Symbiont Read online

  “No, nothing,” I said, and stood. My legs were still a little wobbly, but I was reasonably sure that they would support my weight. “Get the leashes, and then let’s get out of here.”

  Nathan smiled. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I said. He tossed me Minnie’s leash, correctly assessing my condition as “up to the bulldog, not quite ready for the Lab.” Beverly stood up, tail wagging and attention fixed on him. She was clearly aware of whose leash that was, and what it meant for probable walkies. “Do we have anything remotely like a weapon?”

  “Just the carving knives from the kitchen,” said Nathan. He bent to clip the leash to Beverly’s collar. “And the dogs, I suppose. Our friend from the hall clearly learned that a dog can be a weapon.”

  “I’ll get the knives,” I said, and turned.

  Walking to the kitchen served a dual purpose: it let me get the carving knives from the butcher’s block next to the microwave, and it also let me assess my ability to walk in a straight line without hurting myself. My head spun a little, but that was it; apart from that, and a general all-over weakness, I seemed to be mostly okay.

  Nathan had made an effort to wipe down the kitchen table, but there had been other things on his mind, and he’d missed more than a few streaky patches of my blood, now dried to a dark reddish brown that looked almost like coffee stains against the wood. I stopped to look at it for a few seconds, waiting for my throat to tighten and my stomach to clench. It didn’t happen. This was my blood; it had been created to keep me alive while it was inside me, and it did a very good job. Now that it was outside of my body, it didn’t really matter anymore. I was almost relieved to realize that my opinion about that sort of thing hadn’t changed now that I was in mortal danger, instead of just being marginally confused by the world around me.

  “Sal?”

  “Coming!” I gathered both knives, careful to hold them away from myself, and walked back to the living room with Minnie at my heels.

  Nathan had the terrarium balanced atop my roller bag, held in place with a bungee cord. He was holding Beverly’s leash in one hand and his suitcase in the other. He put the suitcase down long enough to take the knife I offered him. “All right,” he said. “As soon as I open the door, run for the elevator. If anyone tries to attack you or stop you from getting there, do whatever it takes to get them out of your way.” He paused, looking startled by the words that were coming out of his mouth. “Oh, God. Is this my life now? ‘Do whatever it takes,’ and planning attacks on the elevator call button?”

  “The key word there is ‘life,’ ” I said, tucking the remaining knife into my belt before bending to clip Minnie’s leash on. She wagged her stubby tail and panted at me, clearly overjoyed by the prospect of going for a walk, no matter how strange the circumstances surrounding it happened to be. “This is your life now, because this is a life that lasts long enough for us to get back to your mother’s place. We can disappear with her. We’ll be safe until this blows over.”

  Nathan frowned. “Sal… do you honestly think this is something that’s going to ‘blow over’?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  The hallway was empty when Nathan and I cautiously peeked our heads out of the apartment door, the dogs straining at their leashes and eager to be on their way. It was a struggle to keep my grasp on Minnie’s lead, making me even more grateful that Nathan was able to handle Beverly. I at least stood a chance of restraining Minnie if she decided to go for a sleepwalker. With Beverly… there would have been no chance, and things would have ended poorly for everyone involved.

  The power hadn’t flickered once. I was choosing to take that as a good sign, and kept reminding myself that it was a good sign as I half ran, half stumbled down the hall, hampered by both my overall bodily weakness and the suitcase-slash-terrarium construct that I was dragging behind me. We’d abandon our things at the first sign of trouble—nothing either one of us owned was worth our lives, except for maybe the dogs, and we’d already risked death to save them—but if we were going to be at Dr. Cale’s for a while, we were going to want a few familiar things around us.

  The idea of going into hiding in someone else’s secret lair made the drums pound harder in my ears. I had only recently escaped from the house of Sally’s parents, who had been determined to keep me penned up like a child rather than admitting that I had grown up to be someone other than their daughter—although maybe that was all Sally’s mother speaking. Her father had his own reasons for keeping me captive, and they had nothing to do with the pretense that I was Sally Mitchell. Motives didn’t change the fact that I’d been a prisoner for my entire life, and now I was willingly going into a new kind of cage. I guess that in the end, the urge to survive is stronger than almost anything else.

