Chimera (Parasitology) (9 page)

The temptation to ask why, if he valued my safety so much, I was out in the general population with the looters and the addicts and the people driven insane by grief was strong. I swallowed it down, one more bitter pill for the pharmacy growing inside of me, and said, “That’s why my housemate asked me to go. She figured that if there was a problem, the patrols would step in and keep me from getting myself too messed up. She’s
a smart enough lady to know that she wouldn’t get the same treatment.”

The soldier looked uncomfortable at my accusation. “It would still be best if you returned to your home. Report your missing housemate to your region’s patrol, and they’ll be able to keep an eye out for him.”

Sally. If they knew who I was, then they knew that I was supposed to be Sally: pushy and brassy and capable of demanding whatever it was that I thought I deserved to have. I narrowed my eyes, folding my arms across my breasts, and said, “Oh, because
that’s
going to be a slam-dunk. You’ll totally divert manpower to finding one refugee in this whole mess. No. I will not go back to the house. Not unless you make me.”

“I could,” said the soldier. “I am authorized to do whatever is necessary to keep things peaceful within the compound.”

“We’re allowed to move around,” I countered. “I don’t know if you people are going to hit the point where you strap us all to beds ‘for our own protection,’ but we’re not there yet, and we’re allowed to move around. If Daddy doesn’t like me acting like any other member of the quarantined population, he should be keeping me in the big house with my sister.”

The soldier looked even more uncomfortable at that. Discussing the personal choices of his commanding officer was apparently not high on his list of things to do. Doing it in the middle of the street, where we could easily attract attention, was probably even less ideal. “Miss, please. It would be a great favor to me if you would return to your home. You have my personal word that I will go looking for your missing housemate. I won’t even make you talk to your local patrol.”

Weariness washed over me. I had been here before, multiple times since arriving in the quarantine zone and being pushed out of the USAMRIID quarters into general population. Half the soldiers thought I was a murderess, and would treat me with kid gloves when they thought they might be seen—kid
gloves that concealed lead pipes and brass knuckles the second no one else was watching. The bruises on my stomach never quite faded, and I was pretty sure at least one of my ribs was cracked if not dislocated, based on the way it kept digging into my side when I breathed. I didn’t complain. Who would have listened to me? Colonel Mitchell might have, if he hadn’t been so concerned about the daughter he thought he still had, the daughter he was using me to try and save.

The other half of the soldiers thought I was a babe in the woods, an innocent bystander who was being damaged by the fight between the Colonel and his wife. Everyone knew she wouldn’t let me stay in the quarters that had been reserved for the commanding officer’s family. If she hadn’t been able to make it out of the San Francisco area when the sleepwalkers started attacking, I wouldn’t have been in with the general population. I would have been sleeping on clean sheets in a room with dependable air-conditioning and my own toilet, just like all the other pampered civilians who had been pulled in by their military families. The quarters they had at USAMRIID’s temporary headquarters inside the Coliseum were nowhere near as nice as our own rooms, back in our own homes, but compared to the rest of the quarantine zone, they were a palace.

“Of course you won’t make me talk to my local patrol, because you don’t want me to have a way to follow up with you,” I said. “I’ll go home like a good little girl and you’ll pretend you’re actually looking for Paul when you’re really just pretending that none of this ever happened, right? Oh, maybe you’ll track down the looters and shoot them or something, because you don’t want it to become totally unlivable in here, but do you think I’m stupid? I need to find him. So how about we do this. How about you come with me, and that way I’m not wandering around unprotected, and you don’t have to tell my father that you lost track of me?”

One of the other soldiers coughed, trying to use the sound to conceal his laughter. I relaxed marginally. At least two of the five men currently holding guns were on my side—or if not on my side, they weren’t actively hostile toward me. These days, that was the equivalent of a ringing endorsement. If they were laughing, they weren’t punching me in the gut.

“You really think that’s going to happen?” asked the soldier.

