by Mira Grant
So yeah, when I first started having conversations with my dead sister, I was pretty much okay with it. Everybody has their own coping mechanisms, and me? Well, I went crazy to stay sane. For most people, that would have been the end of it. They would have been haunted by the increasingly complex hallucinations until they either gave themselves completely over to the delusion or decided it was time to go on some heavy-duty antipsychotics and get over themselves. The trouble with me was, I got her back. Some trouble, huh? Oh poor me, I got a miracle. I became the luckiest man in the world. My prayers were answered, and it was all sunshine and good times from there on out … except that when I prayed to get her back, I had never prayed for my sanity to return. Recovery was a process, and it was taking a lot longer to heal than it had taken for me to be hurt.
Imaginary Georgia had been my mind’s way of protecting itself from the crushing reality of a world that didn’t have her in it anymore, and deep down, on the level of thought that I couldn’t access no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t believe she was going to stay. Sure, she was back among the living now, but that was just some sort of cosmic filing error. Somebody, somewhere, was going to realize that I didn’t deserve this, this … this mercy, and she was going to leave me again, for good this time. If I allowed myself to fully recover before that happened, I was going to find myself alone in a world that didn’t have the real George, and didn’t have the fake George; a world that didn’t have any George at all. That was a world I couldn’t imagine living in, and so even as I curled close to the flesh-and-blood woman who shared my life, I clung to the ghost who haunted my heart. I couldn’t help it.
The night’s catch had been good, at least: Not counting our friend the fox, I had three wolverines, a pine marten the length of my arm, and six rabbits. Rabbit fur was always in high demand, especially among families with children. The necessity of fur was something you came to terms with when you lived in a place with winters this harsh and an infrastructure this insecure, but people who remembered the world before the Rising still liked to dress their kids in rabbit, which they remembered as a relatively low-cruelty, farmed fur.
There was no such thing as fur without cruelty. There was no such thing as life without cruelty. Everything a person had was something someone else didn’t have. In the end, it all came down to balancing the damage that you did. My rabbits died fast and clean, and did me the favor of not leading predators too close to the cabin. They would bait my traps and pay my debts, and while killing them might have been cruel, I did my best to make sure that their lives weren’t wasted.
I hung the carcasses in the curing shed, a blood-scented box of metal and concrete that would have spelled instant infection for almost anyone else. Even George hadn’t been out there since we’d finished settling into the property, although I had taken video for her a couple of times, when she’d asked. We didn’t have any secrets from each other.
There was a flash of dark hair out of the corner of my eye as my mind reminded me, unflinchingly, that we didn’t have any secrets we could see.
Working with blood the way I did meant I was a walking hot zone, and made it essential for me to be careful with what I touched. That was why I’d installed a chemical shower, in its little plastic pod, right outside the shed. I stripped down, hoping George was watching from the window—it was always fun when I could give her a little show; both of us were still drunk on the idea of being allowed to love each other without social mores and disapproving looks getting in the way—and shoved my clothes into a biohazard bag before stepping into the self-sealing green box.
Even in the middle of nowhere, certain protocols have to be followed. People had taken “safety” to the level of religious mania, making it unsafe in their obsessive need to put it above all else. That didn’t mean decontamination was optional, or make bleach anything other than the ongoing salvation of mankind. I spent the recommended time in the chemical spray, scrubbing every trace of blood, every scrap of viral fomite, from my skin and hair. I emerged smelling of citrus lotion and cleanliness, pulled on the sweatpants that hung from the interior hook of the unit, stepped into a pair of plastic slippers, and strolled, clean and damp and decontaminated, back toward the cabin.
Nothing moved in the windows. I frowned. George might still be in bed—that wasn’t unheard of, especially after she’d had a bad night—but she usually got up when she heard the shower. It was rigged to set off a beeper in the kitchen when someone turned it on. We’d had a few uninvited guests, usually people who’d been driven to the wilderness rather than choosing it, show up on our property and assume they could take advantage of an unguarded opportunity to get themselves clean. That was okay, sort of; we made enough, between her vegetables and my furs, to pay for a few charity-case showers over the course of the year. The trouble was, people like that sometimes wanted more than just a bath, and that was less okay. That couldn’t be allowed.
A twinge of nervousness ran down my spine, tightening my skin and making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I was being silly, I knew, but I still picked up my pace, walking as fast as I dared before I would have to admit that I was running. There was still no movement in the kitchen.
She’s probably still in bed, I thought, and opened the back door, and stopped dead. My eyes widened until it physically hurt. Every muscle in my body seemed to be cramping at the same time, becoming nonresponsive. I couldn’t move. I had to move. Everything hinged on my moving.
But I had hallucinations, right? I saw things that weren’t there. I saw an imaginary Georgia. So maybe this was that. Maybe my cruel, cruel brain had decided to stop playing nice, and had moved on to presenting me with worst-case scenarios, intrusive thoughts that would gradually transform my life into a waking nightmare. It was a terrifying thing to contemplate, and right now I liked it a lot better than the idea that this could be really real, that this could be happening.
My hallucinations were visual, auditory, and sometimes tactile. They never included taste, and they never included smell.
