Parasite p-1 Read online

  “Wait,” I said. “Subjects? Are you talking about sick people?”

  “Nathan…” Dr. Cale gave him a pleading look.

  “I’ll explain in the car, Sal,” he said, and took my arm.

  I wasn’t happy about leaving without getting my question answered—but in a way, it didn’t need to be, because her refusal to say anything was answer enough. We were getting out of the bowling alley alive, and we had more information than we’d had when we came. That was going to have to be good enough. “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ll contact you as soon as I can,” said Dr. Cale.

  Tansy pushed her out of the room. Nathan and I followed. And finally, after some of the most confusing hours of my life, we went our separate ways.

  The threatened roadblock between Lafayette and everywhere else didn’t materialize, but the California Highway Patrol did shut down all but one lane going in either direction, forcing all the normal traffic to slow to a crawl. Nathan and I found ourselves sitting in what was essentially a mile-long parking lot. Several of the local deer had nonchalantly emerged from the edges of the forest that lined the freeway on either side and were chewing on the median grass, all but ignoring the cars around them. Horns honked from all sides, having absolutely no effect on the cars around them.

  Don’t Go Out Alone rested on my knees. I looked down at it, studying the black and blue forest on the cover. Then I glanced at Nathan, who was staring fixedly out the window at the road. He hadn’t really spoken since we left the bowling alley. I’d been okay with that—anything that means the driver is less distracted is okay with me—but if we weren’t going to move, we might as well talk. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  My voice came out softer than I intended it to. That turned out not to matter; Nathan had apparently been waiting for me to say something, because his answer was out almost before I finished the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never thought that I was going to see her again. I thought… I thought she loved me enough to come back, if she could. She could have died, Sal. For real. She swallowed that stupid worm, and she… and she…” Words failed him. After a moment of staring soundlessly out the windshield, he slammed his fists into the steering wheel.

  It was such an abrupt motion that I didn’t see it coming. I shrieked, flattening myself against the car door. If we’d been moving at all, I probably would have fainted again. As it was, the traffic was at a standstill, and I was able to keep myself awake.

  Nathan looked instantly contrite as he realized what he had done. Wincing, he said, “I’m sorry, Sal. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just… she… fuck.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to force my frantically beating heart to calm down. It was funny; at moments like this, my heartbeat didn’t sound like drums at all. It just sounded like being afraid of the world.

  Once I was sure I could talk again without throwing up, I said, “Don’t do that in the car, okay? If you do that in the car again, I’m going to have to get out.” I wasn’t sure I didn’t need to do that anyway. This was the second time in the same week that Nathan had taken his hands off the wheel, and that was something I couldn’t handle. I could walk from here to the nearest BART station. It couldn’t possibly be more dangerous than staying in the car if he was going to drive like that.

  “I won’t,” he said, sounding genuinely apologetic. “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay. Just… okay.” I took a breath. The book was still in my lap. I looked down at it, tracing the outline of the girl’s face with my index finger. She looked terrified. I understood how she felt. “How long was I out?” Why did you leave me alone when I couldn’t defend myself?

  “A little over an hour. You sort of scared me when you just toppled over like that, but your vital signs were steady, and you’d already had a hell of a day… it seemed like a good idea to let you sleep while we did all the crazy science shit that you wouldn’t have understood anyway.”

  “Yeah. I guess that was smart.”

  Nathan gave me a sidelong look, but out of deference to my discomfort, he kept his attention mainly on the road. I could have kissed him for that, if there wasn’t a good chance that it would have distracted him. That was the last thing I wanted to do. “Mom told Tansy to watch you, and make sure you didn’t get scared when you woke up without me.”

  “Considering that Tansy is the scariest thing in that lab, I’m not sure you made the right call, there,” I said.

  He laughed a little, sounding unsteady. “You may be right about that. Did she stay until you woke up?”

  “Yeah, and I woke up to find her staring at me all creepy-time, like I was some sort of zoo animal. It was definitely not my idea of a good way to end an unplanned nap. Let’s never do that again, okay?” I considered telling him that Adam had been there, too, but that would have taken too long, and it wasn’t like he’d done anything. I wanted Nathan to move on to telling me about his mother’s work. “What did you do while I was sleeping?”

  “Reviewed Mom’s notes, looked at some samples she had prepared for when we showed up. She’s been expecting us for a while, apparently.” He smiled thinly, eyes staying on the road this time. “She kept clippings on your accident. SymboGen getting involved the way that they did triggered a lot of warning bells with her.”

  My heart started pounding again. This time it sounded less like panic and more like the increasingly familiar drums. I just wished I knew what made the difference between the two. “What… what did she say about me?”

  “That SymboGen knew they were going to need a poster child for the good side of the implants, because the bad side—the sleeping sickness—was already getting started. The first cases appeared shortly before your crash. They were just a lot more isolated than what we’re seeing right now. SymboGen was able to hush them up. They aren’t able to hush things up anymore. They—”

  Whatever he was planning to say was interrupted by the man who came running out of the woods to the side of our car, his eyes dead and staring like the eyes of the woman who had been on my back porch only a few hours before. He raced to the side of the car, slamming his palms flat against the glass of my window. I screamed, too surprised to do anything else. Nathan shouted something that was half profanity and half raw, wordless surprise. The car locks snapped home as he hit the button on the control panel.

