Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  Honestly, I wished I had any idea who could have fixed it, or whether anyone was going to try. Dr. Cale was hard to predict. USAMRIID was all about humanity, and Sherman was all about the tapeworms, but humanity made the tapeworms—humanity brought the whole situation down on their own heads—and the tapeworms were taking things that didn’t belong to them. No one was completely in the right. No one was completely in the wrong, either.

  The sleepwalker in the corner moaned and shifted again, dislodging several small objects from her nest. One of them hit the floor with a clunk, the light from the window reflecting off its cracked screen. I stared in disbelieving wonder.

  It was a cellphone. And it was less than a foot away from a sleepwalker.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to just let me have that, would you?” I asked, taking a tentative step forward. The sleepwalker’s face swiveled back toward me, and she moaned with weak menace. “No, I didn’t think so.”

  I was the only thing in the room that she could eat: because of that, distracting her from my presence wasn’t going to be easy. I cast around until I found one of those long boards that had been broken off from the bed during her destruction of the room. Picking it up, I took another step forward.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “If you just let me have the phone, I can get out of your room, and you’ll never have to see me again.” That would mean leaving her to die alone, which might not have been a mercy, but which wouldn’t require me to actually be the one to kill her. I took another step forward.

  Sometimes it’s bad to be wrong. I’d assumed that since she hadn’t left her nest, she didn’t have the strength left in her to do anything but shift and moan. As I leaned forward to grab the phone, she lunged, spending the last of her resources in a desperate bid for sustenance. Her hands latched around my wrist, nearly yanking me off my feet as she pulled me toward her frantically working jaws. The light from the window glimmered off her teeth, which seemed too large and too white for her face. Everything had shrunk but those teeth.

  Swallowing my scream was one of the hardest things I had ever done. I backpedaled, trying to yank myself away from her. She didn’t let go. I was her last chance at survival, and no matter how reduced her faculties had been by time and trauma, some part of her still knew that getting my flesh into her mouth would save her. Everything she had left was going into the effort of holding on to me. As she pulled, I felt my feet starting to slip. Before long, I would topple, and she would have me.

  What happened next was pure panic. I raised the board that I was holding, bringing it down on her skull as hard as I could. There was a brittle splintering sound, and she moaned, and I hit her again. She still didn’t let go, and so I kept on hitting her, hitting her over and over again, while the sound of drums rose in my ears and the world narrowed down to a single point: me, and her, and the sound of wood impacting with her head.

  She released my wrist. I didn’t stop hitting her.

  It was exhaustion that finally made me pause and take stock of the situation. She wasn’t moving anymore. She had collapsed to the floor in a broken heap, and while there wasn’t much light in the room, what there was allowed me to see the dents in her skull, and the dark stains that were dripping down her skin as she continued to bleed out. The bleeding was already slowing, thanks to coagulation. Bile rose in my throat. I dropped the board, snatched the phone from the floor, and ran out of the room. I didn’t look back.

  It was a miracle that I made it down the stairs without tripping and breaking my neck. I stopped in the entryway, where no lights or windows would betray my presence, and tried to turn on the phone in my hands. I had killed for it. I ought to use it.

  It didn’t respond. Not even mashing the power button got a flicker of life out of the cracked and blood-spattered screen. I swallowed the panic that was trying to writhe up my throat and take me over, forcing myself to stand perfectly still while I breathed slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth, counting to ten on each exhale. The pounding in my ears began to lessen as my heart rate returned to something closer to normal.

  The phone didn’t work because it had been sitting on the floor long enough for its captive owner to wither away to skin and bones. That was all. Even if she’d been a thin girl to start with, she must have been locked in that room for at least a week—probably more like two—before she got to the condition that I’d found her in. Of course the battery was dead. When I no longer felt like I was going to panic or vomit at any moment I walked down the hall to the bathroom, guided by the light that I’d left turned on earlier. There was a socket in the wall next to the sink, one outlet already occupied by a hair dryer. I plugged the phone charger into the other outlet, connected the phone to the charger, and sat down on the toilet to wait.

