Chimera (Parasitology)

by Mira Grant

  “I went to check on Joyce,” she said, not moving. “You know she sleeps better when I tuck her in and tell her we’re still here waiting for her. But she wasn’t there, Alfred. The room she was supposed to be in was empty. And when I asked the guards where she was, they said I had to talk to you if I wanted to know what was going on. They said I wasn’t cleared to know where she was. Where’s my daughter, Alfred? Where’s Joyce?” Her eyes flicked to me, and then back to him. “What is that monster doing here?”

  I looked at the face of the woman who had called herself my mother, who had kissed my forehead and laughed with me over plates of scrambled eggs and bacon, and I saw nothing there but loathing. She didn’t love me. She had never loved me. She had loved the girl whose face I wore, and that love had died the day she admitted that her daughter was gone.

  Humanity was never going to be able to accept us. We would always wear the faces of their dead, and we would never be those people, not really, not in any of the ways that mattered. I had asked once whether amnesia was a form of dying, and I had been assured that no, no, it was just a second chance at figuring out who you really were. If that was true, then why couldn’t they love us? Our bodies were the same. Only our minds had changed, and while I couldn’t say for sure that the change was for the better, it was no different than the change that came from a blow to the head and a loss of previous self. But it seemed to make all the difference in the world to them, our parents and creators. It made more difference than anything else could have.

  “Gail, darling, you know you’re not supposed to be in this part of the facility,” said Colonel Mitchell, stepping forward to play the peacekeeper and prevent his wife from getting too close to me. She’d swung at me before. There was no question whether she’d do it again, and I couldn’t defend myself—not with this many armed humans standing by and waiting to see what I would do.

  “Where’s Joyce?” she demanded. “Why is that thing here? If you recaptured her, you should have pulled her out of our baby’s brain. She doesn’t deserve to live.”

  I winced. If she wanted me extracted from Sally’s brain, she was definitely going to be unhappy about Tansy setting up shop inside of Joyce. Even if Joyce wasn’t there anymore, Gail Mitchell wasn’t the most forgiving of mothers.

  But then, how many would be? Juniper had been mine for only a short time, and I would have killed anyone who had opened her skull and pulled her out of the safe space she had found for herself. Maybe forgiveness wasn’t a parental skill because it wasn’t supposed to be. Forgiveness was for people who didn’t have as much to lose.

  “Joyce… Gail, I’m so sorry, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Joyce didn’t make it.” Colonel Mitchell swung his head slowly, like the motion pained him.

  Gail stared at him, her eyes going round and impossibly wide in her suddenly pale face. She made a sound, guttural and low in her throat, like she was trying to decide between speech and vomiting, and couldn’t settle on either.

  Colonel Mitchell reached for her. She all but danced away.

  “No-no-no,” she said, scolding like a treed squirrel. Then: “No-no-no,” again, followed by, “I don’t believe you I don’t believe you where is she? If she’s dead, where is she? I want to see my daughter I want to see my baby I want to see my little girl.” Her voice rose steadily as she spoke, although she never shouted. She just got louder and louder, until everyone was looking at us, and all the technicians and clever scientists who had been working with Fang to develop the antiparasitic drugs for the water had stopped working in order to turn and stare. None of them said a word. They were smart people. They recognized an unwinnable situation when they saw one.

  “Gail, please. Not in front of my command.” Colonel Mitchell used the tone he might have used to say “not in front of the children,” and the way his eyes darted to me made it clear that he was saying exactly that.

  Unfortunately for both of us, it made his meaning clear to his wife as well. “You!” She whirled on me. “You did this somehow, you killed her, you weren’t content killing just one of my daughters, you had to have them both, you had to have both my babies, you monster.”

  “Wow,” said Fishy. “I don’t think I heard a single full stop in there. You know, when you start talking entirely in comma splices, you’re probably ready for a time-out and a tranquilizer.”

