Chimera (Parasitology) (11 page)

“Lieutenant Robinson told me about the men who’d been harassing you when you were first located. If they—”

“You’re not listening. I guess that’s not new.” I dropped my sweater and just looked at him, wondering when things had changed so profoundly, and so permanently. He had been the man who hung the stars, once, and I’d been his little girl, struggling to live up to a ghost, willing to do anything to make him happy with me. Now I was a monster in his eyes, and he was a monster in mine, keeping me captive when all I really wanted was to run back to my family—my real family, the one that didn’t say, “Pretend to be something you’re not, and we’ll pretend that you’re worthy of being loved.”

“All these bruises, the ones you saw and the ones I didn’t show you, they all came from
your
men, because they think I’m the one who killed all those soldiers when Sherman and his people broke me out of here.” I wasn’t protecting Dr. Cale, because there was nothing to protect: She had been packing to move when I left the lab with Nathan and the others, and I had no way of finding her if she didn’t want to be found.

I wasn’t protecting Sherman, because I hated him.

Colonel Mitchell stared at me for a moment before shaking his head and saying, “You must be mistaken. The soldiers under my command know that you’re my daughter. They would never lay hands on you.”

“The soldiers under your command know you won’t let me stay in the family quarters with your wife. They know that you have me out in the general population, where there’s no way you can possibly monitor me twenty-four hours a day. They know that you only have me here because you’re trying to save Joyce.” Her name was ashes in my mouth. I still loved her. Out of everyone in my family, she was the one who’d never turned against me, so of course she was the one who had been targeted by the cousins for conversion, because since when has the universe been fair?

Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything, and so I continued for the both of us. “They did this. You never told them I didn’t orchestrate my own escape, and they did this. They’re going to
keep
doing it, too, until the day you either cure Joyce or give up on her, and then they’re going to do something worse… and you’re going to let them, aren’t you? You’re going to stop pretending you care about me, and you’re going to let them.”

“Sally, please. Don’t be unreasonable.”

“Don’t call me ‘Sally,’” I spat. He recoiled. There was something almost childishly shocked in his expression, like that had been the last thing he’d expected from me. “My name is
Sal
. My name has always been Sal, and you
know
that, none of the things you’ve done here will change that, and I don’t want to play this game anymore. Your people are hurting me while you look the other way. You’re letting your wife—”

“Your mother,” he interrupted.

“Oh, my mother, right. You realize that makes this worse, not better, don’t you? If she’s your wife, then she’s saying, ‘I won’t let the monster that took my daughter’s body as her own be in the safe place where I am.’ But if she’s my mother, she’s saying that about her
own little girl
. One of us has to be the monster here, Colonel! Is it her, or is it me? Pick carefully, because you can’t redeem us both!”

He took a deep breath, visibly steadying himself, before he
said, “Sally, I can understand why you’re upset, and I assure you that the men who hurt you will be disciplined. This sort of behavior is not befitting either USAMRIID or the United States Army, and I won’t stand for it. I’m not going to punish you for telling me lies about yourself, or about your mother, because I should have done more to protect you. For that, I am sincerely sorry.”

I stared at him. “You’re sorry? That’s what you have to say? You’re sorry?” More and more, I was coming to realize that the human brain was capable of some amazing, illogical things. Fishy—an employee of Dr. Cale’s—had convinced himself that reality was a video game rather than live with the knowledge that his wife was dead. Dr. Banks had somehow managed to convince himself that he wasn’t a traitor to his own species. For a long time, I had convinced myself that I was human, even with all the evidence in the world staring me in the face, telling me that I was wrong. And now, despite all the evidence in the world, Colonel Mitchell was trying to convince himself, again, that I was still his daughter on anything more than a genetic level.

“I should have been more careful with you,” he said. “I was trying to teach you a lesson, and I was wrong. You won’t be going back to the general population. These spontaneous infections… whatever’s causing them, I can’t afford to risk you being affected.”

