The decontamination cycle was about average in length, which didn’t stop me from jerking on the clean sweatpants provided and running out of the room as soon as the door unlocked. The cold air of the hallway hit me like a slap. Foxy, who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, waiting patiently, flowed back to her feet and smiled sunnily at me.
“There you go,” she said. “You smell less awful now.”
“Where’s George?” The light above the second decontamination chamber’s door was green; there was no one in there. George should have been waiting for me.
Foxy cocked her head to the side, smile fading. “I don’t think you’re happy to see me,” she said. “Why aren’t you happy to see me? I’m happy to see you. You remember the Monkey and the Cat and the house where I used to live, and nobody does those things anymore. That makes us friends. Shared memory is the foundation of friendship.” Her tone changed on the last sentence, becoming almost grounded as it lost the floaty, singsong quality that her voice normally contained.
I didn’t have time to wonder about that. “I’m happy to see you, Foxy, okay? I thought you were dead, and it’s always nice when someone you thought was dead turns out not to be. In the ‘walking around and still being a people’ sense, not the ‘zombie infected grr’ sense. I just … where’s Georgia? She was supposed to be going through the same decontamination cycle I was.” I was struggling not to panic. My thoughts were chasing themselves in circles, and I could virtually feel the phantom fingers on the back of my neck. Fear of losing George had brought her phantom twin to the surface. She was always there, always waiting for the chance to slip back into the place that she thought of as rightfully hers. It was getting harder to fight her. The added stress of not knowing where the real George was didn’t help.
“Oh, Shannon wanted to talk to her in private. You know, girl stuff.” Foxy dimpled. “Anyway, she said I should meet you when you got out of the shower and take you to them. Did you want to put a shirt on? You’re all chesty and it’s distracting.”
“The door closed,” I said.
“I can find you a shirt,” said Foxy. Again, there was that unusual seriousness in her voice. It was easy to think of her as much younger than she was: Her bone structure and general muscle tone fed into that idea. But there were lines in the skin around her eyes and mouth, and it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility for her to have seen the Rising firsthand. Maybe she hadn’t always been this way. Maybe she was like me, broken by outside forces and told to figure out how to keep going now that she was something new. If that was the case, she had found a unique, and uniquely homicidal, method of coping.
“Okay,” I said. It was never good to argue with someone who had that many guns. “But after you find me a shirt, you take me to my sister. All right?”
“Absolutely,” chirped Foxy. She grabbed my hand, all childlike mania again, and dragged me down the hall.
Dr. Abbey’s people had definitely settled into the forestry center. We passed rooms clogged with white-coated researchers, moving around cages full of rats or tanks of wet, squelchy things. Some of the things had suckers. Others seemed to be nothing but shapeless clouds of shadow and silt that moved through the water like smoke. Foxy never slowed down. The rooms blurred, one into the next, without revealing their details to me. On some level, I was grateful. If I’d been able to see everything that Dr. Abbey was working on, I would have had to think about it. That never ended well.
“So what are you doing here, Foxy?” I asked.
“A bad man used me as a decoy to try to make Shannon let him in, like the Big Bad Wolf blowing and blowing and blowing the house down,” she said blithely. “She says he used me like a weapon, and that it was inappropriate, because people aren’t weapons, they’re people, and I deserve better. I think she’s been locked up here so long that she’s turned into an idealist, but that’s why I stick around. She’s going to need people who don’t believe in ideals, when the sky falls down and the wolves are at the door.” She slanted a glance in my direction. “Tom works in hydroponics. He makes drugs for me, so I don’t have to be an idealist.”
“Drugs?” I frowned. “Foxy, if they’re drugging you…”
“No, no, silly boy, they aren’t drugging me, I’m drugging me. I take my pills and I drink my drinks, and the people I used to be don’t come to the surface.” Her gaze sharpened. “You’re a reporter. You work for that site. The one with the smiling man who wears the red glasses.”
It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Alaric. His latest masthead picture showed him wearing a pair of red-framed glasses. “I do,” I said.
“Then you must have read the things he said about me. He dug so deep he hit the bottom of the world, and he said things.” She pulled open a door in the wall, revealing stacks of neatly folded sweatpants, sweatshirts, and medical scrubs. The sweats were gray. The scrubs were blue. I reached for a sweatshirt. If I showed up wearing scrubs, George would probably have a panic attack. “You should know who I used to be.”
“If it was one of his big fact-finding articles, then sorry, I’m a bad coworker.” The shirt was snug, but it would do. “I don’t go in for the historical stuff. If it can’t chew my face off or be used to shoot something that’s trying to chew my face off, I’m not interested.”
“Oh.” Foxy blinked, her entire demeanor softening. “So you don’t know.”
“Honestly, Foxy, the only thing I know right now is that I want you to take me to Georgia. Please. I’m scared out of my mind, and I’m doing my best to stay cool, but I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to pull this off. Will you take me to her?”
“Now that you’re wearing a shirt, sure. Follow me.” She turned and trotted down the hall. I followed, trying not to let my eagerness cause me to overtake her. I needed her to get me to George, and I didn’t want to spend the next hour wandering around this maze masquerading as a medical facility.
