Chimera Read online

  “Well, I did,” I said. I put a hand on my rumbling stomach, swallowing the urge to sigh. “Let’s grab a granola bar or something. Then we can go find out what’s going to go wrong next.”

  Walking back to the bowling alley in daylight gave me the opportunity to look at our new neighborhood. Cars and debris choked the sidewalks, and someone had managed to tip a pickup truck onto its side in the middle of the street, creating cover and the illusion of total abandonment at the same time. If you looked closely at the broken and soaped-over windows, you might notice that a surprising number of the apartments had blackout curtains hanging inside, but that would require getting closer than any casual inspection was going to be.

  “We can’t prevent heat-signature scans; if someone flies over looking for signs of life, we’re screwed,” said Nathan. He was walking alongside me, matching his strides to mine. “On the plus side, sleepwalkers show the same heat signatures as humans or chimera, so that isn’t really a valid means of finding either survivors or fugitives.”

  “I don’t think they have those kinds of resources left,” I said, thinking of the teenagers in fatigues, their assault rifles and cattle prods shaking in their hands. “They’re sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel where personnel are concerned.”

  “That’s good to hear,” said Nathan. “Fang will want to ask you about what you saw in the quarantine zone. USAMRIID has managed to pick up some of our people while they were out gathering supplies. We don’t think they know who they have, but Fang’s been planning a breakout for weeks. The only reason we hadn’t moved is because we didn’t have eyes on you, and I wasn’t willing to agree to anything that might get you hurt.”

  A full assault on the quarantine zone would result in a lot of people getting hurt. Something stealthy might be able to get the folks they needed in and out without causing too much of a hue and cry, especially now that I was with them. I knew the lay of the land in both Pleasanton and Oakland.

  “They don’t know,” I said. “If they did, they would have told me. Colonel Mitchell wanted me to help my—to help Sally’s sister, Joyce.”

  “The one we treated with the antiparasitic drugs?” asked Nathan, sounding surprised. “Did they get the doses wrong? What did they think you could do for her?”

  “Dr. Banks convinced them I was Sally. That my implant had somehow been able to keep me—to keep her—alive, just trapped, and that he’d been able to coax her to the surface.” I stepped around a large hole in the pavement. Adam and Juniper were about ten feet ahead of us, Beverly sticking to their steps like a big black shadow. She knew that I needed them to be safe, and she was being a good dog. Such a good dog.

  “Okay,” said Nathan slowly. It was clear that he didn’t quite understand, and I couldn’t blame him for that, because I wasn’t telling the story properly: I was laying it out in puzzle pieces, as if trying to explain the whole thing at once would hurt me somehow. Maybe because it would.

  I took a gulping breath, and said, “She’s brain-dead. They killed the implant, but not before it had compromised her system so badly that she didn’t… they have her on life support. I don’t know how long they can keep her that way.” The image of my sister—because she was my sister; she was the only member of Sally’s family who had accepted me without question, without using my differences from the original as a measuring stick that I would always fail to live up to—rose unbidden in my mind. Joyce, laughing. Joyce, insisting I let her take me to the mall, because she needed sister time and I needed to get out of my own head. All the good, glorious things that had made her herself, and not just a piece of meat being sustained by computers… all those things were gone.

  They weren’t coming back. Dr. Banks had peddled false hope to her father when he said that I had somehow been able to preserve Sally in her own mind with my intrusion. Sally was gone, and Joyce was gone, and Colonel Mitchell was a man who didn’t have any daughters at all.

  “So if he’d known that he had some of Dr. Cale’s people, he would have been trying to get them to give her up, and he would have been using that to make me give him what he wanted,” I said. “He lost track of her after Vallejo. He wanted to know where she was. I guess the whole ‘she does better work when she’s free-range’ thing stopped looking so appealing when people started getting sick from drinking the water.”

