Chimera Page 25

  “She’s still the one who created them,” Carrie spat.

  “I don’t think we can blame science for the way it gets used,” I said. “She did science. She did good science even, not evil science. Understanding genetics better never hurt anybody. It was Dr. Banks who said her science wasn’t as important as his profits. And he’s the one who said this is all her fault, too. Why do people believe him? Is it just because he has nice hair and white teeth? I don’t think teeth tell you anything about whether or not a person is good. They just tell you that the person could afford a really awesome dentist.”

  Carrie blinked, looking briefly nonplussed. Then she demanded, “If she didn’t have anything to hide, why did she disappear?”

  “Because Dr. Banks had a lot of money, and people listened to him when he talked, at least before all this changed,” I said. “And because he was a man. Haven’t you ever noticed how when a man says one thing, and the woman says another thing, people will almost always believe the man is the one who’s telling the truth? Even if she has more proof than he does. So she ran, because she knew nobody would believe her. You don’t believe her. Even after USAMRIID, you don’t believe her.”

  “Colonel Mitchell is your father.”

  “He didn’t act like it.” I folded my hands in my lap to keep myself from fiddling, and looked at her gravely. “You know Dr. Cale can’t let you leave. I’m sorry I brought you here. I should have asked you to drop me off somewhere on the road, and let you go. That was my fault. I was focused on the idea of surviving—getting home to my people. So I apologize.”

  Carrie’s bark of laughter was almost startled. “You apologize? Like that makes everything better? ‘We’re going to keep you in a cage until we get tired of feeding you, but hey, I’m really sorry about putting you in this position, let’s be friends’? God, Sally, do you know anything about friendship?”

  “I’m not the one who pulled a gun on my traveling companion,” I said. “I’m not the one who brought friendship into this, either. You did both those things. You started shooting at my family. You tried to hit me with your car.”

  Carrie sat in stony silence, not saying anything.

  I sighed. “Look, I never said I wanted to be your friend. I just feel bad for putting you in this position.”

  Carrie blinked at me.

  I continued, “It would probably be easier if we were friends, because it’s almost always easier when you’re friends with the people you’re trying to work with, but I don’t care that much. I have plenty of friends. I just don’t want you to be miserable for the rest of your life because you helped me. That’s why I want to help you.”

  “Help me how?” asked Carrie warily.

  “Dr. Cale needs people, always. If you’re willing to talk to her, see what you can do around the lab, she’s willing to let you out of your cell.” I looked at her as levelly as I could. “She’s not going to leave you unmonitored, but it would be better than sitting in that little box, waiting for the world to fall on your head.”

  “Why would I want to talk to her?” demanded Carrie. “She’s a monster.”

  “I feel like we’re stuck in a loop here,” I said. “What makes her a monster?”

  “She created those things. Whether she’s the one who let them out or not, they’re killing people.”

  I was starting to get angry. That probably wasn’t a good thing. “They’re killing people because they weren’t tested properly, which wasn’t her responsibility. And why should they have less of a right to live than the humans who swallowed them? Nobody forced people to be so lazy that they would rather have a tapeworm living inside them than worry about taking their medication every day.”

  “Paul didn’t have an implant, and look what happened to him!” she shot back. “They’re infecting people who never voluntarily consumed them.”

  “Dr. Cale didn’t put the worms in the water, and as for why someone else did, it was because they’re scared, too!”

  Carrie blinked. “What?”

  “The implants didn’t ask to be made poorly, but they were, so they started taking people over. And then people got scared, and started killing the implants. So the people who depend on their implants got scared, and now the implants are finding new ways to infect, because it’s a race. Humans turned it into a race. Who can kill who the faster, and the better, and the cleaner? This is stupid. It never had to be this way.”

  Carrie’s eyes were wide and round in her suddenly pale face. “She’s managed to twist you so far around that you’ve started sympathizing with the worms. Don’t you see how sick that is?”

