Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (27 page)

The first door on the other side of the hall was closed. I stopped before turning the doorknob, pressing my ear against the wood and listening for any signs that I wasn’t alone in the house. I didn’t hear anything. I turned the knob and pushed the door slowly open. The room on the other side was utterly destroyed, but what I could pick out through the light filtering in from the street below seemed to imply that it had belonged to a teenage girl: everything was frilly and pale, washed out so that I couldn’t tell its original color. Most of it was also broken, thrown to the floor and crushed by some angry hand. The tattered remains of posters still blanketed the walls, and what water remained in the fish tank near the bed was foul and dark with mold. I noted all this dispassionately, the bulk of my attention going to the room’s single largest fixture:

The window.

It was closed, rendering the room stifling and somehow septic-smelling, like something had been left in here to rot, but
the light seeping in from below was strong enough that I knew it would give me a good view of the street. I could find out whether it was safe for me to leave the house and go looking for a pay phone. I stepped into the room, drawn to that window like a moth to a flame.

Something moaned in the dark. It was a small, weak sound, but it was still enough to bring me to an instant halt, my back going so stiff that it pulled at the wounded muscles in my thighs and made
me
want to start moaning. I bit my tongue to keep from making a sound and turned, as slowly as I could, to face the farthest corner of the room.

My eyes were adjusting to the dim light. As I peered into the corner, it began slowly resolving from an indistinguishable jumble into distinct shapes. That long, broken pillar was a piece of the bed. Those soft mounds were the comforter, humped up and caked with something foul. And the skeletal collection of joints and angles in the middle of it all was a human being, eyes sunk deep into a skull that was barely contained by a thin panel of tight-stretched skin, hair almost completely ripped from its scalp. I couldn’t tell its original gender: it was naked, but so huddled over that it could have been male or female. Not that it really mattered. The figure was clearly on the verge of death, having been locked in this room so long that its body had already cannibalized every useful bit of tissue that it could without shutting down essential systems. I didn’t know how long it took the average person to starve to death, or how big this one had been when the door shut and the food stopped coming, but regardless, they didn’t have much longer.

The sleepwalker—because there was nothing else it could have been; not with a closed, unlocked door being the only thing between it and freedom—opened its mouth and moaned again, weakly. It didn’t try to get out of its nest. I didn’t think it could have moved if it wanted to.

I bit my lip, staring at the figure in the corner. It didn’t moan
again. I wasn’t sure whether that was because it was too weak, or because I had stopped moving and it could no longer tell where I was. Either way, it didn’t seem like it was going to come after me anytime soon. I turned my back on it and resumed my trek toward the window, looking out on the street below.

I’m not really sure what I was expecting after the situation at the hospital and the number of people who had been shoved into USAMRIID’s quarantine. Some part of me had still been holding out the hope that this would all just go away, and the world would return to a semblance of normalcy. I put a hand over my mouth, blinking rapidly to prevent the tears that were welling up in my eyes from clouding my vision. Normalcy was no longer an option, assuming it had ever been an option in the first place.

There were no cars moving on this suburban street, and the few lit windows on the houses around me were all on the second floor, meaning that anyone who was still awake and alive was staying as far from ground level as possible. That made sense.

The street belonged to the sleepwalkers.

There were only about twenty of them in my view, although that didn’t mean that there weren’t more hiding in the bushes or skulking in the long shadows down the sides of those same houses. They were of every age and race, from small children to a man I guessed had to be in his eighties. All of them shambled along with the same mindless lack of purpose, their hands held slightly out in front of them as if to ward away obstacles. While I watched, two of them bumped into each other, patted one another’s arms, and finally joined hands before shambling on in tandem. This neighborhood was no longer the property of the human race. Its successors had taken over.

There was a faint moan from behind me. I whirled, suddenly convinced that the sleepwalker in the corner had managed to get loose and come after me. The bright specks of its eyes glared
from the exact spot where I’d seen them before. I took a deep breath, trying to calm my pounding heart. “It’s okay, Sal,” I whispered, earning myself another moan from the sleepwalker. “Unless you’re going to feed it, it’s not strong enough to come after you.” I felt bad about reducing the sleepwalker to an “it,” but that was technically true of the tapeworm part of the composite, and I wasn’t going to sex the human half just to get the proper pronouns.

Still. This room looked like it had been designed for a teenage girl. If she was the sleepwalker, she’d been locked in here when she converted. Either she had been able to shut the door before her parents could get to her or she’d been the first to go, transitioning while she was asleep or otherwise distracted. No matter what had happened, most of her belongings were probably in here with her, and teenage girls had cellphones.

I began feeling my way along the top of the dresser next to the window, moving cautiously in an attempt to keep from cutting myself on the broken glass that had been knocked from the empty picture frames still studding the walls. I found a charger plugged into the wall about halfway down the length of the dresser, its unconnected end seeming to taunt me. There
had
been a phone in this room. This dark, dangerous room with the watching sleepwalker still occasionally moaning from its place in the corner.

“Steady,” I murmured, as I disconnected the charger and stuffed it into my pocket. I knew the house still had power. If I could find the phone, I could call for help.

A rustling sound from the corner dragged my attention back to the sleepwalker. It was trying to work its way free of its nest, its withered, wasted limbs refusing to support its weight. As it moved, it revealed enough of its chest for me to identify it as the teenage girl whose room this had been. I felt a little better about that. She had already been robbed of her humanity and her future; the least I could do for her was think of her as the
woman she had been before one of my cousins burrowed into her brain and destroyed her.

