Chimera (Parasitology)

by Mira Grant

  Carrie stood there for a few more precious seconds, her eyes skipping from label to label until I wanted to scream, grab the first set of keys that came to hand, and haul her away. I forced myself to remain calm until she reached out and selected a set, jiggling it in her palm for two seconds more before she turned to me. “This one,” she said.

  “Where is it?”

  “Slot fifteen.”

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  The alarms were starting to scream when we emerged from the loading dock and into the watery light of the early evening. We ran side by side, her carrying keys and a stolen pistol, me carrying a cattle prod and a mountain of guilt. I had to get out of here. That much was certain. Sally’s mother was never going to accept me as her child, and Colonel Mitchell was playing some long, terrible game that I didn’t understand. He knew I wasn’t Sally, he knew it, but he kept on pretending. Why? I couldn’t force it to make sense.

  There was nothing here for me. Dr. Cale might have been able to help Joyce, but she was never going to get the chance; my biological sister would remain here, on life support, waiting for the day her father finally pulled the plug. All we could ever have saved was her body, anyway, and her mother’s reaction to me made it clear that donating Joyce to a chimera in need of a host would never have been acceptable to her.

  And it still felt like I was running away from yet another family, no matter how dysfunctional: like all I ever did was run from one family after another. The Mitchells, when I chose Dr. Cale; Dr. Cale and Nathan, when I allowed Dr. Banks to sell me back to USAMRIID. The list was short, but even one entry was too long, considering how short my life thus far had been.

  “That one,” said Carrie, pointing to an SUV. I ran after her, throwing myself into the passenger seat as soon as she unlocked the doors. The alarm was still ringing behind us. Hopefully, they wouldn’t think to lock down the motor pool until we were clear.

  You’re not afraid of cars, I told myself sternly. That’s a fear that belongs to somebody else. That’s a fear that belongs to Sally. The people who gave it to you, they were trying to turn you into her. So they gave you her accident, and they gave you her fear. You don’t have to keep it anymore.

  I knew that was true. It didn’t stop the cold worm of terror from unfolding in my stomach as the engine rumbled into life. My fingers fumbled with the seat belt, clicking it home, struggling to make sure it was tight and secure. I already wanted to throw up.

  “There’s something you should know,” I said, in a strangled voice.

  “What?”

  “I’m scared of cars.”

  Carrie shot me a flat you-must-be-kidding look, brows furrowed above wide eyes. “You’re telling me this now, and not before you got me to go along with your genius plan? What the fuck am I supposed to do, Sal, drive twenty miles below the speed limit while the army chases us?”

  Carrie still thought we were going back to San Francisco. Carrie still thought she could have normalcy again, or something so close to normalcy as to make it easier for her to mourn her husband. Carrie was wrong, and I couldn’t tell her that, or she might refuse to take me where I actually needed to go.

  Not that I knew where that was. “No, you’re supposed to floor it,” I said. “Drive like your life depends on it, because it does. But I’m going to try meditating so I don’t freak out, because that wouldn’t help the situation. So if I start breathing shallowly, please don’t get upset.” If I go down into the hot warm dark, where you can’t reach me, please don’t put a bullet in my head.

  Carrie shook her head. “This is unbelievable,” she said, reversing out of the parking space. “This is fucking unbelievable. Hold on.” And then she hit the gas like the hammer of the gods, and we were rocketing away from the motor pool at the sort of speed that made my mouth go dry and my heart start slamming against my ribs.

  Soldiers were emerging from the building behind us, waving their arms like that was somehow going to make Carrie stop the vehicle. She paid them no attention. Her eyes were on the road, her hands were on the wheel, and her foot was on the gas, pressing down with all the force that she could find. All her anger, all her grief, was sublimated into some of the most aggressive driving I had ever experienced.

  I didn’t grip the dashboard or put my hands over my eyes: I couldn’t move. All I could do was sit there, ramrod straight and terrified, as Carrie wove around the men who were now diving into our path, her fingers locked so tight that they had gone white at the knuckles, and accelerated toward the distant fence.

  When USAMRIID had seized the Oakland Coliseum for use as their new base of operations, they had made many changes. They had created rooms where there were none, they had set up full medical facilities, and for all I knew, they had installed the two-way mirror in the room where Colonel Mitchell had interrogated me. But they’d done all those things inside. They still thought of themselves as the biggest dogs at the dog park, and they hadn’t taken extensive precautions around the outside of the building. As long as their electrified fences were keeping the sleepwalkers out, they had seen no need to take any further steps.

  Carrie showed the error of their ways when she veered sharply to the left and went crashing straight through the chain link, punching a hole the size of our stolen SUV in the fence. More alarms started to sound, these loud enough to be audible through the closed windows, adding a whole new layer of terror to my already terrible situation. I tried to force my eyes to close. They didn’t obey.

  “They’re following us!” Carrie shouted.

  That got me to move. I glanced at the rearview mirror before twisting to look in the side mirror. Two Jeeps were on the road far behind us. There was, as yet, no air pursuit; if they had any helicopters, they hadn’t been prepped to send them out. That didn’t mean they weren’t going to appear in a few minutes, but we had a chance.

