Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (47 page)

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 pack 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.”

“You’re the one who came to us, Doctor,” said Fishy languidly. “That was a stupid choice and you knew it was a stupid
choice, which means it must have been the only choice you had. You could have sent your USAMRIID buddies in to snatch Dr. Cale or Sal or even Adam if you just needed data. You could have carted us back to your precious company for disassembly on your own terms. You didn’t do that. Either you
couldn’t
do it, or your relationship with the United States military isn’t as cuddly as you want us to believe it is.”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything.

I turned to look at him, frowning slowly. “You keep trying to convince me that I’m still Sally,” I said. “Why is that so important to you? You never tried to do that before.”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything.

“Colonel Mitchell. Is he still in charge of the local branch of USAMRIID? You know, big guy, thinning hair, sort of old around the eyes—and oh, yeah, Sally’s father. Is he still the one calling the shots? How much oversight does he have at this point? He used to tell me his men would follow him to the end of the world. Was that more than just hyperbole?”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything.

San Francisco continued to roll by outside our windows, broken windows, empty doorways, and the constant, distant smell of rot accompanying us across the city. I unfolded my legs, trying to make myself look a little bit less childish as I leaned closer, invading Dr. Banks’s personal space, and asked, “Are you trying to make me be Sally because you promised her father that you could bring her back to him?”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything… but his eyes cheated away and to the left, the same way Beverly’s did when I caught her digging in the laundry, and I knew that I had found my answer.

“We should leave you on a corner for the sleepwalkers,” I said, disgusted. “You didn’t come to us because you needed to know how to stabilize Anna. You came because you wanted me.”

“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” Dr. Banks’s voice was dull, like he couldn’t even find it in himself to sneer
anymore. “I came for the reasons I gave. Anna won’t stabilize, and the ‘chimera’ ”—he made the word sound dirty—“market is going to be huge over the next few years. With as many people as have died in this little public relations nightmare, SymboGen will need a new product—a new name to go with it, of course, but no one’s going to shut us down. We have too much money, too much power…”

“And you’ve shifted too much of the blame,” I interjected.

Dr. Banks glared at me, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Your kind are as good a cash cow as any. The goodwill I might be able to gain with Colonel Mitchell by handing you back to him is a minor concern. Not nearly as important as stabilizing that little girl.”

“But you told him you could bring Sally back, didn’t you?” Nathan kept his eyes on the road. I wanted to hug him, to chase the bitterness from his voice. “I know what it’s like to pursue your funding, Dr. Banks. I was just a kid when Mom was really dealing with the hard-core academia, but I’ll never forget the way she promised those men the moon and the stars if they’d just put their money in
her
hands, rather than in the hands of her competitors. You told him that because of the way Sal converted, you could bring back the original personality, even though that would normally be impossible—and of course, no one but you could ever manage such a feat of scientific glory. He needed you if he wanted his daughter back.”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything. But he didn’t deny it either, and under the circumstances, that was just as damning as a confession would have been.

San Francisco was a city riddled with makeshift blockades, roadblocks, and destruction. For every open street there were three more that had somehow been stopped up by either the police or the locals, before they went off to meet whatever fate was waiting for them in the foggy hills. I hoped that whatever
had happened to them—and even in a situation like this one, where the end seemed virtually preordained, there were still so many things that could have happened—it had been quick, and had left them with little time to suffer.

Maybe that was the most terrifying thing about Dr. Banks’s attempts to convince me that Sally was still in my head, buried under trauma and scar tissue. The idea of being a prisoner in my own body, unable to change anything, but able to see and understand everything that happened, was horrifying. At least when I’d been an implant, I hadn’t really
understood
what was happening to me, or to the body I inhabited. The cousins were just tapeworms driving broken minds around the world. They weren’t jailers for the humans whose bodies they had taken over. To think anything else was to invite madness.

