We didn’t know. There was nothing we could have done, and we didn’t know. You can’t shoot the wind. You can’t argue with the clouds. There was nothing, nothing we could have done to stop the storm, and even if there had been, we didn’t know. There was no fucking way for us to know. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and we didn’t know.
It wasn’t our fault. And if I say that enough times, maybe I’ll start believing it. Oh, fuck.
It wasn’t our fault. We didn’t know.
Oh, God, we didn’t know.
—From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, June 24, 2041. Unpublished.
Twenty-two
We crossed Kansas on the leading edge of the storm, chasing the light until the sun went down and we were driving in darkness so absolute that it was oppressive. The clouds covered the sky until they blocked out all traces of the stars, and when the rain started—about half an hour after the sun went down—visibility dropped to almost zero, even with the high beams on.
Becks took over driving after the rain started, while I moved to the back and the increasingly futile task owatching for pursuit. We hadn’t spotted anybody yet, but that didn’t mean no one was coming; it just meant they’d been careful enough to stay out of sight. There was a chance the rain would make them careless, driving them closer as they tried to keep from losing us. Of course, there was also a chance I’d wind up shooting myself in the leg if I tried to fire under these conditions. Sadly, that was a risk we had to take.
There was one good thing about the way the wind was howling; with Becks and Mahir in the front seat and me at the rear, they wouldn’t be able to hear me over the storm. “Christ, George, will you listen to that?” I whispered. “It’s like it wants to blow us all the way back to California.”
I don’t like it, she said, tone clipped and razor-sharp with tension. It felt almost like I’d see her if I turned my head just a little to the side, watching the other side of the van with her favorite .40 in her hands as she scanned the road for trouble. I didn’t turn. She added, There’s something not right about all this. Why aren’t they coming after us yet?
“Maybe they’re not sure it was us.” The excuse sounded stupid almost before it was out of my mouth. The people Dr. Wynne was working with had to know he’d sent Kelly to infiltrate us—he couldn’t have triggered the outbreak in Oakland remotely, and he certainly couldn’t have called in an air strike without somebody to approve it. Finding Kelly dead in his lab might confuse the legit members of the CDC, but the corrupt ones would know exactly who must have brought her back to Memphis, and they’d be watching the roads. So where were they?
This is too easy.
“I know.” I took a breath, scanning what little of the road was still visible through the darkness and the pounding rain. I almost wished there was someone else out there. At least a second pair of headlights would have broken up the black a little bit. “I think we fucked up, George. I think we fucked up big.”
We should have come up with a better plan. There has to have been another way. Her voice turned bitter. If anyone should have known better, it was me.
I didn’t argue with her. George was stubborn even when she was alive. Dead, she was basically impossible to convince of anything she didn’t agree with. “So now we head home, we regroup, and we head someplace where we can be invisible. We can’t stay with Maggie anymore. It’s not safe.”
We can’t leave her there alone, either. I could almost see the resignation on her face as she added, in an intentional echo, It’s not safe.
“Fuck,” I whispered, and settled against the seat, eyes still on the road.
Maggie never needed to be a blogger. She never needed to be anything. She had her parents’ money and could have spent her entire life doing nothing as ostentatiously as possible. I’ve never been sure how she and Buffy met. It never really mattered. They were friends when Maggie joined the site, and they stayed friends right up until the day that Buffy died. She was our only real choice to take over the Fictionals, and she’d done an amazing job from day one… and she never needed to. Most people come to the news because there’s something driving them, somethng that they need to find a way to cope with. Maggie was just looking for something to do with her time. She did it well, she did it professionally, and now she was in just as much danger as the rest of us.
She knew the job was dangerous when she took it, George said. She was trying to be reassuring. She was failing.
“Really?” I asked. “Because Buffy didn’t.”
Not even George had an answer to that one.
“Shaun?” Mahir pitched his voice just short of a shout to be heard above the roaring wind. “The wireless has gone out. We’ve no more GPS connection from here, so we’re going to need to pray for clarity of road signs.”
“That’s awesome,” I called back, as deadpan as I could manage. “What’s our last known position?”
“We crossed into Colorado about twenty minutes ago,” shouted Becks. “I’m going to go around Denver—cut through Centennial and skip Wyoming entirely. You can have the wheel when we hit Nevada.”
“Deal.” I crawled over the back of the seat, turning to face the front of the van. “But I have to get some sleep before I drive again. Mahir, can you watch the back? Just scream if anything looks funny.”
“I think I can manage that,” said Mahir, unbuckling his belt.
I stretched out on the middle seat as he worked his way past me. A bag of cheap potato chips from the first convenience store made a decent, if funky-smelling, pillow, and my jacket was a better blanket than I’ve had in some motels. I closed my eyes, listening to the howling wind and the sound of modern country drifting from the radio. George’s phantom fingers stroked my forehead, soothing some of the tension away, and the world faded out as I slipped into a shallow doze.
I woke up several hundred miles and five and a half hours later. Mahir was asleep in the rear seat of the van, and the radio was blasting—not that you could really tell. The cloud cover seemed lighter here, allowing a few traces of what might have been sunlight to cut through. The wind was still committed to playing storm, screaming even louder than it had been when I went to sleep. I sat up groggily, rubbing the grit from my eyes, and swallowed twice to clear my throat before I rasped, “Where are we?”
“About thirty miles into Nevada,” said Becks. She sounded exhausted. I was going to ask how she was still awake when I noticed the drift of Red Bull cans covering the floor. Those hadn’t been there when I went to sleep.
I rubbed my eyes again. “Another supply run?” I guessed.
“Sort of.” Becks met my eyes in the rearview mirror, and I realized with a start that she was on the verge of panic. “The wireless is still out. I can’t get a decent radio signal. I stopped for gas about twenty minutes ago, and the place was deserted. Open, but there was no one there. I grabbed what I could, filled the tank, and ran.”
“Did you grab anything but Red Bull?”
“Generic donuts, enough Coke to get you through Nevada, and some salmon jerky.” She returned her attention to the road. “I don’t think we should stop again if we don’t have to. Something’s really wrong out there.”
“How do you mean?” I dug around between the seats until I found the bag with the Cokes. I grabbed one of those and a box of donuts, the kind so cheap that they may as well have been dipped in faintly chocolate-flavored plastic. Then I half stood and made my way to the front passenger seat, dropping down next to her.