Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (23 page)

I fought the urge to bat his hand away. He wasn’t touching my skin, which meant that the drums wouldn’t synchronize to his heartbeat, but having him touch any part of me felt like a violation. “I like my hair the way it is.”

“Ah, but appearances must be maintained. You know that. It’s how we fit into the world, snug as a needle fitting into an injection site. Nothing that attracts attention of the wrong sort.” Sherman delivered this little sermon with the pious air of a man who was preaching to the heathens, but knew they would catch on sooner or later. As always, it made me want to scratch his eyes right out of his head.

There was a time when I’d found his little life lessons endearing, attractive even. That was before I knew he was a tapeworm, and before I knew he was on the “kill all humans” side of the program, and most of all, before he was keeping me captive in an abandoned mall, with no way of reaching the people I loved most in all the world. “The only attention I’m attracting here is from you,” I countered. “
All
the attention I get from you is the wrong kind of attention, now that I know what you are.”

“You still don’t understand, do you?” He grabbed my arm. It was a swift motion: I had no opportunity to dodge or defend myself. Fingers sinking into my skin, he continued: “My attention is the only attention you will ever need. My approval is the only approval you should ever crave. I am your perfect other half, Sal, and the sooner you come to terms with that idea and begin making yourself over in my image, the sooner we’ll be able to move on to the next phase of our relationship.”

“Let me go!” I struggled against his grasp, but he held firm. The drums were pounding in my ears, slowing bit by bit to fall into synch with his pulse. As always, the feeling left me dizzy and confused, like someone was messing with my inner ear.
“You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to… to…” The sentence seemed to slip away from me. I wobbled.

Sherman tightened his hand a little more. It was starting to hurt, and I would probably have a bruise the next day, something to commemorate our little encounter. “I do have to do this, because you make me do this,” he said apologetically. “Besides, anesthesia is expensive, and you’re so much more pliant when you’ve started seeing things my way. It’s truly a pity that it never seems to last.”

Still holding my wrist tight, he half dragged me across the room to a chair that looked like it had been stolen from a dentist’s office. I made one last feeble attempt to struggle. I knew that chair. It had started to feature prominently in my nightmares, swelling to hellish proportions with every new appearance. The real chair was smaller than the one in my dreams, made of plain green vinyl instead of burning human leather, but their meanings were exactly the same. They both meant pain.

“Down you go,” said Sherman, releasing my wrist as he shoved me into the chair. I tumbled helplessly, unable to resist the pull of my slowed, muddled pulse. Sherman immediately started strapping me down, putting restraints across my wrists, ankles, and chest. He stopped short of making it hard to breathe, but only barely; as long as he didn’t kill me, my comfort was not his concern.

“Still don’t know… how you do that,” I mumbled. My lips felt like they were made of lead, too heavy to operate properly and only technically grafted onto my body.

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams,” he replied, before leaning down to give me a peck on the forehead. “If I tell you how much I am your superior, will you finally cease this pointless attempt to rail against me?”

I couldn’t answer. I just looked at him.

Apparently, Sherman took silence as agreement—that, or
he’d been waiting for the chance to tell me all about his brilliance for a while now, and this was enough of an opening that he couldn’t resist. He picked up a drill, giving its trigger an experimental pull. And then, after the sound had passed, he told me.

“We were all engineered for different things, you know. We each have different mechanisms of supporting and enhancing the human body.” His hands worked as he spoke, clever hands holding clever needles and making them do clever things. My throat ached to scream, but the numbing effect of my slowed pulse and confused flesh kept me from doing anything more extreme than whimpering. Any time it seemed like I was going to break loose, he would press a hand down against the exposed skin of my upper arm and yank me back down into the darkness, where my needs and desires mattered not at all. “I know you spoke with Ronnie about her enhancements. It’s why she can stay awake for so long, and move so fast, and have such a terribly bad temper without slipping over into Tansy territory. Tansy was designed to secrete antipsychotic medication, if you can believe that. Maybe she still does. That would explain why that damaged brain of hers doesn’t kick her out entirely. It will one day. Won’t that be something to see?”

