Parasite (Parasitology) (40 page)

“It’s all right,” said my father. “Both my daughters have the clearance to hear this.”

“Really?” I asked, despite myself.

“Sal, hush,” said my father. “Private. Report.”

“The subjects are restless, sir. They’re moving around, and some of them are in danger of hurting themselves on their restraints. We weren’t sure what to do. I was sent to find you and see if you had any ideas.” The private’s eyes cheated toward me, like he was trying to skip ahead and find out what would happen next.

I looked back at him blankly. If anyone here knew how this was going to play out, it wasn’t me.

I was so preoccupied with watching the private that I didn’t see my father move until his hand was clamping down on my shoulder again. I staggered a bit, turning to look up at him. His expression was unreadable, a blank mask.

“This sounds like the perfect opportunity for my daughter to show us what she knows,” he said. “Lead the way.”

The private’s eyes widened. He looked as alarmed as I felt. “But sir—”

“Now.”

Any concern the unnamed private might have for my safety was less powerful than the need to maintain military discipline. The private nodded, the concern not leaving his face, before he turned and led the way toward a door in the back wall. Joyce walked after him of her own accord. I didn’t, but that didn’t matter; my father’s hand was on my shoulder, propelling me toward whatever was waiting in the next room.

The private swept his key card across the electronic lock, which beeped twice before accepting his credentials and releasing. He pulled the door open for us, and held it as we walked through, into the humid, groan-filled air beyond.

The room where the sleepwalkers were being kept was like something out of a nightmare, familiar and strange all at the same time, so that I didn’t know where to look. It was large, clean, and white-walled, just like every hospital patient storage room I’d had the dubious pleasure of seeing since the day I woke up after my accident. There were no windows, but there were light boxes placed strategically around the room, creating the illusion of natural sunlight even if the sun hadn’t been inside here since construction was finished. The floor was industrial-green linoleum, easy to clean while also being easier on the eyes than the walls. Green floors encouraged the eye to track down, increasing the chances that messes would be seen before they could be accidentally tracked around the room.

I took all this in within seconds, trying to focus on the normal for as long as I could before I admitted it was absolutely in the minority within this space. This was not a normal hospital room. If it ever had been, that time was long in the past. What it was now….

I didn’t even have a name for what it was now. Short of comparing it to pictures I’d seen of tuberculosis wards—Sherman wasn’t supposed to show me those, which is probably why he did, and was definitely why I looked—I wasn’t sure something like this had ever existed before. I stopped at the threshold, digging my heels in and refusing to let my father drag me any farther.

“No,” I said, shaking my head to reinforce my words. Not that I expected it to do very much good; not with the scene that was unfolding in front of me. Whatever I could say would be just that much more noise. “No, no, no.”

“Yes,” said my father implacably, and pulled me on.

Beds filled the room, so narrow and packed so closely together that they might be better classified as “cots.” There was barely room for the technicians to move between them, adjusting IV poles and frantically tightening the leather straps holding the patients down. Every bed was occupied. The occupants came from every ethnic group. Men and women, children and adults, there seemed to be no common feature shared amongst them. Except for one:

They were all sleepwalkers. Their eyes were dead, rolling wildly or staring at nothing as they writhed against their restraints. Some of them were snapping at the air, their teeth slamming shut with such force that it was cutting their gums. Blood and drool ran down their chins, undifferentiated and unchecked. None of the technicians were getting near those snapping jaws, even as they frantically injected what I assumed had to be liquid sedatives into the patient IV bags.

One man had managed to yank a hand free from his restraints,
at the cost of most of the skin on his wrist. He was flailing without any apparent purpose. The main strap holding him to the cot was buckled at his chest. He could have reached it easily and let himself go. But he didn’t. He clearly knew something was holding him down, but he wasn’t acting like he had any idea what that thing might be, or how to make it let him up.

Some of them were making sounds. Little squeaks and gasps, for the most part, although at least one of them was moaning, a low, constant noise that ebbed and rose with the moaner’s breathing. I couldn’t tell which one was making the sound, and I was glad. It would have been almost impossible to fight the urge to grab a pillow and make the moaning stop. Someone else was giggling. That was less disturbing, somehow, even though the sound was flat and without any trace of humor.

