Chimera Read online

  The body is currently undergoing sectioning and staining for a more thorough examination. More information as it becomes available.

  —FROM THE PRIVATE NOTES OF DR. STEVEN BANKS, DECEMBER 11, 2027

  Chapter 3

  DECEMBER 2027

  Someone was screaming on the street outside my window. They had been screaming for more than an hour, and no one inside the house had been able to work up the courage to go out and try to make them stop. The last time one of us had gone out to make someone stop screaming while people were trying to sleep, it had ended in gunfire, and we’d suddenly found ourselves with more room in the house. That should have seemed like a gift—there were eighteen of us crammed into a three-bedroom home that had been designed for a single nuclear family, not a jumbled alliance of refugees—but instead, it had come with a whole new dose of fear, resentment, and anger, all mingled with our grief. USAMRIID didn’t allow any space to go unused for very long; their unofficial motto here in the quarantine facility was “Waste not, want not,” and there were always people looking to change housing. But the sort of people who needed to approach strangers to find a place to live were generally not the sort of people any of us wanted to share a home with.

  It was possible to get drugs inside the quarantine zone. USAMRIID’s soldiers thought they’d cleaned the place out, but people were clever about where they hid things, and the junkies and hustlers were forever finding joints taped to the back of toilet tanks or tabs of Ecstasy hidden in bottles of aspirin. I guess where there’s a need, there’s a way. I tried not to judge, but we’d already had two people removed from our block due to overdose after the need to escape overrode whatever sense of self-preservation that they might have once possessed.

  Getting into the quarantine zone required no qualifications beyond “alive” and “not infected with a SymboGen implant”—and I was living proof that the second qualification could be gotten around, if you knew the right people and were disturbed enough to think this was a good place to be. It wasn’t an entirely bad place. There were people like Paul and Carrie. I’d liked them when I met them on the truck, and after living with them for a week and a half, I trusted them as much as I was capable of trusting outside of Dr. Cale’s lab. But there were also people like John, who’d been squatting in the house when USAMRIID dropped us off and told us that this was our home now. He’d tried to do… things… to several of the women who were living with us, until Paul threatened to stab him. He’d been brave when faced with unarmed women. He wasn’t so brave when up against Paul, who was a foot taller and thirty pounds heavier. John had run, vanishing into the fenced-off streets of Pleasanton.

  There were good people in the quarantine zone, but they were in the minority. There were killers in here. There were thieves. There were people whose minds had snapped under the pressure of what was happening to the world, dropping them into endless spirals of panic and despair. They needed professional help, therapy, and oversight, but what they got was a quarter or less of a bedroom in someone else’s home, with a bunch of strangers sleeping around them and claiming to be friends. It was no wonder that some people started screaming and never stopped.

  It was more of a wonder that the rest of us were so quiet.

  Something smashed outside. The screaming finally stopped. I resisted the urge to move to the window and look out. Having a window wasn’t a privilege. It was a burden at best, and a punishment at worst. The USAMRIID teams that had prepared this area for us had taken down all the curtains and blinds in open houses, citing the need to have a clean line of sight if something happened—and we all understood that “something” was code for “a sleepwalker outbreak.” The people who slept in windowless rooms, or on the other side of rooms like mine, could hang blankets and give themselves the illusion of privacy. Not me. I got the pleasure of sharing my life with anyone who wanted to stand on the opposite sidewalk and look up, and when things went wrong, I was one of the people who were expected to man the window and keep everyone else up-to-date. The only good thing about it was airflow, but most days, none of us were brave enough to open the windows. We didn’t want to attract attention.

  Inside the Pleasanton quarantine facility, attracting attention from the all-too-human monsters surrounding us was death. Maybe not immediately, maybe not even overnight, but soon enough that none of us were willing to take the risk.

  There was a sound behind me. I turned to find Carrie standing in the doorway, twisting a dishrag in her hands like it had done something to personally offend her. She had lost weight since arriving in Pleasanton, and her hair was growing out, revealing brown roots under the artificial green of her hair. It was a small thing, but it seemed indicative of the tragedy unfolding around us. People were going to bed hungry and afraid; the water ran red with rust sometimes, like we were expected to bathe ourselves in blood; the government that was supposed to protect us had turned against us, just like the genetically engineered tapeworms that were supposed to protect humanity had turned against their creators; and Carrie couldn’t re-dye her hair.

  Maybe that was the most human thing about me. Even in the depths of tragedy, I could find the smallest things to seize upon.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Carrie shook her head. The motion was tight and controlled, designed to make her look as inoffensive as possible. She had started shaking her head like that sometime in the past week, and I didn’t even think she knew that she was doing it. It was just another small piece of protective coloration, and unless she held to it religiously, she wasn’t going to survive in here. None of us were.

  “Paul hasn’t come back yet.”

  I blinked at her for a moment, absorbing the meaning behind her words. They were so simple, with no room for ambiguity, no hidden meanings or concealed intent. Here, in this glorified cage, I had finally met people who spoke like parasites: quick and brief and uncomplicated. I could have thrived in an environment like this one, if it hadn’t come with such a terrible cost.