“I’m sorry about touching all your stuff, but I don’t think you could tell me where your phone is,” I said apologetically, and resumed feeling my way along the dresser. “I wish you could. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

She moaned again, even more weakly this time. It was sort of nice not to be alone, since I knew that she wasn’t going to attack me: if she’d been capable of getting to her feet, rather than just rustling around in her nest, she would have done it already. I had a body packed with nutrients and fat, and I could have kept her alive for a good long time if she’d been able to get to me. I felt bad about that too—it was like I was waving a steak in front of a starving man—but since the steak was what was keeping me alive, I wasn’t going to share. It was terrible that her fate and mine had taken such different directions, but it wasn’t my fault. I just wished that there was something I could have done to fix it.

Honestly, I wished I had any idea who
could
have fixed it, or whether anyone was going to try. Dr. Cale was hard to predict. USAMRIID was all about humanity, and Sherman was all about the tapeworms, but humanity made the tapeworms—humanity brought the whole situation down on their own heads—and the tapeworms were taking things that didn’t belong to them. No one was completely in the right. No one was completely in the wrong, either.

The sleepwalker in the corner moaned and shifted again, dislodging several small objects from her nest. One of them hit the floor with a clunk, the light from the window reflecting off its cracked screen. I stared in disbelieving wonder.

It was a cellphone. And it was less than a foot away from a sleepwalker.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to just let me have that, would you?” I asked, taking a tentative step forward. The
sleepwalker’s face swiveled back toward me, and she moaned with weak menace. “No, I didn’t think so.”

I was the only thing in the room that she could eat: because of that, distracting her from my presence wasn’t going to be easy. I cast around until I found one of those long boards that had been broken off from the bed during her destruction of the room. Picking it up, I took another step forward.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “If you just let me have the phone, I can get out of your room, and you’ll never have to see me again.” That would mean leaving her to die alone, which might not have been a mercy, but which wouldn’t require me to actually be the one to kill her. I took another step forward.

Sometimes it’s bad to be wrong. I’d assumed that since she hadn’t left her nest, she didn’t have the strength left in her to do anything but shift and moan. As I leaned forward to grab the phone, she lunged, spending the last of her resources in a desperate bid for sustenance. Her hands latched around my wrist, nearly yanking me off my feet as she pulled me toward her frantically working jaws. The light from the window glimmered off her teeth, which seemed too large and too white for her face. Everything had shrunk but those teeth.

Swallowing my scream was one of the hardest things I had ever done. I backpedaled, trying to yank myself away from her. She didn’t let go. I was her last chance at survival, and no matter how reduced her faculties had been by time and trauma, some part of her still knew that getting my flesh into her mouth would save her. Everything she had left was going into the effort of holding on to me. As she pulled, I felt my feet starting to slip. Before long, I would topple, and she would have me.

What happened next was pure panic. I raised the board that I was holding, bringing it down on her skull as hard as I could. There was a brittle splintering sound, and she moaned, and I hit her again. She still didn’t let go, and so I kept on hitting her, hitting her over and over again, while the sound of drums rose
in my ears and the world narrowed down to a single point: me, and her, and the sound of wood impacting with her head.

She released my wrist. I didn’t stop hitting her.

It was exhaustion that finally made me pause and take stock of the situation. She wasn’t moving anymore. She had collapsed to the floor in a broken heap, and while there wasn’t much light in the room, what there was allowed me to see the dents in her skull, and the dark stains that were dripping down her skin as she continued to bleed out. The bleeding was already slowing, thanks to coagulation. Bile rose in my throat. I dropped the board, snatched the phone from the floor, and ran out of the room. I didn’t look back.

It was a miracle that I made it down the stairs without tripping and breaking my neck. I stopped in the entryway, where no lights or windows would betray my presence, and tried to turn on the phone in my hands. I had killed for it. I ought to use it.

It didn’t respond. Not even mashing the power button got a flicker of life out of the cracked and blood-spattered screen. I swallowed the panic that was trying to writhe up my throat and take me over, forcing myself to stand perfectly still while I breathed slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth, counting to ten on each exhale. The pounding in my ears began to lessen as my heart rate returned to something closer to normal.

The phone didn’t work because it had been sitting on the floor long enough for its captive owner to wither away to skin and bones. That was all. Even if she’d been a thin girl to start with, she must have been locked in that room for at least a week—probably more like two—before she got to the condition that I’d found her in. Of course the battery was dead. When I no longer felt like I was going to panic or vomit at any moment I walked down the hall to the bathroom, guided by the light that I’d left turned on earlier. There was a socket in the wall
next to the sink, one outlet already occupied by a hair dryer. I plugged the phone charger into the other outlet, connected the phone to the charger, and sat down on the toilet to wait.

It was hard to keep track of time sitting alone in a dark house surrounded by sleepwalkers. It felt like it had been an hour when the phone beeped to signal that it was charged enough to use. It had probably been more like fifteen minutes. I left it connected to the charger as I picked it up and carefully pushed the button to activate the screen.

Please don’t be password protected
, I prayed silently, unsure of who might be listening and even less sure that I cared.
Please just give me that much. Please
.

The screen flashed live, displaying the face of a smiling teenage girl wearing lipstick the color of bubble gum. There was no key pad. Relief washed over me. Her parents probably hadn’t allowed her to lock the phone, wanting to keep track of her activities. My parents had done something similar to me, although they had allowed Joyce all the privacy she wanted. That was the difference between adulthood and medical adolescence.

“Thank you,” I whispered, and touched the phone icon.

For one terrifying moment I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to remember Nathan’s number. Why should I? It was stored in my phone after all, and I had better things to remember. But it had been on a piece of paper first, pressed into my hand when we met at the hospital. Everyone kept telling me that I was using Sally Mitchell’s brain like a giant hard drive, storing information on it that couldn’t be contained in my original tapeworm neural system. That meant that everything I’d experienced since taking over had to be stored somewhere, if I just went looking for it.