Chimera (Parasitology) (33 page)

F
ang had gone to recover the largest of our trucks from the garage where it was concealed, far enough from the bowling alley that it wouldn’t lead USAMRIID to us if they found its heat signature after it had been used—and ironically, far enough from the bowling alley that Sherman and his men wouldn’t have seen it during their sweep for assets. Fishy, who understood weapons better than I did, had gone to see what we had left, leaving me to the unpleasant task of sweeping the apartments for people who had not been at work when the raid occurred.

Sherman had been created in the bowling alley. He must have been acting on what he remembered about the lab and its environs when he planned the raid, because none of his people had gone anywhere near the apartment buildings we had repurposed for our use. If I had only encouraged Adam to
hold Juniper’s lessons at home, with the dogs, they might still be with us. I could have saved them. I could have—

No. Following that rabbit wouldn’t lead me to Wonderland: It would take me down an increasingly dark series of tunnels, until there was no way for me to find the light again. I couldn’t live my entire life waiting for the darkness to come and claim me. Adam had enjoyed holding Juniper’s lessons at the garden center. Everything we’d had access to had told us it was safe, and since both of them were happy, what was the harm? It didn’t matter that the harm had shown its face, and proven itself more dangerous than we could have ever guessed. We’d allowed them to make choices. We’d allowed them to
live
.

That was all that any of us could ask.

I knocked on doors, waited for a count of ten, and then moved on to the next apartment, both glad that I didn’t have to explain what had happened, and aching from each successive bout with silence. Had Sherman and his men really taken everyone? Were Fishy, Fang, and I all that remained? It seemed impossible. I’d known Dr. Cale for less than a year, but she had already become one of the fixed points around which the universe revolved, untouchable and unimpeachable and indestructible. But here we were.

I was halfway through the neighborhood when a door opened in answer to my knocking. The technician on the other side—a slim, dark-skinned woman with black hair and long-boned hands that were currently occupied in clutching a sheet around her body—blinked at me. I blinked back.

“Er, Sal, yeah?” she said. “Please don’t tell me there’s another chemical fire. I just got the smell of the last one out of my hair.”

“It’s not a chemical fire,” I said. I hadn’t been expecting to find anyone, even though I probably should have been: The night shift would have had no reason to be in the building. I just didn’t know how big the night shift
was
. “Um, Heina, right?”

“You remembered,” she said, sounding pleasantly surprised. Her smile was quick, bright, and filled with teeth. “Wasn’t sure you would. We’ve met a few times, but I get up around the time you’re going to bed, and you always look like you’re dead on your feet.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. I tried to keep talking, to tell her what had happened to our friends and colleagues. My lips refused to move. “I guess I’m sort of a morning person most of the time. I. Just. I…” I took a deep breath, and then spilled it all out in one great, indigestible chunk: “Sherman and his people raided the bowling alley, they took Dr. Cale and Adam and all the equipment and all her research, they’re probably planning to use it to make the worms in the water even better at doing what they do, and then we’re all going to be in big, big trouble, no matter what we are, so Fishy, Fang, and I are going to USAMRIID to tell Colonel Mitchell what’s going on and try to convince him to join forces with us and make Sherman stop. Only I came here to see if anyone from the night shift had managed to miss the whole thing, and it seems like you did, so now I guess I have to ask you whether you want to come with us or stay here and hold down the fort.”

Heina blinked. Slowly, once, twice, and then a third time, the animation draining from her face more with each small motion. By the time she was done, she looked like a brown wax figure of a woman, perfectly still, filled with waiting.

“They got everything?” she asked.

I nodded.

“There’s a transmitter just under the roofline. Did they take it? Do you remember seeing it after they came through?”

“I… where would it have been?”

“Near the front door.” Heina took a step forward, eyes suddenly intense. “It would have been tucked next to the sign, where it wouldn’t have been super obvious to someone who
didn’t know the place. Taking it down would have probably required breaking the sign away from the wall. Was the sign broken?”

That question I could answer with confidence. “No. The door was off its hinges, but the sign was still intact.”

