Chimera

  There was something about that thought that was sad and hopeful at the same time. She would find a new name; she would find a new family; she would grow up thinking of the human race as scared and endangered, but ultimately enduring. Assuming, again, that they could endure, and that she’d get to grow up at all, rather than winding up in the hands of someone like Sherman, who would look into those wide, trusting eyes and think that the space behind them was the perfect incubator for a daughter of his own. One who would never need to forget her name, one whose family would never leave her.

  I honestly didn’t know whether or not that would be a kinder ending for her than the blasted, frightened world I was envisioning, and so I kept running, trying to outrace my own thoughts, trying to find the place where I could sink down into the dark and let the drums become the backbeat of the world.

  I was so focused on what I was doing, on where I was going, that I didn’t notice when I ran out of our residential neighborhood and into one of the narrow bands of strip malls and commercial establishments that ringed every set of houses. Pleasanton was designed to keep people home and happy when they weren’t at work, and that meant no one had to go too far before they reached a grocery store. The sidewalk hadn’t changed, so I kept on running, letting my feet take me where I needed to go. I didn’t see the men lurking behind the battered old Dumpster until I was almost on top of them. A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me roughly off balance, pulling me into the shadows between the Dumpster and the wall.

  A second, even rougher hand was clapped over my mouth, cutting off sound and air at the same time. I didn’t have time to scream. Then the four of them were surrounding me, moving in until I could smell the sweat and desperation baking off of their skins like sour perfume.

  “What are you doing on our turf, little girl?” asked one of the men. He was shorter than the others, but held himself with the sort of confidence that left no doubt as to his status in the group: he was their leader, and he wasn’t going to take any shit from anyone, least of all from me. “Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to be here?”

  I didn’t squirm. I didn’t fight. I didn’t bite the hand that held me in place. I just stood perfectly still and glared daggers at the man responsible for my current situation.

  He smirked. “Ah, you did know, you just hoped we wouldn’t notice. Aaron, let her go. I want to hear what she has to say for herself.”

  The hand was removed from my mouth. The other hands were not removed from my arms. The man made a gesture with his hand, indicating that it was time for me to speak. I continued to glare, and resisted the urge to spit until the taste of unwashed hand was no longer lingering in my mouth.

  “I knew no such thing,” I said. “This is public space. We’re allowed to search the local stores for supplies that may have been overlooked.” It was a terrible policy, and I had to assume that USAMRIID had put it in place because they’d run out of places to stow the looters. Better to just make it legal than to keep arresting people you couldn’t hold.

  “That may be what the Army says, but they’re the ones keeping us locked up in here,” said the man. “Standing up to them is the American way. This is unconstitutional, and when it comes out what’s been done to us, people like me and my boys are going to be heroes, while people like you are going to be collaborators.”

  I looked at him blankly, my glare giving way to confusion. “I don’t understand what all those words mean,” I said. “Not in that order, anyway.”

  The short man sneered. “They mean that if you have anything valuable on you, you’ll give it to us now, and we’ll let you go on your way. No harm, no foul, no punishment for failure to understand the rules. You look like pretty new meat, and we try to be forgiving of ignorance in circumstances like yours.”

  “I’ve been here a few weeks,” I said. “I don’t have anything valuable.”

  “Then you won’t mind if we search you,” said the man, and lunged forward, shoving his hand into the pocket of my coat. I squirmed as best I could against the man who was holding me in place, trying to fight my way free, but it was no use: My captor was bigger than me, and his grip was strong.

  The short man stepped back again, holding a few crumpled slips of paper in his hand. He held them up, brandishing them triumphantly, and demanded, “Did you really think you could hide these from me? You come into my territory, you refuse to pay the toll, and then you try to hide your ration slips?”

  “I didn’t try to hide anything,” I said. “They were in my coat pocket. They’re not that valuable. I only had them in case I ran into a distribution truck—we have a little kid living with us, and sometimes the trucks have chocolate bars, if you have a little kid.”

  The faces of the three visible men changed, going from scowling intimidation to slow comprehension. I realized my mistake too late to take it back. Ration slips were supposed to be precious: most people only got so many per week. You could get a small number of additional slips if you had a child under the age of ten living with you, since little kids don’t understand rationing as well as adults do—not that most of the adults I’d encountered since reaching Pleasanton really seemed to understand rationing. They were forever running out of basic supplies, and blaming it on the people who operated the trucks instead of blaming it on their own appetites.

  If I didn’t think ration slips were precious, that implied I was somehow not experiencing scarcity like the rest of them were. And that implied… “I knew I recognized you. You’re the Colonel’s girl, aren’t you?” asked the short man. “The one who did something to piss off her daddy and wound up getting herself banished to the hinterlands with the rest of us expendables. Oh, don’t look so surprised, princess. Everybody knows about you. You’re supposed to be off-limits, you know. I guess your father wants you punished, but not too punished. What are you learning here? Humility? Good behavior? You’re sure as fuck not learning how to be hungry.”

  “Boss, she’s got two egg slips here,” said one of the other men as he looked through the crumpled rations that had been thrust into his hands. “A dozen each.”

