Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (11 page)

“Nathan?”

“This is how everything falls apart, Sal,” he said, voice
slightly muffled by his position. “This is where everything breaks down. That man should have hauled us in—between the blood and the bridge shutting down, we’re too suspicious to be allowed to roam free. But he didn’t, because we looked like ‘nice kids,’ and you’re a pretty girl with big, sad eyes, and he didn’t want to do that to us. We looked too innocent.”

“That’s… bad?” I asked blankly.

“No one is innocent when you’re talking about infection, whether it’s viral or parasitic.” Nathan raised his head and started the engine again. “We’re not carrying SymboGen implants on the verge of going rogue, but we could be. There’s no way to look at a person and know. So if we were carriers, and if the goal were to shut down the sleepwalker plague in San Francisco, our friendly neighborhood state trooper would have just ruined everything.”

“Everyone’s a carrier,” I said. “You’re being really hard on him. He let us go.”

“Everyone’s a
potential
carrier. There will always be outliers, like you, but it seems like most sleepwalkers are triggered by getting near another sleepwalker. The pheromone tags put off by the worms in their new state excite and agitate the worms that are still in a resting phase. The change isn’t instant unless the second worm was already in the process of attempting to colonize the brain of their host—it takes time to chew and slither your way through a human body—but it starts with that pheromone tag. That’s why Sherman could form a mob by dropping one or two individuals in key neighborhoods. That’s why Mom was so worried about us going out in public. There’s no telling how many people are already out there, putting off the pheromone tags that say ‘it’s time to move,’ and haven’t yet started showing symptoms.”

“You’re making it sound like you
wanted
him to arrest us,” I snapped. “Because that would keep us and our scary pheromones away from the people who aren’t sick yet. Only you
can’t be putting off those pheromones, since you never got an implant, and I…” I stopped, a sick feeling spreading through my stomach. “Nathan, are you saying this is all my fault?”

“No,” he said hurriedly. “No, I’m not saying that at all. I talked to Mom, at length, about the differences between chimera and sleepwalkers, because I knew I’d need to explain them to you—and I really think I should do as much of it as I can. Mom isn’t good at talking to people who aren’t geneticists.”

“You’re not a geneticist.”

“No, and sometimes she loses me. But you’re not giving off the pheromone tag that the sleepwalkers use to activate each other. She said it’s like comparing a can of spray paint to a master painter’s brush. You can get art out of either one, but one will tend to be much more focused and refined. The sleepwalkers are putting off a chemical stew that says everything from ‘hey, do what I’m doing, this is neat and you should try it’ to ‘eat here, here, eat.’ She’s still trying to analyze the specific pheromones that you and the other chimera put off. As near as she can tell, they say ‘listen to me, I am bigger than you, and you should listen.’ You may eventually be able to use them to accomplish just that. You may be able to make them listen.”

I looked at my bandaged wrist, the white barely visible through the gloom. “Are all the sleepwalkers going to listen with their teeth?” I asked glumly.

“Only the ones who are already too brain-damaged from the integration process to understand the message. I think they’re all going to want to be close to you. Some of them may even have the intelligence to obey when you give them simple orders, like ‘stop’ or ‘don’t eat me.’ But some of them are going to be too far gone, because the integration process involves far too much brute trauma to the host. They don’t have the superstructure necessary to process complicated information.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, hunching over in my seat. “This just keeps on making me feel worse and worse.
Every time I think I’m okay with not being human, you come up with some new fun fact, like ‘hey, Sal, you’re basically a bug zapper for sleepwalkers, hope that’s okay with you.’ ”

“I’m okay with you not being human,” said Nathan. “However long it takes for you to be okay with it, I will wait for you. We’re going to figure this all out together.”

“But you still think that cop should have arrested us.”

