“There’s a control room on the main concourse,” said Pris. “All we have to do is get to one of the house phones, call up, and tell whoever’s in there which switches to press.”
“How do we even know that there’s someone inside?”
Pris gestured with her free hand, indicating the convention center. “Look around. There’s no way someone had the opportunity to get into a secure room with a lock on the door and didn’t do it.”
Marty looked at her. She looked back, a challenge in the tilt of her chin. Pris wasn’t a girl who enjoyed sitting idle; once she had a thing that could be done, she wanted to do it. Getting the wireless back on was something she could do, and that meant that she wanted to be doing it.
As bad as things were, they could get a lot worse. This wasn’t the time to start trouble with the people he needed watching his back. “Wake Eric up,” Marty said gruffly. “We’re going to get the wireless back on.”
* * *
9:25 P.M.
Shawn’s phone beeped softly, snapping him out of his light doze and into a state of almost instant awareness. The phone beeped again. He hit the button to activate the walkie-talkie function, and Lorelei’s voice said uncertainly, “Dad? Are you there?”
“Lorelei?” He smiled as he raised the phone to his mouth. “I’m here, honey. What’s going on?” Around him, the convention center slept, or tried to. Dwight and Rebecca had never come back from their trip to the parking garage. Their absence had created an uneasy divide among the Browncoats. Half of them were firmly convinced that Dwight and Rebecca had managed to find a way out and would be coming back with emergency services. The other half believed that Dwight and Rebecca were never coming back at all.
After spending most of his adult life in the Coast Guard, Shawn knew better than to pin all his hopes on empty wishes. Dwight was a Marine. If he’d been able to come back, he would have done so, leaving Rebecca to organize a rescue party while he told everyone else what was going on. He hadn’t come back. That meant he couldn’t come back…and anything that could stop a Marine who didn’t want to be stopped was probably stopping that Marine permanently.
“I finally got them to listen to me at the office. Lieutenant Farago said to let you know that he’s working on getting cell service into the hall, but nobody would tell me what was actually happening.” There was a note of panic in Lorelei’s voice that Shawn didn’t like. At the end of the day, she was his daughter, and she shared his tendency to go running toward danger as fast as her legs could carry her when she felt like the people she loved were at risk. “Are you okay?”
“Well, honey, we’ve had to redefine the local standards for ‘okay,’ but none of us is hurt right now.” Not unless you included Dwight and Rebecca, and that was just a possibility, not a definite fact. “So they think they can get our phones to start working? That’s a good thing.” It would have been better if it had happened faster. Most of the people in the convention center probably weren’t carrying chargers. Shawn could see outlets and universal connectors becoming the start of the next big fight.
“Yes. But getting the phones working won’t get you out right now.”
“I understand that, honey.”
Lorelei paused for a long moment before she asked, “Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Yes,” admitted Shawn. He couldn’t think of any good reason for the relative peace that had settled over the hall. After the screaming and hysterics that had accompanied the beginning of the siege, he was expecting all-out chaos, not this strange and sudden lull. “But worrying about what we can’t change won’t do us any good. You tell Lieutenant Farago that we need an exit strategy as soon as he can get us one. Things are calm right now. I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”
“Okay, Daddy,” said Lorelei. “I love you.”
“I love you too, sweetheart. Just keep flying, okay? Everything’s going to be just fine. You’ll see.”
Lorelei didn’t answer him.
LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044
Our tea is cold. Lorelei doesn’t seem to notice, and I don’t feel that pointing it out to her would be beneficial. Her gaze is far away. Sometime during the most recent part of her story, she left the present behind and slipped into a time and place that I have never seen. She is back in San Diego, back in the first summer of the Rising, and I begin to understand why she never wanted to tell her story.
LORELEI: We didn’t know how the infected behaved yet. Fuck. We didn’t even know for sure that they were infected. Maybe if we’d had more information… [she stops for a long moment; when she speaks again, her voice is even more distant] It wouldn’t have made any difference at all. Those doors were already locked. What was going to happen was already a foregone conclusion. All that could have changed is the details.
MAHIR: Sometimes, it’s the details that matter the most of all.
