—SHAUN MASON
My name is Georgia Carolyn Mason. I belong to the vast, unspoken class of people known as the Orphans of the Rising, individuals who were under two years of age when their parents were killed. Individuals who were too young to remember anything about where they came from. My biological family is presumably listed somewhere on the Wall, living eople transformed into one more simple footnote of a dead world. Their world died in the Rising, just like they did. They didn’t live to see the new one.
My adoptive parents have raised me to question the world around me, understand the realities of my situation, and, in times of necessity, shoot first. They have equipped me with the tools I need to survive, and for that I am grateful. Through this blog, I will do my best to share my experiences and, yes, my opinions in as open and honest a way as I can. It is the best way to honor the family that raised me; it is the only way I have to honor the family that lost me.
I’m going to tell you the truth as I understand it. You can take it from there.
—From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, June 20, 2035
So George says I have to write a “mission statement” for this blog, because apparently, our contract with Bridge Supporters says that I will. I am personally opposed to mission statements, since they’re basically one more way of sucking the fun out of everything. I tried telling George this, but all she said was that it’s her job to suck the fun out of everything. She then threatened physical violence of a type that I will not describe in detail, as it might unsettle and upset my theoretical readership. Suffice to say that here I am, writing a mission statement. So here it is:
I, Shaun Phillip Mason, being of sound mind and body, do hereby swear to poke dead shit with sticks, do stupid things for your amusement, and put it all on the Internet where you can watch it over and over again. Because that’s what you want, right?
Glad to oblige.
—From Hail to the King, the blog of Shaun Mason, June 20, 2035
One
My story ended where so many stories have ended over the course of the last two decades: with a man—in 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.