Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus
Author: Mira Grant
Date: 2015-07-14 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Horror; Science Fiction; Novella; Fiction; Short Stories; Fantasy; Dystopia; Post Apocalyptic; Urban Fantasy
Description: As Dr. Abbey knows, there are difficulties in running an underground virology lab in a post-Rising America. And unwanted guests must be dealt with.
Publisher: Orbit

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Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus

A Newsflesh Novella

Mira Grant

www.orbitbooks.net
www.orbitshortfiction.com

For Brooke and Vixy.

I cannot imagine the person I would be without you in my life. Thank you so much for everything you do. You make me be better, just to have a chance of being good enough.

Chapter 1

Relative Perspectives

I hate the term “mad scientist.” Shit yeah, I’m angry. I have every reason in the world to be angry. But what right do you have to call me insane?

—Dr. Shannon Abbey

Dr. Shannon Abbey is one of the more dedicated, driven individuals it has been my pleasure to know. Considering the company I have been known to keep, this is both high praise and a dire warning.

—Mahir Gowda

1.

My day started like any other: with the sound of screaming from the next lab over, followed by one of the interns—Dana or Daisy or something like that—running past my door, her hands flung up over her head and her mouth open in an ongoing howl. She wasn’t on fire or covered in blood, so I figured it couldn’t be that big of a deal. I put my head back down and resumed studying the quarter’s expense reports.

It would be easy to think that running a semisecret underground virology lab wouldn’t come with any of the normal paperwork. It would also be incorrect. Contractors and supply companies don’t donate their time and wares just because a lab happens to operate outside the usual boundaries. If anything, they’re likely to charge more, since there’s always the chance that this month’s order will be the last. They have to get their dues in where they can. It used to piss me off, but there was nothing to be done about it, and besides, the more I paid, the more I could count upon their discretion. A bribed bastard never tells.

Thank God for the American Affordable Care Act. It was passed in a limited form right before the Rising began, despite the opposition of one hell of a lot of people who thought that providing health care to their fellow citizens was somehow, I don’t know, inappropriate. Honestly, it was a miracle the thing passed at all, considering that we’re talking about the era of vaccine denial and homeopathic cures for everything from autism to erectile dysfunction. If the Rising hadn’t come along when it did, most of the United States would probably have died of whooping cough before 2020, leaving the middle part of the continent ripe for Canadian invasion.

But resistance to public health aside, the ACA did pass, and after the Rising made the consequences of ignoring one’s fellow man blazingly apparent, it was strengthened and improved until the United States had one of the best health care systems in the world. My interns might be officially unemployed and not drawing a salary, but at least I didn’t have to worry about paying their medical insurance.

The intern—I was pretty sure her name was Daisy; I seemed to remember her saying something about flowers, or The Great Gatsby, or something equally inane—ran past again, still screaming, still not on fire. I narrowed my eyes and dropped my stylus on the desk before pushing back my chair. Joe, my black English Mastiff, raised his head and made a bewildered ruffing noise deep in his throat. I leaned down to stroke his ears.

“Good boy, Joe,” I said. “You guard the desk. I’m going to go cut a few strips out of my new intern. Maybe I can make you some jerky. Would you like that, Joe? Would you like some nice intern jerky?”

Joe made another ruffing noise, all but indicating that he very much would like some nice intern jerky. I stroked his ears again.

“Good boy,” I repeated, and made my way out of the office, pausing only to grab my lab coat from the hook next to the door.

There’s something powerful about a lab coat, no matter how dirty or threadbare it may become. I was never going to get the bloodstains out of this one, and even if I had, I’d spilled a glass of ruby port on my right sleeve the week before. That’s the sort of stain that nothing will remove, not even hydrofluoric acid. Although acid would remove the fabric, so technically, it would also remove the stain.

But yes: power. A person who wears a lab coat is a person who knows what’s up: a person who can change the world, for either good or ill, through the studied application of science. A person who understands the way things are done. And in my lab, when I wear a lab coat, it means that some serious shit is about to go down.

The screaming intern wasn’t screaming anymore by the time I stepped into the wet lab three doors down from my office. She was crying instead, her hands clasped over her face in what seemed to me to be an excessively theatrical manner. Three more of the interns were clustered around her, varying expressions of shock and dismay on their faces. The tank behind them was empty. I sighed.

“All right, where the fuck’s the octopus?”

One of the interns pointed up. I followed the line of his finger to the light fixture at the center of the ceiling. A large white mass was clinging there, three of its legs slapped flat against the plaster. The rest of its legs were twined around the light fixture itself, holding it in place.

“Barney, dammit.” I crossed my arms. “You know you’re not supposed to be up there. How are we supposed to take cell samples if you’re sticking to the damn ceiling all the time?”

“Eh-eh-it grabbed my face!” wailed probably-Daisy. Her voice was distorted by her hands, which was possibly the most annoying thing she’d done since the screaming began.

“Of course he grabbed your face,” I said. “If you give Barney the opportunity to grab your face, he’ll grab your face. Everyone knows that. Grabbing faces is his one true joy in life, since we won’t let him stick to the ceiling all the time, and he’s never going to get laid.” Octopuses died shortly after they mated. It was a biological kill switch that all my tinkering hadn’t been able to remove, which made hormone depressants and celibacy the only real solution. I needed my test subjects to live until I was done with them. Barney had been with us for ten years now, and I was planning to keep him for ten more, no matter how cranky he got.

Probably-Daisy finally lowered her hands and stared at me. I looked impassively back at her, raising an eyebrow for emphasis. If she was going to work in my lab, she was going to need to learn to deal with the fact that sometimes, things were going to get messy. She was honestly lucky that she’d just had her face grabbed by an angry octopus. Worse things had happened to my staff in the past, and not all of them had survived.

“Does anyone have a stick?” I asked. “We need to get Barney off the ceiling and back into his tank. Preferably today. I can’t authorize feeding the rest of the cephalopods while he’s still hanging around out here, and I don’t want an army of angry, hungry octopuses rampaging through the place.”

“Sorry, Dr. Abbey,” said Tom. He’d been with me longer than most of the research staff, a distinction he bore with dignity, grace, and a whole lot of marijuana. As long as he didn’t try to do delicate work while he was stoned, I really didn’t care. Besides, the more interested he got in hydroponics, the better everyone else’s food became. It was a win-win situation. Especially for me, since as long as I looked the other way when he lit up, he didn’t leave me for a more legitimate, less murderously dangerous workplace.

“It was an accident,” said Jill. She hadn’t been with me as long as Tom, but she’d survived two outbreaks in her time, one by removing her prosthetic leg and using it as a club. She was also one of the only researchers in my lab that we hadn’t recruited. She’d just shown up one day, like a particularly tall, gawky, Canadian puppy with a fondness for bioluminescence.

Between the two of them, I had managed to create the perfect intern-hazing machine. Tom was lackadaisical enough that no one ever expected him to move quickly or act cruelly, and Jill was a safety valve on his occasionally dangerous impulses, turning what could have been harmful pranks into octopus antics and the occasional sewage line backup. Maybe it was cruel of me to put that sort of pressure on the new kids, but to be honest, I didn’t really give a fuck about whether I was being cruel. My interns either broke while they were brand-new and still under warranty, or they proved themselves capable of surviving under laboratory conditions.

Really, what one person saw as cruelty, another person would probably see as a mercy. There was no way of knowing who could and couldn’t hack it before they’d been put into a position to try, and the consequences for failure weren’t pretty.

Probably-Daisy looked from Tom to Jill and back again before finally turning to me, her tears stopping in the face of her confusion. “Wait,” she said. “Why are you acting like this is normal?”

“Because it is normal,” I said. Tom handed me a stick. I took it, and began gently prodding at the legs Barney had wrapped around the light fixture. “Didn’t you see the signs? The ones that say ‘don’t taunt the octopus’?”

“Yes, but…that was also the e-mail address you used when you offered me this job,” said probably-Daisy. She picked herself up from the floor, only wobbling a little. Her tears were by now completely forgotten, washed away by everything that was happening around her. That was good. It showed flexibility, assuming she wasn’t on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown.

If she was, I was going to owe Tom another bag of fertilizer for his ganja garden. He had been betting against her since day one, when she’d worn high heels to the pharm lab. Jill thought—and I was inclined to agree with her, although I would never have said so—that Tom didn’t understand what it was to be a woman coming into an established workplace. We didn’t care about those conventions here: As long as my employees wore shoes, they could run in, and took their chemical showers on time, I could give a shit how they chose to present themselves. But the CDC didn’t work like that. The CDC might never work like that, not even now that the EIS was rebuilding their command structure. And probably-Daisy was just the latest in a long line of prettily gift-wrapped, beautifully disloyal CDC spies.

The sooner she figured out that I knew what she was, and didn’t care, the better off she was going to be. In the meantime, she had to survive her first week.

“I use that as my e-mail address in part because it’s a really basic aspect of lab safety,” I said. “The octopus has eight arms, incredibly good eyesight, and enough brains to hold a grudge against anyone who pisses it off. So when I say, ‘Do not taunt the octopus,’ what I’m actually saying is, ‘Have a sliver of self-preservation in that rotten walnut you persist in calling a brain.’” I poked Barney again with the stick. Barney took the stick away and poked me back.

Probably-Daisy looked to Tom and Jill, seeking moral support. They both shook their heads, and didn’t say anything. They knew when their input was not needed.

“What’s your name, anyway?” I tried to grab the stick back from Barney. He used it to whack me upside the head.

“Zelda,” said probably-Daisy.

“Wow, okay. I was way off.” I grabbed the stick again. This time, Barney let me have it. I tossed it aside and held my arms out, and he let go of the ceiling, falling like so much dead weight. The impact of him slamming into my elbows made me stagger a little. He curled his legs around me, and I pulled him close to my chest, providing the comfort and security that a healthy octopus needs. “Don’t let him grab your face again. Jill, Tom, don’t let the interns feed Barney if they’re going to freak out when he behaves in a totally reasonable manner.”

“Yes, Dr. Abbey,” they chorused dutifully.

“Good. Now go the fuck back to work.” I walked out of the room, Barney nestled comfortably in my arms and slowly turned a deep shade of orange as he adjusted his chromatophores to match my shirt.

Sometimes it’s good to be in charge.

2.

It was generally pretty easy to get Barney to go into the recreation tank. It was wide and shallow and usually contained other octopuses, or sometimes an interesting crab or toy that he could take apart. This time, he clung to my arms and chest like he was afraid I was going to drop him, even going so far as to wrap the tip of one tentacle around the back of my head. The feeling of suckers trying to find purchase on my hair was bizarre, and made me glad all over again that I had abandoned the professional vanity of my youth in favor of the practical buzz cut of my…non-youth. Middle age.

“Just call me mature for my years, and don’t ask for my birthday,” I said to Barney, who responded, in typical fashion, by reaching up and trying to wrap his arms around my face. I sighed, pushing him away as I waded into the water. It was cold enough to chill my ankles and calves immediately, and my shoes were going to need some serious time in the dryer, but whatever. If it got Barney to let me go, it was worth the sacrifice.

“You need to let go now,” I said, bending forward until the back of his mantle touched the water. Barney lessened his grip, but didn’t release me completely. I moved my hands so that they were tucked under his central arms, rather than supporting his body, and began gently pushing him away.

Like most octopuses, Barney was smart enough to be a problem and alien enough to human modes of thought that he didn’t really subscribe to mammalian notions of right, wrong, and “I shouldn’t stick to that.” Still, he had been my lab animal since he had first emerged from his tiny, translucent egg sac and into a thick solution of protein, mutagenic agents, and Kellis-Amberlee. He was the first Giant Pacific Octopus I had failed to infect, and he was still at the forefront of my cephalopod studies. And after years of working with me—voluntarily or not—he knew when he was pushing his luck. With what I could only describe as a disgruntled pulse of his chromatophores, he released me and sank down into the pool, settling on the smooth, sandy bottom.

“Thanks,” I said, reaching down and pressing one hand flat against the surface of the water. He reached up and twined the tip of one arm briefly around my wrist before letting me go and ambulating off to look for something to play with.

It must have been nice, being an octopus. I couldn’t even say that the lack of sex was a deterrent, since I myself hadn’t gotten laid in more than two years. “Mate or die” might not be built into the human genome, but the need to actually form an emotional connection with someone is, chemically speaking, and running an underground virology lab leaves very little opportunity for dating.

I waded back to the edge of the pond and stepped out, grimacing at the way my shoes squelched on the tile. The two researchers currently responsible for maintaining the pool looked at me from the other side of the room, their expressions making it clear that they wanted, desperately, to ask why I had decided to take my octopus for a walk. I lifted my eyebrows and waited until they looked away. Then, smirking, I turned and walked back toward my office.

To say that this is not the future my parents envisioned for me when I said I wanted to become a virologist would be an understatement. They pictured a life of scientific accomplishment and research performed in perfectly clean, brilliantly white rooms, with no fewer than five layers of security between me and the things I worked on. They pictured marriage, a family, and above all else, safety. Their daughter was going to be a doctor. Their daughter was going to find the cure for Kellis-Amberlee. Their daughter was going to save the world.

They were sort of right. For a while, I’d thrived in just the sort of environment they’d imagined for me. I had gone from Health Canada to the Canadian branch of the CDC, an organization established after the Rising for the purpose of keeping things on a relatively even, zombie-free keel. I’d met a good man, gotten married, and started thinking about children. There are people who say that it’s immoral to bring kids into the world we have today. Most of those people aren’t really thinking about the long-term consequences of their words. If everyone stopped having kids, the human race would die out. Maybe not directly because of Kellis-Amberlee, but does that really matter? We’d still be dying out due to the zombie apocalypse. Screw that.

Then came the outbreak at Simon Fraser University. My husband, Joseph Abbey, was on campus, giving a lecture to a class of future software engineers. Someone got sick, someone died, the dead began to walk, and rather than sending in a team of soldiers to save the healthy, the people at the switch decided to cut their losses and burn the whole thing to the ground. It was the first major firebombing on Canadian soil since the end of the Rising. There were no survivors. Including my husband. Including, once I had managed to beg, borrow, and steal my way into accessing the few shreds of footage that had managed to survive the “accidental” purge that followed the bombs, my professional career.

They—Health Canada, the CDC, the governments of their respective countries—were lying to me, and had been lying to me since the day I said, “I think I want to go to medical school.” They weren’t keeping us safe. They weren’t searching for a cure, or even for a solution. They were just writing us off as acceptable losses. After Simon Fraser, I couldn’t believe that any losses were acceptable. Not unless I saw them with my own eyes.

I’d handed in my resignation the day after the funeral. The CDC had refused it. They had also refused the second one I handed them. I don’t know if they bothered to refuse the third. I was gone before anyone could come looking for me. I’ve been gone ever since.

Technicians walked past me in the hall, and if any of them found the wet splotches on my shirt, or the fact that I was soaked to the knees, to be a little bit strange, they were smart enough not to say anything about it. It’s always nice to have confirmation that I hire intelligent people—sometimes brains are the only things that stand between a living person and a gruesome death. Or maybe brains and Kevlar.

Joe lifted his head when I opened my office door, looking perplexed as only a large canine can. I offered him a smile and closed the door behind myself, heading for the closet on the other side of my desk. “It’s okay, Joe,” I said. “Barney just gave me a few hugs too many, and now I need a fresh shirt.”

Joe’s tail thumped the floor hopefully. I sighed.

“No, not right now. Sorry, buddy, but I really do need to finish these expense reports before Joey calls me up and wants to know what happened to all that human growth hormone he shipped my way last quarter. I’ll make it up to you later, all right?”

Joe’s tail hit the floor one more time before my “no” processed. Looking sad, he put his head down on his paws and heaved a sigh deep enough that it seemed to have deflated his entire body. I grinned. I couldn’t help myself. There was just something about an overly dramatic dog that amused the hell out of me—a direct contradiction of my reaction to overly dramatic interns, who were generally sent packing at the first opportunity. One nice thing about running my own private, illegal lab: Everything is work for hire.

Our current facility was one of the nicer ones we’d had for a while, and we’d been there for coming on three years. That was a record for my little operation, which normally got driven out of each new facility within eleven months. I blamed the changes in the status quo that had accompanied our relocation to Shady Cove, Oregon. All my previous labs had operated in a climate where the CDC was the enemy—no question, no quarter—and the government was actively working against research into Kellis-Amberlee reservoir conditions. Thanks to some dangerous houseguests of mine, there had been what I could only describe as an ideological climate change. I wasn’t coming back to the fold of “legitimate medicine” any time soon, but the new world we were moving into was a lot better for people like me.

If I was being honest with myself, I had to admit that “legitimate medicine” wanted to deal with me about as much as I wanted to deal with it. Joey knew exactly where I was located these days. So did Dr. Danika Kimberley, an EIS researcher who had managed to worm her way into the upper echelons of the restructured CDC. Either one of them could have set the wolves on me at any time, and they didn’t, because they knew the work I was doing was as important as it was impossible for them to do. No ethics committees for me. No oversight. Just a bunch of skilled technicians, a lot of animals, and the knowledge that someone should have started years before I had.

It was nice, still being in Shady Cove. I had told Joey that we’d be cutting our losses and running, during the final showdown between the old CDC and the branch of the EIS that would go on to become the new one. He had cautioned me to wait a little while, to be patient, and for once in my life, I had actually listened, maybe because Dr. Joseph Shoji was one of my only old colleagues who had never, not for a second, tried to write me off as deluded or insane. He had always understood that there was a difference between anger and loss of faculties, and he didn’t throw around ableist terms like “mad” just because it made him look better. So when he’d asked me to stay, I’d given him the benefit of the doubt.

My reward was the Shady Cove Forestry Center. It had been the site of the single largest massacre my team had ever experienced, when a CDC spy who had managed to worm her way into my interns decided that she could exterminate a whole lot of problems with one pair of lock cutters. She’d been torn apart by the test subjects she released, before they went on to kill eleven more of my people. Eleven. I had never lost that many team members in a single day, and if the infected hadn’t killed her, I would have done it myself.

I had always known that the CDC was watching me. They would have been stupid not to be, and while the CDC was many things—corrupt, cowardly, morally bankrupt in a way that all the “mad science” in the world would never be able to match—they weren’t stupid. They never had been. I’d even rooted out a few of their previous spies, many of whom were still with me in one capacity or another. It was amazing how quickly exposure to the real world would deprogram the little darlings, many of whom had never seen unredacted infection data in their lives. My IT department was excellent, and backstopped by the latest technology from the antisurveillance teams working in their own part of the modern underground. One of the past moles had admitted, after he changed sides, that the CDC called my lab “the roach motel.” Data got in, but it didn’t get out.

“Once I managed to get hired, I was supposed to keep my head down and wait for you to trust me enough to send me on a supply run,” he’d said, looking just chagrined enough that I hadn’t wanted to belt him upside the head with a stapler. “Then I could transmit a signal back to the CDC with everything I’d managed to learn.”

“Did you?” That had been my only question, and when I’d asked it, he had shaken his head.

“Never got the chance,” he’d said. “Can I stay?”

“Sure, Tom; you can stay.” And then he’d shaken my hand and gone back to hydroponics, where he had proceeded to test the rumors that people could die from marijuana overdose. Since he’d survived, I was pretty sure those rumors were just that—rumors, and no more true than the one about the human clone living somewhere in Canada, off the grid and out of the public eye.

Well. Maybe that one had a little grain of truth to it.

The Shady Cove facility had everything we’d ever needed and a few things we hadn’t considered, such as the octopus wading pool and the sizable living quarters that had been provided for the rangers and college interns who had originally ruled the forestry center. For the first time in a long time, my people were comfortable, no one was worried about using up the last of the hot water, and we were even starting to make acquaintances within the local black market, rather than just going for the mutual exploitation model.

It was a pretty sweet gig. I had all faith that it was going to come to a terrible end, and very soon, because that’s what happens to pretty sweet gigs. And in the meanwhile, no matter how much I tried to delay or deny it, there was still paperwork to be done.

I produced a dry shirt, pants, and socks from the stock in my closet, kicked off my shoes, and tossed my wet clothes onto the floor to be dealt with later. It only took a few minutes for me to get myself re-dressed, and no elves or CPAs or other mythological creatures appeared to do my paperwork in the interim.

Sometimes, it’s not so good to be the boss after all. I sat back down, picked up my pen, and bent forward. This time, the sound of screams did not come to save me.

3.

After two hours of paperwork, broken up by three cups of coffee, a banana-mango smoothie, and the corresponding trips to the bathroom, I was done. Virtually anything would have been better than filling out one more itemized list, and that included dealing with another outbreak in my own living room. “Life was easier when assholes tried to kill us on the regular, Joe,” I said. Joe replied by lifting his head and thumping his tail against the floor again, eternally hopeful.

Might as well reward him for his patience. “Come on, buddy,” I said, and stood. “Let’s go on an inspection.”