  “We didn’t do that,” said Nathan. It was a needless interjection—I had always known that Dr. Cale wouldn’t kill her own children that way—but I was still glad to hear it: The denial patched a little hole that had been opening in my heart. “It has to be Sherman’s work. He’s the only one with the reason and the resources.”

  “What reason could he possibly have for doing something like this?” I asked. “I know he wants to destroy the humans, but this is hurting the sleepwalkers just as badly.”

  Nathan hesitated. That brief silence was the most frightening thing he could have said. Finally, he spoke: “You need to talk to my mother. She’s going to explain everything.”

  The drums were beating in my ears like warnings. Things weren’t better just because I was home. Having people around me that I cared about gave me more to lose.

  “Oh,” I whispered.

  Nathan squeezed my hand, clearly trying to be reassuring, and said, “He lost sight of us because we were smart in the evacuation. Lead-lined trucks to prevent radar penetration, movement underground when possible—the BART tunnels are pretty clear, and they haven’t been unmaintained long enough to become safety hazards—and a lot of evasive maneuvers. Fang wanted us to keep going east and get out of California, but he was voted down by the rest of us. We needed to stay where we could get you back, for one. We needed to be where we knew all the players, for another.”

  “They probably have military of their own in Utah,” I said.

  Nathan nodded. “And we won’t know who’s in charge or how they’re running their patrols. As long as we can stay out of USAMRIID’s sight, we’re safer here than we would be anywhere else.”

  The bowling alley was in front of us now, familiar and decrepit in that carefully maintained way that Dr. Cale had always been so rightly proud of. It was oddly reassuring to know that we were here again, in the place where I’d first learned that I wasn’t human and that nothing was ever going to be the same.

  The door was open: Adam, Beverly, and Juniper were already inside. Fishy was standing off to one side, an assault rifle in his hands, his eyes scanning the horizon. “I don’t mean to disrupt this homey little cutscene and infodump for the players, but if you could pick it up, that would be swell. The longer you’re out in the open, the higher your chances of a random encounter get. I, for one, don’t feel like wasting ammo today.”

  “I missed you too, Fishy,” I said, walking past him.

  “Glad you’re still in the game,” he called after me. Then he laughed, the high, delighted sound of a man for whom nothing carried any real weight or stakes. All of this was a fiction to him, and he was enjoying it a hell of a lot more than the rest of us were.

  “Sometimes I miss lying to myself about the things that make my life complicated,” I said conversationally.

  Nathan laughed, sounding surprised. “Really?”

  “Yeah. But only sometimes.” Life had been easier when I thought I was a human being. Not better, necessarily. I missed eating regularly and having access to a hot shower whenever I wanted one; I missed the routines of riding the bus and working at the shelter and generally living like a free person, not like a fugitive. But I didn’t miss the uncertainty that had come with it, the nagging feeling that I was somehow failing myself and the people around me by not being better at… well, everything. I was never going to be good enough at being human, because I had never been human in the first place. Having that weight lifted off my shoulders was worth any number of missed showers.

  “I’m glad it’s only sometimes,” said Nathan. “I’m a lot happier having you happy.”

  I blinked at him, and bea
med.

  Adam and Juniper were nowhere to be seen when we entered the lab portion of the bowling alley. I considered worrying about them, and decided that it wasn’t necessary. I had seen them go inside. I trusted Adam with my life, and that meant that I could trust him with her life, too.

  Dr. Cale’s staff was everywhere. There seemed to be twice as many people here as there had been the night before, which made sense. Left to their own devices, some scientists will become nocturnal, but they’re not the majority: Most of her people had always chosen to work days.

  Because these were the technicians and doctors and interns who hadn’t been in the bowling alley when I arrived, they all looked surprised to see me. Surprised and pleased, like they hadn’t been sure they were ever going to see me again. That was actually reassuring. Everyone here was on my side, not just the people I thought of as my family. We could make it through this crisis, because we would be making it through together.

