Having a home means having somewhere to go back to. Having a family means having something to defend. Having a life means knowing you’ll do anything to keep it.
—SAL MITCHELL
The girl Sal found in Oakland is a revelation. Sal named her “Juniper,” after the character from Don’t Go Out Alone. I couldn’t think of a more fitting name for a child who found her own way to the broken doors, and more, found her own way through them.
I have done multiple MRIs. It appears that her original implant did minimal damage to the brain when it attempted to integrate, and that it was integrated long enough for her tissue to have begun repairing itself, unmaking the damage. Once that was done, it was an easy thing for a second worm to slide along the path of scar tissue and claim the mind as its own.
Surgery may be necessary at a later date, to remove any traces of the original implant. There do not appear to be any. The new implant—the one we now call “Juniper”—consumed its rival before moving on to the brain. It’s a miracle of science. It’s a triumph of genetic engineering. It’s the end of mankind.
—FROM THE NOTES OF DR. SHANTI CALE, JANUARY 2028
Colonel Mitchell—
Please understand that the President sees and respects the difficulties you have faced in attempting to secure the West Coast. The contamination in the waterways has spread as far inland as Iowa, and does not show any signs of stopping. At this time, we cannot provide you with any support beyond what you already have.
I’ll be frank, Alfred: if there were any way for us to pull some of those men out of your command and bring them closer to D.C., we’d do it. We may have delayed the impact of the SymboGen problem here on the East Coast, but we didn’t stop it. A large number of civilians did not come forward when asked to report for extraction of their SymboGen implants, and we’re facing mobs as big or bigger than the ones you described. We can’t afford to help you. We can barely afford to help ourselves.
The end of days is upon us. Make your peace with God.
Sorry about your little girls.
—MESSAGE FROM MICHAEL PETERMAN, UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, TRANSMITTED TO USAMRIID ON JANUARY 6, 2028
Chapter 12
JANUARY 2028
Our lack of preparation came to a head three days later, in the middle of the afternoon.
Adam and Juniper were in the garden supply center, where they spent most of their days—if it wasn’t raining, they were happy to sit in the rich, mulch-based mud with their books and their flash cards, Adam coaxing his youngest sister out of her initial isolation and into the world of human understanding. Math and language were things we had stolen from our hosts, and now that we had them, we weren’t giving them up.
Fishy and Fang were outside the lab, going through the motions of their daily patrol. They spent a lot of time checking the edges of our small settlement, which became larger every day as everyone relaxed into what felt increasingly like a permanent home. The sleepwalkers in the area were either dead of the secondary contamination or safely locked in the Kmart, where they couldn’t hurt us. The suburbs had been under-inhabited and largely ignored for years; none of the remaining uninfected humans were going to come running to us for shelter. USAMRIID was far away, and had problems of their own. Sherman’s people hadn’t been seen since the water contamination began. We might not have been safe, but we had the illusion of safety, and under the circumstances, that felt as if it might be just as good.
I was helping Daisy with another necropsy—a goat this time—when everything started. She still didn’t like me much, compared to some of the other residents of the lab, but she said I had steady hands, and she appreciated the way I never threw up on her specimens, no matter how decayed they were when she found them. She had sliced up just about every species of mammal and bird that the area had to offer. Most mammals were infected. Of the birds, the only ones that had been carrying viable tapeworm eggs were the big predatory ones, the hawks and falcons. They couldn’t be infected, but they appeared to make a viable secondary host, which meant the eggs would continue to spread through the local waterways, until all the groundwater was contaminated, forever.
The alarm above the necropsy station began ringing. Daisy glanced up, unconcerned, before she went back to her cutting. “Ignore it,” she said. “There’s a short in that thing, it goes off for no good reason all the damn time.”
I was opening my mouth to answer when another alarm rang, and another, until the entire lab was filled with strident bells and flashing lights. Daisy looked up again, this time meeting my eyes with evident dismay.
“Is this a short?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. This is all-hands.” Then she dropped her scalpel, right into the dead goat’s abdomen, and ran for the front of the bowling alley.
I stayed frozen where I was for a count of five before my eyes widened and the drums began pounding in my ears, so loud that they almost drowned out the sound of sirens. If Dr. Cale hadn’t already repaired the veins in the back of my skull, I would probably have lost consciousness as the blood drained toward my feet.
Adam and Juniper were outside. They wouldn’t hear the alarm.
I ran.
Most of the security personnel ran with me, or more accurately, ran past me, heading for the door. The rest of the workers were running deeper into the bowling alley, toward places of known safety. Part of me wanted to follow them—the part of me that prioritized my own survival above everything else, the part of me that had decided to move through my host’s body and take it as my own. Another part wanted to find Nathan, to let him protect me from whatever was about to happen. That was the point of having someone who wanted to protect you, wasn’t it? Let them go first. Let them keep you safe, for as long as they could.
But the rest of me—the greater part of me—knew that what I needed to do was get to Adam and Juniper. Adam was older than I was, in chimera terms, but he was also more sheltered, and wouldn’t know what to do if USAMRIID or Sherman took him. He wouldn’t be able to lie and convince Colonel Mitchell that he was human; he wouldn’t know where to begin. As for Sherman, he’d been willing to cut me open, all while professing to care for me. What would he do to Adam? What would he do to Juniper?
