Chimera (Parasitology) (3 page)

With comprehension came the return of consciousness, and with the return of consciousness came the slowly growing awareness of my body, coming back to me an inch at a time, like the power being turned on in an office building. It wasn’t the worst comparison. The connections between me and the body that had been Sally Mitchell were strong, built by science and reinforced by biology, but they weren’t as natural as a human brain’s connection to its own body. Sometimes things were slower than they were supposed to be. I’d attributed that to my accident, right up until I learned that it was really a case of mind over matter—my mind, Sally’s abandoned matter.

When enough of the power had come back on, I opened my eyes and blinked up at a dark, oddly shaped ceiling. There were lights there, uncovered bulbs that were so bright they hurt, yet somehow didn’t manage to illuminate most of what was around them. It was a senseless design. I didn’t understand it, and so I closed my eyes again, willing myself to return to the weightlessness and the dark.

Something nudged me in the ribs. “You dead, girl? Or worse, you turning into one of those
things
? We’ll kill you before you can hurt any of us, so don’t you even think about jumping up and going for our throats.”

“I don’t think you can reason with monsters, Paul,” said a
female voice. It was farther away than the first voice; wherever we were, it was large enough to include things like “distance,” even if there wasn’t all that much of it. “If she’s going to rip your throat out, she’s going to do it no matter how much you kick her. Hell, maybe she’s going to do it
because
you kicked her. I’d go for your throat if you kept prodding me with your filthy-ass foot.”

“Shut up,” said the man. The nudge to my ribs was repeated. Based on what the woman had said, he was nudging me with his foot. I tried to decide whether I cared, or whether caring would be too much work. Part of me still felt like I was floating, disconnected from myself.

I’d never been hit with a Taser before. I decided I never wanted to be hit with one ever again. The electricity had been enough to disrupt me in ways that were terrifying and invasive at the same time, and I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I felt like myself again. Too long. Even one minute would be too long.

“Look, lady, we don’t actually think they’d throw you in here with us if you were getting sick or some such shit, but we’d really, really appreciate it if you’d do something to indicate that you’re not actually a mindless killing machine getting ready to feast on our tasty flesh, okay? It’s the polite thing to do.”

“Don’t lecture the semiconscious woman on how to be polite,” said the woman.

“Shut up, Carrie,” said the man.

My jaw seemed to be working again. I opened and closed my mouth a few times, reacquainting myself with the motion, before I took the deepest breath my chest could contain and forced it out, resulting in a thin squeaking sound, like a bike tire in need of air. That didn’t seem like enough, so I did it again, squeaking with a bit more vehemence.

“The zombies moan, she’s squeaking, she’s fine,” said the woman.

“They’re not zombies,” said Paul. “Zombies exist in movies and in Haitian folklore. They don’t wander around the streets of San Francisco attacking people.” I tensed, expecting another prod to my ribs. It didn’t come. Instead, a hand was slipped gently under my shoulder while another gripped my wrist, tugging me into a sitting position. “Poor kid’s been zapped.”

“Those soldiers are animals,” said the woman—Carrie, Paul had called her Carrie. Both of them had names. There was something comforting about realizing that, like they had just become real people. And since they were talking to me like I was a real person, that meant their reality was transitive: They existed, and so did I.

Electric shocks were definitely bad for me, if this was how they left me feeling. I moved my jaw again, trying to tell them my name, and succeeded only in making another squeaking sound. My eyes were still closed. I willed them to open. To my sublime relief, they did, and I found myself looking at a skinny woman with bright green hair, folded in on herself like a piece of origami as she sat on the long bench that ran the length of the wall behind her. No, it wasn’t a wall: We were moving. The feeling of weightlessness was coming from the vibrations that passed up through the floor.

As soon as I recognized why I felt so comfortably weightless, the feeling stopped. Sometimes awareness had its downside.

The woman tilted her head, looking me thoughtfully up and down before she said, “Clean, looks well fed, decent haircut… where did they find you, honey? Were you in a closed-off survivor’s alcove? Why the hell did you leave?”