  Greed and rage warred for ownership of the first man’s face. In the end, greed won. “Daddy takes care of his little girl, doesn’t he? Where do you live, sweetheart? We’ll walk you home, check your cupboards for anything that’s going wanting, and then let you go on your merry way.”

  “Or you could let her go right now, and we might not have to shoot you,” said a voice to the side. I turned my head, struggling against the man who still held me, and saw three men in USAMRIID uniforms, two holding guns and the third holding a cattle prod, standing about ten feet away. The sight of the cattle prod was enough to make my stomach drop and the muscles in my legs go weak, like the electricity would somehow jump the distance between us and shock me out of myself.

  The man didn’t let me go. The shorter man stepped to the side, as if he was trying to block me from view. “This is a private matter,” he said.

  The man at the head of the patrol looked genuinely surprised. “You’re going to fight me on this?” he asked. “You’re really going to stand there, with your hands on an innocent woman, and fight me on this?”

  “It’s a private matter,” the man replied.

  “All right,” said the soldier, and fired.

  The report was small, more of a cough than a bang. The short man looked surprised. Then he looked down at his shirt, where a red stain had appeared on the left side of his chest. He looked up again, mouth moving silently. Then, finally, he fell, hitting the pavement with the grace of a sack of wet oatmeal. He didn’t move after that.

  The soldier calmly worked the bolt on his rifle and turned to look at the three men who were still clustered around me. The one whose hands were on my arms had tightened his grip at the sound of the gunshot, and was now holding me so hard that it was going to leave bruises. Bruises on top of bruises.

  “Do the rest of you want to argue with me?” asked the soldier. The man let go of my a
rms, shoving me toward the patrol as he did, so that I stumbled forward and fouled any possible shot. The three of them turned and bolted away into the strip mall before I managed to catch myself and spin around to watch them go.

  For a moment, the only sounds I heard were their footsteps, pounding hard against the pavement. Then a hand touched my elbow. I jumped, whipping around again, and found myself staring at the lead soldier. He looked back, expression unreadable under the lip of his helmet. When he spoke, he didn’t show his teeth. I appreciated that more than I could say.

  “You shouldn’t be this far from your assigned quarters, Miss Mitchell,” he said. He spoke more politely than most of the soldiers did when they addressed me, which meant he was probably new, assigned to the quarantine zone when other bases and detachments began collapsing. He didn’t know what I’d supposedly done, or if he did know, he didn’t believe it. I was such a little thing, after all, and so quiet when I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything. There was no way I could have killed half a dozen trained soldiers.

  I hadn’t. A man named Ronnie did all that, and he did it wearing the body of a prepubescent girl. Mind over matter is what chimera are all about, and Ronnie’s mind never met a challenge it wasn’t willing to stick a knife into.

  “One of the people who’s been assigned to the house where I live is missing,” I said. The drums were in my ears again, soothing me, chasing the tremors from my voice. Mind over matter. Don’t let it get to you. “His wife asked me to go look for him, and I figured it couldn’t hurt anything.”

  The soldier looked meaningfully in the direction my attackers had run before looking back to me and saying, “It could have hurt you. It could have hurt you very badly. You know your father values your safety. He doesn’t like it when you wander too far afield.”

  The temptation to ask why, if he valued my safety so much, I was out in the general population with the looters and the addicts and the people driven insane by grief was strong. I swallowed it down, one more bitter pill for the pharmacy growing inside of me, and said, “That’s why my housemate asked me to go. She figured that if there was a problem, the patrols would step in and keep me from getting myself too messed up. She’s a smart enough lady to know that she wouldn’t get the same treatment.”

  The soldier looked uncomfortable at my accusation. “It would still be best if you returned to your home. Report your missing housemate to your region’s patrol, and they’ll be able to keep an eye out for him.”

  Sally. If they knew who I was, then they knew that I was supposed to be Sally: pushy and brassy and capable of demanding whatever it was that I thought I deserved to have. I narrowed my eyes, folding my arms across my breasts, and said, “Oh, because that’s going to be a slam-dunk. You’ll totally divert manpower to finding one refugee in this whole mess. No. I will not go back to the house. Not unless you make me.”

  “I could,” said the soldier. “I am authorized to do whatever is necessary to keep things peaceful within the compound.”

  “We’re allowed to move around,” I countered. “I don’t know if you people are going to hit the point where you strap us all to beds ‘for our own protection,’ but we’re not there yet, and we’re allowed to move around. If Daddy doesn’t like me acting like any other member of the quarantined population, he should be keeping me in the big house with my sister.”

  The soldier looked even more uncomfortable at that. Discussing the personal choices of his commanding officer was apparently not high on his list of things to do. Doing it in the middle of the street, where we could easily attract attention, was probably even less ideal. “Miss, please. It would be a great favor to me if you would return to your home. You have my personal word that I will go looking for your missing housemate. I won’t even make you talk to your local patrol.”

