Chimera (Parasitology) (46 page)

S
herman’s bullet had been what they called “through and through”: It had passed through the skin of my back and through the skin of my stomach, and through a few other things on the way. It had taken Fang and Nathan working together almost two days to stabilize me, while Dr. Cale had taken over monitoring Tansy.

Nathan had never left my side. Not once. Every time I’d woken up, he was there, watching me, waiting for me to get better. Sometimes Adam and Juniper were there too. Neither of them had been seriously hurt in the attack on the old mall. Sometimes the world was fair. Not often, but…

Sometimes.

After two days, I had been stable enough to no longer be considered critical. After three days, I had been sitting up. And after a week, I had been ready to be moved. That was a good
thing. A week was all that the Colonel had been able to buy us. He’d lied and he’d called in favors and he’d isolated the part of the facility where I was kept, claiming that it was being cleaned after a biocontamination incident. He had done everything he could, as Sally’s father, as a man who regretted the way the world had fallen apart, and when the clock had run out, he’d been the one to cut the power long enough for our ragged little group of survivors to make it to the motor pool, which had been conveniently deserted.

The last time I’d seen him, he’d been standing in the loading bay, wearing his uniform, saluting silently. He’d also been crying. I still wished I had been able to run back, to hug him and tell him I was grateful. Sometimes, there isn’t enough time. Even when you have all the time in the world.

The sound of the bedroom door opening pulled me out of my recollections. I rolled over, knocking Beverly’s head off my hip, and smiled at the two figures peeking around the doorframe. Juniper was getting taller all the time, and Heina had been showing me how to do her hair. Her braids from the previous day were frayed but still intact. She was wearing one of her handmade jumpers, stitched from fabric scavenged from a Jo-Ann’s, and she was smiling, closed-lipped and bright.

Tansy towered over her. Joyce had never been tall, but somehow the way my living sister carried my lost sister’s donated body made her seem longer, leaner, made less for study and more for motion. Her hair was several inches long now, coming in thick and brown. She still kept her scalp covered by scarves most of the time, for warmth.

“Mama,” said Juniper, and launched herself at the bed. The dogs watched indulgently as the little girl flopped against the mattress and climbed toward me. Nathan stirred, a warm lump under the covers.

“You couldn’t distract her for another hour?” I asked, looking at Tansy.

She shrugged and flashed me a sheepish smile, but said nothing.

Tansy was adapting quickly. After five months in Joyce’s body, she could walk and feed herself, and had toilet-trained in record time. She
could
talk, just not well, and mostly chose to stay quiet unless she was having a speech therapy lesson. Hopefully that would change as she became more confident with language. Her fine motor control was improving daily. Dr. Cale had been teaching her basic sign language, and that seemed to be helping with her frustration. Anything that got her communicating was important.

She looked more like herself every day, like she was growing secure inside her skin. The day before, I’d found her wallowing in a mud puddle with Juniper, both of them laughing their heads off. She was still Tansy. Another iteration, yes, with so much left to learn but… still Tansy.

“Mama,” said Juniper, finally reaching me and flinging her arms around my waist. I stroked her hair with one hand, and poked Nathan with the other.

“Up,” I said. “The alarm clock has arrived, and that means it’s time for breakfast.”

He made a small mumbling noise, but sat up and reached for his glasses. “Is it morning
again
?” he asked.

“Daddy!” squealed Juniper, and switched her attentions to him, allowing me to slide out of the bed and stand.

The scar on my stomach pulled as I stretched. The soft-tissue damage had been bad enough that Fang hadn’t been able to repair it all. I would always have that little reminder of Sherman. I was all right with that. Remembering things would keep us from making the same mistakes twice. That was important.

Dr. Banks was still with USAMRIID, more under supervision than as a consultant now. He had managed to land on his feet. He always did. Maybe it would be a few years before he convinced the government that he could be trusted again, but
he would. I knew he would. If I had any regrets about the way we’d left things, it was that we’d left him alive. I didn’t like to think of myself as a killer, but for Dr. Banks, I would have been happy to make an exception.

At least he’d be busy for a while. Dr. Cale had called Colonel Mitchell from the bowling alley after we had finished collecting our surviving people and the last of our supplies. USAMRIID had the remaining sleepwalkers from the Kmart. It wasn’t ideal. We had no way of knowing how many of the sleepwalkers would survive being in human custody. But they would have access to purified water that hadn’t been treated in a way that would kill them, and maybe the next generation would have a chance. There was work to be done. We just weren’t going to be the ones who did it for a while.

Sherman was dead. I had gone to see his body before I left USAMRIID; I had asked to see his brain. There was no sign of life in the slick, limbless length of him. I had cried. How could I not? He had been my friend and he had been my enemy, and he had been with us from the beginning. It was always appropriate to mourn when someone like that left you.

Tansy handed me my robe. I smiled at her, and walked over to the window, looking out.

When Colonel Mitchell had agreed to look the other way as we “stole” a truck and supplies, we hadn’t been sure where we were going: just that we couldn’t stay where we were. The world had changed, but not enough to allow humans and chimera to coexist. Not without building a whole new society. We had fled north, clinging to the coast, looking for a place where there were no survivors to ask what we were doing there. We needed to dig in and create our new normal before the humans started coming back.