“Did they cut the power?”

Tansy’s life support had continued to operate throughout the entire fight. “No,” I said again.

Then, to my surprise, Heina smiled. It was nothing like her quick, easy expression when I’d remembered her name. This smile was slow, and dark, and filled with the simple joy of a techie who had managed to get one over on the world. I’d seen a similar smile on Fishy, usually right before he did something irresponsibly dangerous. “Then I’ll stay here. I’ll get the rest of my team on it.”

“On what?” I asked.

“Sal, please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve never struck me as the most tech-savvy person around. Is that accurate?” Heina waited for me to nod before she continued: “That antenna was feeding everything from the servers in the bowling alley into the cloud, which is local and sustained by machines in the spare room of this apartment and in the entire floor space of the apartment underneath me. If the local network was disrupted, then those machines I just mentioned? They sucked everything
out
of the cloud, and turned it into solid, stored, salvageable data. And if Sherman’s men were unplugging things all willy-nilly? Oh, poor them.”

“Why?” I asked blankly.

“Because they just carted off a bunch of empty hard drives with nothing interesting for them to look at.” Heina’s smile was virtually feral, and seemed to contain more teeth than a single human head could hold. “As soon as those machines were uncoupled from the network without appropriate protocols, they started wiping themselves. It was a counterespionage measure
we decided to put in place when it became clear that Dr. Cale didn’t know jack about computer security. As long as everything turned on when she told it to, she was perfectly happy to carry on with minimal backups and no off-site. Love her to death, but that woman is lucky she made it this far.”

“I don’t understand.”

Heina’s smile grew broader still. “I’m saying we have all her data—everything—and that Sherman may have our people, but he only has the research they bothered to print out.”

I blinked again. “Oh,” I breathed. Then: “Can you come with me? We need to tell Fang about this.”

“Can I put some clothes on first?” asked Heina.

I nodded.

Fang was back with the truck by the time I returned to the bowling alley with Heina. It would have taken longer, but she had promised to finish going through the apartments, since she knew which ones were supposed to be occupied. “Besides, Princess,” she’d said, once she was clothed and willing to step outside. “We’re all fun-and-frisky folks, and you don’t know us well enough to be walking in on some of those scenes.”

Modesty about nudity and sexual situations was a human trait, one I had learned how to mimic reasonably well, but had never quite managed to internalize. Still, it seemed somehow important to Heina that she be shocking me, so I did my best to look embarrassed. Mostly, I think I just managed to look anxious, which nicely matched my actual mood.

Fang turned at the sound of footsteps, his shoulders locked in the way that usually meant someone was about to get punched. When he saw me, he relaxed. When he saw Heina, he actually brightened. “You found someone!” he said, jumping down from the truck’s rear bumper. “Heina, you old goat. I should have realized you’d still be asleep at this unreasonable hour of the afternoon.”

“I was getting my beauty rest while you were all getting shot.” Heina scanned the front of the bowling alley, looking sad when her eyes skated over the bodies lying in the gravel. She brightened at something, and I assumed that meant her transmitter was still in place, doing whatever it was that hidden transmitters were supposed to do. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

“I’m not,” said Fang firmly. “If you had been, you’d have been shot along with everyone else, and I’d have missed your smiling face.”

I was starting to wonder whether there might be something more than workplace friendliness between the two of them. That would have been nice. Fang needed more people he actually liked well enough to relax around. Still, this wasn’t the time to deal with that. “Heina says she has cloud backups of all the data from the bowling alley.”

“They didn’t knock out my transmitters,” she said in a tone that implied confirmation of what I had just said. “Amateurs. Evil amateurs, which is the worst kind. Couldn’t we have had the villains we deserved?”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t sit around wishing for more competence on the part of the people who killed Daisy,” said Fang. “Can you prepare a quick sampler platter of data? Not enough to give our location away to someone who doesn’t already have it, but enough to make it clear that we have some valuable information to barter with?”

“Sure, but why?” asked Heina.

“Because we’re going to USAMRIID,” said Fang.

