Chimera (Parasitology) (10 page)

Paul was huddled against the wall, his arms wrapped around his stomach like he was trying to hold his insides in place, shaking uncontrollably. The tremors seemed to start at the core of his body and radiate outward, sending his legs jittering and knocking his head against the wall.

“Is he having a seizure?” asked one of the soldiers.

“Paul!” I said, and ran forward, dropping to my knees next to my housemate—next to my friend, although that friendship was a strained and stunted thing, kept small and fragile by the circumstances under which we had come to know one another. Maybe it could have been more, in a different world, in a different time.

But in a different world, in a different time, I would never have existed at all.

Paul’s eyes flicked toward me, his mouth working soundlessly as he struggled against the tremors that were still rocking his body. It wasn’t the mindless grasping of the sleepwalkers, not yet: Paul was still in there, fighting for control. I couldn’t have said how I knew, just that it was the truth… and that he was going to lose. He had already lost, and all he could do now was struggle against the inevitable.

“I’m here, Paul, I’m here,” I said, putting my hands on his arm. The drums in my ears pounded even louder, and for the first time, I wished that whatever genetic quirk had allowed me to become the person I was now had come with Sherman’s gifts, and not my own. I was the only chimera I knew of who could access the hot warm dark at will, sinking down into the peace and safety of my original home. Sherman could use a host’s original biology against it, soothing and smoothing out the body’s systems until the chimera or sleepwalker fell into a trance, letting him tell them what to do. It didn’t always work on sleepwalkers—most of them were too damaged—but Paul wasn’t that far gone yet. It might have worked on him, and then he wouldn’t have needed to be aware of what was going to happen next.

“S-Sally?” Even getting my name out seemed like an impossible effort. Paul’s eyes flicked from me to the patrol, jittering as badly as the rest of his body, before he focused back in on me. “W-what’s happening to me? Why can’t I move?”

“Sir, we have a situation in the N-sector. Civilian down, apparent epileptic seizure. How do you want us to proceed?” Lieutenant Robinson didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. His words, and the faint hiss of his radio as he called in the emergency, were more than loud enough to get the point across.

I twisted to look back at him, and said, “This is my friend. This is the friend I was looking for. He’s sick. This isn’t a situation, he’s just sick.” The lies came out smooth and easy, like I’d been intending to tell them all along. Paul was sick, all right, but his sickness was going to become a situation very soon. The original personality would die, subsumed by the parasite now working its way into his brain, and we would be left with a hungry, unthinking predator that knew only that it needed to feed. Some sleepwalkers were more capable of planning and strategy than others—some of them might even have a chance
at recovering some higher brain functions, if they managed to stay alive long enough—but none of that mattered when compared with the danger Paul would soon present.

And this was wrong, this was
all wrong
. He shouldn’t have been able to speak by the time he reached this stage. Something was different. Maybe he was going to be a chimera. I knew how unlikely that was, and I knew that he was going to die. None of the odds were on his side. Nothing about this situation was on his side.

My loyalties were too divided, and I couldn’t change that. But I could shield him for now. I could keep them from shooting him while he would still be able to see the muzzle of the gun swinging toward him. If I was careful, I might even be able to do it without giving myself away.

I wasn’t sure I knew how to be careful.

“Not s-s-s-sick,” stammered Paul, looking increasingly frustrated as the sibilance of “sick” tried to escape him. He made an effort to sit up. The shaking got worse, and he slumped against the wall, twitching and trembling. “Don’t know what’s w-w-wrong with me.”

Lieutenant Robinson’s radio squawked. I couldn’t make out the words buried in the static. I was too far away, and too focused on holding on to Paul, who felt like he was going to shake himself into pieces. But I heard Lieutenant Robinson’s reply.

“As I said, sir, he appears to be having a seizure. Slurred speech, tremors, inability to stand or move. One of his housemates is here: Colonel Mitchell’s daughter.”

The radio squawked again. There was an ominous pause, during which I heard the click of safeties being released.

“Miss Mitchell, please move away from your housemate.” Lieutenant Robinson’s voice was suddenly flat, devoid of all inflection or emotion. I twisted to look at him again. It wasn’t a surprise to see that all the guns were pointed toward me—
or more accurately, toward Paul, who was continuing to shake and jitter.

I shifted positions, trying to put more of my body between them and Paul without being obvious about what I was doing. The pheromone tags were continuing to get stronger. It would all be over soon. “Why? He’s sick. Why are you pointing guns at him when he’s just sick? Guns don’t make sick people better!” I didn’t have to work to add the panicked whine to my voice. It came entirely on its own.

