Parasite p-1

by Mira Grant

  But it did.

  I didn’t have much time to dwell on it. One of the security guards who’d been locked in with us when USAMRIID decided to close the doors finally shook off her shock, drawing her own weapon and advancing on the standing sleepwalker.

  “Put your hands up and stay where you are,” she commanded, her words barely audible above the roar of the sirens and the pounding of the drums.

  They were audible enough to catch the sleepwalker’s attention. His head swiveled slowly toward her, and the rest of his body followed suit. Each movement seemed to take an eon, but he had fully turned before she could take another two steps. He made a strange growling sound, baring his teeth at her. Blood and strands of flesh coated them, making the gesture even more horrifying.

  The guard was smart enough to stop moving and hold her ground, bracing her drawn pistol against the heel of her free hand for stability. “Do not move,” she said, more loudly than before.

  Too loudly. In the chaos, no one had been paying much attention to the sleepwalkers who were still bound, preferring to focus on the immediate threats presented by Ms. Lawrence and the bloody-faced man. The shortsightedness of this approach was made horribly apparent as two more of the supposedly secure patients abruptly sat up on their cots. One of them was right behind the guard.

  She didn’t even have time to scream before her throat was crushed. But I had time to scream. I had plenty of time to scream, and so I did, long and loud. It was enough to carry over both the sirens and the pounding of the drums.

  Every head in the room turned toward me. The three sleepwalkers who were currently free of their restraints repeated the bloody man’s strange full-body turn, their shoulders following their heads like they hadn’t figured out how to work them independently yet. I screamed again. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “Sally!” shouted Joyce from the other side of the room. I glanced in her direction. Her wide, terrified eyes stood out even in the red-washed room, making her seem younger than she really was. She couldn’t save me. She knew it, and as I looked into her face, so did I.

  “Sal!” bellowed our father, and began wading through the tethered sleepwalkers, kicking and shoving their cots out of the way. I wanted to tell him not to do that; I wanted to point out that three of them had already broken loose—four, if you counted Ms. Lawrence. But there were no words left in me. There was only screaming.

  Then the sleepwalkers, all three of them, stopped moving. Their blank gazes fell on me, seeming to have an almost physical weight. The sirens faded to nothingness as the drums got even louder, hammering in my ears until my whole head was pounding. There was an air of unreality to the whole scene, like I was dreaming.

  Please let me be dreaming, I thought.

  Then the man with the bloody chin opened his mouth, sighed, and moaned, “Sah-lee.”

  As with Chave before him, he seemed almost physically hurt by the act of saying my name, like those two syllables had been ripped out of his throat. He took a step forward, dead eyes remaining fixed on my face.

  “Sah-lee,” he repeated.

  The other sleepwalkers took up the chant, each of them saying my name in the same broken way. They weren’t speaking in unison. That would almost have been better. It wouldn’t have forced me to acknowledge how many of them there were. Even the ones who were still strapped down joined in the horrible chorus, some speaking so slowly they were barely comprehensible, while others sounded like normal people.

  I stopped screaming and stared at the sleepwalkers. My father was shouting somewhere in the room, his words drowned out by their slow, droning syllables and the pounding of the drums. Somehow, the drums were louder than the sirens and quieter than those broken, disconnected voices at the same time. It didn’t make any sense.

  Nothing made any sense.

  The sleepwalker at the head of the group took another step toward me. “Sah-lee,” he said, the syllables sounding less like moans and more like speech with every instant that passed. He sounded… sad.

  I blinked at him, trying to make sense of it all. The sirens blared, beginning to make themselves heard again above the pounding of the drums. The red light bathed everything in a ruby glow, like something out of a fairy tale. I took a breath, unsure whether I was going to answer him or start screaming again.

  The bullet hole that suddenly appeared in the middle of his forehead answered the question for me. I screamed again, and I kept screaming while my father rushed across the room, gunning down the other loose sleepwalkers in the process.

  I was still screaming when the last of the sleepwalkers hit the floor. Then the door behind me finally banged open, and soldiers shoved me out of the way as they rushed into the room with tranquilizer guns in their hands. My father gathered me into his arms, barking orders and directing men with sharp waves of the hand that held his gun. I kept screaming. It seemed like the most sensible thing to do. It seemed like the only thing to do.

  The needle bit into the side of my neck, and I kept screaming until the darkness, and the sound of drums, reached up to take me down.

  Everything after that was silence.

  -

  Find the key that knows the lock,

  Find the root that knows the rock,

  Find the things you’re seeking in the place you fear to look.

  Promise me that you’ll take care,

  You’ll show caution, you’ll beware.

  There are many dangers in the pages of this book.

  The broken doors are waiting. You are stronger than you’ve known.

  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.

  You know what I find really interesting about the people who want to ask about the “consequences” of what they consider to be me and my company playing God? They’re never the ones refusing medical care. They’re never the ones saying “No thank you, Doctor, I’d rather be on insulin and taking inefficient medications in pill form and dealing with the possible side effects of increasingly ineffective antibiotics than have something living inside me.” They’re never the ones who refuse the implant on moral or religious grounds.

