Parasite p-1 Read online

  “Do we need to pull over so you can calm down?” I asked the question as calmly as I could, but my hands were pressed against the dashboard so hard the skin on my fingers was bleached bloodless white. My stomach felt like it was turning backflips. The only thing stopping me from giving in to the urge to throw up was the knowledge that it probably wouldn’t improve her driving.

  “No! I’m fine.” She stabbed the search button with her index finger, sending the radio skipping to the next station.

  “—doctors are baffled by a spate of what appears to be a new form of viral sleepwalking. Five victims of this ‘sleeping sickness’ have already been admitted to Bay Area hospitals. While the experts insist there is no evidence that this illness is contagious, it seems fairly obvious that something must be causing it, as none of the known victims have any history of narcolepsy or somnambulism—that’s falling asleep without warning, and walking around while you’re sleeping, for those of us without a medical degree. There is no word yet on whether the Centers for Disease Control—”

  I leaned forward and turned the radio off. Joyce yelped.

  “I was listening to that!”

  “You were getting upset by that,” I corrected. “Let’s get home and talk to Dad. He’ll know if something is really going on, and you won’t wind up scaring yourself half to death before we fully understand the situation.”

  Joyce glared. I looked impassively back, trying not to twitch at the fact that she wasn’t paying enough attention to the road. Finally, as I expected, she relented.

  “I hate it when you’re reasonable,” she grumbled. “You should be freaking out.”

  “You’re freaking out enough for both of us,” I said. “I just want to know what I’m going to be freaking out about before I waste energy freaking out about the wrong things. Conservation of panic is important.”

  “Pretty sure we’re not having a panic shortage, Sal.”

  “I don’t care. You’re still not turning that back on until we’re home. If you kill us both because you’re too busy being upset at the radio to keep your eyes on the road, I’m never going to speak to you again.”

  Joyce glared again before turning and looking resolutely out at the road. I closed my eyes, pressing myself back in my seat, and tried not to think about the cars around us. We passed the rest of the drive that way. I relaxed when I felt the car take the familiar turn into our driveway, and opened my eyes when Joyce turned the engine off.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  “You should be,” I said, before I thought better of it.

  “What?” Joyce turned to me, eyes wide. “What did you say?”

  “You know I’m not okay with that sort of stuff.”

  “I said I was sorry! Don’t freak out on me.”

  Somehow, her sheer wounded indignation was the final straw. “Believe me, I’m not freaking out. If I start freaking out, you’ll have to sedate me to get me to stop,” I snapped, and opened the door, barely remembering to undo my seat belt before I stormed away. Joyce could carry her own damn bags. I was done being the helpful big sister for the day.

  Mom and Dad were in the living room. They both looked up at the sound of the front door slamming, and for a moment, I saw that flicker of wary unhappiness that I thought of as the tracks of the old Sally—the one whose moods apparently made my panic attacks look like a fair trade in terms of “daughter we can live with.”

  “Sal?” said Mom carefully, standing. “Honey, are you okay?”

  Somehow, making her look at me like that just made the day worse. I shook my head and walked over to embrace her, pressing my face into her shoulder. Alarmed, she closed her arms around me.

  “Honey, where’s Joyce? Was there an accident?”

  I shook my head, not lifting it from her shoulder. I heard Dad stand and walk over to us. He didn’t say anything. That was probably for the best. At the moment, I wouldn’t have been able to answer him.

  The door banged open again as Joyce came stomping in, dropping her bags with a series of rustles and thuds before she demanded, “Turn on the news!”

  “Joyce, what’s going on?” asked Mom. “Why is your sister so upset?”

  “There were these people at the mall, I think they were sick.” I lifted my head to see Joyce grabbing the remote off the coffee table. She clicked the TV on, flipping channels until she landed on CNN. They were airing a story about reality-star salaries. She snarled. “Why aren’t they saying anything? I’m going to my room. Maybe the Internet will have a clue.” She whirled and went stomping out of the room. Her bedroom door slammed a few seconds later.