“He’s sick, yes,” said Lieutenant Robinson. “We cannot offer medical assistance with you between us and him. Please move away from your housemate.”

“That doesn’t look like medical assistance,” I said, pulling one hand away from Paul in order to indicate the guns. “That looks like you’re going to shoot him.”

“We’re going to do everything we can to help.”

Paul moaned.

Lieutenant Robinson stiffened, his posture changing to something more closed and military. “Move away from the target! That is an order!”

I didn’t comment on how Paul had just gone from being my housemate to being “the target.” I didn’t need to. I just turned back to him, and watched the last of the clarity slip out of his eyes, replaced by incomprehension and hunger. So much hunger. In the span of a second, Paul went from a man who didn’t know what was happening to him but was willing to fight against it to an appetite big enough to eat the world. His jaw dropped, tension going out of it. He moaned again.

“Paul?” I whispered.

He lunged for me.

I scrambled backward as quickly as I could, nearly tumbling over myself as I moved out of range of his teeth. Some sleepwalkers experienced a period of disorientation or even unconsciousness when they took over their human hosts, hence the
name, which had been coined following the earliest outbreaks. Others had a more violent response, and went straight to trying to do what they did best: eating. Paul was apparently one of the lucky ones.

A hand grabbed my arm, yanking me farther back, and then the sound of gunfire consumed the world. Paul didn’t have a chance. He didn’t seem to notice, though: He just kept advancing, even as the bullets struck his body, reaching for me with hands that could never hold enough to feel full.

When the damage became too much for him, he fell, and he didn’t move again. The smell of gunpowder and blood filled the alley, wiping away the pheromones that had betrayed Paul’s position in the first place. I twisted to find Lieutenant Robinson holding my arm. He didn’t let go.

“That’s two you owe me,” he said. “Your father wants to see you now.”

Under the circumstances, there was nothing I could do but nod meekly and let him take me.

T
he room was small and gray, with a large mirror on one wall that was probably a window for the people standing on the other side. The table in the middle of the room came with two chairs, both bolted to the floor. I was seated in the chair that faced the mirror, giving me an unwanted view of my hollow cheeks and greasy hair. I looked like I’d just run through ten miles of hell and had another thousand miles to go.

I
felt
like I’d just run through ten miles of hell. The trip from Pleasanton to Oakland had been spent huddled in a corner of the truck, praying that the men who’d brought me here wouldn’t start hitting me again. There had been sirens outside when we were close to the quarantine fence, but after that? Silence. The absolute, unbroken silence of a wounded, uncomprehending world.

I might have been all right if I’d been allowed to stay with
Lieutenant Robinson and his squad, but they had been called away as soon as we reached the main building, and their replacements had been neither friendly nor gentle with me. Why should they have been gentle with me? I was a killer in their eyes, after all. The bruises they’d left on my arms were already starting to blossom, and would continue to grow for days. My only solace was that we’d been in public the whole time. They hadn’t been able to do anything worse than grip me too tightly as they dragged me through the halls and threw me into the waiting chair.

I held myself as close to perfectly still as I could manage, keeping my eyes on the mirror that wasn’t a mirror. In an odd way, this little room, with its lack of decoration or ornamentation, was a relief. There was nothing here that could hurt me, although I was sure there was something that could hurt me on the other side of that “mirror.” Everything was contained and clearly defined, and I felt like I could breathe for the first time in weeks.

Maybe best of all, I wasn’t back at the little house we’d been assigned, trying to tell Carrie why Paul wasn’t coming back. She wouldn’t understand.
I
didn’t understand. Paul had been checked out as clean before he was allowed to enter the quarantine zone—all the civilians had. The only reason I hadn’t been checked was Colonel Mitchell, and he wouldn’t have pulled those strings for anybody else. So how had Paul, who should have been safe, wound up with a SymboGen implant burrowing its way into his brain?

The doorknob turned. I tensed, eyes darting toward the sound, and tried to cling to the drums beating behind my ears as I waited to see what would happen next. I didn’t have to wait for long. The door swung inward, and Colonel Mitchell walked into the room, his long face set in a mask of grim seriousness.

He glanced in my direction as he walked to the table’s remaining
chair, but that was all. He didn’t greet me or acknowledge my existence in any other way: just a flicker of the eyes before he sat. He was carrying a thick manila folder under one arm. Once he was settled, he placed it on the table squarely between us, turned so that I could see the label. I had to squint and struggle for several minutes to get the words to swim into clarity. Even then, they twisted and rearranged themselves, leaving me guessing at their meaning.

Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything as I struggled to read, so neither did I, not even once I was fairly sure I understood the words. We just sat there, both looking at the folder, until I realized I would have to be the one to break the silence. He couldn’t do this forever, but if I tried to make him, I was going to get him angry, and I didn’t want to deal with that. Sometimes the only way to win is to look like you’re losing.

“What is this?” I asked, looking up. As always, I searched his face for some sign that he knew who I was, that he was willing to treat me as me, and not as a surrogate for his lost little girl. As always, I didn’t find it—but I didn’t find the affection he usually reserved for her, either. All I found was cold, military appraisal.

“It’s a report,” he said. “Open it.”

I squirmed. “You know I have reading issues.”

“No,
Sally
, you don’t,” he said, and his voice was even colder than his face. “Your reading issues came on after your accident, and I don’t expect them to have continued.”

“My reading issues were the result of physical brain damage,” I snapped. “You can’t just wish them away because they’re inconvenient. Sorry if that’s a problem, but it’s a biological
reality. I’m dyslexic, I’m always going to be dyslexic, and if you want me to know what’s in this report, you’re going to have to read it to me.”

Colonel Mitchell reached out and flipped the report around so that it was turned toward him. He opened the cover with a quick, angry motion, and read, “‘The first case was reported at zero eight hundred on December second, and involved Private Kelly, age twenty-three, Army Reserve. Private Kelly had been given a clean bill of health by USAMRIID doctors, and had completed two full courses of prophylactic antiparasitics to ensure that no eggs or cysts remained in her tissue.’ Do you know what eggs and cysts are, Sally?”

“Eggs are eggs, and cysts are infant tapeworms that have gone into a sort of dormant state because conditions aren’t right for them,” I said.

Colonel Mitchell nodded. His eyes were still so cold. The drums pounded ever harder in my ears, never quite making it difficult to hear but always making it impossible to forget that I was in danger. I was not safe here, no matter how it may have seemed before he came into the room. I was never going to be safe here.

“In the case of the SymboGen implants, they were created to be territorial. We thought they were also asexual, but that turns out not to be true,” he said.

I kept my mouth shut. Tapeworms weren’t asexual: They were hermaphroditic, capable of reproduction even if they never encountered another member of their own species. The tapeworms created by SymboGen were supposed to have been sterile. The tapeworms created by SymboGen were supposed to have been a lot of things.

“When one of those worms spits out a bunch of eggs, they either lie dormant in the body, waiting for the original to die, or they hatch, realize they can’t take out the competition, and encyst themselves somewhere in their host’s brain or muscle
tissue,” said Colonel Mitchell. He was still watching me with those cold, cold eyes, clearly waiting for me to offer some sort of a useful response. I didn’t have one. “We’ve cleared up to eighty cysts out of a single subject. That was eighty little time bombs, all ticking away, waiting for their opportunity to explode.”

I still didn’t say anything. I knew about the life cycle of the implants: Dr. Cale had explained it to me when she was telling me how she protected her staff. As a chimera, I didn’t need to worry about cysts. Even if there were some hidden in my muscles or organs, none of them would hatch as long as I lived in Sally’s skull. The pheromone changes I’d caused when I took over would make sure of that. It was connected to the parasitic overgrowth that caused the “tendrils” of tissue that black lights revealed on the bodies of the sleepwalkers, and while I didn’t fully understand the science behind it, I knew enough not to have any questions.

Colonel Mitchell’s eyes narrowed. “If Private Kelly had no eggs or cysts in her body, and had already consumed a sufficient quantity of antiparasitic drugs, how did she get sick?”

“Did she get sick?” I asked. “You didn’t say that. You just said ‘the first case.’ I didn’t want to assume.”

“Yes, she got sick.” He flipped to another part of the folder, turned it back around, and shoved it toward me. “She got very, very sick.”

I knew that if I didn’t look, I would be punished. I knew I didn’t want to see.

I looked.

The folder was open to a pair of glossy pictures, both large and clear enough that it was impossible not to see details. Private Kelly was a young woman of what looked like Vietnamese descent—or had been, anyway. In the first of the two pictures, she was strapped to a bed, her eyes rolled back in her head, her mouth open in a gesture that I knew all too well. She had broken
two of her teeth, and blood covered everything. In the second picture, she was dead. Her skin had taken on a waxy sheen, and her eyes were clouded, staring into nothingness. The blood had dried around her mouth in a thick layer that looked almost like jam, as long as I didn’t think about it too hard.

Colonel Mitchell reached out and turned the page, revealing two more pictures, these of a young man. His first picture was similar to Private Kelly’s. His second showed him with a bullet hole between his eyes.

“Shall I keep going?” asked Colonel Mitchell.

“Please don’t,” I whispered.

