* * *
6:00 P.M.
Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand people were waiting outside the sprawling convention center complex by six o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. Another thirteen hundred were already inside, getting their booths and fan tables ready for the onslaught.
According to security footage of the convention center lobby and front sidewalk—what was recovered from the remains of the disaster, which wasn’t much; the destruction was too complete, and the recovery had to wait for quite some time, given the events that followed—the last person to leave before the doors opened was Lorelei Tutt, a member of the California Browncoats fan organization. Preview Night officially began six minutes later.
The first events of Preview Night were mostly small: announcements from minor comic companies and interviews with the convention’s lower-profile guests. One television program was presenting their sneak preview of the season to come at six thirty: Space Crime Continuum, which ceased production permanently following the convention. Four thousand people packed themselves into a midsized ballroom to see their favorite stars up close and personal.
We may never know which of those four thousand was infected, or how the outbreak began. Perhaps the outbreak’s Patient Zero had been bitten by something—human or animal, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the Rising—on the way to the convention and had chosen good seats over seeking medical care. Perhaps a heart attack or stroke claimed a life and left a husk for the virus to reanimate and control. Perhaps it was a case of spontaneous amplification, rare in the modern day, but substantially more common during the Rising, when the human body was still adapting to the infection that would become known as “Kellis-Amberlee.” However the infection entered the building, it entered, and once it was inside, there was no way it could be forced to leave.
At 6:30 P.M., July 23, 2014, the first major panel of the convention began. The cast of Space Crime Continuum—minus their leading lady, the lovely Elle Riley, who was mysteriously absent from the green room—began filing onto the stage. Convention security staff waved more and more people into the hall, until there were no seats left empty. That was when the doors swung closed, and what happened from there, in that room, in that dark, empty space, is lost to history.
Given the nature of the things we did not lose, perhaps this is a mercy.
* * *
6:43 P.M.
Elle Riley struggled to keep up with her handler as he shoved his way through the convention center, fighting against the tides of eager fans rushing for the delights of the booths against the back wall. There were less congested routes, but she hadn’t realized her handler meant it literally when he said they’d be going through the middle of the floor, and by the time she understood that he was planning to go the worst way possible, it was too late for her to tell him it was a bad idea. Not that he would have listened if she’d tried. No matter how many interviews she gave where she mentioned her past as a rabid fan of shows like Star Trek, Buffy, and Doctor Who—which was the reason she’d auditioned for a time-travel procedural in the first place—people kept assuming she was another pretty face who didn’t know a damn thing about the way the geek world functioned. Even though it was her knowledge of the geek world that told her not to try cutting between the Marvel and DC booths in order to exit the main hall at Comic-Con.
“We’re almost there, Ms. Riley,” announced her handler, loudly enough that another half-dozen heads turned in their direction. Elle bit back a groan and forced herself to keep on smiling. This was her public, after all; she couldn’t afford to look ungracious.
Great, more autographs and pictures and questions, she thought. Just what I needed. Maybe if she was lucky, they’d make it to the panel in time for the question-and-answer session. Or maybe she’d be even luckier, and they wouldn’t make it to the panel at all. She’d look flaky but not inconsiderate if she missed the panel because she was signing autographs. She’d look like a stuck-up diva extraordinaire if she waltzed in for the last fifteen minutes and forced everyone else to listen to the inevitable stream of comments about her appearance masquerading as questions. As if she could possibly enjoy that sort of thing. As if anyone could possibly enjoy it.
Now they weren’t even moving, forced into a holding pattern by the people shoving past in front of them. That meant there was no good reason for the fans to stay away, since it wasn’t like she was trying to get anywhere. Sure enough, a timid voice at her elbow said, “Excuse me, are you Elle Riley?”
Elle’s smile remained fixed in place as she turned toward the speaker, a sweet-faced woman with a slight Kentucky drawl and hair that cascaded to her shoulders in a series of artificially copper curls. She was wearing a shirt that proclaimed her to be a member of the Time Police. That didn’t necessarily make her a fan—lots of shows and stories about time travel had time police in them—but it definitely shifted the odds toward fandom.
