Parasite p-1

by Mira Grant

  Sledding on a dirt hill with the resident socially maladjusted possibly-a-tapeworm? I could think of a lot of things I’d rather do, including making a return trip to SymboGen. “I really need to talk to Nathan,” I said, standing.

  “Whatever. Suit yourself.” Tansy rolled her eyes in exaggerated disgust. “Adam, Doctor C says to tell you it’s time for your pills, and you need to go to your room so you can take them.”

  “Yes, Tansy,” said Adam. He looked at me shyly as he stood. “It’s really nice to finally meet you, Sal. I hope you like it here enough that you’ll come back sometime. I think Mom would like that, too.” He turned before I could say anything, walking quickly into the shadows.

  “I guess he’s sweet on you, too,” said Tansy. She sounded faintly disgusted. “Like you’re all that just because you’re all living in the world, doing stuff without supervision. Whatever. Like that’s so impressive. Come on, I’ll take you to Doctor C.”

  “Thank you,” I said—both because it was the right thing to say and because I was a little bit afraid that if Tansy thought I was being rude to her, she’d stab me with a scalpel. She seemed like the kind of girl who regularly carried scalpels around just for stabbing people. “I’m sorry I’m taking up so much of your time.”

  “Whatever,” she said, for the third time in as many minutes. “It’s not like I’d be doing anything important if you weren’t here.”

  “Sure you would,” I said. “You’d be sledding.”

  Tansy blinked at that. Then, slowly, she grinned. She never seemed to smile; it was always grinning with her, big, wide grins that showed off all her teeth at once. “Hey, that’s right. I’d totally be sledding if you weren’t here. You’re pretty smart to have figured that out, you know?”

  “If you say so,” I hedged.

  “That, or I told you, and you’re trying to play smart.” Her expression turned suspicious. “Are you trying to mess with me?”

  “Honestly, I just want to get to Nathan.” Before you stab me with something, I added silently. Of all the unnerving things I’d encountered since arriving at Dr. Cale’s lab, Tansy was definitely the most upsetting.

  “Fine.” She started walking. I followed.

  We were about halfway across the bowling alley before she said, “You better not be here to try and talk Doctor C into running away with you. We need her here. You can stay if you want—she’d probably like it if you stayed, because then her son would stay, and they could be all ‘rar, we fight the medical establishment and their dangerously lax and corrupt distribution channels’ together—but you can’t take her.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. “We just came here to get some answers. That’s all. Once we have them, we can go.” Assuming Nathan was willing to leave his newly rediscovered mother. Tansy might be kidding when she said that we could stay, but I was starting to be afraid that Dr. Cale wasn’t going to let us leave. Even if she did, we could still wind up remaining here with her for as long as Nathan wanted to talk to her.

  Tansy looked back over her shoulder at me. The look on her face was actually serious for the first time since I’d turned to find her sitting on the hood of Nathan’s car. “Didn’t Doctor C warn you about what happens when you ask questions?”

  It took me a second to realize that she was talking about that children’s book again. I was going to need to find a copy. “I’m sure I want to know,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Tansy, with a very small shrug. That seemed to exhaust her available conversation. She was silent as she led me onward, into the dark.

  Dr. Cale’s private lab was a small room—even smaller than the office where we’d first gone to speak—with hand-drawn charts and black-and-white photographs of tapeworms covering the walls so completely that I wasn’t even sure what color the paint was. Since this looked like it was one of the original parts of the bowling alley and not a room that had been constructed by walling off a piece of the larger spaces, they were probably something eye-searing, green or purple or another bowling-related color. As I thought that, I realized that I didn’t really know very much about bowling alleys. It had never seemed important to me before.

  A low counter split the room in half, and more counters lined the walls, covered in lab equipment and manila folders. Nathan was sitting on a stool at the central counter when Tansy led me into the room. He was bent over a microscope—a position I’d seen him in a hundred times before—and was so focused on whatever was on the other side of his lens that he didn’t even look up when Tansy pushed me toward him and announced, loudly, “I am going to go throw myself down the side of a large hill multiple times.”