He finished with the veins in my arm and moved on to the veins in my thighs. There was nothing sexual about it, for all that he was so fond of posturing and propositioning. I knew that Sherman would have taken me up on any offer I chose to make—taken me up on it enthusiastically and without hesitation. He’d said as much, and I remembered his assignations with the scientists back at SymboGen, back when our relationship consisted of more than needles and captivity.

“You, I haven’t quite figured out. No one has an exact genetic profile on you, which is odd, since I know you were of SymboGen design. Nothing off-market or back alley about you, Sal
my girl, and still I don’t know what your chimeric interface has blessed or cursed you with. You’ll sort it out one day, probably when you least want to, and you’ll forgive me if I very much want to be standing by to point and laugh. Discovery is almost always traumatic for someone. That’s what discovery is
for
. If only they hadn’t hidden your files from me. I looked. I looked so hard. But alas. They had to make me do things the hard way.”

He put the syringe he’d been using aside, and I had time to breathe a sigh of disoriented relief before he picked up a scalpel, raising it high to be certain that I would see it.

“I was designed to regulate the heartbeat of a captain of industry, a man who did so love his indulgences. They might as well have called him Old King Cole for the way he carried on. He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl and he called for his fiddlers three, and when those proved to be too much for his feeble mammalian body, he called for his faithful tapeworm jester to come and bear the brunt of everything he’d ever done to himself. I’m a biological pacemaker. Can’t do much to humans, I’m afraid, and I can only slow a sleepwalker down if I can get them to stop biting me long enough to notice that they’ve been calmed past all reason, but give me a chimera and ah, you’ve given me the world.”

He brought the scalpel down. I think I surprised us both when I found another scrap of strength in my damaged throat and began to scream.

“Really, Sal,” chided Sherman, once he had his composure back—and he did not, I noted, look happy about having lost it in the first place. Sherman was not a man who liked looking foolish, no matter how good his reasons had been. “Flesh is an illusion, human flesh doubly so. You should be grateful that I’m teaching you that now, rather than your needing to learn it the way that Ronnie did.” He continued slicing small chunks of my underarm off. Every time he raised the scalpel, it was a
little redder, as were his fingers. I could hear my blood dripping into the pan he’d positioned for just that purpose. I pictured a basin overflowing with pieces of me, things I had never agreed to give away or let him steal. How many pieces could I lose before I could never be put back together again? How many pieces did he
want
?

“You’ve been very good so far today, but it’s time you pull your little mental rabbit hole trick, because this next bit is going to be quite painful.” Sherman’s jovial tone was all the warning I really needed. I gathered my consciousness into a tight knot and plummeted down, down, down through the layers of self until I reached the hot warm dark, where everything was safe and warm and red, and no men with scalpels or inscrutable designs could touch or take me.

It was becoming increasingly easy to separate myself—my actual self, the part of me that was Sal, and had never been Sally Mitchell—from the human body that had always defined me. It was something I’d always been able to do when I was sleeping, whether I intended to or not, but since Sherman had started putting his hands on me, it had become a waking refuge as well, a place where I could know that my inner core would not be violated in any way. I didn’t know why I could do it, just like Sherman didn’t know why he couldn’t. I just knew that when I really needed to escape, everything except the hot warm dark and the sound of distant drums would go away.

Maybe that’s what they built into me
, I thought, floating formless in the void that was the core of my self.
Silence and meditation, instead of messing with people’s hearts or never being still
. I had only heard the word “epigenetic” once before I was brought here. I still wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I wondered if Dr. Cale would know. I wondered whether I would ever have the chance to ask her.

He’s never going to let you go
, murmured one of the under-voices that lurked in the dark, more and more often these days,
giving voice to things I knew but didn’t want to know. I felt fractured, fragmented, like I was splitting myself into pieces in my effort to remain whole.

I know
, I answered myself miserably, and stopped trying to think about anything at all, letting myself fall deeper down into the perfect timelessness of the only place that had always been meant to belong to me.

I woke up with the worst headache I had ever had in my life. I sat up slowly, forcing down the nausea that threatened to rise up in my throat and overwhelm me. A lock of hair fell in my face and I jumped before reaching up with shaky fingers and pulling it in front of my eyes.