Joe was immediately on his feet, tail wagging so hard that his entire massive body shook. This time, I left my lab coat on the hook as I opened the door and stepped out into the hall, Joe pacing along beside me. Together, we filled all the available space, forming an impassable wall of scientist and dog. I liked it that way. It was good to remind people that when something needed to move, it wasn’t going to be me.

Again, some of the psychology that went into my lab design and behavior could be seen as cruel, but there was always a good reason for it. I wasn’t here to foster a loving workplace environment or encourage my people to be the best that they could be. I was here to save the world, and to hopefully do it with a minimum of casualties. That meant, among other things, that I needed people to remember the chain of command, and to not think that they were somehow above it because they had feelings, needs, and opinions of their own. Surprisingly enough, wandering around with a carnivore the size of a small pony helped me get my point across.

The lab where Barney had performed his classic face-hugging stunt was empty, and I was pleased to see that the floor and ceiling had both been dried off. Two of the smaller octopuses were in the tank, one of them clinging to a rocky outcropping high in the corner, and the other lazily wandering around the bottom. Joe pressed his nose against the glass and made a little wuffing noise. I pulled him back.

“Don’t bark at the octopuses,” I scolded mildly, wiping the wet spot his nose had left on the glass away with my sleeve. “You know they hold grudges.”

Joe looked at me dolefully. I ruffled his ears and pulled him away from the tank, stepping back out into the hall. The air smelled of bleach and artificial citrus: The cleaning crew had been through recently. I nodded to myself, satisfied with their work, but kept studying the walls and floor as I led Joe through the facility. Part of being the head of an underground lab is knowing that no one is responsible for your survival but you. I didn’t have a job—I had all the jobs, from making the mac and cheese on Tuesdays to scrubbing out the octopus enclosures. The fact that I outsourced them from time to time didn’t make them any less my own, and it wouldn’t save me from the consequences if they were done poorly.

Joe sniffed the ground as we walked, his tail waving wide and creating a dangerous barrier behind us. A dog that big, with a tail that long, can leave bruises just by being happy to see you. The various interns we passed all gave Joe a wide berth, until we reached the lobby of the forestry center. Out of all the rooms in the building, this was the one we had changed the least. It was too big and too oddly shaped to be of use for much beyond storage and socialization, and we already had several storage rooms. Consequently, the lobby was where couches and chairs from the rest of the building went to die. They were shoved up against walls and curved into conversation pits, some of which were currently in use. I waved but didn’t approach. My people, no matter how much they liked me and appreciated my leadership, weren’t here to be my friends. All I’d do by approaching was make them uncomfortable.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown. If you ask me—and why wouldn’t you ask me? I’m a genius—heavier yet are the shoulders that wear the lab coat. Everyone in this facility depended on me to keep them alive. If that meant I wasn’t invited to the Friday movie nights, well, so be it.

Sometimes I really missed the days when Shaun Mason and his little band of fools had been in and out every time I turned around. Shaun had never been afraid of me. He’d been suffering from PTSD and obsessed with getting revenge for his dead sister, and most of his people should probably have quit and come to work for me, since at least I don’t hit, but he’d been fun. He’d been trying to make a place for himself in a world that doesn’t yield easily to people like us, and he’d been doing it while knowing exactly how broken he really was.

I missed them all, honestly. Mahir and his frustrations, Alaric and his confusion, Becks—God, poor Becks—with her grudges and her resentments and her infinite potential. Even Maggie and Kelly had been interesting to talk to, in their own privileged ways. But I missed Shaun most of all. He’d been the one who reminded me most of myself, back in the early days, when there was nothing left for me but rage.

I swiped my card at the reader next to the front door. It buzzed softly, a small tone that would also sound at each of our security stations. Then the door unlocked, and I let myself out into the sweet green loveliness of the Oregon afternoon.

Mammals are pretty Johnny-come-lately in the natural world. Compared to plants and insects, we’ve been here for fifteen minutes, and we’re already fucking shit up. Removing the large mammals from the forests surrounding Shady Cove hadn’t done anything to hurt them. If anything, it had allowed the underbrush to achieve a level of lush health that the forest hadn’t known in centuries. We still got squirrels, rabbits, rats, and pre-amplification raccoons, as well as the occasional possum. One of the interns swore that she’d seen a bear, but until I saw some proof, I wasn’t going to worry about it. With as many cameras as we had around the edges of the building, “Pics or it didn’t happen” was a totally fair request.

Joe’s nose immediately went to the ground, drinking in the scent of the day. I walked with him to the edge of the parking lot, where the woods began. Then I gave him a pat on the shoulder and tugged once on the back of his collar, re-creating the degree of pressure that would have accompanied unclipping a leash. Joe’s head came up, eyes bright with sudden excitement.

“That’s right, good boy,” I said. “You’re off-leash. Go ahead and run around a little bit.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. Tail wagging and ears pressed flat in canine excitement, Joe went bounding into the underbrush. The greenery rustled once, twice, three times, and he was gone, returning to the wilds that had created his ancestors.

I stayed where I was, in the open space where the paving still held dominance and the forest had not yet taken back its original territory. We’d been at the forestry center long enough that we’d cleared out all the mobs in the area, stacking up infected humans, deer, and raccoons like cordwood. I’d been sending my people farther and farther to collect test subjects, because we just couldn’t find them near the lab. But none of that made me feel like taking the risk of going out into the green.

A gunshot sounded from straight ahead of me, followed by a strangled yelp from—“Joe!” I didn’t pause to think about what I was doing. I just charged forward, racing into the wood with my head down and my heart pounding wildly. My own pistol was strapped at my hip. It wouldn’t help me against, say, a zombie bear, but a zombie bear wouldn’t be shooting at my dog.

I broke through a wall of green into a small clearing, formed by a collusion of tree roots ripping up the ground and making it inhospitable to further growth. The surrounding brush was dense and tangled, pulling at my clothing even as I tried to shake it off. Joe was standing in the middle of the clearing, legs set in a wide-splayed “guard” position, a growl resonating up through his massive chest. His ears were completely flat, making him look more like a small bear than a large dog. It would have been a heart-stopping sight if he hadn’t been my dog, and if my heart hadn’t already been struggling to recover from the shock of hearing that gun go off.

He was growling at a large tree, his eyes fixed on its branches. I looked up, trying to see what had him so upset. It was probably human. Joe sometimes got excited about squirrels and bunny rabbits—I tried to stay out of the way when that happened, since no amount of scientific detachment could make the sight of a mastiff crunching on a rabbit’s skull pleasant—but those didn’t usually carry guns.

“What do you have, boy?” I asked, trying to estimate the lines of sight from the tree to where I was standing. “Did you startle a trespasser? Is that what you did, boy? Did you come out of the bushes and scare some poor local kid who was just looking for something they could eat? Or did you find yourself a looter? The difference between a looter and a trespasser is about eight bullets, by the way.” I raised my voice, abandoning the pretense that I was talking to my dog. “We don’t mind people passing through, but I assure you, we’re not that easy to rob.”

Big words for a woman in jeans and a T-shirt. Whoever was in that tree didn’t have to know that, and Joe definitely helped me present a terrifying public front. Most people aren’t accustomed to dogs anymore. When your family pet can turn you into the walking dead with a single bite, most people decide to go with goldfish.

“That’s a dog.” The voice was female, and ageless in that way some women have, a combination of innocence and experience that could have come out of a throat aged anywhere from seventeen to seventy. She sounded affronted, like Joe’s existence was somehow an insult to her ideas about the world. “You have a dog.”

“Yes,” I said, tracking the sound of her voice until my eyes lit on a spot high in the tree. She was there. She was hidden by branches, and might not have a clear line of sight on me—but then again, she might. It was hard to say, without being able to see her hands, and the way she was holding her gun. “You shot at my dog.”

“He came up out of the bushes at me! He was going ow-ow-ow-ow!” Her onomatopoeia for the sound of Joe’s bark was shallow, restricted by the span of her rib cage, but it was surprisingly good: I would have recognized that bark anywhere.

“Yeah, he does that when he’s running around his own backyard. It means he’s happy.” I didn’t move. “I know you have a gun. I know you took a shot at my dog. Do you have any more bullets? Because if you take another shot at my dog, I will have to return fire.”

“Is he a good dog, or a bad, bitey dog? I don’t think I should have to leave bad, bitey dogs alone.” The woman in the tree sounded genuinely curious. She also sounded somehow off, like she was working harder to speak than she should have needed to.

Joe hadn’t bitten her: I knew that. With the size of his jaws, if he’d been able to catch any part of her body, one of them would have died. Either the woman, from blood loss, or Joe, from lead poisoning. Whatever was wrong with her, it predated her encounter with my dog.

“Whether he’s a good dog or a biting dog depends entirely on your relationship with me,” I said. “Joe follows instructions. Do you have any bullets left?”

“Yes, but not so many,” said the woman. “I’ve been running out of bullets. Running out of pills, too. So I said, wait, I said, maybe there’s a somebody who could make both of those things better. So I asked some questions, and maybe used a few more bullets—definitely used a few knives—and found out where there was a somebody. I don’t want to hurt you. You seem like a nice lady, and like I said, I’ve been running out of bullets. You’re a nice lady with a really big dog. The dog is probably better than bullets in a lot of situations, huh? I bet when you have a dog that big, nobody messes with you.”

“We’re getting off the topic, my unseen friend, and that topic is whether or not we’re both walking away from here under our own power,” I said. “You say you’re low on bullets. You say you don’t want to hurt me. Well, you’re on my land. If you’re not here to hurt me, what are you here for?”

“I’m looking for someone.” The feeling that something was wrong came through even more strongly in her brief, blunt statement. It was like she’d been drawing strength from her run-on sentences, using them to keep herself together. I’d heard that sort of thing before, from exhausted interns who were sure they could solve the zombie apocalypse if they just gave up sleep and learned to live entirely on coffee and adrenaline.

It always ended in a crash.

“Who?”

The tree rustled. “Will your doggy hurt me if I come down?”

“Not unless you draw first. Joe? Heel.”

Joe’s massive head swung around to me, and he leveled the most reproachful look I had ever received in my direction. He had the person, he seemed to say; they were right there. Why would I pull him away from someone, when he had them?

“Heel,” I said again, and with a deep, long-suffering sigh, Joe turned and trotted over to sit down by my feet. He was still tense and alert, his body thrumming with the need to leap back into action. I placed my free hand atop his head, feeling the tension run upward through my fingers, until it filled my body the way that it was filling his.

“All right,” I said. “You can come down now. You don’t threaten us, and we won’t threaten you.”

There was no verbal answer from the tree. But the branches rustled, and something scraped against the trunk. And then, with no further fanfare, a woman dropped down to the ground in front of me.

She was short, and for a moment, I thought she was just a kid. It would have gone with that voice of hers, half Disney princess, half prom queen. Then she straightened up, unbending her knees and lifting her head, and I knew that whoever she was, wherever she had come from, she was older than that—mid-thirties at the least, and maybe even a well preserved early forties. There were fine lines around her eyes, which were an unprepossessing shade of slate blue, and deeper lines around the corners of her mouth. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed in weeks. It was bundled into a thick ponytail that was going to hurt like hell when she finally tried to wash and style it again. It looked like it was a dark reddish brown, but it was honestly hard to tell, with all the dirt.

Her clothes fit her size: she could have raided the Juniors section at the local Target for them, if there had been a local Target. There were holes in the knees of her overalls, and her long-sleeved rainbow shirt was as dirty as the rest of her. She wasn’t really showing any skin apart from her face and hands, but I didn’t need to see her flesh to know that she was shockingly thin, bordering on emaciated. There are people whose bodies function best without an extra ounce on them. This girl wasn’t one of those people.

She looked at me with the wary unease of someone who had seen the worst the world has to offer, only to discover that they didn’t deserve anything better. “I’m looking for someone,” she said again. “I’m running out of pills, and I’m looking for someone.”

“From those two statements, I’d guess you’re looking for a doctor,” I said.

She nodded, biting her lower lip.

“Who are you looking for?”

“I…the person who said I should come here said Dr. Abbey, and I was sort of coming this way anyway, already I mean, so I came here to see if I could find him. Dr. Shannon Abbey. Please. I can pay. I don’t have money, but I can pay. I’m running out of pills. Please.” She held out her empty hands. They were shaking, I noted impassively, probably from a combination of hunger and withdrawal: Whatever pills she was looking for, their absence was hitting her hard.

“Please,” she repeated, and collapsed.

I waited several minutes. She didn’t get back up.

“Well, shit,” I said with a sigh. “Looks like we have a houseguest. Come on, Joe. Let’s go get somebody who can help us haul her bony ass inside.”

Joe gave the stranger one last suspicious look. Then, with an amiable wuffing noise, he turned and followed me back toward the lab.

Chapter 2

Coming In Fom the Cold

Science is a cruel mistress. That means you should always have a safe word before you try to change the world. Otherwise, how will science know when to let you go?

—Dr. Shannon Abbey

Coincidence doesn’t really exist. We see connections where there are none, and ignore all the connections that were never made. The story sounds so much better when we only talk about the miracles that happen.

—Georgia Mason

1.

“You don’t usually come back from walking the dog with women who look like they just escaped from The Care Bears Meet Mad Max,” said Tom dubiously, peering through the small glass window in the office door at the unconscious girl now sprawled on one of our guest cots. Locking her in until she woke up had seemed like a reasonable precaution. Jill had suggested that we also handcuff our guest to something—possibly Joe—but we had all agreed that this would have been overkill. People don’t usually react well when they wake up and find themselves fastened to things.

“To be fair, that’s less a statement of the sort of things I’m likely to find interesting, and more a critique of the available resources. If the woods gave me more Mad Max refugees, I would definitely bring them home,” I said, and sipped my cocoa. Chocolate always settled my nerves after a bad run-in in the woods. Unlike Joe, who had forgotten the gunshots as soon as I filled his food bowl, I still had the ghosts of adrenaline running rampant in my blood. The thought of losing him was going to keep me up for days.

Fortunately for me, the same woman who had caused me such terror had also presented me with a charming mystery to preoccupy my racing mind. I just needed her to wake up and let me start trying to solve her.

“I’m not comfortable with this,” pressed Tom. He turned away from the door, focusing on me instead. “It could be a trap.”

“What, you think the CDC is so desperate for information that they’re willing to starve one of their own people to the point of collapse—she’s undergone severe muscular wasting because she’s so hungry, did you notice that? She’s lucky she was able to climb that tree in the first place, and she’s luckier that she didn’t break a hip getting down—just to get past our cheerfully lackadaisical screening process? You’re cute, but no. Zelda is their latest attempt to trick us into spilling things we don’t want to have spilled, and she’s about as effective as a hamster in a python cage.”

Tom blinked several times. If it hadn’t been for the clarity of his eyes, I would have suspected him of hitting his stash before coming to talk to me. “Zelda? The new intern?”

“Yes, Zelda, or as I prefer to call her, ‘not-Daisy.’” He looked blank. I shook my head. “You need to read more. Anyway, yes, she’s a CDC plant. I confirmed that the same day that her application hit my desk.”

“But how—?”

“The same way I confirm all our CDC plants: I did a deep background check.” More accurately, I paid a woman in Canada to do a deep background check. Tessa Markowski was competent, affordable, and discreet. That combination put her miles above most of her contemporaries, who would sell you out as soon as look at you—and like many of the people in our cheerfully anarchistic underworld of secret virology labs, hackers, survivalists, and folks who really liked owning big dogs, she hated the CDC with a passion. It was a match made in heaven, assuming you believed in places like that.

I didn’t, really. But I believed in Quebec, and that was where I sent her money. In exchange, I got all the information I could want on any name I happened to throw her way. It was a good deal all the way around.

Tom frowned. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought her credentials checked out. I thought she was a good fit. I—”

“You’re getting off the subject,” I said. “If we didn’t hire CDC plants, we wouldn’t have any staff at all. It’s all part of my master plan.”

“You have a master plan?”

“I’m a mad scientist, aren’t I? We all have master plans. Without them, we’d just be faintly disgruntled scientists who think we really ought to form a committee to discuss our grievances.” I turned back to the door. Our mystery woman was still dead to the world—although she was not, I noted, actually deceased. Her attenuated thinness made every rise and fall of her chest painfully obvious. I could almost count the ridges on her sternum through the tattered fabric of her shirt. If we didn’t get some food and fluids into her soon, she was probably going to die.

No, the CDC wasn’t responsible for her tracking me down. Whoever she was, she came here for her own reasons, and following her own agenda.

“Someone sent her to us,” I said quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I glanced at Tom as I turned away from the door. “I want you to head for the kitchen, let Patrick know that we need a full meal of soft foods. Mashed potatoes, buttered noodles, plain white rice, and some clear chicken broth. Jell-O would also be good. Probably cherry, almost everyone likes cherry Jell-O. It’s the universal donor of hospital desserts.”

Tom, who was too young for the concept of “universal donors” ever to have held any meaning for him, continued to look at me blankly. I swallowed the urge to sigh. Sometimes it can be easy to forget that I don’t really work with anyone my own age. Except on the rare occasions where Joey or Danika decide to call me up for a chat, I am the lone adult in a sea of children, like Captain Hook finally taking full responsibility for the Lost Boys after getting rid of that loser Pan.

“Guess that makes Joe Tinker Bell,” I said, and smiled to myself. “Never mind, Tom: just ignore everything I said after ‘full meal of soft foods.’ Patrick can take care of the rest, and he’ll design a better menu than either of us ever could. I’m going to go check with my sources, see if anyone knows who our mystery guest might be.”

“We can’t just leave her here alone,” said Tom, sounding horrified. “What if she gets out?”

I managed, somehow, not to roll my eyes. If there had been any justice in the world, I would have received a medal for that. “That room was designed to hold a fully amplified adult male for up to a week before he had to be cycled out, and the only reason we’d need to move a specimen is so we could hose down the walls. I don’t think a girl who doesn’t weigh eighty pounds soaking wet could break down that door.”

“No, but she might be able to unscrew the hinges,” he said. “Zombies aren’t known for their problem-solving capabilities. People are.”

I paused. “All right, you have a point,” I said, after taking a moment to absorb what he was saying. “I’ll send not-Daisy down here to keep an eye on today’s surprise guest. It’ll be one more in her undoubtedly long line of learning experiences. First she gets hugged by an octopus, and now she gets to watch an unnerving feral woman sleep. Funtimes!”

I turned and walked out of the room before Tom could offer another objection. Reasonable as he was being, I didn’t have the patience for him, and I didn’t want to yell. Never yell in the middle of a mystery. It distracts people from the core issues—those being “What the fuck is going on?” and “How do we all get through this alive?”

Hopefully, I’d have answers to both very soon. In the meanwhile, not-Daisy was going to learn why the CDC had to keep sending plants into my facility, despite the fact that almost all of them made it back alive.

I was smiling as I walked down the hall. Really, this was proving to be a much better day than I’d expected when I sat down to do my paperwork.

2.

Not-Daisy wasn’t thrilled about her new assignment, which just made my awesome day even better. Nothing said “Mad science: you’re doing it right” like pissing off the people who didn’t want to work for me in the first place. After putting in a quick call to Jill and asking her to take a security team out and sweep the woods, I sat down at my computer, shoving my now deprioritized paperwork aside with one hand. I’d probably regret that later, but oh, it felt good in the here and now.

There are a lot of ways to contact people over the Internet, some of them more subtle than others. I accessed a Lego trading forum that I had belonged to since long before my current status as a scientific outlaw became a thing, dropped by the “Antiques and Oddities” section, and posted a request for Unikitty figures from The Lego Movie, one of the last computer-animated films released before the Rising had come along and shut down theatrical productions for several years. Then I sat back to wait.

Tessa Markowski was an odd duck in a barnyard full of odd ducks. If there’s a norm for hackers and computer experts, I’ve never encountered it: All the members of their clade that I’ve known have been idiosyncratic to the point of seeming like they took a class in not fitting in with the other children. Whether it’s a routine or a reality has never seemed to matter much, although I’m sure there’s a great research paper lurking there for a mad sociologist to exhume one day. As a mad virologist, I’ve had to focus my attention on what they can do for me, and what they can do is make my life one hell of a lot easier…as long as I’m willing to play by their rules.

Five minutes after I posted my request to the Lego forum, my computer beeped, signaling that I had received a private message. I clicked the little red flag at the top of my screen.

HOW MUCH?

It wasn’t personal, and it didn’t invite chatter, but then, I didn’t need it to. I smiled as I tapped out my reply: $500 FOR LOOKING, $1,500 IF YOU FIND ME SOMETHING I LIKE. HAVE A MYSTERY FOR YOU. ALSO HAVE BOX OF MOVIE-BRANDED LEGO BLIND BAGS. NONE OPENED. I HAVE COUNTED THEM. ALL FIGURES ACCOUNTED FOR, ALTHOUGH I CAN’T GUARANTEE SOMEONE DIDN’T REPLACE SOME OF THE ORIGINAL PACKETS WITH PACKETS FROM A DIFFERENT BOX.

