“Come on,” I said to Fishy, and stepped outside.
Together, we crept around the edge of the building, stopping every five feet or so to listen for footsteps or tires, anything that would indicate that the danger was returning. A crow called somewhere in the distance; another crow answered, shriller and farther away. Leaves rustled. But nothing had the distinct sound of a human or a human’s machines. We were alone.
Fishy took a deep breath. I stopped and looked back, waiting to see what he was going to say. The pause was almost a relief. We were less than five yards from the corner of the building; even at our current glacial pace, we would be there soon, and we would have to face whatever had happened to our friends.
“I think you should wait here,” he said.
I blinked at him.
“You’re a playable character, and I’m NPC support,” he said. “It’s obvious that we’ve just been through a major cutscene, and this is probably kicking off a pretty big quest for you. We don’t need you to go first and get killed when it would just mean playing through the whole Kmart jumping sequence again. Although I guess there could have been an autosave somewhere in there.”
I had never been a video game player. I blinked at him again before saying, hesitantly, “Okay.”
Fishy looked relieved, some of the old cockiness coming back into his eyes. He was reasserting his video game reality now that we were moving again. He needed this to make it all the way real, and keep the edges from slipping out of his grasp. “Wait here,” he said, and walked past me, still slowly, but faster now, like he had made an important decision and no longer wanted to wait around to see what the consequences would be.
When he reached the corner he stopped, and for a moment, he was perfectly still, just looking. Then his shoulders slumped, and he called back to me—making no effort to keep his voice from carrying—“Sal. Come on.”
His tone was dead, devoid of any real emotion or life. I think I knew then. I think I understood. I came anyway.
The bowling alley doors had been torn off their hinges and reduced to splinters. The windows, always boarded or soaped over, were so much shattered glass on the pavement. There were bodies. Some had obviously been sleepwalkers who hadn’t fallen for my lure and returned to the building. Others…
A tall woman with short-cropped hair lay facedown on the ground near the entrance to the bowling alley. The back of her lab coat was the dark red-brown of dried blood, and she wasn’t moving. Daisy was never going to move again. A few more technicians were on the ground near her, all of them motionless, even the young man with his face turned toward the sky, his eyes open and filled with unforgiving sunlight. Their wounds were almost abstract from this distance, but that didn’t make them any less real.
Someone moaned, low and strained. I realized it was me.
“Sherman’s people must have released the sleepwalkers to keep us from seeing them coming,” said Fishy. He still sounded dead, like someone had snapped all the circuits connecting his emotions to his voice. That might have been a mercy. “We weren’t expecting something like this. We had security. We were watching for USAMRIID. But we weren’t expecting this sort of frontal assault. How could we have?”
I tried to speak. No words would come, just another low, pained moan. Then, almost without realizing that I was going to do it, I started to run.
It wasn’t graceful. It was a loping, scrabbling thing. I nearly fell twice, catching myself on my palms both times and pushing away from the ground, heedless of the gravel and glass that bit into my skin. I was still moaning, as frantic as any sleepwalker. I couldn’t make the sounds stop. Making the sounds stop would have left my panic with no place to go, and then things would have really started to fall apart.
I was halfway between the Kmart and the bowling alley when I remembered what had caused me to step between the sleepwalkers and my people in the first place. I stopped running, feeling suddenly numb, and turned to look at the garden center.
The door was on the ground. The door was on the ground, and most of the plants were on their sides, and Adam and Juniper were gone.
My knees went suddenly weak, and it was all I could do to stay standing. I swayed from side to side like a tree in a strong wind, moaning, until Fishy’s hands closed on my shoulders, pulling me upright.
“They can’t have killed everyone,” he said. “We have to move.”
We moved.
The smell of gunpowder, blood, and emptied bowels hung in the air around the bowling alley, a thick miasma of fragility and loss. I breathed in and out through my mouth, shallowly, and grimaced every time I tasted the lingering pheromones of another chimera. Sherman had been here. Sherman had probably pulled the trigger, more than once. He hadn’t been content violating my body. He had to come here and violate my home.
