Chimera Page 15

  Carrie frowned. Then, slowly, she lowered her gun. “What’s your deal, Sal? You’re the Colonel’s daughter, but you live in the mud with the rest of us. You’re a total pushover until you start planning escapes that involve driving cars into the water. And you’re not nearly as scared of a woman with a gun as you should be.”

  “My father disowned me when he decided he didn’t like the people I was spending time with—my real family. They might not be biologically related to me, but they love me, and they respect my choices, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted. His wife hates me for existing, and for not being her daughter.” Too late, I realized that I’d just made myself sound like the product of an affair. Well, that wasn’t too far off the mark. I decided not to try explaining myself. “I know Dr. Cale will have been trying to figure out how to get me out of quarantine. If she hears that there’s been an escape, she—”

  “Wait, what?” Carrie’s gun was suddenly raised again, aimed at the center mass of my chest. The little girl I was holding didn’t react. She was too new to the world of physical things like guns and threatening gestures to understand what was going on, and I was grateful for that. “Who?”

  Oops. “Dr. Cale. She’s the boss of the lab where I live.” I didn’t work there. I didn’t have the training, the experience, or the high school reading level necessary to observe lab-safety protocols. I helped in hydroponics, and took care of the animals that we kept for both research and food purposes, but actual lab work was beyond me, and attempting it would probably have resulted in somebody getting killed.

  “Dr. Shanti Cale?” asked Carrie, sounding utterly appalled.

  Again, oops. “Look, I know what you’re thinking, and this isn’t her fault. She wasn’t the one who decided to release the implants to the general public. She—”

  “She created the damned things! How could this be anybody’s fault but hers?” Carrie waved her gun in a way that made me want to start moving backward. I knew better. Attempts to get out of range were going to end with me getting shot. “She’s the one who made this whole mess. How can you be working with her?”

  “I told you, I don’t work with her, I just live with her. And she’s not the one to blame for everything that’s happened. That’s Dr. Steven Banks, at SymboGen, and honestly, that’s the people at USAMRIID. They knew there was something wrong with the implants years ago, and they didn’t do anything.” There might have been corporate protections for Dr. Banks to hide behind, but that didn’t mean the government had been forced to stay silent. They could have started sounding the alarm bells. Instead, they’d hung back, waiting for the perfect smoking gun, and had allowed the SymboGen implants to become entrenched in all levels of society, all over the world.

  How many people would have lived if someone had decided to start telling the truth about the SymboGen implants? How many lives could have been saved if there had been an alternative?

  Maybe that was a question I should have been asking Dr. Cale—but then, she’d never been in a position to show her hand. Not with the government playing nicely with Dr. Banks, and Dr. Banks gunning to have her taken out of the picture on a permanent basis. Her hands had been tied the minute the Intestinal Bodyguard went on the open market. It was the people who’d come after her who were to blame for what happened. Dr. Cale had followed the exact same imperative as her children: survival, at all costs. I couldn’t blame her for that without blaming myself, or blaming the little girl huddled in my arms, her sweet pheromone tags wafting through the gathering twilight. She had as much right to live as anyone else. It didn’t matter whether she’d been created in a womb or in a test tube. She was alive. She got to live.

  “She’s a monster,” spat Carrie, and for a moment I couldn’t tell whether she meant Dr. Cale or the child in my arms.

  It didn’t matter. Maybe it never had. “We’re all monsters,” I said. “Being a monster is not the same as being a bad person. It just means you’re willing to eat the world if that’s what you have to do to keep yourself alive. You really want to tell me that you wouldn’t eat the world if that was what you had to do? That you wouldn’t unhinge your jaw and swallow the sky if it brought Paul back? You’re no better than Dr. Cale. Maybe you’re even worse. You’re not willing to admit that you’re a monster too, and you should. You should just let yourself be the monster that you want to be. Maybe then you wouldn’t feel the need to hide behind a gun all the time.”

