Chimera (Parasitology)

by Mira Grant

  “I’m sorry.” It was a useless comment, and I wasn’t fully sure what I meant by it. I hadn’t created this world. I hadn’t created the cousins. But I could apologize for all of it, and if that was what Carrie needed me to do, I was going to do it. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “They wouldn’t even let me see his body.” She dragged the heel of her hand across her cheek, smearing the grime. “We used to joke about what we wanted to have done with our bodies after we died. Paul wanted to go to the Body Farm and help the FBI study the effects of exposure on the human body. He thought it would be great to just hang out in the government facility, rotting. And now I g-guess he got his wish…”

  That seemed to be the last straw. Carrie buried her face in her hands and sobbed, curling in on herself like she could shut out the rest of the world. I pulled back, not touching her. She needed to come through this on her own. If she seemed to be rendered insensate by her grief, I could find another driver. I wasn’t sure where, or how, but I would do it if that was what I had to do.

  It might be better that way, honestly. Carrie was emotionally compromised, and I didn’t know if I could trust her to get me out of here. She was also the only person I currently had access to. Sometimes you have to work with the materials at hand.

  “I’m sorry.” I patted her, awkwardly, on the back before leaning as close as I could and whispering in her ear, “I told them you were sick too, so they’d get you out of the quarantine zone. I need your help.”

  “What?” She whipped around to face me. Her eyes were so wide that I could see rings of white all the way around her irises, making her look almost cartoony. “But I’m not—”

  I motioned frantically for her to shush. She stopped herself mid-sentence, and just stared at me.

  I leaned forward, getting close to her ear once again, and murmured, “I know you’re not. The question is, do they know? Or did they put you in here with me to find out what would happen?” Even if Colonel Mitchell had been able to successfully convince himself that I was Sally—and I still didn’t know whether that was the case; he’d played a long game before, and he could have been doing it again. He knew I had a tapeworm inside my skull. Since I’d seen Joyce, there had been no more talk of surgery or making an effort to remove my implant. I was incredibly grateful for that, since removing the implant would have killed me instantly, but…

  They had to know that sleepwalkers were triggered by the presence of other sleepwalkers. Implants that had integrated put off very different pheromone tags than implants that were still quiescent, and those tags seemed to carry a sort of… instruction manual for taking over a host. We still didn’t know whether chimera had the same effect. Dr. Cale didn’t know. We didn’t release the pheromones that triggered migration in sleepwalkers, but that didn’t mean we weren’t releasing other coded messages, silent, secret instructions for the cousins to follow. Maybe I hadn’t said “convert,” but I could have said “wake up.”

  Had Paul gotten sick faster than he normally would have because he was sharing a house with me? I couldn’t deny the possibility. So had they put Carrie in my bubble to see whether proximity would make her get sick faster? What kind of game were they playing here?

  Carrie shot me a horrified look before whispering back, “What do you mean, ‘What would happen’?”

  I could tell her, or I could keep my secret a little longer. I didn’t like lying to her, not when I was about to try to convince her to drive me out of here, but telling her the truth could very easily result in her panicking and refusing to help me at all. I took a breath and answered, “The Colonel’s wife hates me. She says I’m not really her daughter. If you’re supposed to be getting sick, why would they lock me up with you, unless it was to see if you’d kill me?”

  “That’s stupid,” she said, louder than I liked. She pulled away. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Why would anyone do any of this?” We were probably being monitored. I moved closer again, trying to use my hair as a veil to hide the motion of my lips. “Things were bad when they put us in here, and you know they’ve just gotten worse since then. Haven’t you noticed that there aren’t any new soldiers around? There’s no backup coming. There’s no support. Of course they’re going to start getting desperate, and doing whatever they can for data.”

  “But you’re his daughter.”

  “I’m his little traitor. And you’re the wife of a man who got sick when he shouldn’t have been able to. We’re both expendable in our own ways.” I wasn’t quite lying, not yet, but I was bending and eluding the truth, shaping it into my own creation. The thought made me feel nauseous, and set the drums pounding harder still in my ears. I didn’t want to be a liar. Sherman and Dr. Banks and my father, they were liars, and they weren’t the people I wanted to become.

  “We have to get out of here,” said Carrie.

  I had been trying to lead her to this conclusion. I restrained myself to a small nod as I agreed, “We do.”

  “But how?”

  That was where my plan fell apart. I had expected them to lock me and Carrie in a room, not in one of the quarantine bubbles. I sat up straighter and looked around. When Sherman had broken me out of here, he’d used a chemical compound to melt the plastic. I didn’t have that. There were no seams or openings, apart from the place where the bubble joined up with the vent; I had to assume that when the soldiers came to feed us or move us, they’d open the bubble in the same way.

  I didn’t have a knife. I didn’t even have an underwire in my bra—and even if I had, using it would have assumed that we weren’t being watched somehow, and that the soldiers wouldn’t show up the second I started trying to puncture the plastic. We were in a completely exposed situation, with no weapons, no way to take the tactical advantage, and no combat training.

