Someone was screaming on the street outside my window. They had been screaming for more than an hour, and no one inside the house had been able to work up the courage to go out and try to make them stop. The last time one of us had gone out to make someone stop screaming while people were trying to sleep, it had ended in gunfire, and we’d suddenly found ourselves with more room in the house. That should have seemed like a gift—there were eighteen of us crammed into a three-bedroom home that had been designed for a single nuclear family, not a jumbled alliance of refugees—but instead, it had come with a whole new dose of fear, resentment, and anger, all mingled with our grief. USAMRIID didn’t allow any space to go unused for very long; their unofficial motto here in the quarantine facility was “Waste not, want not,” and there were always people looking to change housing. But the sort of people who needed to approach strangers to find a place to live were generally not the sort of people any of us wanted to share a home with.
It was possible to get drugs inside the quarantine zone. USAMRIID’s soldiers thought they’d cleaned the place out, but people were clever about where they hid things, and the junkies and hustlers were forever finding joints taped to the back of toilet tanks or tabs of Ecstasy hidden in bottles of aspirin. I guess where there’s a need, there’s a way. I tried not to judge, but we’d already had two people removed from our block due to overdose after the need to escape overrode whatever sense of self-preservation that they might have once possessed.
Getting into the quarantine zone required no qualifications beyond “alive” and “not infected with a SymboGen implant”—and I was living proof that the second qualification could be gotten around, if you knew the right people and were disturbed enough to think this was a good place to be. It wasn’t an entirely bad place. There were people like Paul and Carrie. I’d liked them when I met them on the truck, and after living with them for a week and a half, I trusted them as much as I was capable of trusting outside of Dr. Cale’s lab. But there were also people like John, who’d been squatting in the house when USAMRIID dropped us off and told us that this was our home now. He’d tried to do… things… to several of the women who were living with us, until Paul threatened to stab him. He’d been brave when faced with unarmed women. He wasn’t so brave when up against Paul, who was a foot taller and thirty pounds heavier. John had run, vanishing into the fenced-off streets of Pleasanton.
There were good people in the quarantine zone, but they were in the minority. There were killers in here. There were thieves. There were people whose minds had snapped under the pressure of what was happening to the world, dropping them into endless spirals of panic and despair. They needed professional help, therapy, and oversight, but what they got was a quarter or less of a bedroom in someone else’s home, with a bunch of strangers sleeping around them and claiming to be friends. It was no wonder that some people started screaming and never stopped.
It was more of a wonder that the rest of us were so quiet.
Something smashed outside. The screaming finally stopped. I resisted the urge to move to the window and look out. Having a window wasn’t a privilege. It was a burden at best, and a punishment at worst. The USAMRIID teams that had prepared this area for us had taken down all the curtains and blinds in open houses, citing the need to have a clean line of sight if something happened—and we all understood that “something” was code for “a sleepwalker outbreak.” The people who slept in windowless rooms, or on the other side of rooms like mine, could hang blankets and give themselves the illusion of privacy. Not me. I got the pleasure of sharing my life with anyone who wanted to stand on the opposite sidewalk and look up, and when things went wrong, I was one of the people who were expected to man the window and keep everyone else up-to-date. The only good thing about it was airflow, but most days, none of us were brave enough to open the windows. We didn’t want to attract attention.
Inside the Pleasanton quarantine facility, attracting attention from the all-too-human monsters surrounding us was death. Maybe not immediately, maybe not even overnight, but soon enough that none of us were willing to take the risk.
There was a sound behind me. I turned to find Carrie standing in the doorway, twisting a dishrag in her hands like it had done something to personally offend her. She had lost weight since arriving in Pleasanton, and her hair was growing out, revealing brown roots under the artificial green of her hair. It was a small thing, but it seemed indicative of the tragedy unfolding around us. People were going to bed hungry and afraid; the water ran red with rust sometimes, like we were expected to bathe ourselves in blood; the government that was supposed to protect us had turned against us, just like the genetically engineered tapeworms that were supposed to protect humanity had turned against their creators; and Carrie couldn’t re-dye her hair.
Maybe that was the most human thing about me. Even in the depths of tragedy, I could find the smallest things to seize upon.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Carrie shook her head. The motion was tight and controlled, designed to make her look as inoffensive as possible. She had started shaking her head like that sometime in the past week, and I didn’t even think she knew that she was doing it. It was just another small piece of protective coloration, and unless she held to it religiously, she wasn’t going to survive in here. None of us were.
“Paul hasn’t come back yet.”
I blinked at her for a moment, absorbing the meaning behind her words. They were so simple, with no room for ambiguity, no hidden meanings or concealed intent. Here, in this glorified cage, I had finally met people who spoke like parasites: quick and brief and uncomplicated. I could have thrived in an environment like this one, if it hadn’t come with such a terrible cost.
“Oh,” I said finally.
