Chimera (Parasitology) (42 page)

“I would run,” he said without hesitation. “I’d do whatever I had to in order to convince the humans that I wasn’t a threat, and then I’d take my people, and I would run for the hills. I would go where no one would ever find me. I would never come back.”

“There aren’t many places like that in the world,” I said.

“Gonna be more, since so many people died,” he said, and shrugged. “I’d find a place that hadn’t been very popular before the outbreak, and I’d go there. Build myself a community. Get a reputation for not liking strangers. And never come back.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” I said.

Private Larsen looked at me sadly. “That’s because I really mean it.”

I cocked my head to the side. “You don’t have to mince words with me, you know.”

“I know,” he said. “I watched my superior officer beat the shit out of you, remember? I felt bad about it then, and I feel bad about it now. You’re not an enemy combatant, and you didn’t kill all those people. You’re just someone who wound up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong body.”

“And yet, if I hadn’t been Sally Mitchell, I might never have been able to make it this far,” I said.

“True,” he said. “Or maybe you would’ve made it even farther, since you wouldn’t have been dealing with all this military bullshit. It’s pretty much impossible to say. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”

“I hate hindsight,” I muttered, and held out my hand. “We’ve never had real introductions. Hi. I’m Sal Mitchell. I’m a sapient tapeworm in a girl-suit, and I didn’t kill anybody who wasn’t trying to kill me.”

“Private Sonny Larsen,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

“I thought you didn’t like me,” I said, shaking his hand once before letting go. “You seemed pretty happy when I was bruised and wilting.”

“People talk,” he said. “People said a lot of crap about you when they heard you were back on base. Things like ‘she slit a bunch of throats last time she was here, let’s make sure she doesn’t do it again.’ But there was never any evidence of that, you know? And you’re nice and all, but you’re not a criminal genius. You wouldn’t have known how to commit that kind of crime without leaving
some
sign that it was you.”

“Thanks,” I said with a small smile. “That’s kind of you to say.”

“I didn’t say anything kind,” said Private Larsen, looking surprised. “I just stated the facts.”

“In a situation like the one we’ve been in, the facts are sometimes the first thing to go,” I said, and started walking back toward the room where Colonel Mitchell and Fishy were waiting for me. “Everyone gets wrapped up in what they
think
is going on, or what they’ve
decided
is going on, and they don’t look at what’s
actually
going on. The fact of the matter is, Dr. Cale designed something that could have been useful, but that needed more testing, and Dr. Banks released it anyway, because a decade of human trials was more trouble than he wanted to put up with. Colonel Mitchell knew Dr. Banks was moving
a product that could hurt people—he had me in his house, as proof and collateral damage—and he didn’t do anything about it, because he was trying to study the phenomenon and protect his career at the same time. Dr. Banks knew Sally was epileptic, after all. Meanwhile, Dr. Banks didn’t check the credentials of his employees well enough, because Dr. Cale had at least two spies on his staff, plus Sherman, who snuck in all by himself. This whole situation is a big snarl of people ignoring facts. If Banks had responded to ‘We’re not ready’ with ‘Okay,’ I wouldn’t be here now, and you wouldn’t be worrying about whether or not you’ll have a species at the end of the day.”

Private Larsen blinked. “But you wouldn’t exist.”

“So? I wouldn’t miss existing, since I would never have started. Now that I’m here, I plan to survive: Survival is the main drive of any living organism. But I wouldn’t know to want survival if I hadn’t been made.” I considered telling him what Fishy had said, about not blaming babies for the things they did before they were born. Babies didn’t ask to exist, but once they did, they wanted to keep going.

I decided against it. The situation was complicated enough as it was.

At the end of the hall was a door. On the other side of the door there were people, talking. I stopped when a familiar voice drifted through the conversational din, caressing my ears in that old, paternal way.

“Sal? You all right?” Private Larsen sounded concerned. That made a certain amount of sense. I had gone pale, and the drums were hammering harder than ever, making me wobble slightly where I stood. “Should I go get a doctor?”

“No,” I managed to say. “No, that’s the problem.” And then I was moving forward, gathering speed with each step, until I slammed my palms into the slightly ajar door and sent it crashing against the far wall. Colonel Mitchell and Dr. Banks, who
had been bent over the map of the Bay Area, looked up in surprise. Fishy, who was sitting on the counter with his shoulders slumped against the room’s rear wall, raised his head and gave me a feral grin.
He
wasn’t surprised by my reaction. Gauging solely from the look on his face, he had been counting the minutes until it came.

