Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus (9 page)

Something about her stance was setting off alarm bells in the back of my head. The trouble with mysteries was that they always came with the urge to
solve
them. They were like shiny baubles to bat at, and they were
distracting
. She had distracted me from the moment she dropped out of the tree, too thin and too sick and too far gone to have made it all the way into the woods without help. Someone had broken her—and while the Monkey might have done some digging on her fault lines, it couldn’t possibly have been enough to leave her the way I’d found her. She’d been strong enough to survive for two years without him. Someone else had broken her down. Someone else had left her at my doorstep.

“You’re a trap, aren’t you?” I sounded more weary than anything else, even to my own ears. I knew Jill was listening in, and I raised my voice as I demanded, “Who left you here?”

“Please,” she moaned. “Please, just give me the drugs I need. They can’t make them for me. They can’t, they never could, that’s why I had to come here. You have a lab, they said. Food, they said. I didn’t want to, but the pills ran out, and I need my pills.”

“Who can’t make your drugs for you? Who sent you here? Elaine, you have to tell me. If you want your pills, if you want me to help you, you have to tell me
who sent you here
?” I stood, not quite towering over her. I’m short. She was shorter, and lying in the bed besides. For once in my life, I got to be the imposing figure in the room.

The Fox—Elaine, she had to be Elaine, because anything else was too stupid to be tolerated—rolled onto her back and closed her eyes, pointing her face toward the ceiling. She looked pale and wan and fragile; so fragile that I could break her with a look, with a touch, with anything at all.

“Clive,” she said.

I swore. I couldn’t help it. “Stay here, stay
right here
, and don’t you move. If you move, my staff will fill this room with formalin, and we’ll watch the video of you melting at the company Christmas party every year from here until the death of time. Got it? Actually, I don’t care if you’ve got it, you’re fucked up on drugs and I’m in charge. Stay where you are.” Then I turned and stormed out of the room, moving as fast as I dared without starting a panic.

Clive had sent her. May whatever God or gods exist have mercy on us all.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. That’s physics, but it’s also human nature. If you take a single person and isolate them, they will find ways to start warping the world to conform to their needs and expectations. When I left the CDC, I was a single woman with a medical degree, a chip on my shoulder, and my husband’s not inconsiderable life insurance payout. I didn’t have a lab, or a staff, or the resources to defend myself: All those things came later. I did have some connections within the various health organizations that effectively governed our world, and even the friends who were no longer willing to be seen with me were sometimes willing to sneak me a few hours of computer access or let me have off-the-books access to their research facilities, but that was about it. Everything I’d built since then, I had built on my own, one brick at a time. And yeah, in the process, I may have racked up a few debts…and made a couple of enemies.

Because nothing exists in a vacuum, any time you set up a society that has to operate off the radar and out of sight, you’re going to get your share of con men, grifters, and petty despots who think that the way to control everyone around them is with an iron fist—skip the velvet glove. Every black market on the West Coast had its own tin king or pasteboard queen. Gangs controlled some of the supply chains, and could have been a serious problem if not for the fact that they knew I controlled most of the painkillers and vaccines in this part of the country. If they didn’t want to die of measles or deal with the consequences of their own insistence on riding motorcycles down poorly maintained roads, they didn’t fuck with me.

And then there was Clive.

For every wanna-be boss man and petty little comptroller with more bullets than sense, it seemed like there was someone in the shadows: someone smarter than they were, someone who understood how to bide their time and plan for a future that was coming faster than any of those amateurs could dream. Some of those potential overlords found better things to do with their time. Others found themselves on the receiving end of a coup before they could properly get started. And then there was Clive.

Clive, who controlled most of the narcotics trade from Vancouver down to Redding, spanning two countries and hundreds of miles. Clive, whose detractors tended to disappear, only to show up later in the zombie-baiting pits or roaming wild on the highways, mindless, infected, and good only for research and dissection in labs like mine. Clive, who had offered more than once to buy me out, smiling through his perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth and saying things like “cooperation is a virtue,” and “if you scratch my back, I can scratch yours.”

The only venture he’d ever undertaken that hadn’t been successful had been an attempt to control the zombie traffic along his narcotic routes. He’d believed that he could single-handedly take back territory that had been ceded by two governments, and when he’d failed, he had executed all the mercenaries and scientists who had been working for him, doing everything he could to wipe the proof that he wasn’t infallible from the face of the planet. He might have succeeded, too, if it weren’t for the fact that the underground scientific community is very small, and we gossip like academics. Some of my staff had been a part of that doomed project before they had realized just how doomed they were, and disappeared into the night.

