by Mira Grant
Dr. Cale’s eyes widened, dubiousness dropping away. “You mean she’s a result of a second implant entering the same body?”
I nodded. “Yeah. She was a sleepwalker, and now she’s not. Her name is Juniper. I’m taking care of her. But I knew I needed to bring her to you.”
“Yes, you did. How likely is your other friend to shoot someone?”
The sound of a gunshot, breaking glass, and Juniper screaming was our answer. I spun around and ran for the car, past Fishy, who had also turned, and was aiming his rifle at the driver’s-side window. That window was intact: Carrie must have shot forward. That was confirmed when I got closer, and saw the shattered safety glass of the windshield gleaming on the hood. There were other shapes in the darkness, people I didn’t recognize. I was running into a firefight. I knew it, and I couldn’t stop. Juniper was in that car. If Dr. Cale’s people started shooting back—
“Carrie, stop!” I shouted, waving my arms over my head in an effort to make her focus her attention on me. It was dark enough that I felt the need to make myself as visible as possible. “You’re not under attack! We found my family! Stop shooting!”
There was a pause, during which the only sounds were Juniper whimpering and me running toward the SUV. Then Carrie fired again, blowing out more of the windshield. Juniper screamed louder.
None of Dr. Cale’s people were returning fire. Carrie was essentially shooting blindly into the shadows, and while she was going to hit someone eventually, they had an advantage she didn’t: They were capable of moving. Until she got out of the car, she was a known quantity with a small handgun and a limited supply of bullets. There was no reason for them to do anything but evade.
Juniper didn’t understand that. Juniper didn’t even know how to unfasten a seat belt. She was trapped with a woman who was firing a gun indiscriminately at enemies she couldn’t possibly see or comprehend, and she was panicking appropriately.
“Carrie! Carrie! This is my family! Stop shooting!” I was close enough now to see Carrie’s face through the shattered window. Her eyes darted wildly in my direction, round and white and furious. She was holding her pistol up with both hands, and while it was aimed away from me for the moment, there was no guarantee that would continue.
Juniper was still screaming. It tore at my heart. I would have strangled Carrie with my bare hands in that moment, if I had thought it would make the screaming stop.
“You’re not in danger here!” The words felt like lies in my mouth. Carrie very much was in danger. If she kept behaving like this, there was no way Dr. Cale would let her stay—and if Dr. Cale didn’t let her stay, she was going to die. Not of natural causes, either. Fang took his position as head of security very seriously. Fishy had no normal moral qualms, since he thought that everything that was happening was part of a strange, highly immersive video game. Either one of them would be happy to put a bullet in her skull to keep her from betraying them.
Carrie shook her head wildly. “They’re everywhere!”
“Yes! This is where they live! Now, put down the gun and come meet my family.” I held my hands up, hoping she could see that they were empty, that I was still unarmed. I hadn’t expected this violent response to finding the people we’d come here looking for. It didn’t make any sense.
Or maybe it did. She had reacted with violence, or the threat of violence, over and over again while we’d been alone. Now that we were surrounded by other people, maybe she just couldn’t help herself.
“Please, put down the gun.” I was begging. “They’ll shoot you if you don’t. Please.”
“You asked me to bring you back to your family, and I did it,” said Carrie. At least that meant she was hearing me: Even if she didn’t fully understand what I was saying, she knew that I was talking. “I brought you back to her. She killed my husband. She killed us all, and now I’m going to put a bullet in her head!”
The venom and hatred in her voice was staggering. I stopped where I was, looking over my shoulder to where Dr. Cale sat in her wheelchair, backlit by the soft glow from inside. It wasn’t very bright—they must have been keeping the front room of the bowling alley dim, to help them avoid detection—but it was bright enough that I could see her clearly, despite the distance between us. She didn’t look angry, or even surprised. She just looked resigned, like this was the only reasonable outcome to my hitching a ride home.
