Symbiont Page 9

  “Why are we stopped?” I asked.

  “The dogs need a bathroom break, and according to the traffic reports, we’re in the clear from here on out,” he said, unfastening his seat belt as he spoke. “We made it over the bridge. No incidents. If the quarantine on San Francisco has been declared, no one’s told anyone this far from the city yet.”

  “Anything on the news?” I sat up, rumpling my hair with one hand and yawning. I felt, if anything, even more limp and wrung-out than I had before we left the apartment. However much energy I’d been able to gain from the cookies and juice, it wasn’t going to last forever.

  “They’re reporting fires in San Francisco, and advising travelers to either stay in their hotels or cars and await evacuation, if they’re already in the city, or stay at home, and as far from San Francisco as possible. There hasn’t been anything about a bridge closure yet. That may just be a media effort to keep people from rushing to see what’s going on. People love to gawk at accidents. They’re not quite as fond of being set on fire.”

  “Right.” I reached for my seat belt. Nathan’s hand on my shoulder stopped me. I turned to face him, blinking. “What?”

  “I want you to stay in the car,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because your hands are shaking. They’ve been shaking since you woke up.” He pulled his hand away. “You need medical attention. I’m not going to risk you collapsing by the side of the road because you didn’t want me to walk the dogs by myself.”

  Much as I hated to admit it, Nathan had a point. I sighed, sagging back in my seat. “Okay, but leave the keys? I want to listen to the radio.”

  “You’ve got it.” He leaned over and kissed my temple before turning the key in the ignition, reactivating the car’s electrical systems. I reached for the radio and was starting to scan through the local stations when he got out of the car, slamming the door behind himself, and let the dogs out of the back. I was alone.

  The first three stations were generic classic rock, all power ballads and songs about how awesome it was to be young forever. I skipped past them, looking for the news. I was so focused that I scanned right past a familiar voice, only realizing what I’d done two stations later. The drums beginning to hammer in my ears again, I rolled the scanner carefully back.

  “—during a tragic break-in at our offices earlier today. I knew our competition was capable of a lot of things, but I had no idea they would stoop to corporate espionage, or that they’d be willing to involve someone who couldn’t understand what she was doing.” Dr. Banks sounded solemn and upset, like he was barely keeping himself under control. I’d always known he was an excellent liar, but as I listened to him talk, I started to understand how good he really was. “Sally Mitchell is a wonderful girl. I’ve enjoyed our time together immensely, and I think of her as a daughter, but it’s no secret that she’s not… well. She suffered some fairly severe brain damage in her accident, and she’s never fully recovered. She never will. Her family has been holding her in custodianship for the last several years, and she and I had been speaking about the virtues of transferring that custody to me. I think of her as a daughter, and her biological parents, well, they could never look at her without seeing everything she had lost. I love her. I know she’d never have done anything like this of her own initiative. Someone put her up to this. Someone exploited a poor, mentally handicapped girl for their own ends, and when I find out who did this, I swear, I am going to come down on them with the full force of the law.”

  His tone changed, becoming ingratiating. I knew that most of the station’s listeners—if it was just this station; if this wasn’t going out nationwide—would take his words as paternal and loving, but I saw them for what they had always been: a trap. He was trying to trap me, just like he’d been doing for my entire life.

  “Sally, if you can hear this, if you’re out there somewhere, listening to me, Sally, please, come home. The people who told you to steal from me, they’re not your friends. I don’t know what lies they’ve been feeding to you, but I only have your best interests at heart, I’ve only ever wanted to help you, and I can’t do that if you’re running from me. I’m not pressing charges against you for what you did. I’m not blaming you for the people who were hurt. I know that none of this was your idea. But Sally, please, please, I am begging you. Please come home.”

  The quality of the sound abruptly changed, and an unfamiliar woman said, “That was Dr. Steven Banks at his press conference earlier today, discussing the break-in at the SymboGen headquarters that resulted in the deaths of three security guards, and the hospitalization of two doctors. It is widely believed that this break-in was made possible by the actions of Sally Mitchell, a patient of SymboGen’s. Miss Mitchell, as you may recall, was involved in a tragic accident—”

  I gasped and turned off the radio before the woman could start telling me about my own past. I was still staring at it, my arms wrapped tightly around myself, when the car doors opened. Beverly and Minnie came bounding into the backseat, and Beverly shoved her nose under my hair, snuffling loudly, in case I had changed while she was away. The door closed, and the driver’s-side door opened. I kept staring at the radio.

  “Sal?” Nathan put a hand on my arm as he slid back into his seat. I didn’t react. He pulled the hand away, closing his door, creating a safe, enclosed space around us. Only then did he try again, asking, “Sal, honey, what’s wrong? What was on the radio?”

  “Dr. Banks.” I turned slowly to face him. “He did a press conference. He told everyone about the break-in, and said that people got hurt, and that it was my fault. But he’s not pressing charges, he says, he just wants me to come home.”

  “Which may mean he’s offering a reward for anyone who turns you in, and trying to deflect people from suspecting SymboGen’s involvement in the sleepwalker outbreak at the same time. Dammit.” Nathan scowled, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “I guess that just means we’ll need to be a little bit more careful for the rest of the drive. Are you ready to go?”