One of the technicians walked over to join us, clutching a clipboard against her chest as she approached. She stopped a few feet away, saluting my father. “Colonel Mitchell, sir,” she said.

“At ease,” said my father. “You remember my eldest daughter, Sally.”

“Of course, Colonel,” said the woman, and gave me a nod. “Hello, Sally.” If she thought it was strange that my father was taking me for a sightseeing trip in an isolation ward, she didn’t say anything about it. Being the boss apparently came with some privileges.

“Dr. Snyder, Sally is here because she may be able to demonstrate a mechanism for testing for the sleepwalking sickness,” said my father, as calmly as if everything around us was completely normal. The sleepwalkers continued to writhe against their restraints, clawing and gnashing and striking at the air as best they could. I shrank a bit farther down into myself. He couldn’t really want me to go
near
them, could he? To
touch
them?

“Colonel Mitchell, this is highly irregular. I—”

“She saw the test at SymboGen,” said Joyce. Her tone wasn’t one I’d heard before: it was the same mix of authority and arrogance that I heard from Dad when he was on the phone with his military contacts… and that I heard from Dr. Banks, when he was trying to get me to do what he wanted. It made her sound older, and scarier, like she was a part of the establishment.

Which, technically, I suppose she was.

Joyce continued: “This is the first lead we’ve had toward finding a physical sign of infection. We know these people are ill. If they show as positive on Sally’s test, we can begin testing asymptomatic individuals. This could put our preventative measures forward by a matter of weeks, if not months.”

“I don’t want to do this,” I whispered. My voice was barely audible, even to myself.

My father looked at me. There was a cold sympathy in his eyes, like he understood my dilemma, and even cared about it, but couldn’t justify doing any more than that. “I know you don’t, Sally,” he said calmly. “The trouble is, you don’t have a choice. Your country needs you.”

My country had never needed me before. I shrank down farther, the sound of drums pounding in my ears.

Dr. Snyder nodded once, accepting her orders, and asked, “What will you need?”

“Sally?”

I glanced up again and said, “A UV wand, and someone to dim the lights. Not all the way, just enough that we can see bioluminescence.”

“Of course.” Dr. Snyder turned and walked away from us, presumably to arrange for what I’d requested.

“Pick a subject, Sally,” said my father.

They’re not subjects, they’re
people, I thought. I didn’t say anything. Whether they were people in the classic sense or Dr. Cale’s people who’d passed through the broken doors, becoming monsters, it didn’t matter. They were sick and confused,
and they couldn’t be trusted without the restraints. They would hurt us if we let them.

I looked around the room, finally settling on a frail-looking little woman who must have been in her late eighties. “Her,” I said. If she somehow managed to get loose, it was unlikely she’d be able to do much damage before someone could get her restrained again.

My father followed the direction of my gaze, and nodded. “That’s Ms. Lawrence. She’s been here for two weeks. Her family was quite relieved when we offered to take over her care and cover her medical bills, in exchange for being allowed to study the progress of her symptoms.” I shot him a startled look. He shook his head. “No matter what you may think of our work here, Sal, we try to do right by the people who come to us. We don’t have to. Their illnesses will teach us how to prevent hundreds more, and the only way to stay sane in this job is to treat everyone who walks through that door—or is wheeled through—as if they’ve already died. But every single one of us will celebrate the day that someone is able to get up and walk out under their own power. We’re not monsters. We’re just trying to do our jobs.”

He was calling me “Sal” again. I couldn’t tell what that meant. I just shook my head and said, “I want to go home as soon as this is over.” Then I turned and walked toward Ms. Lawrence, inhaling to make myself as narrow as possible as I edged between the cots with their squirming, moaning burdens. I did my best to avoid the biters, and didn’t go anywhere near the man who had pulled his arm free. If he grabbed me… I didn’t want to die the way that Devi had.

The thought of Devi made the cold terror curl through my stomach again, winding itself around my spine. These people were dangerous. Even restrained, they were dangerous, and all of them, even the frail Ms. Lawrence, were upset. I didn’t know why. That wasn’t going to matter if they managed to break loose.

