Blackout

Thirteen

The sound of alarms screaming in the hall outside my room slammed me from a sound sleep straight into adrenaline-laced consciousness. I was on my feet with my hands over my ears before I was aware I was awake, every muscle tight with the need to move, move, move. I didn’t know whether I wanted to run away from the danger or toward it. In a more lucid moment, I would have embraced that confusion, because it was what my journalistic training told me I should be feeling—the need to get the story warring with the need to not die in the process.

Funny thing about dying, coming back from the dead, and finding out you’re not actually the woman you think you are: Anything that goes the way it’s supposed to becomes reassuring as hell.

The alarms were still going, making it hard to hold any single thought for more than a second. Curiosity and years of working the front-page news beat won out over the shreds of my common sense. I ran to the one-way mirror, uncovering my ears and cupping my hands around my eyes as I tried to squint through the opaque glass. All I could see were blurry outlines of people rushing past, none holding still long enough for me to get an idea of who they were.

None of them were turning toward my door. And the alarm was still going.

“Hey!” I shouted, stepping back from the mirror. “Monitor people! What’s going on?” There was no response. A thin worm of fear began working its way through my guts, twisting and biting as it gnawed toward my center. I was alone in here. I had a little gun, but that wasn’t going to be enough if things were going really wrong. If they didn’t let me out… “Hey!”

A group ran by in the hall, making so much noise that I could actually hear them through the window and over the alarm, even if I couldn’t quite make sense of what they were doing. Were they screaming? Singing? Laughing? Or—worst of all, and looking increasingly possible as the seconds slipped by with the alarm still screaming—were they moaning?

I shrank back from the mirror, putting another useless foot between me and the glass. If we were in an outbreak situation, a few feet weren’t going to make a difference one way or the other. Either the infected would realize I was there, or they wouldn’t. Either the people outside the building would decide it needed to be sterilized, or they wouldn’t. Where I was standing wasn’t going to do a damn thing to change the outcome.

I wonder if the clone lab is zombie-proof, I thought, almost nonsensically. A titter of laughter escaped from my lips, the sound bright and ice-pick sharp under the shriek of the alarm.

Somehow, that little sound was what I needed to snap me out of my nascent panic and back into the problem at hand. There was something going on outside the room; whatever it was, it wasn’t a good thing. I wasn’t unarmed, but I might as well have been, for all the good my little gun would do me if this was an outbreak. I was, however, observing Michael Mason’s first rule of dealing with the living dead: I had enough bullets that they wouldn’t take me alive.

Feeling suddenly calmer, I looked up toward the speaker and said, “This is Georgia Mason. I don’t know what’s going on outside my room, but I am uninfected. I repeat, I am uninfected. Please advise if there’s anything I should be doing. In the meanwhile, I’m going to assume none of you people have time for me, and I’m going to go sit down.”

I walked back to the bed, keeping my shoulders squared and my chin up. It would have been a lot easier without the alarm wailing in my ears. I was going to have one hell of a headache later, assuming we lived that long. Putting my hands back over my ears, I waited.

All sense of time dropped away, blurred into nothingness by the steady blare of the alarm. Occasional sounds drifted through the mirror—once there was a burst of machine-gun fire that lasted long enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end; shortly after that there was a piercing scream that rose, buzz saw–sharp, before tapering off and vanishing back into the din—but for the most part, it was just me and the alarm. Not the best company I’d ever kept.

The sudden cessation of the noise was almost shocking. I jerked upright, suddenly aware that I had managed to sink so deep into semi-meditation that I was almost dozing. Wide-eyed, I unfolded my legs and slid into a standing position, keeping my eyes fixed on the door. It didn’t open. I took a cautious step forward. It didn’t open.

“Well, isn’t that just fantastic,” I muttered.

The sound of the intercom clicking on sent a wave of relief washing through me, so powerful that my knees felt weak for a few seconds. “Hello, Georgia,” said Dr. Thomas, in his customary mild tone. “How are you feeling?”

