Blackout

GEORGIA: Twenty-seven

After some discussion, we—meaning “Maggie and Mahir,” who were the only ones still considered completely rational; the rest of us were treated as compromised, to one degree or another—decided the best course of action was to stay at the Agora long enough to recover, and then head out. Mahir also pointed out that we were better off keeping the van under cover for at least a few hours, in case it had been seen leaving the vicinity of the CDC. So we were staying put. I wasn’t inclined to argue. The last few hours were starting to catch up with me, and I wanted nothing more than a dark corner I could curl up in until the urge to start shaking went away.

After a bit more discussion, Becks reluctantly agreed that I wasn’t likely to go crazy and kill Shaun without setting off the hotel security system, which meant the two of us could do our recovery in the same hotel room. “The Agora takes the safety of its guests very seriously,” Maggie assured her. “There are so few blood tests because the biometric monitoring system is so advanced. If either of them is in medical distress, the guards will be alerted within seconds.”

“Nice place,” I said, approvingly. “I didn’t even know this was here.”

“That’s the point.” Maggie smiled, still looking somewhat uncertain. “Is there anything I can have sent up to the room for you?”

I bit back my first answer, waiting a few seconds to be sure that it was what I wanted to say. Oh, well. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Can I get some clean clothes, a pair of sunglasses, and a bottle of the darkest brown hair color you can find?”

Most of the uncertainty went out of Maggie’s smile. “We can do that,” she agreed. “Shaun? Do you want to show Georgia to your room? I’ll call the front desk and have things sent up.” She gave me a measuring look. “I think the biometrics from the door will give us her size.”

“Thank you,” I said. There wasn’t time to say much more—Shaun was making hasty farewells as he grabbed my hand and started hauling me toward the door. Mahir was still saying good-bye when the door slammed shut behind us, leaving us alone in the hall.

I expected Shaun to say something then. He didn’t. He just kept pulling me along, walking briskly back toward the elevators. I glanced at his face and decided to give it a minute. He’d survived me being dead for over a year. I could survive him being silent for a little while. Still, my feet hurt, and even the soft carpet wasn’t helping all that much. I was relieved when he finally pulled me to a stop in front of a door that looked like every other doorway in the hall.

There was a small green light just above the peephole. It blinked twice when he gripped the door handle. Then the door swung open, revealing a room that looked like the younger sibling of Maggie’s room. I had to blink twice before I realized the dimness wasn’t only because he had the curtains drawn; the overhead lights were set to UV. It was the kind of change that used to be second nature to both of us, making sure the lights in our hotel rooms wouldn’t give me migraines that left me incapable of doing my job.

Shaun let me enter first. He pulled the door closed as he stepped inside and said roughly, “The bathroom’s through there. You can change the lights if you want to. I don’t mind.”

“No. No, this is… this is good.” There were no signs that he’d been in this room before, except for the curtains and the lights. I turned to face him. He was watching me, a deep, anxious hunger in his eyes. “I’m real, Shaun. I’m not going anywhere.”

“What did you give me for my eighth birthday?”

“A black eye, because you said girls couldn’t be Newsies.”

“How did we meet Buffy?”

“Online job fair.”

“Who was your first boyfriend?”

I had to smile at that. “You were. Also my second, and my third, and every other number you can think of. You can keep asking questions as long as you want, Shaun, but I’m only going to get ninety-seven percent of them right. It’s up to you whether that makes me real or not.”

“I missed you.” He raised a hand, touching my cheek so gently that it made my heart hurt. I put my own hand over it, forcing his fingers flat against my skin. He sighed. “You died, George. I shot you, and you died.”

“No. You shot Georgia Mason.” He winced, but didn’t pull his hand away. I forced myself to keep going. If I didn’t say this now, when we were alone for the first time, I was never going to say it. And I had to say it. “You shot a woman whose DNA profile I share. I have ninety-seven percent of her memories. I remember growing up with you. I remember my first blog post. I even remember dying. I remember everything, right up until you pulled the trigger.”

“George…”

“I remember thinking I was the luckiest woman in the world, because you were there to do it. But those memories aren’t only mine. Do you understand?”

“You’re Georgia enough for me,” he said, finally pulling his hand away. “Neither of us is perfect anymore.”

I nodded. Fine, then. If this was who I was going to be, then I was going to be her. “You saved me.”

Shaun dipped his chin in what would have been a nod, if he’d raised his head again. Instead, he kept looking down at the floor, slow tears beginning to make their way down his cheeks. “I wanted to die with you.”

“You didn’t.” I grabbed his hand again, squeezing his fingers. “You kept going. And now I’m back, and we get to finish this thing together.”

He raised his head, looking at me anxiously. “What if you get hurt again?”

“We can’t start living in ‘what if,’ Shaun. If we do that, I might as well have stayed dead.” I smiled a little. “Is there a first-aid kit? I want to get some sealant on my feet.”