I ran. The guards had propped the door open to keep it from hampering them, and so I was able to charge straight through to the outside, where I stopped and stared in horror at the parking lot.
The Kmart doors were open. The sleepwalkers, well fed and healthy as they were, were shambling out into the parking lot. They weren’t running or rushing anywhere; they seemed almost curious about their surroundings, and hadn’t started attacking anyone. Yet. As soon as the sleepwalkers were startled, or alarmed, or just hungry, everything was going to change.
I was too far from the storefront to see into the garden center, but I could see that the little metal gate that was usually kept open to allow for access had been closed. Adam and Juniper were almost certainly still there.
“Sal, get back inside.” The command came from Fang. He was holding his rifle braced against his shoulder, his eyes flicking back and forth as he marked the paths taken by the sleepwalkers. They were still pouring out of the store, and showed no signs of stopping any time soon. How many had Dr. Cale been able to capture? How could she say it was humane to keep that many of them in there? They must have been living virtually on top of one another.
No wonder they all came out as soon as they had the opportunity. They’d been confined for a long time, and like all living things, they wanted a better situation. I could sympathize with that, even as my heart hammered wildly against my ribs and the drums pounded in my ears.
“I can’t,” I said. “Adam and Juniper are out there.”
Fang shot me a quick glance before he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Get back inside. We’ll take care of everything.”
The sleepwalkers had been rounded up one and two at a time. There must have been nearly two hundred o
f them in the parking lot, with more emerging from the store. They weren’t moaning or grabbing at each other. They were just walking, as calm and unhurried as anyone who was heading out for a stroll.
That gave me an idea. It might have been a terrible idea, but it was mine, and it was the only one I had. “No,” I said, and took a deep breath, trying to still the frantic beating of my heart. I didn’t have conscious control over my pheromones, but I’d been able to summon them a few times before, or at least it had felt that way. So I reached as deep as I could, trying to command the body I had stolen for my own to obey me.
Tell them I’m a friend, I thought, and started walking.
Behind me, Fang swore, but he didn’t run after me or start shooting into the crowd. I kept on going, pressing forward until I reached the leading edge of the sleepwalkers. They turned their blank, dirty faces in my direction, eyes tracking my movement. Some of them looked almost curious. I couldn’t know how much of that was muscle memory and how much of it was actual emotion, but none of them grabbed me, and none of them bit me, and I kept walking.
The sleepwalkers parted just enough to let me through. Then they closed around me, and I was surrounded.
They smelled of human waste and sweat, of long-dried blood and occasional whiffs of infection. I wondered whether their implants were still delivering their medications, pumping them straight into the bloodstream despite their new locations in the body. I realized distantly that I’d never asked about that. Was I still producing medication for my host? Sally Mitchell was an epileptic. I had never experienced a seizure—the last one she’d had was the one that had led, indirectly, to her death. So I must have been putting medication into her bloodstream. Any diabetics among the crowd would still be cared for.
A sleepwalker caught my arm. I stopped walking. She leaned close, sniffing at my face, the smell of her breath rolling over me like a rancid wave. She had been pretty, once, with dark-brown skin and curly black hair. Now she was a walking shell, like the rest of them, a home for the parasitic hermit crab that had needed a place to call its own. There was no comprehension in her eyes. Just a bottomless emptiness, brightened by the faintest flickers of curiosity.
Moving slowly and carefully, I removed her hand from my arm. “No,” I said, hoping my voice would carry my pheromones closer to her, bathing her in them. “No, I’m not food. But I’ll take you back where the food is.” Still holding her hand, I resumed walking, tugging her along with me as I moved toward the Kmart.
The sleepwalkers parted to let us through. Some turned to walk with us, their mobbing instincts motivating them to keep pace. The urge to drop her hand and run like hell was unspeakably strong. All I was going to do was get myself killed, at least according to the small, screaming voice at the back of my head. It was my survivor-voice, my pre-primate-voice, the voice of self-interest above all else. But while I was willing to live my life by the principles of survival, I wasn’t willing to let that turn me into someone I couldn’t face in the mirror. I kept walking.
We were almost to the Kmart now. I glanced toward the closed garden-center fence, and there was Adam, holding Juniper in his arms with her face buried against his chest, watching me with wide and terrified eyes. He understood what I was doing better than anyone; maybe even better than I did. He just couldn’t help me.
Dr. Cale’s people had to be securing the lab by now, moving into place and waiting for the sleepwalkers to turn aggressive. I didn’t know how many of the cousins were following my pheromone trail, but I hoped it was lots of them; I hoped I was showing them the way home.
The woman whose hand I held made a querulous sound as we approached the Kmart doors. I didn’t let her go. “I’ll talk to Dr. Cale about improving your living conditions,” I said, keeping my tone as light and pleasant as possible. “Maybe we can open up the garden center for you, so you can go outside.” Adam would have to find a new place to hold Juniper’s lessons. I didn’t feel too bad about that. He had the whole world open to him, and it was just going to get wider when this war was over. Giving up one little spot for the sake of those who had essentially nothing was no big deal.
