Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (46 page)

“It’s about time you accepted the reality of your situation, Sally my dear. There’s two miles of city between us and my doors, and there’s no telling how many walking dead men are packed into that distance. Let me go. Uncuff my hands and let me contact my people. They’ll send an extraction team, and if you’re willing to roll over on the good doctor, they’ll be happy to cut you a deal.” His smile was a terrible thing, filled with teeth and shadows. “She’d roll over on you, you know. She’s never been loyal to anything she didn’t make in a test tube. You probably came closest to her affections, Nate, but a womb isn’t the same as an incubator to a woman like her. You never stood a chance.”

Nathan’s mouth was a thin, hard line. I clung tighter to his hand. “I know exactly where I stand with my mother, but I thank you for your concern. As for your request, you had plenty of time to negotiate while we were back at the lab. This is the mission you agreed to. I hope it kills you.”

He stood, still holding my hand, and pulled me with him as he walked away from Dr. Banks, across the deck, and into the small control room where Fishy was now frantically pushing buttons, flipping switches, and generally flailing, such that he seemed to fill all available space even before Nathan and I wedged ourselves inside.

“The brakes are good, but we’re
really
low on gas,” said Fishy, without turning to see who had joined him. I guess his options were pretty limited. “That’s making me nervous, especially since I don’t know what the pumping equipment is going to look like, or whether they’d have anything canned in case of emergency.”

“Earthquake kits,” I said. “I’d think the ferry people would want to be prepared for an earthquake making it unsafe to visit the gas station.”

“Good thinking!” Fishy yanked on a lever and finally stilled, putting his hands back on the wheel. The Ferry Building loomed directly ahead of us, seeming untouched by the changes to the city around it. It was a landmark, a place to visit for the Saturday Farmer’s Market or to buy expensive artisanal cheese, and just seeing it was enough to take a little of the tension out of my shoulders and loosen a little of the twisted panic that was knotted in my gut. If the Ferry Building was still standing, then not
everything
had changed. Most things, maybe, but not
everything
.

Fishy continued, blithely unaware of my relief: “The employee lot is off to the side. Most of the people who worked the ferry took public transit to work—which is sort of funny if you think about it—but there were always a few who needed to have a vehicle, for one reason or another. The odds are definitely with us that someone drove in and then got slaughtered, or turned sleepwalker, and didn’t need their keys anymore.”

“What if the keys aren’t in the car?” I asked anxiously. “Do you know how to drive without keys?”

“Do you
actually
know?” added Nathan. “Seeing it in a game of Grand Theft Auto isn’t the same thing.”

Fishy laughed. There was an odd underpinning of exhaustion to the sound, something I would have taken as completely normal from Nathan or even Dr. Banks, but which sounded
out of place in Fishy’s normally jovial tone. “Yeah, I actually know,” he said, pulling back on another lever. The boat bled off a few more notches of speed, sliding smoothly under the canopy of the Ferry Building’s landing zone. We were almost there. “My wife—Laney—was a genius when it came to spreadsheets and numbers and knowing how your insurance policy worked, but she was a little bit of a space cadet when it came to remembering where she left her keys. I learned how to hot-wire a car after the third or fourth time she lost them so completely that we couldn’t figure out how we were going to get home. It was a challenge. I like challenges. I always have.”

I frowned a little, glancing uncertainly at Nathan. He gave a little shake of his head, signaling for me to stay quiet, and in this instance, listening to him seemed like the better idea.

“Once we have a car, the two of you can take Dr. Banks and head for SymboGen,” continued Fishy calmly. “I’ll stay with the boat, make sure we don’t get overrun with sleepwalkers or taken out by survivors or anything cliché and inconvenient like that.”

“But what will we do once we have Tansy?” I asked, alarmed. Our plan hadn’t involved Fishy staying behind.

He glanced back over his shoulder. “Bring her here. If I can’t stay docked, I’ll at least stay close to the shore, so you can see me. Then we’ll just have to find a place where you can park and I can pull in close enough that you can get on board. It’ll be a fun challenge.”

“A fun challenge,” I echoed faintly. I felt like I wanted to be sick. Throwing up would have been a terrible idea, but that didn’t make it any less appealing. That horrible hot/cold mixture was forming in my stomach again, and the drums were getting softer, harder to hear, which struck me as bad in some way I couldn’t entirely define.