  It was hard to keep track of time sitting alone in a dark house surrounded by sleepwalkers. It felt like it had been an hour when the phone beeped to signal that it was charged enough to use. It had probably been more like fifteen minutes. I left it connected to the charger as I picked it up and carefully pushed the button to activate the screen.

  Please don’t be password protected, I prayed silently, unsure of who might be listening and even less sure that I cared. Please just give me that much. Please.

  The screen flashed live, displaying the face of a smiling teenage girl wearing lipstick the color of bubble gum. There was no key pad. Relief washed over me. Her parents probably hadn’t allowed her to lock the phone, wanting to keep track of her activities. My parents had done something similar to me, although they had allowed Joyce all the privacy she wanted. That was the difference between adulthood and medical adolescence.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, and touched the phone icon.

  For one terrifying moment I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to remember Nathan’s number. Why should I? It was stored in my phone after all, and I had better things to remember. But it had been on a piece of paper first, pressed into my hand when we met at the hospital. Everyone kept telling me that I was using Sally Mitchell’s brain like a giant hard drive, storing information on it that couldn’t be contained in my original tapeworm neural system. That meant that everything I’d experienced since taking over had to be stored somewhere, if I just went looking for it.

  Bit by bit, the image of a piece of paper formed behind my eyes. The numbers were blurry around the edges, but I could still tell what they were—I thought. I dialed quickly, trying to avoid cutting my fingers on the damaged screen, and raised the phone to my ear. It was ringing. That was a good sign: that meant the cell network was still up. Civilization couldn’t have collapsed completely if the cell network was still up.

  The ringing stopped. Silence reigned. I waited a few seconds for the person on the other end to say something, and when they didn’t, I said, “H-hello? This is Sal Mitchell, looking for Nathan Kim. Please, do you know where he is?”

  “Sal?” Nathan sounded almost confused, like he couldn’t believe it was really my voice. I didn’t care. Just hearing him say my name was enough to dull the drums that had been hammering in my ears, reducing them to a distant background hum. “Is it… oh, thank God, Sal, is it really you?”

  “I think so,” I said, slumping against the cool porcelain of the toilet tank. “I’m really scared.”

  “I—” Nathan stopped for a moment. I heard him take a deep breath. Then: “I’m sorry, are you telling me this is Sally Mitchell? Can you confirm your identity?”

  Someone else had to be there with him: someone else had to be making sure he checked on me. That was okay. Better safe and making it home than sorry and alone. “I don’t like to be called Sally,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough, so I asked, “Are the broken doors still open? I want to come home.”

  Nathan laughed. It was a gasping, unsteady sound, and the only way I knew it was laughter and not tears was because it stopped. “You can’t be serious. You can’t really think we’re that easy to fool.”

  “I’m
not trying to fool anyone. We went to the hospital to fix the arteries in my head and then we got separated in the parking lot when I ran away to distract the sleepwalkers from eating you—did Daisy and Fang make it to the car okay? I hope they did—and USAMRIID took me and they put me in this big bubble inside the Oakland Coliseum and there were a lot of other people there and Colonel Mitchell wasn’t telling anybody I was a chimera which seemed sort of weird but I didn’t want to call him on it in front of the men with guns and then…” I paused to take a deep breath, having run out of air somewhere in the middle of that long, gasping speech. Once my lungs were full, I continued: “Then Sherman was there and he broke me out and he’s been keeping me prisoner while he took samples from me all sorts of samples like blood and bone marrow and yesterday he cut my head open so I’m afraid he took samples of me, only one of his people helped me get out and I don’t know where I am but there’s sleepwalkers outside and I want to come home. Please come and get me and take me home.”

  This time when I stopped talking, Nathan didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything. I could hear him breathing, and so I stayed quiet, trying not to pant as I waited to see what was going to happen next.

