Chimera (Parasitology) (45 page)

Nathan was the first out, ducking under the rising grate as soon as it was high enough. He rushed to me, embraced me, whispered, “I knew you would find us,” in my ear, and then he was gone, running away down the mall concourse, heading for the distant doors to the old department store.

“Go, go, follow him!” shouted Dr. Cale. The grate was still rising, but slowly: She was trapped until it was high enough to let her wheel her chair out. She looked frustrated, and almost anguished. It was the first time I’d ever seen her really limited by her circumstances, and it made me hate Sherman even more. How dare he put her in this position? How dare he put
us
in this position? “He’s trying to find Adam and the others! Here!”

She lobbed a stack of white towels soaked with whatever solution she’d mixed up to shield me out onto the concourse floor. It hit with a wet smacking sound. I grabbed the towels and ran after Nathan. He had a head start, but I was faster, and I had as much to lose as he did. In very little time, we were running side by side. Then I was pulling ahead, scanning the wall for the same lever setup that had allowed me to access the store where he’d been kept. If I could get the grate open…

The lever was almost ten feet away when I heard the gun go off. I staggered, almost dropping the towel I was breathing through, and looked back over my shoulder. Sherman was standing some twenty feet away, wearing a mask over the lower half of his face. Where had he been able to find a mask? Was he expecting this sort of attack?

No, no, he couldn’t have been. There was a sporting goods
store in the mall, and he’d been stockpiling medical supplies for who knew how long. He must have had it already, and come back for his revenge when he realized that he’d been set up. He shook his head as he looked at me, the gun in his hand still raised. I stumbled onward, trying to put more distance between us. He’d missed me once. He could miss me again.

Then the men broke through the skylights, and the sound of machine gun fire filled the air. Sherman’s attention was instantly wrenched away from me. He turned to fire on them, and they shot back, and he fell, he fell, his body bloomed red, like the hot warm dark was finally coming up into the light, and he
fell
, and I turned, and I ran for the lever.

Nathan was already rolling up the metal shielding when I hit the lever to retract the grate. As soon as he had enough of an opening, he slid inside, and I realized—with dawning hope—that if USAMRIID hadn’t thrown any grenades into the department store itself, they might still be safe. There were no skylights in the store. There would have been no way for the gas to get inside.

The men in their black armor were on the ground now, unclipping themselves from the cords they’d used to jump down. I wondered how many of them I knew. I wondered how many were men like Private Larsen, who had been able to accept me as a person, if not a human being; I wondered how many were women like his sergeant, who had been so happy to bury her fists in my stomach. There was no way of knowing. They were faceless behind their helmets, and their hands were full of rifle barrels and electric prods.

I ducked and followed Nathan under the grate. The towels were soaking my clothing, making everything wet and warm. I kept running. We had passed the point where there were any other choices left for me.

“Sal!”

The shout came from the direction of the stairs. I turned, and
there was Nathan, standing above the level of the creeping gas, with the terrified faces of our friends and colleagues behind him. Adam was there, and he was holding Juniper in his arms. She squealed when she saw me, a screeching, inhuman, beautiful sound, reaching out her hands like she could somehow seize the distance between us and throw it away.

“Coming!” It was hard to yell through the towel; my voice came out muffled and strange. I ran for them. I seemed to be slowing down for some reason, but still, I ran, and pressed the extra towels into Nathan’s hands. “Your mom sent these.”

He looked at me, and his eyes went wide even as his face went pale. He turned, handing the towels to Adam. “Put one of these over your face, and one over Juniper’s. They’ll protect you from the gas. Close your eyes. Everyone else, take a towel if it makes you feel better, but you don’t need to worry as much. The gas is an antiparasitic, it shouldn’t hurt you if you’re human.”

Towels were passed around. Juniper reached for me and made that high keening noise again, her hands starfishing in the air as Adam pressed a towel over her mouth and nose.

Nathan reached for me, taking my arm. “Sal, focus on me.”

“What?” I blinked at him. He was getting fuzzy around the edges. Maybe I’d breathed in more of the gas than I had thought. “Nathan. We did it. We got you back.”

“Stay with me, Sal. You can’t go now, I’m not ready for you to go now. Close the broken doors. Just don’t look at them.”

“What? I’m not… I’m not going anywhere.”

He sounded more anxious than I had ever heard him before. I blinked again, more slowly this time, before looking down at myself, and at the large red stain that was spreading across my abdomen as the blood soaked my shirt.

“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding. “I’ve been shot.”

Saying the words seemed to unlock a whole world of displaced pain and weakness. My knees buckled. Nathan was
there to catch me, and I smiled at him before I closed my eyes and let him hold me up. Juniper was keening, Adam and the others were shouting, and the broken doors were there. The broken doors were open, and I entered, and I was home.

I floated in the hot warm dark, where I had begun, where I had gone whenever I needed safety or comfort during my brief, confusing human life, and where I was apparently going to die. Everything was formless and safe, holding me in the warm embrace of weightless perfection. I moved with a thought, and there were no clumsy, unnecessary limbs to get in my way: I was evolution’s darling, a ribbon of flesh capable of reproducing without aid, of regrowing from even the smallest segment.

