Mira Grant - Blackout

“That would be the plan.” I removed both guns from the waist of my jeans, putting them on the dashboard. George gasped a little. I paused, really looking at the guns for the first time in a long time. “Oh. I guess this one’s yours, isn’t it?”

“She can get it back after we finish dealing with the happy neighborhood psychopath brigade, okay?” said Becks, dropping three clips of ammo onto the floor. “Right now, I want to get in, get what we came for, and get the hell out of here. Seattle is not a good place for us to be anymore.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” I opened the van door. Still looking unsure about the whole thing, George followed Mahir out the side door. Maggie walked around the van to meet us, and the four of waited as patiently as we could for Becks to finish disarming.

“What are you carrying, an armory?” I called.

“I’m prepared,” she shot back, and slid out of the van. Part of the reason it had taken her so long was revealed; she had already unlaced her combat boots, making them easier to remove. Seeing the understanding in my expression, she smirked. “See? Prepared. You should try it some time, Mason. You might discover that you like it.”

Mahir snorted. “And swine may soar. Now come along.”

“Yes, sir,” said Becks, in a lilting, half-mocking tone. She was still chuckling as we walked toward the house.

I dropped back, letting Mahir and Maggie lead George as I asked Becks quietly, “You okay? You’re all… chipper… all of a sudden.”

She shook her head. “I’m not, really. I feel like I’ve been put through seven kinds of emotional wringers in the last year, and I can’t even begin to imagine how you feel right now. Thing is? It’s not going to change, and it’s not going to stop, and it’s not going to go away. The dead are coming back to life, and this time, they want to give us a piece of their minds instead of taking a piece of ours away.” Becks nodded toward George, who was walking up the porch steps. “The more I talk to her, the more I think she’s for real. That’s terrifying. That’s my whole life, falling down, because my parents are the kind of old money that funds politicians who fund places like the CDC, and now the CDC is bringing back the dead, again . So no, I’m not okay. I just don’t have the energy left to be miserable about it all the damn time.”

“So you’re in a good mood because it’s easier?”

“Yeah.” Becks gripped the crumbling remains of the banister, holding it as she started going up the stairs. “You went crazy because it was easier. So what’s so bad about deciding to stop scowling for the same reason?”

I didn’t have a good answer. I shrugged and followed her into the house. The others were waiting for us there.

Once we had all removed our shoes, we proceeded into the living room. George hung back to walk beside me, our hands not quite touching. Her presence was almost reassuring enough to make up for the fact that none of us were armed.

The Cat was sitting on one of the room’s two couches, feet up on the coffee table and a tablet braced against her knees. The Fox was nowhere to be seen. I honestly couldn’t have said whether or not that was a good thing.

“You know, I did not think we would be seeing you again,” said the Cat, not looking up from her tablet. Her fingers skated across the screen with the grace of an artist, making connections in some pattern I couldn’t see. “If there’d been a bet, I would have lost.”

“We’re here for our IDs,” said Becks. “We did our part.”

“Oh, I know. I knew as soon as the bug started transmitting. They’ve been naughty, naughty boys and girls there at the CDC. They’re going to be very sorry when they get the bill for this. Killing people, cloning people, arranging outbreaks… it would have been so much cheaper if they’d settled their debts in a civilized manner.”

I went cold. Grabbing blindly for George’s hand, I asked, “What do you mean, ‘the bill’?”

The Cat looked up. For a moment, the smug, almost alien look on her face told me exactly where her nickname had come from. “We’re free operatives, Mr. Mason. You can’t blame me for taking my money where I can get it.”

“It was you.” Mahir’s voice was tinged with a dawning horror. I turned to look at him. He was staring at her, the white showing all the way around his irises. “One thing always seemed a little off to me when I reviewed the tapes we managed to recover from Oakland. Dr. Connelly was traveling on one of your ID cards. She should have been safe. She should have been untraceable. So how is it the CDC tracked her less than two hours after she arrived? And why did they lose track of her after that first ID was consigned to the fires?”

“I don’t know,” said the Cat. “Why don’t you tell me? You’re the journalists. You’re supposed to be the smart ones.”

“Wait.” Becks turned toward Mahir. I didn’t like the edge on her voice. “Are you telling me this woman got Dave killed?”

“If you answer that question, you don’t get your new identities. Think about that.” The Cat looked back down at her tablet, seemingly unconcerned. “You came here because you wanted a free pass out of your lives. You committed an act of treason because you were willing to do whatever it took to get that free pass into your hands. Are you going to let something that happened in the past come between you and getting what you paid for?”

“I guess that depends on whether getting what we paid for is going to get an airstrike called down on our heads,” I said.

Then a small, perplexed voice spoke from the stairs: “Kitty, what did you do?” I looked toward it. The Fox was descending from the second floor. The look on her face was almost childlike in its confusion, like whatever was going on was so far outside her experience that it verged on impossible. “Did you do another bad thing? You know what Monkey said he’d do if you did another bad thing. You remember what he did to Wolf.”

“Go back upstairs, Foxy,” said the Cat calmly. “Watch a movie in your room. I’ll bring cookies later.”

The Fox frowned. “You’re not answering my question.”

“That’s because I don’t have to answer to you.”

“No, but you do have to answer to me.” We all turned toward the new voice, Becks reaching for a gun she didn’t have. Her hand hovered in the air next to her hip for a moment, and then dropped back to her side.

The man who had emerged from the short hallway behind the kitchen looked at us mildly, like he had groups of strangers appear in his living room every day. Then again, maybe he did, considering his line of work.

“Mr. Monkey, I presume?” I said.

“No, no, Mr. Monkey was my father.” His voice was vague enough that I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “You must be the journalists.”

“Yes, we are,” said Mahir. “Are you the gentleman in charge of this establishment?”

“Not sure anybody really runs the Brainpan, but I guess it’s down to me.” A certain sharpness came into his eyes as he surveyed our motley group, belying his earlier vagueness. “Now what am I going to do with you?”

The Monkey was average-looking to the point of being forgettable almost while I was still looking at him. Caucasian male, average height, average weight, features that were neither ugly nor attractive, brown hair with bleach streaks, just like every other man on the planet who cared more about functionality than vanity. No one’s that forgettable without working at it. We were probably looking at the result of years of careful refinement, possibly including some plastic surgery. This was a man who never wanted to stand out in a crowd. He could disappear into the background before you even realized he was there. In its own way, he was as terrifying as the Fox. At least there, you’d probably see the crazy coming.