty sure he finished by shooting himself with live Kellis-Amberlee, to make it easier to cover his tracks.” There was a loud thud from the bedroom. I amended: “I’m positive he shot himself with live Kellis-Amberlee. He’s amplified, he’s locked in the bedroom, and he’s hungry. Now stop the damn car.”
We began slowing down. My ear cuff beeped with another incoming transmission. I jerked my head hard to the side. “You’re go for Ash.”
“Ash, are you okay?” Audrey’s recent anger was gone, replaced with borderline panic. “We just got the weirdest transmission from John—”
“Did someone record it? I want to hear that bastard amplify,” I said, pulling things out of the closet and piling them on the floor, as far from that damned needle as I could. The other one was embedded somewhere. We were going to have to leave it behind. We were still slowing down. We’d be stopped soon, and I couldn’t justify staying in the vehicle after that. This was a hot zone now. “What did he say?”
“He said Ben was sick, and that you were standing in front of him so John couldn’t shoot, even though Ben was about to amplify,” said Audrey. “What’s going on over there? Are you all right? Is Ben… is Ben…?”
“Do you have our GPS coordinates? How close are you?”
“Um, about a half mile back. Ash—”
“I love you, I’m sorry I nearly got myself eaten, and you’re going to find me, Ben, Mat, and as many of our things as we can salvage on the side of the road,” I said. “I’ll explain when you get here.” I killed the connection. I hated to hang up on her—this wasn’t going to help the fight we’d been having, at least not in the way I wanted it to—but I needed to focus on the tasks at hand. Like emptying our weapons locker into a rolling suitcase. I paused long enough to strap my gun to my thigh.
“Remind me never to sit around unarmed again,” I said. “I don’t care if we’re in the most secure location in the world, we’re not getting caught this way twice. Once was once too many.”
Ben had been tearing down our computer equipment, moving with quick efficiency only slightly undermined by the way his hands kept shaking. He looked in my direction and said, “I didn’t have my weapon either. This isn’t just on you.”
“But see, Ben, you’re about the facts, and I’m supposed to be the wall that stands between you and the things that want to keep those facts from getting out. I am supposed”—I slammed the locker shut—“to be”—I opened the last closet and began yanking out the rest of our clothing—“the wall.”
“Ash.” A hand touched my shoulder. I jerked away, pulling my arm back as I readied a haymaker, before I realized the hand belonged to Ben: He was the only option. The RV was finally, finally pulling to a stop, and Ben was standing beside me, a worried expression on his face. “This wasn’t your fault. None of this has been your fault. If this is on anyone, it’s on me; I was the one who decided we needed to follow a presidential campaign if we wanted to make it to the big time, remember? This is on me. You’re doing a wonderful job. You’re keeping us all safe.”
“For how long?” I pointed to the needle jutting out of the floor. “We’re up against people we don’t know, who will use whatever weapons they can get their hands on to hurt us. John was supposed to be our friend. When even our friends can do this sort of thing…”
“It’s worse than that,” said Mat’s voice in my ear. I straightened, blinking. Ben did the same. “Sorry about overriding the com locks, but I can’t get the side doors to unseal from the dash, which means we’re going to need to do blood test protocols.”
“Makes sense,” said Ben. “We have a biohazard in here.”
“Right,” said Mat. “Well, you’re not the only one. We’ve got a double whammy of a problem, and we’re going to need to get to cover like, five seconds after you get out of the vehicle. I’m serious. Bring the baggage we can’t leave behind, and be ready to run like fuck. We’re talking Jurassic Park and the raptors are on your ass levels of running for your life. If you don’t, you may not have a life to run for.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “Did you park us in the middle of an outbreak?”
“Georgette Meissonier—you know, the Fictional who travels with the Masons? Well, she’s dead. There was an accident while their convoy was moving, and she got bitten by a member of the campaign staff, and she died.”
“That’s tragic, but I don’t see what it has to do with us,” I said. “Sorry if she was a friend of yours. Not trying to be heartless. Just trying to keep breathing. Which means we need to pick it up, and you need to be working the exterior lock.” A clean blood test from outside would activate the interior testing panels, and allow me and Ben to check ourselves. It was a convoluted system, but it was one of the only things that allowed the nation’s RVs to stay on the road. If the driver tested clean, they could at least attempt to get their passengers out. If the driver didn’t, the passengers stayed inside, isolated and supposedly safe.
“Supposedly” was such a big word.
