Georgia was still asleep when I rolled out of bed and tiptoed for the door, leaving her to slowly roll into the warm spot created by my body. I stopped at the door and looked back at her, unable to stop myself from smiling. She always looked so peaceful in the mornings. Sure, it was usually because she’d exhausted herself screaming in the middle of the night, but that didn’t change the fact that in the morning, when her eyes were closed and the screaming was over, she looked like this was working, like she was healing, like she was getting better.
It was amazing how good we were getting at lying to each other and to ourselves about the state of our respective recoveries. George slept in stages: pre-nightmare, nightmare, post-nightmare, like a marathon runner who had to punish her body before she could let it relax. I didn’t sleep so much as move from one catnap to another, sometimes staying in bed for ten or twelve hours just to get half that much rest. As long as I never dipped much below the surface of my dreams, I didn’t have to live with the things they would try to show me.
We had gotten lucky, Georgia and I. We had taken everything the world had thrown at us, and in the end, we’d been able to walk away together, side by side, and let everyone else keep fighting without us. If George wanted to get hung up on the fact that the woman who’d walked away from the fight wasn’t exactly the same as the woman who’d signed up for it, well. I wasn’t the same man either. I didn’t even have the convenient excuse of having died and come back as an abomination of science. Unlike George, I’d been alive and kicking for every awful moment, even if I’d spent more than half of it out of my mind with grief and shock.
Some days I wasn’t sure I had ever come back into my mind. George got the nightmares to tell her that everything she knew was a lie, but at least when she was awake, she believed in the world around her. She believed I was real, and that I loved her; she believed that the sky and the forest and the snow would keep us safe. She believed we’d done the right thing, even though I knew she thought—sometimes privately, sometimes aloud and with a vehemence that frightened even me—that we’d paid way too much for what we’d gotten away with. She always believed.
Me? I wasn’t sure I believed in anything anymore, not even in myself. Sometimes I thought I was the one who’d died in Sacramento, bleeding out my life across the inside of our van, and that everything I’d experienced since putting the gun to my best friend’s head and pulling the trigger was either the hallucination of a dying mind, or—even worse—the vicious work of some CDC tech. Maybe I was a brain in a jar, and George’s nightmares were my subconscious trying to make me face the truth. Maybe. After everything we’d been through, it didn’t seem that far out of line.
But then she’d smile at me, or rub her thumb across the corner of my mouth to try to coax me into kissing her, and I would think, nah. Nah, there’s no way I could have a dream this good; there’s no way my lies could ever be this perfect. Truth is stranger than fiction, and so this had to be the truth. It was just that the moments when I could believe that were few and far between, and they didn’t seem to be getting any more common.
My name is Shaun Mason, and I am not okay.
I walked through the cabin, picking up pieces of my gear from tables and couches as I made for the back door. We were careful about decontamination—we had to be, until we knew whether my immunity to Kellis-Amberlee, which had been contracted from the original Georgia, had been sexually transmitted to her clone, and the mere fact that I could think that sentence with a straight face said something about how fucking weird my life had become—but we weren’t always careful about where things got put away after they were certified clean. Body armor tended to wind up on the couch in the front room. Boots got piled up by the back door. And weapons went on every flat surface in the place, always loaded, always close to hand.
That part, at least, was intentional, for both of us, even if we never wanted to talk about it. George and I both knew that one day, someone was going to come looking for us. Maybe they would be a friend, a member of the EIS who just wanted to check George’s vitals, since there had never been a clone who’d survived outside laboratory settings for as long as she had. Maybe they would be an enemy, an old CDC scientist come to reclaim their secret weapon and use it for evil. It didn’t matter either way, because she wasn’t going back. We weren’t going back, and anyone who tried to make us had better be prepared to learn just how many bullets we could squeeze off in the space between “hello” and “good-bye.”
My pistol was on the low mail table next to the door. I picked it up, checked the clip, and shoved it into my belt before I opened the door and stepped out into the fresh air of the Canadian morning. The sky was a perfect, pristine blue, save for the long tail of a jetliner high overhead. Transcontinental, if they were willing to risk cutting across abandoned territory. During the Rising, when the dead had risen from their beds and gone walking around snacking on the living, most rural and low-population areas had been declared too dangerous, impossible to defend, and evacuated. The United States had lost the state of Alaska, judged too hostile for human occupation and left for the zombie wolves and polar bears to divide between themselves. Canada had lost substantially more. Pretty much the entire middle of the country had been written off and left for the infected.
The infected, and people like us, who had nowhere else to go. Anyone who didn’t want to live in the modern American surveillance state, where everything you did could and would be held against you in a court of law, wound up running for the Canadian border. It was still a largely deserted country. Our closest neighbors were fifteen miles away—a nice group of First Nations activists who refused to miss out on this opportunity to take back what the European settlers had stolen from them—and even they were only there for half the year. They moved from site to site, working them all, helping to massage this land back into something livable.
Farmers and survivalists and cultists and dog breeders and political refugees dotted the Canadian countryside like mushrooms growing after a rain, hiding in dense forest or on the banks of rivers or, as with me and George, in plain sight. Everyone who knew us expected us to be living in an underground bunker, where George could craft her manifesto and I could do pushups until my biceps exploded. That was why we had found a nice little cabin that had been sealed against the weather and clearly deserted within the past decade and claimed it as our own. Sure, the original owners might have been surprised by some of our enhancements—razor wire and pit traps and homemade land mines not being exactly standard for their brand of rustic “getting back to nature”—but under the circumstances, I didn’t think they were going to question it. There had still been food in the pantry when we’d found the place. The original owners were probably long dead, eaten by their neighbors while out for a walk and leaving a perfectly good cabin for us to find.
Me, I had no interest in being eaten by the neighbors. Even more, I had no interest in George being eaten by the neighbors. I’d managed to survive losing her once. I’d done it by driving myself insane and rolling through the world like a wrecking ball, breaking everything I touched with the sheer force of my denial. The fact that I’d survived that period of my life was nothing short of a miracle, and I meant that literally. Only a miracle could have brought my dead sister back to me, and now that I had her, I wasn’t letting her go. Not if I had to burn the entire fucking world down to keep her safe.
Branches crunched underfoot as I walked across the yard, steering well clear of the orange spikes that marked the land mines and the yellow spikes that marked the pit traps. The infected didn’t pay attention to little things like lawn ornaments. There was always the vague concern that we’d kill somebody who was just coming to borrow a cup of sugar, but anyone who lived out here would know that you didn’t stroll up to the front door and ask for what you wanted: You stood as far away as you could while still being heard, and you yelled. Yelling might attract the dead, but it would sure as hell make the living friendlier.
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.”