  I pulled away from Mom. “So what was that you were saying last week, about how I used to be the dramatic one? Can we have a re-vote on that title?”

  “I think that might be a good idea.” Mom looked down the hall toward Joyce’s room. “What happened? Did you two have a fight?”

  “If they’d had a fight bad enough that Joyce would be looking for it on CNN, I think we’d be down a daughter, Gail,” said my father reasonably. He was usually the reasonable one. Mom was a lot more like Joyce, only older and slightly less inclined to drag me to the mall when I didn’t want to go. “What happened, Sal?”

  I sighed. “I wanted to talk to you about this anyway. See, there was this little girl…”

  It didn’t take me long to explain what we’d seen at the mall. Mom and Dad listened without comment until I was done. I shrugged, spreading my hands. “That’s everything. It was weird, and sort of scary, but it really upset Joyce. The way she was driving scared the hell out of me, and it was like she didn’t even care. All she wanted to do was get home and find out what was going on. We were supposed to talk to you, but she didn’t even wait. I don’t get it.”

  “She was probably worried about a biochemical attack on the mall,” said my father.

  I blinked. Joyce had mentioned something in the air vents…“Dad? Is there something I should know?”

  My father—Colonel Alfred Mitchell, United States Army, former director at USAMRIID and current director-slash-lab manager of their San Francisco research center, which is how my entire family wound up with the earliest specialized versions of the SymboGen implant—looked at me for a long moment without saying anything. Finally, he sighed, and said, “We didn’t want to worry you.”

  “You know, that’s one of the most worrying things anyone ever says.”

  “I know.” He paused before saying, “There have been a few isolated events recently. Unique pathogens showing up in inhabited areas. Nothing we can solidly say points to terrorist activity, but…”

  “Enough that when we see people sleepwalking in broad daylight, you jump to bad conclusions,” I said. “How long have you known about this?” I paused, and added, “How long has Joyce known?”

  “Sal—”

  “Didn’t you think this might be something I’d want to know about, too?”

  “It’s not public knowledge, and given your current condition, it seemed best not to upset you,” Dad said.

  I stared at him. “It’s been six years since the accident. How long does this get to be my ‘current condition’ before it becomes just the way I am? I mean, really, I’d like to know, since I guess I’m going to have to wait until we hit that day before you’re going to start treating me like an adult, instead of like a child you have to protect.”

  “Sal, that isn’t fair,” said Mom.

  “I didn’t mean your memory loss, Sal,” said my father. I frowned. He shook his head. “I meant SymboGen.”

  Understanding came suddenly. It did not come kindly. “You think SymboGen is involved in this?”

  “Honey, I don’t know what I think. What I do know is that it’s a big, scary world out there, and I can’t protect you from it.” He looked toward Joyce’s room. “I need to go check on your sister.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You do that.”

  Mom took my arm as Dad walked down the hall. “Let’s go make some tea.”<
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  I thought about shaking off her hand, but experience told me that would be a bad idea. If I started acting like a child, she’d just work harder to treat me like one. “I’m not so delicate that you have to hide things from me,” I said.

  “I know. It’s just your father’s way. You were used to it before… before.” She stumbled a little, sidestepping the issue of my memory loss with her usual awkwardness. Even after six years, it hadn’t gotten any easier. “He needs to be sure of the facts before he really starts frightening people.”

  “He told Joyce.”

  “Joyce works in his lab. I’m not sure he could avoid telling her.”

  “She’s just an intern.”

  “Even interns have to understand what they’re doing.” Mom let go of my arm, pushing me gently toward the kitchen table. I sat down. “I’m pretty sure we have some rosemary shortbread left over from last night. It’s always better on the second day, don’t you think?”

  That was her way of saying that the conversation was over. I wasn’t quite ready to let it go. “Mom, should I be scared right now?”

