by Mira Grant
George blinked. Dr. Abbey lifted an eyebrow.
“All right?” she echoed. “Who are you, and what have you done with Shaun Mason?”
“I’m the man whose sister is really, really sick right now, and I’m not going to get in the way of anything that could make her better,” I said. “Do I want to? Yeah. I hope you’ve got a real zombie problem in your woods right now, Doc, because I’m going to need something to distract me from all the help I can’t offer.”
“You’re helping,” said George. “You brought me here. You’re still here. Don’t ever think that you’re not helping.” She got out of the chair. Only the way she held on to the arm, fingers clenched tight and arm suspiciously rigid, told me how much effort that was. Someone who didn’t know her might not even realize that she was sick.
“I’m trying,” I said, offering her my arm as I looked back to Dr. Abbey. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?”
“Not yet,” she said. She held up a small vial of something red. I realized, after a moment’s blank staring, that it was George’s blood. “But I will. You can trust me on that.”
“We’re already trusting you on everything else,” I said, putting an arm around George’s shoulders. She leaned into me, as much for support as for comfort. “What’s one more thing?”
Dr. Abbey nodded, and didn’t say anything. For the three of us, in that moment, there was nothing else to say.
Then Foxy stuck her head in from the hall. “Should I show them to their room?” she asked. “Because it’s almost time for me to go take my pills, and I don’t think I should show them anything after that. It’s always hard to know whether I’m showing people a thing that is, or a thing that I think ought to be.”
“In a moment, Foxy,” said Dr. Abbey. Foxy beamed and withdrew again.
George’s eyebrows were climbing toward her hairline. “I have so many questions right now,” she said. “Did you see Alaric’s report…?”
“Wait, you read that?” I asked.
She punched me lightly in the chest. “You’re not as disinterested as you pretend to be. Everyone here knows it.”
“I still didn’t read the article,” I said. “You know Alaric’s prose doesn’t do anything for me.”
Dr. Abbey snorted. “The two of you have been living alone in the wastes too long. You’ve forgotten how to leave room in conversations for other people—not that you were ever particularly good at it to begin with. Yes, I read Mr. Kwong’s dissertation on the case of Elaine Oldenburg, and yes, I am aware that she’s the woman we call ‘Foxy.’ She has severe depression and PTSD, and has been coping by means of pharmaceuticals for years. We’re supplying her with synthetic cannabinoids, mixed by one of my assistants, and I’ve been working with her on cutting back. Someday I may be able to wean her off them completely. She isn’t exactly keen on the idea of facing the world without filters, but she’s been trying. People used that girl unconscionably. If you ever need proof that the dead aren’t the real monsters, just look at her. But she’s trying, and I’m trying, and she has a home here for as long as she needs one. Even if she does track unmentionable things on the carpet.”
She turned on George. “As for you: I don’t know what’s wrong with you yet. I do know that you’re dehydrated, and that we need to get that taken care of pronto. I’ll be at your room in an hour, to set up a saline drip and to show your damn fool brother how to keep it from kinking. Now, go get cleaned up. We have work to do.”
George still leaning against me for support, we went. Dr. Abbey was right.
We had work to do.
Book IV
Enemy Without, Enemy Within
I am the only person I know whose deaths can be counted on more than one finger. I don’t know whether or not that’s something to be proud of. I legitimately have no idea.
—GEORGIA MASON
I hate problems I can’t punch.
—SHAUN MASON
One
I was lying on the bed in what had become my usual room when Dr. Abbey looked up from her computer, said, “I’ll be right back,” and rose, stalking out the door. I barely had time to lift my head and blink before she was gone, leaving me alone with Joe. The big black dog was asleep again, stretched out so that he occupied most of the floor to one side of my bed. Dr. Abbey was an expert at stepping over and around him, seeming to waltz through the spaces where the dog was not, all for the sake of not needing to disturb her faithful companion. It was sweet. It was surreal—I had never lived with a dog, and her devotion to the animal was strange to me, like it belonged to somebody else, somebody who wasn’t a no-nonsense mad scientist dedicated to understanding the structure of Kellis-Amberlee. But it was nice not to be alone.
“I wonder where she’s going in such a hurry,” I said. Joe didn’t respond.
We’d been in Shady Cove for a week. I spent my days moving between the bed in the treatment room and the bed in the room I shared with Shaun. Not for fun reasons, either. On one end, I gave blood and allowed Dr. Abbey to subject me to every test she could think of, looking for the place where my body was betraying me. On the other end, I crawled under the blankets and slept, so exhausted by the effort of lying on a mattress and answering questions that I couldn’t see straight. I was alive. I couldn’t call what I was doing living.
Shaun wasn’t handling the situation well, although he was doing his best to keep me from seeing how distressed and frightened he was. Every morning, he walked with me to meet Dr. Abbey, and kissed me on the cheek before he left us alone together. From there, he walked to the lobby, met up with Foxy, and left the building, heading out into the woods to collect samples for Dr. Abbey’s studies. He’d brought back six infected humans, three infected deer, and two dead wolves in just the last few days. It seemed to help him, and it wasn’t like he needed to worry about infection. Idleness was a much bigger threat for him. It left him too much time to think about what was happening—and as we both knew, Shaun’s mind was his own greatest enemy. I was aware that my phantom twin was waiting in the wings, ready to replace me the second I stepped aside. She would probably have done it before then, if she’d thought Shaun would let her get away with it.
