Chimera Read online

  I offered her the most encouraging smile I could muster before gesturing toward the distant slice of fading daylight that represented the way out. Carrie’s eyes widened and she shook her head in violent negation, pointing down the line of the waterfront. I frowned. Didn’t she understand how dangerous it was for us to stay in the water? Even if the tide didn’t come in, even if there were no sharks or other predators, we were running out of time. I gestured again toward the daylight.

  This time, when Carrie shook her head, she also pulled away from me, and began swimming down the line of the waterfront. I hesitated before following her. Yes, there was a chance that she was about to get us both killed, but she had trusted me when I told her to drive into the water. I was going to trust her now, for as long as I had left.

  We swam maybe twenty yards, resting against the pillars when the cold sapped too much of our strength and left us flailing in the water. A dark rectangle appeared a yard or so above the waterline on the gray concrete slope of the wall. Carrie swam for it, and I followed her. The cold had seeped so deeply into my bones that I couldn’t feel my feet or lower legs at all; it was like I ended at the knee, truncated cleanly and coldly by some unseen hand. As long as I could thrash hard enough to keep myself afloat, I was going to keep swimming, and I was going to keep surviving. Survival had become the only thing that mattered.

  There it was: that was the thing we all had in common. “We all want to stay alive,” I said, horrified by the slur in my voice. The cold had its claws deeper into me than I thought.

  “What?” Carrie’s voice was as strained and slurred as mine was. I wasn’t the only one feeling the cold.

  “Nothing,” I said, and swam closer to the rectangle. It was a door, incongruous and out of place as… well, as we were, two women struggling to stay alive in the bitter waters running in from the Pacific. “Can you get it open?”

  “Boost me.”

  Carrie’s command dumbfounded me for a moment. There was nothing to boost her with. And then I realized what the answer would inevitably be. There was no use in arguing. It wouldn’t change the laws of physics or the reality of our situation; it wouldn’t create a ladder or give us another convenient way out. The only way for me to work toward my own survival was to prioritize hers.

  “All right,” I said. I swam to the wall, putting my hands flat against the concrete. I could see them dimly through the gloom, like pale starfish. Then Carrie’s hands were on my shoulders, using them to push herself up. I barely had time to take a breath before her weight shoved me underwater, down into the dark.

  It all comes down to survival, I thought, shutting my eyes against the sting of the salt water and trying to resist the siren song of the hot warm dark, which was offering me its sweet, fatal escape. If I went into the dark, I wouldn’t survive. That much was certain, even as everything I had screamed for me to give in and go under. The hot warm dark would be kinder than this oceanic chill, which wound its way into my bones and threatened to devour me whole.

  It was about survival. Everything, from the very beginning, had been about survival. The human race wanted to survive, so they created the implants to make it easier for them to thrive. The implants wanted to survive, so they became resistant to the antiparasitic drugs, they learned to lay eggs and form cysts even though they had supposedly been engineered away from those behaviors, and when none of that worked, the implants learned to take over their hosts. But that still didn’t work, not always, so they learned how to take over their hosts better. They learned how to become chimera.

  If one implant in ten could successfully take over, and one in a hundred, or a thousand, of those successful takeovers resulted in a chimera, that was still better than nothing. That was still survival. But not for the humans, which was why their fight to survive had changed forms, becoming open war against the creatures they had created. We were the enemy now, and all because we had wanted to survive. Just like they had.

  The weight of Carrie’s hands was abruptly withdrawn from my shoulders. I bobbed up to the surface of the water, gasping for breath. The chilly air under the dock seemed positively warm when I compared it with the water. That was probably another bad sign… and Carrie was gone.

  But the door was open.

  I tried to reach for it. My hands fell almost a foot short, and with nothing to grant me leverage or purchase, no matter how much I scrabbled, I couldn’t make that distance any shorter. I sank down in the water, staring at the dark hole in the concrete wall. This wasn’t how I had expected things to end. It wasn’t fair. And it was happening, because Carrie was gone, and I was too short to span those last few inches on my own.

  “So much for survival,” I whispered.

  A rope hit the water in front of me, dangling down from the hole like a second chance. I grabbed hold of it without thinking, wrapping my numb hands in its coils and trying to pull myself up. I managed to haul my torso a few more inches out of the water, and hung there shivering, looking for the strength I needed to make the rest of the climb.

  The rope moved. Not much—just a few more inches—but enough to pull me farther out of the water, sliding me up the concrete until I was close enough to the door’s lip that I could reach out and slap my hands on the smooth floor beyond. I let go of the rope, trying instead to pull myself up via the stone. I was still scrambling when hands closed over mine, helping me pull.

  I raised my head and there was Carrie, her hair a wet tangle covering one side of her face, an intent look in her eyes. “Don’t let go,” she said.

  “I won’t,” I replied. She pulled, and I scrambled, and together, we were able to get me into the tunnel, where I collapsed against the floor. The stone was cold, but not compared to the water outside; compared to the water, it was as warm as a sunny beach in the middle of July. That probably said something bad about my body’s current core temperature. I didn’t care. I was no longer in the water: Everything else could wait.