  Dr. Cale was waiting in her office. She looked up when Nathan knocked on the doorframe, then followed his arm down to our joined hands. She smiled, looking obscurely pleased. “Nathan. Sal,” she said. “Please, come on in.”

  “Hi, Dr. Cale.” I stepped through the door, pulling Nathan along behind me. The office was small, converted from the old bowling alley manager’s space, and barely had room for the three of us and the equipment that it already held. “How have you been?”

  “Oh, you know. Same old, same old.” She cracked a smile at her own joke, but it seemed to be more a matter of rote response than actual amusement. I have been funny; see, here is my smile; do you feel at ease with me now? Sometimes I felt like Dr. Cale was even worse at being a person than I was. “Did you and Adam have a chance to talk?”

  Nothing I did could have suppressed the grin that spread across my face, or the warm feeling that uncurled in my stomach. “It was really good to see him again. I missed him.”

  “You were probably experiencing mild withdrawal symptoms,” said Dr. Cale.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Adam experienced the same thing when we lost Tansy. You didn’t, because you hadn’t been around her for long enough.”

  I blinked at her again. “Uh, what?”

  “I was able to monitor Adam after Tansy left—remember how depressed he got? Well, I monitored him again when we lost you, and watched the changes in his pheromone levels. I think that once chimera have bonded on a familial level, they become, for lack of a better word, addicted to the chemical signatures of their family group. You’re so accustomed to Adam’s pheromones that when they’re taken away, your system overcompensates, which can cause feelings of depression, lethargy, and hopelessness.” Dr. Cale shook her head. “It’s a complicated chemical system. I’m still trying to fully decode it.”

  “You can compensate with over-the-counter antidepressants,” said Nathan, picking up on my distress where Dr. Cale did not. He gave his mother a sharp look. “I thought we agreed that you’d explain this to Sal after she’d had time to adjust to being back with us.”

  “No, Nathan, you agreed. I said that she’d probably taken this long to escape because she was depressed from the withdrawal, and that on the off chance she was somehow blaming herself for being too slow, it would make her feel better if she knew this was natural for her.” Dr. Cale shrugged. “You’re the one who told me I couldn’t go around withholding information because I thought people weren’t ready for it. I’m just following instructions.”

  “Wow, you know, I’ve really missed hanging out with science people and listening to them talk about me like I didn’t get a say in my own existence.” I pulled my hand out of Nathan’s and sat down in the chair across from Dr. Cale, doing my best to glare at both of them at the same time. “Is there anything else you thought I didn’t need to know? I’m ready to listen.”

  Dr. Cale took a sharp breath, glancing toward Nathan. He nodded, closing his eyes for a bare moment, like he was trying to brace himself against whatever was going to happen next. That was unnerving.

  It was nothing compared to what came next. Dr. Cale turned back to me, and asked, “Do you remember when Sherman took a sample of your primary body?”

  Almost involuntarily, I reached up and touched the back of my head. There was a line of scar tissue there, left by Sherman’s tools. I hadn’t invited him to cut me open. He had done it all the same. “Yes,” I said, and I wasn’t ashamed when my voice cracked on the single syllable. He had violated me in a way more profound than I’d thought possible. Dr. Cale had also taken samples of my primary body—a violation I was still trying to forgive her for—but she had done it during a necessary and life-saving procedure. Without it, I would have been dead long ago. What Sherman had done…

  I might be able to forgive Dr. Cale completely for what she’d done to me. I was never going to be able to forgive Sherman.

  “I have analyzed the genetic material of a hundred and seventeen tapeworms cultured from the tap water,” said Dr. Cale. She was speaking slowly and clearly, in the way she had when she felt that it was vitally important to be understood. Each word felt like another rock being placed atop my chest, rendering me unable to move away. They were heavy. I was trapped.

