Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  “I’m okay with you not being human,” said Nathan. “However long it takes for you to be okay with it, I will wait for you. We’re going to figure this all out together.”

  “But you still think that cop should have arrested us.”

  “Yes,” admitted Nathan. “At the very least, he should have questioned us more about why we’d decided to load ourselves and the dogs into the car when you were clearly injured, instead of going to a hospital. I think…” He took one hand off the wheel as he reached up and adjusted his glasses, and I suddenly realized the car was moving: had been moving for some time. I’d been so distracted by arguing with him that I hadn’t even noticed. Finally, he sighed, and said, “I think things are getting very bad, very quickly, and I think that officer knew about it. He made a threat assessment. He decided we were not dangerous. As luck would have it, he was right, and it was definitely the choice we wanted him to make. I’m just worried about how many times people will make that same choice tonight, and how many times they’re going to be wrong. It’s too late to stop the outbreak. That doesn’t mean we need to help it spread faster than it has to.”

  I bit my lip again, frowning. I couldn’t make out the details of Nathan’s face, and I was glad; I didn’t want to know whether he was wearing his mother’s look of calm resignation, like talking about leaving people locked in what was about to become a plague zone could ever be interpreted as a good thing. The landscape rushing by outside the car windows was a bruised blur that echoed my mood: purple and gray and somehow threatening.

  It was nice to know that a good scare that had nothing to do with being in a car could distract me from the fact that I was in a moving vehicle. Maybe I just needed to get a portable DVD player and start watching horror movies whenever I had to go somewhere.

  I wanted to let the matter lie—I really did—but there was one more question I needed to ask before I could do that. “How many people do you think are going to die?”

  There was a long pause before Nathan answered me. “A lot,” he said, finally. “From both sides. I think a lot of humans are going to die, and a lot of the ones who don’t are going to take powerful antiparasitics and kill their implants—and they’d do it even if we had evidence that the tapeworms have achieved rudimentary sapience in their isolated state, and should hence be treated as thinking beings. People have fought long and hard to have the right to control their own bodies in this country. They’re going to view the implants as dangerous intruders. And the sleepwalkers… maybe there’s some kind of treatment that can give the tapeworms that have taken their hosts over a better existence, something closer to what you and Adam have, or at least closer to what Tansy has. But for right now, we have to treat them as if they were already dead.”

  “Do you think that would work?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. Most people—human people—are going to be very upset when they find out what’s going on. Even if there is a treatment, it might be a long time before it can be put into practice, if ever.”

  I looked at him steadily, searching his face for signs of panic. “How are you so calm?” I asked. “I mean, I’m a tapeworm. I’ve been a tapeworm the whole time we’ve been dating. You’ve been having sex with a tapeworm. Your mother has been making more tapeworm-people just like me. Other tapeworms are eating the brains out of their hosts, and you’re still so calm.”

  “I could ask you the same question, you know,” he said. “I’ve had days to come to terms with what you are and what that means about our future together. I already decided that it doesn’t matter, and that I want to marry you and be with you forever, no matter what species you technically are. You just found out tonight, and you’re already playing action girl across the Bay Area. It’s not a normal reaction.”

  “Tapeworm,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. I failed. “We don’t know much about invertebrate psychology. Maybe what would be a normal reaction in a human isn’t a normal reaction coming from me.”

  “Maybe,” he allowed. “But you’ve always seemed to be following a human template to me. It’s been a slightly odd one—more than a little weird at times—but it was recognizably human. I think that once you became fully bonded to Sally Mitchell’s brain, a certain amount of normal human response became inevitable. It’s the form defining the function, as much as the function defining the form.”

  I had to laugh at that, a tight, gasping series of sounds that made Beverly push her head back into the front seat again, concerned and checking to see what was wrong. I put a hand on her muzzle, pushing her back, and said, “So you love me even though I’m not human, because I seem human because I’m living in a human body?”