  “Are you breathing?” asked Carrie. She didn’t sound particularly interested.

  I rolled over onto my back so that I could stare at the unseen ceiling. There were no lights down here, and while the light leaking in from outside meant that it wasn’t totally black, it was dark enough that I couldn’t see more than a few feet directly in front of me. “I’m breathing,” I said, and then, “I’m cold.”

  “Me, too. Can you walk?”

  “I don’t think I have a choice.” I rolled over again, this time so that I could start trying to climb to my feet. My limbs were slow and unresponsive. It took me five tries to get upright, and another two to become fully stable. Even then, I kept a hand against the wall, in case I needed to fall over.

  Carrie was close enough that I could see the pale oval of her face through the gloom. That was good. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but that didn’t mean I wanted to follow someone I couldn’t see.

  “Where are we?” I asked again.

  “Maintenance tunnel. Sometimes dead sea lions or other dead bodies will wash up under the dock. The management company doesn’t want them decaying down there, and neither does local law enforcement. So they built a few of these hatches to use in emergencies.”

  I blinked. “How did you know…?”

  “I worked for an Internet news aggregator before everything went to shit. My main beat was local interest—not just things like your accident, Sally ‘I survived getting into an argument with a bus’ Mitchell, but things like ‘Did you know about this secret network of tunnels under your favorite free outdoor concert venue?’ Once you said we were heading for Jack London Square, I knew what you were going to tell me to do. I started planning our trajectory so we’d hit the water with a chance in hell of getting out again. Come on.” She turned and walked away, heading down the tunnel toward what would hopefully be an unlocked exit.

  “Wait,” I said, following her. Confusion gave me a burst of unexpected strength, making it easier for me to motivate my frozen legs to carry me in her wake. “You knew about my ac
cident? Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  “Everyone knew you were the Colonel’s daughter. You didn’t need ‘medical miracle’ on top of that.” It was getting darker the deeper we went into the tunnel. I heard Carrie’s footsteps stop. “There’s just one thing I need to know before we get to the door.”

  “What’s that?”

  There was a click. The sound of a safety being thumbed back. I had thought I was cold, but as my blood froze in my veins, I understood that the water had been safer in many ways. It would have killed me, yes. That death would have been impersonal and merciful, taking me down into the dark and not letting me come back up for air. The ocean didn’t care.

  Carrie was human. Carrie didn’t do mercy. And Carrie cared.

  “What the hell happened to my husband?”

  The cold in my veins and the cold in my bones warred over who would hold dominion while I stood there shivering, trying to figure out where the shot that killed me was going to originate.

  “I already told you what happened to Paul.”

  “You said he turned into one of those things. That isn’t possible. He was clean. We all were.”

  I remembered the taste of pheromones in the air, weak but unmistakable, and the moment when the light had gone out of Paul’s eyes, replaced by the confused dullness of the cousin that had taken him over. “It may not be possible, but it happened. Colonel Mitchell pulled me in to question me about it. He had a folder. There were pictures. Paul wasn’t the first. I’m sorry, Carrie, but I’m not lying to you.”

  “You just want to save your own skin.”

  Her accusation was surprising enough that I laughed out loud. The sound echoed off the tunnel walls, becoming alien and strange.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” she demanded.

  “You are. This is all about survival. Every bit of it. You and Paul were trying to survive when USAMRIID picked you up. USAMRIID is trying make sure the human race survives—they’re not doing a very good job, but they’re trying. I was trying to survive when I told the Colonel that you were sick, because I knew I needed a getaway driver. This has been about survival from day one. So yes, I want to save my own skin, but I’m not going to do it by lying to you. You’re the one with the gun. You’d figure it out, and then you’d shoot me dead.”

  “So you expect me to believe that one of those worms ate his brain out? He never even had an implant! He was a vegan!”

  The urge to laugh again was strong. I fought it back and said, “I know how it sounds, but it’s the truth. Now, please, Carrie. I have to get back to my family. My real family. Not the Mitchells.”

  “They didn’t want you, did they?”

  “Would they have put me in with the general population if they had?” It wasn’t really an answer. It was all I had. My situation was too strange and too complicated to be explained here, in the dark and the cold.

  “So where are you going?”

  “Can we talk about it when we’re not freezing to death?”

  There was a long pause before Carrie said, “All right.” There was another click as she reengaged the safety. “Keep walking forward. Be careful. We’re almost to the stairs.”

  Even with her warning, I stumbled when my foot hit the first step. I felt around in front of me until my hand found the rail. From there, it was a small thing to begin pulling myself up the concrete stairs, my numb feet thudding down on each of them in turn like this was it: I could go no farther.

  And then a rectangle of light opened ahead of me, bringing hot tears springing to my eyes, and I found that I could go farther after all.

  Carrie grabbed my arm when I reached the top of the stairs, pulling me into the light. We were facing the square, with the ocean at our backs. Nothing moved but a few seagulls, picking listlessly at the pavement in their endless avian search for food. Either the men from USAMRIID had already withdrawn, or they were setting an ambush and waiting for us to walk into the middle of it.

