Symbiont

by Mira Grant

  The man who was trying to gnaw through my wrist might not have known much about pain anymore, but that didn’t make him immune to the laws of physics. Beverly slammed into his knees and he let me go, moaning in confusion as he struggled to keep his balance. The gash in my wrist was almost three inches long. Thanks to the way his teeth had broken through skin and muscle, the wound ran up and not across. Beverly was growling, and Minnie was barking from somewhere inside the apartment, and I was bleeding everywhere. So much blood.

  The sight of it actually helped a little. It meant I was on a time limit. I danced backward, getting away from him, and waved my arms in the air, trying to keep his attention on me rather than allowing it to switch to my dog. He staggered forward, arms outstretched, a moan bubbling from his lips.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and grabbed him by the hair, yanking with all of my might. The motion made the open wound in my wrist burn with new pain. But Beverly was still hitting him from behind, and with me pulling from the front, I was able to navigate him to the head of the stairs. He moaned again. I swiveled, and shoved.

  The sound of his body rolling down the steps from the eighth floor to the seventh, and then down to the sixth, was like a sack of oatmeal being dropped. Something snapped when he was about halfway down, and the moaning stopped. I stayed where I was, panting and panicked, my wrist bleeding copiously, and stared after him, waiting for some sign of movement. None came.

  Beverly stepped up next to me, leaning against my leg as she whined and tried to shove her head into my hand. “It’s okay, Bevvie,” I said, patting her automatically. It caused more pain, but not much; shock was starting to slide between me and my injury, blurring and soothing its edges. Blood loss was probably also helping. “You’re a good dog. You did good to hurt that bad man. Good girl, Bevvie, good girl.”

  Then Nathan was there, putting his hands on my shoulders and pulling me inexorably away from the stairs. “Come on, Sal,” he said. “I need to get a bandage on that before you lose too much more blood.”

  I nodded mutely, and went with him, leaving the body of the sleepwalker—the person I could have been, had things gone just a little differently during Sally’s accident—behind us.

  In the places time forgot

  What we are meets what we’re not:

  Every choice you’re making throws another choice away.

  Choose the passage, choose the task,

  Choose the face or choose the mask.

  If you choose correctly then, my darling, you can stay.

  The broken doors are open—come and enter and be home.

  My darling girl, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.

  –FROM DON’T GO OUT ALONE, BY SIMONE KIMBERLEY, PUBLISHED 2006 BY LIGHTHOUSE PRESS. CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT.

  The worst part is that I know everyone blames me, and they’re not wrong.

  There was a time when it was easy to make choices and say that history would vindicate my genius. I was standing in the present, and when you’re only thinking about today, history is always so far away. You have a lot of time to kill before history comes knocking and demands you live up to all those big claims you made. History is the ultimate thesis review board, and unlike the board that reviewed my thesis, history doesn’t take bribes.

  I always swore that I was going to do great things with my life, things that would change the world in a way that could never be undone. Well, I guess I got my wish. I brought an end to the Age of Mankind.

  Good for me.

  –FROM CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.

  Chapter 3

  SEPTEMBER 2027

  The dogs were as upset over the blood and screaming as I was. Minnie met us just inside the apartment, looking like she was on the verge of a canine panic attack—there was a certain brightness to her eyes and unsteadiness to her normally rollicking bulldog gait that I didn’t like at all. Both our dogs had lost their original owners to the sleepwalking sickness. But while Beverly had chosen to run away from her former master when his implant took him over, Minnie had tried to stay with her owners, and she had still lost them both. For her, this situation had to verge on the nightmarish, and there was no way to make her understand what was really going on.

  Then again, there was no real way to make me understand it, either. The science was all gibberish delivered by people wearing white coats and serious expressions; the fact that I was actually a tapeworm in a woman-suit made no more or less sense than anything else that had happened in my short, improbable life.

  “God, Sal, you’re bleeding everywhere.” Nathan let go of my wrist long enough to push Beverly fully inside before he turned and locked the door. Then he steered me to the kitchen table, looking back over his shoulder several times as he checked my face for signs that I was still with him. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t… I just didn’t expect to see him there. That was Mr. Bouman from Apartment 8C, down the hall. He must have found a way to open his door after he converted, and then forgotten it by the time he got to the end of the hall…”

  I tried to muster a response, but my fear that it would come out as a wordless moan kept me from saying anything. The world was starting to go black and fuzzy around the edges, swarmed by countless tiny dots of nothingness. It was like insects were eating away at the borders of my vision, and I was helpless to do anything but let them. I didn’t like that. I scowled at the insects. The insects, which didn’t technically exist, ignored me.

  I knew when we had reached the table less because I was paying any attention to my surroundings, and more because Nathan placed his hand on my shoulder and pushed me down into a chair. I didn’t fight him. Gravity was a simple thing, and it seemed better to just let it do what it wanted with me.

  “Sal, I need you to keep pressure on this.” His voice echoed.

  I blinked at him, and then at my wrist, which had somehow been wrapped in a dish towel that was rapidly turning bright red with my blood. He was pressing down hard enough that it should have hurt, and probably would when I took a moment to breathe.

