Our lack of preparation came to a head three days later, in the middle of the afternoon.
Adam and Juniper were in the garden supply center, where they spent most of their days—if it wasn’t raining, they were happy to sit in the rich, mulch-based mud with their books and their flash cards, Adam coaxing his youngest sister out of her initial isolation and into the world of human understanding. Math and language were things we had stolen from our hosts, and now that we had them, we weren’t giving them up.
Fishy and Fang were outside the lab, going through the motions of their daily patrol. They spent a lot of time checking the edges of our small settlement, which became larger every day as everyone relaxed into what felt increasingly like a permanent home. The sleepwalkers in the area were either dead of the secondary contamination or safely locked in the Kmart, where they couldn’t hurt us. The suburbs had been under-inhabited and largely ignored for years; none of the remaining uninfected humans were going to come running to us for shelter. USAMRIID was far away, and had problems of their own. Sherman’s people hadn’t been seen since the water contamination began. We might not have been safe, but we had the illusion of safety, and under the circumstances, that felt as if it might be just as good.
I was helping Daisy with another necropsy—a goat this time—when everything started. She still didn’t like me much, compared to some of the other residents of the lab, but she said I had steady hands, and she appreciated the way I never threw up on her specimens, no matter how decayed they were when she found them. She had sliced up just about every species of mammal and bird that the area had to offer. Most mammals were infected. Of the birds, the only ones that had been carrying viable tapeworm eggs were the big predatory ones, the hawks and falcons. They couldn’t be infected, but they appeared to make a viable secondary host, which meant the eggs would continue to spread through the local waterways, until all the groundwater was contaminated, forever.
The alarm above the necropsy station began ringing. Daisy glanced up, unconcerned, before she went back to her cutting. “Ignore it,” she said. “There’s a short in that thing, it goes off for no good reason all the damn time.”
I was opening my mouth to answer when another alarm rang, and another, until the entire lab was filled with strident bells and flashing lights. Daisy looked up again, this time meeting my eyes with evident dismay.
“Is this a short?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. This is all-hands.” Then she dropped her scalpel, right into the dead goat’s abdomen, and ran for the front of the bowling alley.
I stayed frozen where I was for a count of five before my eyes widened and the drums began pounding in my ears, so loud that they almost drowned out the sound of sirens. If Dr. Cale hadn’t already repaired the veins in the back of my skull, I would probably have lost consciousness as the blood drained toward my feet.
Adam and Juniper were outside. They wouldn’t hear the alarm.
I ran.
Most of the security personnel ran with me, or more accurately, ran past me, heading for the door. The rest of the workers were running deeper into the bowling alley, toward places of known safety. Part of me wanted to follow them—the part of me that prioritized my own survival above everything else, the part of me that had decided to move through my host’s body and take it as my own. Another part wanted to find Nathan, to let him protect me from whatever was about to happen. That was the point of having someone who wanted to protect you, wasn’t it? Let them go first. Let them keep you safe, for as long as they could.
But the rest of me—the greater part of me—knew that what I needed to do was get to Adam and Juniper. Adam was older than I was, in chimera terms, but he was also more sheltered, and wouldn’t know what to do if USAMRIID or Sherman took him. He wouldn’t be able to lie and convince Colonel Mitchell that he was human; he wouldn’t know where to begin. As for Sherman, he’d been willing to cut me open, all while professing to care for me. What would he do to Adam? What would he do to Juniper?
I ran. The guards had propped the door open to keep it from hampering them, and so I was able to charge straight through to the outside, where I stopped and stared in horror at the parking lot.
The Kmart doors were open. The sleepwalkers, well fed and healthy as they were, were shambling out into the parking lot. They weren’t running or rushing anywhere; they seemed almost curious about their surroundings, and hadn’t started attacking anyone. Yet. As soon as the sleepwalkers were startled, or alarmed, or just hungry, everything was going to change.
I was too far from the storefront to see into the garden center, but I could see that the little metal gate that was usually kept open to allow for access had been closed. Adam and Juniper were almost certainly still there.
