Chimera (Parasitology) (4 page)

“Humans will hurt you because they want what you have, not because it’s their instinct,” said Carrie. “We should have stayed hidden. We should have stayed safe. We knew how to survive where we were. Here… here, we don’t know anything.” She buried her face in Paul’s shoulder again, and none of us said anything. It felt like there was nothing left for us to say.

W
e stopped three times during our drive. Each time, the back of the truck was pulled open by a group of grim-faced men in uniform, who would then proceed to throw more passengers into the vehicle with as much compassion as the people at the animal shelter where I used to work showed to the sacks of dog food. They added one passenger at our first stop; three at our second; and finally seven people at our third, including a woman who was wrapped almost completely around a toddler, limbs rigid, like she was forcing her body to act as a human cage. Of the eleven people who were thrown into the truck, only the toddler hadn’t been hit with a Taser. She sat on the bench, crying huge, silent tears while the rest of us helped her mother uncurl and shake herself back into the moment.

None of the people who had been thrown in with us shared
my slow recovery from the shock. They weren’t
happy
—I don’t think anyone could be
happy
about getting zapped with that much raw voltage—but they sat up quickly, getting their bearings back. One of the men threw up in the corner of the truck before slinking guiltily back to sit beside the woman and the toddler. Most of them were crying. No one looked happy to be there.

One by one, the newcomers revealed how they’d been caught. Looting a supermarket that still had an active alarm system. Running from a pack of sleepwalkers in a public park. Trying to find a CVS that had children’s cold medicine on the shelves. That last was the young woman with the toddler. She glanced guiltily at the child as she spoke, as if she was questioning the wisdom of trading freedom for cold medication.

None of them had any possessions beyond the clothes on their backs, not even the little girl, which seemed odd to me. When I saw children that age, they almost always seemed to have a doll or a toy truck or stuffed bear. This little girl had nothing, and she clung to the woman she was with like she was afraid that even this last scrap of comfort would be taken away from her.

“No one’s managed to escape in weeks,” moaned one of the men, closing his eyes as he slumped against the wall of the truck. “They’ve shored up the fences and increased the patrols. There’s no way anyone is getting out of there once they go in.”

“So we escape from the quarantine facility,” said Paul stoutly. “I’m sure it’s possible.”

“Oh, it’s possible,” said the first man. “Some lady escaped from the quarantine facility months ago, and killed almost a dozen men getting to the exit. They have instructions at the quarantine facility now. They start with ‘shoot,’ and they end with ‘to kill.’”

I managed not to squirm, even though I knew I was probably the woman he was talking about. I had been held in a
quarantine facility the first time USAMRIID had captured me. Sherman had somehow managed to infiltrate the team that transported me to the facility, and hadn’t even waited a day before he’d come for me. He’d come with a full team. One of them, Ronnie, had been dealing with some anger issues. He was the one who had killed those soldiers. Not me, even though they’d died so that Sherman could have me all to himself.

At the time, I’d been grateful for the rescue. I’d even stayed grateful once I was aware of the lives it had cost—at least for a while. Sherman had a way of stomping the gratitude out of people.

It wasn’t a surprise that Sherman had been able to infiltrate USAMRIID: In some ways, it would have been more of a surprise if he hadn’t. Sherman Lewis was a man with a talent for getting into places where he wasn’t needed, wanted, or allowed to be. He’d started when he got into the skull of the body he inhabited. Like me, Sherman was a chimera. Unlike me, he couldn’t access the hot warm dark, and he hadn’t been able to take his body unassisted; he had been Dr. Cale’s second surgical protégé, following on the heels of my eldest brother and her first successful chimera, Adam. Sherman had been intended to show her that the process was stable and dependable and could be repeated. He’d shown all those things.

He’d also been the first one to show her that her children could be—would be—disloyal. He’d left her lab immediately after Sally Mitchell’s accident and had been waiting for me at SymboGen when my head finally cleared. I’d known Sherman for literally years before I’d become aware of my own nature. He’d been my friend and my guide through a world that was bigger and more complicated than it had any right to be. I’d always felt safe in his presence, like Sherman of all people would always understand what I was dealing with, and better, like he would be able to explain it all to me. He
got
me in a way that very few people ever could. Finding out the real reasons
why had been, in some ways, a greater betrayal than finding out that I wasn’t human. He’d known all along that I was his sister in petri dish and production line, and he’d never said a word. Not until it was profitable for him.

