Chimera (Parasitology) (34 page)

“I don’t take orders from you,” said Heina.

“Why not?” I asked. “I’m the last chimera standing. I’m the boss’s genetically engineered daughter, and I’m the one who’s marrying her biological son. No matter how you slice it, I’m technically in charge now that she’s gone, and I say we’re wasting time.”

“Cat’s got claws,” said Fishy. He sounded surprised and pleased, like this was the best possible outcome.

“Sal is correct,” said Fang, not giving the argument a chance to continue. “We need to leave if we’re going to reach USAMRIID before the sun goes down. Heina, you have to get the equipment transferred over, and more importantly, you have to leave the bodies where they are. They’re essential camouflage.”

“But they’re our friends,” she said softly.

“I know,” said Fang, his tone echoing hers. “I am going to miss them forever. But they wouldn’t want us to die because we were unwilling to let them protect us one last time. Leave their bodies where they fell. They’ll keep you safe by keeping the wolves away.”

“How did it come to this?” asked Heina.

Fang shook his head. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I really don’t know.”

Working together, the four of us had been able to transfer Tansy and her life-support equipment into the back of the truck without jostling her more than was absolutely necessary. Her heart monitor beeped once, signaling an increase in her resting vitals, before calming again.

Fishy had managed to secure a generator in the corner of the truck, small enough to be unobtrusive, large enough to power the machines that were keeping Tansy’s host—and hence Tansy herself—alive. One by one, he plugged in her life-support components, swapping them from the lab extension cord with a speed and grace that spoke to a lifetime spent doing similar work, albeit with less potentially fatal consequences.

We had food for a day, in case we got held up on the way to USAMRIID; small weapons enough to get us through whatever dangers we encountered; and all the medical supplies Fishy and Fang had been able to scrounge from the bowling alley. If anything went wrong during transport, we’d be in the best possible position to try to put Tansy back together. Not that it was ever going to work completely. Until she got a new host, this persistent vegetative state was the most that we would have to hope for.

Heina was going to take care of my dogs until we got back. I didn’t like the idea of leaving them with a virtual stranger, but I liked the idea of taking them with us even less. There were no animals inside the quarantine zone, save for the ones that had been there before USAMRIID moved in and hadn’t been hunted down and euthanized yet. Beverly might have been okay with the trip. Minnie wouldn’t have been. And I wouldn’t have been okay with the stress of looking out for either one of them. Better to leave them here, where they would be safe, even if they would also be lonely. It wasn’t like I needed them to detect sleepwalkers for me anymore. My pheromones had evolved. I could detect the sleepwalkers for myself.

I sat on the truck’s back bumper, watching the sky and wishing we were already in motion. The waiting was killing me. Sherman wasn’t waiting. Whatever he was going to do to our people, he had probably already started. Maybe he hadn’t realized yet how special Juniper was; maybe he thought Dr. Cale had just decided to implant one of her babies in an actual baby and see what happened. But Sherman was smart, and if he didn’t know already, he was going to figure it out. He
had
to figure it out. Once that happened…

The clock was ticking, and we needed to move.

There was just one problem: We were the good guys. We were the ones who were still trying to hold on to empathy and compassion—things that it would be easier to call “humanity,” but I had them too, and I wasn’t human. Sherman could roll in and roll out like a hurricane, destroying whatever happened to be standing in his way. Colonel Mitchell could run the world like it was an extension of his army, letting everything be sacrificed in the name of a “greater good” that many would never live to see. Even Dr. Banks had his excuses. He’d never cared about anyone but himself, so why should he start now?

We couldn’t do that. If we wanted to hold on to the only things that made us better than they were, we
had
to take the time to say good-bye to our people, no matter how much I wanted to be moving. We
had
to remember that everyone mattered. That was going to keep us from losing sight of ourselves.

But oh, how I wanted to move.

Fishy walked into my frame of view, boosting himself up onto the truck’s bumper next to me. “Fang and Heina are almost done,” he said. “I’m driving. Will you ride up front with me? I know you’re not super big into cars and all that, but you’re the only one who’s actually been to USAMRIID before. I figure you can give me directions.”

