Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (15 page)

Somehow, that was what I’d been afraid of since I’d woken up to find myself still in the hospital, and not safely back in the bowling alley. “Why not?” Horror washed over me. “Did we get caught? Are we under arrest for misuse of a medical facility?”

“No,” said Nathan, shaking his head. “Actually, we sort of got the opposite. No one’s asked any questions about whether or not we’re allowed to be here, but Daisy and Fang have both been drafted into patient triage. The administration tried to make me go too. I was able to put them off by saying you
still needed to be monitored, but I expected them back at any moment with a nurse’s aide that they plan to plunk down in a chair and make sure you don’t die. They need the hands, and they’re not being particularly picky about where those hands come from.”

“What
happened
?”

“There’s been another outbreak in Lafayette. This one was larger than the one we got caught in before, and the authorities have closed down the hospital in an effort to contain it. They still think quarantine zones help. They could, if we were able to filter out people whose implants are on the verge of going active and could be triggered by pheromone tags, but we don’t have that capacity yet, which means the quarantines are doing nothing but causing panic. Of course, try getting the people in charge to admit that.” Nathan looked, if anything, even grimmer than he had before. “They’ve also closed down most of the roads. The official cover story is that there’s been a gas leak—that’s what we’re supposed to tell patients who ask, or reporters who manage to sneak past the cordons. It’s a mess out there, Sal. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this building.”

“You’ll think of something,” I said, and then, because that didn’t seem quite right, I amended to “We’ll think of something. This is just more survival, right? We’re good at surviving. We can get out of this.”

“The ambulances are locked down.”

I frowned. “That’s bad,” I agreed. “But do we need an ambulance? I mean, I was on a gurney last time, because you needed me to be sedated, and because it made things more believable, but couldn’t we take a taxi or… or steal a car or something?”

Nathan paused, his eyes widening slowly as he absorbed my question. “There’s no one watching the parking lot at this point,” he said, after a long pause for thought. “All the available security has been pulled inside, to stop people who shouldn’t
be here from getting in, and to prevent patients from escaping. They haven’t cracked down on the staff yet, and the security reinforcements are still an hour or so out.”

“Am I right to think that ‘yet’ is the important word there?” I asked.

“Yes.” Nathan stood. “I’ll be right back with some clothes, and with Fang and Daisy. We need to get out of here.”

I had never been so relieved to watch my boyfriend walk away from me. The danger in my head had been repaired, my wounds had been patched up, and we were getting out of here.

Things were finally starting to go our way.

I
waited anxious and alone in my purloined hospital room, jumping at every little sound and scuffle from the hall outside. If Nathan was right about my super-sleepwalker pheromones attracting sleepwalkers to me, there was every chance that a stray patient could stumble through the door at any moment, hands outstretched and mouth hungry for a piece of my flesh. It wasn’t the sort of thought that made me inclined to go exploring, even if I was having trouble sitting in the room alone.

What if Nathan couldn’t find me clothes? What if Daisy and Fang were so busy with the sudden influx of patients that they couldn’t get away, and we had to leave them? Dr. Cale was going to stop letting us borrow her people if we kept on not bringing them back.

The doorknob turned. I tensed, hunching down in the bed and trying to look like I was asleep. A fully turned sleepwalker
wouldn’t be able to work the door, but a doctor would, and that would be just as bad. What if they decided that I didn’t need a private room, and moved me out to the hall? I’d have nothing to protect me then.

I was getting awfully tired of the words “what if.”

The door swung open, and I closed my eyes, playing dead. Footsteps approached me and Nathan said, “Sal, it’s me. I found you some clothes, and Daisy’s getting Fang out of the ER, but we need to hurry. We don’t have much time.”

There was a degree of urgency in his voice that was out of proportion with the trouble that we were in—something I wouldn’t have thought possible until I heard it. I opened my eyes and sat up, staring at him. “What’s going on?”

“I overheard two of the doctors who actually work here talking in the hall. The CDC is en route to lock this place down for good, and that means that USAMRIID can’t be too far behind. Mom’s going to get the news soon, if she hasn’t already.”

My eyes got even wider. “You think she’s going to move the lab?”

“I think she’ll have to. We’re important to her, but we’re not more important than the entire human race.” He gestured to the clothes on the foot of my bed: jeans, a heavy sweater, a lab coat in what looked like my size, and a pair of worn-out white canvas shoes that would mostly fit. “Get dressed, and let’s go.”

I was still wobbly—which was only fair, since I’d suffered major blood loss and had
brain surgery
all in the same day—and getting the clothing on was a little harder than it should have been. It felt eerily like my first days after waking up, when I’d been stranded in a body that had muscle memory and nothing else, making the easy things that everyone around me took for granted seem like minor miracles. Nathan helped me with the sweater, twisting it around until I could find the hole for my head, but I did the rest by myself while he watched the door, waiting for someone to burst in on us.

