A ccording to the bike’s GPS, the drive from the Portland CDC to Maggie’s place should have taken a little over five hours on the main highway. It actually took us closer to eight. Since the chances that we were being tracked by the CDC had just gone way, way up, we stuck to the back roads, keeping our cameras off and avoiding checkpoints whenever we could. I won’t say we drove through the ass-end of nowhere, exactly, but we had to stop twice to gun down the zombie deer trying to chew their way through the fence between the road and the undeveloped land around us.
“I wish to God I could post this,” bemoaned Becks, shooting another infected herbivore squarely between the antlers.
“Yeah, well, I wish to God I had a cup of coffee,” I replied, and gunned the bike’s engine. “Come on.”
There was a time when I thought George was paranoid for asking Buffy to build a jammer into her bike’s tracking system. I’m over it, especially since that jammer allowed us to duck back onto the highway three times for fuel and twice more for caffeine. Becks kept scanning through the newsfeeds as I drove, listening for reports of the outbreak in Portland. “We can’t be too careful,” she said when we stopped for drinks and enough greasy snack food to get us to Maggie’s without crashing. I agreed with her. We’d come too far to die because we weren’t paying attention to the news.
None of the initial reports mentioned our presence. They were all bland, tragic, and carefully sanitized. We’d been on the road for about two hours when the “official record” began admitting that perhaps some journalists had been present for the outbreak, but they didn’t identify us by name and they didn’t try to pin things on us. That was good. That meant it would be a little longer before we needed to kill them all.
George stayed uncharacteristically quiet during the drive. She wasn’t gone—that would’ve left me too shaken to control the bike, especially after everything that had happened since Kelly’s arrival—but she wasn’t talking, either. She was just quiet, sitting at the back of my head and brooding over God knows what. I figured she’d tell me when she was through working it out for herself. Maybe it says something about my mental health that I didn’t find the idea even a little strange. We were too far away from normal for strange to have any meaning anymore.
The sun was hanging low in a mango-colored sky w turned onto Maggie’s driveway. I had to keep one foot on the ground to keep the bike upright while we navigated the various security gates, until my clutch hand was cramping and I started to feel like we would have made better time if we’d ditched the bike on the street and made the rest of the trip to the house on foot. Becks clearly shared my frustration. By the time we cleared the ocular scanner, she was all but twitching with the anxious need to be back in the safety of friendly walls.
The fifth gate was standing open, just like it was when we first arrived as refugees from the ashes of Oakland. A casual observer might have thought Maggie never closed the damn thing. They would have been proven wrong almost immediately, because as soon as I coasted to a stop, the gate slid slickly shut. The sound of the locks engaging was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard.
Becks barely waited for the bike to stop before she dismounted; my foot was still on the kickstand when she hopped off. She stayed where she was for a few brief seconds, jittering in place as she worked the feeling back into her legs. Then she grabbed her bag off the side of the bike, announced, “I’m going to go take a shower,” and took off for the kitchen door. I watched her go without commenting. She didn’t want to give the live breakdown on what happened at the CDC, and, since I was the boss, she was leaving that little luxury for me.
“She’s such a sweetheart,” I said dryly.
Be careful. George sounded concerned. I jumped. It wasn’t just the worry in her tone: She’d been quiet for so long that I’d almost forgotten she was there, like sitting in a room with someone who hasn’t spoken in hours, until they finally get up to leave. I don’t think you really understand what’s going on with her.
“What, are you saying she might be working with the CDC? I don’t think so. I’m usually better at reading people than that.”
Shaun… I could almost see the exasperated shake of George’s head, the way she’d be glowering at me behind her sunglasses. I don’t think Becks is a traitor, but you need to be careful with her. Okay? Can you do that for me?