We had found our safe harbor on a small island in Puget Sound. There were only nine houses there, and all of them had been empty when we arrived. So we had moved in, and
begun the process of making ourselves a home where we’d be safe. Fang and Heina were monitoring the recovering Internet; according to them, the President was granting squatter’s rights to anyone who’d survived in the areas that had been hit particularly hard. We were going to be able to keep our island, if we could get our roots in deep enough.

And people
had
survived. Sleepwalker outbreaks were still happening—would maybe always be happening—but humanity was difficult to kill. Cities had burned, whole industries had been destroyed, and still the human race went on. Heina and Fishy argued at night about how much recovery was possible, and how long the United States would hold together with its reduced population and decimated centers of commerce, and they both seemed so happy about the problem that I didn’t try to stop them. This, too, was part of the recovery.

Nathan rolled out of bed, holding Juniper on his hip, and joined me at the window. “Sleep well?”

“Yes,” I said, and craned my neck to kiss his cheek. “You?”

“Mostly.”

It was Nathan’s turn to have bad dreams, to wake up thrashing in the middle of the night because he was convinced the world was ending. I was doing my best to stand by him and be as good a wife as I could. He had stood by me when I needed him.

Yes, wife. There had been no wedding, no priest from a religion neither of us believed in or representative of a government that didn’t currently exist where we were. There had just been Fishy, ducking into an abandoned mall en route to Puget Sound and stealing us an assortment of rings from the only jewelry store that hadn’t been looted. There had just been Dr. Cale, saying that science had ordained her.

There had just been us, kissing and making a promise. There had always been us. We just needed to be willing to stop long enough to see it.

“Story?” Juniper pulled on my arm. “Story?”

Most families did bedtime stories. Ours did good-morning stories. Dessert first, in the most practical way possible. “All right,” I said, and took her from Nathan, walking back over to the bed. Tansy was already there, sitting on the edge of the mattress with a hopeful look on her face.

I took the book from the bedside table as I sat. The world was putting itself back together. Juniper and I had to avoid all groundwater. We’d decided that it was best if Adam and Tansy do the same; they hadn’t been created from my specific genetic strain, but there was still a chance the antiparasitics in the water could hurt them. Dr. Cale was working to find ways to help the sleepwalker population, and to keep the human survivors near us from being endangered, all without revealing her identity to anyone outside our island. Fishy and Fang were rebuilding three boats for us to use, just in case. Everything we did, forever, was going to take “just in case” into account. You can’t survive the end of the world and not carry a few scars.

The drums were pounding gently in my ears as I settled Juniper beside me, where she snuggled close. Nathan sat down on my other side.

“You can come in,” I said as I opened the cover.

Adam laughed as he ran into the room, and sat down at Nathan’s feet, where he could lean over and see the pictures.

This was my family. This was my home.

“‘The two children had been next-door neighbors all their lives…’” I read.

The broken doors were closed.

We had so far left to go.

The broken doors are closed.

Thank you all for coming with me to the end. I don’t get to finish a series every day, and it’s always emotional for me. Like closing a door that may never open again. I am so honored that you spend your time letting me tell you stories, and now I need to thank a few people.

Michelle Dockrey is my best friend and puts up with basically everything. She is all that is good and right in the world, and the reason I do not view Dr. Cale as a role model. Brooke Abbey and Dr. Wesley Crowell answer my medical questions with a minimum of grimacing, while Diana Fox makes sure that I can keep telling stories without needing to worry about whether or not my audience exists. These are the people I would be lost without.

The Parasitology trilogy was originally acquired as a duology, by DongWon Song, who moved on to other opportunities before the first volume was ready to be edited.
Parasite
was edited by Tom Bowman, who moved on as well (I swear it wasn’t my fault) before Will Hinton arrived and saved the day, editing the second and third volumes of the trilogy. Will is awesome, and I am lucky to get to work with him. Lauren Panepinto, who has provided all three covers for this trilogy, has hit it out of the park every time. Really, everyone at Orbit is fantastic, and I adore them.

Great and lasting thanks to Patty Pace, Sarah Kuhn, Amber
Benson, Margaret Dunlap, Dr. Mary Crowell, Nikki Purvis, Amy Mebberson, and everyone who had to share a dinner table with me during my “let’s talk enthusiastically about parasitic infections” phase (which isn’t actually over). As always, acknowledgment for forbearance goes to Amy McNally, Shawn Connolly, and Cat Valente, who keep me on an even keel; to my agent, Diana Fox, who remains my favorite superhero; to the cats, for not eating me when I got too wrapped up in work to feed them; and to Chris Mangum, the incredible technical mind behind www.MiraGrant.com. This book might have been written without them. It would not have been the same.

If you’re curious about parasites, check out your local library. There’s a lot to learn, and some of it will really amaze you. And disgust you. And make it hard to sleep at night.

Once more, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. All of you. Thank you for reading, for being here, and for following me when I asked you to come into the dark. When I said you could trust me. You did, and that means the world.

See you soon.

The broken doors are closed now; there is nothing left unknown.

You are my dearest darling ones. Please don’t go out alone.

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