The door was still closed when I finished tying my shoes and shrugging on the lab coat. Nathan tossed me an elastic band. I used it to pull my hair back in a ponytail, concealing the bandages from my operation. “How do I look?” I asked, spreading my arms a little to give him the full effect.

“Like you belong here,” he said, and leaned in and kissed me—quickly, but with an intensity that spoke to his fear, and to our mutual, growing conviction that we weren’t going to make it out of here. I kissed him back, allowing the momentary closeness to distract from my terror. It was going to be okay. We were going to find a way to make this okay, and I was going to spend the rest of my life kissing Nathan, although preferably not in besieged hospital rooms.

The door swung open. Nathan and I pulled away from each other, our eyes going wide and our backs going tight as we prepared to flee. Fang looked at us disdainfully, tilting his chin up just enough to let him stare at us down the length of his nose. It was a surprisingly effective expression.

“Daisy’s already waiting for us in the parking lot, so if you two lovebirds are done celebrating the fact that we’ve made it this far, we’d like to make it the rest of the way,” he said mildly. “Come on.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, cheeks flaring red, and hurried out of the room. Nathan followed after me, and we plunged into the chaos of the hospital.

I’d believed myself prepared for anything, based on Nathan’s description and my own knowledge of what usually happened during a sleepwalker outbreak. I hadn’t been prepared at all.

There were bodies everywhere we looked. Some were on stretchers or strapped to gurneys like the one they’d used to bring me from Dr. Cale’s. Others sat propped against the walls, hands clasped over obvious injuries and shocked expressions on their faces. Those were actually the ones that bothered me the least. They were clearly upset about what had
happened to them. Their wounds hurt. They could feel pain, and they were connected enough to their bodies to understand what that meant, to know that they needed to stop what they were doing and have it taken care of. Those people might be infected—the majority of them probably had implants, considering SymboGen’s saturation of the market—but they weren’t sleepwalkers yet.

The ones that worried me were the ones who weren’t clutching themselves. The ones who leaned against walls, staring into nothingness with the characteristically dead eyes of someone whose human mind has shut off, but whose tapeworm mind has not yet started supplying fresh instructions. The ones who seemed to have fallen asleep, but whose chests were still moving smoothly up and down, marking their continued life even as the worms within them worked their way toward a stronger integration. I stuck close to Nathan, trying not to look at those people. It was like I was afraid that eye contact was all it would take to make them come after me.

The air smelled like blood and vomit and human waste, a horrible mixture of urine, feces, and other things that I didn’t want to put a name to. People cried and screamed and shouted profanities, and that was all good, yes, that was all welcome, because those cries were
human
. The people who made them were still
people
.

The steady undercurrent of moaning was a lot less welcome.

Fang wove his way through the crowd like a man who’d spent most of his life moving in tight spaces, and Nathan and I followed him, taking advantage of the narrow openings he created in the brief seconds before they could close again. We were like a surgical laser: we didn’t wound the crowd, but we sliced it open and let it heal behind us, leaving no trace, creating no scar.

One of the dead-eyed men turned his head as we walked past, tracking my movement. I whimpered a little and walked
faster, nearly stepping on Fang’s heels in my hurry to get out of range. If these people were far enough along to start picking up on my pheromones, we were in trouble. Real trouble, the kind that no clever plan or stolen car was going to get us out of.

Nathan produced a clipboard from somewhere, probably taking it off one of the hooks on the wall. He handed it to me, motioning that I should start consulting it. I ducked my head and pretended to do just that, watching as the letters seemed to shift and blur around the page. Sally wasn’t dyslexic before I chewed myself a place in her brain. Sorry, Sally. On the plus side for her, she didn’t have to live with the consequences of what I’d done, and I did.

Next time I’ll be more careful which part of the brain I eat
, I thought, and barely suppressed an inappropriate giggle. The stress was getting to me. I was expecting to be attacked at any second, or stopped by hospital administration when one of them realized that no matter what I was wearing, I didn’t work there. None of us did.

A few of the people in lab coats looked up as we passed, but Fang moved with enough purpose for ten people, and I had a clipboard; as long as Nathan and I stayed close to him, we looked like a strange little research group, going somewhere important to do something essential. It was all props and posing. Maybe that was enough.

It wasn’t until we reached the doors that one of the actual doctors seemed to realize where we were going. He turned away from the patient he’d been examining, fear flashing across his face, and raised a hand in a beseeching gesture. “Wait!” he cried. “Don’t go out there!”

It was too late. Fang had already hit the doors, never breaking his stride, and we were supposed to be his little research team. We followed him, only to stop dead as he ran out of room to move. It wasn’t that the lobby wasn’t large—it was enormous, as befitted a medical center of this size. It was that
the lobby was even worse than the halls, so full that there was barely room to take a step.

People had spilled over from the ER and the urgent care, clogging the couches and chairs until no more bodies could be packed onto them. After that, they’d started sitting on the floor. They milled, almost mindlessly, even though most of them still had the bright-eyed awareness that meant a conscious mind was in control. Most—not all. I saw a young woman with a toddler in her arms, the baby’s mouth hanging slack, the baby’s eyes filled with the nothingness that meant that there was a tapeworm in the process of taking over that tiny body. Nathan followed my gaze and grimaced.

