Mira Grant - Deadline

The relative safety of the desert made our route less suspicious, even as it meant that we’d need to stop regularly for water and watch the van to be sure it didn’t overheat. It was a small price to pay for potentially making it to Memphce to palive. Most of the checkpoints just waved us through, the guards too anxious to stay cool to do more than the most cursory of tests. That suited our needs perfectly.

Becks and I did the driving in shifts, six hours on, six hours off. After the first two shifts, the one who’d just finished a shift would move to the backseat to sleep, while one of the passengers would move up front to keep the driver from passing out. Mahir didn’t have a license to drive in the USA, and while Kelly could drive, she didn’t have her field license, and was too jumpy to drive safely. So it was just the two of us, and that meant taking turns.

Mahir and I worked on our strategy—such as it was—when Becks slept, using Kelly as a sort of a sanity check. “It’s not that I’m not willing to die for this story,” Mahir said, reasonably. “It’s just that I’d rather not be martyred and leave the tale half-told if there’s any other option.” Even George had to admit that this was a sound approach, and so the four of us put our three heads together and tried to come up with something that wouldn’t get us all killed for good. It was harder than it sounded, which was impressive, since it sounded pretty damn difficult. Finally, we decided to go with what we had: surprise, and the threat of going public without letting the CDC tell their side of the story.

The farther we got from Maggie’s house, the dumber our makeshift plan looked… and the more obvious it became that there wasn’t another way. When the corruption seems to go all the way to the end of the world, the only good approach is through the front door with a gun in each hand. No one was going to help us take on the CDC, not with our resources and reputation, and not with the radio silence coming out of the White House. That meant we needed to play to our strengths, and our strengths came from lifelong training in shoving microphones at danger and demanding that it explain itself. It wasn’t much. It was going to have to be enough.

We stopped at a seedy motel in Little Rock, Arkansas, the night before we got to Memphis. They took cash and didn’t look too hard at our IDs. No matter how high-tech the world gets, there will always be places designed for people who are looking to slip between the cracks. This was one of them. The man behind the desk didn’t know who we were, and better, he didn’t want to know. Becks and I checked in together, letting Mahir and Kelly wait in the van until the necessary transactions had been completed. The man was disinterested. He was also a modern American, which meant he might have seen Kelly’s face on the news, and might well wonder what a dead woman was doing wandering around Arkansas with a couple of disreputable-looking types like me and Becks.

After the better part of two days spent driving down empty highways and eating out of truck-stop diners, all four of us smelled like road trip—that funky mix of stale corn chips, sweat, dirty hair, and ass that seems to show up any time you drive more than a couple hundred miles in one stretch. We had two rooms, which meant two of us could shower at once, after all four of us had cleared the blood test required to get inside.

Somehow, even though one room was supposed to be for the men and one for the women, Becks and Kelly managed to snag the first showers. It was like a magic trick. I asked “Does anybody want a shower?” and they were gone, disappearance punctuated only by the steady hiss of the water.

Mahir and I settle in the room where Kelly was taking her shower, again, just in case. We were too close to her home ground for us to want her left alone. The motel security could be worked around, and I didn’t trust her to shoot her way out of a paper bag if something happened while she was unguarded.

I sat on the edge of one of the two queen-sized beds, rubbing my face with one hand like I could wipe the exhaustion away. It never worked. “So the Doc says most folks get to work around nine. The janitorial staff arrives at seven. That gives us two hours to evade one of the best security systems in the world, get inside without taking any blood tests that would announce our presence, and make our way to Dr. Wynne’s lab.”

“Correct,” said Mahir. Paradoxically, he looked less tired than he did when he first arrived in Weed. The bastard. I hadn’t been able to get any real sleep in the van—too many years of training telling me never to let my guard down in the field—but he’d been out like a light every time he didn’t need to be working on something. The rest had been good for him. He was going to need it.

“Is it just me, or is this essentially fucking impossible?”

“If they haven’t changed the timing of the security sweeps since Dr. Connolly’s death, it’s going to be bloody difficult, but no, I wouldn’t call it ‘fucking impossible.’ Fucking impossible requires rather more in the way of, I don’t know, ninjas.” Mahir smiled. It was a small thing, half-buried in stubble and his own natural restraint, but it was there. “I’m not sure where one goes about ordering ninjas.”

“Same place you get the submarines.” I looked toward the bathroom door, listening to the sound of running water for a moment before I asked, “Does this shit ever end, Mahir? I mean, really, is there a point where we get to say ‘enough’ and let things go back to normal?”

“No.”

I blinked at him.

He shrugged, smile fading. “Your sister trained me, and she never stood for liars. No, Shaun, I don’t think this ever ends, not for us, not until we’re dead. Maybe not even then. You’re a haunted house pretending to be a man these days, and Georgia may be dead, but she’s still not out of the game, is she?”

Bet your ass I’m not, said George. Her tone was grimmer than I’d ever heard it.

Mahir looked at my face and nodded. “I thought not. You get distant when you’re listening to her. Either you’re truly haunted, or you’re the most reasonable madman I’ve ever known, and it doesn’t much matter either way: The end result’s the same, and she’s not going to be resting in peace anytime soon.”

“What if we all die here?”

“What makes you think we won’t find people of our own to haunt?” Mahir dug into his pocket, producing a slim nylon wallet. He flipped it open and passed it to me. “My wife, Nandini. Nan. You never once asked to see a picture of her. You realize that? You called at all hours of the night, you drove her mad with your nonsense, and you never asked me a damn thing about her.”

I took the wallet, too abashed to know what else to do. It was open to a picture of a slim, sharp-eyed woman with dark hair that she must have dyed regularly, to keep the bleach from showing. She was wearing a cowl-necked sweater the color of cherry cola, and frowning at the camera.

The resemblance wasn’t perfect. Her skin was too dark and her clothing was too impractical and her nose was a little bit too long. But something in the way she held herself, something about the expression in her eyes…

“She looks like George.”

“Yes.” Mahir leaned over and plucked the wallet from my hand. I didn’t fight him. “It was an arranged marriage, but she wasn’t the first bride they offered me, or even the fifteenth. She was just the first one I fancied enough to have a go with. Traditional enough to suit my family, but fierce enough to be worth fighting with. I’m not sure whose parents were more relieved, hers or mine.” He gave the picture a fond look, snapped the wallet shut, and slid it back into his pocket. “I told her to divorce me when I bought my tickets out of London. She’s not much for listening—still, I’ve no doubt she listened this time, for spite if nothing else.”