“They might also be less likely to shoot first and ask questions later if they see me in the front seat with you,” I said.

“So very, very true,” said Fishy amiably. “Fang can monitor all the beeping things in the back. He’s good at that. Way better than I am. I’m an engineer, not a neurosurgeon.”

“Yeah,” I said. I hesitated and then asked, “Fishy? Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

“Honestly, Sal, I think ‘the right thing’ sort of fell by the wayside when the cities started burning,” said Fishy. He looked morosely out over the parking lot. His eyes fell on one of the corpses, and he flinched, looking away. “At this point, we’re doing the best that we can. USAMRIID has bigger guns and better resources. If we get them on our side, we’ll be in a much better position to take on Sherman. If we can’t, we’ll figure something out.”

“It’s not that easy,” I said.

Fishy smiled and nudged me with his elbow. “Sure it is. You managed to get away from them twice, right? Three times, if we count that horrifying story Dr. Cale tells about you and your sister and the Colonel back before shit got real. We’ll just follow you, and you’ll know what to do.”

I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t want to disillusion him when we were already getting ready to march into danger. So I just smiled thinly and didn’t say anything.

Fang came walking around the corner of the truck. “Heina has gone to wake the others and start her work. We should go, if we don’t want to be stuck here while we explain everything again.”

I slid down off the bumper. “Let’s get moving.”

“Yes,” said Fang, swinging himself up into the truck and moving toward the back to check on Tansy. “Let’s.”

He was bending over her cot when Fishy pulled the truck’s door down, and cut Fang off from view. Together, Fishy and I walked around to the cab, and climbed in. I fastened my seat belt. Fishy didn’t. Maybe believing that life was a video game made personal safety seem less important.

I watched out the window as we drove out of the parking lot and back onto Willow Pass Road. No one watched us go.

No one but the dead.

Sherman and his people had taken advantage of the relatively clear road outside the bowling alley to make their approach. They would have needed to move very little aside in the way of blockages: While Dr. Cale’s people had worked to keep the area looking realistically deserted, they had also needed to rearrange the crashes and abandoned vehicles to make it possible for supply runs and scavenging parties to move freely. We were using those same streets now, following them back to I-4. We didn’t dare clear a new route. Like the bodies outside the bowling alley, the unmoved vehicles littering the streets would make it seem like we had never passed through here.

Fishy took it slow, moving around the blockages and swerving to avoid spills, all while trying to keep the ride steady enough that it wouldn’t jostle Tansy and Fang more than absolutely necessary. I admired the artistry of it all, even as I tried to focus on the drums pounding in my ears, forbidding myself to listen to the small, gnawing voice of my own panic. I had no reason to be afraid of riding in cars. There was no traffic to contend with. There was no way Fishy was going to lose control of the truck. All I had to fear was fear itself, and honestly, I didn’t have time for that.

“I miss the radio,” said Fishy after taking a quick scan through the available frequencies and confirming that everything was off the air. “I used to have this old junker I inherited from my dad. It was a piece of rust that drove like a car, you know? Actual ferrous frame, weighted like a personal tank. It had a CD player instead of a proper satellite radio hookup. Man, I hated that thing. If I wanted music, I either had to play it through my phone or remember to grab a bunch of actual
discs before I got in the car. I guess the joke’s on me, though. I’d kill for a CD player now.”

I didn’t even know what a CD player was. I stayed quiet.

“It’s weird how technology changes everything, isn’t it?” Fishy drove around an overturned semi. “Once, there were CD players everywhere. Before that it was tape decks, and before that it was these weird things called eight-tracks that looked like video game cartridges from the eighties and only held like two songs. But every time, it was a revolution. More control, more content, more choices. And now here we are, back to silence, because we got rid of all the physical media and then we lost the radio.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I admitted.

“That’s cool,” said Fishy. He smiled, and there was something terribly sad about the expression, like he had always known that he was speaking into the void. “Sometimes I just talk so I’ll know I still exist, you know?”