  Carrie stared at me. “You’re insane.”

  “I hate that word. All it means is ‘you don’t think like I do,’ and by that standard, everyone is insane. It’s a meaningless idea. If what you mean is ‘you’re dangerous,’ I got you out, Carrie. I made sure they told you about what had happened to Paul. I helped you get out of there before they could start taking samples to figure out why it hadn’t happened to you too. I saved you. I didn’t have to do that.”

  “You can’t drive. How were you going to get out of there without me?”

  I shrugged. “I would have found a way.” And I would have. I would have found a way, and if it hadn’t worked, I would have tried something else, and something else after that, until I either got out or got myself killed in the process of trying. My patience had already been worn almost to the bone when Paul got sick. I’d only been staying because I was afraid. Maybe part of me had hoped that I could do something for Joyce, even if it was nothing more than convincing her father that it was time to let her go. He’d been willing to unplug me once, when he thought that I was gone. I could have convinced him to do the same for her.

  “You needed me.”

  “Yes,” I said calmly. “I’m not denying that I needed you. But I don’t need you anymore. So you can shoot me, or you can walk away, or you can come with me. I’m not going to stay with you if you’re going to insist on drawing a gun every time you want to get your way. I’m not stupid, Carrie.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Could’ve fooled me. You walked into a nest of those things.”

  “I went to investigate a bunch of corpses. I came out with a little girl who needed my help.” I looked up at the darkening sky. “It’s going to be night soon. If there are any sleepwalkers left around here, that’s when they’ll start hunting. We need to get out of the open. Are we doing it together, or are we doing it in opposite directions? I’ll let you pick first, if you want to separate. You can have whatever direction you want.”

  Carrie lowered her gun again, visibly shaken. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do mean that. You don’t need me. I can find a way to get where I’m going without you.” Traveling from Oakland to Vallejo on foot, with a newborn chimera who hadn’t figured out how to walk, while trying to read maps that might as well have been written in Latin… it wasn’t going to be easy. It was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done, and that included coming to terms with my own biology. I was still going to do it. My survival depended on it.

  So did the little girl’s, and part of me resented the fact that I had so quickly slaved my survival to hers. This was one quirk of biology that I hadn’t been prepared for. It was going to take me some time to get used to it.

  Carrie hesitated. Then she shoved the gun back into the waistband of her pants. “I want to stay together.”

  I looked at her warily. “If you pull that on me one more time, I’m gone. You understand that, right? If you pull it on me, or on her,” I indicated the chimera girl with my chin, “I will take her, and I will leave, and I will not come back.”

  “I understand,” she said quietly.

  “I need to get to Vallejo. I know you were picked up in San Francisco. Is anyone else waiting for you there?”

  This time she shook her head. “No. Paul and I worked for the same company—that’s why we were together when the Army picked us up. Everyone else in that building can fend for themselves. I don’t owe anything to any of them.”

  “All right,” I said. “We stay together. Now, let’s get under cover. It’s going to get cold so
on.”

  We wound up taking refuge in a diner that had no broken windows, and smelled only faintly of dust and spoiled food. I wouldn’t have wanted to open the refrigerator, which was probably dripping with rot, but the booths were padded in red vinyl, and there was no one else there with us.

  Carrie found the diner’s earthquake kit behind the counter and set up a pair of lanterns in the back of the dining room, where the light wouldn’t be visible from outside. Even then, we wound up bracing cardboard from the supply cupboard next to the bathroom over the windows to prevent leakage. We didn’t talk while we worked. We might not be friends, but we were allies, and capture wouldn’t do either of us any good.

  I settled the chimera girl in one of the overstuffed booths, getting her comfortable while we secured the diner. When I returned, she had pulled herself into a sitting position and was watching me with wary, curious eyes.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Sal,” she said, and opened her mouth like a baby bird, leaving it hanging for a few seconds before she closed it and looked at me expectantly. She was hungry, and the same instinct that told me she was my sister told her that I would take care of her.

