Symbiont

by Mira Grant

  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.

  “Almost there, honey!” shouted Nathan. The words barely penetrated the fog.

  San Francisco is a smaller city than it seems from the outside, miles and miles of streets packed into a relatively narrow stretch of land. It’s possible to walk there for hours without ever seeing its borders. At the same time, if someone knows the territory, knows what they’re doing, and doesn’t mind violating a few traffic laws, it’s possible to drive across the city in less than twenty minutes.

  If there was a traffic law that Nathan didn’t break in those twenty minutes, I didn’t know about it, and my terror wouldn’t allow me to open my eyes long enough to find out. The car screeched to a halt, the engine cutting off, only to be replaced by sudden silence. The drums were still pounding in my ears, but the screams had stopped. It took me several seconds to realize that it was because I had stopped screaming.

  Cautiously, I removed my hands from my face and opened my eyes, looking around. We were parked behind Nathan’s—behind our apartment building, catty-corner across two spaces in a way that was guaranteed to alienate our neighbors.

  “
Can you move?” asked Nathan.

  I nodded wordlessly.

  “Good. Then let’s move.” He opened his door and jumped out of the car before slamming it closed behind him, moving with an urgency that I wasn’t used to seeing from my usually staid, scholarly boyfriend.

  My back was a solid knot of tension as I forced myself to sit up, undo my seat belt, and open the car door. I started to stand, only to fall to the ground as my knees refused to bear my weight, sending me sprawling. Nathan ran toward me.

  “Sal! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” I grasped his offered hand, using it to pull myself back to my feet. My palms and knees were stinging. Gravel had cut through my skin, leaving the heels of my hands red and raw. I laughed a little, wincing at the faint edge of hysteria in the sound. “Let’s remember to grab the first aid kit, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Nathan, keeping hold of my hand as he kicked the passenger-side door shut and started toward the building entrance.

  I let him lead, and focused on listening as hard as I could to our environment, looking for any sign that we were not alone. I could hear cars driving by, and the distant sound of sirens—but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. We were far enough away from the bridge exit that I couldn’t be hearing those sirens, and San Francisco is a city with a lot of sirens. Police cars, private security, ambulances, they all made up the constant background noise of the city. I was probably just hearing one of those, and not a sign that the crisis was getting worse in our immediate vicinity.

  A thin line of ice curled and uncurled in my belly, almost like a new kind of parasite. You don’t really believe that, murmured that little inner voice, and it was right. I knew the situation was devolving around us, and we didn’t have very long. Maybe pressuring Dr. Cale into letting us go home had been the wrong thing to do… but we couldn’t leave the dogs. They needed us, and unless the world was burning, that wasn’t a trust that I was willing to break.

  There were no moans on the thin, smoke-scented air. Even if the mob of sleepwalkers was spreading, it either wasn’t here yet, or it wasn’t attacking yet. We had a little bit of time.

  Nathan got the door unlocked and tugged me inside. I let go of his hand and took the lead down the hallway to the stairs. We didn’t even discuss using the elevator. The mob by the bridge had drawn the fragility of our situation into sharp relief, and the last thing that either of us wanted was to be trapped between floors if the electricity suddenly cut out.

  The stairwell was silent save for the soft clicks of our shoes against the steps, and the sound of Nathan’s faintly labored breathing after the third floor. Neither of us was in the best of shape, but at least my tendency to walk when I couldn’t get a bus somewhere meant that I did all right with things like “walking up eight flights of stairs.” By the time we reached our floor, his face had taken on a distressingly plummy cast, and he wasn’t talking anymore, just nodding when I looked back and asked if he was all right. I paused on the landing, my hand on the door handle, and waited for him to catch up.

  “I don’t think we should go through until you catch your breath,” I said. “We don’t know what’s up there.” Nathan’s building had a limited number of apartments per floor, and most were occupied by single residents or couples, rather than entire families. I wasn’t certain how many people we shared the floor with, but I knew that it was less than ten. That was a good thing, because most of them were also young urban professionals, the kind of people who thought that no price was too high to pay for the opportunity to avoid needing to take a sick day. The kind of people the SymboGen implant had been virtually designed for. If they had started their cascade into sleepwalker-dom…

  We would cross that bridge when we came to it. “My life made a lot more sense a week ago,” I said, almost contemplatively.

  Nathan looked at me, his hands braced on his knees and his black hair lank with sweat. It hung into his eyes, making him look disheveled. “I don’t think either of us has had a life that made sense in years,” he said. “We’ve just started noticing how strange everything is.”

  “The broken doors are open,” I said sourly.

  “Come and enter and be home,” Nathan replied. “Open the door, Sal. I’m okay to keep moving.”

  I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to tell him that we needed to take a few more minutes so that he could catch his breath and I could prepare myself for whatever was waiting in the hall. And I knew how much I hated it when people argued with me about my own assessment of my mental or physical state, so I didn’t say anything. I just nodded, once, and opened the door.

