Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (19 page)

“General health is good, but it’s unclear what she was doing at the hospital, and her arms showed bruises and recent puncture wounds, in addition to a stitched-up human bite wound,” said the first scientist, slanting a glare at her competition.

I wanted to scream at both of them. I didn’t make a sound. Instead, I folded my arms and just watched them through the thin plastic wall, waiting for Colonel Mitchell to say or do something. At least I’d learned two things for sure: I was being held by USAMRIID, and sound could pass through these bubbles. I still didn’t know what they were made of, but every bit of information was going to be helpful if I was going to figure out a way out of here.

The scientists stopped speaking, leaving me and Colonel Mitchell to stare silently at each other. Even if my file didn’t say Sally was his daughter, there was no way anyone could look at him and then at me without seeing the traces of his paternity. Joyce—his other daughter, Sally’s sister—looked like her mother, and Sally looked like her father.

Finally, Colonel Mitchell said, “Hello, Sally.”

“Hi.” I didn’t call him “Dad,” because he wasn’t my dad, no matter how much part of me still wanted him to be, and I didn’t call him “Colonel,” because I didn’t want the scientists to figure out what I was, if they didn’t know already. They probably
did. They might have picked me up thinking I was just another refugee, but he knew, and they worked for him. So they probably knew by now. Still, anything that could keep me off the dissection table for a little bit longer seemed like a good idea.

“You’re looking well.” He sounded uncomfortable. That was good. I didn’t want him to be happy and relaxed, not when I was being held captive in a giant plastic bubble and he was free to walk away at any time.

“I’ve had better days.”

He nodded, like that was an understandable answer. “Where have you been for the last week?”

“Has it been a week?” I didn’t have to feign confusion. As far as my memory was concerned, it had only been about two days since I last saw him. The other five days, if they existed, were missing, replaced by nothingness. “How long was I unconscious?”

“All healthy individuals recovered from Contra Costa County were kept sedated for a five-day period,” said one of the scientists, apparently relieved to have something that she could contribute to the conversation. “It allowed us to be sure you were as clean as you appeared to be.”

“The implants have shown the ability to go temporarily quiescent,” said Colonel Mitchell, shooting a warning look at the scientist. She flushed red, looking away. He returned his attention to me. “Someone who tests clean today can start showing protein markers tomorrow. Several of us have required multiple courses of antiparasitic drugs before we could be genuinely sure of being uncontaminated.”

Antiparasitics that couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier wouldn’t touch a sleepwalker, or a chimera. Antiparasitics that could cross the barrier would either be metabolized or cause anaphylactic shock, severe illness, and potentially, if the drugs weren’t discontinued quickly enough, death. It wasn’t a fun
way to go, at least if my own brushes with antiparasitic reaction were anything to go by. “Congratulations,” I said. “It must be nice to not be scared anymore.”

Colonel Mitchell winced for some reason. I frowned at him with his daughter’s face, arms still folded. He looked away.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“A secure holding facility,” he said, without looking at me. “You’re safe here.”

“That wasn’t the question.” Several of the scientists were starting to look unhappy about the way that I was talking to their boss. I didn’t really care all that much about how they felt. I kept my attention on the Colonel, trying not to think about the nights he’d spent in my doorway, keeping the nightmares away with his presence, or the times he’d done things that were more fatherly than scientific. He’d taken me out for ice cream, just the two of us, and we’d eaten dripping cones on Fisherman’s Wharf while we laughed at the tourists. Those moments had never been common, but they’d
been
, and it was hard not to dwell on that as I watched him stand there in his uniform, with me in a scientific prison.

“I know you’re confused, and I know you’re upset, but this is protocol right now,” he said finally, looking back to me. “You should be grateful that you were located during the early stages of the outbreak. Right now, we can afford to space you out and give you a little room to move. By the time this is all over, that’s not going to be the case.”

“What? You’re going to start a zoo for unturned humans?” I uncrossed my arms in order to gesture in both directions at once, indicating the rows of bubbles stretching out in both directions. I wasn’t lying, quite: I still hadn’t claimed to be one of those precious unturned souls. “You can’t keep us in here forever. It’s inhumane. There are laws against this sort of thing.”