We stopped on the Presidio to let Nathan get out and Fishy get behind the wheel. Nathan transferred an uncharacteristically silent Dr. Banks to the front passenger seat and got in next to me, putting a hand on my knee without saying a word about why he thought I might need the comfort. I sighed, shifting to rest my head against his shoulder. Beverly mirrored the sound a moment later, and I had to clap my hand over my mouth to smother my giggles. For better or for worse, we were driving into the unknown. Yes, it was a trap, but wasn’t everything a trap these days? I couldn’t think of the last time I’d experienced something that wasn’t a trap in some way. Even Nathan and my dogs were traps. They made me want a life I probably wasn’t going to ever have, and a world that had been buried because of the circumstances of my birth.

“Sleepwalkers at three o’clock,” reported Fishy. “They don’t seem to realize we’re here, but I’m going to take the next few blocks a little faster. You kids may want to hang on.”

“Okay,” said Nathan. Fishy accelerated. I felt, rather than saw, Nathan twist around to peer down at me. He asked, “Are you sure that you’re okay?”

“I’m pretty sure, and that’s better than I was expecting,” I said. “I feel numb, more than anything else. I don’t think I have the energy to be scared anymore. Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll have some screaming nightmares about this later.” If there was a later.

Nathan chuckled, reaching up to stroke my hair with one hand. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“You’re never having another nightmare,” said Dr. Banks. “Things in jars don’t have nightmares.”

“You’re such a charmer, I totally understand why people let you talk them into swallowing live worms,” said Fishy calmly. “Now shut the fuck up, or I’ll dump your useless ass on the street corner.”

“You can’t keep threatening me forever, boy,” said Dr. Banks. “Eventually, you’ll have to either act on your words or admit that you still need me too much to waste me on a bit of petty revenge.”

“I know which one I’d prefer,” said Fishy. The van sped up a little more, the soft whir of the engine filling the cab.

I sighed and closed my eyes. I could feel the faint buzz that notified me of sleepwalker presence at the back of my head, like the blood there was carbonated and fizzing against my skull. It was almost comforting, now that I knew what it was and what it really meant. The sleepwalkers would have a harder time sneaking up on us now, at least while I was awake—and I had Dr. Banks to thank. It wasn’t until he’d brought Anna into the building that I’d really begun to understand what I felt around Adam, and around Sherman and the others.

Sherman had to know that we could detect each other. Maybe that was the real reason he’d kept me isolated from his people the way he had: he hadn’t wanted me to develop this little party trick any faster than I was going to on my own. I didn’t know what useful applications it would have had back in his mall, but there must have been
something
I could have done with it, if I’d
understood what those occasional flashes of disorientation and awareness really meant.

“You’ll never lie to me, will you, Nathan?” I asked, quietly, trying to keep the pair in the front seat from overhearing.

“I promise I’ll do my best not to,” he said, and that was somehow better than an outright pledge to never do it, ever, under any circumstances would have been: he was human, and fallible, just like all of us. He could make mistakes. Pretending that was never going to happen wouldn’t do anybody any good, but it could leave us unprepared for what was yet to come.

In the front seat, Dr. Banks made a small noise that was neither scoff nor snort. I lifted my head to see what he was looking at, and stiffened, the drums suddenly beating loud and angry in my ears. All the fear I hadn’t been feeling flooded into me at once, leaving the small boat of my courage floundering on the tide.

SymboGen was directly in front of us, standing like a shining beacon of enduring civilization among the ruined and smoking wreckage of the city. It looked… it looked like nothing at all had changed, like everything was business as usual and anyone who claimed that there was an emergency going on was just crying wolf. The late afternoon sun gleamed off the unbroken windows of the high-rise, and the gated parking lot was filled with cars. That was the only thing that broke the illusion of perfect normalcy: there were several olive drab army convoys parked in among the hybrids and electric cars, which looked like candy-colored jewels next to their larger, more functional cousins. From what I could see, even the exterior landscaping was still perfectly maintained.