The smell of pine was a constant, perfuming the air and hiding any underlying decay. It was nice, like living inside a giant car air freshener. I allowed myself to relax as much as I ever did, falling into an easy rolling gait as I walked the edges of the property we called our own.
A couple of my traps had been triggered in the night, catching stoats, wolverines, and one red fox that was still very much alive. It bared its teeth and snarled a warning as I approached. It was lucky: It had managed to wedge itself into one of the live-catch traps I used to tag the local rabbit and feral cat populations. If it had gone for something more its size, it would have crushed its skull on an unyielding metal bar, and be good for nothing but tonight’s bait.
“What are you doing in there?” I asked, pulling on my gloves and moving around to the back of the trap. The fox watched me warily, but was too confined to turn around. That was good. I liked foxes. They kept the vermin down, and since they never reached amplification weight, they couldn’t become zombies, which made them decent neighbors. Best of all, they hated the smell of the infected, and they liked to yell at infected things. When foxes yelled at something, it sounded like a murder party getting underway. As biological early warning systems went, you couldn’t do much better than foxes.
The fox growled. I unlatched the back of the trap, tilted it at an angle, and shook until the fox popped out. It didn’t hang around to posture or pretend that it was bigger than it was: It just took off running, vanishing into the underbrush without leaving so much as a footprint behind. I smiled as I reset and re-baited the trap, using a bit of nicely stinky canned fish as the lure. It was always good to confirm that we still had foxes around here. The natural world was putting itself back together, one piece at a time.
Then the fox screamed. Not a pain scream: a fury scream, rage scream, “you are wrong and should not be” scream. I was very familiar with that sound. I tensed as I set the trap down and removed my gloves, trying to move fast and silently at the same time. It wasn’t an easy combination. It was a combination I’d had a lot of practice at.
I drew my gun. It fit perfectly into my hand, as it always did, as it always would. No matter how bleak and confusing the world got, no matter how not okay I became, there were some things that stayed the same. A man, a gun, a world full of zombies in need of putting down. The simple things in life.
The underbrush rustled. A gray wolf stalked out into the open, legs stiff, head down, a low moan whispering from its jaws. I smiled.
“Howdy,” I said, and thumbed off the safety. “I guess it’s time for you to meet the neighbors.”
Three
The sound of gunshots woke me, distant enough not to be alarming, close enough to be worthy of my attention. I opened one eye, trying to count the reports registered by my semiconscious mind. Three. I was relatively sure there had been three. I closed my eye again, waiting, and sure enough, there were three more. Shaun was out for his morning constitutional, which included playing with the local wildlife. Since he hadn’t started setting off sticks of dynamite and wasn’t screaming for backup, I figured he hadn’t managed to flush out another zombie moose. That was a good thing. I hated dealing with prehistoric megafauna that refused to go extinct like the rest of the supersized land mammals before I’d had my morning caffeine.
When the gunshots didn’t resume, I rolled out of bed, eyes still closed, stretched, and felt around on the floor for my bathrobe. It was crumpled up under the edge of the bed, along with three shoes, a pillow, and an empty Coke can. I shoved the can into the pocket of my robe as I slid it on, rose, and walked toward the bedroom door, all without opening my eyes.
The original Georgia Mason—the one who supplied the DNA that made all of me, and the memories that made most of me—had developed retinal Kellis-Amberlee when she was a little girl. I remembered feeling my eyes go strange on me as the muscles stopped responding and the tear ducts stopped lubricating properly, forcing me into an unending cycle of dark glasses and saline solutions. I remembered the doctors talking to her/my parents, saying things like “Acquired Kellis-Amberlee Optic Neuropathic Reservoir Condition” and “still possible to live a normal life.” Most of all, I remembered learning how to do everything in the dark while I allowed my eyes to rest, because they were a limited commodity. Given enough light damage and enough time, I would go blind, which would severely interfere with my workflow.
The body I lived in now, the person I was now, had never dealt with any of that. My eyes were factory standard; my vision was just this side of perfect. The CDC’s attempts to force specific reservoir conditions in their clones had resulted in amplification, which was a waste of taxpayer money. Not that cloning one mouthy dead journalist wasn’t a waste of taxpayer money—I probably cost more than last year’s corn subsidies—but there was no reason to waste more than absolutely necessary. I had been the showroom model, never intended to set foot outside the lab. The release model had been surgically altered, given blown-out pupils and degenerating retinas by a clever surgeon’s knife. If she had been the one to walk away, then all the precautions Shaun and I still took by rote would mean something, rather than being one more way to honor the memories of a woman I had never actually been.
But did it matter which mind had formed the memories, when they were still real to me? I walked through the first steps of my day with my eyes closed because everything I was told me that was the way to do it; under normal conditions, when no one was trying to kill us, I got to have my darkness. I had long since memorized the entire cabin. I could run from one end to the other without opening my eyes. It was soothing. It was home.
The light changed around me as I stepped into the hall. I opened my eyes, enjoying the dimness as I continued on my way to the kitchen.