“A surprising number of laws can be suspended when it’s a
matter of public health.” Colonel Mitchell looked at me gravely, his eyes searching my face like he was trying to find something he no longer believed existed. “This is a quarantine situation. Individuals without any sign of a SymboGen implant are relatively rare, thanks to the corporation’s increasing market saturation over the past few years. We need to isolate people long enough to be sure that they’re genuinely clean, and not Trojan horses looking to get into our protected populations. Once someone is fully cleared, they will be released into a less restrained setting. We’ve acquired a small town in Contra Costa County, relatively isolated by both geography and design. The inhabitants have either been restrained here or relocated elsewhere. I’m sure you’ll all find it quite comfortable there.”

I stared at him, momentarily at a loss for words. Some of the scientists were exchanging glances, like they weren’t comfortable with him telling me even this much. “Wait, you really
are
going to put us in a zoo?”

“An isolated environment where you can be protected from the current threat,” he corrected. “There’s no way of telling whether the SymboGen implant has become transmissible, and we need to protect the few individuals who have been confirmed as unaffected.”

This wasn’t working. He was feeding me a party line—maybe a little bit more of the line than he was supposed to feed me, but that could all be excused by the fact that I wore his daughter’s face. I dropped my arms to my sides, trying to look vulnerable, and asked, “How’s Joyce?”

His face shut down. There was no other way of describing what happened. It wasn’t the muscular death of the sleepwalkers, or even the sudden loss of muscle tension that came when someone fell asleep or was knocked unconscious: this was a simultaneous tightening and smoothing out, until there was nothing left in his expression that could tell me how he felt. “She survived the course of intramuscular praziquantel that we
gave her on Dr. Kim’s recommendation. There were some side effects, of course, but she’s still breathing. That’s more than I felt confident in hoping for when we began the treatment.”

The intramuscular praziquantel had been intended to target the SymboGen implant that was colonizing her brain. Nathan and I had known substantially less about the sleepwalkers when Joyce got sick. She hadn’t gone all the way into the “walking around, trying to kill people” stage, but she’d lost consciousness and been bad enough that USAMRIID had quarantined her. Dad—
Colonel Mitchell
, I reminded myself; he’d been Dad at the time, but that time had passed—had demanded that we help. We’d done our best, and it sounded like we’d saved her body.

It was a pity that I was pretty sure we hadn’t saved her mind.

I’ve never been good at concealing my thoughts. They played out on my face in real time, and Colonel Mitchell had had a lot of practice at reading me. “I doubt she’ll ever wake up,” he said. “The worm that chewed its way into her skull did a lot of damage in the process. The drugs did even more. She’s still on life support while we look for a miracle. Do you have a miracle for me,
Sal
?” He stressed the single syllable of my name, reminding me of who I was, who we were to each other. I stared at him, mouth falling briefly open in comprehension.

He was hiding me.

He’d known what I was all along, so he had to have known who Nathan’s mother was—he would have investigated Nathan as soon as we started dating. He probably knew we’d been with Dr. Cale, and how much information I had access to. He was hiding me from the rest of USAMRIID because he really hoped I had a miracle, that I could produce some magic equation from Dr. Cale’s lab that would mysteriously allow him to bring Joyce’s mind and body together again. He was a father who had already lost one of his two daughters forever, only to see a stranger put that little girl’s body on and walk it around
like a suit. He would do anything to save the daughter he had left.

He was grasping at straws.

“I’m in a bubble, Daddy,” I said. Several of the scientists paused, eyes widening. Apparently, the nature of our biological relationship hadn’t been known to his entire team. Well, if he wanted that cat to stay in the bag, he should have said something sooner. “I don’t think I can produce many miracles from in here.”

“Think harder,” he said. He didn’t say goodbye: he just turned and resumed his walk down the row of bubbles. The scientists chased after him, so many fluttering, white-winged birds trying to keep up with the leader of their flock. I stayed exactly where I was, only turning my head to watch him walking away. The occupants of the other bubbles pressed themselves against the plastic as he passed, waving their arms and shouting to get his attention. The bubbles had to be proximity-permeable somehow, because I didn’t hear any of them.

