Chimera Page 17

  Mine. There it was again. The possessiveness was surprising every time it reared its head, and I wasn’t going to let it go. I wasn’t going to let her go.

  The clothes I picked out for her were too large, but they were better than nothing, and she’d need room to grow. I scrubbed her down as best as I could with a bottle of hand sanitizer I’d found hidden behind one of the registers, and stuffed the rest of my scavenged goods into a big cloth shopping bag with the Old Navy logo on the side. Hoisting the girl back onto my hip, I turned toward the exit.

  There was a sleepwalker standing in the doorway.

  I froze, my grip on the girl tightening. I hadn’t heard him approach. I hadn’t detected his pheromones either: The wind was blowing the wrong way to have carried them into the store. He seemed to be alone, but he was blocking the exit; if he decided to charge, I was going to have to fight.

  Better to fight than to die, especially with the chimera child here, depending on me to save her. Moving slowly, in the hopes that it would keep the sleepwalker from realizing what was happening, I put her down on the counter. “Stay there,” I murmured, looking into her bright, bewildered gaze. Did she understand what was going on? Chimera learned fast, but it wasn’t like I was taking the time to teach her the way I should. We’d been together for less than a day. There hadn’t been time.

  She didn’t grab for my arm when I pulled away from her. I turned back to the sleepwalker, half expecting to find him standing right behind me. Instead, he was still in the doorway, rocking gently back and forth like he had forgotten what he was doing there.

  Hope flooded through me, briefly drowning out the sound of drums with an odd, rosy silence. Maybe he was one of the more high-functioning sleepwalkers, the ones we’d theorized could verge on becoming chimera. They’d always have brain damage to work around, thanks to the way the implants had chewed their way into their host brains, but they might be capable of learning, of reasoning, of analytical thinking. All those things combined could mean they were capable of not killing and eating uninfected people on sight—and according to everything I understood about pheromone communication, those were the sleepwalkers who would be especially susceptible to my instructions.

  “Hello.” I took a cautious step toward him, reaching behind me to put a hand on the knife I had jammed into my belt. “My name is Sal. Are you all right? Do you know where you are?”

  It was sort of ironic: Sleepwalkers got no or limited higher brain functions, but they understood how to walk, run, and grab from the moment they woke up in their new bodies. Chimera could learn how to do anything their human hosts had been capable of, but in order to get that far, they first had to relearn everything, from sitting up to fine motor control. It would be weeks, if not months, before the girl I’d rescued could stand up like this man, even as he stared at me with empty, uncomprehending eyes.

  If he was a high-functioning sleepwalker, it was only barely: There was no understanding on his face, no sign that he knew who I was or what I was doing by approaching him. I took another step toward him and froze as I finally drew close enough to pick his pheromones out of the air. His signature was wrong. He should have smelled of mature implant, and he did: he had all the chemical tags and protein twists that my nose had developed to detect. But that wasn’t all he had.

  The smell of a newborn sleepwalker was heavy in the air all around him, fresh and muddled and new. It shouldn’t have been possible. Those two signatures should never have been able to coexist. But in this man, somehow, they were doing just that.

  He opened his mouth. I braced myself, expecting the classic sleepwalker moan, which would summon any of his friends who happened to be nearby. All that came out was a squeak, high and tight and quickly strangled as his throat constricted. His eyes flashed alarm—one of the first genuine emotions I’d ever seen from a sleepwalker. Most of the time they functioned on hunger alone, unable to pause long enough to consider anything more complex. They would withdraw to their nests to sleep when they were full, but anything more complicated was supposed to be beyond them.

  Maybe he was one of the sleepwalkers who bordered on chimera after all. He squeaked again, the look of alarm deepening until it overwrote everything else about him. Then, without any other warning, he collapsed like his tendons had been cut, rendering his legs incapable of holding him up. He made no effort to catch himself as he fell, and the sound of his face impacting with the floor was wet and red.

  I rushed to drop to my knees beside him, grabbing his shoulders and hoisting him onto his back. His nose was mashed, misshapen, and gushing blood. One of his front teeth had been knocked out when he hit the floor. His mouth continued to move soundlessly, and that missing tooth formed a little square of darkness against a field of white washed in blood. His eyes rolled from side to side, trying to focus but failing.

  The smell of new sleepwalker was getting stronger with by the second. It had almost overwhelmed the more developed pheromones, making them muddled and difficult to detect. The drums were pounding loudly in my ears as things put themselves together one after another, creating an image that made as little sense as everything else about the situation, while remaining impossible to deny.

  Paul had gotten sick despite being certified as clean. So had several of Colonel Mitchell’s men—and while I might believe that he wouldn’t order as many medical tests as needed on one of the denizens of the quarantine zone, I couldn’t believe he’d leave his own people vulnerable in that way. He needed them too much, and there were no reinforcements coming.

  There were dead sleepwalkers all over the Old Navy. The only survivor had been the little girl—but sleepwalkers didn’t recognize chimera as being the same as them. She should have been eaten long before she was abandoned. Unless they’d all turned at the same time, there was no way for her to have survived… unless.

