Chimera Read online

  To my surprise, Paul’s expression faded slowly into one of pure pity. Carrie buried her face deeper into his shoulder, like she was trying to keep herself from needing to face me. “You mean… you don’t know about Pleasanton?”

  “I’ve heard the Pleasanton facility mentioned a few times. I understand not wanting to be locked up, but the sleepwalkers are dangerous. Isn’t it a good thing not to have them in the same place?” The sleepwalkers were even dangerous to me. I had scars on one wrist, and a whole lot of nightmares, from my encounters with them.

  My encounters with the other chimera—Sherman in particular—had left me with even more nightmares. Sherman thought he knew what was best for me, and didn’t see a need to let me have a vote. He had performed surgery on me without my consent, removing samples of my core. He could have killed me. He hadn’t hesitated. So I guess species wasn’t as big a deal as I tried to make it out to be.

  “The Pleasanton ‘facility,’ as you put it, doesn’t exist. We’re going to an encampment. Do you understand the difference?”

  I did, a bit. A facility was large and clean and filled with chrome surfaces and clean glass windows. SymboGen was a facility. Even the candy factory that had served as Dr. Cale’s temporary home was a facility, albeit a more sugar-soaked one than was necessarily normal. An encampment… I wasn’t completely sure what that was, but it sounded bad. “Not really,” I admitted.

  “They fenced off half the neighborhoods in the city,” said Carrie, rolling her face slowly toward me, so that she could watch me as she spoke. She was crying, and her tears drew mascara trails down her cheeks, like she was trying to outline her own bones. “Then they went in and cleaned the sleepwalkers out. House by house. I know a woman who managed to escape, before they reinforced the fences. She said that the Army men removed the bodies, but they didn’t really make any effort to clean up the bloodstains. They’re putting people in houses that still have bloodstains on the walls.”

  “Oh,” I said blankly. I didn’t share the normal human aversion for the bodily secretions of others. All living things were just a combination of fluid and rigid structures. Everything bled; everything defecated. I didn’t want to play in sewage, and I was as sensitive to foul smells as anyone with a human olfactory system, but blood generally dried dark and mostly scentless. It shouldn’t have been an issue. Not in a rational world.

  But humans didn’t live in a rational world, did they? Not really. I was human enough not to live in a rational world any more than they did. I just sometimes faked it a little better, because I’d been faking it for my entire life.

  Carrie appeared to take my confusion for concern, because she said, “They swear everything’s been cleaned to within a ‘reasonable standard,’ and that no one’s going to get sick from being in those houses, but it’s not the houses that people need to worry about. It’s the other people!”

  “They’re sleeping upwards of twelve adults to a single-family home. The only way you get more space is if you have children or disabled adults: Then you’ll be put in private apartments in what used to be the bad part of town,” said Paul grimly.

  “Pleasanton has a bad part of town?” The question sounded incredibly naive. I still wanted to know the answer. Pleasanton was one of those places that had always struck me as being as innocuous as its name: sleepy and suburban and filled with malls and car dealerships and families, not close enough to San Francisco to really be subjected to population crush, not far enough away to be suffering from a bad economy. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect place to live, but it had always looked that way from a distance.

  “The slightly less good part of town,” amended Paul. “It’s the bad part of town now.”

  “Everything is the bad part of town now,” said Carrie.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Aren’t you safer there, with people who you know aren’t infected?”

  “Those things will just kill you,” said Paul. “It’s an awful way to die, but that’s all that happens. You change or you die. Humans are worse. Humans are terrifying.”

  “Humans will hurt you because they want what you have, not because it’s their instinct,” said Carrie. “We should have stayed hidden. We should have stayed safe. We knew how to survive where we were. Here… here, we don’t know anything.” She buried her face in Paul’s shoulder again, and none of us said anything. It felt like there was nothing left for us to say.

  Break the mirror; it tells lies.

  Learn to live in your disguise.

  Everything is changing now, it’s too late to go back.

  Caterpillar child of mine,

  This was always life’s design,

  Here at last you’ll find the things you can’t afford to lack.

  The broken doors are ready, you are very nearly home.

  My darling child, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.

  —FROM DON’T GO OUT ALONE, BY SIMONE KIMBERLEY, PUBLISHED 2006 BY LIGHTHOUSE PRESS. CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT.

  I don’t know why I keep pretending this book is going to be published someday. “Dr. Cale, the woman who betrayed the human race, tells all in her explosive memoir.” That’s not exactly something that’s going to fly off store shelves: not unless we’re talking about 300 pages of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” over and over again, and as I discussed earlier in this volume, I am not sorry. I’ve never been sorry. I’ve said it—Lord, have I said it—but I’ve never meant it. That just isn’t how I’m made. When my parents combined the genetic material that would become Surrey Kim, they included genes for brilliance, for ambition, for curiosity… but they forgot to include the genes that would have taught me regret. What’s done is done. We live with it, and we move on.

  What’s done is done. I have learned to live with it. Now is the time when we move on, and when we ask the world, “Well? What’s next?” Because there has to be a form of equilibrium somewhere on the horizon: There has to be at point at which the systems currently in motion find a way to rest. There has to be.

