The bed where I’d woken up was bolted to the floor, and so was the matching bedside table. It wouldn’t do to have the mysteriously resurrected dead journalist throwing things at the mirror that took up most of one wall. Naturally, the wall with the mirror was the only wall with a door—a door that refused to open. I’d tried waving my hands in front of every place that might hold a motion sensor, and then I’d searched for a test panel in the vain hope that checking out clean would make the locks let go and release me.
There were no test panels, or screens, or ocular scanners. There wasn’t anything inside that seemed designed to let me out. That was chilling all by itself. I grew up in a post-Rising world, one where blood tests and the threat of infection are a part of daily life. I’m sure I’d been in sealed rooms without testing units before. I just couldn’t remember any.
The room lacked something else: clocks. There was nothing to let me know how much time had passed since I woke up, much less how much time had passed before I woke up. There’d been a voice from the speaker above the mirror, an unfamiliar voice asking my name and what the last thing I remembered was. I’d answered him—“My name is Georgia Mason. What the fuck is going on here?”—and he’d gone away without answering my question. That might have been ten minutes ago. It might have been ten hours ago. The lights overhead glared steady and white, not so much as flickering as the seconds went slipping past.
That was another thing. The overhead lights were industrial fluorescents, the sort that have been popular in medical facilities since long before the Rising. They should have been burning my eyes like acid… and they weren’t.
I was diagnosed with retinal Kellis-Amberlee when I was a kid, meaning that the same disease that causes the dead to rise had taken up permanent residence in my eyeballs. It didn’t turn me into a zombie—retinal KA is a reservoir condition, one where the live virus is somehow contained inside the body. Retinal KA gave me extreme light sensitivity, excellent night vision, and a tendency to get sickening migraines if I did anything without my sunglasses on.
Well, I wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and it wasn’t like I could dim the lights, but my eyes still didn’t hurt. All I felt was thirst, and a vague, gnawing hunger in the pit of my stomach, like lunch might be a good idea sometime soon. There was no headache. I honestly couldn’t decide whether or not that was a good sign.
Anxiety was making my palms sweat. I scrubbed them against the legs of my unfamiliar white cotton pajamas. Everything in the room was unfamiliar… even me. I’ve never been heavy—a life spent running after stories and away from zombies doesn’t encourage putting on weight—but the girl in the one-way mirror was thin to the point of being scrawny. She looked like she’d be easy to break. Her hair was as dark as mine. It was also too long, falling past her shoulders. I’ve never 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…
Her eyes were brown. That, more than anything else, made it impossible to think of her face as my own. 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 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 shuddered, looking away from my reflection, and resumed what was currently my main activity: pacing back and forth and trying to think. Until I knew whether I was being watched, I had to think quietly, and that 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 recorder running. I’m an accredited journalist. When I talk to myself, it’s not a sign of insanity; it’s just my way of making sure I don’t lose important material before I can write it down.
None of this was right. Even if there was some sort of experimental treatment to reverse amplification, someone would have been there to explain things to me. Shaun would have been there. And there it was, the reason I couldn’t believe any of this was right: I remembered him pulling the trigger. Even assuming it was a false memory, even assuming it never happened, why wasn’t he here? Shaun would move Heaven and Earth to reach me.
I briefly entertained the idea that he was somewhere in the building, forcing the voice from the intercom to tell him where I was. Regretfully, I dismissed it. Something would have exploded by now if that were true.
“Goddammit.” I scowled at the wall, turned, and started in the other direction. The hunger was getting worse, and it was accompanied by a new, more frustrating sensation. I needed to pee. If someone didn’t let me out soon, I was going to have a whole new set of problems to contend with.