by Mira Grant
Unless something I couldn’t see was triggering them. I took a step backward, moving away from him.
“Sal?” Joyce sounded puzzled.
“Dad?”
He didn’t respond. He just kept standing there, like he was going to say something. But he wasn’t. I could tell that just by looking at him.
The worst part of it was that he didn’t look like the sleepwalker who’d been at our back door, or the one outside the car. His eyes were still aware, still struggling to focus.
“Joyce, if this lab has security, this would be a good time to call for them,” I said, not taking my eyes off my father. He wasn’t moving. I honestly didn’t know whether that was a good sign, or a bad one. In dogs, that sort of stillness could be a precursor to an attack.
“What are you talking about, Sal?” She stepped forward, moving toward us.
I didn’t think. I just reacted, moving quickly to get her out of Dad’s reach. I grabbed her arm and jerked her back just as he began to move again, hands grasping at the air where she had been standing only a half second before. Joyce made a small, startled shrieking sound, one that dwindled almost instantly into a cough. Dad grabbed for the air again. I jerked her even harder away from him.
The other technicians were starting to look up from their work, abandoning the pretense that we could have a private family conversation in the middle of a busy government lab. That was good, since the alternative was their politely ignoring us while my father ripped us apart.
“He’s sick!” I shouted, pulling Joyce another step backward. Dad continued to follow us. At least he wasn’t moving very fast yet; he still seemed disoriented, like he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.
Fight it, Dad, I thought. That… thing… that’s taking you over, fight it for as long as you can. Let me get Joyce out of here.
Joyce finally seemed to understand the danger we were in. She stumbled as she got her feet under her, and then she was backpedaling on her own, no longer relying on me to pull her. “Daddy?” she asked.
“He was fine when we got here!” I said. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? He’d already been slipping, and I’d known that something was wrong, I’d known, and I’d ignored the signs, because… because…
Because I didn’t know what else to do. We were through the broken doors now, and the only ground left was the unfamiliar kind.
Dr. Cale said that once someone started showing symptoms of the sleepwalking sickness, it was too late for any treatment, because the parasite was already in their brain. But she would say that, wouldn’t she? Even if it wasn’t strictly true, she’d say it. The SymboGen implants were her children. She might not actively side with them against the human race. That didn’t mean she was going to go out of her way to figure out how to stop them from taking the things they wanted. Like bodies of their own.
The other technicians were in motion now, some of them running for the exits, others grabbing old-fashioned telephones from the walls and gabbling into them, presumably calling security. I yanked Joyce back another step before raising my voice and calling, “Does anybody have any antiparasitics? I mean really good ones? We need—” I cheated my eyes toward Joyce and asked, “What do you use for tapeworms?”
It seemed impossibly weird to be asking her questions when our father, clearly dazed, was shambling toward us like something out of a horror movie. Oddly, that seemed to help Joyce. This was too strange to be happening: therefore, it wasn’t happening. “Praziquantel,” she said. “It has some negative side effects, though, like—”
“Is one of the negative side effects death?” I demanded. “Because if it’s not, I suggest we get somebody to pump Dad full of the stuff right now.”
Joyce took her eyes off our father in order to blink at me in obvious bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”
I wasn’t sure whether sleepwalkers were capable of watching for an opening—if they were anything like as confused as Dr. Cale had implied, they might not be capable of anything beyond basic instinct, at least initially—but my father still took advantage of the opening when Joyce presented it to him. He lunged forward. He was fast. I was just a little bit faster. I grabbed her shoulders and yanked her hard away from him, leaving his hands to slap together on empty air with a flat, meaty sound that would haunt my dreams for days. Joyce yelped, as much with surprise as anything else, and fell over, upsetting two trays of instruments in the process. I barely managed to dodge in time to keep her from taking me to the floor with her.
The sudden flurry of movement seemed to confuse our father, who froze, his face swinging slowly toward me, then toward Joyce, and back to me again. I straightened slowly, raising my hands in front of me to show that they were empty. I don’t know what good I was expecting that to do. I wasn’t thinking particularly clearly by that point.
“Dad, you’re sick,” I said, enunciating each word as clearly as I could. “I need you to fight against whatever it is you want to do right now, and focus on the sound of my voice. There’s something we can do to help you be better, but it won’t work if you don’t focus on the sound of my voice. Can you do that for me, Dad? Can you fo—”
Without warning, he lunged. I squeaked, stopping in the middle of my sentence, and turned to run. He seemed to track by sound and motion. Joyce was frozen in terror. She wasn’t making a sound, and she wasn’t going anywhere. All I had to do was keep his eyes on me, and trust that someone would stop him before he could do something we’d both regret later.
Well. Maybe I wouldn’t regret it if he killed me. I’d be dead, after all. But I’d sure as hell regret letting myself get into this position if things got that far, in the time I had before oxygen deprivation resulted in my second clinical brain death.
