Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (5 page)

“If this
was
Sherman, how is he activating the sleepwalkers?” asked Nathan. “What mechanism is he using?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Dr. Cale. “But I will. Trust me on that. I will.”

“My head hurts,” I said, putting one hand against my temple. It felt surprisingly fragile now, like I was carrying around my brain and my body in an eggshell, one that could smash open and spill me on the floor at any moment. “I want to go home.”

Dr. Cale actually looked alarmed. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you do that.”

“What?” I lowered my hand, staring at her. “What do you mean, you can’t let me do that? I want to go home. Why is that so difficult?”

“Because SymboGen’s security is going to be looking for you by now, and Tansy still isn’t back,” said Dr. Cale. “It’s not safe for you to go out without someone to keep an eye on you. The sleepwalker activity in San Francisco is rather extreme right now.” She shot a meaningful look to Nathan, who frowned and looked away.

I scowled at the both of them. “You didn’t mention my—I mean, Sally’s father, who’s probably looking for me by now, especially if that treatment we suggested for Joyce didn’t work, and did I mention that I don’t
care
what you think? I want to go home. Beverly and Minnie need to be let out, or they’re going to destroy the apartment.”

“Beverly and Minnie?” asked Dr. Cale blankly.

“Our dogs,” said Nathan. “Sal’s right, Mom. Even if it’s not
safe for us to stay in the apartment anymore, we can’t leave the dogs alone there. They’ll run out of food and water, and I’m not willing to do that to them.”

Beverly and Minnie were rescues, casualties of the same epidemic that had claimed so many human lives. Beverly’s owner was last seen in the hospital, sunk deep in the coma that claimed many sleepwalkers in the early stages of their illness. He’d been hospitalized when he lost consciousness, and he’d still been there when vital services began to collapse. I didn’t know whether he had died or woken up and shambled off to join his fellows, but either way, I wasn’t giving back his dog. Minnie’s situation was similarly tragic, and made slightly worse by the fact that Nathan and I had known her owners. Katherine had become sick and had killed her wife, Devi, who used to work with Nathan at San Francisco City Hospital.

Whether she was still trapped in the hospital or loose on the streets of San Francisco, I hoped that Katherine didn’t remember anything about the woman she used to be: I hoped her colonizing worm had wiped her original identity cleanly away. No one should have to live remembering that they murdered their own wife.

I shook my head vigorously. “I didn’t come here to be your prisoner, and I’m not going to stay if I’m not allowed to come and go when I want. I’ve already been through that with the Mitchells. If you’re not willing to let me go and take care of my dogs, I’m going to leave anyway, and I’m not going to come back.”

Dr. Cale sighed, sagging in her chair. “Do you understand that this is all about your well-being?” she asked. “It’s not
safe
out there, and from what I’ve been able to determine so far from the data you retrieved from SymboGen, it’s not going to get safer anytime soon. Things are going to get much worse before they get better.”

“How much worse?” asked Nathan.

“Ten percent human DNA,” said Dr. Cale grimly. “That’s an apocalypse number.”

“How soon?” asked Nathan.

Dr. Cale hesitated before she said, “I don’t know.”

“Then why don’t we compromise?” I asked. They both turned to me. “Nathan and I will go and get the dogs. We’ll be careful, and we won’t let ourselves get arrested or eaten or anything, but we’ll go, because we have to go. And then we’ll come back here. You won’t keep us prisoner, and we’ll be here willingly for as long as it takes to find an answer that doesn’t end up in the extinction of the human race. But you have to show that you can let us go before we’re going to agree to do that. You have to show that you’re playing fair.”

“I don’t see—” began Dr. Cale.

“Mom,” said Nathan. His voice was soft, but it stopped her dead. She looked at him for a moment, tilting her chin up to compensate for the difference in their heights. Then she sighed.

“I don’t like this,” she said. “You’re my son, and she’s virtually my daughter, in more ways than one, and I don’t like this at all. I’m supposed to keep you safe. It’s my job. How am I supposed to be a good mother to you if you won’t let me do my job?”