Again, Tessa was a unique sort of woman. Based on what little I’d been able to glean from our conversations, she was a single mother, utterly devoted to her son, and one of their great shared joys was pre-Rising Lego, which had been a lot more creative and free-form than post-Rising Lego. All the modern build sets focused on killing zombies, constructing impenetrable safe houses, and staying alive—useful things, sure, but all part of daily life. When Tessa built with her son, they constructed pirate ships and castles, robots and highways, and she was always looking for minifigs, the tiny plastic people who inhabited the Lego world.

Her reply was almost immediate.

PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.

I attached a picture and sent it to her, leaning back in my seat to wait. I counted quietly as I did. I had just reached thirty when my computer beeped, telling me that I had an incoming call from an unlisted number. I smiled, and answered.

The window that popped up framed Tessa’s fine-boned, pretty face almost perfectly. She had curly green hair, two rings in her left nostril, and looked like she was about nineteen, despite being only a few years younger than I was. Good genes. Good thing she had a sharp mind to go with them. Over the years, I’d been able to patch together most of her story: Internet bride from Russia who came to Canada looking for a better life and found herself married to a man who worshipped the ground she walked on. He was the one who’d insisted she get a college education, sending her to school for a Computer Science degree. I didn’t know his name, or what had happened to him. I just knew that somewhere between her graduation and the birth of their only son, he had died and left her a widow with limited job skills in a country thousands of miles from the one where she’d been born.

Lucky for Tessa, she had her degree to fall back on, as well as his life insurance, and a surprisingly large library of books on computer crime—both how to do it and how to do it without getting caught. So when the Canadian government came and said that she had six months to get out of the country or demonstrate that she had a skill that made her worth keeping, she demonstrated how good she was at disappearing into the rabbit warren of underground services and hidden people.

Sometimes I wondered if she was anywhere near where the Masons had ended up. Then I dismissed the thought. Wondering where they were was dangerous. For them, and for me. Georgia Mason might forgive me if I set someone on their trail—she was the kinder, gentler model—but Shaun? We’d been friends. Still were, no doubt, in his mind; I had every faith that one day there would be a knock on my door, and I’d open it to find Shaun standing there, as carefree as if no time at all had passed. He was also the one who wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet between my eyes if he thought I was a danger to Georgia. No matter how much he liked me, she was his entire world, and no one smiles at the monster that’s come to end the world.

“You really have these things?” demanded Tessa without preamble. Her accent was a fascinating mix of Russian and Quebecois, with vowels borrowed at random from both regions. Her son had to have the most amazing vocabulary. I didn’t know for sure. I’d never seen him, knew of his existence only through rumor and Tessa’s insatiable desire for Lego. For all I knew, he was as dead as the husband, and she was building pirate ships with a tiny, undemanding ghost. As long as she kept doing what I paid her for, I didn’t care.

“I do,” I said. “One of my people found them at a swap meet.” That was a bit of an untruth—I had found them myself, while I was vaccinating kids from the local survivalist community. But my stall had been set up at the local swap meet, and I’d been paid in trade for my services.

“The bags haven’t been opened?”

“I checked the glue myself.”

Tessa worried her lip between her teeth for a moment, clearly thinking it over—or pretending to, anyway. The money I was offering her wasn’t great, but the expense of smuggling a box of Lego figures through the back channels our little underground had developed would be at least twice her fee. I was offering her a fair deal. She just didn’t know what I was offering her a fair deal for. “What’s the situation?”

“I found someone on my property today.”

“Everyone finds people on their property. If they’re not dead when you find them, they are shortly after. What’s the problem?”

“Well, first problem is that I didn’t find a zombie, I found a person. She was lucid and capable of coherent speech. We’ve done a base-level blood test on her—she came back as clean as you or me. I’m doing full blood work, naturally, but I don’t expect it to show me anything different.”

Tessa smirked. “When you say that ‘you’ are doing full blood work, you mean the many attractive young people who labor in your nasty laboratory are doing full blood work, yes?”

“What’s the point of having many attractive young people working for me if I can’t make them miserable from time to time?” I shrugged. “It’s part of my job as a mad scientist to turn them against the world through whatever means necessary. But we’re getting off the subject. She showed up looking for me.”

“What?” Tessa sat up a little straighter. “She knew you were there, and she didn’t run like a person with a shred of survival instinct? I like you, Doc. You pay on time and you send the bonuses you promise. But I ever found myself sharing space with you, I’d get the fuck out.”

“I’m flattered, truly,” I said dryly. “She thought I was a man, which tells me she was going on reputation and not any real data. Can’t stop people from talking unless you use a rifle, and that gets messy. Hard to maintain a business when you kill everyone who knows who you are.”

“Fair, but that still doesn’t explain what she was doing there,” said Tessa. “Not too many people go looking for you on purpose. Fewer who don’t know that they’re looking for a woman from the land of the traffic cones.”

“My fashion sense is not up for debate,” I said. “I have pictures. She’s in pretty bad shape, and she’s lost enough weight that she’s in danger of organ failure, but you should be able to start facial recognition based on what I can give you. Five hundred if you can tell me who she is, fifteen hundred if you can tell me who sent her and how deep I should bury the body. You get the Legos either way.”

“Five hundred for a name, a thousand for a background, and fifteen hundred if I get you the rest,” countered Tessa. Her smile was wide enough to show the silver cap on one of her teeth, glittering in the light from her monitor. “A girl has got to eat, and growing boys need to eat even more.”

“Fair,” I agreed. I hadn’t expected to get away with any less, but that was the thing about dealing with Tessa: If I didn’t bargain, at least a little, she felt cheated. We all have our little quirks. “How fast can you get started?”

“For you, Doc, and for those Lego figures, I can start right away. Transmit whatever you’ve got to my usual drop box, and I’ll get to work. Pleasure doing business with you.” The picture blinked out, leaving me looking at my desktop background.

I smiled. The game, as some old dead dude once said, was definitely afoot.

3.

“Report.” I crossed my arms and leaned against the doorframe, trying not to look impatient. It was harder than I expected, maybe because I was impatient. I wanted answers—not out of fear that our guest would hurt me or my employees somehow, but because she was the most interesting thing that had happened since the Masons left. Mad science may be a little more fun and fancy-free than the boring mainstream kind, but that doesn’t make it exciting on a day-to-day basis. If anything, mad science steals the excitement from a lot of things that should be exciting, like surprise fires, stabbing people with needles, and the occasional ceiling octopus.

“I’m not sure why our guest isn’t dead,” said Jill, looking up from her computer. “If you told me that this was all a joke, and that you’d given me a faked-up blood sample to see whether I was paying attention, I would believe you. I’m just saying.” She paused, watching me expectantly.

I raised my eyebrows and waited.

Jill’s face fell. It was a complicated expression, beginning with the muscles around her eyes and finishing when her chin dipped slightly forward, almost hitting her chest. “My God, you’re serious,” she said. “This is a living person’s blood.”

“Now you’re getting it,” I said. “Report. Now. Before I lose patience.”

“Um, right. Okay. Her iron levels are ridiculously low—if she’s not normally anemic, she definitely is now. She’s malnourished. I don’t think she’s had a decent meal in weeks, which is probably how she’s been able to medicate herself this far.”

I raised my eyebrows for a second time. “Medicate herself…?” I prompted.

“You said she came here looking for pills, right? Well, there’s a reason for that. This girl is drugged to the gills, and some of the shit she’s taking I’ve never seen on the open market. I mean, she has the usual assortment of psychotropic drugs—there’s some LSD, some magic mushrooms, all those fun things you don’t want your sister doing—but there’s also a couple of synthetic cannabinoids that I don’t even recognize. She came back positive for JWH-018, and that hasn’t been on the drug circuit in years. It’s mostly used for therapy and pain management in people who are so sick that they don’t need to be lucid anymore.”

Jill stopped to take a breath. I didn’t say anything. I had the feeling she was just getting warmed up.

I was right. She continued, “The worst of it—apart from traces of what I think is probably cocaine, and the Ecstasy, and did I mention the PCP? Because she’s also on PCP—is the synthetic ergine. Someone went to the trouble of coming up with a new derivative of shit that already fucks you up so bad that you can’t tell up from down, and then they pumped this poor girl full of it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they just wanted to see what would happen. But I can tell you this: If you wanted to take the trip of a lifetime, all you’d need to do is lick one of her blood panels.”

“Since you’re recommending that I lick her blood panels, I’m assuming she doesn’t have hepatitis or anything fun like that?”

“Nope, no fun diseases, except for the omnipresent Kellis-Amberlee,” said Jill, far too cheerfully. “I’m running immunity panels on our last samples now, but as she shows no signs of a reservoir condition, I don’t think she’s going to be another Shaun Mason. Sorry about that.”

“He was one of a kind,” I said.

Jill snorted.

Calling Shaun Mason—or more appropriately, Shaun Mason’s immunity to the fully amplified form of the Kellis-Amberlee virus—“one of a kind” was a bit inaccurate. He had been exposed at great and intimate length to someone whose body generated antigens, due to the presence of a live-state viral reservoir condition. As a consequence, his own body had learnt how to fight the virus, and did just that when he was exposed. It was a neat trick, and probably one that could be replicated by hundreds, if not thousands of people and large mammals around the globe. I just didn’t have access to any of them, and my banked supply of Shaun’s blood was running low.

Kellis-Amberlee was the reason that Jill wasn’t serious when she told me to lick our guest’s blood panels. Everyone on the planet is infected, including our mystery woman, and as soon as her blood had been removed from her body, the virus that slumbered there had woken up and started going about its business. It was a surprisingly good preservative, maybe because the blood was never allowed to fully “die.” It was also a biological hot agent rivaled by very few naturally occurring diseases. One drop and we’d all lose our minds in the most literal and permanent of fashions.

“Will she live?”

Jill bit her lip, worrying it for a moment between her teeth before she said, “I’ll be honest: I don’t know. We’ve got her set up on a saline drip for the dehydration, and we can set up a feeding tube if she doesn’t wake up soon, but if she doesn’t get some body mass back, she’s not going to pull through. Even if she does…the withdrawal from the drugs she’s been taking would be hard on someone twice her size. As skinny and malnourished as she is, they could easily kill her.”

Well, crap. “Can we synthesize something that will take the edge off? I don’t mind playing methadone clinic if it gets us a healthy person at the other end.”

“Why?” Jill frowned. “I know you like a mystery, but there’s such a thing as going too far. We didn’t invite her here. Make her comfortable, provide palliative care, and if she dies, she dies. She didn’t become our responsibility just because she collapsed in front of you. If you’d taken Joe out an hour later, she would have died and risen, and you wouldn’t be trying to save her. And did you forget the part where she tried to shoot your dog? Shit. You’d fire half the staff for raising their voices to Joe. Why do you want to save someone who tried to hurt him?”

“I’d fire the staff—including you, Jill—for raising their voices to an animal that they know is friendly, well-trained, and not a threat,” I said. “This woman didn’t know any of those things. A giant carnivore came bounding through the woods, and she reacted like someone who enjoyed being among the living. I can’t fault people for trying to stay alive. Not when everything we teach them is focused on survival. As for the rest…I was a doctor before I became anything else. The first rule we were taught in medical school was ‘Do no harm.’”

That wasn’t quite true. The first rule we were taught in medical school was “A cadaver is not a toy.” Even though the bodies we used for practice were pickled and sterilized to the point of becoming virtually useless for any fine diagnostic work, they had still started out as living people, and they deserved our respect. That was what separated us from the zombies. We could still show respect for the things that shared our world. Even if sometimes that respect took the form of a clean death.

“So?”

“So if we let her die just because we didn’t invite her over for popcorn and a movie, we’re doing harm. This is an opportunity to practice medicine. Not mad science, not virology research, just medicine. The old-fashioned kind, where you start off with someone who’s sick, and you finish up with someone who’s well.”

Jill’s eyes narrowed. “Sorry, boss, but I know you too well to believe this degree of altruism. What’s the real deal?”

“The real deal is, she found us somehow. Someone told her that we were here to find, and that if she wanted drugs, she should come looking.” I felt my expression harden. I made no effort to soften it. Jill had seen me at my worst, and she hadn’t run screaming into the night. She wasn’t going to run now. “I need her alive, and I need her lucid enough to tell me what brought her to our doorstep, because whatever it is, it’s not going to happen again. Do you understand? Now, keep running those blood tests, and whatever sort of methadone clinic we have to become, that’s what we’re going to be. We’re going to save her life if it kills her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jill, and twisted back around to her computer. The conversation was over. I had my information, and she had her orders. Now all we had to do was save a life.

4.

Mystery girl was still unconscious when I returned to the viewing area, Joe sticking by my side like a happy, tail-wagging shadow. Not-Daisy jumped at the sound of my footsteps, and jumped again when she saw Joe. I frowned at her.

“You may want to think about taking up yoga,” I said. “It’s very calming, and if you’re going to flinch every time I come into a room, you need some calm. You can also talk to Tom about the many restorative benefits of marijuana. As long as you’re not stoned when you’re supposed to be working, I don’t care. This isn’t the CDC.”

The shadow of her guilt moved across her face so fast that I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t already been watching for it. Not-Daisy wasn’t going to be one of my long-term employees; I could already tell, just from the way she reacted to things—or didn’t react to them. It was for the best, really. People as high-strung as she was didn’t do well in a lab like mine, where losing control for a minute could result in your life coming to a swift, sticky end. She’d be better off with the CDC, where she would do her research from behind six layers of security, and never need to see how the sausage was made.

“I just didn’t expect you, is all, Dr. Abbey,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m so jumpy. The octopus thing this morning really threw me off.”

“Barney does what Barney wants,” I said. “Just wait until what he wants is to sneak into your quarters in the middle of the night and turn the light on and off for an hour. He’s a big adventure in tolerance. What’s the situation with our guest?”

“No change,” said not-Daisy. She sounded relieved to be back on something that resembled familiar ground. She knew how to watch an unconscious woman remain unconscious. That was fairly normal CDC fare.

“Good.” I motioned for her to get up. “Go on. Back to whatever you were doing when I had you pulled for this duty. Scrub something, or culture something, or whatever it is they have you assigned to this week. I can watch her sleep.”

Not-Daisy stood—a little too quickly—and started for the door. I let her get halfway there before I cleared my throat. She froze. Smart girl.

“I don’t recommend trying to send any e-mail right now, however. We’re on high alert, thanks to this woman’s presence, and it’s entirely possible that an innocent e-mail to a friend or family member could get flagged as something that it wasn’t. A coded transmission to the CDC, for example. I know they’d be very interested in our guest. And I know I’d be very interested in finding out what someone could have said that would activate that flag. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“Good. Because while I don’t pay enough for absolute loyalty, I am very, very dedicated to security. It’s what separates us from the animals. Enjoy your assignments, Zelda. We’re glad to have you working with us here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she repeated, and scurried out of the room without looking back.

“She isn’t going to last the month, Joe,” I said, settling into the seat she had so recently vacated. The one-way window into the observation room gave me a perfect view of the bed where our mystery woman slept. An IV was connected to her right arm, held in place with pieces of surgical tape. The needle was the size we always used, but she was emaciated enough that it looked like it was going all the way through her arm. I didn’t envy whoever Tom had deputized to get her IV started—although knowing Tom, he had probably done it himself. He didn’t like leaving things to chance.

A catheter snaked out from under the blanket. As her body was rehydrated, involuntary urination became a risk, and no one wanted to clean that up. Luckily, she was starved enough that there was no need to really worry about other waste products. Can’t shit if you don’t eat. And other inspirational proverbs that were never going to catch on.

She looked peaceful, lying there on her back with her eyes closed. Someone had wiped most of the dirt from her face, revealing pale skin with an almost purplish undertone. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose. That seemed incredibly sad to me, for some reason. Whoever she was, whoever she had been before she stumbled, half starved, to my doorstep, she was the sort of person who freckled when she went out in the sun, and must have spent her life drowning in SPF-40. The fact that she wasn’t burnt now told me that she had traveled mostly at night; she’d been filthy enough when I found her that she definitely hadn’t been keeping up any sort of skin care regimen.

“So who are you, strange girl?” I asked. “Why are you here? Why did you come looking for me?”

She didn’t answer. She just slept on.

Chapter 3

Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus

There are people who will tell you that the ends justify the means, right up until they’re talking about their own ends. Then, suddenly, morals and ethics matter. Funny thing, that.

—Dr. Shannon Abbey

Good morning, class. Who’s ready to learn?

—Elaine Oldenburg

1.

“Dr. Abbey?” Not-Daisy’s voice was soft, almost hesitant, like she was afraid that I was going to sic Joe on her for daring to come near my office. For a moment I entertained the fantasy of doing precisely that: unleashing my faithful hound and shutting her up before she found a way to tell the CDC about our mystery guest. I’d always been fairly relaxed about the presence of spies and infiltrators. No matter how often I moved the lab, being connected to the supply chain meant being vulnerable to discovery: The CDC was always going to find me, and having found me, they were always going to send their people in to try to learn what I knew.

Most of the time, what I knew either wasn’t worth reporting, or wasn’t worth protecting, or was hidden behind closed doors and managed by my more loyal staffers. But something like our mystery woman had been vulnerable to discovery from the start. How do you hide a stranger who falls out of the forest and virtually lands on your head? The answer was sadly simple. You didn’t. Mystery girl had been sleeping for two days, and we’d managed to block all of not-Daisy’s attempts to message her government masters in that period. But we weren’t going to be able to stay on high alert forever. Eventually, either not-Daisy was going to get something past us, or we were going to have to make a decision about her probable retirement situation.

“Yes, Zelda?” I asked, looking up and away from my computer. If I was thinking about having her killed for security reasons, it seemed only polite to use her name, at least to her face. She was always going to be “not-Daisy” to me.

“Um, you said that we should notify you if there was any change in, um, our visitor’s status? And there’s been a change.”

I stood, knocking my chair backward in the process. “What kind of change?”

Not-Daisy’s eyes were sad and resigned. She understood what she was saying. That was the moment when I realized that she knew she’d been set up by her employers. They weren’t showing faith in her by sending her to me: They were saying that she was, on some level, essentially expendable. “She’s awake.”

“That’s certainly a change,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. I stepped around the desk. Joe rose to follow me, and I shook my head, accompanying the motion with the hand gesture that meant, “Stay.” “No, Joe. I’m sorry, buddy, but you need to stay here.”

Joe’s butt hit the ground while his face was still composing itself into a look of pure bewilderment. I was going somewhere. I was his person. If I was going somewhere, he was supposed to be going somewhere with me. That was the way the world worked. But I was telling him to stay, and when I told him to do a thing, it had to be done. That was also the way the world worked.

“I know, buddy,” I said, and scratched his ears. “Stay. Guard. We’ll do something fun later, okay?”

Joe slowly sank back to the floor, resting his head on his massive forepaws. He looked at me so reproachfully that I almost went back on my decision and told him to come along. But the last time our mystery woman had been awake, she’d taken a shot at Joe. She didn’t have any of her weapons anymore. That didn’t mean I wanted to tempt her. I shot one last apologetic look at my dog and turned to head for the doorway, where not-Daisy was waiting for me.

We fell into step together as we walked down the hall toward the observation room, not-Daisy shooting sidelong glances in my direction like she expected me to attack her at any moment. I tried to keep my eyes forward, and to resist the urge to whirl and shout “Boo!” at the poor terrified thing. No matter what she thought of me, I wasn’t a monster, and I wasn’t going to let her turn me into one. Even though it would have been fun to watch her jump out of her skin.

Jill and Tom were both waiting in the observation room when we arrived. Jill was seated at the monitoring station while Tom leaned against the wall and chewed a piece of peppermint gum, probably to cover the lingering smell of pot that hung around him like a shroud. “What’s the situation?” I asked, stepping inside.

Not-Daisy stopped in the hall, staying a foot outside the doorway. She knew this wasn’t her project, and more, she knew that she wasn’t really welcome. I respected that, even as I wondered whether she knew just how unwelcome she actually was.

“She woke up fifteen minutes ago,” said Jill. “Sat up, looked around, looked at the IV, and then lay back down. I thought she was asleep again, until I realized that her heart rate was elevated. She’s waiting for something.”

“We thought it was best that we call you,” said Tom. “We can gas the room, knock her out again—”

“Let’s not,” I said. “We want to talk to her, right? And she’s not ripping out the tubes. That implies that she’s at least somewhat lucid, and understands that we’re trying to help her with all this stuff, not hurt her. So let’s assume that she can be reasoned with.”

“You’re not going to go in there by yourself, are you?” asked Jill, sounding faintly horrified—but not, I noted, even remotely surprised. My people were used to me. Jill had been with me for the infamous “Shaun Mason gets exposed to Kellis-Amberlee and fails to seroconvert” incident, and had watched me walk into a room with a man who should by all rights have been a zombie. There wasn’t anything I could do that would surprise her anymore.

That didn’t mean I needed to be stupid just to keep my people on their toes. “Fuck, no,” I said. “Tom, you’re with me. Bring the tranq gun, we don’t want to kill her, but if she so much as looks funny in my direction, you’re going to send her off to play with the magical pastel bunnies in the Shouldn’t-Have-Fucking-Done-That Meadow.”