  Unless something was causing sleepwalkers to convert the same way humans did. In the case of the little girl, whose brain was young and elastic and capable of recovering from incredible trauma, it had resulted in a fully integrated chimera. In the case of the adult sleepwalkers…

  The man in front of me began to convulse. It wasn’t dramatic, not like Carrie’s performance back at the Coliseum, but each convulsion was more violent than the one before it, until he was writhing on the floor. The new pheromones rose briefly triumphant, overwhelming the old—and then they, too, were gone, leaving nothing but a broken jumble hanging in the air. The man went slack, the smell of bodily wastes filling the air. I didn’t have to check for a pulse to know that he was dead. There was nothing else he could have been.

  I stood on legs that seemed almost as shaky as his had been, looking down at his motionless body. I didn’t have any proof of what was going on—I would have needed to split his skull open and see for myself if I wanted actual proof—but observation was good enough under the circumstances. He’d been a sleepwalker. He had somehow been infected with a second implant. That was the key to everything that had been happening, and it explained all his symptoms. It even explained the little girl, who had, after all, been fine when I found her surrounded by the bodies of the dead.

  Paul had been free of infection. Colonel Mitchell’s soldiers had been free of infection. And then they hadn’t been. Something was allowing new implants to enter already-infected bodies, and once they were there, the origin story that had created the sleepwalkers—that had created me—was playing out all over again.

  “Oh, no,” I moaned, and rushed back to the girl, scooping her into my arms. She held on to me this time: She was learning to cling and be carried, listening to the old primate instincts of the body she now possessed. She had taken it twice, once from the human who bore it at birth, and once from the implant that had chased that human away. Somehow, the second invasion had succeeded where the first had failed. Was that going to be normal? I didn’t know what the numbers were supposed to be for how many infections it took to get a chimera.

  Suddenly, I wanted Dr. Cale mor
e than I wanted anything else in the world, even Nathan. She would have been able to explain what was going on in a way that made sense and didn’t make me feel stupid. She might not like dumbing herself down for the nonscientists in her world, but she knew how to do it. So did Nathan. It was just that he hadn’t created the implants; he didn’t understand them like she did.

  No one understood them like she did. That was the problem. People kept doing things with and to them, and the only woman in the world who really understood what the consequences might be was largely ignored.

  I clutched the little girl and the bag of clothes hard, and ran for the door. I needed to find Carrie. We needed to move.

  Carrie was waiting outside the diner, surrounded by a small wall of boxes and coolers and watching the plaza like she was getting ready to bolt. Given that there had been at least one sleepwalker still wandering around as of this morning, I understood the impulse. I decided not to tell her about him if I could help it. What I was about to say was going to freak her out enough.

  “I wish this place had a decent shoe store,” she said, when I came running up. “There’s an Amazon hyperlink ATM near the parking garage, which I guess was supposed to make up for the lack. Who buys shoes off of Amazon? Hell, who can anymore? The Internet died, and apparently we have to go barefoot from now on.”

  She sounded surprisingly unflustered, almost, well, normal, like something about having enough to eat and no USAMRIID patrols on the streets outside had hit a reset button somewhere deep inside her. I panted as I stared at her, trying to use my exertion as cover for tasting the air, looking for signs that she was about to fall victim to an implant of her own.

  There were no unfamiliar pheromones around her. Either she wasn’t infected yet, or her implant—her invader, at this point, since she wouldn’t have taken it in willingly—hadn’t grown large enough to start causing a problem. I couldn’t count on her, no matter which one was true. She was a time bomb waiting to go off.

  Maybe I was too.

  She finally seemed to notice that something was off. She frowned slowly, putting down the loose paving stone she’d been turning over in her hands, and asked, “Sal? Are you all right?”

  Carrie had a history of instability when faced with situations she didn’t want to deal with. She’d reacted badly to the dead sleepwalkers in the Old Navy, to my adoption of the chimera girl, even to my insistence that we were going to have to keep moving, because I was going back to my family whether she helped me or not. She’d drawn a gun on me several times. I couldn’t count on her, but more, I couldn’t trust her to act in my best interests if she felt like she was at risk. My survival depended on her cooperation.

  I understand now, Sherman, I thought, almost desperately, and I smiled at her as I lied. “I’m fine. I thought I saw a rat back by the store. Probably attracted by all the bodies in there. We should move.”

  Carrie shuddered. “Oh, gross. You’d think nature could lay off with the vermin for a while, since we’re dealing with an honest-to-God apocalypse. Do you think there are more of them around here?”

  “Probably.” A thought struck me. Everything we’d eaten at the diner had been sealed somehow: wrapped in plastic, or in a closed jug, or even kept in the freezer. If the implants-turned-invaders were coming in through tainted food, Carrie might still be clean. It all depended on whether she had been exposed to the same source as Paul, back in the quarantine zone. “We should probably throw away anything that might have been open. There’s no telling what’s touched it.”