“Yes,” admitted Nathan. “At the very least, he should have questioned us more about why we’d decided to load ourselves and the dogs into the car when you were clearly injured, instead of going to a hospital. I think…” He took one hand off the wheel as he reached up and adjusted his glasses, and I suddenly realized the car was moving: had been moving for some time. I’d been so distracted by arguing with him that I hadn’t even noticed. Finally, he sighed, and said, “I think things are getting very bad, very quickly, and I think that officer knew about it. He made a threat assessment. He decided we were not dangerous. As luck would have it, he was right, and it was definitely the choice we wanted him to make. I’m just worried about how many times people will make that same choice tonight, and how many times they’re going to be wrong. It’s too late to stop the outbreak. That doesn’t mean we need to help it spread faster than it has to.”

I bit my lip again, frowning. I couldn’t make out the details of Nathan’s face, and I was glad; I didn’t want to know whether he was wearing his mother’s look of calm resignation, like talking about leaving people locked in what was about to become a plague zone could ever be interpreted as a good thing. The landscape rushing by outside the car windows was a bruised blur that echoed my mood: purple and gray and somehow threatening.

It was nice to know that a good scare that had nothing to do with being in a car could distract me from the fact that I was in a moving vehicle. Maybe I just needed to get a portable DVD
player and start watching horror movies whenever I had to go somewhere.

I wanted to let the matter lie—I really did—but there was one more question I needed to ask before I could do that. “How many people do you think are going to die?”

There was a long pause before Nathan answered me. “A lot,” he said, finally. “From both sides. I think a lot of humans are going to die, and a lot of the ones who don’t are going to take powerful antiparasitics and kill their implants—and they’d do it even if we had evidence that the tapeworms have achieved rudimentary sapience in their isolated state, and should hence be treated as thinking beings. People have fought long and hard to have the right to control their own bodies in this country. They’re going to view the implants as dangerous intruders. And the sleepwalkers… maybe there’s some kind of treatment that can give the tapeworms that have taken their hosts over a better existence, something closer to what you and Adam have, or at least closer to what Tansy has. But for right now, we have to treat them as if they were already dead.”

“Do you think that would work?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Most people—human people—are going to be very upset when they find out what’s going on. Even if there is a treatment, it might be a long time before it can be put into practice, if ever.”

I looked at him steadily, searching his face for signs of panic. “How are you so calm?” I asked. “I mean, I’m a tapeworm. I’ve been a tapeworm the whole time we’ve been dating. You’ve been having sex with a tapeworm. Your mother has been making more tapeworm-people just like me. Other tapeworms are eating the brains out of their hosts, and you’re still so
calm
.”

“I could ask you the same question, you know,” he said. “I’ve had days to come to terms with what you are and what that means about our future together. I already decided that it doesn’t matter, and that I want to marry you and be with you
forever, no matter what species you technically are. You just found out tonight, and you’re already playing action girl across the Bay Area. It’s not a normal reaction.”

“Tapeworm,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. I failed. “We don’t know much about invertebrate psychology. Maybe what would be a normal reaction in a human isn’t a normal reaction coming from me.”

“Maybe,” he allowed. “But you’ve always seemed to be following a human template to me. It’s been a slightly odd one—more than a little weird at times—but it was recognizably human. I think that once you became fully bonded to Sally Mitchell’s brain, a certain amount of normal human response became inevitable. It’s the form defining the function, as much as the function defining the form.”

I had to laugh at that, a tight, gasping series of sounds that made Beverly push her head back into the front seat again, concerned and checking to see what was wrong. I put a hand on her muzzle, pushing her back, and said, “So you love me even though I’m not human, because I seem human because I’m living in a human body?”

“No. I love you because you’re you. The rest is all details.”

“Scientist,” I accused fondly.

Nathan smiled, the expression visible in the light coming off the dash. “Guilty as charged,” he said, and drove on.

The parking lot outside the abandoned bowling alley that Dr. Cale had converted into a lab was dark and empty, looking more like the setting of a murder mystery than a sanctuary. It was at least partially an illusion: I knew she and her team had security cameras hidden all over the place, making it virtually impossible for anyone to sneak up on the lab. That was good. We were going to need that kind of security if we were going to be staying here for a while.

