Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  The living room boasted a large picture window covered only by gauzy curtains, and the clearly artificial glare from the streetlights outside came in through the sheer fabric, giving me enough light to see by, if not clearly or well. I peered around in the gloom, making note of the major articles of furniture and the two exits. One appeared to lead deeper into the house, while the other was close enough to the picture window that I was willing to bet it would lead me to an entryway and then to the front door. I wasn’t ready to go outside—not when I was this weak and this unsure of where I was—so I turned and shuffled deeper into the house, moving slowly to keep myself from falling down again.

  The hardest part was crossing the wide-open center of the living room. Once I had reached the far wall and had something to brace myself against, things got easier, if not exactly pleasant. I shuffled along until my hand dipped into another room, one that both felt and sounded smaller than the first one. I felt around, my fingers finally brushing the cool edge of what felt like a sink. The bathroom. Good. I stepped fully inside, feeling blindly around until I hit a light switch.

  This was it: the moment of truth. Turning on a light in the living room would have been like sending up a flare to notify anyone nearby that someone was in a house that was supposed to be empty, but the bathroom window wasn’t likely to be visible from the street. Now all I had to do was pray that the place hadn’t been empty for so long that the power had been cut.

  As soon as I flipped the switch the room was flooded with soft white light from the low-emission bulbs above the sink. It didn’t hurt my eyes as much as normal lights would have after being in the dark for so long. That was a relief. I fumbled the medicine cabinet open without really looking at the rest of the room. The shelves were laden with all sorts of things both prescription and non, including a full bottle of ibuprofen. I struggled for a moment with the childproof lid before it came free, abruptly enough that little red pills went all over the room. I didn’t bother trying to pick them all up. I just shoved six into my mouth, swallowing greedily, before I turned on the tap and bent to drink straight from the faucet like a dog. For all I knew, ibuprofen was contraindicated after brain surgery, but since Sherman hadn’t exactly provided me with aftercare instructions, I was playing things by ear, and my ear said it would do a better job if it wasn’t attached to a skull that felt like it was full of wasps.

  When I had swallowed away the last of the dryness in my throat I stayed where I was, bracing my hands against the edge of the sink and bowing my head as I watched the water swirl down the drain. My hair was still an unfamiliar distraction as it hung in my frame of vision, keeping me from seeing the rest of the sink. A single pill had landed in the basin, and was resisting the swirling water that threatened to pull it down the drain. It looked out of place.

  Everything looked out of place. Something about that pill, red against the white, made me lift my head and really look at what was in front of me for the first time since I had turned the lights on.

  The sink was laden with all the things that I would have expected to find in a bathroom—hairbrushes, straightening iron, toothbrush, toothpaste, and a dozen other grooming tools that Joyce would have been better equipped to identify than I was. There were framed pictures on the walls, and the medicine cabinet wasn’t just full, it was overfull, packed with bottles and creams and cosmetics. The house smelled abandoned, and no one had come to investigate the noises that I was making, but whoever lived here hadn’t moved away. They’d just disappeared.

  Slowly, I turned to look at the rest of the bathroom. Everything I saw just confirmed my fears. The shower curtain was puddled in the bottom of the tub, having been ripped from its rod by someone who wasn’t being careful. They might not have been capable of being careful: the bathroom rug was almost entirely the deep brown color of dried blood, save for a few splotches around the edge where the fabric remained plush and white. I stared at the rug for a moment, trying to convince myself that I was just looking at a bad dye job. The little splatters of blood on the linoleum and the edge of the tub made that an impossible trial.

  The drums were beginning to pound in my ears. Ronnie must have brought me here because he knew that the original owners of the house were gone, either killed by sleepwalkers or joining them. How far had the infection spread while I was locked away? How much time did the human race have left?

  I walked carefully back to the bathroom door, trying to tread as lightly as I could. Not only did my legs hurt so much that running would have been impossible, but any sound I made would mean risking an attack.

  The hall was still deserted. I stood for a moment in the bathroom doorway, listening to the house around me. I didn’t hear movement. That was good; that could mean that I really was alone. The real question was Ronnie. Would he have put me someplace safe, or would he have left me in a killing jar to see what would happen to Sherman’s prize specimen when faced with real danger?

  Almost unconsciously, I rubbed my still-healing wrist, feeling the stitches shift beneath the gauze. I could handle myself if I had to. I just didn’t want to do it if I had any other choice.

  A house this well lived in had probably been occupied for at least five years, which meant the occupants might have installed an emergency services landline. I turned to my left, heading still deeper into the house as I looked for the most logical place to find that sort of thing: the kitchen.

  The carpet underfoot muffled my steps, which was a good thing, except for the fact that it would also have muffled the steps of anyone who followed me. I kept glancing over my shoulder, squinting through the thin light from the open bathroom door as I watched to see whether I was being followed. No slack-jawed shapes had yet loomed out of the darkness, but that sadly didn’t mean much of anything. Sleepwalkers weren’t clever—at least not if the ones we’d encountered thus far were anything to go by—but they moved slowly enough that they were basically ambushes waiting to happen, at least until the moment when they decided to attack.