When Colonel Mitchell and his entourage had passed out of sight I walked back to the bed, crawled onto it, and stretched out on top of the covers. It was time to wait and see what happened next. I had every confidence that it was going to be something interesting.

I
must have fallen asleep at some point. When I opened my eyes, I found myself staring up at a twilit ceiling, all the lights having been turned down sometime in the interim. I sat up, rubbing the back of my neck with one hand as I tried to figure out exactly what had woken me. It couldn’t have been the change in the light; a gradual dimming would have made me sleep more deeply, not wake up. That only left a few possible stimuli.

Something moved in the dim hall in front of my bubble. There was a thick, meaty noise, followed by the sound of something hitting the floor. I sat up straighter, brushing my hair away from my eyes. There was another movement, but I couldn’t quite see what it was; it was like the plastic had gone cloudy, turning everything on the other side into a series of undifferentiated blurs. Then the wall began to melt.

It didn’t happen all at once. Holes appeared in the plastic, seeming almost organic in their progression. It was like watching invisible caterpillars chew their way through a translucent leaf. Once the holes had spread far enough, they joined together, and sheets of gooey bubble wall fell to the floor of my enclosure with wet splattering sounds. I watched them fall, fascinated. They continued to dissolve after they hit the ground.

As the bubble fell away, the body of the guard became visible—slit throat and all. I swallowed hard, watching the sheets of bubble foam and fade. Only when the last of the pieces was gone did I raise my eyes to my murderous savior.

Sherman’s smile was more than halfway to being a smirk. He clipped the spray can of solvent he’d used to melt my bubble to his belt, leaving his hand resting on the spray trigger. “Hello, pet,” he said. His accent was back in full force, which was actually reassuring. He wasn’t pretending with me. I liked that. He was wearing a smoke gray bodysuit that was distinctly not USAMRIID issue, and he had somehow committed murder without getting a drop of blood on him. “Thought you might like an extraction.”

I stayed where I was, seated on the bed, and simply looked at him.

Sherman’s smile gradually faded. “You seem to think this is an open-ended offer, Sal. I assure you, it is not. It took a good bit of work to jam their cameras long enough to get to you. If you don’t move your pretty little butt in short order, I’ll have to leave you.”

“Fine,” I said. “Leave me. Let me tell them what you did. I didn’t ask you to save me.”

“No, you didn’t. I did this out of the goodness of my heart—and that’s not a thing I do for just anyone. Hear that? You’re special, Sal Mitchell, you’re the girl of my dreams and I have to save you or I’ll simply die.” He held out his hand, making a beckoning gesture. “That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?
Now come along, we really don’t have time for this. And it’s not as if they’d believe you when you blamed me.”

When did I get so blasé about dead bodies? It must have been when I was taken captive by my host’s father, treated like a possession rather than a person. It wasn’t because I was adjusting to the idea of life as a different species. It
wasn’t
. “It would work better if you didn’t sound so bored while you were saying it,” I replied. “Where are we going? I’m safe here. I don’t think I’ll be safe wherever it is you’re planning to take me.”

“True enough, pet. I’m going to take you someplace where you’ll be poked and prodded and stared at by people who don’t like you very much. But you’ll have opportunities to try and escape, and none of my people will shoot you in the back for running—unlike the people who run
this
place”—he indicated the warehouse with a sweep of his outstretched hand—“we have respect for our own kind. We don’t kill chimera.”

I glanced again to the body on the floor. “Just humans.” My initial nonreaction was fading, replaced by the coldness and the distant sound of drums. I had never considered panic to be a relief before.

Sherman shrugged broadly. “Can you blame us? They’d mow us down like wheat if they knew that we existed. Now come along, Sal. I’m not going to ask again, and I do have ways of enforcing your cooperation.”

“You mean you’ll drug me.” I finally swung my feet down to the floor and stood. “I’m getting really tired of that, you know.”

“Then you should stop making people feel the need to do it.” Sherman tapped his foot impatiently. “Are you coming, or am I sedating you? I simply need your answer.”

