It's the whispers that wake her. They start out low, a sort of sibilant hissing, just barely there at all. But just as she thinks she's imagined them, they get louder, more frantic, until it's not whispering, it's shouting. It's all nonsense, nothing that makes sense, and in her saner moments, Marianne's glad she can't understand it. Now, though, it panics her. She starts awake, hand flying upward to check for her faceplate and panics even more when she doesn't feel it. Her bare face doesn't feel natural anymore: it's exposed, vulnerable.
Before she completely freaks out, she remembers. That's right: she doesn't have to sleep in a hazmat suit anymore. She's home – home and safe.
Alone in her bedroom, she laughs bitterly. She's home, all right, but not safe. Never safe; never again.
Marianne glances at the clock and isn't surprised to see that it reads 3am. These nightmares always come at 3am. She wishes she knew what it meant, that she had someone she could ask. But even if she did, she's not sure she really wants to know the answer.
She won't sleep again; she knows that, so she gets up and heads to the bathroom to shower. Part of her new routine these days – shower at 3am, followed by coffee. She drinks enough coffee now that her hands have acquired a near-permanent tremor, but it keeps her going.
In the bathroom, she's careful not to look to closely at the mirror. She's too afraid of what she might see. Herself, of course, and she doesn't look too different – no tentacles, nothing like that, though she's thinner, with huge dark circles under her eyes. But one time she thought she saw it in the reflection – the Filth, creeping up her bathroom wall behind her, gleaming like crude oil. When she turned around, there was nothing there, but she couldn't shake the impression that it was just hiding, waiting for her to look away.
Another time, her reflection winked at her. That was when she decided she was done with looking. She's seen too much already.
Too bad it's so much harder to forget.
Her therapist says she has PTSD and survivor's guilt. Her therapist is right, but she doesn't know the truth. She thinks Marianne's team members died during some disease outbreak, that they were some sort of heroes who were trying to help the sick and wound up infected - the kind of thing Marianne herself used to believe about the CDC. But what else can she say? She can't tell the truth. That way lies a quick trip to an institution and wouldn't her bosses love that?
She never expected to get out alive. Oh, she'd talked a good game, at least some of the time, but she'd expected to die there. She'd never really thought about what it would be like to go back to the normal world after what she's experienced.
She's thought about quitting her job. It was hopelessly naïve of her; she sees that now, but she used to believe she was helping people. Serving her country and making a difference. Now that she knows the truth, how can she pretend nothing's changed? She can't, but she can't quit either. What else would she do?
Her bosses would love to fire her, but they know they can't. She knows too much and despite the cover up, (as long as she keeps herself from being committed) she might manage to make something stick. So when she told them she wanted to study the Bees, they raised her security clearance instead.
Sometimes she wishes she hadn't done that either.
Marianne has her first cup of coffee now, the thick ceramic clutched tightly in both hands to be certain she won't drop it. She used to drink her coffee black, but these days, she can't stand anything liquid and dark. She adds non-dairy creamer until it's a nice, safe tan before she takes the first sip.
She sits at her kitchen table and drinks the first cup, then pours the second before moving to the desk, opening her laptop, and starting work. She can't do much from home, but it keeps her thoughts occupied. She can't afford to let them wander, not these days. If she did, she might drown in the horror and never come back out.
Once she'd boarded the helicopter they finally sent for her, she'd thought the worst was behind her. After everything she'd been through, what could possibly be worse?
But then she'd had her clearance raised and taken a look at the files on the Filth. The first time she read them, she barely kept herself from vomiting. The same sort of transformations she'd witnessed, meticulously documented. Plants, wildlife, people - even children - twisted and deformed, changed in hundreds of different ways, all uniformly horrible. And not just accidental infections like her – like Ernesto's team – just in the wrong place at the wrong time. (And wasn't that the story of her life? Marianne Chen: the wrong place, wrong time girl. New Orleans, Solomon Island – that's all it was, the only explanation she was offered. She was always just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every time it happened, she saw too much. And every time, she was the only one to make it out alive.)
It was hard to believe anyone could deliberately infect people with the Filth, but she'd seen the evidence with her own eyes. Oh, the Solomon Island infection was an accident, or so everything she'd been able to access said, and she tried to believe it. She had to believe it. But there had been others that weren't. Too many others that weren't.
Marianne thinks she should do something about them, but what can she do? No matter what she knows, she's just an ordinary person. Fixing something like that, that has to be up to the Bees. From what she's seen in her research, they're more than capable of it.
Maybe next time she sees one, she'll tell them about it. She can recognize them now, though she can't explain how. It's like the way she felt she could see through that raccoon, or the way she can see right through the phony concern of her superiors at work. Like that, except what she sees in the Bees is the opposite: they glow with this sort of golden light. Not literally, not to look at them, but it's there somehow. Under the skin.
By the time she's done with the pot of coffee, it's time to get ready for work. Now that she can't look in mirrors, she's given up wearing makeup, so it doesn't take her long.
She's lucky she lives somewhere with decent public transportation, though. Marianne can't drive, not anymore. She sees things: misshapen forms and dripping black corruption, just glimpses from the corner of her eye, and it doesn't help much to tell herself that they're not really there. At least as a passenger, she can't swerve unexpectedly and injure anyone else.
She walks in the front door precisely on time and manages to suppress her instinctual shudder at the hiss as the automatic doors shut behind her. No one can tell she's already been up for hours, or at least she hopes they can't. Marianne strides across the lobby, resolutely staring straight ahead and ignoring both her peripheral vision and the way the building feels oppressive now, like a trap she can't escape.
In the elevator, she hears whispering in the whoosh of the doors and the mechanical sounds the car makes as it rises.
Sometimes she wonders if it will ever stop. Will all the visions and whispers just cease, vanish as if they'd never been? Will it all be normal one day?
Or is it the normality that's the mask? Maybe it's always been there; maybe the Filth has always been hiding behind the world she thought she knew. Or worse: maybe none of this is real. Maybe she's still back by that bog, sweating in a hazmat suit that finally couldn't keep the pathogen out.
Marianne never expected to leave Solomon Island alive. As hard as she tries to believe otherwise, sometimes she thinks she never did.