“There could be a lot of explanations,” said Paul. “Don’t pressure her. Hey, I know you can’t talk yet, but do you think you could stand if I helped you? I want to get you off the floor. There’s no telling when they’re going to throw somebody else in here, and I don’t want them to land on top of you.”

We were in a truck. This was a covered truck, like the ones
the Army used for troop movements. I’d been in one of them once before, shortly after my accident, when they were in the process of transferring all my care over to SymboGen. Colonel Mitchell—who had been insisting I call him “Dad” back then, a habit that I probably needed to get back into if I wanted him to believe I was really his daughter returned from the dead, and not the genetically engineered tapeworm that had stolen her body—had commandeered one of the trucks from the USAMRIID base to move me and the machines that were dedicated to monitoring my health over to SymboGen’s San Francisco office.

I had been younger then; I hadn’t possessed language yet, or fully grasped the complexities of what my newly human mind kept trying to tell me. But I’d been integrating faster than a human child, building on all the work Sally Mitchell had already done to grow neurons and form connections, and my recall of those early days never faded the way a human infant’s recall does. I remembered looking at the walls and finding them soothingly dark in comparison to the white ones at the hospital. I remembered wanting the light to go away. And I remembered Colonel Mitchell holding my hand, telling me it was going to be all right, that they were going to find a solution, that I was going to come back to him just as good as new.

He hadn’t really talked to me that way after the move. I wondered whether that was when he’d learnt about who—what—I was, and that his daughter was never coming back to him. But that thought just conjured more questions. He
knew
I was a tapeworm. He
knew
I had shoved Sally out of her own mind, assuming that she’d been left to push aside: The accident had been bad enough, and the brain damage had been severe enough, that it was entirely possible she had been gone before I even managed to squirm through the remnants of her skull.

If he knew those things, why was he asking me to pretend she could have come back?

With Paul’s arms supporting me and pulling when my balance threatened to give way, I was able to climb shakily to my feet and be moved, one halting step at a time, to the waiting bench. By the time we finished the process, I was feeling more like I actually lived inside my own body. I moved my jaw again. This time, what came out was a croaky but distinct “Thank you.”

“It’s no problem.” Paul let go of my arm and retreated to sit down next to Carrie, who unfolded herself just enough to hook one foot under his leg and place one elbow on his shoulder. It seemed less possessive than it was simply a means of seeking comfort in a bad situation, the way the dogs would sometimes pile together when there was a rainstorm. A mammalian instinct, written through the DNA all the way to the masters of the world.

I wondered whether I would have learnt to offer comfort that way, given enough time, given the luxury of learning things on my own and not learning things for the sake of emulating the dead. I liked to snuggle with Nathan, but it was never a matter of comforting him: It was all about comforting myself. It was a way of being close, of allowing for the part of me that was always going to be a little unhappy in wide-open spaces. I was a mammal and I wasn’t a mammal, all at the same time. I still didn’t know what was natural for me and what was learned, and maybe I never would.

“They picked us up down by the ballpark,” said Carrie, mistaking my contemplation for personal interest. “It was stupid. We should never have left the office, but we were running low on bottled water, and Paul remembered that the coaches kept a supply for the players. We both figured we’d be able to get in and get out without anyone noticing us.”

“We didn’t count on an Army sweep happening in the same area,” said Paul wryly. “It didn’t make any sense. They’d cleaned out all the major hot spots last week. We should have been totally fine.”

My heart sank. It made
perfect
sense, because the ballpark was only a few blocks away from the Ferry Building. We had made land there. We had stirred up the sleepwalkers there. If anything was going to trigger a response from the military, it was the arrival of an unauthorized vessel from the other side of the Bay. These people had been caught in a dragnet that I helped trigger, and nothing was going to save them now.

“Do you know where they’re taking us?” My voice still sounded rusty, like part of me was still remembering how to talk.