  “I am one of the worms, Carrie,” I said.

  She froze.

  “The sleepwalkers are what happens when we don’t mesh with the human brain right. We’re like USB cables. We have to be positioned just right, or we don’t make full contact,” I continued. “When we do, we have access to all that processing power, and we become people. I’m a person, I’m just not a human person. I’m one of the worms.”

  “You’re sick,” she whispered. “That is a sick, gross lie, and I won’t believe it.”

  I hadn’t been intending to tell her about it, either: it had just come out when my frustration with her mulishness became too much to tolerate. I remained seated, looking at her gravely, and said, “Am I sick? Colonel Mitchell said I was his daughter, but his wife wouldn’t let me stay in the family housing with the rest of the family. It’s not because we fought a lot. It’s because she knew I wasn’t her child. I’m the invader who took her child’s body as my own after Sally had her accident and wasn’t there anymore. Fathers may be willing to lie to themselves, but mothers never forgive.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I guess you don’t have to while you’re sitting in that cell,” I said. “As long as you’re in there, you’ll be fed and watered and given new things to read, and you won’t have to believe anything. But eventually, you’re going to want a way out, and then you’re going to have two choices. Either you can believe me when I say that Dr. Cale isn’t a monster and that not every implant is out to hurt you, or you can try to escape. I don’t think you’re going to. But I guess it’s an option.”

  I stood, brushing the creases out of my trousers with nervous fingers. I’d tried so hard to look like a human being for her, and she had never even noticed. “I’m really sorry you’re stuck here because of me, Carrie. I really, really am.”

  “Saying ‘really’ three times doesn’t make me believe you,” she said. “If you want to show me how sorry you are, you’ll open up this door and give me back my gun. You owe me.”

  “I guess I do, but I don’t owe you my life or anybody else’s,” I said. “It’s about survival. It always has been. And if I have to pick a side, I pick the side I’m actually on. Not yours. Sorry, Carrie.” I turned and walked back to the door. She didn’t call after me. I guess when it came right down to it, she knew as well as I did that we were done.

  Fang was waiting outside. He looked at my expression and frowned. “It didn’t go well?”

  “You still have a prisoner,” I replied, and kept walking.

  Having Juniper—who was still nailing down the finer points of toilet training—and the dogs meant that I had fallen into the habit of keeping clean clothes in Dr. Cale’s office, since there was no guarantee I’d be able to make it through the day without getting something spilled on me. I went straight there. Dr. Cale was out, overseeing some essential piece of science, so I was alone as I stripped off my human disguise and traded it for more workaday clothes.

  My eyes burned, and when I touched them, my fingers came away damp with frustrated tears. Carrie wasn’t my friend. She had never been my friend. But she was the closest thing I had to a surrogate for all the humans I’d known in my old life, the life I had before I chose to seek the broken doors. She was Joyce, and Colonel Mitchell, and my coworkers from the shelter. None of them had ever known me for what I really was. I had lied to them all,
whether I intended to or not, and I was sorry. Carrie was the only one left for me to apologize to. She just wouldn’t accept.

  Maybe she never would.

  I left my nice clothes in the office, shutting the door behind me like it could somehow shut away the complicated emotions of the morning. The bowling alley was still buzzing along, everyone wrapped up in their own scientific pursuits and unaware of my inner turmoil. That was… sort of nice, actually. I was one piece in a large and complicated machine, and if I broke down for a while, it would all keep working without me.

  I was halfway to the exit when a tall, well-built woman with her graying hair cut close to her scalp raised her hand and waved me over. “Sal! You busy?”

  “Not right now,” I said, walking to her station. “Adam’s teaching Juniper her ABCs, and he doesn’t expect me to come take over until lunchtime. What’s up, Daisy?”

  “Can you help me hold this down?” She indicated her workspace, where a large, dead raccoon had been placed in a metal tray. She was wearing latex gloves, and a face mask dangled around her neck. “I know this is a shitty place for a necropsy, but we need to check this big boy’s stomach and make sure he died of natural causes.”