I stared at the wall for a long moment, mouth falling open. Finally, slowly, I said, “Did you just ask me how I was feeling? Seriously? What’s going on? Is there an outbreak? Are we alone in the building?” A new thought struck me, horrifying in its reasonableness. “Am I alone in the building?” He could be using an outside connection to reach the intercom, giving me the opportunity to say good-bye before the sterilization of the facility began.

Dr. Thomas actually laughed. In that moment, any good feeling I might have held toward him died. “Oh, no, Georgia! I’m sorry, you were reacting so calmly, I thought you’d realized.”

“You thought I’d realized? Realized what?” I balled my hands into fists, glaring at the intercom. It belatedly occurred to me that this could come off as inappropriately aggressive—by CDC standards, anyway; Shaun would have said I was displaying just the right amount of aggression—and I shoved my still-balled hands behind my back, trying to conceal them.

“This was a test. We wanted to see how you would respond to an extreme stress situation—especially one that was a close mirror to things you would have experienced”—Dr. Thomas paused for just a little too long before finishing the sentence—“before.”

I kept staring at the intercom. I didn’t say anything.

“Georgia?”

I didn’t say anything.

More sharply this time: “Georgia?”

I didn’t say anything.

Annoyed now, but with a thin ribbon of anxiety running under the words, like my silence was a sign that some unknowable bearing strain had finally been reached: “Georgia, please. Don’t be childish.”

“Don’t be childish?” I echoed, my eyes growing even wider for half a heartbeat before narrowing, reducing my vision to a thin line. “Did you seriously just tell me not to be childish?”

“Now, Georgia—”

“You faked an outbreak to see how I would respond to stress, and now you’re basically saying ‘gotcha,’ like that makes it all better! I died in an outbreak, you bastard! The fact that I’m not crying in a corner should be all it takes to prove that I’m not being childish. If anyone’s being childish, it’s you. You’re the one playing asshole pranks and getting offended when your target doesn’t find them funny.”

The silence lasted several seconds before Dr. Thomas said, “I think you’re being unreasonable.”

“And I think you’re being a dick. In fact, four out of five cloned journalists agree that you’re behaving badly.” I crossed my arms. “So did I pass?”

“What?”

“Did. I. Pass?” I repeated, enunciating each word until it was almost a sentence all by itself. “You said this was a test of how I would react under stress. Well? Did I pass? Am I a fully functional individual?”

Again, silence. Finally, sounding almost subdued, Dr. Thomas said, “We’ll go over your test results tomorrow. One of the orderlies will be along shortly with your dinner, and to take you to use the facilities. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“What cooperation? You blasted my ears out with your damn special effects and watched me like a bunch of sick voyeurs!” I realized I was yelling and took a deep breath, forcing myself to ramp it back. It wasn’t easy. Very little seemed to be, these days.

There was no response. The intercom was already off.

I walked back to my bed, feeling the headache the alarm had summoned starting to construct itself, bit by bit, in the space between my ears. Dropping to the mattress, I let gravity pull me into a slump, catching my forehead on my hands before it could hit my knees. I stayed like that for I don’t know how long—long enough for my wrists to start going numb—before I heard the door slide open. I lifted my head.

One of the familiar rotating guards was standing there with an orderly. George, from Dr. Shaw’s team. I blinked.

“We’re here to take you to the restroom,” he said, giving no sign that we’d met before. “Your dinner will be waiting when we bring you back, along with painkillers for your head.”

I frowned a little. “Do you have medical sensors in my mattress?”

He risked a smile. “No. We just have cameras that show us the way you’re clutching your temples. If you would come with us…?”

Whatever game he was playing, he was probably playing it on Dr. Shaw’s behalf, and while I still wasn’t sure I trusted her, I trusted Gregory, and he trusted her. My relationships with the people around me were becoming increasingly conditional. Trust George because Dr. Shaw trusted him. Trust Dr. Shaw because Gregory trusted her.

Trust Gregory because he was the one who stood the best chance of getting me out of here without getting me killed. Again.

“Sure,” I said, and stood.

There was another guard outside. He fell into step behind me, while the first guard took point, and George stayed to my right. We walked to the bathroom, stopping outside the door.

