Chimera (Parasitology) (8 page)

I took a deep breath and stepped down off the porch. The world didn’t end. I took another step forward.

The screamer was gone, leaving the sidewalks empty on either side of the street, but I could feel the eyes watching me from the windows. I inhaled instinctively, looking for traces of sleepwalker pheromones. I didn’t find any, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything: I still didn’t fully understand my connection to the cousins, and I’d only been beginning to develop my ability to detect them, when things had gone to hell and I’d wound up in USAMRIID custody. They could be all around me, standing just slightly downwind, and I would never know.

This was supposed to be a secure quarantine zone. I was safe. I had to be safe.

I took another step, and just like that, I was walking, moving with quick, anxious purpose down the walkway to the sidewalk, and then down the sidewalk toward the part of town where Paul had been heading. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye as I passed the windows, and I did my best not to turn toward them. The people who were hiding inside didn’t want me to see them, and I was willing to respect that. They had so little left to call their own; the least I could do was allow them to keep what remained of their tattered privacy. I walked faster, and then I was jogging, enjoying the open sidewalk and the smooth, untroubled stretch of my legs. I was still getting stronger. It had started when Sherman had held me captive, and it had continued since then. It was like learning the provenance of my body had finally made it acceptable for me
to turn it into something new, something other than the soft, untested thing that Sally had deeded to me. This was
my
body now, and it was going to do what
I
needed it to do. And what I needed it to do was run.

My feet slammed down against the pavement as I continued to pick up speed, and each impact was like a door closing somewhere behind me. I might never find my way out of here; I might never make it home to Nathan and Adam and the rest of my family. The broken doors were still open for me—they would always be open for me—but passing through them required the freedom to reach them, and that wasn’t something I had right now. I could run for the rest of my life, however long or short that was, and never reach the place I wanted to be.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do some good. I was a chimera in a nest of humans, and I had been created to improve their lives. Maybe not like this, maybe not with eyes and hands and the freedom to make my own decisions, and yet I still felt like maybe they needed me. We didn’t create humanity, after all. My parasitic ancestors had been perfectly happy for thousands of years. They had never woken up and thought
we need to create a whole new species to make sure that we’re okay.
It was hard not to look at the humans, with all their advantages and strengths, and feel just a little bit sorry for them. They were so
bad
at living in their own world.

Take Carrie, for example. She’d been fine when she felt like she was in control of things. I wasn’t sure how she’d managed to avoid receiving a SymboGen implant, although I suspected it had something to do with her diet—I’d never seen her voluntarily eat animal proteins, not even cheese or eggs. If she was vegan, the idea of swallowing another living thing would have been anathema to her. Or maybe she had an allergy. SymboGen had been working on reducing the protein tags of the implants when everything went wrong, since there was a very
small percentage of the population who couldn’t handle the waste products we naturally generated. People whose immune systems reacted poorly to the implants had been viewed with pity for years, since they couldn’t take the easy route to health that had been promised to the rest of humanity. It was sort of ironic now, since those people might make up the bulk of the survivors.

She’d been fine when she was in control, and now she was falling apart, and it wasn’t fair to focus on her to the exclusion of all others, because
everyone
was falling apart in their own ways, even the nameless little girl. Her refusal to accept an identity that wasn’t exactly right was a sign that she wasn’t coping any better than the adults around her. She just had a better chance of doing it eventually as her memories of the world before the apocalypse dropped away and were replaced by memories of a world where this was normal.

There was something about that thought that was sad and hopeful at the same time. She would find a new name; she would find a new family; she would grow up thinking of the human race as scared and endangered, but ultimately enduring. Assuming, again, that they
could
endure, and that she’d get to grow up at all, rather than winding up in the hands of someone like Sherman, who would look into those wide, trusting eyes and think that the space behind them was the perfect incubator for a daughter of his own. One who would never need to forget her name, one whose family would never leave her.