“That’s why I’m telling you this.” Mat sounded about as frustrated as I felt. They were clipping their words, swallowing the vowels until everything turned staccato and hard. “Her death was confirmed and uploaded to the Wall fifteen minutes after she was reported dead to the CDC.”
“How do you know
what was reported to the CDC?” asked Ben.
“A friend of mine watches for anomalies like that,” said Mat, a little less tensely, and a little more evasively. “She says time-stamp glitches can happen, but fifteen minutes? No. That’s too big. That’s not an error, that’s an intentional report that someone has been infected. So I asked her to keep an eye out for anyone else related to the campaign who might get hit with a glitch like that. She called me five minutes before you asked me to stop the vehicle.”
My stomach sank until it felt like it was going to drop out of my body and keep falling, passing through the floor, to the very center of the planet. “We got reported as infected and dead, didn’t we?”
“We did,” said Mat. “All three of us.”
“At least now we know he was lying when he said he’d spare you,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to steady myself. “What of Audrey?”
“She’s not listed.”
“Ah, thank whoever’s listening, and thank the dumb bastard’s crush besides.” I opened my eyes. “All right. Come get us out, and then we run for cover. It might could be we’ll die today, but if we do, we’ll do it running as hard as we can, and we’ll shame the devil on the way down.”
“On my way,” said Mat. They didn’t kill the connection. We could both hear the RV door slam, and the crunch of footsteps on the ground. I listened as intently as I could, waiting for the moaning to begin, or for the sound of gunshots. This was all too easy.
Or maybe my idea of what was easy and what was hard was flawed. I had wrestled a gun away from a man who wanted to infect before he killed, because he needed our deaths to look natural—or at least as natural as the deaths of those who had attacked me in Huntsville. I had learned too much, and shared what I knew, and triggered some sort of extermination protocol. “Easy” was no longer a part of the plan. Survival was all that mattered.
There was a beep. I looked around before I realized it had come through the open connection, and not from inside the RV. Mat muttered something under their breath. The beep came again. “Uh, guys?”
“What is it, Mat?” asked Ben.
“The locks won’t disengage. Somehow, the old blood tests Mallory had disabled are back online, and PS, they’re broken. I’m checking out clean—it knows I’m not infected—but it still won’t open. I can’t get you out of there.”
“Why the hell not?” I demanded.
“When John attacked you, where was he before that?”
“He was asleep in the bedroom.” Except he hadn’t been sleeping the whole time, had he? He’d come out as soon as I’d said enough that he knew it was time to take us out of the equation. John could have been awake for hours, and we’d have no way of knowing. I amended, “In the bedroom, anyway. He was definitely in the bedroom. Why?”
“Because it’s possible to upload malware to a locked-loop testing system. They’re not unhackable. Too many open ports. I’ll call you back.” There was a click, and the connection was cut.
John was still banging on the RV’s bedroom door. He was fully amplified by this point. He knew there was a source of food nearby, and he wanted it. The slow, viral intelligence that had replaced his humanity would never give up, not until his body broke down, and that could take days. He’d die of thirst before anything else, and that wasn’t a fast process.
“He’ll break that down in an hour or two,” I said, looking toward the door. “It’s not built to take this sort of abuse for long periods.”
“I want a divorce,” said Ben.
I turned toward him, blinking. “Excuse me?”
“I said, I want a divorce.” Ben smiled a little. “You’re not going to ask me for one. Mom just died, you’re still adjusting to being a citizen, there’s a lot of great reasons for you to put it off. I know that. But you need this more than I do. And hell, maybe I need it too. I met some really sweet Newsie girls at the convention, and I couldn’t figure out how to get them to see past the ring on my finger.”
“You don’t wear a ring,” I said.
“They’re Newsies,” he replied. “They all know it’s there, even if it isn’t visible, and most of them aren’t looking to join a harem. So let’s get divorced. You can marry Audrey. I know you want to. And I can finally start looking for someone I want to marry. Someone who’s funny, and sweet, and likes me for me, and isn’t a lesbian…”
“See, it’s that last one where you lose me,” I said.
His smile widened. “It’s that last one where I never had you. I’m fine with that. I’ve always been fine with that. But maybe it’s time for both of us to start asking for more. So can I have a divorce?”
