Symbiont

  “Hi, Nathan,” I said.

  Nathan swallowed hard, the muscles in his jaw clenching and unclenching before he said, “Hello, Sal. Are you ready to go home?”

  “More than ready.” I stepped out onto the porch, leaving the door open behind me. If any of the original occupants were still alive—if they had become sleepwalkers, rather than just being torn apart by them—at least now they could come home. The broken cellphone I tucked into my pocket. It had Nathan’s number in memory now. I wasn’t leaving that behind.

  “Mom sends her regards, and asked me to tell you she always knew you’d find a way to stay alive,” said Nathan stiffly. Then the stiffness melted, and he was putting his arms around me and pulling me close, into an embrace that made me feel like everything was going to be all right after all. The world could end and Sherman could plot against humanity and I could beat the stolen body of a teenage girl to death in her bedroom, and still things would somehow find a way to be all right.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to get caught. I just wanted to keep you safe.”

  “Never apologize,” Nathan whispered back. He turned, lifting me with me one arm so that we wouldn’t need to break off our embrace. The butt of his rifle dug into my back. I didn’t care. We were almost the same size, and he carried me easily as he stepped off the porch and turned to face Fang, the stranger, and the car. “Can you walk?”

  “I’m sore and slow, but I can walk,” I assured him. He lowered my feet back to the ground. I left my hand against his chest as I looked around the area. We were in what would have been a normal suburban neighborhood once, although the gunshots hadn’t caused any of the other houses to turn their lights on; my worried impression of an abandoned city had been close to accurate. I could see shapes farther down the street, all of them turning and shambling in our direction. We weren’t going to be alone for very long. “Where are we?”

  “Pleasant Hill, near the community college,” said Nathan. “There’s a mall nearby, but it doesn’t seem to be the one where Sherman was holding you.”

  Of course they would have checked before they came to get me. Their safety would have depended on whether I was telling the truth, and whether I’d been left in this neighborhood as a trap. I nodded mutely, suddenly exhausted, and closed my eyes as I let Nathan guide me down the pathway to the car. I didn’t want to see the sleepwalkers staggering toward us; some of them might even be the parents of the girl I’d killed inside. The world was changing. We were all of us changing with it. That didn’t make it any easier to bear.

  I opened my eyes when we reached the car. Nathan opened the door, motioning for me to get into the backseat. He must have seen my discomfort, because he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be riding with you. I just need to cover Fang and Fishy while they get back to their seats.”

  That answered the question of who, exactly, the man I didn’t recognize was. I nodded and climbed in, scooting over until I was pressed against the door on the far side. Looking down the length of the backseat, I watched as Nathan raised his rifle and covered the other two men making their retreat. The pair split up when they reached the car, with Fang walking around to take the driver’s seat. Nathan got in next to me, and the sound of the door closing was the sound of coming home. I looked at him, eyes wide, unable to force myself to speak.

  Nathan smiled a little. “I like your hair,” he said.

  I laughed brokenly, and leaned over to put my head against his shoulder as Fang started the car and we drove away from the place where I had been abandoned, the place where I had been saved.

  Nathan talked as we drove, explaining what had happened with the lab. I closed my eyes, leaned my head against his shoulder, and just listened. It was all I’d wanted to do for weeks: sit and listen to someone who would actually talk to me. He was constantly touching my hair or shoulder, like he was reassuring himself that I was real. I didn’t mind that either. It kept me from needing to be the one who moved.

  The bowling alley hadn’t been Dr. Cale’s first lab. The first lab had been located in an old supermarket, and was moved when word came that the people who actually owned the property were planning to have it fumigated and then torn down. The second lab had been a closed-down Costco with the gas pumps still out back, and had been abandoned after Sherman defected. The bowling alley came third, and it had been her base of operations for longer than anything else. It was perfect in a lot of ways, isolated while still being close to civilization, and best of all, owned by a shell corporation that used it as a tax write-off and had no interest in either refurbishing or demolishing the place. It had become a lot less useful when USAMRIID started closing in.

  The collapse of most of the local social norms—and the evacuations of any “nonessential” buildings, like the mall where Sherman had been keeping me, wherever that was—had created the perfect vacuum for Dr. Cale’s team. They’d smuggled themselves and all their equipment out of Clayton through a series of tricks and double blinds that Nathan didn’t explain very well, or maybe I just wasn’t quite listening anymore.

  And then he said a name that actually caught my attention. I opened my eyes, tilting my head back until I could see his face, and said, “You can’t be serious.”

  “But I am.” Nathan smiled a little, like he was perfectly aware of just how ridiculous he sounded. “We’ve moved the lab, and our living quarters, to the Captain Candy Chocolate Factory.”

  I stared at him.

  He smiled a little more. “I see you’ve heard of it. I wasn’t sure. I went there with a class field trip when I was in middle school, but you missed the whole ‘middle school’ experience.”

  “Will used to leave the radio on when we were cleaning the shelter, and they advertised a lot during the afternoon,” I said. “It’s out in Vallejo, isn’t it?”

  Nathan nodded. “That’s the one.”