  “No. I love you because you’re you. The rest is all details.”

  “Scientist,” I accused fondly.

  Nathan smiled, the expression visible in the light coming off the dash. “Guilty as charged,” he said, and drove on.

  The parking lot outside the abandoned bowling alley that Dr. Cale had converted into a lab was dark and empty, looking more like the setting of a murder mystery than a sanctuary. It was at least partially an illusion: I knew she and her team had security cameras hidden all over the place, making it virtually impossible for anyone to sneak up on the lab. That was good. We were going to need that kind of security if we were going to be staying here for a while.

  Nathan parked behind the bowling alley, where his virtually new Prius stuck out like a sore thumb among the battered, rust-covered cars favored by the staff. Most of them looked newer than they seemed when I took a second glance; one more bit of visual chicanery to keep the local authorities from looking twice at the place.

  “You get Minnie, I’ll get Beverly, and I’ll come back for the suitcases,” said Nathan, handing me a leash.

  I nodded. “It’s a deal.”

  Leashing two excited dogs who had been cramped up in the backseat of a car for the better part of an hour and a half wasn’t easy, but I’d been working at an animal shelter for years, and I’d never met the dog I couldn’t get onto a lead. Nathan struggled to get the leash on Beverly for a while before just handing it to me and letting me do it. I grinned to myself as I passed Minnie’s leash to him. It was nice to know that there was still something I could contribute to our partnership, even if it was as small and silly a thing as putting leashes on dogs. Everyone has their talents.

  Nothing moved but us as we made our way across the parking lot to the bowling alley, which looked as locked and abandoned as it had the first time we had come here. All that was missing was Tansy, Dr. Cale’s bodyguard and effective head of security, sitting on the hood of a car and getting ready to shoot us if we looked at her funny. A knot formed in my throat. I never would have thought I could miss that little disaster waiting to happen, but it was wrong for her not to be here. She was supposed to be here, and she wasn’t, and that was because of me.

  Nathan stepped in front of me when we got to the door, raising his hand and knocking briskly. Only silence answered.

  “Do you think they left without us?” I asked anxiously.

  “Not if Mom’s still in charge,” he said, and knocked again. When there was still no answer he started looking around, scanning the edge of the roof and door frame. “See if you can find a security camera.”

  “I don’t know what your mother’s security cameras look like,” I protested. “It’s dark and I’m woozy and shouldn’t she have let us in by now?”

  “Not if whoever’s manning the door is waiting for a sign that we’re actually us, and that we haven’t led half the police in the Bay Area back here,” he said. “Look for something that looks completely unlike what you’d expect from a security camera, and assume that’s probably what Mom’s security cameras look like. She’s been doing this for a long time.”

  “Right. So I should go and start trying to attract a pigeon’s attention. Got it.” I turned and let Beverly start pulling me along the side of the building. She had her nose glued to the ground, taking in
a whole new world of smells. I kept my eyes equally glued to the slight overhang of the roof, looking for something that didn’t look like a security camera.

  It turns out there are a lot of things that don’t look like security cameras. Rocks, for example. Wasps’ nests. Pieces of the roof. I kept letting Beverly pull me along, and while I didn’t see anything that looked like a camera, I saw plenty of things that absolutely were not cameras. We went around a corner, and saw more of the same. The next two sides of the building didn’t yield anything new.

  “This is hopeless,” I said to Beverly, who wagged her tail agreeably. If I wanted to tell her a thing was hopeless, why, she’d be happy to agree, because I was her people, and if I thought something was so, then I had to be right. Dogs are good like that. We were reaching the corner that would take us back to where Nathan had parked the car, and so I sighed, raised my voice, and said, “Hey, Nathan, nothing out here—”

  I stopped as we came around the corner. The bowling alley door was open, and a man was standing there, aiming what looked like an assault rifle at Nathan’s chest. Minnie was standing stock-still next to Nathan’s right leg, her head up and her ears back as an almost subsonic growl echoed from her chest. It wasn’t her sleepwalker growl, which would have been followed by lunging and attempts to bite: it was just the growl of a good dog whose person was being threatened.

