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.
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.”