Chimera (Parasitology) (12 page)

Please,
I moaned, and there was no sound, because I had no lips, or mouth, or throat. Was this what it had been like for Tansy when Dr. Banks split her skull open and started severing the connections that bound her to the body she controlled? Had she thrashed in nothingness, reaching frantically for any sign that her existence still had weight or purpose? She’d always been a little neuro-atypical, but most of that had been a consequence of the body she was in, which had suffered some damage before Tansy took it over. Had she felt her sanity melting away in the isolation, when what should have become a privilege became a prison?

Please
. This time my moan was a whimper, and it was just as quiet as it had been before.

I stopped trying to move through the hot warm dark and sank deeper, letting go of the motive force that had driven me to seek a way through, a way out. It was over. I had lost. I had taken this body when it hadn’t been mine, and now, finally, it had been taken away from me. I was going to die here. I might as well have been dead already.

Wait
.

I had
taken
this body. I had been completely unaware of what I was and what I was doing, but instinct had been enough to let me make the connections between Sally Mitchell’s abandoned brain and my own boneless form. Her brain tissue and my body were essentially the same, when you really looked at them. They were both quivering tubes of protein, folded back on themselves dozens, even hundreds of times, until they formed something functional.

I had claimed ownership of this body when I couldn’t think, couldn’t make choices for myself, couldn’t do anything but follow the instincts that had been unwittingly built into me by the scientists who designed my genetic code. Even sleepwalkers could manage to do it, and the damage they did in the process was all a consequence of getting
into
the brain. I was already
there. I had made myself a comfortable bed, and the tissue had folded itself around me, accepting me as a part of itself. I couldn’t damage anything if I was careful.

Where was the hot warm dark? The hot warm dark was in my memory, and in my original body, the one I had forgotten for so very, terribly long. It was in the smooth white flesh and flower-shaped head of a tapeworm, sheltered in the delicate folds of a human brain.

Tapeworms didn’t have eyes: I couldn’t open them, couldn’t do anything to make myself more aware of my environment. But I could accept myself. Bit by bit, I let go of the idea of myself as a human being, as a bipedal creature with hands and arms and eyes and teeth. Instead, I thought of myself as long and fine and ribbonlike, designed for dark places, created to survive no matter what. I thought of myself as I had once been without thinking about it, as the creature that had hatched from an egg created in a SymboGen lab.

Part of me still wanted to regard my origins as shameful, but why should I? Everything started from an egg, even human children. There was nothing wrong with the way I was born. I was alive now, and that was what mattered. I was alive, and I was going to stay that way, no matter what the consequences—no matter what the costs.

The hot warm dark seemed to fade around me, replaced by a new kind of awareness, like the world had contracted still further and somehow become bigger at the same time, maybe because I had become so unbelievably much smaller. The world was black now, not red, but the heat, the warmth, the reality of the hot warm remained. This was where I had begun.

So begin again,
I thought fiercely. I felt myself
twitch
, a squamous, slick feeling that had little to do with the kind of motion that had become so familiar to me since the day I woke up in Sally Mitchell’s hospital bed. But this was me, too, and I needed to accept that, or I was never getting out of here.

Begin again,
I thought, and the twitch repeated itself, my body responding to my commands without bothering to take the time to explain what it was doing—and that was all right, really, because I was so divorced from my original form that I couldn’t have understood if I’d tried to tell myself. There wasn’t time for that. There was only time to hope that this would work, that I had found the way out after all.

All I had to do was open my eyes.

All I had to do was open my eyes.

All I had to do—

I opened my eyes.

I was once again lying on a cold concrete floor. There was a vent set into the ceiling high above me. Plastic billowed down from it, belling out to form an umbrella shape. The quarantine bubbles. When I’d been taken by USAMRIID the first time, the time that Sherman came to break me out, they had placed me in a quarantine bubble for study before they decided what to do with me. There had been dozens of other bubbles visible from mine; they must have cycled the entire current population of Pleasanton through this facility.