“Four people under my command have succumbed to the parasites in the last twenty-four hours,” he said. Mercifully, he closed the folder as he spoke. I shivered, forcing myself to remain otherwise still. “That’s in addition to six civilians—seven now, including your friend. Why do you think that’s happening?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think is causing this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me!” He swept the folder off the table as he spoke, sending it crashing to the floor. I squeaked and fell back in my chair, but he wasn’t done. He stood, slamming his hands against the table, and leaned forward until his nose was only a foot or so from mine. “You ran off with that crazy bitch Cale, you were in her
lab
, you have to know what she was doing!”

“Dr. Cale wasn’t doing anything like this!” I wailed. “She created the implants, but she didn’t distribute them, she didn’t modify them to contain unsafe levels of human DNA! That was all SymboGen! Ask Dr. Banks if you want to know what’s happening!”

“
You’re lying
!”

“I’m not!” I jumped to my feet, stumbling around the chair to get away from him, from the sight of his eyes and the whiteness
of his teeth, which showed every time he yelled at me. “Dr. Banks is the one who modified the implants, not Dr. Cale! If they’re doing something they shouldn’t be able to do, blame him! It’s his fault!”

It was all his fault. Even my existence was his fault. That man—that horrible, hateful man—was my father as much as Colonel Mitchell was. Each of them had contributed to one half of me.

“Dr. Banks has been nothing but cooperative since this crisis began,” said Colonel Mitchell. He didn’t sit down, but he wasn’t yelling anymore, either. “He has provided research material and raw data that has proven exceedingly helpful in preserving civilian lives.”

“He modified the implants from their original design. He added more human DNA than they were supposed to contain. And he didn’t listen to Dr. Cale when she told him what he was doing was dangerous,” I countered. “He
knew
the sleepwalkers were a risk. SymboGen was covering this up for months before it got too big. God, Daddy, when did you start believing his lies? You used to know what kind of man he was!”

“Yes. He’s the kind of man who offered medical care to my daughter when she needed it, and the kind of man who has provided us with supplies of antiparasitics far in excess of what we had on hand,” said Colonel Mitchell. My calling him “Daddy” didn’t seem to have changed a thing. “He’s not a good man, Sally. I’m not foolish enough to think he is. His bottom line has always been his first priority. But when the cards were down, he stepped up and helped us. What did your precious Dr. Cale do? She ran and hid. She took data that could have helped us, and she kept it to herself.”

“You knew where she was all along,” I said. “Dr. Banks even said so, when you sent him to us with his science project. Why are you mad at her when you could have gone and collected her any time you wanted to?”

“Because she hid,” said Colonel Mitchell. “She hid, and she started sending her research out to anyone who wanted to use it—including the enemy. Why didn’t we take her? Because we knew she wouldn’t work for us. She made that perfectly clear in her videos. But we still needed her
working
. We needed her trying to find a solution to this problem, and that meant monitoring but not touching. And now we’ve lost her.”

“What?” The word came out softer than I had intended, strangled by terror and hope, which were not easy bedfellows. “What do you mean you’ve…” Nathan was with Dr. Cale. My dogs were with Dr. Cale.
Adam
was with Dr. Cale. My entire family, my real family, they were all with her.

“We’ve lost all contact with her lab,” he said. “The satellites are still up there, they’re still beaming down data, but we have fewer analysts every day. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Sally, but we’re fighting for the future of the human race out there, and we’re losing. Now your Dr. Cale may have doomed us all.”

“You can’t think she did this!”

“I can’t think she didn’t! Have you
seen
the videos she’s released so far? She openly states that she doesn’t know whether to side with the humans or the worms! She’s a traitor to her own species.”

I stared at him. Then, gathering as much courage as I could find, I drew myself up to my full height and said, “If Dr. Cale is a traitor to her species, so am I. I don’t know anything about why people are getting sick. I wouldn’t have led that patrol to Paul if I’d known he was getting sick, I would have gone by myself and tried to make sure he didn’t suffer. He didn’t deserve to suffer. I haven’t got anything to tell you. But I have bruises on my arms from where your people grabbed me, and I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Colonel Mitchell paused, visibly thrown off of whatever he had been about to say. “What?”

“Look.” I rolled up the sleeve of my sweater until the fingermarks on my arm became visible. The newest ones hadn’t quite brightened yet, but that didn’t matter; there were plenty of older bruises to take up the slack. I looked like a child’s art project, all yellow and purple and black.

“Look,” I said again, letting go of my sleeve and pulling up the bottom of my sweater, showing him the deep purple bruises on my stomach. “I think I have a broken rib, too, maybe, but I can’t show you that. My chest doesn’t come open.”