  Not that the sleepwalker tried the handles. The man—who was wearing what looked like it had been a very nice business suit, before he got taken over by a tapeworm and wore it out into the Lafayette woods—kept slamming his hands against the window, right up on the glass, so close that I could see the glassy emptiness of his eyes in perfect, horrifying detail. His mouth was open, but with the window closed, I couldn’t tell if he was making any sound. That was the one good thing about our current situation.

  If he was trying to talk to us, I didn’t want to know about it.

  Horns blared around us as the other motorists in the traffic jam realized what was going on. The sleepwalker kept slamming his hands against our window, ignoring them. A few drivers tried to pull out of the throng and drive away, but succeeded only in making things worse as they got stuck on the shoulder or ran into the ditch next to the freeway. The sound of blaring horns spread as panic leapt like a disease from car to car.

  And then people started opening their doors and running away from the sleepwalker. Running away from us, since we were the ones he had pinned. He slapped the glass again. I shrank back against Nathan, who put his arms around me and held me tight. We were both breathing hard, enough that the glass was starting to fog.

  Then someone outside the car screamed. I whipped around and saw that more sleepwalkers were emerging from the trees, and that these seemed to be falling into the same camp as Devi’s wife: they weren’t docile. They were violent. One of them had grabbed a woman by the hair and seemed to be trying to wrench her head off. Another was dragging a man by the leg back into the woods. I didn’t know what they were going to do with those people. I di
dn’t need to think about it very hard to know that I didn’t want to.

  The man slapped the glass again, harder this time, like he was gaining confidence from the fact that we were still there. I moaned. “What are we supposed to do?” I asked. I knew that Nathan didn’t have any answers. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that there was nowhere left for us to go: we could stay in the car with a sleepwalker trying to methodically slap his way through the glass, or we could run for cover, and risk being taken down by the sleepwalkers who were still emerging, locustlike, from the shelter of the trees.

  “I don’t know,” Nathan whispered. His eyes were on the sleepwalkers now working their way between the gridlocked cars, ignoring the man who was beating against the car. “How many of them are there?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m scared.” The man slammed his hand against the window again, even harder than before. I jumped, pressing myself against Nathan. Then I frowned, glaring at the man outside the car. What gave him the right to come here and terrorize us like this? What gave any of them the right? If Dr. Cale was telling the truth about these people, and they were just the implants taking over their hosts, why did they need to come and threaten us like this? I pushed myself forward, slamming my own hands against the glass. “You go away!” I shouted. “Leave us alone!”

  Much to my surprise, the man actually took a step backward, a flicker of what looked like surprise appearing in his otherwise empty eyes.

  I slapped the glass again. “Yeah, that’s it! Go away! Go bother somebody else!”

  “Sal, maybe you shouldn’t—”

  The man lunged at the car again. This time, he actually looked angry, and his hands were balled into fists when he slammed them against the window. Something inside the frame that joined the window to the car made an ominous cracking sound. I shrank back against Nathan, who put his arms around me without hesitation.

  “It was a good attempt,” he murmured. “I’m sorry I brought you out here.”

  “I said I wanted the answers,” I replied, matching my tone to his. The sleepwalker was still punching the window, and I was suddenly unsure about how long it would hold… or how much it would hurt once he got inside. “I was the one who got offered the chance to go to the broken doors, remember?”

  To my surprise, Nathan actually chuckled a little. It was a deeply resigned sound, but it was still a laugh. “She’s got us all doing it now.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Mom. She was always coming up with secret codes when I was little, and then she’d get me and Dad both using them like they were totally normal. Half the kids at school thought I was crazy. The other half just thought I had better cable channels.” He kissed the top of my head. “Love you, Sal.”

  “Love you, too.” I settled more firmly against him, watching as the sleepwalker punched the window again and again. There was nowhere we could go. Cars surrounded us on all sides, and trying to run would just mean meeting the fates of the drivers who had already been dragged into the woods. We had no weapons. We had nothing we could use to defend ourselves.

  We were going to die here. We finally had some of the answers that we’d been looking for, and we were going to die. The sound of drums was starting to echo in my ears again, but it was comforting this time, like it always was in my dreams. If I died, I would die to the sound of drums.

  The sleepwalker punched the window again. This time, he was rewarded for his efforts with a horrible crunching noise, and a cobweb pattern of cracks appeared where his fist had hit. There was a smear of blood on the glass; he had managed to split the skin on his knuckles, if he hadn’t actually broken the bones inside his hand. I couldn’t feel too bad for him, given the circumstances. He pulled back to hit the glass—

  —and stopped, looking almost perplexed as blood started running down his face from the hole in the middle of his forehead. Then he fell, dropping straight out of sight. I pushed away from Nathan, scrambling to look out my window. The sleepwalker was sprawled on the pavement outside the car with his eyes still open, clearly dead.

  “Sal?” demanded Nathan. “What do you see?”