I was so busy thinking about what the plastic meant that it took me a few seconds to realize I could
see
the plastic. My eyes were working again. I focused on the rest of my body, looking for the places where my limbs diverged from the mass of my torso and hips. Finding my fingers shouldn’t have required an effort, but it did; they were slightly numb, like they had gone to sleep and weren’t quite ready to get out of bed yet.

Too bad,
I thought, and forced them to move, bending each of them in turn until I was sure that they were all present and accounted for. The numbness had faded by the time I finished. I turned my hands over, pressing them against the cold floor until my palms felt fully responsive. Then I pushed, and slowly, laboriously, worked my way into a sitting position.

“You’re alive.” The voice was dull, uninflected.

I turned slowly, still trying to wake up my sluggish muscles, and found myself looking at Carrie. She was sitting on the bubble’s single narrow cot, still wearing her coat over her slightly grimy sweater and jeans. Tears had drawn tracks through the dirt on her cheeks. I hadn’t realized how filthy she’d become until seeing her here, in a sterile environment.

“Did they hurt you?” I asked. There were no traces of sleepwalker pheromones in the air; Carrie was still unaffected by whatever was causing the spontaneous infections among the quarantine subjects and Colonel Mitchell’s men. That was a good thing. Sleepwalkers couldn’t drive.

I was sorry for the thought as soon as I had it. There was being practical, and then there was being inhumane. I didn’t want to allow the first to make me become the second.

“They shoved me around, but they didn’t hurt me,” said Carrie. A tear ran down her cheek, drawing another line through the dirt. “Is it true what they said? About Paul? Did he really become one of those… those things?”

“Carrie, I’m sorry.” I gathered my limbs, pushing myself away from the floor again until I was standing, unsteady as a newborn puppy. I felt like
I
was a little numb, a little distanced from myself. That would pass with time… or, if it was the cost of reconnecting with my original body, it wouldn’t. It had still been worth it, to claw my way back up out of the dark, to find my way back to a world where there was light, and motion, and the chance that I could still find a way home.

She looked at me for a moment, lower lip wobbling like she was trying to keep her feelings inside and failing, one escaping tear at a time. “How is that even possible?” she asked. “He was clean. We were both clean. The Army made sure of that before they locked us up. He
can’t
have become one of those things.”

“But he did,” I said. I risked a step forward, toward the bed.
It felt clunky, disconnected, and I nearly fell when my foot hit the floor bent wrong. I managed to turn it into a stumble, and took another step. “I’m so sorry. He was already almost gone when I found him.”

“I should’ve gone with you,” she whispered, and ducked her head, bracing her chin against her chest. “I shouldn’t have let you go alone. He deserved… you shouldn’t have been… I should have gone with you. I should have been there for him.”

“I don’t think he would have wanted you to see him like that,” I said. I took another step forward before allowing myself to half fall onto the bed. Carrie blinked at my impact, but she didn’t move away. She still didn’t know about me. That was for the best, for both of us. “Paul was almost gone when I found him, and it would have taken longer for the two of us to get there, if we’d been traveling together. Just remember him. Remember why you loved him. And be glad you didn’t have to see.”

Carrie shook her head. “Maybe it wasn’t Paul.”

“It was.”

“Maybe it wasn’t!” The sheer force of her denial raised her voice, and the gently curved walls of our bubble bounced it back at us, making it seem loud enough to fill the whole world. Carrie came out of her curl and turned to me, her eyes blazing with the need to make me
see
, to make me
understand
. “Maybe it was somebody else, there are lots of people in the quarantine zone, and it could have been somebody
else
, somebody who just looked.… looked sort of like him, enough like him to fool you but not enough to fool me. He could still be out there!”

“Carrie…”

“All those
things
look alike, they’re all hungry and snarling, how could you be sure? How could you really know that it was him? Maybe it wasn’t.”

