Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (28 page)

Bit by bit, the image of a piece of paper formed behind my eyes. The numbers were blurry around the edges, but I could still tell what they were—I thought. I dialed quickly, trying
to avoid cutting my fingers on the damaged screen, and raised the phone to my ear. It was ringing. That was a good sign: that meant the cell network was still up. Civilization couldn’t have collapsed completely if the cell network was still up.

The ringing stopped. Silence reigned. I waited a few seconds for the person on the other end to say something, and when they didn’t, I said, “H-hello? This is Sal Mitchell, looking for Nathan Kim. Please, do you know where he is?”

“Sal?” Nathan sounded almost confused, like he couldn’t believe it was really my voice. I didn’t care. Just hearing him say my name was enough to dull the drums that had been hammering in my ears, reducing them to a distant background hum. “Is it… oh, thank God, Sal, is it really you?”

“I think so,” I said, slumping against the cool porcelain of the toilet tank. “I’m really scared.”

“I—” Nathan stopped for a moment. I heard him take a deep breath. Then: “I’m sorry, are you telling me this is Sally Mitchell? Can you confirm your identity?”

Someone else had to be there with him: someone else had to be making sure he checked on me. That was okay. Better safe and making it home than sorry and alone. “I don’t like to be called Sally,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough, so I asked, “Are the broken doors still open? I want to come home.”

Nathan laughed. It was a gasping, unsteady sound, and the only way I knew it was laughter and not tears was because it stopped. “You can’t be serious. You can’t really think we’re that easy to fool.”

“I’m not trying to fool anyone. We went to the hospital to fix the arteries in my head and then we got separated in the parking lot when I ran away to distract the sleepwalkers from eating you—did Daisy and Fang make it to the car okay? I hope they did—and USAMRIID took me and they put me in this big bubble inside the Oakland Coliseum and there were a lot of other people there and Colonel Mitchell wasn’t telling anybody
I was a chimera which seemed sort of weird but I didn’t want to call him on it in front of the men with guns and then…” I paused to take a deep breath, having run out of air somewhere in the middle of that long, gasping speech. Once my lungs were full, I continued: “Then Sherman was there and he broke me out and he’s been keeping me prisoner while he took samples from me all sorts of samples like blood and bone marrow and yesterday he cut my head open so I’m afraid he took samples of
me
, only one of his people helped me get out and I don’t know where I am but there’s sleepwalkers outside and I want to come home. Please come and get me and take me home.”

This time when I stopped talking, Nathan didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything. I could hear him breathing, and so I stayed quiet, trying not to pant as I waited to see what was going to happen next.

Finally, quietly, Nathan asked, “Why should I believe that you’re still Sal?”

I blinked at the phone. I had a dozen questions, and all of them seemed both equally important and equally frivolous. Finally, I asked, “Can Sherman
do
that? I know he’s been creating more chimera, and I’m not exactly sure how long he had me captive, but the first time I learned how to talk, it took like, years. Can he scoop people out of their heads and put new people in?” Belatedly I realized that I had just characterized tapeworms as “people.” I didn’t bother correcting myself. I was a person, regardless of my origins, and I was willing to extend that label to the rest of the chimera, regardless of theirs.

“You’ve been gone for over a month, Sal. We had to abandon the bowling alley after USAMRIID quarantined the area. Tansy never came back. Mom’s had Adam under constant surveillance since you disappeared. We didn’t know whether USAMRIID had you or whether you’d escaped, and there was too much chance you’d tell them where he was.”

As the first chimera—and the only one created from a first
generation tapeworm—Adam would have been invaluable to anyone trying to figure out how we’d been created. I wanted to be offended, but I couldn’t muster the emotional response. Instead, I asked, “How are the dogs?”

“Beverly howled for about two days, which was a problem, since we were trying to dodge the quarantine vans at the time. Minnie just took it in stride, like she always knew that you were going to abandon her someday.” Nathan’s voice was starting to thaw. “Sal, is that really you?”

“It really is.” I sniffled, relief washing over me and leaving me almost dizzy. I hadn’t realized how afraid I was that Nathan would never accept me for who I claimed to be until the threat was lifting. “I don’t know where I am. Sherman was keeping me in an old mall, and I don’t know where that was either.”

