Chimera (Parasitology) (13 page)

Carrie shot me a horrified look before whispering back, “What do you mean, ‘What would happen’?”

I could tell her, or I could keep my secret a little longer. I didn’t like lying to her, not when I was about to try to convince her to drive me out of here, but telling her the truth could very easily result in her panicking and refusing to help me at all. I took a breath and answered, “The Colonel’s wife hates me. She says I’m not really her daughter. If you’re supposed to be getting sick, why would they lock me up with you, unless it was to see if you’d kill me?”

“That’s stupid,” she said, louder than I liked. She pulled away. “Why would anyone do that?”

“Why would anyone do any of this?” We were probably being monitored. I moved closer again, trying to use my hair
as a veil to hide the motion of my lips. “Things were bad when they put us in here, and you know they’ve just gotten worse since then. Haven’t you noticed that there aren’t any new soldiers around? There’s no backup coming. There’s no support. Of course they’re going to start getting desperate, and doing whatever they can for data.”

“But you’re his
daughter
.”

“I’m his little traitor. And you’re the wife of a man who got sick when he shouldn’t have been able to. We’re both expendable in our own ways.” I wasn’t quite lying, not yet, but I was bending and eluding the truth, shaping it into my own creation. The thought made me feel nauseous, and set the drums pounding harder still in my ears. I didn’t want to be a liar. Sherman and Dr. Banks and my father, they were liars, and they weren’t the people I wanted to become.

“We have to get out of here,” said Carrie.

I had been trying to lead her to this conclusion. I restrained myself to a small nod as I agreed, “We do.”

“But how?”

That was where my plan fell apart. I had expected them to lock me and Carrie in a room, not in one of the quarantine bubbles. I sat up straighter and looked around. When Sherman had broken me out of here, he’d used a chemical compound to melt the plastic. I didn’t have that. There were no seams or openings, apart from the place where the bubble joined up with the vent; I had to assume that when the soldiers came to feed us or move us, they’d open the bubble in the same way.

I didn’t have a knife. I didn’t even have an underwire in my bra—and even if I had, using it would have assumed that we weren’t being watched somehow, and that the soldiers wouldn’t show up the second I started trying to puncture the plastic. We were in a completely exposed situation, with no weapons, no way to take the tactical advantage, and no combat training.

Well.
I
didn’t have any combat training. “Do you know how to fight?” I asked.

“Not really? I took a few years of self-defense in college. I can mostly handle myself in a fight, as long as running away is an option.”

I nodded slowly. “All right,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do…”

C
arrie seized and spasmed on the floor like she was dying, arching her back until she lifted her hips and the backs of her thighs into the air. She formed a brief, perfect arch before collapsing back down and starting to thrash again.

I wanted to admire her muscular control, but this wasn’t the time. Instead, I stood on the cot, shrinking back against the bubble wall, and screamed as loudly as I could.

It was almost a relief, after weeks of keeping quiet, to let my voice out, to hear it echoing off the plastic walls and bouncing back down from the vent above me. Carrie continued to take up as much of the floor as she possibly could, jackknifing her body and flailing her arms, and I kept on screaming until the sound of running feet interposed itself beneath my wails.

As soon as the soldiers were in view, I pointed at Carrie and turned my screams to wails, saying, “She’s sick! She’s sick! I
told them she was sick and now she’s sick and she’s in here with me
what are you waiting for
?!”

As I’d hoped, the thought that I could be hurt by their inaction actually slowed them down. Not enough so that Colonel Mitchell would be able to say that they hadn’t responded, no, but enough to let me be taught the error of my ways. They weren’t running anymore. They were approaching calmly, and their expressions broadcast nothing but anticipation for what was about to happen.

I screamed. Carrie thrashed. Then, with a horrible rasping gurgle that made me want to applaud her acting skills, she went still, her head lolling to the side and her wide-open eyes staring blankly off into space. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that she had actually succeeded in thrashing herself to death.

“Oh, God,” I moaned, pushing myself harder against the wall of the bubble. It bent and distorted under me, but it didn’t break: it had been made too well for the weight of one small woman to rupture it. That didn’t matter. I was putting pressure on the membrane, and that was the important thing.

Stay still, Carrie,
I thought, and Carrie didn’t move, and for one horrible moment, neither did the soldiers. Did they know? Had we somehow given ourselves away? Did they have monitors that told them whether we lived or died, convenient medical spies built into the bubble’s walls and feeding back our vital data? I couldn’t put it past them, but I couldn’t quite believe it, either. The people here at USAMRIID were so perfectly, beautifully human, and being human meant being arrogant, in some ways: It meant believing that you knew better than anyone else ever possibly could. They wouldn’t expect something like this. Not from us. Not from anyone.

