Mira Grant - Deadline

“Hey.” George put her hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you go lie down? You’re exhausted.”

I shrugged her hand off. “No, I don’t want to sleep through this. If this is the end of me being me, I don’t want to miss it.” A thought struck me, and I chuckled bitterly. “I can’t be too far gone if I’m still hallucinating you, can I? You’re a pretty complicated delusion. Zombies probably can’t manage this quality of crazy.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You’re welcome.”

She fell silent, and so did I. I was too tense to carry on a conversation, even with a dead person who lived only in my head. I’d just keep trying to pick a fight, and she’d keep trying to stop me, until we wound up screaming at each other and I spent the last minutes of my conscious life arguing with the one person I least wanted to argue with. I just wanted to know that she was there, and that I wasn’t going through this alone.

So I stared at the test unit instead of talking to her, willing it to develop lights and tell me what I needed to know. All I needed was for it to confirm that my life was over. Nothing difficult. Nothing any fucking toaster couldn’t manage these days.

I don’t know how long I sat there staring at the test unit, feeling my throat getting dryer and waiting for the other symptoms to set in. The difficulty breathing, the sensitivity to light, the murkiness of thought—all the little dividing lines that separated human from zombie. Dryness of the throat was only the beginning, and my training was extensive enough to tell me exactly what the progression would be. Every little step along the way.

The door opened.

My head snapped up, tensing as I waited for the gunmen to enter. I wondered whether they’d send Becks to shoot me; I wondered whether she’d insist. We’d been colleagues for a long time, and Irwins tend to view shooting infected comrades as part of the job. It’s a sign of respect.

Dr. Abbey stepped into the room.

I stopped breathing for a second, eyes going wide. They went even wider as Joe pushed past her, his tail wagging wildly from side to side. “You’re going to let him be in here while you put me down?” I asked. “That’s cold. I mean, not that I’m one to judge, but that’s cold .”

Dr. Abbey smiled. “Hello, Shaun.” She shut the door behind herself, waiting until the locks finished hissing before she walked over to the other side of the table. She was carrying a folding chair, which she set up and sank into, watching me the whole time. “How are you feeling?”

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said. Joe walked around the table and shoved his enormous head into my crotch in canine greeting. I barely remembered the blood on my hand in time to stop myself from pushing him away. “This isn’t safe.”

“Oh, right. You’re contagious.” She reached into the pocket of her lab coat, pulling out a can of Coke and putting it down on the table between us. “You must be thirsty. You’ve been sitting in here for a while.” I stared at her. “No, really, open the can. I want to see how good your manual dexterity is.”

Still staring, I reached out and picked up the can. Its cold heaviness was soothing, even before I popped the tab, closed my eyes, and took a long, freezing drink. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted, sugary syrupy sweetness and all.

Dr. Abbey was watching me intently when I opened my eyes. “How’s the throat feeling, Shaun?” she asked.

“A little dry. I don’t understand what you’re doing—” I stopped. The dryness in my throat was gone, replaced by the residual carbonated tingle that always came after I drank one of George’s Candyland hookers. “—here,” I finished, more slowly. “Dr. Abbey?”

“I’m here because I wanted to talk to you about your test results, Shaun.” She reached into her pocket again, this time producing a standard, run-of-the-mill field testing unit. Catching my surprise, she said, “Don’t worry. It’s been modified so it won’t upload—it’ll think it has, but it won’t. This won’t give our position away to the CDC, or to anybody else.”

“I don’t understand. Did something go wrong with my first test?”

“No, nothing went wrong with your first test. Now please.” She gestured toward the unit. “Humor the woman who’s willing to risk her life by offering sanctuary to your team, and take the goddamn test.”

“Right.” At least this one had lights. I popped off the lid, whispering, “One,” and waiting for George’s answering Two, before pressing my hand against the pressure pad. The needles bit in, quick and painful as always, and the lights began to flash through their complex analytic series of reds and greens. They flashed fast to begin with, then slowed as they settled on their final determination. It only took about thirty seconds for the last light to stop flashing.

All five of them settled on green.

I frowned, looking up at Dr. Abbey. Joe shoved his nose into my hand. I ignored him, focusing on her instead. “Is this a side effect of blocking the transmission? You change something internally so it registers negatives as positives?”

“No, Shaun. I didn’t.” Dr. Abbey calmly picked up the lid to the testing unit, snapping it back into place. She watched my face the entire time, moving with slow, methodical gestures, so that I wouldn’t be surprised. She didn’t really need to worry. I was somewhere past surprise by that point. “None of the adjustments we’ve made to our equipment would do something as suicidal or idiotic as showing a positive result as a negative one. We’d just disable the readouts, like we did with your first test. Those results came to my computer, and no one else’s. I was able to study your entire viral profile.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. What I am saying is that your test results—both times, the ones you didn’t see and the ones you just witnessed—came back clean.” Dr. Abbey looked at me gravely, a wild excitement barely contained in her expression. “You’re not sick, Shaun. You’re not going to amplify.

“I don’t know what your body did, but it encountered the live virus… and it fought it off. You’re going to live.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I just stared at her, the green lights on the testing unit glowing steadily, like an accusation of a crime I had never plotted to commit. I’d been right all along; amplification would have been too easy an exit, and when given the chance, my body somehow refused to do it. I was going to live.

So now what?

Coda: Living for You

I have no idea what’s going on anymore. When did the world stop making sense?

—SHAUN MASON

What the fuck is going on here?

—GEORGIA MASON

One of the Fictionals asked me this morning, if I could have one wish—any wish in the world, no matter how big or how small—what would I wish for? This would be a universe-changing wish. I could wish away Kellis-Amberlee. Hell, I could wish away the Rising if I wanted to, restore us to a universe where the zombies never came and we never wound up hiding in our houses, scared of everything we couldn’t sterilize. And I stared at him until he realized what a stupid question that was and went running off, probably figuring that I was going to start hitting next.

He wasn’t wrong.

If I could have any wish, no matter how big, no matter how small, I’d wish to have George back. Without that, nothing else I could wish for would be worth a fucking thing. And if you don’t like that, you can shove it up your ass, because I don’t care.