“Sal, get back inside.” The command came from Fang. He was holding his rifle braced against his shoulder, his eyes flicking back and forth as he marked the paths taken by the sleepwalkers. They were still pouring out of the store, and showed no signs of stopping any time soon. How many had Dr. Cale been able to capture? How could she say it was humane to keep that many of them in there? They must have been living virtually on top of one another.
No wonder they all came out as soon as they had the opportunity. They’d been confined for a long time, and like all living things, they wanted a better situation. I could sympathize with that, even as my heart hammered wildly against my ribs and the drums pounded in my ears.
“I can’t,” I said. “Adam and Juniper are out there.”
Fang shot me a quick glance before he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Get back inside. We’ll take care of everything.”
The sleepwalkers had been rounded up one and two at a time. There must have been nearly two hundred of them in the parking lot, with more emerging from the store. They weren’t moaning or grabbing at each other. They were just walking, as calm and unhurried as anyone who was heading out for a stroll.
That gave me an idea. It might have been a terrible idea, but it was mine, and it was the only one I had. “No,” I said, and took a deep breath, trying to still the frantic beating of my heart. I didn’t have conscious control over my pheromones, but I’d been able to summon them a few times before, or at least it had felt that way. So I reached as deep as I could, trying to command the body I had stolen for my own to obey me.
Tell them I’m a friend, I thought, and started walking.
Behind me, Fang swore, but he didn’t run after me or start shooting into the crowd. I kept on going, pressing forward until I reached the leading edge of the sleepwalkers. They turned their blank, dirty faces in my direction, eyes tracking my movement. Some of them looked almost curious. I couldn’t know how much of that was muscle memory and how much of it was actual emotion, but none of them grabbed me, and none of them bit me, and I kept walking.
The sleepwalkers parted just enough to let me through. Then they closed around me, and I was surrounded.
They smelled of human waste and sweat, of long-dried blood and occasional whiffs of infection. I wondered whether their implants were still delivering their medications, pumping them straight into the bloodstream despite their new locations in the body. I realized distantly that I’d never asked about that. Was I still producing medication for my host? Sally Mitchell was an epileptic. I had never experienced a seizure—the last one she’d had was the one that had led, indirectly, to her death. So I must have been putting medication into her bloodstream. Any diabetics among the crowd would still be cared for.
A sleepwalker caught my arm. I stopped walking. She leaned close, sniffing at my face, the smell of her breath rolling over me like a rancid wave. She had been pretty, once, with dark-brown skin and curly black hair. Now she was a walking shell, like the rest of them, a home for the parasitic hermit crab that had needed a place to call its own. There was no comprehension in her eyes. Just a bottomless emptiness, brightened by the faintest flickers of curiosity.
Moving slowly and carefully, I removed her hand from my arm. “No,” I said, hoping my voice would carry my pheromones closer to her, bathing her in them. “No, I’m not food. But I’ll take you back where the food is.” Still holding her hand, I resumed walking, tugging her along with me as I moved toward the Kmart.
The sleepwalkers parted to let us through. Some turned to walk with us, their mobbing instincts motivating them to keep pace. The urge to drop her hand and run like hell was unspeakably strong. All I was going to do was get myself killed, at least according to the small, screaming voice at the back of my head. It was my survivor-voice, my pre-primate-voice, the voice of self-interest above all else. But while I was willing to live my life by the principles of survival, I wasn’t willing to let that turn me into someone I couldn’t face in the mirror. I kept walking.
We were almost to the Kmart now. I glanced toward the closed garden-center fence, and there was Adam, holding Juniper in his arms with her face buried against his chest, watching me with wide and terrified eyes. He understood what I was doing better than anyone; maybe even better than I did. He just couldn’t help me.
Dr. Cale’s people had to be securing the lab by now, moving into place and waiting for the sleepwalkers to turn aggressive. I didn’t know how many of the cousins were following my pheromone trail, but I hoped it was lots of them; I hoped I was showing them the way home.