“A quarantine facility first, so they can triple-check us for signs of infection,” said Paul. “After that…” His expression turned grim. He glanced to Carrie before leaning over and placing a kiss gently on her forehead. She started to cry, burying her face against his shoulder. He looked back to me, and said, much more quietly, “They’re going to take us to the Pleasanton encampment. They’re going to put us with all the other ‘survivors’ of this little science experiment, and fuck us if we don’t like that idea.”

I frowned. “Why don’t you like that idea?” Being under USAMRIID’s control didn’t sit well with me for a lot of reasons, but those reasons were entirely my own. Paul and Carrie seemed like reasonable people. I couldn’t imagine they had the same sorts of issues with my—with Sally’s—father.

To my surprise, Paul’s expression faded slowly into one of pure pity. Carrie buried her face deeper into his shoulder, like she was trying to keep herself from needing to face me. “You mean… you don’t know about Pleasanton?”

“I’ve heard the Pleasanton facility mentioned a few times.
I understand not wanting to be locked up, but the sleepwalkers are dangerous. Isn’t it a good thing not to have them in the same place?” The sleepwalkers were even dangerous to me. I had scars on one wrist, and a whole lot of nightmares, from my encounters with them.

My encounters with the other chimera—Sherman in particular—had left me with even more nightmares. Sherman thought he knew what was best for me, and didn’t see a need to let me have a vote. He had performed surgery on me without my consent, removing samples of my core. He could have killed me. He hadn’t hesitated. So I guess species wasn’t as big a deal as I tried to make it out to be.

“The Pleasanton ‘facility,’ as you put it, doesn’t exist. We’re going to an encampment. Do you understand the difference?”

I did, a bit. A facility was large and clean and filled with chrome surfaces and clean glass windows. SymboGen was a facility. Even the candy factory that had served as Dr. Cale’s temporary home was a facility, albeit a more sugar-soaked one than was necessarily normal. An encampment… I wasn’t completely sure what that was, but it sounded bad. “Not really,” I admitted.

“They fenced off half the neighborhoods in the city,” said Carrie, rolling her face slowly toward me, so that she could watch me as she spoke. She was crying, and her tears drew mascara trails down her cheeks, like she was trying to outline her own bones. “Then they went in and cleaned the sleepwalkers out. House by house. I know a woman who managed to escape, before they reinforced the fences. She said that the Army men removed the bodies, but they didn’t really make any effort to clean up the bloodstains. They’re putting people in houses that still have bloodstains on the walls.”

“Oh,” I said blankly. I didn’t share the normal human aversion for the bodily secretions of others. All living things were
just a combination of fluid and rigid structures. Everything bled; everything defecated. I didn’t want to play in sewage, and I was as sensitive to foul smells as anyone with a human olfactory system, but blood generally dried dark and mostly scentless. It shouldn’t have been an issue. Not in a rational world.

But humans didn’t live in a rational world, did they? Not really. I was human enough not to live in a rational world any more than they did. I just sometimes faked it a little better, because I’d been faking it for my entire life.

Carrie appeared to take my confusion for concern, because she said, “They swear everything’s been cleaned to within a ‘reasonable standard,’ and that no one’s going to get sick from being in those houses, but it’s not the houses that people need to worry about. It’s the other people!”

“They’re sleeping upwards of twelve adults to a single-family home. The only way you get more space is if you have children or disabled adults: Then you’ll be put in private apartments in what used to be the bad part of town,” said Paul grimly.

“Pleasanton has a bad part of town?” The question sounded incredibly naive. I still wanted to know the answer. Pleasanton was one of those places that had always struck me as being as innocuous as its name: sleepy and suburban and filled with malls and car dealerships and families, not close enough to San Francisco to really be subjected to population crush, not far enough away to be suffering from a bad economy. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect place to live, but it had always looked that way from a distance.

“The slightly less good part of town,” amended Paul. “It’s the bad part of town now.”

“Everything is the bad part of town now,” said Carrie.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Aren’t you safer there, with people who you know aren’t infected?”

“Those things will just kill you,” said Paul. “It’s an awful
way to die, but that’s all that happens. You change or you die. Humans are worse. Humans are terrifying.”