“How are you supposed to be a good mother if you’re choosing to be a jailer instead?” asked Nathan.

Dr. Cale didn’t have an answer for that. She just looked away, and said nothing at all.

Half an hour later, Nathan and I were in the front seat of his car, driving toward San Francisco faster than I liked, with strict instructions to turn around and return to the lab if we encountered
anything
that seemed threatening or out of place. “I can’t lose you,” was what Dr. Cale had said, as she watched us head for the bowling alley door. Adam was nowhere to be seen. I had felt—and still felt—guilty and glad at the same time.
I didn’t want him to see me go. Not with Tansy missing, not when there was so much reason for him to question whether I would ever be coming back.

I really hoped we’d be coming back.

Nathan’s attention was fixed almost completely on the road, and my attention was focused on keeping my eyes closed and my shoulders relaxed. If I allowed myself to think too hard about how fast we were going, I would lose my nerve and start screaming for him to slow down, slow down before he got us both killed. It was sort of funny, in an awful kind of way: I existed because Sally Mitchell had suffered a seizure and lost control of her car, freeing the way for me to colonize her brain. But the therapy—or I guess the experiment in psychological conditioning pretending to be therapy—that I’d been required to go through as part of my “recovery” had left me with a phobia of cars and car crashes that bordered on crippling. Had Sally been the one left in our shared body when all was said and done, she would probably have gotten her license back by now. I’d been essentially an infant, and any infant barraged with an unending stream of automotive horror stories would have developed a phobia just like mine.

Thinking about that made it even harder not to be angry with Dr. Cale, and with SymboGen, for the way they’d allowed me to be handled. I wasn’t a control group. I wasn’t an experiment. I was a
person
, and they shouldn’t have psychologically damaged me just to see what would happen if they did. Dr. Cale knew what I was from the moment I opened my eyes. She shouldn’t have allowed me to be twisted into something that I was never going to be.

She shouldn’t have let them try so hard to turn me into a human.

“We’re approaching the end of the bridge, Sal,” said Nathan, using the light, almost aggressively conversational tone he always affected when he was trying to keep me from
panicking during a stressful car ride. I was grateful for that consideration, even as I resented it. My boyfriend shouldn’t have been forced to speak to me like I was a child because someone else had taken it upon themselves to give me a phobia I didn’t need to have.

The resentment helped a little. It enabled me to focus as I forced myself to nod, keeping my eyes closed. The car was curving slightly to the left, navigating the bend in the exit from the freeway. We’d be on city streets soon. That would mean more traffic, more drivers to work around, but no big blue ocean underneath us; no threat of sinking to the bottom of the Bay and being lost forever if we took one wrong turn. The change would help. The change always helped.

Then I heard the sirens up ahead. That was all the warning I got before the car came screeching to a halt, the tires squealing against the surface of the road. The seat belt drew suddenly tight, the momentum of the car throwing me forward before flinging me hard back into the seat again. I shrieked, a high, panicky sound that seemed to steal all the air from my lungs. The drums were suddenly loud, not just beating in my ears, but
pounding
, thudding until they drowned out the world. I sank down into them, letting the sound wash over me until it felt like the panic was starting to leach away, dissolving into the sound and the thin red screen that suddenly blurred my vision, turning everything carmine and bloody-bright.

There was a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t want to think about it. Thinking about it would have meant admitting that I had a shoulder, and that it existed in a physical place where people could reach out and take hold of it. It would mean letting the world back in. I wasn’t ready for that. Panic had its claws in me, and there wasn’t room in the world for anything else.

“—please, Sal, you need to snap out of it.
Please
.” Nathan gave my shoulder another shake, digging his fingers in harder
this time, until I had no choice but to acknowledge his reality. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I can’t wait. You have to open your eyes. Please.”