  Normally, his mild, slightly off-kilter observations helped to defuse bad situations. It was hard to stay angry or upset when someone was standing there treating everything like a comedy in the process of winding down. Gail Mitchell seemed to be one of the few people who was immune to his charms. Her lips drew back from her teeth, and I flinched. Primates showed their teeth. Tapeworms didn’t.

  “You did this,” she repeated, and reached behind her, producing a service pistol much like the ones worn by the guards around us. Colonel Mitchell reacted with alarm, putting his hands up. Most of the guards reached for their own weapons. Gail ignored them. All her focus was on me.

  “You did this,” she said, for the third time, as she trained the muzzle of her gun on the center of my chest. “You killed Sally, and then you came back and you killed Joyce. My husband may look at you and see his little girl, but he was always blind where she was concerned, and you can’t fool me anymore, you monster. I’m going to stop this. I’m going to get revenge for my babies.”

  “Gail, please,” said Colonel Mitchell.

  “Please,” I echoed. I didn’t raise my hands. I was afraid to move. I could barely even look at her face. It was a wall of teeth and hatred, and part of me would always think of her as my mother; would always look to her for comfort, and be startled by the now-inevitable rejection. “I didn’t hurt your daughter on purpose. I would never have decided that my life mattered more than hers. Things just happened, that’s all. Please. I have a family.”

  “I had a family,” she said. “Before you barged in and started killing them, I had a family too. If I can’t have mine, you can’t have yours.” She unhooked the safety with her thumb, her aim never wavering—

  —and collapsed to the floor in a twitching heap, revealing Private Larsen standing behind her with an electric prod in his hand. His face was pale, and his eyes were filled with the horrified realization that he had just electrocuted his commander’s wife.

  “Sir, I…” he began, and stopped, clearly unsure what he should say next.

  “Stand down, son,” said Colonel Mitchell. There was pain and sorrow and a surprising amount of sympathy in his voice. “You did the right thing.” He knelt and gathered his fallen wife into his arms, lifting her off the floor. She jittered, but was otherwise still.

  “I’m sorry,” said Private Larsen, and fled back to his post, an unlikely savior setting the mantle aside as quickly as he possibly could.

  Colonel Mitchell looked to me. “Do you understand now why we can’t be allies?” he asked.

  I nodded, because I did. Gail Mitchell was a microcosm of the human race, of the thousands of people who would look at us and see their children, friends, and lovers turned into monsters and turned against them. We were the invaders, and we would never be accepted. Even people like Fishy, who claimed not to resent us for killing his wife, probably wouldn’t have been accepting if she had opened her eyes and started talking with someone else’s voice. Sleepwalkers were an easy enemy. You could see them coming, and you could mow them down without considering the people they had been. Chimera… chimera were hard.

  “We can’t be allies,” I said. “I understand that. I… I wish it were different.”

  “So do I,” said Colonel Mitchell.

  But I wasn’t finished. “Not being allies doesn’t mean we can’t work together for a while. Long enough to make sure that there’s a future for all of us.”

  Colonel Mitchell frowned. “What did you have in mind?”

  “It’s simple.” I looked at Gail Mitchell, still collapsed bonelessly in his arms, and then up to his face. “You’re going to help us sav
e the world, and then we’re going to disappear.”

  Attached please find the formula for a new antiparasitic treatment now being deployed in the Californian waterways. We have provided this formula to outposts in Oregon, Utah, and Nevada, and are hoping to have all publicly used water in the western United States undergoing treatment by the end of the week. Our manpower is sketchy at best, but the faster we are able to treat the contaminated water, the more we will be able to reduce the speed of spread and prevent further infections. This antiparasitic is tailored to the specific strain of tapeworm that has been used to contaminate our water supplies, and should be safe for the majority of people and animals who will ingest it. Adverse reactions are of course possible—there is someone who is allergic to virtually anything you can produce—but the casualties that may arise from this treatment are far less than the casualties that will arise from withholding it.

