Chimera (Parasitology) (24 page)

“Luckily, you’re not going to have to.” He stepped forward to put his arms around my waist, pulling me back so that I was resting against him. “We’re a family. We take care of our own.”

I closed my eyes. Finally,
finally
, I was home.

Juniper seemed to like her new room well enough, but that didn’t mean she was willing to stay there alone: as soon as I went to leave, she was reaching out her arms again, demanding to be taken with me. Nathan and I had exchanged a look, and then I’d picked her up and carried her back out to the living room, where we sat together on the couch while Nathan went out to get our things. Beverly and Minnie stayed with me, the bulldog settling at my feet while the Lab leapt up onto the couch and curled up against my hip. Juniper viewed this with wary acceptance, clearly still trying to make up her mind about the dogs.

“They’re our friends,” I told her. “They’ll take care of us, and we’ll take care of them. Just like Nathan and I are going to take care of you. That’s what families do. We take care of each other.”

“Sal,” said Juniper, and I took it for acceptance, for understanding, even as I knew that it was probably nothing of the sort. I smiled at her.

“We’re going to be happy here,” I said, and closed my eyes.

Sleep had been gathering around me, waiting to pounce, and as soon as my guard was down, it took me. I slipped into unconsciousness with Juniper on my lap and the dogs surrounding me, and I didn’t wake up even when Nathan came back with the clothes and bottled water from the car. I didn’t wake up when he put the blanket over us, or when he sat down beside me, on the side Beverly had left open, and put his head on my shoulder. I was home. I was safe. I didn’t need to be afraid anymore. Those things were each of them more precious than anything I could ever have dreamed, and so I let my dreams have me for a while. It was only fair.

I was home, and everything else could wait.

S
omeone was knocking on the door.

I sat bolt upright, instantly awake, every nerve I had screaming that this was it: The patrol had found us, they were going to take me back to the quarantine zone, and they were going to take everything else with us. Beverly, her head dislodged from my knee by my sudden motion, looked at me and whined.

Inch by inch, I became aware of my surroundings. I was in a shabby, clean little apartment, with Juniper in my arms, and my dogs snuggled up to me, and Nathan sleeping, still fully clothed, on the couch beside me. His head was lolling, mouth open as he snored gently. The knock came again.

Now Juniper began to stir, lifting her head with a small noise of protest. I shushed her. From the smell, she had wet herself again while she was sleeping. Dr. Cale had the power on;
I wondered whether she also had working washers and dryers, and whether it would be safe to wash clothes in potentially infected water.

“Shhh, honey, shhh, I just need to see who’s at the door,” I said. I set Juniper aside, bracing her against Beverly, who began sniffing her curiously. Either Juniper was too sleepy to cling, or she was distracted by the dog, because she let me get up without reaching for me.

I made my way to the door, grateful for having fallen asleep with my clothes on, and peered out the peephole. If it was a team from USAMRIID, I didn’t know what I was going to do—although if it had been a team from USAMRIID, wouldn’t they have knocked the door down already? They didn’t have any reason to be polite. They weren’t banging, either. Their knocking was insistent, but it wasn’t so loud that it would have woken us if we’d been asleep in the back of the apartment.

The warped glass of the peephole distorted the scene enough that I had to blink several times before I could see who was outside. Then I gasped, and undid the locks so fast that I broke a nail on the deadbolt, leaving it hanging there like a scrap of paper as I wrenched the door open.

Adam didn’t wait for me to say hello or invite him inside. As soon as the door was open wide enough for him to wedge his body through, it he was inside, flinging his arms around me and holding me so tight that it felt like he was bending my ribs. My injured rib throbbed with pain. I ignored it as I put my arms around him and held him just as tightly.

He bent to press his head against my chest like a much younger child. I felt the warm wetness of his tears beginning to spread through my grubby, travel-stained shirt. In so many ways, he was the youngest of us. Maybe he always would be.

“You came back,” he whispered. “You came back to me, just like you said you would. I missed you. I missed you so much. Don’t
do
that again, Sal. You can’t do that. You went away.”

“I won’t,” I said, and kissed the top of his head. His hair tasted like salt water and sandalwood. I realized I was crying too. That didn’t seem to matter. “I’m here. I’m staying here. I don’t ever, ever want to go away again. It’s all right, Adam, I’m here.”

“I thought you were gone forever.” His voice was anguished, filled with the cruel truth of his words. He really had thought that they had lost me.