We all took turns leaving the house and going out into the streets to scavenge for the things we needed. There were food trucks twice a day, and USAMRIID doctors who came around to dispense medicines and check on the sick or wounded, but they didn’t provide many of the basic necessities of life, considering them “frivolous” or otherwise low-priority. Sanitary supplies for the women. Toys for the children. Condoms and birth control for the people who had depended on their implants for contraception, and who couldn’t fight the primate urge to seek comfort in the arms of their own species. I had walked in on Paul and Carrie several times, some by accident, others out of sheer curiosity. I had never seen people having sex before. When I slept with Nathan, I was always too much in the moment to observe. In those moments, I was a mammal like any other, and my origins didn’t matter in the least.
They fucked with their eyes closed and tears running down their cheeks, and they clung to each other like the world was ending. Paul had opened his eyes once and seen me standing there, watching them. He hadn’t said anything. He’d just looked at me, sorrow and understanding in his eyes, until I’d been forced to turn away.
I hadn’t walked in on them since then.
“What time did he leave?”
“Just after breakfast,” said Carrie. “Gloria’s little girl was crying again. He thought he’d seen some Otter Pops in one of the convenience stores. Most adults won’t eat them—they don’t register as food—and he said he’d try to pick them up while he was out. That was hours ago.”
The little girl didn’t have a name. The woman who had found her, Gloria, had tried name after name on the child, looking for something she would respond to. The rest of us had done the same, dredging up names from our past that we thought were pretty, but that weren’t attached to losses so bright and recent that hearing those names over and over again would hurt. The child had refused them all. Somewhere out there was her real name, and until we found it, she wasn’t going to let us call her anything. She still treated Gloria as her primary caretaker. The rest of us were acceptable substitutes, when necessary.
I’d never spent much time around human children before. Puppies and kittens, yes; infants and toddlers, no. It was refreshingly similar, and confoundingly different at the same time. We all catered to her every whim. She was our tiny queen, and if she had wanted Otter Pops—whatever those were—then of course Paul would have volunteered to get them for her.
“Oh,” I said again. Then, with a slow, almost morbid dread gathering in my stomach, I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
Carrie just looked at me for a moment, and her expression was so oddly similar to the one Paul had worn when I watched them making love that it was all I could do not to turn my face away, cheeks burning with conditioned shame. I didn’t want to be as human as I was. The people who had created me had made sure I didn’t have a choice.
“The soldiers treat you different because of who you are,” she said finally. “You try to pretend they don’t, and we try to let you, because we have to live with you. Things are hard enough here without us being at war against ourselves. But they won’t shoot you if they find you in the wrong part of the camp. They might even give you a ride home.”
I didn’t say anything. She was telling the truth: There was nothing I could do to change that. The fact that they would kick the living crap out of me before giving me a ride really didn’t matter.
“Please, Sal. I don’t know what your deal is, and right now, I don’t care. I just want Paul back.”
“You could go yourself.” The words were cruel before they were spoken, and they were crueler when they hung in the air between us, impossible to take back or ignore.
“I could,” Carrie agreed. “But I wouldn’t make it three streets before something happened, and you know it. The patrols will come to your defense. I’ve seen it.”
She was right. Colonel Mitchell was happy to keep me with the general population for now—pacifying his wife and reminding me of my place at the same time, until I was willing to be a good little girl and play by his rules—but he wasn’t going to let me get killed. Not while there was still a chance, however small, that I could be used to call Joyce back from the void where she existed now. So he set extra patrols on the streets around the house that had been assigned to me, and he made sure people were there to monitor my activities on the rare occasions when I dared to venture outside. I was probably the safest person in the Pleasanton quarantine zone, and I didn’t want it. I didn’t want the responsibility that was implied by Carrie’s face, or the burdens of being able to walk without fear of my fellow inmates. I didn’t want to be afraid of the soldiers who were supposedly protecting me. I didn’t want any of this.
And what I wanted didn’t matter. Maybe it never had. “We could go together,” I said, one last desperate bid for something other than what she was asking me to do. I realized resentfully that she had never actually asked. She hadn’t needed to. All she’d needed to do was stand there and look at me, and allow my guilt to fill in the rest.
“I don’t want to leave the house,” said Carrie. Her voice was meek, especially compared to that of the angry, anxious girl who had arrived here with me. Bit by bit, this place was wearing her away, reducing her to the bones of herself. I wondered if she liked who she saw when she looked in the mirror. “Paul might come back. I should be here when he comes back. I don’t want him to be scared because I’m not here.”
That answer made sense, and I knew it was a lie, just as surely as she did. Paul wouldn’t be scared if he came back and Carrie was gone: He would assume she’d gone looking for him, or that she’d gone to get something else we needed, especially if I was gone too. She just didn’t want to go outside, where the world might take notice of her. Then again, why should she? The last time she’d gone outside of her own free will, she’d been seized and thrown into the back of a truck, and her world had changed forever. I sighed heavily, trying to keep my frustration from showing in my face. I didn’t do a very good job, I knew, but the effort seemed better than nothing.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”
Carrie smiled. “I knew you would,” she said, and the worst thing was, she had known—and she hadn’t been wrong.