  “Fasten your seat belt,” I said.

  Nathan fastened his seat belt.

  “Is your mom going to let us back into the lab when there are people looking for me?”

  “There have always been people looking for you, and there have always been people looking for her,” he said. “Maybe that doesn’t sound reassuring, but it is, because she’s always been willing to let you in. You’re her greatest creation, a chimera that formed entirely without human aid. I’m not going to let her use you as a lab subject, but darling, you have to understand how much leverage this gives you over her. She needs to study you. She’ll let us in.”

  “The broken doors will still be open.”

  “Yeah,” said Nathan, reaching for the wheel. “And while I find it deeply odd that my life is now defined by a children’s book, it’s also reassuring. As long as Mom keeps treating that thing like the newest book of the damn Bible, she’s not going to shut us out. The whole point of going to where the monsters are is that the monsters will always let you in.”

  “Yay, monsters,” I said, leaning back in my seat and closing my eyes again. I liked riding in cars at night a little bit more than I liked doing it during the day. As long as I couldn’t see anything around us, I could almost pretend that we were sitting safely still. But other cars had a tendency to break the illusion, and with Nathan driving the way he had to in order to get us to safety, it was better for me not to risk it.

  I heard the engine rumble to life, and then the faint jouncing as Nathan rolled from the shoulder and back onto the road.

  The sirens started a few seconds later.

  The sound was coming from directly behind us. I opened my eyes, and the cab of the car was filled with flashing red and blue lights. “Nathan…”

  “I know. Just be cool, okay? I can handle this.” He pulled over again, leaving his hands resting on the wheel, while I stayed frozen in my seat and tried not to look like an inhuman thing we
aring a girl’s skin. What if the cop could tell somehow? What if we were both arrested, and I was thrown into whatever sort of cell they reserved for creatures who dared to pretend to be people, and I never saw Nathan or the dogs again?

  Beverly, sensing my distress, shoved her nose into my ear. I left it there, not trying to push her away, as Nathan rolled down the window and a flashlight shined into the car, illuminating first my lap, and then moving to my face, where it seemed like the glare was going to blind me. I squinted, recoiling. Beverly pulled her nose out of my ear and gave an inquisitive yip.

  “Are these your dogs, miss?” asked the officer. The voice was male, but I couldn’t make out a face, thanks to that flashlight in my eyes.

  I was silent for a few seconds, trying to find an answer that was both honest and unlikely to get me into trouble. Finally, I settled for the safest option: “Y-yes,” I stammered. “The big one is Beverly, and the little one is Minnie. They’re both friendly, and we have leashes for them.” I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to add that last part, except that I’d heard horror stories before of cops shooting dogs for getting too close to them while appearing “vicious,” a designation that seemed to mean “the dog had teeth in its mouth and I saw them at some point.” Since happy, friendly dogs were apt to show off their teeth in the process of panting, that made me worry about my girls.

  “Any reason they were just outside the car without a lead on?”

  Now Nathan spoke up. “I’m sorry, Officer. They were whining, and my girlfriend was asleep, and I took them out so that she wouldn’t have to. I never even thought to grab their leashes.”

  “This is state land. It’s against local ordinance for dogs to be in the fields without leads.” The flashlight beam switched to Nathan’s face, finally allowing me to see the officer on the other side. He was a big man of African-American descent, thick around the middle, with a face that seemed inclined to be gentle, even as he was interrogating Nathan about walking the dogs. “Did you see any wildlife while you were out there?”

  It smacked of a question that had a right answer and a wrong answer. I bit my lip as I waited to see which one Nathan was going to offer.

  “I think we startled a duck,” he said. “It flew away when Minnie got close to it, and the dogs did their business—urine only, I had bags in case they decided to poop—and we got back into the car. My girlfriend was awake by that point, I told her what I’d done, and we started to get back on the road. That’s when you pulled us over.”

  The flashlight beam switched back to my face, making my eyes water. I squinted, resisting the urge to raise a hand against the glare. Looking inoffensive was important when dealing with the police, never more than right now. “Miss, is this true?”

  “I can’t say about the duck, because I was in the car, but all the rest is true as far as I know,” I said meekly. “I’m really sorry. I would have told him to put the leashes on if I’d been awake.”

  “Miss, why is there blood on your shirt?”

  The question was asked in the same mild, almost innocuous tone as the questions about the dogs, and for a moment, I didn’t realize how dangerous it was. The moment passed quickly. I swallowed hard before holding up my injured arm, showing him the bandage wrapped around my wrist. “I was making dinner, and I slipped,” I said. “I cut myself pretty bad, and I didn’t have a clean shirt, so we’re heading back to my place to get me a change of clothes.” It seemed odd to avoid using Nathan’s name, but he hadn’t used mine, and I had to assume that there was a reason for that. Maybe he just didn’t want to risk the cop guessing who we were… but wouldn’t the officer have run Nathan’s plates before he got out of his squad car? Didn’t he already know?