  —FROM CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.

  Chapter 2

  NOVEMBER 2027

  We stopped three times during our drive. Each time, the back of the truck was pulled open by a group of grim-faced men in uniform, who would then proceed to throw more passengers into the vehicle with as much compassion as the people at the animal shelter where I used to work showed to the sacks of dog food. They added one passenger at our first stop; three at our second; and finally seven people at our third, including a woman who was wrapped almost completely around a toddler, limbs rigid, like she was forcing her body to act as a human cage. Of the eleven people who were thrown into the truck, only the toddler hadn’t been hit with a Taser. She sat on the bench, crying huge, silent tears while the rest of us helped her mother uncurl and shake herself back into the moment.

  None of the people who had been thrown in with us shared my slow recovery from the shock. They weren’t happy—I don’t think anyone could be happy about getting zapped with that much raw voltage—but they sat up quickly, getting their bearings back. One of the men threw up in the corner of the truck before slinking guiltily back to sit beside the woman and the toddler. Most of them were crying. No one looked happy to be there.

  One by one, the newcomers revealed how they’d been caught. Looting a supermarket that still had an active alarm system. Running from a pack of sleepwalkers in a public park. Trying to find a CVS that had children’s cold medicine on the shelves. That last was the young woman with the toddler. She glanced guiltily at the child as she spoke, as if she was questioning the wisdom of trading freedom for cold medication.

  None of them had any possessions beyond the clothes on their backs, not even the little girl, which seemed odd to me. When I saw children that age, they almost always seemed to have a doll or a toy truck or stuffed bear. This little girl had nothing, and she clung to the woman she was with like she was afraid that even this last scrap of c
omfort would be taken away from her.

  “No one’s managed to escape in weeks,” moaned one of the men, closing his eyes as he slumped against the wall of the truck. “They’ve shored up the fences and increased the patrols. There’s no way anyone is getting out of there once they go in.”

  “So we escape from the quarantine facility,” said Paul stoutly. “I’m sure it’s possible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible,” said the first man. “Some lady escaped from the quarantine facility months ago, and killed almost a dozen men getting to the exit. They have instructions at the quarantine facility now. They start with ‘shoot,’ and they end with ‘to kill.’”

  I managed not to squirm, even though I knew I was probably the woman he was talking about. I had been held in a quarantine facility the first time USAMRIID had captured me. Sherman had somehow managed to infiltrate the team that transported me to the facility, and hadn’t even waited a day before he’d come for me. He’d come with a full team. One of them, Ronnie, had been dealing with some anger issues. He was the one who had killed those soldiers. Not me, even though they’d died so that Sherman could have me all to himself.

  At the time, I’d been grateful for the rescue. I’d even stayed grateful once I was aware of the lives it had cost—at least for a while. Sherman had a way of stomping the gratitude out of people.

  It wasn’t a surprise that Sherman had been able to infiltrate USAMRIID: In some ways, it would have been more of a surprise if he hadn’t. Sherman Lewis was a man with a talent for getting into places where he wasn’t needed, wanted, or allowed to be. He’d started when he got into the skull of the body he inhabited. Like me, Sherman was a chimera. Unlike me, he couldn’t access the hot warm dark, and he hadn’t been able to take his body unassisted; he had been Dr. Cale’s second surgical protégé, following on the heels of my eldest brother and her first successful chimera, Adam. Sherman had been intended to show her that the process was stable and dependable and could be repeated. He’d shown all those things.

  He’d also been the first one to show her that her children could be—would be—disloyal. He’d left her lab immediately after Sally Mitchell’s accident and had been waiting for me at SymboGen when my head finally cleared. I’d known Sherman for literally years before I’d become aware of my own nature. He’d been my friend and my guide through a world that was bigger and more complicated than it had any right to be. I’d always felt safe in his presence, like Sherman of all people would always understand what I was dealing with, and better, like he would be able to explain it all to me. He got me in a way that very few people ever could. Finding out the real reasons why had been, in some ways, a greater betrayal than finding out that I wasn’t human. He’d known all along that I was his sister in petri dish and production line, and he’d never said a word. Not until it was profitable for him.

  Sherman was playing a very long game, and the necessary conditions for victory involved the destruction of mankind and the replacement of their rule with his own. Dr. Cale wasn’t going to let him do that. Neither, if I could help it, was I.

  The conversation in the truck was continuing, growing more urgent by the minute. “What about the transfer point?” demanded the woman with the toddler. “They have to move us from the truck to the quarantine, right? We can run then. We can just break away and run.”

  “Bang fucking bang, Gloria,” said one of the men she’d been captured with.

  She shot him a poisonous glare. “Not in front of the kid,” she snapped.

  The little girl wasn’t originally hers, then. That explained the differences in their appearance—the child was at least three shades darker than the woman, which could have been a matter of paternity, adoption, or recessive genes, but was more likely, under the circumstances, to mean the woman was taking care of a child whose parents had been killed. Or who had started killing. SymboGen implants were cleared for all humans, all ages, genders, and weights. There was a good chance the little girl had an implant. I watched her across the truck, looking for signs that her eyes were coming unfocused or going cold. I wished I had a dog. They could accurately predict when someone was about to go sleepwalker—something that neither humans nor chimera could do.

