As we got closer to the wall, I saw something wonderful: a door, a slice of darker gray cut out of the haze around it. Better yet, it was a real door, with a doorknob, not one of the swinging doors that connected to the stockrooms. Sleepwalkers didn’t understand doorknobs. The odds were good that whatever was on the other side, it was a form of safety.
Unless it was locked.
Fear knotted and unknotted in my stomach, making it difficult to continue my slow, rhythmic breathing. What if we had come this far, only to find the door was locked? We’d never be able to make it back to the relative safety of the shelves. The sleepwalkers were becoming too agitated, and even breaking into a run wouldn’t get us out of their reach before they could lunge. This was our one way out, and I had no way of knowing whether it would work.
Fishy squeezed my hand. I glanced to the side. He was holding something up; something that gleamed in the faint light.
A key. He had a key.
I swallowed the urge to laugh in relief, and just kept breathing in and out until we reached the wall. The sleepwalkers were getting more active, shuffling and shambling and making those little inquisitive moaning noises, but they weren’t rushing us yet. That was all going to change when Fishy turned the knob. My pheromones were confusing the issue, making it difficult for them to tell whether he was an uninfected human—and hence easy, uncomplicated prey—or another sleepwalker. They didn’t understand concepts like “loyalty” on a rational level, but I had to think they ate humans before they ate their own kind because they knew, in some deep way, that eating your own kind was bad. They still turned to cannibalism when it was convenient or when supplies were low, but it wasn’t a preference the way it could have been without the pheromones and the vague understanding of the swarm versus the individual.
When Fishy turned the knob, however, he would be doing something no sleepwalker understood well enough to do spontaneously. After that, we would be “other,” and things that were “other” were subject to attack. So we moved slowly toward the door, knowing that as soon as we reached it, we would have to start moving very quickly indeed.
Something brushed my ankle. I kept breathing in and out, not allowing myself to look down or back. It could have been a piece of forgotten clothing, still dangling on its rack. It could have been a sleepwalker’s fingers, inquisitive and questing through the gloom for a better sense of the intruders. As long as it didn’t grab me, as long as I could keep moving forward, it could be ignored—could even be forgotten.
That was my life. I moved through dangerous places, among dangerous things, and as long as they didn’t grab me and force me to stay with them, I did my best to ignore, to forget, because anything else would be the end of me.
We had reached the wall. Fishy let go of my hand and stepped forward, feeling for the knob, for the little indentation of the keyhole. It seemed almost quaintly old-fashioned, this door that locked with a key and not a magnetic swipe card or a fingerprint scanner. But if it had been something more modern, we would have had no way of getting out of here: We would have been trapped, and in even more trouble than we already were. Quaintness had its advantages.
Fishy found the keyhole. The key slid in with a click, and he turned it, and then the door was swinging inward, a dark hole in an already dark space, revealing absolutely nothing. Whatever was on the other side was too far from the front of the store for even the watery light that we had been enjoying so far. Fishy looked back at me, visible more in contrast with that utter blackness than anything else.
The sleepwalkers were moaning louder now. They knew we weren’t their kind, that we were enjoying the fruits of a civilization that wasn’t theirs to claim. We were out of time. I nodded, once, and followed Fishy into the dark.
Sal’s latest MRIs show that her integration with her host remains complete and undamaged by the things she’s been through, including Sherman’s clumsy attempts to extract her genetic material. At this point, I’m not sure she could be removed from her host’s brain without killing both of them. Contrast this with Tansy, who was introduced to her host well before Sal met Sally Mitchell, yet never accomplished so thorough an integration. It’s like looking at a masterpiece in comparison to a child’s paint-by-numbers kit.
The main difference between the two of them seems to lie in the host itself. Tansy’s original host had suffered some physical damage to the brain before she moved in: She could never have fully bonded with those neural pathways, because they were already scarred from the accident. This gives me hope. Maybe we can bring Tansy back to us, only better, by finding her a body that has suffered less damage.
—FROM THE NOTES OF DR. NATHAN KIM, JANUARY 2028
We have sufficient supplies to continue our work for another year. We have sufficient “clean” humans to serve as breeding stock and replacement hosts. Some of them seem to think the former will carry more weight than the latter: Most of us seem healthy, after all, and will be keeping our current hosts for some time. They haven’t considered that we can make our own replacement hosts. We have all the tools that they have, and why shouldn’t we have children of our own? A human child is a blank slate, ready and waiting to have the soft bones of the growing skulls opened and used as perfect doorways for the next generation of chimera. They can be ours in every sense of the word.
We’ll still need the humans, of course—replacement parts will always be necessary—but they’re not as essential as they think they are. They never were.
All that remains now is to secure the future. It was always meant to be ours.
—FROM THE NOTES OF SHERMAN LEWIS (SUBJECT VIII, ITERATION III), JANUARY 2028
Chapter 13
JANUARY 2028
The door slammed behind us. Fishy put a hand on my shoulder, like he was verifying my location, and then pulled it away as he turned to feel for the door and make sure it was locked. There was always the chance that we’d encounter a sleepwalker that was particularly high-functioning and capable of mimicking what it had witnessed, even if they hadn’t thought to try the door before we opened it. Their unexpected flashes of intellect were part of what made them so dangerous. There was no one way that they behaved.