  Dr. Cale was still speaking. “They are not identical to any existing implant. They have been cultured from a scrubbed source, a sample that was reengineered to be compatible with as wide a range of human subjects as possible. The epigenetic data has been removed. These worms, were they able to successfully bond with a human host, would grow up as individuals, not as reproductions of their parent and original. But they were all cultured from a single tapeworm.”

  “Me.” The word sounded distorted. The drums were pounding so hard that they were making everything echo and twist.

  Dr. Cale nodded. “You,” she agreed. “When Sherman took that sample, he was looking for whatever it was that had made you able to bond with your host without medical intervention. He wanted to give the eggs he was introducing into the water supply the best possible chance.”

  “The best possible chance at what?” I already knew—she had already told me—but I needed to hear her say it in so many words. I needed to be sure.

  “At claiming a human host. At maturing into a chimera. People trust the water. It’s been filtered and purified for so long that no one questions what comes out of the tap, not even during a situation like this one—not that there’s ever been a situation like this one.” She laughed bitterly. “We are in a unique time. He wanted to infect the remainder of the human race. If he got one chimera out of every hundred warm bodies remaining, that would still be thousands. When he scrubbed the epigenetic data, he also removed the triggers that would prevent maturation in a body already containing a viable implant. He was hoping he might be able to infect a few sleepwalkers. Not many. He always had an overinflated opinion of how well the implants could defend themselves. I genuinely believe that he thought any worm strong enough to have taken over a human body would be able to fight off invaders.”

  “He thought chimera would be immune,” I said.

  “I can’t be certain, but yes, I do believe he thought that,” said Dr. Cale. “When Sherman was with me, he believed chimera were the pinnacle of evolution, that nothing would ever be able to match them for purity and power. I can’t imagine his time with Dr. Banks, seeing the worst of what the human race has to offer, would have done much to change his mind.”

  “So… I’m doing this?” The drums had stopped. Everything was silence. “This is me, somehow?”

  “No.” Dr. Cale’s answer was immediate, and left no room for argument. She shook her head, as if in punctuation. “He scrubbed the epigenetic data. Even if he hadn’t, he clipped a single segment of your core body. He didn’t dig out your core, the piece of you that actually interfaces with the human brain. If he had, you would be dead, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “Transplanting a chimera from one human host to another requires the head of the or
iginal implant,” said Nathan. He seemed to be acting under the impression that his words would help. All they did was turn my stomach. “Mom calls it the ‘core segment’ most of the time, to differentiate it from the other parts of the implant’s body. There’s no way Sherman could have accessed your core without killing you.”

  “Oh,” I said faintly.

  “He wanted the antiseizure medications coded into your DNA,” said Dr. Cale. “Some people will react to them badly—I’d estimate that as much as point five percent of the population will have an allergic response to those medications, leading to convulsions and death. But the rest will have a higher chance of successful sleepwalker integration, and a greatly improved chance of successful chimera integration. It’s just that he didn’t consider the biggest problem with his little plan.”

  “You mean apart from all the other problems you’re talking about?” I stared at her. This was like something out of a horror movie. It wasn’t—it couldn’t be—real. At least before, we’d just been dealing with a single, world-destroying issue.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Cale. She didn’t seem to recognize the irony in my question. Then again, when had she ever? “He didn’t consider reinfection. Everyone is vulnerable to this. Humans, sleepwalkers, chimera, everyone. And it doesn’t matter if someone has already been infected by the water. They can be infected again, and again. We’ve removed up to thirty cysts from a single body after exposure to the water. I don’t know if it’s going to be possible to fully sterilize the reservoirs in my lifetime—and I intend to live for a very long time. I still have a great deal of work to do.”

  “Because of me.” My lips felt numb.

  “It’s not your fault.” Dr. Cale frowned. “Haven’t you been listening? You aren’t the one who reengineered the DNA that had been built into you. You’re certainly not the one who introduced eggs into the water supply. We’re still not sure how Sherman accomplished that so quickly, or on such a wide scale. We’ve taken samples from three reservoirs, and found them all to have been contaminated.”