Chimera (Parasitology) (21 page)

“Did you see that?” demanded Carrie.

“Just keep driving. We’re almost there.” The buildings were becoming denser as we moved from the outskirts of town toward the point of commercial development.

“We need to stop.”

“Just keep driving.”

Carrie shook her head but kept her foot on the gas and her eyes on the road. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.

The bulky shape of the feed store appeared to our left. I pointed to the mouth of the attached parking lot. “Turn in there,” I said.

“That doesn’t look like a good place to spend the night.”

“If they’re not here, the facility still will be,” I said. “I know how to get us in.” That wasn’t entirely true. If Dr. Cale had armed her security systems before abandoning the place, the doors might be locked beyond anything I could do to open them. That didn’t matter now. I had to get out there. I
had
to.

There was something sweetly anticlimactic about Carrie turning into the parking lot, slowing down as she did, until we were just coasting along. I fiddled with my seat belt, barely realizing that I was doing it, my eyes fixed on the looming shape of the bowling alley. Its windows were dark, but that was nothing new; Dr. Cale had boarded or painted them all over years ago. It was hard to maintain a secret lab when people could see you working.

Tansy had always been a big help with that. I had to wonder how many people had discovered the place, or almost discovered it, only to be turned away by a quirky, homicidal girl in overalls.

Tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. I blinked them away
hard. Tansy wasn’t gone. The broken doors weren’t closed to her—not forever, anyway. Dr. Cale had been able to create her in the first place, and she was going to find a way to save her. She
had
to.

Carrie rolled to a stop in the bowling-alley parking lot and killed the engine before turning to frown at me across the darkened cab. I could barely see her face. “This is it? This is your other idea? Because it looks like a terrible idea. There’s no one here.”

“That’s just what they want you to think.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand before unbuckling my seat belt. “Wait here. If anything happens to me, take Juniper and get as far away from here as you can.”

“Wait, what? Sal, don’t do this. I can’t turn on the lights. I can’t—”

The door closing behind me cut off her words, reducing them to silence. I stayed where I was, watching the dark parking lot and taking a deep breath, trying to find traces of sleepwalker pheromones on the wind. I failed. If there were sleepwalkers lurking in the shadows, they weren’t close enough to pose a problem, or they were downwind and keeping themselves carefully out of sight. I didn’t know whether their slow recovery would make that possible, but I had to assume that any sleepwalkers to have survived this long were on the smarter—and luckier—end. I waited.

When nothing came charging out of the dark to devour me, I took another breath, this time to steady myself, and started walking toward the bowling alley. More images flashed across my mind: Tansy laughing, Adam and his shy smile, Nathan seeing his mother for the first time since her “death.” Things had already been getting complicated by the time we arrived at the bowling alley, but they had been better then. It had still felt like it was possible for us to win whatever conflicts might
be coming, like maybe we were all going to find a way to live happily ever after.

I didn’t feel like that anymore. The world was not a fairy tale.

Glass and gravel crunched underfoot as I slowly approached the door. There were no little red lights to betray the presence of security cameras, and none of the cars I could see looked like they’d been driven since things began falling apart. Tansy had always been responsible for a lot of the exterior security. Fang, who had become Dr. Cale’s right-hand man after the fall of San Francisco, had taken over a lot of Tansy’s responsibilities in the last few months. He wasn’t going to do things the way she had. I kept trying to tell myself that, forcing my feet to keep moving, forcing my mind not to dwell on what would happen if they weren’t here after all.

It doesn’t make sense for them to come back here,
warned the small voice of my deepest fears, the voice that always knew Nathan didn’t really love me, that he’d stopped loving me the moment he learned I wasn’t human; the voice that said I should have let them brainwash me into Sally Mitchell, who could at least have been content with the world, even if she was never quite the same. I hated that voice.

The voice hated me too. That was the only explanation for the way it kept talking, whispering,
This site was compromised. USAMRIID would just come and sweep them up and take them away. You’re wrong. You’re wrong, and you’re going to get yourself killed trying to deny it. You should have stayed in Pleasanton. At least there, you knew where the walls were.

