San Diego 2014 (10 page)

“Let us in!” shouted a male voice, very real, and very much alive. “We can hear you in there!”

“Please!” added a second voice—female this time, and very clearly terrified.

Matthew and Elle exchanged a look. They didn’t say anything. In a moment like this, there was nothing to be said. Matthew let go of Patty, pressing a kiss to the top of her head as he stood to help Elle move the filing cabinets. As soon as they were out of the way, Elle stepped forward and opened the door.

“Get in here,” she said to the small group of people clustered in the aisle outside. “Now.”

“Thank you,” said their leader, an older African-American man with a death grip on an aluminum baseball bat. He turned and started gesturing for his people to get into the building: two other men, both younger than he was, one Asian, one white, and a pale-faced woman with a mop of wild, uncombed curls. Once all three of them were in, he followed, and Elle slammed the door behind him.

“Matthew, the filing cabinets,” she said.

“On it,” he replied. To his surprise and mild relief, the newcomers hastened to help him. With all of them working together, they had the door blocked in a matter of seconds.

“Good,” said Elle. The moaning outside was getting louder. “I guess this means help isn’t on the way, huh?”

“Not quite yet,” said the older man.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

The wild-haired girl was staring at Elle. “Aren’t you…”

“I used to be,” Elle replied. “Hi. I’m Elle. This is Matthew, and Patty. They’re on their honeymoon. I have no idea why I thought it was important to tell you that, but I did, so there you go. The censors are officially off duty for the duration of this convention.”

“I’m Marty,” said the older man. “These two are Pris and Eric.”

“I’m Stuart,” said the Asian man. He was holding a spear like he didn’t really know what to do with it but was terrified of what would happen if he put it down.

“Nice to meet you all,” said Elle briskly. “Now, what sort of danger did you people lead to our door?” She realized she was falling into the speech patterns she used for Indiction Rivers—and well, so what if she was? Indy Rivers got things
done
. Maybe she was a fictional character, but they were in a fictional place, in a fictional situation. There were worse things to be than fictional.

Fictional people cried only when the story told them to.

“Well, ma’am, I don’t know how to break this to you, exactly, but I’m afraid we’re in the middle of the zombie apocalypse here,” said Marty. “One of our friends got bitten. She’s outside now, leading a whole mob of them after us.”

“And you came
here
?” cried Patty, standing. “Why would you do that? We were doing just fine before you came crashing in here! Now we’re probably going to die, and it’s going to be all your fault!”

“Patty.” Matthew put his hand on her shoulder. “Patty, sweetheart, hush. It’s not their fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

“That asshole who decided to cure the common cold, maybe,” said Eric.

“Or maybe not,” said Elle. “I don’t think ‘blame’ is what we should be looking for here. Survival is. If those zombies are behind you, this is where we start shoring up the walls, and we get ready to make our last stand. Are you with me?”

Marty nodded. “Just tell us what to do.”

Elle told them.

11:57
P.M.

“Daddy!”
Lorelei’s voice came through the phone in a wail, terror and heartbreak warring with fury for dominance.

Shawn snatched his phone from his belt and depressed the walkie-talkie button as he raised it to his mouth. “Lorelei, what’s wrong?”

She was crying; he could hear it even before she spoke again. Little hitching sobs that she was trying, and failing, to hold back. She’d cried that way since she was a little girl. “D-Daddy, they’re…I just heard them saying…”

“Slow down. Breathe. Are you all right?”

“They’re going to blow up the convention center!”
This was less a wail, and more a scream. Shawn went cold, his fingers clenching on the phone as she continued: “They didn’t know I could hear them when they started talking about it. They said there was no safe way to do an extraction. There are too many z-z—” She broke down and started crying in earnest before she could even get the word out.

“Zombies,” said Vanessa quietly, stepping up next to Shawn. “There are too many zombies for them to get us out.”

