Deadline (53 page)

“Where are you going?” asked Becks, half-rising.

“The van.” I looked between them, noting their matching blank looks, and explained, “I’m pretty sure Buffy’s old wireless booster is still out there. If I can get it running—”

“—we can get back online,” said Alaric, his eyes
widening in comprehension. “I forgot all about that thing!”

“We haven’t exactly needed to use it in the last year.” I started walking again. “I’ll be right back. If I’m not right back, well… fuck, I don’t know. If I’m not right back, throw some gas grenades into the garage and call for the security dudes to come and shoot me until I stop bleeding.”

“We’ll shoot you ourselves,” said Becks, causing Alaric to shoot her a distressed look. She ignored it. You learn to shrug that sort of thing off after you’ve been in the field for a while. That, or you stop trying to talk to people who aren’t Irwins.

“Thanks.” I opened the garage door, shoving a bulldog aside with my foot before it could sneak by me, and slipped through.

The garage lights were motion-activated white fluorescents. They clicked on as soon as the door to the kitchen swung shut, filling the enclosed space with an even, sterile glow. I scanned the area, automatically assessing the load-bearing capacity of the shelves lining the walls and the security of the pipes connecting to the water heater and emergency backup generator. Maggie used the garage primarily for storage, cramming most of the shelves with boxes and using the ones nearest the door as an extension of the pantry. One entire floor-to-ceiling shelving unit was dedicated to bags of dried dog food. At least the bulldogs wouldn’t be going crazy with hunger anytime soon.

Our van was sitting at the center of the room. It had been washed before it was put away, and its paint almost gleamed in the antiseptic light. I took a step toward it.

“Hello, Mr. Mason,” said the voice of the house. It
managed to sound chiding, which was a nice trick, since it didn’t have normal human intonations. I stopped where I was, looking vainly for the speaker. “I am afraid the house is presently in a sealed state. You will be unable to exit, and should return to the interior.”

“That’s cool. I’m not trying to get out.” I forced myself to relax, one inch at a time. “I just need to get something from the van.”

“Attempts to break the isolation seals will be met with necessary force.”

“Necessary force” was a polite way of saying that the house security system would shoot me where I stood if I looked like I was trying to get the doors open. “Noted,” I said. “I’m not trying to get out, I swear. The van is right there, and I won’t even be turning on the engine. Promise.”

“Your compliance is appreciated,” said the house, and went silent. I wted a few seconds to see if it was going to try to evict me from the garage. Nothing happened. I started for the van, moving faster this time—if the house decided I was dawdling, it might decide I was planning to escape, and then things could get really messy, really fast. Use of lethal force by private security systems has been authorized since some jackass in Arizona loaded his house guns with dummy bullets and got himself ripped apart by a pack of starving infected. His estate tried to sue the security firm that managed his defenses, and the security firm turned right around and sued the state, saying they hadn’t been allowed to do the things they had to do if they wanted to keep their client alive.

“Mangum v. Pierce Security v. the State of Arizona,”
supplied George. She reached the van a few steps ahead of me, folding her arms as she leaned against the door. “Do you remember where Buffy kept the booster?”

“Hi, George. Nice to see you.” I pressed my thumb against the scanner, letting the van identify me as an authorized driver. The locks clicked open. “So does this mean I’m finally going
really
crazy?”

She shrugged. Her face still looked wrong without her sunglasses, alien and familiar at the same time. “I think it means you already have a way of coping with things that are too big for you to handle. So Maggie goes into vapor lock, and Mahir shouts at the embassy trying to get a call through to his wife, and you…”

“I see dead people walking around and giving me orders. Great.” I offered her a pained smile as I pulled the van door open. “At least I like having you here. This would get old damn fast if you were Mom.”

George grimaced exaggeratedly. “There’s a bright side to everything.”

“Really? What’s the bright side for Florida? Because I’m really not seeing one.” Our field equipment was piled haphazardly around the van’s interior, stacked on counters and taking up most of the floor space. It would take an hour, maybe more, to get the thing ready for an excursion. I couldn’t blame Maggie and Alaric for putting it away in this condition—they weren’t expecting to leave the house without a lot of notice, and they weren’t field operatives—but I still had to grit my teeth when I saw that the weapon racks hadn’t been properly secured. If we had to run for any reason, we’d all wind up getting killed by our own carelessness.

“If you’re not seeing one, I can’t see it either. You know that.”

I bit back the urge to swear at her. Fighting with George used to be one of my best ways of blowing off steam. I’ve mostly tried to avoid it since she’s been gone; it doesn’t seem fair to start something when neither of
us can really leave the room. Besides, in my saner days, I was always afraid I’d say something unforgivable and she’d leave me alone with the dark behind my eyes, and no more George, ever. I wasn’t so much afraid of that anymore. We just didn’t have
time
to fight.

“Hey, George, do me a favor, will you? Either go away, or stop pointing out how you’re just a figment of my imagination and help me find the damn booster. I can’t handle having you hanging around calling me crazy. I get enough of that from everybody else.”

“Your wish is y command,” she deadpanned, before climbing up to join me in the van. She couldn’t touch anything, naturally, but her feet still made soft echoing sounds when they hit the floorboards, and her shadow on the walls moved just the way that it was supposed to. I had to admire the realism of my hallucinations, even though I knew that probably wasn’t what most people would consider to be a good sign.

“Really? ’Cause right now, what I’m wishing for is a tank.” I paused. “Maybe two tanks. Becks will probably want one, too, and I don’t want to be greedy.”

“Always thinking of others, that’s you.” Her fingers brushed the back of my neck as she moved past me. I shivered. “The last time I saw the booster, Buffy was stowing it back here, with the rest of the backup network hardware.”

