Parasite
Dad was waiting when I emerged from the changing room, and he had changed his own clothes for blue scrubs identical to mine. The feeling that something was wrong just got stronger when I saw the look on his face, a grim mix of determination and unhappiness. I forced a smile before handing back the key card.
“All ready,” I said.
“There’s been another mob of sleepwalkers,” he replied. “This one formed in downtown Walnut Creek. They attacked the outdoor shopping center. Casualties are still being tabulated. It’s spreading—and it’s not staying off the news this time. We’re already getting reports of runs on water and canned goods at the local grocery stores.”
I glanced at the guard at the reception desk, who gave no sign of having heard, before turning back to my father. “I… Dad, why are you telling me this?”
“Because if there is anything, anything, you know about this disease, and you don’t share that information today, I don’t know how I’ll be able to justify letting you leave without arresting you for treason.” He shook his head. Something behind his eyes was hard and unfamiliar. The dread in my stomach wound itself even tighter. “I’ve tried to be patient. I’ve tried to wait for you to come around. I’ve tried, God knows, to understand how difficult this is for you—how hard it’s been for someone with your limited exposure to the world to understand the severity of our current situation. I’ve defended my actions to my superiors several times already. I don’t know how much longer I can do that.”
I stared at him. It was the only thing I could do. What he was saying… “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If that’s true, then we’re both in a great deal of trouble. Come along.” He turned his back on me again, this time as he walked to the next sealed door and swiped his key card across the lock. The door swung open. He stepped through, and I followed him.
The main room of the USAMRIID L4 lab looked so much like Dr. Cale’s makeshift bowling alley laboratory that I actually caught myself glancing around, hoping to spot a blonde woman in a wheelchair. I might not entirely trust her, but at least if she were here, I wouldn’t be so torn about how much I could or couldn’t tell my father.
Instead of Dr. Cale, I saw military doctors and scientists in scrubs very much like mine, albeit accessorized with lab coats and identification, working at their individual stations and ignoring the two of us completely. The walls were lined with supply shelves and light boxes, continuing the similarity to the bowling alley, but the space not taken up by equipment was filled with cautionary signs. Most of them were too far away for me to even attempt reading, assuming I could convince my eyes to focus. That didn’t matter, since they had handy symbols to make sure I couldn’t miss the meanings. Do not touch, do not ingest, do not remove from the lab. There were so many rules that it was dizzying.
Joyce was working at one of the nearby lab tables. She looked up as the door swung shut behind us, and stopped, a perplexed expression crossing her face. She looked from Dad to me, and back to Dad again. Finally, she put down the scalpel she was holding, carefully peeled off her plastic gloves, and started toward us. She was moving slowly, like she was afraid one or both of us might spook.
“Sal?” she said, when she was close enough that she wouldn’t need to raise her voice. The rest of the lab technicians politely ignored us. “What are you doing here?”
“Your sister is here to demonstrate the SymboGen test for the sleepwalking sickness. Isn’t that right, Sally?”
Dad’s hand clamped onto my shoulder. It felt heavier than it should have. I swallowed hard and said, “That’s right. When I was… when Chave got sick, they tested to see if I had the sleepwalking sickness. I can demonstrate.” I snuck a glance up at my father. He was frowning straight ahead, almost like he was no longer paying attention to Joyce, or to me.
“Oh.” Joyce followed my gaze, and bit her lip. Then she focused back on me, forcing a smile through her obvious dismay. “Well, you’re here now, and that means we can maybe make some progress. What do we need?”
I don’t know, I wanted to cry. I’m not supposed to be the one who knows. That was my father, the Colonel, or my sister, the scientist, or my boyfriend, the doctor. I was the one who wandered through life and was gently corrected when I started to drift off course. I was the one who didn’t remember enough to know when she was wrong. So why were people suddenly looking to me like I was going to have answers? Answers weren’t my job.
But there was no one to provide them for me. I sniffled as softly as I could, hoping no one would notice, and said, “Dad said you had some sick people here. I need to see one of them. And I’m going to need a portable UV wand.”
“And…?” prompted Joyce.
I shook my head. “That’s all. A sick person, and a portable UV wand.”
My father’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “If that’s all you needed, why did you make me bring you here?”
“Ow.” I stepped away from his hand, turning to glare at him. “I told you why back at the house. I need to understand what’s going on. I need to ask questions and get answers, not get more dismissals and half-truths. I need—”
I stopped midsentence. My father’s face was turned toward me, but he wasn’t really looking at me anymore; his eyes were unfocused, and one corner of his mouth was starting to sag downward, like he was in the early stages of a stroke. The sound of drums grew even louder in my ears as I realized just how erratic his behavior had become over the course of the day. He’d gone from normal to overly solicitous to aggressive, all without the normal stimulus I would expect to trigger such shifts in mood.
Unless something I couldn’t see was triggering them. I took a step backward, moving away from him.
“Sal?” Joyce sounded puzzled.
“Dad?”
He didn’t respond. He just kept standing there, like he was going to say something. But he wasn’t. I could tell that just by looking at him.