Daisy’s body was the closest to the door. I had to assume that she’d been defending the bowling alley when she was gunned down. I stepped around the bloodstains, feeling strangely squeamish, and then stepped inside, barely three feet ahead of Fishy.
Something slammed into the back of my neck, hard enough to send a bolt of pain jolting through my entire body, and I collapsed, unconscious before I hit the floor.
“—have been killed! Are you stupid, or just high?” Fishy sounded furious. “What if the last save point was before we left the Kmart, huh?” Furious, and delusional. At least one of us was getting back to normal.
My head hurt. No: That was insufficient. My head throbbed with every breath I took, and even the distant pounding of the drums was enough to make my skull feel like it was coming apart, like I had lost all structural integrity and was going to fall to pieces at any moment. I considered opening my eyes, and realized that adding light to the pain I was already experiencing would do nothing to make things better, but could make things substantially worse.
“I didn’t know you weren’t Sherman’s men,” snapped Fang. Relief swept through me, almost strong enough to distract temporarily from the pain. “The bastard missed some things. I thought someone might have talked.”
“Our people wouldn’t talk!”
“Spoken like someone who’s never met the wrong end of a pair of pliers,” said Fang calmly. He still sounded shaken. I realized that I’d never heard him sounding that unsure of himself, even when they were rushing me to the hospital for emergency brain surgery. Why shouldn’t he be unsure? Everything we’d built, everything we’d worked for… it was just gone, and I didn’t know whether there was going to be any way of getting it back. “Put enough pressure on a body, and they’ll talk. Everybody talks. I’d talk, you’d talk, even our sweet, sleeping Sal there would talk, if only to make the hurting stop. Well. Maybe not Sal. She could do that trick of hers, the one where she takes herself away from pain.”
The words were casual, but they seemed aimed at me in a way the rest hadn’t been, and I realized something. He wanted me to go down into the hot warm dark. Dr. Cale must have told him about it, told him how I could enter that state at will, when none of the other chimera could, and now he was trying to get me to take myself down. If I wasn’t awake, I wouldn’t have heard him say that, and he could speak freely. If I was awake, and I went into the dark, I wouldn’t hear anything else he said, and he could speak freely.
I focused on my breathing, making sure it was slow and level, mimicking the breathing of a sleeping person. But I didn’t go down into the hot warm dark. Whatever he didn’t want me to hear, I very much wanted to hear it.
Fang’s silence stretched out for long enough that I thought he knew I was awake. Then he sighed, and said, “I didn’t mean to hurt her. I’d do it again, under the circumstances. They took Dr. Cale, Fishy. They took Nathan. They took all the lab techs that they didn’t kill. God help us, they took Adam and Juniper, and Juniper represents a leap forward in chimera evolution that we’re still trying to comprehend.”
“Sherman used Sal’s genetic material,” said Fishy. “How is that a leap?”
“
He used Sal’s genetic material, but he scrubbed her epigenetics,” said Fang. “He couldn’t prevent tissue rejection, but he was able to minimize it, almost like he had made the tapeworm DNA more dominant in the recognition phase. The important part, though, is the brain of Juniper’s host. It should have been much more damaged than it was by the initial takeover. MRIs show light scarring, and areas of tissue improvement. It’s like she’s spurring the brain to recover around her, and that means that eventually, she may be the only chimera with a fully functional, undamaged human brain for a host. If Sherman can figure out how she’s accomplishing that, and increase that tendency in the next generation, he may be able to coax even badly damaged sleepwalkers fully back to sentience.”
“That’s some DLC bullshit,” said Fishy. He sounded shaken. “I don’t need smart grunts attacking me every time we go into a combat situation.”