“I’ll see if Amber can recommend a good lawyer,” I said. I knew what he was doing. This was a distraction, a way of keeping me from focusing on what was happening to us. I appreciated it, even as I wanted to shake him and tell him we had more important things to worry about. Instead, I forced myself to smile back, and said, “It wasn’t so bad being married to you. If I had to be married to a man, you’re the one I would have picked, no question about it.”
“We’re a good team,” he said. “I didn’t necessarily think this was where things were going to wind up going when I decided to fly to Ireland and help you out—”
“If you’d predicted this future, we would have needed to have a nice long talk about how people are not playthings and Sherlock Holmes is not a life coach,” I said.
Ben laughed. It was an incongruous sound when set against the steady thumping from the bedroom. “Yeah, I know. But we did okay, right? We did some good. We had some fun. We didn’t break too many things that shouldn’t have been broken.”
“You’re very sentimental. I don’t like it.” The new voice coming through my ear cuff was female, with an accent that somehow combined the oddest aspects of both French and Russian. I wanted to hear her recite poetry. “Stop it right now, or I will leave the two of you in that tin can to rot.”
“Excuse me?” I stiffened. “Who is this, please? This is a private channel.”
“There is no such thing as a private channel, sentimental girl, and if you believe in the existence of such things, then there’s no wonder you’ve been targeted for extinction. You’re a technological dinosaur, and the comet is coming.”
Mat sighed. Apparently, we had become a party line. “Tessa, please don’t torment my teammates just because you can. Ash, Ben, this is my friend Tessa. Tessa, these are my teammates.”
“They are dinosaurs. You belong to a team full of dinosaurs.”
“I know,” said Mat. “Now can you let them out? Please? I called you because I need you to let them out, and because I don’t know anyone else who could do this remotely.”
“Wait, what?” Ben frowned. It was a general expression, since there was no one but me around to see it. “What do you mean, do this remotely?”
“I am very far away from you, dinosaur, and I am happy with that situation.” The sound of typing came through my ear cuff. It was fast: This Tessa woman knew how to move her fingers. “You will never see my face, you will never taste my cooking, and I will be nowhere near you when the comet hits. But you’re friends of my dear Mat, and that means I can be merciful to something that will soon become extinct. See how kind I am?”
There were several beeps—this time from inside the RV, as lights I had never seen before came on above the doorframe. There were five in total. Each of them started yellow, cycled to red for two seconds, and turned green, remaining steady.
The last light was red when Tessa said, “Technically, this is a felony, since I am manipulating the outcome of an official blood testing system. This isn’t transmitting to any of the servers meant to keep and collect this data; they’ll think you’re still inside your vehicle when they come for it. And they’re coming. A team was dispatched from your local office five minutes ago. Do me a favor and don’t eat anyone, won’t you? I’m not in the United States, but I still don’t want to become a terrorist because you got hu
ngry.”
“We’re not infected,” I said.
“Sweet dinosaur, oblivious to what’s coming, don’t you know? Everyone’s infected.” The red light turned green. The door swung open, and there was Mat, standing next to the RV, an anxious look on their face and a backpack over their shoulder.
“Well?” they said. “Come on. I don’t know how long that’s staying open.”
“We’re coming,” I said.
We tossed our bags out the door and jumped out after them. Mat was there to help us grab as much as we could, and we took off down the median, running as fast as we could away from the RV. We didn’t discuss it: We didn’t need to. If the CDC thought that we were infected and contained, they were going to do the most sensible thing, and prevent the infection from spreading. They were going to blow up the RV.
There was an abandoned rest stop less than a quarter mile up the road. I gave Mat a questioning look as we ran, not wasting my breath. I was the strongest of the three of us, and I was carrying the bulk of our weapons and equipment. It was a fair division of labor, but it didn’t leave me with much breath to waste on things like asking questions.
“I thought we might need to run,” said Mat, gasping for air between words. “We can hide here.”
So could the dead, but the thought was sound, and it wasn’t like we had any more options at this point. We charged down the exit leading to the rest stop, getting under cover of the trees bare seconds before the sound of helicopter blades came churning through the air, chopping the wind into bite-sized pieces. If the leaves were too thin, or the helicopter flew directly overhead, we were done for. Mat was wearing lime green pants, and my hair was a burning brand, notifying them of our presence. All we could do was keep running, and hope for the best.
My ear cuff beeped. Audrey. I jerked my head to the side, and said, as softly as I could, “We’re alive, we’re not infected, whatever they’re telling you is a lie, we’re alive, we’re not infected, please, believe me, love.”