Chimera (Parasitology) (30 page)

I watched her move past, wanting to grab her wrist as well, to keep her safe from the scene around her. Dr. Cale needed to examine her. She needed to know what was going on with that baby—the baby the woman would probably eat as soon as it was outside of her body, because what else was she supposed to do with a tiny, helpless thing? Even if it was a sleepwalker, it would smell more like food than family. Babies arrived covered in blood, didn’t they? Maybe dropping something tiny and helpless into the world with its own gravy was a terrible decision on the part of evolution.

We had almost reached the back of the store. Moans rose from the darkness, wavering at the end before they broke. These were the most damaged, least functional of the sleepwalkers, I realized, the ones that would have been devoured by their fellows if they’d been in a less curated environment. They seemed to understand that, in their way, because when the doors had been opened, they hadn’t tried for their freedom. Where else were they supposed to go? Here they had food, they had comfort, such as it was, they had the safety to eat and sleep without fearing attack. Outside, there would be only pain.

Sleepwalkers might not be intelligent compared to humans or chimera, but they had their own type of brilliance. They
were all about survival, unmitigated by emotion or intellect. No sleepwalker would walk into danger to save someone else. It would be alien to them.

For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe in the end, neither humans nor chimera would inherit the Earth. We were focused on survival, but we weren’t
good
at it. Not the way the sleepwalkers were. They could sleepwalk their way to the top of the food pyramid, and all they had to do was wait for us to betray ourselves.

“Sal!” The shout came from the front of the store. I looked over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see anything. There was a dim light in the distance, sliced by shelves and diluted by the bodies of the sleepwalkers between me and its source. It might as well have been on the moon, for all the good it was going to do me. I didn’t even know who was yelling. The shape of the store—cluttered and cavernous at the same time—distorted the voice, twisting it and bouncing it off the walls until all I could know for sure was that it belonged to a man.

There was no more gunfire. Either Dr. Cale’s people had stopped the sleepwalkers from escaping, or they’d been overrun. I looked at the crowd around me, standing agitated but docile, and hoped it was the first. I hoped they’d fired their guns into the air and driven the sleepwalkers back, rather than killing creatures that intended them no harm, because they weren’t capable of “intending” anything. They just existed. They just survived. That was all they wanted to do. I would still fight if they tried to eat me, because my survival mattered too, but if they weren’t hurting anything, they deserved the chance to live.

There was a clang. The light from the front of the store suddenly dimmed, and I knew the doors had been closed. The windows were still allowing a certain amount of illumination into the store, and I wondered briefly whether that might not explain the slow shamble of the sleepwalkers across the parking
lot. If their eyes weren’t accustomed to bright lights anymore, they would have been blinded by the sun. Of course they would have moved slowly. They wouldn’t have known what else to do.

“Sal!” This time, the voice was closer. The sleepwalkers around me moaned and grumbled, making little wordless noises of discontent. They looked around themselves, their eyes more adjusted to the gloom than mine were. When they didn’t find the source of the voice, they stilled.

I breathed out again, trying to put as many reassuring pheromones into the air as possible, and looked the one place they hadn’t: I looked up.

A figure was crouched atop the nearest shelf, keeping low to reduce its profile and avoid knocking over the dusty merchandise still piled there. He must have crossed the store at high speed, unimpeded by crowds of sleepwalkers, but knowing all along that a misstep would send him crashing to the floor.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Get up here, and we can head for the roof.”

“Fishy, get out,” I whispered back. The sleepwalkers around me were getting more upset by the second. I didn’t know how long I would have before my pheromones were no longer enough to keep them calm. I was running blind here, and the consequences of failure were going to be dire. “You’re
upsetting
them.”

“We can’t leave you in here,” he replied. He thrust his hand down, fingers moving palely into my line of sight. “Grab hold. I’m here to get you out.”

The fact that only the person who didn’t believe any of this was real had been willing to follow me into the store said something about how bad the situation was. I didn’t know how many sleepwalkers were crammed in behind me, but judging by the smell and the crush of bodies, it was more than enough. We could both die in an instant if we made a misstep.