Sherman was playing a very long game, and the necessary conditions for victory involved the destruction of mankind and the replacement of their rule with his own. Dr. Cale wasn’t going to let him do that. Neither, if I could help it, was I.

The conversation in the truck was continuing, growing more urgent by the minute. “What about the transfer point?” demanded the woman with the toddler. “They have to move us from the truck to the quarantine, right? We can run then. We can just break away and run.”

“Bang fucking bang, Gloria,” said one of the men she’d been captured with.

She shot him a poisonous glare. “Not in front of the kid,” she snapped.

The little girl wasn’t originally hers, then. That explained the differences in their appearance—the child was at least three shades darker than the woman, which could have been a matter of paternity, adoption, or recessive genes, but was more likely, under the circumstances, to mean the woman was taking care of a child whose parents had been killed. Or who had started killing. SymboGen implants were cleared for all humans, all ages, genders, and weights. There was a good chance the little girl had an implant. I watched her across the truck, looking for signs that her eyes were coming unfocused or going cold. I wished I had a dog. They could accurately predict when someone was about to go sleepwalker—something that neither humans nor chimera could do.

USAMRIID wasn’t using dogs. I wondered why not, and whether they had even realized how useful dogs could be when it came to catching the early stages of a tapeworm takeover of
their host body. I decided just as quickly that I wasn’t going to tell them. If they were really reacting to all outbreaks and escape attempts with deadly force, regardless of the situation, I didn’t want to give them any more ammunition than I absolutely had to. Dogs could be used to capture more humans, and ferret out more sleepwalkers who weren’t hurting anyone. And I didn’t trust them to take
care
of their dogs. I wasn’t going to be responsible for opening a new avenue of animal abuse.

And none of that mattered. They had me now. One way or another, I was going to wind up giving them a lot of ammunition. The only question was whether I was going to answer their questions honestly, giving them ammunition that could actually be used, or whether I was going to start lying to them.

“She doesn’t care if I cuss,” said the man. “Her own mom tried to chew her face off and left her stuck with the babysitter. A few swear words aren’t going to fuck up her world any worse than it already is.”

The little girl moaned and buried her face against the woman’s—Gloria’s—shoulder. It was a human sound, filled with confusion and pain, rather than the hollow hunger of the sleepwalkers. Most of the people around us still flinched, and more than a few of them glared at the man, like he was solely responsible for their growing sensitivity to such things.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, settling against the truck wall. “The world is fucked up. We did that. We broke it because we were too lazy to take our allergy meds and monitor our own health. All I’m doing is trying to stay alive in the pieces that remain.”

“Fuck you,” said Carrie dully.

“Please,” said Gloria. “Please, not in front of the kid. Please.”

Her quiet plea was enough to silence the others. The truck drove on, and we rode in silence, each of us sinking down into
the pits of our own thoughts. The drums hammered in my ears, providing me with some small comfort. I only wished that I could believe the humans around me had something similar. But they didn’t, and I didn’t have any way to help them, and so we just rode on.

I don’t know how long the drive took. There were no clocks in the truck, and if anyone had a cell phone that was still keeping time, they weren’t pulling it out. The cell networks were down. The phones were glorified wristwatches now. That didn’t mean the soldiers who’d sedated my fellow passengers would have let them keep their things. The absence of the little girl’s expected security object was the best indicator I could find that anything people had been carrying had been cast aside. Less to sterilize, I guess.

Our first sign that things were about to change came when the truck screeched to a sudden stop, sending some of the passengers rocking forward while others gripped the bench seats and stayed exactly where they were.

“Are we there?” whispered Carrie. “Are we at the quarantine?”

Paul, who held her, said nothing.

