Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  Beverly was still barking. I tried to focus past that. “I’m Sal,” I said. “I know you can hear me. I know you can tell that I’m family. Do you have a name? Do you know who you are?” Maybe we had been missing chimera because they were concealed among the greater sleepwalker population, effectively going feral in their efforts to stay hidden. Maybe there were chimera everywhere, and all we needed to do was start looking for them.

  The woman bared her teeth and hissed at me. She lunged, and her head seemed to explode, sending bits of skull, brain tissue, and shattered tapeworm everywhere. I shrieked, recoiling. Not fast enough; bits of her showered both me and Beverly, leaving me feeling sticky and contaminated.

  “Sal!” Nathan shouted. He ran up bare seconds after her body hit the ground. I stared down at her, unable to take my eyes off the white loops of tapeworm squirming weakly against the red wetness of her blood. Nathan followed my gaze. There was a horrified pause before he said, “Oh, God. Her implant… there was almost no brain tissue left.”

  I stared at him mutely, unable to quite comprehend what he was saying. Fishy trotted up behind us, pulling a protesting Dr. Banks in his wake, and peered down at the remains of the sleepwalker. “Looks like her growth limiter broke,” he said, sounding entirely too cheerful about the idea. “It’s sort of like spaghetti, don’t you think?”

  “And here I didn’t think you could make it any worse,” muttered Nathan.

  Make it worse… I shook off the veil of disgust that had settled over me, standing up straighter and trying to look like I hadn’t just been on the verge of vomiting as I said, “There are at least two more on their way here, and we just made a lot of noise. We need to get out of here.”

  “Sal’s right,” said Nathan. “Fishy, are we clear?”

  “You mean ‘are we about to get eaten alive by pseudo-zombies conceived by a creative team with an obsession for body horror’?” asked Fishy blithely. “Oh, we’re golden.”

  There wasn’t much that any of us could say to that. We resumed our march into the deserted city, moving away from the site of the slaughter as quickly as we could without attracting even more attention.

  The condition of the three sleepwalkers we’d seen so far explained why we weren’t being rushed: they had been malnourished and coping with injuries even before they got to us. The human body is exquisitely adapted to its environment. It has hands to grasp and eyes to see. It is capable of communication and complicated thought. But it’s not very well designed for roaming naked through the ashes of a city, walking barefoot on broken glass because it no longer understands shoes, eating whatever rotten, stinking things it can find because it no longer understands the concepts of “food poisoning” or “indigestible.” The sleepwalkers had been monsters when they first awoke, ripping apart people who didn’t have implants, and people whose implants hadn’t managed to awaken yet, with their bare hands. Now they were just… sad. They were sad, broken things that had once been people and were never going to be people again. Even the ones like the woman, who had still possessed a glimmer of cunning and coherent thought—enough to plan, enough to hang back and assess the situation reasonably—were too broken to be fixed.

  Beverly tugged on her leash as we walked, clearly uneasy and eager to be someplace safer. Things rustled and moved in the shadows, making my nerves even worse, but the small, strange part of my mind that said “sleepwalkers here” was quiescent. We were safe, for now. That didn’t mean we could stop moving.

  “There should be a restroom or staff break room at the ferry launch,” said Nathan. He pitched his voice as low as he could, trying to keep it from echoing through the empty streets and notifying the local sleepwalkers as to our location. “We can get you cleaned up before we head for San Francisco.”

  I grimaced. The blood had dried on my cheeks and throat; it cracked and pulled whenever I moved my head. “We can’t afford to waste the time. I’ll be fine. I’m trying to pretend that it’s just pasta sauce, but that’s sort of hard,” I murmured. “It sure doesn’t smell like pasta sauce. It smells more like dog food. That doesn’t make things better, you know?”

  “I know,” said Nathan. He glanced around us, assessing the nearby buildings. It was almost automatic now, for both of us, and that hurt my heart a little. We used to be able to go for walks because we wanted to be together, we wanted to relax and enjoy each other’s company, we wanted to move. Now we spent all our time out in the open looking for cover and planning escape routes, like a failure to know exactly how to get out of every situation could be fatal.