I turned back to Carrie. “That’s Dr. Cale. I told you we were coming to her lab, and you agreed, remember? She’s my fiancé’s mother. She didn’t hurt anyone on purpose, and she isn’t going to hurt you, I promise.” Not unless Carrie kept shooting. If she managed to injure one of Dr. Cale’s people, then all bets were going to be off. “Please, put down the gun.”
“This is her fault!”
And there it was: the factor I’d been missing, the one I should have considered in more depth before asking Carrie to bring me here. The fact that I would never have been able to make it on my own was almost irrelevant; the fact that I had explained the situation, including where we were going, was maybe the only reason she’d come this far. To Carrie—to any human who understood the development of the SymboGen Intestinal Bodyguardor who had been exposed to Dr. Banks’s frantic after-the-fact spin—Dr. Cale was public enemy number one, the woman who had singlehandedly engineered the downfall of mankind and the rise of the invertebrate invader. She was the mother of monsters, and I had led Carrie straight to her.
It was understandable that Carrie was out for revenge.
“Oh, no,” I whispered, raising one hand to press over my mouth in horror. If Juniper hadn’t been in the car, I might have told Carrie to run, to hit the gas and flee. She would never be comfortable here, not with her personal nightmare running the lab. She wouldn’t go back to USAMRIID, and who else was there for her to tell? She could run until she died and never give us away… and even as I had the thought, I recognized that I was only allowing it to form because Juniper was in the car. Carrie couldn’t be allowed to run. Imagining mercy did nothing to endanger me, or the ones I cared about.
Carrie seemed to realize that her little gunshots weren’t getting her anything she wanted. She dropped the gun onto the seat beside her and hit the gas, sending the SUV lurching into life. It barreled toward me, moving impossibly fast, from my perspective as a stationary object, and I realized that I wasn’t as afraid of being hit by a car as I was of being in one when it hit something else.
The realization was enough to root my feet to the pavement, until a body slammed into mine from the side and knocked me out of the way. The sound of gunshots split the air at the same time, and the SUV spun out of control as the rear tires were shot out. It was dark enough that all I really saw was the vehicle turning, no longer following Carrie’s commands. Juniper was still screaming, louder now than ever.
“Are you hurt?” demanded Fang.
“Let me up!” I pushed, and the security chief—who was stronger than I was, by a good measure, even though we were basically the same size—allowed me to move. I scrambled to get my feet back under me and ran for the SUV, which had stopped a few feet from the bowling alley entrance.
The rest of Dr. Cale’s security staff had already moved into position around the vehicle, guns drawn and aimed at the front seat, where Carrie slumped motionless against her seat belt, her forehead resting on the steering wheel. Through it all, Dr. Cale hadn’t moved once. She was still sitting in the open doorway, her hands folded in her lap, watching the scene in silence.
I wrenched the SUV’s back door open, ignoring the armed figures at my back. Juniper’s wails redoubled when she saw me, accompanied by her reaching her arms out in my direction, hands making small, unconscious grasping motions. I had only been in her life for a day, but she already knew that I represented comfort: Like all children, she wanted to know that there was something bigger than she was standing between her and the monsters.
My hands were shaking as I undid her seat belt and scooped her into my arms. I had
been out of the SUV when it was shot to a standstill, but my little girl hadn’t. She could have been killed. I think that was the moment when I started hating Carrie. Losing her senses could be forgiven, but endangering Juniper? That was a step too far.
“Good to have you back,” said Fishy as I passed him with Juniper in my arms. He blinked at the sight of her. Then he grinned. “Nice mission objective! See you inside.” He turned his back on me and began moving toward the SUV. The other figures followed him. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Carrie in that moment: If she had survived the accident, she was about to find herself on the receiving end of Dr. Cale’s darker brand of hospitality.
Dr. Cale herself gripped the wheels of her chair and rolled backward when I reached the door, looking at me, and at Juniper, who was clinging so tightly to my neck that separating us would have been virtually impossible. “We looked for you,” she said.
