Parasite (Parasitology) (41 page)

Dr. Snyder flailed, knocking the UV light out of my hands. It went skidding across the floor as I stumbled back, stopping when my back hit another cot. The occupant was snarling and snapping at the air, trying to struggle free of his bonds—but either he was a more recent arrival or they had been more mindful of security where he was concerned, because his efforts to break loose were unsuccessful.

Joyce shouted something I couldn’t make out over the drums that were pounding in my ears. I jerked away from the cot that was half-supporting my weight, staggering toward the dubious safety of the wall, where at least no one would grab me. My father was bellowing for security—and that was something
I understood perfectly well. He was so loud that I could hear him even through the screams, even through the endless sound of drums.

Someone grabbed my arm.

I screamed and tried to jerk away, only to have the intern who was holding me pull me roughly back, away from the sea of agitated patients. “Ms. Mitchell, please! Calm down!” he said, continuing to pull. “We need to lock this room down, and that means all civilians need to be removed.”

I was too shaken to speak, and so I just nodded, trying to force myself to breathe as I let him lead me toward the door. I glanced back. Joyce was being escorted away from the floor by another intern, and our father was still in the middle of it all, trying to pry Ms. Lawrence’s fingers off Dr. Snyder’s throat. Dr. Snyder was barely twitching as she hung limply, half supported by my father, half by the gnarled hand of the parasite-infected old woman who was crushing the life from her.

Is this what you wanted, Dr. Cale?
I thought, as the sound of drums got louder and the scene started to take on a strangely unreal quality, like I was seeing it through gauze.
Is this where the broken doors were supposed to lead us? There are only monsters here….

Then, as calmly as if he were waking up in his own bed at home, one of the patients sat up. The restraints that were meant to hold him down fell away as he moved, split cleanly down the middle. Either the fabric of the belts had been frayed by the stress of his constant squirming, or his body’s new driver didn’t know yet about the breaking point of flesh and bone—it wasn’t playing gently with its toys. His eyes rolled madly in his head, jaws working as he turned toward us and slid to his feet.

Someone hit an alarm. Red lights began to flash as a siren blared from hidden speakers, alerting the entire building to a breach in the medical holding area. The intern gave me another jerk, away from the man who was now advancing toward us.

“Aren’t you supposed to be armed?” I demanded. “You’re the army!”

“Ma’am, I’m not even a doctor yet! They didn’t give me a gun!” He dropped my arm. “Run!”

I turned when he did, and I ran, following him toward the nearest door. One of the flashing red lights was above it, and I saw white, terrified faces through the door’s narrow window, looking back at us from their place of safety. Then the security slammed down, the door sealing with a loud bang that sounded like every deadbolt in the world being thrown, and we were trapped.

I turned to the intern, blindly hoping he could tell me what to do, but he was already running for the corner, leaving me standing on my own. I stared after him for a few seconds—too long—before spinning and flattening my back against the door, hoping that the people on the other side would take pity and open it for me. I’d take falling on my ass over having my neck broken any day.

What I saw when I turned back to the room was a horror show. The red lights flashing overhead didn’t help; they painted the whole scene bloody, making it look like we were in the middle of a slaughter. And then the jerkily moving sleepwalker somehow caught up to the first of the interns—and how could he move so
fast
, he wasn’t used to having a body, he shouldn’t have known how to make it work so well, he shouldn’t have been so
fast
—and grabbed her by the shoulders, burying his teeth in her throat. She screamed, a high, shrill sound that somehow rose above the alarms for a single horrifying second before it stopped as abruptly as it had started, cut off by the severing of her trachea. The cessation of the sound should have seemed like a mercy. Would have seemed like a mercy, even, if it hadn’t been followed by the sudden red gush of arterial blood that poured from the wound his teeth had made.

As for the sleepwalker, he stood there for a few moments,
swaying, clutching the twitching, half-dead intern like a teddy bear. Then his arms unlocked, and she fell limply to the ground as he straightened and looked around the room for another target.

The drums were pounding in my ears again. I pressed myself harder against the closed door, praying that his gaze wouldn’t fall on me.
Please don’t see me
, I thought.
Please, please don’t see me. I’m sorry I kept secrets from my father. I’m sorry I didn’t tell him everything Dr. Cale told me. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry….

The swaying sleepwalker’s gaze fell on me, a sudden sharpness coming into his eyes. I swallowed, glancing frantically around for a place to run. Ms. Lawrence was still latched onto Dr. Snyder’s throat. Dad was no longer trying to pry her loose. Instead, he had pulled the gun from his belt and backed away two steps, taking careful aim on the seemingly frail old woman with the unbreakable grip.

I wanted to look away when he pulled the trigger.

I couldn’t.

Ms. Lawrence collapsed in a bloody heap, just like the intern whose throat had been ripped out by the man who was now advancing on my position. Dr. Snyder collapsed as well, crumpling to the floor. My father, with his first and most immediate crisis handled, turned to scan the room. I wasn’t screaming; he didn’t know where I was, and he had two daughters to worry about, not just one. So maybe it shouldn’t have felt like such a betrayal when he turned away from me, scanning the far side of the room for Joyce before he did anything else.

But it did.

I didn’t have much time to dwell on it. One of the security guards who’d been locked in with us when USAMRIID decided to close the doors finally shook off her shock, drawing her own weapon and advancing on the standing sleepwalker.