  Finally, quietly, Nathan asked, “Why should I believe that you’re still Sal?”

  I blinked at the phone. I had a dozen questions, and all of them seemed both equally important and equally frivolous. Finally, I asked, “Can Sherman do that? I know he’s been creating more chimera, and I’m not exactly sure how long he had me captive, but the first time I learned how to talk, it took like, years. Can he scoop people out of their heads and put new people in?” Belatedly I realized that I had just characterized tapeworms as “people.” I didn’t bother correcting myself. I was a person, regardless of my origins, and I was willing to extend that label to the rest of the chimera, regardless of theirs.

  “You’ve been gone for over a month, Sal. We had to abandon the bowling alley after USAMRIID quarantined the area. Tansy never came back. Mom’s had Adam under constant surveillance since you disappeared. We didn’t know whether USAMRIID had you or whether you’d escaped, and there was too much chance you’d tell them where he was.”

  As the first chimera—and the only one created from a first generation tapeworm—Adam would have been invaluable to anyone trying to figure out how we’d been created. I wanted to be offended, but I couldn’t muster the emotional response. Instead, I asked, “How are the dogs?”

  “Beverly howled for about two days, which was a problem, since we were trying to dodge the quarantine vans at the time. Minnie just took it in stride, like she always knew that you were going to abandon her someday.” Nathan’s voice was starting to thaw. “Sal, is that really you?”

  “It really is.” I sniffled, relief washing over me and leaving me almost dizzy. I hadn’t realized how afraid I was that Nathan would never accept me for who I claimed to be until the threat was lifting. “I don’t know where I am. Sherman was keeping me in an old mall, and I don’t know where that was either.”

  “We’re working on that,” said Nathan. “Fishy started a trace on this call as soon as it came in. Not many people use my private cell number these days.”

  “So Fishy’s okay?” I put my hand over my eyes, careful not to unplug the still-charging phone from the wall. “Who else is okay?”

  “How about I tell you about the dogs until we have a fix on you, just so I don’t slip up and say something if you’re being monitored by someone else’s people?”

  I smiled a little. “I’d like that.”

  “Well, Beverly’s started eating shoes…” Nathan began, and I sat quietly and listened to him talk about what our dogs had been up to, and began to feel like maybe things were going to be okay after all.

  Break the mirror; it tells lies.

  Learn to live in your disguise.

  Everything is changing now, it’s too late to go back.

  Caterpillar child of mine,

  This was always life’s design,

  Here at last you’ll find the things you can’t afford to lack.

  The broken doors are ready, you are very nearly home.

  My darling child, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.

  –FROM DON’T GO OUT ALONE, BY SIMONE KIMBERLEY, PUBLISHED 2006 BY LIGHTHOUSE PRESS. CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT.

  —hear me? This is Harry Lo of KNBR, the Bay Area’s real rock, broadcasting live because I have nothing else to do and no other way of getting the message that I’m still alive in here out to the world. I have now been broadcasting for twenty days straight. It’s almost Halloween, kids, and if anyone’s out there listening, I recommend against going trick-or-treating this year, because the streets are alive with the actual undead, which may make it hard to tell the kids in costumes from the people who want to eat your face off.

  Eating. I remember eating. Those of you who tuned in yesterday—and if any of you tuned in yesterday, why aren’t you calling to let me know that I’m not alone in here? Please, I’m begging you—you may recall that I ate the last of the crackers from the staff vending machine. I’ve started eating tissue paper, since my sister used to swear by that as a weight loss aid. I’ve also eaten an entire bottle of Vicodin, taken from our former lead anchor’s purse, and I’m about to follow it with the last of the tequila.

  This is Harry Lo, signing off. I hope that if you’re out there, you have better options left than I did.

