by Mira Grant
“What? I’m not… I’m not going anywhere.”
He sounded more anxious than I had ever heard him before. I blinked again, more slowly this time, before looking down at myself, and at the large red stain that was spreading across my abdomen as the blood soaked my shirt.
“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding. “I’ve been shot.”
Saying the words seemed to unlock a whole world of displaced pain and weakness. My knees buckled. Nathan was there to catch me, and I smiled at him before I closed my eyes and let him hold me up. Juniper was keening, Adam and the others were shouting, and the broken doors were there. The broken doors were open, and I entered, and I was home.
I floated in the hot warm dark, where I had begun, where I had gone whenever I needed safety or comfort during my brief, confusing human life, and where I was apparently going to die. Everything was formless and safe, holding me in the warm embrace of weightless perfection. I moved with a thought, and there were no clumsy, unnecessary limbs to get in my way: I was evolution’s darling, a ribbon of flesh capable of reproducing without aid, of regrowing from even the smallest segment.
I wonder if they’re growing a new me, I thought. They could do it. One little snip and they’d have a whole new Sal, epigenetic data and core personality intact, but ready to learn and grow and have a second chance at everything. I’d thought of it as dying before, when Sherman was threatening me with a transplant. Now, in the hot warm dark, it seemed like a beautiful rebirth, as long as I didn’t have to leave. If they wanted to take a little piece and grow themselves a new friend and lover and companion, I was all right with that. But here…
I was finally home.
I was going to miss my friends and loved ones, but not forever. Their names were already fading around the edges, going soft as trauma worked on my brain. I would be down in the hot warm dark until the mind that sustained me shut down, and then I would be gone. My body would live, my epigenetics would live, but the memories and experiences and ideas I had stored in the tissue of Sally Mitchell’s mind would be lost.
I don’t want to go, I thought, and I am already gone, I thought, and both things were true at the same time, and I made my peace with that.
The hot warm dark that surrounded me was part real, part memory: I knew that. I couldn’t move weightlessly when I was tangled in Sally’s brain, but part of me remembered moving like a delicate ribbon through her digestive tract and then through her major arteries, tracing a pathway from her intestines to her brain. The human body was a miracle. Teeth always felt so big when you touched them with a tongue, and so small when you touched them with a finger. Everything was like that, a shifting scale of outside and in. As Sally—as Sal—my body had been the sum of the universe, so small and so fragile and so brutally defined. But before I had a name, Sally’s body had been the universe, so enormous that I could have wandered it until I died and never have seen all that it had to offer. Everything was a matter of scale.
“—me? Sal, can you hear me?”
There was no sound in the hot warm dark: even the distant, constant pounding of drums was more vibration than noise, echoing through everything without ever making itself heard. For a moment, I didn’t understand. I had no concept of sound, and thus had no concept of spoken words, or the meanings they were intended to convey.
“Don’t give up, honey, just hold on for me. Hold on. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see. You’ll see. We’re going to get you out of here.”
The words continued, and began to carry meanings, little packets of information that burst like fireworks across the night sky of my mind. They were for me. I was Sal, and someone was telling me to hold on. Hold on to what? You needed hands to hold on, and I had no hands, not here, not down in the dark where the monsters lived.
You don’t have to stay here.
The thought was more interesting than the words were. I turned my full attention on it. I didn’t have to stay here? But here was where I existed: Here was where I had settled after running for so long. How could I not stay? Here was where I belonged.
You could belong somewhere else. You could belong with your family. We could belong with your family.
I recoiled from the thought. Sally?
No. Sally’s dead. Sally’s been dead since before we existed, but we’ll be dead too soon if we don’t do something about it.
Who are you?
I’m you, and you’re me. You’re the me that yearns for the hot warm dark, for vastness with limits. I’m the you that dreams of hands and fingers, of smallness that goes on forever. I’m your connection to the human brain where you store the person you have become, and I am that person, and we don’t have to let go yet. They’re trying so hard to save us. They’re fighting so hard to save us, and Sal, it’s up to you. You’re the part that endures. What do we do? What do we do? What do we—
“Just please, do something!”
The voice sliced through the thought, breaking it into a thousand pieces. I couldn’t forget sound now, and with that memory came the memory of sight: The hot warm dark went red around me, filling with the movement of blood through veins and bile through the stomach. I couldn’t be seeing any of this—I had no eyes—but I could see it all the same. My memory was good. I had looked inside so many animals when I helped Daisy with her necropsies. I had looked inside so many people when the sleepwalkers ripped them apart. I knew what I should be seeing.
“—to stop the bleeding. I need more cloths!” This voice belonged to Dr. Cale, which meant the other voice belonged to Nathan.
Nathan.
I didn’t want to leave him. He was so important to me, and it had been so long since we’d been able to just be together, existing together, figuring out the future together. He was all I wanted. He was sweet and kind and stable, and he would hold my hand while I decided what was going to happen next. I couldn’t leave him. Not like this.
Help me, I thought.
Breathe, I replied.