  Well. I didn’t have any combat training. “Do you know how to fight?” I asked.

  “Not really? I took a few years of self-defense in college. I can mostly handle myself in a fight, as long as running away is an option.”

  I nodded slowly. “All right,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do…”

  Kristoph died today.

  Symptoms appeared in his host body shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon. It started with tremors in his hands and loss of fine motor control, and progressed rapidly to full-body convulsions, followed by a loss of consciousness and a systemic shutdown that we were unable to stop, despite the best efforts of everyone in the facility.

  Following the cessation of vital signs, we opened his host’s skull to extract Kristoph and prepare him for transplantation. We found a nest of tapeworms where the host’s brain tissue should have been. Several of them were wound around Kristoph’s body, and had successfully strangled it, rendering it inert. Attempts were made to resuscitate the lead segment. All were unsuccessful.

  Eggs have been harvested from Kristoph’s remains, and will be cultured shortly. Analysis of the invading worms is now under way.

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

  Solve the puzzle, take your time,

  Spurn the reason, shift the rhyme,

  Let the labyrinth guide you through the darkness to the dawn.

  Children’s games can break your heart,

  We all have to play our part.

  Know this world will grieve you when it wakes to find you gone.

  The broken doors will open for we sinners who atone.

  My darling boy, 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.

  Chapter 5

  DECEMBER 2027

  Carrie seized and spasmed on the floor like she was dying, arching her back until she lifted her hips and the backs of her thighs into the air. She formed a brief, perfect arch before collapsing back down and starting to thrash again.

  I wanted to admire her muscular control, but t
his wasn’t the time. Instead, I stood on the cot, shrinking back against the bubble wall, and screamed as loudly as I could.

  It was almost a relief, after weeks of keeping quiet, to let my voice out, to hear it echoing off the plastic walls and bouncing back down from the vent above me. Carrie continued to take up as much of the floor as she possibly could, jackknifing her body and flailing her arms, and I kept on screaming until the sound of running feet interposed itself beneath my wails.

  As soon as the soldiers were in view, I pointed at Carrie and turned my screams to wails, saying, “She’s sick! She’s sick! I told them she was sick and now she’s sick and she’s in here with me what are you waiting for?!”

  As I’d hoped, the thought that I could be hurt by their inaction actually slowed them down. Not enough so that Colonel Mitchell would be able to say that they hadn’t responded, no, but enough to let me be taught the error of my ways. They weren’t running anymore. They were approaching calmly, and their expressions broadcast nothing but anticipation for what was about to happen.

  I screamed. Carrie thrashed. Then, with a horrible rasping gurgle that made me want to applaud her acting skills, she went still, her head lolling to the side and her wide-open eyes staring blankly off into space. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that she had actually succeeded in thrashing herself to death.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned, pushing myself harder against the wall of the bubble. It bent and distorted under me, but it didn’t break: it had been made too well for the weight of one small woman to rupture it. That didn’t matter. I was putting pressure on the membrane, and that was the important thing.

  Stay still, Carrie, I thought, and Carrie didn’t move, and for one horrible moment, neither did the soldiers. Did they know? Had we somehow given ourselves away? Did they have monitors that told them whether we lived or died, convenient medical spies built into the bubble’s walls and feeding back our vital data? I couldn’t put it past them, but I couldn’t quite believe it, either. The people here at USAMRIID were so perfectly, beautifully human, and being human meant being arrogant, in some ways: It meant believing that you knew better than anyone else ever possibly could. They wouldn’t expect something like this. Not from us. Not from anyone.

  “Miss Mitchell, stay where you are,” said the figure at the front of the formation—and while I couldn’t make out her face in the shadows of her helmet, I recognized the voice of the woman from the shower, the nameless sergeant who’d been so gleeful about causing me pain. Knowing it was her made what we were about to do less difficult. I didn’t care if her career went up in flames because I got away.

  I shrank back against the bubble, stretching it more, putting more pressure on the whole structure. She pulled a spray can from her belt, shaking it briskly before she traced a fizzing line down the front of the plastic dome. It was supposed to dissolve the membrane cleanly, allowing the soldiers to come inside. It was also supposed to be applied to a bubble that was not under pressure.

  The front of the bubble exploded as it finally found a way to vent off some of the tension I had created. It wasn’t a reaction with any heat behind it, but it was enough to send chunks of fizzing, dissolving plastic everywhere, covering the soldiers in thin chunks of bubbling membrane. The soldiers screamed, and I realized, to my horror and delight that the stuff they’d sprayed on the bubble to dissolve it was also eating the plastic parts of their uniforms and guns. Once again, humanity had decided to make use of something that couldn’t be controlled, and now they were paying the price.

  “Come on!” I jumped down from the cot and grabbed Carrie’s hand, hauling her to her feet before I rushed for the opening. The lead soldiers were clawing at the fizzing plastic that stuck to their faces and chests, paying virtually no attention to us.