  –FROM THE FINAL TRANSMISSION OF HARRY LO, KNBR, RECORDED ON OCTOBER 28, 2027

  Chapter 10

  OCTOBER 2027

  The sound of tires on the street outside made me stand and stick my head out of the bathroom, still clutching the fully charged cellphone in my hand like a talisman against all the bad things that were waiting in the dark. I’d been sitting silently since Nathan hung up, watching the phone’s battery bar slowly fill and wishing that he had been able to stay on the line. Apparently, it was unsafe to have too many connections going in or out of the new lab location; Fishy wasn’t the only person who knew how to trace a call. With the cell network on the verge of collapse thanks to neglect and a lack of callers, anyone who was still making calls was exposing themselves to all manner of tracking. By the government, definitely. But also, apparently, by SymboGen, which was still open and operational, and offering to “help” anyone who had been impacted by the sleepwalker plague.

  According to what Nathan had been able to tell me during our short time on the phone, I’d missed the shit really starting to hit the fan by three days. That was the span between my disappearance and the first person to go into a sleepwalker frenzy on live television. That would have been a big deal no matter who did it, but that first victim was Paul Moffat, the mayor of San Francisco. He had been in the process of giving a speech about the crisis, one that was mirrored to the local public television station, less because anyone thought he had anything new to say, and more because he was a heavy contributor to their operating budget.

  People started caring a lot more about what he had to say after he ripped somebody’s throat out with his teeth. That probably wasn’t the kind of attention he’d been looking for.

  By the time somebody thought to shoot him, even CNN was carrying the footage of his conversion and subsequent attack. According to Nathan, that segment had aired on an almost constant loop for three days, and even Dr. Cale had put it on the main screen in her lab for a few hours, making sure everyone had the chance to see it. Then she’d turned off the screen and announced that while they were not abandoning the search for me and Tansy, they couldn’t hold off moving the lab any longer. Things were destabilizing too fast.

  She was right about that, since by that point, no one really cared about the mayor who’d freaked out and eaten a few people. They were too busy worrying about their friends, their neighbors, their parents, their children… themselves. The warning signs had been there, and they had been ignored, one bellwether after another, until their weight became too great and everything came crashing down
.

  It took less than ten days for my cousins to incapacitate American civilization as we understood it, disrupting food chains, causing power outages and hospital shutdowns, and in some cases causing the evacuation of entire cities. There were still news feeds and Internet reports coming through, but they got scarcer each day as the people behind them fell. I guess maybe I should have been proud of that, except I was a tapeworm who thought of herself as a human, and they were tapeworms who thought of themselves as tapeworms. We were on different sides, and whenever there’s a conflict, somebody’s going to wind up on the losing one.

  I just didn’t want it to be my side, even if I still wasn’t sure what side that was.

  Footsteps on the walkway in front of the house snapped me out of my brief reverie, followed by the sound of gunshots. They came quick and efficient, one after the other, like someone running a hand along a typewriter. Then the shots stopped, and someone began hammering on the front door.

  “I’m coming!” I still couldn’t run, but I could hobble quickly. Two more gunshots sounded in the time it took me to get to the front door, which I unlocked and opened to reveal the wild-eyed face of Nathan Kim. He was wearing a black uniform I’d never seen before, and had an assault rifle in one hand. It looked out of place against the backdrop of my gentle, scholarly boyfriend. So did the bodies that were littering the lawn. Fang and a man I didn’t recognize were standing back-to-back behind him, their own rifles slowly sweeping the area as they watched for more sleepwalkers.

  Nathan stared at me. I stared back. The world seemed to freeze for a moment, narrowing to a single point that existed only in the space between us. I couldn’t move. From the hungry, hopeful expression on his face, neither could he.

  “This is great and all, reunion, true love, blah blah blah, but can you confirm that it’s really your missing girlfriend so that we can get the fuck out of here before we get shredded like piñatas on a playground?” demanded the man I didn’t know. “We may have cleared this area, and my EMP blasts may have killed any bugs, but the gunshots are going to attract more playmates in no time at all. We need to roll.”