“Because I’m dead, remember?” She kept hold of my wrist as she spoke, pulling me toward the kitchen. “You need to ask Alaric whether Maggie moved our van into the garage before things locked down.” Catching my blank expression, she sighed. “Come on, Shaun, try to keep up for, like, thirty seconds while you’re losing your mind, okay? If we can get to the van without going outside, we can get to our emergency wireless booster.”

My eyes widened. “Crap, you’re right. We still have that thing, don’t we?”

“Unless you threw it away in a moment of unrepeated sanity and then didn’t tell me about it, yeah, we do.”

Being on a news team with Buffy Meissonier meant dealing with a girl who was occasionally twenty pounds of crazy crammed into a ten-pound sack, and who eventually sold us out to the government conspiracy that got George killed. It also meant working with the best espionage technician I’ve ever encountered, either in the private sector or working for the government. She could make computers do things I’m not sure even science fiction considers possible, and she did it all while wearing holo-foil butterflies in her hair and T-shirts claiming that some dude named Joss was her master now. People say Buffy was good. They’re wrong. Buffy was great.

Mahir was still shouting at the phone when George pulled me past him. He gave me a harried glance and nodded, eyes skipping straight past George. That made sense, I guess, since it’s not like she was really there.

“I’m pretty sure this represents a whole new level of fucked-up crazy,” I muttered, as George yanked me into the kitchen.

“I’m he cause of your psychotic break; I’m just a symptom,” she replied waspishly, and shoved me toward Becks and Alaric.

Becks, like Mahir, had managed to dress while I was staring at the television and was wearing combat boots, a black tank top, and camouflage pants—the Irwin equivalent of a uniform. She and Alaric were sitting at the table, him with his laptop pulled as close to his body as it would go, leaving the rest of the space for her. She had what looked like a small armory spread out in front of her, and was in the process of reassembling a semiautomatic handgun that had yet to be legally cleared for private ownership. They looked up when they heard my footsteps.

“What’s the update?” asked Becks. She snapped the magazine into place with a click that echoed through the kitchen, eliciting a startled yip from one of the bulldogs sprawled next to the sealed-off door.

“Nothing that’s good,” I replied. George had released my wrist when she got me where she wanted me, and I realized without surprise that she was gone again. That was okay by me. Her appearing and physically hauling me around the house represented a whole new level of crazy, and I wanted to avoid thinking about it for as long as possible. “Forever” seemed like an excellent place to start. “They’ve declared martial law in the areas that haven’t been officially marked as hazard zones, and it’s starting to look like they’re going to mark the entire damn Gulf Coast as a Level 1 hazard.”