The woman whose hand I held made a querulous sound as we approached the Kmart doors. I didn’t let her go. “I’ll talk to Dr. Cale about improving your living conditions,” I said, keeping my tone as light and pleasant as possible. “Maybe we can open up the garden center for you, so you can go outside.” Adam would have to find a new place to hold Juniper’s lessons. I didn’t feel too bad about that. He had the whole world open to him, and it was just going to get wider when this war was over. Giving up one little spot for the sake of those who had essentially nothing was no big deal.
The smell inside the Kmart was terrible, a roiling mix of human waste, spoiled food, and other, less pleasant things that I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to. The stench was practically visible. The sleepwalkers who entered with me didn’t seem to notice it. They just kept shuffling along, sometimes making small noises, but otherwise keeping whatever thoughts they were capable of having to themselves.
There were more sleepwalkers in here, lying on display beds or in nests of clothing yanked down from hangers in the clearance section. They watched with dead, disinterested eyes as we walked past.
The store was bigger than it had looked from the outside, and it had looked plenty big. I kept walking, not sure how to stop. If I let go of my unwitting companion, was she just going to wander back toward the open doors? More sleepwalkers were following me, and the exodus seemed to have stopped, but how could I keep them from bolting in the other direction?
Gunfire in the distance. Dr. Cale’s people were winning. That was the only explanation. If it had been USAMRIID, if they had seen this many sleepwalkers, they would have just set the whole damn place on fire.
The sleepwalkers around me started to stir, waking from their walking stupor. Their faces sharpened, eyes darkening from simple blankness into a state of wary apprehension. A few turned, walking back toward the exit—toward the sound of gunfire. Their shoulders were suddenly tight and their motions were precise, indicating that they somehow understood the sound as representative of a threat. I couldn’t understand why that would draw them toward it.
I kept my grasp on my first companion and breathed out as long as I could, filling the air with the smell of my pheromones. The sleepwalkers that had turned away turned back, suddenly more interested in me than they were in the gunfire. It couldn’t last. They were more restless now than they’d been before, and some of them were starting to moan, the thin, half-strangled sound that they usually made before they attacked.
I was surrounded, and I was so deep inside the Kmart that there was no way I could get away if they decided to attack. They’d tear me to pieces in seconds. I suppose that was better than a slow, lingering death would have been, but I would have preferred not dying at all. I had become very fond of staying alive since I had first opened my eyes in the hospital. Dying like this…
Dying like this would be worth it if it meant that Adam and Juniper got away. That realization seemed to tint everything in a rosy glow, like the redness of the hot warm dark had come flowing up my body to make whatever happened next easier to bear. My survival was important. The survival of the people I loved and had promised to protect would always matter just as much. It always had. As long as I kept hold of that, I could endure anything. Whether or not I survived. No matter how much it hurt me.
The sleepwalkers around me were becoming a more tight-pressed mass, making movement hard. The drums in my ears had virtually stopped, and I realized my heart was no longer pounding like it was going to break out of my chest. I was calm. It seemed silly, like calm should have been impossible in this place, but it was true. Whatever happened next wasn’t entirely out of my control, but I’d accomplished what I had set out to do. I’d drawn the sleepwalkers away. It was all on Dr. Cale and her people now.
There was more gunfire outside. The sleepwalkers around me mumbled and shifted again, becoming restless. I breathed out, trying to keep them under my control. I was blindingly thankful to Dr. Cale for keeping the sleepwalkers so well fed that they hadn’t thought of eating me yet. That would come with time, I was sure.
A woman shambled into the crowd next to me, nearly bumping into my first companion, who hissed and clicked her teeth in warning. The newcomer looked down at the floor, her view blocked by the swell of her belly. She was at least six months along, and the skin of her stomach was stretched tight as a drum where it was visible through the tears in her clothing. She wasn’t cradling or protecting it the way I’d seen pregnant humans do; she bullied her way through the crowd with her belly as just one more weapon to be swung. It didn’t seem to have troubled the developing fetus any; she looked like any pregnant host woman, save for the filth on her face and the rags on her body.