  USAMRIID wasn’t using dogs. I wondered why not, and whether they had even realized how useful dogs could be when it came to catching the early stages of a tapeworm takeover of their host body. I decided just as quickly that I wasn’t going to tell them. If they were really reacting to all outbreaks and escape attempts with deadly force, regardless of the situation, I didn’t want to give them any more ammunition than I absolutely had to. Dogs could be used to capture more humans, and ferret out more sleepwalkers who weren’t hurting anyone. And I didn’t trust them to take care of their dogs. I wasn’t going to be responsible for opening a new avenue of animal abuse.

  And none of that mattered. They had me now. One way or another, I was going to wind up giving them a lot of ammunition. The only question was whether I was going to answer their questions honestly, giving them ammunition that could actually be used, or whether I was going to start lying to them.

  “She doesn’t care if I cuss,” said the man. “Her own mom tried to chew her face off and left her stuck with the babysitter. A few swear words aren’t going to fuck up her world any worse than it already is.”

  The little girl moaned and buried her face against the woman’s—Gloria’s—shoulder. It was a human sound, filled with confusion and pain, rather than the hollow hunger of the sleepwalkers. Most of the people around us still flinched, and more than a few of them glared at the man, like he was solely responsible for their growing sensitivity to such things.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said, settling against the truck wall. “The world is fucked up. We did that. We broke it because we were too lazy to take our allergy meds and monitor our own health. All I’m doing is trying to stay alive in the pieces that remain.”

  “Fuck you,” said Carrie dully.

  “Please,” said Gloria. “Please, not in front of the kid. Please.”

  Her quiet plea was enough to silence the others. The truck drove on, and we rode in silence, each of us sinking down into the pits of our own thoughts. The drums hammered in my ears, providing me with some small comfort. I only wished that I could believe the humans around me had something similar. But they didn’t, and I didn’t have any way to help them, and so we just rode on.

  I don’t know how long the drive took. There were no clocks in the truck, and if anyone had a cell phone that was still keeping time, they weren’t pulling it out. The cell networks were down. The phones were glorified wristwatches now. That didn’t mean the soldiers who’d sedated my fellow passengers would have let them keep their things. The absence of the little girl’s expected security object was the best indicator I could find that anything people had been carrying had been cast aside. Less to sterilize, I guess.

  Our first sign that things were about to change came when the truck screeched to a sudden stop, sending some of the passengers rocking forward while others gripped the bench seats and stayed exactly where they were.

  “Are we there?” whispered Carrie. “Are we at the quarantine?”

  Paul, who held her, said nothing.

  There was a clattering from the back of the truck, near the doors. All of us, from the oldest to the youngest, pulled instinctively away, pushing ourselves together in our need to escape from that terribly mundane sound. Then the doors swung open, and what looked like an entire platoon of soldiers was standing there. Some held guns that seemed too big for their arms. Others held cattle prods, their active ends sparking and crackling in the evening air.

  The sun was almost down. Or maybe it was almost up: this could just as easily be morning. I realized I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious after Colonel Mitchell had me electrocuted. Maybe I’d lost hours. Maybe I’d lost days.

  And maybe these men were here to take even more away from me. Most of them looked young, their fa
ces gaunt and their eyes haunted with specters I couldn’t even imagine. All of them looked grim, like they had given up hope of anything but this world, this place and time.

  “Everyone out of the truck,” commanded one of the men. His voice broke in the middle of the sentence. Based on that and the acne that was scrawled red and raw across his face, he was barely out of his teens, going through a delayed and possibly painful puberty. I hadn’t even realized it was possible to enlist that young… and maybe it wasn’t. There were always going to be people willing to trade a place in a cage for a gun and somebody they could point it at.

  No one moved.

  Another soldier stepped forward. This one was carrying a cattle prod. The sight of it made us all shrink back just a little bit farther. “My name is Sergeant Hinton. Will Sally Mitchell please come with me?”

  No one moved.

  Looking annoyed now, Sergeant Hinton said, “Sally Mitchell, we know you are present in this vehicle. We have confirmed your name on the manifest. If you do not present yourself, we will be forced to take steps to subdue the entire area before locating you. You won’t enjoy that. I won’t enjoy that. Some of my men may enjoy that. I’d rather not know. So if Sally Mitchell would please get her damn ass up and come out, of her own free fucking will, I would very much appreciate it.”

  Those cattle prods seemed enormous. They loomed in my field of vision like the answer to a question I had neither asked nor particularly wanted to have answered. Slowly, I pushed myself off the bench seat and walked on shaking legs to the mouth of the truck. The muzzles of the guns and the sparking ends of the cattle prods tracked me with every step I took. The people who had been my fellow passengers until only a few moments before—travelers on the same terrible journey that I was involuntarily taking—recoiled as I passed them, eyeing me with all the suspicion they had previously reserved for the men with the guns.