Chimera (Parasitology)

by Mira Grant

  We stopped outside a plain wooden door that looked like it would lead to an office or backstage area. Sergeant Hinton gave me a frank up-and-down appraisal before he said, “Colonel Mitchell is the ranking officer at this facility. I recognize that he’s your father, but we will not tolerate insubordination at this time. It’s bad for morale. I’m sure you can see why, under the circumstances, morale has become extremely important.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. My voice was squeakier than I liked, the fear bleeding through and making itself plain.

  Sergeant Hinton seemed to like that. His chest visibly puffed at the sound of my small, frightened voice, and he smiled—the sort of friendly, painted smile that men had been using on me my entire life, always when they thought they could control me. “Good. This will be easier for you if you understand. Answer any questions he asks you. Answer them politely and completely, and remember, there are different levels of quarantine. We can make this easy on you. You might even enjoy your new life with us. It’s only temporary, until we can get this country back under control. But if you make things difficult for us, we can respond in kind.”

  The memory of the unnamed sergeant burying her fist in my stomach rose unbidden to my mind’s eye. I couldn’t tell him about her. For all that I knew, he was already aware and was waiting to see whether I would tattle. I swallowed, standing straighter, and said, “I understand, sir.”

  “Good. Now I hope you don’t harbor any loyalty for the people who helped you break out of here—assuming you didn’t break out on your own. You’re going to be telling us everything eventually. Unless you’d like to begin telling me everything now?”

  I shook my head silently.

  “I didn’t think so.” He opened the door, holding it wide for me to go through. It was clear just by looking at him that he had no interest in hearing what I had to say; my opinion was worse than useless here, it was unwanted and surplus to requirements. I still wasn’t sure what my part in this little drama was supposed to be, aside from prisoner of war and punching bag, but I had the grim feeling that I was about to find out. I looked at him for a moment, worrying my lip between my teeth, and then I turned, and I stepped through the empty eye of the doorframe.

  The room on the other side was small, and had been outfitted according to the USAMRIID standards for patient care. Everything except for the workstations was covered in plastic, and a sheet of clear plastic bisected the area, which explained my initial impression of smallness: It had been a medium-sized room before the structural changes began.

  Curtains were pulled on the inside of the plastic wall, blocking whatever was on the other side from view. Colonel Mitchell was standing in front of that wall, talking quietly with a man in a lab coat. The sight of it made me feel briefly homesick for Dr. Cale and her lab, until the man turned slightly and I saw the USAMRIID logo on his shoulder. I was a long way from home. I might never get to go home again.

  “Sally,” said Colonel Mitchell. He smiled warmly, and it seemed like the expression actually reached his eyes. “How was your trip here?”

  What would Sally do? Sal would have done as she was told: As Sal, I had been taught to follow orders and follow directions and keep my head down as much as possible. But Sally, who had come before me, had been a lot more demanding. Colonel Mitchell had me here because he thought I had somehow transformed back into her, like her pushiness had been enough to let her dig her way out of the grave and reassert control of the body that she had abandoned. He didn’t want Sal. He wanted Sally.

  I was here to give him what he wanted. I crossed my arms, managing not to wince as the motion tugged at the bruises on my stomach, and glared at him. He blinked. I smiled as angrily as I could, showing all my teeth in the process.

  “Is there a reason I was loaded into the back of a gross old truck with a bunch of filthy strangers your men harvested off the street?” I demanded. I forced myself to keep showing my teeth as I spoke, even as every instinct I had reminded me—loudly—that it was a sign of aggression, an invitation for the person I was looking at to take offense and attack me. Showing teeth was anathema to every chimera I’d ever met, even Sherman and Tansy. Sherman could fake it when he had to, when he was trying to pass for human, and that was what I clung to now. If Sherman could do it, so could I.