  No, the people who say the SymboGen Intestinal Bodyguard™ is somehow morally wrong are always the ones whose implants are securely in place and wouldn’t be impacted by any new regulations. They’re the ones with dependable medical care, for whom the hygiene hypothesis was always an interesting theory held at bay by their physicians and their medications.

  They’re the ones with nothing to lose. The people with everything to lose, the ones whose lives have been transformed by D. symbogenesis? They’re the ones who stand up and say “No” when legislation is proposed that would make us and what we do illegal. They’re the ones who keep us going.

  They’re the ones this is all for.

  —FROM “KING OF THE WORMS,” AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. STEVEN BANKS, CO-FOUNDER OF SYMBOGEN. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ROLLING STONE, FEBRUARY 2027.

  Chapter 16

  AUGUST 2027

  Something is different.

  I am alone in the dark, in the hot warm dark, and nothing here is supposed to change; change is the antithesis of the dark. Change is forever, it cannot be undone. Even if things are returned to their original state, they will still have been changed. They will still remember the act of changing. Change is the great destroyer.

  But whatever has changed, it is not something I can see, and so I forget that anything has changed at all. There is no point to holding on, and memory is hard, so hard, almost as hard as change; memory is for another time, another place, a place outside the hot warm dark. I let go and let myself drift through the darkness, and everything is safe, and everything is warm, and everything is always and forever accompanied by the sound of drums.

  The sound….

  The sound of drums.

  But hadn’t the drums stopped? I wa
s sure they had… and as soon as I thought that, it became true. The drums stopped, the red turned to black, and the warmth turned to coldness. I woke up alone in the dark, opening my eyes and squinting into the shadows as I tried to figure out where I was.

  All I found was more darkness, and a growing sense of dread.

  The dread intensified when I tried to sit up and discovered that I was strapped to the unfamiliar surface beneath me. I froze, suddenly, horribly convinced I’d been hallucinating when I heard the sleepwalkers saying my name before. I’d been undergoing my own conversion, that was all, and the syllables that sounded like my name were really moans, translated into words by my own damaged ears as my implant devoured my mind, my self, everything that was me—

  I made a strangled squeaking sound, feeling hot tears rise burning to my eyes. The sound wasn’t a moan, and that was more of a relief than I could have imagined. Besides, argued a small, logical part of me, if I’d been succumbing to the sleepwalking sickness, I wouldn’t be here to worry about it, now would I? Sally Mitchell would be gone, replaced by a confused tapeworm in a body it didn’t understand or know how to operate.

  At some point between leaving my house and waking up alone in the dark, I’d stopped questioning what Dr. Cale had explained to me. It made too much sense when I held it up to the situation. Frankly, it was the only thing that made sense.

  Anyone with a SymboGen implant was in danger. Anyone with a SymboGen implant was a danger, to themselves and to others. Nausea rolled in my gut, intensified by the ongoing knowledge that I was strapped down. If I threw up, I was going to be lying in it until someone came and let me up. But the thought that I might have a tapeworm laying siege to my brain, my self, was just too horrifying to put aside.

  There was another thought beneath that. It was even worse than the idea of the siege. I buried it more firmly, trying to dwell on the more understandable horror. And I did understand what Dr. Cale was claiming she, Dr. Banks, and Dr. Jablonsky had done. I wasn’t a doctor, and I wasn’t a scientist, but I wasn’t stupid, and I learn quickly. So I understood, even if there was no way I could have re-created her work, or even explained the fine nuance to someone who hadn’t been present for her explanation. It wasn’t until the containment ward at USAMRIID that I started to fully believe her, and to accept what her actions meant.

  My throat was dry. At least the room was silent; no sirens, no moaning, and no distant sound of drums. I licked my lips to moisten them, and said, “H-hello? This is Sally Mitchell. I’m not sick. Please, is anyone there? Please, can you come and untie me? I want to get up. I’m not sick. Please.” That didn’t seem like enough. I tried to count how many times I’d used the word “please,” how many times I’d said I wasn’t sick. It didn’t seem like enough. It didn’t seem like anything could possibly be enough. “I’m not sick,” I whispered, just once more.

  “The sedatives you were given can have some unpleasant side effects, including increased salivation and sensitivity to light,” said my father’s voice, clear and firm and reassuringly familiar. It also sounded like he was speaking from somewhere inside the room—but that wasn’t possible. He was a quiet man, but I would have been able to hear him breathing in the absolute silence that had greeted me when I first woke up.

  “Dad?” I said, craning my neck to peer into the blackness. I couldn’t see anything. That didn’t stop me from looking. “Where are you? Why am I strapped down?”

  “It was a precaution in case you woke disoriented,” he said. He made it sound like it was a perfectly reasonable step to take. “Can you please say your full name?”

  “Sally Mitchell. Can you untie me now?”

  “Your full name.” His tone was gentle, like he was trying to prompt a recalcitrant child.

  Anger began to gather in my chest, overwhelming the lingering nausea. “That is my full name,” I half said, half snapped. “I go by ‘Sal.’ Remember?”

