Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (26 page)

“That’s what I thought.” He pulled his hand out from behind his back, aiming the gun at me. “You’re a wimp, but you
managed to outsmart me once. I didn’t even think to check the vents. That won’t happen again.”

I started to raise my hands in protest, but I was too slow. Ronnie pulled the trigger, and a small fletched dart appeared on the right side of my chest, followed almost instantly by the feeling of being stabbed. I grabbed it and yanked it loose, for all that it wasn’t going to do me a lick of good: I had enough experience with tranquilizers to know that the dart’s contents had already done their work.

“Please don’t take me back,” I whispered.

“I’m not going to.”

“Why…?”

“Because you’re the only person here who used the pronouns I asked them to use,” said Ronnie. He put the pistol away. “That buys you one ‘get out of jail free’ card from me. If you need another one, you’re going to be on your own.”

I took a step toward the edge of the roof, feeling a strange languor starting to seep through my limbs. Most tranquilizers don’t work instantly, but they don’t have to, because they’ll stop you before you have the chance to get away. Every step seemed to take twice as long as the one before, until finally my knees buckled and I pitched forward, my cheek hitting the roof for the second time. There was no pain. Unconsciousness closed over me like a Venus flytrap closing on its prey, and there was nothing left to hurt.

The sun was fully down when I woke up. I was lying on a couch in a living room I didn’t recognize. All the lights were out, and the air smelled stale, like the occupants hadn’t been around to move it in quite some time. I jerked upright and winced as the incision in my head reminded me that I had recently had surgery.

In a weird way, the persistence of pain was a relief. I didn’t
know how much time had passed since Ronnie shot me with the tranquilizer dart—hours? Days? But the incision still felt raw enough that it probably hadn’t been that long. It could even have been the same night. I stayed where I was for a few minutes, listening for any signs that I wasn’t alone in the house and waiting for my head to stop its spinning. Once I felt like I could stand without vomiting on the floor, I did, and promptly collapsed back onto the couch as my abused legs refused to hold my weight.

The first giggle escaped before I knew it was coming. I clapped my hands over my mouth, trying to keep any additional giggles from breaking free, but I might as well have been trying to dam a river with Popsicle sticks. The giggles came in a wave before giving way to full-out laughter, leaving me doubled over and clutching my stomach in an effort to keep from hurting myself. I was a captive, and then I wasn’t! I was someone else’s captive, and then I got away! Only now I was alone in an abandoned house where the air smelled like dust and mold, and my legs hurt so much from my escape that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do anything useful with them ever again. My choices were laughter or tears, and laughter at least felt a little bit better.

Once I had laughed myself out I cautiously tried standing again, this time gripping the arm of the couch for balance. My legs wobbled but didn’t drop me on my ass a second time. They ached like they had never ached before, and my arms weren’t much better, all courtesy of my foolhardy ascent of the ventilation system.

“But it worked, didn’t it?” I said aloud, and giggled again—nervously this time—at the sound of my own voice. It seemed too big in this empty, dusty room. Big sounds were dangerous. I knew that instinctively, just like I knew that I needed to get out of here as soon as I feasibly could.

The living room boasted a large picture window covered only by gauzy curtains, and the clearly artificial glare from
the streetlights outside came in through the sheer fabric, giving me enough light to see by, if not clearly or well. I peered around in the gloom, making note of the major articles of furniture and the two exits. One appeared to lead deeper into the house, while the other was close enough to the picture window that I was willing to bet it would lead me to an entryway and then to the front door. I wasn’t ready to go outside—not when I was this weak and this unsure of where I was—so I turned and shuffled deeper into the house, moving slowly to keep myself from falling down again.

The hardest part was crossing the wide-open center of the living room. Once I had reached the far wall and had something to brace myself against, things got easier, if not exactly pleasant. I shuffled along until my hand dipped into another room, one that both felt and sounded smaller than the first one. I felt around, my fingers finally brushing the cool edge of what felt like a sink. The bathroom. Good. I stepped fully inside, feeling blindly around until I hit a light switch.