“I’m not wrong,” I murmured, mostly to hear the sound of my own voice, the outside voice that said the things I
wanted
to say, not the things I was most afraid of. USAMRIID never pinpointed the bowling alley. Dr. Cale had spent
years
securing it, as opposed to the weeks she’d had to secure the candy factory. With their resources flagging, Colonel Mitchell’s men
weren’t going to have time to go looking for a suspected underground lab. Dr. Cale was smart. Smart people didn’t go back to places where they didn’t feel safe. She would only have come back here if she knew, as deeply and as truly as I did, that she was safe here.

I rapped my knuckles against the door, stepped back, and waited.

Nothing happened.

I began counting silently, marking time in the only way I had. I reached three hundred, and still the door was closed, and still nothing was happening.

The last time I’d been separated from my people, Nathan had been concerned that I wasn’t myself when I finally managed to get out. Maybe that was happening again. I stepped forward, resting my forehead against the door. I might get splinters. That was fine. A few splinters were a small price to pay for the chance to go home.

“Please, it’s me,” I said. “It’s always been me. Please, let me in.”

Nothing happened.

Maybe I wasn’t saying the right things. “‘Shadows dancing all around, some things better lost than found,’” I said haltingly. “‘If you ask the questions, best be sure you want to know. Some things better left forgot, some dreams better left unsought. Knowing the direction doesn’t mean you have to go.’” It got easier as the verse went on, each line leading inevitably into the next, until it was like I was trying to keep hold of a living thing, a snake that turned and twisted in my mouth.

“‘The broken doors can open if you seek them on your own,’” I said. “Please.
Please
.”

There was a click, like a switch being flipped, or a safety being disengaged. I straightened, turning wide eyes on the night behind me. A figure moved in the gloom. For a second—one beautiful, impossible second—I thought it was Tansy. Then
the moment passed, and it was Fishy standing there, with his riotous curls and his square, practical face. He was holding an assault rifle, the muzzle pointed squarely at my chest.

I almost missed the sound of the door opening. I whirled again, and there was Dr. Cale in her wheelchair, stains on the cuffs of her lab coat, circles etched deep into the skin under her eyes. She looked at me with a hunger that bordered on desperation, hope and fear and anxious need reflected in her eyes.

“My darling girl,” she said. “‘Be careful now, and don’t go out alone.’”

I threw myself into her arms, and she caught me, and I was home.

Our embrace lasted longer than I would have thought possible. Dr. Cale was my creator and Nathan’s mother. She was also the woman who’d once ordered her people to take samples of my true body, the one that slept in the cathedral of my human body’s skull, because she thought they might be important for her research. I had thought, after she did that, that I was never going to trust her again. I had thought it wouldn’t be
possible
for me to trust her again.

Only it turned out that there were some betrayals that cut deeper than those enacted by people who thought they were saving me and the world at the same time. There were the betrayals by people who had never had my best interests at heart. There were the betrayals by people who
meant
to hurt me. Dr. Cale had acted without my consent. She had also apologized, and I believed her. I was never going to get that from Sherman, or from Dr. Banks… or from Sally’s father.

She let me go. I started to straighten, and she lashed out, grabbing the sides of my face in either hand and staring, searchingly, into my eyes. I looked back, trying not to blink, trying to let her see whatever it was that she was looking for.

This time, when she let go, she didn’t grab me again. “Sal,” she said, and smiled, that sweet, infrequent smile that she shared with her biological son. “You made it. You found us. You came home.”

“This is nice and all, but can we get some clear instructions on the lady and the kid?” asked Fishy. “Lady’s got a gun. If she shoots somebody, it’s going to trigger a cutscene, and nobody’s got time for that.”

“Oh!” I turned away from Dr. Cale, and then back again, realizing that trying to explain myself to Fishy wasn’t going to end well for anyone. “They’re with me. Carrie drove me here. I needed her to help me break out of the quarantine zone. Juniper—the little girl—she’s special. We need to talk about her.”

Dr. Cale raised an eyebrow, looking dubious. “That’s how you’re going to start our grand reunion? By telling me we need to talk about a kid you picked up somewhere along the way? Children aren’t like dogs, Sal. We don’t adopt them just because their owners die.”