“How’s your head?” asked George.

“It hurts,” I replied. “How long was I in there?”

“About six hours.”

That explained the way reality had seemed to stretch and blur into nothing but alarm bells and waiting. I scowled. “I’d better be getting a lot of painkillers,” I said, even though there was no way I’d be taking them. The people who prepared my food could drug me at any time, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. That didn’t mean I needed to make it easy.

“You’ll be getting a medically safe dosage,” said George, in what sounded like it was supposed to be a reassuring tone. “Now please, you have about twelve minutes before your dinner is ready. You don’t need to rush, but you wouldn’t want your soup getting cold.”

The last time Gregory had come to remove me from my quarters, he’d done it at midnight. I nodded slightly, indicating that the message had been received—assuming it was a message at all, and wasn’t just me fumbling for meaning where there wasn’t any. “I’ll be quick.”

“We appreciate it.”

The guards didn’t accompany me into the bathroom. I still moved like they were there, watching me; it was the only way I knew to keep from getting annoyed by the knowledge that I was being watched by half a dozen hidden cameras. If Buffy had been here, she could have spotted them all by measuring minute inaccuracies in the grout, and disabled them with soap suds and mock-clumsiness. If one of us was going to come back from the dead, it should have been her. She could have treated it like just another story. She would have handled it better.

Then again, maybe not. The truth is allowed to be stranger than fiction, and the parts of this that weren’t making sense yet might have been enough to send her over the edge. The only reason they weren’t making me crazy was the fact that I had something to hold on to. Shaun was alive. Shaun was out there somewhere. And wherever he was, he needed me.

I undressed the way I always did, shoving my pants down my legs and peeling my socks off in the same gesture, concealing my little gun. It meant putting the same clothes back on when I was finished, carrying the clean pajamas they’d provided back to the room, and changing under the covers of my bed, but I’d been able to pass it off as a strange form of modesty… at least so far. I soaped up and rinsed down in record time, assisted by the fact that my bleach rinse only lasted for about fifteen seconds—a perfunctory nod to regulations, while acknowledging that I hadn’t been near anything infectious since I was Frankensteined to life.

George and the guards were still waiting outside the bathroom when I emerged. “All clean,” I announced, wiping my damp bangs back from my forehead. “Now, about those painkillers.”

George nodded, motioning for the lead guard to take us back to my room. True to his word, my dinner tray was waiting when we arrived, tomato soup the color of watered-down blood and what looked like grilled cheese sandwiches. High-end hospital food. Tomato soup and cheese sandwiches seemed to surface at every other meal. I didn’t mind as much as I might have. At least they were well prepared, which was more than I could say for many of the more ambitious things to come out of the kitchen.

Four small white pills were sitting on the tray, next to my glass of milk. “Thanks,” I said, stepping through the doorway, into the room.

“Have a nice night, Miss Mason,” said George. The door closed, cutting him from view.

I sat down at the table, palming the pills and dropping them into my lap as I mimed swallowing them. The room’s white-on-white decorating scheme helped with that. Whoever was monitoring the security monitors currently airing The Georgia Mason Show would have to be paying extremely close attention to catch white pills being dropped onto the white legs of my pajamas, where I covered them with my white napkin.

My soup was hot, and had obviously been put on the table seconds before we returned to the room. That didn’t fit George’s twelve-minute estimate, so either he was wrong, or he really had been telling me to wait for midnight. That was fine. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do.

An orderly came and took my empty dishes after I finished eating. The pills I’d managed not to take were safely tucked into the seam of my pillowcase by then. I smiled. He flinched. I smiled wider. If these people couldn’t handle the results of their crazy science, they shouldn’t be bringing back the dead. The orderly all but scurried from the room, and I started to feel a little bad. It wasn’t his fault. None of this was. The orders that controlled my life came from way above his pay grade.

I paced around the room a few times, feigning my normal restlessness, before climbing back into bed. I’d been sleeping more and more, and all sense of time was going rapidly out the window. If the alarms were going off for six hours, and they’d been off for about an hour and half, that meant I’d been awake for less than eight hours. It felt like forever. I was exhausted.