Pleasanton was located in the deep East Bay, a sleepy suburban community that served both Livermore and San Francisco, feeding commuters into the tech and science industries thriving across the Bay Area. There had always been people who lived and worked at home, of course, but most of them had been keeping the city infrastructure functional, and when the sleepwalkers had overrun Pleasanton during the early days of the outbreaks, those people—and the infrastructure—had been among the first to fall. According to every soldier who’d been willing to give me the time of day, the selection of Pleasanton for the quarantine facility had been as much a matter of efficiency as anything else. By the time USAMRIID rode in with their tanks and their guns, there hadn’t been much of anybody left to fight them.
I closed the door of our assigned home behind me as I stepped out onto the porch, breathing in the chilly December air, and for a moment, I was grateful to be exactly where I was. Everything smelled like rain, and the grass on the lawns around me was patchy and brown, where it hadn’t been churned into a muddy froth by passing feet. California winters are gentle compared to most of the rest of the country. If our quarantine zone had been almost anywhere else, I would have been standing in snow outside a house where the electricity was intermittent and the hot water didn’t always work.
Not for the first time, it struck me that the rest of the country was probably in real, serious trouble, and that if this crisis didn’t either pass or come to a head soon, a lot more humans were going to die for reasons having nothing to do with the sleepwalkers. The sleepwalkers were going to be dying too, if they hadn’t already started. Their minds might be parasitic, but their bodies were mammalian, soft and warm and susceptible to frostbite and the weather. They’d freeze before they ever understood what was happening to them.
I took a deep breath and stepped down off the porch. The world didn’t end. I took another step forward.
The screamer was gone, leaving the sidewalks empty on either side of the street, but I could feel the eyes watching me from the windows. I inhaled instinctively, looking for traces of sleepwalker pheromones. I didn’t find any, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything: I still didn’t fully understand my connection to the cousins, and I’d only been beginning to develop my ability to detect them, when things had gone to hell and I’d wound up in USAMRIID custody. They could be all around me, standing just slightly downwind, and I would never know.
This was supposed to be a secure quarantine zone. I was safe. I had to be safe.
I took another step, and just like that, I was walking, moving with quick, anxious purpose down the walkway to the sidewalk, and then down the sidewalk toward the part of town where Paul had been heading. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye as I passed the windows, and I did my best not to turn toward them. The people who were hiding inside didn’t want me to see them, and I was willing to respect that. They had so little left to call their own; the least I could do was allow them to keep what remained of their tattered privacy. I walked faster, and then I was jogging, enjoying the open sidewalk and the smooth, untroubled stretch of my legs. I was still getting stronger. It had started when Sherman had held me captive, and it had continued since then. It was like learning the provenance of my body had finally made it acceptable for me to turn it into something new, something other than the soft, untested thing that Sally had deeded to me. This was my body now, and it was going to do what I needed it to do. And what I needed it to do was run.
My feet slammed down against the pavement as I continued to pick up speed, and each impact was like a door closing somewhere behind me. I might never find my way out of here; I might never make it home to Nathan and Adam and the rest of my family. The broken doors were still open for me—they would always be open for me—but passing through them required the freedom to reach them, and that wasn’t something I had right now. I could run for the rest of my life, however long or short that was, and never reach the place I wanted to be.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do some good. I was a chimera in a nest of humans, and I had been created to improve their lives. Maybe not like this, maybe not with eyes and hands and the freedom to make my own decisions, and yet I still felt like maybe they needed me. We didn’t create humanity, after all. My parasitic ancestors had been perfectly happy for thousands of years. They had never woken up and thought we need to create a whole new species to make sure that we’re okay. It was hard not to look at the humans, with all their advantages and strengths, and feel just a little bit sorry for them. They were so bad at living in their own world.
Take Carrie, for example. She’d been fine when she felt like she was in control of things. I wasn’t sure how she’d managed to avoid receiving a SymboGen implant, although I suspected it had something to do with her diet—I’d never seen her voluntarily eat animal proteins, not even cheese or eggs. If she was vegan, the idea of swallowing another living thing would have been anathema to her. Or maybe she had an allergy. SymboGen had been working on reducing the protein tags of the implants when everything went wrong, since there was a very small percentage of the population who couldn’t handle the waste products we naturally generated. People whose immune systems reacted poorly to the implants had been viewed with pity for years, since they couldn’t take the easy route to health that had been promised to the rest of humanity. It was sort of ironic now, since those people might make up the bulk of the survivors.
She’d been fine when she was in control, and now she was falling apart, and it wasn’t fair to focus on her to the exclusion of all others, because everyone was falling apart in their own ways, even the nameless little girl. Her refusal to accept an identity that wasn’t exactly right was a sign that she wasn’t coping any better than the adults around her. She just had a better chance of doing it eventually as her memories of the world before the apocalypse dropped away and were replaced by memories of a world where this was normal.
There was something about that thought that was sad and hopeful at the same time. She would find a new name; she would find a new family; she would grow up thinking of the human race as scared and endangered, but ultimately enduring. Assuming, again, that they could endure, and that she’d get to grow up at all, rather than winding up in the hands of someone like Sherman, who would look into those wide, trusting eyes and think that the space behind them was the perfect incubator for a daughter of his own. One who would never need to forget her name, one whose family would never leave her.
I honestly didn’t know whether or not that would be a kinder ending for her than the blasted, frightened world I was envisioning, and so I kept running, trying to outrace my own thoughts, trying to find the place where I could sink down into the dark and let the drums become the backbeat of the world.
