by Grant, Mira
Calm down, Sal, I told myself. This is what he wants. And that was true, wasn’t it? Dr. Banks didn’t want me to have anything that he couldn’t manipulate or control. He was trying to make me lose touch with myself with his lies about Sally still being locked somewhere in my mind. It was my mind. Not hers. Not now, and not ever again.
The third time I reached out, the dark reached back to greet me. I tangled the idea of fingers into the idea of hands, and then I was plummeting down, down, down into the hot warm dark, where it didn’t matter how fast we were moving or how dangerous the things we were doing were, because I was safe and home and far away from everything but the drums that were my own pounding heart. I was alone. I was safe, because I was alone.
Wasn’t I?
Sally? It was a stupid question to ask, even if I was only asking it of the silence at the center of myself—and the silence wasn’t really silent, was it? The drums were always there, so constant and so unvarying that they might as well have been silent. It was hard to put words on the things I saw when my eyes were closed. They were built into my DNA, never intended to be expressed in things as limitless or as limited as words. Are you there?
There was no reply from the hot warm dark. I was alone there, like I had always been alone there, and there could be no answers unless I gave them to myself.
A hand touched my shoulder, pulling me back up out of the darkness and into the frame of flesh and bone and sinew that I had stolen for my own. I sat up a little straighter as my skin settled around me, and I opened my eyes, expecting to see the waterfront stretching outside the van like a watery promise.
Instead, what I saw was an intersection packed with the smashed remains of a six-car pileup. There were no sleepwalkers—at least not at the moment—but there was also no way for us to get the van through. I blinked, and then twisted to look behind me. Nathan looked grimly back, his hand still resting on my shoulder.
“I waited as long as possible to wake you,” he said. “I think we’re going to have to abandon the van.”
“I’m not getting out of this seat,” said Dr. Banks mulishly. I got the distinct impression that he’d already made this statement several times while I was down in the hot warm dark, and that he hadn’t budged since the crisis began. That was almost reassuring. Even when things were at their worst, some people could be counted on to be absolutely terrible.
“Then you’re going to be the delicious filling in a big metal bonbon,” said Fishy cheerfully. His words were accompanied by the sound of a rifle slide slotting into place. I glanced at him and grimaced when I saw the assault rifle in his hands, held as casually as a child’s toy. He grinned at my grimace. “Don’t worry. I have plenty of ammo, and if I start running out, we can always smash vases and jars until we find more.”
“Life isn’t a video game,” I said. It seemed like such a logical thing, but from the look on Fishy’s face, it was anything but. I bit my lip and turned back to Nathan, asking, “There’s really no way around?”
He shook his head. “We’re about a mile from the ferry launch, and all the roads are like this. I think a lot of people tried to get out of Vallejo this way. The quarantine must have stopped them.” He left two things unsaid: that the quarantine’s efforts to keep the infected contained could easily have included sinking the boats, and that if this many people had been here at one time, there was no real way of guessing how many sleepwalkers were still around, hungry and hiding from the hottest point in the day. They didn’t care for direct sunlight much, probably because it made it harder to sort their pheromone instructions from the things their eyes were telling them. It was harder to avoid hunting your own kind in daylight.
I didn’t question how I knew that. I just did.
“So we’re going to walk?” I asked, in a small voice.
“I most certainly am not going to walk,” said Dr. Banks.
“Says you,” said Fishy amiably.
“Um.” I worried my lip a bit more between my teeth before I asked, “If we manage to get Tansy, how are we going to get her back to the lab?”
“Mom gave me a list of places that might be suitable to hide out with Tansy until someone finds us,” said Nathan. “Once we have Tansy, we’ll lie low until we’re found by someone from the lab. After that, we’ll find a way to get Tansy to the new lab, or Mom will send a truck to get us.”
“Oh.” This was sounding like an increasingly bad plan. But I’d known that when I made it, hadn’t I? It was already too late.