I breathed. A great, sucking breath that required a mouth to take, and lungs to hold, and so I had both of those things. Pain crashed into me like a wave, and I let it fill me, because pain was better than serenity in this moment: Pain was more important than floating in the hot warm dark until everything ended.
With pain came gravity, and I was suddenly anchored to a body, pinned down to the surface I was lying on. I tried to force my eyes to open, but that was one thing too many; I couldn’t make my eyelids do more than twitch.
“I’ve got a pulse,” someone shouted.
Everything was jittering. I was in the back of a truck, I realized: We were driving away from the mall. Where were we going? Who was behind the wheel? Was I heading for safety, or for another disaster?
“Keep her head steady, Nathan, we don’t want her jostling around more than she has to.”
Nathan. The hands on the side of my face belonged to Nathan. Had I even realized that there were hands on the side of my face? It didn’t matter now. I tried again to open my eyes, and this time I succeeded, looking up into the wan, worried face of my boyfriend.
“Sal,” he said. The relief in his voice was painful. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Sherman shot you, but we have some of the best doctors left in the world, and you’re going to be fine.”
“Juniper? Adam?” I whispered.
“They’re okay, too.” He bent to kiss me. I closed my eyes again.
We were going to be fine.
STAGE IV: SPECIATION
The broken doors are closed now; there is nothing left unknown.
You are my dearest darling ones. Please don’t go out alone.
—SIMONE KIMBERLEY
This isn’t who I thought I was going to be. This is someone better.
—SAL MITCHELL
I am pleased to confirm that Sherman Lewis, the mastermind behind the contamination of the western American waterways, has been killed. We were able to take out most of his terror cell, and the survivors are unlikely to g
et far. Treatment of the waterways is ongoing.
I regret to say that there were more casualties than anticipated. Dr. Shanti Cale and her son, Dr. Nathan Kim, were both killed during the raid on Lewis’s headquarters, as was the transgenic infiltrator that had taken over the body of my eldest daughter, Sally Mitchell. Sally died long ago. I have mourned her. Her body died saving the United States of America, and possibly the human race.
I know we will never be able to regard these monstrosities of science as anything other than the invaders and abominations that they are. But I hope that someday, when this crisis has faded behind us, we will be able to acknowledge my daughter as a hero.
—MESSAGE FROM COLONEL ALFRED MITCHELL, USAMRIID, TRANSMITTED TO THE WHITE HOUSE ON JANUARY 22, 2028
Someday, I hope this can be published. I look at it sometimes, its sprawling scope, half confession and half manifesto, and think that no, it should be allowed to molder in a drawer somewhere. But then I realize that allowing it to go unread would be to give in to my greatest flaw.
I am proud. I am arrogant. I am a manifestation of hubris in this modern world. I have played God. I have remade the world in my own image, because I thought I could do it better. Maybe I was right and maybe I was wrong, but I cannot be allowed to pretend that I didn’t do the things I did.
This is your world now. It’s not the same as it was when it belonged to me and my kind; it’s better in some ways, worse in others. It must be shared, always, between the humans and the chimera. It will not go back to what it was. I did this, and I am sorry, and I have no regrets.
The broken doors are open, children. Now show me what you can do.
—FROM CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.
Chapter 20
MAY 2028
Sherman’s bullet had been what they called “through and through”: It had passed through the skin of my back and through the skin of my stomach, and through a few other things on the way. It had taken Fang and Nathan working together almost two days to stabilize me, while Dr. Cale had taken over monitoring Tansy.
Nathan had never left my side. Not once. Every time I’d woken up, he was there, watching me, waiting for me to get better. Sometimes Adam and Juniper were there too. Neither of them had been seriously hurt in the attack on the old mall. Sometimes the world was fair. Not often, but…
Sometimes.
After two days, I had been stable enough to no longer be considered critical. After three days, I had been sitting up. And after a week, I had been ready to be moved. That was a good thing. A week was all that the Colonel had been able to buy us. He’d lied and he’d called in favors and he’d isolated the part of the facility where I was kept, claiming that it was being cleaned after a biocontamination incident. He had done everything he could, as Sally’s father, as a man who regretted the way the world had fallen apart, and when the clock had run out, he’d been the one to cut the power long enough for our ragged little group of survivors to make it to the motor pool, which had been conveniently deserted.
The last time I’d seen him, he’d been standing in the loading bay, wearing his uniform, saluting silently. He’d also been crying. I still wished I had been able to run back, to hug him and tell him I was grateful. Sometimes, there isn’t enough time. Even when you have all the time in the world.
The sound of the bedroom door opening pulled me out of my recollections. I rolled over, knocking Beverly’s head off my hip, and smiled at the two figures peeking around the doorframe. Juniper was getting taller all the time, and Heina had been showing me how to do her hair. Her braids from the previous day were frayed but still intact. She was wearing one of her handmade jumpers, stitched from fabric scavenged from a Jo-Ann’s, and she was smiling, closed-lipped and bright.
