Chimera (Parasitology) (18 page)

The light switches were mostly concealed behind an artificial plant near the door, probably to keep customers from playing
with them. I walked over to them, said, “Please cover her eyes,” and turned on the lights.

They blazed up white and vivid and impossible, like the last dying gasp of the empire that had built this place, filling it with red vinyl and kitschy 1950s memorabilia. Carrie gasped. The young chimera wailed. I hit the lights again, turning them off, plunging us back down into darkness.

“Hey!” yelped Carrie. “Turn them back on! We need those!”

“I told you to cover her eyes!” I shouted. I was furious. Not just furious: frightened. What if the child never trusted me again? I had allowed the light to hurt her. I should have moved more slowly, should have made sure Carrie was covering her eyes like I’d asked.

That little girl was one of the only members of my own species that I had ever met. Most of the others were already working with Sherman for the downfall of the human race—and he lumped me in with them, since I’d refused to help him when he’d asked. If I didn’t want to be alone in the world, I needed to find other chimera who hadn’t already signed on with his poisonous philosophy. And apart from my own selfish needs, she was too young and too inexperienced to take care of herself. She
needed
me. She needed me, and I had allowed her to be hurt. I was a terrible person. The fact that my need to keep her safe was at least half biochemical didn’t matter. She was my responsibility, by biology and coincidence, and I was damn well going to protect her.

“Forget the kid, turn the lights back on,” pleaded Carrie. “Please, please, turn the lights back on.”

“If you want me to turn the lights back on, you’ll cover her eyes,” I said, struggling to keep my words from devolving into a snarl. I couldn’t afford to start fighting with Carrie again. Our nascent peace was too delicate, and there were other things that needed our time and energy—things like calming the girl, and
cooking the box of frozen hamburger patties that was waiting on the counter.

“Okay, okay,” said Carrie. There was a pause, and then, “My hands are over her eyes now, all right? Turn the lights back on. Please.”

“You’d better not be lying,” I said, and flipped the switches.

This time, when the lights came on, no one gasped or screamed or otherwise overreacted to what used to be such a simple thing. The world used to be defined by light, not by shadows. But we had changed all that, and now light, however fleeting, was a precious thing, to be celebrated whenever it appeared.

I turned back to the booth where Carrie and the young chimera sat. Carrie was staring at me, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. True to her word, she had her hands over the young chimera’s face. As for the girl, she sat silent and unmoving, either recovered from her surprise when the lights came on or already resigned to her inability to defend herself against what must have seemed like a huge, endlessly cruel world. If she couldn’t save herself, what was the point in trying to fight?

I could understand her resignation, even as I wanted to gather her close and tell her it didn’t have to be like this; that the world could be her friend, if she was willing to give it the chance. Giving up had seemed like the right thing to me, more than once. It was sheer luck that had gotten me through some of what I had experienced, and I wasn’t to the broken doors yet. I was still trying to figure out the way home.

“How did you…?” Carrie asked.

“The freezer was still on. There’s a lot more where these hamburgers came from. Fries, more patties, ice cream.” And a dead man, but I didn’t see reason to mention that just yet. I wanted her to eat, not repudiate my food as being somehow tainted. The clothes we were wearing had been a lot closer to the dead. “If the freezer was on, I figured there had to be electricity somewhere. If there wasn’t, everything would have shut
down and thawed out.” Probably making the worst stench I had ever encountered in the process. It was a good thing on many levels that the power was working.

“Why does this building have power?”

I shrugged. “Private generator, maybe? I know you can get those, and it’s a big freezer. It would make sense for the owners to want to be sure that nothing would rot if the power went out.” I walked over to kneel in front of the young chimera, putting one hand on her knee. “You can take your hands away now.”

Looking unsure about the idea, Carrie pulled her hands away. The girl looked surprised before screwing her face up tight, wrinkling her nose and lips together until she appeared to have bitten into a lemon. She didn’t put her hands over her own eyes. She hadn’t figured out that she could do that yet.