“I’ll yell if you try to take me out of this vehicle,” cautioned Dr. Banks. “I’ll scream. I’ll bring every sleepwalker in miles down on your heads.”
“Our heads,” I corrected. “They’ll be coming down on your head, too, and you’re the one who’s wearing handcuffs, so I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it very much. I can run pretty fast, and Fishy has a gun, and Nathan—”
“I can run,” said Nathan.
“Nathan can run,” I helpfully parroted. “Beverly will be totally fine, she’s a dog, nothing runs for its life like a dog. But you’re just going to be an old tired guy in handcuffs and dress shoes, which means you won’t be able to keep up.”
“I don’t need to run faster than the zombie horde,” said Fishy blithely. “I just need to run faster than you.”
Dr. Banks was starting to look pale and sweaty. “You wouldn’t do that to me,” he said. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “You wanna try me?”
The look Dr. Banks gave me was midway between panic and disbelief. “Oh, no, Sally. You can’t fool me like that. You would never leave a man to die like that.”
“I’m starting to think that being a person has nothing to do with species, and everything to do with how you comport yourself,” I said, finally unbuckling my belt. “I would go back for Beverly.” The Lab lifted her head at the sound of her name, making an inquisitive buff sound. I smiled at her reflection and picked up her leash from the dashboard. “Beverly has earned the right to be considered a person. You haven’t. Not only would I leave you here to be torn apart, I would enjoy it. Dead men don’t hurt people. You’ve hurt too many of the people I care about. Maybe it’s time somebody hurt you for a change.”
“I think she means it,” said Fishy helpfully. “The chimera are a helper class, but that doesn’t make them good guys. There’s no telling what she’ll do if we’re going into a cut scene.”
For a moment, Nathan, Dr. Banks, and I were united in looking at Fishy like he had just lost his mind. The moment passed, and Nathan said, “This is pointless. Sal, get Bev. We’ll leave Dr. Banks here, and we’ll leave the doors open. Let the local sleepwalkers get up close and personal with their creator for a change.”
“That’s really sweet of you,” I said, and slid out of the van, cutting off any reply from the back—at least until I walked carefully to the side door, my feet crunching on the glass-covered street. Beverly rushed out as soon as the door was open, her tail wagging so hard that it seemed to wag the entire van. I crouched down to put her leash on, glancing up when I was done.
Nathan had his seat belt off and was sliding out of the car, his feet crunching somewhat louder than mine had, due to the difference in our sizes… and Dr. Banks was scooting along the seat as he followed, his face pale and splotched with patches of hectic red, like he was on the verge of having a heart attack from sheer fright.
I should have felt good, seeing him brought down to the level of the people he had treated so poorly. All I felt was tired. I straightened, Beverly’s leash held loosely in one hand, and raised my eyebrows.
“Well?”
Dr. Banks scowled at me. “You were a good girl,” he said.
I shrugged. “Things change. Are you going to behave?”
“I’ll stay quiet. I won’t attract any unnecessary company. I won’t try to run away.” The words seemed virtually dragged out of him, like they caused him physical pain to utter. Shooting me one last, betrayed look
, he added, “All this ends when we get back to SymboGen. I’m not going to be your prisoner forever, no matter how much of an upper hand you have right now.”
“If you were smart, you would have kept that last part to yourself,” said Fishy amiably, stepping around the front of the van and reaching past Nathan to pull Dr. Banks out onto the street. Fishy kept hold of Dr. Banks’s shoulder as he turned a wide, toothy grin on the rest of us. I managed, barely, not to cringe away.
“Well, come on,” said Fishy. “Let’s go trigger a boss fight.”
It was easier to let Fishy take both the lead and custody of Dr. Banks: after all, he had the assault rifle, combined with a loose approach to reality, and would probably handle either an escape attempt or an attack better than Nathan or I would. Nathan had a pistol, produced from somewhere inside his lab coat—and I didn’t want to think about how long he’d been carrying that, or how many opportunities he’d been given to use it—while I had Beverly. In a world full of sleepwalkers, she was one of the most effective weapons we had. Anything that tried to sneak up on us would find themselves confronted with an angry, protective canine.