  There were too many variables. I was drowning in them.

  “I see.” The flashlight moved away from my eyes to my bandaged wrist, and hovered there as the officer considered my words. Finally, he asked, “Are you being held against your will?”

  “What? No!” I was so startled by the question that I forgot to moderate my response. I wound up half squawking at the cop, my eyes going wide and round with surprise.

  Maybe that was the right way to react. The flashlight finally pointed upward at the ceiling of the cab, where it illuminated the car without blinding anyone. “I don’t know if you were aware, but I just got the call that we’re closing down the bridge,” said the officer. “It seems there’s been some sort of outbreak in San Francisco, and we’re trying to contain it before it can spread to the rest of the Bay Area. You kids wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “No, Officer,” said Nathan.

  I didn’t trust my voice, and so I just shook my head, hoping that the policeman would take my silence as a sign of fear, and not a sign of guilt.

  “You look like good kids, but it’s not safe out here,” he said. “Wherever it is you’re going, you want to keep going until you get there, you hear me? Don’t stop again, no matter how bad your dogs need to pee.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Nathan. “Thank you.”

  “I’m letting you off with a warning this time. Get your girl home.” Then the flashlight was turned away, and the officer was walking back down the shoulder toward his car. Nathan and I raised our eyes to watch him go, tracking his reflection as it got smaller and smaller, until he finally climbed into his squad car. The lights flashed once as he restarted the engine, and then he pulled out onto the highway and was gone.

  Nathan groaned, leaning forward to rest his forehead against the wheel for a moment. I blinked at him, alarmed.

  “Nathan?”

  “This is how everything falls apart, Sal,” he said, voice slightly muffled by his position. “This is where everything breaks down. That man should have hauled us in—between the blood and the bridge shutting down, we’re too suspicious to be allowed to roam free. But he didn’t, because we looked like ‘nice kids,’ and you’re a pretty girl with big, sad eyes, and he didn’t want to do that to us. We looked too innocent.”

  “That’s… bad?” I asked blankly.

  “No one is innocent when you’re talking about infection, whether it’s viral or parasitic.” Nathan raised his head and started the engine again. “We’re not carrying SymboGen implants on the verge of going rogue, but we could be. There’s no way to look at a person and know. So if we were carriers, and if the goal were to shut down the sleepwalker plague in San Francisco, our friendly neighborhood state trooper would have just ruined everything.”

  “Everyone’s a carrier,” I said. “You’re being really hard on him. He let us go.”

  “Everyone’s a potential carrier. There will always be outliers, like you, but it seems like most sleepwalkers are triggered by getting near another sleepwalker. The pheromone tags put off by the worms in their new state excite and agitate the worms that are still in a resting phase. The change isn’t instant unless the second worm was already in the process of attempting to colonize the brain of their host—it takes time to chew and slither your way through a human body—but it starts with that pheromone tag. That’s why Sherman could form a mob by dropping one or two individuals in key neighborhoods. That’s why Mom was so worried about us going out in public. There’s no telling how many people are already out there, putting off the pheromone tags that say ‘it’s time to move,’ and haven’t yet started showing symptoms.”

  “You’re making it sound like you wanted him to arrest us,” I snapped. “Because that would keep us and our scary pheromones away from the people who aren’t sick yet. Only you can’t be putting off those pheromones, since you never got an implant, and I…” I stopped, a sick feeling spreading through my stomach. “Nathan, are you saying this is all my fault?”

  “No,” he said hurriedly. “No, I’m not saying that at all. I talked to Mom, at length, about the differences between chimera and sleepwalkers, because I knew I’d need to explain them to you—and I really think I should do as much of it as I can. Mom isn’t good at talking to people who aren’t
geneticists.”

  “You’re not a geneticist.”

  “No, and sometimes she loses me. But you’re not giving off the pheromone tag that the sleepwalkers use to activate each other. She said it’s like comparing a can of spray paint to a master painter’s brush. You can get art out of either one, but one will tend to be much more focused and refined. The sleepwalkers are putting off a chemical stew that says everything from ‘hey, do what I’m doing, this is neat and you should try it’ to ‘eat here, here, eat.’ She’s still trying to analyze the specific pheromones that you and the other chimera put off. As near as she can tell, they say ‘listen to me, I am bigger than you, and you should listen.’ You may eventually be able to use them to accomplish just that. You may be able to make them listen.”

  I looked at my bandaged wrist, the white barely visible through the gloom. “Are all the sleepwalkers going to listen with their teeth?” I asked glumly.

  “Only the ones who are already too brain-damaged from the integration process to understand the message. I think they’re all going to want to be close to you. Some of them may even have the intelligence to obey when you give them simple orders, like ‘stop’ or ‘don’t eat me.’ But some of them are going to be too far gone, because the integration process involves far too much brute trauma to the host. They don’t have the superstructure necessary to process complicated information.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself, hunching over in my seat. “This just keeps on making me feel worse and worse. Every time I think I’m okay with not being human, you come up with some new fun fact, like ‘hey, Sal, you’re basically a bug zapper for sleepwalkers, hope that’s okay with you.’ ”