Weed’s airport was tiny, three buildings and a runway, with only the minimum in federally mandated air lock and quarantine space between the airport and the curb. Several airport security cars were parked nearby. Overkill most of the time, especially for an airport this small, but I was willing to bet they wouldn’t be nearly enough if a plane actually flew in with an unexpected cargo of live infected. That’s the trouble with being scared all the time. Eventually, people just go numb.
I stopped the car in the space marked for passenger pick-up and drop-off, hitting the horn twice. Kelly winced, but didn’t question the action. Only an idiot gets out of their car unprompted at even the smallest of airports.
We didn’t have to wait long. The echoes from the horn barely had time to die out when the air lock door opened and Mahir came walking briskly toward us, dragging a single battered carry-on bag behind him. The formerly black nylon was scuffed and torn and patched with strips of duct tape in several places. At least that probably made it easy to recognize when it came along the conveyor belt at baggage claim—not that Weed’s airport was large enough to have a conveyor belt. I was pretty sure Mahir hadn’t arrived on any commercial flight.
He pulled open the van’s rear passenger-side door without saying anything, putting his carry-on bag on the seat before he climbed in and pulled the door shut again. Even then, he didn’t say anything, just fastened his seat belt and met my eyes in the rearview mirror, clearly waiting.
I started the engine.
Mahir held his silence until we were half a mile from the airport, and the rest of us stayed silent just as long, waiting for him to say something. Finally, closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose and said, “Magdalene, how far is it from here to your home?”
“About ten miles,” she said, twisting in her seat to look at him with wide and worried eyes. “Honey, are you okay?”
“No. No, I am not okay. I am several thousand miles from okay. I am quite probably involved in divorce proceedings even now, I am present in this country under only the most tenuous of legal umbrellas, I am entirely unsure as to what time zone I am in, and I want nothing more than to rewind my life to the point at which I permitted myself to first be hired by one Miss Georgia Mason.” Mahir dropped his hand away from his face, eyes remaining closed as he sagged backward. “I believe that if I were any more exhausted, I would actually be dead, and I might regard that as a blessing. Hello, Shaun. Hello, Dr. Connolly. I would say it is a pleasure to see you again, but under the circumstances, that would be disingenuous at best.”
“Hello, Mr. Gowda,” said Kelly. I didn’t say anything. I kept driving, listening to George swearing loudly in the space between my ears. If there had been any question about what Mahir had found—whether it was good, bad, or just weird—his demeanor answered it. There was no way he’d look that beat down over anything but the end of the world, and somehow, I was starting to suspect that the end of the world was exactly what he represented.
Maggie looked around the car, a crease forming between her brows as she considered the expressions around her. Then she reached for the remote and turned the volume on the radio up. Somehow, that seemed like exactly the right thing to do, and we drove the rest of the way home without saying a word, blasting the happily nihilistic pop music of a dead generation behind us as we went.
Mahir opened his eyes when we reached Maggie’s driveway, watching with interest as we passed the first and second gates. As we approached the third gate, he asked, “Does it know how many people are in the vehicle?” I hit the switch to roll down the van windows as I glanced to Maggie for her answer. Metal posts telescoped up from the bushes around the driveway, unfolding to reveal small blood test units with reflective metal panels fastened to their sides. The tiny apertures where the needles would emerge glittered in the sunlight.
“The security grid runs on biometric heat-detection, equipped with low-grade sonar,” Maggie said, with the sort of rote precision that implied she knew because she’d read the manual, not because she really understood what the security system was doing. At least she read the manual. Some people trust their safety to machines without even doing that much. “It always knows how many people need to be tested. We ran a bus up here once, when we did the group trip to Disneyland, and the gate wouldn’t open until all thirty-eight of us had tested clean.”