I ran; my father followed. The rest of the technicians had cleared the room, which was convenient, since it meant I didn’t need to worry about leading their rampaging, somewhat addled boss into the middle of their workspace. I shoved things into his path as I tried to evade him without losing his interest. I was afraid if anyone else in the room moved or made a sound, he’d abandon chasing me in favor of going for easier prey. Prey that wasn’t running like hell, or throwing file boxes at his head.
The doors at the back of the room opened and military police flooded in, almost like they were imitating the SymboGen security guards on the day when Chave got sick. That seemed like it had happened so long ago. It seemed like it had happened yesterday. Several of them pulled their guns, and I stopped running in order to put up my hands, and yell, “No! Don’t shoot! Stun him, and get the pretzel drugs!” I was saying it wrong. I knew I was. But long words were Joyce’s thing, not mine, and I’d only heard the name of the drug once. I was frankly impressed I could remember it started with the letter “P.”
And then my father’s hands closed around my throat, and I stopped being impressed by anything, except for maybe how tight his grip was. I scrabbled at his fingers, trying to dislodge them, and couldn’t find any purchase. He was bigger than I was, he was stronger than I was, and he was going to win this one if I didn’t figure out a way to change the rules.
Dad, I’m sorry, I thought, and focused all my remaining energy on planting my foot squarely between his legs.
His response was to groan and let go of my throat, causing me to drop first to my knees and then to my ass as my legs folded up beneath me. My father didn’t seem to notice; he was too busy grasping his crotch and moaning.
I scrambled back to my feet. “It’s not too late!” I shouted. “Joyce, get the antiparasitics!”
The other sleepwalkers didn’t seem to feel or really register pain once they had fully succumbed to the parasites that were infiltrating their brains. My father still responded to extreme pain stimuli like a normal human, and that meant he hadn’t been completely taken over yet. There was still a chance that we could treat him. There was—
“Oh, my God, my balls,” he moaned.
I stopped. “Dad?”
“Wow, D
addy, great idea,” said Joyce, picking herself up off the floor. She dusted off her lab coat with the heels of her hands, scowling at our father like he had just disappointed her in some deep and profound manner. “It’s not Halloween, we’re not twelve anymore, and this isn’t how you make it clear that things are serious.”
The soldiers were standing down. Some of them even seemed to be snickering, trying to hide their amusement behind their hands. I looked from them to Joyce, my confusion growing by the second. The sound of drums was getting louder, now fueled by anger instead of by fear.
“Joyce?” I said, trying to keep my voice measured. “What’s going on here?”
“Daddy thought you might be holding out on us, since you went and disappeared for hours right after a bunch of sleepers showed up in the yard.”
He managed to gasp out something that might have been “I still think that,” or might have simply been a request for an ice pack. I ignored him either way, focusing my attention on Joyce instead. If I looked at him, I was going to be too tempted to give him another kick. The military police might think it was funny for me to attack my father when he was playing sleepwalker, but kicking him while he was down was likely to get a less positive reaction.
“So you’re saying he faked this?” I asked. My voice was sounding a lot less measured. I took a step away from my father. “He set this up to—what, scare me into giving away secrets?”
“It… worked,” gasped my father, finally pulling himself to his feet. “Why did you start asking for antiparasitics?”
“That was pretty specific,” said Joyce. She walked toward us, primly stepping around the objects I’d knocked over during my flight. I noticed that she didn’t bother picking anything up. That was apparently below her pay grade. “What would make you decide to ask for antiparasitics?”
I looked from Dad, who was still white-faced and grasping his crotch, to Joyce, who looked utterly calm. The technicians were moving back to their stations, and although security was still in the room, none of them looked like they were planning to do anything to secure anyone. It had all been a sham. It was a play to see what I would do, and while that spoke to the level of their desperation, it still infuriated me in ways I didn’t really have the words for.
“Is this why you locked me in the house and wouldn’t let me talk to Nathan for five days?” I asked. “Because you wanted me to be scared?”
“The things I said to you on the way here were true,” said my father. He was starting to sound less winded, which made me want to kick him again. “I really did want time to check for bugs, and there really were things about the news that would have made you ask questions.”
“They made Nathan ask questions,” said Joyce. “He showed up here yesterday, demanding to know if you were all right.”
I blinked. “Why would he come here?”
“Because we told him you weren’t at home, and this was the only other place you could logically be,” said my father. I turned to stare at him. He continued, “We tried telling him you’d become symptomatic, to see what he would say. He said we were lying. We’ve been trying to find him since then.”
“What?”
“He vanished, Sal,” said Joyce. “Do you know where he would go?”
Yes; back to his mother, who had answers, and who would be able to tell him whether it was possible for me to have become symptomatic so quickly, when there had been no signs that my resident implant was planning to migrate from my digestive system to my brain. Dr. Cale could hide him, keep him off the grid and keep him safe, while they figured out where I was and how to get me out. I glanced toward the security guards, wondering how many of them might be working for her, playing both sides against the middle. It was a paranoid thought, but given that my father and sister had just staged some kind of horror movie dumbshow for my benefit, paranoid didn’t seem so strange anymore.