“She’s yours as much as she’s mine,” I said, and then, in case Dr. Cale didn’t feel like getting the point, I added, “She’s a chimera. And she’s the third owner of her current body.”

Dr. Cale’s eyes widened, dubiousness dropping away. “You mean she’s a result of a second implant entering the same body?”

I nodded. “Yeah. She was a sleepwalker, and now she’s not. Her name is Juniper. I’m taking care of her. But I knew I needed to bring her to you.”

“Yes, you did. How likely is your other friend to shoot someone?”

The sound of a gunshot, breaking glass, and Juniper screaming was our answer. I spun around and ran for the car, past Fishy, who had also turned, and was aiming his rifle at the driver’s-side window. That window was intact: Carrie must have shot forward. That was confirmed when I got closer, and saw the shattered safety glass of the windshield gleaming on
the hood. There were other shapes in the darkness, people I didn’t recognize. I was running into a firefight. I knew it, and I couldn’t stop. Juniper was in that car. If Dr. Cale’s people started shooting back—

“Carrie,
stop
!” I shouted, waving my arms over my head in an effort to make her focus her attention on me. It was dark enough that I felt the need to make myself as visible as possible. “You’re not under attack! We found my family!
Stop shooting!
”

There was a pause, during which the only sounds were Juniper whimpering and me running toward the SUV. Then Carrie fired again, blowing out more of the windshield. Juniper screamed louder.

None of Dr. Cale’s people were returning fire. Carrie was essentially shooting blindly into the shadows, and while she was going to hit someone eventually, they had an advantage she didn’t: They were capable of moving. Until she got out of the car, she was a known quantity with a small handgun and a limited supply of bullets. There was no reason for them to do anything but evade.

Juniper didn’t understand that. Juniper didn’t even know how to unfasten a seat belt. She was trapped with a woman who was firing a gun indiscriminately at enemies she couldn’t possibly see or comprehend, and she was panicking appropriately.

“Carrie!
Carrie!
This is my family! Stop shooting!” I was close enough now to see Carrie’s face through the shattered window. Her eyes darted wildly in my direction, round and white and furious. She was holding her pistol up with both hands, and while it was aimed away from me for the moment, there was no guarantee that would continue.

Juniper was still screaming. It tore at my heart. I would have strangled Carrie with my bare hands in that moment, if I had thought it would make the screaming stop.

“You’re not in danger here!” The words felt like lies in my mouth. Carrie very much
was
in danger. If she kept behaving
like this, there was no way Dr. Cale would let her stay—and if Dr. Cale didn’t let her stay, she was going to die. Not of natural causes, either. Fang took his position as head of security very seriously. Fishy had no normal moral qualms, since he thought that everything that was happening was part of a strange, highly immersive video game. Either one of them would be happy to put a bullet in her skull to keep her from betraying them.

Carrie shook her head wildly. “They’re everywhere!”

“Yes! This is where they live! Now, put down the gun and come meet my family.” I held my hands up, hoping she could see that they were empty, that I was still unarmed. I hadn’t expected this violent response to finding the people we’d come here looking for. It didn’t make any sense.

Or maybe it did. She had reacted with violence, or the threat of violence, over and over again while we’d been alone. Now that we were surrounded by other people, maybe she just couldn’t help herself.

“Please, put down the gun.” I was begging. “They’ll shoot you if you don’t. Please.”

“You asked me to bring you back to your family, and I did it,” said Carrie. At least that meant she was hearing me: Even if she didn’t fully understand what I was saying, she knew that I was talking. “I brought you back to
her
. She killed my husband. She killed us all, and now I’m going to put a bullet in her head!”

The venom and hatred in her voice was staggering. I stopped where I was, looking over my shoulder to where Dr. Cale sat in her wheelchair, backlit by the soft glow from inside. It wasn’t very bright—they must have been keeping the front room of the bowling alley dim, to help them avoid detection—but it was bright enough that I could see her clearly, despite the distance between us. She didn’t look angry, or even surprised. She just looked resigned, like this was the only reasonable outcome to my hitching a ride home.