Chimera

  “Sal!” The shout came from the front of the store. I looked over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see anything. There was a dim light in the distance, sliced by shelves and diluted by the bodies of the sleepwalkers between me and its source. It might as well have been on the moon, for all the good it was going to do me. I didn’t even know who was yelling. The shape of the store—cluttered and cavernous at the same time—distorted the voice, twisting it and bouncing it off the walls until all I could know for sure was that it belonged to a man.

  There was no more gunfire. Either Dr. Cale’s people had stopped the sleepwalkers from escaping, or they’d been overrun. I looked at the crowd around me, standing agitated but docile, and hoped it was the first. I hoped they’d fired their guns into the air and driven the sleepwalkers back, rather than killing creatures that intended them no harm, because they weren’t capable of “intending” anything. They just existed. They just survived. That was all they wanted to do. I would still fight if they tried to eat me, because my survival mattered too, but if they weren’t hurting anything, they deserved the chance to live.

  There was a clang. The light from the front of the store suddenly dimmed, and I knew the doors had been closed. The windows were still allowing a certain amount of illumination into the store, and I wondered briefly whether that might not explain the slow shamble of the sleepwalkers across the parking lot. If their eyes weren’t accustomed to bright lights anymore, they would have been blinded by the sun. Of course they would have moved slowly. They wouldn’t have known what else to do.

  “Sal!” This time, the voice was closer. The sleepwalkers around me moaned and grumbled, making little wordless noises of discontent. They looked around themselves, their eyes more adjusted to the gloom than mine were. When they didn’t find the source of the voice, they stilled.

  I breathed out again, trying to put as many reassuring pheromones into the air as possible, and looked the one place they hadn’t: I looked up.

  A figure was crouched atop the nearest shelf, keeping low to reduce its profile and avoid knocking over the dusty merchandise still piled there. He must have crossed the store at high speed, unimpeded by crowds of sleepwalkers, but knowing all along that a misstep would send him crashing to the floor.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Get up here, and we can head for the roof.”

  “Fishy, get out,” I whispered back. The sleepwalkers around me were getting more upset by the second. I didn’t know how long I would have before my pheromones were no longer enough to keep them calm. I was running blind here, and the consequences of failure were going to be dire. “You’re upsetting them.”

  “We can’t leave you in here,” he replied. He thrust his hand down, fingers moving palely into my line of sight. “Grab hold. I’m here to get you out.”

  The fact that only the person who didn’t believe any of this was real had been willing to follow me into the store said something about how bad the situation was. I didn’t know how many sleepwalkers were crammed in behind me, but judging by the smell and the crush of bodies, it was more than enough. We could both die in an instant if we made a misstep.

  Not making a misstep was going to be virtually impossible. I breathed out again. Every time I did that, it seemed to work less well. Either the sleepwalkers were getting accustomed to my pheromones, or they were becoming agitated enough that they didn’t care anymore. Neither option was going to end well for me.

  I let go of the sleepwalker woman’s wrist and took a step toward the shelf where Fishy crouched. She hissed and began moaning, but she didn’t grab for me or otherwise try to stop me from moving away. That would come next, I was sure: Once she figured out that whatever purpose I’d been serving for her was no longer being served, she would lunge. Then it would be strong fingers hauling me back, and teeth biting into my flesh, and everything would have been for nothing.

  I could see my own death as clear as day, played out in blood and screaming and the rainbow splatter of my internal organs. That motivated me to take another step, moving closer to the shelf, and to the point where I could get a decent grip on Fishy’s waiting hand. If he could just haul me up…

  One of the sleepwalkers made a querulous noise, like it had just realized that maybe I didn’t belong there. Then it moaned, deep and low in its chest, and lunged for me.