  The man standing on the other side was almost an anticlimax. He was barefoot, and his pants were unfastened, like he had been in the process of getting dressed when his thoughts became scrambled and unclear. His mouth hung slack, although he wasn’t drooling. There was no one behind him: the hallway was empty and beckoning, promising safety and lockable doors, if we could just get past the poor soul who was staring blankly at us.

  “Hi,” I said. It wasn’t a good start. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  The man twitched. Not a lot—I wouldn’t even have noticed it in someone like Nathan or Dr. Cale, who still moved like the living, all heat and suddenness—but enough that it was clear he was responding to my voice. His eyes refocused on my face, vague interest sparking in their depths. My breath caught, my lungs seeming to constrict like collapsing balloons. He knew I was there. He could hear me.

  “Sal…” said Nathan. His voice was low, marbled with amazement and fear. Amazement because this man knew I was speaking to him somehow: fear because we both knew what the sleepwalkers could do.

  “I mean, hello,” I said, eyes still on the sleepwalker. His ability to respond at all was incredible. Maybe he was a chimera, like me: maybe this was how the conversion process began in someone who was actually awake and not sunk deep into a trauma-induced coma. At any moment, his eyes might clear, and he might become a confused, amnesiac person who needed to be guided through his new life. The human who had owned this body was already gone, and I knew abstractly that I should be mourning for him—he hadn’t done anything wrong, not really, apart from trusting a company that could afford to buy hundreds of hours of advertising time that said their products were safe. But he was gone, and if one of my cousins was here now, I should take care of the living.

  Even more abstractly, I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to remain this calm if Nathan had been at risk—if Nathan had possessed a SymboGen implant, I would have been moving heaven and earth to get it out of him as quickly as possible. But this wasn’t Nathan. This was a stranger, and whoever he had been before was already gone.

  The sleepwalker continued to look at me, an almost puzzled expression in his glazed blue eyes. He moved his mouth silently, and the first gob of spit escaped, running unfettered down his chin.

  “I’m Sal,” I said, pressing a hand flat against my chest. “This is Nathan. We’re not going to hurt you. We’d like to help you, if you’d be willing to let us—” I reached my hand out toward him, not coming close enough to startle, but hopefully close enough that he would be able to recognize my offer of support as what it was.

  The sleepwalker’s mouth moved again, like he was struggling to remember how to form words. Then, in a low voice that was only barely above a moan, he said, “Saaaaaaaaal.”

  I blanched, starting to pull my hand away. That was when the sleepwalker moved.

  Like many of the sleepwalkers we’d encountered, he was fast: something about the flawed interface between tapeworm thought and human mind had removed the normal limitations imposed by the body. He didn’t know that he needed to be afraid of hurting himself. He just moved, lunging with an inhuman speed as he latched his hands around my wrist. I screamed, trying to pull away. It was an automatic response, offered without thought for the sleepwalkers that might be lurking in the other apartments on the floor, and it was louder than I would have believed possible, gi
ven the torn-up state of my throat. The sleepwalker clamped down harder. He wasn’t just fast, he was strong, and I could feel the bones in my wrist grind together.

  “Sal!” Nathan grabbed my other arm. Just in time, too: the sleepwalker gave a mighty tug and I stumbled forward, barely held in place by Nathan’s frantic grip.

  “Let me go!” I shouted, trying again to jerk myself free.

  “Saaaaaaaaaaal,” responded the sleepwalker, and pulled my arm toward his mouth.

  The feeling of his teeth breaking the skin of my wrist was like nothing I had ever felt before or wanted to feel again: intensely painful, and almost unreal at the same time. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening. It didn’t make sense, and so my brain tried to reject the reality of it, shoving it aside in favor of the pounding sound of drums rising in my ears. Nathan pulled on me again, and for a moment, it was like I was being torn in two. My shoulders ached. The sleepwalker’s teeth dug deeper into my wrist. I screamed.

  Nathan let me go.

  I whipped around as best I could to stare at him, too stunned to keep screaming. The sleepwalker yanked me closer, his teeth digging into my flesh until it felt like they were scraping against the bone, and then Nathan was squeezing past us both and running down the hall, one hand fumbling in his pants pocket.

  I realized what he was doing as he shoved the key into the lock, and I shoved my hand against the sleepwalker’s face, trying to break his hold on my wrist. I didn’t expect it to work. It didn’t really need to. It just needed to distract him a little bit, to keep him focused on me while Nathan got the door open.

  The dogs must have been waiting just inside for us to return. Nathan kicked the door inward, and Beverly’s long, low growl echoed out into the hall, followed by the sleek black shape of Beverly herself rocketing for the sleepwalker’s knees. Beverly was a black Lab that we had acquired when her original owner went into conversion; it had been her barking and growling that alerted us to the fact that something was wrong with him. Most animals hated sleepwalkers. Something about the chemical changes to the body that occurred during an invasive takeover upset them. Beverly took that hate to a new level.