I watched her move past, wanting to grab her wrist as well, to keep her safe from the scene around her. Dr. Cale needed to examine her. She needed to know what was going on with that baby—the baby the woman would probably eat as soon as it was outside of her body, because what else was she supposed to do with a tiny, helpless thing? Even if it was a sleepwalker, it would smell more like food than family. Babies arrived covered in blood, didn’t they? Maybe dropping something tiny and helpless into the world with its own gravy was a terrible decision on the part of evolution.
We had almost reached the back of the store. Moans rose from the darkness, wavering at the end before they broke. These were the most damaged, least functional of the sleepwalkers, I realized, the ones that would have been devoured by their fellows if they’d been in a less curated environment. They seemed to understand that, in their way, because when the doors had been opened, they hadn’t tried for their freedom. Where else were they supposed to go? Here they had food, they had comfort, such as it was, they had the safety to eat and sleep without fearing attack. Outside, there would be only pain.
Sleepwalkers might not be intelligent compared to humans or chimera, but they had their own type of brilliance. They were all about survival, unmitigated by emotion or intellect. No sleepwalker would walk into danger to save someone else. It would be alien to them.
For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe in the end, neither humans nor chimera would inherit the Earth. We were focused on survival, but we weren’t good at it. Not the way the sleepwalkers were. They could sleepwalk their way to the top of the food pyramid, and all they had to do was wait for us to betray ourselves.
“Sal!” The shout came from the front of the store. I looked over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see anything. There was a dim light in the distance, sliced by shelves and diluted by the bodies of the sleepwalkers between me and its source. It might as well have been on the moon, for all the good it was going to do me. I didn’t even know who was yelling. The shape of the store—cluttered and cavernous at the same time—distorted the voice, twisting it and bouncing it off the walls until all I could know for sure was that it belonged to a man.
There was no more gunfire. Either Dr. Cale’s people had stopped the sleepwalkers from escaping, or they’d been overrun. I looked at the crowd around me, standing agitated but docile, and hoped it was the first. I hoped they’d fired their guns into the air and driven the sleepwalkers back, rather than killing creatures that intended them no harm, because they weren’t capable of “intending” anything. They just existed. They just survived. That was all they wanted to do. I would still fight if they tried to eat me, because my survival mattered too, but if they weren’t hurting anything, they deserved the chance to live.
There was a clang. The light from the front of the store suddenly dimmed, and I knew the doors had been closed. The windows were still allowing a certain amount of illumination into the store, and I wondered briefly whether that might not explain the slow shamble of the sleepwalkers across the parking lot. If their eyes weren’t accustomed to bright lights anymore, they would have been blinded by the sun. Of course they would have moved slowly. They wouldn’t have known what else to do.
“Sal!” This time, the voice was closer. The sleepwalkers around me moaned and grumbled, making little wordless noises of discontent. They looked around themselves, their eyes more adjusted to the gloom than mine were. When they didn’t find the source of the voice, they stilled.
I breathed out again, trying to put as many reassuring pheromones into the air as possible, and looked the one place they hadn’t: I looked up.
A figure was crouched atop the nearest shelf, keeping low to reduce its profile and avoid knocking over the dusty merchandise still piled there. He must have crossed the store at high speed, unimpeded by crowds of sleepwalkers, but knowing all along that a misstep would send him crashing to the floor.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Get up here, and we can head for the roof.”
“Fishy, get out,” I whispered back. The sleepwalkers around me were getting more upset by the second. I didn’t know how long I would have before my pheromones were no longer enough to keep them calm. I was running blind here, and the consequences of failure were going to be dire. “You’re upsetting them.”
“We can’t leave you in here,” he replied. He thrust his hand down, fingers moving palely into my line of sight. “Grab hold. I’m here to get you out.”
The fact that only the person who didn’t believe any of this was real had been willing to follow me into the store said something about how bad the situation was. I didn’t know how many sleepwalkers were crammed in behind me, but judging by the smell and the crush of bodies, it was more than enough. We could both die in an instant if we made a misstep.