There was a click, and Fishy said, voice dripping with relief, “Okay. That’s got it. We’re locked in.”
“Okay,” I said, and inhaled, checking the air for any signs of pheromone trails or traces. I wasn’t a perfect sleepwalker detector—I would have needed more opportunities to hone my skills, and since those were also opportunities to get disemboweled, I was mostly content not to seek them out. It was still better than nothing.
All I smelled was dust, and gently decaying cardboard, and the curious stillness of a room that had been sealed off for so long that it might as well never have existed.
“I think we’re alone,” I said. Then: “Where are we?”
“The loading dock,” said Fishy. “It connects to the storerooms, but those doors were locked when the store was closed down. There shouldn’t be any direct route for the sleepwalkers to take from where they are to where we are.”
“That’s good,” I said. The darkness was absolute, which was starting to soothe my jangled nerves. Being born an eyeless creature that was never meant to see the light of day had left me with a strange affinity for the dark, one that was shared by my sleepwalker cousins. It was rare for me to find pure darkness that wasn’t also dangerous. “Do you know how we’re supposed to get out of here?”
“There’s a door to the outside on the other side of the dock,” said Fishy. “If we walk slowly and watch our steps, we should be able to get there without twisting our ankles or anything.”
I blinked into the darkness. Then, almost reluctantly, I started to laugh. Fishy joined in, and for a minute or so it was just the two of us, alone in the dark, laughing at the sheer relief that accompanied our survival.
Finally, we calmed and quieted. Fishy’s hand sought mine in the darkness and clasped it tight. Then, together, we began walking
away from the door.
It was soothing, moving through the dark like that, trusting my feet to carry me and my outstretched hand to warn me before I walked into anything dangerous. I had a human’s body and a tapeworm’s world, and it was a beautiful reversal of the way I usually had to live. Fishy kept hold of my hand, allowing me to lead. He recognized that I was more confident in the dark than he was, even if he didn’t fully understand the reasons why.
Bit by bit, we crossed the cavernous span of the loading docks, stopping when my fingers found the opposing wall. “We’re here,” I said, and my voice was very small in the vastness of space, and very loud in the silence, all at the same time. “Fishy?”
“Just a second. Stay where you are.” Fishy let go of my hand. I felt immediately adrift, unmoored from the anchor that had been keeping me from floating away into the darkness. I pressed my palm against the wall, using that as a touchstone, something that meant the world had limits and was thus still real.
Fishy’s footsteps moved away from me, but not very far. Then there was a click, and a rectangle of blinding light opened in the wall of the world. I moved toward it, squinting, my eyes filling with hot, aggravated tears. But I wanted that world, I needed that world, brightly lit and painful as it was.
Fishy waited for me, his own eyes as stunned and tear-filled as my own, and we stepped together into the light.
It was a dramatic transition for a mundane place: We stepped out of the loading dock and onto a short metal staircase so drenched in rust that it was probably a health hazard. The railing was barely bolted on, and wobbled under my questing hand like it was going to give way at any moment. The pavement back here was in worse shape than the parking lot: It was basically potholes and gravel, stitched together by the jaunty, jutting shapes of weeds, forcing their way through cracks and up into the sun.
Carefully, moving slowly while our eyes adjusted, we descended the stairs and started toward the front of the building, our feet crunching with every step. We were maybe halfway there when another sound caught my attention. I stopped dead. Fishy, thankfully, followed my lead, and I listened as hard as I could, trying to figure out what was wrong.
Tires, moving on gravel. Moving slowly, like whoever was driving didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention. But we didn’t use any of the vehicles during the day. It would have been too big of a risk, given USAMRIID’s presence in the Bay Area. If we needed to get out one of the cars, we did it at night, when we’d be harder to spot via a simple visual inspection. So who was driving around in our lot?
The sound was getting closer. I had an instant to decide what I was going to do. I turned, grabbing Fishy’s hand, and ran back toward the back of the Kmart. The door to the loading dock was ajar. I hauled Fishy up the metal steps and swung it open, diving through into the safety of the dark. Then I let him go and spun around to push the door most of the way shut, leaving it just slightly cracked, like it had been left that way by the people who had abandoned the store in the first place.
“What—” began Fishy.
“Shhh,” I said, and pressed my eye to the crack, and waited.
Only a few seconds had passed when the Jeep came around the corner. It was moving slowly, so that its occupants could scan the area without coming to a stop. I didn’t recognize the woman in the passenger seat. She was wearing a snood of some sort over her hair and holding an assault rifle; her eyes were cold. She didn’t scare me half as much as the driver. He was familiar. He was my darkest fear, come back to haunt me.