“I knew it was him because he wasn’t all the way gone when we found him,” I said. The memories were fresh and raw. I felt even worse for him now than I had then. How quickly had the cousin burrowing into his brain wiped away human consciousness? Had Paul become a passenger in his own body, trapped the way I had been? “He spoke to me, Carrie. He knew who I was. And then he was just gone.”

“Before the bastards shot him?”

Nothing I could say was going to ease her pain, and so I said nothing at all. I just nodded, watching her eyes for some sign that she understood me, that she was following what I had to say.

Carrie’s eyes filled with fresh tears. “God,” she said. “
God
.” She punched the bed with both hands, slamming them down so hard that I worried, briefly, that she had broken a finger. That might make it more difficult for her to drive. “He died, and I wasn’t there. I sent a stranger. And now I’m in here. Why am I in here?”

“Didn’t they tell you?” I asked anxiously.

Her laugh was short and bitter, the laughter of a woman who had given up on hoping for the best from the world and was now resigned to expecting nothing but the worst. “Since when have these assholes been in the business of telling us anything, Sal? A bunch of men in camo showed up on the doorstep, grabbed me, informed the rest of the house that they’d be getting three new roommates, and dragged me back to their truck. We were halfway here before they told me Paul was dead. How is any of this happening? This can’t be the real world. It just can’t be.”

“I’m sorry.” It was a useless comment, and I wasn’t fully sure what I meant by it. I hadn’t created this world. I hadn’t created the cousins. But I could apologize for all of it, and if that was what Carrie needed me to do, I was going to do it. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“They wouldn’t even let me see his body.” She dragged the heel of her hand across her cheek, smearing the grime. “We used to joke about what we wanted to have done with our bodies after we died. Paul wanted to go to the Body Farm and help the FBI study the effects of exposure on the human body. He thought it would be great to just hang out in the government facility, rotting. And now I g-guess he got his wish…”

That seemed to be the last straw. Carrie buried her face in her hands and sobbed, curling in on herself like she could shut out the rest of the world. I pulled back, not touching her. She needed to come through this on her own. If she seemed to be rendered insensate by her grief, I could find another driver. I wasn’t sure where, or how, but I would do it if that was what I had to do.

It might be better that way, honestly. Carrie was emotionally compromised, and I didn’t know if I could trust her to get me out of here. She was also the only person I currently had access to. Sometimes you have to work with the materials at hand.

“I’m sorry.” I patted her, awkwardly, on the back before leaning as close as I could and whispering in her ear, “I told them you were sick too, so they’d get you out of the quarantine zone. I need your help.”

“What?” She whipped around to face me. Her eyes were so wide that I could see rings of white all the way around her irises, making her look almost cartoony. “But I’m not—”

I motioned frantically for her to shush. She stopped herself mid-sentence, and just stared at me.

I leaned forward, getting close to her ear once again, and murmured, “I know you’re not. The question is, do they know? Or did they put you in here with me to find out what would happen?” Even if Colonel Mitchell had been able to successfully convince himself that I was Sally—and I still didn’t know whether that was the case; he’d played a long game before, and he could have been doing it again. He knew I had a tapeworm
inside my skull. Since I’d seen Joyce, there had been no more talk of surgery or making an effort to remove my implant. I was incredibly grateful for that, since removing the implant would have killed me instantly, but…

They
had
to know that sleepwalkers were triggered by the presence of other sleepwalkers. Implants that had integrated put off very different pheromone tags than implants that were still quiescent, and those tags seemed to carry a sort of… instruction manual for taking over a host. We still didn’t know whether chimera had the same effect. Dr. Cale didn’t know. We didn’t release the pheromones that triggered migration in sleepwalkers, but that didn’t mean we weren’t releasing other coded messages, silent, secret instructions for the cousins to follow. Maybe I hadn’t said “convert,” but I could have said “wake up.”

Had Paul gotten sick faster than he normally would have because he was sharing a house with me? I couldn’t deny the possibility. So had they put Carrie in my bubble to see whether proximity would make her get sick faster? What kind of game were they playing here?