Those five days may have been the last good time for us. Maybe the universe had been listening when I made my wish out in the garden; I don’t know. I just know that I asked for time to rest, and somehow, miraculously, I actually got it. Nothing exploded. There were no outbreaks and no emergencies, nothing to pull us away from the difficult task of turning ourselves back into a team. The hours turned into days, and the days blended together, distinguished from each other only by the activity in the forums and the reports we were posting.
Kelly continued her series of guest articles under the Barbara Tinney byline. It wasn’t exactly a runaway hit, but it was popular—surprisingly so. I always forget how much people like getting excuses for their crazy. The profits Kelly’s column brought in went directly to Maggie, where they could help pay for our room and board. She snorted and waved it off like it was no big thing. She also took the money. It made me feel a little bit less guilty about the way we were intruding.
Becks moved into the study, saying that the air mattress was better for her back than the couch was for mine. That meant I could move to the guest room, which was a relief, since I wasn’t really sleeping in the living room. And I needed my sleep. I went to bed every night with my head stuffed full of science, and woke up every morning ready to cram in some more. I needed to understand the research Dr. Abbey had given us. More important, I needed to understand the research Mahir was hopefully sweet-talking some British professor into doing. If I was going to march everyone off to get themselves killed on my behalf, I was by God going to be certain I knew what they were dying for. It was the only promise I could make that I felt reasonably sure of being able to keep.
When I wasn’t studying, I was making calls. My little team of reporters might not have much in the way of manpower, but we had connections, and it was time to exploit them. Rick’s ascent from Newsie to vice president of the United States isn’t a normal career path for either a journalist or a politician, but hey, it’s worked out pretty well for him. I started calling his office, once a day at first, then twice a day, until it became clear that he wasn’t going to call me back. That wasn’t like him. Not even a little bit. And that worried me.
The days rolled on. Alaric started a series on the rise of digital profiling and its applications in the medical field. Becks took a trip up into Washington, looking for zombies she could harass on camera; she came back with powder burns, bruises, and twice as many articles about her adventures. Reading the first one made my throat get tight with half a dozen emotions it was hard to put into words. That used to be me running into the woods to play tag with zombie deer and gathering “no shit, there I was” stories from truckers who remembered the roads during the Rising. That used to be all I wanted in the world. Everything changed when George died. Sometimes I read the articles that Becks posts and I wonder whether the man I used to be would even recognize the one I’m becoming. I don’t think he’d like the new me very much.
I know I don’t.
I told Mahir and Maggie about the silence from Rick’s office, and they agreed that it was best if we kept it between us, at least for now. Everyone was freaked out enough without adding that little wrinkle to the mix. Maggie’s Fictionals didn’t help; at some point, she’d given at least half of them the all-clear. They went back to dropping in without warning, appearing on the doorstep and in the kitchen like they’d been there all along. Most of them brought pizza, or cookies, or samosas. I’d never met two-thirds of them before, even though they were all technically part of the site staff. They walked on eggshells around everyone but Maggie, and we started using their visits as excuses for equipment repair and trips into Weed for more groceries. Once their grindhouse parties got started, they could go for hours, watching crappy pre-Rising horror movies and eating gallons of popcorn. I didn’t realize how antisocial I was becoming until the Fictionals started to descend, and all I could think of was how quickly I could get away.
The bug at the Portland CDC yielded nothing useful; either they’d managed to find and destroy it, or it hadn’t survived the decontamination process. One more possible information source down the drain. The worms Alaric activated back in Oakland were doing a little bit better. They kept finding old research papers and short-lived projects buried in the bowels of one server or another. We added them to the data we already had, and kept on working.
Mahir had a few local scientists who were willing to at least discuss the situation with him; he didn’t tell us their names, and I didn’t press. There were some things I was better off not knowing until I had to. It seemed to be going well, at least in the beginning, but after the second day, he stopped calling or e-mailing. His reports still went up on time, and he still did his time on the forums—from the outside, everything looked fine—but he wasn’t keeping up normal contact.