  “And it was just… empty?”

  “It turns out that keeping a candy factory open isn’t a major priority when the world is ending,” said Fishy, twisting around in the front seat to look at us. “It’s a nice place. A little weird. Smells like chocolate. I hope you don’t have any allergies.”

  “Just antiparasitics,” I said shyly.

  “I guess that would be a problem for you,” he said, giving me a frank up-and-down look. “You don’t look like a tapeworm.”

  “Surprise,” I said.

  He grinned. It opened up his face like a flower, bright and honest enough that I didn’t even mind the fact that he was showing off virtually all of his teeth. The absence of malice in his expression was enough to rob them of their menace, making the expression as harmless as a grin on a dog.

  Fishy was a short, stocky man with broad workman’s shoulders and a full head of riotously curly hair that was currently skimmed back into a ponytail to keep it out of his way. His eyes swam behind the lenses of his thick-framed glasses, which were seated so solidly on his nose that they looked like they would be impossible to dislodge. He was wearing a black outfit that matched Nathan’s in cut and construction, but couldn’t have looked more different on his frame.

  “You seem more like a human being than Adam does,” he said. “He’s a nice guy, but he’s never really seemed like a functioning person to me.”

  I blinked at him, casting an anxious glance at Nathan before returning my attention to Fishy and saying, hesitantly, “Maybe that’s because I learned how to be a human by living with humans, instead of learning how to be a human by sitting in a lab surrounded by people who never forgot that I wasn’t really one of them?”

  “Maybe,” Fishy agreed. His gaze flicked to Nathan, smile fading. “We good?”

  “We’re good,” Nathan agreed. Fishy withdrew back into the front seat. Nathan put an arm around my shoulder and said, “We weren’t expecting your call. Honestly, most of the people back at the lab had written you off as lost. I think that I was one of the only people who was still willing to believe that you were alive—well, me and
Adam. Adam never gave up on you.”

  “He wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Neither would I.” Nathan tightened his arm. “Everyone’s going to be a little jumpy around you for a while. I just want you to be ready for that.”

  “I can be ready for anything, as long as you let me stay with you.”

  Nathan kissed the top of my head. “I’m never going to let myself be separated from you again.”

  “Good,” I said, and closed my eyes.

  Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory was a Bay Area tradition, originally designed to compete with the better-known and more nationally established Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield. The Captain didn’t specialize in jelly beans; instead, he had made his name on chocolate and chocolate confections of all kinds, from cookies to ice cream. Instead of free tours, the Captain charged fifteen dollars a head, with a promise to make it up by providing ridiculous quantities of chocolate and candy at the end—a promise that he had apparently kept, since people kept coming back. Captain Candy never became a national brand, although I didn’t know whether that was a matter of economic necessity or a matter of corporate choice. There was a lot of competition in the national chocolate arena, but in Northern California, Captain Candy was king.

  The factory was built to serve three purposes at once, and it needed to serve them all well before it could be considered a success. First, to offer a candy-coated wonderland that would invoke thoughts of children’s literature and impossible dreams, available for rent at a reasonable fee. Second, to create the illusion of a factory that Willy Wonka would have been proud to own and operate, even down to the brightly colored scrubs worn by all of the employees. Third, to host the actual Captain Candy’s factory, producing hundreds of pounds of candy daily on an assembly line that looked exactly like every other candy assembly line in the world.

  The drive from Pleasant Hill to Vallejo took a little more than an hour, since we had to navigate a bridge choked with stalled-out and abandoned cars. Fishy and Fang got out at one point, pushing several of the cars out of the way with an ease that spoke of greased wheels and hidden levers. We drove through and they got out again, pushing the cars back into their original positions. “No one knows that we’re using this route for our supply runs, and we’re going to keep it that way,” said Fishy amiably, while Fang restarted the car.

  “Good idea,” I said vaguely. It was hard to pay attention to them—the scene outside the car windows was too distracting.

  We’d been passing abandoned cars and empty houses the whole time, but for the most part, the lack of light had kept me from really looking at what was around us. Now, the sun was rising, and there was no way not to see the wreckage of the world. Not without closing my eyes, and part of me felt responsible enough for what had happened that I couldn’t bring myself to do that. This was the world my species had made. It didn’t matter that I had never willingly hurt a human being, or that I had actually killed multiple sleepwalkers, thus putting myself firmly on the side of my creators. This was still my fault. Somehow.

  The cars on the bridge weren’t alone. The streets of Vallejo were equally choked, although the vehicles had been carefully pushed to this side or that, creating open channels in the motionless traffic. A casual observer would have thought those channels were organic, arising naturally as the drivers had succumbed to their invertebrate attackers. From the way Fang swung the car from one clear path to the next, it was clear that they had been created to allow for occasions just like this one.

  It might have been okay if the cars had been empty, or at least intact, but both those things were too much to ask. Windows were smashed, or smeared with streaks of long-dried blood, or both. Bodies were still belted into the seats where they had died, while others had fallen in the street, dried out by the elements or picked clean by predators. Every time we came around a corner it seemed like we dislodged another flock of crows, sending the urban scavenger birds flapping into the early morning sky. They’d clearly owned the streets long enough to turn bold, because they came back as soon as we rounded the next corner; I could see them returning to their prizes if I looked behind me. And I couldn’t stop looking back.