  To be fair, it probably could.

  At least Dr. Banks was staying quiet. I turned my attention briefly to him, since Nathan was checking the buildings around us and I knew that there were no sleepwalkers close enough to worry about. I’d been afraid that Dr. Banks would blow our position just for the sake of screwing us over, but he was moving as carefully as the rest of us, and his cheeks were pale and tight with strain. It looked almost like he was having an epiphany of some kind, something deep and slow and moving entirely beneath the surface. A subclinical understanding.

  And then I realized what it had to be. “You’ve been in your lab this whole time, haven’t you?” I asked, pitching my voice just loud enough for him to hear me. “All of this has been academic. Like Fishy pretending that it’s all a video game so he doesn’t have to deal with how real it is.”

  “I’m not pretending anything,” said Fishy.

  Dr. Banks didn’t say anything.

  Beverly started to growl.

  All heads swung toward the dog, and Nathan asked, cautiously, “Sal…?”

  “I’m not picking up on any sleepwalkers, but I’m not radar,” I said, panic spiking in my throat, still unaccompanied by the sound of drums. Their absence was making the world seem terrifyingly quiet, like it had been stripped of its sound track for the first time in my life. “They could be all around us and if the wind was blowing the wrong way, I might not know.”

  “We’re going to die,” moaned Dr. Banks.

  The sound of a gun going off was amplified by the buildings around us, which turned it from a simple boom into a long, echoing crack that bounced off walls and vibrated against windows until it seemed to have no single direction; it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The same couldn’t be said of the bullet, which slammed down into the pavement in front of Fishy’s feet with the accuracy of a sharpshooter—or maybe the blind luck of someone who was firing wildly at the intruders in their dangerous, postapocalyptic world.

  “Shit,” snarled Fishy. “It’s not sleepwalkers, it’s survivors. Run!” And with that, he was in motion, his grip on Dr. Banks’s elbow never slackening. Dr. Banks had no choice but to keep up, and that meant that Nathan and I had to do the same, or risk being left alone and unarmed in the streets of Vallejo.

  My time with Sherman had actually done me some good, unbelievable as those words sounded even inside my own head: before he’d taken me captive, I would never have been able to handle a dead sprint down a deserted, debris-cluttered road. Now I kept up with ease, running alongside Beverly rather than being towed along in her wake. It was Nathan who fell slightly behind, forcing me to shorten my steps rather than leave him alone in the street.

  There were two more gunshots, as omnidirectional as the first, their echoes rolling down the avenue like thunder. We kept running, and when Fishy shouted, “Left!” we turned, pounding down a smaller alley without losing more than the barest shreds of speed.

  Beverly snarled, and the feeling I had come to recognize as my sleepwalker detection sounding off fizzed as if my brain had been carbonated. “Sleepwalker!” I shouted, just as a hulking, filthy figure shambled out from behind a Dumpster. Fishy didn’t break stride as he swung his rifle around and put two bullets in the man, one in his throat, the other in his forehead. The sleepwalker fell back, the feeling of presence in my head snapping off like a switch had been flipped. Fishy laughed, and a cold feeling raced across my ski
n, like he had finally started making sense and I really didn’t want him to.

  There wasn’t time to explore that feeling, or even begin consciously feeling it. We were still running, and with gunshots behind us and sleepwalkers potentially up ahead, stopping to think would have been a good way to get somebody killed. Probably Dr. Banks, who was huffing and struggling to stay upright as Fishy hauled him along. He had always struck me as being in excellent shape, but how much of that was thanks to his implant siphoning off the extra calories he ingested and keeping him from needing to watch his cholesterol? His cheeks were bright with exertion now, not pale with fear, and he was starting to have trouble breathing.

  “We’re almost there!” shouted Fishy, who wasn’t even breathing hard. Out of all of us, he was the only one who seemed to be benefiting from this run. He looked more alive than I had ever seen him, and the grin on his face was unwavering.

  “Why are people shooting at us?” demanded Nathan.