“Tansy is going to be on life support,” said Nathan. “Putting her in the water could kill her.”

“Which makes it all the more important that someone stay with the boat.” Fishy turned the wheel delicately to the side, and we slid in along the dock as if our boat had been intended to sit there all along: the missing piece of an elaborate puzzle. “Welcome to San Francisco.”

Only one of the other ferry bays was occupied, by a boat that was half submerged and still taking on water through the gaping hole in its side. I had no idea what could have done that to one of these sturdy, metal-plated craft, and I didn’t want to know. The dock was clear, and nothing moved in the shadows. That was what really mattered to me, at least right now: that we were, for the moment, alone.

“Sal?” asked Nathan.

I nodded tightly and left the cabin, moving to the rail. Dr. Banks said something, but his words were washed away by the roar of the engine as Fishy did whatever he had to do in order to lock us into place, and so I just kept walking, turning my back on the scientist who had helped to make me. When I reached the edge of the boat I stopped, resting my hands on the railing, and closed my eyes, trying to
listen
with everything I had. The noise didn’t matter; my ears weren’t a part of this.

Pheromone trails are funny things. They’re both immediate, generated by bodies in motion, and left behind by bodies that have already passed. Ants use them to keep track of each other. Cats use them to claim things as part of their territory. And tapeworms use them, in a strange, incomprehensible way, to communicate. I didn’t know what an unaltered tapeworm would have to say, but I knew what the sleepwalkers were saying with their pheromone trails, and hence one of the things that I was saying to them when they happened to cross my path—maybe the most important thing:

Here I am
.

The air in the Ferry Building was stale, thick with salt and a faint, sweet foundation of decay. There had been sleepwalkers
here—I couldn’t have explained how I knew that, because the knowledge didn’t come with any accompanying words. Neither did the knowledge that they weren’t here now. The water was too close and too bitter, and it got too cold at night. They had been driven deeper into the city, or at least away from the dock area. What that was going to mean for the rest of our journey, I couldn’t say.

I let go of the rail and turned, unsurprised to find Nathan and Dr. Banks standing behind me. “There’s no one here but us,” I said. “It’s an enclosed space, though. There could be a hundred sleepwalkers outside and I wouldn’t know about it.”

Dr. Banks sneered. “Leave it to Surrey to build an early warning system that can’t work through walls. What use are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I guess I’ll have time to figure it out. Where’s Fishy?”

“He’s shutting down the engine, and then he’s going to come help us find a car,” said Nathan. “It should be a minute or so.”

The slow rumble of the boat beneath us died, leaving my feet tingling at the sudden lack of vibration. Fishy trotted out from the cabin, waving to make sure we knew that everything was all right. Beverly jumped, pressing herself hard against my legs. For one terrible moment, I expected to hear her growl come ripping through the still air of the Ferry Building like a condemnation. This was going too easily: something had to go wrong. That was how things went for us. Wrong.

Fishy slowed as he drew closer, and Beverly did not growl. “Are we clear?” he asked.

“No sleepwalkers in the building, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way, especially after we open a door,” I said. “I can’t be sure they’re not at the front, either. I’m still figuring out how all this works.”

“As long as they leave me alone long enough to get some fuel
into this baby, I’ll be fine,” said Fishy, patting the side of the ferry. He was smiling, calmly and consistently.

I didn’t like that expression—something about it was off, somehow, although not in a way that would have meant he was going into conversion—but it was Nathan who spoke, asking, “Are you feeling all right, Fishy? I didn’t expect you to volunteer to stay behind.”

“Yeah, I’m good,” said Fishy calmly. “It’s all good. See, this is where we split the party to deliver the MacGuffin”—he pointed at Dr. Banks, who looked more confused than affronted—“and cure the zombie plague that’s been destroying mankind. You guys are running into a series of cut scenes. If I stay here with the boat, I’ll either get an unstoppable wave of enemies to fight, or I’ll be ready when you come back with the final boss fight in tow. Either way, I’m good.”

I frowned. It took me a moment to puzzle through what he was saying. I’ve never really liked video games. They moved too fast, and involved too much violence. I was happier with cartoons and audio books when I needed something to keep me entertained. “You’re really sad, aren’t you?” I ventured.

“Not anymore,” said Fishy. “I’m probably going to die today. Thanks for that.” He thrust his hand out at me, fingers spread. I blinked. Then I took it, and shook. He beamed. “I’m pretty much ready to log out and go home. Now let’s find you guys a car.” He pulled his hand away and loped off toward the stairway that would grant him access to the deck. I stared mutely after him, not sure how I should respond.

