Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  Fishy slipped into the garage. A moment later his voice drifted back like a ghost out of the darkness, saying, “The lights are out, but I think we’ll be okay.”

  That was our cue. I slipped in after him before Nathan could push in front of me, letting Beverly’s curiously sniffing nose lead the way. Her sleepwalker radar was more reliable than mine, and if she started barking, we’d know that we needed to get the hell out.

  High windows were set around the edge of the garage roof, allowing the watery San Francisco light to ooze inside, seeming almost liquid as it clung to the corners of the room and trickled down the walls to outline the shapes of the cars and trucks that had been safely tucked away by their owners before those owners went on to meet their fates. The air smelled ever so subtly of decay, and I was glad for the darkness, glad for the shadows that concealed the corners and the secrets they might hold; Beverly wasn’t barking and my private radar wasn’t ringing, which meant that nothing else lived in this space. If a sleepwalker had been trapped inside, they had long since starved to death. I didn’t think that was the case, though. I was pretty sure the lock Fishy had so carelessly destroyed had been placed by someone who then entered the garage through another door—something small, something overlooked in our quick, goal-oriented search—and finished things in the only way they could. Someone who wanted to die with dignity.

  Fishy didn’t seem bothered by the smell. He moved from vehicle to vehicle, cupping his hands around his eyes as he peered through the glass. “Can’t see a damn thing,” he announced, and kept moving. “Start looking for unlocked doors. One of these bastards has to still have the keys in it.”

  “Why?” I asked. I moved toward the nearest van at the same time; there was no point in waiting for an answer before I started trying to help.

  “Because otherwise I’m teaching one of you how to hot-wire a car, and trust me, that’s not the sort of skill you pick up in one lesson.” Fishy pulled on the door of a pickup truck, scowled, and moved on. “Someone needs to wait with the boat; it’s not going to be either one of you; it’s sure as shit not going to be Dr. Frankenstein; that means we need a car with keys.”

  “This one’s open.” Nathan’s call came from the other side of the garage. I turned, peering through the gloom, and found him standing next to the dark bulk of what looked like a minivan. “No keys.”

  “What’s the make?” asked Fishy.

  “Io.”

  Fishy actually grinned. “Pre- or post-auto drive?”

  “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know that? It’s an Io. I can’t even tell what color it is.”

  “Wait right there.” Fishy half jogged across the garage, neatly sidestepping around Beverly, to join Nathan at the open van door. He peered inside the vehicle, seeming to look more with his hands than with his eyes—which made sense, given the darkness—and finally announced, gleefully, “You don’t need keys or a crash course on how to hot-wire a car. All you need is one short and a screwdriver.”

  “What?” said Nathan.

  “What?” I said.

  “You spent a lot of time in prison before the world got messed up, didn’t you?” said Dr. Banks.

  Fishy ignored us all as he turned and walked over to the wall. Bumping, clattering sounds traced his progress, making me wince. It was hard to know how much of the noise he was making would be audible outside the garage, but even a little could very easily be too much, under the circumstances. There was one final clatter, louder than the rest, and then Fishy was trotting back, holding something long and pointed in one hand. “There’s always a toolbox in a place like this,” he said, pushing past Nathan. His upper body half vanished into the van, and for a few moments the only sounds were the drums beating in my eyes and Fishy rustling around in the front seat.

  There was a click. The van’s engine turned over, and the headlights came on, throwing the front half of the garage into terrible clarity. A man was slumped against the wall on the right, only a few feet away from the bench and open toolbox that Fishy must have been rummaging through. The man’s throat had been slit, and the words “I’m sorry” were written on the wall in what I strongly suspected was his blood. I shuddered and looked away.

  Fishy didn’t appear to have noticed. He was enthusiastically explaining the art of using a screwdriver in place of a key to Nathan, periodically leaning back into the van to give the screwdriver a twist or jiggle, for reasons I couldn’t understand and didn’t particularly want to learn. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, waiting for them to be done, waiting for the moment when we could start moving and put this dark, dead space behind us.

