Chimera (Parasitology) (35 page)

The shape of the Oakland Coliseum loomed up ahead and to our left. Fishy looked toward me, eyebrows raised.

“Well?” he asked. “How do you want to play this?”

I took a deep breath. “Follow my lead,” I said.

We pulled up to the gate that blocked the Coliseum parking lots from the road. It was manned by four men in fatigues, each of them holding an assault rifle. My stomach unclenched when I realized that none of them had a cattle prod. This was going to be much easier if I wasn’t living in fear of being separated from myself.

One of them walked to Fishy’s window and rapped on it with his knuckles. Fishy obligingly rolled the window down, smiling his customary, toothy smile at the officer.

“Afternoon,” he said. “I guess maybe it’s technically evening? Sun looks like it should be going down any minute. How strict are we being with the day divisions now that most of the clocks are toast?”

“Sir, this is a restricted area,” said the officer. “We’re going to have to ask you to turn around.”

“Sorry, no can do. I’m here on a mission of medical mercy, and turning around would sort of go against the whole purpose of driving here. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be rounding up survivors like me and making sure that we’re comfortable in quarantine, not being snacked on by tapeworm-zombies all the damn time?”

The officer looked uneasy. That was the first inkling I had that things had gotten worse in Pleasanton after Paul’s death: that we might, in fact, have lost the entire quarantine zone.

I leaned forward, tucking my hair back behind my ears so that the officer who was talking to Fishy could see my face. Sally had
always taken after her father: Her features were Colonel Mitchell’s, softened by genetics and estrogen into the face of a reasonably pretty woman. Now they were my features, and I was going to put them to good use.

“Hi,” I said. The officer went very still. “Can you tell my father that I’m back?”

T
he soldiers at the gate had walked with the truck as they led us to the front of the Coliseum. They had looked surprised and only a little confused when Fishy led them to the back and opened the door to reveal Fang, bent over Tansy’s unmoving form and checking the connections on her ventilator. It must have been an odd sight, from their perspective: an unmoving woman with a shaven head, lying unconscious on a gurney, while a man in a white coat worked to make sure that she was still breathing.

Then Fang had straightened, and turned, and said—in his most polite, most congenial tone—“I suppose you’d like me to move away from the equipment now. Is one of you a trained medical professional? If not, is there any way I could convince you to let me keep working until we have my patient inside and
stable? It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that we’ve brought her this far, and we’d rather not lose her now.”

The soldiers hadn’t known what to say. Dr. Cale’s people tended to have that effect.

Their leader had taken custody of me. I wasn’t making any effort to run away. I hadn’t strayed from his side since he’d pulled me out of the cab, wrapping his vast hand around my upper arm so that I felt small next to him, reduced to the child I had never been. We stood some feet away, watching as his men—still puzzled, and somehow taking orders from Fang, however temporarily—helped Fishy and Fang get Tansy’s gurney down from the back of the truck.

“I never thought we’d be seeing you again,” said the soldier who was watching me.

I shrugged as best I could with my right arm effectively locked into position. “I wasn’t planning on coming back. But we need your help, and I’m pretty sure you need ours too.”

“There’s nothing you could offer us.”

“How long ago did you lose the quarantine zone?”

His hand tightened on my arm, clamping down almost hard enough to become painful, and I knew that I was right. “That’s classified.”

“It was almost a war zone in there while I was confined. It wouldn’t have taken many of those unexpected conversions for things to get really ugly. Did everyone die, or were there riots? Were you able to get anyone out?” I tried not to think about the people I’d known by name while I was there, the ones who’d shared the house with me and Carrie and Paul. The teenage mother, the little girl who’d never had a name… was my desire to let Juniper be nameless until she could name herself partially an attempt to honor that child? I sort of thought it might have been.

The rest of the soldiers walked past, pushing the gurney, Fishy and Fang among them. My companions had been disarmed
but not restrained. I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed that. I wondered whether this was some sort of silent challenge. Let them try to run: They’d just be taken again.

My captor pulled on my arm and started after his companions. We left the truck and walked across what remained of the parking lot, heading for the loading-bay door in the side of the Coliseum wall. It wasn’t the door I’d escaped through twice before, thankfully: a building this size had multiple entrances and exits. Four more soldiers flanked the door, guarding it from interlopers. Each of them was holding a cattle prod.

My mouth went dry, and my feet stopped listening to my commands, instead digging into the gravel and trying to bring me to a halt. My captor ignored my stumbling as he dragged me forward, into range of those men.

