None of this was right. Even if they had some sort of experimental treatment that could reverse the effects of amplification, there would have been somebody there to explain things to me. Shaun would have been there. There it was: the reason I knew that this, whatever it was, was a long way from being right. I remembered him pulling the trigger. Even assuming it was a false memory, even assuming that never happened, why wasn’t he here? Shaun would move Heaven and Earth to be with me. I briefly entertained the notion that he might be off forcing the voices from the intercom to tell him where I was, and then regretfully dismissed it.

Something would have exploded by now, if that was the situation.

“Goddammit.” I scowled at the white wall in front of me, turned, and started walking in the other direction. The vague hunger was getting worse, and was accompanied by a new, more frustrating sensation: the need to pee. If someone didn’t let me out soon, I was going to have a whole new set of problems to contend with.

“Run the timeline, George,” I said, trying to take some comfort in the still-familiar sound of my own voice. Everything else may have changed, but not that. “You were in Sacramento with Rick and Shaun, running for the van. Something hit you in the arm. One of those syringes like they used at the Ryman farm. The test came back positive. Rick left. And then… then…” I faltered, having trouble finding the words, even if there was no one else to hear them.

Everyone who grew up after the Rising knows what happens when you come into contact with the live form of Kellis-Amberlee. You essentially go rabid, becoming a mindless slave to the virus and its needs. You become a zombie, and you do what every zombie exists to do. You bite. You infect. You kill. You feed. You don’t wake up in a white room, wearing white pajamas, and wondering how your brother was able to shoot you in the neck without even leaving a scar.

Scars. I stopped in my tracks before wheeling and stalking back to the mirror, pulling the lids on my right eye apart while I studied its reflection. I learned how to look at my own eyes when I was eleven. That’s when I got my first pair of protective contacts. That’s also when I got my first visible retinal scarring, little patches of tissue that had been so scorched by the sun that they would never recover. We caught it in time to prevent there being any major vision loss, and I got a lot more careful after that. The scarring was there to remind me every day, creating small blind spots at the center of my vision. Nothing major. Nothing that prevented my working in the field. Just… little spots.