and less the longer there was a living, breathing George for me to hold on to, but that didn’t mean she was gone. It just meant my crazy was biding its time, waiting to strike when I was least prepared. You don’t go that far past the borders of Crazytown and come waltzing out unscathed.
The worst part of it was that she—the dead girl’s voice in my head—was right, because she was always right. I wanted to know if George was going to die. There was no way I could survive that twice.
Becks looked at me levelly. “She’s stable, Shaun. Those doctors from the EIS took out the CDC fail-safes, and they couldn’t actually build a human body that would self-destruct without help. The science isn’t that good.”
“Yet,” said Alaric. He shook his head. “I believe in her now, Shaun. I mean, she’s right when she says she’s an imperfect copy—the Kellis-Amberlee kept turning her brain’s basic functions back on, but there was a little bit more tissue loss every time. That doesn’t mean she’s not who she says she is. She never had the chance to become anybody else.”
“God.” Becks shuddered. “Headshots just became a hell of a lot more important to me.”
I frowned, finishing off my lukewarm coffee before I asked, “Why?”
“Because Miss Atherton has just realized one of the things the CDC would prefer the population not be aware of.” Dr. Shoji took the seat next to Alaric. “I hope you don’t mind my joining you. When I realized you were finally getting around to discussing the science, I thought you might like the opportunity to question someone who used to be involved with it.”
My eyes narrowed. “You mean—”
“No, no.” He put his hands up, motioning for me to stay calm. “I left that part of my life behind a long time ago. There were some ethical lines I couldn’t bring myself to cross, and at that point… I was still suited to work in the private sector—hence my work with the Kauai Institute—but I could no longer stomach the CDC.”
“The cross-infection trials Kelly mentioned,” said Alaric.
It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. When we first got to Dr. Abbey’s lab—what felt like a million years ago—we’d still been traveling with Kelly Connolly. In an effort to show us that the CDC wasn’t all rainbows and roses, Dr. Abbey asked her about some cross-infection trials using prisoners who “volunteered” to be injected with multiple strains of KA. All of them died.
“Yes,” said Dr. Shoji. “Those men and women died horribly, and they didn’t have to. That was when I realized it had to end. I stopped working on things that we didn’t need to do—and forgive me, Shaun, but finding a new way of bringing back the dead wasn’t something that needed to be a priority. We’d already done that. It didn’t work out well.”
“It’s cool,” I said.
Slowly, Becks said, “Kellis-Amberlee ‘raises the dead’ by turning the body’s electrical impulses back on. It’s like a viral defibrillator that just keeps on working, and working, and working, until there’s nothing left to work with. If they got a clean brain scan off of Georgia after you shot her, that means her brain was turned on at the time. They took their scans off a living brain.”
Dr. Shoji nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “That’s how the technology works. It was originally intended to be a treatment for Alzheimer’s, a way of calling back memories that were still present, but had become… clouded, let’s say. Misplaced somehow. Once we realized that it could be used on the victims of Kellis-Amberlee, there was hope that we’d be able to bring them back to themselves—that memory recall could be used as a form of treatment, that, combined with antivirals and proper therapy, they could be cured.”
“So why didn’t it work?” I asked.
“The virus didn’t give up that easily. Nothing we did resulted in anything but agitation in the subjects. Some researchers, myself included, were concerned that we might actually cause the infected to become self-aware. People with rabies are aware that they’ve done horrible things. They simply can’t prevent themselves from doing them. No one wanted that with Kellis-Amberlee, and so the project was suspended.”
“Why didn’t you publish?” asked Becks.
“For the same reason the government is shooting everybody with a reservoir condition,” said Alaric. “If they let it get out that people are still thinking, no one’s going to pull the trigger. And then there won’t be anyone left to do the curing, because we’ll all be zombies.”
I frowned. “I’m not following.”
“They’re saying that once someone is infected, the virus takes over, but they’re still in there.” The engines might be soft, but they were loud enough that I hadn’t heard George walking up until she spoke. I turned to see her standing beside me, hair still rumpled from sleep, sunglasses in her hand. She looked at Dr. Shoji and asked, “Do zombies think?”
“No,” he said. “The virus does their thinking for them, thank God, because Alaric is right. If people stop shooting because they’re afraid of committing murder, we’re all going to die. But there’s a chance—not a huge chance, but a chance—that zombies dream.”
George nodded, leaning against the seat next to me. “That’s what I thought you were going to say. How long before we land?”
“We have about an hour before we begin our initial descent into Washington D.C.,” said Dr. Shoji. “How are you feeling?”
“Exhausted. I need a Coke.”
I was never going to get tired of hearing those words. “I’ll get you one,” I said, standing. “I needed to get another coffee anyway.”
She slid into my seat, flashing me a quick, grateful smile. Then she leaned forward, posture making it clear that she was asking Dr. Shoji a question. Probably more things about zombies thinking. Whatever it was, they would fill me in later.
I walked to the self-serve kitchenette at the back of the plane, pulling a can of Coke from the refrigerator unit before pouring myself a cup of blessedly hot coffee. There were wrapped cheese and turkey sandwiches in one of the cold drawers over the coffee machine. I took down three of those—one for me, one for George, and one for the first person who asked where their sandwich was. We needed to keep our strength up if we were going to go take on the United States government. Which was, by the way, insane.
I didn’t reply. It felt weird, trying to reject that little inner voice when it was the only thing that had kept me even halfway functional in the months following the real Georgia’s death, but I couldn’t have them both, and given the choice, I’d take the George I could share with other people. That made her real. I needed real. I needed real to anchor me to the world, because otherwise I was going to slip right over the edge.
Going all the way crazy seemed a lot less appealing now than it had a few weeks ago. I used to view a total break with reality as a sort of psychological permission to spend the rest of my life—however long or short it happened to be—with George, and maybe even be happy. Having a living, breathing woman with her face made me admit that it wouldn’t make me happy. The George in my head wasn’t the real thing. Neither was the clone, if you wanted to get technical, but I’ve never been a technical guy. I needed Georgia in my life. I chose the one who was sitting in the cabin, waiting for her Coke.
Alaric had come around surprisingly quickly, after he finished yelling at us for not keeping him updated while we were in Seattle. Typical Newsie; he was less upset about the CDC raising the dead than he was about us not sending him regular reports. He’d spent about half an hour quizzing George on everything he could think of while Becks and I were getting us packed to go. She must have passed, because when he was done, he’d looked at me, said, “It’s her,” and started listening to her like she’d never died in the first place. If only it was going to be that easy for everyone.
“What did I miss?” I asked, walking back over to the group. George stuck her hand out as soon as I was close enough. I passed her the Coke and a sandwich, and was rewarded with a brief smile. She was wearing her sunglasses again, even though she didn’t technically need them. We were all frankly more comfortable that way.
“Dr. Shoji was explaining the landing plan,” said Becks. “We’re going to set down at the Montgomery County Airpark in Maryland, and drive from there.”
“The airport has been owned by the EIS since shortly after the Rising,” said Dr. Shoji. “We’ve managed to resist all CDC efforts to buy it from us, and since we’re still officially on the books as a functional organization, they haven’t been able to simply take it. There’s a ground crew waiting, and they’ve promised to have a vehicle ready.”