  Dr. Cale was at one of the other counters, preparing a fresh slide. She looked toward Tansy, saying mildly, “Just don’t break any bones that you think you’re going to need later. I don’t want to spend another six weeks listening to you whine about how I won’t let you go outside.”

  Tansy sniffed haughtily before turning on her heel and striding back out of the room. She tried to slam the door behind herself, but the hinges were configured to allow people time to get out of the way, and the door swung gracefully shut instead.

  “She broke her ankle once, when she tried to snowboard on a cookie tray,” said Dr. Cale. She had the same fond, nostalgic tone that Mom always got when she was talking about something Joyce or I had done as children. The “my little girls can do no wrong” voice. She picked up the tray with her slides and wheeled her way over to Nathan, one-handed. “I have never in my life had a worse patient, and that includes myself.”

  “I find it hard to believe that anyone could be a worse patient than you,” said Nathan, lifting his head from the microscope. “I remember when I was a kid, and you got the flu. I thought Dad was going to lock you in the bedroom, just so the rest of us could get some peace.” He turned to look at me, betraying awareness of my presence for the first time. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” I said awkwardly, not moving away from the door. I wanted to add something about how he’d left me to wake up surrounded by potentially dangerous strangers, but I couldn’t find the words. So I blurted the first thing that came into my head, instead: “Is there a copy of Don’t Go Out Alone that I could read? People keep talking about it, and I want to know what happens.”

  “Of course there is.” Dr. Cale put her slides down next to Nathan before she wheeled herself over to a bookcase, leaning up to pull a slim volume with a cover the color of a slow-healing bruise off the top shelf.

  “What?” Nathan turned to look at her, eyes wide. “You took it? I always wondered where it went…”

  “I had to,” said Dr. Cale, resting the book on her knees. She smiled a little, looking down at it. “Every time I looked at it, I could hear you asking me to read it to you one more time before bed. It was the thing that most made me feel like I was still with my family.”

  “You could have asked,” grumbled Nathan.

  “The creepiest children’s book in the world was what made you feel connected to your family?” I asked. I wasn’t quite able to keep the disbelief out of my voice. After a moment to consider, I decided that I didn’t want to.

  “With as many times as I’d read it to Nathan? Yes.” Dr. Cale wheeled herself over to me, and offered me the book. “Here you go. Read it, and see if it helps at all.”

  “Can I… can I take it with me when we leave?” asked Nathan hesitantly. My heart leapt at the confirmation that we were going to be leaving. He continued, “It’s been so long since I’ve read it. I never was able to find another copy.”

  “I would never have found this copy if I hadn’t known the author from school,” said Dr. Cale. “Of course you can take it. It’s yours, after all. I just borrowed it for a little while.” She cast a professionally polite smile in my direction. “If you want to sit down and read for a bit, we still have a few more samples to go over.”

  “And then we’ll go,” said Nathan. He had the slightly unfocused tone that I normally associa
ted with his office: the days when I’d show up before he was ready to put work to bed and leave with me.

  “Okay,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure it was what I actually wanted, and took a seat in the corner of the room, looking down at the battered copy of Don’t Go Out Alone. The cover illustration showed two children—a boy and a girl—hand in hand, clearly frightened, walking through a dark, spooky forest. Everything was painted in watercolor shades of blue and black, except for the children themselves. They were painted in color, which just made them look more out of place, and somehow made the woods seem even darker and spookier.

  The story inside wasn’t much better. The boy and girl were never named. They received letters from a mysterious stranger telling them to be careful, but to find the broken doors as soon as they could, because otherwise, they would be in trouble. More notes awaited them at every step along their journey, alternately cajoling and warning them off what they were doing. “Come quickly” warred with “don’t come at all.” The boy and the girl, lacking a better option—or maybe just lacking basic survival instincts—kept looking for the broken doors, no matter how many times they were warned off.