The worst part of it was that he didn’t look like the sleepwalker who’d been at our backdoor, or the one outside the car. His eyes were still aware, still struggling to focus.
“Joyce, if this lab has security, this would be a good time to call for them,” I said, not taking my eyes off my father. He wasn’t moving. I honestly didn’t know whether that was a good sign, or a bad one. In dogs, that sort of stillness could be a precursor to an attack.
“What are you talking about, Sal?” She stepped forward, moving toward us.
I didn’t think. I just reacted, moving quickly to get her out of Dad’s reach. I grabbed her arm and jerked her back just as he began to move again, hands grasping at the air where she had been standing only a half second before. Joyce made a small, startled shrieking sound, one that dwindled almost instantly into a cough. Dad grabbed for the air again. I jerked her even harder away from him.
The other technicians were starting to look up from their work, abandoning the pretense that we could have a private family conversation in the middle of a busy government lab. That was good, since the alternative was their politely ignoring us while my father ripped us apart.
“He’s sick!” I shouted, pulling Joyce another step backward. Dad continued to follow us. At least he wasn’t moving very fast yet; he still seemed disoriented, like he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.
Fight it, Dad, I thought. That… thing… that’s taking you over, fight it for as long as you can. Let me get Joyce out of here.
Joyce finally seemed to understand the danger we were in. She stumbled as she got her feet under her, and then she was backpedaling on her own, no longer relying on me to pull her. “Daddy?” she asked.
“He was fine when we got here!” I said. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? He’d already been slipping, and I’d known that something was wrong, I’d known, and I’d ignored the signs, because… because…
Because I didn’t know what else to do. We were through the broken doors now, and the only ground left was the unfamiliar kind.
&nbs
p; Dr. Cale said that once someone started showing symptoms of the sleepwalking sickness, it was too late for any treatment, because the parasite was already in their brain. But she would say that, wouldn’t she? Even if it wasn’t strictly true, she’d say it. The SymboGen implants were her children. She might not actively side with them against the human race. That didn’t mean she was going to go out of her way to figure out how to stop them from taking the things they wanted. Like bodies of their own.
The other technicians were in motion now, some of them running for the exits, others grabbing old-fashioned telephones from the walls and gabbling into them, presumably calling security. I yanked Joyce back another step before raising my voice and calling, “Does anybody have any antiparasitics? I mean really good ones? We need—” I cheated my eyes toward Joyce and asked, “What do you use for tapeworms?”
It seemed impossibly weird to be asking her questions when our father, clearly dazed, was shambling toward us like something out of a horror movie. Oddly, that seemed to help Joyce. This was too strange to be happening: therefore, it wasn’t happening. “Praziquantel,” she said. “It has some negative side effects, though, like—”
“Is one of the negative side effects death?” I demanded. “Because if it’s not, I suggest we get somebody to pump Dad full of the stuff right now.”
Joyce took her eyes off our father in order to blink at me in obvious bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”
I wasn’t sure whether sleepwalkers were capable of watching for an opening—if they were anything like as confused as Dr. Cale had implied, they might not be capable of anything beyond basic instinct, at least initially—but my father still took advantage of the opening when Joyce presented it to him. He lunged forward. He was fast. I was just a little bit faster. I grabbed her shoulders and yanked her hard away from him, leaving his hands to slap together on empty air with a flat, meaty sound that would haunt my dreams for days. Joyce yelped, as much with surprise as anything else, and fell over, upsetting two trays of instruments in the process. I barely managed to dodge in time to keep her from taking me to the floor with her.
The sudden flurry of movement seemed to confuse our father, who froze, his face swinging slowly toward me, then toward Joyce, and back to me again. I straightened slowly, raising my hands in front of me to show that they were empty. I don’t know what good I was expecting that to do. I wasn’t thinking particularly clearly by that point.
“Dad, you’re sick,” I said, enunciating each word as clearly as I could. “I need you to fight against whatever it is you want to do right now, and focus on the sound of my voice. There’s something we can do to help you be better, but it won’t work if you don’t focus on the sound of my voice. Can you do that for me, Dad? Can you fo—”
Without warning, he lunged. I squeaked, stopping in the middle of my sentence, and turned to run. He seemed to track by sound and motion. Joyce was frozen in terror. She wasn’t making a sound, and she wasn’t going anywhere. All I had to do was keep his eyes on me, and trust that someone would stop him before he could do something we’d both regret later.
Well. Maybe I wouldn’t regret it if he killed me. I’d be dead, after all. But I’d sure as hell regret letting myself get into this position if things got that far, in the time I had before oxygen deprivation resulted in my second clinical brain death.
I ran; my father followed. The rest of the technicians had cleared the room, which was convenient, since it meant I didn’t need to worry about leading their rampaging, somewhat addled boss into the middle of their workspace. I shoved things into his path as I tried to evade him without losing his interest. I was afraid if anyone else in the room moved or made a sound, he’d abandon chasing me in favor of going for easier prey. Prey that wasn’t running like hell, or throwing file boxes at his head.