“What is
he
doing here?” I demanded, pointing at Dr. Banks. “This is his fault. He shouldn’t be standing here looking at the maps, he should be locked up.”

“Hello to you, too, Sally,” said Dr. Banks. “It’s good to see that all that poison Shanti poured into your ears has had a permanent effect on how you think of me.”

“Sal, please,” said Colonel Mitchell. “Dr. Banks has agreed to assist in this process, in exchange for certain considerations.”

“Money, or freedom? Because those are the only things he cares about, and only when they belong to him.” I narrowed my eyes. “He cut my sister open and dug around in her brain because he was curious about how she worked. He put her into the living brain of a
conscious
human.”

“Your so-called sister was an enemy combatant who attacked my property, and the subject I implanted her in was a volunteer who knew what was going to happen to her,” said Dr. Banks. “We were pushing forward the bounds of science.”

“You’re the monster here,” I said. “Not me. Not any of my kind. Not even Sherman. You. You’re the one who couldn’t leave the broken doors alone.”

“It’s adorable how your kind has imprinted on a second-rate children’s book as your Bible, but it’s just like any other holy book: It doesn’t actually change the world,” said Dr. Banks. “USAMRIID needs someone who understands these monsters if they’re going to succeed in taking them out. Since Dr. Jablonsky is not available, and Dr. Cale is not impartial, it’s going to be me.”

“Dr. Jablonsky shot himself because you let us out into the world without proper testing, and you’re not impartial either,” I snapped. “You’re on your own side. We can’t trust you.”

“It’s a good thing for me that you don’t have a choice,” said Dr. Banks. He turned back to Colonel Mitchell and said, as if I had never interrupted, “Aerosol grenades would be an excellent approach. We can load them with a wide-spectrum antiparasitic gas and throw them through the mall skylights. There’s no way they’ll be able to kill or even incapacitate all the tapeworms in the building, but the degree of confusion they’ll create will be enough to let us enter without resistance. After that—”

I’d been listening with growing horror. Now I interrupted, putting out my hands as I said, “You can’t do that! Adam’s in there! And not all of Sherman’s people are evil, they’re just confused and following their creator! You can’t do this, you’ll
hurt
them.”

“Hurting them was the idea, Sally.” Now Dr. Banks sounded annoyed, like I was intentionally missing the point he was trying to make. “They’re enemy combatants.”

“They’re
people
.” I turned on Colonel Mitchell. “I don’t believe I’m having to tell you this again. I thought we had this conversation. I thought you
understood
. They’re people, and we’re going there to save them, not to kill them for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Sal, I don’t know what you expect me to do,” said Colonel Mitchell. “I have a responsibility to the American public, and to the human race above all. History is going to see me as a traitor and an ecological terrorist for what I’ve already done. I refuse to let history see me as a coward.”

I stared at him. “What about me?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Is the plan still to send me in first, so that Sherman will open the doors? Because any antiparasitic broad enough to
hurt Sherman’s people is going to affect me, and I can’t walk in there with a gas mask around my neck and expect not to raise some questions. There’s no way I’m going to be in and out fast enough for this plan.”

“You’ll know it’s coming,” said Colonel Mitchell. “You can cover your mouth and nose when you hear the glass break.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s going to have to be good enough. I know you want everything to go your way, and I respect it: It’s one of the only traits you share with the real Sally. She didn’t like to be told what to do either. But I am not a father speaking to his daughter. I am a colonel in the United States Army, speaking to a representative of an opposing force, and I am telling you that no, you don’t get your own way this time. Your own way is off the table. You can go in knowing the attack is coming, or you can refuse to go in at all. At this point, we’re the only chance you have—and while you may not want to hear this, we don’t need you anymore. We know where the enemy is located. We know how to kill them. We’re offering to let you help us because you want your people back, and because we appreciate the service you provided by bringing us this information. But that doesn’t mean you’re running this operation. If anything, it means the opposite. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

Colonel Mitchell folded his arms as he stopped speaking, and looked down his nose at me like he was passing judgment on the entire world. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had locked up: Like having my own way, oxygen was suddenly off the table. I was going to die here, shocked into suffocation by one betrayal too many, one act of treason beyond what I could bear. I…

I saw Fishy. Fishy was winking so hard that it looked like he’d developed a nervous tic. When he saw me looking, he stopped winking and flashed a quick, secretive smile before returning to his previous, sullen pose. I was missing something. I was missing
something, and for whatever reason, he wasn’t in a position to tell me what it was.