“Miss Mitchell, stay where you are,” said the figure at the front of the formation—and while I couldn’t make out her face in the shadows of her helmet, I recognized the voice of the
woman from the shower, the nameless sergeant who’d been so gleeful about causing me pain. Knowing it was her made what we were about to do less difficult. I didn’t care if her career went up in flames because I got away.

I shrank back against the bubble, stretching it more, putting more pressure on the whole structure. She pulled a spray can from her belt, shaking it briskly before she traced a fizzing line down the front of the plastic dome. It was supposed to dissolve the membrane cleanly, allowing the soldiers to come inside. It was also supposed to be applied to a bubble that was not under pressure.

The front of the bubble exploded as it finally found a way to vent off some of the tension I had created. It wasn’t a reaction with any heat behind it, but it was enough to send chunks of fizzing, dissolving plastic everywhere, covering the soldiers in thin chunks of bubbling membrane. The soldiers screamed, and I realized, to my horror and delight that the stuff they’d sprayed on the bubble to dissolve it was also eating the plastic parts of their uniforms and guns. Once again, humanity had decided to make use of something that couldn’t be controlled, and now they were paying the price.

“Come on!” I jumped down from the cot and grabbed Carrie’s hand, hauling her to her feet before I rushed for the opening. The lead soldiers were clawing at the fizzing plastic that stuck to their faces and chests, paying virtually no attention to us.

And the woman at the head of the formation had dropped her cattle prod.

I didn’t think: I just did. I let go of Carrie’s hand and dove for the cattle prod while the soldiers were still scraping at the plastic, not yet reacting to the fact that two of their tractable, controlled prisoners were making an escape. The line of it fit perfectly into my palm, and I began swinging.

Surprise was the main thing we had going for us: surprise,
and the expectation of fear. We were supposed to be paralyzed with terror at the idea of the sleepwalker contagion, so beaten down by what we’d been through that we would offer no resistance. That wasn’t the case with either one of us, so when we moved against the soldiers, they weren’t ready. The cattle prod hit the nameless sergeant in the throat. She went down flopping and choking. The other soldiers finally seemed to realize that they had a problem on their hands, apart from the plastic-eating chemicals that were chewing holes in their armor. I kept swinging the cattle prod. They went for their guns.

So did Carrie.

She grabbed the sidearm from the fallen sergeant, who was still thrashing, her own seizure much more believable than Carrie’s. The soldiers who had managed to get their guns out turned them on Carrie, and I slammed my cattle prod into whatever exposed skin I could find, sending them tumbling to the floor. Some of them had probably been recruited after things started going bad, and had never been trained for situations like this one. The others might have the training, but weren’t used to enemies who could think. Too much time spent fighting the sleepwalkers had left them, if not soft, then at least slower than they should have been for situations like this one.

In the end, the only gunshots were Carrie’s. Two of them, both small and muffled in the vastness of the room where we’d been quartered. The men she’d shot looked almost surprised before they fell, like this wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. Carrie clicked back the hammer, ready to fire again. There was no one to fire at. All the soldiers were either down or already writhing on the floor.

I hated the cattle prod. I hated the weight of it and the poisonous future that it represented. But I knew better than to think that I could be trusted with a firearm, and so I kept my
hand locked tight around the hard black shaft as I gestured for Carrie to follow me. “Come on!” I shouted again, in case she didn’t understand the gesture. Then I bent, grabbed the access card off the nearest soldier, and ran for the door.

Sherman had freed me the last time I’d been kept here. I knew the way out. I knew where the loading dock was. If there were still vehicles kept there, then it might be our salvation. If not…

If not, at least we had weapons now. I ran, and Carrie ran after me, and we listened for the alarm that would mean we had been discovered as we fled toward the distant, impossible promise of freedom.

We emerged from the umbilical into an empty control room, the monitors scrolling images of the facility. Most of the rooms they showed were empty or severely understaffed. USAMRIID was running out of people. That should have been reassuring—it meant we were so much more likely to escape—but it was really just chilling. If this facility was meant to be the last stronghold of the humans of the Bay Area, and it was this understaffed, what did that say about the rest of the world?

There wasn’t time for us to stop or dwell: We were getting out. I kept going, trusting Carrie to follow me, and we emerged into the shadows of the loading-dock garage. It was colder here; the air was unfiltered, filled with the smell of a burning world. Ash, mold, and the distant promise of rain all flooded in through the open doors. I glanced around automatically, checking for sentries, and found none. Instead, my eyes seized on a small patch of darkened concrete, special only in its incongruity. A man had died there, bleeding out after Ronnie slit his throat, just like two men had died for us to get this far. Maybe more, if I’d shocked some of the others too hard.

How many people had died in the quarantine zone? How
many sleepwalkers, how many infant chimera who were only struggling to stay alive? It wasn’t me who had made this an us-against-them battle, and now that it was, the only side I cared about was the one that left me free and still alive.