  Nathan pressed the elevator call button. We stood there nervously, our shoulders touching, as if physical proximity could provide us with some measure of protection. The panel above the elevator dinged comfortingly, marking the approach of our way out. I was starting to think that everything was going to be okay…

  And Beverly was starting to growl.

  It was soft at first, almost subsonic when it caught my attention. I looked down at her. She had her ears pressed flat against her skull, giving her an angular, predatory cast, and her lips were drawn back, showing the pale lines of her gums around the white, dangerous angles of her teeth.

  “Nathan?”

  He didn’t turn, his eyes intent on the light of the elevator call button.

  I looked toward Minnie. She was growling too, deeper and lower than Beverly—so deep and low that I had mistaken the sound for the rumble of the approaching elevator. She and Beverly were facing the same way, down the hall, toward the other apartments.

  “Nathan,” I said again, a little more loudly—but not much, no, not much. I was starting to think that making noise was the last thing that either of us wanted to do. “I think we’re about to have company.”

  “What?” He followed my gaze to the end of the hall, and then looked down at the wild-eyed, growling dogs, who had taken on that stiff-legged posture characteristic of canines defending humans since the dawn of time. He paled. “Oh. Fuck.”

  “I think we may have to take the stairs.”

  “I don’t know if we can get there,” he said slowly. “One of those doors is between us and them.”

  “Oh.” Things had seemed almost hopeful only a few seconds before, even if “hope” had been redefined on the local level to mean “slightly less bleak.” Now, with an unknown number of sleepwalkers approaching, it was difficult to muster anything but resigned despair. “I don’t know what to do, Nathan. None of my remedial education classes covered how to escape in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.”

  Nathan laughed once, a single short, sharp bark that actually distracted Minnie from her growling long enough to give him a quizzical look. “Surviving the zombie apocalypse was an incredibly popular topic of discussion with the folks I went to college with. Too bad no one ever came up with a simple solution for ‘zombie apocalypse, genetically engineered parasite variant.’ I’d be the savior of the human race if they had.”

  I was opening my mouth to answer him when the first moan drifted around the corner at the end of the hall, followed by another, and another, until it sounded like an entire mob was shambling our way. At least none of them was saying my name—not yet, anyway. Whatever half-decayed connection allowed the sleepwalkers to recognize me as a chimera was present, but no one had given them a word to hang on what I was. Not that awareness of our relationship would keep them from attacking me. As the man in the stairwell had proven, they could recognize me and still want to rip my throat out with their teeth.

  “Nathan…”

  “I know.”

  We both backed up until we were pressed against the closed elevator doors, holding to the dogs’ leashes for dear life. I could deal with the fact that I was probably about to die. The fact that I was still weak from bloo
d loss meant that I would almost certainly die first, saving me from needing to see what my tapeworm cousins would do to Nathan. But I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the dogs ripped to pieces by the sleepwalkers. The dogs could do a lot of damage before they were killed. The sleepwalkers barely acknowledged pain. They would win.

  “You know, in all my wildest dreams, this was never how I imagined I would die,” said Nathan. He sounded almost wistful. “I mean, I assumed you would be there, but that it would either be one of those ‘dying in bed at the ripe old age of a hundred and twenty, my beloved wife by my side’ situations, or a freak surfing accident while we were on our honeymoon.”

  “You surf?” I paused. “Wait, honeymoon?”

  “I surf,” he confirmed. “And yes, honeymoon. I mean, assuming you said yes when I finally got up the nerve to propose.”

  “If we get out of here alive, you should try it,” I said.

  Nathan smiled sadly, and said nothing.