I wonder if they’re growing a new me,
I thought. They could do it. One little snip and they’d have a whole new Sal, epigenetic data and core personality intact, but ready to learn and grow and have a second chance at everything. I’d thought of it as dying before, when Sherman was threatening me with a transplant. Now, in the hot warm dark, it seemed like a beautiful rebirth, as long as
I
didn’t have to leave. If they wanted to take a little piece and grow themselves a new friend and lover and companion, I was all right with that. But here…

I was finally home.

I was going to miss my friends and loved ones, but not forever. Their names were already fading around the edges, going soft as trauma worked on my brain. I would be down in the hot warm dark until the mind that sustained me shut down, and then I would be gone. My body would live, my epigenetics would live, but the memories and experiences and ideas I had stored in the tissue of Sally Mitchell’s mind would be lost.

I don’t want to go
, I thought, and
I am already gone
, I thought, and both things were true at the same time, and I made my peace with that.

The hot warm dark that surrounded me was part real, part
memory: I knew that. I couldn’t move weightlessly when I was tangled in Sally’s brain, but part of me remembered moving like a delicate ribbon through her digestive tract and then through her major arteries, tracing a pathway from her intestines to her brain. The human body was a miracle. Teeth always felt so big when you touched them with a tongue, and so small when you touched them with a finger. Everything was like that, a shifting scale of outside and in. As Sally—as Sal—my body had been the sum of the universe, so small and so fragile and so brutally defined. But before I had a name, Sally’s body had
been
the universe, so enormous that I could have wandered it until I died and never have seen all that it had to offer. Everything was a matter of scale.

“—me? Sal, can you hear me?”

There was no sound in the hot warm dark: even the distant, constant pounding of drums was more vibration than noise, echoing through everything without ever making itself heard. For a moment, I didn’t understand. I had no concept of sound, and thus had no concept of spoken words, or the meanings they were intended to convey.

“Don’t give up, honey, just hold on for me. Hold on. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see. You’ll see. We’re going to get you out of here.”

The words continued, and began to carry meanings, little packets of information that burst like fireworks across the night sky of my mind. They were for
me
. I was Sal, and someone was telling me to hold on. Hold on to what? You needed hands to hold on, and I had no hands, not here, not down in the dark where the monsters lived.

You don’t have to stay here
.

The thought was more interesting than the words were. I turned my full attention on it. I didn’t have to stay here? But here was where I existed: Here was where I had settled after running for so long. How could I not stay? Here was where I belonged.

You could belong somewhere else. You could belong with your family. We could belong with your family.

I recoiled from the thought.
Sally?

No. Sally’s dead. Sally’s been dead since before we existed, but we’ll be dead too soon if we don’t do something about it.

Who are you?

I’m you, and you’re me. You’re the me that yearns for the hot warm dark, for vastness with limits. I’m the you that dreams of hands and fingers, of smallness that goes on forever. I’m your connection to the human brain where you store the person you have become, and I am that person, and we don’t have to let go yet. They’re trying so hard to save us. They’re fighting so hard to save us, and Sal, it’s up to you. You’re the part that endures. What do we do? What do we do? What do we
—

“Just please, do something!”

The voice sliced through the thought, breaking it into a thousand pieces. I couldn’t forget sound now, and with that memory came the memory of sight: The hot warm dark went red around me, filling with the movement of blood through veins and bile through the stomach. I couldn’t be seeing any of this—I had no eyes—but I could see it all the same. My memory was good. I had looked inside so many animals when I helped Daisy with her necropsies. I had looked inside so many people when the sleepwalkers ripped them apart. I knew what I should be seeing.

“—to stop the bleeding. I need more cloths!” This voice belonged to Dr. Cale, which meant the other voice belonged to Nathan.

Nathan.

I didn’t want to leave him. He was so important to me, and it had been so long since we’d been able to just be together, existing together, figuring out the future together. He was all I wanted. He was sweet and kind and stable, and he would hold my hand while I decided what was going to happen next. I couldn’t leave him. Not like this.

Help me,
I thought.

Breathe,
I replied.

I breathed. A great, sucking breath that required a mouth to take, and lungs to hold, and so I had both of those things. Pain crashed into me like a wave, and I let it fill me, because pain was better than serenity in this moment: Pain was more important than floating in the hot warm dark until everything ended.

With pain came gravity, and I was suddenly anchored to a body, pinned down to the surface I was lying on. I tried to force my eyes to open, but that was one thing too many; I couldn’t make my eyelids do more than twitch.

“I’ve got a pulse,” someone shouted.

Everything was jittering. I was in the back of a truck, I realized: We were driving away from the mall. Where were we going? Who was behind the wheel? Was I heading for safety, or for another disaster?

“Keep her head steady, Nathan, we don’t want her jostling around more than she has to.”

Nathan. The hands on the side of my face belonged to Nathan. Had I even realized that there were hands on the side of my face? It didn’t matter now. I tried again to open my eyes, and this time I succeeded, looking up into the wan, worried face of my boyfriend.

“Sal,” he said. The relief in his voice was painful. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Sherman shot you, but we have some of the best doctors left in the world, and you’re going to be
fine
.”

“Juniper? Adam?” I whispered.

“They’re okay, too.” He bent to kiss me. I closed my eyes again.

We were going to be fine.