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.
So yeah, when I first started having conversations with my dead sister, I was pretty much okay with it. Everybody has their own coping mechanisms, and me? Well, I went crazy to stay sane. For most people, that would have been the end of it. They would have been haunted by the increasingly complex hallucinations until they either gave themselves completely over to the delusion or decided it was time to go on some heavy-duty antipsychotics and get over themselves. The trouble with me was, I got her back. Some trouble, huh? Oh poor me, I got a miracle. I became the luckiest man in the world. My prayers were answered, and it was all sunshine and good times from there on out … except that when I prayed to get her back, I had never prayed for my sanity to return. Recovery was a process, and it was taking a lot longer to heal than it had taken for me to be hurt.
Imaginary Georgia had been my mind’s way of protecting itself from the crushing reality of a world that didn’t have her in it anymore, and deep down, on the level of thought that I couldn’t access no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t believe she was going to stay. Sure, she was back among the living now, but that was just some sort of cosmic filing error. Somebody, somewhere, was going to realize that I didn’t deserve this, this … this mercy, and she was going to leave me again, for good this time. If I allowed myself to fully recover before that happened, I was going to find myself alone in a world that didn’t have the real George, and didn’t have the fake George; a world that didn’t have any George at all. That was a world I couldn’t imagine living in, and so even as I curled close to the flesh-and-blood woman who shared my life, I clung to the ghost who haunted my heart. I couldn’t help it.
The night’s catch had been good, at least: Not counting our friend the fox, I had three wolverines, a pine marten the length of my arm, and six rabbits. Rabbit fur was always in high demand, especially among families with children. The necessity of fur was something you came to terms with when you lived in a place with winters this harsh and an infrastructure this insecure, but people who remembered the world before the Rising still liked to dress their kids in rabbit, which they remembered as a relatively low-cruelty, farmed fur.
There was no such thing as fur without cruelty. There was no such thing as life without cruelty. Everything a person had was something someone else didn’t have. In the end, it all came down to balancing the damage that you did. My rabbits died fast and clean, and did me the favor of not leading predators too close to the cabin. They would bait my traps and pay my debts, and while killing them might have been cruel, I did my best to make sure that their lives weren’t wasted.
I hung the carcasses in the curing shed, a blood-scented box of metal and concrete that would have spelled instant infection for almost anyone else. Even George hadn’t been out there since we’d finished settling into the property, although I had taken video for her a couple of times, when she’d asked. We didn’t have any secrets from each other.
There was a flash of dark hair out of the corner of my eye as my mind reminded me, unflinchingly, that we didn’t have any secrets we could see.
Working with blood the way I did meant I was a walking hot zone, and made it essential for me to be careful with what I touched. That was why I’d installed a chemical shower, in its little plastic pod, right outside the shed. I stripped down, hoping George was watching from the window—it was always fun when I could give her a little show; both of us were still drunk on the idea of being allowed to love each other without social mores and disapproving looks getting in the way—and shoved my clothes into a biohazard bag before stepping into the self-sealing green box.
Even in the middle of nowhere, certain protocols have to be followed. People had taken “safety” to the level of religious mania, making it unsafe in their obsessive need to put it above all else. That didn’t mean decontamination was optional, or make bleach anything other than the ongoing salvation of mankind. I spent the recommended time in the chemical spray, scrubbing every trace of blood, every scrap of viral fomite, from my skin and hair. I emerged smelling of citrus lotion and cleanliness, pulled on the sweatpants that hung from the interior hook of the unit, stepped into a pair of plastic slippers, and strolled, clean and damp and decontaminated, back toward the cabin.
Nothing moved in the windows. I frowned. George might still be in bed—that wasn’t unheard of, especially after she’d had a bad night—but she usually got up when she heard the shower. It was rigged to set off a beeper in the kitchen when someone turned it on. We’d had a few uninvited guests, usually people who’d been driven to the wilderness rather than choosing it, show up on our property and assume they could take advantage of an unguarded opportunity to get themselves clean. That was okay, sort of; we made enough, between her vegetables and my furs, to pay for a few charity-case showers over the course of the year. The trouble was, people like that sometimes wanted more than just a bath, and that was less okay. That couldn’t be allowed.