Not making a misstep was going to be virtually impossible. I breathed out again. Every time I did that, it seemed to work less well. Either the sleepwalkers were getting accustomed to my pheromones, or they were becoming agitated enough that they didn’t care anymore. Neither option was going to end well for me.
I let go of the sleepwalker woman’s wrist and took a step toward the shelf where Fishy crouched. She hissed and began moaning, but she didn’t grab for me or otherwise try to stop me from moving away. That would come next, I was sure: Once she figured out that whatever purpose I’d been serving for her was no longer being served, she would lunge. Then it would be strong fingers hauling me back, and teeth biting into my flesh, and everything would have been for nothing.
I could see my own death as clear as day, played out in blood and screaming and the rainbow splatter of my internal organs. That motivated me to take another step, moving closer to the shelf, and to the point where I could get a decent grip on Fishy’s waiting hand. If he could just haul me up…
One of the sleepwalkers made a querulous noise, like it had just realized that maybe I didn’t belong there. Then it moaned, deep and low in its chest, and lunged for me.
The sleepwalkers might be tapeworms in human suits, but that didn’t give them special powers: Their reflexes weren’t enhanced, and their eyesight was no better than it had been before they took over their hosts. They moved fast. That was all. When I was frightened, I was faster. He lunged, and I jerked away, grabbing Fishy’s hand with my own even as I began scrabbling my way up the shelf. While the sleepwalkers had been fed and left to linger in their own filth, which had to confuse their senses of smell at least a little, I had been running and jumping and working to become stronger than I had ever been in my life. He was fast.
I was faster.
Fishy’s hand closed tight around my wrist, hauling me upward as I scrambled for footholds on the loose shelving unit. The sleepwalker grabbed for me again, but it was too late: I was already out of his reach.
“Are you okay?” Fishy boosted me onto the top of the shelf, putting a hand on my waist to steady me until I could balance on my own. “Did they hurt you? Are you bleeding?”
He was talking too loudly. The sleepwalkers were becoming more active with every word, twitching and moaning and shambling to surround the shelf where we crouched. We were outside their reach, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t knock the shelving unit over. While they didn’t seem to make plans—not really—they were good at feeding themselves. It was maybe the thing they were best at in the world.
“Shhh,” I said, shaking my head fiercely. In a whisper I continued, “They didn’t hurt me, but you’ve got to be quiet. You’re upsetting them.”
“I’m upsetting them? Sal, we’re stuck in a cutscene-level battle here, and I didn’t find a single power-up on my way to get you. I don’t think we’re the player characters in this situation.”
I paused in the act of shaking my head to stare at him, open-mouthed and stunned into silence. I had always known that Fishy’s grasp on reality was shaky at best. I hadn’t realized it was this bad.
“No,” I said finally. “No. You can pretend you don’t believe in anything when you’re out there, but right now, in here, I need you to take this seriously. This is real. If you’re here to get me out, then you need to be here. With me.” In this darkened, abandoned Kmart, with the sleepwalkers all around us, moaning their agitation to the gloom.
Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that he’d decided to divorce himself from the real world. The shock was that he had taken it so far.
“I’m not pretending, Sal,” said Fishy. He sounded unusually serious. Part of me pointed out that this was a ridiculous place to have this conversation. The sleepwalkers were pressing closer and closer, until it felt like we were perched on the last island in the world, waiting for the sea to carry us away. The rest of me ordered that part to be silent. This, too, was survival. Survival of the mind, not just survival of the body. “Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see the pixels bleeding off the edges of the world. This is a game. It has to be a game. If it’s not a game, then everything I’ve ever loved is gone, and I’m not getting any of it back. So let it be a game. I’ll play to win, until the day I don’t. It’s the least I can do. But I refuse to let this be real. I refuse to let her be gone.”
Fishy’s wife had been killed when her SymboGen implant decided it would be a better driver for her body than she was. According to Dr. Cale, his disassociation from reality had accompanied her conversion. His wife tried to eat him, he decided the world was actually a complicated video game. It wasn’t the worst coping mechanism I’d ever heard. It was just, under the circumstances, pretty inconvenient.