The smell inside the Kmart was terrible, a roiling mix of human waste, spoiled food, and other, less pleasant things that I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to. The stench was practically visible. The sleepwalkers who entered with me didn’t seem to notice it. They just kept shuffling along, sometimes making small noises, but otherwise keeping whatever thoughts they were capable of having to themselves.
There were more sleepwalkers in here, lying on display beds or in nests of clothing yanked down from hangers in the clearance section. They watched with dead, disinterested eyes as we walked past.
The store was bigger than it had looked from the outside, and it had looked plenty big. I kept walking, not sure how to stop. If I let go of my unwitting companion, was she just going to wander back toward the open doors? More sleepwalkers were following me, and the exodus seemed to have stopped, but how could I keep them from bolting in the other direction?
Gunfire in the distance. Dr. Cale’s people were winning. That was the only explanation. If it had been USAMRIID, if they had seen this many sleepwalkers, they would have just set the whole damn place on fire.
The sleepwalkers around me started to stir, waking from their walking stupor. Their faces sharpened, eyes darkening from simple blankness into a state of wary apprehension. A few turned, walking back toward the exit—toward the sound of gunfire. Their shoulders were suddenly tight and their motions were precise, indicating that they somehow understood the sound as representative of a threat. I couldn’t understand why that would draw them toward it.
I kept my grasp on my first companion and breathed out as long as I could, filling the air with the smell of my pheromones. The sleepwalkers that had turned away turned back, suddenly more interested in me than they were in the gunfire. It couldn’t last. They were more restless now than they’d been before, and some of them were starting to moan, the thin, half-strangled sound that they usually made before they attacked.
I was surrounded, and I was so deep inside the Kmart that there was no way I could get away if they decided to attack. They’d tear me to pieces in seconds. I suppose that was better than a slow, lingering death would have been, but I would have preferred not dying at all. I had become very fond of staying alive since I had first opened my eyes in the hospital. Dying like this…
Dying like this would be worth it if it meant that Adam and Juniper got away. That realization seemed to tint everything in a rosy glow, like the redness of the hot warm dark had come flowing up my body to make whatever happened next easier to bear. My survival was important. The survival of the people I loved and had promised to protect would always matter just as much. It always had. As long as I kept hold of that, I could endure anything. Whether or not I survived. No matter how much it hurt me.
The sleepwalkers around me were becoming a more tight-pressed mass, making movement hard. The drums in my ears had virtually stopped, and I realized my heart was no longer pounding like it was going to break out of my chest. I was calm. It seemed silly, like calm should have been impossible in this place, but it was true. Whatever happened next wasn’t entirely out of my control, but I’d accomplished what I had set out to do. I’d drawn the sleepwalkers away. It was all on Dr. Cale and her people now.
There was more gunfire outside. The sleepwalkers around me mumbled and shifted again, becoming restless. I breathed out, trying to keep them under my control. I was blindingly thankful to Dr. Cale for keeping the sleepwalkers so well fed that they hadn’t thought of eating me yet. That would come with time, I was sure.
A woman shambled into the crowd next to me, nearly bumping into my first companion, who hissed and clicked her teeth in warning. The newcomer looked down at the floor, her view blocked by the swell of her belly. She was at least six months along, and the skin of her stomach was stretched tight as a drum where it was visible through the tears in her cl
othing. She wasn’t cradling or protecting it the way I’d seen pregnant humans do; she bullied her way through the crowd with her belly as just one more weapon to be swung. It didn’t seem to have troubled the developing fetus any; she looked like any pregnant host woman, save for the filth on her face and the rags on her body.
I watched her move past, wanting to grab her wrist as well, to keep her safe from the scene around her. Dr. Cale needed to examine her. She needed to know what was going on with that baby—the baby the woman would probably eat as soon as it was outside of her body, because what else was she supposed to do with a tiny, helpless thing? Even if it was a sleepwalker, it would smell more like food than family. Babies arrived covered in blood, didn’t they? Maybe dropping something tiny and helpless into the world with its own gravy was a terrible decision on the part of evolution.
We had almost reached the back of the store. Moans rose from the darkness, wavering at the end before they broke. These were the most damaged, least functional of the sleepwalkers, I realized, the ones that would have been devoured by their fellows if they’d been in a less curated environment. They seemed to understand that, in their way, because when the doors had been opened, they hadn’t tried for their freedom. Where else were they supposed to go? Here they had food, they had comfort, such as it was, they had the safety to eat and sleep without fearing attack. Outside, there would be only pain.
Sleepwalkers might not be intelligent compared to humans or chimera, but they had their own type of brilliance. They were all about survival, unmitigated by emotion or intellect. No sleepwalker would walk into danger to save someone else. It would be alien to them.
For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe in the end, neither humans nor chimera would inherit the Earth. We were focused on survival, but we weren’t good at it. Not the way the sleepwalkers were. They could sleepwalk their way to the top of the food pyramid, and all they had to do was wait for us to betray ourselves.