Chimera (Parasitology) (7 page)

“I made some arrangements to have her located and retrieved,” said Colonel Mitchell. He slanted a warning glance in my direction, and I realized, in a sudden moment of blinding clarity, that he was telling me not to mention Dr. Banks or the situation at SymboGen. Maybe Mo—maybe Gail didn’t know that her husband was still working with the man who had unleashed the implants on an unsuspecting world, and he didn’t want this to be the way that she found out.

“Why would you do that, Alfred?” She sounded less angry than hurt this time. I wasn’t foolish enough to take that as a sign that we were suddenly on the same side. As much as it broke my heart, I was never going to be on the same side as her again. “Why would you bring that—that
thing
here, when our daughter is lying in that bed, dying? What possible reason could you have for doing this to me?”

“She may be able to help us bring Joyce back.” His tone was calm, reasonable, and filled with the sort of false hope that brings no joy, only more pain down the line. I turned to stare at him. He really thought this was something I could do: that I could somehow awaken their Sleeping Beauty and bring her back to them the same as she’d been before she went away.

Gail turned, slowly, to stare at me. “Really?” she asked. It wasn’t clear whether she was talking to me or him. Then she reoriented her body, angling it toward me, and repeated, “
Really
? This… this
monster
is going to bring our daughter back?”

“She already did,” said Colonel Mitchell. “Sally’s still in there. She’s fighting her way back to the surface.”

Gail’s hand struck him across the cheek so fast that he didn’t have time to pull away. He stared at her. She snarled at him.

“You think I don’t know my daughter?” she demanded. “You think I don’t know the way she stands, the way she holds
her head, the way she
breathes
? That
thing
is not my Sally! Sally is dead, and you’re dancing on her grave!”

“I was in your house for six years, and you never thought there was anything wrong with me.” The words were out before I stopped to consider what they confirmed: that I wasn’t Sally, and that I was never going to be Sally again. That Sally was dead.

Gail Mitchell didn’t say anything. She just lunged for me, her hands out and hooked like claws as she dove for my eyes. I fell back, making a startled mewling sound, and stopped only when my shoulders bumped against the plastic wall between us and Joyce. Colonel Mitchell appeared behind his wife, grabbing her around the waist and stopping her before she could get to me. She kicked and struggled against him, clawing at the air, still trying to reach me. She was making a high-pitched keening noise that shouldn’t have been able to come from a human throat. It was animal and cold, and absolutely as terrifying as the moans of the sleepwalkers or the screams of the wounded.

“Get her out of here!” barked Colonel Mitchell. Two men rushed through the open door, taking hold of Gail’s shoulders, and pulled her, still struggling, out of the room.

For a moment, everything was silence. Colonel Mitchell turned his eyes on me, and oh, they were so cold.

“Your mother has not been well,” he said solemnly. “Losing you hurt her deeply. Losing Joyce on top of that… I’m sure you can understand why it’s so important we get your sister to wake up. I’m also sure you can understand why you can’t stay here with me. Your mother simply doesn’t understand that you’re not the enemy, and that you’re really her child.”

“Wh-where are you going to send me?” My voice quavered. I hated it. I didn’t want to sound weak in front of this man, who held my future in his hands, and wasn’t afraid to start squeezing.

He smiled broadly, showing all his teeth. I had to fight not to recoil. “To our Pleasanton facility, of course. We could put you in isolation, but that wouldn’t help you understand the situation. Pleasanton will do that. Pleasanton will open your eyes. You’ll be safe there, and you can think about how you can best help us. It’s all up to you, Sally. Everything that happens next is up to you.”

S
omeone was screaming on the street outside my window. They had been screaming for more than an hour, and no one inside the house had been able to work up the courage to go out and try to make them stop. The last time one of us had gone out to make someone stop screaming while people were trying to sleep, it had ended in gunfire, and we’d suddenly found ourselves with more room in the house. That should have seemed like a gift—there were eighteen of us crammed into a three-bedroom home that had been designed for a single nuclear family, not a jumbled alliance of refugees—but instead, it had come with a whole new dose of fear, resentment, and anger, all mingled with our grief. USAMRIID didn’t allow any space to go unused for very long; their unofficial motto here in the quarantine facility was “Waste not, want not,” and there were always people looking to change housing. But the sort of
people who needed to approach strangers to find a place to live were generally not the sort of people any of us wanted to share a home with.

It was possible to get drugs inside the quarantine zone. USAMRIID’s soldiers thought they’d cleaned the place out, but people were clever about where they hid things, and the junkies and hustlers were forever finding joints taped to the back of toilet tanks or tabs of Ecstasy hidden in bottles of aspirin. I guess where there’s a need, there’s a way. I tried not to judge, but we’d already had two people removed from our block due to overdose after the need to escape overrode whatever sense of self-preservation that they might have once possessed.