A twinge of nervousness ran down my spine, tightening my skin and making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I was being silly, I knew, but I still picked up my pace, walking as fast as I dared before I would have to admit that I was running. There was still no movement in the kitchen.
She’s probably still in bed, I thought, and opened the back door, and stopped dead. My eyes widened until it physically hurt. Every muscle in my body seemed to be cramping at the same time, becoming nonresponsive. I couldn’t move. I had to move. Everything hinged on my moving.
But I had hallucinations, right? I saw things that weren’t there. I saw an imaginary Georgia. So maybe this was that. Maybe my cruel, cruel brain had decided to stop playing nice, and had moved on to presenting me with worst-case scenarios, intrusive thoughts that would gradually transform my life into a waking nightmare. It was a terrifying thing to contemplate, and right now I liked it a lot better than the idea that this could be really real, that this could be happening.
My hallucinations were visual, auditory, and sometimes tactile. They never included taste, and they never included smell.
I could smell the blood.
George was lying in a curved comma on the kitchen floor, the angle of her body seeming somehow outraged, like she was furious with herself for having limitations, like she was furious with gravity for enforcing them. She had dropped a nearly full can of Coke when she fell; the sticky brown liquid had spread across the floor in a fan of droplets. It was going to attract ants. That was a small, petty thing to focus on, but that was what made it so safe. We were going to have ants, and George was going to be furious, because she hated ants. At least this time I could blame her, and not one of my botched attempts to make caramel. We would laugh, and laugh, and laugh…
The sound I was making wasn’t laughter. It was barely even human, and it hurt my throat. Under the circumstances, that was the least of my concerns.
The Coke had been in her hand when she fell, and had splattered away from her. The blood, though, that was all her. It surrounded her head like a corona, some asshole artist’s idea of religious art. I finally remembered how to move. I rushed into the kitchen, the screen door slamming behind me, and dropped to my knees on the sticky, blood-tacky floor, reaching for her.
“George? Hey, George, can you hear me?”
She didn’t respond. I rolled her halfway into my lap, feeling the limp, dead weight of her. The blood had come from her nose; there were caked-on trails leading from both nostrils, fanning out to cover her mouth and chin. She looked like a zombie, like she’d been feasting on something unspeakable. Was that possible? Could she have amplified?
Anything was possible. If she opened her eyes and they were black with virus and devoid of humanity, well, it would just be like we were finishing what we’d begun, back in Sacramento, back in the van. I was so tired. I wasn’t going to fight her.
I also wasn’t going to write her—or us—off that easily. I slid my arms under her body and stood, staggering a little under the weight of her. She hung limply against my chest, her head rolling to rest on my shoulder. Blood was getting everywhere. That was all right. Maybe I leaned too heavily on my immunity these days, but this was George. I would have risked infection for her even before we knew that the virus didn’t want me.
Step by careful step, I carried her through the cabin to the bathroom and lowered her into the tub. She didn’t open her eyes, not even when I braced her head against the cold tile and gingerly removed her blood-soaked robe, for fear of later contamination. Her stillness was a vote against her being infected: Zombies didn’t usually sleep calmly while people treated them like giant dolls. I clung to that thought as I got a washcloth, wetted it down with warm, soapy water, and began wiping the blood from her face.
Maybe she was already dead. Maybe I was fooling myself. I didn’t care. She was all I had, and I wasn’t going to lose her. Not today. Not like this.
“I’ll still be here for you,” said the George who wasn’t real, perching on the edge of the sink and smiling sweetly at me, like this wasn’t exactly what she wanted. Her and me, alone against the world, the way it had been when I was at my lowest. The way it had been when she was the only thing keeping me from swallowing a bullet. “I’ll never leave you.”
I didn’t say anything to her. I just kept my eyes on the real George, and prayed, foolish as it was, that she was going to wake up.