  “Come on, sweetie. I know it hurts, but I need you to stay with me here. I need you to keep the pressure on while I get the first aid kit.” Nathan took my free hand in his and pressed it down on the sodden dressing. I did my best to mimic his motion, pushing down until there was an unpleasant squishing sensation, things shifting under my fingers that had nothing to do with the towel.

  Nathan, at least, looked somewhat relieved by my response. That made one of us.

  “Stay here; I’ll be right back,” he said, and then he was gone, disappearing into the depths of the apartment and leaving me alone to try to fight against my body’s natural desire to bleed to death. Minnie and Beverly stayed with me, their furry bodies plopped down to either side of my chair and their enormous brown eyes fixed on me, like they thought they could just wish everything better.

  “Should’ve designed dog,” I mumbled, my fully coherent thought—that the Intestinal Bodyguard should have been designed for dogs, which would be much easier things to be than humans—turning into so much gibberish by the time it finished making the journey to my mouth. I sighed and sagged in place, finally allowing my eyes to slide closed. The drums were there, in the silence behind my eyelids, although they were neither as strong nor as steady as they usually were. That was probably a bad thing. Then again, what wasn’t a bad thing, anymore?

  I must have blacked out. That shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, considering the combination of shock and blood loss that I was dealing with, but I was still surprised when I opened my eyes and found myself staring up at the living room ceiling, with a pillow supporting my head. I tried to sit up. A wave of dizziness assured me that this was a terrible idea, and that I should stay where I was for as long as possible. Maybe forever.

  I groaned.

  “Oh, good, you’re awake,” said Nathan. He paused. “Are you awake? If you’re not awake, just don’t respond. But I’d really prefer it if y
ou were awake.”

  I licked my lips, which were somehow dry and gummy at the same time. “How long was I out?” I managed to croak, and felt ridiculously proud of myself for accomplishing that much. Everything was still a little gray around the edges, but it was no longer in danger of being swallowed up by shadows, and I thought that was probably a good sign.

  “Two hours,” said Nathan. I heard him get up. His footsteps moved away, followed by the sound of the fridge door opening and closing. Then the steps returned, moving toward me with purpose. “I’ve been monitoring your vital signs. Your pulse has remained mostly steady, though you should have gone to the hospital, given how much blood I’m guessing you lost.”

  “No hospitals,” I whispered, alarmed.

  “No, no hospitals,” Nathan agreed. He sat down on the edge of the couch, setting something on the coffee table. There was a smudge of blood on his chin, and his hair was even more disheveled, making him look younger and lost. “It was killing me not to take you there, but given what we’ve seen so far today, I think it would have killed us both if I’d tried getting you to the ER. Not to mention the danger that the police would get involved.”

  Possibly forcing him to choose between leaving me there and getting arrested, depending on what story SymboGen was spinning about the break-in and theft of their data. I grimaced. “Thank you.”

  “No thanks needed. We’re in this together.” He kissed my forehead tenderly before asking, “Do you think you can sit up if I help you? I want you to drink some juice.”

  “I think so.” I took his arm, making note of the clean white dressing on my wrist as I did so, and allowed him to half help, half pull me into a seated position. The room swam briefly out of focus, and then swam back just as quickly. “Oh, wow. Oh, ow.”

  “Are you dizzy?”

  “A little bit,” I said, starting to nod. I realized at the last moment that it would be a bad idea, and turned the motion into a semi-bob of my chin instead. Even that was enough to make my head spin. “Everything’s a little gray around the outside.”

  “As long as it’s just gray and not black, you should be okay.” He picked up a glass of orange juice from the coffee table, offering it to me. “This will help.”

  “I’ve given enough blood voluntarily to know that orange juice doesn’t equal instant recovery,” I said, and took the glass. My hand was shaking. I willed it to be still, and once I was sure I wouldn’t spill juice all over the floor, I raised the glass to my lips. Sweetness flooded my mouth, almost strong enough to make me gag. I did choke a little, before forcing myself to keep on drinking.

  “The better it tastes, the more you need it,” said Nathan. He grimaced wryly, and added, “Except when it goes too far, and you feel like you’re turning into a hummingbird. And no, orange juice isn’t an instant restorative. But you didn’t lose enough blood to need a transfusion, thank God, or we would have needed to go to the hospital no matter how bad an idea that was. This should give you enough of a boost that we can get back to the car with the dogs.”

  “Thank you for not being willing to let me die in our kitchen,” I said, and took another drink of orange juice. “Has anyone noticed the body in the stairwell?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. The building’s been pretty quiet since you passed out. As for the rest of the city…” Nathan shook his head. “I turned the news off when I realized that it was just getting worse. We’ve passed some sort of critical mass of sleepwalkers. More and more of the implants are waking up.”

  I looked at him solemnly as I sipped the juice, trying to force myself to choke every last drop of it down. There was no way any of this was a coincidence; not with Sherman on the loose, not with his team of doctors dedicated to championing the cause of D. symbogenesis over the cause of the human race.

