Chimera (Parasitology) (2 page)

T
hey kept me inside an unused office for an hour while Colonel Mitchell and Dr. Banks went over what had happened at Dr. Cale’s lab. Three soldiers with USAMRIID patches on their shoulders stood over me, guns in their hands and eyes narrowed with justified suspicion. I looked calmly back at them, trying to pretend that my hands weren’t cuffed behind my back, that my boyfriend and my allies and my dog weren’t being escorted across San Francisco by soldiers who had no reason to let them live. Colonel Mitchell was never going to let me go. If his people wanted to shoot my friends in the head and leave them among the sleepwalkers and the deceased, what was going to stop them? Not me. And certainly not the ghost of Sally Mitchell.

It was starting to occur to me that I would never know if he broke his word and killed them all. I had nothing left to bargain with.

One of the men made eye contact with me. It may have been an accident, but it still happened. I seized the moment, offering him a small, strained smile. I’ve always looked young for my age—Sally left me with an excellent bone structure to call my own, and when people searched my eyes for experience, they didn’t usually find it, since technically I’m only about eight years old. Hopefully he would read my smile as shy, the sort of thing he might receive from any human prisoner under the same conditions.

He paled, and turned his face away when he realized I was looking at him. I let my smile die. These men either already knew who—and what—I really was or they knew me as their superior officer’s daughter, and hence dangerous in a whole different way. I was a mission objective to them, nothing more and nothing less. As long as they brought me back alive, they would win.

Keeping my face neutral, I looked around the office for what must have been the hundredth time. It was small, corporate, and virtually pristine. The only personal touches were a Disneyland snow globe on one corner of the desk and a picture frame next to the computer. The frame faced away from me; if it held anything other than the blank paper from the frame store, I would never know. I felt a strong, irrational urge to ask them to turn that picture around, to let me see, but I didn’t say anything. It was going to be one more unsolved little mystery in a world that was full of them, and had been since the day I made my “miraculous recovery” in the hospital, coming back to life after the doctors had already pronounced me dead.

Only I wasn’t the one who’d been pronounced dead. I wasn’t the one who’d suffered a massive seizure while driving and steered my car into a bus. I wasn’t the one who’d concealed important facts about my own medical history in order to protect my father, whose military career depended upon him not being revealed as a secret epileptic. All those things
had been done to and by Sally Mitchell, the human girl whose body I now called my own. I had earned it. I was the one who put her brain back together, however instinctually, creating something that I could use to sustain the body she had left behind. I was the one who had to clean up her messes. Including this one.

My name is Sal. I was born in a lab in the basement of the SymboGen building, where geneticists who thought they were being clever combined a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a whole lot of terrible idea to make a tailored “biological implant” for Sally Mitchell, one that would naturally secrete the antiseizure medication she needed kept off the books and outside of the public eye. I was placed in her body when I was still an egg smaller than the head of a pin, hatching in the hot warm dark of her digestive tract and growing to maturity there. I hadn’t known what I was or where I came from, because those were concepts that didn’t matter to a tapeworm—and all pretty language and marketing nonsense aside, that’s what I was. A tapeworm, a member of the genetically engineered species
Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis
, designed to improve and promote human health, human well-being, human welfare.

What my creators didn’t bank on was the fact that all living things will seek to improve their own circumstances, and for me—for all the worms like me—that meant taking control of our own lives. I had been migrating through Sally’s body at the time of the accident, which is how I was able to survive the gross physical damage to her abdomen that had crushed at least part of my own long, threadlike body. While she was hooked to life-support systems and her parents were exploring other options, I was working my way through the bones at the back of her skull, following an instinct I didn’t understand until I was able to connect myself to her brain. Normally, that was where things would have gone wrong. Very few worms, even
ones as carefully designed as I was, can fully integrate with their human hosts. But I was made to prevent seizures, and I integrated with minimal physiological issues. For all intents and purposes, I
became
Sally Mitchell the first time that I ordered her body to open its eyes.

For literally years, that’s what I believed I was. I thought I was a human girl suffering from traumatic amnesia, and not a tapeworm wearing a human body like a fancy dress. I let Sally’s parents and Sally’s doctors and Sally’s therapists try to make me into someone I had never been and had no real interest in being. Nothing any of them had to tell me about her made her seem like an appealing person to transform myself into, but still, I tried. I tried for their sakes, and because they said they loved me, and I believed them. How could I have done any different?

They were my family. They were all I had. That’s what I’d thought for a long, long time, and now that I was finally starting to understand what they’d really been to me—what they had done to me, all in the name of trying to bring Sally back—I was right back in their hands.

Or at least, I was right back in the hands of Sally’s father, Colonel Mitchell, and since he was the only member of the Mitchell family who had ever given signs of understanding what was going on with me, that didn’t make me feel any better. His wife, Sally’s mother, hadn’t known, I was sure of that, and I was almost as sure that his other daughter, Joyce, hadn’t known either. She would have told her mother. She would have told
me
. Instead, she had told me how much nicer I’d become since my accident, and how happy she was that we were finally friends, instead of just people who happened to be related.

No. Joyce couldn’t have known. But Colonel Mitchell had known from the beginning that I wasn’t his daughter. He had looked into the eyes of an alien creature, of a chimera born
from the union of tapeworm and human, and he had decided that the appropriate thing to do was try to brainwash it into becoming human after all. Brainwash
me
into becoming human after all.

And now I was his, to do with as he pleased. That had been the cost of saving Nathan, Fishy, and Beverly… and as I remembered the looks on their faces when I turned away from them, I realized I wasn’t sorry. I had lived the first six years of my life going along the path of least resistance and letting other people make my decisions for me. I’d been allowing my tapeworm nature to dictate my decisions. I was a tailored symbiont; I existed to be led. But I was here because I had stood up and said I would go if my friends could be set free… and that was an impulse from the human side of me, wasn’t it? That was me struggling to become a person who
acts
, a person who controls her own fate.

