Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  “They’re going to be crushed,” said Nathan, sounding horrified. I turned to see him standing next to me at the rail, Beverly sitting by his feet. They looked so normal, like they had no place in this scene. It was hard to believe that any of us did.

  “They’re going to drown,” I said, not arguing so much as adding to the risks that the sleepwalkers faced. I turned, trying to get my bearings on the ferry deck. We were standing in an open space, with plastic benches stretching behind us and a metal roof overhead, both providing protection from the elements and creating a secondary seating area. Dr. Banks was sitting on one of the benches, glaring at us like that would somehow change his situation. “Where’s Fishy?”

  “The… I don’t know what you call it on a boat. The cockpit is over there.” Nathan gestured toward the front of the ferry.

  “Watch Beverly,” I said, and took off running in the direction Nathan had indicated, weaving around benches and a single coil of weathered rope. I quickly ran up against a wall, which wasn’t something I expected to find on a boat. Moving along it brought me to a door, and through the door’s single clear aperture, I saw Fishy, standing behind a bank of controls I didn’t understand. I tried the door handle, and found it locked.

  “Fuck,” I muttered, and knocked on the clear opening.

  Fishy didn’t turn.

  “Double fuck,” I amended. This time I beat both my fists against the actual metal part of the door, setting up a din that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for engine noise. Fishy’s shoulders tensed for a moment before he turned, squinting at me. I waved.

  It only took him three steps to cross the small cabin and wrench the door open. He didn’t wait for me to step inside or speak before he was running back to his controls, turning his back to me once more. “What is it, Sal?” he demanded. There was an edge of strain in his voice that was decidedly unusual for the usually laconic technician. “I’m sort of busy getting us out of here alive.”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “The sleepwalkers that followed us here are still trying to attack the boat! They’re going to be killed!”

  “How is that my problem?” He glanced over his shoulder only long enough for me to see that he was serious, and then turned his attention back to the water. We were still driving through the shadowed depths of the ferry launch, which seemed unreasonably long for what was essentially a glorified waterfront garage. “I know the mad doctor thinks of those things as her kids, and while she’s welcome to her fucked-up family reunions, I don’t see any need to worry about them. Every sleepwalker that dies now is one that won’t be waiting for us when we get back.”

  I stopped. His perspective was callous but accurate in at least one regard: we needed the sleepwalker population to go down if we wanted to come back this way. And I still couldn’t see that as a good enough reason to kill them all. “You’re not going to do anything?”

  “What do you want me to do, Sal?” For the first time, he sounded genuinely tired. “I stop the boat, they swarm up here and kill us all. Plus this whole damn suicide mission was for nothing, which would be one hell of a bummer. I don’t have an air horn or anything, and they’re not raccoons; they wouldn’t just scatter even if I did.”

  “An air horn,” I said. The words had sparked an idea that was as improbable as it was unlikely to work. It was all that I had. “Thanks, Fishy, you’re the best.”

  “Whatever, kid.” He didn’t look around as I ran back out of the room, returning to my place on the deck next to Nathan.

  He hadn’t moved while I’d been gone. Neither had Dr. Banks. Beverly was trotting up and down along the rail, tail up in a warning position, pausing only to fire off menacing volleys of barks at the sleepwalkers below.

  Running back to the rail, I gripped it with both hands, leaned over as far as I could without getting myself grabbed by a sleepwalker, and shouted, “Go home! All of you! Go back where you were! Leave! Go!”

  It felt uncomfortably like yelling at a cloud to stop floating through the sky, and about as likely to work. Most of the sleepwalkers kept attacking the side of the boat, a constant, unyielding assault that sounded like a hundred men with hammers trying to beat their way through the hull. But some—not enough—stopped, tilting their heads back as they looked at me with dead, dull eyes. Anything in them that still understood language was slaved to their parasitic driver, and that parasite was responsive to the pheromones I was putting off. According to Dr. Cale, I was what all the sleepwalkers had been trying to become when they tried to take over their hosts, and that meant that they would listen to me. I’d seen it work at least once. Now I just needed to make it work more.

  “You’re not safe! Leave!” I began waving my arms in a swooping, visually arresting semaphore that would hopefully not only hold their attention, but make it easier for me to spread my pheromone trails. The motion of the boat was also helping: it would blow the air past me, carrying the command I was trying to convey to the waiting crowd. “You have to leave! Go!”

  “Now I know the girl’s gone loony,” said Dr. Banks, sounding more disgusted than anything else. “You can’t tell a worm what to do. You can just hope the worm doesn’t eat you up in the process of going about its wormy business.”

  “It’s working.” Nathan sounded awed. I followed his gaze, still waving, still trying to get my pheromones into the air. Some of the sleepwalkers were backing away from the boat, pushing their way through the crush of the crowd as they moved back to open ground. Still more were pulling away from the edges of the mob, beginning to slouch away, heading for the exit. “My God, Sal, it’s working.”

  “Not on all of them,” I said, and waved harder. “Go! Go on! Shoo!”