  I blanched. “You don’t think the cousins killed him, do you?”

  “It’s possible. He’s been drinking the water, and that’s where they are.” She offered me a box of gloves. “Help me out?”

  “Okay,” I said, and plucked out a pair.

  Daisy was one of Dr. Cale’s surgical assistants. She had been a parasitologist at SymboGen when the company was still in its infancy, and had left with Dr. Cale when things started going south. She wasn’t the most comfortable with chimera—Nathan sometimes called her a “human supremacist,” and while he wasn’t serious, he wasn’t entirely joking—but she was good at her job, and she recognized the skills we brought to the table. Like my ability to stick my hands into a dead raccoon without tossing my cookies, which was surprisingly rare among the geneticists and engineers who flocked around the lab.

  I got my gloves on and plucked a face mask from the rack, pulling it over my nose and mouth. Aspirating raccoon was never a good idea. “Where do you want me?” I asked.

  Daisy picked up a scalpel. “He’s too big to secure to the board with pins. If you hold down his shoulders, I’ll be able to open the stomach cavity with minimal trouble.”

  “Got it,” I said, and moved into the spot she’d indicated.

  The raccoon hadn’t been dead for long, and felt almost like a living thing under my hands. It showed no signs of wasting or decay; if it had taken a breath and opened its eyes, I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised. But there was no rush of blood as Daisy opened the abdominal cavity, and the raccoon did not respond when she pinned the flaps to the sides of the board. I remained as a steadying presence, looking with interest at the jumbled puzzle of the raccoon’s internal organs. It was always a little surprising, how many colors there were inside a previously living thing. It wasn’t just red. It was purple, and green, and yellow, and black. A rainbow written in flesh.

  Daisy nimbly moved the raccoon’s organs aside as she dug for the intestine, which came into view like a long ribbon of pinkish gray. She sliced into the surface, freeing a thin wash of yellow fluid. Then she set the scalpel aside.

  “Adult male raccoon, no signs of internal bleeding or lesions, cause of death unknown,” she said. There was no recorder running. I blinked, but didn’t say anything. If she needed to talk her way through this, then that was up to her.

  Or maybe she was trying to teach me something. This could be Daisy’s way of reaching out the hand of friendship, in the form of a lecture about a dead raccoon.

  She plunged her hand into the open intestine, feeling around for a moment before she pulled it out into the light. Small white shapes squirmed and twisted in the gunk that covered her palm. She squinted at them for a moment, moving them around with her thumb. Then she scraped the contents of her hand—gunk, worms, and all—into a waiting specimen dish.

  “Roundworms,” she said. “Endemic in the local raccoon population. They’re thriving, too; this bad boy was probably carrying thousands of them with him while he went about his business. That wouldn’t be the case if he’d been carrying one of your cousins.”

  “Because we don’t play well with others,” I ventured.

  Daisy nodded. “That’s right. They don’t play well with others. One implant and bam, the whole local parasite ecology is thrown off.” She plunged her hand back into the raccoon’s intestine, pulling out another handful of slime studded with small, squirming things. “I’m going to say this fellow probably died of distemper, or rabies, or something else nasty but not man-made. You can let go now. I’m done with the manual slicing. Thanks.”

  I pulled my gloved hands away from the raccoon, stepping back and watching Daisy for a moment as she continued to scoop out the contents of the raccoon’s digestive system. She was so focused on her work that she didn’t even seem to realize I was still there. Maybe that was for the best.

  When a minute had passed without her acknowledging me, I peeled off my gloves and mask, dropped them into the trash can, and walked away.