  “Don’t move, Sal,” said Nathan, without looking at me. He had his hands up, and his attention remained focused firmly on the man with the gun. That seemed like a good idea. “I was just explaining to Fang here that we’re not trying to break in, we’re just trying to get back to my mother. Dr. Cale. Who runs this lab.” He pronounced “Fang” to rhyme with “long,” rather than like he was talking about a particularly sharp tooth.

  He was of clearly Chinese descent, but taller than Nathan, with a shaved head and eyes that were narrowed in concentration. Only the lab coat he was wearing over his shirt and trousers broke the unrelenting blackness of his attire… and he looked familiar.

  “You’re, um, on Dr. Cale’s security team, aren’t you? Only you were on assignment until recently, because I know you, don’t I? I’ve seen you at SymboGen.” It was the lab coat that did it. His face was memorable, but I didn’t like making eye contact with people when I didn’t have to. They had an unfortunate tendency to smile at me, and all those teeth made me uncomfortable. But I’d been around doctors and medical technicians for as long as I could remember, and I’d never forget a lab coat. “You worked in the phlebotomy lab, didn’t you? With Dr. Lo?”

  The man—Fang—didn’t turn. Keeping his rifle trained on Nathan, he asked, “When would you have seen me there, if I had been there to be seen?”

  It took me a moment to puzzle through his grammar, which seemed oddly recursive to me, like it was a snake biting its own tail. Finally, I ventured, “During one of my checkups? Dr. Banks made me come in a lot more often than I probably needed to. I always thought it was because he was worried about my well-being, but I guess now it was because he was monitoring my integration with the human brain, since it sort of sucks when all of your tapeworm-human hybrids just moan and try to bite people all the time. Which, you know, speaking of that, one of them bit me pretty badly.” I held up my bandaged wrist like a macabre exhibit A. “I lost a lot of blood and the world’s still sort of spinny and I just walked all the way around the outside of the bowling alley which wouldn’t be a thing normally, but I haven’t lost a lot of blood normally, and I think I’m going to pass out soon. So I’d appreciate it if you’d put the gun down, or at least stop aiming it at my boyfriend, and go tell Dr. Cale that we’re here. This whole situation is wank.”

  “Wack, Sal,” said Nathan, a nervous giggle underscoring his words. “The word you want is ‘wack.’ ”

  “Oh,” I said. “So what does ‘wank’ mean?”

  “It means ‘to masturbate,’ ” said Fang, adjusting his rifle so that it was pointed at the sky instead of at Nathan. The drums that had been pounding in my ears slacked off slightly, making it easier for me to hear. “Do you have everything you need out of your vehicle?”

  The sudden change in topics threw me for a loop. It appeared to do the same to Nathan, because he just blinked at Fang, and for a moment the three of us stood there silently, everyone waiting for someone else to start making sense.

  Finally, Fang sighed and explained, “I need to get rid of your car. If you have everything you need, I can do that now. If you don’t, I will escort you inside, come back out with some movers, and do it while you’re undergoing orientation.”

  “What do you mean, get rid of my car?” Now Nathan sounded alarmed.

  “Dr. Cale told me you’d have this reaction.” Fang smiled thinly. “She said to let you know that we’ll be issuing you a replacement vehicle from our motor pool, but that we can’t risk having a nearly new Prius sitting near what’s supposed to be an abandoned building. She also said to let you know that you’ll be receiving twenty percent of the sale price, so you shouldn’t fuss about it overly much.”

  “Twenty percent of—you know what? No. I’m not going to get upset about this. If this is what needs to happen for us to be safe, then fine, so be it.” Nathan shook his head. “Sal and I both have things in the car. She needs medical attention, and that seemed more important than dealing with our suitcases.”