  Colonel Mitchell blinked. He might have wanted Sally back, but he’d still been expecting passivity and agreement: That was obvious, even as he started to smile again, more earnestly this time. “Some of my men didn’t like the idea of you riding with us when you hadn’t gone through decontamination and been properly examined. I didn’t like doing that to you, sweetheart, but it was important for their peace of mind. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Understand that you let a bunch of gun-monkeys tell you to throw your oldest daughter into the grossest truck I’ve been in for like, months? Oh, sure, I get that. Is there a reason you let them practice their electroshock on me? Because that shit hurts.”

  His smile died like a switch had been flipped, leaving an expression of total neutrality behind. “You are not a member of USAMRIID, Sally. You’re not here as a guest, either. You’re here because you’ve been flagged as potentially useful personnel, and because I was willing to vouch for you. That means you get treated like any civilian, at least until you’ve proven yourself to us. If you want to be handled with more respect, you’ll earn it.”

  I cocked my head. “Got it.” He wanted to believe I was Sally—whether because he didn’t fully understand the science behind the SymboGen implants or because he was delusional, I didn’t know—and yet he was still too much of a rationalist to have fully convinced himself that it was possible. That was almost reassuring. The Colonel Mitchell I knew was a man who would lie to his family, who would strive to convince an alien stranger that she was his daughter, but he wasn’t a fool. And only a fool would have believed that I was really Sally Mitchell without some very good reason.

  “Then here’s your first chance to earn it.” He looked to the man in the lab coat, giving a very small nod, and said, “Open it.”

  The man nodded in return before crossing to a simple, almost primitive pulley that had been set up in the corner. He tugged the cord, and the curtain on the other side of the plastic wall swung open, revealing a small figure on a plain white surgical cot. I gasped, one hand coming up to cover my mouth without my consciously deciding to do so.

  It was an adult woman: She only looked small because of the machines around her, strangling her in wires and cords, dwarfing her with their vastness. There were machines I recognized from my own time in the hospital, machines to monitor her vitals and clean her blood and keep her breathing at all costs. Her head had been shaved, and her scalp gleamed like an eggshell in the pale overhead light, seeming impossibly fragile. Her eyelashes were bruises against the curvature of her cheeks. A breathing mask covered her mouth and nose, a tube that looked obscenely like an oversized tapeworm extending downward to the floor.

  “Joyce,” I whispered through my fingers.

  “So you remember your sister,” said Colonel Mitchell. He turned back to face me. “We tried the antiparasitic drugs your terrorist boyfriend suggested. They were successful: We were able to stop the implant from entering her brain.”

  I dropped my hand. “What? It didn’t break through?” Joyce had been diagnosed as entering the early stages of sleepwalker sickness, using a test developed by SymboGen’s own scientists. The test showed parasitic growth throughout the muscle tissue, and I had always assumed that the growth was tied to the presence of the implant in the brain… but that didn’t make sense, did it? D. symbogenesis was a chimeric organism, cobbled together from multiple sources that could never have combined in nature. One of them, Toxoplasma gondii, allowed the parasite to spread tendrils through the rest of the body, even the muscular tissue, although I didn’t understand why, or what benefit that had. Those tendrils didn’t feed the main body of the implant, and they were left to wither and atrophy when integr
ation was complete. So why would they only be triggered by penetration of the brain?

  Still, the best test we had for early infection depended on those tendrils, since they showed that the implant had begun acting outside the narrow, human-friendly guidelines supposedly built into its genetic code. When I’d given the SymboGen early-detection test to USAMRIID, they had promptly flagged Joyce as among the afflicted. I hadn’t known what I was then: I hadn’t known about the chimera, or that the implants had the potential to be thinking creatures in their own right. All I’d known was that my sister was sick, and that I had the potential to help her be well again.

  “No,” said Colonel Mitchell. “It made it as far as her superior vena cava before we were able to finish the antiparasitics and surgically remove it from her body. It cut off blood flow to her brain for more than eight minutes, Sally. That’s long enough that most people would have called her dead. Some people did. Not me.” His eyes searched my face like they were looking for the missing piece of a puzzle—the thing to make this all fit together. “Because you were without oxygen for as long, if not longer, and you came back. You woke up.”