“I think you have a gun, but I have my father, which means I have the bigger stick,” I said. It was oddly refreshing to pretend to be Sally. She didn’t care if she pissed people off: She just wanted to get what she wanted. I don’t think I would have enjoyed being her all the time, but as a mask that I could slip on when I needed to, she was remarkably useful. “So come on. How about you tell me your name, we all make nice, and you and your people come with me to find my missing guy?”

“We’re supposed to be patrolling this area,” said the soldier. “And I’m Lieutenant Robinson. Do you want introductions to the rest of my men, or will that suffice?”

“Only if they feel like giving me their names,” I said. “You’re supposed to be patrolling to find people who are misbehaving, or who need help. You found people who were misbehaving when you found me. Now it’s time to help me find people who need help. Come on. You didn’t enlist because you wanted everyone to hate you. You did it to serve your country and defend your fellow citizens, right? Paul’s a fellow citizen. Defend him by bringing him home.”

“She’s got you there,” said one of the other soldiers. Lieutenant Robinson twisted enough to shoot a glare at the man, who grinned unrepentantly. He showed his teeth in the process, and it was all I could do not to flinch. That was the flip side of pretending to be Sally: The harder I tried to fake humanity, the more some parts of it seemed to crumble, becoming virtually impossible to maintain. My distaste for the primate habit of
baring fangs in amusement or greeting was one of those crumbling pieces.

“If we accompany you, will you report this to your father?” asked Lieutenant Robinson, turning back to me.

“Only the part where you and your men heroically rescued me from my own stupidity, at great risk to yourselves but with no damage to property or loss of life,” I replied without hesitation. I had been doing this for weeks now, and I had always been a fast learner. “I won’t tell him you deviated from your patrol route unless you tell me to.”

Lieutenant Robinson looked at me carefully, apparently weighing the pros of having me give his men a ringing endorsement against the cons of that endorsement coming from my lips. Finally, with reluctance clear on his face, he nodded. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go find your missing man.”

Walking through Pleasanton with five armed men surrounding me was very different from running through it on my own. The streets were as deserted as they had ever been, but no figures lingered in the windows, and when we passed an open door, no shapes lurked behind it. There were no more looters, just the signs of their passing—broken windows and debris on the sidewalks. A brightly colored chip wrapper blew past, looking almost obscene against the beaten-down gray of everything else.

“You people have done a number on this place,” muttered one of the soldiers. My nervousness meant my dyslexia wasn’t allowing me to read the name tags on their chests, and none of them had volunteered their names. They were willing to rise or fall with their commanding officer, and not be fingered individually. I could respect that, even as it made me faintly uncomfortable. They could do anything, and I wouldn’t know who to point to when my father asked me what had happened.

Then again, what good would pointing at them do? Unless
I took it all the way to Colonel Mitchell, nothing I said would carry any weight with the people around me. I was somewhere between a prisoner and a pet, and there was no immediately visible way for me to change that. The quarantine zone was too well defended for an escape to be possible, unless something went dramatically wrong.

I turned to the soldier, eyes narrowed, and asked, “Would you have done any differently? If you hadn’t been enlisted when this all went to hell, would you be sitting quietly in your assigned room, not touching anything, not getting worried or upset or depressed or
anything
, because the people in charge told you not to? Because that doesn’t seem human to me. I thought the whole point of this was showing that humanity can win. Breaking things is human. It’s stupid and dangerous and irresponsible, but it’s
human
.” I had learned that early, from the doctors around me, and from Joyce’s tales of Sally, who had been a champion breaker of things.

Maybe that was going to prove to be the real difference between humanity and their tapeworm children. We didn’t feel the deep-seated need to break the world just so that it would remember our existence.

The soldier I had challenged looked at me uncomfortably for a moment before he looked away, going back to watching the houses and storefronts around us. Lieutenant Robinson didn’t say anything. Either he thought the man had deserved my anger, or he just didn’t feel like getting involved. It didn’t really matter.