  Sudden light flooded the deck as we passed out from under the shaded part of the ferry launch. The dock still continued, and too many sleepwalkers were shambling along it, smashing their hands against the hull. Maybe one in five had listened to my desperate command that they withdraw… but one in five was better than none. Those were the ones who might be most equipped to learn how to subdue their violent urges.

  The ferry began to pull away from the dock. Sleepwalkers toppled forward, falling into the water with a series of small splashes. Some of them clawed at the boat as they fell, trying to stabilize themselves, and still the others pushed their way forward, sending even more sleepwalkers to their deaths. The boat continued inexorably on, sucking sleepwalkers under in its wake. I made a small whimpering noise, clapping my hand over my mouth to keep myself from screaming, but I didn’t look away. We had done this, with our maddened race through the city to the waterfront. We were the reason these people were drowning. The fact that we hadn’t asked them to come didn’t make any difference. I owed it to them not to look away.

  Nathan’s hand settled on my shoulder, reassuringly warm and steady. I leaned against him, and together the two of us watched the sleepwalkers fall, until the end of the dock appeared and we sailed onward, out of the darkness and into the uncertainty of the light.

  Everything is ready. I hold in my hand the end of mankind, and the beginning of a new, glorious era. It seems only fair, really: we made them, selecting for the strongest through millennia of predation, and when they were finally free of us, they turned those brilliant minds that we had helped them to develop on the task of making us better. Humanity did for the parasite what the parasite had once done for humanity, and now, at long last, it is time for the circle to close. It is time for us to take our rightful places in the sun, and never go back down into the dark again.

  Without the parasite, humanity would never have left the trees. Without humanity, the parasite would never have left the gut.

  There’s a beautiful symmetry to it, I think, and as he who has the power makes the rules, what I think is now and forever the only thing that matters.

  –FROM THE NOTES OF SHERMAN LEWIS (SUBJECT VIII, ITERATION III), NOVEMBER 2027

  Mom thinks I don’t remember Sherman, because I was so young when she was teachin
g him how to be a people, but I do.

  Mom thinks I don’t miss him, either, but I do that too; I miss him all the time, the same way I miss everyone who has to leave us. We’re supposed to be a family. That means we’re supposed to stay together, no matter what. If we always stayed together, so many of the bad things that have happened to us would never have happened. Tansy wouldn’t have gotten lost. Sal wouldn’t have had to be so scared of herself for so long. Mom wouldn’t have missed Nathan, and Nathan wouldn’t look at me like I was trying to steal his mother away from him. It would all be so much easier if we just stayed together.

  Mom thinks she can tell me that everything’s okay, that Sal and Nathan are okay, and that it doesn’t matter that they’ve gone back to SymboGen with the bad man who made Mom make us in the first place. She thinks she can say those things and I’ll just believe her, because I’m her good boy, and believing their mothers is what good boys do. I wish I could believe her. It would be so much easier, if I could.

  I’m scared.

  –FROM THE JOURNAL OF ADAM CALE, NOVEMBER 2027

  Chapter 18

  NOVEMBER 2027

  The air was thick with sea spray, making it almost like we were sailing through a salty mist, even though the water was open on all sides. It had been long enough since the crisis began that any ships that had capsized out here had been given plenty of time to either fully sink or simply wash away with the tide, leaving us with few obstacles as we cut a course straight toward the distant spires of San Francisco. We were all going to be soaked before we made it back to land. Somehow, that didn’t seem to matter very much.

  After the excitement of getting through Vallejo, riding the ferry into the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay managed to seem almost peaceful, like it was the least of all the available evils. Sure, we were bouncing from wave to wave, sometimes with a force that made my teeth rattle in my head, but we weren’t being chased by anything. That alone was enough to let me sit down on one of the hard plastic benches, slumping forward until my forehead rested against my knees, and breathe. Beverly curled at my feet, her head on her forepaws and her tail occasionally thumping against the deck. It was a small, comforting metronome, almost as regular as the drumbeats in my head, and it made it even easier for me to relax.

  Soon enough, we’d be in San Francisco. Soon enough, we’d be past the point of no return, barreling into the future with no way back to the past we’d left behind us. But for right now, we could breathe.

  Nathan sat down beside me, announcing his presence by resting his hand between my shoulder blades and saying, “Fishy confirmed that we have a full tank of diesel. We should be able to make it to the shore without any problem.”

  “It’s a good thing Fishy knows how to drive a boat.” I lifted my head just enough to turn and peer up at Nathan through the fringe of my hair. “I guess we’d still be trying to figure out how to get across the water if he didn’t.”

  Nathan grimaced. “As it turns out… this was his first time.”

  I sat bolt upright. “What?” The motion disturbed Beverly. She scrambled to her feet, ready to run or stay as I commanded.

  “He just told me. He’s never actually operated a real boat before, but he assumed the controls couldn’t be too difficult compared to piloting a remote drone around the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, so he didn’t bother to provide that little bit of data until after we had left the dock.” Nathan’s grimace deepened. “I would talk to Mom about her hiring practices, but since they basically boil down to ‘are you human, implant-free, and/or not actively trying to murder us, great, here’s your lab coat,’ I don’t think it would do very much good.”