Getting into the quarantine zone required no qualifications beyond “alive” and “not infected with a SymboGen implant”—and I was living proof that the second qualification could be gotten around, if you knew the right people and were disturbed enough to think this was a good place to be. It wasn’t an entirely bad place. There were people like Paul and Carrie. I’d liked them when I met them on the truck, and after living with them for a week and a half, I trusted them as much as I was capable of trusting outside of Dr. Cale’s lab. But there were also people like John, who’d been squatting in the house when USAMRIID dropped us off and told us that this was our home now. He’d tried to do… things… to several of the women who were living with us, until Paul threatened to stab him. He’d been brave when faced with unarmed women. He wasn’t so brave when up against Paul, who was a foot taller and thirty pounds heavier. John had run, vanishing into the fenced-off streets of Pleasanton.

There were good people in the quarantine zone, but they were in the minority. There were killers in here. There were thieves. There were people whose minds had snapped under the pressure of what was happening to the world, dropping them into endless spirals of panic and despair. They needed professional
help, therapy, and oversight, but what they got was a quarter or less of a bedroom in someone else’s home, with a bunch of strangers sleeping around them and claiming to be friends. It was no wonder that some people started screaming and never stopped.

It was more of a wonder that the rest of us were so quiet.

Something smashed outside. The screaming finally stopped. I resisted the urge to move to the window and look out. Having a window wasn’t a privilege. It was a burden at best, and a punishment at worst. The USAMRIID teams that had prepared this area for us had taken down all the curtains and blinds in open houses, citing the need to have a clean line of sight if something happened—and we all understood that “something” was code for “a sleepwalker outbreak.” The people who slept in windowless rooms, or on the other side of rooms like mine, could hang blankets and give themselves the illusion of privacy. Not me. I got the pleasure of sharing my life with anyone who wanted to stand on the opposite sidewalk and look up, and when things went wrong, I was one of the people who were expected to man the window and keep everyone else up-to-date. The only good thing about it was airflow, but most days, none of us were brave enough to open the windows. We didn’t want to attract attention.

Inside the Pleasanton quarantine facility, attracting attention from the all-too-human monsters surrounding us was death. Maybe not immediately, maybe not even overnight, but soon enough that none of us were willing to take the risk.

There was a sound behind me. I turned to find Carrie standing in the doorway, twisting a dishrag in her hands like it had done something to personally offend her. She had lost weight since arriving in Pleasanton, and her hair was growing out, revealing brown roots under the artificial green of her hair. It was a small thing, but it seemed indicative of the tragedy unfolding around us. People were going to bed hungry and afraid; the
water ran red with rust sometimes, like we were expected to bathe ourselves in blood; the government that was supposed to protect us had turned against us, just like the genetically engineered tapeworms that were supposed to protect humanity had turned against their creators; and Carrie couldn’t re-dye her hair.

Maybe that was the most human thing about me. Even in the depths of tragedy, I could find the smallest things to seize upon.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Carrie shook her head. The motion was tight and controlled, designed to make her look as inoffensive as possible. She had started shaking her head like that sometime in the past week, and I didn’t even think she knew that she was doing it. It was just another small piece of protective coloration, and unless she held to it religiously, she wasn’t going to survive in here. None of us were.

“Paul hasn’t come back yet.”

I blinked at her for a moment, absorbing the meaning behind her words. They were so simple, with no room for ambiguity, no hidden meanings or concealed intent. Here, in this glorified cage, I had finally met people who spoke like parasites: quick and brief and uncomplicated. I could have thrived in an environment like this one, if it hadn’t come with such a terrible cost.

“Oh,” I said finally.

We all took turns leaving the house and going out into the streets to scavenge for the things we needed. There were food trucks twice a day, and USAMRIID doctors who came around to dispense medicines and check on the sick or wounded, but they didn’t provide many of the basic necessities of life, considering them “frivolous” or otherwise low-priority. Sanitary supplies for the women. Toys for the children. Condoms and birth control for the people who had depended on their implants for contraception, and who couldn’t fight the primate
urge to seek comfort in the arms of their own species. I had walked in on Paul and Carrie several times, some by accident, others out of sheer curiosity. I had never seen people having sex before. When I slept with Nathan, I was always too much in the moment to observe. In those moments, I was a mammal like any other, and my origins didn’t matter in the least.

They fucked with their eyes closed and tears running down their cheeks, and they clung to each other like the world was ending. Paul had opened his eyes once and seen me standing there, watching them. He hadn’t said anything. He’d just looked at me, sorrow and understanding in his eyes, until I’d been forced to turn away.

I hadn’t walked in on them since then.

“What time did he leave?”

“Just after breakfast,” said Carrie. “Gloria’s little girl was crying again. He thought he’d seen some Otter Pops in one of the convenience stores. Most adults won’t eat them—they don’t register as food—and he said he’d try to pick them up while he was out. That was hours ago.”

The little girl didn’t have a name. The woman who had found her, Gloria, had tried name after name on the child, looking for something she would respond to. The rest of us had done the same, dredging up names from our past that we thought were pretty, but that weren’t attached to losses so bright and recent that hearing those names over and over again would hurt. The child had refused them all. Somewhere out there was her real name, and until we found it, she wasn’t going to let us call her anything. She still treated Gloria as her primary caretaker. The rest of us were acceptable substitutes, when necessary.