Suddenly, breathing was possible again. “I go in first,” I said. “You have to give me thirty minutes.”

“Fifteen,” countered Colonel Mitchell.

“Twenty,” I said. “Sherman’s going to want to have me searched before he does anything else, and I refuse to be naked and surrounded by armed guards when you decide to attack the place.”

“Done,” said Colonel Mitchell. “We roll out in an hour.”

“I’ll go tell Fang,” I said, and turned, and left them all—even Private Larsen—behind.

G
etting to the mall where Sherman and his people were holed up wasn’t an issue. It was near a major freeway, and accessible from several major and minor surface streets. We could easily roll up and knock on the front door, if that had been what we wanted to do. But that approach—that direct, aggressive approach—would have made it impossible for me to pretend to be alone. We had to do something else.

“Odds are good that he has eyes on the surrounding buildings, and on the freeway overpass,” said Fishy, with the manic good cheer of a man who had spent his entire life figuring out how to lay siege to ridiculous video game locations. “But if we take I-4 through Concord, and then approach up Monument Boulevard, we can probably get to the Oak Grove intersection without being close enough to attract attention. At that
distance, movement is going to get ascribed to sleepwalkers or carrion birds, not an army convoy.”

“Okay,” I said. “What then?”

Fishy smiled brightly, lips barely staying closed over his teeth. “Can you ride a bicycle?”

I looked at him, aghast.

Twenty minutes later, I was riding a bright pink bicycle with tassels on the handlebars down the middle of Monument Boulevard. I was wobbling but I wasn’t falling over, thanks to the training wheels Fishy had attached to the base. He’d scavenged the whole thing from the Big Lots near where the convoy was waiting, producing it with the sort of flourish that told me he’d been dreaming of this moment for years. I wasn’t sure what that said about him.

One thing that could definitely be said about me: I had never learned how to ride a bicycle. It hadn’t seemed like a major priority, and even if it had, there was no way the Mitchells and SymboGen would have ever signed off on the idea, back when I was living by their rules and following their ideas of what my world should be. Buses were safer than bicycles. Bicycles got hit by cars, and stolen by bored teenagers looking for something to do with their time. They definitely didn’t belong with mentally unstable amnesiacs who had panic attacks when they tried to ride in private vehicles.

Still, the principle was simple, and even I could work a set of pedals. I wobbled down the street, trying to avoid potholes and abandoned cars, and watched the businesses and buses to either side as I went. Nothing moved but birds and one bored orange cat, which looked so much like Tumbleweeds—a cat I used to know in San Francisco—that I almost stopped. Only the knowledge that no domestic cat could have made the trip across the Bay on foot kept me from checking to see if it was Marya’s old pet.

Marya hadn’t survived the first wave of sleepwalker attacks.
I was almost sure of that. But Tumbleweeds had always been allowed to roam freely, and I hoped he was all right. Maybe someday we’d be able to go back to San Francisco and find out.

Getting to that someday started now. I pedaled faster, and tried not to think about the fact that I was riding on a rickety assortment of bolts and pink tubes. It was faster than walking. That was the only good thing about it.

The mall appeared in front of me, set off to the left and surrounded by some rather impressive traffic jams. I was close enough now that I was sure I’d make it, whether or not I had a vehicle. I got off the bike, walking it through the snarl of cars, and propped it up against a defunct traffic light, where anyone watching from the mall would be able to see and identify it, but wouldn’t necessarily see the training wheels. I wanted them to think I’d pedaled much farther than I actually had. I wanted them as confused as possible—and hence as focused on me as possible—for as long as I could manage it.

Walking across the parking lot felt like walking to my own execution. Every part of me strained to turn around and go back, to run for the promise of my own safety, my own survival. I kept going anyway. Survival would be meaningless if it came at the expense of everyone I’d ever cared about. That wasn’t the point of staying alive. I wanted my friends, and my family, and I wanted to get the hell out of here before things fell apart again.