  “I don’t think it would do any good, and that means it’s not worth wasting the energy.” Mom got down the cookie jar and a tin of loose-leaf tea. “Now why don’t you tell me how the trip to the mall went, up until those people showed up?”

  I sighed. There was no way I was getting anything else out of her. “Well, first Joyce dragged me through every shoe store in the place…” I began.

  Reciting the minutiae of our trip to the mall took very little of my attention. Mom fixed tea, and I kept talking. I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on that little girl’s face, the dead-eyed blankness that still projected a type of unwavering determination, like all that mattered in the world was getting to that door. The man had looked the same way, and they’d known each other through the fog.

  Whatever was going on, it was bigger than Dad was admitting, maybe big enough to justify Joyce’s panic. It was definitely a hell of a lot more important than shoe stores and shopping. Mom put the shortbread in front of me, and the summer afternoon ticked inexorably by, like so many others before it, like so many more that hadn’t arrived yet.

  I don’t remember what we talked about. None of it mattered, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the little girl.

  It wasn’t until I went to bed that night that I realized I’d been hearing the drums all day.

  -

  …in biotech news, a patent for a lab-created organism has been filed by genetic research leader SymboGen. The patented organism, dubbed “Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis,” is a form of modified tapeworm hybrid. The representatives from SymboGen, led by Dr. Steven Banks, have successfully demonstrated that this hybrid cannot arise in nature, and more, that the modifications to its genome have resulted in several medically and scientifically useful changes to the overall organism.

  Rumors that SymboGen is already petitioning the FDA for permission to begin human testing of the D. symbogenesis organism have yet to be confirmed. This would represent a dramatic escalation of the normal timeline for research of this type. Sources inside the company say…

  —FROM THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PARASITOLOGY, PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 2015.

  San Bruno officials have as yet made no statement relating to the strange events at the downtown San Bruno Mall, although one mall employee has reported a strange smell in the area of the second-floor public restrooms. Sources indicate that a gas leak of some kind may have triggered the strange behavior in the five individuals affected by what locals have begun calling “the Sleeping Sickness.”

  All five of the victims of this strange outbreak have been hospitalized, and are being held in quarantine pending further updates on their condition…

  —FROM THE CONTRA COSTA TIMES, AUGUST 19, 2027.

  Chapter 4

  AUGUST 2027

  The morning dawned bright, early, and awkward. Joyce was sullen and refused to talk during breakfast; Mom was already gone by the time I got up. I had an e-mail from Nathan apologizing for not calling me the night before; there had been a sudden surge of patients at the ER, bad enough that it overwhelmed the normal doctors and caused them to call as many specialists as they could lure out of their labs. As a staff parasitologist, Nathan was accustomed to doing ER rounds—there were medical conditions that could be alleviated by making adjustments to the patient’s SymboGen implant, and others that could kill the implants, requiring them to be extracted immediately, before decomposition could set in. There were very few medical emergencies that could be improved by having two and a half pounds of dead tapeworm decaying in the patient’s gut.

  I might have thought that the influx of patients was somehow related to what Joyce and I saw at the mall, but he was using the code words that meant “accident.” I didn’t like to think about car crashes, and so he avoided discussing them with me in any specific terms. He invited me to come to the hospital for lunch. Since I didn’t have to be at the shelter that day, I wrote back saying I’d be there. Anything to get out of the house.

  Dad and Joyce were leaving for work at ten: unusually late, but a concession they were sometimes able to make when I needed a ride. They dropped me off six blocks from the hospital, at a little florist’s shop I’d discovered during my outpatient physical therapy. The shop always had terrible roses. They made up for it by having some of the most beautiful orchids I’d ever seen—but that wasn’t their specialty: McNally’s Flowers specialized in carnivorous plants.

  The bell over the door rang as I stepped into the warm, moist confines of the shop. There was no one in sight. “Hello?” I called. The store’s orange tabby came strolling out from a rack of vases, his tail held in a high, relaxed position. I knelt to offer him my hand. “Hey, Tumbleweeds. How are you today? Where are your people?”