  I understand that I have acted without authorization, and that I will be repudiated by environmental groups for the rest of time. As there will be environmental groups partially due to my actions, I am willing to accept the consequences of what I have done. I will not stand aside and let judgment fall on my men, who have only ever followed orders.

  History will decide how great my crimes were, one way or the other.

  —MESSAGE FROM COLONEL ALFRED MITCHELL, USAMRIID, TRANSMITTED TO THE WHITE HOUSE ON JANUARY 15, 2028

  I’m starting to lose my grip on my delusions. Which sounds like I’m getting better, I guess—“Hey, it’s getting harder for me to hallucinate my way through the afternoon! Score one for neurotypicality!”—but it’s not that simple, and it’s not that positive. I think things have gotten too bearable around here. That’s part of it. Humans are novel animals: We need constant variety if we don’t want to get used to things. I’m getting used to things.

  Every morning I wake up and you’re not there, and somehow that’s becoming normal. Every day I work with people who are really worms inhabiting human skins, but are still perfectly nice people, and somehow that’s becoming normal. Every night I brush my teeth and go to bed alone, and somehow the fact that that’s becoming normal is the worst part of all.

  I’m starting to accept this world as the real one, and I’m starting to forget what your shampoo smelled like, and I don’t know how long I can do this before I go sane, and I can’t cope anymore.

  —FROM THE DIARY OF MATTHEW “FISHY” DOCKREY, JANUARY 2028

  Chapter 17

  JANUARY 2028

  Colonel Mitchell had the most detailed maps of the Bay Area I had ever seen. They covered the entire table in the conference room, and more spilled over onto the walls and floor. We had been able to reject a great many of them as clearly not being suitable: They showed neighborhoods that didn’t have indoor malls of the sort Sherman had been using for his base, or that weren’t close enough to the house where I’d been found to be a reasonable journey from the nearest such shopping center. Ronnie wouldn’t have wanted to be caught sneaking me off the property. He’d knocked me out before he took me out of the mall, but that didn’t mean he’d been able to take forever moving me.

  “Do you remember anything else about this place, Sal?” asked Colonel Mitchell.

  “There was a fountain,” I said. “Inside.”

  “That’s not helpful,” said Private Larsen, who had somehow been drafted into this little planning session. I guess once you electrocute the boss’s wife, you become a lot more interesting to him. “A lot of malls built in the seventies and eighties had fountains, and that covers most of the indoor shopping malls in the Bay Area.”

  “Didn’t you say you got up on the roof?” asked Fishy.

  “Yes.” I had had to crawl through a series of air-conditioning ducts. It had been a surprisingly soothing way to make an escape—I like tight spaces—except for the part where I had been constantly afraid of falling.

  “Were there mountains?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “When you looked off the edge of the roof, were there mountains?”

  I blinked again, more slowly this time. I had only been able to see the landscape for a few moments before Ronnie had been there to subdue me and take me away. Had there been mountains? I thought maybe there had been. “Y-yes,” I said hesitantly. “Off to the left. In front of me there was just parking lot, and a street, and the freeway.”

  “So that means we have dedicated parking, visible from the rooftop, mountains, and no nearby residential housing.” Fishy pushed another three maps off the table. “Was it warm?”

  “No. It was the middle of winter.”

  To my surprise, he pushed another map off the table. “Means you weren’t in San Jose. Which wouldn’t make sense anyway—we picked you up in Pleasant Hill. Do you remember seeing a movie theater?”

  “No,” I said. “I would have remembered that.”

  “Good, because that was a trick question.” He pulled a map closer to himself. “So here’s a fun fact for you. Malls used to be a much bigger deal than they are now, and sometimes you’d get multiple malls built in the same city. Pleasant Hill, California, for example, had two major malls for a long time. Sun Valley, which is here”—he tapped the map—“thrived. It was near a major freeway on-ramp, there was a nearby community college, a high school, lots of residential housing—basically perfect growing conditions for a mall. It never closed its doors.”