“That
bastard
,” I breathed. It was easier to focus on my hair than on my aching head, or on the bandages wrapped around my wrists and inner elbows. My formerly long hair had been cut into a bob, long enough to get in my mouth and eyes, too short to pull back in anything more elaborate than a ponytail. To add insult to injury, it was also about three shades darker and redder than my original chestnut brown, filled with auburn highlights that made it look like it belonged on someone else’s head. I dropped the lock of hair.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said. Hearing the words made me feel a little better, and so I raised my voice and called, “Do you hear me, Sherman? I’m going to kill you. You can use my body for your fucked-up experiments, but you had no right to cut my hair. It’s not
yours
.”

“See, he thinks everything about us is his, and that means everything about you, and that means he had every right,” said Ronnie, from off to my left.

I flinched away from the sound of his voice. That was a bad decision. “Ow!” I yelped, clapping my hands over the back of my head. They hit a thick gauze pad, covering the same spot as the incision Nathan and the others had used to repair my
faulty arteries. My head spun, filled with a pain so profound that it seemed to be coming from inside and outside at the same exact time. I wanted to throw up. I was afraid my skull would explode if I did.

“Ow,” I repeated, this time almost in a whimper, and collapsed backward onto the mattress, pulling myself into a fetal ball. The pain didn’t subside. I had awoken it, and it was going to have its say before it left me in peace.

Footsteps to my left signaled Ronnie’s approach. There was a small clicking sound as he put something down on the display nightstand next to my current bed. “I brought painkillers and antibiotics,” he said. “Sherman’s proud of his surgical theater, but that doesn’t make it completely sterile. You need to take these pills to make sure you don’t wind up with an infection.”

I said nothing. I just stayed in my curl, clutching my head and fighting the urge to whimper.

Ronnie sighed. “You don’t trust us and you don’t like us and you don’t have to, because we’ve all basically been assholes to you. I’m not going to lecture you on getting along with people who’ve fucked you over. But we need you alive, so if you don’t want to wake up strapped down and attached to half a dozen IVs, you need to take your medicine.”

“Why do you need me alive?” The question was faint and reedy, but I forced it out word by word. The effort left me feeling wrung-out and exhausted. I needed to sleep. I needed to sleep forever.

“You can learn a lot from a necropsy,” said Ronnie. “You sometimes learn even more from a living being.”

This time, I didn’t swallow my whimper. When you dissect a human being, you’re performing an autopsy. When you dissect anything else in the world, intelligent or not, you’re performing a necropsy. By using the word “necropsy,” Ronnie made it clear that he wasn’t talking about cutting up the human body that I inhabited. He was talking about the actual me, the pound
and a half of tapeworm that was wedged tight into Sally Mitchell’s skull, like a squatter that had taken over the house while the original owner wasn’t home.

Ronnie sighed. “We’re not the enemy, Sal. Those people out there, all they want to do is wipe us out. Kill us off, even though we’re their creation. We’re part of a healthier, hardier world, and you’re going to help us make that happen. So yeah, we’re
going
to keep you alive, whether you like it or not. You’re going to be a lot happier if you just go along with things.”

I was silent. A few seconds passed before Ronnie sighed again, louder this time, and I heard his footsteps moving away. I waited until I was sure he was gone before rolling over and opening my eyes. The plastic tray he’d placed on the nightstand contained a bottle of water and a little paper cup of pills. It was only a few feet away from me. It might as well have been a mile.

It took what felt like an hour for me to inch my way across the bed and catch the edge of the tray, pulling it closer to me. For one sickening moment it teetered on the nightstand, seeming to be in danger of crashing to the floor. I swallowed hard and forced myself to keep moving, pulling it inch by agonizing inch into reach. It didn’t fall. I emptied the little paper cup of pills into my mouth, dry-swallowing them one by one, holding the others under my tongue until they were needed. I nearly choked twice, the round edges of the pills seeming to become jagged and sharp as they rasped against the walls of my esophagus. Finally, though, the last of them was inside me, and I collapsed back into limp motionlessness, looking longingly at the water. I wanted it more than I could remember wanting almost anything. I knew that trying to drink it without sitting up would make a mess without slaking my thirst, and sitting up was off the table as long as the pain was raging in my head.