  “Ew,” said Carrie, with another shudder. “I’ll check all the food. I picked up some bottled water from the storeroom, too. Nobody’s been maintaining these pipes. When I went to wash my hands this morning, the water that came out of the faucet was all cloudy and gross.”

  “Avoid the water, check.” I didn’t like bottled water. It always tasted sterile to me, like all the life had been filtered out of it. Considering that the problem we were facing now was an excess of life, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. And maybe…

  Dr. Banks had tried to spin me a story about infection carried through the water supply once. He’d been lying—he had always been lying to me—but maybe there was something to what he’d been saying after all. Avoiding the water might be the only smart thing we could do.

  “Sal? You okay?”

  “What?” I shook my head, brushing away my morbid train of thought. One thing was for sure: I wasn’t going to drink the water. The chimera girl clutched my neck and whimpered. I stroked her hair as best I could without losing my grip on her, and asked, “Are you ready to move?”

  Carrie responded with a quick, thin smile, tight-lipped and blessedly free of teeth. “I still wish you were willing to let us stay in that diner. But since you’re not, let’s go ahead and see the back of this place before USAMRIID comes back and makes us run.” She picked up the first of the coolers and started walking toward the parking garage, leaving me with little choice but to follow her.

  I followed her.

  She had found a large SUV with two-thirds of a tank of gas and the keys still in the ignition, declaring it proof that our luck was changing. I wanted to ask why it was our good luck, and not the bad luck of the original owner—who had clearly either become a sleepwalker or been devoured by them—that mattered here. I thought better of it. Pointing out that we were fighting an uphill battle against a dangerous world was just going to upset her, and upsetting her wasn’t going to get me to Vallejo any faster. Especially not when she could begin to show symptoms of sleepwalking sickness at any moment. I was never relaxed when I was riding in a car, but I was starting to think this might be the worst ride of my life. And I still didn’t have any better options.

  It took us long enough to move the supplies that I was actively worried about someone stumbling over us before we were done. The chimera girl had been happy to sit in the back seat of the SUV, buckled in and chewing on a dill pickle from the diner’s supplies. I was reasonably sure she didn’t know how the seat belt worked and wouldn’t be able to let herself out: That was one small fear removed from my growing supply. If I lost track of her and she got too far away for me to sense her pheromones, I’d never be able to find her again—she didn’t have a name I could shout, and she didn’t answer any commands yet. I needed to teach her to be safe as soon as I possibly could. She’d been with me less than a day, and I already couldn’t imagine a world without her.

  Carrie brought her up as we were loading the last of the boxes into the back. “What are you going to call the kid?” she asked. “She has to have a name. We can’t just go around calling her ‘hey you.’”

  “Why not?” I asked. “We don’t have the authority to make those sorts of choices for her. She should get to make them for herself.”

  To my surprise, Carrie actually laughed. “What, like she won’t? My name is ‘Carolyn,’ not ‘Carrie.’ I asked people to call me ‘Carrie’ because it was a name I chose for myself. Your legal name isn’t ‘Sal,’ is it?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But ‘Sal’ still sounds a lot like ‘Sally.’”

  “So you never quite outran the name your parents gave you. So what? That just means you’re comfortable with it. I’ve known people who were named ‘Beth’ by their parents, and went by ‘Belladonna’ or ‘Chastity’ or even ‘Susan’ as soon as they were old enough to choose. Nothing says she can’t change her name, and as long as you’re willing to respect whatever it is she wants to be called when she’s old enough to make up her mind about it, there’s no good reason for you not to give her a name to hold on to now. It’ll help if you have something you can shout when she makes you mad.”

  I frowned. “It still seems like I’m making her choices for her, instead of letting her make them herself.”

  Carrie sighed before slamming the back hatch of the SUV. The sound echoed through the parking garage, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. If there was anything near us, it would be showing up soon. Of that much,
I was sure.

  “Look, Sal, I get that you don’t get along very well with your birth family, and believe me, even if we weren’t fugitives from the US Army right now, I wouldn’t want to pry. But you’re not that kid’s birth family. You’re the family that found her, and if you’re going to keep her, you need to give her a name. You need to show her that you’re going to be her home.”

  I blinked. “I thought you didn’t like her.”

  “I don’t,” said Carrie bluntly. “I think she’s creepy, and I think she’s going to slow us down. Maybe even get us killed. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take care of the kid if you’re going to keep her. Kids tend to be happier when they have names, and part of being a parent is making some of their choices for them, at least until they’re old enough to do it for themselves.”

  “Oh.”

  “Think about it, all right? Now, let’s get out of here.” Carrie turned and walked toward the driver’s-side door. I went the opposite way, moving to my own door.

  Once we were both in the car, seated and safely buckled in, I twisted around enough to look at the little girl, still gnawing on her pickle. “I know I said I wasn’t going to give you a name, but Carrie made a good point: I need something I can call you,” I said. “So how about this? I’m going to call you something, and you’re going to answer to it, I hope. That doesn’t mean you have to use it if you don’t want to. Just as soon as you can tell me what you want to be called, we can change it. Does that sound fair?”