Neither Shaun nor I was an electrician. That had always been Buffy’s job, clever as she was with anything that involved a power source. She could rewire anything to suit her, and some of the miracles she’d accomplished with a soldering iron were probably in violation of the actual laws of science. But we knew how to read, and we knew how to follow instructions, and when we had found this cabin, we had been able to set up the generator systems and get them all online before the snow came and the world went white.
Our first winter had been a hard one. We hadn’t known our neighbors, such as they were, yet; when we’d needed to go looking for food or basic supplies, we had found ourselves confronted with a seemingly never-ending stream of frowning faces and suspicious questions. Who were we? Why were we here? What made us think that they would sell us their precious eggs or potatoes or apples, when we were strangers who might not care enough to stay? We couldn’t have things shipped to us, not when the U.S. government was likely to be monitoring our accounts, watching for any activity that could betray our location. They’d promised to leave us alone. They’d allowed us to walk away. But there was such a thing as being too trusting, too ready to believe the people in power when they claimed they were the good guys now, and that was a mistake that neither of us had any interest in making.
We’d clawed our way through the first winter, and then the first year, one day at a time, coming out of it thinner, wiser, and all the more determined to make this work. This was our life now. It belonged to us. And we were not going back.
Shaun had learned how to tan and prepare hides, reading everything he could find on the subject and pushing his Kellis-Amberlee immunity to its limits. Several times he had come home from the forest shaking and feverish and refusing to let me touch him. He would lock himself in his office, holing up until the shaking stopped and there was no chance that he was still infectious. Out here, there was always a demand for safe, sterile, clean fur, which kept people warm better than anything else could. Shaun used the remains of the things he killed to bait the traps that brought in more, and bit by bit, we built up a rapport with our neighbors, while also cutting down the number of things that wanted to eat us.
I learned how to garden. Together, we constructe
d a greenhouse to compensate for the cold, and I grew tomatoes, melons, peppers, and greens, which we dutifully canned and put aside against the inevitability of winter. We bought Coke in bulk from a black market connection who also supplied Shaun’s coffee, my birth control, and the occasional new pair of jeans. Our neighbors learned to trust us. We learned to trust them. A few of them even knew who we were, even though Shaun told them that his name was “Phil,” that my name was “Jean,” and that we were a married couple from Seattle who’d decided to drop out of society after a new iteration of Mason’s Law had required us to have our beloved corgis put to sleep. It was a paper-thin cover story, obviously fake if looked at with a critical eye, and that was what made it so secure.
For the people who recognized us as Shaun and Georgia Mason, the reporters who refused to die, a pathetic cover story said “we trust you enough that we’re not bothering with a convincing lie.” For the people who didn’t know who we were and had no idea what we were running from, that same story said “we are not good enough liars to be a threat; we’re just here to live our lives in peace, same as you, same as anybody.” A story that was too good would have painted us as possible government spies trying to infiltrate the community. The kind of people who chose to live in this little slice of the middle of nowhere weren’t the sort who looked kindly on government oversight.
And that label included us, now. We were that kind of people. We didn’t want to be monitored, and we didn’t want to be protected, and we didn’t want to be legislated. We just wanted to be left the fuck alone.
Not that we were leaving the world alone forever. The world needed our attention. Maybe that was a little self-aggrandizing, but look at the facts: The one time I’d trusted the world to get by without my input, it had gone off the rails in a big, big way. The people in power needed to be held accountable for the things they did, and Shaun and I were in the best possible position to do it. We’d already given our lives—me—and our sanity—Shaun—in the service of telling the truth. We’d given everything we had. We’d given too much. What did we have left to lose? Only each other, and we were never far enough apart for that to happen. Any attack or airstrike that took out one of us was going to take out both of us. And we were not planning to go down easy.
Our kitchen was small and surprisingly cozy, with cream-colored walls and red-and-white checked curtains on the windows. It was warm, and homey, and completely out of character for the face we’d always worked so hard to show people. This was us, relaxed. Us, safe. Us, not running away anymore. I walked to the fridge, opened it, and took a can of Coke from the door, noting as I did that the salmon we had set to marinate the night before looked like it was just about done. It was a simple dressing, sugar and vinegar and crushed cranberries, but it would still taste better than anything we’d ever eaten, because we were the ones who’d set the menu. No more focus groups or nutritionally ideal proteins, no more sponsors or captors. Just us. That was the best seasoning in the world.
My head spun as I opened the can of Coke and took my first sip. As always, it was cold enough to burn as it traveled down my throat, waking up my body just a bit more. I held the can against my temple, willing it to stop the spin. Sometimes I got disoriented in the mornings, that was all. No big deal.
Except that when you’re an illegally grown and programmed clone of a dead journalist, living in the middle of nowhere with no access to medical care, since seeking medical care would mean exposing yourself to the people who made you, everything is a big deal. Those were the thoughts that kept me from going to sleep, as opposed to the nightmares that kept me from staying that way. If Shaun broke his leg or one of us got an impacted molar, there was no one out here to save us. We were young and healthy for now, but we both knew that wasn’t going to last forever, and while living long enough to get old was a luxury we couldn’t count on, the fear of getting old in the middle of the Canadian wastes was a concern we couldn’t ignore.
