“Good.”
We were back in street clothes when we heard the shouting. We exchanged a wide-eyed look before we went running for the door. George was two steps ahead of me as we left the trailer, and saw a stunned-looking Rick come staggering up the path.
Lois was cradled against his chest.
I’ve seen a lot of road kill in my day. I know a dead cat when I see one. So did George; she sucked in a sharp breath, calling, “Rick…?”
He stopped where he was, staring at us.
George ran the last fifteen feet, and I ran close behind her. Fifteen feet. That’s all it took to change everything.
Those fifteen stupid little feet saved our lives.
“What happened?” George reached toward the cat, like there was a chance she could do something. I managed not to grab her arm and pull her away. Stupid as it may sound, I suddenly didn’t want her playing with dead things.
“She was just…I got back to the trailer, and I almost tripped on her.” Rick was still wearing his formal clothes. He hadn’t even had the time to change. “She was just inside the doorway. I think… even after they hurt her, I think she tried to get away.” He started to cry. “I think she was trying to come and find me. She was just a little cat, Georgia. Why would anyone do this to such a little cat?”
Then his words hit me. I stiffened. “She was inside? Are you sure this wasn’t natural causes?”
“Since when do natural causes break your neck?” asked Rick.
“We should go to the van.” The hair on the back of my neck was standing on end, and I suddenly felt very exposed.
George frowned at me. “Shaun—?”
“I’m serious. We can talk about this in the van, but we should go there. Right now.”
“Just let me get my gun.” George turned toward the trailer.
I didn’t think: I just knew I didn’t want her near that trailer. I grabbed her elbow, yanking her back. She stumbled into me, and a split second later, the trailer exploded with the characteristic concus-sive bang of packed C4. A second, larger bang followed the first as the rest of the explosives went off, and there was a third explosion in the distance as another trailer—probably Rick’s—went up.
Fuck this, I thought, and took off running, dragging George with me. I didn’t know whether Rick was following us, and I didn’t care. I was getting her to safety. Fuck everybody else.
My first impulse was to run ahead and make sure the ground was clear. George knew where we were going, and she knew enough to keep running without me hauling her. I forced the thought away.
I was staying with her, and we were going to get out of this. Together.
We were still running when something hit me in the arm, hard enough to break the skin. It was a lucky shot; they should have hit the Kevlar, and the fact that they hadn’t meant that someone had damn good aim. I glanced to the side, just long enough to see the hollow plastic dart sticking out of me. My throat went dry. I forced my eyes back to the front, and kept on running.
“Shaun?” George must have felt my steps falter.
That wasn’t important. All that mattered was getting her safely inside. “Get the doors!” I shouted, and pushed her away from me, toward the van. She stumbled as she ran, then evened out, and sprinted the last twenty feet. She grabbed the han-dles on the van’s rear doors, pressing her forefingers against the reader pads. There was a click as the onboard testing system ran her blood and prints, confirming that she was both uninfected and an authorized driver before the locks released.
“Rick! Shaun! Come on!” She pulled the doors open and climbed up into the back of the van, turning to offer us her hands.
Rick ran toward her. He finally seemed to realize that he was carrying Lois, because he dropped the cat’s body in order to take George’s hand and let her pull him up to safety.
I kept running until I was about ten feet away. Then I slowed, stopping just out of reach. I wasn’t in a hurry anymore. I didn’t need to be.
George blinked, a line appearing between her eyebrows as she frowned in confusion. “Shaun? Stop f**king around. Get in the van.”
“No can do, George. I’m sorry.” I turned to show her the dart protruding from my arm. A patch of red had appeared around it, like a warning.
I was bleeding. And I wasn’t stupid, no matter what I tried to make people believe; I’d seen those darts before. I knew what they meant.
George paled. “No. It’s…it’s not that. It’s a tranquilizer. It’s harmless. Get in the van. At least let us run tests. At least…”
“You know better.” I smiled at her, despite the growing ache in my chest. She was safe. She was in the van. She’d be able to drive away, and get the hell out of this whole situation. “Don’t play dumb, George. You’re no good at it. You’ll just make us both look bad.”
Rick’s face appeared next to hers as he leaned back out of the van. His eyes widened when he saw my arm. “Oh, hell.”