If she couldn’t figure it out on her own, I would show her. “Here,” I said, gingerly taking hold of her hands and raising them to cover her eyes. I pressed on the backs of her wrists, helping to slide her fingers into place until they would block out the majority of the light. “Do it like this, and then the light won’t be able to hurt you.”

I took my hands away. Hers remained where they were, shielding her eyes from the unexpected brightness. I wondered whether she’d ever seen electric lights before. Depending on when she had taken over her host—which must have been recently, given where I’d found her—she might have spent her entire existence in the comfortable divisions of sunlight and shadow, with nothing like electricity to ever disrupt her understanding of the world. It was a daunting thought.

Slowly, the fingers on her left hand slid open just a crack, and she peered at me through the opening. There was no mistaking the intelligence or the confusion in her dark brown eye. I smiled at her.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry the light hurt you before. I didn’t
mean for that to happen, and I’m going to be extra-special careful to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“She can’t understand you,” said Carrie. “There’s something wrong with her.”

Only by human standards. By chimera standards, everything about the girl was exactly right. “Do you know how to work a grill?” I asked. “I can probably cook the burgers, but I’ll ruin a bunch before I get it right.”

“I used to work at a McDonald’s—that’s part of why I stopped eating meat,” said Carrie. She looked relieved as she moved toward the box of frozen hamburger patties. “I don’t think we want to fire up the grease fryer right now, but I can manage a couple burgers. I’m hungry enough that I don’t give a crap.”

“Just don’t go in the freezer if you need more. Send me.”

There was a pause, during which Carrie’s not asking was practically audible. Finally, she bowed before the face of common sense, and said, “Got it,” before picking up the box and disappearing into the kitchen.

I turned my attention back to the chimera girl. “Food soon. There’s applesauce, so if you haven’t figured out how to chew, we can still feed you.” Chewing came automatically to sleepwalkers, but this was a chimera: Instinct wasn’t going to be her friend, and her body’s old muscle memory wasn’t going to be her gentle guide.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about who she used to be. Maybe her host had been a vegetarian, and eating hamburger patty, no matter how well cooked it was, would make her sick. Maybe she had allergies, and that was what her implant had been intended to suppress. I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to find a convenient file with her medical history. She was going to have to muddle through, and so was I. If we were lucky, neither of us would be hurt in the process.

“I hope you like hamburger,” I said, brushing her hair back
with my fingers. It was thick and soft, and needed to be washed. “I wish I knew your name.”

“Sal,” said the girl, still peeking at me through her fingers.

“No, sweetie, that’s my name. We can’t all be called ‘Sal’; it would get very confusing, very fast, and we try not to make things more confusing than they already are. Do you know any other words? Do you know a word that sounds like your name?”

“Sal,” said the girl again.

I sighed. “Okay, so that’s not going to work. We’ll figure out what your name is when you’re farther along in your language skills.” I was the one who’d decided my name was “Sal,” a nickname that Sally would never have tolerated. It was too short, and too curt, like someone clearing their throat. It hadn’t been a big decision—clipping one syllable from the end of a name I got from somebody else—but it had been
my
decision, and I treasured it, because it had taken someone else’s name and made it
mine
. I wanted my girl to have the same freedom. Even more, I wanted her to be able to name herself, to begin the process of forging her own identity. People would always be telling her who and what she had to be. At least this way, she could choose one of the things that would define her to the rest of the world.

The scent of seared meat drifted in from the kitchen. The little girl lowered her hands away from her eyes and sniffed the air, looking suddenly excited. I smiled, this time in relief.

“I guess you’re a meat eater after all,” I said, and squeezed into the booth beside her to wait for Carrie to come out with our dinner.