“I’m coming.” My plastic-soled socks made no sound as I walked across the bubble and out through the hole he’d made; I stepped carefully around the blood pooling on the tile floor. “I’d rather be someplace where I won’t be shot if they figure out what I am. But I’m warning you, I
am
going to try to escape.”

“You wouldn’t be my best girl if you didn’t.” Sherman turned and started walking down the hall, clearly trusting that I would follow him. For a moment, I considered defying his expectations. I could turn and bolt in the other direction: my experience at John Muir had shown me that a stolen lab coat and an “I belong here” attitude could get me a long way. Maybe I’d be able to find the exit. Maybe I’d be able to get away.

And maybe I’d find myself gunned down by some guard with more testosterone than training, and wind up bleeding to death in an unmarked hallway in a building I didn’t know. It wasn’t worth the risk. Sherman was the devil I knew, and I believed him when he said he wouldn’t kill me. He wanted a chimera-dominant future. We were an endangered species, and he wasn’t going to go out of his way to endanger it further.

I followed him.

We walked along the row of bubbles, each with its own sleeping occupant, until we reached a door in the far wall. Sherman entered a code in the key pad and the door swung inward, allowing a rush of cool air to flow over us. The other side was a long tunnel of white, with gently billowing panels of what looked like vinyl sheeting connected by thick plastic joints. It was like a hose that someone had turned into a walkway for some reason. The lights were very bright, especially compared to the dim room where I’d been imprisoned. I glanced at Sherman, suddenly nervous and seeking the reassurance that he had always been so happy to offer me.

“It’s an umbilical,” he said, grabbing my arm and yanking me forward into the open doorway. “It’s what has us connected to the rest of the idiots. Now walk, Sal. I don’t have time for this crap.”

“Where does it go?”

“
Away
.” He pushed me this time, planting his hand between my shoulders and shoving me hard enough that I stumbled for several steps. That was enough to let him follow me into the
umbilical. The door swung shut behind him, sealing with a clang. “Do you have any concept of what I risked to get in here, to get to
you
? You’re the only shot we have right now. I’m not going to let your neurosis be what stops me. Now move, or I’ll move you.”

His voice was cold, leaving absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would make me do what he wanted if I didn’t go along with it willingly. I started walking, and Sherman paced me, his longer legs eating up the distance with ease.

The air in the umbilical smelled of antiseptic and nothingness. It was the kind of non-scent that could only be achieved by feeding the ventilation system through so many filters that we would probably be safe from virtually any form of biological attack. Some of the rooms at SymboGen had smelled like that, and they had always been the ones that unnerved me the most. Their silence and their cleanliness had seemed oppressive in a way that could never have been achieved by good, honest noise and dirt.

“If God exists, He created everything in the world just to make a bit of a mess,” said Sherman, making me flinch. I hadn’t expected his thoughts to be such a close mirror of my own. His hand closed around my upper arm in a friendly hold that I knew could quickly become a trap. “Humans have been trying to clean up the world ever since they figured out soap and water. I think that’s what their Devil really taught them. There’s a lot of bollocks in the Bible about humans learning modesty and shame when they first sinned, but I don’t think they went ‘oh no, I’m naked.’ I think they went ‘oh no, I’m filthy.’ That was the true fall from grace. You can’t be a part of nature if you’re trying to be
clean
all the time.”

“You’ve read the Bible?” I asked, bemused.

“Not all of us got dyslexia from the integration, my poppet. I’ve been reading since I was eight weeks old.” He continued to pull me along. “You’re the only one of us to have that particular
complication, actually, and I doubt you would have if you’d occurred under lab conditions. You probably chewed through something that you shouldn’t have before you knew any better. It’s really a pity we can’t midwife ourselves into being, don’t you think?”

We were halfway down the umbilical now, with white, faintly ridged walls stretching out in either direction. My stomach gave a lurch as I suddenly realized what the tube-tunnel really reminded me of: It was like being a parasite again. It was like we were walking through the gut of a giant, passing from one end to the other to be digested or excreted at the whim of our monstrous host. I didn’t say anything.