“What? Oh!” He straightened, focus returning almost instantly as he realized he had something he could do, rather than standing around worrying until Mahir came back and said it was time to go. “This way.”

He led me to the bathroom, where a search of the medicine cabinet yielded a first-aid kit that could have put some hospitals to shame. I sat on the edge of the bathtub while he wiped my feet off with a wet cloth, then sprayed them with a fast-drying layer of wound sealant. It would act as an artificial skin, porous enough to let my wounds heal, but thick enough to prevent infection. I’d used the stuff before, although never on quite such a large area. It’s amazing how big the bottoms of your feet can seem when you’ve managed to run all the skin off of them.

He wrapped my feet in a layer of gauze once the sealant was dry, just in case. I didn’t ask him to stop. I just watched him work, studying the tension in his shoulders and the new strands of gray at his temples, visible even through the bleached-out streaks of almost-blond. I saw the moment when that tension turned into decision, and was prepared when he straightened up, leaned forward, and kissed me.

There have been times when I wondered how people didn’t put the pieces together. How many so-called siblings share hotel rooms after puberty, much less share bedrooms with a door connecting them? We never dated. We never went to school events with anyone but each other. We never did any of the normal social things, and yet people still assumed we were on the market, not that we’d been off the market before we even knew what the market was.

We were still in the bathroom ten minutes later when someone knocked on the front door. The voice of the hotel said politely, “Mr. Mason, your request from the front desk has arrived. Would you like to claim it now, or would you prefer that it be left for your convenience?”

Shaun pulled away from me, cheeks flushed. “Uh…” he said. Then, more coherently, he said, “I’ll be right there. Thanks.” He got up, leaving me sitting where I was as he walked out of the room. I’d expected being alone to make me nervous, but it did the opposite. For the first time since the CDC decided to bring me back, no one was watching me. I was genuinely free.

Low voices came from the hall, followed by the sound of the door closing. Shaun reappeared, a brown paper bundle in one hand and a bottle of hair dye in the other. “What do you want to do first?” he asked.

I smiled.

An hour later, I actually felt like myself again. My hair was damp and dark brown, sticking to my ears and forehead as it dried. The clothes Maggie requested were perfect, if two sizes smaller than I would normally have worn—black slacks, a white button-down shirt, and a black blazer with pockets for my audio recorder and notepad. I didn’t have either of those at the moment, but just having the pockets made me feel better. Even the shoes fit. My eyes were the only things that didn’t look right, and that was what the sunglasses were for. Once I put them on, I looked like I’d been sick for a while, but I didn’t look like a clone.

I looked like Georgia Mason.

Shaun apparently thought so, too. When I put the sunglasses on, he stopped talking and just stared at me. Finally, in a quiet, reasonable tone, he said, “If it turns out that this is all some crazy, impossible hoax, and you’re a fucking android or something, I’m going to kill us both.”

“Cloning is crazy enough for me, so I’m good with that,” I said. “Can we kill a bunch of other people first?”

“Yeah,” said Shaun, and smiled. “We can.”

“How much of this is our fault, Shaun? How much… how many questions did we ask that we should have left quiet? People are dying.” I walked over to the bed, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. “Do we own this?”

Shaun barked a short, humorless laugh. “The people who started all this shit own it. We just made it happen a little faster. I think… enough of it is ours that we have to fix it if we can.”

“We can.”

“God, I hope so.” He sat down next to me, taking my hands. “This is what you missed. Your post got out—you know that—and it changed a lot of things, and nothing, all at the same time. It’s part of why Ryman got elected. You made it pretty clear he wasn’t playing on Tate’s team. It probably doesn’t help that Tate went all bad movie villain when I cornered him.”

My eyes widened. “When you what? Shaun—”

“Just listen, okay? See, after you… after I… I had to leave the van. Steve—you remember Steve, from Ryman’s security detail? Big fucker, looked like he could stand in for the entire Brute Squad?”

“Please don’t tell me Steve died,” I said.

“No, he’s fine. Still writes me sometimes, or did, before we had to go off the grid. See, Steve and I broke quarantine to get to Ryman…”

The story he told was crazy and impossible and enough to break my heart. I’d always known that Tate was bad, but Shaun was the one who confronted him, and got fed a line about restoring America to its roots through fear and control. Tate martyred himself. It might have worked, too, if he hadn’t martyred me first.

Shaun buried me and tried to move on, but the world wouldn’t let him; the world never does. Instead, he wound up neck deep in conspiracies and craziness. Dave died. Kelly Connolly died. Dr. Wynne turned out not to be an ally, but one more crazy man out to change the world into what he thought it should be. The longer Shaun talked, the more I realized that the only allies we had were the ones we shared a website with.

