Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (45 page)

Running back to the rail, I gripped it with both hands, leaned over as far as I could without getting myself grabbed by a sleepwalker, and shouted, “Go home! All of you! Go back where you were! Leave! Go!”

It felt uncomfortably like yelling at a cloud to stop floating through the sky, and about as likely to work. Most of the sleepwalkers kept attacking the side of the boat, a constant, unyielding assault that sounded like a hundred men with hammers trying to beat their way through the hull. But some—not enough—stopped, tilting their heads back as they looked at me with dead, dull eyes. Anything in them that still understood language was slaved to their parasitic driver, and that parasite was responsive to the pheromones I was putting off. According to Dr. Cale, I was what all the sleepwalkers had been trying to become when they tried to take over their hosts, and that meant that they would listen to me. I’d seen it work at least once. Now I just needed to make it work
more
.

“You’re not safe! Leave!” I began waving my arms in a swooping, visually arresting semaphore that would hopefully not only hold their attention, but make it easier for me to spread my pheromone trails. The motion of the boat was also helping: it would blow the air past me, carrying the command I was trying to convey to the waiting crowd. “You have to leave! Go!”

“Now I know the girl’s gone loony,” said Dr. Banks, sounding more disgusted than anything else. “You can’t tell a worm what to do. You can just hope the worm doesn’t eat you up in the process of going about its wormy business.”

“It’s working.” Nathan sounded awed. I followed his gaze, still waving, still trying to get my pheromones into the air. Some of the sleepwalkers were backing away from the boat, pushing their way through the crush of the crowd as they moved back to open ground. Still more were pulling away from
the edges of the mob, beginning to slouch away, heading for the exit. “My God, Sal, it’s
working
.”

“Not on all of them,” I said, and waved harder. “Go! Go on! Shoo!”

Sudden light flooded the deck as we passed out from under the shaded part of the ferry launch. The dock still continued, and too many sleepwalkers were shambling along it, smashing their hands against the hull. Maybe one in five had listened to my desperate command that they withdraw… but one in five was better than none. Those were the ones who might be most equipped to learn how to subdue their violent urges.

The ferry began to pull away from the dock. Sleepwalkers toppled forward, falling into the water with a series of small splashes. Some of them clawed at the boat as they fell, trying to stabilize themselves, and still the others pushed their way forward, sending even more sleepwalkers to their deaths. The boat continued inexorably on, sucking sleepwalkers under in its wake. I made a small whimpering noise, clapping my hand over my mouth to keep myself from screaming, but I didn’t look away. We had done this, with our maddened race through the city to the waterfront. We were the reason these people were drowning. The fact that we hadn’t asked them to come didn’t make any difference. I owed it to them not to look away.

Nathan’s hand settled on my shoulder, reassuringly warm and steady. I leaned against him, and together the two of us watched the sleepwalkers fall, until the end of the dock appeared and we sailed onward, out of the darkness and into the uncertainty of the light.

T
he air was thick with sea spray, making it almost like we were sailing through a salty mist, even though the water was open on all sides. It had been long enough since the crisis began that any ships that had capsized out here had been given plenty of time to either fully sink or simply wash away with the tide, leaving us with few obstacles as we cut a course straight toward the distant spires of San Francisco. We were all going to be soaked before we made it back to land. Somehow, that didn’t seem to matter very much.

After the excitement of getting through Vallejo, riding the ferry into the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay managed to seem almost peaceful, like it was the least of all the available evils. Sure, we were bouncing from wave to wave, sometimes with a force that made my teeth rattle in my head, but we weren’t being chased by anything. That alone was enough to let
me sit down on one of the hard plastic benches, slumping forward until my forehead rested against my knees, and breathe. Beverly curled at my feet, her head on her forepaws and her tail occasionally thumping against the deck. It was a small, comforting metronome, almost as regular as the drumbeats in my head, and it made it even easier for me to relax.

Soon enough, we’d be in San Francisco. Soon enough, we’d be past the point of no return, barreling into the future with no way back to the past we’d left behind us. But for right now, we could breathe.

Nathan sat down beside me, announcing his presence by resting his hand between my shoulder blades and saying, “Fishy confirmed that we have a full tank of diesel. We should be able to make it to the shore without any problem.”

“It’s a good thing Fishy knows how to drive a boat.” I lifted my head just enough to turn and peer up at Nathan through the fringe of my hair. “I guess we’d still be trying to figure out how to get across the water if he didn’t.”

Nathan grimaced. “As it turns out… this was his first time.”

I sat bolt upright. “
What?
” The motion disturbed Beverly. She scrambled to her feet, ready to run or stay as I commanded.

“He just told me. He’s never actually operated a real boat before, but he assumed the controls couldn’t be too difficult compared to piloting a remote drone around the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, so he didn’t bother to provide that little bit of data until after we had left the dock.” Nathan’s grimace deepened. “I would talk to Mom about her hiring practices, but since they basically boil down to ‘are you human, implant-free, and/or not actively trying to murder us, great, here’s your lab coat,’ I don’t think it would do very much good.”