“Even if all those computers wiped themselves, Sherman still has Dr. Cale, and Nathan, and
everybody,
” I said.
Juniper, he has Juniper, he’s going to see what she means for everything, and then he’s going to take her apart.
The thought was a constant chant at the back of my mind, almost dismissible when it wasn’t allowing myself to focus on it. “He’s going to be able to re-create their work, and do work of his own, until he figures
out how to make the DNA do what he wants it to do. We have to get Colonel Mitchell’s people on our side.”

And then there was Tansy. I didn’t want to look in the back of the truck and see whether Fang had already transferred her over. I couldn’t hear the beep of the heart monitor or the whistling hiss of the intubation, so I supposed that she was probably still inside. Without a full team to monitor her around the clock, she wasn’t going to be able to stay alive for much longer.

Without someone to drive the bus, neither would Joyce. They would both die, both of them broken beyond repair by bad people and bad science. But together, they might stand a chance. If we could get Tansy to Oakland before she gave up. If I could convince Sally’s father that my life honored hers, and didn’t shame her death. It was a lot of “if.” It was all that we really had left.

Fishy came trotting out of the bowling alley with his arms full of small firearms and large pieces of metal rebar. He stopped when he saw Heina. Then he brightened, and called, “Hey, Bonus Player! You didn’t die! That’s awesome.”

“Hello, Fishy,” Heina replied. “Fang tells me you’re heading for USAMRIID? You sure that’s a good idea?”

I wanted to rankle over how quickly she had dismissed me from the decision-making process, but I couldn’t: not really. These three were coworkers, and I was someone who just happened to live there, and more, had accidentally become a miracle of science. That didn’t mean I’d let her undermine me—if she started really trying to convince them that we shouldn’t go, I’d step in—but it meant that she would take this better if she heard it from one of the people whose work she actually respected.

“Nope, but Sal’s the main PC of this run, so I’m going along with her,” said Fishy. Then he paused, and straightened, his posture shifting so completely that for a moment, it was almost like I was looking at an entirely different person. “It’s a bad
situation, Heina, and it’s going to get worse from here. USAMRIID has men, they have resources, and they have the sort of firepower we can only dream of. So we go to them, because it’s the last good option we have. Maybe we’re all going to get gunned down. Maybe we’re going to be arrested for crimes against the US government. I don’t know. But it’s better than sitting here and waiting for the world to fall down.”

“You get the network stable, and shift everything over into the apartments,” said Fang. “Have your people feed the sleepwalkers, but don’t do anything else around this shopping center. If Sherman sends a crew back to check for stragglers, I want them to think that they killed us all.”

“That means we can’t bury the dead,” I said quietly. The other three turned to look at me. Fishy and Heina both looked shocked. Fang looked almost relieved, like he had been hoping someone else would come to that conclusion before he had to be the one to say it. I wanted to be angry at him for that, but I couldn’t. These had been his friends and colleagues long before they had been mine. He could seem stoic sometimes, but his situation was just as bad as everyone else’s.

“What do you mean?” demanded Heina. “We can’t leave them out here to rot.”

“They won’t,” I said. “There are coyotes around here, and raccoons, and feral cats. The bodies won’t last very long once night falls.”

That didn’t seem to help much. Heina scowled, and even Fishy looked faintly nauseated. Only Fang’s face remained neutral. I was saying things he’d already considered, and while that didn’t mean he had to like them, it did mean there were no surprises hiding in my words.

“That’s disrespectful and unhygienic,” said Heina. “How are we supposed to work with a bunch of bodies rotting outside the door?”

“You’re not supposed to be working in the bowling alley at all, remember?” I was so tired. I needed to be moving, running, racing against time to get my people back, and instead I was standing here arguing about the dead. How much time were we going to spend arguing about the dead before we started to understand how unimportant they were compared to the living? The dead were
nothing
. They were food for worms that had never been uplifted by science. The living, the survivors… that was what we needed to be concerned about. “You’re going to shift everything to the apartments, and you’re going to leave the bodies here.”