“So what do we do?” I asked. “We can’t climb down, and we can’t stay here.”
Fishy’s teeth were a flash of white through the darkness. “Can you jump?”
The shelves were firmly affixed to the floor, thanks to California’s earthquake regulations. The magnetic clamps that held them were old, and some of them were misaligned, but they were holding fast, doing their duty even after the people who had installed them were long gone. Maybe some of those same people were here with us, mindless meat-cars being driven by my cousins, no longer able to understand their own technology. The thought should probably have been unsettling. I didn’t have the time to waste on feeling bad for them.
Fishy, who apparently spent his free time training for video-game survival situations, went first. He leapt across the space between shelves without hesitation, as if some unseen controller was guiding his actions. He didn’t need to be afraid of falling: He knew that none of this was real, and that if he toppled into the waiting hands of the sleepwalkers below, he would simply wake from the terrible dream that had redefined his reality.
My own fate was much less assured. I didn’t have a comforting delusion to wrap around my shoulders and keep me safe: The only thing I’d ever had to lie to myself about was my own humanity, and while I had held on to that lie for as long as possible, I had also willingly set it aside when it became clear that it was no longer doing me any good. I knew this was the real world. I knew that I couldn’t fly. And I knew I was scared out of my mind, which didn’t help.
The sleepwalkers were becoming more agitated, and the hands that were reaching up to grab and drag us down were becoming more plentiful, clustering around the shelves until even the magnetic clamps weren’t enough to keep us from rocking slightly.
That was the motivation I had been waiting for. The shelf rocked, and I leapt, flailing wildly until I felt Fishy’s arms lock around my waist and pull me safely away from the edge of our new perch. He was grinning again, his teeth gleaming in the faint light that was capable of reaching this deep into the old Kmart. It should have turned my stomach—I hate the sight of human teeth, the violent, hard reality of them—but given the circumstances, his obvious joy was more of an anchor than anything else. I could hold on to that joy, using it to keep me from toppling into the waiting hands below.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I am not okay. What’s happening? How did they get out? Why did you come in?”
“Uh, well, I came in because you decided to play Saint Patrick and the Snakes with our shambling buddies here, and Dr. Cale freaked out, and Nate freaked out, and everybody freaked out, and nobody was willing to, like, burn the place to the ground while you were still inside it, even though that would have been the most reasonable reaction under the circumstances,” said Fishy. “So I said I’d do it, since hell, what are they going to do to me? Eat me? Game over is something I’m really looking forward to.” There was a faint wistfulness to his tone, like he spent his nights dreaming about the day this game would end.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I pulled away, getting my feet under me, and looked down at the crush of moving bodies around us. I couldn’t see more than sketchy outlines and shadows, but that was more than enough, all things considered. “How did they get out?” I asked again.
Fishy sighed. “You’re like a dog with a bone sometimes, Sal. Anybody ever tell you that? Like a dog with a bone.”
Maybe I was like a dog. People had spent enough of my short life telling me to sit and stay, telling me when to speak, and ordering me to be quiet. This wasn’t a time for that sort of command. “I’ll follow you out of here, but I need to know.”
“All right,” said Fishy. “Come with me.” And he turned, and jumped for the next shelf, leaving me no choice but to follow.
As soon as I landed on our new perch, the reason for both the pause and the leap became clear. By lingering on the first shelf as long as we had, we’d lured sleepwalkers over to it, and were now above a relatively clear stretch of aisle. He leapt a second time, and I followed, trying not to think about what would happen if I missed my landing and fell to the floor below. I was Sal Mitchell. I had survived worse things than an obstacle course in a darkened store, and this was not going to be the thing that took me down.
Fishy stopped after the second jump, taking a few breaths, before he said, “The doors were tied shut from the outside. We couldn’t chain them—it would have been too obvious that we were using the place for permanent storage, instead of closing the place off like terrified suburbanites. Aside from that, it would have made the place a death trap if anything had ever gone wrong. Start a fire, watch everybody die when no one could get close enough to deal with a padlock.”