  Beverly began to growl.

  It was a low, almost inaudible sound at first, easily overlooked under the chatter from Fishy and the questioning replies from Nathan. I stiffened, trying to turn my senses outward, looking for pheromone trails or… or whatever it was that I actually looked for when I did that. I found nothing. But Beverly was still growling, the sound increasing in both volume and urgency, and she didn’t do that without cause. “Guys?” I said.

  They ignored me.

  Beverly pressed herself hard against my leg. Her eyes were fixed on the open garage door, and her ears were flat against her head, giving her a distinctly predatory cast. “Guys,” I said again, louder this time. “Something’s upsetting Beverly.”

  That got Dr. Banks to pay attention to me, at least. “Is it sleepwalkers?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not picking up anything, but I don’t know if I would. I think we should be moving.”

  “In a second,” said Fishy.

  Beverly continued to growl, still getting steadily louder. For the first time, I felt that odd ping at the back of my head that meant sleepwalkers coming, sleepwalkers nearby—but it was so much stronger than I had expected it to be, especially with so little lead-in, that it might as well have meant sleepwalkers here.

  “We don’t have any more seconds,” I said, urgently. “We have to go now.”

  The urgency in my voice must have been enough to catch his attention; the outline of his head appeared above the dashboard of the van. I turned, dragging Beverly with me, and ran toward the others. Dr. Banks saw me move and moved with me, and for one glorious moment, I thought we were going to be okay: we had moved fast enough, we had made it out of the path of oncoming danger.

  And then the sleepwalkers of San Francisco, who had had quite a long while to grow hungry as they roved the hills looking for things to fill the holes that could never be filled, hit the open door of the garage like a wave. Their bodies blocked out what little light there was in an instant, and everything became the shouts and shoves of my companions as we tried to get ourselves into the van. I wound up in the back, holding on to Beverly with all my might as I struggled to keep her from leaping out of the vehicle and tearing off into the fray. Nathan pushed Dr. Banks in after me and slammed the door.

  The front doors were still open. “Come on, you idiot, get in the car!” shouted Nathan.

  Fishy. Fishy was still out there. “I’m good!” he shouted back. “Go, I’ll hold them off!”

  “The damn fool’s going to kill us all,” snarled Dr. Banks, and for once he and I were in perfect, terrible agreement. Then Nathan was in the driver’s seat, and was reaching across the van to grab the back of Fishy’s shirt and haul him into the front passenger seat, somehow managing to lift the smaller, stockier man with nothing but a grunt of strained protest. The sleepwalkers were closing fast, and the buzz in my head that told me they were coming was a clanging bell warning me of a five-alarm fire. It was becoming physically painful. I bent forward, clasping my hands at the base of my skull, and tried to will the sound away.

  Someone’s hands were pressed between my shoulder blades. They weren’t mine. With Nathan and Fishy in the front seat… I realized who was trying to comfort me a bare second before he spoke, and I stiffened, wishing there were any way for me to remove myself from the situation. There wasn’t. With the alarm b
ells screaming in my head, I would have been doing well to sit up.

  “Concentrate, Sally.” Dr. Banks’s voice was low and soft, so close to my ear that he had to have been leaning forward to whisper to me. That went with the presence of his cuffed hands on my back. I could hear Nathan and Fishy shouting at each other. There was no help coming from that quarter, not until they had a chance to breathe and realize what was happening. “She’s distracted right now, and I know you’re in there. I know you’ve always been in there. This is your chance. Take a deep breath, and come back to us.”

  I wanted to slap his smug face away from me. I couldn’t bring myself to move. The alarm bells were still ringing, but in their clamor I could also hear an absence of sound: the drums had stopped, leaving the world missing its natural backbeat. That was horrifying, in a way I couldn’t entirely define.

  “Sally.”

  He sounded so sure of himself. Like he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all he had to do was keep calling her and she would appear. Sally, with her human upbringing and her human ideas about the world. Sally, who wasn’t afraid of riding in cars, and who had never experienced the collapse of civilization, or the discovery that she wasn’t what she believed herself to be. Sally, who was as alien to me as I was to her, but whose body I had taken over without so much as a by-your-leave.