There was a rack of neatly labeled keys on the far side of the garage. I started toward it, motioning for Carrie to follow. “Come on. We need to find something that you know how to drive.”

“You electrocuted those soldiers.” Her voice quavered. The enormity of what we’d just done was beginning to catch up with her.

I didn’t have time for a crisis of conscience—either mine or hers. “Yes, and you shot two of them. Now, find something that you can drive. We need to get out of here before the ones who aren’t dead recover and send people looking for us.”

Assume three minutes to run from the bubble to here. Assume five minutes for the effects of the electrocution to wear off and leave our former captors capable of calling for help; that was about how long it had taken for the people who’d been tossed into the truck that carried me to Pleasanton in the first place to recover. And it was all just a guess. They could have bounced back in under a minute. I had no way of knowing, and every second we spent was a second we couldn’t afford to lose.

Carrie could be upset about what she’d done
after
. After we were out of here, after we were free and clear, after I had decided what came next. What we were doing now would guarantee there
was
an after. Because until we got our butts into a vehicle, that was far from certain.

“I can—I can drive a stick or an automatic. I don’t think I could drive a tank.”

“I think they’d notice if we stole a tank.” The labels on the keys writhed and spun, becoming utterly impossible to read. I was too amped up, the adrenaline racing through my veins
until there was no chance I’d be able to calm myself down and fight through my dyslexia. “Pick one of these, and let’s go.”

Carrie stood there for a few more precious seconds, her eyes skipping from label to label until I wanted to scream, grab the first set of keys that came to hand, and haul her away. I forced myself to remain calm until she reached out and selected a set, jiggling it in her palm for two seconds more before she turned to me. “This one,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“Slot fifteen.”

“Great. Let’s go.”

The alarms were starting to scream when we emerged from the loading dock and into the watery light of the early evening. We ran side by side, her carrying keys and a stolen pistol, me carrying a cattle prod and a mountain of guilt. I had to get out of here. That much was certain. Sally’s mother was never going to accept me as her child, and Colonel Mitchell was playing some long, terrible game that I didn’t understand. He knew I wasn’t Sally, he
knew
it, but he kept on pretending. Why? I couldn’t force it to make sense.

There was nothing here for me. Dr. Cale might have been able to help Joyce, but she was never going to get the chance; my biological sister would remain here, on life support, waiting for the day her father finally pulled the plug. All we could ever have saved was her body, anyway, and her mother’s reaction to me made it clear that donating Joyce to a chimera in need of a host would never have been acceptable to her.

And it still felt like I was running away from yet another family, no matter how dysfunctional: like all I ever did was run from one family after another. The Mitchells, when I chose Dr. Cale; Dr. Cale and Nathan, when I allowed Dr. Banks to sell me back to USAMRIID. The list was short, but even one entry was too long, considering how short my life thus far had been.

“That one,” said Carrie, pointing to an SUV. I ran after her, throwing myself into the passenger seat as soon as she unlocked the doors. The alarm was still ringing behind us. Hopefully, they wouldn’t think to lock down the motor pool until we were clear.

You’re not afraid of cars,
I told myself sternly.
That’s a fear that belongs to somebody else. That’s a fear that belongs to Sally. The people who gave it to you, they were trying to turn you into
her
. So they gave you her accident, and they gave you her fear. You don’t have to keep it anymore.

I knew that was true. It didn’t stop the cold worm of terror from unfolding in my stomach as the engine rumbled into life. My fingers fumbled with the seat belt, clicking it home, struggling to make sure it was tight and secure. I already wanted to throw up.

“There’s something you should know,” I said, in a strangled voice.

“What?”

“I’m scared of cars.”

Carrie shot me a flat you-must-be-kidding look, brows furrowed above wide eyes. “You’re telling me this now, and not before you got me to go along with your genius plan? What the fuck am I supposed to do, Sal, drive twenty miles below the speed limit while the army chases us?”

Carrie still thought we were going back to San Francisco. Carrie still thought she could have normalcy again, or something so close to normalcy as to make it easier for her to mourn her husband. Carrie was wrong, and I couldn’t tell her that, or she might refuse to take me where I actually needed to go.

Not that I knew where that was. “No, you’re supposed to floor it,” I said. “Drive like your life depends on it, because it does. But I’m going to try meditating so I don’t freak out, because that wouldn’t help the situation. So if I start breathing shallowly, please don’t get upset.”
If I go down into the hot
warm dark, where you can’t reach me, please don’t put a bullet in my head.

Carrie shook her head. “This is unbelievable,” she said, reversing out of the parking space. “This is
fucking
unbelievable. Hold on.” And then she hit the gas like the hammer of the gods, and we were rocketing away from the motor pool at the sort of speed that made my mouth go dry and my heart start slamming against my ribs.