Clive knew where my lab was. Of course Clive knew—nothing as big as the Shady Cove facility could have remained completely off his radar, especially not with the supplies we purchased on a monthly basis from the surrounding communities. We generated our own power and fed it back into the under-grid, using that excess to pay for some of the things we couldn’t create for ourselves. No matter how many solar panels we concealed on the structure or hydroponic-food bays we created, we were always going to be dependent on the outside for some things, and that meant that people like Clive would always know how to find us.

But that didn’t mean he knew how to get inside, or where our weak spots were. If he wanted to learn
that
, he would need to get someone past our fences. Someone small and light, who he could monitor the entire time. Oh, she didn’t have a tracker on her—my people were nothing if not efficient, and any chips or devices attached to her clothing would have been microwaved into uselessness two seconds after it was discovered—but visual surveillance will always have its place, no matter how advanced the world becomes. Clive could have watched her work her way past our outer defenses, and then watched as I took her into the building. If he claimed her as one of his people, he could even convince the court of public opinion that he’d been mounting a rescue mission to get her back. Everyone knew that I was a mad scientist. They were happy enough with that reputation when they needed vaccines or had questions about food and water safety, but as soon as someone mentioned body snatching or raising the dead, those same people were happy to turn on me. It was part of the job.

No one liked Clive, but they feared and respected him. Tell them the right story, and they’d take it as the gospel truth, just to keep his knives away from their throats. Clive didn’t like me, because I represented something uncontrollable, incomprehensible, and heavily armed that didn’t pay him the “taxes” he was so fond of demanding. He’d wanted my people and my resources for years. Now it looked like he was finally making his play.

I skidded to a stop in the doorway of the control room, where Jill was still staring in horrified silence at the window to the observation room. Elaine hadn’t moved since I left. I guess she felt like she’d worked hard enough for one day. “Did you hear that?” I demanded.

“Shit,” said Jill, turning slowly to face me. “Fuck. Damn. Shit-fuck-damn.”

“Since you’re not taking a correspondence course in profanity, I’m taking that as a yes,” I said. “Call back anyone we have in the field or visiting the local encampments. I want this place locked down tighter than a CDC administrator’s sense of whimsy. Grab as many security people as you think you’ll need, and have everyone searched for bugs or bombs on their way back in. Have you finished running deep backgrounds on everyone we have on staff?”

“No,” said Jill. “I’m maybe sixty percent of the way there. I’ve flagged five people who might be feeding data back to corporate or private health concerns. No one else from the CDC yet. We do have Amal from the EIS down in research, but since she gave us a copy of her résumé, with references, including your friend Danika, I didn’t have to look very hard for her.”

“Amal’s fine, Danika vouched for her,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “Tell her to keep doing the security checks, and to notify you if she finds anything. Pull those five people and lock them up until this is settled. Tell them we’re doing isolation tests if they give you any trouble.” They wouldn’t give her any trouble. Spies expected to be caught, and spies who had been caught expected to be shot if they caused any problems. If our five were loyal to someone else, they’d be relieved to be facing nothing more serious than short-term incarceration.

“What do you want us to do about Zelda?” Jill stood, wobbling a little as the servos in her prosthetic leg reoriented themselves to the level of the floor. “I can’t give her a gun. She hasn’t passed any of our marksmanship tests, and I don’t think the CDC prepped her for anything more strenuous than doing lab work when they sent her out here.”

“I swear I’m going to contact Joey and tell him that while I don’t mind him sending spies over here to do my chores, I need a slightly better class of infiltrator,” I said. “All right, we’re blowing her cover. I’ll do it, I can’t help lock down the lab without getting in the way. If there’s anyone else here who’s serving two masters, find them, and tell them that they’re quitting one of their jobs today. I don’t care whether they decide to work for me or decide to be locked up until it’s safe to throw them out—just make sure we’re not going to have anyone trying to hold our lines while they’re thinking about how they’re going to type this up for their bosses.”

“On it,” said Jill. She leaned forward and punched a few keys on her keyboard. The lights in the observation room flickered almost imperceptibly. “She’s locked down. Your keycard will still open the door. So will mine, Tom’s, or anyone’s who has full security access. You’re sure no one with full access is on someone else’s payroll?”

“If they are, we’re going to find out real fucking fast,” I said. “Now, move.”

She moved. So did I. I ran one way down the hall and she ran the other, outpacing me with ease. Jill might not do much fieldwork, but she’d been a runner before the accident that claimed her original leg, and her prosthetic had been designed to let her keep as much of her old life as possible. She could have graced any lab in the world, if they hadn’t been so small-minded about what constituted physical health. As it was, I got lucky, and she got to squat in an abandoned forestry center, trying to unsnarl the structure of Kellis-Amberlee one twist at a time.

