“We’ll have to cut through Albany to get to the 4,” said Carrie, interrupting my train of thought. “How well do you know this area?”
“I’m pretty familiar with Solano,” I said. “I go there once a year for the Solano Stroll.” There would be no Stroll this year, I realized with dismay; no huge outdoor craft fair and food festival, no barbecue scenting the air with honey and hickory, no local social clubs trying to recruit new members. I’d manned the Cause for Paws booth there for the past three years, bringing out hopeful dogs and fluffy kittens who were in need of new homes. It was one of my favorite events. It, like the human ownership of Berkeley, was over.
“What kind of traffic are we looking at there?”
Solano was near several schools, and in a fairly heavily developed suburban area. “Lots of cars, but hopefully most people stayed off the main streets when they started getting sick,” I said after a moment’s thought. “We can take Shattuck all the way, and then it’s a straight shot to the freeway.”
Carrie nodded. “Okay. Let’s do that. I haven’t seen any of those things for a while, and I want to get out of here before that changes.”
“Do you think we’ll make it to Vallejo tonight?” I hated sounding so eager. Even knowing that Dr. Cale and the others weren’t going to be at the candy factory anymore, I still wanted to see it. It had been one of the closest things to a real home that I’d ever had, and I wanted to go back there. Not forever. Just long enough to catch my breath.
If I was ever going to breathe again.
“Hard to say,” said Carrie. “I’m worried about the freeway. I’m worried about USAMRIID. And I’m worried about the bridge. Vallejo is surrounded by water. Couldn’t you decide that we needed to go somewhere else to look for your family? Somewhere more, you know, landlocked?”
“I—” I stopped before I said anything else.
Landlocked.
Dr. Cale had said that she was getting out of Vallejo. USAMRIID knew she was there, and Carrie was right: Staying in a city that was most accessible via bridge wasn’t a good idea after the world started coming to an end. She had some incredibly talented scientists and engineers working for her. That didn’t mean they were equipped to rebuild a bridge if something happened to it. When she moved, she would have moved inland.
Not to San Francisco, because San Francisco was in SymboGen’s backyard. Not to Colma, either, for the same reason. Oakland and Alameda were both out for being too close to USAMRIID. Pleasanton being the quarantine zone took out the surrounding cities, San Ramon and Dublin and Fremont. But she wouldn’t have gone farther north, either. Even if she’d wanted to, Nathan wouldn’t have allowed it—not with Tansy in critical condition and me in Colonel Mitchell’s custody. They would have wanted to stay close. Not so close that they got caught, but… close.
“Yes,” I said, softly.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I think there’s somewhere else we can look. Keep going. I’ll tell you when you need to exit the freeway.”
Carrie nodded, and drove on.
Juniper had finished her pickle and gone to sleep in her seat, her head resting against the window and her mouth hanging slack. The sun was sinking lower against the horizon, turning everything orange and rose and making it harder for Carrie to see the road without turning on the headlights. When it got too dark, we were going to have to stop for the night. The chances that we would be spotted were just too high if we were the only thing that was lit up in the entire East Bay.
The idea of waiting in an unmoving car until dawn, with who-knows-what moving through the night outside, was not appealing. The idea of being picked up by USAMRIID when we were so close to what might be our goal was even worse—especially since, if I was right, I would be responsible for leading them to Dr. Cale’s doorstep when she’d finally managed to drop completely off their radar. I couldn’t do that to her. If we had to sleep in the car, then we had to sleep in the car. Even with the possibility of sleepwalkers prowling the hills, it would still feel safer than the quarantine zone.
“Willow Pass in a mile,” said Carrie. “You sure about this?”
“No.” I looked out the window at the rolling Contra Costa hills. Cows dotted them here and there, grazing, apparently unaware of the chaos around them. They must have been meat cows, not dairy, or be lucky enough to belong to ranchers who were still alive. Dairy cows who went without being milked for too long could die when their udders became infected, and while cows were good at feeding themselves, they weren’t always good about protecting themselves from predators.
Speaking of predators… we hadn’t seen any sleepwalkers for long enough that I was starting to worry. Either they were dying off, from the secondary infections or from the many other dangers that the world presented to essentially mindless creatures trapped in fragile human bodies, or they were learning how to hide, becoming more efficient attackers. The higher-functioning sleepwalkers might have had enough time to settle into their bodies that they had figured out how to plan, how to use their resources to best effect, rather than just mobbing and expecting it to get them what they wanted. I didn’t know. Not knowing was the worst part.
I-4 was mostly clear, although the sides of the road were lined with the cars of people who had made it this far and no farther. We’d had to go around several accidents. The lack of traffic in the other lanes made it easier than it should have been; when one side was blocked, we could just use the law enforcement cutouts and drive on the other side of the road for a while. It was eerie, and I was glad Juniper was sleeping. She didn’t need to see this. Not that it would mean anything to her. She was essentially a newborn, and this was the world she would grow up in: this empty place, filled with deserted shells, and with silence.
The sun was hitting the horizon hard enough to bruise the sky when Carrie reached the Willow Pass exit. We still had a few miles to go before we would be inside the city limits. She looked at me across the gloomy cab, her half-visible expression clearly asking what I wanted to do.