Maybe they were putting something in my food after all.

The throbbing in my head kept me from falling into anything deeper than a light doze. It shattered when the door opened. I sat up, squinting.

“Hello?”

“We have sixteen minutes,” said Gregory. He didn’t leave the doorway. Maybe there was too much risk of him getting stuck in the room when the sixteen-minute security window closed. “I’m sorry. It was the best I could arrange on such short notice.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I swung my feet around to the floor, wincing a little. “Did you bring any painkillers I can actually trust?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” Gregory dipped a hand into his pocket. “I even brought water.”

“Thanks,” I said. The word seemed to stick in my throat. Shaun was always the one who brought me painkillers when the light got to be too much and one of my migraines decided to start making its presence known. I missed him so much.

“We don’t have long.”

I paused in the process of getting up. Then I stood and walked toward him, holding out my hand for the pills. “What do you mean? Sixteen minutes, right?”

“We arranged the window when today’s testing schedule went up on the intranet.” Gregory sounded grimmer than I’d ever heard him. “Someone’s going to get caught over this one. It won’t be me, but whoever it is, they’re going to be lucky if all they lose is their job.”

A chill started in the pit of my stomach. “What are you saying?”

“They’ve started stress-testing you. That isn’t good.” He dropped two pills into my hand, producing a bottle of water from his other pocket. “Four subjects have made it this far. None of them got through the alarm sequence without permanent psychological damage. Georgia, I’m sorry. We didn’t realize they were going to speed things up like this, but with your brother—” He stopped dead.

The silence that stretched between us was the loudest I had ever heard. I opened the bottle of water and tossed the pills into my mouth, washing them down without really registering the motion. It was something that had to be done, and so I was doing it; that was all. The silence continued, Gregory waiting to see how I would respond, my mind racing through all the possible ways that sentence could have ended.

None of them were good.

“With Shaun what?” I asked. Gregory didn’t answer. “With Shaun what?” I repeated.

“Off the grid,” said Gregory. He took the empty bottle from my hand. “He and the rest of your old news site dropped off the radar following Tropical Storm Fiona.”

He mentioned the storm like it was a big event. I frowned. “Were they in the area? Are they missing?”

“No. There have been a few sightings, all of them on the West Coast. The EIS has been planting sighting reports elsewhere in the country, but it’s hard, with as little data as we have.”

“So what, they’re thinking they can tell me to find him, and I’ll know where he’s gone to ground?” I scoffed. “That’s not going to happen.”

“No. They’re thinking they can finish running their tests on you, demonstrating to the investors just how stable a clone can be, and then they can decommission you in favor of a Georgia Mason who’ll be willing to play the part they ask it to play.”

The chill continued to uncurl, spreading to cover my entire body. “What part is that?”

“Bait.” I couldn’t see Gregory’s expression with the light shining so brightly behind him. I didn’t need to. His voice told me everything I needed to know. “They’re going to put the new Georgia on the air, and they’re going to use it to do the one thing they couldn’t do on their own.”

“They’re going to use her to lure Shaun in,” I finished, in a whisper.

“They’ll use her to do more than that, if they possibly can. I’ll be honest, Georgia, because this isn’t a time for being anything else. Shaun’s psychological profiles since your death have been… disturbing, to say the least.”

“Disturbing how? Cutting up children and old ladies disturbing, or not showering anymore disturbing?”

“Talking to himself. Refusing to let go of the idea that you’ll come back someday. That’s part of what let the investors sell the idea that you would have multiple uses.”

“But not me in specific.”

“No,” Gregory admitted.

I took a deep breath. The painkillers hadn’t had time to work, but the chill was muffling the pain nicely, making everything seem a little more distant, and hence a little easier to deal with. “Well, all right. I guess that means it’s time to get me the hell out of Dodge, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does,” said Gregory—and now he sounded sad, and deeply concerned. “There’s just one problem.”

I closed my eyes. “You still don’t know how you’re going to do that, do you?”

“No. We don’t.”

“Well.” I opened my eyes, sighing once. “This is going to be fun.”