  I found Adam and Juniper in the Kmart garden center, which was still filled with green and growing things, despite the time of year. They were safe from the sleepwalkers contained inside the main building: The doors connecting the garden center to the Kmart proper had been sealed off, leaving the plants and potting soil outside in their theft-proof cage. Juniper was sitting on her butt in the middle of a groundcover display, watching avidly as Adam read to her from Don’t Go Out Alone. I was starting to feel like that was the only book left in the world.

  None of this was surprising. Adam was devoted to Juniper, and had been from the moment they met. As for Juniper, she was happy with either one of us. I couldn’t tell from a sample size of two whether she liked us in specific, or whether she was attracted to her fellow chimera. Hopefully, when we found out, it wouldn’t be because of Sherman.

  No, the surprise was sitting a few feet away, next to a display of carefully trimmed and packaged rosebushes. Dr. Cale’s wheelchair was sturdy enough to be rolled basically anywhere in the shopping center that didn’t involve going up stairs; it probably shouldn’t have been so odd to find her sitting there, a small smile on her face, watching as her son read to her first “grandchild.” But it was. I stopped, blinking, and just looked at the three of them, trying to make some sense of the scene.

  Juniper noticed me first. She raised her head, and smiled her tight-lipped little smile before saying, “Sal. Sal!” Adam also offered me a smile, but didn’t say anything. He looked perfectly content, sitting there in his slowly overgrowing artificial Eden, his baby sister nearby and his mother watching on.

  My name still seemed to make up half of Juniper’s vocabulary. It only meant me about a third of the time, and was slowly being phased out as she learned the words for other things. “Hi, Juniper,” I said. I looked to Dr. Cale. “Hi, Dr. Cale.”

  “Hello, Sal,” she said. “How did your little meeting go?”

  That seemed enough like an invitation for me. I walked over to her and leaned against a planter as I replied, “Not so well. She still doesn’t want to work for you. She thinks you’re a monster, and that all of this was your fault.”

  “Monster,” said Juniper contentedly, and turned her attention back to her book.

  I stifled a smile. The whole plot of Don’t Go Out Alone centered on a pair of children trying to find their monster and make their home with it, wherever it was. Given how many times she’d heard that book already—and how many times she would read it once she was reading on her own, if Adam and Nathan were anything to go by—she probably had a very different definition of “monster” than Carrie did. That was a good thing. This wasn’t a world that was going to support the old definition for much longer.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it, how facts fall down in the face of appeara
nces? I’ve always been fascinated by the way people get their ideas.” Dr. Cale didn’t sound fascinated. She sounded tired.

  The reason was revealed a moment later, when she looked back to Adam and Juniper and said, quietly, “We lost two sleepwalkers yesterday. Convulsions, spasms, and finally death. If it hadn’t happened during feeding time, we might have missed it.”

  “What happened?” I asked, wide-eyed. “Did someone give them contaminated water?”

  “Unfortunately, that would be too simple,” she said. “We think there was an infected sleepwalker in the group we initially rounded up. The implants are… tricky, for lack of a better word. If conditions aren’t ideal, they can form cysts rather than maturing immediately into adult worms. We think the sleepwalker was underfed, and so the intruding eggs didn’t mature. Then we fed them up to a point where the cysts felt safe to hatch. If the sleepwalker died when no one was watching…”

  “Then the others would have eaten the body,” I said slowly. “And they’d have eaten any eggs or remaining cysts at the same time.”

  “We can’t test them all. They’d have to be sedated and removed from the enclosure one at a time. That would frighten and upset them, and it could lead to a stampede. They’re mostly calm right now. They eat, they sleep, they copulate.” She paused and laughed, seeing my expression. “They still have the instincts of their human hosts, Sal. You didn’t know what sex was when you were just a tapeworm. It was your host body that taught you about sexual response and hormonal need. Once a sleepwalker is well fed and no longer needs to search for sustenance, it can move on to other needs. Of course, sometimes they get hungry in the middle of the act and begin attacking one another, but they manage to get by. They’ve been observed masturbating and engaging in group sex, as well. It’s fascinating, from a purely biological standpoint.”