  “Fear, panic, protecting their shit, I don’t know!” Fishy actually laughed. That cold sensation raced across my skin again. Dr. Cale had been very clear about the fact that Fishy was not participating in the same version of reality as the rest of us. Until this moment, I hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that I was crossing the city with an armed man who didn’t believe that I—that anyone—was actually real.

  This day just kept on getting worse, and I was ready for it to stop anytime now.

  Nothing else lunged out at us as we ran down the alley and onto a new street, and there was the water, glimmering calm and deep, deep blue in the sunlight, like a sheet of glass stretching out toward the distant shape of San Francisco, its skyscrapers and bridges rising like ghosts out of the fog. We all stumbled to a halt, even Fishy, briefly shocked out of our headlong flight.

  “Here we go,” murmured Nathan, and I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t say anything at all.

  I received the official “disconnect at your earliest convenience” request from my superiors today. They couched it like they were asking me to turn off a faulty piece of machinery or requesting that I decommission a vehicle no longer capable of performing its function. There was no compassion, no concern for how their request might impact my ability to carry it out. I am career military, after all. When I am given an order, that order is followed, regardless of the consequences.

  For more than thirty years, I have done everything that has been asked of me. I have served my country to the best of my ability and at the expense of my own better judgment. I have done everything within my power to be a patriot and a credit to my nation. Even when they asked me to host the occupied body of what had been my eldest daughter, I agreed, because it was my duty.

  They are asking me to kill my only surviving child. For the first time, I do not know whether I am capable of what I have been asked to do.

  –FROM THE PRIVATE FILES OF COLONEL ALFRED MITCHELL, USAMRIID, NOVEMBER 2027

  I have sent my biological son and my spiritual daughter away with my worst enemy and a man whose grasp on reality makes mine seem both solid and admirable. I have sent them to do the impossible, and the fact that it was at their own request is cold comfort; I should have been able to stop them, somehow. I should have convinced them that there was another way. But there wasn’t another way. They knew it, and so did I. That’s why I let them go.

  The world was supposed to get easier once I was no longer standing in the middle of it. I have what I always said I wanted: a problem too big to be solved in a single lifetime, a lab full of people to help me solve it, and no oversight of any kind.

  Why do I feel like I’ve lost?

  –FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. SHANTI CALE, NOVEMBER 16, 2027

  Chapter 17

  NOVEMBER 2027

  The ferry landing was abandoned. Private watercraft lined the dock, some of them half submerged, others clearly ransacked for whatever food or medications might have been stored on board. A dead woman lay, naked and fully exposed, on the deck of the nearest sailboat. Her skin was blackened and full of holes, showing the depredations of the crows and seagulls; her eyes were two dark pits in the stripped circle of her skull, staring up into the sky until time or a storm washed her away and left the clouds once again mercifully unobserved.

  I paused as we passed the dead woman. Then I stooped down, taking quick, shallow breaths through my mouth as I peered closer at her skeletal visage. There were streaks of withered off-white in the dark where her eyes had been; the looping segments of her implant, dried to fishing line by the sun. “She was a sleepwalker,” I said. “I don’t know what killed her.”

  “Hunger, maybe, or thirst,” said Nathan. “This is salt water. If she didn’t have the intelligence to realize that she couldn’t drink it safely, she could have died of dehydration within sight of the sea.”

  It was a terrible way to go. I wrinkled my nose as I straightened, and turned to see Dr. Banks and Nathan both looking uncomfortable and upset. Only Fishy still looked calm. To him, this was just so much scene setting, background data that would tell him the severity of the crisis before it was casually dismissed as unimportant to the greater game.

  I had never hated someone for being deluded before. I was starting to consider it where Fishy was concerned. “We should keep moving,” I said.

  “The ferry landing is just up ahead,” said Fishy. He retook Dr. Banks’s elbow. “Come on, Dr. Frankenstein. Let’s roll.”

  “Don’t call me that,” snarled Dr. Banks… but he didn’t resist, and he didn’t pull away. Like the rest of us, he understood that strength was a matter of numbers now—and more, he recognized that maybe arguing with the man who had the assault rifle was a terrible idea.