I was so focused on what I was doing, on where I was going, that I didn’t notice when I ran out of our residential neighborhood and into one of the narrow bands of strip malls and commercial establishments that ringed every set of houses. Pleasanton was designed to keep people home and happy when they weren’t at work, and that meant no one had to go too far before they reached a grocery store. The sidewalk hadn’t changed, so I kept on running, letting my feet take me where I needed to go. I didn’t see the men lurking behind the battered old Dumpster until I was almost on top of them. A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me roughly off balance, pulling me into the shadows between the Dumpster and the wall.
A second, even rougher hand was clapped over my mouth, cutting off sound and air at the same time. I didn’t have time to scream. Then the four of them were surrounding me, moving in until I could smell the sweat and desperation baking off of their skins like sour perfume.
“What are you doing on our turf, little girl?” asked one of the men. He was shorter than the others, but held himself with the sort of confidence that left no doubt as to his status in the group: he was their leader, and he wasn’t going to take any shit from anyone, least of all from me. “Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to be here?”
I didn’t squirm. I didn’t fight. I didn’t bite the hand that held me in place. I just stood perfectly still and glared daggers at the man responsible for my current situation.
He smirked. “Ah, you did know, you just hoped we wouldn’t notice. Aaron, let her go. I want to hear what she has to say for herself.”
The hand was removed from my mouth. The other hands were not removed from my arms. The man made a gesture with his hand, indicating that it was time for me to speak. I continued to glare, and resisted the urge to spit until the taste of unwashed hand was no longer lingering in my mouth.
“I knew no such thing,” I said. “This is public space. We’re allowed to search the local stores for supplies that may have been overlooked.” It was a terrible policy, and I had to assume that USAMRIID had put it in place because they’d run out of places to stow the looters. Better to just make it legal than to keep arresting people you couldn’t hold.
“That may be what the Army says, but they’re the ones keeping us locked up in here,” said the man. “Standing up to them is the American way. This is unconstitutional, and when it comes out what’s been done to us, people like me and my boys are going to be heroes, while people like you are going to be collaborators.”
I looked at him blankly, my glare giving way to confusion. “I don’t understand what all those words mean,” I said. “Not in that order, anyway.”
The short man sneered. “They mean that if you have anything valuable on you, you’ll give it to us now, and we’ll let you go on your way. No harm, no foul, no punishment for failure to understand the rules. You look like pretty new meat, and we try to be forgiving of ignorance in circumstances like yours.”
“I’ve been here a few weeks,” I said. “I don’t have anything valuable.”
“Then you won’t mind if we search you,” said the man, and lunged forward, shoving his hand into the pocket of my coat. I squirmed as best I could against the man who was holding me in place, trying to fight my way free, but it was no use: My captor was bigger than me, and his grip was strong.
The short man stepped back again, holding a few crumpled slips of paper in his hand. He held them up, brandishing them triumphantly, and demanded, “Did you really think you could hide these from me? You come into my territory, you refuse to pay the toll, and then you try to hide your ration slips?”
“I didn’t try to hide anything,” I said. “They were in my coat pocket. They’re not that valuable. I only had them in case I ran into a distribution truck—we have a little kid living with us, and sometimes the trucks have chocolate bars, if you have a little kid.”
The faces of the three visible men changed, going from scowling intimidation to slow comprehension. I realized my mistake too late to take it back. Ration slips were supposed to be precious: most people only got so many per week. You could get a small number of additional slips if you had a child under the age of ten living with you, since little kids don’t understand rationing as well as adults do—not that most of the adults I’d encountered since reaching Pleasanton really seemed to understand rationing. They were forever running out of basic supplies, and blaming it on the people who operated the trucks instead of blaming it on their own appetites.
If I didn’t think ration slips were precious, that implied I was somehow not experiencing scarcity like the rest of them were. And that implied… “I knew I recognized you. You’re the Colonel’s girl, aren’t you?” asked the short man. “The one who did something to piss off her daddy and wound up getting herself banished to the hinterlands with the rest of us expendables. Oh, don’t look so surprised, princess. Everybody knows about you. You’re supposed to be off-limits, you know. I guess your father wants you punished, but not too punished. What are you learning here? Humility? Good behavior? You’re sure as fuck not learning how to be hungry.”
“Boss, she’s got two egg slips here,” said one of the other men as he looked through the crumpled rations that had been thrust into his hands. “A dozen each.”
Greed and rage warred for ownership of the first man’s face. In the end, greed won. “Daddy takes care of his little girl, doesn’t he? Where do you live, sweetheart? We’ll walk you home, check your cupboards for anything that’s going wanting, and then let you go on your merry way.”
“Or you could let her go right now, and we might not have to shoot you,” said a voice to the side. I turned my head, struggling against the man who still held me, and saw three men in USAMRIID uniforms, two holding guns and the third holding a cattle prod, standing about ten feet away. The sight of the cattle prod was enough to make my stomach drop and the muscles in my legs go weak, like the electricity would somehow jump the distance between us and shock me out of myself.
The man didn’t let me go. The shorter man stepped to the side, as if he was trying to block me from view. “This is a private matter,” he said.