“There are times when I question whether or not you actually know how to speak English,” said Fang. He sounded exasperated, and his accent—which I had never been able to quite identify—got stronger, like a reminder that he, as a man of Chinese descent, had probably been asked about his grasp of the language a great deal more often than Fishy had. “If Sherman can isolate what has allowed Juniper to heal her host, he can use it to increase the size of his army tenfold.”
“He doesn’t have the skills for that,” said Fishy.
“Dr. Cale does,” replied Fang. “More, and more terrifyingly, Dr. Cale’s allegiances have always been… negotiable. She stands in the middle, because she sees both sides as valid, and since neither side has held her, she has done her work to benefit both of them as much as she can. With Sherman holding her prisoner, and holding the lives of her sons in his hands, I think it very likely that she is about to become in earnest the enemy of the human race that some people have taken her to be. Even if Juniper’s life is the cost of theirs.”
There was a pause before Fishy said, “You mean she’s going to go all boss level because she’s working for the bad guys now?”
Fang sighed. “It’s a distinct possibility, yes.”
“You don’t have to use so many fancy words, you know. You could just say what you mean.”
They were verbally sparring, something I had come across members of the lab staff doing when they were nervous and needed to do something to make themselves feel better. It was an understandable and very human reaction. It was something that we didn’t have time for.
The pain in my head was still bad enough to make me yearn for the safety and weightlessness of the hot warm dark. I opened my eyes anyway, forcing them to stay open even as the light lanced through them and involuntary reactions filled them with tears. Then, with a force of will that I wasn’t sure I possessed until I had to use it, I sat up.
My head rang like a bell at the motion, creating a wave of pain so intense that it converted itself into sound that nearly deafened me. I didn’t lie back down. Instead, I turned, seeking the source of the voices. Fang and Fishy were standing only a few feet away, staring at me, Fishy in clear shock, Fang in resignation. He had suspected I was awake, then, and simply hoped that I would take his cue to drop down into the dark.
How I wished I could. But Juniper was in danger, and I couldn’t afford to let myself rest. I swallowed to try and force the pain away, and asked, “What did Sherman’s men miss that you were afraid they’d be coming back for? Is there anyone left here besides you?”
Fang looked at me, discomfort written plainly across his face. “When Sherman’s people arrived, I wanted to defend the doors,” he said finally. “I thought it was important. But Dr. Cale ordered me back. She told me to defend… something else. God forgive me, I followed orders.”
I frowned. “What did you defend?”
“Tansy. She and I are the only ones who remain, aside from the two of you.”
My mouth was suddenly dry. “Oh,” I whispered.
Tansy’s condition was delicate enough that she’d been put in a private room at the back of the bowling alley, one that had originally been a pantry, and was hence designed to be as unobtrusive as possible. If Fang had gone inside, closed the door, and turned off the lights, it was reasonable for Sherman’s people to have missed it. Leaving one security officer and one comatose, badly damaged chimera alone in the bowling alley.
Bracing my hands against the cot they had placed me on, I took a better look around. All the equipment that could be easily lifted and taken was gone. The workstations, the computer towers, even most of the paper printouts, they had all been carried away by the people who had taken Dr. Cale and her staff.
Her staff, and your brother, and your daughter, and your fiancé, whispered the voice of my anxieties. You’ve lost. It’s over.
“It’s not over,” I said aloud. Fang and Fishy frowned at me. I reached up to touch the back of my head with my fingers, gingerly prodding the lump I found there. Nothing shifted under my touch. I’d been hit hard, but not hard enough to actually break my skull. “It can’t be over. We’re not letting Sherman win. That isn’t how this ends.”
“That’s, uh, really heroic of you to say and all, but I think it’s also sort of misguided,” said Fishy. “There’s three of us. Four if you count the popsicle. We’re not coming out of this on top, unless you’ve been hiding a bunch of nukes in your underwear drawer.”