Not making a misstep was going to be virtually impossible. I breathed out again. Every time I did that, it seemed to work less well. Either the sleepwalkers were getting accustomed to my pheromones, or they were becoming agitated enough that they didn’t care anymore. Neither option was going to end well for me.

I let go of the sleepwalker woman’s wrist and took a step toward the shelf where Fishy crouched. She hissed and began moaning, but she didn’t grab for me or otherwise try to stop me from moving away. That would come next, I was sure: Once she figured out that whatever purpose I’d been serving for her was no longer being served, she would lunge. Then it would be strong fingers hauling me back, and teeth biting into my flesh, and everything would have been for nothing.

I could see my own death as clear as day, played out in blood and screaming and the rainbow splatter of my internal organs. That motivated me to take another step, moving closer to the shelf, and to the point where I could get a decent grip on Fishy’s waiting hand. If he could just haul me up…

One of the sleepwalkers made a querulous noise, like it had just realized that maybe I didn’t belong there. Then it moaned, deep and low in its chest, and lunged for me.

The sleepwalkers might be tapeworms in human suits, but that didn’t give them special powers: Their reflexes weren’t enhanced, and their eyesight was no better than it had been before they took over their hosts. They moved fast. That was all. When I was frightened, I was faster. He lunged, and I jerked away, grabbing Fishy’s hand with my own even as I began scrabbling my way up the shelf. While the sleepwalkers had been fed and left to linger in their own filth, which had to confuse their senses of smell at least a little, I had been running and jumping and working to become stronger than I had ever been in my life. He was fast.

I was faster.

Fishy’s hand closed tight around my wrist, hauling me upward as I scrambled for footholds on the loose shelving unit. The sleepwalker grabbed for me again, but it was too late: I was already out of his reach.

“Are you okay?” Fishy boosted me onto the top of the shelf, putting a hand on my waist to steady me until I could balance on my own. “Did they hurt you? Are you bleeding?”

He was talking too loudly. The sleepwalkers were becoming more active with every word, twitching and moaning and shambling to surround the shelf where we crouched. We were outside their reach, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t knock the shelving unit over. While they didn’t seem to make plans—not really—they were good at feeding themselves. It was maybe the thing they were best at in the world.

“Shhh,” I said, shaking my head fiercely. In a whisper I continued, “They didn’t hurt me, but you’ve got to be quiet. You’re
upsetting
them.”

“I’m upsetting them? Sal, we’re stuck in a cutscene-level battle here, and I didn’t find a single power-up on my way to get you. I don’t think we’re the player characters in this situation.”

I paused in the act of shaking my head to stare at him, open-mouthed and stunned into silence. I had always known that Fishy’s grasp on reality was shaky at best. I hadn’t realized it was this bad.

“No,” I said finally. “No. You can pretend you don’t believe in anything when you’re out there, but right now, in here, I need you to take this seriously. This is
real
. If you’re here to get me out, then you need to be
here
. With me.” In this darkened, abandoned Kmart, with the sleepwalkers all around us, moaning their agitation to the gloom.

Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that he’d decided to divorce himself from the real world. The shock was that he had taken it so far.

“I’m not pretending, Sal,” said Fishy. He sounded unusually serious. Part of me pointed out that this was a ridiculous
place to have this conversation. The sleepwalkers were pressing closer and closer, until it felt like we were perched on the last island in the world, waiting for the sea to carry us away. The rest of me ordered that part to be silent. This, too, was survival. Survival of the mind, not just survival of the body. “Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see the pixels bleeding off the edges of the world. This is a game. It has to be a game. If it’s not a game, then everything I’ve ever loved is gone, and I’m not getting any of it back. So let it be a game. I’ll play to win, until the day I don’t. It’s the least I can do. But I refuse to let this be real. I refuse to let her be gone.”