“That, I know,” I said quietly.

The landscape outside the truck windows was oddly blasted. It had been a low-rain year—normal enough, although according to the Mitchells, California used to experience heavy rains during December and January, back when we were the greatest produce supplier in the United States. The climate had shifted since then, enough that rain was rare and fires were common. Enough that the brown, dry hills around us didn’t seem so unusual, although they were more overgrown than they used to be, thanks to the relative absence of cows. Oh, there were a few here and there, dotted around the hills like bruises on a banana. Horses were more plentiful. They were smarter, and didn’t have the same milking requirements. Even more important, they were better at getting out of their stalls.

In a similar vein, goats were more common than sheep, and cats were more common than dogs. Birds of prey roosted atop telephone poles, watching us pass with their cold avian eyes.
They wouldn’t care if we never managed to resolve this conflict. Sherman could kill us all, and the hawks and falcons and crows would inherit everything.

“Sorry, birdie, but we’re not ready for that,” I muttered as we rolled under yet another red-tailed hawk. Fishy shot me a faintly confused look, but didn’t say anything. I suppose he was so accustomed to being the one who didn’t make sense that he was willing to let me take a turn.

“The freeways are open this way, you said?” he asked.

“They should be, unless things have changed since Carrie and I got out of the Coliseum,” I said. “Did anyone see which direction Sherman’s people came from? I wouldn’t put it past them to have collapsed some wrecks over their path, just for cover.” In this context, “anyone” could only mean Fang, since Fishy and I had both been inside the Kmart when everything went wrong.

Fishy shook his head. “Not enough survivors, and there wasn’t time to check the security footage. You think we’re going to catch up to them?”

“No. They’d have to be holed up in Albany or Emeryville if they drove down this road to reach us, and neither of those has anything like the big abandoned mall Sherman was using as his headquarters. I’m almost positive.” Almost wasn’t good enough—had stopped being good enough before I was engineered in the SymboGen lab that made me—but it was all we had left, and I was clinging to it as tightly as I could.

Besides, Sherman was
smart
. Smart enough to know that Dr. Cale, when driven out of Vallejo, would have gone back to familiar ground; smart enough to check the bowling alley. He had been smart enough to build an army of chimera under everyone’s noses. He must have hid the disappearances in an untold number of counties, burying the Missing Person alerts in a dozen local news reports. He wouldn’t have stayed in a hideout that was equidistant between his creator and his
enemies at USAMRIID. There was too much chance that one day Dr. Cale would go too far and bring the Army down on her head, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be in the path of that.

We drove amongst untouched hills, under the watchful eyes of hawks. For maybe the first time since this freeway was built, there was no roadkill anywhere; the pavement was free of blood. Cars sat on the shoulder, and glass glittered on the blacktop, but as far as the natural world was concerned, the age of man was over. It had come to an end when the last raccoon was struck by a car’s bumper, when the last deer was left to rot on the median.

Speaking of deer… a whole family raised their heads from cropping the grass by the side of the road, watching us go by. I had seen deer before, but never so many of them, and never so bold. I pressed my face against the glass and watched them until they were out of sight. None of them jumped into the road. We killed nothing, destroyed nothing, as we sailed down the black ribbon of the highway and into the devouring distance.

Clayton dropped far behind us, a forgotten dream of a place where we’d been happy, for a time; where we’d allowed ourselves to feel like we were safe. Other cities followed, until we were moving through the thicker traffic on the approach to Oakland. It wasn’t quite gridlock: There was space between the abandoned cars for Fishy to maneuver the truck, as long as he took it slow and didn’t worry about scratching the paint. We had just squeezed through an opening between two electric cars when I realized that I hadn’t felt the need to drop down into the hot warm dark once during this drive. I was getting better, or at least I was learning to swallow my fear more efficiently, leaving myself capable of riding in a motor vehicle without hyperventilating.

I guess after you’ve been in a car that was intentionally
driven into the ocean, and raced the sunset to find your way home, normal vehicular transportation loses some of its sting.