We left the apartment in a tight diamond formation. I was on point and Becks was at the rear, with Dave and Alaric flanking Kelly in the center. If there were any other people in the building, they didn’t show themselves as we descended. That’s the right thing to do when you’re caught in an outbreak and don’t have an evacuation route: stay put, stay quiet, and wait for the nice men with guns to come and save you. Sometimes they’ll even show up in time.
We were halfway down the last flight of stairs when the sirens changed, going from a continuous shriek to a rising series of piercing air-horn blasts, like a car alarm with rabies. Alaric stumbled, knocking Kelly into Becks and nearly sending all three of them sprawling. I took two more steps and a get out of the way, and then turned, looking back toward the others.
That’s not a good sound.
“I know,” I muttered, before saying, more loudly, “Dave? What’s going on?”
Dave might as well have been a statue. He was standing frozen, eyes gone wide in a suddenly pale face. My question startled him back into the moment. He blinked at me twice, shook his head, and whipped his PDA out of his pocket, fingers shaking as he tapped the screen.
“We should be moving,” said Becks.
“We should be waiting,” I replied.
“We should be praying,” said Dave, glancing up. “This block has been declared a loss.”
Alaric closed his eyes. Becks started swearing steadily in a mixture of English, French, and what sounded like German. Even George got into the action, uttering some choice oaths at the back of my head. Only Kelly didn’t seem to share the group’s sudden distress. Sweet ignorance.
“Meaning what?” she asked. “Why are we stopping?”
“Meaning they salt the ashes,” said Becks, before starting to swear again.
Dave swallowed, squaring his shoulders as he looked at me. “Boss…”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“There’s got to be another option.”
There isn’t, said George, quietly. You know that. You have to let him.
“I can delay the lockdown. Not forever, but long enough.”
I shook my head. “No. There’s got to be—”
“There’s not,” said Alaric. I turned toward him, not quite fast enough to miss the mixture of terror and relief washing over Dave’s face. Alaric had pulled off his goggles, presumably so we could see his eyes. He was looking at me with something close to pity in his expression. “The computers in the apartment are wired into the building’s security systems. They can’t be controlled remotely, but they work just fine if you’re tapped directly into the cable. He can do it. But only if he does it from up there.”
“Do you know what you’re asking me to do?” I demanded. “You’re asking me to let him kill himself.”
“I’m asking you to let me do my job.” Dave’s voice was quiet, almost serene. “I didn’t become an Irwin because I wanted to live a long and happy life, boss. I sure as shit didn’t stay with this site because I thought it was going to be a cushy job. The math’s pretty simple. It’s me or it’s everybody. Pick one.”
“Can’t someone else—”
“Unless you’re planning to bring Buffy back from the de, no.”
My hand clenched into a fist. I forced myself to lower it, gritting my teeth all the way. “You’re trying to piss me off,” I accused.
“Yeah, I am,” Dave agreed. The air-horn blasts were getting louder and closer together, breaking up our conversation like gunshots. “Keep fighting me, and we all die here.” And then, the killing blow: “You’ll never find out who killed your sister.”
I stiffened. There was a moment where it could have gone either way; a moment where I could have grabbed him and dragged him along with us, where we would have been caught in the government lockdown when it hit our building.
Please, George whispered.
The moment passed.
“Who has the ID Dr. Wynne made for Kelly?” I demanded. Kelly blinked as she produced the card from her pocket. I snatched it from her hand and passed it to Dave. She started to protest. I cut her off, saying, “You’re not carrying any trackers, and your equipment checks clean. This is the only thing with circuitry we can’t decode, and somebody traced you here. Understand?”
Mutely, she nodded, face gone white with increasing terror. I’m not sure she’d realized before that moment that she could still be followed.
Dave shot me a pained look, saying, “Shaun—”
“Just don’t. You f**ker, you better make this count.” I turned my back on him and continued down the stairs, snapping, “Move out!” to the others. I heard steps going up as he started back toward the apartment. Then the others were moving with me, Alaric and Becks hustling Kelly along.
We were halfway down the tunnel when the bleach jets came on, but that was all; no acid, no nerve toxins designed to target the infected and the healthy alike. We just got decontaminated, and then we were out, moving through the empty garage to our vehicles. Becks got Alaric and Kelly into the van while I donned my helmet and straddled George’s bike, shoving the key into the ignition.