I took a breath, the red scrim over my vision receding slightly. As it did, it was replaced by blackness, and I realized that my eyes were still closed. Once I realized that, it was hard but not impossible to force my eyes to open. First a crack—barely a sliver, barely enough to let the light come flooding in—and then all the way, blinking against the glare, the world resolving into a blurry photograph, splashes of color on a black and white background. I blinked again. The color came back. The blurs became people…

… and the people were sleepwalkers. An ocean of sleepwalkers, hundreds of bodies thronging in the streets of San Francisco. They hadn’t reached the bridge yet, but they were close; the exit was clogged with them, some shambling by almost close enough for me to roll down my window and touch. The sirens came from the police vehicles and fire trucks that blocked the intersection just off the bridge, their lights flashing and their doors standing open as the rescue personnel tried to do their jobs against impossible odds. They were trying to rescue the people. The people were no longer really present anymore.

I stared at the crowd, trying to find individuals among the weaving bodies. Age, race, gender, socioeconomic background—none of it mattered now that their implants were in control. A little girl shambled past, her mouth hanging slack, a runnel of drool charting a path down her chin to dangle above her chest. I put a hand over my mouth. These were early-stage sleepwalkers, nonviolent, confused but not attacking anyone. That was a good sign. It wasn’t going to last. Not with this many sleepwalkers in one area, and not with the tapeworm brains in the process of building fast, flawed connections to the human minds that they were trying to control. Eventually, higher
thought and human instinct would both give out, and tapeworm instincts would take over.

Tapeworm instincts only really came with one command. These people were going to start looking for food, and any unturned or unimplanted humans still in the area were going to be prime targets.

Unimplanted humans meant Nathan, who had never been given an Intestinal Bodyguard. “We have to get out of here,” I said tightly. The sleepwalkers couldn’t possibly hear me through the closed windows, especially not with the sirens going off so close by, but I still felt the urge to whisper. “They’re going to notice us soon. We need to drive.”

“They’re everywhere,” Nathan said, his voice pitched equally low. “Where do you want me to go?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. Nathan, they’re mobbing. Once they figure out what’s going on, they’re going to turn hungry.”

“Or they’re going to go to sleep. That’s what most of the ones at the hospital did.” He sounded hopeful.

“Only with the ones you found alone. Have any of the mobs stayed calm or gone to sleep of their own accord?”

Nathan hesitated before shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No, that hasn’t happened. But we don’t have that big of a sample set. We’re still finding different forms of interaction. It depends on the strain of
D. symbogenesis
that’s set up shop inside each of those people’s brains. Some of them are peaceful. Some of them aren’t.”

“Is there anything that could tell us what strain they’re infected with?”

“No.”

“Then
drive
.” I actually reached out and shook the wheel with one hand, ignoring the thin jet of panic it sent snaking through my belly. “We need to get the dogs, and we need to get out of this city. If it’s already this bad…”

“Sal, you’re not going to like what I have to do.”

“I know.” I pulled my hand off the wheel, closing my eyes as I shrank back down into my seat. “If I start screaming, just ignore it. Get us home.” I closed my eyes.

“I love you,” said Nathan, and he hit the gas, weaving around the milling bodies as he aimed for the gap in the barricade. He was trying not to hit them. He almost succeeded, although we clipped a few as we passed. I felt bad about that. Not bad enough to ask him to stop. Some of the police yelled and waved their arms, but most of them were too busy with the sleepwalkers to pay attention to the commuters who were just trying to get away. Things were falling apart.

If the screech of tires when the car stopped had seemed loud, the squeal of tires against the pavement as we accelerated was louder than anything else in the universe: louder than the sirens, louder than the drums, even louder than my pained screams. I clapped my hands over my eyes, turning the wash of red inside my eyelids into solid black. Nathan drove, and I screamed. That was how it had to be.

Nathan’s first turn took us hard to the right, toward Market Street. He picked up speed as we drove, until I had no idea how fast we were going or how many turns he had taken. I bent forward, resting my forehead on my knees, and screamed until my throat was raw as sandpaper. It hurt, and I tried to focus on the pain as I continued to scream, choosing that over the frantic, irregular movements of the car. We were going to crash at any moment, I just knew it, and when that happened, we were going to die. We were both going to die.

At least this time, it’s going to be
your
accident
, I thought, a thin line of rationality drawing itself across the black and red landscape of my fear. It wasn’t as reassuring a thought as I had wanted it to be.