Blackout

“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.