I honestly didn’t know whether or not that would be a kinder ending for her than the blasted, frightened world I was envisioning, and so I kept running, trying to outrace my own thoughts, trying to find the place where I could sink down into the dark and let the drums become the backbeat of the world.

I was so focused on what I was doing, on where I was going, that I didn’t notice when I ran out of our residential neighborhood and into one of the narrow bands of strip malls and
commercial establishments that ringed every set of houses. Pleasanton was designed to keep people home and happy when they weren’t at work, and that meant no one had to go too far before they reached a grocery store. The sidewalk hadn’t changed, so I kept on running, letting my feet take me where I needed to go. I didn’t see the men lurking behind the battered old Dumpster until I was almost on top of them. A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me roughly off balance, pulling me into the shadows between the Dumpster and the wall.

A second, even rougher hand was clapped over my mouth, cutting off sound and air at the same time. I didn’t have time to scream. Then the four of them were surrounding me, moving in until I could smell the sweat and desperation baking off of their skins like sour perfume.

“What are you doing on our turf, little girl?” asked one of the men. He was shorter than the others, but held himself with the sort of confidence that left no doubt as to his status in the group: he was their leader, and he wasn’t going to take any shit from anyone, least of all from me. “Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to be here?”

I didn’t squirm. I didn’t fight. I didn’t bite the hand that held me in place. I just stood perfectly still and glared daggers at the man responsible for my current situation.

He smirked. “Ah, you did know, you just hoped we wouldn’t notice. Aaron, let her go. I want to hear what she has to say for herself.”

The hand was removed from my mouth. The other hands were not removed from my arms. The man made a gesture with his hand, indicating that it was time for me to speak. I continued to glare, and resisted the urge to spit until the taste of unwashed hand was no longer lingering in my mouth.

“I knew no such thing,” I said. “This is public space. We’re allowed to search the local stores for supplies that may have
been overlooked.” It was a terrible policy, and I had to assume that USAMRIID had put it in place because they’d run out of places to stow the looters. Better to just make it legal than to keep arresting people you couldn’t hold.

“That may be what the Army says, but they’re the ones keeping us locked up in here,” said the man. “Standing up to them is the American way. This is unconstitutional, and when it comes out what’s been done to us, people like me and my boys are going to be heroes, while people like you are going to be collaborators.”

I looked at him blankly, my glare giving way to confusion. “I don’t understand what all those words mean,” I said. “Not in that order, anyway.”

The short man sneered. “They mean that if you have anything valuable on you, you’ll give it to us now, and we’ll let you go on your way. No harm, no foul, no punishment for failure to understand the rules. You look like pretty new meat, and we try to be forgiving of ignorance in circumstances like yours.”

“I’ve been here a few weeks,” I said. “I don’t have anything valuable.”

“Then you won’t mind if we search you,” said the man, and lunged forward, shoving his hand into the pocket of my coat. I squirmed as best I could against the man who was holding me in place, trying to fight my way free, but it was no use: My captor was bigger than me, and his grip was strong.

The short man stepped back again, holding a few crumpled slips of paper in his hand. He held them up, brandishing them triumphantly, and demanded, “Did you really think you could hide these from me? You come into my territory, you refuse to pay the toll, and then you try to hide your ration slips?”

“I didn’t try to hide anything,” I said. “They were in my coat pocket. They’re not that valuable. I only had them in case I ran into a distribution truck—we have a little kid living with us,
and sometimes the trucks have chocolate bars, if you have a little kid.”

The faces of the three visible men changed, going from scowling intimidation to slow comprehension. I realized my mistake too late to take it back. Ration slips were supposed to be precious: most people only got so many per week. You could get a small number of additional slips if you had a child under the age of ten living with you, since little kids don’t understand rationing as well as adults do—not that most of the adults I’d encountered since reaching Pleasanton really seemed to understand rationing. They were forever running out of basic supplies, and blaming it on the people who operated the trucks instead of blaming it on their own appetites.