“We moved that around Valentine’s Day, when Becks did her ‘romantic places to take an Irwin’ article series.” I snapped my fingers. “The lockboxes!”

George leaned against the counter to watch as I dropped to my knees, rolled back the industrial rug covering the van floor, and pried up the trapdoor it had been concealing. We don’t have a complete second floor in the van—the weight would have been prohibitive,
not to mention the structural instability it would have introduced—but we had a few extra storage compartments built in for a rainy day during the first major retrofit. They made good hiding spots for contraband when we were doing certain types of articles, and the rest of the time, they were a convenient place to hide snack foods… or excess hardware.

The first compartment held nothing but weird-looking cartoon porn and Russian girlie magazines. I smiled despite myself. “Damn, Dave. You had smarts and you had guts, but what you did
not
have was taste.”

“He was pretty much in love with Magdalene,” said George.

I amended: “Most of the time, what you didn’t have was taste. Sometimes, you were spot on.” I pried open the second compartment. A metal box with half a dozen antennae welded to the sides was nestled in the bottom, padded by wads of duct tape. I reached down to wriggle it loose, lifting it carefully out of its cradle. “There we go.”

“Remember, there’s supposed to be a detached battery pack that goes with it.”

“Right.” I stuck my hand into the welter of duct tape, rummaging for a moment before pulling up a small metal square with a power adapter at one end and a USB port at the other. “Got it!” I held it up, turning to show her.

George was gone. Again.

I stopped for a second, looking at the space where she’d been—hadn’t been—had appeared to be—only a moment before. Then I sighed, lowering the battery pack as I picked the wireless booster back up and pushed myself to my feet. “This stage of the crazy is going to get real old, real fast, you know.”

Sorry. But you’re still too sane to sustain that sort of breakdown for very long.

“Guess this means that whole ‘not forever’ thing we talked about before is sort of moot, huh?” My hads moved automatically as I spoke, pulling a bag from under the counter and sliding the wireless booster inside.

I think that depends on you,
said George apologetically.
I’m not the one who needs to move on. I’m the one who’s here because you still need me.

“Yeah, well, right now? Right now, I think being crazy may be the only thing that’s keeping me sane. Come on.”

I closed the van door and made my way back across the garage. The house security system didn’t say anything. I guess it was smart enough to recognize that I hadn’t gone near any of the exits. That, or it just wasn’t in the mood to argue with me. I didn’t care either way.

Alaric and Becks were still at the kitchen table, in the exact positions they were in when I went into the garage. There was one difference: Half of Becks’s guns were gone, making room for me to put down the bag. “Alaric, you got an extension cord?”

“In my laptop bag,” he said. As he bent to retrieve it, he asked, “Did you find the wireless booster?”

“I did. Got any idea how it works?”

“Not really.”

“That explains why we stopped using it. I guess we’re going to have to hope that my classic ‘smack it until it works’ approach can save the day.” I sat, unpacking the wireless booster and connecting it to the battery pack. Alaric passed me an extension cord. I hooked it to the battery, and Becks took the other end, plugging it into the wall.

Try not to break anything you can’t fix.

“Hush, you,” I said vaguely. “Working now.”

Becks and Alaric exchanged a glance, but didn’t say anything. That was probably the best thing they could have done.

Buffy built all her own equipment. That would have been fine—a lot of people build their own equipment—if it weren’t for the fact that her idea of what equipment should look like was almost completely defined by pre-Rising television. She could put more wires, switches, and buttons on a single remote than anybody else I’ve ever met, and each one had a specific purpose. She also understood that by her standards, she worked with a bunch of ham-handed techno-illiterates. After the fifth time George tried to reboot a server by putting her foot through it, Buffy started putting idiot buttons on everything. They wouldn’t provide access to the more complicated functions, but they’d get things going.

“Red,” I mumbled. “Red, red, red…” Red buttons used to be common. They were visible, hard to miss, and universally understood as important. After the Rising, red took on another meaning: It became the color of infection, the color of danger… the color of death. Red buttons were installed on things that needed the capacity to self-destruct, and they represented the things that you should never, under any circumstances, touch. So of course Buffy, with her perverse sense of humor and pre-Rising aesthetic, made all the really good stuff red.

The center button on the booster’s control panel was a glossy shade of strawberry red. Becks and Alaric knew Buffy by reputation and through staff meetings, but she was dead before they joined the standing office team. They never learned some of her little quirks. So
it wasn’t really surprising to see Alaric come halfway to his feet when I hit the button. Becks managed not to stand. She did have to stop herself before she grabbed my arm, but hey, at least she stopped herself.

I took my finger off the button. The wireless booster made a cheerful beeping sound as it started scanning the local network, looking for exploitable cracks in the security. I looked from Becks to Alaric, smiled, and stood.

“Give it five minutes,” I said. “I’m going to get myself a Coke. Either of you want anything?”

Neither of them did.

The wireless booster clicked to itself, occasionally beeping as it verified some part of the network structure to its own satisfaction. It had been running for three of the five minutes I’d requested when Mahir came into the kitchen, rubbing his face with one hand. His glasses were propped up on his forehead, and he looked exhausted. Seeing the beeping, blinking box on the kitchen table, he slid his glasses back down and frowned. “What in bloody hell is that thing supposed to be, and what is it doing?” he asked.

“Hey, Mahir.” I took a swig of Coke before saluting him with the can. “The embassy get you a connection?”

“No.” He scowled. “All international lines are locked down until the cause of this incident can be determined. The damned government’s thinking terrorist action, naturally. I’ve just had an offer of extraction back to Britain. As if the United States could hold an Indian citizen against his will.”

“If this is declared an act of terrorism, I think they can,” said Alaric.