“Got it, boss,” said Tom, and saluted only half jokingly before he took the tranquilizer gun down from the wall.

I turned to Jill. “Stay here; monitor everything. If her heart rate spikes or you get an odd reading, notify us immediately, and we’ll get out of there. If you get a bad feeling about something, notify us immediately, and we’ll get out of there. If you just don’t like the look on her face…”

“Notify you immediately, and you’ll get out of there,” said Jill.

“Good girl.” I turned and walked out of the room, past not-Daisy, who was still hovering in the hall like she thought that this would all start making sense if she just waited long enough. Poor kid. CDC plant or not, she was going to come to learn that the world was under no obligation to make sense either now or ever. Logic was a story we told ourselves to keep from going completely insane in the face of all the impossible things reality threw at us on a daily basis.

The door to the room where our mystery woman was being kept was only a few feet down the hall. I pressed my thumb to the panel next to the doorknob, only grimacing a little as a needle lanced out and sampled my blood. My lab contained less than half the recommended number of blood-testing units for a facility of this size, and most of them were external; once you were inside, we figured we’d be able to tell if you were infected. But some doors needed to be locked, and some tests needed to be run. If someone was going into one of the isolation rooms, it was important to be absolutely sure of their amplification status.

The light above the door flashed twice before turning green, and the deadbolt released. “Tom, stay close,” I said, and opened the door. If we’d been a more formal facility, he would have needed to take a blood test as well. I didn’t see the point in that. He was already behind me. If he was infected, it was way too late to start worrying.

The mystery woman was still in the position she’d been in when I looked through the window: arms flat at her sides, feet together, face turned toward the ceiling. Really, if I hadn’t had so much experience with recalcitrant patients, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell that her eyes were cracked just enough to let her see me through her lashes.

“Good morning.” I pulled a plastic chair away from the wall and moved it a few feet closer to her bed, creating space for Tom to stand behind me without holding the door open. I sat, putting my hands on my knees so that she could see I was unarmed. Tom wasn’t, of course, but I was showing trust. Now it was up to her to show me the same. “My name is Dr. Shannon Abbey. You’re in my lab. You’ve been asleep for the last two days. I know you’ve noticed the IV, and I assume you’ve also noticed the catheter, since those are fairly hard to miss. I’m sorry we had to put those in without your consent, but you weren’t waking up, and I figured you’d rather be surprised than dead. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. I have plenty of bullets, and I’m always happy to fix my own mistakes. It seems cleaner that way. Less like I’m trying to avoid blame for my actions. I always take responsibility for the things I do.”

The mystery woman didn’t respond. Her eyelashes fluttered slightly; she was still awake, and she was paying close enough attention that she had allowed her rigid muscular control to slip for a moment. I glanced to the two-way mirror on the wall. Jill would have told me if our guest’s vital signs were showing tension or other indications that she was getting ready to attack.

“We provided medical care in part because it was the right thing to do, but I admit, we also did it because we wanted you to survive long enough to wake up and explain yourself. This is a secure facility. We operate under a veil of strict secrecy, and we do not encourage or invite visitors. So I’m really curious as to how you found us.” Tessa was still working, still running facial-recognition programs and trying to trace our mystery woman to some distant point of origin. The fact that it had taken her two days already, with no success in sight, told me that someone very, very good had gone to great lengths to scrub this woman from the world. Deleting an identity that thoroughly was hard as hell, and not something that anyone would do on a whim.

Still the mystery woman didn’t respond. Her eyelashes didn’t even flutter this time. I was either losing her interest or I was back on ground that she’d expected me to cover. I wasn’t sure what was worse—and I realized I didn’t know how long she had really been awake. Someone who looked at surprise IVs this calmly might well have held her peace for a long time before she even sat up to see what they were. I needed to proceed with caution.

“You’re in slightly better shape now than you were when I found you. Your body was starting to digest itself; you’d gone into a state of what’s called ‘ketosis,’ meaning that you were basically fueling everything you did by burning your own muscle tissue. You’re going to need a lot of rehab to get back to anything resembling fighting shape, and I suppose that what I’m really offering you here is a chance. Not a choice—that comes later—but a chance. If you can tell me why you showed up on my doorstep, why you were looking for me, I’ll consider letting you stay here long enough to recover a little bit of that lost muscle mass. You might have a chance in hell of keeping yourself alive when I finally toss you out. Or you can keep playing silent treatment, and I can throw you out just like you are now. I told my people that my Hippocratic Oath was part of why I let you stay—that whole ‘above all else, do no harm’ routine—but I’ve patched you up. I’ve given you the thinnest sliver of a prayer that you’ll survive. My conscience will be clear if I have to throw you out into the forest to die.”

“I wasn’t looking for you.” Her voice was dry and raspy, the voice of someone who hadn’t spoken in days. Her eyelids relaxed, settling into a closed position. “I was looking for your husband, or your brother, or whoever it is who owns this place. Somebody told me he was out here. They said he could get me what I needed, and all I had to do was find his front door.”

“Hasn’t anybody ever told you that you can’t get something for nothing? Any doctor you could find in a place like this would charge dearly for whatever he—or she—gave you. It usually isn’t going to be worth it.”

Her laugh was small, and utterly devoid of mirth. It was the laugh of someone who had been broken, more than once, and put back together in increasingly foreign combinations, until she had less in common with whoever she had once been than a jellyfish had with a juniper tree. I knew that laugh. I heard it coming from myself, some days. “I knew I’d have to pay. You always have to pay, and the more you need a thing, the more it costs. That’s why we have things to bargain and to barter with.”

“My people searched you. You were telling the truth when you said that you didn’t have any money. You’re low on bullets, and the only recreational pharmaceuticals we found on you were in your bloodstream. There’s nothing you could pay with.”

“I have a body. I have my training. I can kill people. I’m real good at killing people.” She giggled, a high, discordant sound that grated on my nerves. It didn’t seem like it had come from the same throat that had offered the dry, quiet laughter we’d heard before. I glanced back at Tom, and saw that he looked just as unnerved as I felt. That was something, at least. I wasn’t the only one who heard the fault lines in her giggles. “It’s probably what I’m best at. Everybody says so, and everybody needs somebody dead. Goods and services, it’s all goods and services.”

“We don’t need anybody killed,” I said firmly. “We never outsource our assassinations.”

“Dr. Abbey will,” she said. “If you let me see him, I’m sure that he will.”

“That’s going to be a problem, because I am Dr. Abbey,” I said. I couldn’t keep my irritation out of my voice any longer. “My name is Shannon Abbey. This is my lab. It is very large. I have been giving you my patience. It is very small, and growing smaller by the minute.”

The mystery woman was silent for a few seconds. Then, finally, she opened her eyes, blinking rapidly as they adjusted to the light, and turned her head to look at me. She was frowning, lips pursed in what was virtually a pout. The expression was far too young for her, and looked learned rather than instinctual. Whoever had taught her that shrill, nerve-racking giggle had probably taught her the pout at the same time. It made my flesh crawl.

“You’re Dr. Abbey?” she said, uncertainly.

“Have been for years and years,” I said. “No brother. No husband. Just me. This is my lab: I’m the one you came here looking for.”

“You have to help me!” She sat up, nearly dislodging her IV in the process, and tried to reach for me. The catheter pulled her up short. She glanced down, clearly unsure what she should do. There was a small click from behind me as Tom brought the tranquilizer gun into position. She looked up again and went very still, her eyes narrowing with a shrewd, calculating intelligence that didn’t fit with anything she’d displayed so far. Our mystery woman might be awake and talking to us, but she was still a mystery, and she was going to remain that way for as long as it took to get her to start making sense. Which meant she might be a mystery forever.

“Why don’t you stay where you are, not making any hostile moves, and try telling me what it is you want me to do for you?” I gestured behind myself, indicating Tom and the gun in his hands. “This is Tom. He works for me. If you’re looking for drugs, it’s possible that whoever you spoke to was thinking of him. Tom grows some of the best marijuana you’ll find in this part of the Pacific Northwest, and we trade a lot of it on the black market for things that we need. Is that why you’re here? Did you need some of Tom’s drugs?”

“No,” she said firmly, shaking her head as she settled back on the cot. At least she was trying to play by the rules. Even if she was only doing it to avoid being shot, it showed a degree of understanding about what was going on around her. I liked that. It might mean we wouldn’t have to kill her. “No, and no, and no again. I ran out of cookies, and then I ran out of pills, so I asked some people some questions. Most of them didn’t want to give me answers. I made them. I asked again and again, until I knew what I needed to know.”

Fear writhed in my chest like a fistful of maggots. “Did you kill the people you asked for answers? Did you kill people in order to find me?” My connections on the black market were good, but no one’s connections were good enough to survive something like that. If this little slip of an assassin had carved her way through the local drug dealers and information brokers in her quest to find me, the repercussions were going to be devastating.

“Only one, and he asked for it.” Her eyes flashed. “He liked his hands. He liked putting them on people who hadn’t asked to have his hands on them. He put them on me, after he’d said he didn’t know what I needed to know. So I took them off, and then there was so much blood, and then the people who lived there with him came in, and they said they’d been waiting for this to happen, they said it had been coming for a long time, and they told me to leave, but they weren’t angry. They just didn’t want me there while I was all over covered in his blood.”

“Ah.” I had actually heard something about this, from one of my contacts near Portland. They’d had an incident in one of the way stations with a transient girl and a veterinarian who, yes, had a reputation for putting his hands where they didn’t belong. People had been trying to catch him in the act for years. The women he got grabby with had a tendency to either vanish or refuse to talk, claiming that nothing had really happened. Way I heard it, he’d grabbed for the transient, she’d cut his hands off with his own bone saw, and nobody had done anything to stop her from leaving.

If she’d been dropping my name by that point, none of the survivors had heard it. Interesting. “Who told you about me?” I asked. “Who first said, ‘You should look for Dr. Abbey’?”

“Don’t remember,” said the woman, shaking her head defiantly. “I was just looking for someone who could give me more pills. I need my pills. They make the world look the way that it’s supposed to look, and not the way it wants to look when the pills run out.”

She had to be talking about the synthetic cannabinoids Jill had found in her blood. Those were the only drugs strong enough and nonstandard enough to both change her perceptions of the world and be difficult to replace. “I’m not a pharmacist,” I said. “This is a research facility. This isn’t a place people come for pills.”

The woman looked at me blankly for a moment. “You should have been a pharmacist,” she said. “You could have said ‘Hello sir’ and ‘Gosh that’s a nice hat, ma’am,’ and filled little bottles with littler pills, and given lollipops to kids who behaved.” She rolled back into her original position, staring up at the ceiling. ‘Be good boys and girls, and you’ll have all the good things in the world, and none of the bad things, ever again, forever after, amen.”

“Look, I’d like to help you,” I said. “I’m not what you were looking for, but you’re here now, and I know you’ve been through a lot. Can you tell me your name? Where you came from? Anything that would make it easier for me and my friends to help you?”

“I am a raven who used to be a writing desk, and there aren’t going to be any more cookies ever again, because Kitty did a bad thing, and when kitty cats do bad things, they have to go down the well.” The woman closed her eyes. A single tear escaped and ran down her cheek. “I don’t think she made it out of the house. I’m almost certain that she didn’t, and I can’t really be sorry, because it was her fault that everything went wrong, but she was still my Kitty, and I loved her. She shouldn’t have done the bad thing and I don’t want to know I don’t want to know what she did, I need my pills!” She balled her hands into fists, punching the sides of the bed so fast and so fiercely that Tom and I both jumped.

It was honestly a miracle that Tom’s trigger discipline was so good he didn’t shoot her with a tranq dart right then and there. She stopped punching the bed and said, in a suddenly toneless voice, “I’m tired now. I think I’m going to sleep some more. Thank you for the saline, and for letting me sleep here. If you kill me while I’m sleeping, that’s okay. It’s what I deserve. I won’t be mad.”

“What’s your name?” I asked again.

She didn’t answer.

2.

Jill met us outside the door. “She’s asleep,” she said, voice tight and somewhat agitated. “She literally went to sleep the second she stopped talking. This is someone who’s had training for that sort of thing.”

“Ex-military?” I asked.

“Not unless she was Black Ops and got herself deleted from the system,” said Jill. “Your hacker would have found her by now if she was in the military databases. That’s one of the first places anyone with a lick of training goes to look for someone like this.”

“Fair,” I allowed. “All right, keep an eye on our guest, and if she wakes up again, call me. I’m going to go see if anything else has come to light. You.” I turned, looking past Jill to not-Daisy, who was still standing in the spot she’d been in when we entered the observation room. “Go feed the lab animals, make sure everyone is still doing their jobs. We need to be operating at top capacity.”

“Why?” asked not-Daisy, blinking at me. She looked like a sheep, easily led and even more easily confused. My hands itched to slap the stupid off her face. I tucked them into my lab coat pockets. I don’t hit my staff, no matter how much they might sometimes aggravate me. There are lines that should not be crossed. They separate reputable underground establishments, like mine, from the black market free clinics, where sure, you might get your vaccinations, but you also might get to become an uncredited and unwilling part of someone else’s experimental testing pool.

It’s a hard world these days, and no matter how hard we try, it just keeps on getting harder. “Because life goes on, even when there’s a mystery to be solved. Maybe especially when there’s a mystery to be solved. And because you work for me, and I just told you to do it. So unless you’re interested in exploring other employment opportunities, you’ll scoot.”

Not-Daisy’s eyes went very wide in her wan face. She nodded, quickly, and scurried away down the hall, leaving me standing alone with Jill and Tom. I turned to face them.

“Jill, I need you to go over all the personnel records for people whose origins we have not absolutely confirmed, and check them again,” I said. “Zelda there may be our only current CDC plant, but it’s possible she’s not our only potential mole, and there’s something about this situation that doesn’t smell right to me. I want to be sure that whatever happens next, it’s because we fucked up, not because somebody fucked us.”

“I love the conviction that we’re about to get fucked,” said Jill. “It’s real comforting.”

“There are three constants in this world, Jill,” I said. “One, you don’t know everything. Two, what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you. And three, someone’s getting fucked. The only question is, who’s wearing the strap-on? Tom, while Jill is going over our records, I want you to look at those synthetic cannabinoids she isolated from our mystery woman’s blood. I don’t expect you to be able to replicate them exactly, but if you can come up with a way to synthesize something similar, that could be an enormous help. I don’t think she’s going to talk to us until we start offering her what she wants, and what she wants are those pills.”

“We don’t know what those drugs do, and there isn’t time to do proper testing if I’m just trying to synthesize a batch based on what we already have,” Tom said. “We could be giving her just about anything. Those chemicals aren’t toys.”

“No, but neither is a woman who somehow got my name and had the resources to track us down without leaving a trail,” I said. “Our location isn’t a state secret, but we’re pretty good about not saying, ‘Here we are, come rob us blind.’ Depending on the quality of the places she’s been asking around, however…”

“You’re afraid she’s the precursor to a raid?” Jill couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of her tone. “Her? I don’t care how much she wants to offer to kill people for aspirin, she’s not someone’s advance spy. No one sends somebody in that poor of physical condition to scout for them. There’s no guarantee you’ll get your scout back when you starve them half to death.”

“I don’t think she’s a scout.” I glanced over my shoulder at the closed door. “She’s too disjointed, for one thing. Whether it’s the drugs or whatever she’s been taking them to treat, she needs help. I think she’s a distraction, and a tracking dog. Sometimes when I need to flush out specimens, I’ll send Joe into the woods with the retrieval team. He likes running into groups of the infected and starting to make a ruckus. I know they can’t hurt him more than he can hurt them, so it’s a good way to collect zombies for my research. Do you understand what I mean?”

“You’re saying that when you want to find a doctor, you send in a sick person,” said Tom slowly. “One that you’re not too concerned about losing.”

“Exactly.” I turned back to the pair. “We need to know where she came from, we need to know how she got here, and we need to know who pointed her in our direction. Until we know all that, we can’t afford to trust that everyone who’s here has our best interests at heart. Remember what happened last time?”

Tom and Jill exchanged a look. “We remember,” said Jill. “We’re on it.”

“Good,” I said. “Report back in an hour, just so I know where we stand—and call me if she wakes up again. I’ll be in my office.” I turned and started down the hall before they could ask any more questions. Sometimes I think the worst part of being in charge is all the questions. They never end, and somehow, I’m always expected to be the one who has all the answers.

Joe was still on the floor with his head on his paws, sulking, when I made it back to the office. I started counting silently as I walked to my desk, and made it to twenty-three before his delight overwhelmed him and his tail started wagging. “You’re no good at sulking, Joe,” I scolded. “If you want me to really believe in your suffering, you need to suffer for at least thirty full seconds. I’d recommend trying for an entire minute. Just for realism.”

His tail continued to wag as his head came up off his paws. I wasn’t just back in the room, I was back in the room and talking to him. Truly, this was a banner day. I sighed.

“You’re a good dog, Joe, but you’re a terrible negotiator. You could have held out for anything you wanted, and instead I’ve been forgiven with a tail wag and a goofy smile. You need to learn to look out for your own interests.” I opened the top drawer of my desk, pulled out a dog biscuit, and tossed it to him. He caught it out of the air and began the ecstatic process of reducing it to so many gooey crumbs on the carpet.

Crunching sounds accompanied me as I turned back to my computer, typed in my password, and sent Tessa a chat request. She was better about allowing those through normal channels when she was actively on a job: there was only so much cloak-and-dagger that either one of us could handle as a part of our daily lives. I had no way of knowing whether or not she was at her computer, so I opened one of the files Jill had e-mailed to me and began reading about the drug cocktails isolated from our guest.

I was on page three, and was beginning to really agree with the “if you told me she was dead, I wouldn’t argue with you” diagnosis, when my chat client beeped to signal an incoming call. I minimized the file and opened the chat window, revealing Tessa’s face. She was wearing a surprising amount of glitter smeared around her eyes, and she wasn’t smiling.

“Tell me you got me something to work with, because I still got nothing,” she said.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said. “She woke up for a little bit. She didn’t tell us her name, but she talked, and I have video. Will that help?”

“Speech patterns and accent might let me start narrowing in on an origin, and an origin would help me figure out her identity, so yes, that’ll help.” Tessa shook her head, curls bouncing. “This is starting to haunt my dreams. I’ve never had a missing person this determined to stay that way who hadn’t been intentionally scrubbed from the Internet.”

“Sending the file over now.” I opened the drive where our feeds from the isolation room were stored, selecting the twenty-minute segment that included my conversation with the mystery woman and dropping it onto the chat box. A small status bar immediately appeared, displaying the status of the transfer. “She’s still not too lucid. Part of it’s probably the drugs, and part of it’s probably withdrawal from the drugs. I have Tom working on synthesizing something to help her through the next few days. That’ll give us something to bargain with, even if it doesn’t do anything else.”

“What did she say?”

“Well, she offered to kill people for me. And that ‘Kitty did a bad thing,’ but that she didn’t think Kitty had made it out of the house. I don’t know whether she was talking about a pet or a person, but—” I stopped talking. Tessa was sitting suddenly ramrod straight, her eyes gone wide in their circles of club makeup, her mouth gone suddenly slack with something that might be shock, or might be plain and simple fear. “Tessa? You want to tell me what you just figured out? Because honestly, I’m getting a little tired of not knowing what’s going on.”

“You’re sure she said ‘Kitty.’ She didn’t use some other word, or a proper name.”

“No, she said ‘Kitty.’ She said it multiple times, she was very clear.” The status bar turned blue and then disappeared. “See for yourself, you should have the file now.”

“Hang on.” Tessa bent her head and started to type. I heard my own voice through her computer speakers, distorted by distance and compression. We always sound strange to ourselves when heard in playback. This was especially strange. I might not have recognized myself, if not for the mystery woman’s voice speaking a second later, answering me, confirming the provenance of the file. Tessa began shaking her head. “No,” she said. “Nyet. No.”

“What?” I tapped on my computer screen, hoping the noise and motion together would be enough to catch her attention. “Tessa, what? You can’t freak out without inviting me to your ‘everything is ruined forever’ party. It’s not nice, and it’s not productive. What’s wrong? Why are you trying to refute reality? Refuting reality never works out in the long run, trust me.”

“This woman…I may know who she is.” Tessa looked up, shaking her head again. “I think she used to work with the competition. A man from Seattle, who did the kind of work I do, but I will be honest: he was better than I will ever be. I have more patience for legwork, I am happier to look for missing people and use the skills I have, but this man? He could wipe you from the world if you told him where to start. He could build an identity out of nothing, put a person in cracks that no one even realized were there until they might as well have existed all along. He was an artist.”

“What happened to him?”

“What happens to all the artists in this world? He died.” She kept typing, her eyes fixed at a point below the level of her webcam. I could see the roots of her hair, dark brown showing through her carefully cultivated blonde. “The community was in an uproar for months. Some people even said it was a hoax, that he was doing the ultimate ID scrub and scrubbing himself right out of reality. Nobody knows for sure. I’ve seen the autopsy reports. They look legit to me, but what do I know? I’m no doctor.”