“We’re working on that,” said Nathan. “Fishy started a trace on this call as soon as it came in. Not many people use my private cell number these days.”

“So Fishy’s okay?” I put my hand over my eyes, careful not to unplug the still-charging phone from the wall. “Who else is okay?”

“How about I tell you about the dogs until we have a fix on you, just so I don’t slip up and say something if you’re being monitored by someone else’s people?”

I smiled a little. “I’d like that.”

“Well, Beverly’s started eating shoes…” Nathan began, and I sat quietly and listened to him talk about what our dogs had been up to, and began to feel like maybe things were going to be okay after all.

T
he sound of tires on the street outside made me stand and stick my head out of the bathroom, still clutching the fully charged cellphone in my hand like a talisman against all the bad things that were waiting in the dark. I’d been sitting silently since Nathan hung up, watching the phone’s battery bar slowly fill and wishing that he had been able to stay on the line. Apparently, it was unsafe to have too many connections going in or out of the new lab location; Fishy wasn’t the only person who knew how to trace a call. With the cell network on the verge of collapse thanks to neglect and a lack of callers, anyone who
was
still making calls was exposing themselves to all manner of tracking. By the government, definitely. But also, apparently, by SymboGen, which was still open and operational, and offering to “help” anyone who had been impacted by the sleepwalker plague.

According to what Nathan had been able to tell me during our short time on the phone, I’d missed the shit really starting to hit the fan by three days. That was the span between my disappearance and the first person to go into a sleepwalker frenzy on live television. That would have been a big deal no matter who did it, but that first victim was Paul Moffat, the mayor of San Francisco. He had been in the process of giving a speech about the crisis, one that was mirrored to the local public television station, less because anyone thought he had anything new to say, and more because he was a heavy contributor to their operating budget.

People started caring a lot more about what he had to say after he ripped somebody’s throat out with his teeth. That probably wasn’t the kind of attention he’d been looking for.

By the time somebody thought to shoot him, even CNN was carrying the footage of his conversion and subsequent attack. According to Nathan, that segment had aired on an almost constant loop for three days, and even Dr. Cale had put it on the main screen in her lab for a few hours, making sure everyone had the chance to see it. Then she’d turned off the screen and announced that while they were not abandoning the search for me and Tansy, they couldn’t hold off moving the lab any longer. Things were destabilizing too fast.

She was right about that, since by that point, no one really cared about the mayor who’d freaked out and eaten a few people. They were too busy worrying about their friends, their neighbors, their parents, their children… themselves. The warning signs had been there, and they had been ignored, one bellwether after another, until their weight became too great and everything came crashing down.

It took less than ten days for my cousins to incapacitate American civilization as we understood it, disrupting food chains, causing power outages and hospital shutdowns, and
in some cases causing the evacuation of entire cities. There were still news feeds and Internet reports coming through, but they got scarcer each day as the people behind them fell. I guess maybe I should have been proud of that, except I was a tapeworm who thought of herself as a human, and they were tapeworms who thought of themselves as tapeworms. We were on different sides, and whenever there’s a conflict, somebody’s going to wind up on the losing one.

I just didn’t want it to be my side, even if I still wasn’t sure what side that was.

Footsteps on the walkway in front of the house snapped me out of my brief reverie, followed by the sound of gunshots. They came quick and efficient, one after the other, like someone running a hand along a typewriter. Then the shots stopped, and someone began hammering on the front door.

“I’m coming!” I still couldn’t run, but I could hobble quickly. Two more gunshots sounded in the time it took me to get to the front door, which I unlocked and opened to reveal the wild-eyed face of Nathan Kim. He was wearing a black uniform I’d never seen before, and had an assault rifle in one hand. It looked out of place against the backdrop of my gentle, scholarly boyfriend. So did the bodies that were littering the lawn. Fang and a man I didn’t recognize were standing back-to-back behind him, their own rifles slowly sweeping the area as they watched for more sleepwalkers.

Nathan stared at me. I stared back. The world seemed to freeze for a moment, narrowing to a single point that existed only in the space between us. I couldn’t move. From the hungry, hopeful expression on his face, neither could he.

“This is great and all, reunion, true love, blah blah blah, but can you confirm that it’s really your missing girlfriend so that we can get the fuck out of here before we get shredded like piñatas on a playground?” demanded the man I didn’t know. “We
may have cleared this area, and my EMP blasts may have killed any bugs, but the gunshots are going to attract more playmates in no time at all. We need to roll.”