  Weariness washed over me. I had been here before, multiple times since arriving in the quarantine zone and being pushed out of the USAMRIID quarters into general population. Half the soldiers thought I was a murderess, and would treat me with kid gloves when they thought they might be seen—kid gloves that concealed lead pipes and brass knuckles the second no one else was watching. The bruises on my stomach never quite faded, and I was pretty sure at least one of my ribs was cracked if not dislocated, based on the way it kept digging into my side when I breathed. I didn’t complain. Who would have listened to me? Colonel Mitchell might have, if he hadn’t been so concerned about the daughter he thought he still had, the daughter he was using me to try and save.

  The other half of the soldiers thought I was a babe in the woods, an innocent bystander who was being damaged by the fight between the Colonel and his wife. Everyone knew she wouldn’t let me stay in the quarters that had been reserved for the commanding officer’s family. If she hadn’t been able to make it out of the San Francisco area when the sleepwalkers started attacking, I wouldn’t have been in with the general population. I would have been sleeping on clean sheets in a room with dependable air-conditioning and my own toilet, just like all the other pampered civilians who had been pulled in by their military families. The quarters they had at USAMRIID’s temporary headquarters inside the Coliseum were nowhere near as nice as our own rooms, back in our own homes, but compared to the rest of the quarantine zone, they were a palace.

  “Of course you won’t make me talk to my local patrol, because you don’t want me to have a way to follow up with you,” I said. “I’ll go home like a good little girl and you’ll pretend you’re actually looking for Paul when you’re really just pretending that none of this ever happened, right? Oh, maybe you’ll track down the looters and shoot them or something, because you don’t want it to become totally unlivable in here, but do you think I’m stupid? I need to find him. So how about we do this. How about you come with me, and that way I’m not wandering around unprotected, and you don’t have to tell my father that you lost track of me?”

  One of the other soldiers coughed, trying to use the sound to conceal his laughter. I relaxed marginally. At least two of the five men currently holding guns were on my side—or if not on my side, they weren’t actively hostile toward me. These days, that was the equivalent of a ringing endorsement. If they were laughing, they weren’t punching me in the gut.

  “You really think that’s going to happen?” asked the soldier.

  “I think you have a gun, but I have my father, which means I have the bigger stick,” I said. It was oddly refreshing to pretend to be Sally. She didn’t care if she pissed people off: She just wanted to get what she wanted. I don’t think I would have enjoyed being her all the time, but as a mask that I could slip on when I needed to, she was remarkably useful. “So come on. How about you tell me your name, we all make nice, and you and your people come with me to find my missing guy?”

  “We’re supposed to be patrolling this area,” said the soldier. “And I’m Lieutenant Robinson. Do you want introductions to the rest of my men, or will that suffice?”

  “Only if they feel like giving me their names,” I said. “You’re supposed to be patrolling to find people who are misbehaving, or who need help. You found people who were misbehaving when you found me. Now it’s time to help me find people who need help. Come on. You didn’t enlist because you wanted everyone to hate you. You did it to serve your country and defend your fellow citizens, right? Paul’s a fellow citizen. Defend him by bringing him home.”

  “She’s got you there,” said one of the other soldiers. Lieutenant Robinson twisted enough to shoot a glare at the man, who grinned unrepentantly. He showed his teeth in the process, and it was all I could do not to flinch. That was the flip side of pretending to be Sally: The harder I tried to fake humanity, the more some parts of it seemed to crumble, becoming virtually impossible to maintain. My distaste for the primate habit of baring fangs in amusement or greeting was one of those crumbling pieces.

  “If we accompany you, will you report this to your father?” asked Lieutenant Robinson, turning back to me.

  ??
?Only the part where you and your men heroically rescued me from my own stupidity, at great risk to yourselves but with no damage to property or loss of life,” I replied without hesitation. I had been doing this for weeks now, and I had always been a fast learner. “I won’t tell him you deviated from your patrol route unless you tell me to.”

  Lieutenant Robinson looked at me carefully, apparently weighing the pros of having me give his men a ringing endorsement against the cons of that endorsement coming from my lips. Finally, with reluctance clear on his face, he nodded. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go find your missing man.”

  Walking through Pleasanton with five armed men surrounding me was very different from running through it on my own. The streets were as deserted as they had ever been, but no figures lingered in the windows, and when we passed an open door, no shapes lurked behind it. There were no more looters, just the signs of their passing—broken windows and debris on the sidewalks. A brightly colored chip wrapper blew past, looking almost obscene against the beaten-down gray of everything else.

  “You people have done a number on this place,” muttered one of the soldiers. My nervousness meant my dyslexia wasn’t allowing me to read the name tags on their chests, and none of them had volunteered their names. They were willing to rise or fall with their commanding officer, and not be fingered individually. I could respect that, even as it made me faintly uncomfortable. They could do anything, and I wouldn’t know who to point to when my father asked me what had happened.

  Then again, what good would pointing at them do? Unless I took it all the way to Colonel Mitchell, nothing I said would carry any weight with the people around me. I was somewhere between a prisoner and a pet, and there was no immediately visible way for me to change that. The quarantine zone was too well defended for an escape to be possible, unless something went dramatically wrong.