LORELEI: The people who’d been infected were skulking around the edges of the hall, waiting for the lights to dim. They weren’t hungry yet. They had enough to eat, and they were in the incubation phase. Once in a while they’d grab someone from the edges of a group, but my dad didn’t know that.
MAHIR: Kellis-Amberlee had a longer incubation in the early days of the Rising. Today, it’s all through our bodies even before we begin to amplify. One bite triggers a cataclysmic chain reaction. For them, back then…how quickly they lost control would have been determined by a dozen factors. Prior exposure, general health, height, weight… It’s simpler now.
LORELEI: Yeah. If you can ever call the zombie apocalypse “simple.” Anyway, our booth was set up toward the back of the hall, and the infection was self-containing at that stage. I think sometimes that it would have been kinder if it had been like the movies, you know? One zombie gets in, everyone’s bitten or dead inside of an hour.
MAHIR: Life rarely concerns itself with being kind, I’m afraid. If it did, we would all be much more content.
LORELEI: Ain’t that the truth?
She appears to notice her tea for the first time in almost an hour. She pushes the cup aside, and stands.
LORELEI: I’m going to need something stronger for what comes next. You game?
MAHIR: All things considered, yes. I believe that I am.
10:06 P.M.
It shouldn’t have taken an hour and a half to reach the back of the hall. Not with the amount of space available and the relatively small number of people who had been able to cram themselves inside for Preview Night before the doors were closed. But that was a reflection of Comic-Con B.E.—Before Emergency—and this was travel through Comic-Con now. Walkways that should have been open were barricaded, some with as little as caution tape and “Keep Out” signs, others with full-on walls that had been constructed from cannibalized booth displays. Of the people Kelly and Stuart encountered outside the barriers, it seemed like everyone knew someone who had been attacked.
One girl had confessed in a whisper that she and her boyfriend had been right up front when things turned ugly, probably right near where Kelly herself had been attacked. “He got bit by this guy who ran away right after, like it didn’t even matter,” she said. “He seemed fine for like, ages, and then he started getting sort of shaky. And then he flipped out and bit me and ran away. Just like that other guy. Just like the guy by the door.”
Kelly and Stuart hadn’t said anything as the girl rolled up her sleeve and showed them the bite marks scored deep into her lower arm. Her boyfriend’s teeth had clearly broken the skin.
The girl had looked calmly between them as she rolled her sleeve back down. “I know what this is,” she’d said. “It’s the zombie apocalypse. We’re all going to die in here, because this is the zombie apocalypse. I’ll die before you do. I’ve already been bitten.” Then she’d turned and wandered away, like they didn’t matter anymore.
The barriers made a lot more sense as Kelly and Stuart resumed their slow passage toward the back of the hall.
They were almost through the last of the truly congested areas when three people came around a blind corner and stopped in the middle of the aisle, eyeing Kelly and Stuart warily. Kelly and Stuart stopped in turn, eyeing the trio right back. It was two men—one older, one in his mid-twenties—and a woman, clutching a tablet to her chest like it was the only handle she had left on reality.
“You don’t want to go that way,” said Kelly, breaking their small bubble of silence. “There’s nothing that way but scared people building cardboard walls and talking about the zombie apocalypse.”
“Which may be actually happening,” added Stuart.
“Which may be actually happening,” allowed Kelly, in a resigned tone. “Anyway. It’s not safe that way.”
“Maybe not, but we think we have a way to get the wireless turned back on,” said the woman.
Leave it to the geeks of the world to prioritize Internet access over staying alive. “The convention center is full of zombies, victims, and proto-zombies,” said Kelly slowly. “Maybe you should go for option number four, and walk away from the carnage, not toward it.”
“Or maybe we should make it easier for emergency personnel to coordinate with people inside the hall and keep everyone a little bit calmer by enabling their Facebook updates,” countered the younger of the two men. “Who are you, anyway? We’re not stopping you from going anywhere you want to go.”
“I’m Stuart; this is Kelly,” said Stuart helpfully.
Kelly groaned. “You just love introducing yourself to people, don’t you? You have to stop that.”
“I’m Pris,” said the woman with the tablet. “This is Marty and Eric. We appreciate the warning, but we really do need to get the wireless working again. It may be the best shot we have at getting out of here.”