I’d never spent much time around human children before. Puppies and kittens, yes; infants and toddlers, no. It was refreshingly similar, and confoundingly different at the same time. We all catered to her every whim. She was our tiny queen,
and if she had wanted Otter Pops—whatever those were—then of course Paul would have volunteered to get them for her.

“Oh,” I said again. Then, with a slow, almost morbid dread gathering in my stomach, I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

Carrie just looked at me for a moment, and her expression was so oddly similar to the one Paul had worn when I watched them making love that it was all I could do not to turn my face away, cheeks burning with conditioned shame. I didn’t want to be as human as I was. The people who had created me had made sure I didn’t have a choice.

“The soldiers treat you different because of who you are,” she said finally. “You try to pretend they don’t, and we try to let you, because we have to live with you. Things are hard enough here without us being at war against ourselves. But they won’t shoot you if they find you in the wrong part of the camp. They might even give you a ride home.”

I didn’t say anything. She was telling the truth: There was nothing I could do to change that. The fact that they would kick the living crap out of me before giving me a ride really didn’t matter.

“Please, Sal. I don’t know what your deal is, and right now, I don’t care. I just want Paul back.”

“You could go yourself.” The words were cruel before they were spoken, and they were crueler when they hung in the air between us, impossible to take back or ignore.

“I could,” Carrie agreed. “But I wouldn’t make it three streets before something happened, and you know it. The patrols will come to your defense. I’ve seen it.”

She was right. Colonel Mitchell was happy to keep me with the general population for now—pacifying his wife and reminding me of my place at the same time, until I was willing to be a good little girl and play by his rules—but he wasn’t
going to let me get killed. Not while there was still a chance, however small, that I could be used to call Joyce back from the void where she existed now. So he set extra patrols on the streets around the house that had been assigned to me, and he made sure people were there to monitor my activities on the rare occasions when I dared to venture outside. I was probably the safest person in the Pleasanton quarantine zone, and I didn’t want it. I didn’t want the responsibility that was implied by Carrie’s face, or the burdens of being able to walk without fear of my fellow inmates. I didn’t want to be afraid of the soldiers who were supposedly protecting me. I didn’t want any of this.

And what I wanted didn’t matter. Maybe it never had. “We could go together,” I said, one last desperate bid for something other than what she was asking me to do. I realized resentfully that she had never actually
asked
. She hadn’t needed to. All she’d needed to do was stand there and look at me, and allow my guilt to fill in the rest.

“I don’t want to leave the house,” said Carrie. Her voice was meek, especially compared to that of the angry, anxious girl who had arrived here with me. Bit by bit, this place was wearing her away, reducing her to the bones of herself. I wondered if she liked who she saw when she looked in the mirror. “Paul might come back. I should be here when he comes back. I don’t want him to be scared because I’m not here.”

That answer made sense, and I knew it was a lie, just as surely as she did. Paul wouldn’t be scared if he came back and Carrie was gone: He would assume she’d gone looking for him, or that she’d gone to get something else we needed, especially if I was gone too. She just didn’t want to go outside, where the world might take notice of her. Then again, why should she? The last time she’d gone outside of her own free will, she’d been seized and thrown into the back of a truck, and her world
had changed forever. I sighed heavily, trying to keep my frustration from showing in my face. I didn’t do a very good job, I knew, but the effort seemed better than nothing.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”

Carrie smiled. “I knew you would,” she said, and the worst thing was, she had known—and she hadn’t been wrong.

Pleasanton was located in the deep East Bay, a sleepy suburban community that served both Livermore and San Francisco, feeding commuters into the tech and science industries thriving across the Bay Area. There had always been people who lived and worked at home, of course, but most of them had been keeping the city infrastructure functional, and when the sleepwalkers had overrun Pleasanton during the early days of the outbreaks, those people—and the infrastructure—had been among the first to fall. According to every soldier who’d been willing to give me the time of day, the selection of Pleasanton for the quarantine facility had been as much a matter of efficiency as anything else. By the time USAMRIID rode in with their tanks and their guns, there hadn’t been much of anybody left to fight them.

I closed the door of our assigned home behind me as I stepped out onto the porch, breathing in the chilly December air, and for a moment, I was grateful to be exactly where I was. Everything smelled like rain, and the grass on the lawns around me was patchy and brown, where it hadn’t been churned into a muddy froth by passing feet. California winters are gentle compared to most of the rest of the country. If our quarantine zone had been almost anywhere else, I would have been standing in snow outside a house where the electricity was intermittent and the hot water didn’t always work.

Not for the first time, it struck me that the rest of the country was probably in real, serious trouble, and that if this crisis didn’t either pass or come to a head soon, a lot more humans
were going to die for reasons having nothing to do with the sleepwalkers. The sleepwalkers were going to be dying too, if they hadn’t already started. Their minds might be parasitic, but their bodies were mammalian, soft and warm and susceptible to frostbite and the weather. They’d freeze before they ever understood what was happening to them.