Dr. Banks did it for me. “You know that boy’s a few kittens short of a litter, right?” he asked. “Not sure I’d feel good about leaving him with my escape route, if I were you. Not that you’re going to make it back here to use it. It’s just a matter of principle.”

“Yes, because crossing the city with the arrogant bastard
who brought about the end of mankind in order to increase his profit share is so much better.” Nathan grabbed Dr. Banks’s arms, ignoring the older man’s protests, and hauled him after Fishy.

I took one last nervous glance over the side of the boat, tightened my grip on Beverly’s leash, and followed them.

T
he garage where the employee vehicles were kept was locked, which made no sense to me—who stops in the middle of an apocalypse to make sure everything is safe and secure from looters? Fishy dispatched the lock with a single swipe of the crowbar he’d acquired from somewhere, knocking it to the ground with a loud clattering noise that made the rest of us wince and look around, waiting for an attack. I still wasn’t picking up on any nearby sleepwalkers, but as I had tried to explain to Dr. Banks, my funny sort of radar was neither tested nor proven to be completely reliable. It was a mad science party trick, and like all party tricks, I had to assume that sometimes it could fail to work the way it was supposed to.

Fishy slipped into the garage. A moment later his voice drifted back like a ghost out of the darkness, saying, “The lights are out, but I think we’ll be okay.”

That was our cue. I slipped in after him before Nathan could push in front of me, letting Beverly’s curiously sniffing nose lead the way. Her sleepwalker radar was more reliable than mine, and if she started barking, we’d know that we needed to get the hell out.

High windows were set around the edge of the garage roof, allowing the watery San Francisco light to ooze inside, seeming almost liquid as it clung to the corners of the room and trickled down the walls to outline the shapes of the cars and trucks that had been safely tucked away by their owners before those owners went on to meet their fates. The air smelled ever so subtly of decay, and I was glad for the darkness, glad for the shadows that concealed the corners and the secrets they might hold; Beverly wasn’t barking and my private radar wasn’t ringing, which meant that nothing else lived in this space. If a sleepwalker had been trapped inside, they had long since starved to death. I didn’t think that was the case, though. I was pretty sure the lock Fishy had so carelessly destroyed had been placed by someone who then entered the garage through another door—something small, something overlooked in our quick, goal-oriented search—and finished things in the only way they could. Someone who wanted to die with dignity.

Fishy didn’t seem bothered by the smell. He moved from vehicle to vehicle, cupping his hands around his eyes as he peered through the glass. “Can’t see a damn thing,” he announced, and kept moving. “Start looking for unlocked doors. One of these bastards has to still have the keys in it.”

“Why?” I asked. I moved toward the nearest van at the same time; there was no point in waiting for an answer before I started trying to help.

“Because otherwise I’m teaching one of you how to hot-wire a car, and trust me, that’s not the sort of skill you pick up in one lesson.” Fishy pulled on the door of a pickup truck, scowled, and moved on. “Someone needs to wait with the boat; it’s not
going to be either one of you; it’s sure as shit not going to be Dr. Frankenstein; that means we need a car with keys.”

“This one’s open.” Nathan’s call came from the other side of the garage. I turned, peering through the gloom, and found him standing next to the dark bulk of what looked like a minivan. “No keys.”

“What’s the make?” asked Fishy.

“Io.”

Fishy actually grinned. “Pre- or post-auto drive?”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know that? It’s an Io. I can’t even tell what color it is.”

“Wait right there.” Fishy half jogged across the garage, neatly sidestepping around Beverly, to join Nathan at the open van door. He peered inside the vehicle, seeming to look more with his hands than with his eyes—which made sense, given the darkness—and finally announced, gleefully, “You don’t need keys
or
a crash course on how to hot-wire a car. All you need is one short and a screwdriver.”

“What?” said Nathan.

“What?” I said.

“You spent a lot of time in prison before the world got messed up, didn’t you?” said Dr. Banks.

Fishy ignored us all as he turned and walked over to the wall. Bumping, clattering sounds traced his progress, making me wince. It was hard to know how much of the noise he was making would be audible outside the garage, but even a little could very easily be too much, under the circumstances. There was one final clatter, louder than the rest, and then Fishy was trotting back, holding something long and pointed in one hand. “There’s always a toolbox in a place like this,” he said, pushing past Nathan. His upper body half vanished into the van, and for a few moments the only sounds were the drums beating in my eyes and Fishy rustling around in the front seat.