“Hi, Nathan,” I said.

Nathan swallowed hard, the muscles in his jaw clenching and unclenching before he said, “Hello, Sal. Are you ready to go home?”

“More than ready.” I stepped out onto the porch, leaving the door open behind me. If any of the original occupants were still alive—if they had become sleepwalkers, rather than just being torn apart by them—at least now they could come home. The broken cellphone I tucked into my pocket. It had Nathan’s number in memory now. I wasn’t leaving that behind.

“Mom sends her regards, and asked me to tell you she always knew you’d find a way to stay alive,” said Nathan stiffly. Then the stiffness melted, and he was putting his arms around me and pulling me close, into an embrace that made me feel like everything was going to be all right after all. The world could end and Sherman could plot against humanity and I could beat the stolen body of a teenage girl to death in her bedroom, and still things would somehow find a way to be all right.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to get caught. I just wanted to keep you safe.”

“Never apologize,” Nathan whispered back. He turned, lifting me with me one arm so that we wouldn’t need to break off our embrace. The butt of his rifle dug into my back. I didn’t care. We were almost the same size, and he carried me easily as he stepped off the porch and turned to face Fang, the stranger, and the car. “Can you walk?”

“I’m sore and slow, but I can walk,” I assured him. He lowered my feet back to the ground. I left my hand against his chest as I looked around the area. We were in what would have been a normal suburban neighborhood once, although the gunshots
hadn’t caused any of the other houses to turn their lights on; my worried impression of an abandoned city had been close to accurate. I could see shapes farther down the street, all of them turning and shambling in our direction. We weren’t going to be alone for very long. “Where are we?”

“Pleasant Hill, near the community college,” said Nathan. “There’s a mall nearby, but it doesn’t seem to be the one where Sherman was holding you.”

Of course they would have checked before they came to get me. Their safety would have depended on whether I was telling the truth, and whether I’d been left in this neighborhood as a trap. I nodded mutely, suddenly exhausted, and closed my eyes as I let Nathan guide me down the pathway to the car. I didn’t want to see the sleepwalkers staggering toward us; some of them might even be the parents of the girl I’d killed inside. The world was changing. We were all of us changing with it. That didn’t make it any easier to bear.

I opened my eyes when we reached the car. Nathan opened the door, motioning for me to get into the backseat. He must have seen my discomfort, because he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be riding with you. I just need to cover Fang and Fishy while they get back to their seats.”

That answered the question of who, exactly, the man I didn’t recognize was. I nodded and climbed in, scooting over until I was pressed against the door on the far side. Looking down the length of the backseat, I watched as Nathan raised his rifle and covered the other two men making their retreat. The pair split up when they reached the car, with Fang walking around to take the driver’s seat. Nathan got in next to me, and the sound of the door closing was the sound of coming home. I looked at him, eyes wide, unable to force myself to speak.

Nathan smiled a little. “I like your hair,” he said.

I laughed brokenly, and leaned over to put my head against
his shoulder as Fang started the car and we drove away from the place where I had been abandoned, the place where I had been saved.

Nathan talked as we drove, explaining what had happened with the lab. I closed my eyes, leaned my head against his shoulder, and just listened. It was all I’d wanted to do for weeks: sit and listen to someone who would actually
talk
to me. He was constantly touching my hair or shoulder, like he was reassuring himself that I was real. I didn’t mind that either. It kept me from needing to be the one who moved.

The bowling alley hadn’t been Dr. Cale’s first lab. The first lab had been located in an old supermarket, and was moved when word came that the people who actually owned the property were planning to have it fumigated and then torn down. The second lab had been a closed-down Costco with the gas pumps still out back, and had been abandoned after Sherman defected. The bowling alley came third, and it had been her base of operations for longer than anything else. It was perfect in a lot of ways, isolated while still being close to civilization, and best of all, owned by a shell corporation that used it as a tax write-off and had no interest in either refurbishing or demolishing the place. It had become a lot less useful when USAMRIID started closing in.

