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"Jesus, Rebecca, I don’t know This cloak-and-dagger shit was never my first choice for a career I think it stands a chance, anyway, and if there’s any e can get this to Dr Abbey, we should She’ll knohat to do with it"
"If we don’t come back from Memphis?" Becks kept her eyes on her laptop, but I could hear the tension in the question
"Pretty hed, shoulders straightening a little, and got back to work In the backseat, Kelly pulled out one of Mahir’s research files and started reading She’d been over it all a thousand ti the rest of uson the steering wheel, and waited
It can’t have been more than ten minutes before Mahir pulled open the van’s side door and cli the whole tile stroke She was brilliant, beautiful, and brave as hell If anything proved how fked-up I was, it was s All I could do was hurt her, and having already done it once, I wasn’t exactly racing to do it again
"Right," said Mahir, settling next to Kelly as the door shut and locked behind hiood-byes to make, I suppose we’d best be on our way"
I nodded and started the engine
Maggie stayed on the lawn as we drove aaving at first, and then just standing there, a se dwindled in the rearviewas ent around the curves in the driveway, until finally she was out of sight for good Sanctuary was behind us, and ell and truly on our way
The plan called for us to drive down the length of California before cutting across through Arizona, New Mexico--the desert states It wasn’t the e of one of the bigger weaknesses of the infected: the heat We had to cede Alaska because frostbite doesn’t do much but slow a zombie down until it becomes fatal The deserts, on the other hand, were one of the first things we ed to take back completely The human host of the active virus still needs water, still needs shade, still collapses with heatstroke and sunstroke, still putrefies, andof a scorpion There are no resident zombie mobs in the deserts of America, and while even the driest desert can sustain life, very little of that life is big enough to cross the Kellis-Amberlee amplification barrier If we encountered any real threats, they’d be fresh ones, and that limited their potential numbers
The relative safety of the desert made our route less suspicious, even as it ularly for water and watch the van to be sure it didn’t overheat It was a s it to Meh, the guards too anxious to stay cool to do more than the most cursory of tests That suited our needs perfectly
Becks and I did the driving in shifts, six hours on, six hours off After the first two shifts, the one who’d just finished a shift would ers wouldout Mahir didn’t have a license to drive in the USA, and while Kelly could drive, she didn’t have her field license, and was too jumpy to drive safely So it was just the two of us, and that y--such as it hen Becks slept, using Kelly as a sort of a sanity check "It’s not that I’ to die for this story," Mahir said, reasonably "It’s just that I’d rather not be martyred and leave the tale half-told if there’s any other option" Even George had to admit that this was a sound approach, and so the four of us put our three heads together and tried to coood It was harder than it sounded, which was impressive, since it sounded pretty dao e had: surprise, and the threat of going public without letting the CDC tell their side of the story
The farther we got froie’s house, the dumber our makeshift plan looked… and the more obvious it became that there wasn’t another way When the corruption seeood approach is through the front door with a gun in each hand No one was going to help us take on the CDC, not with our resources and reputation, and not with the radio silence co out of the White House That ths caer and de to have to be enough
We stopped at a seedy ot to Memphis They took cash and didn’t look too hard at our IDs No ets, there will always be places designed for people who are looking to slip between the cracks This was one of them The man behind the desk didn’t knoe were, and better, he didn’t want to know Becks and I checked in together, letting Mahir and Kelly wait in the van until the necessary transactions had been completed The man was disinterested He was also a ht have seen Kelly’s face on the news, andaround Arkansas with a couple of disreputable-looking types like me and Becks