“Damn,” whispered Shawn. Then he raised his phone again and said, “Okay, honey. I need you to breathe deep and stay calm, and listen to me.
Do not
try to get off the base.
Do not
try to get over here. Whatever’s going to happen, I don’t want you in the middle of it. Do you hear me? You stay where you are. Your mother and I need to know that you’re safe.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Lorelei wasn’t screaming anymore. She was barely even whispering. “They’re going to blow it up. The whole thing. They’re going to
kill
you.”

“And I wish that wasn’t going to happen, but, sweetheart, what matters here is that you’re safe. You’re not in this building. You’re going to be fine.” Shawn closed his eyes. He didn’t want to risk seeing his wife’s face. Once she started crying, there was no way he’d be able to keep from doing the same. “It’s going to be hard. Everything’s changing. But you got out. That means we won.”

Someone was crying; he could hear them, even with the screaming that was starting to get closer and closer to their position, even with the sound of distant moans. It didn’t matter. What mattered was Lorelei’s whispered reply: “I don’t want you to die.”

“I don’t want to leave you. We all have to do things we don’t want to do. Can you keep flying for me, baby girl? Please? Because all I need to know right now is that you can do that.”

“I’ll try,” whispered Lorelei.

“That’s all I’ll ever ask of you.” Shawn opened his eyes and turned to his right, where he knew Lynn would be waiting. The tears were running down her cheeks, but her expression was calm. She knew what was coming next. “Honey, I’m going to give the phone to your mother now. You need to talk to her before we lose connection. I love you, Lorelei. Don’t ever forget. Promise me that you won’t.”

“I won’t, Daddy. I love you.”

“Good,” said Shawn. He handed the phone to Lynn before he could say anything else—before he could stretch it out any further, before he could insist that she keep talking to him until it was too late to say anything else. He’d said what needed saying. Everything else would just be self-indulgent, and they were past the time for things like that. He had work to do.

Vanessa and Robert followed him to the far side of the booth. “Tell us what to do, and we’ll do it,” said Vanessa.

“If they’re going to blow this place to Kingdom Come, we’ve got two choices,” said Shawn. “First, we sit here and wait for the boom. Odds are we wouldn’t feel anything. That sort of thing tends to happen pretty damn fast.”

“And our second choice?” asked Robert.

Shawn smiled grimly. “We get the fuck out of here.”

Vanessa nodded. “Sounds good to me. Lead the way.”

12:02
A.M.

Unis lifted her head off her paws, attention fixing on the door. Her ears pricked forward and her nostrils flared. The smell coming through the door wasn’t a good smell. It was Bad. It was a Bad Smell, bad enough to stand out against all the other smells in the world. A low growl started in her chest, shaking her body as she got slowly to her feet. The Bad Smell was getting stronger. But she was a Good Dog. She wouldn’t let the Bad Smell reach The Woman. No. That wouldn’t happen while
she
was standing guard.

“Unis? What’s wrong?”

Unis kept growling. She knew that her duty was to The Woman—and yes, usually that meant answering to her name, because The Woman might need something. But Unis knew that The Woman’s nose wasn’t as good as hers. The Woman didn’t know that there was a Bad Smell. It was up to Unis to protect her.

“Unis.” This time, Lesley’s voice cracked with command. Unis’s growl wavered, losing focus for a moment as instinct warred with training. In the end, instinct and loyalty won: No amount of training could have pulled her attention away from that door.

For her part, Lesley was becoming alarmed. She knew her dog. Unis was the best service dog she’d ever had, and if Unis was ignoring her, that meant that something was seriously wrong.

“This isn’t good,” she whispered, and wished, not for the first time, that she wasn’t locked in alone with her dog, who might be excellent company but had never quite mastered the art of conversation.

Unis continued growling. It was getting louder now. It still couldn’t quite block out the new sound that was coming from the other side of the door: human voices, moaning.

“Here!” said Lesley, sitting up a little straighter. “Whoever you are, you can just go away! You’re frightening my dog! We don’t want any!”

The moaning didn’t stop. If anything, it increased, and someone began banging on the door. Several someones, from the sound of it.

“Go away!”
shouted Lesley.

