Chimera (Parasitology) (16 page)

Carrie smiled, showing all her teeth. They were even, white, and terrifying. “Let’s go shopping,” she said.

I somehow managed not to shudder as I turned away from her and started cautiously across the square, watching for signs of an ambush with every step I took. I could detect sleepwalkers before they were on top of us, but that didn’t give me any special “know that the Army is about to fall on your head” powers. Where USAMRIID was concerned, I was operating as blind as anyone else.

I knew one thing for sure: It was worth the risk. If I didn’t get out of my wet clothes and into something warm and dry soon, then getting out of the water would have been for nothing, because I was going to freeze. My body still felt distant and unconnected after the electrical zaps I’d received from Colonel Mitchell’s people, and I wasn’t sure I’d know nerve damage even as it was setting in. Better to get into more appropriate clothing, and take one variable off my list of terrible things.

Carrie stuck close to me as we crossed the open spaces between us and the shopping promenade, letting me take the lead. It didn’t feel like trust: it felt like letting me be the one who triggered any traps and blundered into any sneak attacks. I didn’t protest. My nose was still telling me that there was nothing waiting here to hurt us. Any sleepwalkers that passed through this area were long gone.

She wasn’t holding the gun she’d taken from USAMRIID, and while I wanted to ask her where she was hiding it, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to remind her of its existence. Her hatred for the sleepwalkers was logical, and terrifying. If she found out what I really was…

For her to find out, I would have to tell her, or we would have to make it safely back to Dr. Cale, wherever Dr. Cale was now. The former required me to be a lot less survival-oriented than was likely. The latter would give me a lot of backup.

Only one of the front windows at the Old Navy was smashed in. The lights were out, but the sun was still high enough to illuminate the first ten yards or so of the store. I could see toppled-over displays and windblown racks of shirts and sweaters. Bright signs advertised their post-Thanksgiving sales. The prices were never going to go back up; the Christmas displays were never going to be completed. There was something sad about that, like the essential passage of the year had been disrupted.

As I’d expected, the doors were unlocked. Whoever had smashed the window had done it for their own reasons, and not because it was the only way inside. When things began falling apart, it had happened so quickly and conclusively that there hadn’t been time to shut things down and put them away until they’d be needed again. I slipped into the Old Navy with Carrie close behind me, sniffing the air, hoping she’d write it off as a result of water in my nose. There were still no pheromone trails. The temperature inside was at least eight degrees warmer than outside, thanks to the trapped air being unable to circulate. It was still cold, but like the concrete after the water, the difference was enough to make me feel like I might someday thaw out again.

“It would be too much to ask to have a bra shop in this same strip mall, wouldn’t it?” asked Carrie.

“I think they were a little too all-ages for lingerie,” I said, making a beeline for the nearest rack of sweaters. “If we pass a Target or something, we can go in and raid them for fresh bras.”

“I bet guys don’t have this sort of problem after the apocalypse.”

It was a frothy statement, inviting me to join in and banter with her. I didn’t understand. She’d been ready to shoot me ten minutes ago, and now she wanted to talk about gender equality after the fall of mankind? I gave her a blank look through the
gloom and stripped to the waist, pulling on a clean, dry camisole and topping it off with the bulkiest sweater I could find.

Both were cotton, absorbent, and not designed to be worn over wet skin, but that didn’t matter, because putting them on felt like lifting a huge, freezing burden from myself. I stripped off my wet pants and underwear, leaving them on the floor as I wandered, bare-assed, over to the display of jeans.

Carrie didn’t say anything. Either she had no real nudity taboos, or she was distracted by trying to find clothing for herself.

I grabbed the first pair of jeans I found and rubbed them briskly over my lower body, soaking up as much excess water as I could. Then I rooted through the display until I found my size—two down from what I’d worn at the beginning of this crisis—and stepped into them. They fit loosely. I scowled. I had never been particularly interested in weight loss, and apocalypse-as-diet was definitely not a plan I recommended. I wanted to eat a cheesecake without worrying that I was going to be attacked, betrayed, or electrocuted at any moment. When did that become so much to ask?

“Do they carry backpacks? We should find—” Carrie stopped in the middle of her sentence, her words devolving into screams.