  My foot struck linoleum. I stopped, struck by the sliding glass door on the wall directly ahead of me. It was standing open, a bloody handprint against its surface like a tattoo. The drums in my head got even louder. That was how the sleepwalkers had been able to get into the house, or maybe that was how the original inhabitants had been able to escape after they lost themselves to their implants. Either way, it was a way out.

  Would the sleepwalkers still be lurking in the backyard, unable to find their way past the fences? Or were they in the darkest corners of the kitchen, trying to make up their slow minds about what to do with me? I had to make a decision.

  I chose safety. I crossed the kitchen floor as fast as my legs allowed, grasping the sliding glass door and yanking it shut. It squealed in its track, and I winced but kept pulling until it was snug against its frame. Then I flipped the lock, and froze, watching the foliage in the backyard for signs of movement.

  There weren’t any. But nothing moaned behind me either, and so I did my best to set my paranoia aside as I turned and began searching for a working phone.

  It was slow going in the dark. I didn’t dare turn a light on, not with the chance that the backyard was full of sleepwalkers, and so I worked my way around by feel. When I discovered the butcher’s block I pulled out a cleaver, holding it in one hand while I continued to feel my way along with the other. I’d be more likely to cut myself than anyone else, but it made me feel a little bit better to at least have the potential to defend myself.

  Ten minutes later, I had found a bunch of half-rotten bananas and a loaf of moldy bread, but no phone. I made my way slowly out of the kitchen, walking past the bright haven of the bathroom to the front of the house, where that big picture window now seemed terrifyingly exposed to a night that contained who-knows-what. My search turned up no phone here either. I winced. Apparently, my choices were staying in the house, cut off but potentially safe, or going out into the world with no idea where I was or how far I would have to travel to get back
to the bowling alley. I’d be able to see any sleepwalkers better if I waited for daylight, but sleepwalkers had to sleep too. Were they more or less active during the day?

  I didn’t know. Nobody knew. That was the problem: I was standing in a safe place, trying to make plans that would mean leaving that safety for a whole new kind of danger. Maybe I really was a wimp, but that idea didn’t seem very appealing.

  There was still one door I hadn’t tried. I stepped through the other exit from the front room, and stopped. It was an entryway, as I had suspected. It was also the access to the stairs. That was more of a surprise, and for a moment I just stood there, contemplating the seemingly impossible task of convincing my tired, strained legs to carry me to the second floor.

  If the people who lived here had been killed by sleepwalkers, they wouldn’t have had time to take anything with them. Even if there wasn’t a landline, there could be cellphones in the dark upstairs, little electronic miracles just waiting for me to find them and use them to summon a rescue.

  I took a breath, gripped the banister, and began pulling myself, one agonizing step at a time, toward the second floor.

  It took what felt like an hour for me to climb the twenty or so steps between the entryway and the upstairs hall. When I finally ran out of steps I collapsed forward, landing on my hands and knees on the plush carpet, and fought the urge to curl into a ball and cry until the pain stopped. Every muscle I had from the waist down felt like it was on fire. The drums were pounding so hard that I was beginning to worry that Sherman had undone the surgery that was intended to keep me alive. Worst of all, there was no light up here: either the curtains were drawn, or there were no windows in the hall, leaving me in absolute blackness. It was like being thrown back into the vent, only this time I had no destination in mind.

  When the tremors in my thighs stopped I pulled myself to my feet, picking up the cleaver from the floor, and began shuffling forward into the dark. I moved like a sleepwalker as I tried to avoid running into anything. My hand found a wall. I followed it to an open door. A search of the room on the other side—which was slightly less dark than the hall, thanks to a small window looking out on the empty backyard—yielded nothing. The next room was much the same, as was the one after it, until I’d searched the entire back of the house without finding what I needed.

  The first door on the other side of the hall was closed. I stopped before turning the doorknob, pressing my ear against the wood and listening for any signs that I wasn’t alone in the house. I didn’t hear anything. I turned the knob and pushed the door slowly open. The room on the other side was utterly destroyed, but what I could pick out through the light filtering in from the street below seemed to imply that it had belonged to a teenage girl: everything was frilly and pale, washed out so that I couldn’t tell its original color. Most of it was also broken, thrown to the floor and crushed by some angry hand. The tattered remains of posters still blanketed the walls, and what water remained in the fish tank near the bed was foul and dark with mold. I noted all this dispassionately, the bulk of my attention going to the room’s single largest fixture:

  The window.

  It was closed, rendering the room stifling and somehow septic-smelling, like something had been left in here to rot, but the light seeping in from below was strong enough that I knew it would give me a good view of the street. I could find out whether it was safe for me to leave the house and go looking for a pay phone. I stepped into the room, drawn to that window like a moth to a flame.

  Something moaned in the dark. It was a small, weak sound, but it was still enough to bring me to an instant halt, my back going so stiff that it pulled at the wounded muscles in my thighs and made me want to start moaning. I bit my tongue to keep from making a sound and turned, as slowly as I could, to face the farthest corner of the room.