“We’re getting close to where Carrie said he was going,” I said. I was going to keep talking, but I couldn’t. The wind had shifted, and when I breathed in, parts of my brain that had nothing to do with Sally Mitchell, and everything to do with the tapeworm that was my true body, activated.
Sleepwalker present
, they said, interpreting the pheromone signals on the wind with ease.
Sleepwalker waking
.

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, nearly tripping over my own feet in the process. I hadn’t been able to read the pheromones put off by my sleepwalker cousins nearly that clearly the last time I had tried, but I’d been getting there, hadn’t I? Maybe exposure followed by isolation had always been the answer. Maybe that was all I’d needed to really figure out what I could do.

The patrol kept going for another few feet, unaware of the danger I was suddenly detecting. They stopped when they realized I wasn’t moving, all five of them turning back to look at me with varying expressions of confusion or annoyance.

“Well?” asked Lieutenant Robinson.

I couldn’t tell him. There was no possible way for me to explain what I was detecting in the air, because it wasn’t a human trait I was manifesting, and they didn’t know I was a chimera. If I told them, if I unmasked myself, I was going to find myself with a bullet between the eyes before the Lieutenant could think through the implications of shooting the Colonel’s daughter and order his men to stand down. That was human nature rearing its ugly head again: Break what you can’t control; destroy what you can’t understand.

I still loved humanity, but the more time I spent as their prisoner, the more I began to understand why Sherman had decided they had to be overthrown. And that terrified me, because as much as I feared becoming Sally in earnest—becoming a human girl with a medical problem, and not a chimera at all—I feared becoming a monster even more.

“We should go this way,” I said, hoping they wouldn’t hear the strain in my voice. I
wanted
to tell them to turn around and run, to keep them from getting too close to the sleepwalker who was putting this pheromone tag into the air. The sleepwalker was more my species than the human soldiers, after all, and it deserved time to come completely into itself. But if it was a sleepwalker and not a chimera—if it was mindless and
damaged and acting only on instinct, I couldn’t let it go undiscovered inside a compound filled with trapped and frightened people.

Walking the line between the species I was and the species I was pretending to be wasn’t getting any easier with practice. If anything, it was just getting more complicated.

“What makes you say that?” asked Lieutenant Robinson. There was a faint warning note in his voice. He didn’t like me taking control of his men, and while I couldn’t blame him for that, I couldn’t take the time to soothe his ego, either. Not with the pheromone tags getting stronger.

They were increasing so fast that it felt like the sleepwalker was coming closer to us, but even as I thought that, I knew that it was wrong. The sleepwalker wasn’t moving. The tags were remaining at the same level, they were just becoming
more
. More plentiful, more consistent, more steadily drifting in my direction. I took a step back, beckoning for the others to follow me. “Because I think Carrie said the convenience store he was going to was in this direction,” I said. There were enough convenience stores in the area that I knew there would be one in whatever direction we went. “That’s all.”

My voice broke on the last word as things fell into place, and horror overwhelmed my ability to remain calm—just for a moment, but that was long enough that I was sure the Lieutenant would see the dismay and agony in my expression. The pheromone tags weren’t getting stronger because the sleepwalker was moving toward us.

They were getting stronger because the sleepwalker was in the process of taking over its human host.

“If you say so,” said the Lieutenant, frowning as he looked at my face. “You heard the lady, men; we’re following Miss Mitchell. Now, lead the way.”

I nodded tightly, not quite trusting myself to speak anymore, before I turned and started moving upwind.

It was easier now that I had a trail to follow, and also harder, because I knew what I was going to find at the end: I knew I was bringing a team of armed men to execute someone who was in the process of becoming my cousin. And I knew I didn’t have a choice.

The smell was strong enough to make the drums start hammering in my ears like a beacon, or a warning—I was walking into familiar danger, and I knew there wasn’t any other way, even as I knew that whatever waited up ahead was going to break my heart. Then we turned the corner, moving into the narrow alley between two buildings, and I realized that I hadn’t known anything. I had been as ignorant as the men who followed me, and I was going to pay for my blind assumptions.