JONATHAN

Since his mother had gotten sick and he'd stopped being allowed to visit, there were many nights when Jonathan would get blackout drunk and wake up with a mind fog so severe he'd forget where he was. Somehow, he knew, even before opening his eyes, that this was a different kind of morning.

The symptoms were relatively the same. There was the ever-present ringing in his ear and the dry feeling in his mouth that made deep breaths feel like fire running down his throat. There was also the pressure behind his eyes, like a dull ache that radiated around his temples. His body was cold and clammy, and he was aware that he was shaking even beneath the sheets that someone had laid over him. But, unlike waking up from some drunken night, the sensation of it was all wrong.

He knew pain, but this was different... because there wasn't any.

An indescribable numbness seemed to flatten him against the bed like a weighted blanket. It crushed against his chest making it difficult to breathe, pressed down on his muscles making it hard to move and dragged down his eyelids making them impossible to open. It felt as if a pins and needles sensation was radiating over his whole body.

The ringing was becoming impossible to ignore, so even though he knew it wouldn't help, he reached up to touch his left ear. He'd barely brushed the skin with his fingers, when his tired arm dropped clumsily back to the bed as if his brain somehow forgot how to transmit the message properly. With difficulty he managed to force his eyes open. The world was a blurry mess of white blobs. Jonathan had never needed to wear glasses before and for a dazed moment, he wondered if this was the way Evie saw the world.

Evie.

Something about her, even just the thought of her, sent adrenaline shooting through his system and his vision cleared. He was lying on a metal-frame cot, shoved in the corner of a small square-shaped room. There was a plastic desk and chair across the room to his right, which oddly featured a notebook and a box of crayons. The three white walls that surrounded him were completely bare apart from a small window overlooking the city at a height that would probably be deadly to fall from. A large one-way mirror stood in place of the fourth wall directly across from the bed; the presence of it told him that the door that stood beside it was indubitably locked.

He tried to raise himself up on the bed to get a better look but as he tried to force his uncooperative muscles to obey, a robotic-sounding female voice echoed through the room.

"Jonathan. I need you to lie back down please."

He opened his mouth to speak but only a faint noise came out and he closed it again, trying to build up enough saliva to wet his tongue.

"Calm down." The voice commanded but Jonathan ignored it. He managed to prop himself up on his elbows before he noticed a warm, wet liquid moving down his arm.

"You pulled out your IV." The voice told him, revealing that whoever was speaking could read the confusion on his face. As he watched the trail of blood lazily trace down his arm, the events of the previous day slowly began to creep back into focus. He remembered Jaycee giving him the keys to the jeep, going to the bookstore with Evelyn, being attacked and racing back to the compound only to find that they were... waiting for them.

"What's going on?" He demanded, finally finding his voice. He turned his attention to the one-way mirror, "What are you doing to me? Where's—"

There was a muffled sound, and he realized that whoever was on the other side of the mirror was no longer listening.

"Make a note," he heard them saying, "I think we can all agree that the effects wore off more quickly than expected. We will need to up the dosage for the next round."

"HEY!" Jonathan shouted, raising his voice as much as his sore throat would allow, "Will someone tell me what the f—"

"Note the aggression." The voice said in that same stupid monotonous tone.

Whatever numbness had been inhibiting his motion had melted away and he found himself on his feet. Blood was pumping loudly in his ears and next to the ringing, the noise had become unbearable.

"WHAT IS HAPPENING?" He roared in a voice so loud he couldn't believe it was his own. Before he knew it, he had the chair from the corner of the room in his hands and he was poised to throw it against the mirror.

His reflection was that of a wild animal; grey eyes bloodshot, teeth bared, saliva dripping from his mouth. There was blood staining the white t-shirt he was wearing, and his arms shook with the effort to hold back as he held the chair over his head. The bandage covering his shoulder, where he'd been bitten, was visible just below the collar of his shirt.

Shaken, he set the chair back down and collapsed into it. How had he forgotten?

"I'm infected, aren't I?" He asked the disembodied voice.

"You are." They replied.

Jonathan never considered what it would be like to be a lost soul, and he found himself combing the inventory of his brain for what he knew about it...while his thoughts were still cohesive enough to make sense of it all. The ringing in his ear was making it nearly impossible to focus but he willed his mind to concentrate. Usually in times like these, he'd reach for his Walkman, but the music box was nowhere to be found.