“Sherman took our people: We need to get them back,” I said, sliding off the cot. My legs wobbled, but held me up. That was good enough, for now. “Sherman put the eggs in the water supply: We need to get them out, or everyone’s in danger, regardless of species. Dr. Cale was working on that. She’s not going to be working on it anymore if Sherman has her. There are two real sides in this fight, and we’ve been standing in the middle, waiting to see which one would win. Isn’t it obvious? The one we decide to help is going to be the winner.”
“Meaning what?” asked Fang warily.
I sighed. The words burned even before they left my lips. I had to say them anyway. “Meaning we can’t help Sherman, or give Dr. Cale the chance to help him either. Meaning we need to go to USAMRIID. On our terms. Because things are just going to get worse from here.”
They’re never going to let me out of here. I am going to die here. I am never going to see the sun again. I am never going to walk free again. I am never going to feel the wind on my face again. They are monsters, and they have taken me to be their toy, and I am not afraid, I am not afraid, I AM NOT AFRAID.
When they kill me, I will see my husband again. I will see my home again. I will go back where I belong, finally, and I will be so glad to be there.
How did it get this bad? How did we hand the world over to the monsters? How were we so willing to believe in miracles that made our lives easier, even when we knew that they couldn’t be true?
How?
—WRITTEN ON A SCRAP OF PAPER FOUND IN CARRIE BLACK’S CELL, JANUARY 2028
The results are in, and they point to one, inescapable conclusion: We’ve lost. Oh, we can continue to thrash and posture and fight, and pretend that we can do something to change what’s already happened, but it will be just that: pretense. We’ll be lying to ourselves, even as our numbers fall and our walls fail to hold.
I wonder if this is how the Neanderthals felt, seeing whatever works they had managed to create being swept away by the tide of modern man. And then I realize that the comparison does not hold, because the Neanderthals didn’t create us, their successors: They didn’t feed us on their flesh and nurture us inside their bodies, only to see us turn on them. We are the engineers of our own destruction, and when all is burning, we will have no one but ourselves to blame.
Maybe it’s a mercy that both of my daughters are dead. They didn’t need to see this.
No one needed to see this.
—FROM THE DIARY OF COLONEL ALFRED MITCHELL, USAMRIID, JANUARY 2028
Chapter 14
JANUARY 2028
Fang had gone to recover the largest of our trucks from the garage whe
re it was concealed, far enough from the bowling alley that it wouldn’t lead USAMRIID to us if they found its heat signature after it had been used—and ironically, far enough from the bowling alley that Sherman and his men wouldn’t have seen it during their sweep for assets. Fishy, who understood weapons better than I did, had gone to see what we had left, leaving me to the unpleasant task of sweeping the apartments for people who had not been at work when the raid occurred.
Sherman had been created in the bowling alley. He must have been acting on what he remembered about the lab and its environs when he planned the raid, because none of his people had gone anywhere near the apartment buildings we had repurposed for our use. If I had only encouraged Adam to hold Juniper’s lessons at home, with the dogs, they might still be with us. I could have saved them. I could have—
No. Following that rabbit wouldn’t lead me to Wonderland: It would take me down an increasingly dark series of tunnels, until there was no way for me to find the light again. I couldn’t live my entire life waiting for the darkness to come and claim me. Adam had enjoyed holding Juniper’s lessons at the garden center. Everything we’d had access to had told us it was safe, and since both of them were happy, what was the harm? It didn’t matter that the harm had shown its face, and proven itself more dangerous than we could have ever guessed. We’d allowed them to make choices. We’d allowed them to live.
That was all that any of us could ask.
I knocked on doors, waited for a count of ten, and then moved on to the next apartment, both glad that I didn’t have to explain what had happened, and aching from each successive bout with silence. Had Sherman and his men really taken everyone? Were Fishy, Fang, and I all that remained? It seemed impossible. I’d known Dr. Cale for less than a year, but she had already become one of the fixed points around which the universe revolved, untouchable and unimpeachable and indestructible. But here we were.