  The first of the sleepwalkers shambled into view, moving toward us with slow, implacable purpose. The dogs were still growling, but louder now, like they still thought that they could somehow dissuade these unwanted intruders on their space through volume alone. My insistence on grabbing the knives suddenly seemed like a child’s demand for a security blanket. We were two people with kitchen cutlery and no training, and I was already injured. All we could do with those knives was slit our own wrists and hope that we bled out fully before the sleepwalkers ripped us apart.

  “I’m really glad I got to know you,” I said.

  “Me, too,” said Nathan. “Marry me?”

  The elevator doors opened.

  We were pressed flat against them, and when the support suddenly left our backs, we toppled over, taking suitcases, terrarium, and dogs with us as we tumbled into the elevator. Luck was with us for the first time since we’d left the lab: there was no one already inside, waiting to take a bite out of our tender flesh. I squeaked shrilly, surprised and disoriented. Nathan scrambled to his feet, slamming the heel of his hand down on the door-close button. I managed to sit up just in time to see the blank, emotionless faces of the sleepwalkers blocked out by the closing elevator doors.

  Beverly and Minnie stopped growling, their belligerence transforming instantly into confusion. Minnie sat down, beginning to scratch her ear with her hind leg. I picked myself up from the floor, pausing to right the luggage and make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. My heart was hammering in my chest so hard that it hurt, and for once it didn’t sound like drums at all—it sounded like the heartbeat of a mammal, panicked beyond reason and confronting its own mortality.

  Nathan was standing squarely in the middle of the elevator by the time I finished getting to my feet. His carving knife was in his hand, and his shoulders were shaking, betraying the depth of his distress. It was weird to realize that of the two of us, I was probably the one handling things better. Then again, I was also the one who was accustomed to the world being turned on its head. Nathan liked his routines. He was used to things being just so, and even dating me hadn’t changed that. My chaos hadn’t intruded on his daily life—not until recently, anyway.

  “Nathan?” I kept my voice low, like I was speaking to a panicky animal. In a way, maybe I was. My still-pounding heart was doing its best to remind me that humans were just animals, as subject to the whims and whimsies of biology. The fight or flight response was wreaking havoc with both of us.

  I’d always wondered why I sometimes passed out before I really panicked, despite everyone I knew working almost exactly the opposite. If “I” was a separate beast from the brain that stored my memories and emotional response, though, it started to make sense. Too much adrenaline flooded the mind, and I got knocked out of the synaptic loop, resulting in a loss of consciousness but not total loss of cool. Inefficient. Doubtless unintentional, too. So much about my design was.

  “We don’t know what the lobby’s going to look like.” Nathan’s voice was soft, uninflected—virtually dead. If I hadn’t known that he’d never been fitted with an implant, I would have rethought my position on panic when I heard him speak. “If there are sleepwalkers there, if it’s dangerous, take the dogs and run. I’ll hold them off so that you can get away.”

  “And go where? Nathan, I can’t drive. I never learned, and even if I had, I’d never be able to make myself drive away and leave you. We could run off down the street, but if the situation is that bad, we’d just be eaten by the next swarm of sleepwalkers we saw. We’re staying with you. We’re staying together. That’s the only way that we’re going to get out of this. Together.” I forced myself to smile. “Besides, you know your mother would kill me if I called her from the Concord BART Station and said, ‘Hey, I left your son to die but I made it to the train, do you think you could come and pick me up?’ ”

  Nathan chuckled.

  The floor indicator counted down from three to two.

  My hands were full, and I didn’t dare let go of anything I had. Nathan had already dropped his suitcase, and the mere fact that he would prioritize my dog—our dog—over the only personal possessions he had been able to save made me even more certain that marrying him was the right course of action. He didn’t care that I was a tapeworm in a human skin, but he cared about proper leash etiquette. I was never going to find a more perfect man.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  The counter reached one with a soft “ding,” and the elevator doors opened to reveal an anticlimactically empty lobby. I blinked, unable to believe what my eyes were seeing. Only Minnie tugging on the leash as she eagerly tried to pull me out of the elevator to the walkies she assumed were waiting for her snapped me out of my fugue.