  Most jarringly of all, there were no sleepwalkers. I had expected the square to be thronging with the cousins, drawn by the noise of the car chase, but there was no one. I tensed, trying to unobtrusively sniff the air. There were pheromone trails here, old and faded and tattered by the wind. Nothing smelled fresh enough to have been made during the previous twenty-four hours.

  “Something’s wrong,” I muttered.

  Carrie laughed. It was a hard, sharp sound. It had teeth. “Really? You think something’s wrong? Because I think everything’s wrong. This is the end of the world, or didn’t you notice?”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” I said without thinking, still scanning the area for signs of movement. Apart from the seagulls, there was nothing. “It’s just the end of humanity. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Oh, God, you’re one of those,” said Carrie. She sounded more weary than anything else. After the day we’d had, that was sort of to be expected. “So what, you think we did this to ourselves? That we deserve whatever we get, and the tapeworms will inherit the Earth? This is no different from the cars rising up and trying to overthrow us. We made them. They don’t get to take the planet away from us.”

  “I’m cold.” It was a nonsensical statement, but it was a true one, and it was better than trying to argue with her about something we could never agree on. I was not the same as a car. Humanity had created me by altering the raw materials nature provided. That didn’t make me a machine. It didn’t make me property. I was damn tired of people acting like it did. “There’s an Old Navy near here. I bet it didn’t get looted too hard when things got bad. Nobody ever thinks, ‘Society is collapsing, let’s go steal tank tops.’”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” admitted Carrie slowly. “But what if there are sleepwalkers inside?”

  “You have a gun.” There weren’t going to be sleepwalkers inside, not with the way the air tasted. There hadn’t been sleepwalkers here in at least a day, and possibly much longer. “If there’s anything dangerous in the Old Navy, you can shoot it.”

  Carrie smiled, showing all her teeth. They were even, white, and terrifying. “Let’s go shopping,” she said.

  I somehow managed not to shudder as I turned away from her and started cautiously across the square, watching for signs of an ambush with every step I took. I could detect sleepwalkers before they were on top of us, but that didn’t give me any special “know that the Army is about to fall on your head” powers. Where USAMRIID was concerned, I was operating as blind as anyone else.

  I knew one thing for sure: It was worth the risk. If I didn’t get out of my wet clothes and into something warm and dry soon, then getting out of the water would have been for nothing, because I was going to freeze. My body still felt distant and unconnected after the electrical zaps I’d received from Colonel Mitchell’s people, and I wasn’t sure I’d know nerve damage even as it was setting in. Better to get into more appropriate clothing, and take one variable off my list of terrible things.

  Carrie stuck close to me as we crossed the open spaces between us and the shopping promenade, letting me take the lead. It didn’t feel like trust: it felt like letting me be the one who triggered any traps and blundered into any sneak attacks. I didn’t protest. My nose was still telling me that there was nothing waiting here to hurt us. Any sleepwalkers that passed through this area were long gone.

  She wasn’t holding the gun she’d taken from USAMRIID, and while I wanted to ask her where she was hiding it, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to remind her of its existence. Her hatred for the sleepwalkers was logical, and terrifying. If she found out what I really was…

  For her to find out, I would have to tell her, or we would have to make it safely back to Dr. Cale, wherever Dr. Cale was now. The former required me to be a lot less survival-oriented than was likely. The latter would give me a lot of backup.

  Only one of the front windows at the Old Navy was smashed in. The lights were out, but the sun was still high enough to illuminate the first ten yards or so
of the store. I could see toppled-over displays and windblown racks of shirts and sweaters. Bright signs advertised their post-Thanksgiving sales. The prices were never going to go back up; the Christmas displays were never going to be completed. There was something sad about that, like the essential passage of the year had been disrupted.

  As I’d expected, the doors were unlocked. Whoever had smashed the window had done it for their own reasons, and not because it was the only way inside. When things began falling apart, it had happened so quickly and conclusively that there hadn’t been time to shut things down and put them away until they’d be needed again. I slipped into the Old Navy with Carrie close behind me, sniffing the air, hoping she’d write it off as a result of water in my nose. There were still no pheromone trails. The temperature inside was at least eight degrees warmer than outside, thanks to the trapped air being unable to circulate. It was still cold, but like the concrete after the water, the difference was enough to make me feel like I might someday thaw out again.

  “It would be too much to ask to have a bra shop in this same strip mall, wouldn’t it?” asked Carrie.

  “I think they were a little too all-ages for lingerie,” I said, making a beeline for the nearest rack of sweaters. “If we pass a Target or something, we can go in and raid them for fresh bras.”

  “I bet guys don’t have this sort of problem after the apocalypse.”

  It was a frothy statement, inviting me to join in and banter with her. I didn’t understand. She’d been ready to shoot me ten minutes ago, and now she wanted to talk about gender equality after the fall of mankind? I gave her a blank look through the gloom and stripped to the waist, pulling on a clean, dry camisole and topping it off with the bulkiest sweater I could find.

  Both were cotton, absorbent, and not designed to be worn over wet skin, but that didn’t matter, because putting them on felt like lifting a huge, freezing burden from myself. I stripped off my wet pants and underwear, leaving them on the floor as I wandered, bare-assed, over to the display of jeans.