Deadline (39 page)

When all this is over, I’ll make sure you can retire on a farm with lots of room to run around and play with the other puppies,
said George dryly.

I managed to turn my laughter into a shallow cough, ducking my head to the side before Maggie and the Doc could see me smile. With as good as things had been going, I was trying not to shove reminders of my relationship with George in their faces. Knowing the boss is crazy is one thing. Dealing with it is something else.

“How far is the airport?” asked Kelly, leaning between the seats so she could see the road. Her hair was starting to grow out, and it tangled in front of her eyes in a
tawny fringe. It made her look more like herself, and that made it easier for me to deal with her, especially since she was still wearing Buffy’s clothes everywhere. One ghost was more than enough for me.

“About ten miles,” said Maggie. She picked up the radio remote, beginning to flick through the frequencies. Our van has a sophisticated antenna array capable of picking up police and even some military bands, thanks to Buffy’s tinkering and George’s endless willingness to throw money into improving our access to information. Maggie’s van, on the other hand, has six hundred channels of satellite radio. Prior to riding with her, I didn’t know there was enough, say, Celtic teenybopper surf rock to fill a podcast, much less an entire radio station. Live and learn.

Maggie settled on a station blaring pre-Rising grunge pop, cranking the volume a few notches before she put the remote down and reclined in her seat. “That’s better.”

“Better than what?” asked Kelly.

“Not having the music on.” Maggie twisted to face me, delivering a firm jab of her forefinger to my ribs at almost exactly the same time. “Now spill. Did you have any idea he was coming?”

“I really had no idea, Maggie, I swear.” I slowed at a stop sign—not quite coming to a full stop—before gunning the engine again and going barreling down a narrow, tree-lined street at a speed that only bordered on unsafe. As long as I didn’t cross that line and kill us all, I figured I was doing pretty well. “He was doing some research for me, but I honestly never expected that particular phone call.”

Neither did I, and that worries me,
said George.

“Who are we talking about?” asked Kelly. She
sounded worried. “I’m already a little uncomfortable with the number of people who’ve been in the house lately. Is this guy going to be staying?”

“For a while, yeah,” I said. “We’re on our way to pick up Mahir Gowda. You met him at the funeral.” Not that they’d had very much time to talk, or reason to; Kelly was only in attendance because the FBI had seized George’s body as evidence in the case against Governor Tate, and the CDC doesn’t allow human remains to be shipped without an escort. Thanks to that little rule, I wound up with two extra guests at a party I never intended to hold: Kelly and her boss, Dr. Wynne. I left George in the van and went to confront the man who really killed her—I shot her, but Tate ordered her infection, and I held Tate responsible for what happened—and I didn’t see her again until she was nothing but a heap of sterile ash—

Steady,
said George, breaking my black mood before it could fully form.

“Right, sorry,” I muttered. Mahir’s unexpected visit had me on the edge of panic, and every little thing—like the reminder of how Kelly and Mahir had first met—was enough to send me over the edge into seriously brooding. That wasn’t something I could afford just now.

Maggie gave me a sidelong look that was thoughtful and, oddly, relieved. “He was the one in the really unfortunate brown pants,” she said, directing her words toward Kelly.

“He flew in from London, didn’t he?” Kelly paused, eyes widening. “Wait, did he just fly in from London
again
?”

“That’s what it I looks like,” I said. We were approaching a large green sign that read
WEED AIRPORT
(MUNICIPAL FIELD O46) AHEAD.
I slowed to match the posted speed limit, turning into the lane that would take us to the quarantine zone.

Air travel changed a lot after the Rising. According to the history books, it used to be a pretty simple process. Older movies show airports packed with people comg and going as they pleased, and the real old ones show
really
crazy shit, like guys who aren’t even passengers pursuing their runaway girlfriends through security and people buying tickets from flight attendants, in cash. Every flight attendant I’ve ever seen has been carrying more ordnance than your average Irwin, and if somebody ran onto a flight without the proper medical clearances and a green light from the check-in desk, they’d be dead long before they hit the floor. Working for the airlines teaches a person to shoot first and ask questions later, if ever.

People who can’t hack it as Irwins because they’re too violent go into the air travel industry. There’s a thought to make a person want to stay at home.

Travel between the major airports requires a clean bill of health from an accredited doctor, followed by inspection by airport medical personnel before even moving into the ticketing concourse. Nonpassengers aren’t allowed past the first air lock. Once you’re inside, you’re herded from blood test to blood test, usually supervised by people with lots and lots of guns. That’s another thing that seems unbelievable about pre-Rising air travel: Nobody in those old movies is ever carrying a weapon unless they work for the police or the air marshals. Something about the fear of hijacking. Well, these days, the fear of zombies ensures that even people who have no business carrying a gun will have one when they want to get on a plane. You get on, you sit
down, and you stay sitting unless one of the flight attendants is escorting you to the restroom—after a blood test, of course. It takes their clearance to even unbuckle your seat belt once the plane is in motion. So yeah, air travel? Not simple, not fun, and definitely not something people undertake lightly.

Weed’s airport was tiny, three buildings and a runway, with only the minimum in federally mandated air lock and quarantine space between the airport and the curb. Several airport security cars were parked nearby. Overkill most of the time, especially for an airport this small, but I was willing to bet they wouldn’t be nearly enough if a plane actually flew in with an unexpected cargo of live infected. That’s the trouble with being scared all the time. Eventually, people just go numb.

I stopped the car in the space marked for passenger pick-up and drop-off, hitting the horn twice. Kelly winced, but didn’t question the action. Only an idiot gets out of their car unprompted at even the smallest of airports.