  “Oh,” I said finally.

  We all took turns leaving the house and going out into the streets to scavenge for the things we needed. There were food trucks twice a day, and USAMRIID doctors who came around to dispense medicines and check on the sick or wounded, but they didn’t provide many of the basic necessities of life, considering them “frivolous” or otherwise low-priority. Sanitary supplies for the women. Toys for the children. Condoms and birth control for the people who had depended on their implants for contraception, and who couldn’t fight the primate urge to seek comfort in the arms of their own species. I had walked in on Paul and Carrie several times, some by accident, others out of sheer curiosity. I had never seen people having sex before. When I slept with Nathan, I was always too much in the moment to observe. In those moments, I was a mammal like any other, and my origins didn’t matter in the least.

  They fucked with their eyes closed and tears running down their cheeks, and they clung to each other like the world was ending. Paul had opened his eyes once and seen me standing there, watching them. He hadn’t said anything. He’d just looked at me, sorrow and understanding in his eyes, until I’d been forced to turn away.

  I hadn’t walked in on them since then.

  “What time did he leave?”

  “Just after breakfast,” said Carrie. “Gloria’s little girl was crying again. He thought he’d seen some Otter Pops in one of the convenience stores. Most adults won’t eat them—they don’t register as food—and he said he’d try to pick them up while he was out. That was hours ago.”

  The little girl didn’t have a name. The woman who had found her, Gloria, had tried name after name on the child, looking for something she would respond to. The rest of us had done the same, dredging up names from our past that we thought were pretty, but that weren’t attached to losses so bright and recent that hearing those names over and over again would hurt. The child had refused them all. Somewhere out there was her real name, and until we found it, she wasn’t
going to let us call her anything. She still treated Gloria as her primary caretaker. The rest of us were acceptable substitutes, when necessary.

  I’d never spent much time around human children before. Puppies and kittens, yes; infants and toddlers, no. It was refreshingly similar, and confoundingly different at the same time. We all catered to her every whim. She was our tiny queen, and if she had wanted Otter Pops—whatever those were—then of course Paul would have volunteered to get them for her.

  “Oh,” I said again. Then, with a slow, almost morbid dread gathering in my stomach, I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

  Carrie just looked at me for a moment, and her expression was so oddly similar to the one Paul had worn when I watched them making love that it was all I could do not to turn my face away, cheeks burning with conditioned shame. I didn’t want to be as human as I was. The people who had created me had made sure I didn’t have a choice.

  “The soldiers treat you different because of who you are,” she said finally. “You try to pretend they don’t, and we try to let you, because we have to live with you. Things are hard enough here without us being at war against ourselves. But they won’t shoot you if they find you in the wrong part of the camp. They might even give you a ride home.”

  I didn’t say anything. She was telling the truth: There was nothing I could do to change that. The fact that they would kick the living crap out of me before giving me a ride really didn’t matter.

  “Please, Sal. I don’t know what your deal is, and right now, I don’t care. I just want Paul back.”

  “You could go yourself.” The words were cruel before they were spoken, and they were crueler when they hung in the air between us, impossible to take back or ignore.

  “I could,” Carrie agreed. “But I wouldn’t make it three streets before something happened, and you know it. The patrols will come to your defense. I’ve seen it.”

  She was right. Colonel Mitchell was happy to keep me with the general population for now—pacifying his wife and reminding me of my place at the same time, until I was willing to be a good little girl and play by his rules—but he wasn’t going to let me get killed. Not while there was still a chance, however small, that I could be used to call Joyce back from the void where she existed now. So he set extra patrols on the streets around the house that had been assigned to me, and he made sure people were there to monitor my activities on the rare occasions when I dared to venture outside. I was probably the safest person in the Pleasanton quarantine zone, and I didn’t want it. I didn’t want the responsibility that was implied by Carrie’s face, or the burdens of being able to walk without fear of my fellow inmates. I didn’t want to be afraid of the soldiers who were supposedly protecting me. I didn’t want any of this.

  And what I wanted didn’t matter. Maybe it never had. “We could go together,” I said, one last desperate bid for something other than what she was asking me to do. I realized resentfully that she had never actually asked. She hadn’t needed to. All she’d needed to do was stand there and look at me, and allow my guilt to fill in the rest.

  “I don’t want to leave the house,” said Carrie. Her voice was meek, especially compared to that of the angry, anxious girl who had arrived here with me. Bit by bit, this place was wearing her away, reducing her to the bones of herself. I wondered if she liked who she saw when she looked in the mirror. “Paul might come back. I should be here when he comes back. I don’t want him to be scared because I’m not here.”

  That answer made sense, and I knew it was a lie, just as surely as she did. Paul wouldn’t be scared if he came back and Carrie was gone: He would assume she’d gone looking for him, or that she’d gone to get something else we needed, especially if I was gone too. She just didn’t want to go outside, where the world might take notice of her. Then again, why should she? The last time she’d gone outside of her own free will, she’d been seized and thrown into the back of a truck, and her world had changed forever. I sighed heavily, trying to keep my frustration from showing in my face. I didn’t do a very good job, I knew, but the effort seemed better than nothing.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  Carrie smiled. “I knew you would,” she said, and the worst thing was, she had known—and she hadn’t been wrong.

