Chimera Page 24

  “I went with him willingly,” I said. “When he came to USAMRIID to break me out, I could have screamed. I could have refused to go. I could have done something, but I was mad at the humans for treating me the way they had, and I thought I would be able to escape from him more easily than I could escape from them. So I went with him willingly, and now he’s using… he’s using something that he got from me, something that he stole from my body, to kill people. This is my fault. If I hadn’t gone with Sherman, none of this would be happening.”

  “And if I had refused Steven when he came to me and asked if I wanted to change the world, there would never have been implants in the first place. You wouldn’t exist. Neither would Sherman, or Adam, or Juniper. I might still be a married woman, and the world certainly wouldn’t be in the state it’s in right now.” Dr. Cale sounded calm, but there was a thin vein of agony in her eyes. She had thought about this a lot: She knew what she was taking responsibility for. “Steven is a brilliant man, but he isn’t as creative as he thinks he is. He would never have unlocked the genetic code of the worms without me. So should I take full responsibility for what he did with my work? Should I say, ‘Yes, someone else took good science and perverted it in the name of quick profits, but I still did it, so blame me’?”

  “No, but—” I began.

  She cut me off. “Sherman exists because I was trying to learn how the chimera were able to occupy their hosts. Adam may be the single most ethically questionable thing I’ve ever done, but I was trying to figure out how bad things could get, and I acted without regrets. Sherman… by the time I introduced him into his human host, I knew the process worked. I knew what chimera were, and that they could be healthy, stable people. So why did I have to do it again? He was hubris, pure and simple. I wanted another son. I was lonely. Does that mean that I am responsible for everything he’s ever done? Are the sins of the son vested on the mother, rather than the sins of the father being vested on the son?”

  “No,” I said, and shook my head. “You’re getting me all confused. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “If you own a knife, and someone else steals it and uses it to kill a person, you are not at fault. Yes, it was your knife, but you didn’t buy it because you wanted to commit a murder. You bought it because sometimes you need a knife. I didn’t create the implants because I wanted to destroy the world. My science was sound—my knife was clean. Steven took my work and perverted it in the name of profit. He knew this could happen, and he did it anyway. He doesn’t care that the survivors will mistrust science and its gifts for generations. He cared about profits now and stock options later and coming out on top at every possible turn. Sherman did to you what Steven did to me. He stole something precious and turned it into a weapon. That doesn’t make you the bad one. It doesn’t transform your precious thing into something that is innately evil. Do you understand?” Dr. Cale looked at me, and this time, she was pleading. “You are not at fault here. All of the fault is on him.”

  Nathan put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve never done anything you need to be ashamed of, and that includes going with someone you thought offered you a better shot at survival. You need to take care of yourself. How else are you going to take care of the people you care about?”

  I looked at him. I looked at her. And then, very slowly, I nodded.

  “All right,” I said. “This isn’t my fault, but it’s still everybody’s problem. What are we going to do?”

  “That’s the real problem,” said Dr. Cale. “I have no idea.”

  Batya has continued to experiment with new water-purification systems. So far, she’s had the best luck with gravity filters, and with rainwater reclamation. Even the rainwater isn’t safe without processing: We have found eggs there, tiny and captured by the natural interplay of wind and water. They are uncommon. They are common enough that by now, we must assume that all open and standing water sources have become contaminated.

  The eggs do not fare well in salt water. Increasing the salinity of freshwater is effective, but not absolutely so. Desalinization may be our next best hope. It will require us to gain access to the coastline. USAMRIID is still functional, and mobs of both sleepwalkers and human survivors remain an issue. We’re going to have to figure out a way to deal with them soon. If we don’t, we’re going to reach a point where water rationing becomes necessary. I can’t afford the hit that would represent to our morale.

  USAMRIID has to go.

  —FROM THE NOTES OF SHERMAN LEWIS (SUBJECT VIII, ITERATION III), JANUARY 2028

  I don’t know how I can make this any clearer than I already have: We need help. We are no longer able to afford the luxury of pretending that the situation here on the West Coast is under control. I’ve heard nothing from Los Angeles for the last ten days. Our team in Salt Lake transmitted a report of contamination in the water supply before they ceased communication.

  Attached, please find analysis of the local reservoirs, showing the contamination levels. While the SymboGen implants are unable to mature in other mammals, they are capable of using those other mammals as intermediate hosts, spreading from waterway to waterway in the bellies of deer, raccoons, and feral cats. They will continue to spread until they have contaminated all water sources in North America.

  We need to stop this, and we need to stop it now, before it gets too far out of hand.

  —MESSAGE FROM COLONEL ALFRED MITCHELL, USAMRIID, TRANSMITTED TO THE WHITE HOUSE ON JANUARY 6, 2028

  Chapter 11

  JANUARY 2028

  Adam!” Juniper’s gleeful squeal was accompanied by pulling her hand out of mine and taking off at a run for her beloved brother, who stooped to intercept her. She laughed wildly as he slung her over his shoulder, keeping an arm around her waist to brace her. She was a squirmy thing, and getting squirmier by the day, as she figured out the uses and limitations of her body—and as far as Juniper was concerned, there were very few limitations. Whatever she wanted to do, she was going to attempt, and what she didn’t accomplish on her first try, she was going to do again, and again, until she got it right.