I didn’t hesitate. I turned and ran back to her, ready to either yank her away from the soldiers or start trying to convince the sleepwalkers to leave her alone. Neither was present. It was just Carrie, pointing into the dark and screaming.

I stopped, squinting in the direction she was indicating. At first, there was nothing. Then, bit by bit, my eyes adjusted, and I saw what had her so upset.

The back of the Old Navy was littered with bodies.

There were at least twenty of them, heaped together and twisted like they had died in excruciating pain. I stepped forward, ignoring Carrie’s frantic grabs for my arm, and stared at
the sea of corpses. The faint smell of pheromones hung in the air around them, too denuded and pushed down by the wind blowing through the broken window for me to have noticed it before. All these people had been sleepwalkers, and now they were dead.

What was going on? How had they died?

As Carrie grabbed for me, a thin line of fear uncurled in my stomach, bringing a new question with it.

Was this contagious?

T
he bodies were relatively fresh, which explained why the smell of decay hadn’t slapped us when we stepped into the Old Navy; that, and the fact that all the air was flowing
in
, not flowing
out
. They must have crawled off here to die sometime within the last two days, collapsing in insensate heaps before they finally gave up fighting.

I stepped between the bodies, trying to ignore the whimpering sounds that Carrie was making behind me, and scanned their slack faces for any sign of what had happened to them. It was too dark for me to make out fine details, but I couldn’t find even broad strokes to point me in the right direction. Some of them had vomited before they died, while others were clean-faced and even serene-looking. The faint smells of bodily waste and decay drifted up from the floor. They smelled…
clean
, like
they were supposed to smell, and not tainted by any outside source.

The pheromones were another story. They were a jumbled mess, some with the complexity I was coming to associate with “old” sleepwalkers, others as fresh and unrefined as the traces I’d gotten off of Paul before he died. It didn’t make any sense. Either I was so tired and shocky from my unplanned swim that I could no longer understand what my mind was trying to tell me, or something had caused the cousins inside these hosts to start double-producing the chemical tags that defined them.

“Sal, come
back
here,” said Carrie, her voice a harsh whisper through the dark. I knew she was right, that I should be taking care of myself rather than trying to make sense of things, but at the same time, I knew she was wrong. If something was killing the sleepwalkers, I needed to know what it was, and I needed to know
now
… because there was every chance in the world I was vulnerable.

Then something moved up ahead of me, and everything changed.

“There’s someone in here,” I said, taking another step forward.

Carrie moaned. It was a frustrated, agonized,
human
sound, not a sleepwalker’s inchoate hunger, but it still made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in uneasy horror. “No, no, no,” she said. “It’s one of those
things
. If something is killing them all off, then you should just let it. Don’t go looking for trouble. Don’t do this.”

It didn’t sound like she was coming any closer. That was good. If there was danger in the darkness, I didn’t want to pull her into it. I had used her to make my escape, but that didn’t mean I wanted her dead. “I have to,” I said, and kept walking.

There was a click behind me as she thumbed off the safety on her gun once again. “Don’t do this,” she repeated.

I stopped, looking back over my shoulder. With the light
behind her, she was nothing but an outline of a woman, a dark shape against the windows. “Is that how this is going to be from now on?” I asked. “Every time I do something you don’t like, you’re going to draw your gun on me and threaten until I agree to go along with you? Because that’s not going to work for me, Carrie. I’m not your slave, and having a gun doesn’t put you in charge.”

“You’re going to get us both killed!”

“I don’t think so. But if you’re really worried about it, you can go wait for me outside. I need to see what’s going on.” I turned my back on her and took another step into the dark, heading for the motion I’d seen before. I could hear Carrie moving around behind me. I kept walking. If she wanted to shoot me, I couldn’t stop her. She had the gun. All I could do by turning back now was cement her position as “leader” of our little pairing, and I couldn’t afford that any more than I could afford a gunshot wound. I needed to find my way home. That meant Carrie wasn’t in control.

The shot didn’t come. The motion up ahead was repeated, and I picked my way through the bodies and over fallen clothes racks until I saw its source: a thin, huddled figure, probably no older than four or five, packed into a crevice between two of the fallen sleepwalkers. It was too dark for me to tell gender, or anything other than the fact that this was a person, this was someone who was alive and moving and capable of getting out of here.

