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 was still no mechanism in the room for marking time, but if anyone was watching me—and someone had to be watching me—this might be a big enough change in my behavior to get their attention. I wanted their attention. I wanted their attention really, really badly. Almost as badly as I wanted an MP3 recorder, an Internet connection, and a bathroom.
After I’d been waiting for what felt like hours but, again, might have just been minutes, the need for a bathroom had crept substantially higher on that list, as had the need for a drink of water. The fact that the human body can demand both of these things at the same time is proof that evolution has no erase button.
I was beginning to consider the possibility that I might need to somehow cover the mirror with one of the blankets while I used a corner of the room as a lavatory when the intercom clicked on again. “Miss Mason? Are you awake?”
“Yes,” I said, without opening my eyes. “Do I get a name to call you by?”
He ignored my question like it didn’t matter. Maybe it didn’t, to him. “I apologize for going silent before. We were a little surprised by your vehemence. We’d expected a slightly longer period of disorientation.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Oh, we weren’t disappointed,” the voice said, hurriedly. It was a male voice, with the faintest traces of a Midwestern accent. I couldn’t place the state, but I knew I’d never heard it before. “I promise you, we’re thrilled to see you up and coherent so quickly. It’s a wonderful indicator for your recovery.”
“A glass of water and a trip to the ladies’ room would do a lot more to help my recovery than a bunch of apologies and evasions.”
Now the voice sounded faintly abashed. “I’m so sorry, Miss Mason. We didn’t think… Just a moment.” The intercom clicked off again, leaving me in silence once again. I stayed where I was, and kept on waiting.
A new sound intruded on my silence: the hiss of a hydraulic lock unsealing itself. I opened my eyes, turning my head to see a small panel slide open above the door, revealing a single red light. The hissing continued, and the door, at long last, swung inward, revealing a skinny, nervous-looking man in a long white lab coat. He was holding his clipboard against his chest like he thought it afforded him some sort of protection, and his eyes were wide behind the lenses of his glasses.
“Miss Mason? If you’d like to come with me, I’d be happy to escort you to the restroom.”
“Thank you.” I unfolded my legs, ignoring the protest of pins and needles in my calves, and walked toward the man in the doorway. He didn’t quite cringe as I approached, but he definitely shied back, looking more profoundly uneasy with every step I took in his direction. Interesting.
“We do apologize for making you wait,” he said. His words had the distinct cadence of something recited by rote, like telephone tech support asking for your ID and computer serial number. “There were just a few things that had to be taken care of before we could proceed.”
“Let’s worry about that after I get to the bathroom, okay?” I sidestepped around him, out into the hall, and stopped as I found myself looking at three hospital orderlies in blue scrubs, each of them pointing a pistol in my direction. I put my hands up, palms outward. “Okay, okay, I get it. I can wait for my escort.”
“That’s probably for the best, Miss Mason,” said the nervous man, whose voice I now recognized from the intercom. It just took me a moment, without the filtering speakers between us. “We’re all a bit jumpy right now. I’m sure you understand.”
“Yeah. Sure.” I lowered my hands as I fell into step behind the nervous man. The orderlies followed us down the hall, their aim never wavering. I did my best not to make any sudden moves. Having just returned to the land of the living, I was in no mood to exit it again before I had a few answers about what, exactly, was happening. “Am I ever going to get something I can call you?”