He'd been told that flu-like symptoms appeared usually in the first 24 hours after transmission of the virus, and he could tell he was already feeling those effects. He glanced back down at his arm noting the trail of blood that was already beginning to dry from having ripped out his IV. The lack of sensitivity to pain was also evident. So, it hadn't been more than a day, but he didn't know how long he had before the paranoia, tremors, confusion or disorientation fully set in or when he'd start experiencing the hallucinations, seizures, and blackouts.

Suddenly a thought occurred to him, did emotion trigger him now too?

There was indiscernible chatter from behind the mirror as the voice of whoever was speaking before died down and was replaced with a new voice that caught Jonathan's attention. It was Jaycee.

"I know you're there Jaycee, you need to tell me what's going on right now." He demanded, "How did you know—"

"That you'd be in trouble?" Jaycee mused, it was her voice, but it wasn't, all the gentleness in her tone had gone and was replaced by something cold and distant. "Simple, I ensured it."

"I knew we were careful! I knew there was no way they could have gotten through! Why? How could you?" Fury burned through Jonathan again and this time he did throw the chair which bounced harmlessly off the mirror and clattered to the floor.

"Shhh," Jaycee's voice soothed through the mirror, "you're doing us a great service. You have volunteered to be our first official human trial for the cure."

"What?" Jonathan's head was spinning now, and he had to brace himself against the mirror to keep from collapsing. It was as if the aggression had suddenly sapped all his strength, which had disappeared just as quickly as it had appeared.

"You need to lie back down." Jaycee said in a voice gentler than it deserved to be, "we don't want you to hurt yourself."

"Hurt myself?" Jonathan growled, "You did this to me."

"No," Jaycee replied evenly, "the soulless did and it is what they will do to all of us if we cannot come up with a cure. Jonathan we are so close!"

"You set me up!"

"I merely offered an opportunity, you made the decision to leave the compound, I did not force you to do anything."

Jonathan shook his head, "Why me?"

Jaycee was silent for a moment and there was shuffling on the other side of the mirror; he wondered if she was pacing. "We have some of the greatest minds in the country here, but you see, some of us are losing hope. Some of us, aren't willing to do what needs to be done to save humanity. You are... a... how do I put this delicately... a motivating factor."

Jonathan frowned, "You've chosen the wrong person. I don't matter to anyone here." But even as he said the words, he knew that perhaps that's what he believed up until last night before Evie had made it clear that it wasn't true.

Jaycee laughed humourlessly, "you're right. You were not the most action-inspiring person, I could have chosen but I made a safe bet; either of you would have sufficed, really. I guess I would have preferred if it had been her, but here we are."

Jonathan's legs wobbled beneath him, and he sank down to the floor. The tremors had started, and he was sure that his temperature was spiking based on the sweat that was now soaking his body. "You wanted Evie to be infected?"

"Of course, that would have been more motivating," Jaycee's voice said, emotionlessly, "but you'll do just fine as long as Evelyn plays her part and convinces her sister that you are worth saving. She was so close with Dayna, but we didn't know what we do now about the interactions between the virus and Serenozine. Dr. Li's journal offered us the final piece of the puzzle."

Jonathan's eyes widened at the mention of Liz's former girlfriend. He hadn't heard anyone speak about her at all, besides Elliot.

"What happened to her?" Jonathan asked.

"You must know what happens to people who become lost souls; they lose their minds, their ability to process emotion and become violent and volatile. For most of them, their bodies eventually give out and succumb to starvation or dehydration or mortal wounds. But then we learned-- much like you did over at my old workplace-- that sometimes they don't. If they have Serenozine in their bloodstream, they don't die, not really. It suppresses those nasty impulses, unless of course they witness emotion and the interaction between the drug and the virus allows the virus to puppet their bodies, falling back on old patterns of behaviour until they crumble to dust. Liz wasn't brave enough to test her father's theory without more proof. Something had to force her hand."

"You infected her on purpose? Does Liz know?"

"The results from the experiment showed promise, but ultimately it failed." Jaycee said, she sounded bored as if Jonathan's questions were an irritating fruit fly, she couldn't wait to squash, "And no, Liz only knows what she needed to. Now that we know what we did wrong last time, we can try again. Liz wasn't ready to get back on the horse, not after what happened to Dayna but now, she'll be convinced."

"Why are you telling me all this? Aren't you afraid someone will find out?"

"Who would you tell?" Jaycee responded. Her voice wasn't cruel, only resigned, "This is the end of the world after all! I'm not an optimist, I'm a realist. I know we aren't getting this right on the first try but studying you during the procedure, now that will provide crucial information that will ensure that our next few tries will yield success. Look at it this way, your life may not have mattered much, Jonathan Johnson, but your death will."