“No,” I said, and was surprised by how sincere I sounded. “I don’t have any idea where Nathan would go, and I don’t think I want to talk to either one of you right now. I asked Dad to bring me here because I was tired of being locked in the house, and because I wanted to help. After what you did, I don’t feel like helping anymore. Being locked up is better than being here with you.”
“I’m afraid I can’t take you home until you demonstrate that test you promised to show us,” said my father. All traces of weakness were gone from his voice, and he was once again standing up straight. The jangling feeling of wrongness was still coming off him like a wave, but that might just have been my nerves reacting to the overall mood in the room.
Might. “Then I’ll call Tasha or Will to come and get me,” I said, raising my chin defiantly. My coworkers at the shelter hadn’t seen me in days. They’d be annoyed by my suddenly calling and asking for favors. They’d also be more than willing to get in the car and pick me up. They both understood why I didn’t drive, and respected it. I sometimes suspected I was just another abandoned animal to them, but in moments like this, I didn’t mind.
“No, you won’t.” My father’s voice was almost gentle, for all that it was still firm. “You won’t be able to get a cell phone signal inside here, and I’m not going to let you leave this building until you show me what you promised.”
I stared at him. “I made that promise before you pretended to be a sleepwalker and tried to strangle me,” I said.
“Desperate times can lead us to do things we’re not proud of,” he said. Joyce was a silent statue next to him, her gaze cast slightly off to one side, so that she wouldn’t have to meet my eyes.
“I want to go home.”
“Why did you ask for antiparasitics?” Dad shook his head. “I can do this as long as you can, Sal. Longer, even.”
“He could also have you arrested for withholding information from the United States military,” said Joyce.
I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she was messing with me or not. Sally would have known. Sally would have seen this whole scenario as bullshit from the minute Dad loomed up outside her bedroom door—assuming Sally let herself be put under house arrest in the first place. She would probably have just vanished the minute she was told that she was in trouble, and refused to come home until the restrictions were dropped. It wasn’t very often that I wished I were still Sally. In that moment, if I could have reclaimed my memories and the girl I used to be from the ether, I would have done it without hesitation. Sally would have known what to do.
Sally wouldn’t have heard the drums.
I faltered, blinking. Why was I so sure Sally wouldn’t have heard the drums? Something was dancing on the edge of my consciousness, some combination of facts and suppositions that I couldn’t quite force together in the right order. Sally wouldn’t have heard the drums. Why wouldn’t Sally have heard the drums? What made her so special?
“Colonel Mitchell?” A guard stepped up next to my father, interrupting my train of thought before it could go any further toward a conclusion that I was increasingly sure I wasn’t going to like. All three of us turned to face the man. He was average in every possible way, average height, average build, and average face. The only thing about him that stood out was his expression. He looked worried, maybe verging on panic. Not a good sign, given the circumstances.
“What is it?” asked my father.
“There’s a disturbance in the ward.” The man glanced toward me, seemingly hesitant to continue.
“It’s all right,” said my father. “Both my daughters have the clearance to hear this.”
“Really?” I asked, despite myself.
“Sal, hush,” said my father. “Private. Report.”
“The subjects are restless, sir. They’re moving around, and some of them are in danger of hurting themselves on their restraints. We weren’t sure what to do. I was sent to find you and see if you had any ideas.” The private’s eyes cheated toward me, like he was trying to skip ahead and find out what would happen next.
I looked back at him blankly. If any
one here knew how this was going to play out, it wasn’t me.
I was so preoccupied with watching the private that I didn’t see my father move until his hand was clamping down on my shoulder again. I staggered a bit, turning to look up at him. His expression was unreadable, a blank mask.
“This sounds like the perfect opportunity for my daughter to show us what she knows,” he said. “Lead the way.”
The private’s eyes widened. He looked as alarmed as I felt. “But sir—”
“Now.”
Any concern the unnamed private might have for my safety was less powerful than the need to maintain military discipline. The private nodded, the concern not leaving his face, before he turned and led the way toward a door in the back wall. Joyce walked after him of her own accord. I didn’t, but that didn’t matter; my father’s hand was on my shoulder, propelling me toward whatever was waiting in the next room.
The private swept his key card across the electronic lock, which beeped twice before accepting his credentials and releasing. He pulled the door open for us, and held it as we walked through, into the humid, groan-filled air beyond.
The room where the sleepwalkers were being kept was like something out of a nightmare, familiar and strange all at the same time, so that I didn’t know where to look. It was large, clean, and white-walled, just like every hospital patient storage room I’d had the dubious pleasure of seeing since the day I woke up after my accident. There were no windows, but there were light boxes placed strategically around the room, creating the illusion of natural sunlight even if the sun hadn’t been inside here since construction was finished. The floor was industrial-green linoleum, easy to clean while also being easier on the eyes than the walls. Green floors encouraged the eye to track down, increasing the chances that messes would be seen before they could be accidentally tracked around the room.