“But you said it was affecting your soldiers too,” I said. The drums were pounding harder now, spurred by the terror of staying in a building filled with people who hated me. The only one who didn’t was Joyce, and she was in a coma she was never going to wake up from. “Why am I any safer in here than I would be out there?”

“Because here, we can keep you in isolation,” said Colonel Banks. “We can make sure nothing touches you, and you can focus on your purpose here. You can help me save your sister.”

“Nothing’s going to save her,” I said quietly. “I wish you could see that.”

“You had best hope something does,” he replied. “That’s what’s going to save you, too.” He turned and walked back to the door, leaving me alone in the little room with the mirrored wall, and the pages of his report scattered across the floor like so many fallen leaves.

There was no clock in the little room. There were few clocks left anywhere, and most of them were keeping their own time at this point, refusing to synchronize. Things were falling apart, one piece at a time, and telling prisoners how long they’d been locked away probably wasn’t high on the priority list.

I walked circles around the room for a while, trying to let the exercise both stabilize and soothe me. When my legs got tired, I gathered up the pages of Colonel Mitchell’s report, careful not to look at the pictures, and put them back in the folder. I placed the folder itself on the table, where I wouldn’t step on it by mistake. Maybe my little effort at housecleaning would convince them that I was trying to play by their rules, and they would be kinder to me—or at least more inclined to treat me like I genuinely belonged.

There was nothing else to do in this isolated little room, and I didn’t dare try the door. Either it was locked or it was a trap, and whatever waited on the other side wasn’t going to be kind, or gentle, or care how many bruises it left. I retreated to the corner and sat, pulling my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around my legs before doing what I had wanted to do since being put in here. I released my hold on the world of human sights and human senses and sank down, down, down into the hot warm dark, where nothing was going to hurt or trouble me again.

It was difficult to describe the hot warm dark in words. Nathan could never wrap his head around the idea that it was
hot and warm at the same time, that the two things were different states that could coexist without difficulty. There was no color there, because I had no eyes when I was there, but it was still a kind, red world, even when everything was washed away by blackness. Those contradictions didn’t seem contradictory at all. Not when I was there.

I moved through the hot warm dark, and time fell away, leaving me in an eternal, peaceful
now
. “Moved” wasn’t the right word; I knew I wasn’t moving. There wasn’t room inside the cathedral of Sally’s skull for me to do anything but sleep. Still, some part of me remembered what it had been to move through her body, free and twisting like a ribbon in the tissues of her flesh, and that was the part that ruled when I was in the hot warm dark.

As I moved, I tried to think. It was becoming increasingly clear that I needed to find a way out of here—I should have tried to find it the minute I was taken. The electrical prods the soldiers used as nonlethal prisoner control had frightened me so badly that I’d stopped moving forward, choosing instead to stay where I was and wait for the situation to change around me. Well, the situation had changed. I needed to go.

The quarantine zone was protected by fences and patrols. If there were weak spots in the fences, no one I knew was talking about them, and while there was a black market inside the fence, it seemed to be entirely based on selling things that had been scavenged from homes and businesses. I hadn’t heard anything, from anyone, about goods coming in from the outside. It was possible that my position as the Colonel’s daughter meant that no one wanted to talk to me, but I doubted it. Carrie, Paul, and the rest of my housemates had accepted me as one of their own. If they’d known anything, I would have known it too.

Trucks left from the Coliseum and entered the quarantine zone daily, carrying soldiers who swept the surrounding areas for survivors and supplies that were starting to run low inside
the fence. It was government-sanctioned looting, and it might represent my best chance of getting out of here. If I could somehow get onto one of those trucks…

… which would be packed full of soldiers with guns and cattle prods. Soldiers who could legitimately claim that they hadn’t realized who I was before they shot me, or even worse, shocked me. The thought of dying was sad and scary. I wanted to make it back to my family. I didn’t want to die without them knowing what had happened to me. The thought of being shocked again was
terrifying
. Death was an end. Electrocution could leave me stranded and still aware in Sally’s body, but unable to control it ever again. No. The trucks weren’t the answer.

Unless I could steal one.