  “Run,” said Nathan, stuffing the knife back into his waistband and grabbing his previously discarded suitcase.

  We ran.

  The street outside the apartment building was eerily deserted, as if all of San Francisco had suddenly realized they had better things to do than their afternoon commute. Two people, both bloody, running with suitcases and dogs out of a private building and into an equally private parking lot, should have attracted some attention of the police persuasion. We saw no one, and if anyone saw us, they didn’t bother contacting the authorities—or maybe they did, and the systems had already reached the point of overload. That was a question that would never be answered, because there wasn’t time to stop and ask, and there were more important things for us to do. Like escaping the prison that San Francisco was about to become.

  We threw our suitcases into the trunk, placing the terrarium with only slightly more care, and loaded the excited, overstimulated dogs into the backseat before getting into the front. Nathan waited for me to buckle myself in before he hit the gas, but only barely. For once, my phobias were going to have to take second place on the list of priorities, and even as I swallowed the rising tide of panic—and the rising bile in my throat—I agreed with this decision. I could have hysterics when we got out of this.

  The drums were back in my ears, pounding steadily and reassuringly. I wondered what my tendency to freak out in cars meant for my “Sal passes out before the chemicals can make her panic” theory, and decided that since this particular strain of panic was psychological, not triggered by physiological reactions, it ran according to a different set of rules, even though the actual biochemistry probably wasn’t all that different. This question kept me occupied for almost six blocks, which made it worth the contemplation. Anything to distract me from the way that Nathan was driving.

  Then I glanced up, and frowned as I recognized the neighborhood around us. “Nathan, where are you going? This isn’t the way to the Bay Bridge.”

  “That’s because we’re taking another route,” he said. “There were too many sleepwalkers there, and that was hours ago. By now the area has either completely devolved into chaos, or the authorities have it locked down. We’d be lucky if they let us onto the bridge at all. If we were particularly un
lucky, they’d take one look at us and haul us off for medical testing. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t escape from that apartment building just so I could go into quarantine.”

  “I don’t want that either,” I assured him. “So where are we going?”

  “Down the coast to the San Mateo Bridge. It’s going to be a longer drive, and I’m really sorry about that. I should be able to slow down once we’re past the airport.”

  I forced myself to nod as if I was okay with this plan, as if it didn’t make me want to fling myself screaming from the car. “I may try to sleep, if that’s all right with you. I don’t know if I can, but it would give me something else to focus on.”

  The corner of Nathan’s mouth that I could see twisted downward in obvious displeasure. “If you really need to, okay. Just, I may wake you up if your breathing seems shallow, all right? I don’t know how much blood you lost back there, but between that and the shocks you’ve had today, I want to keep an eye on you.”

  “All right,” I agreed, and closed my eyes.

  The San Francisco Bay Area sounds like it should be small, cozy even, the sort of place you can see in a day if you really enjoy spending time in a car. But just like San Francisco itself is deceptively small, the Bay Area is deceptively large. It’s too big for any one transit system, bridge, or highway to accommodate, and the only way someone could see the whole thing in a single day would be to start at midnight and never stop the car. Twenty-four hours might be enough time to drive through all the major cities, as long as you were quick and not overly concerned with actually seeing anything.

  My car issues and reliance on buses and BART trains meant I was mostly familiar with San Francisco proper, and some parts of the East Bay—the ones with good farmer’s markets or interesting local attractions, like Solano Avenue and their annual street fair, or the big animal shelter out in Oakland. Caltrain ran between San Francisco and the South Bay, but since I’d never had a pressing reason to spend time down there, I really didn’t know much about the geography beyond “every time they try to put in a BART extension, San Jose comes up with another way to block it.” I got the feeling the residents of Silicon Valley didn’t like being lumped into the San Francisco family of cities, and the feeling was pretty much mutual.