“My thoughts exactly.” My smile faded as I straightened up. “Get me a shotgun, and someammo. Don’t hand them to me—toss them out the back. We’re about to be in a bad situation, and I’ll hold it off for as long as I can.”
“Shaun.” George’s voice was barely a whisper. “Please. This isn’t funny.”
“You’re the one who says the truth is all that matters, Georgia,” I said, as gently as I could, under the circumstances. “Here’s the truth: I’m finished.
Now give me some guns. Let me buy you a little more time. Let me do something. Please.”
The raw need in my voice, heavy with all the things I didn’t have a way of saying, must have finally gotten through to her. George sniffled as she nodded, once. Then she disappeared into the van, reappearing a few seconds later with a shotgun and a box of ammunition. She tossed them to me. I caught the gun, and allowed the box to land on the pavement at my feet.
“Shaun—”
“I love you, Georgia Mason. Now shut that door.”
She looked at me. Rick was still there, but he didn’t matter anymore; all that mattered was Georgia, and me, and the distance between us, which we would never be able to close again. Those bastards had taken her away from me with a single needle, and nothing was ever going to give her back.
I smiled at her, trying to keep my chin up. If anyone needed me to be brave, it was Georgia.
Then I turned my back on her.
The sound of moaning was starting in the distance, as the people who’d been caught in the blast from our exploding trailers got up and discovered that they were no longer among the living. I’d be with them, soon enough. For now, I had a line to hold, and George had work to do.
“I love you, too.” Her words were barely loud enough to hear over the rest of the surrounding noise. Maybe I imagined them. If I did, I didn’t care; they were all I needed to take with me into the dark.
The van doors slammed shut. I racked the slide on my shotgun, and waited for the dead to come to me.
If you want an easy job—if you want the sort of job where you never have to bury somebody that you care about—I recommend you pursue a career in whatever strikes your fancy…just so long as it isn’t the news.
—From Another Point of True, the blog of Richard Cousins, June 20th, 2040.
Two: Georgia
Rick was the one who actually closed the van doors. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move. Shaun’s back was to me, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to leave a story untold—I wanted to jump down and run to him, like one of those brainless he**ines in Buffy’s stories, and go with him into the dark.
If she were still alive, I’d have to apologize to her for calling those characters unrealistic, I thought distantly. I didn’t move as Rick flipped the dead-bolts on the rear doors, and then pushed past me to do the same on the movable wall that shut the driver’s cabin off from the rest of the vehicle. With those latches thrown, we were effectively cut off from the rest of the world. Nothing could get in, and unless we opened the locks, nothing could get out. Barring heavy explosives, we were as safe as it was possible to be.
We were safe, and Shaun was outside with the dead, guaranteeing himself a place on the Wall.
That was what he’d always claimed to want. I looked at the closed doors, and wondered whether he’d finally changed his mind.
“Georgia?” Rick’s voice intruded on my thoughts. I turned to face him, blinking as I realized that he was still there. Somehow, I’d already been starting to think of myself as alone. “When was the last security sweep?”
“I…I don’t know.” I took a seat at the main console, glad to be doing something as I brought up the security recordings for the last day. The scanner came up clean, showing no attempted break-ins or unauthorized contact with the van’s exterior during that time. “It looks like Shaun ran one while you were at the event. I don’t know whether it was suc-cessful or not.”
“He didn’t start swearing.”
“So we’re probably clean.” My fingers itched to turn on the exterior cameras. I wanted to see Shaun one more time.
I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him convert. I wanted to remember him as Shaun, not as one more member of a mob of shambling undead. I put my hands in my lap, folding them tightly.
I sat there in silence for several minutes, waiting for something to change. It was Rick who forced my hand, asking the one question I most needed to hear:
“What do we do now?”
We. Me and Rick; we were what was left. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat, suddenly tired. “I don’t know what you do next, Rick. I wish I did. Maybe you should write something, or call Steve for an evac, or…I don’t know.
But I need to post. I need to…”
I needed to write down what happened. I needed to make sure people understood what this cost us, what we paid, what we thought we would be paying. This wasn’t what we signed up for, but it was what we died for. It was what we felt we had to do.