“I believe you,” I replied.
“Welcome home,” she said, and then she smiled, and I smiled back, despite everything, because I had done it. I had made it back to where I belonged.
Whatever happened next was going to be easier, because I was going to be with my family.
For me, the remarkable thing is not that things went wrong. Science is a powerful tool, but like any tool, it doesn’t care whether it hurts you. Fire warms us, cooks our food, protects us from predators, but it will burn us if we let it. Fire is more than happy to eat us all alive. Science is fire writ large. As soon as we created the prototype for what would become the SymboGen implants, I knew that we were tailoring our own demise. Even if the science hadn’t been willing to turn on us, we were entrusting a magic bullet to corporate greed.
Humanity has always been disturbingly happy to sacrifice its future on the altar of right now. Look at the antitrust suits of the early 2000s, or the copyright extensions pushed through again and again by large media companies who feared losing their hold over their greatest moneymakers. We will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. So for me, the remarkable thing has never been that things went wrong. It’s that it took so long for them to fall apart as badly as they did.
—FROM CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.
We lost two more people today. Both had checked out as clean, and then abruptly went into convulsions. They died before we could offer medical help.
It’s unclear how this new strain is interfacing with the human brain. We seem to be experiencing more early deaths than we did with the previous strain: It’s as if the worm is going so directly for the brain that it skips the “sleepwalker” stage entirely, leading to a quick, violent death. Only two of the impacted personnel have made it from stage 1 (infection) to stage 2 (animation). None have progressed to stage 3 (sapience), although posthumous study has shown that in all cases, the worms had infiltrated the brain to such a degree that stage 3 should have been possible.
I sent men into the city today to round up surviving stage 2 victims of this terrible disease. They came back with thirty-four test subjects. We’ll be spraying them down with infected water, to see what happens when someone who has already been infected is infected for a second time.
Still no signs of Shanti. USAMRIID has lost Sal. We may be doomed.
—FROM THE PRIVATE NOTES OF DR. STEVEN BANKS, DECEMBER 19, 2027
Chapter 9
DECEMBER 2027
Entering the bowling alley was like stepping into a dream. I had never expected to be here again. Dr. Cale was waiting for her people to get Carrie out of the car, so I walked through the familiar, purposefully decrepit antechamber alone, until I reached the door that would take me to the main lab. I hesitated in reaching for the doorknob. Was I ready for what was waiting on the other side? What if we had lost people? What if we had lost Nathan? A lot could have changed since I’d been taken into custody by Colonel Mitchell.
There was only one way I was going to find out. I closed my eyes for a moment, taking comfort in the distant sound of drums and the increasingly familiar weight of Juniper clinging to my neck. Then I opened them, and grasped the knob, and turned it.
My first impression of the lab was that nothing had changed. The workstations were where they had always been; the lights were bright where they needed to be but otherwise dim, keeping the power profile low and the chances of detection even lower. People in lab coats moved like ghosts through the gloom, some carrying clipboards or tablet computers, others transporting biological samples from one place to another. The lab coats were dingier than they used to be, no longer quite so pristinely white, but everyone I saw was wearing one. If you had a lab coat, you were a scientist. More now than ever, these people needed to be scientists.
As I thought that, I blinked, and I realized that everything had changed.
The people who moved through the gloom used to do it with calm assurance, like they had all the time in the world. Now they scuttled, moving fast, to the point where two of them nearly collided as I watched. The lights were low in part because some of the bulbs appeared to have burnt out. The charts and diagrams I remembered from the first time we’d been living and working out of the bowling alley were back in place, but they were interspersed with new signs, written in large red letters and often illuminated by pin lights. I stopped in front of one of those signs, squinting as I tried to make the letters stop swimming around the paper. Whatever it was, I needed to understand it if I was going to understand the changes that had happened here in the lab.
Juniper whimpered. I stroked her back with one hand, squinting harder. Bit by bit, the shifting, twisting letters settled down, becoming words.
