Deadline

“That’s enough, Mahir,” I said quietly.

He stopped immediately. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I wouldn’t have called if I hadn’t expected them to be bad. At least this tells me what I’ll be dealing with when I get back to the office.” George was as pissed off by the world’s refusal to leave me the f**k alone as I was, and she was swearing steadily in the back of my head. It was more reassuring than distracting. The things that get under my skin don’t always get under hers, and I feel the closest to crazy when I’m disagreeing with the voice in my head.

“Are you all right?”

I paused before answering, trying to find the best words. If George had a best friend—a best friend who wasn’t me, anyway—it was Mahir. He was her second-in-command before she died and gave him a promotion that he’d never wanted. Sometimes, I thought he was the only person who fully understood how close we’d been, or how much her death had broken me. He was the only one who never questioned the fact that she still talked to me.

Frankly, I think he was jealous that she never spoke to him.

“Ignoring the part where you know the answer to that is ‘fuck, no,’ I’m fine, Mahir. Tired. I shouldn’t have gone out there.”

“If you hadn’t—”

“Becks had it under control. It’s her department now. I shouldn’t have interfered.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“Do I?”

Mahir paused before saying, “I was actually pleased to see you out there. If you don’t mind my saying so, Shaun, you looked more like yourself than you have in quite some time. You might want to consider making this the beginning of a true… well, revival, if the word isn’t in poor taste. You could do with something beyond spending all your time in an office.”

“I’ll take that under consideration.”

No, you won’t.

“No, you won’t,” said Mahir, in eerie imitation of George.

“Now you’re ganging up on me,” I muttered.

“What?”

Sometimes Mahir was a little too sharp for my own good. “Nothing,” I said, more loudly. “I’m signing off now, Mahir. I need to concentrate on the drive.”

“Shaun, I really think you should—”

“Tell the management I won’t call back until it’s a decent hour in your part of the world. Say, five minutes before the alarm clock?”

“Shaun, really—”

“Later.” I hit the manual switch on the dashboard, cutting Mahir off midsentence. The silence that followed was almost reassuring enough to distract me from the fact that I was still apparently being filmed. I raised a hand and amiably flipped off the van.

Not nice, chided Georgia.

“George, please.”

She fell sullenly quiet. For a change, I didn’t mind. A sulking sister is better than a scolding sister, especially when I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that the world wants me back in the field on a regular basis. One dead Mason just isn’t enough for some people.

To distract myself, I hit the gas, sped up, and passed the van. It was a deviation from our standing driving formation, but not enough of one that it was likely to cause any real distress with the occupants of the van. With our viewing audience, maybe—especially the percentage that was hoping to see me fight off a horde of the infected through the rearview cam—but the staff would understand.

Hitting the gas harder, I sped off toward Alameda County, and home.

Prior to George’s death, the two of us lived with our adoptive parents in the genteel Berkeley house where we were raised, a former faculty residence sold by the university after the Rising. I went back there initially, and quickly found that I couldn’t take it. I could handle having George’s ghost in my head, but I couldn’t deal with the years of memory in those halls. More important, I couldn’t watching the Masons hover around looking for ways to capitalize on the death of their adopted daughter. We always knew what they were to us and what we were to them, but it took George dying to really make me realize how unhealthy it was. I moved out as soon as I could manage it, renting a crappy little apartment in downtown El Cerrito. I moved again six months later, after the site really started pulling in the bucks. Oakland this time, and one of the four apartments in the same building that we’d rented under the name of After the End Times. One apartment for the office; one apartment shared by Alaric and Dave, who spent half their time as best buddies and half their time as mortal enemies; one apartment open for visiting staffers who needed a place to crash.

One apartment for me and George, who didn’t take up any physical space but was so much a part of every room that sometimes I could fool myself into thinking she had just stepped out for some fresh air. That she’d be right back, if I were just willing to wait. If I were still seeing a psychiatrist, I’m sure I’d be getting lectured on how unhealthy my attitude is. Good thing I fired my shrink, huh?

Oakland’s a pretty awesome place to hang your hat, whether or not you’ve got a dead sister to deal with. Twenty-five years ago—roughly, I’m not big on math—Oakland was an urban battlefield. They had a gang problem in the early nineteen-eighties, but that cleared up, and they were fighting a different war by the time the Rising rolled around. Oakland had become the site of an ongoing conflict between the natives who’d lived there for generations and the forces of gentrification that really wanted a Starbucks on every corner and an iPod in every pocket. Then the zombies showed up, and gentrification lost.