  “Go faster,” I said, even though it was the last thing I wanted, even though it felt like my lungs were being squeezed by a vast, external hand.

  Carrie looked like she wanted to protest. In the end, she said nothing: merely slammed her foot down even harder, until the SUV was moving at a speed that made every inch of me ache with the need for stillness. I forced myself to keep breathing, trying to come up with some scenario that didn’t end in USAMRIID catching up with us and taking us back.

  We’d managed to escape them this time, but things were different now. We were killers now. We were never going to get a chance like this again.

  The freeways were a clogged disaster, choked with the abandoned cars of people who’d been attacked or who had completed their own transformation into sleepwalkers. The surface streets were somewhat better, which I had to assume was a function of USAMRIID’s presence: They had been clearing the streets to make it easier for them to get around as they transported people back and forth, as they went on supply runs.

  The sun was going down, but it was still bright enough to see—for now. A sign flashed past, miraculously legible in its familiarity, and I knew what we had to do. “Follow the signs!” I exclaimed, almost shouting in my excitement and my terror. “Go to Jack London Square!”

  “What?”

  “Jack London Square!”

  “You’re a crazy person! I stole a car and ran away with a crazy person!” Carrie hauled hard on the wheel as she was yelling at me. It felt like the SUV lifted up onto two wheels when she took the turn, but she didn’t slam us into anything, and she didn’t flip the car, so I had to call that a victory. My standards were definitely dropping.

  “There’s a ferry landing there!” I had seen it a few times, when my fam—when Colonel Mitchell and his wife had taken me and Joyce to see free concerts at the attached plaza. It was a shopping area, filled with little stores and big chains. It had probably fallen fast when the sleepwalkers began to wake and hunt. They might still be there, depending on how tactically important USAMRIID considered the place. They didn’t matter.

  What mattered was the water.

&n
bsp; Jack London Square was built entirely along the waterfront. There were canoe and kayak rental stations, and most days, the water was calm enough that it was safe to risk falling out of your boat and going for an impromptu swim. The plaza management had always been very strict about enforcing their “No Swimming” policies, but I really didn’t think the Posted signs were going to be a big deal anymore. Something about the collapse of local government told me that no one was going to stop us.

  “They’re gaining!” snapped Carrie.

  “Keep driving,” I replied.

  Some of the surface streets were narrow, clogged with cars and other obstacles that forced Carrie to reduce speed or risk flipping us over. The setting sun didn’t help, casting the world around us deeper into shadow with each passing second. Our followers had less speed to lose, and were making up ground. We didn’t need to have that much of a lead; we just needed to have enough to get us to the waterfront before they did.

  “You better have a plan!”

  “Keep driving!”

  Carrie swore and slammed down on the gas again, sending us swerving around a tipped-over UPS truck. I took a deep breath, fighting down the urge to scream or vomit. My terror wasn’t more manageable than usual: It was just tempered by the knowledge that this was the only way. If we didn’t beat the soldiers to Jack London Square, we weren’t going to escape, and all this would have been for nothing.

  I refused to let it have been for nothing. No matter what I had to do, no matter what I had to pay, I was going to reach the broken doors. I was going home.

  The signs for Jack London Square were becoming more frequent as we drove, even if it was getting harder to see them. There should have been more. Some of them had probably been destroyed during the sleepwalker uprising in Oakland. Even with as little attention as I was currently capable of paying to things outside my own head, I could see the signs of the conflict written on the buildings around us in burn marks and blood splatter, which had dried brown and terrible across the storefronts and brightly colored murals. Nathan and I used to visit Oakland to look at the graffiti, which was beautiful and transformative in a way that was difficult to put into words, turning a cold urban landscape into something as virile and alive as any forest or human body. Now those graffiti artists were gone, and their works had been profaned by blood and worse. It made me want to weep for them—and while that might have been an overreaction, it was an overreaction born of my brain trying to protect me from the speed of transit, and I welcomed it.

  “Almost there!” shouted Carrie. “Now what?”

  “Head for the water!”

  She took her eyes off the road ahead to stare at me, shocked into carelessness. “Excuse me but what?”

  “Can you swim?” That was a wrinkle I hadn’t considered when I was putting together my hasty escape plan. If Carrie couldn’t swim…

  “Are you insane?!”

  “Good, I can swim too!” I gestured toward the blue sheet of the water, which was drawing closer by the second. Then I unfastened my seat belt. The SUV’s internal sensors promptly started beeping, sending ants marching across my every nerve. Even the car knew that what I was doing was dangerous and stupid. So why was I doing it?

  Because I wanted to live. The most important reason of them all. “Undo your belt and open your door before we go off the edge!” I swallowed my fear and reached for my door handle, popping it just slightly out of true. “The water pressure won’t let us open them once we hit, so this is important! You’re going to have to jump before the SUV hits the water!”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Carrie’s face was white with fear, but she was still driving toward the water. She didn’t see another way either.