“Put your hands up and stay where you are,” she commanded, her words barely audible above the roar of the sirens and the pounding of the drums.

They were audible enough to catch the sleepwalker’s attention. His head swiveled slowly toward her, and the rest of his body followed suit. Each movement seemed to take an eon, but he had fully turned before she could take another two steps. He made a strange growling sound, baring his teeth at her. Blood and strands of flesh coated them, making the gesture even more horrifying.

The guard was smart enough to stop moving and hold her ground, bracing her drawn pistol against the heel of her free hand for stability. “Do not move,” she said, more loudly than before.

Too loudly. In the chaos, no one had been paying much attention to the sleepwalkers who were still bound, preferring to focus on the immediate threats presented by Ms. Lawrence and the bloody-faced man. The shortsightedness of this approach was made horribly apparent as two more of the supposedly secure patients abruptly sat up on their cots. One of them was right behind the guard.

She didn’t even have time to scream before her throat was crushed. But I had time to scream. I had
plenty
of time to scream, and so I did, long and loud. It was enough to carry over both the sirens and the pounding of the drums.

Every head in the room turned toward me. The three sleepwalkers who were currently free of their restraints repeated the bloody man’s strange full-body turn, their shoulders following their heads like they hadn’t figured out how to work them independently yet. I screamed again. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Sally!” shouted Joyce from the other side of the room. I glanced in her direction. Her wide, terrified eyes stood out even in the red-washed room, making her seem younger than she really was. She couldn’t save me. She knew it, and as I looked into her face, so did I.

“Sal!” bellowed our father, and began wading through the
tethered sleepwalkers, kicking and shoving their cots out of the way. I wanted to tell him not to do that; I wanted to point out that three of them had already broken loose—four, if you counted Ms. Lawrence. But there were no words left in me. There was only screaming.

Then the sleepwalkers, all three of them, stopped moving. Their blank gazes fell on me, seeming to have an almost physical weight. The sirens faded to nothingness as the drums got even louder, hammering in my ears until my whole head was pounding. There was an air of unreality to the whole scene, like I was dreaming.

Please let me be dreaming
, I thought.

Then the man with the bloody chin opened his mouth, sighed, and moaned, “Sah-lee.”

As with Chave before him, he seemed almost physically hurt by the act of saying my name, like those two syllables had been ripped out of his throat. He took a step forward, dead eyes remaining fixed on my face.

“Sah-lee,” he repeated.

The other sleepwalkers took up the chant, each of them saying my name in the same broken way. They weren’t speaking in unison. That would almost have been better. It wouldn’t have forced me to acknowledge how
many
of them there were. Even the ones who were still strapped down joined in the horrible chorus, some speaking so slowly they were barely comprehensible, while others sounded like normal people.

I stopped screaming and stared at the sleepwalkers. My father was shouting somewhere in the room, his words drowned out by their slow, droning syllables and the pounding of the drums. Somehow, the drums were louder than the sirens and quieter than those broken, disconnected voices at the same time. It didn’t make any sense.

Nothing made any sense.

The sleepwalker at the head of the group took another step
toward me. “Sah-lee,” he said, the syllables sounding less like moans and more like speech with every instant that passed. He sounded… sad.

I blinked at him, trying to make sense of it all. The sirens blared, beginning to make themselves heard again above the pounding of the drums. The red light bathed everything in a ruby glow, like something out of a fairy tale. I took a breath, unsure whether I was going to answer him or start screaming again.

The bullet hole that suddenly appeared in the middle of his forehead answered the question for me. I screamed again, and I kept screaming while my father rushed across the room, gunning down the other loose sleepwalkers in the process.

I was still screaming when the last of the sleepwalkers hit the floor. Then the door behind me finally banged open, and soldiers shoved me out of the way as they rushed into the room with tranquilizer guns in their hands. My father gathered me into his arms, barking orders and directing men with sharp waves of the hand that held his gun. I kept screaming. It seemed like the most sensible thing to do. It seemed like the
only
thing to do.

The needle bit into the side of my neck, and I kept screaming until the darkness, and the sound of drums, reached up to take me down.

Everything after that was silence.

You know what I find really interesting about the people who want to ask about the “consequences” of what they consider to be me and my company playing God? They’re never the ones refusing medical care. They’re never the ones saying “No thank you, Doctor, I’d rather be on insulin and taking inefficient medications in pill form and dealing with the possible side effects of increasingly ineffective antibiotics than have something living inside me.” They’re never the ones who refuse the implant on moral or religious grounds.

No, the people who say the SymboGen Intestinal Bodyguard™ is somehow morally wrong are always the ones whose implants are securely in place and wouldn’t be impacted by any new regulations. They’re the ones with dependable medical care, for whom the hygiene hypothesis was always an interesting theory held at bay by their physicians and their medications.

They’re the ones with nothing to lose. The people with everything to lose, the ones whose lives have been transformed by
D. symbogenesis?
They’re the ones who stand up and say “No” when legislation is proposed that would make us and what we do illegal. They’re the ones who keep us going.

They’re the ones this is all for.

—FROM “KING OF THE WORMS,” AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. STEVEN BANKS, CO-FOUNDER OF SYMBOGEN. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN
ROLLING STONE
, FEBRUARY 2027.