Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus (3 page)

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.

“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.

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?”