I lowered the can and took another swig, bigger this time, trying to force caffeine into my body as fast as I could. When I pulled it away from my lips, there was blood on the rim.
I looked at it blankly for a long moment, trying to make sense of what I saw. Then I raised my other hand and touched my lip. My fingertips came away bloody. I gave them the same look I’d given the can, trying to justify the bleeding to myself. There was no good answer for it, no good reason for my blood to be fleeing from my body.
Shaun. Shaun couldn’t see me this way. He’d freak out if he thought there was something wrong with me, and I needed us both calm if we were going to review our options. I turned to face the door, taking a step toward it.
Somewhere between my foot coming up and my foot coming down, I lost consciousness. I don’t remember falling. I don’t remember having fallen. I just remember the thought, sharp as a needle across the blackness that was taking me down:
Oh, God, no. I can’t leave him again.
And then there was nothing.
Book II
Pay the Piper
It’s always the ones who made the mess who talk about how cleaning it up should be a group effort—or better yet, how cleaning it up should be somebody else’s problem. It’s almost like the kind of people who break things for fun don’t care for being held accountable.
—GEORGIA MASON
I will never get tired of the sound my fist makes when it slams into some over-entitled asshole’s nose. Cartilage crunching is my jam.
—SHAUN MASON
One
Normally, George came and fished me out of the woods after an hour or two, citing things like “breakfast” as a good reason to shower and rejoin the human race. Personally, I figured she just got lonely, since her usual routine didn’t involve logging on and getting to work until after lunch. Once she started, it was hard for her to stop. So she made it a rule to do stuff like socializing and going out in the yard before she let herself reach for the keyboard. I guess it made her feel less like she was addicted to her job. It was cool by me. I knew she was a junkie, and so did she, but we all needed our illusions to get through the days. If she wanted to pretend she wasn’t hooked, that was okay.
Her lying to me made it easier for me to lie to her. We both knew recovery was a process. We both understood the necessity of taking it one day at a time, and we’d both spent our share of hours chatting with the folks at the helplines, her over one of Buffy’s video chat servers, randomized and anonymized until government agencies could have blown their entire budgets trying to track her down, me over cruder but equally effective text clients. We spilled out our guts to each other, and when that didn’t fix things we spilled out our guts to strangers, and none of that changed the fact that recovery was a process and we both wanted it to be over, finished and done with, and let us get back to our lives.
So George pretended she wasn’t addicted to her work, and I pretended I wasn’t still out of my goddamn mind, and we got by.
“She kept you up all night again, huh?” The Georgia who asked was leaning up against a nearby tree, wearing her old, familiar uniform of black and white, even down to the sunglasses covering her too-normal eyes. That was one thing my Georges had in common: They both had brown eyes, untouched by Kellis-Amberlee. The real one’s eyes were like that because the scientists who built her weren’t as good at playing God as they wanted to think they were. This one’s eyes were like that because even at my craziest, I had been trying to remind myself that she was a hallucination.
The not-real George wasn’t bothered by my lack of response. She continued, “I would never do that to you. I sleep like a baby.”
I didn’t say anything. George had left me alone out here for an unusually long time, hence her imaginary twin showing up to needle me, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t waiting for me in the cabin, ready to chase the bad dreams away with a smile and a touch of her hand. My hallucinations could seem solid sometimes. On the really bad days, they covered almost every sense I had. They still didn’t
feel as real as she did.
“You can’t ignore me forever, Shaun. You can try, but you know as well as I do that I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me. You think you’re healing? If you’re healing, why am I still here?” Her voice dropped to a hiss at the end of her sentence, turning menacing. “She’ll leave you. That’s what she was created to do. She always leaves you. I’m the one who loves you enough to stay. I’m the one who’s always going to be here. Just me. You’ll see.”
“I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore.” I closed my eyes, keeping them closed for a slow count of five before I turned toward the tree where she’d been standing, opened them, and said, “Leave.”
And just like that, she wasn’t there. The skin on my arms lumped itself into large, painful knots of gooseflesh, a physiological response to a psychological problem. I shivered, picked up the last of the night’s catch—a wolverine that had managed to neatly decapitate itself on the bar-trap I’d set for it—and turned back toward the cabin. I needed to get out of the woods. I needed to see Georgia. I needed to hear her voice outside my head, not just in the empty, echoing space that had opened when she’d died, and still hadn’t finished closing.
Hallucinatory George used to be my friend. She’d offered me advice and held my hand when I needed to sleep; she’d told me she loved me, and I had believed her. I still did. She was my projection of the woman I knew and loved best in all the world, and the one thing I’d never brought myself to doubt was Georgia’s love. Our adoptive parents sort of fucked us up. They didn’t know how to deal with kids who lived long enough to grow up, and while I guess they did their best, it wasn’t good enough. We’d grown up starved for affection, starved for connection, and the only place we had known that we could find it was with each other. So we’d tangled ourselves together until sometimes I thought I could understand what family meant. The rest of the time I thought, Shaun, dude, you are so fucked in the head that you can call this girl your sister while you’re thinking about going down on her, and that was true, too, but that was the model we had. It wasn’t right. It probably wasn’t healthy. It was ours.