If I didn’t think ration slips were precious, that implied I was somehow not experiencing scarcity like the rest of them were. And
that
implied… “I knew I recognized you. You’re the Colonel’s girl, aren’t you?” asked the short man. “The one who did something to piss off her daddy and wound up getting herself banished to the hinterlands with the rest of us expendables. Oh, don’t look so surprised, princess. Everybody knows about you. You’re supposed to be off-limits, you know. I guess your father wants you punished, but not
too
punished. What are you learning here? Humility? Good behavior? You’re sure as fuck not learning how to be hungry.”

“Boss, she’s got two egg slips here,” said one of the other men as he looked through the crumpled rations that had been thrust into his hands. “A dozen each.”

Greed and rage warred for ownership of the first man’s face. In the end, greed won. “Daddy takes care of his little girl, doesn’t he? Where do you live, sweetheart? We’ll walk you home, check your cupboards for anything that’s going wanting, and then let you go on your merry way.”

“Or you could let her go right now, and we might not have to shoot you,” said a voice to the side. I turned my head,
struggling against the man who still held me, and saw three men in USAMRIID uniforms, two holding guns and the third holding a cattle prod, standing about ten feet away. The sight of the cattle prod was enough to make my stomach drop and the muscles in my legs go weak, like the electricity would somehow jump the distance between us and shock me out of myself.

The man didn’t let me go. The shorter man stepped to the side, as if he was trying to block me from view. “This is a private matter,” he said.

The man at the head of the patrol looked genuinely surprised. “You’re going to fight me on this?” he asked. “You’re really going to stand there, with your hands on an innocent woman, and fight me on this?”

“It’s a private matter,” the man replied.

“All right,” said the soldier, and fired.

The report was small, more of a cough than a bang. The short man looked surprised. Then he looked down at his shirt, where a red stain had appeared on the left side of his chest. He looked up again, mouth moving silently. Then, finally, he fell, hitting the pavement with the grace of a sack of wet oatmeal. He didn’t move after that.

The soldier calmly worked the bolt on his rifle and turned to look at the three men who were still clustered around me. The one whose hands were on my arms had tightened his grip at the sound of the gunshot, and was now holding me so hard that it was going to leave bruises. Bruises on top of bruises.

“Do the rest of you want to argue with me?” asked the soldier. The man let go of my arms, shoving me toward the patrol as he did, so that I stumbled forward and fouled any possible shot. The three of them turned and bolted away into the strip mall before I managed to catch myself and spin around to watch them go.

For a moment, the only sounds I heard were their footsteps, pounding hard against the pavement. Then a hand touched my
elbow. I jumped, whipping around again, and found myself staring at the lead soldier. He looked back, expression unreadable under the lip of his helmet. When he spoke, he didn’t show his teeth. I appreciated that more than I could say.

“You shouldn’t be this far from your assigned quarters, Miss Mitchell,” he said. He spoke more politely than most of the soldiers did when they addressed me, which meant he was probably new, assigned to the quarantine zone when other bases and detachments began collapsing. He didn’t know what I’d supposedly done, or if he did know, he didn’t believe it. I was such a little thing, after all, and so quiet when I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything. There was no way I could have killed half a dozen trained soldiers.

I hadn’t. A man named Ronnie did all that, and he did it wearing the body of a prepubescent girl. Mind over matter is what chimera are all about, and Ronnie’s mind never met a challenge it wasn’t willing to stick a knife into.

“One of the people who’s been assigned to the house where I live is missing,” I said. The drums were in my ears again, soothing me, chasing the tremors from my voice. Mind over matter. Don’t let it get to you. “His wife asked me to go look for him, and I figured it couldn’t hurt anything.”

The soldier looked meaningfully in the direction my attackers had run before looking back to me and saying, “It could have hurt you. It could have hurt you very badly. You know your father values your safety. He doesn’t like it when you wander too far afield.”