The man at the head of the patrol looked genuinely surprised. “You’re going to fight me on this?” he asked. “You’re really going to stand there, with your hands on an innocent woman, and fight me on this?”
“It’s a private matter,” the man replied.
“All right,” said the soldier, and fired.
The report was small, more of a cough than a bang. The short man looked surprised. Then he looked down at his shirt, where a red stain had appeared on the left side of his chest. He looked up again, mouth moving silently. Then, finally, he fell, hitting the pavement with the grace of a sack of wet oatmeal. He didn’t move after that.
The soldier calmly worked the bolt on his rifle and turned to look at the three men who were still clustered around me. The one whose hands were on my arms had tightened his grip at the sound of the gunshot, and was now holding me so hard that it was going to leave bruises. Bruises on top of bruises.
“Do the rest of you want to argue with me?” asked the soldier. The man let go of my arms, shoving me toward the patrol as he did, so that I stumbled forward and fouled any possible shot. The three of them turned and bolted away into the strip mall before I managed to catch myself and spin around to watch them go.
For a moment, the only sounds I heard were their footsteps, pounding hard against the pavement. Then a hand touched my elbow. I jumped, whipping around again, and found myself staring at the lead soldier. He looked back, expression unreadable under the lip of his helmet. When he spoke, he didn’t show his teeth. I appreciated that more than I could say.
“You shouldn’t be this far from your assigned quarters, Miss Mitchell,” he said. He spoke more politely than most of the soldiers did when they addressed me, which meant he was probably new, assigned to the quarantine zone when other bases and detachments began collapsing. He didn’t know what I’d supposedly done, or if he did know, he didn’t believe it. I was such a little thing, after all, and so quiet when I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything. There was no way I could have killed half a dozen trained soldiers.
I hadn’t. A man named Ronnie did all that, and he did it wearing the body of a prepubescent girl. Mind over matter is what chimera are all about, and Ronnie’s mind never met a challenge it wasn’t willing to stick a knife into.
“One of the people who’s been assigned to the house where I live is missing,” I said. The drums were in my ears again, soothing me, chasing the tremors from my voice. Mind over matter. Don’t let it get to you. “His wife asked me to go look for him, and I figured it couldn’t hurt anything.”
The soldier looked meaningfully in the direction my attackers had run before looking back to me and saying, “It could have hurt you. It could have hurt you very badly. You know your father values your safety. He doesn’t like it when you wander too far afield.”
The temptation to ask why, if he valued my safety so much, I was out in the general population with the looters and the addicts and the people driven insane by grief was strong. I swallowed it down, one more bitter pill for the pharmacy growing inside of me, and said, “That’s why my housemate asked me to go. She figured that if there was a problem, the patrols would step in and keep me from getting myself too messed up. She’s a smart enough lady to know that she wouldn’t get the same treatment.”
The soldier looked uncomfortable at my accusation. “It would still be best if you returned to your home. Report your missing housemate to your region’s patrol, and they’ll be able to keep an eye out for him.”
Sally. If they knew who I was, then they knew that I was supposed to be Sally: pushy and brassy and capable of demanding whatever it was that I thought I deserved to have. I narrowed my eyes, folding my arms across my breasts, and said, “Oh, because that’s going to be a slam-dunk. You’ll totally divert manpower to finding one refugee in this whole mess. No. I will not go back to the house. Not unless you make me.”
“I could,” said the soldier. “I am authorized to do whatever is necessary to keep things peaceful within the compound.”
“We’re allowed to move around,” I countered. “I don’t know if you people are going to hit the point where you strap us all to beds ‘for our own protection,’ but we’re not there yet, and we’re allowed to move around. If Daddy doesn’t like me acting like any other member of the quarantined population, he should be keeping me in the big house with my sister.”
The soldier looked even more uncomfortable at that. Discussing the personal choices of his commanding officer was apparently not high on his list of things to do. Doing it in the middle of the street, where we could easily attract attention, was probably even less ideal. “Miss, please. It would be a great favor to me if you would return to your home. You have my personal word that I will go looking for your missing housemate. I won’t even make you talk to your local patrol.”
Weariness washed over me. I had been here before, multiple times since arriving in the quarantine zone and being pushed out of the USAMRIID quarters into general population. Half the soldiers thought I was a murderess, and would treat me with kid gloves when they thought they might be seen—kid gloves that concealed lead pipes and brass knuckles the second no one else was watching. The bruises on my stomach never quite faded, and I was pretty sure at least one of my ribs was cracked if not dislocated, based on the way it kept digging into my side when I breathed. I didn’t complain. Who would have listened to me? Colonel Mitchell might have, if he hadn’t been so concerned about the daughter he thought he still had, the daughter he was using me to try and save.
The other half of the soldiers thought I was a babe in the woods, an innocent bystander who was being damaged by the fight between the Colonel and his wife. Everyone knew she wouldn’t let me stay in the quarters that had been reserved for the commanding officer’s family. If she hadn’t been able to make it out of the San Francisco area when the sleepwalkers started attacking, I wouldn’t have been in with the general population. I would have been sleeping on clean sheets in a room with dependable air-conditioning and my own toilet, just like all the other pampered civilians who had been pulled in by their military families. The quarters they had at USAMRIID’s temporary headquarters inside the Coliseum were nowhere near as nice as our own rooms, back in our own homes, but compared to the rest of the quarantine zone, they were a palace.