The pheromones in this little corner of the store smelled subtly different. Not wrong, exactly, but
different
, like something had happened to modify them from within. “Hello?” I said cautiously, hanging back in case my survivor turned out to be a sleepwalker after all. They would eat dead bodies, and the more high-functioning ones wouldn’t usually go for targets they couldn’t take down, but I didn’t feel like taking the chance if I didn’t have to.

The thought was almost comical. If I didn’t feel like “taking the chance,” what the hell was I doing in a dark store, surrounded by corpses, trying to talk to the only person left alive?

The figure scuffed one foot against the tile, lifting its head like it was trying to get a better look at me. It didn’t speak, and didn’t moan. It just sat there, small and still and frightened.

“My name’s Sal,” I said. “Do you have a name? Do you remember your name?”

The child—and it
was
a child, short and slim and small, even compacted on itself as it was—hesitated before saying, awkwardly, “Sal.” The word had an atonal non-accent, like the speaker had never heard language before. It lacked the moan sleepwalkers always had when they parroted speech.

I risked a small step closer. “That’s my name,” I said. “What’s your name?” Chimera were essentially fully integrated sleepwalkers. Maybe this child had a chimera parent, or a parent who had become a sleepwalker capable of functioning at a previously unknown level. It wasn’t impossible to think that a sleepwalker who was well fed could still have protective instincts. They were damaged, but they were still people.

Silence.

“Do you have a name?”

Silence.

I took another step closer. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” I kept my voice as low and soothing as possible. I didn’t want to frighten the child while I was trying to figure out what was going on. “Why are you hiding back here?”

“Sal!” The child moved without warning, pushing itself forward and flinging its arms around my calves. It clung hard, holding on like it was afraid I might cease to exist at any moment. It didn’t try to bite. I blinked, bending down to stroke the child’s hair… and froze.

Chimera put off pheromone tags just like sleepwalkers, but ours are thinner, subtler, less easily detected. Something about
the way we slot into human brains slows production, replacing it with a sort of radar for one another, a strong pull toward unity. It was what had drawn me to Sherman, even before I had known what he was. It was how I had been able to accept Adam as my brother, even as I’d been rejecting the reality of my own origins. Chimera knew each other, and chimera cared for each other.

And the child clinging to my legs like it had just discovered salvation was a chimera. Somehow, it was a chimera. I stroked its hair automatically, staring into the dark, and wondered whether there was any way for me to resist the pull that told me that I had to take care of this new complication.

I had no idea what I was going to do now.

Carrie had retreated outside by the time I emerged carrying the child in my arms like a bundle of rolled laundry. It was a little girl: That had become clear when I carried her into the light, revealing her smooth brown skin and tousled black curls. Her eyes were closed, and had been since we reached the edge of the sunlit zone. I remembered how much trouble I’d had with light when I was first waking up, how strange and painful and unnecessary it had seemed. I wondered whether she was having the same issue, still trying to get her tapeworm brain, which was small but commanded a surprising number of instinctive reactions, to understand that her human brain was correct when it told her the light was never going to go away.

The adjustment wasn’t going to be easy. It hadn’t been easy for me, and I’d been in a hospital bed, surrounded by people assuring me that I was a human being with a name and an identity I could reclaim, if I worked hard enough. They’d done a lot of damage with those lies, but they’d helped me, too, because they’d given me a clear goal to work toward. I could be Sally Mitchell, if I worked hard enough.

Who was this little girl going to be?

Carrie whirled toward the sound of my footsteps, her expression washing with shock and suspicion when she saw the child in my arms. “What is that?” she demanded.

“It’s a little girl,” I said. “I mean, I think it’s a little girl. I guess she might want to be a little boy once she’s had time to think about it. It’s a kid. You’ve seen kids before. We were just living with one, remember?”

Carrie’s suspicion didn’t fade. “There’s no way she’s not one of those things,” she spat. “Put her down and get away from her.”

Technically, Carrie was right. The child was definitely one of “those things.” She just wasn’t a sleepwalker, and that distinction made all the difference in the world. “She’s not,” I said. “She didn’t try to attack me. She just grabbed my legs and held on, because she’s a kid. A terrified kid.”

“Why isn’t she talking?”