Nathan was my lover. Dr. Cale was my creator. But Adam was my
brother
, and somehow letting him down hurt me most of all. I held him tighter, and he did the same to me, the two of us crushing against each other until there might as well have been no oxygen between us. We had been two things that became single, hybrid creatures: Now we were trying the same trick again, but with two human bodies that wanted to fuse into one. Adam was the calm one, the sweet one, the rational one, who had never had to run or defend himself. I was… I was me. Together, we might make a whole person.

“Sal?”

There was a depth of confusion, curiosity, and wariness packed into the single syllable of my name that I would have thought impossible. Adam pulled away enough to let me turn around, and we both looked toward the couch. Juniper’s head had appeared over the back of it, her hands clutching the cushion for balance, her eyes filled with questions.

“Who…?” Adam paused, and then let me go so that he could take a step toward Juniper without dragging me along. “Hello. Who are you?”

“Sal,” said Juniper warily.

Adam looked at me, looking so confused that it was all I could do not to laugh. It wasn’t really funny. It was deadly serious, like everything in our lives seemed to be most of the time. But I still wanted to laugh, and that was nice. It was nice to want to be happy.

“Adam, meet Juniper. I found her while I was on my way home. She’s—”

“She’s a chimera, like us,” he said, sounding excited. “A
natural
chimera, like you. Hello, Juniper! I’m Adam. I’m your brother.”

“Sal?” said Juniper, looking past him, focusing on me.

“She doesn’t talk yet,” I said. I stepped past Adam and picked her up, letting her get her arms locked around my shoulders. “She’s still learning most things. Like how to use the bathroom. She doesn’t get that yet.” The smell of her was something else. “How do we manage bathing if the water isn’t safe?”

“Chemical showers mostly, but we filter water for the hydroponics. I bet Mom can figure out a way to fill a bathtub.” Adam held out his hand toward Juniper, not reaching for her, but putting himself in reach. It was similar to the way that I would approach a skittish or unfamiliar dog, and I realized that it had a similar intent: He was letting her get a feel for his pheromones, which would confirm him as a member of the family, and someone to be trusted.

“I don’t want to put her in a chemical shower until I’m sure she’ll be able to keep her eyes and mouth shut,” I said. “She’s still figuring out the things her body already knows. So she sits upright and doesn’t fall off things, but it took her a while to start reaching for me. If it weren’t for muscle memory, I think we’d be in trouble.”

Adam nodded. “Can I hold her?” The question was small, almost meek, and reminded me—not for the first time—that he had gone in quick succession from having two sisters to having none. Not with Tansy on life support and me missing, maybe never to return. It hadn’t been fair to him, any more than it had been fair to the rest of us.

“That’s up to her, but let’s see,” I said. I tilted my body, trying to pass Juniper over to Adam. It was amazing how quickly
that particular motion had become familiar, almost second nature. Soon, I wouldn’t even have to think about it.

Juniper looked at him suspiciously, her arms still locked around my neck. Then, to my surprise and relief, she let me go, and allowed herself to be transferred into the slightly taller man’s arms. She leaned back, her butt braced in his elbow, and looked at him gravely. Then, with no further fanfare, she slipped her arms around his neck, put her head against his collarbone, and closed her eyes.

“She’s amazing,” Adam whispered.

I smiled. “Yeah, she is. She’s a lucky little girl, too. If we hadn’t come along when we did…” The thought chilled me. How many children like Juniper were out there, chimera created when their second implant fought off the first, suddenly intelligent and aware, but unequipped to take care of themselves? Juniper had gotten lucky beyond belief when I had stumbled across her. A group of human survivors might have taken her confusion and apparent vacancy as a sign of trauma and taken her with them. Or they might have taken her for a sleepwalker, and killed her where she stood. It was impossible to say. Without me and Carrie escaping when we did, she would have starved to death.

The thought of food was a surprising one, and made my stomach, which had previously been silent, give an audible growl. I hadn’t eaten in too long. Juniper, leaving her head cradled against Adam’s collarbone, opened one eye and gave me a hopeful look.

“We need to eat,” I said. “Can you hold her while I go and change into something cleaner?” Getting Juniper herself changed would need to wait until she’d had a bath, or she would just dirty another set of clothes. I was sweaty from the road, but it was nothing I couldn’t remove with baby wipes and a dish towel.

Adam beamed like I had just asked him to be responsible for the most precious thing in the universe. “I can,” he said. “I’ll be right here.”

“Thank you. You’re the best brother.” I paused to kiss the top of Nathan’s head—he was still sleeping, the dogs now curled against him like none of them had been able to get any real rest while I’d been away—and then trotted down the short hallway to the bedrooms.