This was it: the moment of truth. Turning on a light in the living room would have been like sending up a flare to notify anyone nearby that someone was in a house that was supposed to be empty, but the bathroom window wasn’t likely to be visible from the street. Now all I had to do was pray that the place hadn’t been empty for so long that the power had been cut.

As soon as I flipped the switch the room was flooded with soft white light from the low-emission bulbs above the sink. It didn’t hurt my eyes as much as normal lights would have after being in the dark for so long. That was a relief. I fumbled the medicine cabinet open without really looking at the rest of the room. The shelves were laden with all sorts of things both prescription and non, including a full bottle of ibuprofen. I struggled for a moment with the childproof lid before it came free, abruptly enough that little red pills went all over the room. I didn’t bother trying to pick them all up. I just shoved six into
my mouth, swallowing greedily, before I turned on the tap and bent to drink straight from the faucet like a dog. For all I knew, ibuprofen was contraindicated after brain surgery, but since Sherman hadn’t exactly provided me with aftercare instructions, I was playing things by ear, and my ear said it would do a better job if it wasn’t attached to a skull that felt like it was full of wasps.

When I had swallowed away the last of the dryness in my throat I stayed where I was, bracing my hands against the edge of the sink and bowing my head as I watched the water swirl down the drain. My hair was still an unfamiliar distraction as it hung in my frame of vision, keeping me from seeing the rest of the sink. A single pill had landed in the basin, and was resisting the swirling water that threatened to pull it down the drain. It looked out of place.

Everything looked out of place. Something about that pill, red against the white, made me lift my head and really
look
at what was in front of me for the first time since I had turned the lights on.

The sink was laden with all the things that I would have expected to find in a bathroom—hairbrushes, straightening iron, toothbrush, toothpaste, and a dozen other grooming tools that Joyce would have been better equipped to identify than I was. There were framed pictures on the walls, and the medicine cabinet wasn’t just full, it was overfull, packed with bottles and creams and cosmetics. The house smelled abandoned, and no one had come to investigate the noises that I was making, but whoever lived here hadn’t moved away. They’d just disappeared.

Slowly, I turned to look at the rest of the bathroom. Everything I saw just confirmed my fears. The shower curtain was puddled in the bottom of the tub, having been ripped from its rod by someone who wasn’t being careful. They might not have been capable of being careful: the bathroom rug was almost
entirely the deep brown color of dried blood, save for a few splotches around the edge where the fabric remained plush and white. I stared at the rug for a moment, trying to convince myself that I was just looking at a bad dye job. The little splatters of blood on the linoleum and the edge of the tub made that an impossible trial.

The drums were beginning to pound in my ears. Ronnie must have brought me here because he knew that the original owners of the house were gone, either killed by sleepwalkers or joining them. How far had the infection spread while I was locked away? How much time did the human race have left?

I walked carefully back to the bathroom door, trying to tread as lightly as I could. Not only did my legs hurt so much that running would have been impossible, but any sound I made would mean risking an attack.

The hall was still deserted. I stood for a moment in the bathroom doorway, listening to the house around me. I didn’t hear movement. That was good; that could mean that I really was alone. The real question was Ronnie. Would he have put me someplace safe, or would he have left me in a killing jar to see what would happen to Sherman’s prize specimen when faced with real danger?

Almost unconsciously, I rubbed my still-healing wrist, feeling the stitches shift beneath the gauze. I could handle myself if I had to. I just didn’t want to do it if I had any other choice.

A house this well lived in had probably been occupied for at least five years, which meant the occupants might have installed an emergency services landline. I turned to my left, heading still deeper into the house as I looked for the most logical place to find that sort of thing: the kitchen.

The carpet underfoot muffled my steps, which was a good thing, except for the fact that it would also have muffled the steps of anyone who followed me. I kept glancing over my shoulder, squinting through the thin light from the open bathroom door
as I watched to see whether I was being followed. No slack-jawed shapes had yet loomed out of the darkness, but that sadly didn’t mean much of anything. Sleepwalkers weren’t clever—at least not if the ones we’d encountered thus far were anything to go by—but they moved slowly enough that they were basically ambushes waiting to happen, at least until the moment when they decided to attack.