  The sleepwalkers might be tapeworms in human suits, but that didn’t give them special powers: Their reflexes weren’t enhanced, and their eyesight was no better than it had been before they took over their hosts. They moved fast. That was all. When I was frightened, I was faster. He lunged, and I jerked away, grabbing Fishy’s hand with my own even as I began scrabbling my way up the shelf. While the sleepwalkers had been fed and left to linger in their own filth, which had to confuse their senses of smell at least a little, I had been running and jumping and working to become stronger than I had ever been in my life. He was fast.

  I was faster.

  Fishy’s hand closed tight around my wrist, hauling me upward as I scrambled for footholds on the loose shelving unit. The sleepwalker grabbed for me again, but it was too late: I was already out of his reach.

  “Are you okay?” Fishy boosted me onto the top of the shelf, putting a hand on my waist to steady me until I could balance on my own. “Did they hurt you? Are you bleeding?”

  He was talking too loudly. The sleepwalkers were becoming more active with every word, twitching and moaning and shambling to surround the shelf where we crouched. We were outside their reach, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t knock the shelving unit over. While they didn’t seem to make plans—not really—they were good at feeding themselves. It was maybe the thing they were best at in the world.

  “Shhh,” I said, shaking my head fiercely. In a whisper I continued, “They didn’t hurt me, but you’ve got to be quiet. You’re upsetting them.”

  “I’m upsetting them? Sal, we’re stuck in a cutscene-level battle here, and I didn’t find a single power-up on my way to get you. I don’t think we’re the player characters in this situation.”

  I paused in the act of shaking my head to stare at him, open-mouthed and stunned into silence. I had always known that Fishy’s grasp on reality was shaky at best. I hadn’t realized it was this bad.

  “No,” I said finally. “No. You can pretend you don’t believe in anything when you’re out there, but right now, in here, I need you to take this seriously. This is real. If you’re here to get me out, then you need to be here. With me.” In this darkened, abandoned Kmart, with the sleepwalkers all around us, moaning their agitation to the gloom.

  Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that he’d decided to divorce himself from the real world. The shock was that he had taken it so far.

  “I’m not pretending, Sal,” said Fishy. He sounded unusually serious. Part of me pointed out that this was a ridiculous place to have this conversation. The sleepwalkers were pressing closer and closer, until it felt like we were perched on the last island in the world, waiting for the sea to carry us away. The rest of me ordered that part to be silent. This, too, was survival. Survival of the mind, not just survival of the body. “Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see the pixels bleeding off the edges of the world. This is a game. It has to be a game. If it’s not a game, then everything I’ve ever loved is gone, and I’m not getting any of it back. So let it be a game. I’ll play to win, until the day I don’t. It’s the least I can do. But I refuse to let this be real. I refuse to let her be gone.”

  Fishy’s wife had been killed when her SymboGen implant decided it would be a better driver for her body than she was. According to Dr. Cale, his disassociation from reality had accompanied her conversion. His wife tried to eat him, he decided the world was actually a complicated video game. It wasn’t the worst coping mechanism I’d ever heard. It was just, under the circumstances, pretty inconvenient.

  “So what do we do?” I asked. “We can’t climb down, and we can’t stay here.”

  Fishy’s teeth were a flash o
f white through the darkness. “Can you jump?”

  The shelves were firmly affixed to the floor, thanks to California’s earthquake regulations. The magnetic clamps that held them were old, and some of them were misaligned, but they were holding fast, doing their duty even after the people who had installed them were long gone. Maybe some of those same people were here with us, mindless meat-cars being driven by my cousins, no longer able to understand their own technology. The thought should probably have been unsettling. I didn’t have the time to waste on feeling bad for them.

  Fishy, who apparently spent his free time training for video-game survival situations, went first. He leapt across the space between shelves without hesitation, as if some unseen controller was guiding his actions. He didn’t need to be afraid of falling: He knew that none of this was real, and that if he toppled into the waiting hands of the sleepwalkers below, he would simply wake from the terrible dream that had redefined his reality.