  Sally, who had tormented her family to such an extent that her father was willing to let me play cuckoo in his nest, while her sister had never questioned “her” sudden, total change of personality; had, in fact, looked upon it with gratitude and relief. Sally, whose taste in friends was such that her boyfriend hadn’t even been able to stick around to see whether she was going to recover—one hint of difficulty and he was out the door, moving so fast that he might as well have left contrails in his wake. Sally, who had left the mansion of her body empty and waiting for me, because she just couldn’t cope with existence anymore.

  Maybe Dr. Banks was right about her memories being locked somewhere in the soft gray folds of the brain that had once belonged to her, but he was wrong about at least one thing: Sally didn’t live here anymore, and no matter how hard he tried to convince me, I was never inviting her to come back.

  “Hold on!” shouted Nathan. The van leapt forward. I heard—and felt—the impact of soft bodies against the hood as we slammed into the leading wave of sleepwalkers. Their moans filled the world, drowning out the alarm bells triggered by their presence. I seized on the sound, trying to use it to anchor myself to the real world again. My head was a cacophony of unwanted stimuli. One by one I shunted them aside, looking for the one that would allow me to move again. I wanted Dr. Banks away from me. His hands on my back were a sick, dead weight, more repulsive than the army of sleepwalkers now trying to claw their way inside to reach us.

  Their moaning changed pitch and timbre as we rolled forward, forcing the sleepwalkers to either stand aside or be crushed under our wheels. These were the ones who had been smart or canny enough to stay alive in the ruins of San Francisco: more of them seemed to be moving aside than staying in our path. I forced my head up, off my knees, and croaked, “Crack the windows.”

  “What?” Nathan’s voice, sounding bewildered and no small bit dismayed.

  “I need you to crack the windows.” Forcing my eyes to open came next. I stared down at the mud-smeared floorboards, trying to will myself to keep moving. “The sleepwalkers… if they knew I was here, they might be confused enough to back off. Just a little. I don’t want to hurt them if we don’t have to.”

  “You stupid little cunt.” Dr. Banks spoke softly enough that I knew the others wouldn’t hear him, not with the sleepwalkers moaning outside and the van still straining for escape. It didn’t matter: I could hear him, and I wouldn’t forget. He removed his hands from the middle of my back, and it was like a terrible burden being lifted away.

  After that, it was almost easy to sit up, turning a glare on Dr. Banks in the process. He shied back, pressing himself against the door. My expression must have been fiercer than I thought. “Get away from me,” I said. “Never touch me again. Nathan? The windows.”

  “On it,” said Fishy. The windows in the back rolled down maybe an inch and a half, allowing the moans of the sleepwalkers outside to fill the cab. Beverly’s growls became frantic, full-throated barks, almost drowning out the moaning from outside.

  “Shh, Bevvie, it’s okay,” I said, patting her on the head before climbing up onto the seat, kneeling. I leaned forward, pressing my lips against the opening in the window, and took a deep breath. The stench of decay and unwashed human bodies assaulted my nose, almost gagging me. Most of them were ripe with urine, gangrene, and worse. I forced myself to keep inhaling until my lungs began to ache. Then I exhaled, trying to breathe my pheromones into the garage. We were still rolling slowly forward, Nathan struggling with the wheel as he fought to get us out into the open without doing irreparable damage to our only means of transit.

  I breathed in again, breathed out again, and kept my eyes on the sleepwalkers surrounding the car, willing them to “listen” to the messages coded into my biochemistry, written in protein and chemical chains on my breath. I was a chimera; I was their social superior, just like a termite queen was superior to the drones that filled her hive. They would listen to me. They would listen to me. They didn’t have a choice.

  Apparently, some of the sleepwalkers agreed. The ones closest to my open window slowed, their heads tilting at an alien angle as they canted their eyes upward, looking for the source of the pheromone trail. I kept breathing, trying to spread the command to calm down as far as I could.