  Beverly’s nose was virtually glued to the ground, inhaling all the scents of the seaside as we walked. I felt a pang of guilt as I realized how much time she’d been forced to spend inside since all this began; a few excursions to the rooftop garden weren’t the same thing as running wild and free the way she used to, back when she lived with a man who liked to jog in a world where people didn’t suddenly go feral and start trying to destroy everything they’d ever loved. It wasn’t just the humans who had had their lives completely turned upside down by the advent of the sleepwalkers. It wasn’t just the people who’d made the problem who were going to be suffering its effects for years to come. Dogs, like Beverly, and cats, like the ones back at the shelter—any domestic animal, anything we’d bred and raised to depend on us—they were going to be paying for it too. Their lives were never going to be what they’d been before the sleepwalkers woke and started demanding their own freedom of movement.

  Sure, maybe I should have been worrying about bigger things than my dogs, but my dogs’ lives were something I could, at least superficially, control. How was I supposed to save Tansy if I couldn’t even take care of a dog? “Sorry, Bevvie,” I murmured. Beverly, sniffing raptly at a patch of seagull poop, ignored me.

  Nathan glanced my way. I offered him a small, slightly apologetic smile. Explaining my thoughts would have taken too much time and involved too much talking, and neither was a good idea right now.

  “Nathan.” Fishy’s voice was low but it carried well, holding an authority that made both of us turn to see what he wanted. He shoved Dr. Banks back toward me. The man who used to represent my greatest fears took a few stuttering steps in my direction before stopping and turning back to Fishy, a scowl on his face.

  “Now you see here—” he began.

  Fishy raising his rifle and leveling it on his face made Dr. Banks stop midsentence. He took another step backward, toward me, and stepped in Beverly’s much-valued patch of seagull poop. She made an irritated snorting noise. “Sal, you’ve got babysitting duty. Nathan, I know you have a handgun. I need you in the ferry launch with me. We have to check the boats for seaworthiness, and that’s going to be faster if we’re not dealing with the baggage.”

  “Gonna pretend you didn’t just implicitly lump me and my dog into ‘the ba
ggage,’ ” I said blandly.

  Fishy’s shrug was unapologetic. “Sorry, Sal. Them’s the breaks. Well, Nate? Come on, boy, the sooner we launch this boat, the sooner we can get you back to mama.”

  “We’re not launching anything until everyone is on board,” said Nathan. He hadn’t budged, and his hands were balled at his sides, clearly telegraphing his unhappiness with Fishy. “You understand that, right? We’re all going to San Francisco.”

  “I got it,” said Fishy. “Are we going to stand out here arguing about shit, or are we going to get shit done, son?”

  Nathan frowned before turning to look at me. “Can you handle keeping an eye on him while we check the boat?”

  I nodded. “I’ll be fine. If he tries anything inappropriate, I’ll push him into the water. That’ll teach him.”

  “Don’t push me into anything,” said Dr. Banks.

  “Sal, if any sleepwalkers come…” said Nathan, ignoring Dr. Banks entirely. I wished I had the same option.

  Forcing a smile, I said, “I’ll scream. Now go.”

  “All right.” Nathan kissed my forehead before pulling the handgun out of his jacket and turning to Fishy. “Lead the way.”

  I didn’t like Fishy’s grin. I didn’t like it one bit. But we didn’t have another option, and so I didn’t say anything; I just stood there, Beverly’s leash in one hand, and watched as the two of them slipped into the building that housed the entrance to the ferry.

  Dr. Banks waited until they were gone before he turned to me, expression going imperious, and said, “Untie my hands.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, thank you for asking nicely? But that wouldn’t be in my best interests.”

  “I’m defenseless,” he said. “Are you trying to get me killed? Untie my hands.”

  “I’m not trying to get you killed, but I’m also not sure why you think I’d be upset if something happened to you.” The drums were finally back, beating their old familiar tattoo inside my veins. I didn’t have time to be relieved about their return. I was too busy trying not to let Dr. Banks see how nervous I was about standing here alone with him, with no one to save me if he decided to rush for me. I was much smaller than he was, and my only weapon was a dog who was much more interested in sniffing the dock than she was in keeping an eye on him.