  My own fate was much less assured. I didn’t have a comforting delusion to wrap around my shoulders and keep me safe: The only thing I’d ever had to lie to myself about was my own humanity, and while I had held on to that lie for as long as possible, I had also willingly set it aside when it became clear that it was no longer doing me any good. I knew this was the real world. I knew that I couldn’t fly. And I knew I was scared out of my mind, which didn’t help.

  The sleepwalkers were becoming more agitated, and the hands that were reaching up to grab and drag us down were becoming more plentiful, clustering around the shelves until even the magnetic clamps weren’t enough to keep us from rocking slightly.

  That was the motivation I had been waiting for. The shelf rocked, and I leapt, flailing wildly until I felt Fishy’s arms lock around my waist and pull me safely away from the edge of our new perch. He was grinning again, his teeth gleaming in the faint light that was capable of reaching this deep into the old Kmart. It should have turned my stomach—I hate the sight of human teeth, the violent, hard reality of them—but given the circumstances, his obvious joy was more of an anchor than anything else. I could hold on to that joy, using it to keep me from toppling into the waiting hands below.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I am not okay. What’s happening? How did they get out? Why did you come in?”

  “Uh, well, I came in because you decided to play Saint Patrick and the Snakes with our shambling buddies here, and Dr. Cale freaked out, and Nate freaked out, and everybody freaked out, and nobody was willing to, like, burn the place to the ground while you were still inside it, even though that would have been the most reasonable reaction under the circumstances,” said Fishy. “So I said I’d do it, since hell, what are they going to do to me? Eat me? Game over is something I’m really looking forward to.” There was a faint wistfulness to his tone, like he spent his nights dreaming about the day this game would end.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I pulled away, getting my feet under me, and looked down at the crush of moving bodies around us. I couldn’t see more than sketchy outlines and shadows, but that was more than enough, all things considered. “How did they get out?” I asked again.

  Fishy sighed. “You’re like a dog with a bone sometimes, Sal. Anybody ever tell you that? Like a dog with a bone.”

  Maybe I was like a dog. People had spent enough of my short life telling me to sit and stay, telling me when to speak, and ordering me to be quiet. This wasn’t a time for that sort of command. “I’ll follow you out of here, but I need to know.”

  “All right,” said Fishy. “Come with me.” And he turned, and jumped for the next shelf, leaving me no choice but to follow.

  As soon as I landed on our new perch, the reason for both the pause and the leap became clear. By lingering on the first shelf as long as we had, we’d lured sleepwalkers over to it, and were now above a relatively clear stretch of aisle. He leapt a second time, and I followed, trying not to think about what would happen if I missed my landing and fell to the floor below. I was Sal Mitchell. I had survived worse things than an obstacle course in a darkened store, and this was not going to be the thing that took me down.

  Fishy stopped after the second jump, taking a few breaths, before he said, “The doors were tied shut from the outside. We couldn’t chain them—it would have been too obvious that we were using the place for permanent storage, instead of closing the place off like terrified suburbanites. Aside from that, it would have made the place a death trap if anything had ever gone wrong. Start a fire, watch everybody die when no one could get close enough to deal with a padlock.”

  “Did someone cut the rope?” I asked, following his words to their obvious and horrifying conclusion. Sherman had been a part of Dr. Cale’s family, once. He probably knew where the bowling alley was, and it wasn’t like he would be above that sort of treachery, if he thought that he had something to gain from it.

  To my surprise, Fishy laughed. It was a low, rueful sound, packed with regrets. “Oh, man, that would almost be better, you know? We could have some DLC about spies and traitors and maybe get some pew-pew going. But no. Something chewed through the rope. Probably a squirrel.”

  “What’s DLC?” I asked blankly.

  “Downloadable content,” he said, and tensed, and jumped again. I followed him. There were no other alternatives.