There was only one answer. “Keep going,” I said.
“I’d say it was your funeral, but since it’s going to be mine too, you’d better pray you’re right about this,” she said, and kept on driving.
Navigating the hills and tight turns of Willow Pass Road was nerve-racking even when the driver could see. With Carrie essentially driving blind, I felt like my heart was going to burst inside of my chest before we got to where we were going.
“I need to turn on the lights,” she said.
“Please, not yet,” I said.
She didn’t turn on the lights.
We were so close to our destination that I could almost taste it. It tasted like homecoming, like safety, like finding my way back to where I should have been all along. Carrie kept driving, and I kept my eyes glued to the windshield, trying to pick out details through the increasing gloom. There were wrecks shoved up against the side of the road, but there were no cars abandoned in the road itself. That seemed like a good sign. Dr. Cale had been using her people to rearrange the cars in Vallejo to make it look like there was no one living in the area, while also making sure that her teams could move around freely when they needed to. These cars could have ended up where they were by chance, or they could have been placed there.
“How much farther?”
“Not far,” I said. I thought of the street in daylight, the area as it had been when I first came looking for the broken doors. It had already been a little run-down, a little decrepit. Berkeley had started showing signs of abandonment fast, because there had been so many things waiting for the chance to fall apart. This place had been crumbling for years. I couldn’t see details, but the broad strokes of the streets around me spoke of a place that hadn’t noticed yet that it was over.
Something moved in the shadows. I couldn’t tell whether it was a coyote, a large dog, or something else, something bipedal and formerly human. I didn’t want to roll down the window to check for pheromones. They mi
ght wake Juniper, and keeping her from getting upset about what was coming was very important to me. I was taking her to meet her family as well as mine, and I needed her to be ready. Or at least asleep.
“Did you see that?” demanded Carrie.
“Just keep driving. We’re almost there.” The buildings were becoming denser as we moved from the outskirts of town toward the point of commercial development.
“We need to stop.”
“Just keep driving.”
Carrie shook her head but kept her foot on the gas and her eyes on the road. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.
The bulky shape of the feed store appeared to our left. I pointed to the mouth of the attached parking lot. “Turn in there,” I said.
“That doesn’t look like a good place to spend the night.”
“If they’re not here, the facility still will be,” I said. “I know how to get us in.” That wasn’t entirely true. If Dr. Cale had armed her security systems before abandoning the place, the doors might be locked beyond anything I could do to open them. That didn’t matter now. I had to get out there. I had to.
There was something sweetly anticlimactic about Carrie turning into the parking lot, slowing down as she did, until we were just coasting along. I fiddled with my seat belt, barely realizing that I was doing it, my eyes fixed on the looming shape of the bowling alley. Its windows were dark, but that was nothing new; Dr. Cale had boarded or painted them all over years ago. It was hard to maintain a secret lab when people could see you working.
Tansy had always been a big help with that. I had to wonder how many people had discovered the place, or almost discovered it, only to be turned away by a quirky, homicidal girl in overalls.
Tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. I blinked them away hard. Tansy wasn’t gone. The broken doors weren’t closed to her—not forever, anyway. Dr. Cale had been able to create her in the first place, and she was going to find a way to save her. She had to.
Carrie rolled to a stop in the bowling-alley parking lot and killed the engine before turning to frown at me across the darkened cab. I could barely see her face. “This is it? This is your other idea? Because it looks like a terrible idea. There’s no one here.”
“That’s just what they want you to think.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand before unbuckling my seat belt. “Wait here. If anything happens to me, take Juniper and get as far away from here as you can.”
“Wait, what? Sal, don’t do this. I can’t turn on the lights. I can’t—”
The door closing behind me cut off her words, reducing them to silence. I stayed where I was, watching the dark parking lot and taking a deep breath, trying to find traces of sleepwalker pheromones on the wind. I failed. If there were sleepwalkers lurking in the shadows, they weren’t close enough to pose a problem, or they were downwind and keeping themselves carefully out of sight. I didn’t know whether their slow recovery would make that possible, but I had to assume that any sleepwalkers to have survived this long were on the smarter—and luckier—end. I waited.
When nothing came charging out of the dark to devour me, I took another breath, this time to steady myself, and started walking toward the bowling alley. More images flashed across my mind: Tansy laughing, Adam and his shy smile, Nathan seeing his mother for the first time since her “death.” Things had already been getting complicated by the time we arrived at the bowling alley, but they had been better then. It had still felt like it was possible for us to win whatever conflicts might be coming, like maybe we were all going to find a way to live happily ever after.
I didn’t feel like that anymore. The world was not a fairy tale.
Glass and gravel crunched underfoot as I slowly approached the door. There were no little red lights to betray the presence of security cameras, and none of the cars I could see looked like they’d been driven since things began falling apart. Tansy had always been responsible for a lot of the exterior security. Fang, who had become Dr. Cale’s right-hand man after the fall of San Francisco, had taken over a lot of Tansy’s responsibilities in the last few months. He wasn’t going to do things the way she had. I kept trying to tell myself that, forcing my feet to keep moving, forcing my mind not to dwell on what would happen if they weren’t here after all.
