Read San Diego 2014 for Free Online

I’m going to see if I can call for help.”
    “The police?” asked Rebecca.
    “The Marines?” asked Dwight.
    “My daughter,” said Shawn.
     
    * * *
    7:15 P.M.
    Eric and Marty stood at the doorway to their booth, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Eric held the crowbar he’d used to open the heftier book boxes, keeping it loose, ready to swing. Marty held a baseball bat. Neither Eric nor Pris had asked him where he’d gotten it; at the moment, neither of them was inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. They’d all heard the doors slam shut after the screaming began, and what little they’d been able to learn from people fleeing for the back of the hall was…not good. That was putting it mildly.
    It might not have been so bad if the screams had stopped, or if they’d been continuous. But there were patches of silence long enough to let them think that the worst had passed, and then the screaming would start up again, as loud and terrified as ever. It made it impossible to stop jumping, waiting for the screams to be their own. Maybe paranoid fear was the right emotion when locked in a huge building filled with dangerous strangers. That didn’t mean that it was easy on the heart.
    Marty could hear the Browncoats—he could always hear the Browncoats, and for once, he found that comforting. They were hammering on something, probably shoring up the walls of their booth, and using call-and-response games to keep track of each other whenever they had to move out of direct sight. “Marco” and “Polo” seemed to map to moving forward or backward in the hall, while “Hidey” and “Ho” mapped to movement to the left or right. They were an organized group. He’d have to congratulate them on that, if they survived.
    “How’s it looking back there, Pris?” Marty asked, as loudly as he dared. He might admire the Browncoats for their organization, but he was also concerned about all the noise that they were making. If they attracted the attention of whatever was attacking the convention, he didn’t want it coming after his crew, too.
    “Whoever killed the lights took out the wireless signal at the same time, and they didn’t come back up. I’ve got no cellular signal. The best I can do is an emergency convention center service band that has about a thousand warnings on it telling me I’m not allowed to log in under penalty of being escorted from the premises and never allowed to come back for as long as I live.”
    Marty snorted. “Right now, kid, I’d take that as a blessing from God. Go ahead and log on. We need help, and we need it about fifteen minutes ago.”
    “On it,” said Pris, and began typing again.
    In the distance, people screamed, and the Browncoats continued whatever strange things they were doing. Eric glanced anxiously at Marty.
    “I’ve been hearing things on the Internet, you know,” he said. “Like people saying that the flu everybody says is going around isn’t flu at all—it’s something we made in a lab. Something to do with that cure for the common cold thing that was on the news a couple of weeks ago.”
    “That was a hoax,” said Marty. “You can’t cure the common cold. You’d need something that could take out a million different germs in order to do its job, and that would be a superbug. No one’s stupid enough to make a superbug.”
    “I don’t know,” said Eric. “People do some pretty stupid things because they want to see what will happen.”
    Marty paused. His employee sounded pretty shaken up, and who wouldn’t be? They were apparently under some sort of attack. Crazy locals looking for fat geek wallets, most likely, but whatever it was, they couldn’t get out of the hall. All they could do was stand their ground. “All right, I’ll humor you for a second,” he said. “If it’s not the flu, what is it?”
    “Zombies,” said Eric grimly.
    Marty stared at him and didn’t say anything. It should have been funny. It should have been