WARNING: DO NOT DRINK THE TAP WATER.
IF EXPOSURE IS SUSPECTED, REPORT IMMEDIATELY.
DO NOT CONCEAL EXPOSURE.
SILENCE IS DEATH.
A chill slithered through my stomach. I had been right, and the worms were in the water. It was the only thing that made sense, and it explained everything. I was suddenly glad for the limited water rations back in the quarantine zone, and for the bottled water we’d taken from the diner.
Even sleepwalkers needed to drink. I remembered the desiccated teenage girl I had found dying in her own bedroom. She’d consumed the water from her fish tank before she got really dehydrated. After that was gone, it had only been a matter of time. There had to be faucets that had been left running, accessible toilet bowls still refilled by gravity. The sleepwalkers would have sought out those sources of water, following instincts more powerful than intellect, and then the very thing that had sustained them had killed them all.
“Sal?”
The word was little more than a whisper, familiar and frightened and heartbreakingly near. I was already smiling as I turned to face its source, my hand still stroking Juniper’s back, my eyes beginning to fill with slow and welcome tears.
“Hello, Nathan. I came home.”
My boyfriend slash maybe fiancé—he had proposed several times, and I’d said yes every time, so I guess that was the better word for him—stared at me like I was a ghost. He hadn’t been outside much recently. He was paler than he’d been when he walked away from me in the SymboGen building, although his skin was still several shades darker than mine, going with his black hair and dark eyes, which were wide with pain and hope behind the lenses of his wire-frame glasses. Like the other scientists around him, he was wearing a dingy lab coat over a plain T-shirt and jeans.
Nathan was Dr. Cale’s sole biological child, the result of her first and only marriage. He got most of his coloring and his height from his Korean father. He got most of his facial expressions from his mother, although he was much more emotionally demonstrative than she was: Whatever had been left out of Dr. Cale when she was being put together was present in him, in spades. Never did that show more clearly than in moments like this one as he took a half step forward and raised his hand, like he was going to reach for me. Then he stopped, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
“Nathan—”
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br /> “I’m so sorry.” The words tumbled out, jumbled together and barely intelligible. “I should never have left you there. I should have tried harder to find another way, to find a plan that let us all leave together, and I’m so sorry, can you forgive me? Please, can you forgive me?”
“Oh, Nathan.” Everything was suddenly clear, and there was only one thing I could do to make it any better. I stepped forward to meet him, putting my free arm around him and pulling him as close to me as possible. Juniper made a noise of protest and shifted positions, but she didn’t cry or pull away.
“I was never mad at you,” I whispered. “I never blamed you. I stayed behind because it was the right thing to do, to get the rest of you out of there. It was my choice, not yours, and I never, ever blamed you for letting me make my own decisions. That’s why I love you. Because you always let me be a person, no matter how dangerous it is.”
Nathan laughed shakily, the sound thick with stress and unshed tears. “I don’t think I could have stopped you if I’d tried.”
“Probably not,” I agreed, and buried my face in the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent of his skin. It was soothing in more ways than one. This was Nathan, the man who’d held me through my night terrors and told me it didn’t matter that I was a tapeworm in a human skin. He didn’t love me any less because of my origins, and that meant more to me than I could put into words. But even more importantly, being this close to him, breathing in the chemicals rising off his skin, I could confirm what I needed to know more than anything else in the world. I could confirm he was still clean: that none of the cousins now swarming in the tainted water had managed to find a way into his body.
Juniper made her small sound of protest again, and Nathan let me go. Now I was the one who wanted to protest. I swallowed the urge, stepping back to let Juniper get a better look at him. She was sitting upright in my arms, her eyes fixed on Nathan. She looked wary. It was a new expression for her, and I wondered how much of it had been born when Carrie started shooting, introducing Juniper to the idea that sometimes the people who fed and held her didn’t have her best interests at heart.