“Besides, they could have autopsied a clone.” Tessa’s head snapped up, eyes even wider this time. I shrugged. “What? I did physiological examinations of the second Georgia Mason, remember? Clone tech is more advanced than we like to think it is, especially when you don’t need your clone to do anything but die. Let me tell you, that doesn’t take any special skills.” Anybody could die. It was almost the only thing that every person on Earth had been designed to do with equal proficiency.

“I didn’t even think of that.” She bowed her head as she resumed typing. “They called him ‘the Monkey.’ If he had a real name, he scrubbed it years ago—maybe before he did anything else. The best always experiment on themselves, you know? Means you have time to be sure that whatever it is you’re doing really works, that it’s not just chance. He had the resources to get himself a clone, if he really wanted one. If he needed to disappear.”

“This is all fascinating, but what does it have to do with my mystery woman?” I asked.

“He always lived with at least two women. They were…let’s call them his ‘public relations team.’ That’s what you call your lovers who sometimes kill people for you, right?” Tessa’s scowl was visible only in the way her cheeks distorted, tightening and pulling at the sides of her face. “A friend of mine worked for him for a while. He deleted her whole original identity, just wrote her out of the world and wrote her back in as part of his private menagerie. He called her ‘the Wolf,’ and when she fell out of favor, he deleted that identity, too. We’ve never found her body. I don’t think we ever will.” She was still typing, more fiercely now, like she thought she could bring her friend back from the dead through sheer force of anger.

“So what? You think our guest was one of the Monkey’s girls?”

“The last two recorded members of his little zoo were ‘the Cat’ and ‘the Fox.’ A hacker and a killer, according to all reports.” Tessa glanced up. “The Cat’s body was recovered at the same time as the Monkey’s. The Fox’s body never was.”

I paused. “I know why I’ve heard that name before. The Masons went to the Monkey. He was supposed to get them new identities. Instead, he fucked around and nearly got them all killed. Shaun really hated that guy.” Had he mentioned women working for the Monkey? I felt as if he had, at least once, at least in passing. He’d been a little distracted by the time he and the others made it back down the coast to me—something about finding his dead sister reborn in a CDC holding facility had taken his mind off things he would have once considered to be of the utmost importance.

“Well, your Shaun may have had good reason. This woman seems really fixated on the idea that someone she calls Kitty ‘did a bad thing.’ If that bad thing involved your friends, that could explain why things went so sour at the Monkey’s place.”

“That would make the woman I have the Fox, correct?” When Tessa nodded, so did I. “All right, keep digging, and if you find anything, I want to know about it. I’m going to drop a line to the folks I still know at After the End Times, and see if any of them can confirm your ID.”

“If they do, let me know, okay? Finding the last of the Monkey’s girls would be a pretty big deal in the circles I move in.” I must have made a face, because Tessa put her hands up, and said, “I wouldn’t tell anyone where she was until after she’s not with you, I swear. I value your business, and I value you not sending people to close my mouth permanently. I’m not going to go spilling your secrets all over the Internet just because I want to look cool for my friends.”

“I pay you for secrecy,” I said coldly. “Just remember that.” Then I killed the connection, before she could make any more excuses. If there was any chance at all that our guest was worth something to someone, getting a confirmed ID had just become even more important. And now I had to do it before Tessa did.

“I hate subcontractors,” I muttered, and reached for the phone.

3.

It’s possible to maintain a landline in today’s day and age, and there are even reasons that it can be considered superior to having a cell phone, if you do it right. Old phone cables run through the entire North American continent, laced through earth and stone like veins through the human body. Most of them haven’t been used, or consistently monitored, in decades. One person with a decent understanding of how they work and a few skills picked up from an old telephone company repair manual can set up safe, secure, off-the-grid communications. It’s kind of funny, in a sideways sort of way: People used to go for burn phones and cell blockers, thinking that they were keeping themselves secure, and now those same people would kill their own mothers for a black market landline and the tech to keep it clean.

I held the receiver between my cheek and shoulder as I typed, listening to the ringing. Finally, the line clicked, and an amiable female voice announced, “Kwong-Garcia residence, Maggie speaking.”

“Tick tock says the clock, when the watch runs down,” I said.

There was a pause. “I don’t really like this cloak-and-dagger bullshit, okay? I’ve got a scrambler on the line, courtesy of Daddy, so if you’re calling for Alaric or whatever, you can stop with the weird code phrases and the pretending that this sounds even remotely normal. It doesn’t. Anyone who happens to be in the room with me would know something was up if I gave you the countersign, so how about we just don’t?”

“When did your father get you a scrambler good enough to trust?” I asked.

“It was a wedding gift,” said Maggie. “Dr. Abbey? Is that you?”

“It’s me,” I confirmed. “Congratulations on that, by the way. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to attend. You know how it is. Underground virologist, fugitive from the law, all that.”

“We really liked the KitchenAid you sent,” said Maggie. “I would’ve sent you a thank-you note, but we didn’t so much have a mailing address.”

“I was thanked in spirit,” I said. “Is Alaric around? I need to ask him some questions.”

“He’s working right now, but I can get him if it’s important.” Maggie paused. “What am I saying? You picked up a phone. This isn’t just important, it’s cause for a ticker tape parade.”

“I don’t think they have those anymore,” I said dryly. “As to the rest, I take your point, and will try to be in touch more often, if only so you don’t decide to mount some sort of expedition to my place of work and take me out. Now, can you please put Alaric on the phone?”

“Just a second.” There was a soft click as she put the phone on mute. That was something I actually missed from working at the Canadian branch of the CDC. We had all used heavy handset phones, holdovers from the pre-Rising world that could be hit with a hammer and still function. With those, putting down the phone would invariably make a loud clunking sound, keeping everyone aware of what was happening around them. I didn’t trust phones that could be put on mute. They created too much opportunity for plotting.

A few seconds passed before the line beeped, and Alaric’s familiar voice said, “Dr. Abbey? Is that really you?”

“You should learn to trust your wife,” I said. “She said it was me. Ergo, it was me. Why is that so difficult to believe?”

“Because you never call. You write sometimes, but you never, ever call. Not even when we got married. You sent a fancy blender via courier. It would’ve been nice to hear your voice.”

“You’re hearing it now, and all you’re doing is complaining about it.” I sighed. “It’s nice to talk to you, too, Alaric. Now, what can you tell me about the Monkey and his girls?”

“What?” Alaric sounded genuinely baffled for a moment. His tone turned quickly wary as he continued, asking, “Why do you want to know? Why are you calling me?”

“Because I can’t call Mahir—it’s too difficult to synchronize time zones, and even voice over IP is risky when you’re bouncing it between continents. No one has a number for the Masons. Becks is dead. That leaves you.”

“No, not just me. Hold on.” There was a soft scuffing sound; he hadn’t put the phone on mute, he had put his hand over the receiver. “Maggie! Come in here, and bring the splitter.” The scuffing sound was repeated, and his voice was suddenly back in my ear. “Maggie’s getting the headphone splitter. You need to talk to both of us. Her because she has data, me because I’m not going to sit here eavesdropping in my own home.”

“I love how suddenly my actions are being dictated to me,” I said sourly. “Why am I talking to Maggie, and not to you? You’re the Newsie. She writes smut for a living.”

“I write excellent, extremely literate erotica, thank you very much,” said Maggie primly, her voice coming through as clearly as her husband’s. “It pays more of the bills than his reporting ever will, so you should respect the pornography.”

“Your father pays all your bills,” I said, without rancor. “Since Alaric says I should be talking to you, what can you tell me about the Monkey and his girls?”

“He was a controlling narcissist who didn’t allow for any resistance or deviation from the relatively narrow roles he dictated for the women who came into his orbit,” said Maggie without hesitation. “He’d had extensive plastic surgery at some point: No one looks that generic unless they’ve designed themselves to look that way. I wish I’d been able to get the number for his surgeon. That work was amazing.”

“You’re perfect just the way you are,” said Alaric. “You don’t need a plastic surgeon.”

“Maybe I don’t right now, but it’s always good to have a few numbers on file,” said Maggie serenely. “I may want to cover the scars on my stomach someday. Pancake makeup and concealer are good for a lot, and yet sometimes I’d like to be able to hot tub without tinting the water beige.”

“This is a fascinating conversation, and I’m just thrilled beyond words to be able to be an unwilling participant, but can we please get back on track?” I asked. “I need to know about the Monkey’s girls. I understand that he had two. Can either of you describe them for me?”

“The Cat was tall, thin, brown hair, cold eyes. She did a lot of the grunt work for him. I get the feeling she was a computer genius, but I didn’t get details,” said Maggie.

“Her name was Jane,” said Alaric. His voice was much more subdued. “We dated for a while back in college. She was always a little cold, but I figured that was just the sort of person she was, you know? Not everyone is physically demonstrative.”

“The sex was apparently amazing,” said Maggie. “Seriously transcendent. I did get details about that, but to be fair, I asked for them. The woman should’ve written a book on fucking, instead of going into the business of fucking people over.”

“I am thrilled to be learning more about the intricacies of your marriage, and will send you my therapy bills,” I said flatly.

“I’m good for them,” said Maggie.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “So that’s the Cat. Jane. I’ve heard reports that she didn’t make it out of the Monkey’s compound alive.” Even if she had, she wasn’t the woman in my observation room. My guest could have been a natural brunette, and she could have had cold eyes when she wasn’t drugged to the gills, but no one, however charitable, was ever going to call her “tall.” I’d met taller teenagers. “There was another woman, though. Tell me about her.”

“You mean Foxy?” asked Maggie. “She was little. Red hair. Blue eyes. Violent as all hell. She seemed like she was only really happy when she was hurting something—although she was the one who really got upset when we found out that the Cat had betrayed us. The Monkey was angry when he found out. But the Fox was sad. She was disappointed. It was sort of like she was a little kid in some ways, and she didn’t want to believe that the people who were important to her could actually do anything that was really wrong.”

“There’s more.” Alaric’s interjection was soft enough that I almost missed it.

Good thing I have good ears. “What do you mean, there’s more?”

“I mean…do you keep up with the site at all? The articles, I mean, not the op-ed columns or the updates from the Masons.”

“Not as much as I should,” I admitted. “Running a lab is a full-time job, even when you can do it legitimately. Under these conditions, it’s a full-time job for three people, and there’s only one of me. My reading for pleasure has sort of fallen by the wayside.”

“Okay. I wrote an article a few months ago that I really think you should read. Send me a currently valid e-mail address, and I’ll send it over to you.” Alaric sounded hesitant—more hesitant than normal. “It’ll explain a lot about the Fox.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I show you a picture?”

“Sure,” said Maggie. “Send it to my submissions account. We both have access.”

“On it.” Cradling the phone between my cheek and shoulder again, I pulled up the video of our mystery guest—who was growing less mysterious by the second—and clipped a single frame that showed her face in cool, silent repose. The lighting was good, highlighting the pallor of her skin and the purple shadows under her eyes. I attached it to an e-mail, sent it off, and waited. The connection was good. I didn’t have to wait for long.

“Mother of God,” said Maggie.

Alaric, who had spent more time in my lab than she had and knew exactly where that room was in the facility, was less restrained. “Dr. Abbey, what the fuck is the Fox doing in your observation room?”

“So you’re both identifying her as the woman from the Monkey’s compound?” I asked. “Please be clear in your answers. I need to be sure.”

“If it’s not her, she has a twin sister,” said Maggie. “That’s not okay.”

“It’s her,” said Alaric.

“Okay. That’s what I needed to confirm.”

“Dr. Abbey, I don’t think you understand.” Alaric was sounding more alarmed by the minute. “She’s a killer. That’s what she does. It’s what she lives for. She may have been upset when the Cat broke the rules, but that wasn’t going to stop her from putting a bullet in anyone who got in her way. You need to get her out of there. You’re not safe while she’s with you.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. In the meantime, Alaric, send that article over; I need all the help I can get in dealing with this situation, so if you’ve got something you think will help, I want it. Both of you, congratulations again on your wedding—I hope you’ll be very happy together. Give everyone my best, and don’t call back.” I hung up without saying good-bye. Farewells weren’t really my style, and hadn’t been since my husband died. Maybe it was a silly superstition, but I live in a world where the dead walk: I can be superstitious if I want to.

Alaric’s e-mail had already arrived, shunted though a dozen layers of increasingly sophisticated software to reach my inbox, where it waited for me to open it. I clicked. I opened. I read. And somewhere in the middle of his report, titled “Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System,” I began to cry. Thankfully, there was no one in the room with me but Joe, and Joe was loyal. Joe would never tell.

4.

“Is she awake?”

“You asked us to notify you as soon as she woke up. I have not notified you. I value my position here in this lab, rather than outside in the wilds with no weapons and no references to show the next evil lab that I want to work for. Ergo, she has not woken up.” Jill didn’t look away from her computer as she spoke. Apparently, even being her boss didn’t put me above blood test results in her estimation. That was actually heartening. I signed her paychecks, but science was her real employer. That was exactly as things were meant to be.

“The lab isn’t evil, it’s ethically challenged,” I said. “We do good things.”

“I bet Frankenstein told himself the same thing,” said Jill, still typing. “She’s asleep, but she’s not deeply asleep. You could probably wake her up, if you wanted to go another five rounds with Sleeping Beauty: the horror movie edition.”

“Were you always this rude and disrespectful?” I asked.

“Not until my boss told me that talking back would help me on my annual reviews,” said Jill. She finally turned to look at me. “Do you want me to call Tom to come and play backup? He’s just down in his lab, playing with cannabis. You know, like he does every day.”

“Yes, but this time he’s doing it because I asked him to,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I don’t think she’s here to hurt me. I think she’s genuinely here because she needs help, and because the last person she trusted to help her used her instead. Used her hard, and put her away broken.”

“We’re not the Island of Misfit Toys,” protested Jill. “We can’t be responsible for every broken doll you come across.”

“Why not?” I asked, amiably enough. “I decided to be responsible for you.”

Jill didn’t have an answer for that, and so I turned away and walked out of the room, heading the few feet down the hall to the observation room where our mystery woman—who was becoming less mysterious with every moment that passed, even if she was becoming somewhat sadder at the same time—was waiting for me.

She didn’t stir as I opened the door and stepped inside. I shut the door behind me, walking calmly to the seat I’d been occupying earlier. Routine was important when dealing with people who had every reason to be suspicious of you: It both made you predictable, which could be comforting, and it lulled them into a false sense of security. It was amazing how many people took “doesn’t deviate” to mean “can’t deviate.” If I could build that assumption in her mind, however subtly, I would put myself in a much better position.

“Elaine,” I said. “Wake up. I need to talk to you.”

The woman on the cot flinched. That was all I needed to know that she was awake, and more importantly, that I was right. She was the Monkey’s faithful killer, the one he called “the Fox,” but before that, she had been a schoolteacher from Seattle named Elaine Oldenburg.

“I could sell your location to a lot of people. There are still warrants out for your arrest, thanks to the things that happened at your old school. None of the parents of the surviving students want to press charges, but you know how parents are. They’re always looking for someone to blame. The way you disappeared sure did make you a person of interest.” I leaned back in my seat. “I could sell your location, and I’m not. That should be enough to earn me a little conversation, don’t you think? Stop pretending to sleep, and talk to me.”

“Nothing here is worth saying,” said the woman. Her voice was very small, and it lacked the lilting edge that it had held before: Now it was filled with a deep resignation, like this was the ending that she had always expected but had somehow been holding out hope would be avoided. “I was, I wasn’t, and now you’re telling me that I am again. It’s not fair. When I took the cup and sword, he promised me I’d never have to be again. That was the deal. Give myself over to service, and never be anyone I didn’t want to be ever again, no matter what happened, forever and ever, amen. That was the deal.” Her voice took on a plaintive edge that cut through the air like the whine of a bone saw slicing through flesh. “He wasn’t supposed to leave me.”

“Do you mean the Monkey?” I asked, trying to keep my own voice as neutral as possible. All those drugs that she was on…some of them could be used to induce a dissociative state. If Elaine had gone to him because she had heard that he could supply her with drugs that would do that, then his death could have seemed like the greatest betrayal of all. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if you know this, but the Monkey is dead. He died in Seattle.”

“I know he’s dead.” Now she sounded almost dismissive. I was giving her old information, and she didn’t have time for that. “I saw him die. I didn’t shoot him, if that’s what you’re asking. I could have done it, but I didn’t do it. I wasn’t mad at him. Everyone is just as they’re made, that’s all, and he made himself into what he was one inch at a time.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.

“I mean he made me with drugs and promises, and he made himself with drugs and surgery and blood and women who would do whatever he wanted them to do. His only mistake was the Cat. She was a hunter. He didn’t want hunters. He wanted killers. They’re not the same thing, you know.” She smiled beatifically, her eyes still closed. “They never have been.”

“He died two years ago,” I said. “A lot of people thought that you had died, too. How did you not run out of drugs until now?” Because that should have happened a long time ago. There was no way she could have been maintaining the levels of chemical modification that Jill had found in her bloodstream. Some of those compounds had short shelf lives; they broke down too quickly for her to have been traveling with any kind of a supply. Others were just hard to make, and dangerous to carry. The only way our girl had made it through the past two years was by finding another supplier—and that didn’t fill in any of the gaps that were starting to open around her. She wasn’t telling her story. The story I’d been able to uncover had some holes.

“The Monkey always used to say, ‘If something happens to me, go here,’” she said, and finally turned her head toward me, opening her eyes. They were fathomless and cold. I could have fallen forever into those eyes. “He gave me names. Addresses. Safe houses I could run to. But some of them weren’t as safe as others. Some of them had problems that had to be solved with fire, and with screaming.” She shrugged a little. “It’s a living.”

“So these safe houses, they gave you the drugs that you needed? How did they know what you needed?”

“Monkey told them. He always knew he might die someday. Dying someday came with the job, like getting cavities comes with eating too much sugar, or breaking toes comes with dancing ballet.” She sounded so calm, like she wasn’t talking about her own life. “So he gave the safe houses lists of what I was on, and told them that they could have me if they’d keep me nice and gone. I trusted him. I believed he wouldn’t give me to bad people.”

“Did he give you a copy of that list?”

Now she sighed, shaking her head. “He said knowing what I needed would just make me unhappy, because then I’d be able to see just how broken I really was. I guess he was trying to protect me again. He loved me best, you know. Out of all his girls, he loved me best.”

“Is that so?” I asked, as neutrally as I could. I didn’t recognize what she was describing as love, but I had been around long enough to understand that sometimes love doesn’t look like anything you would expect. Sometimes love is a spider hiding in the corner of the room, dark and brooding and terrible to anyone who doesn’t experience love in the exact same way. That’s what makes love so dangerous, and so impossible to destroy. You can’t kill what you can’t see.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I wasn’t the first, but I was the best, and all I had to do was spend most of my time not being anyone at all. That was what I wanted most, and he gave it to me. He let me not be anyone at all.” Her face fell. “I’m becoming someone again. I don’t like it.”

It was hard not to get frustrated with her. It was half like talking to a child and half like talking to one of the fragile attempts at artificial intelligence that people like Tessa periodically pushed out onto the greater Internet, hoping that the sheer flow of data would transform them from particularly well-designed Chinese rooms into actual people. But getting mad at those programs didn’t make them function any better, and neither would getting mad at her. “Why don’t you like it? You were a person before the Monkey got his hands on you.”

“I was a bad person,” said the woman. I couldn’t decide what to call her. She wasn’t the Fox anymore—and it wasn’t like I would have ever used such a stupid name for a flesh-and-blood person; even at my most understanding, I have my limits—but she hadn’t turned back into Elaine yet. Assuming she ever could. Some of those drugs had permanent, long-term effects, and those were just the compounds I had heard of before. The experimental cannabinoids, who knew? “I was supposed to keep the children safe, and I didn’t. Why would I want to be her ever again? All she was good for was losing. The Monkey made me stronger. The Monkey took all that pain away, and he gave me laughter and happiness instead. I miss him.”

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to yell at her. I wanted to tell her that she’d been used by a man who got her addicted to synthetic narcotics and then given her to his friends when he died. But none of that would have done any good. Love is a spider, and spiders weave webs. “I’m sorry for your loss, but look. I need to know how you found us. I need to know what you’re doing here. I need to know what you want, aside from the drugs.”

“Can you give me drugs?” She pushed herself up onto her elbows, showing more animation than she previously had. “I need my pills. I don’t like feeling this way.”

“What way?”

“Any way.” She shook her head fiercely. “I don’t like feeling. Everything is supposed to be calm and smooth and fun, and yeah, sometimes it’s all irrationally violent, but that’s okay, because the drugs take the scary out of it. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to be the one who had to survive and keep on going. Can you make it go away?”

“None of us asked to be the ones who survived; we just got lucky.” Or unlucky, depending on how you wanted to look at it. “Yes, we can provide you with a certain amount of pharmaceutical support. How much we provide will depend on what you can tell me.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want,” said the woman. Her voice was eager, almost pleading. “I’ll kill anyone, or do anything, or whatever. Just please, please, give me the pills.”