  And then they found them, and found what was waiting on the other side: a pleasant room with a horrible monster in it. Apparently, when they were younger, they had the same monster in their closet, and when their parents chased it away, the monster pined until it could finally call to them to come through the broken doors to the Land of Monsters, where they could be a family forever. The book ended with the implication that now the children would become monsters, too, and would eventually leave the Land of Monsters to find closets, and children, of their own.

  It took me almost an hour before I closed the book, looking up. “That was so messed up,” I said.

  Dr. Cale and Nathan were studying something on the central counter. Nathan looked up and grinned at the sound of my voice, saying, “How do you think I felt? I was what, four, the first time she read that to me?”

  “You were never afraid of the monster in your closet, though,” said Dr. Cale. There was a brief warmth in her voice, like she was remembering what it was like to be the woman she’d been when she was just Nathan’s mother, and not a renegade genetic engineer hiding from the world’s largest biological medical company.

  That thought looped around itself so many times that it managed to confuse even me. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and looked down at the blue and black cover one last time. Even knowing how the story ended didn’t make the children seem any less terrified, or make the painted forest any less dark. If anything, knowing what the book was actually about made it worse. The children were looking for the broken door. By finding it, they would get their answers… and they would give up their humanity forever.

  “No,” said Nathan. His tone was much more subdued than his mother’s. I looked up again to find him studying Dr. Cale, a grave expression on his face. His smile was entirely gone. “I knew the monster in my closet would take care of me. The monster would always love me, no matter what I did. The monster would never leave me.”

  I suddenly felt like I shouldn’t be here, witnessing this. I shrank back in my chair as Dr. Cale’s face fell, all the light going out of her. “Nathan…” she began.

  Nathan talked right over her, asking, “Did you have any contact with Dad after you left us? Did he tell you about the times I ran away, trying to find the broken doors? I knew my monster would be on the other side, and she would love me.” He straightened, suddenly seeming to realize where we were. “We’re pretty much done here. I need to get Sal home. Her parents will be worried about her by now, and I’m supposed to work a late shift at the hospital. We’re slammed right now.”

  “It’s just going to get worse as the implants continue to assert themselves,” said Dr. Cale. “We need to work together on this, Nathan. You can’t just walk away and pretend you don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I’m not going to, Mother, but I’m also not going to stay here. This isn’t the side of the broken doors that I belong on. Once it was, maybe. If you’d come to me when I was still looking for you behind every corner. But not now. I live in the real world now.” Nathan walked over to where I sat, offering me his hand. I took it, and he tugged me to my feet. “It’s time for us to go.”

  “Thank you for sharing what you know, Dr. Cale,” I said, hugging the book to my chest like I was protecting it. I was, in a way; Nathan wanted to take it with us, and I didn’t trust Dr. Cale not to try snatching it away from me if I gave her the chance.

  She didn’t move to take the book. She didn’t move at all. She just looked at the two of us, an odd sort of sorrow in her eyes, and said, “When Simone got that published, mine was one of the very first copies she gave to anyone. She said it would help me teach my children how to be safe. You were a baby at the time, Nathan. You probably don’t even remember Simone.”

  “No,” said Nathan, putting his arm around my shoulders. “I don’t.”

  “She was a little woman. Always sick, all the time, no matter what she did. See, when we were young, parents thought you had to keep the world so clean it was sterile if you wanted to protect your children. Her immune system never learned to deal with anything it didn’t recognize. She died before you were old enough to get to know her, but I think you would have liked her.” Dr. Cale looked toward the charts on the wall, showing the development and life cycle of her precious D. symbogenesis. “You always wanted to know why when you were a little boy. Why this and why that, and why, why, why until I thought your father was going to lose his mind. I’ve been asking myself for years why this was the project I had to join. Why was this the one thing I had to do, out of everything that I could have done, out of every opportunity I had.”