  I didn’t want to leave her with Carrie, but I didn’t want to take her with me while I scavenged, either. I bit my lip, trying to decide which would be worse, and finally turned toward Carrie. “She needs to eat, and so do we,” I said. “I’m going to go check the kitchen for things that haven’t spoiled and don’t need to be cooked. Can you stay with her? Make sure she doesn’t fall down or hurt herself, or anything?” We hadn’t been in the kitchen yet. I didn’t know what I was going to find there, or if it would be safe.

  Carrie frowned. “You’d trust me with her?”

  “I don’t want to, but we need to eat, and I think I have more experience with scavenging for what I need.” We had scavenged at the candy factory, and I had done more supply runs than Carrie had during our time in the quarantine zone. We’d always known that nothing would really hurt me, not while I was under the Colonel’s protection. “Just make sure she doesn’t do anything. I’ll be right back.” With that, I seized one of the lanterns and strode toward the doorway to the kitchen.

  The shadows were deeper there, and the smell of decay was stronger. There were no bodies on the floor, which was a relief; I’d been half afraid I would find another group of dead sleepwalkers, like a party favor no one wanted. Most of the stench was coming from the trash cans, which were fuzzed with mold and pulsed with maggots. Flies swarmed overhead, but seemed to give me a wide berth, either because they somehow recognized me as a fellow invertebrate—albeit one in a very fancy suit—or because they were so secure in their resources that didn’t see the need to risk getting swatted.

  Flies weren’t intelligent. I knew that. I also knew that tapeworms weren’t capable of rational thought, and yet here I was, skirting the pulsing mounds of maggots with a mixture of professional courtesy and disgust. If Nature had been able to twist science to the point of creating me, who was to say that one day, the houseflies and larvae wouldn’t rise up and demand their piece of the sapience pie? It was better to treat them with something like respect, just in case.

  Besides, the mindless hunger of the maggots reminded me too much of the sleepwalkers for comfort. It was better if I didn’t dwell on it. I kept moving.

  The pantry didn’t smell of rot: It hadn’t been used for the storage of anything that could go bad that quickly. I found jars of prefabricated spaghetti sauce and gravy, and canned vegetables of every description. There was applesauce, and dry pasta, and even potatoes, which were shriveled and sad-looking. There was an attached door leading to the walk-in freezer. I cracked it open, peering cautiously inside.

  The short-order cook who had been on duty when things went all the way wrong looked rigidly back, his face frozen in an expression of permanent regret. I blinked. I should probably have screamed, or jumped, or done something else human and visceral, but I couldn’t. He looked so sad, like he’d never expected this; like he had been so sure that humanity would find a way to fix things before he was forced to do the unthinkable.

  There was no blood, and we’d seen no signs of sleepwalker incursion in the diner. I wondered what had driven him to freeze himself like this. Had his implant started to stir, causing him to realize that soon, he’d lose control of his own body? Had he chosen death before loss of identity, stepping into the cold and allowing hypothermia to steal his breath away? It seemed like the same ending, really, but with the added knowledge that someone else wouldn’t be using his body as a weapon after he was gone.

  My breath plumed white in front of me, and I realized what else it was: It was proof that the freezer was still working.

  I closed the freezer door, barely allowing myself to hope, and turned to scan the pantry wall for the switch I knew must be there. My lantern illuminated it when I had finished half of my turn. I kept going, verifying that there were no windows before I returned to the switch. I reached out, hand shaking slightly, and flicked it.

  The light in the pantry came on.

  My hands were still shaking as I opened the freezer door again and grabbed a box of premade hamburger patties off the nearest shelf. Maybe they were a sign that the diner had been relatively cheap back in the days when things like that mattered, but right now, they represented the kind of meal I hadn’t eaten since I’d left Dr. Cale’s. Protein, real protein, and as much of it as I wanted to stuff into my face. There was a bag of hamburger rolls on the shelf, and I grabbed that as well. I could thaw them out on the grill, assuming the grill actually worked, and then… and then…

  And then we would feast.

