Mira Grant - Blackout

“And I think you’re being a dick. In fact, four out of five cloned journalists agree that you’re behaving badly.” I crossed my arms. “So did I pass?”

“What?”

“Did. I. Pass?” I repeated, enunciating each word until it was almost a sentence all by itself. “You said this was a test of how I would react under stress. Well? Did I pass? Am I a fully functional individual?”

Again, silence. Finally, sounding almost subdued, Dr. Thomas said, “We’ll go over your test results tomorrow. One of the orderlies will be along shortly with your dinner, and to take you to use the facilities. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“What cooperation? You blasted my ears out with your damn special effects and watched me like a bunch of sick voyeurs!” I realized I was yelling and took a deep breath, forcing myself to ramp it back. It wasn’t easy. Very little seemed to be, these days.

There was no response. The intercom was already off.

I walked back to my bed, feeling the headache the alarm had summoned starting to construct itself, bit by bit, in the space between my ears. Dropping to the mattress, I let gravity pull me into a slump, catching my forehead on my hands before it could hit my knees. I stayed like that for I don’t know how long—long enough for my wrists to start going numb—before I heard the door slide open. I lifted my head.

One of the familiar rotating guards was standing there with an orderly. George, from Dr. Shaw’s team. I blinked.

“We’re here to take you to the restroom,” he said, giving no sign that we’d met before. “Your dinner will be waiting when we bring you back, along with painkillers for your head.”

I frowned a little. “Do you have medical sensors in my mattress?”

He risked a smile. “No. We just have cameras that show us the way you’re clutching your temples. If you would come with us…?”

Whatever game he was playing, he was probably playing it on Dr. Shaw’s behalf, and while I still wasn’t sure I trusted her, I trusted Gregory, and he trusted her. My relationships with the people around me were becoming increasingly conditional. Trust George because Dr. Shaw trusted him. Trust Dr. Shaw because Gregory trusted her.

Trust Gregory because he was the one who stood the best chance of getting me out of here without getting me killed. Again.

“Sure,” I said, and stood.

There was another guard outside. He fell into step behind me, while the first guard took point, and George stayed to my right. We walked to the bathroom, stopping outside the door.

“How’s your head?” asked George.

“It hurts,” I replied. “How long was I in there?”

“About six hours.”

That explained the way reality had seemed to stretch and blur into nothing but alarm bells and waiting. I scowled. “I’d better be getting a lot of painkillers,” I said, even though there was no way I’d be taking them. The people who prepared my food could drug me at any time, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. That didn’t mean I needed to make it easy.

“You’ll be getting a medically safe dosage,” said George, in what sounded like it was supposed to be a reassuring tone. “Now please, you have about twelve minutes before your dinner is ready. You don’t need to rush, but you wouldn’t want your soup getting cold.”

The last time Gregory had come to remove me from my quarters, he’d done it at midnight. I nodded slightly, indicating that the message had been received—assuming it was a message at all, and wasn’t just me fumbling for meaning where there wasn’t any. “I’ll be quick.”

“We appreciate it.”

The guards didn’t accompany me into the bathroom. I still moved like they were there, watching me; it was the only way I knew to keep from getting annoyed by the knowledge that I was being watched by half a dozen hidden cameras. If Buffy had been here, she could have spotted them all by measuring minute inaccuracies in the grout, and disabled them with soap suds and mock-clumsiness. If one of us was going to come back from the dead, it should have been her. She could have treated it like just another story. She would have handled it better.

Then again, maybe not. The truth is allowed to be stranger than fiction, and the parts of this that weren’t making sense yet might have been enough to send her over the edge. The only reason they weren’t making me crazy was the fact that I had something to hold on to. Shaun was alive. Shaun was out there somewhere. And wherever he was, he needed me.

I undressed the way I always did, shoving my pants down my legs and peeling my socks off in the same gesture, concealing my little gun. It meant putting the same clothes back on when I was finished, carrying the clean pajamas they’d provided back to the room, and changing under the covers of my bed, but I’d been able to pass it off as a strange form of modesty… at least so far. I soaped up and rinsed down in record time, assisted by the fact that my bleach rinse only lasted for about fifteen seconds—a perfunctory nod to regulations, while acknowledging that I hadn’t been near anything infectious since I was Frankensteined to life.

George and the guards were still waiting outside the bathroom when I emerged. “All clean,” I announced, wiping my damp bangs back from my forehead. “Now, about those painkillers.”

George nodded, motioning for the lead guard to take us back to my room. True to his word, my dinner tray was waiting when we arrived, tomato soup the color of watered-down blood and what looked like grilled cheese sandwiches. High-end hospital food. Tomato soup and cheese sandwiches seemed to surface at every other meal. I didn’t mind as much as I might have. At least they were well prepared, which was more than I could say for many of the more ambitious things to come out of the kitchen.

Four small white pills were sitting on the tray, next to my glass of milk. “Thanks,” I said, stepping through the doorway, into the room.

“Have a nice night, Miss Mason,” said George. The door closed, cutting him from view.

I sat down at the table, palming the pills and dropping them into my lap as I mimed swallowing them. The room’s white-on-white decorating scheme helped with that. Whoever was monitoring the security monitors currently airing The Georgia Mason Show would have to be paying extremely close attention to catch white pills being dropped onto the white legs of my pajamas, where I covered them with my white napkin.

My soup was hot, and had obviously been put on the table seconds before we returned to the room. That didn’t fit George’s twelve-minute estimate, so either he was wrong, or he really had been telling me to wait for midnight. That was fine. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do.

An orderly came and took my empty dishes after I finished eating. The pills I’d managed not to take were safely tucked into the seam of my pillowcase by then. I smiled. He flinched. I smiled wider. If these people couldn’t handle the results of their crazy science, they shouldn’t be bringing back the dead. The orderly all but scurried from the room, and I started to feel a little bad. It wasn’t his fault. None of this was. The orders that controlled my life came from way above his pay grade.

I paced around the room a few times, feigning my normal restlessness, before climbing back into bed. I’d been sleeping more and more, and all sense of time was going rapidly out the window. If the alarms were going off for six hours, and they’d been off for about an hour and half, that meant I’d been awake for less than eight hours. It felt like forever. I was exhausted.

Maybe they were putting something in my food after all.

The throbbing in my head kept me from falling into anything deeper than a light doze. It shattered when the door opened. I sat up, squinting.