“How did you find us?”

She pulled back slightly, eyes darting to the side. “I asked people where I could go for drugs. They said to come here. They said this was the place to go.”

“Who did you ask? Who told you that this was the place to go?”

“People. Please.” She looked at me pleadingly. “Please, just give me the drugs. I don’t have that much time. Please, you have to help me. They promised you could help me.”

Something about her stance was setting off alarm bells in the back of my head. The trouble with mysteries was that they always came with the urge to solve them. They were like shiny baubles to bat at, and they were distracting. She had distracted me from the moment she dropped out of the tree, too thin and too sick and too far gone to have made it all the way into the woods without help. Someone had broken her—and while the Monkey might have done some digging on her fault lines, it couldn’t possibly have been enough to leave her the way I’d found her. She’d been strong enough to survive for two years without him. Someone else had broken her down. Someone else had left her at my doorstep.

“You’re a trap, aren’t you?” I sounded more weary than anything else, even to my own ears. I knew Jill was listening in, and I raised my voice as I demanded, “Who left you here?”

“Please,” she moaned. “Please, just give me the drugs I need. They can’t make them for me. They can’t, they never could, that’s why I had to come here. You have a lab, they said. Food, they said. I didn’t want to, but the pills ran out, and I need my pills.”

“Who can’t make your drugs for you? Who sent you here? Elaine, you have to tell me. If you want your pills, if you want me to help you, you have to tell me who sent you here?” I stood, not quite towering over her. I’m short. She was shorter, and lying in the bed besides. For once in my life, I got to be the imposing figure in the room.

The Fox—Elaine, she had to be Elaine, because anything else was too stupid to be tolerated—rolled onto her back and closed her eyes, pointing her face toward the ceiling. She looked pale and wan and fragile; so fragile that I could break her with a look, with a touch, with anything at all.

“Clive,” she said.

I swore. I couldn’t help it. “Stay here, stay right here, and don’t you move. If you move, my staff will fill this room with formalin, and we’ll watch the video of you melting at the company Christmas party every year from here until the death of time. Got it? Actually, I don’t care if you’ve got it, you’re fucked up on drugs and I’m in charge. Stay where you are.” Then I turned and stormed out of the room, moving as fast as I dared without starting a panic.

Clive had sent her. May whatever God or gods exist have mercy on us all.

Chapter 4

When Your Back’s Against the Wall

All I ask is that people leave me alone to pursue my private perversions of science. Why is that so difficult to understand? Why do I have to keep buying bullets in bulk to get my point across?

—Dr. Shannon Abbey

The fortunate among us do not live their lives haunted by the ghosts of their better selves. Very few of us are truly fortunate.

—Mahir Gowda

1.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. That’s physics, but it’s also human nature. If you take a single person and isolate them, they will find ways to start warping the world to conform to their needs and expectations. When I left the CDC, I was a single woman with a medical degree, a chip on my shoulder, and my husband’s not inconsiderable life insurance payout. I didn’t have a lab, or a staff, or the resources to defend myself: All those things came later. I did have some connections within the various health organizations that effectively governed our world, and even the friends who were no longer willing to be seen with me were sometimes willing to sneak me a few hours of computer access or let me have off-the-books access to their research facilities, but that was about it. Everything I’d built since then, I had built on my own, one brick at a time. And yeah, in the process, I may have racked up a few debts…and made a couple of enemies.

Because nothing exists in a vacuum, any time you set up a society that has to operate off the radar and out of sight, you’re going to get your share of con men, grifters, and petty despots who think that the way to control everyone around them is with an iron fist—skip the velvet glove. Every black market on the West Coast had its own tin king or pasteboard queen. Gangs controlled some of the supply chains, and could have been a serious problem if not for the fact that they knew I controlled most of the painkillers and vaccines in this part of the country. If they didn’t want to die of measles or deal with the consequences of their own insistence on riding motorcycles down poorly maintained roads, they didn’t fuck with me.

And then there was Clive.

For every wanna-be boss man and petty little comptroller with more bullets than sense, it seemed like there was someone in the shadows: someone smarter than they were, someone who understood how to bide their time and plan for a future that was coming faster than any of those amateurs could dream. Some of those potential overlords found better things to do with their time. Others found themselves on the receiving end of a coup before they could properly get started. And then there was Clive.

Clive, who controlled most of the narcotics trade from Vancouver down to Redding, spanning two countries and hundreds of miles. Clive, whose detractors tended to disappear, only to show up later in the zombie-baiting pits or roaming wild on the highways, mindless, infected, and good only for research and dissection in labs like mine. Clive, who had offered more than once to buy me out, smiling through his perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth and saying things like “cooperation is a virtue,” and “if you scratch my back, I can scratch yours.”

The only venture he’d ever undertaken that hadn’t been successful had been an attempt to control the zombie traffic along his narcotic routes. He’d believed that he could single-handedly take back territory that had been ceded by two governments, and when he’d failed, he had executed all the mercenaries and scientists who had been working for him, doing everything he could to wipe the proof that he wasn’t infallible from the face of the planet. He might have succeeded, too, if it weren’t for the fact that the underground scientific community is very small, and we gossip like academics. Some of my staff had been a part of that doomed project before they had realized just how doomed they were, and disappeared into the night.

Clive knew where my lab was. Of course Clive knew—nothing as big as the Shady Cove facility could have remained completely off his radar, especially not with the supplies we purchased on a monthly basis from the surrounding communities. We generated our own power and fed it back into the under-grid, using that excess to pay for some of the things we couldn’t create for ourselves. No matter how many solar panels we concealed on the structure or hydroponic-food bays we created, we were always going to be dependent on the outside for some things, and that meant that people like Clive would always know how to find us.

But that didn’t mean he knew how to get inside, or where our weak spots were. If he wanted to learn that, he would need to get someone past our fences. Someone small and light, who he could monitor the entire time. Oh, she didn’t have a tracker on her—my people were nothing if not efficient, and any chips or devices attached to her clothing would have been microwaved into uselessness two seconds after it was discovered—but visual surveillance will always have its place, no matter how advanced the world becomes. Clive could have watched her work her way past our outer defenses, and then watched as I took her into the building. If he claimed her as one of his people, he could even convince the court of public opinion that he’d been mounting a rescue mission to get her back. Everyone knew that I was a mad scientist. They were happy enough with that reputation when they needed vaccines or had questions about food and water safety, but as soon as someone mentioned body snatching or raising the dead, those same people were happy to turn on me. It was part of the job.

No one liked Clive, but they feared and respected him. Tell them the right story, and they’d take it as the gospel truth, just to keep his knives away from their throats. Clive didn’t like me, because I represented something uncontrollable, incomprehensible, and heavily armed that didn’t pay him the “taxes” he was so fond of demanding. He’d wanted my people and my resources for years. Now it looked like he was finally making his play.

I skidded to a stop in the doorway of the control room, where Jill was still staring in horrified silence at the window to the observation room. Elaine hadn’t moved since I left. I guess she felt like she’d worked hard enough for one day. “Did you hear that?” I demanded.

“Shit,” said Jill, turning slowly to face me. “Fuck. Damn. Shit-fuck-damn.”

“Since you’re not taking a correspondence course in profanity, I’m taking that as a yes,” I said. “Call back anyone we have in the field or visiting the local encampments. I want this place locked down tighter than a CDC administrator’s sense of whimsy. Grab as many security people as you think you’ll need, and have everyone searched for bugs or bombs on their way back in. Have you finished running deep backgrounds on everyone we have on staff?”

“No,” said Jill. “I’m maybe sixty percent of the way there. I’ve flagged five people who might be feeding data back to corporate or private health concerns. No one else from the CDC yet. We do have Amal from the EIS down in research, but since she gave us a copy of her résumé, with references, including your friend Danika, I didn’t have to look very hard for her.”

“Amal’s fine, Danika vouched for her,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “Tell her to keep doing the security checks, and to notify you if she finds anything. Pull those five people and lock them up until this is settled. Tell them we’re doing isolation tests if they give you any trouble.” They wouldn’t give her any trouble. Spies expected to be caught, and spies who had been caught expected to be shot if they caused any problems. If our five were loyal to someone else, they’d be relieved to be facing nothing more serious than short-term incarceration.

“What do you want us to do about Zelda?” Jill stood, wobbling a little as the servos in her prosthetic leg reoriented themselves to the level of the floor. “I can’t give her a gun. She hasn’t passed any of our marksmanship tests, and I don’t think the CDC prepped her for anything more strenuous than doing lab work when they sent her out here.”

“I swear I’m going to contact Joey and tell him that while I don’t mind him sending spies over here to do my chores, I need a slightly better class of infiltrator,” I said. “All right, we’re blowing her cover. I’ll do it, I can’t help lock down the lab without getting in the way. If there’s anyone else here who’s serving two masters, find them, and tell them that they’re quitting one of their jobs today. I don’t care whether they decide to work for me or decide to be locked up until it’s safe to throw them out—just make sure we’re not going to have anyone trying to hold our lines while they’re thinking about how they’re going to type this up for their bosses.”

“On it,” said Jill. She leaned forward and punched a few keys on her keyboard. The lights in the observation room flickered almost imperceptibly. “She’s locked down. Your keycard will still open the door. So will mine, Tom’s, or anyone’s who has full security access. You’re sure no one with full access is on someone else’s payroll?”

“If they are, we’re going to find out real fucking fast,” I said. “Now, move.”

She moved. So did I. I ran one way down the hall and she ran the other, outpacing me with ease. Jill might not do much fieldwork, but she’d been a runner before the accident that claimed her original leg, and her prosthetic had been designed to let her keep as much of her old life as possible. She could have graced any lab in the world, if they hadn’t been so small-minded about what constituted physical health. As it was, I got lucky, and she got to squat in an abandoned forestry center, trying to unsnarl the structure of Kellis-Amberlee one twist at a time.

There were no alarms or blaring lights to signal the moment when Jill got to Tom and told him to put the lab into a state of high alert. A few doors locked themselves. A few banks of fluorescents changed shade, going from a cool white to a more artificial, less relaxing yellow. That was all my people needed to know that we had a problem, and the staff members who hadn’t been with us for long enough to know what an emergency looked like could take their cues from the people around them.

All except for our darling not-Daisy, who was about to get a hard lesson in exactly how little she was valued by the people who had sent her to me. The CDC might be getting better about their human rights violations—might actually be learning that you can’t feed your best and brightest through a meat grinder year upon year and still expect to have a competent, reliable staff that wasn’t completely corrupt—but real change takes time. Danika and Joey could rebuild the organization from the ground up, and they’d still have to deal with people like the ones they had replaced.

Some ways of thinking are seductive. They tell you “one person doesn’t matter as much as a world,” and while that’s technically true, there’s a big difference between choosing to burn a single population center in order to save a province, and deciding to bomb a school because there are a few live infections among an otherwise healthy student body. To choose a completely random example, not in any way influenced by my own life or experiences. Not-Daisy was the product of the old system, and she was going to have to deal with what that meant.

I found her in one of the smaller labs. They were supposed to have been closed off for the moment—we weren’t doing any research in epigenetics or botanical treatments for Kellis-Amberlee, and hadn’t been since Shaun Mason had arrived and brought us all his lovely biological data on sexually transmitted immunity and the role of reservoir conditions. The blood I’d been able to extract from the man before he fucked off to the wilds of Canada with the clone of his dead sister had changed everything, and had closed several avenues of fruitless inquiry.

We were going to repurpose those labs eventually. But when I came down the hall, I saw that one of the banks of lights was on and that the door, which should have been tightly closed, was cracked open just enough to let the room’s occupant hear if anyone was coming.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice, most people aren’t that good at paying attention to their surroundings when they’re already nervous, and my experience with corporate espionage told me that not-Daisy would be plenty nervous, especially if she was trying to get around our firewall without getting herself caught. There was no question that she, or someone very much like her, was in the lab. My people knew better than to open closed doors just so they could smoke a joint or have a little illicit hanky-panky: They learned that early and they learned it hard, usually when Joe came bounding into the room barking his canine heart out. The ones who didn’t learn it from Joe had a tendency to learn it at the end of a Taser.

I paused outside the door, considering my options. I could take it slow and easy, without frightening the woman…but had she really earned that sort of consideration? And more importantly, was I really feeling generous enough to give it to her?

“Fuck, no,” I murmured, and kicked the door open.

The effect was immediate, and highly gratifying. There was a loud clatter from the other side of the lab, accompanied by the familiar sound of someone typing as fast as their little hands allowed, trying desperately to get their data out before the authorities shut them down. Of course, normally it was my people trying to get their info transmitted ahead of someone with actual legal power. My power was all situational. I had no legal authority, but hey, who needs legal authority when you have the ability to strand someone in the middle of a zombie-infested forest without backup or weaponry? Everything is relative. And relatively speaking, I was the most powerful person for miles—at least until Clive made his appearance.

“You can stop typing now,” I said calmly, still standing in the doorway of the lab. “Jill has already shut down all outgoing transmissions, so you’re not going to get your data to whomever it is that you actually work for. Who do you work for? I know you’re with the CDC, but I’m really curious to know who arranged to have you assigned here. Did you piss somebody off? Refuse some inappropriate sexual advances? Oh, they say that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, but we’re both women, we’ve both worked for those assholes. The truth is somewhere between the party line and the bottom line, and it’s moving all the goddamn time.”

“Dr. Abbey?” Not-Daisy’s voice was timid, filled with a fear that was too believable to be anything but genuine. She stood up, her face a dim mask lit by the glow from her computer screen. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be in here. I just thought this was a good place to…to sit and review my notes. I mean, there’s so much to learn here…”

“It’s okay, Zelda. I know.” I sounded exhausted. That was almost a surprise to me. I usually relished these confrontations, which either ended with an expulsion or a change of sides. Under the circumstances, however, all I could really feel was tired. “Zelda Roland. Top of your class at Stanford, recruited by the CDC before you even picked up your diploma. You were supposed to be fighting the good fight, and yet somehow you ended up here instead. So who did you cross? Who did you offend? Or are you one of the idealists—do you really think that all research should belong to the CDC, even if that means you have to sneak into an independent lab and steal it? Time’s short, Zelda, and your answer will determine what happens next. So talk.”

She took a breath, clearly preparing another protest…and then she stopped, and straightened, the mask of the frightened intern dropping away like a coat she didn’t need to wear any longer. She was still scared; she would have been a fool not to be. Whether she trusted the people who had sent her to me or not, she was embedded in what part of her must have viewed as enemy territory, and I was between her and all the exits. Even if she’d been able to make it to the exit, she would have been stranded in the forest. We patrolled regularly. Shady Cove was safer than, say, Santa Cruz. It was still abandoned territory, and it belonged to the infected.

“In the event that my cover is breached, I have been instructed to remind you that I am an employee of the United States government. As such, any retaliation against my person will be considered a federal crime, and will be prosecuted accordingly.”

“Nice,” I said agreeably. “Succinct, yet threatening. This is where I remind you that I’m a Canadian citizen, and that if I were arrested, the Canadian government would demand that I be returned to them to stand trial.” My own government would be harsher on me than the feds could ever be. To the feds, I was a mad scientist and a valuable nuisance, tolerated because of the things I might yet discover. My friends in the CDC and medical-research community even considered me an asset. After all, I vaccinated the underground population, preventing an outbreak of whooping cough or measles from adding a whole new frisson of despair to life after the zombie apocalypse. But to the Canadian government…

To them, I was a traitor and a disappointment and a stain upon an otherwise pristine record of loyal patriots slaving away for the greater good. People who say Canadians are the politest people on the planet have never been on the receiving end of a disappointed military official’s anger. I’d die before I let them ship me back to my home country.

Sadly, sometimes that meant other people had to die in my stead. “Well?” I prompted. “Are you going to tell me what you did to get yourself sent here? Or did you volunteer?”

“I refused to run some human-serotype trials,” she said. Her tone was flat. The fear was still there, but it was buried under old shame and older disillusionment. “I said that it was against my moral and religious beliefs. It was…it was shameful, what they wanted done. My supervisor said that I was violating my contract, that I had agreed to do whatever the CDC required. Then he said that if I wanted to redeem myself, I could take a field assignment. And then he sent me here.”

Serotyping is most commonly used to distinguish types of bacteria. The only way it could have been part of a test that Zelda would refer to as “shameful” was if it had been being used for organ transplant typing. Organ transplants weren’t easy before the Rising, and they’ve only gotten more complicated, and more expensive, since then. You can’t carve bits out of dead people and drop them into live ones anymore, not unless you want your live people to undergo explosive amplification and start trying to eat your surgeons. I briefly considered the implications, and then dismissed them as irrelevant to the issues at hand: staying alive, and neutralizing the threat of the CDC stepping in. “I’m going to want the names of the people you were working for. Dr. Kimberley is going to be very interested in knowing who’s doing that sort of study.” Zelda’s eyes widened. I sighed. “They really didn’t brief you, did they? I tolerate spies for a reason. Part of that reason is that I know the CDC isn’t really out to get me, since your new director is one of my old lab mates. She’s also fucking weird, but we try not to hold that against her. She’s cleaning house right now, and people like you give me the information she needs to know about whose research she should be reviewing more closely.”

“But that’s…that’s…that’s treason!” Zelda stared at me like I had just told her Santa Claus was a myth and the Easter Bunny had undergone amplification.

“Everyone has their own definitions,” I said. “Zelda Roland, do you admit that you are in the employ of the Centers for Disease Control, and that you have entered my lab under false pretenses, to collect information on my staff and our research for your actual employers?”

Her eyes darted from side to side, making one last pointless bid for freedom. She didn’t find it. There were no exits aside from the one where I was standing, and she wasn’t quite desperate enough to charge straight at me. Finally, her shoulders sagged. “Yes,” she admitted.

“Great. Please return to your quarters. We’re going to give you a gun and lock you in.” Her eyes widened, and I sighed. “No, we don’t expect you to kill yourself. What kind of monsters do you take us for? Signs point to an attack on this facility sometime in the very near future, and since I can’t trust you, I can’t have you on the front line, but I won’t leave you defenseless either. After all this is over, we can discuss your future employment prospects, and who you’re going to be working for. Oh, don’t look so confused. You have to know that I’ve welcomed a few defectors from the CDC. We’d be happy to make you one of them. You’re good. Cocky and green and way too easily manipulated, but good. You can talk to Tom about what we require if you want to change employers.”

“You…you’d let me stay here?” She paused. “You knew? You didn’t just find out?”

“Mad science is not forgiving of stupidity or willful blindness, Miss Roland,” I said. “You were too good and too easy to recruit. There’s no way you hadn’t already been picked up by an acronym agency. If it had been WHO or USAMRIID, we would have told you thanks but no thanks. They play too roughly with their toys. The CDC we can usually get along with. Now, will you please remove yourself quietly to your quarters, before I have to make you go?”

“Yes, Dr. Abbey,” she said. “Thank you, Dr. Abbey.” She picked up a notepad from next to the workstation she’d been using and half ran toward me, only stopping at the last moment, when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get out of her way.

I smiled sweetly. “Just to be clear: if I find out that you went anywhere but back to your quarters, I will add you to my list of enemies. You won’t enjoy that list. You won’t be on it for very long, either. No one ever is. Clear?”

“Clear,” she said. “I’m going to my quarters now.”

“Excellent,” I said, and stepped aside. She rushed past me, careful to avoid actual physical contact, and broke into a run as soon as she hit the hall. I stayed where I was for a silent count of twenty, letting her get away. She needed time to think, and I? I needed time to find a way to keep my people—including Zelda and Elaine—alive.

It was time to call Tessa.

2.

Joe pushed his head into my lap as I sat down at my computer, his finely honed canine instincts picking up on my distress. He was big enough that he made typing difficult. He also made me feel safe, and so I let him stay as I sent Tessa a chat request. Just to make sure she understood the urgency of my situation, I sent her three more in rapid succession. Childish and annoying? Maybe. But it was oh, so soothing, and I needed a little soothing just then.

People rushed by in the hall outside my open office door. None of them stopped to ask me for instructions or tell me what was going on. I had trained them well, and they all knew that a mad scientist who was working peacefully at her desk was a mad scientist who wasn’t going to react well to being interrupted. They’d call if they actually needed me for something. If everything went well, they wouldn’t need me for anything at all.

I was preparing to send another chat request when a window popped up on my screen, framing Tessa’s harried, exhausted face. “What is it?” she demanded. “We didn’t have an update scheduled until tomorrow, and I have found nothing new.”

“Clive dumped her on my doorstep,” I said, skipping the introductory material and going straight for the advanced course. “I need to know how many people he’s rolling toward me, when they got moving, and whether they have any heavy artillery. I’m assuming he wants to take the building in one piece, so if he’s smart, he won’t have brought a tank, but when’s the last time Clive went for ‘smart’ over ‘showy’?”

“This wasn’t part of our original deal,” said Tessa—but it was just for show. Her hands were already starting to dance across the keyboard, performing a hacker’s ballet for one soloist and an audience of me. “I could hang up on you right now and it wouldn’t damage my reputation one little bit.”