Fishy’s wife had been killed when her SymboGen implant decided it would be a better driver for her body than she was. According to Dr. Cale, his disassociation from reality had accompanied her conversion. His wife tried to eat him, he decided the world was actually a complicated video game. It wasn’t the worst coping mechanism I’d ever heard. It was just, under the circumstances, pretty inconvenient.

“So what do we do?” I asked. “We can’t climb down, and we can’t stay here.”

Fishy’s teeth were a flash of white through the darkness. “Can you jump?”

The shelves were firmly affixed to the floor, thanks to California’s earthquake regulations. The magnetic clamps that held them were old, and some of them were misaligned, but they were holding fast, doing their duty even after the people who had installed them were long gone. Maybe some of those same people were here with us, mindless meat-cars being driven by my cousins, no longer able to understand their own technology. The thought should probably have been unsettling. I didn’t have the time to waste on feeling bad for them.

Fishy, who apparently spent his free time training for video-game survival situations, went first. He leapt across the space
between shelves without hesitation, as if some unseen controller was guiding his actions. He didn’t need to be afraid of falling: He knew that none of this was real, and that if he toppled into the waiting hands of the sleepwalkers below, he would simply wake from the terrible dream that had redefined his reality.

My own fate was much less assured. I didn’t have a comforting delusion to wrap around my shoulders and keep me safe: The only thing I’d ever had to lie to myself about was my own humanity, and while I had held on to that lie for as long as possible, I had also willingly set it aside when it became clear that it was no longer doing me any good. I knew this was the real world. I knew that I couldn’t fly. And I knew I was scared out of my mind, which didn’t help.

The sleepwalkers were becoming more agitated, and the hands that were reaching up to grab and drag us down were becoming more plentiful, clustering around the shelves until even the magnetic clamps weren’t enough to keep us from rocking slightly.

That was the motivation I had been waiting for. The shelf rocked, and I leapt, flailing wildly until I felt Fishy’s arms lock around my waist and pull me safely away from the edge of our new perch. He was grinning again, his teeth gleaming in the faint light that was capable of reaching this deep into the old Kmart. It should have turned my stomach—I hate the sight of human teeth, the violent, hard reality of them—but given the circumstances, his obvious joy was more of an anchor than anything else. I could hold on to that joy, using it to keep me from toppling into the waiting hands below.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I am
not
okay. What’s happening? How did they get out? Why did you come in?”

“Uh, well, I came in because you decided to play Saint Patrick and the Snakes with our shambling buddies here, and Dr. Cale freaked out, and Nate freaked out, and everybody freaked out, and nobody was willing to, like, burn the place
to the ground while you were still inside it, even though that would have been the most reasonable reaction under the circumstances,” said Fishy. “So I said I’d do it, since hell, what are they going to do to me? Eat me? Game over is something I’m really looking forward to.” There was a faint wistfulness to his tone, like he spent his nights dreaming about the day this game would end.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I pulled away, getting my feet under me, and looked down at the crush of moving bodies around us. I couldn’t see more than sketchy outlines and shadows, but that was more than enough, all things considered. “How did they get out?” I asked again.

Fishy sighed. “You’re like a dog with a bone sometimes, Sal. Anybody ever tell you that? Like a dog with a bone.”

Maybe I was like a dog. People had spent enough of my short life telling me to sit and stay, telling me when to speak, and ordering me to be quiet. This wasn’t a time for that sort of command. “I’ll follow you out of here, but I need to know.”

“All right,” said Fishy. “Come with me.” And he turned, and jumped for the next shelf, leaving me no choice but to follow.

As soon as I landed on our new perch, the reason for both the pause and the leap became clear. By lingering on the first shelf as long as we had, we’d lured sleepwalkers over to it, and were now above a relatively clear stretch of aisle. He leapt a second time, and I followed, trying not to think about what would happen if I missed my landing and fell to the floor below. I was Sal Mitchell. I had survived worse things than an obstacle course in a darkened store, and this was not going to be the thing that took me down.