W
e glutted ourselves on substandard burgers served on half-frozen rolls. Carrie had found ketchup and mustard and relish in the pantry, and we had applied condiments with abandon, glorying in the taste of spices, crushed tomato, and corn syrup. Everything seemed impossibly rich, impossibly sweet, especially when stacked against these last few weeks. We ate like kings of the world, and for that short time, it didn’t matter that the world was ending outside our little stronghold; we had burgers enough for a lifetime, and everything was going to be all right.

The chimera girl knew how to chew, which was a relief. Since burgers were a food that people habitually picked up with their hands, I hadn’t needed to worry about Carrie judging the girl’s table manners. She’d just stuffed her burger into her mouth with single-minded need, and when her first was
gone, we’d given her a second, and the three of us had eaten and kept eating until our bellies were tight as drums and filled with calories.

I had fallen asleep in one of the larger booths, with the chimera girl curled up against my legs like a wayward puppy. All my dreams were of the dark, the hot warm dark, where nothing could hurt me, or reach me, or make me decide what was going to happen next. In the hot warm dark, I could be free.

I woke to find the diner filled with amber sunlight, illuminating the dust motes that danced around me. I sat up, yawning, enjoying the tang of grease still hanging in the air.

Carrie and the girl were gone.

I rocketed instantly from sleepy pleasure into terrified consciousness. “Carrie?” I hit my knee on the edge of the booth as I stood. I ignored it. I had more important things to worry about. “Carrie, where are you?”

There was no answer. I was alone.

The drums pounded in my ears as I looked around the room. It was large enough to easily hold fifty people, but it didn’t have that many hiding places. They weren’t here. I turned toward the door to the kitchen, my heart beating like it was breaking. Why would Carrie have taken her? Why would she have
gone
with Carrie? It didn’t make any sense.

Slowly, I started for the kitchen, forcing myself to move with the sort of calm deliberation that would keep me from doing anything I was going to regret later. My mind—helpful, so-human mind—insisted on presenting suggestions as to what might be happening, ideas about death and dismemberment and bodies shoved into that large walk-in freezer. I did my best to force each of them aside as soon as it reared its head, refusing them the privilege of reality. Thoughts didn’t shape the world. I
knew
that. I still couldn’t let those thoughts linger. They were dangerous, like snakes, and they would bite me.

I pushed open the kitchen door. Carrie, who was sitting on the counter watching the chimera girl as she calmly, methodically ate pickle relish straight from the jar, raised her head and smiled. It was an easy expression. I didn’t trust it.

“There you are,” she said. “I was starting to think you were going to sleep the day away.”

“I woke up and you were gone,” I said.

Carrie nodded. “She,” she indicated the chimera girl, who was still eating relish with the single-minded determination of someone who’d learned the hard way that food wasn’t reliable, “woke up and got hungry. I figured it was better to let you sleep, and let her eat whatever she wanted that wouldn’t kill her. I’ve never seen a kid suck down relish like that before. It’s sort of impressive. Do you think there’s some record she’s about to beat?”

My hands itched to snatch the girl up and move her away from Carrie, who was being too casual, too easy, for me to believe a word she was saying. Instead, I forced myself to smile, and said, “That was really nice of you. Next time, you can wake me. Are you ready to go?”

Carrie’s own smile dropped away, replaced by an expression of confusion. “What do you mean? Why would we be going anywhere?”

“I have to get to Vallejo, remember? I can’t stay here. My family is waiting for me.” They wouldn’t be waiting in Vallejo—they’d be waiting in San Francisco, in Walnut Creek, in some forgotten farmhouse or abandoned animal rehab center, but they
would
be waiting. They were consummate waiters. Dr. Cale could wait out geologic ages, if she thought there was good reason, and she would be enough to keep Nathan in check. I had every faith that they were looking for me, sounding out weaknesses in the systems at USAMRIID and searching for routes into the quarantine zone, and that was why I had
to get back to them as soon as possible. If they got captured trying to get me back, I’d just have to go save them, and none of us would be getting anything done.