I only stopped him twice: once to ask about the reservoir conditions, and once to make him repeat, several times, that he’d been bitten and hadn’t amplified. Crazy as it might sound, that was the part I had the most trouble believing. The additional details on the insect vector for Kellis-Amberlee just left me cold. Maybe mankind was going to lose the war against the living dead after all—and this time, it might not be because someone dropped a vial.

Eventually, Shaun stopped talking. Then he reached up and removed my sunglasses, putting them beside me on the bed. “We could run,” he said. “You and me. Head for Canada, or something. The others could finish this without us. You know they would.”

“And we’d never forgive ourselves,” I said. “We finish this. And if we survive, somehow, through some miracle… then we run. You and me, and anywhere they won’t find us.”

“It’s a date.” He leaned back, reaching for the phone.

I blinked. “What are you doing?”

“Calling room service. I don’t want you to blow away if there’s a stiff wind.”

I laughed and hit him without thinking about it. That brought a totally sincere smile to his face before he turned away to deal with placing our order. Less than fifteen minutes later, two massive bowls of chicken cacciatore were delivered to our door, along with a six-pack of Coke and a piece of tiramisu the size of my head. My stomach growled when I saw the food, and I realized that I was genuinely hungry for the first time in a long time.

The only thing I wanted more than food was access to the Internet, which Shaun provided as soon as our dinner was just memory and crumbs. My laptop wasn’t at the Agora—why would it be?—so he let me borrow his, both of us stretching out on the bed with our backs to the headboard, my shoulder pressing into his chest as I began doing the most important thing I could possibly do.

I began catching up on the news.

Working as a professional journalist meant years of learning to absorb as much information as possible in as short a time as possible, since failure to stay on top of current events could easily result in posting a story that had no relevance at all. I was always a little slower than most of my contemporaries, because I was always so damn careful to check and double-check my facts before I put my name behind them. Oh, I had my op-ed blogs—Just the Wind when I was a teenager on a provisional license, and Images May Disturb You once I was old enough to go full-time—but those were thoughts. Opinions. Ideas. It was the articles I put on the main site that really mattered, and those were the things that needed me to do my research.

Using After the End Times as my start point, I pulled up the archives, going all the way back to the day after I died. Shaun’s posts from that period were a jumbled mess; half the time, I wasn’t even certain they were written in English. Mahir and Alaric did most of the real reporting, following the rest of the Ryman campaign with a clinical detachment that told me everything I needed to know about the depth of their grief. Shaun wasn’t the only one who’d been hurting. And the headlines rolled on.

Ryman elected in a landslide vote, stuns voters by choosing Richard Cousins as his replacement vice president! The Democratic candidate, Susan Kilburn, is so devastated by her loss that she takes her own life! Ryman takes the White House!

Shaun Mason goes quietly crazy, while his staff scramble to cover up the cracks in his facade. Maggie Garcia moves into Buffy’s place, and does a good job, especially considering the circumstances. Shaun cedes his position to Rebecca Atherton, letting her run the Irwins while he runs deeper into the damaged recesses of his own psyche. Mahir continues shaping the site into a force for the truth, doing as much as he can to stand against the tide of ignorance and corruption.

CDC researcher Kelly Connolly is shot in a robbery gone wrong! Downtown Oakland is sterilized following an outbreak, resulting in the tragic death of thousands, including reporter David Novakowski! An insect vector for the Kellis-Amberlee virus appears along the Gulf Coast, killing millions more! The members of the After the End Times core team are wanted in conjunction with potential bioterrorism, and should be reported if seen! Ryman grieves for his wounded nation!

The CDC decides to raise the dead. Someone tells a whole lot of lies, and someone else makes sure the world will believe them.

Everything goes wrong.

The effort of filtering the headlines for the truth hidden beneath them—the truth hidden between the lines, in the places where it was less likely to be seen—left my head pounding. I slumped backward, letting my head rest against Shaun’s shoulder.

“I couldn’t have done it,” I said, closing my eyes.

“Done what?”

“What you did. Kept things going. I wouldn’t have—couldn’t have—done it. I would have fallen apart.”

“I did fall apart,” he noted, in a tone that was almost comically reasonable. “I went nuts. I’ve been talking to you since Sacramento, and you’ve been talking back.”

“I thought it might be something like that. You never did do ‘alone’ very well.”

“Neither did you.”

“That’s why I would have killed myself by now.”

Silence fell, and stretched out for almost a minute before Shaun said, “Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing I’m the one who got out of Sacramento, huh? Which is kind of funny if you stop to think about it.”

I put the laptop aside on the bed and pushed myself up, twisting around to look at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Dr. Wynne died because Kelly—the Doc, that’s what I called her while she was with us—stabbed him with a scalpel while he was in the middle of a big-time bad-guy soliloquy. I mean, I don’t know if there’s an Evil Fucker 101 class that they all take, but between him and Tate, I’m about ready to slap the next person who wants to tell me about his evil plan.” Shaun’s eyes were haunted. “The Doc was a good person. Maybe the only good person left in the CDC. I don’t know. I never had time to find out.”