  “So it’s not our mall,” I said gloomily, and reached for another map.

  Fishy held up his hand. “Ah-ah-ah, my young student, you haven’t let me get to the cool part. I don’t get many awesome cutscenes. Give me this one, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Colonel Mitchell scowled. “I don’t know what a cutscene is, but get to the point, son. We don’t have all day.”

  “We owe it to the people Sherman is holding captive to get this right; give me my moment,” said Fishy. He tapped another section of the map. “The Monument Mall. It was never as big as Sun Valley, the stores were never as diverse, and the population was never as interested. It originally grew up around a big theater called ‘the Dome’ that got driven out by the local multiplexes and torn down in the teens. Even that wasn’t enough to save the place. It shuttered its doors about eight years ago. Total bankruptcy. They didn’t even clean out most of the stores.”

  “And you know this how?” asked Colonel Mitchell.

  “The maker group I was involved with used to do a lot of scavenging for materials. We broke in there a couple of times before somebody went and installed a better security system on the place. I sort of figured that was because they were going to reopen it, but that never happened.”

  “How long ago was that?” I asked.

  “Four years,” said Fishy.

  I thought back to the level of… well, entrenchedness I had witnessed from Sherman’s people. They hadn’t been squatting on the surface of the mall: They had been fully integrated with the spaces they were planning to use, having long since converted them to their purposes. Four years would have been sufficient time for the changes I’d seen, and more, for Sherman to have surgically induced all of the chimera I had seen there. If he’d started with one or two, and then trained them to assist him with the medical procedures necessary to make more…

  “That’s it,” I said. “At least, I think that’s it. Are there pictures?”

  “No, but look.” Fishy tapped the map again. “Here’s Sun Valley. And here”—he moved his finger less than an inch, into the nearby residential zone—“is where we found you. He dumped you next to a different mall. That way, if you insisted that Sherman was in ‘the mall’ instead of ‘a mall,’ we’d be looking in the wrong place.”

  His explanation worked, except for one small part. “It wasn’t Sherman who dumped me, it was Ronnie.”

  Fishy shrugged. “Makes no difference.”

  “Makes all the difference. Ronnie was trying to cover for his boss, even while he was letting me go. Sherman doesn’t know
I had help getting away, unless this was some really complicated double cross that I still don’t understand. So as far as Sherman knows, I figured out where he was hiding forever ago, and then I didn’t bring people to his doorstep.”

  “So?” asked Colonel Mitchell.

  I took a deep breath. Sometimes it felt like I only had one plan, a plan that predated my existence as a thinking creature: infiltrate; invade; enter without permission. “If we can’t sneak up on him without risking our people, I think I know how we can get inside. It’s not going to be fun. But we can do it.”

  Fishy looked at me with stunned approval. Colonel Mitchell, who didn’t understand yet what I was suggesting, just frowned.

  “All right,” I began. “This is how we get in…”

  Fishy liked my plan: He said it was the sort of stealth mission that would be included in the downloadable content, and probably win some sort of award for clever use of the game mechanics.

  Colonel Mitchell didn’t like my plan. He said it was an unnecessary risk, and that it smacked of martyrdom, like I had decided that the only way to prove my loyalty to the human race was to get myself killed trying to defend them. I considered telling him that I had no interest in dying for the human race, but that I’d be willing to die for certain humans. I decided against it. He wasn’t seeing nuance. The fact that he was willing to sit in a room and talk with the monster who had stolen his daughter’s face was nuance enough. He was trying.

  Fang didn’t look up from Joyce-turning-Tansy’s chart as I explained that we had found what we believed to be Sherman’s hideout, and what I wanted to do. He just kept making notes and adjusting documentation, until I stopped talking. The silence stretched out for almost half a minute before he looked up, and asked, “Are you quite done telling me what I missed?”

  “Yes,” I said, almost meekly.

  “Are you here to ask for my permission? Or for my approval?”