There were no alarms or blaring lights to signal the moment when Jill got to Tom and told him to put the lab into a state of high alert. A few doors locked themselves. A few banks of fluorescents changed shade, going from a cool white to a more artificial, less relaxing yellow. That was all my people needed to know that we had a problem, and the staff members who hadn’t been with us for long enough to know what an emergency looked like could take their cues from the people around them.

All except for our darling not-Daisy, who was about to get a hard lesson in exactly how little she was valued by the people who had sent her to me. The CDC might be getting better about their human rights violations—might actually be learning that you can’t feed your best and brightest through a meat grinder year upon year and still expect to have a competent, reliable staff that wasn’t completely corrupt—but real change takes time. Danika and Joey could rebuild the organization from the ground up, and they’d still have to deal with people like the ones they had replaced.

Some ways of thinking are seductive. They tell you “one person doesn’t matter as much as a world,” and while that’s technically true, there’s a big difference between choosing to burn a single population center in order to save a province, and deciding to bomb a school because there are a few live infections among an otherwise healthy student body. To choose a completely random example, not in any way influenced by my own life or experiences. Not-Daisy was the product of the old system, and she was going to have to deal with what that meant.

I found her in one of the smaller labs. They were supposed to have been closed off for the moment—we weren’t doing any research in epigenetics or botanical treatments for Kellis-Amberlee, and hadn’t been since Shaun Mason had arrived and brought us all his lovely biological data on sexually transmitted immunity and the role of reservoir conditions. The blood I’d been able to extract from the man before he fucked off to the wilds of Canada with the clone of his dead sister had changed everything, and had closed several avenues of fruitless inquiry.

We were going to repurpose those labs eventually. But when I came down the hall, I saw that one of the banks of lights was on and that the door, which should have been tightly closed, was cracked open just enough to let the room’s occupant hear if anyone was coming.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice, most people aren’t that good at paying attention to their surroundings when they’re already nervous, and my experience with corporate espionage told me that not-Daisy would be plenty nervous, especially if she was trying to get around our firewall without getting herself caught. There was no question that she, or someone very much like her, was in the lab. My people knew better than to open closed doors just so they could smoke a joint or have a little illicit hanky-panky: They learned that early and they learned it hard, usually when Joe came bounding into the room barking his canine heart out. The ones who didn’t learn it from Joe had a tendency to learn it at the end of a Taser.

I paused outside the door, considering my options. I could take it slow and easy, without frightening the woman…but had she really
earned
that sort of consideration? And more importantly, was I really feeling generous enough to give it to her?

“Fuck, no,” I murmured, and kicked the door open.

The effect was immediate, and highly gratifying. There was a loud clatter from the other side of the lab, accompanied by the familiar sound of someone typing as fast as their little hands allowed, trying desperately to get their data out before the authorities shut them down. Of course, normally it was
my
people trying to get their info transmitted ahead of someone with actual legal power. My power was all situational. I had no legal authority, but hey, who needs legal authority when you have the ability to strand someone in the middle of a zombie-infested forest without backup or weaponry? Everything is relative. And relatively speaking, I was the most powerful person for miles—at least until Clive made his appearance.

“You can stop typing now,” I said calmly, still standing in the doorway of the lab. “Jill has already shut down all outgoing transmissions, so you’re not going to get your data to whomever it is that you actually work for. Who
do
you work for? I know you’re with the CDC, but I’m really curious to know who arranged to have you assigned here. Did you piss somebody off? Refuse some inappropriate sexual advances? Oh, they say that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, but we’re both women, we’ve both worked for those assholes. The truth is somewhere between the party line and the bottom line, and it’s moving all the goddamn time.”

“Dr. Abbey?” Not-Daisy’s voice was timid, filled with a fear that was too believable to be anything but genuine. She stood up, her face a dim mask lit by the glow from her computer screen. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be in here. I just thought this was a good place to…to sit and review my notes. I mean, there’s so much to learn here…”

“It’s okay, Zelda. I know.” I sounded exhausted. That was almost a surprise to me. I usually relished these confrontations, which either ended with an expulsion or a change of sides. Under the circumstances, however, all I could really feel was tired. “Zelda Roland. Top of your class at Stanford, recruited by the CDC before you even picked up your diploma. You were supposed to be fighting the good fight, and yet somehow you ended up here instead. So who did you cross? Who did you offend? Or are you one of the idealists—do you really think that all research should belong to the CDC, even if that means you have to sneak into an independent lab and steal it? Time’s short, Zelda, and your answer will determine what happens next. So talk.”