  My eyes were adjusting to the dim light. As I peered into the corner, it began slowly resolving from an indistinguishable jumble into distinct shapes. That long, broken pillar was a piece of the bed. Those soft mounds were the comforter, humped up and caked with something foul. And the skeletal collection of joints and angles in the middle of it all was a human being, eyes sunk deep into a skull that was barely contained by a thin panel of tight-stretched skin, hair almost completely ripped from its scalp. I couldn’t tell its original gender: it was naked, but so huddled over that it could have been male or female. Not that it really mattered. The figure was clearly on the verge of death, having been locked in this room so long that its body had already cannibalized every useful bit of tissue that it could without shutting down essential systems. I didn’t know how long it took the average person to starve to death, or how big this one had been when the door shut and the food stopped coming, but regardless, they didn’t have much longer.

  The sleepwalker—because there was nothing else it could have been; not with a closed, unlocked door being the only thing between it and freedom—opened its mouth and moaned again, weakly. It didn’t try to get out of its nest. I didn’t think it could have moved if it wanted to.

  I bit my lip, staring at the figure in the corner. It didn’t moan again. I wasn’t sure whether that was because it was too weak, or because I had stopped moving and it could no longer tell where I was. Either way, it didn’t seem like it was going to come after me anytime soon. I turned my back on it and resumed my trek toward the window, looking out on the street below.

  I’m not really sure what I was expecting after the situation at the hospital and the number of people who had been shoved into USAMRIID’s quarantine. Some part of me had still been holding out the hope that this would all just go away, and the world would return to a semblance of normalcy. I put a hand over my mouth, blinking rapidly to prevent the tears that were welling up in my eyes from clouding my vision. Normalcy was no longer an option, assuming it had ever been an option in the first place.

  There were no cars moving on this suburban street, and the few lit windows on the houses around me were all on the second floor, meaning that anyone who was still awake and alive was staying as far from ground level as possible. That made sense.

  The street belonged to the sleepwalkers.

  There were only about twenty of them in my view, although that didn’t mean that there weren’t more hiding in the bushes or skulking in the long shadows down the sides of those same houses. They were of every age and race, from small children to a man I guessed had to be in his eighties. All of them shambled along with the same mindless lack of purpose, their hands held slightly out in front of them as if to ward away obstacles. While I watched, two of them bumped into each other, patted one another’s arms, and finally joined hands before shambling on in tandem. This neighborhood was no longer the property of the human race. Its successors had taken over.

  There was a faint moan from behind me. I whirled, suddenly convinced that the sleepwalker in the corner had managed to get loose and come after me. The bright specks of its eyes glared from the exact spot where I’d seen them before. I took a deep breath, trying to calm my pounding heart. “It’s okay, Sal,” I whispered, earning myself another moan from the sleepwalker. “Unless you’re going to feed it, it’s not strong enough to come after you.” I felt bad about reducing the sleepwalker to an “it,” but that was technically true of the tapeworm part of the composite, and I wasn’t going to sex the human half just to get the proper pronouns.

  Still. This room looked like it had been designed for a teenage girl. If she was the sleepwalker, she’d been locked in here when she converted. Either she had been able to shut the door before her parents could get to her or she’d been the first to go, transitioning while she was asleep or otherwise distracted. No matter what had happened, most of her belongings were probably in here with her, and teenage girls had cellphones.

  I began feeling my way along the top of the dresser next to the window, moving cautiously in an attempt to keep from cutting myself on the broken glass that had been knocked from the empty picture frames still studd
ing the walls. I found a charger plugged into the wall about halfway down the length of the dresser, its unconnected end seeming to taunt me. There had been a phone in this room. This dark, dangerous room with the watching sleepwalker still occasionally moaning from its place in the corner.

  “Steady,” I murmured, as I disconnected the charger and stuffed it into my pocket. I knew the house still had power. If I could find the phone, I could call for help.

  A rustling sound from the corner dragged my attention back to the sleepwalker. It was trying to work its way free of its nest, its withered, wasted limbs refusing to support its weight. As it moved, it revealed enough of its chest for me to identify it as the teenage girl whose room this had been. I felt a little better about that. She had already been robbed of her humanity and her future; the least I could do for her was think of her as the woman she had been before one of my cousins burrowed into her brain and destroyed her.

  “I’m sorry about touching all your stuff, but I don’t think you could tell me where your phone is,” I said apologetically, and resumed feeling my way along the dresser. “I wish you could. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  She moaned again, even more weakly this time. It was sort of nice not to be alone, since I knew that she wasn’t going to attack me: if she’d been capable of getting to her feet, rather than just rustling around in her nest, she would have done it already. I had a body packed with nutrients and fat, and I could have kept her alive for a good long time if she’d been able to get to me. I felt bad about that too—it was like I was waving a steak in front of a starving man—but since the steak was what was keeping me alive, I wasn’t going to share. It was terrible that her fate and mine had taken such different directions, but it wasn’t my fault. I just wished that there was something I could have done to fix it.