The collapse of most of the local social norms—and the evacuations of any “nonessential” buildings, like the mall where Sherman had been keeping me, wherever that was—had created the perfect vacuum for Dr. Cale’s team. They’d smuggled themselves and all their equipment out of Clayton through a series of tricks and double blinds that Nathan didn’t explain very well, or maybe I just wasn’t quite listening anymore.

And then he said a name that actually caught my attention. I opened my eyes, tilting my head back until I could see his face, and said, “You can’t be serious.”

“But I am.” Nathan smiled a little, like he was perfectly aware of just how ridiculous he sounded. “We’ve moved the lab, and our living quarters, to the Captain Candy Chocolate Factory.”

I stared at him.

He smiled a little more. “I see you’ve heard of it. I wasn’t sure. I went there with a class field trip when I was in middle school, but you missed the whole ‘middle school’ experience.”

“Will used to leave the radio on when we were cleaning the shelter, and they advertised a lot during the afternoon,” I said. “It’s out in Vallejo, isn’t it?”

Nathan nodded. “That’s the one.”

“And it was just… empty?”

“It turns out that keeping a candy factory open isn’t a major priority when the world is ending,” said Fishy, twisting around in the front seat to look at us. “It’s a nice place. A little weird. Smells like chocolate. I hope you don’t have any allergies.”

“Just antiparasitics,” I said shyly.

“I guess that would be a problem for you,” he said, giving me a frank up-and-down look. “You don’t look like a tapeworm.”

“Surprise,” I said.

He grinned. It opened up his face like a flower, bright and honest enough that I didn’t even mind the fact that he was showing off virtually all of his teeth. The absence of malice in his expression was enough to rob them of their menace, making the expression as harmless as a grin on a dog.

Fishy was a short, stocky man with broad workman’s shoulders and a full head of riotously curly hair that was currently skimmed back into a ponytail to keep it out of his way. His eyes swam behind the lenses of his thick-framed glasses, which were seated so solidly on his nose that they looked like they would be impossible to dislodge. He was wearing a black outfit that matched Nathan’s in cut and construction, but couldn’t have looked more different on his frame.

“You seem more like a human being than Adam does,” he said. “He’s a nice guy, but he’s never really seemed like a functioning person to me.”

I blinked at him, casting an anxious glance at Nathan before returning my attention to Fishy and saying, hesitantly, “Maybe that’s because I learned how to be a human by living with humans, instead of learning how to be a human by sitting in a lab surrounded by people who never forgot that I wasn’t really one of them?”

“Maybe,” Fishy agreed. His gaze flicked to Nathan, smile fading. “We good?”

“We’re good,” Nathan agreed. Fishy withdrew back into the front seat. Nathan put an arm around my shoulder and said, “We weren’t expecting your call. Honestly, most of the people back at the lab had written you off as lost. I think that I was one of the only people who was still willing to believe that you were alive—well, me and Adam. Adam never gave up on you.”

“He wouldn’t,” I said.

“Neither would I.” Nathan tightened his arm. “Everyone’s going to be a little jumpy around you for a while. I just want you to be ready for that.”

“I can be ready for anything, as long as you let me stay with you.”

Nathan kissed the top of my head. “I’m never going to let myself be separated from you again.”

“Good,” I said, and closed my eyes.

Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory was a Bay Area tradition, originally designed to compete with the better-known and more nationally established Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield. The Captain didn’t specialize in jelly beans; instead, he had made his name on chocolate and chocolate confections of all kinds, from cookies to ice cream. Instead of free tours, the Captain charged fifteen dollars a head, with a promise to make it up by
providing ridiculous quantities of chocolate and candy at the end—a promise that he had apparently kept, since people kept coming back. Captain Candy never became a national brand, although I didn’t know whether that was a matter of economic necessity or a matter of corporate choice. There was a lot of competition in the national chocolate arena, but in Northern California, Captain Candy was king.

The factory was built to serve three purposes at once, and it needed to serve them all well before it could be considered a success. First, to offer a candy-coated wonderland that would invoke thoughts of children’s literature and impossible dreams, available for rent at a reasonable fee. Second, to create the illusion of a factory that Willy Wonka would have been proud to own and operate, even down to the brightly colored scrubs worn by all of the employees. Third, to host the
actual
Captain Candy’s factory, producing hundreds of pounds of candy daily on an assembly line that looked exactly like every other candy assembly line in the world.