  Carrie frowned when I returned with my arms full of food that needed to be cooked. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “The freezer works,” I said, dropping everything on the counter. I walked over to the windows, double-checking our cardboard coverings to be sure they covered the glass. There were blackout curtains, probably to keep people from looking in during morning setup and late-night cleanup. I pulled them tight before turning and scanning the walls.

  The light switches were mostly concealed behind an artificial plant near the door, probably to keep customers from playing with them. I walked over to them, said, “Please cover her eyes,” and turned on the lights.

  They blazed up white and vivid and impossible, like the last dying gasp of the empire that had built this place, filling it with red vinyl and kitschy 1950s memorabilia. Carrie gasped. The young chimera wailed. I hit the lights again, turning them off, plunging us back down into darkness.

  “Hey!” yelped Carrie. “Turn them back on! We need those!”

  “I told you to cover her eyes!” I shouted. I was furious. Not just furious: frightened. What if the child never trusted me again? I had allowed the light to hurt her. I should have moved more slowly, should have made sure Carrie was covering her eyes like I’d asked.

  That little girl was one of the only members of my own species that I had ever met. Most of the others were already working with Sherman for the downfall of the human race—and he lumped me in with them, since I’d refused to help him when he’d asked. If I didn’t want to be alone in the world, I needed to find other chimera who hadn’t already signed on with his poisonous philosophy. And apart from my own selfish needs, she was too young and too inexperienced to take care of herself. She needed me. She needed me, and I had allowed her to be hurt. I was a terrible person. The fact that my need to keep her safe was at least half biochemical didn’t matter. She was my responsibility, by biology and coincidence, and I was damn well going to protect her.

  “Forget the kid, turn the lights back on,” pleaded Carrie. “Please, please, turn the lights back on.”

  “If you want me to turn the lights back on, you’ll cover her eyes,” I said, struggling to keep my words from devolving into a snarl. I couldn’t afford to start fighting with Carrie again. Our nascent peace was too delicate, and there were other things th
at needed our time and energy—things like calming the girl, and cooking the box of frozen hamburger patties that was waiting on the counter.

  “Okay, okay,” said Carrie. There was a pause, and then, “My hands are over her eyes now, all right? Turn the lights back on. Please.”

  “You’d better not be lying,” I said, and flipped the switches.

  This time, when the lights came on, no one gasped or screamed or otherwise overreacted to what used to be such a simple thing. The world used to be defined by light, not by shadows. But we had changed all that, and now light, however fleeting, was a precious thing, to be celebrated whenever it appeared.

  I turned back to the booth where Carrie and the young chimera sat. Carrie was staring at me, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. True to her word, she had her hands over the young chimera’s face. As for the girl, she sat silent and unmoving, either recovered from her surprise when the lights came on or already resigned to her inability to defend herself against what must have seemed like a huge, endlessly cruel world. If she couldn’t save herself, what was the point in trying to fight?

  I could understand her resignation, even as I wanted to gather her close and tell her it didn’t have to be like this; that the world could be her friend, if she was willing to give it the chance. Giving up had seemed like the right thing to me, more than once. It was sheer luck that had gotten me through some of what I had experienced, and I wasn’t to the broken doors yet. I was still trying to figure out the way home.

  “How did you…?” Carrie asked.

  “The freezer was still on. There’s a lot more where these hamburgers came from. Fries, more patties, ice cream.” And a dead man, but I didn’t see reason to mention that just yet. I wanted her to eat, not repudiate my food as being somehow tainted. The clothes we were wearing had been a lot closer to the dead. “If the freezer was on, I figured there had to be electricity somewhere. If there wasn’t, everything would have shut down and thawed out.” Probably making the worst stench I had ever encountered in the process. It was a good thing on many levels that the power was working.