“Neither do I,” I said gravely. With no more fanfare than that, I burst out laughing. Nathan blinked at me, his expression slowly fading into a look of profound confusion.

“I thought you’d be more stressed-out right now,” he said. “The water’s pretty rough.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t like being in a car,” I said. “We’re on a boat. If we hit something or flip over or whatever, I can just swim away.” There were almost certainly safety concerns I wasn’t thinking about, because I didn’t know what they were. The simple fact of the matter was that being on the water didn’t frighten me the way that being on the road did. The phobia I had been given as my penalty for taking Sally’s place only seemed to hold sway on land.

That thought was sobering in at least one regard: we were almost certainly going to need to steal a car or van in order to move through the remains of San Francisco, which had been hit even harder than Vallejo by the sleepwalker plague. Sherman had triggered at least one outbreak there that I knew of, and the nature of the implants meant that that initial outbreak would have had a domino effect throughout the city, impacting thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. We’d never make it to SymboGen on foot. One way or another, I was going to be in another car today, probably being driven by Fishy.

“I guess that’s true,” said Nathan. He glanced back over his shoulder. I knew that he was checking on Dr. Banks, who had been sitting as far from us as the layout of the deck allowed ever since we left Vallejo. “I don’t trust him.”

“Neither do I.” This was it: this was the moment where I could tell Nathan what Dr. Banks had said about me still being Sally on some level, just repressed and locked away by trauma and socialization. I took a breath. “Nathan, I—”

“Sorry to disturb you kids, but you may want to move to the front of the boat.” Fishy’s voice blared from the speakers set in all four corners of the overhang that sheltered us from the sky. It was warped and distorted, becoming almost
more crackle than words. “I look forward to your helpful contributions.”

Nathan and I exchanged a look. Then, without a word, we got up and made our way to the front of the boat as fast as seemed safe. The ferry bucked and rolled with the waves, making our footing less certain than it could have been. Still, we made decent time to the front of the boat, and stopped there, both of us frozen by the reality of what we were seeing.

The Bay Bridge was straight ahead, and it was packed with sleepwalkers. They jammed the lower deck, crushed up against the pylons that held the span in place. The fence designed to keep people from toppling off the bike path had been broken in several places, and sleepwalkers fell in an almost steady stream, vanishing with neither sound nor trace into the black waters below. There was always another sleepwalker jockeying to take their place, hands outstretched in angry need. It took me a moment to realize what they were trying to accomplish. I clapped my hands over my mouth, torn between pained laughter and angry tears.

The cables that supported the bulk of the bridge were alive with crows. I had never seen so many of the scavenger birds in one place. They were packed together until their bodies were almost indistinguishable from one another, ruffling their feathers and occasionally taking off in brief flurries of wings that were almost negative reliefs of the waves below. Black water and white foam met empty air and black bodies, flashing from place to place with arrogant slowness. They were
taunting
the sleepwalkers, driving them to unthinking suicide.

“Why are the crows doing that, and why aren’t the sleepwalkers eating each other?” I asked, baffled.

Nathan might not have heard me—between the roar of the engines and the crash of the waves, it would have been easy for my small voice to go overlooked—but he was asking himself the
same question, because he said, loudly enough for me to hear, “The pheromone tags must keep the sleepwalkers from recognizing each other as food. The current will carry the bodies back to the beach. Maybe in San Francisco, maybe the surrounding islands. Either way, they’ll wash up, and there won’t be any fight left in them. Easy pickings for an enterprising crow.”

“That’s horrible.”

“That’s nature.” Nathan turned. The window leading to the control booth was right behind us; I could see Fishy through the thick glass, still happily manipulating the controls that he had freely admitted to barely understanding. He hadn’t crashed us yet, which was better than I could have done. Nathan cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Just steer around the breaks!”

“Yeah, genius, I’m already on that.” Again, Fishy’s voice came from the speakers, which must have been installed for the convenience of the commuters who used to ride this boat to and from work every single day. It seemed like a singularly cold, wet way to spend a commute. “Here’s my question: what do you want me to do about the sharks?”

There was a long pause while both Nathan and I tried to puzzle through that statement. Then—again in unison—we walked back to the rail and leaned forward, peering out.

A body floated by to my right. It was a woman, her dead, empty eyes staring upward at the unforgiving sky. Then, with no fanfare and no immediate cause, she was gone, disappearing under the surface like she had never been there. I took a breath, preparing to say something, and stopped as the woman reappeared… only now she was missing much of her right arm, and as I watched, a flash of gray fin signaled the return of the shark that had taken it, coming back for more. The woman disappeared again. This time, if she resurfaced, she didn’t do it where I could see.

I took a big step back from the rail, shuddering. “That’s really creepy,” I said.