The drums that normally accompanied me on any tense occasion were silent, which only made the tension worse. Crows cawed from overhead or strutted through the broken bits of glass littering the street, picking up the ones they liked best and flapping off into the distance. We passed an office building with broken windows on the third floor, and a whole army of crows lined up on the windowsills, watching us walk by with their beady, judgmental eyes.
“I don’t know how the crow population around here will fare after the first winter without people,” said Nathan, in the neutral “science voice” he always used when he wanted to impart something he thought was interesting. “They’re scavengers. They’re smart, but it’s no question that they’ve benefited from the corpses and unprotected Dumpsters since the epidemic began. Their normal food sources are going to drop off, and they’re not going to be renewed.”
“See, there’s a great reason to save the world,” I said. “Save the human race, save the crows.”
Nathan smiled a little. I couldn’t see his eyes—the sunlight glinting off his glasses was making that impossible—but he seemed strangely relaxed, considering the circumstances.
Then again, some of our best times had been like this. Just him and me and the world around us, and whatever was going to come would come. I reached over and slipped my free hand into his, squeezing lightly. Nathan cast another smile in my direction.
“About that wedding—” he began.
Beverly started to growl.
It was a small, constrained sound at first, pitching forward from the back of her throat into the resonating chamber of her mouth. Then her lips drew back, exposing her teeth, while the growl grew steadily louder, becoming impossible to ignore. Even Fishy heard it. He stopped, pulling Dr. Banks to a halt alongside him, and turned to look quizzically back at us.
“What’s up with the dog?” he asked.
“Sleepwalkers,” I said curtly, trying to scan the street around us without losing any forward momentum. Beverly was continuing to growl, making it difficult to focus.
Fishy’s sudden grin didn’t help. “Excellent,” he said, and let Dr. Banks go completely as he raised his rifle into position.
“Remember the mission,” snapped Nathan. “We need to get to the ferry.”
“Nothing says I can’t have a little fun first,” countered Fishy, and began to move again.
The street around us remained mercifully deserted. If it stayed that way, Fishy might not need to pull the trigger; we might make it to the ferry without killing anyone. Please stay that way, I silently prayed, resisting the nearly overwhelming urge to start peering through the darkened, frequently broken windows around us. Looking would only terrify me more when I failed to find any sign of what we might be dealing with. So I didn’t look. I clutched Beverly’s leash and I watched the street, and I waited for all hell to break loose.
It wasn’t like we could just explain what we were doing here and expect to be allowed to go on our way: there was no reasoning with sleepwalkers. All we could do was kill them, and then tell their corpses that we were sorry. I was willing to bet that for Fishy and Dr. Banks—maybe even for Nathan—the tragedy would be in killing something that used to be a human being. The tapeworms didn’t even come into the equation.
It must have been nice to only have to worry about one-half of the being you were killing. When I had to kill a sleepwalker—something I’d only been forced to do twice so far, and that was twice too many as far as I was concerned—I wasn’t just killing a husked-out human being. I was killing one of my own siblings, one that hadn’t been as lucky as I was. Sally Mitchell had provided me with the perfect host in which to grow and thrive. Without her, and without the life support that had sustained her body while I acclimated myself to what I had become, I would have been just like them. Just another sleepwalker, shambling aimlessly until someone like Fishy came along and put a bullet in my head.
Beverly’s growl grew deeper without getting any louder, until it seemed to be coming from her entire body at once. The four of us pressed closer together without discussing it, using one another for cover and support at the same time. I peered around Nathan’s shoulder, looking for any signs of motion, anything that might tell me whether an attack was actually coming.