It doesn’t make sense for them to come back here, warned the small voice of my deepest fears, the voice that always knew Nathan didn’t really love me, that he’d stopped loving me the moment he learned I wasn’t human; the voice that said I should have let them brainwash me into Sally Mitchell, who could at least have been content with the world, even if she was never quite the same. I hated that voice.
The voice hated me too. That was the only explanation for the way it kept talking, whispering, This site was compromised. USAMRIID would just come and sweep them up and take them away. You’re wrong. You’re wrong, and you’re going to get yourself killed trying to deny it. You should have stayed in Pleasanton. At least there, you knew where the walls were.
“I’m not wrong,” I murmured, mostly to hear the sound of my own voice, the outside voice that said the things I wanted to say, not the things I was most afraid of. USAMRIID never pinpointed the bowling alley. Dr. Cale had spent years securing it, as opposed to the weeks she’d had to secure the candy factory. With their resources flagging, Colonel Mitchell’s men weren’t going to have time to go looking for a suspected underground lab. Dr. Cale was smart. Smart people didn’t go back to places where they didn’t feel safe. She would only have come back here if she knew, as deeply and as truly as I did, that she was safe here.
I rapped my knuckles against the door, stepped back, and waited.
Nothing happened.
I began counting silently, marking time in the only way I had. I reached three hundred, and still the door was closed, and still nothing was happening.
The last time I’d been separated from my people, Nathan had been concerned that I wasn’t myself when I finally managed to get out. Maybe that was happening again. I stepped forward, resting my forehead against the door. I might get splinters. That was fine. A few splinters were a small price to pay for the chance to go home.
“Please, it’s me,” I said. “It’s always been me. Please, let me in.”
Nothing happened.
Maybe I wasn’t saying the right things. “‘Shadows dancing all around, some things better lost than found,’” I said haltingly. “‘If you ask the questions, best be sure you want to know. Some things better left forgot, some dreams better left unsought. Knowing the direction doesn’t mean you have to go.’” It got easier as the verse went on, each line leading inevitably into the next, until it was like I was trying to keep hold of a living thing, a snake that turned and twisted in my mouth.
“‘The broken doors can open if you seek them on your own,’” I said. “Please. Please.”
There was a click, like a switch being flipped, or a safety being disengaged. I straightened, turning wide eyes on the night behind me. A figure moved in the gloom. For a second—one beautiful, impossible second—I thought it was Tansy. Then the moment passed, and it was Fishy standing there, with his riotous curls and his square, practical face. He was holding an assault rifle, the muzzle pointed squarely at my chest.
I almost missed the sound of the door opening. I whirled again, and there was Dr. Cale in her wheelchair, stains on the cuffs of her lab coat, circles etched deep into the skin under her eyes. She looked at me with a hunger that bordered on desperation, hope and fear and anxious need reflected in her eyes.
“My darling girl,” she said. “‘Be careful now, and don’t go out alone.’”
I threw myself into her arms, and she caught me, and I was home.
Our embrace lasted longer than I would have thought possible. Dr. Cale was my creator and Nathan’s mother. She was also the woman who’d once ordered her people to take samples of my true body, the one that slept in the cathedral of my human body’s skull, because she though
t they might be important for her research. I had thought, after she did that, that I was never going to trust her again. I had thought it wouldn’t be possible for me to trust her again.
Only it turned out that there were some betrayals that cut deeper than those enacted by people who thought they were saving me and the world at the same time. There were the betrayals by people who had never had my best interests at heart. There were the betrayals by people who meant to hurt me. Dr. Cale had acted without my consent. She had also apologized, and I believed her. I was never going to get that from Sherman, or from Dr. Banks… or from Sally’s father.
She let me go. I started to straighten, and she lashed out, grabbing the sides of my face in either hand and staring, searchingly, into my eyes. I looked back, trying not to blink, trying to let her see whatever it was that she was looking for.
This time, when she let go, she didn’t grab me again. “Sal,” she said, and smiled, that sweet, infrequent smile that she shared with her biological son. “You made it. You found us. You came home.”
“This is nice and all, but can we get some clear instructions on the lady and the kid?” asked Fishy. “Lady’s got a gun. If she shoots somebody, it’s going to trigger a cutscene, and nobody’s got time for that.”
“Oh!” I turned away from Dr. Cale, and then back again, realizing that trying to explain myself to Fishy wasn’t going to end well for anyone. “They’re with me. Carrie drove me here. I needed her to help me break out of the quarantine zone. Juniper—the little girl—she’s special. We need to talk about her.”
Dr. Cale raised an eyebrow, looking dubious. “That’s how you’re going to start our grand reunion? By telling me we need to talk about a kid you picked up somewhere along the way? Children aren’t like dogs, Sal. We don’t adopt them just because their owners die.”
“She’s yours as much as she’s mine,” I said, and then, in case Dr. Cale didn’t feel like getting the point, I added, “She’s a chimera. And she’s the third owner of her current body.”