One of them was my old “friend,” Private Larsen. He looked utterly surprised to see me, eyes going wide as the end of his cattle prod dipped toward the ground. I reached down deep and managed to muster a strained smile.

“Hi,” I said. “Long time no see.”

“What are
you
doing here?” he asked—less a demand and more an exclamation of sheer, confused surprise. “You stole a car! You escaped!”

“And now I’m back,” I said. “My friend needs medical assistance, and I need to see your boss.”

“Colonel Mitchell is not taking visitors,” snapped another of the door guards.

Private Larsen looked toward him, and said, “Don’t you know who this
is
? That’s Sally Mitchell, man. That’s the Colonel’s daughter.”

“The Colonel’s daughter is on life support, you goon.”

“That’s my little sister, Joyce,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady. I felt like I was channeling my Sally-mode again,
but not as a lie: as a way of getting what I needed. It was surprisingly easy, and even more surprisingly comfortable. I didn’t have to pretend to be her to use the lessons I’d learned from my time in her shadow. “I’m the older daughter. The bad daughter, the runaway daughter, the one people blame for killing a bunch of soldiers, even though I didn’t do that. And right now, I’m the daughter who needs to see her father. So if someone could go and tell him that we’re here, that would be awesome.”

The three guards who weren’t Private Larsen readied their cattle prods, apparently prepared to zap the insolence right out of me. Private Larsen looked to the leader of the group of soldiers who had accompanied us from the gate.

“Sir?” he asked.

The man nodded. “If you would.”

“Yes, sir.” Private Larsen snapped a quick salute before he turned, cattle prod still lowered, and trotted away down the hall.

The officer in charge snapped, “At ease, men,” and the other three guards lowered their weapons. I let out a slow breath, relaxing marginally, only to tense again as he turned to me and said, “You realize you’re not escaping for a third time. Once Colonel Mitchell sees you, it’s over.”

There was a warning in his tone that I couldn’t quite make sense of—at least not until I looked over to Fang and Fishy, and saw how open the route back to our truck was behind them. We could still run. For whatever reason, this officer was willing to leave us with an escape route, even as he held on to my arm… but his grip wasn’t as tight as it had been, was it? I could probably pull away, if I really tried.

Chave had been one of Dr. Cale’s people, embedded in SymboGen and kept in place by a combination of loyalty and the need to know what was coming. She had never been able to let me know who she was. And she had died without breaking cover. I looked harder at the officer, trying to remember
whether I’d ever seen him before, either there or in the bowling alley, before things got bad. His face seemed familiar, but I had been a captive here twice already: I could have seen him through a fence, or passing in the hall. There was no way for me to know for sure.

But he was willing to let us run, and somehow, that made me feel all the more certain that we were making the right decision. “It’ll be okay,” I said, and touched his arm. He didn’t pull away. My conviction that he might be one of Dr. Cale’s people grew. “I just need to talk to the Colonel.”

“Soon would be good,” called Fishy. “Tansy’s not doing so well.”

“What?” My head snapped around. Fang was bending over one of the machines, his expression suddenly much more serious than it had been only a few minutes before. “What’s happening?”

“I’ll need to run some tests to be sure, but I believe her kidneys have started to fail,” said Fang. “This was always going to happen before too much longer. The body is not meant to survive indefinitely under these conditions.”

“But she can’t die.”

Fang looked up. The expression on his face was infinitely sad, and infinitely patient at the same time, like he was trying to convey a lesson he knew I wasn’t ready to learn. “We can all die, Sal. The last few months should have taught you that, even if they’ve taught you nothing else. We can all, no matter how clever, no matter how beloved, die.”

Private Larsen reappeared before I could answer. “The Colonel says we’re to escort them in,” he said stiffly.

“You heard the man,” said the officer. “Move.”

Fang and Fishy pushed Tansy on her gurney, and I stayed close to the commanding officer—as far away as I could be from those menacing cattle prods—and we moved onward, back into the belly of the beast.

Our escort saw us to one of the larger interrogation rooms and left us there, locking the door behind themselves. Under the circumstances, it was something of a relief. Fang and Fishy connected Tansy’s monitors to the wall outlets, sparing the portable generator from a little of the drain, and got to work stabilizing her.

There was a table, and chairs, but I didn’t feel like sitting—not after the day we’d had, and not with the specter of my father hovering over us like a knife about to fall. I stalked back and forth in front of the shoddily installed two-way mirror, wondering whether there was anyone on the other side, wondering equally whether the joints with the wall would stand up to a little battering. I knew how hard the glass was to break, but I was willing to bet the wood would give way if I hit it hard enough with a folding chair. Then I could see the people who were no doubt on the other side, monitoring us.