“But we have food and power here,” said Carrie, her voice verging on a whine. The chimera girl was still shoveling relish into her mouth. She was going to make herself sick if she didn’t stop soon. Carrie pointed at her and said, “You have the kid to worry about. Don’t you want her to be someplace safe? We can defend this place. We can keep the bad things out, and keep ourselves in.”

“What happens when the power dies?” I countered. “What happens when whatever made Paul get sick, even though he should have been clean, manages to reach us here? Colonel Mitchell said he was losing soldiers. Why would we be safe just because we found a hole to hide in? Hiding is never the solution. Not forever.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Sal, and I don’t really care.” Carrie’s face set itself in a mulish scowl. “This place is safe. Nothing you can say is going to change that. And I’m not stupid. I’m not going to run away from safety just because you think it’s the right thing to do. I don’t know
anyone
who would do that.”

The chimera girl looked at her latest handful of relish before dropping it on the kitchen floor with a wet
plop
. Then she tilted her head to look up at me, mouth closed and nose scrunched in an expression of utter contentment. She didn’t smile. For us, smiling was something that had to be learned. “Sal,” she said.

“Yes, Sal,” I agreed, crouching down and offering her my arms. She didn’t throw herself into them as much as she leaned until she collapsed, trusting me to catch her. She had inherited a body with the necessary muscle memory for sitting and probably even standing, but she didn’t know anything about the way those things were done. She would need to learn the rules
for fitting them together before she could really start controlling her movements.

She smelled like pickle relish and sweat. She was going to need a bath soon. I didn’t mind. There was something comforting in the way the human odors mingled with her tapeworm pheromones: She was both, and she was more than either.

I stood, holding the girl against my chest, and looked at Carrie. “You can stay here. I told you last night that we could split up if you felt it was necessary. I’ll find my own way to Vallejo. But don’t think for a minute that you’re safe. You can lock the doors, you can board over the windows, and you can die alone. You’ll never be safe.”

Carrie’s scowl faded into an expression of sheer hopelessness. In that moment, I knew I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know: She was well aware of her situation, and that safety was something she had left behind in another world, in another lifetime. “Why can’t you let me pretend?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper.

“Because pretending will get you killed, and I still need you to drive me to Vallejo, if you’re willing.” There was no point in lying to her. “You’re scared. I’m leery. I don’t trust you after you drew a gun on me three times and threatened to use it on my little girl.” It was amazing how quickly possessiveness had crept in, wasn’t it? The child would be nameless until she said otherwise, but in the meantime, she was
mine
. “That doesn’t mean I want to leave you here to die, and it doesn’t mean we can’t help each other. I’ll provide companionship and someone who can watch your back. You’ll drive me home.”

“And if they’re not there? What are you going to do then?”

I shrugged. “I’m going to figure out where they
are
, and I’m going to go to them. You can’t talk me out of this. You can’t make me stay, unless you want to draw your gun again, and if you do that, we’re done. I’ll climb the walls until I find a way
out. All you can do is stay behind or come with me. Those are your choices.”

Carrie looked at me, a virtual stranger with a little girl clutched against her chest. She looked at the kitchen around us, with its promise of safety that could never be realized. She seemed to deflate, letting the last of some unspoken tension escape her chest. Then, finally, she nodded.

“I’ll drive you to Vallejo,” she said. “I think you’re crazy. But I don’t want to stay here alone. I don’t think… I don’t think I could take it.”

“Good.” I nodded. “Let’s gather what we can, and let’s move.”

The diner had apparently done some catering events: We found two large coolers at the back of the kitchen, and packed them full of canned goods, nonperishables, and anything else we could scrounge, including knives and can openers. It seemed silly to be using insulated plastic for warm goods, but cardboard could tear, and we might find a place with a working ice machine a little further down the road, once the ice we’d taken from the freezer melted. It was impossible to really say. Things had changed dramatically while we were in the quarantine zone, and it was no longer clear how much sway, if any, the remnants of the human race held over this part of California.