There was a click. The van’s engine turned over, and the
headlights came on, throwing the front half of the garage into terrible clarity. A man was slumped against the wall on the right, only a few feet away from the bench and open toolbox that Fishy must have been rummaging through. The man’s throat had been slit, and the words “I’m sorry” were written on the wall in what I strongly suspected was his blood. I shuddered and looked away.

Fishy didn’t appear to have noticed. He was enthusiastically explaining the art of using a screwdriver in place of a key to Nathan, periodically leaning back into the van to give the screwdriver a twist or jiggle, for reasons I couldn’t understand and didn’t particularly want to learn. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, waiting for them to be done, waiting for the moment when we could start moving and put this dark, dead space behind us.

Beverly began to growl.

It was a low, almost inaudible sound at first, easily overlooked under the chatter from Fishy and the questioning replies from Nathan. I stiffened, trying to turn my senses outward, looking for pheromone trails or… or whatever it was that I actually looked for when I did that. I found nothing. But Beverly was still growling, the sound increasing in both volume and urgency, and she didn’t do that without cause. “Guys?” I said.

They ignored me.

Beverly pressed herself hard against my leg. Her eyes were fixed on the open garage door, and her ears were flat against her head, giving her a distinctly predatory cast. “Guys,” I said again, louder this time. “Something’s upsetting Beverly.”

That got Dr. Banks to pay attention to me, at least. “Is it sleepwalkers?”

“I don’t know. I’m not picking up anything, but I don’t know if I would. I think we should be moving.”

“In a second,” said Fishy.

Beverly continued to growl, still getting steadily louder. For
the first time, I felt that odd ping at the back of my head that meant
sleepwalkers coming, sleepwalkers nearby
—but it was so much stronger than I had expected it to be, especially with so little lead-in, that it might as well have meant
sleepwalkers here
.

“We don’t have any more seconds,” I said, urgently. “We have to go
now
.”

The urgency in my voice must have been enough to catch his attention; the outline of his head appeared above the dashboard of the van. I turned, dragging Beverly with me, and ran toward the others. Dr. Banks saw me move and moved with me, and for one glorious moment, I thought we were going to be okay: we had moved fast enough, we had made it out of the path of oncoming danger.

And then the sleepwalkers of San Francisco, who had had quite a long while to grow hungry as they roved the hills looking for things to fill the holes that could never be filled, hit the open door of the garage like a wave. Their bodies blocked out what little light there was in an instant, and everything became the shouts and shoves of my companions as we tried to get ourselves into the van. I wound up in the back, holding on to Beverly with all my might as I struggled to keep her from leaping out of the vehicle and tearing off into the fray. Nathan pushed Dr. Banks in after me and slammed the door.

The front doors were still open. “Come on, you idiot, get in the car!” shouted Nathan.

Fishy. Fishy was still out there. “I’m good!” he shouted back. “Go, I’ll hold them off!”

“The damn fool’s going to kill us all,” snarled Dr. Banks, and for once he and I were in perfect, terrible agreement. Then Nathan was in the driver’s seat, and was reaching across the van to grab the back of Fishy’s shirt and haul him into the front passenger seat, somehow managing to lift the smaller, stockier man with nothing but a grunt of strained protest. The sleepwalkers were closing fast, and the buzz in my head that told
me they were coming was a clanging bell warning me of a five-alarm fire. It was becoming physically painful. I bent forward, clasping my hands at the base of my skull, and tried to will the sound away.

Someone’s hands were pressed between my shoulder blades. They weren’t mine. With Nathan and Fishy in the front seat… I realized who was trying to comfort me a bare second before he spoke, and I stiffened, wishing there were any way for me to remove myself from the situation. There wasn’t. With the alarm bells screaming in my head, I would have been doing well to sit up.

“Concentrate, Sally.” Dr. Banks’s voice was low and soft, so close to my ear that he had to have been leaning forward to whisper to me. That went with the presence of his cuffed hands on my back. I could hear Nathan and Fishy shouting at each other. There was no help coming from that quarter, not until they had a chance to breathe and realize what was happening. “She’s distracted right now, and I know you’re in there. I know you’ve always been in there. This is your chance. Take a deep breath, and come back to us.”