Of course, then they would
know
that I was dangerous, and would be able to justify anything they did to me—to us—as self-defense. I couldn’t risk it. I left the chairs where they were and continued to pace, shooting sour looks at the glass and waiting for the door to open.

Colonel Mitchell’s sense of dramatic timing hadn’t gotten any worse while I’d been away. As soon as Tansy’s monitors were all beeping steadily and without alarms, the door opened, and he stepped into the room. I stopped pacing, turning to face him.

He was still a mountain of a man, broad-shouldered and thick-armed and built like a monument to the idea of humanity overcoming the world. His hair was grayer than it had been before my escape, like he had managed to age years in just a few weeks. Soon, there wouldn’t be anything left
but
the gray. There were deep lines around his eyes. Those, too, had spread since my departure. He stopped in the doorway and just looked
at me. That was all. That was all he needed to do. There was a depth of loss and longing and betrayal in his eyes that said more than words could ever manage.

This was it: This was the moment where we had to choose whether we were telling him the truth or continuing to lie, continuing the petty fiction that Dr. Banks had created to save his own skin. I took a step forward.

“I’m not Sally,” I said quietly. “I never was. I’m sorry I lied to you about that: I did it to save some people who were very important to me, and I would probably do it again if I had to, but that doesn’t make it right. I do think it makes us even, don’t you? You lied to me about who I was, and then I lied to you about who I was, and now the scales are balanced. We can start from equal ground.”

Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything. He just dipped his chin, very slightly. That was all the acknowledgment I was going to get.

I took a breath. “You understand why I ran before.”

“I do.” His voice was, if anything, even more revealing than his eyes. He sounded exhausted, beaten down almost to the point of breaking. This was a man who’d seen every inch of protection he thought he possessed pulled away, and was doing his best to hold the line despite it all. He was a good man, who’d been forced to make some bad decisions, first to protect his family and then to protect what he saw as the world. He had just been put into the position of so many good men before him: the place where there were no good options left, only the ones that did a little less damage than the rest.

“These are my colleagues—my
friends
. Fishy and Fang.” I realized I didn’t know their last names. I also realized that it didn’t matter anymore. They had their dingy, tattered lab coats and their willingness to work: Everything else was secondary. “The girl on the gurney is my sister, Tansy Cale.”

Was it my imagination, or did he flinch at the word “sister”?
“I don’t understand why you brought her here,” he said. “Surely the medical care wherever you were hiding was sufficient to keep her alive.”

“It was, before some dick-wad decided to come in and trash the place and shoot a bunch of our people,” said Fishy, looking up from Tansy’s monitors. “That’s why we’re here.”

Right: It was time to stop beating around the bush. “Sherman Lewis, who was responsible for my first escape, and for the deaths of your people, found Dr. Cale’s lab. He raided it this morning. He got away with basically everything. All our people, all our research. Nathan. He took Nathan, and we have to get him back, because Nathan doesn’t have an implant, and Sherman doesn’t think humans have any place left in this world.”

Sherman would see Nathan as just one more host body waiting for a new owner. I loved my fellow chimera, I
loved
them, but could I ever forgive the worm that took Nathan away from me? Would I ever be able to make the jump from loathing to love? I didn’t think so… and just like that, I forgave Sally’s mother for rejecting me. It was all well and good to think of a chimera as just a new occupant in an abandoned home, and in my case, that was true: I had taken over when Sally left. But she didn’t really know that, did she? That was never going to be something she could accept, just like I was never going to be able to accept someone else driving Nathan around like his body’s original owner didn’t matter.

It made what I had to ask next even more difficult. I took a deep breath, and forced myself to continue anyway. Tansy’s life depended on it. “Sherman is responsible for the contamination of the water supply. I have some ideas about how we could maybe fix that, but we’re going to need to work together. We brought copies of the data we were able to salvage. Fang is one of the best neurosurgeons I’ve ever met, and he’s been with Dr. Cale for years. He can explain things to your scientists.”

“That doesn’t explain why you brought the girl,” said Colonel Mitchell.

No, it didn’t. I took another breath. Then I paused, and looked at him. “I would have been your daughter, if you’d allowed me to be myself,” I said. “Adoption is as important as biology. I tried so hard to be who you wanted me to be. I broke myself trying to become your little girl. All you ever had to do was say, ‘You are a stranger, and I love you,’ and I would have been yours forever. You know that, don’t you? I never wanted us to be on opposite sides.”