They didn’t go away.

Unis stopped growling and began barking wildly when the door started caving inward. By then, it was too late to do anything about the infected who were smashing their way into the control room—but really, it had been too late since they were locked in. Lesley screamed.

Unis, who was a very good dog, fought to the end to defend her mistress, and died knowing that The Woman was safer because she had been there. Out of everyone who fell during the siege of San Diego, she may well be the only one who died at peace, knowing that she’d done her best.

The same cannot be said of Lesley Smith. Her last thought was of Unis, whose frenzied barking had stopped a few seconds before. Worrying about her dog made it a little easier to endure the teeth biting into her flesh—and then there was only pain, and darkness, and then there was nothing at all.

No one on the convention floor noticed what was happening in the control room. By that point, they all had problems of their own.

12:09
A.M.

Lynn came to join the group as they were preparing to move. Shawn’s phone was in her hand. She offered it to him, saying quietly, “The battery died. She said to tell you that she loves you.”

“Thank you,” said Shawn, and took the phone, clipping it to his belt.

Lynn nodded and looked around at the remains of their group. The screaming from the front of the hall was getting louder, but it wasn’t quite on top of them. Yet. “Where are we going?”

“The food court,” said Shawn. “The parking garage clearly isn’t a viable exit, or Dwight and Rebecca would have contacted us by now. That means we need another way. There might be an employee door at the back of their little café—and if not, there’s the freezer. It could survive the bombing.”

“And it’s better than sitting here waiting to be blown up,” said Leita.

“Leita’s right,” said Lynn. “But if we’re going to move, it needs to be now. If we stand here too long, we’re not going anywhere.”

“Then let’s go,” said Shawn.

The five of them left the booth together, holding what weapons they could improvise or scrounge from the toolbox. Each of them knew that they would never be coming back, and carried what they thought was important: a backpack, a tote bag filled with merchandise, the cash box, the signed picture of Joss Whedon from the charity drawing. Shawn knew that some of the things people had chosen to carry would slow them down, but he didn’t say anything about it. There would have been no point. They were more likely to die trying to escape than they were to make it out of the building. If people felt better because they died holding their laptops or their favorite shirts, he wasn’t going to be the one who told them no.

As for Shawn himself, he brought his phone, the hammer he’d been holding off and on since arriving at the convention center, and his wife. His daughter was already safe. Nothing else could possibly have mattered to him in that moment.

Together, the last of the California Browncoats walked deeper into the hall, heading for the food court, hoping for a miracle.

They weren’t going to get one.

12:11
A.M.

The moaning outside was getting softer as the zombies moved away, pursuing easier prey along the aisles of the convention center. Elle realized she was giggling under her breath. She clapped a hand over her mouth. That just made it worse. She folded double, laughing and crying at the same time, struggling with the need to do both as quietly as possible.

“What’s so funny?” asked Marty. He didn’t sound belligerent, just tired. They were all tired.

“A friend of mine has—” Elle caught herself. If the lying was going to stop, the lying was going to stop right here and now. “My girlfriend has this shirt that says, ‘In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I don’t have to run faster than the zombies. I just have to run faster than you.’ I guess it’s more accurate than we ever thought.”

Marty chuckled once, eyes narrowed. “I guess that’s true. But it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to do next.”

“How bad is it out there?” asked Matthew. “We’ve been shut in here since the lights went out. We don’t really know what’s happening on the floor.”

“It’s bad,” said Stuart unsteadily. “It’s really bad. Kelly…”

“One of our friends got bitten, and then she became one of those things,” said Pris, a little unsteadily. She was still clutching her tablet. She looked down at it, blinking. She hadn’t realized that she still had it; she’d assumed it was lost during their flight down the aisles. Then she realized that she didn’t remember much about what happened when the zombies came. First Kelly was coming around the corner, and then the rest of them were running through the open door of the makeshift little house.

“So we know it’s contagious,” said Elle. “What does that mean for us? Do we stay in here and keep hoping for rescue, or do we start trying to get the hell out of here?”