“Of course you won’t make me talk to my local patrol, because you don’t want me to have a way to follow up with you,” I said. “I’ll go home like a good little girl and you’ll pretend you’re actually looking for Paul when you’re really just pretending that none of this ever happened, right? Oh, maybe you’ll track down the looters and shoot them or something, because you don’t want it to become totally unlivable in here, but do you think I’m stupid? I need to find him. So how about we do this. How about you come with me, and that way I’m not wandering around unprotected, and you don’t have to tell my father that you lost track of me?”
One of the other soldiers coughed, trying to use the sound to conceal his laughter. I relaxed marginally. At least two of the five men currently holding guns were on my side—or if not on my side, they weren’t actively hostile toward me. These days, that was the equivalent of a ringing endorsement. If they were laughing, they weren’t punching me in the gut.
“You really think that’s going to happen?” asked the soldier.
“I think you have a gun, but I have my father, which means I have the bigger stick,” I said. It was oddly refreshing to pretend to be Sally. She didn’t care if she pissed people off: She just wanted to get what she wanted. I don’t think I would have enjoyed being her all the time, but as a mask that I could slip on when I needed to, she was remarkably useful. “So come on. How about you tell me your name, we all make nice, and you and your people come with me to find my missing guy?”
“We’re supposed to be patrolling this area,” said the soldier. “And I’m Lieutenant Robinson. Do you want introductions to the rest of my men, or will that suffice?”
“Only if they feel like giving me their names,” I said. “You’re supposed to be patrolling to find people who are misbehaving, or who need help. You found people who were misbehaving when you found me. Now it’s time to help me find people who need help. Come on. You didn’t enlist because you wanted everyone to hate you. You did it to serve your country and defend your fellow citizens, right? Paul’s a fellow citizen. Defend him by bringing him home.”
“She’s got you there,” said one of the other soldiers. Lieutenant Robinson twisted enough to shoot a glare at the man, who grinned unrepentantly. He showed his teeth in the process, and it was all I could do not to flinch. That was the flip side of pretending to be Sally: The harder I tried to fake humanity, the more some parts of it seemed to crumble, becoming virtually impossible to maintain. My distaste for the primate habit of baring fangs in amusement or greeting was one of those crumbling pieces.
“If we accompany you, will you report this to your father?” asked Lieutenant Robinson, turning back to me.
“Only the part where you and your men heroically rescued me from my own stupidity, at great risk to yourselves but with no damage to property or loss of life,” I replied without hesitation. I had been doing this for weeks now, and I had always been a fast learner. “I won’t tell him you deviated from your patrol route unless you tell me to.”
Lieutenant Robinson looked at me carefully, apparently weighing the pros of having me give his men a ringing endorsement against the cons of that endorsement coming from my lips. Finally, with reluctance clear on his face, he nodded. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go find your missing man.”
Walking through Pleasanton with five armed men surrounding me was very different from running through it on my own. The streets were as deserted as they had ever been, but no figures lingered in the windows, and when we passed an open door, no shapes lurked behind it. There were no more looters, just the signs of their passing—broken windows and debris on the sidewalks. A brightly colored chip wrapper blew past, looking almost obscene against the beaten-down gray of everything else.
“You people have done a number on this place,” muttered one of the soldiers. My nervousness meant my dyslexia wasn’t allowing me to read the name tags on their chests, and none of them had volunteered their names. They were willing to rise or fall with their commanding officer, and not be fingered individually. I could respect that, even as it made me faintly uncomfortable. They could do anything, and I wouldn’t know who to point to when my father asked me what had happened.
Then again, what good would pointing at them do? Unless I took it all the way to Colonel Mitchell, nothing I said would carry any weight with the people around me. I was somewhere between a prisoner and a pet, and there was no immediately visible way for me to change that. The quarantine zone was too well defended for an escape to be possible, unless something went dramatically wrong.
I turned to the soldier, eyes narrowed, and asked, “Would you have done any differently? If you hadn’t been enlisted when this all went to hell, would you be sitting quietly in your assigned room, not touching anything, not getting worried or upset or depressed or anything, because the people in charge told you not to? Because that doesn’t seem human to me. I thought the whole point of this was showing that humanity can win. Breaking things is human. It’s stupid and dangerous and irresponsible, but it’s human.” I had learned that early, from the doctors around me, and from Joyce’s tales of Sally, who had been a champion breaker of things.
Maybe that was going to prove to be the real difference between humanity and their tapeworm children. We didn’t feel the deep-seated need to break the world just so that it would remember our existence.
The soldier I had challenged looked at me uncomfortably for a moment before he looked away, going back to watching the houses and storefronts around us. Lieutenant Robinson didn’t say anything. Either he thought the man had deserved my anger, or he just didn’t feel like getting involved. It didn’t really matter.