  I followed more sedately, trying to brush the dog hair off my blouse. Getting out of the apartment without a dog in tow had required a thirty-minute brushing session, and a lot of reassurances to both dogs that they were good—excellent, in fact—and that I would be right back. Beverly was generally willing to believe me when I told her things like that. Minnie was less sure, and needed more reassurances before she’d let me walk out the door without at least one canine in tow. Oddly, she was perfectly happy to have Beverly accompany me while she stayed behind. As long as there was a dog with me, she believed I would come back.

  “Hi, Sal,” said Adam, waving around his armload of frantically giggling Juniper. “I was just coming to get you.”

  “I know. I tried to hurry.” I had been at the bowling alley for almost two weeks, and was still getting used to the idea that sometimes I needed to be places at specific times. I couldn’t just dawdle the way I had when I was in the quarantine zone, where nothing but supply runs happened at a specific time, and even those were undependable.

  There, I had been a spare part that nobody needed but nobody was willing to throw away, either. As long as Colonel Mitchell hadn’t needed me, I’d been left mostly to my own devices. Here, everyone worked. Even Adam, who tended the hydroponics and had taken much of Juniper’s education upon himself. After two weeks, she had a vocabulary of more than fifty words, and was adding more every day—people and places and things. Every time she opened her mouth, she astounded me all over again. And she adored him.

  I was jealous, but I was grateful, too. Juniper came home with me every night. She slept in her room, and she cried my name when she woke up scared or confused or needing a glass of water. I could share her days with Adam, especially since it freed me to do whatever was needed. Mostly that meant grunt work, unskilled tasks that didn’t require me to be able to read or to understand the scientific method. Bu
t there were also days like this one, where I had something more important to do.

  I was going to talk to Carrie.

  Adam walked away with Juniper, heading for the retrofitted supermarket that served as our primary social gathering spot and food preparation space. I kept walking, heading for the bowling alley. The path had become familiar so quickly that I actually didn’t trust it to stay the same from day to day: Stability was an alien idea, and much as I wanted to accept it back into my life, I couldn’t.

  The door opened when I was almost there. Nathan smiled out at me, alerted to my approach by the security cameras. “Hey,” he said. “You look nice.”

  “Thanks.” I’d made an effort, putting on black slacks and a nice white blouse, brushing my hair, even putting on a simple necklace and some pearl earrings from the thrift store down the street—all little signs that yes, I was a person, yes, I could be trusted, no, there was no need to react to me as if I was the enemy. Carrie still didn’t know that I wasn’t human. She thought I was a collaborator, someone who’d thrown her lot in with a monster because it would get me nice things, like a comfortable apartment that I didn’t have to share with a bunch of strangers, and dog kibble from the supply room, and the freedom to walk around.

  In a way, she was right. I was collaborating with Dr. Cale and her team, and I did have all those things, from the apartment, where I slept in my own bed with my own boyfriend next to me, all the way down to the privilege of going wherever I wanted within the limited area that Dr. Cale’s people had deemed “safe.” We might only control a few blocks, but those blocks were free of hostile sleepwalkers, and they offered us a cornucopia of opportunities to improve our little community. Fishy had gotten looting down to a science even before I arrived with stories of scarcity within the quarantine zone. Now that he knew what the bad side of things looked like, he had redoubled his efforts, and he took me with him as often as not. I had a good eye for places where people might have squirreled away their bottled water or their prescription medications. More importantly, I had a good nose for the presence of sleepwalkers, either alive or recently dead. Since I had joined the resource-acquisition crews, we hadn’t lost a single person. I was proud of that.

  I needed to be proud of something.

  Nathan and I walked through the bowling alley, past the scientists working at their stations—which were never turned off or powered down, just switched to their next set of tasks—and the pharmacists compounding at what used to be the snack bar. A few people smiled or waved in our direction, but most kept their heads down and kept working. We could afford to run more power through the bowling alley during the day, when the draw would be largely off the solar arrays in the nearby neighborhoods, and would hence make less of an impression on the local grids. That meant all the really big tasks had to happen before the sun went down, and it kept the scientists in a constant state of motion between dawn and dusk.

  Beyond the main room was the manager’s office, and beyond that was the old storage room, which had been converted into a makeshift jail of sorts. Solar-fed lights covered the ceiling, bathing everything in a soft white glow that was somehow antiseptic, like it was cleansing the room even as it lit it up. There were three cells along the wall, each about ten feet by ten feet. Each contained a small cot that had been bolted to the floor, a chemical toilet, a curtain that could be drawn for privacy, and a particleboard end table stacked with books.

  It always made me sad and a little sick to my stomach to look at them, like their existence proved that we had already essentially lost the moral high ground. There was a time when we would never have needed to take prisoners. Now we were prepared to hold them long enough that we had to be concerned about their mental well-being.

  Fang was standing near the wall, his rifle slung over his shoulder, working a wooden puzzle in his hands. He looked up at the sound of our footsteps, offering a polite nod when he saw that it was us. “She’s awake,” he said. “Hasn’t opened her curtain, but that doesn’t mean much. She doesn’t feel social most days.”