  “Neither do I,” I said gravely. With no more fanfare than that, I burst out laughing. Nathan blinked at me, his expression slowly fading into a look of profound confusion.

  “I thought you’d be more stressed-out right now,” he said. “The water’s pretty rough.”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t like being in a car,” I said. “We’re on a boat. If we hit something or flip over or whatever, I can just swim away.” There were almost certainly safety concerns I wasn’t thinking about, because I didn’t know what they were. The simple fact of the matter was that being on the water didn’t frighten me the way that being on the road did. The phobia I had been given as my penalty for taking Sally’s place only seemed to hold sway on land.

  That thought was sobering in at least one regard: we were almost certainly going to need to steal a car or van in order to move through the remains of San Francisco, which had been hit even harder than Vallejo by the sleepwalker plague. Sherman had triggered at least one outbreak there that I knew of, and the nature of the implants meant that that initial outbreak would have had a domino effect throughout the city, impacting thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. We’d never make it to SymboGen on foot. One way or another, I was going to be in another car today, probably being driven by Fishy.

  “I guess that’s true,” said Nathan. He glanced back over his shoulder. I knew that he was checking on Dr. Banks, who had been sitting as far from us as the layout of the deck allowed ever since we left Vallejo. “I don’t trust him.”

  “Neither do I.” This was it: this was the moment where I could tell Nathan what Dr. Banks had said about me still being Sally on some level, just repressed and locked away by trauma and socialization. I took a breath. “Nathan, I—”

  “Sorry to disturb you kids, but you may want to move to the front of the boat.” Fishy’s voice blared from the speakers set in all four corners of the overhang that sheltered us from the sky. It was warped and distorted, becoming almost more crackle than words. “I look forward to your helpful contributions.”

  Nathan and I exchanged a look. Then, without a word, we got up and made our way to the front of the boat as fast as seemed safe. The ferry bucked and rolled with the waves, making our footing less certain than it could have been. Still, we made decent time to the front of the boat, and stopped there, both of us frozen by the reality of what we were seeing.

  The Bay Bridge was straight ahead, and it was packed with sleepwalkers. They jammed the lower deck, crushed up against the pylons that held the span in place. The fence designed to keep people from toppling off the bike path had been broken in several places, and sleepwalkers fell in an almost steady stream, vanishing with neither sound nor trace into the black waters below. There was always another sleepwalker jockeying to take their place, hands outstretched in angry need. It took me a moment to realize what they were trying to accomplish. I clapped my hands over my mouth, torn between pained laughter and angry tears.

  The cables that supported the bulk of the bridge were alive with crows. I had never seen so many of the scavenger birds in one place. They were packed together until their bodies were almost indistinguishable from one another, ruffling their feathers and occasionally taking off in brief flurries of wings that were almost negative reliefs of the waves below. Black water and white foam met empty air and black bodies, flashing from place to place with arrogant slowness. They were taunting the sleepwalkers, driving them to unthinking suicide.

  “Why are the crows doing that, and why aren’t the sleepwalkers eating each other?” I asked, baffled.

  Nathan might not have heard me—between the roar of the engines and the crash of the waves, it would have been easy for my small voice to go overlooked—but he was asking himself the same question, because he said, loudly enough for me to hear, “The pheromone tags must keep the sleepwalkers from recognizing each other as food. The current will carry the bodies back to the beach. Maybe in San Francisco, maybe the surrounding islands. Either way, they’ll wash up, and there won’t be any fight left in them. Easy pickings for an enterprising crow.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “That’s nature.” Nathan turned. The window leading to the control booth was right behind us; I could see Fishy through the thick glass, still happily manipulating the controls that he had freely admitted to barely
understanding. He hadn’t crashed us yet, which was better than I could have done. Nathan cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Just steer around the breaks!”

  “Yeah, genius, I’m already on that.” Again, Fishy’s voice came from the speakers, which must have been installed for the convenience of the commuters who used to ride this boat to and from work every single day. It seemed like a singularly cold, wet way to spend a commute. “Here’s my question: what do you want me to do about the sharks?”

  There was a long pause while both Nathan and I tried to puzzle through that statement. Then—again in unison—we walked back to the rail and leaned forward, peering out.

  A body floated by to my right. It was a woman, her dead, empty eyes staring upward at the unforgiving sky. Then, with no fanfare and no immediate cause, she was gone, disappearing under the surface like she had never been there. I took a breath, preparing to say something, and stopped as the woman reappeared… only now she was missing much of her right arm, and as I watched, a flash of gray fin signaled the return of the shark that had taken it, coming back for more. The woman disappeared again. This time, if she resurfaced, she didn’t do it where I could see.

  I took a big step back from the rail, shuddering. “That’s really creepy,” I said.

  “That’s fascinating.” Nathan was still in his initial position, leaning so far over that he looked like he was in danger of pitching overboard at any moment. “There were probably some minor chemical spills when the luxury boats and such sank—a natural consequence of any emergency that leaves people with time to put out to sea—and that would have killed off a lot of the local fish. Sharks start getting desperate, and then they discover that the crows have established an all-you-can-eat cafeteria near the bridge. It’s elegant. Nothing goes to waste.”