  “All right,” said Fang. He held out his hand. “Give me the keys and follow me.”

  It seemed like Nathan was going to argue. Then he glanced at me. I must have looked worse than I thought, because he paled, lips pressing tightly together, before digging his keys out of his pocket and slapping them down in Fang’s outstretched palm.

  “Thank you,” said Fang, making the keys disappear into his lab coat. “Welcome home.”

  We followed him into the bowling alley, Beverly straining at her leash as she tried to rush ahead into this world of exciting new smells, Minnie lagging behind and nearly tripping me as she looked for something to reassure her that the world wasn’t changing for the worse. I understood the sentiment, even as it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to put one foot in front of the other. The spots around the edges of my vision were back, chewing little moth holes in everything I saw.

  The dark room connecting the bowling alley door to the main lab seemed even darker than usual, although that could have been a side effect of my clouded vision. Fang stopped in front of the interior door, holding up a hand as he motioned for us to do the same.

  “If you’ll wait here, I’ll let Dr. Cale know that you’re back,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said dreamily. “I’m just going to take a little nap, all right?” The black spots were continuing to expand.

  I didn’t even feel myself hit the floor.

  This time, when I woke up, I was in a hospital cot in the middle of what looked like a makeshift operating theater, with two IV bags—one full of blood, one full of saline solution—attached to my left arm. I blinked at the tubes, and then twisted to look around the small room. The walls were just white sheets hanging from a pipe framework. A heart monitor beeped steadily, providing a treble accent to the drums that were beating softly in my ears. Another monitor was tracking… something. I assumed it was connected to the tangle of wires spilling off the bed. I reached up. There were sensors on my forehead, big round flat things held down with what felt like surgical tape. I frowned.

  “Ah, good: you’re awake.” Dr. Cale’s voice came from the other side of the curtain. She pushed it aside with one sweep of her arm and came rolling in. “You gave us all quite a scare, young lady. It may be time to have a little talk about how you’re taking care of yourself. This can’t continue.”

  “What?” I blinked at her blearily, trying to make sense of what she was saying. I’d been standing in the bowling alley with Nathan and the dogs—the dogs. “Where are Beverly and Minnie?”

  “Your dogs are fine. I was prepared to be irritated about you bringing non-lab animals here,
but they’ve already proven their value by distracting my son while you were having a seizure on my floor.” Dr. Cale’s frown deepened. “There are only a few human-tapeworm chimera in the world, Sal. You know that. As far as I’m aware, you’re the only one ever to arise without help. You’re a collector’s item, for lack of a better term, and you’re not taking the proper care to keep yourself in mint condition.”

  “I don’t… I don’t understand. Where are my dogs?”

  Dr. Cale reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Your dogs are with Nathan, who is getting them settled in the room you’ll be sharing until we relocate to a new lab space. Recent events have accelerated our timeline for moving slightly. We can’t risk being found.”

  “Dr. Banks was on the radio,” I said. “He’s telling people I broke into SymboGen because somebody made me do it.”

  “Well, that’s technically true, or close enough to true that I can’t be as angry at him as I’d like to be. But we’re getting off the topic.” She lowered her hand, looking at me gravely. “As I said before, you’re the first chimera to happen naturally. All of the others have had a team of experts standing by, bound and determined to make sure that our subjects had a successful melding with their hosts. Even then, it didn’t always go as well as we wanted it to.”

  “Like Tansy?” I asked.

  Dr. Cale nodded. “Yes. Exactly like Tansy. She had everything going for her when I performed the procedure. I had practiced on other subjects, the original damage to the host’s brain was minimal—it should have been perfect. It wasn’t. She caused seizures in her host, and damaged the brain in the process. All her neurological and cognitive issues stem from those seizures. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  I didn’t. I knew that my ignorance would show on my face, and so I didn’t even try to hide it: I just shook my head, wincing a little as the sensors attached to my forehead pulled, and said, “Not really.”