“You can’t reach the broken doors without going through a bunch of trials, remember? You can do this,” I whispered, and squared my shoulders, and kept on going.

Like most malls, which were sort of pitcher plants for people, sucking them in and spitting them out again without the contents of their wallets, the mall on Monument had multiple entrances. Some of them were built into specific stores, including the old Kohl’s that had been my prison when I was here before. Others were built into the side of the mall proper.
Those seemed like the best bet for getting inside. I angled for a door set between a health food store and a Hawaiian Barbecue. The glass was soapy and opaque, making it impossible to see more than the vaguest shadows filtering through from inside.

Had something just moved in there? I thought it might have. Sherman’s people had to know that I was here. They had to be watching their surroundings, because there were no sleepwalkers in the immediate vicinity. Riding a bicycle down the middle of Mission or Market would have triggered a swarm.

Unless the water had killed them all. For the first time since we’d arrived in Pleasant Hill, a trickle of doubt worked its way through my heart, twisting through the ventricles until it felt like it was going to block the blood flow altogether. What if we were wrong? What if Fishy’s careful logic and Colonel Mitchell’s detailed maps had led us to the wrong conclusion, and Sherman was somewhere else entirely?

What if we hadn’t found them after all?

I walked up to the door and knocked, quick and light. Then I stepped back, waiting for something to happen. Seconds ticked by. If I
had
seen motion from inside, it wasn’t repeated. I crossed my arms, trying to look annoyed, rather than anxious.
Don’t make me wait, Sherman,
I thought, projecting the concept into my face with every ounce of acting skill I possessed. It wasn’t much. I hoped it would be enough.
You’ve made me wait long enough.

There was a sound from behind me, like a shoe scuffing ever so briefly against the pavement. I relaxed slightly. It wasn’t a sleepwalker. Sleepwalkers didn’t sneak. That meant that it had to be someone who wanted to come up behind me without being seen, and
that
meant…

“I guess you’ve probably been waiting for me,” I said, dropping my arms. “I missed you.”

There was a pause, long enough that I started to wonder if
I’d guessed incorrectly. Then, sounding slightly bemused, Sherman said, “I think you may be in the wrong place. There’s no one here for you to miss.” His incongruously British accent was as strong as ever, the result of some neurological tic triggered by his integration. I got dyslexia, he got an accent, Tansy got a misplaced sense of whether or not she was allowed to hurt people. I still didn’t know what Adam got. Or Juniper. If I wanted to find out, I had to play this precisely right.

I turned around. I didn’t smile. “I missed
you
,” I repeated, this time stressing the last word as I looked him in the eye. “I thought you’d come after me. But I knew that if I came back, you’d be here.”

Sherman blinked. His bewilderment was even clearer now that I could see his face, and it gave me hope: hope that this would work, hope that I could bluff my way through the encounter that all my other bluffs had been leading up to. Pretending to be Sally, pretending to be dutiful, pretending to be brave, they were nothing—
nothing
—compared to pretending to be the girl who could have missed this man.

But I had been her once, hadn’t I? Before everything had gotten so strange, back when I was human and Sherman was my favorite SymboGen escort, I had been that girl. All I had to do was remember what it felt like in her skin, and pull it over me.

“You must be kidding,” he said. “Do you think I’m that stupid? We capture a bunch of your people and suddenly you’re on my doorstep claiming to miss me?”

“You mean you captured the
human
who put his hands on me and told me I should feel lucky that I’d taken over a body he liked? Or do you mean you captured the
human
who designed me and then told me I was a flawed experiment that was never supposed to get out of the lab? I’m sure you’re talking about one of them. Just tell me which one is supposedly ‘my’ people, and I’ll be happy to tell you how wrong you are.”

Sherman blinked again. Then, slowly, he reached out and cupped his hand against my cheek. I felt a jolt, like his fingers were buzzing with static electricity. The drums changed their tempo. Slowly at first, and then faster, until they were beating to an entirely different song.

I forced myself to keep breathing. This was what Sherman did. He manipulated the bioelectric fields of other chimera, bending us to his will. But he couldn’t do what I did: He couldn’t wrap the hot warm dark and the peace it brought around himself like a cloak, insulating himself from the world. I reached deep and pulled it as far up as I could, letting it engulf me.

“Do you mean what you’re saying?” he asked.