Nathan parked behind the bowling alley, where his virtually
new Prius stuck out like a sore thumb among the battered, rust-covered cars favored by the staff. Most of them looked newer than they seemed when I took a second glance; one more bit of visual chicanery to keep the local authorities from looking twice at the place.

“You get Minnie, I’ll get Beverly, and I’ll come back for the suitcases,” said Nathan, handing me a leash.

I nodded. “It’s a deal.”

Leashing two excited dogs who had been cramped up in the backseat of a car for the better part of an hour and a half wasn’t easy, but I’d been working at an animal shelter for years, and I’d never met the dog I couldn’t get onto a lead. Nathan struggled to get the leash on Beverly for a while before just handing it to me and letting me do it. I grinned to myself as I passed Minnie’s leash to him. It was nice to know that there was still
something
I could contribute to our partnership, even if it was as small and silly a thing as putting leashes on dogs. Everyone has their talents.

Nothing moved but us as we made our way across the parking lot to the bowling alley, which looked as locked and abandoned as it had the first time we had come here. All that was missing was Tansy, Dr. Cale’s bodyguard and effective head of security, sitting on the hood of a car and getting ready to shoot us if we looked at her funny. A knot formed in my throat. I never would have thought I could miss that little disaster waiting to happen, but it was wrong for her not to be here. She was supposed to be here, and she wasn’t, and that was because of me.

Nathan stepped in front of me when we got to the door, raising his hand and knocking briskly. Only silence answered.

“Do you think they left without us?” I asked anxiously.

“Not if Mom’s still in charge,” he said, and knocked again. When there was still no answer he started looking around, scanning the edge of the roof and door frame. “See if you can find a security camera.”

“I don’t know what your mother’s security cameras look
like,” I protested. “It’s dark and I’m woozy and shouldn’t she have let us in by now?”

“Not if whoever’s manning the door is waiting for a sign that we’re actually us, and that we haven’t led half the police in the Bay Area back here,” he said. “Look for something that looks completely unlike what you’d expect from a security camera, and assume that’s probably what Mom’s security cameras look like. She’s been doing this for a long time.”

“Right. So I should go and start trying to attract a pigeon’s attention. Got it.” I turned and let Beverly start pulling me along the side of the building. She had her nose glued to the ground, taking in a whole new world of smells. I kept my eyes equally glued to the slight overhang of the roof, looking for something that didn’t look like a security camera.

It turns out there are a lot of things that don’t look like security cameras. Rocks, for example. Wasps’ nests. Pieces of the roof. I kept letting Beverly pull me along, and while I didn’t see anything that looked like a camera, I saw plenty of things that absolutely were
not
cameras. We went around a corner, and saw more of the same. The next two sides of the building didn’t yield anything new.

“This is hopeless,” I said to Beverly, who wagged her tail agreeably. If I wanted to tell her a thing was hopeless, why, she’d be happy to agree, because I was her people, and if I thought something was so, then I had to be right. Dogs are good like that. We were reaching the corner that would take us back to where Nathan had parked the car, and so I sighed, raised my voice, and said, “Hey, Nathan, nothing out here—”

I stopped as we came around the corner. The bowling alley door was open, and a man was standing there, aiming what looked like an assault rifle at Nathan’s chest. Minnie was standing stock-still next to Nathan’s right leg, her head up and her ears back as an almost subsonic growl echoed from her chest. It wasn’t her sleepwalker growl, which would have been followed
by lunging and attempts to bite: it was just the growl of a good dog whose person was being threatened.

“Don’t move, Sal,” said Nathan, without looking at me. He had his hands up, and his attention remained focused firmly on the man with the gun. That seemed like a good idea. “I was just explaining to Fang here that we’re not trying to break in, we’re just trying to get back to my mother. Dr. Cale. Who runs this lab.” He pronounced “Fang” to rhyme with “long,” rather than like he was talking about a particularly sharp tooth.

He was of clearly Chinese descent, but taller than Nathan, with a shaved head and eyes that were narrowed in concentration. Only the lab coat he was wearing over his shirt and trousers broke the unrelenting blackness of his attire… and he looked familiar.