by Mira Grant
Dr. Abbey’s people had been rebuilding the forestry center to suit their needs for years. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that their rebuilding had included a full operating theater, complete with observation room. The fact was so logical that it seemed almost silly to question it. I walked silently to the open chair and sat, folding my hands white-knuckled on my knees. Maggie put her right hand on my shoulder. I didn’t turn. I knew that if I looked at her, she would be overflowing with sympathy, so concerned for my well-being that she couldn’t contain it. And I would break. That would be one step too far into the darkness, and there would be no coming back.
Below me, a woman who looked exactly like my sister lay naked on an operating table, a ventilator covering her nose and mouth. I would have thought that she was George, if not for her hair, which had been shaved completely off—that, and her lack of scars. George didn’t take the kind of risks I did, because she couldn’t afford to. There was still no such thing as a risk-free life. She nicked her hands, skinned her knees, went through all the small injuries that the body was heir to, especially when that body lived in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. This girl, this… body, was pristine. She had never opened her eyes, never seen the sun, never had the memories of a dead woman used to jump-start her cloned mind into sudden self-awareness. She was an empty shell.
A shell that contained something we needed. Dr. Shoji moved around the motionless clone, checking machines, checking his tools. He barely looked up when the door opened and Dr. Abbey backed into the room, pulling George’s bed. George followed, eyes closed, surrounded by the silent sentinels of her IVs. Dr. Kimberley came last.
There was a pause while all three of the doctors left the room to scrub up and get ready for what was to come. When they returned, they were gowned in green, faces and hands covered, sterile. Dr. Kimberley sprayed some sort of aerosol, decontaminating the room.
“This process used to be a lot more complicated,” said one of the assistants—Jill. She sounded like she was trying to be helpful. Just the sound of her voice made me want to punch her lights out. “Sterilizing a room was difficult and time-consuming, and the risk of infection was much higher than it is now. The spray binds to particles in the air, and—”
“Not right now, okay?” interrupted Alaric. “That’s our friend down there. We don’t want to talk about this now.”
“Oh,” said Jill. “Sorry.” She fell silent. The rest of us remained that way.
In the theater below, Dr. Shoji picked up a scalpel.
Four
I opened my eyes, and the world was filled with light. Too much light: It burned. I made a wordless sound of protest, clapping my hands over my eyes. The fact that I still had hands, still had eyes, was great; it spoke to survival, or at least the sort of result where I was mostly intact at the end. The fact that my eyes felt like great balls of molten lava shoved into my skull was a lot less awesome.
“Someone get me a UV blocker,” snapped a voice. It had a Welsh accent. I ran through my mental catalog of voices, relieved that I still had that, and identified it as belonging to Dr. Kimberley. “Were none of you thinking?”
There was a clatter as someone rushed to get a UV blocker for her. I took a breath and tried to focus past the pain in my eyes, which was already fading. I wanted to know what else was going on with me.
First: There was no other pain. Just the eyes, and even as I thought about the absence of pain elsewhere, that pain blinked out, gone like it had never happened. I couldn’t seem to feel anything below my breastbone. That realization made my breath hitch for a moment, but I caught myself, forcing the panic down. Dr. Kimberley would never have allowed them to cut off anything I was going to need later. Neither would Dr. Abbey. I didn’t know Dr. Shoji well enough to trust him that completely, but the other two? I would trust them with my life. I had trusted them with my life. I just had to believe that I’d been right to do so.
“Here you go,” said another voice—Dr. Abbey—before a hand tugged at my wrist, trying to pull it back down to my side. “You have to uncover your eyes now, Georgia. I promise, this will help.”
I tried to respond. My lips wouldn’t obey me, and what came out was a petulant grunt.
“The paralytics we used to keep you from moving are still working their way out of your system,” she said. “Only the fact that you were hurting let you move in the first place. Now trust me, and let me work.”
I stopped resisting. She pulled my hands down, first one and then the other, positioning them by my sides. The way she placed them meant that I could feel the curve of my hips, the solid swell of bone and muscle under my fingers. The sheer solidity of my own body was soothing. I stopped fighting against the drugs. They would wear off soon enough.
Something light settled on the bridge of my nose. “You can open your eyes now,” said Dr. Kimberley. “I’d like if you’d try to do that for me. I need to see whether you have any voluntary muscle movement, or if it’s all reflex.”
Open my eyes. Right. I could do that. Maybe. I struggled to remember how the normally effortless motion was supposed to go, fighting against the thick lassitude that covered me. Finally, wrenchingly, my eyelids opened, and I was staring at the ceiling.
“There you are.” Dr. Kimberley leaned over me, smiling. “You should be able to move soon. Not that you should. In fact, if you start moving too much, we’ll be knocking you out again. So don’t.”
“Bedside manner,” said Dr. Abbey. “Get one.”
“Oh, as if you’re one to talk?” Dr. Kimberley briefly wrinkled her nose before returning her attention to me. “All right, we’re going to go over the results of your surgery in order of most to least important, and we’re going to do it now, while you’re still too drugged to interrupt me. Blink once if you understand.”