“Did someone cut the rope?” I asked, following his words to their obvious and horrifying conclusion. Sherman had been a part of Dr. Cale’s family, once. He probably knew where the bowling alley was, and it wasn’t like he would be above that sort of treachery, if he thought that he had something to gain from it.
To my surprise, Fishy laughed. It was a low, rueful sound, packed with regrets. “Oh, man, that would almost be better, you know? We could have some DLC about spies and traitors and maybe get some pew-pew going. But no. Something chewed through the rope. Probably a squirrel.”
“What’s DLC?” I asked blankly.
“Downloadable content,” he said, and tensed, and jumped again. I followed him. There were no other alternatives.
The shelves had been positioned so they were never more than about four feet apart, creating aisles that could hold a shopping cart but were still narrow enough to force consumers to fully engage with the material goods around them. Most physical stores had changed their designs as Internet retailing took over an increasing share of the market. Not places like Kmart. They had a working formula, one that was built on low prices, impulse buys, and narrow aisles.
I was starting to feel like we might actually reach our destination when Fishy stopped jumping, his shoulders suddenly going limp. I crept closer, squinting to see through the darkness, and realized what had happened.
We were on the edge of the women’s clothing section, a vast, open space broken only by the silver skeletons of the racks that had once held discount scrubs and polyester trousers. There were no shelves here for us to use as higher ground. There weren’t that many sleepwalkers, either—the main concentration was still a half-dozen shelves back, trying to figure out where we had gone—but that would change soon.
Soon didn’t mean immediately. “I can get us through this, but you have to trust me,” I said. “Can you trust me?”
“I guess it’s my turn,” said Fishy. “What do I have to do?”
I told him.
Climbing down from the shelf without making any noise would have been impossible without the metal clamps to lend stability to the enterprise. As it was, I held my breath until my feet were back on the dirty linoleum floor, and only started breathing easy when Fishy was beside me, looking tense and unhappy in the gloom. I couldn’t fault him for that. He’d seen me walk among the sleepwalkers without being devoured, but he knew that I was half one of them, while he was just a human, heir to all the sins of his forefathers, including the mad, brutal science that had put him into this situation.
Silently, I slipped my hand into Fishy’s, tangling my fingers with his, and began walking toward the back wall. There were a few sleepwalkers here, full-bellied and too lazy to have joined the exodus when the doors were first opened. I breathed slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying to fill as much of the air as possible with the taste of my pheromones. Friend, I thought fiercely. Friend, friend, do not eat us, for I am your friend, and he is mine. It was a complicated thought—too complicated for my primitive chemical messengers to convey—but I hoped it might seep through, at least a little. At least enough to let us get away.
There was a soft, fleshy sound as Fishy opened his mouth like he was going to say something. I turned to him and shook my head fiercely. No. No, do not speak, do not remind the cousins that you’re something they aren’t; do not give them cause to notice you, to fall upon you in a living wave and take you for their own. Anything “other” would be seen as food, and as a threat to their survival. I was not “other”: I had my pheromones to protect me. If I could keep Fishy as an extension of myself, and not a being in his own right, he might have a chance.
I couldn’t see his expression, but I heard his teeth click together, and I was content. We continued walking.
The sleepwalkers around us were stirring, rustling in the dark as they turned toward us and the disruption we represented. I kept my breathing slow and even, filling the air around me with pheromones. The wall was a gray ghost in the distance, a haven that might offer no salvation at all, but was at least something for us to strive toward. I felt better about the idea of dying while I was doing something than I did about the idea of dying while holding perfectly still, frozen in my own failure.
Fishy’s breathing was starting to get unsteady. The stress of the moment was getting to him. That was fascinating, in an objective sort of way: Normally, Fishy was the one who never got upset about anything, cocooned in the soft unreality of his delusion. But here, he was being forced to live through something slow and terrible, knowing that the end could come crashing out of the dark at any moment, and that there would be nothing he could do about it. He was as captive in the real world as I was, and he didn’t like it.