I knew she couldn’t think anything: that she was just a function of the damage my death had done to the man who loved me more than anything else in the world, and the damage he’d done to himself as he struggled to adjust to a world that didn’t contain me anymore. She was a figment, a phantom, incapable of thinking anything that Shaun didn’t think first. Her desire to replace me was a reflection of his deep-set fear of being left alone again. As long as he held on to her, he would never have to worry about me leaving him. I couldn’t be angry at him—not for that. I understood his terror all too well. So I had to settle for being mad at someone who didn’t exist for reinforcing those fears, and making him think that I was going to leave him.
Even though she might be right. It was getting harder and harder to get out of bed, and my nosebleeds were becoming more frequent. Dr. Abbey was patching the leaks as quickly as she could find them, but without knowing the underlying problem, I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to do enough. I was going.
I just didn’t know where.
I was staring at the ceiling, considering the virtues of getting up and finding something to drink—Dr. Abbey kept orange juice in the little fridge next to my blood samples—when someone knocked on the doorframe. I lifted my head to see a tall, Nordic-looking woman with ice-blonde hair standing there, wearing weathered blue jeans, a green cable-knit sweater, and sensible sneakers. I blinked once, my mind briefly overlaying her image with a silk blouse, red pencil skirt, and stiletto heels that would sound like gunshots whenever she took a step.
But Dr. Shaw had been an illusion, cold and bright and mirror-brittle, only intended to get the woman behind it to the finish line before the mask was dropped. Dr. Danika Kimberley was real, a warm, living, smiling human woman who walked to my side and brushed my hair away from my forehead
the way I’d always imagined a mother would. “Hello there, you silly little thing,” she said, voice thick with unshed tears. Her accent was Welsh: She was a long way from home. “Had to go and break yourself, didn’t you just? I suppose it was a decent excuse to see me again, although really, you could have just called, and saved us both the trouble.”
“I thought you’d have more fun this way,” I said, and forced myself to smile.
Dr. Kimberley hadn’t been a part of the team that grew me, but she’d been associated with them, close enough to the heart of the project that she’d been able to steal some of my time for her own use. She had claimed sleep studies and analysis of my brain waves, anything to keep her interventions believable while she worked to get me the hell out of there. I would be forever grateful to her for that, even as her position within the EIS guaranteed that I would never really be able to trust her.
“Well, you’ll be glad to know that Shannon sent me copies of your scans to review while I was on the way over here, and there’s nothing wrong with your neural integration. I’ll want to run a few more tests, of course, for the sake of being thorough, but it looks as if your memories are locked in there as tight as ever.” She leaned over and tapped one finger against my forehead, like she was checking a melon to see how ripe it was. “Your network is not unsnarling. Your troubles are purely physical, nothing to do with those early, implanted thoughts.”
I relaxed slightly, letting out a breath I’d only been half-aware of holding. I was Georgia Mason because of the memories implanted in me during the final decanting process at the CDC: They had grown a body from the original Georgia’s genetic material, but even as identical twins would grow up to be different people, I would have become someone very different if I hadn’t been programmed with all the original’s thought patterns and recovered memories. Maybe it was a crime that the woman I should have become had never been allowed to develop, but I didn’t see it that way. I was me because of those memories. I didn’t want to lose myself. I needed to be here.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked. “Am I just too awesome for this world?”
“Something like that, yes.” Dr. Kimberley pulled a chair over to my bedside and sat down. There was a flicker of motion from the doorway. I glanced past her. Dr. Abbey was standing there, her face drawn in an expression of silent regret. My heart seized in my chest, cramping up until I couldn’t breathe. Dr. Abbey never made that face. Dr. Abbey raged and scowled and demanded that the world adhere to her standards. She didn’t stand there refusing to meet my eyes while her own eyes grew over-wet with tears.
Dr. Kimberley took my hand in both of hers. I transferred my terrified gaze to her.
“I need you to remain calm,” she said. “Can you do that for me, or would you like a sedative first? I have some that won’t put an undue amount of pressure on your system.”
I wanted to ask why she would come prepared with sedatives, but I was direly afraid that I already knew the answer; more, I didn’t want to hear the careful, clinical words she would use in answering me, each chosen to convey the maximum amount of information, with the minimum possible amount of distress. Her bedside manner could be cold at times. No one was ever going to say that it was anything less than professional.
“I don’t need a sedative,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “We need to run more tests. We need to be sure. But I believe we’ve found a cause.”
“Tell me,” I said.
She did.
Two
Foxy trotted off when we reached the forestry center door, heading for the decontamination rooms. She needed to strip off her gear and scrub herself clean as soon as possible, to avoid potential infection. I needed to decontaminate—I was a danger to others until I did—but I wasn’t in any hurry. There was no way for me to catch Kellis-Amberlee, and Dr. Abbey had taken to requesting blood samples every time I showered, just in case she could catch my cells in the process of doing something interesting. She never explained what “something interesting” meant, and to be honest, I was afraid to ask. If anyone was going to mutate me into some sort of giant green monster, it was probably going to be her.