  “Are you sure she’s… up?” I asked, giving the closed curtain an uneasy look. There were a lot of ways for the prisoners to hurt themselves. When I’d asked Dr. Cale why she didn’t take more steps to keep them safe, she had snorted and replied that if she took someone captive or put them on a medical hold, she wanted them to understand that they had two ways out: her way, or the painful way. If they wanted to commit suicide, that was on them.

  It was something I actively worried about with Carrie. She had suffered a lot of losses in a short time, she had just escaped from USAMRIID, and now she was being held, again, against her will. That sort of thing couldn’t be good for her psyche.

  “She was moving around earlier, and when I asked her if she wanted to trade an open curtain for a nice breakfast, she told me I could go fuck myself,” said Fang. “Then she called me a fascist pig, and made a few anatomically unlikely suggestions. So I’m pretty sure she’s awake and alive. And awful. Have I told you recently that your friend is awful?”

  “Every time we talk about her.” There were folding chairs against the opposite wall. I picked one up and carried it in front of Carrie’s cell, where I unfolded it and sat down. The drums were hammering ceaselessly in my ears. “You guys can go. I’ve got it from here.”

  “She can’t break through that Plexiglas without a weapon, which she doesn’t have,” said Fang, straightening. “You should be totally safe, but just in case, if you need us, yell.”

  “Like a fire alarm,” I promised. Nathan paused long enough to press a kiss against my forehead, and then they were gone, both of them, leaving me alone with the woman who had enabled me to come home, and whose fate was now in my hands.

  She had to know I was there. We hadn’t been quiet or subtle when we were talking about her. But the seconds stretched into minutes, and the curtain didn’t move, and Carrie didn’t speak to me.

  I cleared my throat. “Carrie? It’s Sal. Could you open the curtain, please? I really need to talk to you.”

  There was no response.

  “Come on, Carrie, please? I know you’re upset. I’d be upset too if I’d gone from one prison to another, and I’m really sorry about all this. I tried talking to Dr. Cale, and she said I needed to talk to you before I talked to her.” What I didn’t say was that Dr. Cale hadn’t even been willing to go that far for the first three days, while Carrie was raging and throwing things against the walls of her cell. Or that the first four times I’d tried to get permission to come and talk to her, she had still been considered potentially dangerous, thanks to her ongoing violent outbursts.

  Still there was no response. I sighed.

  “Do you want me to leave you in here to rot? Because that’s what’s going to happen to you, you know. Dr. Cale doesn’t care how long you sit in that cell, but she’s not going to remember you forever. That isn’t how she works. And after she forgets about you, somebody’s going to realize that you’re drinking water and eating food that we could be using for other things. You’re not going to like it if that happens. So you should talk to me now, while that’s still the future, and not the present.”

  The curtain finally twitched, and Carrie’s voice said sullenly, “If you’re trying to convince me that you’re on my side, you’re doing a seriously shitty job. Most of the time people don’t go ‘Oh by the way, might have to kill you because you eat too much,’ when they’re trying to make friends.”

  “I never said we’d have to kill you.” I’d just implied it loudly, and intentionally. It was something she needed to consider. “And I don’t expect that we’re going to be friends, either. Friends trust each other, and I don’t think you’re ever going to trust me again. That doesn’t mean I need to start lying to you and saying that everything’s going to be all hinky-dory.”

  “Hunky-dory. The phrase is ‘hunky-dory.’” The curtain was finally pulled aside, revealing Carrie. She was wearing black yoga pants and a green tank top, both from th
e supplies that had been removed from the Kmart before it was filled with sleepwalkers. I wondered how they had convinced her to change her clothes, and then realized that was a silly question. Carrie was a survivor. She wasn’t going to sit in her own filth just to make a point about being held captive.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I had to relearn English after my accident.” There was still some argument about whether I’d been learning it for the first time or reawakening neural pathways that Sally had used when she was learning the language. Juniper was picking up words faster than any human infant, but was she picking them up faster than a human child with a body as old as hers? Even Dr. Cale didn’t know. Some things about the brain were simply determined to be mysteries.

  “Your grasp of idiom sucks,” said Carrie. She sat down on the edge of her bed, glaring. At least she hadn’t closed the curtain again. She was willing to hear me out, however resistant she might be to listening to my actual words. “What do you mean, ‘start lying’? You’ve been lying since we met.”

  Only about my species, and to be fair, she’d never come out and asked me whether I was human. “No, I haven’t. I never lied to you. I asked you to help me get back to my family. This is my family.”

  “That woman is not your family,” snapped Carrie. She pointed to the closed door on the other side of the room. “She’s a monster. She’s the one who started this whole mess. How can you call her family?”

  “I’m marrying her son, and that means she’s going to be my mother-in-law,” I said. “Besides, this isn’t her fault. She did the initial design work on the SymboGen implants, but she’s not the one who strong-armed them through FDA review or said that they were safe for human use. She had to disappear because she was saying the opposite, and Dr. Banks was the one with all the money, so everybody was listening to him instead of listening to her.”