  That helped. If we both thought this was the only option, then we would live or die together, but we would do it knowing that at least we had tried. “When we hit, swim as hard as you can away from the car, before it drags you down. Find something to hide under, and stay out of—”

  The edge of the waterfront dropped out from under our wheels like a rug being pulled away, and we were sailing into the air, soaring out in a wide arc defined by our speed and the dragging pull of gravity. We were dancing with physics, and it was a beautiful, terrible thing.

  I can’t do this, I thought, and I have to do this, I thought, and I shoved my door open wide and launched myself into the open air bare seconds before gravity won and yanked the SUV down into the blue. I didn’t see whether Carrie did the same; I was too busy slamming into the water and fighting to keep my breath inside my body. Human lungs need air, and that meant I needed air, and then the descent of the car was pulling me down, down, down into the dark, and so I swam as hard as I could, the taste of salt water on my lips and the shocking cold of the Pacific creeping fast into my bones.

  This is not how I die, I thought, and swam in the direction where I remembered the shore. I was trying to keep my entire body submerged. The inexorable pull of the sinking SUV helped; I couldn’t have bobbed to the surface if I’d tried.

  My hands were empty. The cattle prod had been lost when the car went down. That was a pity—it would have been nice to have some sort of weapon—but it was also a relief. I wasn’t sure I could have used that thing against one of the cousins. Better a bullet to the head than an eternity consigned to nothingness, floating in your own body and unable to do anything to make it respond to your commands ever again. And besides, it would only have slowed me down. When survival was the only goal, everything else could fall by the wayside.

  My empty palm slapped against something splintery and wet. I couldn’t see, but I knew that the waterfront was supported by wooden pilings, and so I gripped the thing and pulled myself upward, trying to take it slowly, even as my lungs burned and ached with the need for oxygen. If I wasn’t under the dock…

  I emerged into shadow, with the hard wooden slope of the waterfront above my head and a water-stained concrete wall in front of me, marking the line where the actual soil had been shored up against erosion. I was shivering uncontrollably, and it was all I could do to force myself to breathe out slowly, releasing the old air from my lungs, and pull in an equally slow breath. I wanted to hyperventilate, running all the oxygen in the world through my body, but I didn’t dare. Even with the water sloshing and crashing around me, the sound might be audible to the soldiers I knew were even now spreading through the square.

  There was no sign of Carrie.

  That didn’t have to mean anything bad. She could have swum in the other direction, or she could be somewhere else under the dock, clinging to a pillar and concealed by shadow. But it was hard not to look at the empty ocean and feel like she was gone forever, one more sacrifice to my endless need to be free. I’m sorry, I thought. I didn’t say it out loud. Getting myself caught because I was sorry that she might have been lost wasn’t going to do either one of us any good.

  A flashlight beam played across the water just beyond the dock. I drew farther back against my pillar, trying to move so that I wouldn’t be visible if someone decided to peer over the edge. The disturbance caused by our sinking SUV was gone, leaving the water as smooth and unblemished as it had ever been. As long as they focused their attention there, on that patch of waves, and didn’t look any further…

  My teeth were starting to chatter. I tried to force them to stop. I am in control of my own body, I thought fiercely. I am not going to freeze.

  All the positive thinking in the world wasn’t going to change the reality of my situation. I was mostly submerged in extremely cold water, and if I didn’t move soon, hypothermia was going to set in. I was already losing feeling in my fingers and toes, and my limbs were becoming sluggish, resistant to my commands. The urge to sink down into the hot warm dark until the danger had passed was seductive, and would be fatal if I gave in. Down in the dark, I wouldn’t know what was happening to my body. I would just float, formless and untroubled, until the water filled my lungs and I sank into darkness forever. That wouldn’t get me ho
me… although on some level, the thought of dying in the sea, where no one, not Sherman and not USAMRIID, could use my body for their own ends, was tempting. I wanted to live. I wanted to make it home. I wanted to see how this was going to end.

  A hand touched my shoulder. I swallowed my scream as I whipped around, legs thrashing in the water, and found myself looking into Carrie’s tired, white-cheeked face. She had a cut above her left eye. It was bleeding copiously, looking black in the absence of light beneath the dock.

  I reached out without saying a word, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward me. She nodded in understanding and wrapped herself around me while I hooked one arm around the pillar, the two of us using each other to conserve body heat while we waited for the danger to pass.

  Almost as an afterthought, I pulled us behind the pillar. None too soon: a light hit the back wall seconds later, playing over the stone as the person who held it looked for some sign as to where we had gone. Carrie and I locked eyes, and said nothing. The sound of the water would muffle our breathing. As long as we could hold on and keep ourselves alive, we could still get out of this.

  Someone in the distance shouted something. The light was withdrawn. We stayed where we were. Carrie’s lips were turning blue, and the chattering of her teeth was a thin, constant counterpart to the chattering of my own. We were freezing to death an inch at a time, and if we waited much longer, we weren’t going to make it out of here.

  I started counting to one hundred, trying to pause long enough between numbers that I could be sure each represented at least a second. When I reached the end of my count without any further lights or shouts from above, I gave Carrie a shake, trying to get her to open her eyes. When had she closed them? I wasn’t entirely sure. She was still holding on to me, which made me think that she wasn’t dead yet, just limp with cold and exhaustion. I shook her again.