“Intestinal Bodyguards are rated for infants eighteen months and older,” he murmured. “I always thought that was a terrible idea. Now I see that I was more right than I ever knew.”

“Disgusting,” murmured Fang, and continued toward the exit… or tried to. A sudden living wall of humanity appeared in front of him, hands outstretched, mouths moving in a noisy chorus. It wasn’t sleepwalkers. That would almost have been easier to handle. Sleepwalkers were simple, wanting only to grab and hold and feed. No, this was something far worse, and infinitely more complex:

This was the living.

“We’ve been here for an hour! When is someone going to see us?”

“Where are the doctors?”

“Are you doctors?”

“Please, Kim won’t wake up, I don’t know what to do.”

“Please!”

Their voices blended together into an unearthly chorus of words—“seizure” and “won’t wake up” and “help us.” That was said more than anything else: “help us.” I quailed back against Nathan, and he put a hand on my shoulder, glaring at
the people who were reaching for me. It didn’t help much. They kept coming.

“We’re not doctors!” I shouted. “We can’t help you!”

That didn’t do any good either. Anyone in a lab coat was better than nothing. Hands grabbed for my sleeves, buffeting me deeper into Nathan’s arms. The drums were back, but softer, pounding the way that they used to before the arteries in my head had begun to give way. I guess that was a small blessing. I’d lived long enough to be torn apart by the crowd.

And then the doors at the far end of the lobby banged open and the sleepwalkers surged inside, their arms as outstretched as their unturned kin, but grasping with terrible purpose. They were moaning, an eerie, discordant sound that was quickly answered from the halls behind us. People turned, crying out in dismay, and forgot to grab for us in favor of scrambling away from the tide now flowing through those open doors. There was nowhere for them to go. The mother with the sleepwalker baby was bowled over by her fellows as they fled, and she didn’t get up again. Neither did her baby. They weren’t the only ones to be trampled in that first panicked rush: anyone who couldn’t get up fast enough, who couldn’t get out of the way, was at risk of being crushed to death.

“Come on,” commanded Fang, grabbing my wrist and dragging me with him as he bolted in the exact direction that I did
not
want to go: toward the exit. Nathan chased after us, apparently deciding that it was better for all of us to die together than it was for any of us to die alone. I disagreed—I thought it was better if none of us had to die at all—but I was too busy running to argue.

A row of heavy potted plants created a space maybe three feet wide between the wall and the doors. Fang ran into that space, dragging me with him, and dropped my hand. I stared at him, starting to open my mouth and demand to know what
was going on. He shook his head, motioning for me to be quiet, and pointed to the plants. I frowned. He gestured to the plants again, more urgently this time, like there was some secret he wanted me to catch on to.

My frown deepened. I looked over my shoulder to Nathan, who seemed as lost as I felt. That was something, anyway: I wasn’t the only one who had no idea what was going on. I turned and peered through the broad leaves of the plants, watching the sleepwalkers pouring into the lobby. That was when I finally realized what Fang was trying to show us.

The sleepwalkers weren’t smart. They could be destructive if they were frustrated or wanted to get somewhere, and they were definitely dangerous at close range, but they weren’t
smart
. Something in the interface between worm and human was too broken to allow them to be anything approaching
smart
. They would have come after us if they’d known that we existed—we were too close to ignore, and too defenseless to pass up—but they hunted primarily by sight, and the plants were blocking us from view. My pheromones would still have been an issue under normal circumstances. With this many people in a confined space, some of them with implants of their own that were starting to emit confused pheromone trails, the jumble of scents and instructions must have been throwing the sleepwalkers off. The plants were just one more layer, buying us a little time to let the crowd pass us by.

Fang crouched down, watching them through the space between the leaves. He was perfectly still in that moment, like he could have been a sleepwalker himself. Very softly, he said, “As soon as there’s a break, we’re going to run. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. If you’re afraid you’ve lost the rest of the group,
keep going
. Daisy is straight ahead of us in the parking lot, in the fifth row of cars. She nicked the keys for a red Corolla. If you don’t see her, keep running and test the doors
of the cars you pass. See if you can find something that isn’t locked and shut yourself inside. We
will
come back for you.”

The moans of the sleepwalkers almost obscured his speech, but the gist of it got through, enough to make my stomach clench. I looked over my shoulder at Nathan. He looked even unhappier than I felt, and I realized that a lot of our relationship—not always, maybe, but ever since I’d first called his mother and said I was willing to go through the broken doors—was based on him protecting me. He couldn’t protect me now, and it was making him uncomfortable. The thought of him needing to protect me made me uncomfortable, but in a different way. I didn’t want to be coddled and kept like a specimen in a jar. I’d already had that life. I wanted something bigger and less confined.