“Except for the part where Elaine Oldenburg is in my observation room, and before she came to me, she was with Clive. He used her the way hunters used to use real foxes: He set her loose to see which way she’d run, and now he’s chasing her.” I shook my head. “I hired you to find everything you could on her, and you never found out that Clive had sent her. If I told people, it would ruin you. That makes this a part of the original deal. He’s coming after her. He’s coming for me.”

“And if anyone asks why he went up against a neutral party, he can say you kidnapped one of his people to experiment on,” said Tessa. “I’d be impressed if you weren’t so screwed. As it is, I’m just glad I’m a couple of thousand miles away. Can you courier my Lego before he shoots you in the head? I’m asking for my boy, you understand, not for myself.”

“I sent them off two days ago.”

Tessa smiled briefly as she continued typing. She wasn’t looking at her webcam anymore. She probably didn’t even realize that it was still on. Then her fingers stilled and her eyes grew wide. “Okay. I’ve got chatter about Clive putting together a big party, lots of calls for caterers and cooks—looks like he has a force of about sixty men, three explosive experts, and six virologists with him. Why would he need to bring his own virologists?”

“Because he’s planning to kill me, scare my staff into agreeing to work for him, and put his own people in charge,” I said blithely. “It’s what I’d do in his place. No tanks or air support, huh? Just bodies on the ground, and his firm belief that the sheer size of his balls will be enough to make us lay down our arms and surrender. Asshole.”

“What does he want with your lab?”

“We have vaccines, medicines, all the equipment and supplies he’d need to cook biofuel and meth—hell, what doesn’t he want with my lab? If it weren’t already mine, I’d want to come and take it away from me. Can you get a read on his location? Is he on the move, or did we catch this early enough to cut it off at the pass?” Please, he’s still in his man cave, fantasizing about how fun it’s going to be to put a bullet through my skull, I thought. Please, we caught this while it was latent, and not once the infection had become systemic.

It was almost funny how quickly I defaulted to putting things in medical terms, and it wasn’t funny at all, because that was how I coped with situations I didn’t have a better way to handle: I turned them into cases, things to be studied and taken carefully apart, one quivering chunk at a time, until they were quiescent and couldn’t hurt me anymore. Looked at in that way, my reaction wasn’t funny at all.

“Give me a second.” Tessa’s fingers resumed their ballet, performing arabesques and leaps at a speed that my own more mundane typing never even approached. She frowned, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. Then her face fell. I didn’t really need to hear her answer: not once I’d seen her expression. But she looked up all the same, and said quietly, “He’s been on the move since yesterday morning. His people will be tripping your perimeter sensors within the hour.”

“Got it.” I sighed. “Well, this isn’t how I was planning to spend my afternoon. I’ll pay you before I go to get myself slaughtered by a megalomaniac. Your Legos should be there in a few weeks. I hope you enjoy the shit out of them.”

“I’m sure I will,” said Tessa gravely. “It’s been a pleasure working with you, Dr. Abbey. I hope you’ll be able to kick his hiney all the way back to the hole that he crawled out of. E-mail me if you do. I will watch the news until I hear from you.” And then her picture was gone, replaced by the blank face of my monitor.

I looked at my reflection in the glass and sighed. I looked sad, and why shouldn’t I? My facility was about to be under attack, Jill was still looking for infiltrators who weren’t as civic-minded as Zelda from the CDC, and maybe worst of all, Tessa had just confirmed—with a single, casual comment—that her son was no longer among the living. She would enjoy the Legos for him. He was beyond enjoying anything at all.

Some days I think the world as it is was invented just to fuck with us. And then I realize that doesn’t make any sense at all, because it assumes a childish, vengeful God. If there is a God, He or She isn’t a child. God is a scientist, and all this shit we’re wading in is our agar. It’s the only growth medium we’re ever going to get.

“Fuck my life,” I muttered. “Come on, Joe. Let’s go get ourselves killed.” I rose, pushing Joe’s head off of my lap in the process. He followed me out of the room.

3.

Tom was in his lab when I arrived. His own little swarm of interns and technicians was gone, all of them probably helping lock down the facility, but he was still bent over his compounding station, adding a pinch of this and a drop of that to a vial, like he was making the world’s most complicated brownie recipe. I stopped in the doorway and cleared my throat, not wanting to startle him. Tom rarely worked in things that could actually explode, but I didn’t need to take any chances today.

“Hi, Dr. Abbey,” he said, without looking away from his station. “Give me just a second, I’m almost ready for you.”

“Should I ask what you’re doing, or is this one of those things that’s better for me not to know?” I asked. “In case you missed the announcement, Clive is on his way, and he’s bringing an army. All hands are supposed to be getting ready for war, not making whatever that is.”

“It’s a blend of synthetic cannabinoids,” said Tom. He added another drop to his vial. “It’s not precisely a match to the cocktail Jill extracted from our guest, but it’s close enough that the effects should be extremely similar—maybe even better. I went for long-term impact instead of short-term potency. She drinks this, she’ll be talking to space lobsters for days.”

“…and since she’s been hanging with the space lobsters for years, she’ll be fully functional while she’s doing it,” I said slowly. “Tom, you’re a genius. How much of this stuff do you have?”

“Just the vial,” he said. “I can make as much as we need, but there could be some nasty side effects if she takes this for much longer. I’m surprised she isn’t already experiencing permanent psychological damage.”

I thought of Elaine, so confused and erratic as she lay there in her bed. “Maybe she is,” I said. “I just don’t think she cares at this point. The space lobsters matter more to her than a few brain cells. Call it the opposite of antipsychotics and move on.”

“Right.” Tom added one more drop, swirled the clear contents of the vial gently, and put in the stopper before he turned to hold it out toward me. “I present you a single dose of space lobster bait. To be taken orally, and only if you’re really, really sure you don’t like the reality the rest of us are living in.”

“You’re a miracle worker.” I took the vial gingerly. “Now, get your guns and get to the wall. Your people are going to need you there to back them up, and I don’t feel like explaining why my leads were all hiding in their labs while Clive shot all the interns.”

“Because we’re smart enough not to go where the people who are shooting at us are. This obvious genius is why you made us leads in the first place.” Tom turned back to his work desk as he spoke to me, his hands beginning to move in quick, confident arcs as he put all his perishable and dangerous supplies away. It was probably best not to leave a bunch of synthetic cannabinoids sitting around without supervision, although the idea of hitting Clive’s men with water balloons full of space-lobster juice was oddly tempting. See how he liked dealing with a bunch of stoners where he was expecting an army.

“Genius or not, find your spot and hold it,” I said. “Trouble is en route, and if we want to be able to continue saying that we work here, we need to cut it off at the pass.” I started to turn away.

“Dr. Abbey?”

Tom wasn’t a man who was given to uncertainty; even when he was higher than a kite, he tended to speak in calm, assured sentences, sounding like he was holding forth all the wisdom of the universe. Hearing his voice quaver, even a little bit, was enough to make me stop and turn back toward him, a frown upon my face. Joe paced me, willing, in his implacable canine way, to follow me forever, no matter how many times I changed my mind about where I was going.

“What is it, Tom?”

He looked at me earnestly, and asked, “Do you have a plan? Is it a good plan? Or should we be running for the hills right now? We’d have to leave a lot of our equipment behind, but I think we could make it. Give him the facility. We’ve rebuilt before. We can rebuild again.”

“Ah.” I bought myself a few seconds by looking around the lab. Tom had been in this room since we arrived in Shady Cove: had holed up here with his staff when one of our periodic CDC infiltrators had tried to kill Shaun Mason and his crew by letting our experimental subjects out of their cages. A lot of good people had died that day. Maybe it should have made this space feel haunted, but somehow, it had done the opposite: their blood on the walls had felt like a cleansing, like it was giving us permission to finally lay down roots. Tom was right that we had rebuilt before. We had moved so many times that I had sometimes joked that our permanent address was “return to sender.” But this space, this place, this had become our home. It wasn’t perfect. Maybe it wasn’t even good. But it was ours, and I’d be damned before I’d let Clive chase us away from what we had worked so hard to make.

“We have too many experiments in progress, and too many people who’ve never dealt with a teardown, much less an actual relocation,” I said. “We stand our ground. If it looks like we’re losing, we reassess. But we both know that if we run, we’ll suffer just as many casualties as if we stand, and I don’t want to be the reason for that many graves. Understood?”

“Understood,” said Tom. “I’ll see you on the Wall, if I don’t see you before.”

“Honey, one day we’re all going to see each other on the Wall,” I said. “Get to your post.” And then I turned and walked away, a vial of volatile chemicals in my hand and a big black dog pacing at my side. What I was going to do next might be unforgivable in the annals of the world…but Clive had forced my hand, and I wasn’t sorry. Maybe that’s really what makes me a mad scientist; maybe it’s what has always put me on the path to becoming a monster.

I’m never sorry.

4.

Elaine was awake when I returned to the observation room. She was lying perfectly still on the bed, but her eyes were fixed on the ceiling, and they darted toward me when the door opened. She stiffened a little as she caught sight of Joe. Joe, who clearly remembered her, tensed and slicked back his ears, jowls lifting just enough to serve as a reminder that he had a great many fine, sharp teeth just longing for a leg to be buried in.

“Down, boy,” I said, tapping the top of his head. “We’re not eating our guest today. We’re here to offer her a trade.” I turned my attention to Elaine. “How are you feeling, Miss Oldenburg? Awake and peppy? Ready for your new master to sweep in and carry you away?”

“Please don’t call me that,” she said quietly. She sounded more resigned than anything else. The minute traces of drugs remaining in her system were starting to clear out; soon, she’d be fully sober, maybe for the first time in years. “That hasn’t been my name since Evergreen.”

“I know. It was a neat trick, disappearing from your life and then disappearing from your own mind. The Monkey helped a lot with that, didn’t he? All those chemicals he mixed for you, to help you hide yourself. I’m sorry you felt the need to do that. We’ve all had to do things that weren’t necessarily good for us, just so we could stay alive.”

Elaine chuckled. It was a brittle, brutal sound, filled with ghosts I’d never seen but whose names she clearly knew. She probably called roll for them every morning before she opened her eyes, counting off the children who didn’t make it out of the school. “You have no idea. Whatever it is you think you’ve done, whatever crimes you think you’ve committed…you have no idea.”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but either way, I’m here to offer you a deal.” I looked at her flatly. “You don’t work for Clive. You were doing what he told you to do because you thought it would get you what you needed, but you’ve been a free agent since you left the Monkey, haven’t you? No one’s been able to keep you in the pharmaceutical style to which you had become accustomed.”

Elaine’s brow wrinkled as she looked at me. “You’re getting at something. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take such a long way around.”

“Time is short, but that’s no excuse to be shoddy. Are you a free agent? Yes or no. I need to know if you’re loyal to Clive and staying strapped to this bed, or whether I can make a deal with you.”

“I wouldn’t trust me,” said Elaine. She smiled slightly, although the tension didn’t leave her eyes. “Everyone knows I’m crazy.”

“And everyone knows I’m a mad scientist. It’s amazing what everyone knows, isn’t it? Usually what everyone knows is insulting and sort of ableist, because the people who know everything always seem to think of themselves as being perfectly normal. But that’s neither here nor there. Are you a free agent? Yes or no. I’d say I could keep asking all day. I won’t insult your intelligence like that. As soon as the shooting starts, I’m gone.”

Elaine sighed deeply, sinking back into the bed. “Yes. Yes, I’m a free agent, yes, I came here because Clive said that this was where the drugs were, yes, I knew he would probably follow me and use me as a distraction, yes, I was all right with that, because he has people who would know how to synthesize more drugs if they could get their hands on samples from here. As long as I was willing to become his attack dog, he’d take care of me. That’s how it is for me. I go with the ones who’ll give me what I need.”

“How loyal are you?”

She shrugged. “How far under can you put me? Because that’s all I want. I just don’t want to be Elaine Oldenburg ever, ever again. The Monkey understood that. He made sure I didn’t have to know the woman in the mirror. He made sure I forgot their names.”

I didn’t have to ask her which names she meant. No matter how many people she might have killed since she’d become the Fox, none of them were ever going to matter as much as the students in her first grade class back at Evergreen Elementary. There are some losses that don’t get easier with time, and some costs that you never stop paying. She and I had that much in common. Maybe that was why I was willing to take a chance on her capacity for loyalty.

Or maybe I was a mad scientist after all. I withdrew the vial Tom had given me from my pocket, holding it up so that she could see. “One of my people was able to extract and analyze some really interesting chemical compounds from your blood. And then, because he’s an overachiever, he synthesized them for me. This is one dose of pure bye-bye logic, and it should be enough to keep you flying for a few days. Long enough for us to toss Clive out on his ear, and for my people to break down the structure a little further, give you something that burns cleaner for longer and without as many negative side effects.” Given that kind of time, and knowing where she came from, I might be able to find the Monkey’s original supplier. None of the information on him said that he was a drug dealer. Whatever he’d been feeding Elaine, he’d been getting it from outside his little compound, and that meant that I might be able to get my hands on her original brand.

We’d still make our improvements, of course. If she wanted to chemically divorce reality, I wasn’t going to judge, but that didn’t mean I had to help her melt her own liver.

“Give it to me.” She tried to lunge forward. The wrist straps holding her to the bed stopped her. She was scrappy, though: she kept trying, straining against her restraints like she thought she could dissolve them with the sheer force of her need.

“Not quite yet. See, you may be a drug-addicted killer, but there’s nothing on you, in either of your identities, that implies you don’t keep your word. So here’s the deal. I want you to work for me. I want you to kill for me. I want the gun in your hand to be pointed where I aim it, and I want your word that you don’t hurt anyone who’s on our side. I’ll give you what I have if you agree to my terms. If you don’t want to stay after Clive’s people have been driven back, we can talk about it. I’m not keeping you against your will. But first, I want your word that you’ll help us.”

She frowned. “Why do you want me?”

“Because we’re scientists. We know our way around a gun, and we can hold our own, but we’re not killers. We’re not you. And because I don’t really care yet whether you live or die, and I have the feeling you don’t either, as long as you die flying.” I gave the vial a little shake. “I can get you off the ground. All you have to do is work for me.”

“I didn’t used to be a killer, you know,” she said. “I was a schoolteacher. I wore dresses with little flowers on them, and I hated that they made me carry a gun. But they taught me how to use it. I was top of my class in all the marksmanship rankings. I passed self-defense with flying colors. It was like the universe was getting me ready to turn into someone else.”

“Is that a yes or a no?” I asked.

“Give me the vial, give me a pair of good, stompy boots, give me a gun, and you’ve got yourself a killer,” she said.

I smiled.

Chapter 5

Can’t Stop the Slaughter

Weapons of mass destruction are not, in and of themselves, evil. The evil comes from what you use them to accomplish—and how much collateral damage they do.

—Dr. Shannon Abbey

I don’t gotta do anything you tell me, mister guy. All I gotta do is sing a little song, dance a little dance, and make a little murder.

—Foxy

1.

The Shady Cove Forestry Center was designed with the tourist experience in mind, intended to be open and airy and welcoming to the classes of schoolchildren and buses of retirees that were destined to come pouring through its doors. I’m sure all those people had a grand old time before the Rising came along and shut down casual woodland excursions forever. Since the Rising also shut down Shady Cove forever, the locals probably had better things to worry about than what was going to happen to their forestry center. They had left it open and abandoned, with all those lovely windows glittering in the sun, and all those big, echoing rooms just waiting for something to come along and fill them up. That had been the condition of the place when we first rolled in, following an old map and a bunch of rumors. Indiana Jones and the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, coming never to a theater near you.

So far as I was aware, while Clive might have spoken to people who had been inside my lab, he had never been inside himself. That meant that he was probably still picturing that old center, on some level: the big, empty spaces, the even bigger, even more vulnerable windows. And to be fair, if we’d still been trying to stay off the CDC’s radar like we used to before the change in administrations, he would have been at least superficially correct. We used to make our modifications with an eye toward the satellites passing overhead, trying to minimize the visible changes to the landscape. Once Danika and Joey took over my former place of employment, all of that went out the window. Secrecy was replaced by security.

It had taken us a little while to adjust. It’s hard to throw out the lessons of years, and we were never going to flaunt our presence. But if Clive had been looking for an easy kill, he should’ve shown up years ago.

The big picture windows were gone, not boarded over, but entirely replaced by metal plates and armored hatches that were too high for any normal infected to reach. The roof was a sea of solar panels, sucking in sunlight and producing electricity—the only way to cut us off was to block out the sun, and that was beyond the military capabilities of any small-time black-market king. And while we might have cleared the grounds to such an extent that it was now possible to move both vehicles and troops in closer than I liked, those same grounds concealed a wide assortment of defenses. No land mines, sadly. Land mines don’t really differentiate friend from foe, and we had animals. We also had damn near everything else that could safely be planted in a garden, from radio-triggered barbed-wire caches to retractable spikes.

Give me a group of easily bored scientists and engineers, and give me a couple of undisturbed years, and I can build a stronghold that will never be breached. At least that was the hope. We were about to see just how secure my little modifications had really made us.

Scientists, engineers, and interns lined the interior of the metal “windows,” their guns pointed out the hatchways and their faces as protected as possible. More of my people were in the trees and hides outside, although they wouldn’t be shooting. They’d be operating the remote defenses and trying to stay out of sight for as long as possible. Jill was on one of the catwalks, shouting instructions and making violent hand gestures whenever people didn’t move quickly enough. For the most part, they moved quickly enough. Jill worked for me, and I wouldn’t have wanted to cross her when she was in this mode.

Joe paced by my side, a deep, sonorous growl resonating up from his chest and shaking his entire body. He knew something was wrong, and while he may not have fully understood what it was, he was prepared to protect me until his last breath. Loyalty like that is rare and precious, and I hated that I was having to abuse it by taking him toward a confrontation that could require him to make good on his promises. Good dogs should never be asked to prove that they’re good dogs. If there’s anything in this world that we should take on faith, it’s good dogs.

“Dr. Abbey, they’re coming.” The call came from one of the engineers, a balding redhead I couldn’t name on sight. That wasn’t important. What mattered was the situation.

“How close?”

“Quarter mile out. They just passed Liza’s hide. She managed to trigger two of the camera drones, and then she dropped off the radio.” The redhead’s voice was grim. He knew as well as I did what Liza’s sudden silence was likely to mean. We’d go out later, after the shooting stopped, to check on her. If she was alive—unlikely but still possible—we’d offer whatever medical care she needed. If she wasn’t alive, we’d make an effort to recover her body, if she hadn’t already risen. It wasn’t much of a retirement plan, I’ll admit, but it was the best that we could offer.

“Got it. Keep your positions. Where’s Tom?”

“He’s at the lookout.”

“Got it,” I said again, and kept on walking.

The designated lookout point was halfway around the forestry center lobby, situated above what had once been the front doors, before we boarded them over and plastered the seams with fast-drying concrete. They were still one of our weakest points if someone came along with, say, a tank, but they were no longer a day-to-day risk. A metal ladder leaned against the sealed doors. Tom was standing at the top, a pair of binoculars held up to his eyes, staring out at our euphemistically named “lawn.”

“Situation?” I asked.

“Bad,” he replied. He looked over his shoulder and down, shaking his head. “Clive’s actually marching on us. He’s actually marching on us, with actual men carrying actual guns. What is this, the Rising?”

“It’s that or it’s the wild, wild West,” I said. “Hold the wall as long as you can, Tom. That’s all I can really ask you to do.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to negotiate,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder toward the PA system. It would broadcast from the speakers outside the building, drawing the attention of every living creature—infected or not—within half a mile. If Clive and his people didn’t take us out, the zombies I was about to attract just might. “Well, that, and I’m going to pray that we’re getting a miracle today.”

“Do people like us get miracles?” asked Tom dubiously.

I thought of a gaunt, dead-eyed woman with oddly dyed hair, lying in my observation room and holding a vial of clear liquid like it was the most precious thing in the universe. “We might,” I said, and moved toward my station. It was time to talk to the bogeyman, for all the good that it was going to do.

2.

Clive’s people marched right out into the open, as cocky as you please. They stopped at the edge of the trees, too far out for us to shoot and too close for us to ignore. They weren’t that cocky, then: not cocky enough to believe that we would have left ourselves undefended. As I watched on the monitor next to the PA, three of Clive’s men began setting up portable workstations that would no doubt allow them to perform full magnetic resonance scans on the ground. Soon they’d know about every trap, underground cable, and earthworm within a hundred yards. Once that happened…

“Screwed” was a word. So was “totally and completely thunder-fucked,” although that may have been more of a phrase. It was time to stop sitting around waiting for a miracle, and start doing something.

I flicked the PA on.

“Hello, Robin Hood and your Merry Men, this is the lab of Dr. Shannon Abbey regretfully informing you that the free vaccination clinic is closed this week. Please take your guns and your grim-looking mercenaries and head on home. We’d be happy to treat whatever STIs you’ve picked up during your adventures next month, when we open our doors to the public at half-past never o’clock in the afternoon.”