“We’re getting close to where Carrie said he was going,” I said. I was going to keep talking, but I couldn’t. The wind had shifted, and when I breathed in, parts of my brain that had nothing to do with Sally Mitchell, and everything to do with the tapeworm that was my true body, activated. Sleepwalker present, they said, interpreting the pheromone signals on the wind with ease. Sleepwalker waking.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, nearly tripping over my own feet in the process. I hadn’t been able to read the pheromones put off by my sleepwalker cousins nearly that clearly the last time I had tried, but I’d been getting there, hadn’t I? Maybe exposure followed by isolation had always been the answer. Maybe that was all I’d needed to really figure out what I could do.
The patrol kept going for another few feet, unaware of the danger I was suddenly detecting. They stopped when they realized I wasn’t moving, all five of them turning back to look at me with varying expressions of confusion or annoyance.
“Well?” asked Lieutenant Robinson.
I couldn’t tell him. There was no possible way for me to explain what I was detecting in the air, because it wasn’t a human trait I was manifesting, and they didn’t know I was a chimera. If I told them, if I unmasked myself, I was going to find myself with a bullet between the eyes before the Lieutenant could think through the implications of shooting the Colonel’s daughter and order his men to stand down. That was human nature rearing its ugly head again: Break what you can’t control; destroy what you can’t understand.
I still loved humanity, but the more time I spent as their prisoner, the more I began to understand why Sherman had decided they had to be overthrown. And that terrified me, because as much as I feared becoming Sally in earnest—becoming a human girl with a medical problem, and not a chimera at all—I feared becoming a monster even more.
“We should go this way,” I said, hoping they wouldn’t hear the strain in my voice. I wanted to tell them to turn around and run, to keep them from getting too close to the sleepwalker who was putting this pheromone tag into the air. The sleepwalker was more my species than the human soldiers, after all, and it deserved time to come completely into itself. But if it was a sleepwalker and not a chimera—if it was mindless and damaged and acting only on instinct, I couldn’t let it go undiscovered inside a compound filled with trapped and frightened people.
Walking the line between the species I was and the species I was pretending to be wasn’t getting any easier with practice. If anything, it was just getting more complicated.
“What makes you say that?” asked Lieutenant Robinson. There was a faint warning note in his voice. He didn’t like me taking control of his men, and while I couldn’t blame him for that, I couldn’t take the time to soothe his ego, either. Not with the pheromone tags getting stronger.
They were increasing so fast that it felt like the sleepwalker was coming closer to us, but even as I thought that, I knew that it was wrong. The sleepwalker wasn’t moving. The tags were remaining at the same level, they were just becoming more. More plentiful, more consistent, more steadily drifting in my direction. I took a step back, beckoning for the others to follow me. “Because I think Carrie said the convenience store he was going to was in this direction,” I said. There were enough convenience stores in the area that I knew there would be one in whatever direction we went. “That’s all.”
My voice broke on the last word as things fell into place, and horror overwhelmed my ability to remain calm—just for a moment, but that was long enough that I was sure the Lieutenant would see the dismay and agony in my expression. The pheromone tags weren’t getting stronger because the sleepwalker was moving toward us.
They were getting stronger because the sleepwalker was in the process of taking over its human host.
“If you say so,” said the Lieutenant, frowning as he looked at my face. “You heard the lady, men; we’re following Miss Mitchell. Now, lead the way.”
I nodded tightly, not quite trusting myself to speak anymore, before I turned and started moving upwind.
It was easier now that I had a trail to follow, and also harder, because I knew what I was going to find at the end: I knew I was bringing a team of armed men to execute someone who was in the process of becoming my cousin. And I knew I didn’t have a choice.
The smell was strong enough to make the drums start hammering in my ears like a beacon, or a warning—I was walking into familiar danger, and I knew there wasn’t any other way, even as I knew that whatever waited up ahead was going to break my heart. Then we turned the corner, moving into the narrow alley between two buildings, and I realized that I hadn’t known anything. I had been as ignorant as the men who followed me, and I was going to pay for my blind assumptions.
Paul was huddled against the wall, his arms wrapped around his stomach like he was trying to hold his insides in place, shaking uncontrollably. The tremors seemed to start at the core of his body and radiate outward, sending his legs jittering and knocking his head against the wall.
“Is he having a seizure?” asked one of the soldiers.
“Paul!” I said, and ran forward, dropping to my knees next to my housemate—next to my friend, although that friendship was a strained and stunted thing, kept small and fragile by the circumstances under which we had come to know one another. Maybe it could have been more, in a different world, in a different time.
But in a different world, in a different time, I would never have existed at all.
Paul’s eyes flicked toward me, his mouth working soundlessly as he struggled against the tremors that were still rocking his body. It wasn’t the mindless grasping of the sleepwalkers, not yet: Paul was still in there, fighting for control. I couldn’t have said how I knew, just that it was the truth… and that he was going to lose. He had already lost, and all he could do now was struggle against the inevitable.