I blinked. There was an oddly hollow quality to the light in the room, like it had been stripped of some essential, nearly intangible element.
“First, you’ll be happy to know that we were able to replace your kidneys and liver with the cloned organs,” she said. “All the necessary blood transfusions were conducted before the supply was contaminated. It was tight, but we managed it. You’re going to be all right, Georgia. Your body is working properly again.”
“Well, mostly,” said Dr. Abbey.
Dr. Kimberley grimaced. “Yes,” she agreed, in a reluctant tone. “Mostly. The danger of clones has always been keeping them from spontaneously amplifying when they take their first breath of contaminated air—and all air is contaminated. There’s not a safe breeze on the planet. In this case, we were able to seal and shut down a room, but we couldn’t decontaminate your entire body. Doing that would have wrecked your immune system, and caused more problems than we were already struggling to solve.”
“Full autoimmune collapse is not the gift that keeps on giving,” said Dr. Abbey. She sounded almost… cheerful, like she was finally getting everything she’d ever wanted, and had only needed my near death to put the last pieces into place. “So you still have an immune system, and now you have organs that work, and still have that factory-fresh smell. They should be good for another fifty or sixty years. I am going to want you and Shaun in here every eighteen months, so that I can look you over and be sure that you haven’t done anything perishingly stupid to yourself.”
That was always a risk, especially with Shaun as my primary companion and arbiter of whether or not something was a good idea. I blinked to indicate my understanding.
“Good, good,” said Dr. Kimberley. “We were able to seal your incisions almost immediately; there will be minimal scarring, and you should be up and about by the end of the day. I recommend as much bed rest as possible for the next week. No jumping jacks, marathons, or vigorous sex.”
My cheeks heated. Dr. Abbey cackled. Not laughed—cackled, the gleeful sound of a wild creature in the deep woods.
“Look, her blush reflex works,” she said. “I told you we replaced enough blood for normal vascular function.”
“If she were equipped with a penis, I suppose you’d be suggesting direct stimulation, just to see whether she could become aroused.” Dr. Kimberley sounded peevish. I decided she was my hero.
“Yes, I would,” said Dr. Abbey. She leaned over so that I could see her face. “Look. We know that reservoir conditions are brought on by an interaction between the virus and the host body, and that specific host bodies will have a tropism toward specific reservoir conditions. Identical twins are more likely to develop identical conditions than strangers who have been exposed to the same root strain of Kellis-Amberlee. We don’t know why it happens that way. We just know that it does. Even induced conditions, like the ones in Joe or the ones the CDC attempted to force in some of their clones, will usually break along genetic lines. I always said that if you were exposed to a concentrated enough dose of the virus, while unable to amplify for whatever reason, that you would probably develop either retinal or spinal Kellis-Amberlee. They’re connected. Not sure why. But they tend to co-manifest about half the time, and—”
“You know, Shannon, sometimes I suspect you could keep talking while the building collapsed around your ears, as long as you felt you had an audience,” said Dr. Kimberley mildly. “Your eyes hurt, Georgia, is that correct?”
I blinked once. After Dr. Abbey’s speech, I was pretty sure I knew why my eyes hurt, but I still wanted to hear her say it out loud.
“I am sorry to have to say this, but judging by the viral structures building in your aqueous humor, you are in the early stages of retinal Kellis-Amberlee. We discussed removing your eyes and attempting a transplant, but we didn’t want to take any such drastic steps without your consent.”
The same adrenaline that had allowed me to raise my arms earlier flooded back into my system, allowing me to shake my head very slightly. It was barely more than a rocking from side to side.
It was enough. Dr. Abbey smiled. “I didn’t think so,” she said. She held up a syringe, and said, “We’re going to put you back under for a little while, so that you can process out the worst of the drugs. You may experience some discomfort when you wake. It shouldn’t be too extreme. We’re going to turn the lights out, and I’ll see if I can’t scrounge you up some sunglasses. All right?”
I couldn’t answer her—that sort of fine motor movement was still beyond me—and so I simply closed my eyes. Something pricked the skin on the inside of my elbow, and a cool, tingling sensation flowed into my veins. Sometime after that, consciousness simply slipped away.
When I woke for the second time, the room was dark; the IV lines had been removed, leaving me free to get out of the bed; and Shaun was curled up next to me like the world’s biggest house cat, his head resting on my chest and his arm wrapped around my waist, holding me possessively in place.
I raised my free arm and poked him in the head. He didn’t move.
“Shaun.”
No reaction.
“Shaun.”
No reaction.
“Shaun, if I don’t get up and pee right now, everything is going to be awful. Everything. Let me up.”
No reaction.
I sighed. “Goddammit, Shaun, don’t be an asshole.”
His eyes opened. Lifting his head, he gave me a smile that could have melted snow, and said, “You calling me an asshole is the sweetest sound I’ve ever heard.”
I smiled back. I couldn’t stop myself. “That’s because you are one. Now let me up.”