Sherman kept his hands on the wheel, head moving slightly from side to side as he looked for stragglers. For a terrible moment I was afraid he was going to notice the open door to the Kmart and stop the Jeep, but he rolled on by, still searching the open areas. I pulled back and scrambled away from the light, pulling Fishy with me, until we were safely cocooned in the darkness. If Sherman came back to look for us, he’d have very little trouble finding our hiding spot… but there was no place left for us to go. Not unless we wanted to flee back into the Kmart, where the sleepwalkers were waiting.
Fishy squeezed my hand. His fingers were shaking. Whether he believed any of this was real or not, he understood that some things were worth being afraid of. That just made me feel worse. If the man who didn’t believe the world existed was scared, I should probably have been vomiting with fear. As it was, I just felt numb. Utterly, perfectly numb.
The sound of Sherman’s Jeep driving back the other way drifted through the open door. I didn’t move. We had no weapons—I had no weapons; Fishy might have had a gun in his holster, I hadn’t asked or checked—and we couldn’t just release the sleepwalkers, not without putting ourselves and our friends in even more danger.
I don’t think it was squirrels that cut the rope, I thought, almost frantically, and clapped a hand over my mouth to keep my terrified giggles inside. My guts were churning, filled with hot terror and cold anger, until everything was warm and nauseating. I forced myself to keep breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, blowing softly against my fingers, until I realized that Sherman might be able to pick up on my pheromones. Then I moved to breathing purely through my nose, trying to pretend it was enough, and that the narrower airways weren’t leaving my skin feeling tight and ill-fitting, stretched too harshly against my bones.
What was Sherman doing here? How had he known to look for us at the bowling alley? What was he hoping to accomplish by letting the sleepwalkers out of their comfortable prison? At least my third question was answered easily enough: He’d been looking for a distraction, and had probably been counting on a bigger one than he actually got. He couldn’t have anticipated my interference with his plan.
That should have made me feel good. It just made me feel more afraid. Sherman was out there, and we were hiding in here, and neither of us was brave enough to go and see what was really going on. Either he would lose, and we would emerge to find our friends relieved and delighted by our survival, or he would win, and we would need to stay free in order to save them. The only thing we could do now was wait.
Waiting burned.
The seconds ticked by, stretching like taffy, and everything was silence, except for the endless pounding of the drums in my ears. It would have been easier to wait if I’d dropped down into the hot warm dark, where time had no meaning and nothing could touch me, but I would also be unaware of my surroundings, and unable to defend myself or run if Sherman’s people found our hiding place. My choices were either sitting in terrified darkness or sinking into comforting oblivion, and while they were both terrible, my current position seemed a little bit less bad.
Fishy was still shaking slightly behind me, the tremors passing from his hands into mine, and then all the way down to my bones. I was listening as hard as I could for footsteps crunching on gravel, but the more upset I became, the louder the drums pounded, until it felt like they were the only things in the world. Normally, I loved the drums, loved the comforting mortality that they represented. Now, I would have done anything to make them stop, just long enough to let me hear.
I started counting silently, trying to give myself something to do, something that would distract me from the unknown dangers outside. When I reached a hundred, I paused, trying to decide whether that had been enough, and then resumed counting. I needed more. I needed to know that the danger was past, and that we hadn’t been hiding in here for nothing.
When I reached five hundred, I paused again, trying to shunt the drums to the back of my awareness and listen to the world outside. There was nothing: only silence. Slowly, cautiously, I uncurled my legs, noting the pins and needles that shot through them in protest. It hurt to move. That was a good sign, under the circumstances. I wouldn’t be able to run as fast, but if I had to run, I had already lost. I needed to hurt like this. I needed to know that I had been still long enough to save myself.
“Are you sure?” Fishy’s voice was a whisper that seemed loud enough to shake the world.
I nodded, an
d then realized that he wouldn’t be able to see the gesture through the dark. “I think so,” I whispered back. “We can’t stay hidden here forever.” And there was the truth of the matter. Hopefully we had stayed hidden long enough… but nothing living thrives concealed for more than a short time, even during a crisis. We had to move.
Inch by inch, we moved toward the door. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it, and the answering drums echoed in my ears, making it difficult to hear anything else. Fishy was right behind me, and I couldn’t tell whether he was allowing me to take the lead, or whether he was too frightened to step in front of me. It could have gone either way. His comfortable delusion was wearing thin, and whatever he did to sustain it for himself, he needed to do it soon, or risk losing his veneer of unreality completely.
When we reached the door, I pressed my eye to the opening, squinting against the light, and scanned the lot for signs of movement. There was nothing, not even a breeze. Everything was still.
Pockets were wonderful things. Even in this new world, where money and cell phones were useless affectations, we found things to keep in them. I fumbled in my left hip pocket until my fingers found a smooth stone that I had picked up to show Juniper. Slowly, I pushed the door farther open and tossed the stone out into the parking lot. It slid across the gravel, rolling and clattering, before coming to a stop some ten feet away. I held my breath.
No one came.
Still moving slowly, I straightened up and pushed the door open wider, increasing both my frame of view and the amount of light flooding my abused retinas. Everything took on a teary, blurry halo. I squinted through the pain, still looking for motion, and found nothing. We might not be alone, but this lot, at least, had been checked and abandoned by our attackers.