“I am,” she said. “And you are…?”
“Patty! I mean…I’m Patricia Meigs. This is my husband, Matthew.” She took the arm of the man beside her, who was more mundanely dressed in a sweater vest and gray slacks. He was wearing a bow tie, at least, which was a nod to the geekier elements in the wardrobes around him. That, or he was one of those poor, misguided souls who actually believed that bow ties were “cool.”
“Hello,” said Matthew. He had a mild British accent. Elle amended her assessment of his bow tie: It probably marked him as a Doctor Who fan, which meant that the tie was most definitely cool. “It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Riley.”
“Thanks,” Elle said. “I’m supposed to be on a panel right now, but I guess we judged the traffic wrong, and…” She shrugged a little.
Matthew’s eyebrows went up. “You’re trying to get to a panel by going right down the middle of the hall? Was that entirely wise?”
“Hey, I wanted to cut down the back to Artist’s Alley and make our escape that way, but I’m not the one calling the shots here.” Elle gestured toward her handler’s unmoving back. “He’s supposed to deliver me where I’m going, and I think he’s planning to tackle anything that gets in our way.”
“That’s going to be quite a lot of tackling,” said Matthew.
“I can hear you, you know,” said the handler.
“You really have been here before!” said Patty. The other three turned to face her, even the handler, who put his back to the crowd in order to stare at Patty. She reddened, shrugging. “I read a lot of blogs. There’s a whole debate about you saying that…um…” She stopped, apparently realizing that what she was about to say could be construed as insulting.
Elle sighed. “I know. There’s a whole debate between the people who say I’m being coached on what to say in order to build up my ‘fandom street cred’ and the people who remember seeing me haunting the fan tables back when I was an awkward teenager trying to convince the cast members from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to give me acting tips. One side says I’m a liar; the other side says I’m part of the family. I’m with the second side, naturally. This would be my sixteenth Comic-Con, if I were actually allowed to attend at all. But since this is probably as much as I’m going to see of the show floor, I’m trying not to think about it too hard.”
“Wow,” said Patty, in a voice that was suddenly very small. “Love of fandom got you into the business, and now the business is keeping you away from the thing you love. That’s so sad.”
Privately, Elle thought the girl was being melodramatic, but that didn’t make her wrong. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” she said. She glanced at the crowd, which was still forbidding forward movement—more than she would have expected, actually. Something must have been going on toward the front of the hall. “What brings the two of you to San Diego?”
“It’s our honeymoon,” said Matthew. He smiled fondly at Patty. “We got married in London and hopped onto the next flight to San Diego. We landed about four hours ago.”
“No window for jetlag at all?” asked Elle.
“‘Jetlag is just another lie time tells, and I can’t stand liars,’” said Patty. Then she paused, cheeks reddening again. “Uh. I bet it’s considered gauche to quote your character’s lines at you, huh?”
“Not really,” said Elle, and was surprised to realize that she meant it. “I mean, people quote Indy at me all the time, but it’s usually the catchphrases, not the actual dialog. It’s not like I get a lot of that. It’s sort of flattering.”
“Geeky but flattering,” said Matthew, and grinned. “I’d take it if I were you, Patty. That’s a good way to be viewed.”
Patty opened her mouth to respond, and stopped as someone at the front of the convention center screamed. It wasn’t a playful scream. A playful scream wouldn’t have been able to cut through the rest of the ambient noise. All of them turned instinctively toward the sound, their shoulders going tense as they tried to calculate the respective virtues of fighting and fleeing. None of them were aware of those calculations: They were carried out by a part of the brain older and more focused on survival than anything conscious could be.
“What’s going on?” asked Elle. “Did someone get hurt?”
“Ms. Riley, I’m afraid I’m going to need to ask you to wait here,” said her handler—but his brisk words couldn’t conceal the fear in his eyes, and somehow, that just made everything worse.
“What? No! You’re not supposed to leave me alone on the show floor!”
“Stay with your friends, and stay in this immediate vicinity,” said her handler. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I’ve assessed the situation.” Then he was gone, plunging into the suddenly unmoving crowd, heading toward the sound of screams.