I wanted to slap his smug face away from me. I couldn’t bring myself to move. The alarm bells were still ringing, but in their clamor I could also hear an
absence
of sound: the drums had stopped, leaving the world missing its natural backbeat. That was horrifying, in a way I couldn’t entirely define.

“Sally.”

He sounded so
sure
of himself. Like he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all he had to do was keep calling her and she would appear. Sally, with her human upbringing and her human ideas about the world. Sally, who wasn’t afraid of riding in cars, and who had never experienced the collapse of civilization, or the discovery that she wasn’t what she believed herself to be. Sally, who was as alien to me as I was to her, but whose body I had taken over without so much as a by-your-leave.

Sally, who had tormented her family to such an extent that her father was willing to let me play cuckoo in his nest, while her sister had never questioned “her” sudden, total change of personality; had, in fact, looked upon it with gratitude and relief. Sally, whose taste in friends was such that her boyfriend hadn’t even been able to stick around to see whether she was going to recover—one hint of difficulty and he was out the door, moving so fast that he might as well have left contrails in his wake. Sally, who had left the mansion of her body empty and waiting for me, because she just couldn’t cope with existence anymore.

Maybe Dr. Banks was right about her memories being locked somewhere in the soft gray folds of the brain that had once belonged to her, but he was wrong about at least one thing: Sally didn’t live here anymore, and no matter how hard he tried to convince me, I was never inviting her to come back.

“Hold on!” shouted Nathan. The van leapt forward. I heard—and felt—the impact of soft bodies against the hood as we slammed into the leading wave of sleepwalkers. Their moans filled the world, drowning out the alarm bells triggered by their presence. I seized on the sound, trying to use it to anchor myself to the real world again. My head was a cacophony of unwanted stimuli. One by one I shunted them aside, looking for the one that would allow me to move again. I wanted Dr. Banks away from me. His hands on my back were a sick, dead weight, more repulsive than the army of sleepwalkers now trying to claw their way inside to reach us.

Their moaning changed pitch and timbre as we rolled forward, forcing the sleepwalkers to either stand aside or be crushed under our wheels. These were the ones who had been smart or canny enough to stay alive in the ruins of San Francisco: more of them seemed to be moving aside than staying in our path. I forced my head up, off my knees, and croaked, “Crack the windows.”

“What?” Nathan’s voice, sounding bewildered and no small bit dismayed.

“I need you to crack the windows.” Forcing my eyes to open came next. I stared down at the mud-smeared floorboards, trying to will myself to keep moving. “The sleepwalkers… if they knew I was here, they might be confused enough to back off. Just a little. I don’t want to hurt them if we don’t have to.”

“You stupid little cunt.” Dr. Banks spoke softly enough that I knew the others wouldn’t hear him, not with the sleepwalkers moaning outside and the van still straining for escape. It didn’t matter: I could hear him, and I wouldn’t forget. He removed his hands from the middle of my back, and it was like a terrible burden being lifted away.

After that, it was almost easy to sit up, turning a glare on Dr. Banks in the process. He shied back, pressing himself against the door. My expression must have been fiercer than I thought. “Get away from me,” I said. “Never touch me again. Nathan? The windows.”

“On it,” said Fishy. The windows in the back rolled down maybe an inch and a half, allowing the moans of the sleepwalkers outside to fill the cab. Beverly’s growls became frantic, full-throated barks, almost drowning out the moaning from outside.

“Shh, Bevvie, it’s okay,” I said, patting her on the head before climbing up onto the seat, kneeling. I leaned forward, pressing my lips against the opening in the window, and took a deep breath. The stench of decay and unwashed human bodies assaulted my nose, almost gagging me. Most of them were ripe with urine, gangrene, and worse. I forced myself to keep inhaling until my lungs began to ache. Then I exhaled, trying to breathe my pheromones into the garage. We were still rolling slowly forward, Nathan struggling with the wheel as he fought to get us out into the open without doing irreparable damage to our only means of transit.

I breathed in again, breathed out again, and kept my eyes on the sleepwalkers surrounding the car,
willing
them to “listen” to the messages coded into my biochemistry, written in protein and chemical chains on my breath. I was a chimera; I was their social superior, just like a termite queen was superior to the drones that filled her hive. They would listen to me. They would
listen
to me. They didn’t have a choice.