I thought of Gregory and Dr. Kimberley, both of whom had chosen the EIS over the CDC. “Maybe you’re right,” I admitted.

“Anyway, before Dr. Wynne died, he as good as said that whoever shot you wasn’t aiming for you. The needle was supposed to be mine.” He brushed my hair away from my cheek. “You were supposed to shoot me, not the other way around. Then Tate would give you his big bad guy speech, and you’d think it was over, because you believed in black and white.”

My stomach felt like a solid ball of pain. “They knew how to beat us.”

“Yeah. But the cold equations fucked them up, because the math doesn’t care. They subtracted the wrong half of the equation, and I’ve been kicking them in the ass ever since. For you.” He looked at me earnestly. “I was doing it all for you.”

I sighed, folding my hand over his before I scooted closer. “I know.”

Some time later—once the laptop had been put back on its charger, and the “do not disturb” light had been lit on the door—we slept, both sprawled on top of the covers. Shaun kept one arm around me as we drifted off, clinging like he was afraid I’d vanish before he woke up. I’ve never been the world’s cuddliest person, and that didn’t seem to be one of the things that dying and coming back had changed, but for once, I didn’t mind. Anything that kept me from waking up and thinking I was back in CDC custody was okay by me.

We’d been asleep for a few hours when a gentle chiming noise filled the room, followed by the voice of the Agora saying, “I do hope you’ve enjoyed your rest. Miss Garcia would like to remind you that you have an appointment that cannot be rescheduled.”

“Huh?” I sat up, wiping the sleep from my eyes with one hand and fumbling for my sunglasses with the other. It’s amazing how quickly habits reassert themselves, even when they’re not really needed anymore.

“She means it’s time to go see the Monkey.” Shaun leaned over to grab his shirt off the floor before sitting up.

“The who?”

“I’ll explain on the way. Come on.”

Having just the one set of clothes made getting dressed to go substantially easier than it used to be. Not that I ever spent that much time thinking about what to wear, but when you own ten identical pairs of black pants, you sometimes have to spend a few minutes figuring out which ones are clean. We were both ready in half the time it would have taken before I died. Shaun led the way to the door, where he paused, looking back at me.

“I was tired of being a haunted house,” he said. “Thank you for coming home.” Then he stepped out into the hall, not leaving any space for my response. Maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe this was one of those things that didn’t need to be responded to. I followed him out of the room. The door swung shut behind me, the locks engaging with a muted “click.”

Mahir, Maggie, and Becks were already in the lobby, standing near the entrance to the airlock. Mahir paled when he saw me, looking for all the world like he’d just seen a ghost. In a weird way, I guess he technically had.

“Everything fit?” asked Maggie, as we walked into conversational distance.

“Like a dream,” I said. “Even the shoes are perfect. Thank you. You have no idea how good it feels to be dressed again. They wouldn’t even let me have a bra while I was under observation.”

Maggie shuddered at the thought of that indignity. Becks kept eyeing me, expression not giving away what she might be thinking about the whole situation.

“We were thinking you might not feel completely clothed just yet,” said Mahir, shaking off his shock. He dipped a hand into his pocket, pulling it out with the fingers curled around some small object. “If you would be so kind?”

Blinking blankly at him, I held out my hand. He dropped an ear cuff into it.

It was a small thing, barely weighing a quarter of an ounce, but it felt like the heaviest, most valuable thing in the entire world. I raised my free hand to my mouth, suddenly doubly glad for the familiar screen of my sunglasses. They would keep everyone else from seeing the tears in my eyes.

“Oh, God, Mahir, thank you.” I blinked the tears away as firmly as I could. More rose to take their place. “Thank you so much.”

“It only has three numbers in its address book,” said Becks, tone still tight with suspicion. “Tap it once for Shaun, twice for Mahir, and three times for me. Don’t try to reprogram it. There’s a safety lock on the controls. You mess with the directory, the whole thing will short out, and we’ll know.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Seriously, thank you all. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

Maggie smiled. “I think I might have a bit of a clue.”

I smiled back before reaching up and delicately affixing the ear cuff to the shallow outside curve of my ear. It pinched the skin in a way I remembered from high school, back when I started wearing the portable contact devices on a regular basis. I’d have raw spots and blisters for at least a week while I got used to it. And I didn’t really give a damn.

“If we’re all prepared to wander gaily off to our dooms, we should really get moving,” said Mahir, tearing his eyes away from my face. “I’m sure our gracious hosts would prefer the doom not find us early.”

“You are always such the little ray of golden sunshine, Mahir, you know that?” Shaun grinned. “Let’s roll.”