Sherman seemed to take that as an invitation to keep talking. “Tansy got herself a host of psychological issues, but the majority of them came with the body, I think—the brain was too far gone before she got in there to start stitching things back together. That’s important to remember. When we fight them to a standstill they’re going to try to placate us with their old and infirm, the people whose brains have already been damaged one way or another. We can work around some things—we’re clever, in our way, even before we have a fat mammalian brain to do our thinking for us—but we can’t rewire a busted engine. Can you imagine a world full of Tansys? All of them delusional and violent and running around with no one to restrain them? No, that won’t work at all. It’s healthy brains or nothing. Hence the breeding programs. It will be
so
much easier with infants.”

“They’ll try to make it nothing,” I said, my voice little more than a whisper.

To my relief, Sherman seemed more amused than angry at my statement. “Oh, I know, I know. They’re going to keep fighting to the bitter end, because that’s what men
do
. What they’re going to refuse to realize is that the bitter end passed
some time ago. They’ve already lost. All that’s left from here is the messy process of birth.”

I opened my mouth to answer him, and he swung around to press his raised index finger to my lips, shushing me.

“Shh, shh, my pet, it’s time to be quiet now.” We had reached the door on the far end of the umbilical. It gleamed, black and secretive against all of that nauseating whiteness. “I’m going to open this and let us out. You mustn’t shout or scream or carry on, and most of all, you mustn’t try to get away. If you do that, I can’t protect you. And I know you don’t believe me right now, Sal, but I am your best chance of getting through this alive. Do you understand?”

I had trusted Sherman for most of my life. Even considering his recent betrayals, the habit of trust was strong within me. I forced myself to nod, slowly at first, and then with gathering enthusiasm, until my head was bobbing up and down with surprising force.

Sherman’s hand caught me under the chin, stopping me in mid-nod. He smiled and said, “That’s my good girl. I promise, this is all going to start making sense soon. Too soon, maybe. I did so enjoy your ignorance.”

With that, he let go of me and turned to key his access code into the panel next to the door, which beeped and swung inward, causing us both to have to take a step back. Somehow during the motion, Sherman got his hand around my arm again, and he pulled me with him as he stepped out of the umbilical and into the control room on the other side.

The first thing to catch my attention was the blood. There was so much of it, and it was covering so much of the room, which was small and boxy and lined with monitors, each one tuned to a different bubble back in the room where I had been confined. There was a long, low desk, and three men in military uniforms were seated behind it, still in their chairs. Two
of them were missing chunks of their skulls. The third—the bleeder—had had his throat slashed open, resulting in arterial spray that must have bathed the room in seconds. He was the only one who looked anything less than peaceful, although death had come before he had managed to do more than fumble for his gun and knock over a cup of coffee. The brownish dregs were barely distinguishable from the bloodstains around them.

Sherman’s eyes raked dispassionately over the three men before he nodded. “Sloppy work, but sometimes that’s for the best. Come along, Sal, we have places to be.” He continued across the room, ignoring the dead bodies. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They had been alive, and now they weren’t. They had been people, and now they were gone, just like Sally, just like whoever used to live in Sherman’s body—and also not, because at least Sally and Sherman’s host had left something behind. The ultimate organ donors. These men were just… gone.

I stumbled a little, but continued to let Sherman guide me. It was better than trying to figure out where to go next on my own. At least he’d been here before. That thought sparked something, and I turned to study him, frowning. He was clean. There were little smudges of dirt under his fingernails, and his skin had the healthy scent of a human male, rather than smelling of fresh soap, but he was
clean
, and his hair was dry. That third man had sprayed blood everywhere. There was no way Sherman could have killed him and made it to me without being drenched in the process.

“Who’s here with you?” I asked.

“What, you didn’t think I was working alone, did you?” Sherman flashed me a tight-lipped smile. “I haven’t been alone for quite some time. But it’s good to know that you care. Now come on. I don’t want to have to kill anyone else tonight.”

The little security room opened onto an airlock of sorts,
filled with hanging plastic sheets and industrial gray lockers. There was no one there, and I was glad. I had no doubt that Sherman would kill anyone who happened to get in our way, and I didn’t want to be responsible for any more deaths tonight. Three was too many.