I could smell the blood.
George was lying in a curved comma on the kitchen floor, the angle of her body seeming somehow outraged, like she was furious with herself for having limitations, like she was furious with gravity for enforcing them. She had dropped a nearly full can of Coke when she fell; the sticky brown liquid had spread across the floor in a fan of droplets. It was going to attract ants. That was a small, petty thing to focus on, but that was what made it so safe. We were going to have ants, and George was going to be furious, because she hated ants. At least this time I could blame her, and not one of my botched attempts to make caramel. We would laugh, and laugh, and laugh…
The sound I was making wasn’t laughter. It was barely even human, and it hurt my throat. Under the circumstances, that was the least of my concerns.
The Coke had been in her hand when she fell, and had splattered away from her. The blood, though, that was all her. It surrounded her head like a corona, some asshole artist’s idea of religious art. I finally remembered how to move. I rushed into the kitchen, the screen door slamming behind me, and dropped to my knees on the sticky, blood-tacky floor, reaching for her.
“George? Hey, George, can you hear me?”
She didn’t respond. I rolled her halfway into my lap, feeling the limp, dead weight of her. The blood had come from her nose; there were caked-on trails leading from both nostrils, fanning out to cover her mouth and chin. She looked like a zombie, like she’d been feasting on something unspeakable. Was that possible? Could she have amplified?
Anything was possible. If she opened her eyes and they were black with virus and devoid of humanity, well, it would just be like we were finishing what we’d begun, back in Sacramento, back in the van. I was so tired. I wasn’t going to fight her.
I also wasn’t going to write her—or us—off that easily. I slid my arms under her body and stood, staggering a little under the weight of her. She hung limply against my chest, her head rollin
g to rest on my shoulder. Blood was getting everywhere. That was all right. Maybe I leaned too heavily on my immunity these days, but this was George. I would have risked infection for her even before we knew that the virus didn’t want me.
Step by careful step, I carried her through the cabin to the bathroom and lowered her into the tub. She didn’t open her eyes, not even when I braced her head against the cold tile and gingerly removed her blood-soaked robe, for fear of later contamination. Her stillness was a vote against her being infected: Zombies didn’t usually sleep calmly while people treated them like giant dolls. I clung to that thought as I got a washcloth, wetted it down with warm, soapy water, and began wiping the blood from her face.
Maybe she was already dead. Maybe I was fooling myself. I didn’t care. She was all I had, and I wasn’t going to lose her. Not today. Not like this.
“I’ll still be here for you,” said the George who wasn’t real, perching on the edge of the sink and smiling sweetly at me, like this wasn’t exactly what she wanted. Her and me, alone against the world, the way it had been when I was at my lowest. The way it had been when she was the only thing keeping me from swallowing a bullet. “I’ll never leave you.”
I didn’t say anything to her. I just kept my eyes on the real George, and prayed, foolish as it was, that she was going to wake up.
Two
My eyelids felt like they’d been weighted down. I struggled to open them, noting their unresponsiveness with a clinical detachment that I recognized as my own effort to stave off panic. Part of me knew, absolutely and without question, that when I did manage to open my eyes, I would be back in CDC custody—or worse yet, that I would never have left, because everything I’d experienced in my lifetime had been a simulation, a way for them to test how things would play out if I ever managed to escape. My nightmares were real. Canada was the dream.
If I was capable of dreaming, I was capable of thinking. If I was capable of thinking, I was capable of finding a way to make the things I’d imagined real. So it didn’t matter where I was when I opened my eyes: What mattered was that I opened them. With a wrenching effort that I felt all the way down to my bones, I forced my eyelids to respond, and found myself staring at the ceiling of our bathroom in Canada.
Relief washed through me, beating panic back, at least for the moment. I was home. I hadn’t been dreaming this whole time. The fact that my body felt like it was made of lead didn’t matter; I could deal with that. I had dealt with worse. My freedom was the important thing. My freedom and—
“Shaun!” Adrenaline reawakened my overtaxed muscles as I sat bolt upright in the bathtub. The bathroom door banged open less than a second later, revealing Shaun standing there, wearing one of the battered pairs of sweatpants he always put on after he’d been out in the shed. His hair was standing up in uncombed spikes, and his eyes were wild with panic and fear. There was a smear of dried blood just below the line of his jaw. Given how careful he always was when he came in from the woods, I was willing to lay bets that it was mine.
“George?” His voice was shaking, filled with fear and disbelief. He took a cautious step into the bathroom, studying my eyes. “Are you … are you okay?”
With a pang, I realized that he was checking for signs of infection. “Not really,” I said. “I think I passed out.” I raised a hand to check my lip. My nose wasn’t bleeding anymore. That was something. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Yeah, I think I figured that out when I came in and found you sprawled on the fucking floor, George,” said Shaun. There was an edge to his voice, reminding me of how often he used words as weapons. They weren’t usually aimed at me. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be. “How long has this been going on? Did you think I wouldn’t want to know?”
