Deadline

this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood caused my body to betray me, transforming me from a living, thinking human being into something better suited for a horror movie. I remember the feeling of the hypodermic needle biting into my arm, and the cold, absolute dread as I watched the lights on the blood test unit as they went red, one after the other. I remember the look on Shaun’s face when he realized that this was it, this was really happening, and there wasn’t going to be any clever third-act solution that got me out of the van alive.

I remember the gun pressing against my skin. It was cool, and it was soothing, because it meant that Shaun was going to do his duty. No one was going to get hurt—no one who hadn’t been hurt already. This was something we’d never planned for. I always knew that one day he’d push his luck too far, and I’d lose him. Neither of us ever dreamed that he’d be the one losing I wanted to tell him it would be okay. I wanted to lie to him. I couldn’t. There wasn’t time.

I remember starting to write. I remember thinking that this was it; this was my last chance to say anything I wanted to say to the world. This was the thing I was going to be judged on, now and forever.

I remember feeling my mind start to go. I remember the fear.

I remember the sound of Shaun pulling the trigger.

By all rights, I shouldn’t remember anything after that because that’s where my story ended. Curtain down, save file, that’s a wrap. Once the bullet hits the spinal cord, you’re out, you’re done, you don’t have to worry about this shit anymore. You definitely shouldn’t find yourself waking up in a room that looks suspiciously like a CDC holding facility, with no one to talk to but some unidentified voice on the other side of a one-way mirror. So what the hell did I do to get so lucky?

The room was practically barren, containing nothing but a bed with white blankets and a rounded white bedside table—bolted to the floor, of course. Wouldn’t do to have the mysteriously resurrected dead journalist throwing things at the mirror that took up most of one wall. The only wall with a door, naturally. It was locked. I’d tried the knob, and then I’d searched the walls around it for a blood test unit, in the vain hope that checking out clean would make the locks let go and release me. There weren’t any. That was chilling all by itself. I grew up in a post-Rising world, one where blood tests and the threat of infection are a part of daily life. I’m sure I’d been in sealed rooms without testing units before. I had to have been. I just couldn’t remember any.

There was something else the room was lacking: clocks, or windows, or anything else that might let me know how much time had passed since I woke up, much less how much time had passed before I woke up. There was a voice from the speaker above the mirror when I first woke up, an unfamiliar voice that asked my name and what the last thing I remembered was. I’d answered him—“My name is Georgia Mason. What the fuck is going on here?”—and then he went away, cutting off communication without answering my question. That might have been ten minutes ago. It might have been ten hours ago. The lights overhead glared steady and white, not so much as flickering as the seconds went slipping past.

That was another thing. The light was hard and white, the sort of industrial fluorescent lighting that’s been popular in medical facilities since long before the Rising. It should have been burning my eyes like acid by now. I was diagnosed with retinal Kellis-Amberlee when I was a kid, meaning that the same disease that causes the dead to rise had taken up permanent residence in my eyeballs. It gave me excellent low-light vision, and a tendency to get migraines if I so much as tried to watch normal television without my sunglasses on.

Well, I wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and it wasn’t like I could dim the lights in a room with no light switches or computer controls. Even if it had been only ten minutes since I woke, that was long enough for me to risk permanently damaging my eyesight, if not destroying it entirely. But my eyes didn’t even itch. All I felt was thirsty, and a vague, gnawing hunger in the pit of my stomach, like lunch might be a good idea sometime soon. There was no headache. I honestly couldn’t decide wheter or not that was a good sign.

My palms were starting to sweat as the anxiety really set in. I scrubbed them hard against the legs of the unfamiliar white cotton pajamas. Everything in this room was unfamiliar—even me. I’ve never been heavy—a life spent running after stories and running for your life doesn’t allow for carrying excess weight—but the girl I saw reflected in the one-way mirror was thin to the point of being wrung-out and scrawny. She looked like she’d be easy to break. Her hair was dark enough to be mine, but it was also too long, falling in thick curls to her shoulders. I’ve never in my life allowed my hair to get that long. Hair like that is a passive form of suicide when you do what I do for a living. And her eyes…

When I looked at the face reflected in the mirror, I could see a ring of copper-brown all around her pupils. That, more than anything else, was making it all but impossible to think of the face as my own. Because I don’t have visible irises. I have pupils that fill all the space not occupied by sclera, giving me a black, almost emotionless stare. Those weren’t my eyes. But my eyes didn’t hurt. Which meant that either those were my eyes, and my retinal KA had somehow been cured, or Buffy was right when she said the afterlife existed, and this was hell.

I stared at the unfamiliar eyes in my reflection for a moment more before I went back to what seemed to have become my primary activity: pacing back and forth and trying to think. The fact that I had to do it quietly, with no one to talk to or bounce things off, made it a hell of a lot harder. I’ve always thought better when I do it out loud, and this was the first time in my adult life that I’d been anywhere without at least one personal recorder running. I’m an accredited journalist. When I talk to myself, it’s not a sign of insanity; it’s just me making sure I don’t lose important material before I have the chance to get to a keyboard and write it all down.

None of this was right. Even if they had some sort of experimental treatment that could reverse the effects of amplification, there would have been somebody there to explain things to me. Shaun would have been there. There it was: the reason I knew that this, whatever it was, was a long way from being right. I remembered him pulling the trigger. Even assuming it was a false memory, even assuming that never happened, why wasn’t he here? Shaun would move Heaven and Earth to be with me. I briefly entertained the notion that he might be off forcing the voices from the intercom to tell him where I was, and then regretfully dismissed it.

Something would have exploded by now, if that was the situation.

“Goddammit.” I scowled at the white wall in front of me, turned, and started walking in the other direction. The vague hunger was getting worse, and was accompanied by a new, more frustrating sensation: the need to pee. If someone didn’t let me out soon, I was going to have a whole new set of problems to contend with.

“Run the timeline, George,” I said, trying to take some comfort in the still-familiar sound of my own voice. Everything else may have changed, but not that. “You were in Sacramento with Rick and Shaun, running for the van. Something hit you in the arm. One of those syringes like they used at the Ryman farm. The test came back positive. Rick left. And then… then…” I faltered, having trouble finding the words, even if there was no one else to hear them.

Everyone who grew up after the Rising knows what happens when you come into contact with the live form of Kellis-Amberlee. You essentially go rabid, becoming a mindless slave to the virus and its needs. You become a zombie, and you do what every zombie exists to do. You bite. You infect. You kill. You feed. You don’t wake up in a white room, wearing white pajamas, and wondering how your brother was able to shoot you in the neck without even leaving a scar.

Scars. I stopped in my tracks before wheeling and stalking back to the mirror, pulling the lids on my right eye apart while I studied its reflection. I learned how to look at my own eyes when I was eleven. That’s when I got my first pair of protective contacts. That’s also when I got my first visible retinal scarring, little patches of tissue that had been so scorched by the sun that they would never recover. We caught it in time to prevent there being any major vision loss, and I got a lot more careful after that. The scarring was there to remind me every day, creating small blind spots at the center of my vision. Nothing major. Nothing that prevented my working in the field. Just… little spots.

My pupil contracted to almost nothing as the light hit it. The spots weren’t there. I could see clearly, without any gaps.

“Oh,” I said, lowering my hand. “I guess that makes sense.”

When I first woke up, the voice from the intercom told me that all I had to do was speak and someone would hear me. I looked up toward the speaker. “A little help here?” I said. “I need to pee really bad.”

There was no response. I hadn’t honestly been expecting one. Turning my back on the mirror, I walked to the bed and settled into a cross-legged position atop the mattress, closing my eyes. And then I started waiting. There