I needed to be that person now. Because the person I had always been wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

The men who had been assigned to watch me snapped to attention as the office door swung open. Colonel Mitchell stood framed in the doorway, holding his hands folded behind his back.

“Who opened the door?” I blurted, before I could think better of it.

Colonel Mitchell blinked at me. “That’s your first question? Not ‘What happens next’ or ‘Where are we going’ or ‘Did your friends make it back to their transport,’ but ‘Who opened the door’?”

“You could lie to me if I asked you any of those questions, but the big thing right now is yes, who opened the door? You can’t have moved your hands that fast. You’d have to be a wizard, and there’s no such thing as wizards.”

“That’s not what you said when you were a little girl,” he
said, stepping into the room. Another soldier stepped in right behind him, answering my original question. Colonel Mitchell ignored him. All his attention was on me, even though it didn’t feel like he was looking at me at all. He was seeing Sally. Poor, dead, long-buried Sally.

“You checked the mailbox for your Hogwarts letter every day for an entire year,” he continued. He walked toward me as he spoke, one hand dipping into his pocket. “You were so sure that your owl was coming, and you told me over and over about how you were going to be the greatest witch of your generation. Do you remember which House you hoped to be Sorted into?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I was supposed to be keeping up the pretense of being Sally Mitchell, somehow returned from the grave and reclaiming ownership of her own body. That didn’t mean that I could somehow recall family trivia and jokes that she had shared with her father long before I arrived on the scene. “We always lived in the same house.”

If Colonel Mitchell was disappointed by my answer, he didn’t show it. “I’ll see about finding you copies of the Harry Potter books,” he said, moving behind me and taking hold of my wrists. I stiffened, but he was just undoing my handcuffs. They hadn’t been tight enough to hurt. There was still a feeling of glorious freedom as they fell away. “I know you’ve had trouble with dyslexia since your accident, but they’re available in audiobook form. You can listen to them, and then we can talk again.”

I bit my lip to keep myself from laughing. The world was crumbling outside the building where we stood. People were dying by the thousands, maybe by the millions; cities were being deserted, and the two sides of my heritage—the humans and the tapeworms—were destroying each other at an unspeakable
pace. The human tendency to focus on the inconsequential to avoid focusing on the traumas at hand could be completely ridiculous at times. It was a habit I’d picked up from the humans who’d raised me, but that didn’t mean I really understood it.

The slow, constant beating of the drums in my ears reminded me to stay on guard, no matter how amused I was. They were my compass through a world that seemed determined to destroy me, and they weren’t going to allow me to relax. Not one bit.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice meek and low. He seemed to be in good spirits; whatever Dr. Banks had said to him, it hadn’t been enough to make him lose his temper. I decided to risk another question. “
Did
my friends make it back to their transport okay?”

He paused before walking in front of me, a solemn expression on his face and my newly removed handcuffs dangling from one hand. He held them up like they were a reminder that I needed to stay mindful of my position and the limitations it entailed. “I have no idea whether your friends made it back to their starting point, and to be honest, I don’t care. A group of my people escorted them into the streets, and maintained visual contact until they were approximately one mile from this location. Then my people came back here. The goals of this mission were to retrieve you and to harvest certain essential data from Dr. Cale’s research before she moved again. Both these things have been accomplished.”

I frowned. “How did you get that data? We didn’t give Dr. Banks anything. Dr. Cale had him under guard from the time he stepped into the building. She even took his hard drive away, and we’re sure he didn’t have any tracers or trackers, or—”

Colonel Mitchell was looking at me oddly. The soldiers who shared the room with us weren’t looking at me at all. I stopped talking. I was showing too much interest in the people I had
allowed to leave me behind. That sort of thing would indicate that I wasn’t as committed to being his daughter as I was claiming to be.

“I just, I talked to him, but I was still pretending, you know?” I made my eyes as big as I could, trying to sell the part. “To be Sal, and to think that they were on my side, not on the side of the parasites. So I know how thoroughly they searched him.”

“They didn’t search him for wireless sniffers, or for download signals,” said Colonel Mitchell. “If they had, they might have found out how much of their data he was copying. But that’s none of your concern. I’m glad to see that you can still care about people, even if you’re caring about the wrong ones. No matter. That will change soon enough. Gentlemen, prepare her for transport.” Then he turned, and walked back toward the door.

He took the handcuffs with him, which meant I could put my hands up to ward the soldiers away when they started closing on me. Their faces were grim masks, efficient and cold. “No, please,” I said, not knowing what they were about to do, but knowing that whatever it was, I wasn’t going to enjoy it—not when they were looking at me like that.

I was so focused on the ones in front of me that I never saw the one who slipped behind me with the Taser. Electricity arced through my body, stunning and scrambling everything, and then I hit the floor, and if the pain continued, I didn’t know about it anymore.

Everything was warm and dark and perfect. The drums hammered ceaselessly away in the background, and I felt like I was floating on a hot tide of weightlessness and peace. Everything would be perfect forever if the world could just stay exactly the way it was, filled with comforting darkness and the sound of drums.

Only no. Everything
wasn’t
perfect, because while I was
warm and I was dark, this wasn’t the hot warm dark: this wasn’t the comforting sea that had buoyed me up since before I knew what it was to be a person. This was something different, and “different” was another word for “dangerous,” especially now that things were changing again, now that I was back in the hands of people who would use me for their own ends and not allow me to be who and what I really was. Dr. Cale was a scary woman, and the things she wanted weren’t always things it was safe or reasonable to want, but she’d never tried to force me to be anything other than myself, whatever that was. She wasn’t safe. She was safer than this.