“I’ve been dizzy for the last few days, but I thought it was my period coming on,” I said. “I get anemic sometimes. You know that. Today was the first time I’ve started bleeding. Come on, Shaun. You know I wouldn’t have tried to hide this from you. If nothing else, I would have wanted you to help with the decontamination.”
His face fell, anger cracking and dropping away, to be replaced by raw, aching misery. “I thought you were dead,” he said, taking a step toward me. “I thought you were leaving me.”
“I’m not, and I’m not,” I said, before tapping my jaw, mirroring the spot where he was smeared with my blood. “You’ve got red on you.”
He stopped, blinking at me like I was speaking a foreign language, and not quoting a pre-Rising horror comedy. Then he turned to the mirror, shoulders slumping as he saw the blood. “I’ll wash up,” he said.
“Thank you.” We each harbored our own private reservoir of Kellis-Amberlee, even when it wasn’t manifesting as a proper reservoir condition. Under normal circumstances—a nosebleed, a cracked lip, a normal menstrual cycle—people didn’t trigger amplification in themselves. The body remembered the blood as part of the whole, and so the virus didn’t activate. There was probably some complicated scientific reason for that. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t have the medical background to figure it out. What I did know was that any blood that had been out of contact with my body long enough to have dried to that shade of brown was no longer a part of me, and would happily infect the blood that I had left.
Shaun turned on the water and broke the seal on a disposable sponge, beginning to scrub. That gave me the opportunity to pull myself to my feet, using the lip of the tub and then the walls to stabilize my shaking legs. My body was responding to me now, but it still felt weak and oddly gummy, like something was keeping it from fully understanding my instructions. It didn’t feel like amplification. Thanks to the CDC, I may be the only human alive who actually knows what amplification feels like. As for what this did feel like…
I didn’t know. And that terrified me.
The lip of the tub was too high for me to easily step over, given the way my legs were shaking. I looked at it bleakly before raising my eyes and watching Shaun’s reflection meticulously scrubbing off every bit of mirrored blood. “When you’re done with that, can you come over here and help me get out?”
“Sure thing,” he said. His tone was light. His eyes were full of screaming. “Can you wait just a few seconds?”
“I’ve got nothing else to do today.” That was a lie. Mahir was expecting an op-ed from me on repealing Mason’s Law, and why we were doing ourselves a disservice by refusing to keep animals that were above the amplification threshold. I was focusing on the coevolution of spillover diseases, and some reports that had leaked out of Poland, of all places, describing a reduced amplification rate among black market pig farmers. It was possible that the virus, in bouncing back and forth between mammalian species, was finding a way to settle into a less aggressive form, as characterized by increased reservoir conditions. Smallpox and the milkmaids all over again, playing out in real time.
Somehow, I didn’t think Mahir would mind waiting a little while if we told him that my health was on the line. He hadn’t seen me since Shaun and I had run for Canada and the safety of a big country with very little monitoring or infrastructure. We still chatted sometimes, over secure relays, when I was submitting an article. It was nice to know that someone missed me who had actually met me, and not just the original Georgia.
Not that she’d ever had a lot of friends. She was my original, the template from which I was drawn, and she would have been just as content as I was with a world that consisted of nothing but herself, a wireless connection, and Shaun. I was living her happy ending, and Mahir was a part of that.
Shaun dropped his sponge into the biohazard bin next to the sink, dried his hands on a towel, and turned to face me. I was struck once again by how perfectly he fit into this environment. Neither of us had ever expected to be playing house like this, worrying about washing towels and doing the dishes, and yet here we were, perfectly content in our weird little world. “All better,” he said.
“Here’s hoping,” I said, and held out my arms.
He put his hands under them, cupping my ribcage, and lifted me easily.
Too easily. He frowned again. “Have you been losing weight?”
“I didn’t think I had,” I said, but that was a lie, too, wasn’t it? I hadn’t been eating much for the last week or so. My appetite was down, and I wasn’t good at choking back food I didn’t feel like putting in my mouth. I gave him an alarmed look. “Something’s wrong.”
“Yeah, it is.” He didn’t put me down. Instead, he swung me up into his arms, cradling me against his chest like an invalid. I would have objected to the treatment, but at the moment, it felt appropriate. “You’re going back to bed.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, planting one hand against his chest and pushing gently. His skin was warm and smelled faintly of citrus. “This isn’t going to get better just because I go back to bed, and if I get another nosebleed, I could ruin the mattress. We need to go to the kitchen, and I need my laptop.”
The look he gave me was pure betrayal. “Dammit, George, you’re not going to sit down and start working like nothing happened.”
“No, I’m not,” I said again. “I’m going to sit down and call Dr. Abbey. If anyone can tell us what’s going on with me, it’s her.” She was also the only doctor I knew who Shaun actually trusted. If she told us we had to come to her, he’d go.
“Okay,” he said, almost sullenly. He hoisted my knees—my bare knees—a little higher as he adjusted his grip on me.
I snorted as I suddenly thought through one more thing about my situation. “Actually, can we stop by the bedroom? I should probably put on a clean robe before I start calling our friendly neighborhood mad scientist. Just so she doesn’t get the wrong idea about what I’m reaching out for.”