There was a clattering from the back of the truck, near the doors. All of us, from the oldest to the youngest, pulled instinctively away, pushing ourselves together in our need to escape from that terribly mundane sound. Then the doors swung open, and what looked like an entire platoon of soldiers was standing there. Some held guns that seemed too big for their arms. Others held cattle prods, their active ends sparking and crackling in the evening air.

The sun was almost down. Or maybe it was almost up: this could just as easily be morning. I realized I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious after Colonel Mitchell had me electrocuted. Maybe I’d lost hours. Maybe I’d lost days.

And maybe these men were here to take even more away
from me. Most of them looked young, their faces gaunt and their eyes haunted with specters I couldn’t even imagine. All of them looked grim, like they had given up hope of anything but this world, this place and time.

“Everyone out of the truck,” commanded one of the men. His voice broke in the middle of the sentence. Based on that and the acne that was scrawled red and raw across his face, he was barely out of his teens, going through a delayed and possibly painful puberty. I hadn’t even realized it was possible to enlist that young… and maybe it wasn’t. There were always going to be people willing to trade a place in a cage for a gun and somebody they could point it at.

No one moved.

Another soldier stepped forward. This one was carrying a cattle prod. The sight of it made us all shrink back just a little bit farther. “My name is Sergeant Hinton. Will Sally Mitchell please come with me?”

No one moved.

Looking annoyed now, Sergeant Hinton said, “Sally Mitchell, we know you are present in this vehicle. We have confirmed your name on the manifest. If you do not present yourself, we will be forced to take steps to subdue the entire area before locating you. You won’t enjoy that. I won’t enjoy that. Some of my men may enjoy that. I’d rather not know. So if Sally Mitchell would please get
her damn ass up
and come out, of her own free fucking will, I would very much appreciate it.”

Those cattle prods seemed enormous. They loomed in my field of vision like the answer to a question I had neither asked nor particularly wanted to have answered. Slowly, I pushed myself off the bench seat and walked on shaking legs to the mouth of the truck. The muzzles of the guns and the sparking ends of the cattle prods tracked me with every step I took. The people who had been my fellow passengers until only a few
moments before—travelers on the same terrible journey that I was involuntarily taking—recoiled as I passed them, eyeing me with all the suspicion they had previously reserved for the men with the guns.

I wanted to protest, to tell them I was the same person I had been for the whole journey. I didn’t say anything. I just stopped at the lip of the truck and said, without looking back, “I’m Sally Mitchell, sir.”

“Excellent.” Sergeant Hinton turned away from me. “Private? Secure the prisoner.”

I didn’t have time to dodge before the cattle prod hit me in the small of the back, and everything dropped away again.

This time when I woke up, it was to a hose pointed straight at my face, dousing me in lukewarm water. My scalp felt like it was on fire. As I sputtered and squinted and tried to move away, I realized there was someone holding my hair. They were holding me
up
by my hair. My hands were cuffed behind my back again, my clothes were gone, and the rough floor of the room around me dug into my knees, hard and sharp and painful. I screamed, or tried to; the water flowed into my mouth, reducing the sound to a pained gurgle.

“Stop the water!” shouted a female voice. Blessedly, someone listened: The water stopped.

I spat out as much water as I could before I took a shaky breath. More water promptly found its way into my lungs. I began to cough, and the hand that was holding my hair let go, dropping me to the wet floor. I couldn’t catch myself with my hands cuffed behind me. I fell face-first onto the rough concrete, still coughing, unable to catch my breath.

Sounding almost bored, the same female voice spoke again: “Roll her onto her side. If she dies, we’ll catch hell from the Colonel.”

“Yes, Sarge,” said the man behind me. Hands gripped my shoulder, rolling me onto my side. I kept coughing, but less fiercely now. The hands released my shoulder and thumped me soundly on the back. I retched, water boiling up from the back of my throat and spilling down my chin in a thin, vomitus stream.

After that, I could breathe, if still not terribly well. My throat was as raw as my knees. My entire body felt loose, like the slightest disturbance could jar me out of it for good. I wasn’t sure what it was about the electric shocks that did that to me, but one thing was for sure: I didn’t want to experience that again.