My clothing from the candy factory was in the larger of the master bedroom’s two dressers, and the items I’d taken from the Old Navy were piled on top of it. I shimmied out of my dirty things and put on a clean bra and panties, luxuriating in the feeling of having my own clothes next to my body, instead of shabby, boil-washed pieces of cotton handed out by a USAMRIID patrol truck. A shower would have been even better, but that could wait until we were more settled. Smelling like a human being wasn’t a problem for me, providing we could teach Juniper to wake people up when she needed to go to the bathroom.

I put on jeans and a clean tank top before returning to the living room, where Nathan was sitting up and rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. He had placed his glasses on Beverly’s head, and the big Lab was practically vibrating with joy at the thought that she was being somehow useful to one of her people. She offered me a doggy grin when I stepped back into the room, her tongue lolling and her ears perked in a “look at me” position.

Adam was still holding Juniper, who seemed content to cling to her newly discovered big brother for as long as he let her. I smiled at the scene. It was everything I had ever wanted. A home: a family. People who would accept me for what I was, and not what they thought they could turn me into.

Now all I had to do was make sure that we could stay
together and that things could be like this forever. “Good morning, Nathan,” I said. “Did you sleep well?”

“My back hurts, my knees hurt, my butt hurts, and I haven’t slept that well in weeks,” he said, reclaiming his glasses and putting them on his face. The look he gave me then wasn’t happy or sad or anything so simple: It was pure contentment, tempered with a layer of understanding that we weren’t done fighting. This was an anomaly, a moment of happiness before everything inevitably fell apart again. “I always sleep better when you come back to me.”

“I hope you never sleep that well again,” I said, and he blinked at me and laughed, and everything was wonderful.

It couldn’t last. Nathan looked to Adam, and asked, “Did you just come to see Sal?”

“Oh!” Adam’s eyes widened, filling with sudden realization. It made my stomach twist. This was it: Our moment of peace was over, and it was time to get back to the business of surviving in a world that wanted nothing more than to destroy us all. “Mom sent me. She said to tell you all that we have a lot of work to do, and that she needs to give Juniper a full physical.” His voice changed, becoming soft with wonder. “I thought Sal had brought home another dog or something. I didn’t realize she’d managed to find us a
sister
.”

“Well, I did,” I said. I put a hand on my rumbling stomach, swallowing the urge to sigh. “Let’s grab a granola bar or something. Then we can go find out what’s going to go wrong next.”

Walking back to the bowling alley in daylight gave me the opportunity to look at our new neighborhood. Cars and debris choked the sidewalks, and someone had managed to tip a pickup truck onto its side in the middle of the street, creating cover and the illusion of total abandonment at the same time. If you looked closely at the broken and soaped-over windows,
you might notice that a surprising number of the apartments had blackout curtains hanging inside, but that would require getting closer than any casual inspection was going to be.

“We can’t prevent heat-signature scans; if someone flies over looking for signs of life, we’re screwed,” said Nathan. He was walking alongside me, matching his strides to mine. “On the plus side, sleepwalkers show the same heat signatures as humans or chimera, so that isn’t really a valid means of finding either survivors or fugitives.”

“I don’t think they have those kinds of resources left,” I said, thinking of the teenagers in fatigues, their assault rifles and cattle prods shaking in their hands. “They’re sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel where personnel are concerned.”

“That’s good to hear,” said Nathan. “Fang will want to ask you about what you saw in the quarantine zone. USAMRIID has managed to pick up some of our people while they were out gathering supplies. We don’t
think
they know who they have, but Fang’s been planning a breakout for weeks. The only reason we hadn’t moved is because we didn’t have eyes on you, and I wasn’t willing to agree to anything that might get you hurt.”

A full assault on the quarantine zone would result in a
lot
of people getting hurt. Something stealthy might be able to get the folks they needed in and out without causing too much of a hue and cry, especially now that I was with them. I knew the lay of the land in both Pleasanton and Oakland.

“They don’t know,” I said. “If they did, they would have told me. Colonel Mitchell wanted me to help my—to help
Sally’s
sister, Joyce.”

“The one we treated with the antiparasitic drugs?” asked Nathan, sounding surprised. “Did they get the doses wrong? What did they think you could do for her?”

“Dr. Banks convinced them I was Sally. That my implant had somehow been able to keep me—to keep her—alive, just trapped, and that he’d been able to coax her to the surface.” I
stepped around a large hole in the pavement. Adam and Juniper were about ten feet ahead of us, Beverly sticking to their steps like a big black shadow. She knew that I needed them to be safe, and she was being a good dog. Such a good dog.

“Okay,” said Nathan slowly. It was clear that he didn’t quite understand, and I couldn’t blame him for that, because I wasn’t telling the story properly: I was laying it out in puzzle pieces, as if trying to explain the whole thing at once would hurt me somehow. Maybe because it would.