The doors at the back of the room opened and military police flooded in, almost like they were imitating the SymboGen security guards on the day when Chave got sick. That seemed like it had happened so long ago. It seemed like it had happened yesterday. Several of them pulled their guns, and I stopped running in order to put up my hands, and yell, “No! Don’t shoot! Stun him, and get the pretzel drugs!” I was saying it wrong. I knew I was. But long words were Joyce’s thing, not mine, and I’d only heard the name of the drug once. I was frankly impressed I could remember it started with the letter “P.”
And then my father’s hands closed around my throat, and I stopped being impressed by anything, except for maybe how tight his grip was. I scrabbled at his fingers, trying to dislodge them, and couldn’t find any purchase. He was bigger than I was, he was stronger than I was, and he was going to win this one if I didn’t figure out a way to change the rules.
Dad, I’m sorry, I thought, and focused all my remaining energy on planting my foot squarely between his legs.
His response was to groan and let go of my throat, causing me to drop first to my knees and then to my ass as my legs folded up beneath me. My father didn’t seem to notice; he was too busy grasping his crotch and moaning.
I scrambled back to my feet. “It’s not too late!” I shouted. “Joyce, get the antiparasitics!”
The other sleepwalkers didn’t seem to feel or really register pain once they had fully succumbed to the parasites that were infiltrating their brains. My father still responded to extreme pain stimuli like a normal human, and that meant he hadn’t been completely taken over yet. There was still a chance that we could treat him. There was—
“Oh, my God, my balls,” he moaned.
I stopped. “Dad?”
“Wow, Daddy, great idea,” said Joyce, picking herself up off the floor. She dusted off her lab coat with the heels of her hands, scowling at our father like he had just disappointed her in some deep and profound manner. “It’s not Halloween, we’re not twelve anymore, and this isn’t how you make it clear that things are serious.”
The soldiers were standing down. Some of them even seemed to be snickering, trying to hide their amusement behind their hands. I looked from them to Joyce, my confusion growing by the second. The sound of drums was getting louder, now fueled by anger instead of by fear.
“Joyce?” I said, trying to keep my voice measured. “What’s going on here?”
“Daddy thought you might be holding out on us, since you went and disappeared for hours right after a bunch of sleepers showed up in the yard.”
He managed to gasp out something that might have been “I still think that,” or might have simply been a request for an ice pack. I ignored him either way, focusing my attention on Joyce instead. If I looked at him, I was going to be too tempted to give him another kick. The military police might think it was funny for me to attack my father when he was playing sleepwalker, but kicking him while he was down was likely to get a less positive reaction.
“So you’re saying he faked this?” I asked. My voice was sounding a lot less measured. I took a step away from my father. “He set this up to—what, scare me into giving away secrets?”
“It… worked,” gasped my father, finally pulling himself to his feet. “Why did you start asking for antiparasitics?”
“That was pretty specific,” said Joyce. She walked toward us, primly stepping around the objects I’d knocked over during my flight. I noticed that she didn’t bother picking anything up. That was apparently below her pay grade. “What would make you decide to ask for antiparasitics?”
I looked from Dad, who was still white-faced and grasping his crotch, to Joyce, who looked utterly calm. The technicians were moving back to their stations, and although security was still in the room, none of them looked like they were planning to do anything to secure anyone. It had all been a sham. It was a play to see what I would do, and while that spoke to the level of their desperation, it still infuriated me in ways I didn’t really have the words for.
“Is this why you locked me in the house and wouldn’t let me talk to Nathan for five days?” I asked. “Because you wanted me to b
e scared?”
“The things I said to you on the way here were true,” said my father. He was starting to sound less winded, which made me want to kick him again. “I really did want time to check for bugs, and there really were things about the news that would have made you ask questions.”
“They made Nathan ask questions,” said Joyce. “He showed up here yesterday, demanding to know if you were all right.”
I blinked. “Why would he come here?”
“Because we told him you weren’t at home, and this was the only other place you could logically be,” said my father. I turned to stare at him. He continued, “We tried telling him you’d become symptomatic, to see what he would say. He said we were lying. We’ve been trying to find him since then.”
“What?”
“He vanished, Sal,” said Joyce. “Do you know where he would go?”
Yes; back to his mother, who had answers, and who would be able to tell him whether it was possible for me to have become symptomatic so quickly, when there had been no signs that my resident implant was planning to migrate from my digestive system to my brain. Dr. Cale could hide him, keep him off the grid and keep him safe, while they figured out where I was and how to get me out. I glanced toward the security guards, wondering how many of them might be working for her, playing both sides against the middle. It was a paranoid thought, but given that my father and sister had just staged some kind of horror movie dumbshow for my benefit, paranoid didn’t seem so strange anymore.
“No,” I said, and was surprised by how sincere I sounded. “I don’t have any idea where Nathan would go, and I don’t think I want to talk to either one of you right now. I asked Dad to bring me here because I was tired of being locked in the house, and because I wanted to help. After what you did, I don’t feel like helping anymore. Being locked up is better than being here with you.”
“I’m afraid I can’t take you home until you demonstrate that test you promised to show us,” said my father. All traces of weakness were gone from his voice, and he was once again standing up straight. The jangling feeling of wrongness was still coming off him like a wave, but that might just have been my nerves reacting to the overall mood in the room.