Then, with as little fanfare as a radio coming on, the silence in my head changed forms, going from a simple absence of drums to the soft, warm buzz of someone there. It was the same feeling I had when Adam was in the room with me—the feeling that I used to get, if a little weaker and harder to identify, when Sherman or Ronnie was nearby. The part of me that was tapeworm enough to be wired for receipt of pheromones was picking up on the presence of my cousins, identifying them for what they were without bothering to consult the bigger, slower monkey-mind that controlled the basic functions of the body.
Sleepwalkers.
“There are two groups of them,” I said dazedly, distracted by the threads of data that were slithering their way through my conscious mind. “The bigger group is up ahead, and the smaller group is coming in from the west. They all know that we’re here, but they’re still moving slowly—more slowly than they should be, when there’s prey available.” I paused, understanding dawning, and said, “I think they know we might be dangerous. I think that means they might be learning.”
“That’s not something to sound happy about,” snarled Dr. Banks.
Nathan seemed to share my amazement, and my hesitant joy. “Yes,” he said. “It really is.”
If the sleepwalkers were learning, then they were forming connections with the human brains where they lived. They were retaining information in a way that tapeworms couldn’t, and they were doing it despite their faulty initial connections to their hosts. Maybe not all sleepwalkers had the capacity to learn—maybe not all sleepwalkers could be taught, no matter how great the incentive—but if any of them had that potential, maybe the line between chimera and sleepwalker wasn’t as absolute as we had always assumed. Maybe some of them could be saved.
Then three figures emerged from between the buildings up ahead, and the time for abstract contemplation was over. Beverly seemed to lose her mind, lunging against her leash as she barked and bit at the air, presenting a full threat display to the sleepwalkers who were now running toward us at a terrifying clip. The one in the center—a female, still wearing the tattered remains of a floral housedress—moved faster than the others, a sign of a strong brain/body connection. The others followed. She was probably our “smart” sleepwalker; she was the only one with the coordination to swerve around the obstacles in her path, while her companions tripped over every hubcap and bit of shredded tire. That also raised the question of whether she had been somehow controlling them, using her greater intellect—relatively speaking—to keep them moving at her pace as she led them toward the promise of a meal.
“Get dow
n!” shouted Fishy, taking aim at the onrushing sleepwalker. He didn’t move or seem particularly worried; he just braced the butt of his rifle, making small, precise adjustments to his stance as he lined up the shot. He might as well have been at a shooting gallery, not standing in a debris-riddled street with a barely sentient woman rushing toward him, ready to rip out his throat.
Beverly gave one last fierce yank on her leash, ripping it out of my hands, before she took off for the woman, still barking frantically. I didn’t think: I just reacted. In that moment, I was no different from the sleepwalkers, single-minded and unswerving in the pursuit of my goal. “Beverly! Heel!” I shouted, and ran after her.
Behind me I heard Fishy swear as I blocked his shot. I didn’t care. The woman was a danger, but I wasn’t going to lose my dog.
Beverly was faster than I was, especially across flat ground. She leapt, hitting the woman squarely in the chest with both forepaws and sending her crashing to the ground. The sleepwalker woman didn’t even try to hold Beverly off. She just struggled to get back to her feet, seemingly oblivious to the dog that was sitting on her chest, snarling and barking angrily.
I grabbed Beverly’s collar, hauling her backward. The sleepwalker came up with her, lips drawn back and teeth exposed… and then she stopped, looking at me blankly. There was a spark of something in her eyes that could have been confusion.
Fishy’s gun barked once, and one of the two sleepwalkers that had been following the fallen woman went down, his head exploding into a haze of red mist. I flinched but didn’t turn, forcing myself to keep my eyes locked on the face of the woman in front of me. There was a bruise on one cheek, so purple and livid that it looked more like makeup than an injury, and I could see her clavicle clearly through her skin. She hadn’t eaten in a while. None of them had. She tilted her head slowly to the side, making a crooning noise deep in her throat.