  And the woman at the head of the formation had dropped her cattle prod.

  I didn’t think: I just did. I let go of Carrie’s hand and dove for the cattle prod while the soldiers were still scraping at the plastic, not yet reacting to the fact that two of their tractable, controlled prisoners were making an escape. The line of it fit perfectly into my palm, and I began swinging.

  Surprise was the main thing we had going for us: surprise, and the expectation of fear. We were supposed to be paralyzed with terror at the idea of the sleepwalker contagion, so beaten down by what we’d been through that we would offer no resistance. That wasn’t the case with either one of us, so when we moved against the soldiers, they weren’t ready. The cattle prod hit the nameless sergeant in the throat. She went down flopping and choking. The other soldiers finally seemed to realize that they had a problem on their hands, apart from the plastic-eating chemicals that were chewing holes in their armor. I kept swinging the cattle prod. They went for their guns.

  So did Carrie.

  She grabbed the sidearm from the fallen sergeant, who was still thrashing, her own seizure much more believable than Carrie’s. The soldiers who had managed to get their guns out turned them on Carrie, and I slammed my cattle prod into whatever exposed skin I could find, sending them tumbling to the floor. Some of them had probably been recruited after things started going bad, and had never been trained for situations like this one. The others might have the training, but weren’t used to enemies who could think. Too much time spent fighting the sleepwalkers had left them, if not soft, then at least slower than they should have been for situations like this one.

  In the end, the only gunshots were Carrie’s. Two of them, both small and muffled in the vastness of the room where we’d been quartered. The men she’d shot looked almost surprised before they fell, like this wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. Carrie clicked back the hammer, ready to fire again. There was no one to fire at. All the soldiers were either down or already writhing on the floor.

  I hated the cattle prod. I hated the weight of it and the poisonous future that it represented. But I knew better than to think that I could be trusted with a firearm, and so I kept my hand locked tight around the hard black shaft as I gestured for Carrie to follow me. “Come on!” I shouted again, in case she didn’t understand the gesture. Then I bent, grabbed the access card off the nearest soldier, and ran for the door.

  Sherman had freed me the last time I’d been kept here. I knew the way out. I knew where the loading dock was. If there were still vehicles kept there, then it might be our salvation. If not…

  If not, at least we had weapons now. I ran, and Carrie ran after me, and we listened for the alarm that would mean we had been discovered as we fled toward the distant, impossible promise of freedom.

  We emerged from the umbilical into an empty control room, the monitors scrolling images of the facility. Most of the rooms they showed were empty or severely understaffed. USAMRIID was running out of people. That should have been reassuring—it meant we were so much more likely to escape—but it was really just chilling. If this facility was meant to be the last stronghold of the humans of the Bay Area, and it was this understaffed, what did that say about the rest of the world?

  There wasn’t time for us to stop or dwell: We were getting out. I kept going, trusting Carrie to follow me, and we emerged into the shadows of the loading-dock garage. It was colder here; the air was unfiltered, filled with the smell of a burning world. Ash, mold, and the distant promise of rain all flooded in through the open doors. I glanced around automatically, checking for sentries, and found none. Instead, my eyes seized on a small patch of darkened concrete, special only in its incongruity. A man had died there, bleeding out after Ronnie slit his throat, just like two men had died for us to get this far. Maybe more, if I’d shocked some of the others too hard.

  How many people had died in the quarantine zone? How many sleepwalkers, how many infant chimera who were only struggling to stay alive? It wasn’t me who had made this an us-against-them battle, and now that it was, the only side I cared about was the one that left me free and still alive.

  There was a rack of neatly labeled keys on the far
side of the garage. I started toward it, motioning for Carrie to follow. “Come on. We need to find something that you know how to drive.”

  “You electrocuted those soldiers.” Her voice quavered. The enormity of what we’d just done was beginning to catch up with her.

  I didn’t have time for a crisis of conscience—either mine or hers. “Yes, and you shot two of them. Now, find something that you can drive. We need to get out of here before the ones who aren’t dead recover and send people looking for us.”

  Assume three minutes to run from the bubble to here. Assume five minutes for the effects of the electrocution to wear off and leave our former captors capable of calling for help; that was about how long it had taken for the people who’d been tossed into the truck that carried me to Pleasanton in the first place to recover. And it was all just a guess. They could have bounced back in under a minute. I had no way of knowing, and every second we spent was a second we couldn’t afford to lose.

  Carrie could be upset about what she’d done after. After we were out of here, after we were free and clear, after I had decided what came next. What we were doing now would guarantee there was an after. Because until we got our butts into a vehicle, that was far from certain.

  “I can—I can drive a stick or an automatic. I don’t think I could drive a tank.”

  “I think they’d notice if we stole a tank.” The labels on the keys writhed and spun, becoming utterly impossible to read. I was too amped up, the adrenaline racing through my veins until there was no chance I’d be able to calm myself down and fight through my dyslexia. “Pick one of these, and let’s go.”