Deadline (59 page)

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said. Joe walked around the table and shoved his enormous head into my crotch in canine greeting. I barely remembered the blood on my hand in time to stop myself from pushing him away. “This isn’t safe.”

“Oh, right. You’re contagious.” She reached into the pocket of her lab coat, pulling out a can of Coke and putting it down on the table between us. “You must be thirsty. You’ve been sitting in here for a while.” I stared at her. “No, really, open the can. I want to see how good your manual dexterity is.”

Still staring, I reached out and picked up the can. Its cold heaviness was soothing, even before I popped the tab, closed my eyes, and took a long, freezing drink. It
was the best thing I’d ever tasted, sugary syrupy sweetness and all.

Dr. Abbey was watching me intently when I opened my eyes. “How’s the throat feeling, Shaun?” she asked.

“A little dry. I don’t understand what you’re doing—” I stopped. The dryness in my throat was gone, replaced by the residual carbonated tingle that always came after I drank one of George’s Candyland hookers. “—here,” I finished, more slowly. “Dr. Abbey?”

“I’m here because I wanted to talk to you about your test results, Shaun.” She reached into her pocket again, this time producing a standard, run-of-the-mill field testing unit. Catching my surprise, she said, “Don’t worry. It’s been modified so it won’t upload—it’ll think it has, but it won’t. This won’t give our position away to the CDC, or to anybody else.”

“I don’t understand. Did something go wrong with my first test?”

“No, nothing went wrong with your first test. Now please.” She gestured toward the unit. “Humor the woman who’s willing to risk her life by offering sanctuary to your team, and take the goddamn test.”

“Right.” At least this one had lights. I popped off the lid, whispering, “One,” and waiting for George’s answering
Two,
before pressing my hand against the pressure pad. The needles bit in, quick and painful as always, and the lights began to flash through their complex analytic series of reds and greens. They flashed fast to begin with, then slowed as they settled on their final determination. It only took about thirty seconds for the last light to stop flashing.

All five of them settled on green.

I frowned, looking up at Dr. Abbey. Joe shoved his nose into my hand. I ignored him, focusing on her
instead. “Is this a side effect of blocking the transmission? You change something internally so it registers negatives as positives?”

“No, Shaun. I didn’t.” Dr. Abbey calmly picked up the lid to the testing unit, snapping it back into place. She watched my face the entire time, moving with slow, methodical gestures, so that I wouldn’t be surprised. She didn’t really need to worry. I was somewhere past surprise by that point. “None of the adjustments we’ve made to our equipment would do something as suicidal or idiotic as showing a positive result as a negative one. We’d just disable the readouts, like we did with your first test. Those results came to my computer, and no one else’s. I was able to study your entire viral profile.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not
trying
to say anything. What I
am
saying is that your test results—both times, the ones you didn’t see and the ones you just witnessed—came back clean.” Dr. Abbey looked at me gravely, a wild excitement barely contained in her expression. “You’re not sick, Shaun. You’re not going to amplify.

“I don’t know what your body did, but it encountered the live virus… and it fought it off. You’re going to live.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I just stared at her, the green lights on the testing unit glowing steadily, like an accusation of a crime I had never plotted to commit. I’d been right all along; amplification would have been too easy an exit, and when given the chance, my body somehow refused to do it. I was going to live.

So now what?

I
woke up in a white bed in a white room, with the cloying white smell of bleach in my nose and the tangled white cobwebs of mdreams still gnawing, ratlike, at the inside of my brain. I sat up w
ith a gasp, realizing as I did that I was wearing white cotton pajamas and covered by a white comforter with no buttons or snaps. I took a breath, then another, trying to force my heart rate down as I looked around the room, seeking some clue as to where I was.

The only furnishings were the bed I was in and a single bedside table with rounded edges. I reached out and gave it an experimental shake. It was bolted to the floor. The bed probably was, too. Nothing in the room could be used as a weapon, unless I wanted to try strangling myself with the sheets. Even hanging was out of the question, since there was nothing for me to hang myself from.

A huge, inset mirror that almost certainly doubled as an observation window took up one entire wall. That sort of fixture in this sort of room can mean only one thing: medical holding facility, probably owned by the
CDC. That fit with the dreams I’d been having, horrible, tangled things about some sort of major outbreak. No, not a major outbreak—there weren’t that many people involved, at least not when we closed the doors. And we had to close the doors. We had to close the doors, because—

“I see you’re awake.”