“I’m here, Paul, I’m here,” I said, putting my hands on his arm. The drums in my ears pounded even louder, and for the first time, I wished that whatever genetic quirk had allowed me to become the person I was now had come with Sherman’s gifts, and not my own. I was the only chimera I knew of who could access the hot warm dark at will, sinking down into the peace and safety of my original home. Sherman could use a host’s original biology against it, soothing and smoothing out the body’s systems until the chimera or sleepwalker fell into a trance, letting him tell them what to do. It didn’t always work on sleepwalkers—most of them were too damaged—but Paul wasn’t that far gone yet. It might have worked on him, and then he wouldn’t have needed to be aware of what was going to happen next.
“S-Sally?” Even getting my name out seemed like an impossible effort. Paul’s eyes flicked from me to the patrol, jittering as badly as the rest of his body, before he focused back in on me. “W-what’s happening to me? Why can’t I move?”
“Sir, we have a situation in the N-sector. Civilian down, apparent epileptic seizure. How do you want us to proceed?” Lieutenant Robinson didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. His words, and the faint hiss of his radio as he called in the emergency, were more than loud enough to get the point across.
I twisted to look back at him, and said, “This is my friend. This is the friend I was looking for. He’s sick. This isn’t a situation, he’s just sick.” The lies came out smooth and easy, like I’d been intending to tell them all along. Paul was sick, all right, but his sickness was going to become a situation very soon. The original personality would die, subsumed by the parasite now working its way into his brain, and we would be left with a hungry, unthinking predator that knew only that it needed to feed. Some sleepwalkers were more capable of planning and strategy than others—some of them might even have a chance at recovering some higher brain functions, if they managed to stay alive long enough—but none of that mattered when compared with the danger Paul would soon present.
And this was wrong, this was all wrong. He shouldn’t have been able to speak by the time he reached this stage. Something was different. Maybe he was going to be a chimera. I knew how unlikely that was, and I knew that he was going to die. None of the odds were on his side. Nothing about this situation was on his side.
My loyalties were too divided, and I couldn’t change that. But I could shield him for now. I could keep them from shooting him while he would still be able to see the muzzle of the gun swinging toward him. If I was careful, I might even be able to do it without giving myself away.
I wasn’t sure I knew how to be careful.
“Not s-s-s-sick,” stammered Paul, looking increasingly frustrated as the sibilance of “sick” tried to escape him. He made an effort to sit up. The shaking got worse, and he slumped against the wall, twitching and trembling. “Don’t know what’s w-w-wrong with me.”
Lieutenant Robinson’s radio squawked. I couldn’t make out the words buried in the static. I was too far away, and too focused on holding on to Paul, who felt like he was going to shake himself into pieces. But I heard Lieutenant Robinson’s reply.
“As I said, sir, he appears to be having a seizure. Slurred speech, tremors, inability to stand or move. One of his housemates is here: Colonel Mitchell’s daughter.”
The radio squawked again. There was an ominous pause, during which I heard the click of safeties being released.
“Miss Mitchell, please move away from your housemate.” Lieutenant Robinson’s voice was suddenly flat, devoid of all inflection or emotion. I twisted to look at him again. It wasn’t a surprise to see that all the guns were pointed toward me—or more accurately, toward Paul, who was continuing to shake and jitter.
I shifted positions, trying to put more of my body between them and Paul without being obvious about what I was doing. The pheromone tags were continuing to get stronger. It would all be over soon. “Why? He’s sick. Why are you pointing guns at him when he’s just sick? Guns don’t make sick people better!” I didn’t have to work to add the panicked whine to my voice. It came entirely on its own.
“He’s sick, yes,” said Lieutenant Robinson. “We cannot offer medical assistance with you between us and him. Please move away from your housemate.”
“That doesn’t look like medical assistance,” I said, pulling one hand away from Paul in order to indicate the guns. “That looks like you’re going to shoot him.”
“We’re going to do everything we can to help.”
Paul moaned.
Lieutenant Robinson stiffened, his posture changing to something more closed and military. “Move away from the target! That is an order!”
I didn’t comment on how Paul had just gone from being my housemate to being “the target.” I didn’t need to. I just turned back to him, and watched the last of the clarity slip out of his eyes, replaced by incomprehension and hunger. So much hunger. In the span of a second, Paul went from a man who didn’t know what was happening to him but was willing to fight against it to an appetite big enough to eat the world. His jaw dropped, tension going out of it. He moaned again.
“Paul?” I whispered.
He lunged for me.
I scrambled backward as quickly as I could, nearly tumbling over myself as I moved out of range of his teeth. Some sleepwalkers experienced a period of disorientation or even unconsciousness when they took over their human hosts, hence the name, which had been coined following the earliest outbreaks. Others had a more violent response, and went straight to trying to do what they did best: eating. Paul was apparently one of the lucky ones.
A hand grabbed my arm, yanking me farther back, and then the sound of gunfire consumed the world. Paul didn’t have a chance. He didn’t seem to notice, though: He just kept advancing, even as the bullets struck his body, reaching for me with hands that could never hold enough to feel full.
When the damage became too much for him, he fell, and he didn’t move again. The smell of gunpowder and blood filled the alley, wiping away the pheromones that had betrayed Paul’s position in the first place. I twisted to find Lieutenant Robinson holding my arm. He didn’t let go.
“That’s two you owe me,” he said. “Your father wants to see you now.”
Under the circumstances, there was nothing I could do but nod meekly and let him take me.