  Pleasanton was located in the deep East Bay, a sleepy suburban community that served both Livermore and San Francisco, feeding commuters into the tech and science industries thriving across the Bay Area. There had always been people who lived and worked at home, of course, but most of them had been keeping the city infrastructure functional, and when the sleepwalkers had overrun Pleasanton during the early days of the outbreaks, those people—and the infrastructure—had been among the first to fall. According to every soldier who’d been willing to give me the time of day, the selection of Pleasanton for the quarantine facility had been as much a matter of efficiency as anything else. By the time USAMRIID rode in with their tanks and their guns, there hadn’t been much of anybody left to fight them.

  I closed the door of our assigned home behind me as I stepped out onto the porch, breathing in the chilly December air, and for a moment, I was grateful to be exactly where I was. Everything smelled like rain, and the grass on the lawns around me was patchy and brown, where it hadn’t been churned into a muddy froth by passing feet. California winters are gentle compared to most of the rest of the country. If our quarantine zone had been almost anywhere else, I would have been standing in snow outside a house where the electricity was intermittent and the hot water didn’t always work.

  Not for the first time, it struck me that the rest of the country was probably in real, serious trouble, and that if this crisis didn’t either pass or come to a head soon, a lot more humans were going to die for reasons having nothing to do with the sleepwalkers. The sleepwalkers were going to be dying too, if they hadn’t already started. Their minds might be parasitic, but their bodies were mammalian, soft and warm and susceptible to frostbite and the weather. They’d freeze before they ever understood what was happening to them.

  I took a deep breath and stepped down off the porch. The world didn’t end. I took another step forward.

  The screamer was gone, leaving the sidewalks empty on either side of the street, but I could feel the eyes watching me from the windows. I inhaled instinctively, looking for traces of sleepwalker pheromones. I didn’t find any, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything: I still didn’t fully understand my connection to the cousins, and I’d only been beginning to develop my ability to detect them, when things had gone to hell and I’d wound up in USAMRIID custody. They could be all around me, standing just slightly downwind, and I would never know.

  This was supposed to be a secure quarantine zone. I was safe. I had to be safe.

  I took another step, and just like that, I was walking, moving with quick, anxious purpose down the walkway to the sidewalk, and then down the sidewalk toward the part of town where Paul had been heading. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye as I passed the windows, and I did my best not to turn toward them. The people who were hiding inside didn’t want me to see them, and I was willing to respect that. They had so little left to call their own; the least I could do was allow them to keep what remained of their tattered privacy. I walked faster, and then I was jogging, enjoying the open sidewalk and the smooth, untroubled stretch of my legs. I was still getting stronger. It had started when Sherman had held me captive, and it had continued since then. It was like learning the provenance of my body had finally made it acceptable for me to turn it into something new, something other than the soft, untested thing that Sally had deeded to me. This was my body now, and it was going to do what I needed it to do. And what I needed it to do was run.

  My feet slammed down against the pavement as I continued to pick up speed, and each impact was like a door closing somewhere behind me. I might never find my way out of here; I might never make it home to Nathan and Adam and the rest of my family. The bro
ken doors were still open for me—they would always be open for me—but passing through them required the freedom to reach them, and that wasn’t something I had right now. I could run for the rest of my life, however long or short that was, and never reach the place I wanted to be.

  But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do some good. I was a chimera in a nest of humans, and I had been created to improve their lives. Maybe not like this, maybe not with eyes and hands and the freedom to make my own decisions, and yet I still felt like maybe they needed me. We didn’t create humanity, after all. My parasitic ancestors had been perfectly happy for thousands of years. They had never woken up and thought we need to create a whole new species to make sure that we’re okay. It was hard not to look at the humans, with all their advantages and strengths, and feel just a little bit sorry for them. They were so bad at living in their own world.

  Take Carrie, for example. She’d been fine when she felt like she was in control of things. I wasn’t sure how she’d managed to avoid receiving a SymboGen implant, although I suspected it had something to do with her diet—I’d never seen her voluntarily eat animal proteins, not even cheese or eggs. If she was vegan, the idea of swallowing another living thing would have been anathema to her. Or maybe she had an allergy. SymboGen had been working on reducing the protein tags of the implants when everything went wrong, since there was a very small percentage of the population who couldn’t handle the waste products we naturally generated. People whose immune systems reacted poorly to the implants had been viewed with pity for years, since they couldn’t take the easy route to health that had been promised to the rest of humanity. It was sort of ironic now, since those people might make up the bulk of the survivors.

  She’d been fine when she was in control, and now she was falling apart, and it wasn’t fair to focus on her to the exclusion of all others, because everyone was falling apart in their own ways, even the nameless little girl. Her refusal to accept an identity that wasn’t exactly right was a sign that she wasn’t coping any better than the adults around her. She just had a better chance of doing it eventually as her memories of the world before the apocalypse dropped away and were replaced by memories of a world where this was normal.