  “Someone shot him.” I twisted around to blink at Nathan. “I’ve never seen someone get shot before. Are gunshots like lasers in space? There’s really no sound, so they add it for television?”

  “Sal—”

  I knew that I was calmer than I should have been: someone had just shot the man who was trying to batter his way into Nathan’s car. At the same time, I couldn’t think of what else to do. The drums were still pounding in my ears, and I was relieved that the sleepwalker was dead. I was a little sorry for him, but really, he’d been dead from the moment that the implant decided to take him over. It was the implant that I’d just seen die, not the man, and the implant had been trying to kill us.

  “I think this is what shock feels like,” I said, thoughtfully. “It’s a pity it didn’t kick in earlier. I think I would have been less afraid of dying if my whole body had been made of cotton balls and Novocain.” I turned away from Nathan again, looking at the bloody smears on the glass.

  “Come away from there.” Nathan’s voice was low, almost cajoling. I blinked, twisting to look at him again, this time in surprise. I hadn’t even realized when I moved.

  Something hit the top of the car. I jumped, making a sound that was somewhere between a squeak and a scream as I plastered myself against Nathan for the second time in almost as many minutes. He didn’t seem to mind. He put his arms around me, holding me fast; I could feel the shaking in his chest. He was as scared as I was.

  It was good not to be scared alone—and it wasn’t over yet. A moment later both Nathan and I screamed in earnest as Tansy’s upside-down head appeared in front of the windshield. One hand clutched the edge of the roof, while the other appeared next to her head, waving merrily. It might have been cute, if she hadn’t still been clutching the gun she’d used to shoot the sleepwalker. There was blood splattered on one of her cheeks. That damaged her potential cuteness even more.

  “I’m going to kill her,” muttered Nathan, arms still locked around me.

  Somehow the question just popped out: “Does it count as murder if your mom is right and Tansy’s actually a tapeworm?”

  Nathan didn’t have an answer for that.

  Tansy gave a little “roll down your window” motion with her gun hand and withdrew, disappearing again. The sound of her weight shifting atop the car made it clear that she hadn’t gone far.

  “What…” I asked.

  “I guess Mom didn’t think it was safe to send us out without a bodyguard.” Nathan let go of me as he leaned away from his window in order to roll it down. My window probably wouldn’t work anymore, given the amount of damage the fallen sleepwalker had managed to do to the glass before Tansy shot him.

  Speaking of Tansy, she stuck her head down again, this time so that she could talk through Nathan’s open window. She beamed at us, seeming completely comfortable in her inverted state. “Hi!” she chirped. “Are you two okay in there? Can I get you anything? Did you pee? Sometimes people pee when they see me shoot things right next to them. So I won’t be disappointed in you, you know. If you did.”

  “Neither one of us peed, thank you,” said Nathan stiffly. “Are you following us?”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Did Dr. Cale send you after us?”

  “Yes and no and maybe so,” said Tansy. “I’m here with the extraction team, but when the tracer showed that you were stuck in traffic inside the danger zone, Doctor C thought it might be a good idea for me to come and take a little peek at your situation. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “Tracer?” said Nathan.

  I felt suddenly tired, a thin coil of exhaustion winding itself through my chest. “It’s in the book,” I said. “She put a tracking device in the book because she knew that one of us would ask for it.”

  Tansy’s grin grew even wider. “Okay, wow, you’re way smarter than you look when you’re passe
d out and drooling on yourself. Doctor C just wanted to keep an eye on you guys, that’s all. You should feel super-flattered. It’s not like she has the time to go around bugging just anybody.”

  “She could have asked,” I said. My voice sounded weak, even to my own ears.

  “No, she couldn’t have,” said Tansy. “You would have told her ‘no,’ because you’re both being stupid and stubborn about admitting what’s really going on. And then you’d be stuck out here, with sleepwalkers trying to get into the car, and nobody would be coming to save you. Besides, the tracer also scrambles SymboGen bugs. They think that it’s normal cellular interference, if they’ve even noticed, but it means that no one’s listening in right now.” She frowned, taking in the looks on our faces. “You weren’t even thinking about that, were you? You people. How have you been the dominant species for so long? Sure, you’ve got sweet bodies with thumbs and shit, but it’s like you don’t have any sense of self-preservation.”

  “You’re the one hanging upside down from a car in a place you called ‘the danger zone,’” snapped Nathan. “I don’t think you get to lecture us about common sense.”

  “Don’t I?” In one smooth motion, Tansy swung down from the car, landing solidly on the flats of her feet with her knees bent to absorb the impact. She straightened, looking coldly down her nose at us. “I’m also the one with the gun, who came here with backup, and with a plan, and who didn’t start acting like everything was hunky-dory as soon as I drove away from the secret mad-science lair of mad-science… ness.” She paused. “That sentence sort of got away from me.”

  “That happens to you a lot,” said Nathan.

  “Don’t change the subject, meat-car,” said Tansy. “My point is valid: you didn’t have a plan, and I did. Also, I have a gun. That puts me in a superior bargaining position, no matter how you want to look at things.”