We didn’t have to wait long. The echoes from the horn barely had time to die out when the air lock door opened and Mahir came walking briskly toward us, dragging a single battered carry-on bag behind him. The formerly black nylon was scuffed and torn and patched with strips of duct tape in several places. At least that probably made it easy to recognize when it came along the conveyor belt at baggage claim—not that Weed’s airport was large enough to
have
a conveyor belt. I was pretty sure Mahir hadn’t arrived on any commercial flight.

He pulled open the van’s rear passenger-side door without saying anything, putting his carry-on bag on the seat before he climbed in and pulled the door shut again. Even then, he didn’t say anything, just fastened
his seat belt and met my eyes in the rearview mirror, clearly waiting.

I started the engine.

Mahir held his silence until we were half a mile from the airport, and the rest of us stayed silent just as long, waiting for him to say something. Finally, closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose and said, “Magdalene, how far is it from here to your home?”

“About ten miles,” she said, twisting in her seat to look at him with wide and worried eyes. “Honey, are you okay?”

“No. No, I am not okay. I am several thousand miles from okay. I am quite probably involved in divorce proceedings even now, I am present in this country under only the most tenuous of legal umbrellas, I am entirely unsure as to what time zone I am in, and I want nothing more than to rewind my life to the point at which I permitted myself to first be hired by one Miss Georgia Mason.” Mahir dropped his hand away from his face, eyes remaining closed as he sagged backward. “I believe that if I were any more exhausted, I would actually be dead, and I might regard that as a blessing. Hello, Shaun. Hello, Dr. Connolly. I would say it is a pleasure to see you again, but under the circumstances, that would be disingenuous at best.”

“Hello, Mr. Gowda,” said Kelly. I didn’t say anything. I kept driving, listening to George swearing loudly in the space between my ears. If there had been any question about what Mahir had found—whether it was good, bad, or just weird—his demeanor answered it. There was no way he’d look that beat down over anything but the end of the world, and somehow, I was starting to suspect that the end of the world was exactly what he represented.

Maggie looked around the car, a crease forming between her brows as she considered the expressions around her. Then she reached for the remote and turned the volume on the radio up. Somehow, that seemed like exactly the right thing to do, and we drove the rest of the way home without saying a word, blasting the happily nihilistic pop music of a dead generation behind us as we went.

Mahir opened his eyes when we reached Maggie’s driveway, watching with interest as we passed the first and second gates. As we approached the third gate, he asked, “Does it know how many people are in the vehicle?” I hit the switch to roll down the van windows as I glanced to Maggie for her answer. Metal posts telescoped up from the bushes around the driveway, unfolding to reveal small blood test units with reflective metal panels fastened to their sides. The tiny apertures where the needles would emerge glittered in the sunlight.

“The security grid runs on biometric heat-detection, equipped with low-grade sonar,” Maggie said, with the sort of rote precision that implied she knew because she’d read the manual, not because she really understood what the security system was doing. At least she read the manual. Some people trust their safety to machines without even doing that much. “It always knows how many people need to be tested. We ran a bus up here once, when we did the group trip to Disneyland, and the gate wouldn’t open until all thirty-eight of us had tested clean.”

“It made you run all thirty-eight?” I asked, punctuating the question with a low whistle. “That’s impressive.” Also terrifying, since I was willing to bet the designers hadn’t considered all the possible loopholes in that model. Maggie’s security system made us each
lean out the window long enough for a blood test, but it didn’t actually make us get out of the car and walk through an air lock while everyone else was tested. It would be entirely possible for someone to test cleang togo into amplification while the rest of the group was still being checked out. The ocular scan at the next gate would catch them—probably—but it would increase the number of potential infected from one to everyone in the group.

Maggie smiled blithely, missing the subtext of my comment. That was probably for the best. “It’s the best on the private market.” She stuck her hand out the window as she spoke, pressing it down against the passenger-side testing panel.

“It’s not
on
the private market,” said Kelly. I twisted to look at her as I slapped my hand down on my own testing panel. She shrugged, sticking her hand out the window, and said, “This technology isn’t supposed to be available outside of government agencies for another two years.”

“Oopsie,” said Maggie. She flashed a smile at Kelly and pulled her hand back into the van as the green light next to the testing unit flashed on. “I guess Daddy must have pulled some strings.”

Again,
added George dryly. I swallowed a chuckle.

“He did an excellent job,” said Mahir. The light next to his testing panel flashed green. Withdrawing his hand, he slumped in his seat and closed his eyes again. “Good lord, this nation is enormous. Wake me when there’s coffee.”

“You’ll need to open your eyes for the ocular scan in a minute,” said Maggie.

Mahir groaned.

I glanced at him in the rearview mirror, taking in
the fine stress lines etched around his eyes. Those weren’t there a year ago. George’s death was almost as hard on him as it was on me—something I wouldn’t have believed possible for almost anybody else. Mahir had been her beta blogger, her colleague, and her best friend, and sometimes I got the feeling he would have tried to be more if they hadn’t lived on different continents. At least I had the constant reassurance of going crazy. He just had the silence, and now, thanks to me, the strain of whatever it was he’d learned that was bad enough to drive him out of England.

“Hope this was worth it,” I muttered, and started the engine again.

The ocular scanners were calibrated to test only two people at a time; it took us nearly five minutes to clear the fourth gate. Mahir and I went first—me because safety protocols say to clear the driver as fast as possible, him because I was afraid he’d actually fall asleep if we made him wait too long. His exhaustion was becoming more obvious by the moment. I wasn’t going to insist he stay awake long enough to tell us everything he knew, but I wanted to know if we were looking at another Oakland. Last time we let an unexpected visitor have time to calm down before telling us everything, our apartment building got blown up, Dave died, and we wound up running for our lives. I’d like to avoid having that happen again if I get any say in the matter.