I slammed my hand flat on the metal pressure pad, triggering the needles to start their business. They bit deep, and I hissed, biting my tongue against the pain. I thought amplification was supposed to make this sort of thing easier. I didn’t feel any difference at all. Blood tests always hurt, but this one was worse than most, maybe because the unit was so primitive.

When the last of the needles disengaged, I pulled my hand away. The test unit beeped once and was silent. No lights, no alarms, nothing to indicate whether I’d passed or failed. Not that I really needed the confirmation that I was infected—“Get a bite, say good-night,” as they said when I was in training—but it still would have been nice. You were supposed to see your results. That was how the testing worked.

“Hey.” George put her hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you go lie down? You’re exhausted.”

I shrugged her hand off. “No, I don’t want to sleep through this. If this is the end of me being me, I don’t want to miss it.” A thought struck me, and I chuckled bitterly. “I can’t be too far gone if I’m still hallucinating you, can I? You’re a pretty complicated delusion. Zombies probably can’t manage this quality of crazy.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You’re welcome.”

She fell silent, and so did I. I was too tense to carry on a conversation, even with a dead person who lived only in my head. I’d just keep trying to pick a fight, and she’d keep trying to stop me, until we wound up screaming at each other and I spent the last minutes of my conscious life arguing with the one person I least wanted to argue with. I just wanted to know that she was there, and that I wasn’t going through this alone.

So I stared at the test unit instead of talking to her, willing it to develop lights and tell me what I needed to know. All I needed was for it to confirm that my life was over. Nothing difficult. Nothing any fucking toaster couldn’t manage these days.

I don’t know how long I sat there staring at the test unit, feeling my throat getting dryer and waiting for the other symptoms to set in. The difficulty breathing, the sensitivity to light, the murkiness of thought—all the little dividing lines that separated human from zombie. Dryness of the throat was only the beginning, and my training was extensive enough to tell me exactly what the progression would be. Every little step along the way.

The door opened.