“Trauma? This freaked me out, and I’m a grown-up.” I adjusted my hold on the little girl. She wasn’t moving, wasn’t speaking; was just huddling against me, clearly trusting me to take care of her. In the absence of anything else, she was running off her biological programming, and it said that any other chimera was there to defend her.

It was a good thing Sherman hadn’t found her first. He would have taken advantage of that, the same way he took advantage of everything else. Even if I didn’t want the responsibility of protecting something other than myself, I knew that I would do better than he would.

Carrie stared at me, clearly fumbling for something else to say, something that would make me understand what a mistake I was making. She couldn’t find it, so she threw down the only weapon she had: “You can’t bring her with us.”

“She’ll die if I leave her here. There’s no one to take care of her.” I was starting to think my guess about the girl’s age—somewhere between four and six—was correct: She was small
enough for me to carry, but large enough that she was going to become too heavy before much longer. I wondered whether her host’s age would make a difference in how fast she learned things like walking and speaking. Her brain was more elastic than mine had been when I first took it over.

Maybe I should have felt guilty about how quickly I was dismissing the personhood of the human girl my newfound chimera had replaced, but I didn’t have time for that sort of wasted emotion. All the guilt in the world wasn’t going to bring back the lost.

“So let her die,” said Carrie. “She’s not coming with us.”

I blinked before I shrugged, and said, “I guess that means I’m not coming with you. Thanks for helping me get out of the quarantine. Good luck getting wherever you’re going from here.” I turned away. The sun would be fully down soon. We needed to get somewhere warm and dry, and start figuring out where we were going to go next.

“Wait!”

I looked back over my shoulder at Carrie, who had her hand outstretched, like that would stop me. “What? You said you wouldn’t go with the girl. I won’t leave her. That means we have to split up.”

“You can’t do this. You’re the one who made me steal that car.”

“You could have refused. You did it because you wanted to. You didn’t want to stay in a place where you were treated like a prisoner, where your husband had died, and I offered you a way out. You faked a seizure and stole a car because you wanted to.”

“I didn’t want to do this,” she said, and suddenly the gun was in her hand again, pointed at me. “Put her down and get back over here. You’re not leaving me.”

I sighed as I turned fully back toward her so that she couldn’t pretend the child in my arms was anything but that: a
child
, a living being. It wasn’t my fault if Carrie would take the girl as a
member of her species rather than as a member of mine. “What are you going to do, shoot me? This is the third time you’ve drawn your gun on me since we got here. It’s been less than an hour. I can’t travel with you if I can’t trust you—and I can’t trust you if your response to not getting your way is going to be threatening to shoot me every single time. That makes you worse than USAMRIID. You know that, don’t you?”

Carrie’s chin wobbled, but her aim remained steady. “I don’t care. You’re not leaving me alone out here.”

“I don’t have to leave you alone out here. You could come with us.”

“You still haven’t told me where you’re going!”

“I’m going to find my family. My
real
family, the ones who care about me and want to protect me from people like the Colonel. I know they’re out here. I just have to figure out where they’ve gone.” And just like that, I knew where I was going to go next. Dr. Cale would have left a clue in the wreckage of the candy factory. I knew it. Even if it was something so small as to be virtually unfindable, it would be there, and it would be meant for
me
. USAMRIID would never have been able to use it to track her down. I would. I would find them.

All I had to do was get from Oakland to Vallejo, across miles of sleepwalker-controlled territory, evading USAMRIID patrols and gangs of human looters. If Carrie didn’t see the necessity of my plan, then I would do it on foot. I had done worse things in my time.

Carrie shook her head. “There’s no way. Your family can’t have survived this and stayed free. No one’s can.”

“Mine can.” Dr. Cale was smart and tenacious, and she was surrounded by good people. Fang, Fishy… Nathan. They would have been able to get her out of there before USAMRIID showed up to take her into custody. I
knew
Colonel Mitchell didn’t have hands on her. If he had, he wouldn’t have
been bothering with me. He would have gone straight for the goose that laid the golden eggs, and I could have stayed in the quarantine zone to rot.

At one point he hadn’t been taking her in because he thought she did better work when she wasn’t under lock and key. Now… I seriously suspected he’d been telling the truth when he said he wasn’t bringing her in because he no longer knew how to find her.