“That’s fascinating.” Nathan was still in his initial position, leaning so far over that he looked like he was in danger of pitching overboard at any moment. “There were probably some minor chemical spills when the luxury boats and such sank—a natural consequence of any emergency that leaves people with time to put out to sea—and that would have killed off a lot of the local fish. Sharks start getting desperate, and then they discover that the crows have established an all-you-can-eat cafeteria near the bridge. It’s elegant. Nothing goes to waste.”

“They’re eating
people
,” I said, in case Nathan had somehow managed to miss that.

“Yes. That’s probably for the best—if sleepwalkers are going off the bridge at that rate all day, without the sharks disposing of the bodies that miss the current, we’d be sailing into a solid mat of corpses.” Nathan finally turned away from the water. The salt spray had crusted on the lenses of his glasses, rendering them virtually opaque. “It’s unpleasant, I know, but it’s a good thing, honestly. It’s going to help us make it to land without any major difficulties.”

“I thought you were supposed to be the human one here,” I said, and turned, walking back to the benches without saying another word.

Nathan didn’t follow me.

It took us almost an hour to sail across the Bay, and that was with Fishy pushing the ferry’s undermaintained engines as hard as he could, squeezing every last ounce of speed out of the straining machinery. When we were maybe a quarter mile out from the shore he began to bleed off speed, and his cheerful voice blared over the speakers once again: “Lady, dog, and gentlemen, we are now approaching the Port of San Francisco, where I will attempt to park this boat without actually
destroying the historic San Francisco pier. If I fail in my attempt, you can be comforted by the knowledge that this boat was designed to absorb collisions without killing commuters, so we’ll probably all live, but we probably won’t like it.”

“Oh, yay,” I muttered.

Fishy continued: “Once we have reached the Ferry Building and, again, hopefully come to a safe and secure stop, we will need to refill the tank, as we’re basically out of gas, and may have to paddle the rest of the way. Thank you for sailing with Oceanic Apocalypse: when the world ends, we get you there anyway.”

The speaker clicked off. Dr. Banks groaned, offering a heartfelt “Oh, thank God, he shut up,” to no one in particular. I smothered the urge to chuckle. Laughing openly at his discomfort wasn’t going to do us any good, no matter how much I wanted to do it.

Nathan walked around the corner of the cabin, looking at me uncertainly for a moment before he came and sat down next to me. I reached out and took his hand, twining my fingers firmly through his.

“Do you know how to refuel a ferry?” I asked.

“No, and I’d be willing to bet that Fishy doesn’t either, but I’m sure he’s seen it in a video game.” Nathan squeezed my hand. “We’ll be okay. We’re almost there. We’ll get to SymboGen, we’ll get Tansy back, and we’ll go home. Wherever that is by now.”

“Your mom likes putting labs in recreational facilities. First the bowling alley, and then the candy factory. She’ll have to top that somehow,” I said, and giggled. “Do you think she’ll take over an amusement park next?”

“Roller coasters are a way of showing reverence to physics; she just might,” said Nathan.

“It’s adorable how you two delusional little fuckers think you’re going to walk away from this,” said Dr. Banks. His voice
came from directly behind our bench. I flinched and twisted to look, not letting go of Nathan’s hand. The unkempt, handcuffed CEO of SymboGen Inc. was standing on the deck between our bench and the next, leveling a malicious look in our direction. He rolled easily with the pitch of the boat, shifting his weight between his ankles and toes in a graceful motion that I would have needed weeks to master. Still glaring, he continued: “You’ll be lucky to make it off the boat. Even if you get a car, what happens then? SymboGen is a secure facility. You’ll never get through the doors. Not unless I help you.”

“You’re going to help us, Dr. Banks,” I said calmly, swallowing my anger and my fear and my dislike of having him loom over me like he had the right to think of himself as my superior. He wasn’t my superior. He hadn’t been for a long time, if ever. “We already went over this. If you want to walk away in one piece, you’ll help us get into SymboGen, help us get to Tansy, and help us get away. Then we’ll let you go. You’re our hostage now.”

“You didn’t raise these arguments before we left Vallejo,” noted Nathan.

The boat was making a slow turn, angling toward a steeple-topped building on the far shore. What I could see behind Dr. Banks as the shifting ferry brought the shore into view was heartening: nothing moved there except for seagulls and crows. We might actually be sailing into something shaped almost like safety.

Dr. Banks snorted. “As if I would have said ‘this is never going to work’ when Surrey was sitting right there, threatening to have me taken apart for spare parts? Your mother’s a real piece of work, Nate. She’s a real-life Frankenstein, and she’s going to pay for what she’s done to the human race. You might do well to remember that, and start shifting your loyalties appropriately.”

“Wow. Does USAMRIID have
that
many cameras pointed at the coastline?” I made a show of twisting around and peering toward the closest pier, taking advantage of the moment to scan for sleepwalkers. I didn’t see any. I also didn’t see any visible monitoring equipment—and when you’re fighting an enemy that operates on instinct, not intellect, why would anyone bother making their cameras or microphone pickups hard to spot? Subtlety was no longer necessary.

I twisted back to face Dr. Banks. “You’re already practicing your speech for when you sell us out.”