Tansy towered over her. Joyce had never been tall, but somehow the way my living sister carried my lost sister’s donated body made her seem longer, leaner, made less for study and more for motion. Her hair was several inches long now, coming in thick and brown. She still kept her scalp covered by scarves most of the time, for warmth.
“Mama,” said Juniper, and launched herself at the bed. The dogs watched indulgently as the little girl flopped against the mattress and climbed toward me. Nathan stirred, a warm lump under the covers.
“You couldn’t distract her for another hour?” I asked, looking at Tansy.
She shrugged and flashed me a sheepish smile, but said nothing.
Tansy was adapting quickly. After five months in Joyce’s body, she could walk and feed herself, and had toilet-trained in record time. She could talk, just not well, and mostly chose to stay quiet unless she was having a speech therapy lesson. Hopefully that would change as she became more confident with language. Her fine motor control was improving daily. Dr. Cale had been teaching her basic sign language, and that seemed to be helping with her frustration. Anything that got her communicating was important.
She looked more like herself every day, like she was growing secure inside her skin. The day before, I’d found her wallowing in a mud puddle with Juniper, both of them laughing their heads off. She was still Tansy. Another iteration, yes, with so much left to learn but… still Tansy.
“Mama,” said Juniper, finally reaching me and flinging her arms around my waist. I stroked her hair with one hand, and poked Nathan with the other.
“Up,” I said. “The alarm clock has arrived, and that means it’s time for breakfast.”
He made a small mumbling noise, but sat up and reached for his glasses. “Is it morning again?” he asked.
“Daddy!” squealed Juniper, and switched her attentions to him, allowing me to slide out of the bed and stand.
The scar on my stomach pulled as I stretched. The soft-tissue damage had been bad enough that Fang hadn’t been able to repair it all. I would always have that little reminder of Sherman. I was all right with that. Remembering things would keep us from making the same mistakes twice. That was important.
Dr. Banks was still with USAMRIID, more under supervision than as a consultant now. He had managed to land on his feet. He always did. Maybe it would be a few years before he convinced the government that he could be trusted again, but he would. I knew he would. If I had any regrets about the way we’d left things, it was that we’d left him alive. I didn’t like to think of myself as a killer, but for Dr. Banks, I would have been happy to make an exception.
At least he’d be busy for a while. Dr. Cale had called Colonel Mitchell from the bowling alley after we had finished collecting our surviving people and the last of our supplies. USAMRIID had the remaining sleepwalkers from the Kmart. It wasn’t ideal. We had no way of knowing how many of the sleepwalkers would survive being in human custody. But they would have access to purified water that hadn’t been treated in a way that would kill them, and maybe the next generation would have a chance. There was work to be done. We just weren’t going to be the ones who did it for a while.
Sherman was dead. I had gone to see his body before I left USAMRIID; I had asked to see his brain. There was no sign of life in the slick, limbless length of him. I had cried. How could I not? He had been my friend and he had been my enemy, and he had been with us from the beginning. It was always appropriate to mourn when someone like that left you.
Tansy handed me my robe. I smiled at her, and walked over to the window, looking out.
When Colonel Mitchell had agreed to look the other way as we “stole” a truck and supplies, we hadn’t been sure where we were going: just that we couldn’t stay where we were. The world had changed, but not enough to allow humans and chimera to coexist. Not without building a whole new society. We had fled north, clinging to the coast, looking for a place where there were no survivors to ask what we were doing there. We needed to dig in and create our new normal before the humans started coming back.
We had found our safe harbor on a small island in Puget Sound. There were only nine houses there, and all of them had been empty when we arrived
. So we had moved in, and begun the process of making ourselves a home where we’d be safe. Fang and Heina were monitoring the recovering Internet; according to them, the President was granting squatter’s rights to anyone who’d survived in the areas that had been hit particularly hard. We were going to be able to keep our island, if we could get our roots in deep enough.
And people had survived. Sleepwalker outbreaks were still happening—would maybe always be happening—but humanity was difficult to kill. Cities had burned, whole industries had been destroyed, and still the human race went on. Heina and Fishy argued at night about how much recovery was possible, and how long the United States would hold together with its reduced population and decimated centers of commerce, and they both seemed so happy about the problem that I didn’t try to stop them. This, too, was part of the recovery.
Nathan rolled out of bed, holding Juniper on his hip, and joined me at the window. “Sleep well?”
“Yes,” I said, and craned my neck to kiss his cheek. “You?”
“Mostly.”
It was Nathan’s turn to have bad dreams, to wake up thrashing in the middle of the night because he was convinced the world was ending. I was doing my best to stand by him and be as good a wife as I could. He had stood by me when I needed him.
Yes, wife. There had been no wedding, no priest from a religion neither of us believed in or representative of a government that didn’t currently exist where we were. There had just been Fishy, ducking into an abandoned mall en route to Puget Sound and stealing us an assortment of rings from the only jewelry store that hadn’t been looted. There had just been Dr. Cale, saying that science had ordained her.
There had just been us, kissing and making a promise. There had always been us. We just needed to be willing to stop long enough to see it.
“Story?” Juniper pulled on my arm. “Story?”