  The shelves had been positioned so they were never more than about four feet apart, creating aisles that could hold a shopping cart but were still narrow enough to force consumers to fully engage with the material goods around them. Most physical stores had changed their designs as Internet retailing took over an increasing share of the market. Not places like Kmart. They had a working formula, one that was built on low prices, impulse buys, and narrow aisles.

  I was starting to feel like we might actually reach our destination when Fishy stopped jumping, his shoulders suddenly going limp. I crept closer, squinting to see through the darkness, and realized what had happened.

  We were on the edge of the women’s clothing section, a vast, open space broken only by the silver skeletons of the racks that had once held discount scrubs and polyester trousers. There were no shelves here for us to use as higher ground. There weren’t that many sleepwalkers, either—the main concentration was still a half-dozen shelves back, trying to figure out where we had gone—but that would change soon.

  Soon didn’t mean immediately. “I can get us through this, but you have to trust me,” I said. “Can you trust me?”

  “I guess it’s my turn,” said Fishy. “What do I have to do?”

  I told him.

  Climbing down from the shelf without making any noise would have been impossible without the metal clamps to lend stability to the enterprise. As it was, I held my breath until my feet were back on the dirty linoleum floor, and only started breathing easy when Fishy was beside me, looking tense and unhappy in the gloom. I couldn’t fault him for that. He’d seen me walk among the sleepwalkers without being devoured, but he knew that I was half one of them, while he was just a human, heir to all the sins of his forefathers, including the mad, brutal science that had put him into this situation.

  Silently, I slipped my hand into Fishy’s, tangling my fingers with his, and began walking toward the back wall. There were a few sleepwalkers here, full-bellied and too lazy to have joined the exodus when the doors were first opened. I breathed slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying to fill as much of the air as possible with the taste of my pheromones. Friend, I thought fiercely. Friend, friend, do not eat us, for I am your friend, and he is mine. It was a complicated thought—too complicated for my primitive chemical messengers to convey—but I hoped it might seep through, at least a little. At least enough to let us get away.

  There was a soft, fleshy sound as Fishy opened his mouth like he was going to say something. I turned to him and shook my head fiercely. No. No, do not speak, do not remind the cousins that you’re something they aren’t; do not give them c
ause to notice you, to fall upon you in a living wave and take you for their own. Anything “other” would be seen as food, and as a threat to their survival. I was not “other”: I had my pheromones to protect me. If I could keep Fishy as an extension of myself, and not a being in his own right, he might have a chance.

  I couldn’t see his expression, but I heard his teeth click together, and I was content. We continued walking.

  The sleepwalkers around us were stirring, rustling in the dark as they turned toward us and the disruption we represented. I kept my breathing slow and even, filling the air around me with pheromones. The wall was a gray ghost in the distance, a haven that might offer no salvation at all, but was at least something for us to strive toward. I felt better about the idea of dying while I was doing something than I did about the idea of dying while holding perfectly still, frozen in my own failure.

  Fishy’s breathing was starting to get unsteady. The stress of the moment was getting to him. That was fascinating, in an objective sort of way: Normally, Fishy was the one who never got upset about anything, cocooned in the soft unreality of his delusion. But here, he was being forced to live through something slow and terrible, knowing that the end could come crashing out of the dark at any moment, and that there would be nothing he could do about it. He was as captive in the real world as I was, and he didn’t like it.

  One of the sleepwalkers moaned. The sound was small and inquisitive, and was answered by another moan, from the other side of us. They knew we were there. Whether they were holding off because my pheromones were working or because they weren’t hungry yet was anybody’s guess. I kept breathing slowly in and out, but I picked up my pace, and was relieved when Fishy did the same. If we could just get to the wall…

  What? If we could get to the wall, then what? I was leading us there because Fishy had been leading us there, but he’d never told me why, and I’d been so wrapped up in the moment that I hadn’t asked. It felt foolish now, not to know where I was going or what I was going to do when I got there, but foolishness was a luxury for hindsight. Foresight was all too often based on instinct and on fear, and those were things that left very little room for introspection.