  I stared at him. I came back because I was safe from the impact that would have crushed me if I had still been coiled in Sally Mitchell’s abdomen. In a real way, I didn’t “come back” at all. I had never existed before Sally vacated her brain and left it ripe for me to take as my own.

  “I…” I said.

  “I know that in your case, the SymboGen parasite did break through the skull, and was able to enter your brainpan,” he said without pause. The man in the lab coat blanched, whirling around to eye me warily. I couldn’t blame him. “It may even have done you a favor, by keeping brain activity present while you recovered. We should be able to remove it now that it’s done its work, of course, and we’ll do that after you’ve helped us with Joyce.”

  “What?” I felt like I was yelling. My voice was barely a whisper.

  His eyes were hard as he looked at me. Had they always been that hard? It was difficult to say. “You’re going to help me save your sister, and then I’m going to cut that worm out of your head. Even if you’ve never given a damn about anything else in your life, you loved her. So save her.”

  “What is she doing here?”

  The voice was querulous and thin, so different from the warm, maternal tone that I was used to that hearing it was like a blow. This was the voice that had nursed me through my few bouts with food poisoning and flu, that had helped me with my physical therapy and reeducation. And there was nothing in it now but loathing. Slowly, I turned, and looked into the eyes of the woman who had, once upon a time, believed herself to be my mother.

  Mom recoiled when I looked at her, but she didn’t budge from her place in the doorway, placing herself firmly between me and any hope that I might be able to escape from whatever perverse idea of “justice” had come into her head. She glared at me, and all hope of reconciliation died. Her voice had been cold. Her eyes were arctic. Nothing could live on those cruel and frozen shores, and nothing in me would ever want to. The last time I’d seen her, she had still believed I was her daughter. Somewhere between my then and now, she had learnt what I really was: There was no question of that. I’d even been expecting it, on some level. It was only rational.

  What I hadn’t been expecting was how much it would hurt to have someone who had always been a nurturing figure in my life suddenly look at me like I was worth less than the dirt beneath her heel.

  She was thinner than she’d been the last time I’d seen her, with deep lines around her mouth and eyes etched by both hunger and fear. I remembered what she’d been like on the rare occasions that I had been sick. She’d been the one who sat next to my bed and read me the “childhood favorites” that I was hearing for the first time; she’d been the one who brought me soup and toast and told me it was going to be okay. Most of my early memories of the good side of humanity came from her.

  Everything was different now. I was still coming to terms with how different.

  “Gail, please.” Colonel Mitchell took a step forward. I would have needed to be blind to miss the way he put himself slightly between us, like he was preparing to block a physical assault. But was he expecting me to go for her, or her to come after me?

  “Don’t you ‘Gail, please’ me,” snapped Mo—snapped Gail, her eyes narrowing as she shifted the full focus of her hatred onto her husband. “What is she doing here? What is it doing here?”

  “I made some arrangements to have her located and retrieved,” said Colonel Mitchell. He slanted a warning glance in my direction, and I realized, in a sudden moment of blinding clarity, that he was telling me not to mention Dr. Banks or the situation at SymboGen. Maybe Mo—maybe Gail didn’t know that her husband was still working with the man who had unleashed the implants on an unsuspecting world, and he didn’t want this to be the way that she found out.

  “Why would you do that, Alfred?” She sounded less angry than hurt this time. I wasn’t foolish enough to take that as a sign that we were suddenly on the same side. As much as it broke my heart, I was never going to be on the same side as her again. “Why would you bring that—that thing here, when our daughter is lying in that bed, dying? What possible reason could you have for doing this to me?”

  “She may be able to help us bring Joyce back.” His tone was calm, reasonable, and filled with the sort of false hope that brings no joy, only more pain down the line. I turned to stare at him. He really thought this was something I could do: that I could somehow awaken their Sleeping Beauty and bring her back to them the same as she’d been before she went away.

