Mira Grant - Deadline

Privately, I thought she was being a little complacent—anyone whas willing to nuke a city wouldn’t hesitate before killing a pharmaceutical heir and would have the resources to make it look like an accident—but I didn’t say so. I just scooped the keys into my pocket. “You really have no qualms about abuse of power, do you? Thanks, Maggie. You’re badass.”

“Not a single one,” she said amiably. “Believe me, I know how badass I am. You’ll have to leave the bike behind, you know.”

I’d been trying to avoid thinking about that. The idea of leaving George’s bike when I didn’t know if we’d ever make it back was almost physically painful. “I know.”

“Good, just so long as it isn’t going to be a fight. Now you’d better get moving. I want my guest rooms back in time for this weekend’s film festival.”

“What are you watching?” asked Mahir.

“All thirteen Nightmare on Elm Street movies, back to back,” Maggie replied. “We’re starting with the original and going from there.”

I shuddered. “I’ll take my chances with the CDC.”

“I thought you might,” said Maggie, and smiled.

After a day of arguing about what to pack and how many bullets we’d need, Maggie’s van was loaded and ready to go. She didn’t normally drive on run-flats—something about the way they changed the steering made them too much trouble for her to deal with—but one of the faceless security men we normally never saw walked up the driveway with a brand-new set and installed them before I could even ask if it was an option.

She’s been expecting this for a while, said George.

I said nothing.

Kelly and Mahir were coming along, naturally; they’d both come too far and been through too much to do anything else. Becks was coming, too, despite our mutual misgivings about spending that much time crammed into a van together. We’d need another Irwin on hand if things turned bloody, and after what had happened to Dave, this was almost as personal for her as it was for me. Alaric and Maggie were staying behind.

“I’m no good in the field. I don’t even have my licenses yet,” said Alaric, not meeting my eyes. I think he was afraid I’d start yelling—or worse, that I’d somehow talk him into coming with us. “You’ll be better off if I stay here.”

“You’re right.”

That wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting. He glanced to me, eyes gone wide.

I shrugged. “We can’t pretend we’re here if we’re posting reports from the road, and we can’t all go silent at once, either. Like that’s not going to look suspicious? So we’ll bounce them to you, and you can post everything from here. Same IP address. Business as usual.”

“Right.” Alaric smiled, either not bothering or not managing to hide his relief. “I can do that.”

“On it,” he said.

There was nothing to do after that but leave.

Maggie packed us a cardboard box of sandwiches and potato chips on the morning we finally started for Tennessee, along with a cooler full of sodas. She loaded everything into the backseat with Kelly before turning around and handing me two things: a large envelope packed with cash, and a debit card. “Don’t use the card unless the money runs out. It draws on the company account. Seeing charges from it that match the van’s movements shouldn’t set off any red flags, and my parents won’t care unless you buy a submarine or something.”

“And here I always wanted a submarine,” I said.

“Where would you put it?” asked Mahir.

“I’d have to buy a lake.”

“Well, that’s reasonable, I suppose.”

Maggie laughed—a short, sharp sound that had a lot in common with the confused yipping of the teacup bulldogs milling at her feet—and threw her arms around my shoulders, hugging me close before I had a chance to step back. “Come back, ” she whispered, voice small and tight and right next to my ear, so only I could hear it.

We’ll try, said George.

“Don’t worry about us,” I said. I hugged her back, feeling awkward until she let go and stepped away, turning her face to the side to hide the tears that were glinting in her eyes. I sighed. “Maggie—”

“Go,” she said.

I swallowed the things I still wanted to say and turned to walk toward the van. Behind me, I could hear Maggie and Mahir exchanging their last good-byes, too softly for me to make out the words. The words didn’t matter, really, because we all knew that we might not be coming back.

Becks was in the passenger seat with a laptop propped open on her knees when I slipped behind the wheel. “File transfer and backup is almost complete; when it finishes, we’ll have files stored in twenty different places, ten outside the United States.” Becks kept her eyes on the screen, fingers tapping out rapid patterns across the keyboard.

I fastened my seat belt. “How solid is the encryption?”

“Solid enough that I wouldn’t want to be the one who was trying to break it. Not unless I had a week to waste.”

“I hope that’s good enough.” I slid the key into the ignition before letting my hands rest on the wheel, trying to feel the shape of it the way I felt the shape of my own van, the one George and I rebuilt almost on our own. It wasn’t going to happen, but I could at least force myself to be comfortable with the idea that I was about to drive across the country in someone else’s car. “Alaric’s going to drop the security keys to Dr. Abbey’s last known e-mail address in an hour and a half. If there’s no response withlf an hour, he’s sending a coded message to Dr. Shoji to let him know that we need to reach her.”

“Do you think it’s going to work?”

“Jesus, Rebecca, I don’t know. This cloak-and-dagger shit was never my first choice for a career. I think it stands a chance, anyway, and if there’s any way we can get this to Dr. Abbey, we should. She’ll know what to do with it.”

“If we don’t come back from Memphis?” Becks kept her eyes on her laptop, but I could hear the tension in the question.

“Pretty much,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. She just sighed, shoulders straightening a little, and got back to work. In the backseat, Kelly pulled out one of Mahir’s research files and started reading. She’d been over it all a thousand times, but that didn’t stop her from trying to find something the rest of us might have missed. I stayed where I was, hands resting on the steering wheel, and waited.

It can’t have been more than ten minutes before Mahir pulled open the van’s side door and climbed inside. It felt more like ten years. Becks kept typing the whole time, fingers dancing across her keyboard without missing a single stroke. She was brilliant, beautiful, and brave as hell. If anything proved how fucked-up I was, it was my inability to tell her any of those things. All I could do was hurt her, and having already done it once, I wasn’t exactly racing to do it again.

“Right,” said Mahir, settling next to Kelly as the door shut and locked behind him. “Unless we’ve got any more messy good-byes to make, I suppose we’d best be on our way.”

I nodded and started the engine.

Maggie stayed on the lawn as we drove away, waving at first, and then just standing there, a small figure surrounded by a teeming sea of tiny dogs. Her image dwindled in the rearview mirror, disappearing and reappearing as we went around the curves in the driveway, until finally she was out of sight for good. Sanctuary was behind us, and we were well and truly on our way.

The plan called for us to drive down the length of California before cutting across through Arizona, New Mexico—the desert states. It wasn’t the most efficient route, but it took good advantage of one of the bigger weaknesses of the infected: the heat. We had to cede Alaska because frostbite doesn’t do much but slow a zombie down until it becomes fatal. The deserts, on the other hand, were one of the first things we managed to take back completely. The human host of the active virus still needs water, still needs shade, still collapses with heatstroke and sunstroke, still putrefies, and maybe even dies from the bite of a rattlesnake or the sting of a scorpion. There are no resident zombie mobs in the deserts of America, and while even the driest desert can sustain life, very little of that life is big enough to cross the Kellis-Amberlee amplification barrier. If we encountered any real threats, they’d be fresh ones, and that limited their potential numbers.