The word “no” struggled to form on my lips. He wanted to hear the truth; the rhythm of the drums that were my heartbeat told me that. He wanted to hear the truth, and I wanted to give it to him, because it would make him happy. But he would be happier with the lie, wouldn’t he? I pulled the hot warm dark closer. Yes, yes, he would be happier with the lie; the lie would give him everything he’d ever wanted, the lie would make him
complete
, while the truth would only make him empty.

“Yes,” I sighed, and my voice was the ghost of empty labs and abandoned buildings, places that were in the process of being forgotten by the world. There was no coming back from this lie. The course was set.

Sherman’s eyes widened, suddenly alive with hope. “Yes?” he echoed.

“I came here for you.” Not a lie, not quite. I was leaving a lot of things out, but I wasn’t
lying
. That was easier to do, with the hot warm dark to bolster me and his hand on my face, compelling me to tell the truth. Editing was so much simpler than outright falsehood. “I wanted to see you.” Also true. “I thought you’d come for me by now.” Also true: the stuff of nightmares, but true. I had lain awake waiting for him to come for me. I
had woken up convinced that his hands were on my skin. But I didn’t have to tell him those things. No matter what he did, he couldn’t make me tell him.

His left hand came up to cup the other side of my face, so that he was holding me captive. I couldn’t have gotten away without stepping forcefully back and pulling my face out of his hands, and then he would have known something was wrong. I didn’t pull away.

Slowly, Sherman lowered his mouth to mine and kissed me.

He had only kissed me once before, when he was breaking me out of USAMRIID. Then, he had been doing it to rewire my bioelectrics. This time he was kissing me because he wanted to be kissing me, and I knew that my survival, and the survival of the people I loved, depended on my kissing him back. So I did. I kissed him like I was still that confused, desperate-to-please girl who wanted so badly to be normal, to be human, to be
loved
. I kissed him like she was still inside me, and like I wanted to be with him forever. I kissed him until I started to feel like it was a betrayal of everything I had ever wanted to be, and just as I was about to pull away, he pulled back and let me go, eyes wide and bright.

“Sal,” he breathed. “You really did come back for me. You little fool.” He made the words sound like “I love you.” He made them painful to hear.

I shrugged, managing somehow to muster a smile, and said, “I didn’t know where else to go.”

“So you came to me. You came to
me
.” He turned to the mall door, and called, “Stand down the snipers, open the doors. She came to
me
.”

The door swung open. There was a short, gently rounded woman standing just inside, wearing a snood over her hair and a scowl on her face. “Of course she came to you. Where else would she have gone? We stole her pet humans, and the military would cut her up as soon as look at her.”

“Batya, be nice,” said Sherman. “She is our guest.”

“She is a traitor to her species, and she’s already run away from you once before, or have you forgotten?” The woman—Batya—looked me up and down. Then she turned back to Sherman, shook her head, and said, “You can’t do this. We’re not stable enough for you to do this. Put her back where you found her.”

“I found her right here,” said Sherman. “Right here, because she came to
me
. She’s going to be our guest for a little while, aren’t you, Sal?”

“Forever, maybe,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “Hi, Batya. I’m Sal. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Oh my God give me strength,” muttered Batya. “I know who you are, Sal. I’ve been looking at your genetic material through a microscope for weeks, and I’ve watched your clones explode the brains of several of my friends. You’ve been a busy girl, haven’t you?”

I considered pointing out that it had been
Sherman
who extracted my genetic material and turned it into a weapon, not me, but realized it would be futile to even try. Batya was on Sherman’s side. All I could do was convince her that I was a backstabbing loser, and endanger my tenuous grasp on his goodwill. I needed that goodwill. I needed to get inside.

“I ran because you people were slicing my skull open without my consent, and I get a little squirrely about bodily autonomy and my right to not have my skull sliced open when I don’t want it to be,” I said. I didn’t try to moderate my tone. Batya might be a useful ally, but I wasn’t planning to be here long enough to need useful allies: I just needed Sherman on my side, as much as was possible during the time that I was in his custody. “Only then I got taken back by the humans, and you know what? There are worse things than a few cell samples. There’s being locked in a box and treated like a lab specimen. There’s people
looking at you like you’re worse than dirt because you dared to pick up something they’d already thrown away. You people might have acted like I had fewer rights than you did, but you never acted like I wasn’t a person.”