Dr. Snyder met us at Ms. Lawrence’s cot, a UV wand in her hand. “The lights will be dimmed on your order, sir,” she said, offering the wand to my father.

“Thank you,” he said. He took the wand and passed it to me. “Sally?”

“Lights, please,” I half-whispered.

“Lights!” my father repeated, much more loudly. The technicians and doctors who had been moving around the room stopped where they were, except for the few who moved toward us, apparently wanting to see what I was going to do. Someone hit a switch, and the room’s overhead and ambient lighting decreased, slowly shifting us from artificial day into artificial twilight.

“Can someone get her arm, please?” I asked, turning on the UV wand. It hummed silently in my hand, the sound translating itself into a vibration that traveled through my fingers to my wrist. I swept the wand across the front of my shirt to be sure that it was working, and watched the fabric light up like something out of a bad special effect.

“How do you want it?” asked my father, pulling on a pair of plastic gloves as he stepped past me to the moaning, barely squirming Ms. Lawrence.

“Turn it so that the top of her hand is pressed against the cot,” I said.

He did as I had asked, and everyone was silent as I passed the beam above Ms. Lawrence’s arm. As I had expected, the roots of the parasitic infection responsible for her illness showed up immediately, bright white against the dull purple of her skin. They were thinner and less robust than the roots I’d seen on Nathan’s patient, probably because Ms. Lawrence was older, and had fewer resources for the parasite to draw on.

“What in the world…?” breathed my father.

The roots twitched, seeming to respond to the light that was shining over them. They didn’t move much, but they were definitely moving toward the light.

One of the thicker roots jerked toward Joyce. She made a small squeaking noise, taking a half step backward.

“The sleepwalking sickness isn’t. I mean, it’s actually a parasite, sort of,” I said. “It’s the SymboGen implant. It’s… doing things.” I didn’t want to tell them exactly what it was doing, in part because I didn’t understand it without Dr. Cale or Nathan there to explain, and more because I didn’t trust them anymore. Yes, this was my family, and yes, they loved me, but their focus was on the public health. It had to be.

If they were willing to scare me because they thought I might know something, what would they be willing to do to Nathan and Dr. Cale? What would they do to Tansy, or to Adam? Tansy was probably a sociopath—if a tapeworm in a meat car can be a sociopath—but she didn’t deserve to become a lab animal.

And none of these people deserved to be sick. I didn’t know what to do. I only had six years of living to draw on, and it wasn’t enough. I didn’t know what to
do
.

From the looks on the faces around me, neither did anyone else. Joyce was the first to recover, asking, “How sure about this are you, Sal? I mean…
D. symbogenesis
is an intestinal parasite. It can’t spread through muscular tissue. That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Nature doesn’t have to make sense. Nature just does.” I moved the UV light along Ms. Lawrence’s arm, causing more of the roots to twitch and writhe away. “What kind of virus could cause this sort of a reaction? If there is one, I don’t know what it is. But you’re the ones with the medical training. Maybe I’m wrong.” I looked up, challenging them to offer another explanation.

None of them did. Instead, my father let go of Ms. Lawrence, held out his arm, and said, “Check me.”

“Dad—” Joyce began.

“Just because I’m not symptomatic, that doesn’t mean I’m
not worth examining,” he said, cutting her off. “Sal, if you please?”

It had the feeling of a test. Still, I stepped toward him, holding up the UV light. “Just give me your arm.”

Next to us, Dr. Snyder was frowning at Ms. Lawrence’s unmarked skin. The roots were invisible now that the UV light was no longer shining on her. “It seems so strange that there would be no exterior signs….” she said, reaching out to touch the old woman.

What happened after that happened very quickly, and I didn’t fully understand it until later—until I’d had the time to really think, instead of just reacting.

Ms. Lawrence, who had been frail when she was committed to the care of USAMRIID, had continued to lose weight throughout her treatment; her overlarge hospital gown made that clear. They’d probably stopped tightening her restraints after a certain point, both because she seemed too weak to pose a problem, and because they didn’t want to hurt her. That’s why she was able to rip her left arm free of the straps that were meant to be holding it to the table. In a single convulsive motion, she had hold of Dr. Snyder’s throat, clamping down with a strength that I wouldn’t have thought her fingers still possessed.