  Gail turned, slowly, to stare at me. “Really?” she asked. It wasn’t clear whether she was talking to me or him. Then she reoriented her body, angling it toward me, and repeated, “Really? This… this monster is going to bring our daughter back?”

  “She already did,” said Colonel Mitchell. “Sally’s still in there. She’s fighting her way back to the surface.”

  Gail’s hand struck him across the cheek so fast that he didn’t have time to pull away. He stared at her. She snarled at him.

  “You think I don’t know my daughter?” she demanded. “You think I don’t know the way she stands, the way she holds her head, the way she breathes? That thing is not my Sally! Sally is dead, and you’re dancing on her grave!”

  “I was in your house for six years, and you never thought there was anything wrong with me.” The words were out before I stopped to consider what they confirmed: that I wasn’t Sally, and that I was never going to be Sally again. That Sally was dead.

  Gail Mitchell didn’t say anything. She just lunged for me, her hands out and hooked like claws as she dove for my eyes. I fell back, making a startled mewling sound, and stopped only when my shoulders bumped against the plastic wall between us and Joyce. Colonel Mitchell appeared behind his wife, grabbing her around the waist and stopping her before she could get to me. She kicked and struggled against him, clawing at the air, still trying to reach me. She was making a high-pitched keening noise that shouldn’t have been able to come from a human throat. It was animal and cold, and absolutely as terrifying as the moans of the sleepwalkers or the screams of the wounded.

  “Get her out of here!” barked Colonel Mitchell. Two men rushed through the open door, taking hold of Gail’s shoulders, and pulled her, still struggling, out of the room.

  For a moment, everything was silence. Colonel Mitchell turned his eyes on me, and oh, they were so cold.

  “Your mother has not been well,” he said solemnly. “Losing you hurt her deeply. Losing Joyce on top of that… I’m sure you can understand why it’s so important we get your sister to wake up. I’m also sure you can understand why you can’t stay here with me. Your mother simply doesn’t understand that you’re not the enemy, and that you’re really her child.”

  “Wh-where are you going to send me?” My voice quavered. I hated it. I didn’t want to sound weak in front of this man, w
ho held my future in his hands, and wasn’t afraid to start squeezing.

  He smiled broadly, showing all his teeth. I had to fight not to recoil. “To our Pleasanton facility, of course. We could put you in isolation, but that wouldn’t help you understand the situation. Pleasanton will do that. Pleasanton will open your eyes. You’ll be safe there, and you can think about how you can best help us. It’s all up to you, Sally. Everything that happens next is up to you.”

  It’s done.

  Kristoph reported back this morning, and Ronnie wasn’t with him. He had all of Ronnie’s knives, and he refused to give them to me when I tried to reclaim them. He just looked at me sadly and clutched them to his chest like they represented some sort of connection to his missing friend. For someone so intelligent, Kristoph certainly behaves like a fool sometimes. If he weren’t useful as he is, I would have him cracked open and reassembled in a body that came with fewer inbuilt neurological issues.

  But I won’t allow frustration to dull my moment of triumph. It’s done, and by the time the humans realize the war is lost, it’ll be too late for them to even raise their hands against me. Welcome to the new age. The Age of Men is done.

  —FROM THE NOTES OF SHERMAN LEWIS (SUBJECT VIII, ITERATION III), NOVEMBER 2027

  One of the gardeners collapsed today. He was showing the classic signs of implant overgrowth, and he died within the hour. Examination of the body confirmed my initial diagnosis: There were parasitic threads twisted throughout his muscle tissue and digestive system, and the implant itself was located in the superior vena cava, which seems to be a favored spot of migrating D. symbogenesis.

  Analysis of the worm showed that it was SymboGen stock, but had not been tailored for the man in question: His response was part immune and part tissue mismatch. Questions of black market purchase might have arisen had this happened some months ago, but the man had already been tested repeatedly for the presence of an implant and had come up clean. We must now ask ourselves how he came to be infected with a worm that was not designed for him, that was not present at his last checkup.