I sauntered down the hall, waving to a few of Dr. Abbey’s research assistants as they passed on the catwalks overhead. Most waved back. Some I knew by name; others were just a part of the ever-shifting landscape of the place. They were all individuals. Jill had a prosthetic leg and rolled her eyes a lot. Tom walked in a constant mild funk of pot smoke, and was always happy to share a joint in the hydroponics section—an offer I had taken him up on several times, when the pressure of worrying about George got to be too much. In the end, though, they were all the same. They were the people who were going to help Dr. Abbey find a way to save Georgia. Nothing else mattered.
The first decontamination room I came to was unlocked. I slipped inside and disrobed, shoving my soiled clothes into the hamper before I stepped into range of the showerheads. “Shaun Mason, visitor,” I said clearly. “Preferred temperature: hot. Preferred scent: eucalyptus. Duration, max six minutes.”
“Preferences have been noted and logged, Shaun Mason,” said the bland, pleasant voice of the shower. “Did you have a productive excursion?” The water came on, blasting me from all sides.
“Caught two more zombie deer, and I think there’s a bear somewhere nearby,” I said. “I will forgive the oatmeal in this place if there’s a bear. I haven’t shot a zombie bear in ages.”
“Wow, that’s interesting,” said the shower. “Dr. Abbey wishes me to remind you that you will need to submit to both a blood test and a small donation before you will be allowed to exit the chamber.” I wasn’t really having a conversation with the shower, of course: A.I. technology isn’t that advanced. The decontamination system had a variety of preprogrammed responses and cues, which it cycled through according to the input it received. It flagged keywords at the same time; when Dr. Abbey got the report on the decon, she would also receive a memo listing my kills and the fact that I suspected a bear of living somewhere nearby.
I used to hate it when computers talked to me. After a few years in the middle of nowhere, I’ve gotten more resigned to the fact that it’s never going to stop, and I’ve become more willing to talk back. At least that way I’m carrying on a conversation with something that’s not in my head.
“Oh, come on,” said George’s voice. “The things in your head aren’t so bad.”
I knew I shouldn’t turn around, that turning around would do nothing good for my state of mind. I turned anyway, and there she was, naked, leaning up against the shower’s far wall and smiling a slow, sly smile. I had to give my hallucinations this much: They were high quality. Water beaded on her skin, and when she uncrossed her arms, I saw the flash of her ID tattoo on the inside of her wrist. The original George had had that tattoo. The current one didn’t. The CDC had never prepped her for release—had never prepped her for me—and since she hadn’t bothered to renew her license after we fled the country, neither of us had ever seen the point of seeking out an underground tattoo parlor. Tattoos were dangerous enough under rigidly controlled and sterile conditions. Vanity wasn’t enough reason to get one.
“Go away,” I said. “I don’t need you here.”
“But you do, Shaun, you do,” she said. “When’s the last time you saw your little clone up and walking around under her own power, huh? She’s running down. You need to come back to me while I’m still willing to have you.”
“See, that’s the awful part,” I said, giving her one last look before I turned my back, closing my eyes and tilting my face up into the spray. “I know you’ll always be willing to have me. I’m the only thing you have. But I have a life that doesn’t have to include you if I don’t want it to. Go away.”
“You’ll always want me,” she whispered, her fingers brushing the back of my neck one last time. I knew that if I turned around to look, she would be gone—for now. Because the worst part of it was, she was right. I would
always want her. She was safe. She couldn’t leave me. Not like the original had; not like the replacement might. The fake could never go anywhere.
I went still, letting the water run over me. Was that really how I thought of her? The “replacement”? Sure, she wasn’t the first George, but she wasn’t a replacement. She was George. In every way that mattered, she was George. There wasn’t a word for the part she played in my life. She was my sister, in that I didn’t have any other model for what a sister was: someone who loved me, had always loved me, would always love me, no matter what. I could chase a million rabbits down the burrows in my head, and she would still be waiting for me when I popped back out. She believed in me, even when I was too lost to believe in myself. She understood me better than I understood myself.
She was my sister because the Masons had wanted us to be family, and she was my family because there was no one else in the world who loved, wanted, and accepted me the way that she did. She wasn’t a replacement. She was George.
The shower said pleasantly, “Please close your mouth and eyes,” and the water became bleach, cold and caustic and sleeting down over me like a punishment. I stayed where I was, enduring it as my due. I deserved a little suffering for even thinking the word “replacement,” even if it went unspoken. She was sick. She needed me. I couldn’t let myself weaken.
But maybe it was time, after all this was over and we were getting ready to head home, for me to talk to Dr. Abbey about steps we could take to quiet the voices in my head. I had tried drugs once before, and it hadn’t worked out so well—it had made me actively suicidal, which was no good—but that had been before George returned from the grave. As long as I had one of her, I could be basically okay. I just couldn’t be alone, that was all. Not that big a deal. Not that unusual a thing. And if we were going home, if we were lucky enough to be going home…