One of the sleepwalkers moaned. The sound was small and inquisitive, and was answered by another moan, from the other side of us. They knew we were there. Whether they were holding off because my pheromones were working or because they weren’t hungry yet was anybody’s guess. I kept breathing slowly in and out, but I picked up my pace, and was relieved when Fishy did the same. If we could just get to the wall…
What? If we could get to the wall, then what? I was leading us there because Fishy had been leading us there, but he’d never told me why, and I’d been so wrapped up in the moment that I hadn’t asked. It felt foolish now, not to know where I was going or what I was going to do when I got there, but foolishness was a luxury for hindsight. Foresight was all too often based on instinct and on fear, and those were things that left very little room for introspection.
As we got closer to the wall, I saw something wonderful: a door, a slice of darker gray cut out of the haze around it. Better yet, it was a real door, with a doorknob, not one of the swinging doors that connected to the stockrooms. Sleepwalkers didn’t understand doorknobs. The odds were good that whatever was on the other side, it was a form of safety.
Unless it was locked.
Fear knotted and unknotted in my stomach, making it difficult to continue my slow, rhythmic breathing. What if we had come this far, only to find the door was locked? We’d never be able to make it back to the relative safety of the shelves. The sleepwalkers were becoming too agitated, and even breaking into a run wouldn’t get us out of their reach before they could lunge. This was our one way out, and I had no way of knowing whether it would work.
Fishy squeezed my hand. I glanced to the side. He was holding something up; something that gleamed in the faint light.
A key. He had a key.
I swallowed the urge to laugh in relief, and just kept breathing in and out until we reached the wall. The sleepwalkers were getting more active, shuffling and shambling and making those little inquisitive moaning noises, but they weren’t rushing us yet. That was all going to change when Fishy turned the knob. My pheromones were confusing the issue, making it difficult for them to tell whether he was an uninfected human—and hence easy, uncomplicated prey—or another sleepwalker. They didn’t understand concepts like “loyalty” on a rational level, but I had to think they ate humans before they ate their own kind because they knew, in some deep way, that eating your own kind was bad. They still turned to cannibalism when it was convenient or when supplies were low, but it wasn’t a preference the way it could have been without the pheromones and the vague understanding of the swarm versus the individual.
When Fishy turned the knob, however, he would be doing something no sleepwalker understood well enough to do spontaneously. After that, we would be “other,” and things that were “other” were subject to attack. So we moved slowly toward the door, knowing that as soon as we reached it, we would have to start moving very quickly indeed.
Something brushed my ankle. I kept breathing in and out, not allowing myself to look down or back. It could have been a piece of forgotten clothing, still dangling on its rack. It could have been a sleepwalker’s fingers, inquisitive and questing through the gloom for a better sense of the intruders. As long as it didn’t grab me, as long as I could keep moving forward, it could be ignored—could even be forgotten.
That was my life. I moved through dangerous places, among dangerous things, and as long as they didn’t grab me and force me to stay with them, I did my best to ignore, to forget, because anything else would be the end of me.
We had reached the wall. Fishy let go of my hand and stepped forward, feeling for the knob, for the little indentation of the keyhole. It seemed almost quaintly old-fashioned, this door that locked with a key and not a magnetic swipe card or a fingerprint scanner. But if it had been something more modern, we would have had no way of getting out of here: We would have been trapped, and in even more trouble than we already were. Quaintness had its advantages.
Fishy found the keyhole. The key slid in with a click, and he turned it, and then the door was swinging inward, a dark hole in an already dark space, revealing absolutely nothing. Whatever was on the other side was too far from the front of the store for even the watery light that we had been enjoying so far. Fishy looked back at me, visible more in contrast with that utter blackness than anything else.
The sleepwalkers were moaning louder now. They knew we weren’t their kind, that we were enjoying the fruits of a civilization that wasn’t theirs to claim. We were out of time. I nodded, once, and followed Fishy into the dark.