Cameras ringed the parking garage; cameras with feeds that plugged into the building’s security system. I turned to the nearest of them, blinking back the tears that were suddenly threatening to blur my vision, and saluted.
“Move it or lose it, boss,” said Dave, voice cracked and distorted by the speakers in my helmet. “You’ve got ten minutes at most before the fire rains down.”
“Don’t you dare move into my head after you die, you f**ker,” I said. “It’s crowded enough in here.”
“Boss?”
I closed my eyes. “Open the doors.”
Whatever whack-ass computer voodoo he’d worked on the security system was good; the doors slid open as soon as I gave the command. Only a few of the infected were visible on the street outside, but they’d start to mob soon enough. I gunned my engine, waving for Becks to follow, and roared out into the light. She follows bikeout fifteen yards behind, both of us cutting a path toward the closest major street—Martin Luther King Boulevard—and our hopeful survival.
Dave was wrong about one thing. We didn’t have ten minutes. The building went up in a pillar of flame six minutes later, along with every other structure in its immediate vicinity. Slag and ash rained down on the entire neighborhood. Collateral damage for a major urban outbreak; the only way to be sure the infection wouldn’t spread.
We were outside the quarantine by that point, outside the kill zone, but the light from the explosion was still enough to hurt my eyes. I pulled off to the side of the road and kept watching it all the same. When the glare got to be too much, I put on the extra pair of sunglasses George always kept in a case clipped to her handlebars, and I kept watching.
I kept watching while Oakland burned, and a good man burned with it. A lot of good men, I’m sure, but only one who’d answered to me. The first man lost on my watch, instead of on my sister’s.
“All right, George,” I said. “Now what?”
For once, she didn’t have an answer.
BOOK II
Vectors and Victims
Life’s more fun when you take the chance that it might end. I have no regrets.
—DAVE NOVAKOWSKI
A martyr’s just a casualty with really good PR. I’d rather be a living coward any day.
—GEORGIA MASON
—transmitting? You f**king useless piece of crap, don’t you cut out on me n—
—fixed it. I hope that means I fixed it. If this is getting out, this is Dave Novakowski reporting live from the headquarters of the After the End Times. Well. This was Dave Novakowski reporting live. By the time this report finishes bouncing to our servers, and Mahir sees it and clears it by the boss, I’m going to be long d—
—shit, the sirens just stopped. That means they’re not letting evacuees out anymore. Too late, ha-ha, joke’s on me, couldn’t get out if I wanted to. I take my hands off the controls, the building goes into lockdown. I stay here, I can let people out—or I could, if there were any people left—but I can’t escape. Irony in action, ladies an—
—dalene? Even if this entry stays in-house, I know you’ll see it, some. God, Maggie, I’m sorry we screwed around so much. We should’ve just gone for it. That’s what people ought to do. They should just go for it. I loved you a lot. I loved my job a lot. I guess that makes me one of the lucky ones. I guess—
—can hear the bombs now; I can hear them coming, I can he—
—From The Antibody Electric, the blog of Dave Novakowski, April 12, 2041. Unpublished.
Six
Maggie’s place is located six miles outside a town called, I swear to God, Weed. Weed, California, one of the smallest urban areas intentionally reclaimed after the Rising. What made them so special? Choice of location: Weed offers convenient access to three of California’s major rivers, and with red meat permanently off the menu, the fishing industry is one of the hottest things going. If you want river-fished trout to be one of your menu options, you need to reclaim your fishing towns. Weed was rescued from the oblivion that claimed most of the towns and cities built too close to the wild, and it was rescued because it was so close to the wild. Sometimes, logic just doesn’t work.
Driving from Oakland to Weed takes about four and a half hours if there aren’t any quarantine barriers on I-5. According to the GPS, we were looking at clear sailing the whole way. I signaled for Becks to follow and pulled back onto the road, turning north. It was time for us to get the hell out of Dodge.
Shaun?
“I’m not in the mood right now, George.” The roar of the wind ripped my words away as soon as they were spoken, but that really didn’t matter; she’d hear me. She always heard me, even when I didn’t say a word.
I lost him, too.