  “What’s your middle name, Sally?”

  My middle name? My mind went blank. I didn’t remember having a middle name, much less being told what it was. No, wait—that wasn’t right. I had a middle initial. It appeared on all the official paperwork that SymboGen sent to the house. “It starts with ‘R,’” I said, slowly. “I know that. Is it Rebecca? Rachel?” I paused, trying to think of other names that started with the letter “R.” Finally, I ventured, “Rose?”

  “Your middle name is Rae, Sally. Sally Rae Mitchell.”

  I considered his words. Nothing about them was familiar. Still, it seemed best not to argue with him, not if I wanted to get out of here. “Fine, my middle name is Rae,” I said. “Now will you untie me?”

  “What day is it?”

  That was the last straw. The anger that had been gathering in my chest blossomed like a poisonous flower, and I was suddenly shouting at the darkness, hoping my words were at least somewhat aimed at the father I couldn’t see. “I don’t know, Dad, because I don’t know how long it’s been since you sedated me! And before that, I had sort of stopped paying attention, since you had me under house arrest! Now will you stop asking me stupid questions and let me out of here? I’m not sick, I’m not a lab experiment, and I’m not happy about the way you keep treating me!”

  There was a click. An intercom had just been turned off somewhere in the room. My anger withered as quickly as it had bloomed, replaced by the sudden fear that my rant had been the last piece needed to convince them there was something seriously wrong with me. I couldn’t remember my middle name; I shouted at my own father. Clearly, I had to be sick.

  Except that I wasn’t sick. I felt perfectly fine. And I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to convince anyone else of that.

  A door opened in the far wall of what was suddenly revealed to be a small room, much like the changing room that I’d used when we first arrived at the facility. A broad-shouldered silhouette appeared in the light. My father. I couldn’t let myself be relieved—not quite yet, no matter how much I wanted to—and so I just squinted at him, refusing to allow myself to speak until I had some idea of what he was going to do next.

  “I need you to close your eyes for a moment,” he said. “I’m turning on the lights, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  “Dad—” I couldn’t help myself. The word just slipped out, all fear and longing hanging in the air between us.

  He sighed. “Just trust me, all right? Just for a few more minutes. Please.”

  It wasn’t easy. It wouldn’t have been easy before he pretended to be a sleepwalker just to see what I would do. I still forced myself to squeeze my eyes shut, turning my head to the side in case the lights were bright enough to shine through my eyelids.

  Instead of the expected brilliance, what I got was heat, shining on me from either side of the room. Startled, I turned back toward the door and opened my eyes, finding that my father was only slightly more visible than he’d been before. The room was still in almost total darkness, illuminated only by the two banks of UV lights positioned to either side of my cot. They were glowing a soft purple, turning the small hairs on my arms and the pops of cotton on the front of my scrubs an ethereal shade of raver-girl blue white.

  “What?” I said.

  “She’s clean,” called a voice from the hall, and the UV lights flicked off. The darkness seemed even deeper this time, despite the open door.

  “Close your eyes again, Sally,” said my father, and stepped into the room.

  I obliged, not wanting to do anything to delay his releasing me. A few seconds later, white light flooded my eyelids, making every vein in the thin skin perfectly visible. I waited a few seconds more before squinting through my lashes, watching my father as he approached.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “You showed us the test,” he said, beginning to unbuckle the strap that was holding my chest and arms to the cot. “We simply put it into a more immediately implementable form.”

  I didn’t ask why USAMRIID just happened to have ban
ks of UV lights around their facility, waiting to be used as an early parasite-detection system. They were a major military research center. If something had a potential medical application, I was sure it was somewhere in the building. Instead, I waited for my father to finish undoing the straps, then sat up, watching him warily. He took a step back from the cot, spreading his hands as if to show me they were empty. I appreciated the gesture more than I wanted to.

  “Well?” I asked. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  He sighed. “Sally, I know you’re angry, but—”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Yes.” He straightened, all traces of apology leaving his eyes. “All the patients who survived the… incident… demonstrated clear signs of infection when put under UV lights. So did three of our researchers. They’re in quarantine now, while we figure out how to proceed.”

  I suddenly realized who was missing from the room. My eyes widened as I looked at him. “Joyce?” I asked.

  He looked away.

  I closed my eyes. “Oh, crap.”

  “She’s only showing some very preliminary signs. We may be able to stop the infection from progressing, now that we know what we’re dealing with. We’ve started her on a course of antiparasitics.” I opened my eyes in time to see a small smile twisting his lips, utterly insincere, but clearly meant to comfort me. “She’ll be fine.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “She won’t. You don’t—she won’t be fine.” I slid off my cot, getting my feet back under myself.

  “Sally? Where are you going?”

  “I need a phone.” What I was about to do might cause problems for a lot of people, but I couldn’t let my sister die. I couldn’t. “There’s someone I need to call.”

  “Sally—”

  “You asked me to trust you, Dad. Now I’m asking you to trust me. Please. Isn’t Joyce’s life worth it?”