The voice came from a speaker in the wall above the mirror and caught me entirely by surprise. I screamed a little, clutching the blanket against my chest before I realized I was being an idiot. Whoever had me in here could do a lot worse than talk to me, if they decided that was what they wanted. I eyed the speaker suspiciously, letting go of the blanket.

“I’m awake,” I confirmed.

“Good, good. Now, you may be a little shaky at first. I don’t recommend trying to walk before you’ve had a little time to get adjusted.”

I was out of the bed before the voice was finished with its warning, stalking across the floor toward the mirror. Then I stopped again, stunned by the sight of my own reflection in what should have been—for me—a completely transparent surface. My eyes make one-way glass a pretty fiction.

Or they’re supposed to, anyway. Only for some reason, things weren’t working that way this time, and instead of looking at the hallway beyond the glass, I was looking at myself.

The pajamas I was wearing were at least two sizes too big, or maybe it was just that I’d lost weight: I looked like I was recovering from a long illness, all pale skin and bird-boned limbs. The lines of my collarbone stood out like knives, making me seem downright frail. My hair was too long, falling to hit my shoulders in
those annoying thick curls that always seemed to form when I let it grow out, and my eyes… There was something wrong with my eyes. Something very, very wrong.

I was still staring at my reflection when the speaker crackled on again. The voice from before came smoothly into the room, saying, “We’re very glad to see you up and about. Some disorientation is normal at first, and you shouldn’t let it bother you. Now, the speakers in your room are voice-activated; you don’t need to look for a button or anything like that. Just speak loudly and clearly, and we’ll understand you. Can you please tell us your name, and the last thing that you remember?”

I took a deep breath, holding it for a moment before letting it slowly out. Looking directly into my reflection—and hence, directly at anyone who happened to be standing in the hallway outside the one-way mirror, watching their little test subject, I answered.

“My name is Georgia Mason,” I said. “What the
fuck
is going on here?”

Writing a follow-up volume to
Feed
was both elating and terrifying, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance of a wonderful group of people. I can’t thank them enough. They ranged from medical professionals who worked
with both humans and animals to gun experts and epidemiologists.
Deadline
is the work of many hands, and I am grateful to each and every one of them, because they were the ones who made this all possible.

Michelle Dockrey is a longtime editor of mine who chose to sit out
Feed
because it included zombies. Upon reading it, she promptly demanded the manuscript for
Deadline,
and just as quickly used her red pen and insightful eye for blocking to improve the book beyond all measure. (Also, I no longer need to worry about her trying to “sit this one out.” I win at proofreader.) Brooke Lunderville stepped up to become primary medical consultant on this volume, and her keen sense of what you should and shouldn’t do with a syringe can be seen on every page.

Alan Beatts joined the proofing pool as my new
weapons expert, and his patient efforts to make me understand why a shotgun isn’t the ideal zombie-fighting weapon did a lot to improve my combat scenes. I am incredibly grateful, especially given that it was really, really late in the process when I decided to say, “Hey, do you think you could…” Thanks also to Torrey Stenmark, Dave Tinney, and Debbie J. Gates for their well-timed, well-considered technical suggestions.

The Machete Squad must also, and always, be thanked. Amanda Perry, Rae Hanson, Sunil Patel, Alison Riley-Duncan, Rebecca Newman, Allison Hewett, Janet Maughan, Penelope Skrzynski, Phil Ames, and Amanda Sanders were all on tap for general proofreading and plot consultation. Through their efforts is this book made incalculably better. Meanwhile, at Orbit, DongWon Song was applying a keen editorial eye to the text, Lauren Panepinto was rocking the cover design, and Alex Lencicki was just plain rocking. Thanks so much, guys. I couldn’t have done this without you.

Finally, acknowledgment for forbearance must go to Kate Secor, Shaun Connolly, and Cat Valente, who put up with an amazing amount of “talking it out” as I tried to make the book make sense; to my agent, Diana Fox, who remains my favorite superhero; to Betsy Tinney, for everything; and to Tara O’Shea and Chris Mangum, the incredible technical team behind
www.MiraGrant.com
. This book might have been written without them. It would not have been the same.

If you’re curious about the American yellow fever epidemic and mosquito-based vectors, check out
The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever
, by Molly Crosby.

Rise up while you can.