Deadline

“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 f**ked-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.

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.