There was a brief scramble at the front of the mob, and then Clive himself stepped into view.

He was good-looking, in a tough, “tattooed to the point of losing all individual images” sort of a way: like a children’s coloring book that walked, talked, shaved its head, and scowled at anyone who happened to cross its path. He was wearing tactical gear that he somehow managed to keep from looking silly through the sheer dint of being six and a half feet tall. It’s amazing how much you can forgive with height.

He was carrying a whiteboard. He scrawled something on it, and held it out for me to see: the number of a common radio frequency. So that was how he wanted to play it, huh? Well, I could play along.

“I’ve got a radio right here, Clive, and I’m tuning it to your station. Now, how about you call in and tell me what’s on that portable black hole you call a mind?” I fiddled with the radio next to my transmitter as I spoke, flipping through half a dozen channels of static and the local number station before settling on his chosen frequency. Then I took my finger off the SEND button, and I waited.

It wasn’t a long wait. One of Clive’s men brought him what looked like a tricked-out walkie-talkie. He brought it to his mouth, and a moment later his deep, surprisingly smooth voice boomed out of the radio: “We demand your immediate surrender, Dr. Abbey. If you open the doors and let us in, we won’t even feel the need to shoot you. Make us wait, and…” He clicked his tongue, saying wordlessly what would happen to anyone who resisted.

I depressed the SEND button. “That’s a very kind offer, Clive, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to refuse. You see, I have some very delicate experiments going on here, and while it would be super fun to find myself kneeling in front of you with a pistol in my mouth, it would make it hard to chart the data. Go home. We’re not letting you in.”

“I have more guns, better men, and more ammo,” said the radio. “What can you possibly have that could stand against me?”

“Well gosh, I dunno, but there’s a lot of walls, and a big black dog, and did you know there was an octopus? Because there’s an octopus. I haven’t seen one of those in years.” The voice was female, and absolutely giddy with delight. It was also a little higher pitched than I expected, like its owner had somehow slid backward through time, to a simpler age—fourteen or fifteen, young enough not to really care about consequences or costs. I turned.

Elaine Oldenburg wasn’t standing behind me: Elaine Oldenburg had left the building, possibly forever, courtesy of Tom’s space lobster juice. Instead, I was looking at the Fox, last of the Monkey’s girls and pure killing machine in hospital scrubs and pigtails. She was grinning from ear to ear, the face of a woman whose connection to reality was no longer quite strong enough to serve as any kind of tether. She had managed to find half a dozen guns somewhere and had them tucked into the elastic waistband of her pants like this wasn’t an incredibly dangerous thing to do. She was holding a scalpel in each hand.

I wasn’t sure which to be more impressed by: her transformation into a character out of a pre-Rising comic book, or the fact that she’d managed to do it without setting off any alarms or triggering a panic among my staff. “The octopus is named Barney; I’ll introduce you to him later,” I said. “Did you kill anyone?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But the day is young, and there’s always time for a party.”

“Right,” I said. People around the room were turning to stare at us—more at her than at me, admittedly, since I was nowhere near as exciting, visually speaking, as a relative stranger with a whole lot of guns. “So you know, killing anyone who works for me will not constitute a party. It may, however, get you thrown out. Do we have an understanding?”

“I’m not stupid, Dr. Abbey. Don’t ever, ever make the mistake of thinking that I am. Kitty made that mistake. She didn’t make too many after.” The Fox beamed first at me, and then at Joe. “Hello, doggy! I’m sorry I tried to shoot you before. You were scary, and I was confused. I won’t try to shoot you anymore.”

Joe looked at her, ears cocked, and made the small boof sound that meant he was confused but curious, and willing to explore the situation further. The Fox beamed.

“This is adorable and all, but Clive is at our gates, so I need to get back to negotiating with the megalomaniac now,” I said. “The man on top of the ladder is Tom. He’s in charge of making sure we all come through this alive. Check in with him, and then do whatever you can to bring us through this alive.”

Something hardened in the back of her eyes, turning reptilian and cold. “Are those your orders?” she asked. “Do whatever I can to bring us through this alive, and try not to kill anyone who’s currently inside?”

I nodded. “Those are my orders. Do you understand them?”

“That’s the second time you’ve asked me that. Slow pupils don’t make it to the head of the class, but they do get gold stars for participation.” She was still too thin, this wild-eyed woman with the guns shoved into her pants and a raging case of bedhead. She looked like she could be broken over a larger person’s knee with a minimum of effort. And she was somehow, despite all that, still scary as hell. “I understand your orders. Better make sure everyone else understands them too. Where’s the back door?”

The question was enough of a left turn that I paused for a moment before turning to the nearest group of armed interns and snapping, “Carlton! Take our guest to the back door, unlock it, and let her out.”

The Fox smiled. “Better. See you soon, Dr. Abbey. Remember, I’m your dog now. Woof.” Then she was gone, running fleetly over to Carlton, who looked like he couldn’t decide whether he was being rescued from the shootout to come or sentenced to something even worse. She grabbed his arm, pulling him away from the others, and together they ran to the back of the room and disappeared.

The radio squawked as Clive began transmitting again. “Abbey? I hope you don’t think that you can improve my temper by ignoring me. You’re actually accomplishing just the opposite. I don’t take kindly to being left hanging in front of my men.”

“Sorry, Clive, just dealing with some personnel issues here inside my lab. Note the possessive. This is my lab, and these are my people, and while I appreciate your interest, I really am going to have to decline.”

“Your call, Abbey. A pity. I really thought you cared about their lives.”

The transmission ended. The gunfire began.

3.

Firefights are never as clean as they appear in the movies, where even a shot to the throat never seems to coat the surrounding areas with blood the way that they really ought to. Before the Rising, it was because no one wanted to offend the delicate sensibilities of the women and children that people assumed were flocking to Buckets of Blood III: The Bucketing because of its complex themes of abandonment and human nature. After the Rising, it became a matter of public safety. People who saw that much blood were likely to lose their tempers, their lunches, and their sense of proportion, in that order.

Clive was not playing by MPAA rules. His men unleashed a barrage of gunfire on the front of the forestry center, shooting through the weak points in the wood and sending bullets lancing through the room. Someone cried out. Someone hit the floor. I heard Tom shout, “Return fire!” and then there were guns going off in the enclosed lobby, their reports sounding out loud and angry over the cries and screams of my people.

Joe barked, adding even more chaos to the scene. I grabbed his collar before he could start trying to bite bullets out of the air. He wasn’t fast enough—he was an experimental subject, not a miracle—but that wouldn’t stop him from trying, if he got offended enough by what was going on.

“Stay,” I hissed, hunching down. Clive and his men were still visible on the monitor. I wasn’t the only one with a view on the outside: As I watched, three of his people went down, targeted by my security. One of the shooters fell off her platform immediately afterward, targeted by someone who had been able to analyze her position based on the trajectory of her shot. Her head split when she struck the floor. Three more of my people were immediately there, one of them putting a bullet in her forehead while the other two were pouring bleach on the resulting hot zone.

Gunfights before the Rising only killed you one way. Now they get you coming and going, as the dead rise up and make the situation even worse. That might explain Clive’s bullet-spraying tactics. If he shot enough of us, we’d have an outbreak on our hands. Then he could just walk away and come back later to clean up whatever was left.

We’d weathered outbreaks before. Whatever Clive thought of us, we were tougher than he knew. But it was sort of hard to focus on that with bullets passing overhead and people screaming all around me.

There was a flash of motion on the monitor. I tracked it with my eyes, and clapped a hand over my mouth to cover my gasp as it resolved into the Fox, still barefoot and dressed in borrowed surgical scrubs, with a scalpel clutched firmly in each hand. She was approaching from the side, in Clive’s blind spot—even if he’d had people watching that zone before the shooting started, they were all preoccupied now, trying to take us out before we could do the same to them. That explained why she wasn’t shooting. Gunshots would have attracted attention.

She caught the first of Clive’s hired guns before he had a chance to realize that he was in danger. The scalpel sliced across his throat with almost surgical precision, and then she was gone again, vanishing into the underbrush, leaving him to drop his gun and clutch helplessly at his throat. It wasn’t going to do him any good. He was a dead man walking now, a dead man stumbling back toward his own people and grasping for them, grasping for anything that would let him hold on to life for just a little bit longer. Human beings don’t die easy. If we did, the Rising would have been a lot shorter, and would have had a very different ending.

One of the other mercenaries shouted something as her wounded comrade stumbled into her, coating her in a layer of blood that was surely hot with live Kellis-Amberlee. She fired twice, and the man the Fox had wounded collapsed. The woman had barely a second to breathe before one of the other mercenaries turned and shot at her, sending her toppling after him. She’d been exposed. They couldn’t risk it.

“Goddammit, Abbey, what sort of bullshit do you think you’re pulling?” demanded the radio. Clive sounded angrier than I’d ever heard him. It was almost comic, in a way. He was the one attacking us, yet we were the ones refusing to play along with whatever narrative he had crafted in his power-addled little mind. How dare we not just roll over and die? It was so unreasonable of us.

I’ve always been unreasonable like that. I pressed the button on the PA, and said, “Well, I don’t know. I tend to file this sort of bullshit under ‘defending my home.’ Take your people and leave, Clive. You don’t have enough men to storm this castle.”

“I’ll be back, Abbey,” said Clive. “I’ll be—”

“No, you won’t,” said the Fox, her voice coming through the radio so clearly that for a moment, I thought she had somehow gotten back inside. A thick gurgling noise followed her announcement. I turned to the monitor to see her standing behind Clive, the tip of her scalpel protruding through the front of his throat.

He gurgled again before he fell, collapsing like a sack of wet laundry. The Fox beamed, waving enthusiastically toward the forestry center.

That’s when one of his remaining men shot her.

Chapter 6

Sterilizing the Lab

We can raise the dead. We can cure cancer. We can make the world better in every possible way, save one: No matter how hard we try, we just can’t cure stupid.

—Dr. Shannon Abbey

Everyone’s living in a fantasy world these days. The only thing that matters is whether your fantasy is hurting anybody else. If it’s not, then who am I to judge?

—Tatiana Markowski

1.

“Dr. Abbey?”

I was sitting on the edge of the wading pool with Barney’s tentacles wrapped around my forearms, sharing a content moment with my resident troublemaker. Joe was on the floor nearby, head on his paws, silently judging me for loving a boneless squishy thing more than I loved him. Judge on, big guy, judge on. I turned at the sound of my name. Jill was standing in the doorway, a cast on her left arm and a line of stitches on her forehead. It was going to heal without a scar. Most of the wounds we’d suffered were.

Most, not all. Three of my staff were dead; the main lobby was still closed off for decontamination and repair. We’d burnt six of Clive’s people, as well as Clive himself, after we had pumped enough lead into them that they weren’t going to get up again. Not all wounds heal easy. Not all wounds should.

“What is it?” I asked.

“She’s awake.”

2.

The Fox—Elaine—whatever the hell she wanted to be called—was back on her bed in the observation room, staring up at the ceiling. She turned her head toward me when I came in, and her eyes were just unfocused enough that I knew I was going to be speaking to the killer, not to the tender of children. That was fine by me. I’ve never really known how to talk to people who chose to spend a lot of time around kids. Bullets and blood, those are things I’m more familiar with.

“The bullet nicked your liver and perforated your intestine,” I said, skipping “hello” in favor of a status update. “We were able to repair most of the damage laparoscopically. We didn’t even have to sedate you, thanks to all the drugs you’re on. Thanks for saving us the trouble.”

“Am I going to die?” she asked. She sounded almost hopeful.

“Not this time.”

“Oh.” She frowned before looking at me mistrustfully and asking, “Are you here to throw me out?”

“Why the hell would I do that? This is where you go when you get broken. I’m a scientist. I fix the toys that other people throw away.” Toys like Zelda, who was still trying to figure out whether she was staying with me or heading back to the CDC. Toys like Tessa, who might not be trustworthy but deserved to be trusted all the same. Everyone’s a toy to somebody.

The Fox—Elaine—whatever—blinked at me, uncomprehending.

Then, slowly, she smiled.

Meet the Author

Mira Grant lives in California, sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same. Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Seanan McGuire—winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Find out more about the author at www.miragrant.com or follow her on twitter @seananmcguire.

Photo Credit: Carolyn Billingsley

Also by Mira Grant

PARASITOLOGY

Parasite

Symbiont

Chimera

THE NEWSFLESH TRILOGY

Feed

Deadline

Blackout

Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box (e-only novella)

Countdown (e-only novella)

San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats (e-only novella)

How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea (e-only novella)

The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell (e-only novella)

Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus (e-only novella)

WRITING AS SEANAN MCGUIRE

Rosemary and Rue

A Local Habitation

An Artificial Night

Late Eclipses

One Salt Sea

Ashes of Honor

Chimes at Midnight

The Winter Long

Discount Armageddon

Midnight Blue-Light Special

Half-Off Ragnarok

Pocket Apocalypse

Sparrow Hill Road

Indexing

Indexing: Reflections

If you enjoyed
PLEASE DO NOT TAUNT THE OCTOPUS,
look out for

PARASITE

PARASITOLOGY VOLUME 1
by Mira Grant

Interlude 0: Genesis

My darling ones, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.

—Simone Kimberley, Don’t Go Out Alone

Here there be monsters.

—Dr. Shanti Cale

August 17, 2015: Time stamp 15:06.

[The recording is crisp enough to look like a Hollywood film, too polished to be real. The lab is something out of a science fiction movie, all pristine white walls and gleaming glass and steel equipment. Only one thing in this scene is fully believable: the woman standing in front of the mass spectrometer, her wavy blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, a broad smile on her face. She is pretty, with a classic English bone structure and the sort of pale complexion that speaks less to genetics and more to being the type of person who virtually never goes outside. There is a petri dish in her blue-gloved hand.]

DR. CALE: Doctor Shanti Cale, Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis viability test thirty-seven. We have successfully matured eggs in a growth medium consisting of seventy percent human cells, thirty percent biological slurry. A full breakdown of the slurry can be found in the appendix to my latest progress report. The eggs appear to be viable, but we have not yet successfully induced hatching in any of the provided growth mediums. Upon consultation with Doctor Banks, I received permission to pursue other tissue sources.

[She walks to the back of the room, where a large, airlock-style door has been installed. The camera follows her through the airlock and into what looks very much like an operating theater. Two men are waiting there, faces covered by surgical masks. Dr. Cale pauses long enough to put down her petri dish and put on a mask of her own.]

DR. CALE: The subject was donated to our lab by his wife, following the accident which left him legally brain dead. For confirmation that the subject was obtained legally, please see the medical power of attorney attached to my latest progress report.

[The movement of her mask indicates a smile.]

DR. CALE: Well. Quasi-legally.

[Dr. Cale crosses to the body. Its midsection has been surrounded by a sterile curtain; the face is obscured by life support equipment and by the angle of the shot. She pulls back the curtain to reveal the gleaming interior of the man’s sliced-open abdomen. The skin has been peeled back and the blood has been suctioned away, revealing a wide array of colors. Liver brown, intestinal green and glistening white, and the smooth pink sac of the stomach. Calmly, she reaches into the man’s body, pushing organs aside until the surface of the small intestine is revealed.]

DR. CALE: Scalpel.

[One of the masked men passes her the requested tool. She takes it, pressing down against the man’s intestine. He does not move. Her hand does not tremble.]

DR. CALE: I am not following strict sterile protocol, in part because infection is not a risk. The subject’s immune system has been supplemented. D. symbogenesis eggs were introduced to the subject’s system six days ago, fed into his body along with the nutrient paste we have been using to preserve basic biological functions.

[The surface of the intestine splits, spilling a thin film of brownish liquid over the surrounding organs. Dr. Cale ignores it as she sets the scalpel aside and thrusts her hand into the man’s body. He still does not move as she digs through his small intestine. When she finally retracts her hand, she is clutching something. She pulls down her mask with her free hand and directs a beatific smile toward the camera.]

DR. CALE: I am pleased to report that we have multiple fully-formed proglottids present in the subject’s body, as well as some partial strobila.

[She holds out her hand. The camera zooms in on the white specks writhing against her gloved fingers.]

DR. CALE: D. symbogenesis is capable of maturing when cultured inside a living human host. Ladies and gentlemen…at long last, it’s alive.

[The film ends there. There are no notes in Dr. Cale’s progress reports relating to the eventual fate, or original identity, of the first human subject used to culture D. symbogenesis. The medical power of attorney referenced in the recording has never come to light.]

*  *  *

[End report.]

June 23, 2021: Time stamp, 13:17.

This is not the first thing I remember.

This is the first thing that I was told to remember; this is the memory that has been created for me by the hands and eyes and words of others. The first thing I remember has no need for hands, or eyes, or words. It has no need for others. It only needs the dark and the warm and the distant, constant sound of drums. The first thing I remember is paradise.

This is not the first thing I remember. But this is the first thing you will need to know.

*  *  *

Sally Mitchell was dying.

She was up against an army—an army that had begun with paramedics, moved on to doctors, and finally, to complicated life support machines that performed their function with passionless efficiency—but none of that seemed to make any difference. She had always been determined, and now she was determined to die. Silently, and despite everyone’s best efforts, she was slipping further and further away.

It was not a swift process. Every cell in her body, damaged and undamaged alike, fought to retain cohesion. They struggled to pull in oxygen and force out the toxins that continued to build in her tissues and bloodstream. Her kidney function had been severely impaired in the accident, and waste chemicals had ceased to be automatically eliminated. She no longer responded in any meaningful way to external stimuli. Once she was removed from the machines that labored to keep her body functional, her life would come to an end in very short order.

Sally Mitchell existed in a state of living death, sustained by technology, but slipping away all the same.

Her hospital room was crowded—unusually so, for a woman standing in death’s doorway, but her doctor had hoped that by bringing her family to see her, he could better plead his case for taking her off life support. The damage from the accident had been too great. Tests had shown that Sally herself—the thinking, acting girl they remembered—was gone. “Clinical brain death” was the term he used, over and over again, trying to make them understand. Sally was gone. Sally was not coming back. And if they kept her on artificial life support for much longer, more of her organs would begin to shut down, until there was nothing left. If her family approved the procedures to harvest her organs now, her death could mean life for others. By pairing her organs with splices taken from her SymboGen implant, the risks of rejection could be reduced to virtually nothing. Dozens of lives could be saved, and all her family had to do was approve. All her family had to do was let her go.

All they had to do was admit that she was never waking up.

Sally Mitchell opened her eyes.

The ceiling was so white it burned, making her eyes begin to water in a parody of tears. She stared up at it for almost a minute, unable to process the message she was getting from her nerves. The message wanted her to close her eyes. Another part of her brain awakened, explaining what the burning sensation in her retinas meant.

Sally closed her eyes.

The doctor was still pleading with her family, cajoling and comforting them in turn as he explained what would happen next if they agreed to have Sally declared legally dead. His voice was no more or less compelling than the buzz of the machines around her. None of his words meant anything to her, and so she dismissed them as unimportant stimuli in a world that was suddenly full of unimportant stimuli. She focused instead on getting her eyes to open again. She wanted to see the white ceiling. It was…interesting.

The second time Sally opened her eyes, it was easier. Blinking came after that, and then the realization that she could breathe—her body reminded her of breathing, of the movement that it required, the pulling in of air through the nose, the expelling of air through the mouth. The respirator that was supposed to be handling the breathing process began beeping shrilly, confused in its mechanical way by her sudden involvement. The stimulus from the man in the ceiling-colored coat became more important as it grew louder, hurting her ears.

Sally sat up.

More machines started to beep. Sally winced, and then blinked, surprised by her own automatic reaction. She winced again, this time on purpose. The man in the ceiling-colored coat stared at her and said something she didn’t understand. She looked blankly back at him. Then the other people in the room started making noise, as shrill and confused as the machines around her, and one of them flung herself onto the bed, putting her arms around Sally and making a strange sound in her throat, like she was choking.

More people came into the room. The machines stopped making noise, but the people kept on doing it, making sounds she would learn were called “words,” asking questions she didn’t have answers for, and meanwhile, the body lived. The cells began to heal as the organs, one by one, resumed the jobs they had tried to abandon.

Sally Mitchell was going to live. Everything else was secondary.

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Table of Contents

1. Cover
2. Welcome
3. Title Page
4. Dedication
5. Chapter 1: Relative Perspectives
6. Chapter 2: Coming In Fom the Cold
7. Chapter 3: Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus

8. Chapter 4: When Your Back’s Against the Wall

9. Chapter 5: Can’t Stop the Slaughter
10. Chapter 6: Sterilizing the Lab
11. Meet the Author
12. Also by Mira Grant
13. Bonus Material
14. About Orbit Short Fiction
15. Newsletter
16. Copyright

Navigation

1. Begin Reading

2. Table of Contents

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Seanan McGuire
Excerpt from Parasite copyright © 2013 by Seanan McGuire
Cover design by Wendy Chan
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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First eBook edition: July 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-25902-6

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