  Tumbleweeds deigned to walk over and sniff my fingers before butting his head against the back of my hand. Then he turned and walked away again, having accomplished his duty as store greeter.

  “You’re lucky,” said a voice. I lifted my head. The owner, Marya, was standing near the cooler where she kept the substandard but seemingly obligatory roses. She was a tall, solid woman with long black hair and a narrow waist that she kept cinched in a wide leather belt at all times. I sometimes found myself wondering whether she would explode if the belt was removed.

  She kept smiling as she strolled toward the front of the store, adding, “Tumbles has been standoffish lately. People come in, and he snubs them. He even hissed at a poor woman yesterday. She’d come in to buy flowers for her husband, and here’s my cat, hissing at her.”

  “Did you sell her flowers anyway?” I asked, straightening up.

  “Four dozen of the long-stemmed red roses.” Marya clucked her tongue. “I tried to steer her toward something worth giving to a person who doesn’t feel his best—who wants my roses when they’re already unwell?—but eh, can’t steer a person who won’t be steered, now, can we? She seemed happy enough.”

  I laughed. “You can’t save everyone,” I said.

  “No, I suppose I can’t,” Marya mildly agreed. “What can I get for you today? Something sweet and covered in pretty blossoms?”

  “I was hoping you had some new sundews, actually,” I said. “Nathan had a hard night last night. I wanted to bring him something pretty.”

  “Ah! A discerning customer is the joy of a retailer’s heart.” Marya waved for me to follow her to the back of the store, where another glass door stood between the common flowers and the more exotic climate-controlled carnivorous plants. She held the door open for me, waiting until I was past her before closing it tight and flicking on the overhead lights. “Browse as you like, I’ve nothing better to do.”

  Marya’s attitude wasn’t as odd as it seemed, despite the fact that she was the only one currently working. The bell over the door would ring if anybody else came in, and her true joy was selling her carnivorous babies. Having someone who actually wanted to look at sundews was wo
rth any number of missed opportunities to sell bad roses to tourists.

  “I have some gorgeous King Sundews,” she said, guiding me toward one of the trays of plants resting under their heat lamps, sticky petals spread toward the absent sun. The largest of the King Sundews was bigger than my palm, with beads of delicate pink “dew” clinging to the cilia of its long, green and orange fronds. “They just came in day before yesterday; you’re the first one who’s come in to see them.”

  From her proprietary tone, I could tell what she wanted to hear, and I was happy to give it to her: “Oh, Marya, they’re gorgeous,” I breathed, crouching down to study the sundews with a careful eye. They were no less impressive up close. “What are the care notes?”

  “Dormancy isn’t required, but it’s a good idea if you want your King to flower; they can handle pretty good-sized prey, even up to moths and large beetles. You still want to be careful with feeding, don’t feed live if you can avoid it—just don’t worry too much if your King snatches a few snacks without your approval. They actually wrap their leaves around the things that they’re digesting. Hard to grow, intermediate to care for.” Marya smiled slyly. “Your boy would love one.”

  “You’re probably right.” I straightened. “How much are they?”

  “For you, my darling, thirty dollars even, and you bring me a picture next time you come in, let me see how the new beauty is rooting into the office.”

  “You’ve got a deal.” I looked over the tray again before pointing to a sundew near the back. “I’ll take that one.”

  “A wonderful selection. Come now, you sweet thing, time to move to a new home…” She cooed to the sundew as she plucked its pot from the tray, mixing endearments in English and Ukrainian. I smothered a smile, following her out of the room.

  Marya was a botanist before she moved to the United States. She probably could have continued working in the field, but instead, she’d chosen to do what she loved best: spend all her time with plants, and occasionally foist them off on people who promised to keep them alive. The cut flowers and cheap stuffed toys with “Get Well Soon” slogans were a sideline, another way of meeting expectations.