Mira Grant - Blackout

“Rebecca—”

Becks shot me a venomous glance. “I don’t have her nose for news. I don’t have your total lack of regard for my own safety. What I have is a family that doesn’t want me, and a job that I know how to do. And that job says I stand here and let you get out, because you’re the ones who can do the best job telling this story. Now go !”

“Shaun, come on.” George took a step backward, still firing.

“I don’t want to do this,” I said quietly.

So don’t , said George, in the space behind my eyes. Her voice was soft, cajoling. She would never ask me to do something I didn’t want to do. She would never try to convince me to leave a teammate behind.

She would let me die here, and take everything we’d fought and bled for with me.

“ Shaun ! Go!” shouted Becks. She shoved the PDA into her pocket, and called, “Hey, big guy! How sturdy are those doors?”

“Sturdy enough,” rumbled Steve. “Georgia, come on.”

“Coming.” She kept shooting as she backed away, until she had to turn and press her hand against the test unit, and shooting ceased to be an option.

“Good.” Becks dug her hand into a different pocket, producing a small round object that I recognized, after a few seconds, as a concussion grenade. “Then I’m taking no prisoners.”

“You had a grenade in your pocket ?” I asked, unsure whether to be impressed or horrified.

“Dr. Abbey gave it to me. She swore it was stable.”

“Dr. Abbey isn’t stable!”

“Doesn’t matter now.” Becks grinned, still firing. Gunpowder streaked her cheeks and forehead, mixed with sweat and cleaned in narrow tracks by the tears I wasn’t sure she was aware of shedding. “Get out of here, Mason. We had a good time, didn’t we? It wasn’t all bad.”

The zombies were getting closer all the time. I kept firing. “We had a great time. You were amazing. You are amazing.”

“Same to you, Mason. Now go.”

“Shaun!” shouted Steve.

I took a deep breath, fired twice more into the throng, and ran.

Steve and Becks covered me while the airlock cycled. By the time I was through, there was a distance of barely ten feet between the leading wave of zombies—slowed by bullets, sickness, and the bodies of their own fallen—and the airlock door. Steve was the next one through, Becks covering him by herself. She fired faster than I would have thought possible, and almost every shot was a good one. Still, she was outnumbered, and the zombies were nearly on top of her when Steve stepped out into the parking garage with the rest of us.

Becks stopped firing. She turned to face the glass, a smile on her face, zombies looming up hard and fast behind her. We couldn’t hear them moaning anymore, or the sound her gun made when it hit the ground. She raised her free hand in a perfect pageant wave, seemingly oblivious to the hands reaching out to grab her hair. Then she went over backward, vanishing into the teeming river of infected flesh.

The blast came a few seconds later. There was no sound, only a sudden red rain as the detonation destroyed everything it came in contact with. There was nothing of Becks in that redness—there was everything of Becks in that redness—and so I let George pull me away from the flames that were beginning to consume the hall, leading me toward the motorcade idling in the middle of the parking garage. Alaric was standing next to the lead car. He was crying, silently but steadily, his eyes fixed on the flames now starting to show through the streaks of blood on the glass. The hall was burning. Depending on how many alarms had been disabled before the zombies were released, the whole building might go with it.

I put a hand on Alaric’s shoulder. “She got the news out,” I said.

He nodded. “I know.”

“Good.”

There was nothing else that anyone could say. We climbed into the waiting cars, pulled the doors shut, and drove away into the darkness.

This is where I’m supposed to say something mealymouthed and meaningless, like “we regret” or “we are sorry to say.” That’s what you do at a time like this. But the thing is, there was never anything meaningless about Becks. She was one of the most calculated people I ever knew—and I don’t mean that in a bad way. She always knew her angles; she always knew where the light was. I guess in another world, she was probably Miss America or something, one of those women who lived and died by the light. But we didn’t live in that world, and so she grew up to be something else.

Something better.

Rebecca Atherton was a reporter before she was anything else. She was a crack shot with any ranged weapon you’ve ever heard of, and a few you probably haven’t. She was honest and she was faithful and she was strong and she helped me kill a zombie bear.

She’s also dead. So this is where I say we’d better live up to her sacrifice, because there’s nothing in the world that can ever replace her. Good night, Becks.

You told the truth.

—From Adaptive Immunities , the blog of Shaun Mason, August 8, 2041.

GEORGIA: Forty-one

True to Steve’s word, the zombies came surging in as soon as the parking garage doors were open. Their grasping hands and gaping jaws were no match for an armored presidential motorcade. We mowed them down in droves, their viscera splattering the windshield until Steve activated the wipers and cleaned the gore away. It was surreal, like driving into a bloody red rain. The barrier between the front and back of the car remained down the whole time, which was a mixed blessing. We could see what was going on… but being able to see meant, in some way, that we couldn’t look away.

Alaric, Shaun, and I had been hustled into the same car, along with Steve and Rick. President Ryman, the rest of the Secret Service agents, and Gregory were in the other car. Presumably, Gregory was giving directions to the nearest EIS safehouse. Maybe, if we were lucky, we’d even make it there in one piece.

I wasn’t feeling lucky.

My phone rang shortly after we were clear of the parking garage and its signal-suppressing architecture. I clipped my ear cuff on and tapped it, saying tightly, “Georgia. Go.”

“Did you just blow up the bloody White House?” demanded Mahir, loudly enough that everyone in the back of the car turned and looked at me.

“Yeah, Mahir. We kind of did. Although technically, that’s not entirely true. Becks kind of did.”

There was a pause as he thought through that statement. Then, slowly, he asked, “Georgia, did Becks…?”

“Shaun was her immediate superior, so I believe he’ll be making the official announcement, but I am sorry to say that, as of August 7, 2041, Rebecca Atherton’s name has been added to The Wall.”

Mahir breathed out slowly. Several seconds passed in silence before he said, “Maggie is doing better. She’s taken to swearing at the nurses.”

“I’m sure everyone will be glad to hear that.”

“Georgia…?”

“Yes?”

“Did you kill the president?”

I glanced toward the red-streaked windshield. We were through the last line of zombies, and I could see President Ryman’s car ahead of ours. The whole back window was blocked out by blood and chunks of flesh. Decontamination of our vehicles was going to be a massive undertaking.

“No,” I said. “We just kidnapped him a little. Technically, I suppose he kidnapped himself. I guess that’s one for the courts.”

There was a long pause before Mahir said, “I’m suddenly glad to have remained in Seattle.”

“It’s conveniently close to the Canadian border, in case you need to make a run for it. Mahir, I need you to gather all the betas and moderators we have—wake people up if you need to—and get them online. We’re about to have a massive fire drill.”