He rolled away, letting me slide out of the bed. My legs were shaky, but they held. True to Dr. Abbey’s word, there was a pair of sunglasses on the bedside table. I slid them on, further darkening the room. My eyes hadn’t finished changing. When they did, wearing sunglasses in the dark would become second nature again, and the lack of light wouldn’t bother me at all.
When I turned, Shaun was sitting up in the bed, watching me. “Are you upset?” he asked, in a quiet tone.
I had to stop to think about it. Finally, I said, “Yes, and no. I didn’t exactly miss having fucked-up eyes. We’re going to have to hang so many curtains.” Back to migraines and staying inside when the sun was highest; back to constant vigilance, to keep from damaging myself further. “But it’s going to be nice, I guess. Having my reflection look right.” It might stop some of those dreams, the ones where the real Georgia Mason showed up and took her life back. “Besides, think of all the lightbulbs we’ll save.”
Shaun laughed. “There you go,” he said. “Silver lining.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. Because really, that was the biggest thing. My eyes had been damaged by the virus. But I got to stay. I got to stay with him, in the world.
That was all that really mattered.
Five
I was asleep by the time Georgia came back from the bathroom. I woke up to find her in my arms, sunglasses still seated firmly on her nose. She didn’t stir as I extricated myself, tiptoed out of the room, and started down the hall toward the kitchenette. I needed coffee. Coffee would make everything better.
Mahir was already waiting there, his hands cupped around a mug of tea. He raised his head at the sound of footsteps, and asked, “Well?”
“She’s okay.” The words were like a prayer. I smiled, and repeated them: “She’s okay.”
“Thank God. Is she awake?”
“Not right now. They told you about the…?” I pointed to my left eye.
Mahir nodded. “Yes. I’m sure she’ll adapt well. You both will.”
“Yeah. About that.” Maybe it was selfish to focus on myself at a time like this, but if George was going to live, I was going to stay with her. Completely with her, no matter what that required. “Before we go, I’m going to talk to Dr. Abbey about getting myself medicated. I’m tired of this.”
“That sounds like a very wise idea,” said Mahir. “Are you going to disappear again? Never come to see us?”
“We have to come back here every eighteen months,” said George. I turned. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, sunglasses in place, and she looked so right that my knees went weak. “Maybe we can arrange to meet up. See each other. Debrief.”
Mahir smiled. “I’d like that.”
There was a pot of coffee on the hot plate. I went to pour myself a cup, finally content, all the way down to my bones. It was going to be okay. George was going to live; I was going to get better; we were going to find a way to balance our privacy with our responsibilities. It wasn’t happy ever after—that doesn’t happen until you’re dead—but for the moment, considering the alternatives, it was more than close enough for me.
Acknowledgments
So we have reached the end. Some of you will skip this as meaningless errata; others will read it carefully, to keep the book from being over. I’ve been in both camps, in my day, so: If you’re done, that’s fine. Thank you for coming with me this far. There are no deep secrets or precious reveals past this point, and you can go, if you like. If you want to stick around for just a little while longer, though, I would appreciate it.
Thanks to Merav Hoffman, in whose dining room most of Countdown was written, one frantic entry at a time; I was racing the clock daily, which can’t have made me the most pleasant of houseguests. She has always been understanding of the time I give to fictional friends when she’s standing right there, waiting for her shot at my attention.
Thanks to Michelle Dockrey, who picked me up when I was shattered and put me back together one piece at a time. She was with me through the completion of Feed, and has been my greatest cheerleader through these stories—and through my life, which I can’t imagine without her in it. She hears the ideas before I write them down, and she fixes them after I do.
Thanks to Brooke Abbey, who was, yes, the model for Dr. Shannon Abbey—although my post-zombie mad scientist is a little crankier than her real-life counterpart. She has fact-checked the drug use and pharmaceuticals throughout these stories, making them more accurate than they have any right to be.
Thanks to Michael Ellis, wit
hout whom this series might never have been started, much less completed; he listened to more rambling about this setting than any human being should have been expected to endure, and he did it all with goodness and with grace.
Thanks to Kate Secor and Gian-Paolo Musumeci, at whose dining room table parts of the overarching plot were broken down and built back up, all culminating in the day when I was asked a question that changed absolutely everything.
Thanks to DongWon Song, who took a chance on an urban fantasy author with a manuscript about zombies in one hand and a lot of big ideas in the other. He made this series what it is. I will forever be grateful to him.
Thanks to Diana Fox, for bringing me to DongWon in the first place, for trusting that I knew what I was talking about and would see this story to its necessary ending.
Thanks to Will Hinton, who has done his best to meet my sometimes idiosyncratic needs, and who has seen this volume from concept to completion.
Thanks to Chris Mangum, Amy McNally, Ryan Nutick, Amber Benson, Sarah Kuhn, Margaret Dunlap, Cat Valente, Patty Pace, Phil Ames, Sunil Patel, Amanda Weinstein, Talis Kimberley, Will Frank, Torrey Stenmark, Amanda Perry, Lauren Panepinto, Ellen Wright, the whole team at Orbit, and as always, to Shawn Connelly, for keeping me on an even keel. I know it can be a challenge, and I appreciate it more than you will ever know.