Voices drifted from an open door up ahead. One of them belonged to Dr. Abbey. The other—
“George!” Now I did put on a burst of speed, beating Foxy to the doorway by several steps. Inside was an office, small and cozy, with a dog bed taking up most of one wall. Joe was sleeping there, and under any other circumstances, I would have spared a moment to be amazed that the old dog was still kicking. At the moment, I had better things to worry about. George was sitting in a straight-backed plastic chair, sipping what looked like orange juice. Her hair was dry. She hadn’t gone through decontamination at all.
Dr. Abbey tricked me, I thought, and that wasn’t important, not really, because George was turning to look at me, a weary smile on her lips. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t dead. Things were still okay.
“Hey,” said George. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes, which were sad and scared. “Sorry to frighten you. I like the shirt.”
“What she’s not saying is that she had no input in the matter,” said Dr. Abbey, looking up from her computer. “I needed to talk to her without you in the room. Locking you in the shower seemed like the best solution, since I knew there was no other way I was going to get the two of you apart. Hello, Shaun. Long time no see. You’re looking well. Canada agrees with you.”
“That’s more than I can say for a certain Canadian,” I said, scowling. “You had no right to do that to us.”
“Right and wrong are all about where you’re standing,” she said. “There used to be a thing called ‘doctor-patient confidentiality,’ before the CDC made your health the world’s business. I wanted to talk to Georgia about her condition, and what it could mean for her, specifically. It’s up to her how much of that she passes along. I know you don’t like being left out of things, but you need to accept that this is her body, and it’s her choice whether she tells you everything or holds certain aspects back. There are going to be times when this needs to happen. I’d rather not trick you again. I will, if you make me.”
I opened my mouth, preparing to speak—and then I stopped, closing it so hard that my teeth rattled like a Halloween prop. I took a deep breath, held it, let it out, and said, “All right.”
George blinked. Dr. Abbey lifted an eyebrow.
“All right?” she echoed. “Who are you, and what have you done with Shaun Mason?”
“I’m the man whose sister is really, really sick right now, and I’m not going to get in the way of anything that could make her better,” I said. “Do I want to? Yeah. I hope you’ve got a real zombie problem in your woods right now, Doc, because I’m going to need something to distract me from all the help I can’t offer.”
“You’re helping,” said George. “You brought me here. You’re still here. Don’t ever think that you’re not helping.” She got out of the chair. Only the way she held on to the arm, fingers clenched tight and arm suspiciously rigid, told me how much effort that was. Someone who didn’t know her might not even realize that she was sick.
“I’m trying,” I said, offering her my arm as I looked back to Dr. Abbey. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?”
“Not yet,” she said. She held up a small vial of something red. I realized, after a moment’s blank staring, that it was George’s blood. “But I will. You can trust me on that.”
“We’re already trusting you on everything else,” I said, putting an arm around George’s shoulders. She leaned into me, as much for support as for comfort. “What’s one more thing?”
Dr. Abbey nodded, and didn’t say anything. For the three of us, in that moment, there was nothing else to say.
Then Foxy stuck her head in from the hall. “Should I show them to their room?” she asked. “Because it’s almost time for me to go take my pills, and I don’t think I should show them anything after that. It’s always hard to know whether I’m showing people a thing that is, or a thing that I think ought to be.”
“In a moment, Foxy,” said Dr. Abbey. Foxy beamed and withdrew again.
George’s eyebrows were climbing toward her hairline. “I have so many questions right now,” she said. “Did you see Alaric’s report…?”
“Wait, you read that?” I asked.
She punched me lightly in the chest. “You’re not as disinterested as you pretend to be. Everyone here knows it.”
“I still didn’t read the article,” I said. “You know Alaric’s prose doesn’t do anything for me.”
Dr. Abbey snorted. “The two of you have been living alone in the wastes too long. You’ve forgotten how to leave room in conversations for other people—not that you were ever particularly good at it to begin with. Yes, I read Mr. Kwong’s dissertation on the case of Elaine Oldenburg, and yes, I am aware that she’s the woman we call ‘Foxy.’ She has severe depression and PTSD, and has been coping by means of pharmaceuticals for years. We’re supplying her with synthetic cannabinoids, mixed by one of my assistants, and I’ve been working with her on cutting back. Someday I may be able to wean her off them completely. She isn’t exactly keen on the idea of facing the world without filters, but she’s been trying. People used that girl unconscionably. If you ever need proof that the dead aren’t the real monsters, just look at her. But she’s trying, and I’m trying, and she has a home here for as long as she needs one. Even if she does track unmentionable things on the carpet.”
She turned on George. “As for you: I don’t know what’s wrong with you yet. I do know that you’re dehydrated, and that we need to get that taken care of pronto. I’ll be at your room in an hour, to set up a saline drip and to show your damn fool brother how to keep it from kinking. Now, go get cleaned up. We have work to do.”
George still leaning against me for support, we went. Dr. Abbey was right.
We had work to do.