The thought was shocking enough to pull me out of the dark and back into the bright, sterile light of the interrogation room. My eyes snapped open, the enormity of the idea sinking in. I could steal one. Not without help—I didn’t know how to drive—but there were people here who could help me. There was Carrie. She wanted out as badly as I did, and she was going to want out even more now that Paul was gone. The spontaneous infections would lend an element of randomness to the situation, but if I could get her brought here…

They wouldn’t be keeping us in quarantine if they didn’t want to keep as many people alive as possible. I stood, walking over to the mirror. “Hey,” I said, raising my voice to make sure that it would be audible to the speakers I knew had to be present. “Hey, is someone there? I just remembered something. The man who got sick, his name was Paul. His wife, Carrie, is back at the house. And she wasn’t feeling good this morning, either.”

I’m sorry, Carrie
, I thought. Her boyfriend, lover, whatever he actually was to her was dead, and she might not even know it yet, depending on how quickly the patrol had removed me from the area. Paul was dead, and now I was having her yanked
out of her home and thrown into isolation, and for what? So I could steal a truck and have someone to drive it for me?

I was sorry, but that didn’t change the necessity of what I was doing. I needed a truck. I needed a driver. Who better to serve than the widow of a man who’d just been executed in cold blood by USAMRIID’s soldiers?

There was a clicking sound from somewhere above me, and a female voice said, “Thank you for the information. Please step away from the door.”

With dawning horror, I recognized the speaker as the woman from the shower, the nameless sergeant who’d threatened to make me eat my own vomit after she punched me in the stomach. I stepped backward, stopping only when my thighs hit the side of the table hard enough to add another bruise to my growing collection. The drums in my ears pounded harder than ever, almost dizzying me with their volume. She hated me. She hated me, and Colonel Mitchell was gone, and I didn’t know how she was planning to subdue me, I didn’t know, she could do anything—

The door opened, and there she was, terrible in her uniform, a cattle prod in her hands. There were two more soldiers behind her, but I couldn’t focus on them: All my attention was claimed by the terrible thing she was holding.

“Seems someone told the Colonel there was some question about how you’d been handled by his people,” she said in a low, dangerous tone. “Seems he’s concerned about how many bruises you’ve managed to pick up bumbling around out there. We pointed out that Pleasanton is a pretty dangerous place, but he was dubious. Seems like he wants to believe his precious little princess. So we’re going to have to be extra careful with you from now on.”

“I won’t resist,” I said quickly. “Look, I’m not resisting. I’m not running I’m not fighting I’m not doing anything at all. Please. You don’t have to shock me. I’ll go willingly.”

“Oh, I know you will,” she said, and smiled. “But no one’s looking just now, and you’re already denying us so much of our fun. You’ve got to admit that wasn’t very nice. Means we’ll have to be a little more creative.”

“Please don—”

My words were cut off when the end of the cattle prod slammed into my stomach. Everything was static and pain, and then everything was gone.

The hot warm dark had become a haven since I had become a human, but there was a time when it had been my prison: when it had sketched out the boundaries of my existence, confining me to the spaces inside another’s body and refusing to allow me anything beyond the scraps she saw fit to throw my way. I hadn’t known resentment then, hadn’t understood what it was to yearn for what you couldn’t have; all I’d known had been survival, and some deep-coded impulse in my genetic code that had ordered me to swim up, out of the darkness, into the light.

Since the first time I had opened Sally’s eyes, I had regarded the hot warm dark as my special, secret place. Even Sherman had admitted what a strange thing it was that I could go back there at will—for most chimera, once they came out of the dark, its doors were closed to them forever after. I was a lucky girl.

And now I was trapped.

I moved through the hot warm dark like I was running from the monster in a horror movie, knowing the illusion of motion was just that—an illusion—but unable to make myself stop. I didn’t know whether Sally’s eyes were closed or whether the electricity had somehow managed to break the connection between me and her optic nerves, and the fact that I kept thinking of my body as
her
body told me just how cut off I was, how far removed I suddenly was from the existence that should have been my own.