  I was almost relieved to realize that the thought that he was doing this on purpose made me sick to my stomach. I might not be human, but I still knew right from wrong. That was no small accomplishment, given the circumstances.

  “Sal? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t think it was just reaching a critical mass that triggered this,” I said, setting the empty juice glass back on the coffee table. Nathan was right about one thing: while I still felt shaky and weak, I no longer felt like I was going to collapse back into unconsciousness at any moment. “This is Sherman. He was so mad, Nathan. I think he really expected me to go with him. To just throw up my hands and say, ‘I understand now, I’m really one of you,’ and let him lead me to his secret lair beneath the city.”

  “If his secret lair is under San Francisco, the first big earthquake will solve this problem for us,” said Nathan. There was a brittle edge to his voice, like he was joking because he didn’t know what else to do. “Do you really think Sherman could do this?”

  “I think Sherman doesn’t consider himself human, and he doesn’t see dead humans as dead people,” I said. “He was pretty clear on that point when we were at SymboGen. He wants to be the dominant species. He wants us to be the only things that live here. And we know that sleepwalkers trigger other sleepwalkers. If you wanted to spread them through the city like… like a real disease, all you’d need is a few index cases to scatter around the streets. They’d go wandering and anyone they encountered who was on the verge of going over would succumb.” It was so simple, so elegant, and so horrible that I could barely believe that Sherman, who had always been kind to me, could possibly be behind it.

  But then, I’d thought we were both human in those days, and he’d been playing along with my assumptions, hadn’t he? It was easy to pretend to follow social rules when you didn’t really believe that they applied to you.

  “God.” Nathan got up again. This time the dogs followed him into the kitchen. He returned with the bottle of orange juice, refilling my glass before he set the bottle down on the table. He also had a package of Fig Newtons, which he held out to me. “Eat as many of these as you think you can stomach. If you’re right, and Sherman is doing this, we need to get the hell out of this city.”

  “He doesn’t know where we live,” I protested, taking the cookies.

  “No. But USAMRIID knows that there’s an outbreak in San Francisco, and they don’t know yet exactly how the sleepwalking sickness is being spread. They don’t know that lockdown is already a lost cause. If they decide to quarantine the city…”

  I blanched. My father—Sally Mitchell’s father—was a career army man. He had reached the rank of colonel before he retired from active duty and took over the local branch of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been releasing me from his custody in exchange for a possible cure for his daughter, Joyce. His only surviving daughter, I realized with a pang. She wasn’t really my sister. Somehow that was worse than knowing that he wasn’t really my father. Unlike Joyce, he had always held himself a little bit apart from me, and now I knew the reason why: he had known all along that Sally was dead, and he had been monitoring me to see how the tapeworm in my driver’s seat reacted. He’d turned his little girl’s corpse into a science project for his country.

  The only real family I was ever going to have was the one in Dr. Cale’s lab. We had to get Tansy back.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said, before pulling open the package of cookies and cramming two of them into my mouth, effectively ending my part in the conversation while I chewed and swallowed.

  “Yes,” said Nathan, looking relieved. “We’ll need to take the elevator down—I don’t think we can deal with both dogs and our suitcases on the stairs. Not with your wrist and a dead body in the way.”

  “What if the power goes out?”

  His expression turned grim. “Let’s just not think about that, okay? You eat. I’m going to finish packing.”

  I wanted to argue with him, to point out that being trapped in an elevator during a major outbreak would be a stupid, pointless, horror movie way to die. I didn’t say anythi
ng, because he was right. He couldn’t handle going up and down the stairs repeatedly, and that’s what he’d have to do if we wanted to get the two dogs and their things to the car. Adding our possessions—and while I didn’t have many, I had to admit to being somewhat attached to the ones I did have—to the mix took things to a whole other level. We needed that elevator. And we needed one hell of a lucky break.

  Nathan vanished into the bedroom while I sat on the couch inhaling cookies. Beverly and Minnie stayed with me, their liquid brown eyes hopefully tracking every little motion that I made. They knew a sucker when they saw one. I gave each of them a cookie and took advantage of their distraction to shove three more into my mouth, nearly choking myself in the process. I washed down the sticky mass with a long drink of orange juice. The resulting combination wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever put into my mouth, but it certainly wasn’t among the best.

  I was trying to cover the taste with the last of the Fig Newtons when Nathan emerged from the bedroom. He had a suitcase in one hand, and was dragging my roller bag with the other. He walked over and deposited them both next to the coffee table before saying, “One second,” and darting back into the bedroom.

  This time when he emerged, he was carrying the small plastic terrarium that we used to transport plants between home and his office. About half of our shared collection of sundews, pitcher plants, and Venus flytraps was crammed inside, their root systems dangerously overcrowded by what had clearly been a very hasty transplant.

  “I hate to leave the others, but this was the best I could do,” said Nathan, pushing his glasses nervously up the bridge of his nose as he walked over and set the terrarium down next to my orange juice. “I grabbed some of your clothes, basic toiletries, and your journals. Was there anything else you wanted me to bring? I’m afraid we don’t have much room, but we could probably get a few more things into the suitcases if we really shoved.”