My foot struck linoleum. I stopped, struck by the sliding glass door on the wall directly ahead of me. It was standing open, a bloody handprint against its surface like a tattoo. The drums in my head got even louder. That was how the sleepwalkers had been able to get into the house, or maybe that was how the original inhabitants had been able to escape after they lost themselves to their implants. Either way, it was a way out.

Would the sleepwalkers still be lurking in the backyard, unable to find their way past the fences? Or were they in the darkest corners of the kitchen, trying to make up their slow minds about what to do with me? I had to make a decision.

I chose safety. I crossed the kitchen floor as fast as my legs allowed, grasping the sliding glass door and yanking it shut. It squealed in its track, and I winced but kept pulling until it was snug against its frame. Then I flipped the lock, and froze, watching the foliage in the backyard for signs of movement.

There weren’t any. But nothing moaned behind me either, and so I did my best to set my paranoia aside as I turned and began searching for a working phone.

It was slow going in the dark. I didn’t dare turn a light on, not with the chance that the backyard was full of sleepwalkers, and so I worked my way around by feel. When I discovered the butcher’s block I pulled out a cleaver, holding it in one hand while I continued to feel my way along with the other. I’d be more likely to cut myself than anyone else, but it made me feel a little bit better to at least have the potential to defend myself.

Ten minutes later, I had found a bunch of half-rotten bananas
and a loaf of moldy bread, but no phone. I made my way slowly out of the kitchen, walking past the bright haven of the bathroom to the front of the house, where that big picture window now seemed terrifyingly exposed to a night that contained who-knows-what. My search turned up no phone here either. I winced. Apparently, my choices were staying in the house, cut off but potentially safe, or going out into the world with no idea where I was or how far I would have to travel to get back to the bowling alley. I’d be able to see any sleepwalkers better if I waited for daylight, but sleepwalkers had to sleep too. Were they more or less active during the day?

I didn’t know. Nobody knew. That was the problem: I was standing in a safe place, trying to make plans that would mean leaving that safety for a whole new kind of danger. Maybe I really was a wimp, but that idea didn’t seem very appealing.

There was still one door I hadn’t tried. I stepped through the other exit from the front room, and stopped. It was an entryway, as I had suspected. It was also the access to the stairs. That was more of a surprise, and for a moment I just stood there, contemplating the seemingly impossible task of convincing my tired, strained legs to carry me to the second floor.

If the people who lived here had been killed by sleepwalkers, they wouldn’t have had time to take anything with them. Even if there wasn’t a landline, there could be cellphones in the dark upstairs, little electronic miracles just waiting for me to find them and use them to summon a rescue.

I took a breath, gripped the banister, and began pulling myself, one agonizing step at a time, toward the second floor.

It took what felt like an hour for me to climb the twenty or so steps between the entryway and the upstairs hall. When I finally ran out of steps I collapsed forward, landing on my hands and knees on the plush carpet, and fought the urge to curl into a ball and cry until the pain stopped. Every muscle
I had from the waist down felt like it was on fire. The drums were pounding so hard that I was beginning to worry that Sherman had undone the surgery that was intended to keep me alive. Worst of all, there was no light up here: either the curtains were drawn, or there were no windows in the hall, leaving me in absolute blackness. It was like being thrown back into the vent, only this time I had no destination in mind.

When the tremors in my thighs stopped I pulled myself to my feet, picking up the cleaver from the floor, and began shuffling forward into the dark. I moved like a sleepwalker as I tried to avoid running into anything. My hand found a wall. I followed it to an open door. A search of the room on the other side—which was slightly less dark than the hall, thanks to a small window looking out on the empty backyard—yielded nothing. The next room was much the same, as was the one after it, until I’d searched the entire back of the house without finding what I needed.