It was strange to be thinking of humanity as something that could
end
. But the tapering arrivals in the quarantine zone, even during my stay, told a story that was brutal in its simplicity. The implants had started to awaken, and then they had started awakening each other, creating a fractal cascade that first threatened and then overwhelmed the human race. For every sleepwalker who awakened, a human died. If that sleepwalker wasn’t stopped before they could go on a rampage, they could kill two, or ten, or twenty more people before they were put down. The first ones who turned were able to do a huge amount of damage, just because no one expected them. The last
ones who turned would have found little in the way of resistance. The numbers just weren’t there.

How many dead humans—how many dead cousins—for the sake of a handful of chimera? We hadn’t even been an intentional side effect. We had just
happened
, one more strange consequence of the complicated genetic engineering that went into the original implants. And now we faced a world where the population was unknown, but so much lower than it should have been.

While Carrie packed the supplies, I took the little girl and went back to the Old Navy to scavenge clean clothes for all of us. The bodies of the dead sleepwalkers were easier to see in the light. They were heaped all over the back of the store, blocking access to the men’s department and the clearance racks. The chimera girl looked at them with disinterested eyes, no more invested in their fates than she was in the fates of the racks that had been knocked over since the store was closed. That was a relief. I’d been half afraid that she would start screaming as soon as she saw the dead. But we needed more clothing, and she needed something that didn’t smell of bodily waste and neglect, and I didn’t want to leave her alone with Carrie. I was willing to travel with the human. I wasn’t willing to leave my child with her.

Mine
. There it was again. The possessiveness was surprising every time it reared its head, and I wasn’t going to let it go. I wasn’t going to let
her
go.

The clothes I picked out for her were too large, but they were better than nothing, and she’d need room to grow. I scrubbed her down as best as I could with a bottle of hand sanitizer I’d found hidden behind one of the registers, and stuffed the rest of my scavenged goods into a big cloth shopping bag with the Old Navy logo on the side. Hoisting the girl back onto my hip, I turned toward the exit.

There was a sleepwalker standing in the doorway.

I froze, my grip on the girl tightening. I hadn’t heard him approach. I hadn’t detected his pheromones either: The wind was blowing the wrong way to have carried them into the store. He seemed to be alone, but he was blocking the exit; if he decided to charge, I was going to have to fight.

Better to fight than to die, especially with the chimera child here, depending on me to save her. Moving slowly, in the hopes that it would keep the sleepwalker from realizing what was happening, I put her down on the counter. “Stay there,” I murmured, looking into her bright, bewildered gaze. Did she understand what was going on? Chimera learned fast, but it wasn’t like I was taking the time to teach her the way I should. We’d been together for less than a day. There hadn’t been time.

She didn’t grab for my arm when I pulled away from her. I turned back to the sleepwalker, half expecting to find him standing right behind me. Instead, he was still in the doorway, rocking gently back and forth like he had forgotten what he was doing there.

Hope flooded through me, briefly drowning out the sound of drums with an odd, rosy silence. Maybe he was one of the more high-functioning sleepwalkers, the ones we’d theorized could verge on becoming chimera. They’d always have brain damage to work around, thanks to the way the implants had chewed their way into their host brains, but they might be capable of learning, of reasoning, of analytical thinking. All those things combined could mean they were capable of not killing and eating uninfected people on sight—and according to everything I understood about pheromone communication, those were the sleepwalkers who would be especially susceptible to my instructions.

“Hello.” I took a cautious step toward him, reaching behind me to put a hand on the knife I had jammed into my belt.
“My name is Sal. Are you all right? Do you know where you are?”

It was sort of ironic: Sleepwalkers got no or limited higher brain functions, but they understood how to walk, run, and grab from the moment they woke up in their new bodies. Chimera could learn how to do anything their human hosts had been capable of, but in order to get that far, they first had to relearn everything, from sitting up to fine motor control. It would be weeks, if not months, before the girl I’d rescued could stand up like this man, even as he stared at me with empty, uncomprehending eyes.