  The lights were still on in half the city, with flickering streetlamps and incongruously well-lit storefronts on every street. Nathan saw me looking and said, “Not all systems fail at the same rate. Enough of the city is on solar or hydro power that it’ll be months before Vallejo is completely dark.”

  “Even then, a few of the power stations are still pumping,” said Fishy amiably. “We could go around and shut everything off, but if this place goes dark before it stops being a bright spot on the grid, someone could figure out that we’re here, and we’d rather avoid that for as long as possible.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because Doctor C is wanted for terrorism, naturally,” said Fishy.

  Nathan didn’t say a word.

  I twisted in my seat to look at him, eyes wide, and asked, “Is that true?”

  “She did help create a creature that is now in the process of destroying the human race,” said Nathan. “Whether that was her intention or not, it doesn’t look good.”

  “Oh,” I said, and then the vast, primary-colored shape of Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory came into view ahead of us, and conversation died, at least for the moment.

  Fang drove across the largely empty parking lot and through an open gate into an underground garage that had probably been used to house delivery trucks, once upon a time, before the end of the world. Most of those trucks were gone now, except for a few parked against the far wall. Fang drove across the garage to the row of spaces right in front of a pair of sliding glass doors. Soft white light poured through the glass, bathing us in radiance, welcoming us home.

  “You parked in the handicapped space again, asshole,” said Fishy amiably. He opened the car door, picking up his rifle as he slid out. “Dr. Cale’s going to have your head.”

  “Dr. Cale doesn’t drive, and like I keep telling you, humanity is a handicap,” said Fang. “How else can you explain the things we’ve done to ourselves? Sal, I’m glad we were able to recover you. Now don’t get lost again.” He got out of the car, pocketing the keys, and went striding toward the door.

  “Asshole,” repeated Fishy, and trotted after him.

  I stayed where I was, my legs suddenly feeling like they were frozen to the seat. I’d wanted nothing more than to get back to the people I’d lost since I was taken, and now that safety seemed like it was within my grasp, I was terrified. What if Dr. Cale was angry with me for letting myself get grabbed? What if they tried to lock me up to keep me from going missing again? I couldn’t handle another cage. I just couldn’t.

  “Sal.” Nathan’s voice was gentle. I turned to face him, and he reached out to rest the back of his hand against my cheek, smiling just a little. “It’s all right to be frightened. I’m pretty sure that I’d be scared too, if our positions were reversed. But you’re home now. Mom isn’t going to be mad at you. To be honest, she thinks you’re some kind of miracle. None of us thought we were ever going to see you again.” His voice broke a little on the last word. That, more than anything, told me that he was telling the truth.

  I leaned forward and kissed him. He kissed me back, and for a few minutes, all the rest didn’t matter: we were actually alone, and together, and no one was trying to pull us apart. That was worth everything in the world. So I kissed him, and he kissed me, and then he was undoing my seat belt and pulling me into his lap, and I was exactly where I was meant to be. Where I should have been all along, and would have been, if we’d been just a little bit more careful.

  Nathan’s cheeks were flushed when he pulled away, and his glasses were fogged, making him look young and wild-eyed and a little lost. “I thought you were gone, and I was trying to make myself believe it,” he said. “I am so sorry. I am so sorry I was ready to give up on you.”

  “You didn’t,” I said, and leaned in to kiss him one more t
ime. “Let’s go see your mother.”

  Nathan nodded, and undid his own seat belt as I slid out of his lap and back to my own side of the car, where I opened the door and climbed out into the cool air of the underground garage. It was actually chilly enough that I shivered a little, making me suspect that it would never really get warm down here; it would always be the perfect temperature for shifting pallets of chocolate, or—in the case of the new management—cases containing delicate scientific samples. The more things changed, the more they really stayed the same.

  Nathan walked around the car to join me, offering me his hand. “It’s going to be all right,” he said.

  “I hope so,” I said, lacing my fingers through his and stepping close enough that I’d be able to grab hold of his arm if things got too overwhelming inside. I felt suddenly shy, and more than a little sick to my stomach.

  “I love you,” he said. “Now breathe.” With that last proclamation, he pulled me forward, and together we stepped through the sliding glass doors and onto the red and white tile floor beyond. It had been designed to look like a giant peppermint swirl, which went well with the gust of warm, mint-scented air that greeted us as the doors slid shut again behind us.

  I stopped dead, blinking for a moment, before I passed judgment on the rush of artificial mint with a sneeze.

  Nathan grinned. “Disabling the mechanism that ‘greets all visitors to our candy wonderland’ would mean dismantling half the air-conditioning system, and we don’t have the time or the manpower to waste on something like that. Fishy says that the scent will run out eventually, and in the meantime, anyone who has a chemical sensitivity should use the other door or cover their nose when they walk through here.”

  I sneezed again before sniffling and saying, “That’s really thoughtful of him.”