  One of the nearest sleepwalkers opened his mouth, not to moan, but to shape a word. The sleepwalkers around him did the same, and bit by bit, the stillness spread, replaced by dozens of sleepwalkers exhaling a single syllable:

  “Saaaaaaaaaaaaaal.”

  “Because that’s not creepy,” snapped Fishy. He didn’t roll the windows back up. That was something. “Nathan, I think you can go a little faster. They’re not attacking us right now. Take advantage of that.”

  “We can’t drop you off, you realize,” said Nathan. The van sped up a bit, nudging sleepwalkers out of the way. Most of them were clustering around the sides of the vehicle now, shoving at each other as they tried to get closer to the windows. If I’d been claustrophobic, I would probably have been climbing the walls. As it was, I was sort of amazed that the humans weren’t. I guess the need to stay alive was taking priority over the need to freak out completely.

  “I know,” said Fishy. “We’ll have to find another way to refuel the boat, assuming we can even get back to it with this mob here.” He sounded surprisingly calm for someone who was riding through a mob of angry trans-human attackers. I guess believing that nothing around us was real was helping him in at least that one regard.

  “You people are an affront to the human race,” snarled Dr. Banks.

  I turned away from the window to look at him, eyes narrowed. “We only need you for a little while longer, you know,” I said. “It’s up to you whether we let you go after your people give us Tansy, or whether we take you with us when we leave so that we can throw you to the hungry cousins out there. You made them. Maybe you should have the opportunity to really get to know them.”

  Dr. Banks paled, his eyes going wide. He didn’t say anything else, and so neither did I. I just turned back to the window and resumed breathing through the crack in the glass, trying to keep the sleepwalkers calm long enough for us to escape the garage and drive onward into a bigger, more dangerous future.

  The sleepwalkers clogged the Presidio, but forming the mob that had rushed the garage seemed to have denuded their numbers: once we were away from the water the streets were empty and motionless, filled with abandoned cars and the occasional desiccated corpse. Most of the bodies we passed looked like they’d been partially eaten before decay reached a stage that left the meat useless. Pigeons scattered in front of us, and I saw what looked like a pa
ck of wild dogs disappearing down an alley, there and gone too fast for me to be sure of what I’d seen. I left the windows cracked, listening for the sound of moans. Depending on the wind, it might well reach me before the sleepwalker pheromones did.

  The buzzing in my head had stopped. That was nice. The smell of decay from outside the van hadn’t abated, although it was more distant now, diluted with salt and with the undefinable, stony smell of San Francisco itself. I settled cross-legged on my seat, watching out the window and waiting for our next obstacle to present itself.

  “Sal, are you all right back there?” Nathan raised his head as he spoke, his eyes seeking mine in the rearview mirror. There was an air freshener shaped like a dolphin hanging there, and I felt a brief pang of sorrow for the person who had hung it, who had never come back to get their van and drive it safely home. “I’m sorry we had to drive out of there like that. I know I didn’t give you enough notice.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, offering what I hoped was an earnest smile. “I barely noticed. I was busy trying to keep the cousins from shredding the van and us with it.”

  Now Nathan blinked, his eyes widening a little in the mirror. “Sal… you’re not wearing your seat belt.”

  “What?” I looked down at my unrestrained middle, belatedly realizing just how accurate my words had been: I had barely noticed when we started to move, and I was barely noticing it now. Apparently, the life-threatening reality outside the vehicle was bad enough to keep me focused on the things that actually mattered, and prevent me from having another of my attacks. “Oh.” I buckled my seat belt before looking up again and meeting Nathan’s eyes in the mirror. He looked concerned.

  He had every right to be. Things were moving fast now, and with Dr. Banks in the mix, any deviation from the norm was cause to worry.

  Dr. Banks himself still had not received the memo about behaving decently if he wanted to stay alive. He sneered first at me and then at the front of the van, apparently directing his disgust at Fishy and Nathan combined. “We’re almost to SymboGen,” he said. “That means we’re on my turf now, and you’re going to be sorry that you decided to start this with me.”