  “Did you figure it out?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Dr. Cale turned to me, smiling slightly. “I did it for Simone. She might have died anyway—no one can predict the future, or we’d find ourselves in a lot less hot water—but she wouldn’t have died the way she did, of an immune system that simply refused to keep her alive any longer. I did it because I wanted to give you and your loved ones a better future, Nathan. And yes, I did it because I could. Isn’t that the justification used by every scientist who made something wonderful, only to discover that they’ve made something terrible? ‘We did it for science.’”

  “Science doesn’t always play nicely with the other children,” said Nathan.

  Dr. Cale sighed. “So true. Come on, give your mother a hug—and for God’s sake, be careful out there. I still don’t know how D. symbogenesis is accomplishing all this outside of lab conditions, and I won’t know until I’ve had more opportunity to study the afflicted. There’s no telling what could happen.”

  “Okay, Mom,” said Nathan. He squeezed me quickly before walking over to hug his mother, who returned the gesture with all the fervency of someone who had never expected to have this opportunity again. After a few seconds of that, Nathan melted into her embrace, and the two of them just held each other, long enough that I started to get uncomfortable. I looked away, studying the room instead.

  In addition to the charts and graphs on the walls, there was a corkboard with a few tacked-up photographs, including a grainy shot of Nathan that had clearly been taken with a distance lens. There was one picture of Adam and Tansy sitting together, she with a shaved skull and a bandage taped to the side of her head, he with the doting smile of an older brother.

  Something occurred to me as I looked at the picture. “Dr. Cale?”

  “Yes, Sal?”

  I turned. Nathan and Dr. Cale were no longer hugging, although he was still standing next to her chair. “Why did you call her ‘Tansy’? Isn’t it usually Adam and Eve, not, well, Adam and Tansy?”

  “Oh, that’s an easy one to answer,” said Dr. Cale. “Tapeworms are naturally hermaphroditic; they only acquire gender if they take over something that has biological gender, like humans. I named him Adam because he took over the
first male human body prepared for habitation. I named her Tansy because it was a good name… and she wasn’t the first.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just hugged the book to my chest, staring at her.

  Nathan found his voice before I did. Sounding half-fascinated, half-horrified, he began, “Are you saying that there’s more than just the two—”

  “Doctor C! Doctor C!” Tansy burst into the office without knocking, shoving the door open so hard that it actually slammed against the wall. “There’s a bunch of sleepwalkers in Lafayette! The local police are talking about shutting the freeways to try and maintain a temporary quarantine until they can divert the mob!” She was covered in dust, and had a new rip in the knee of her overalls. Blood was soaking slowly into the denim. It was hard not to stare at it, even with her shouting and waving her hands around. People were sick; the SymboGen implant was causing it; Tansy was bleeding. In that moment, all these things seemed to be of equal importance to me.

  Dr. Cale remained perfectly calm. “How do you know, dear?”

  “I took the police scanner sledding with me.” Tansy made the statement in a matter-of-fact tone, like it was entirely reasonable for her to have taken a police scanner out to play.

  Dr. Cale nodded. “All right, Tansy. Thank you for letting me know. I hate to cut our farewell short, Nathan, but you need to take Sal and get out of here, now.” She gripped the wheels of her chair, starting to roll herself toward the door. Tansy stepped into position when Dr. Cale was halfway there, grabbing hold of the handles on the back of the chair. Dr. Cale stopped pushing as Tansy took over. “I need to scramble an extraction team and get them to Lafayette before the CDC seizes all the available subjects. You need to make sure that you’re not trapped here.”

  “Mom—”

  “Don’t ‘Mom’ me, Nathan! Not right now. You and Sal need to be safe.” She looked fiercely between us. “You don’t understand yet how important you are, but you will. In the meantime, be careful who you trust, and remember, there’s such a thing as knowing without understanding. You need to think carefully before you start sharing the information I’ve given to you.”