“This is unreasonable,” he said. “You’re being unreasonable. Untie my hands.”
“No matter how many times you tell me to do something I don’t want to do, I’m not going to do it.”
“Won’t you?” His expression turned conciliatory like he was flipping a switch, eyes suddenly filled with parental concern. “Sally, I know you don’t want to treat me like this. You know I’ve always, always been on your side. Maybe I’m the only person who’s always been on your side. Why don’t you help me? Let me go?”
“I’m not going to let you go.” The drums were pounding harder. My hands were starting to shake. I balled them both into fists, clutching Beverly’s leash until the leather was biting into my palm. They wouldn’t stop shaking. “Stop asking me.”
“I’m not asking you.”
The drums were pounding harder than ever, and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“I’m asking Sally.”
It was getting hard to focus on him—to focus on anything beyond the urge to turn and run away, fleeing into the city. Vallejo might be filled with sleepwalkers and armed survivors, but no one there would try to find the strings connecting my psyche to itself and pull on them. No one there would even know how to start.
“I know she can hear me.”
“SHUT UP!” I hadn’t intended to scream. It felt like the words were ripped out of me, louder than I could have imagined them being. They bounced off the buildings and boats around us, fading into the distance. Dr. Banks stared at me, too startled to continue cajoling me to remove his bonds.
The back of my brain felt like it was fizzing. I shunted the feeling to the side, taking a step toward him, so that there was barely any space left between us. Dr. Banks shied back. I reached out and grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling him closer still.
“I am the one who owns and operates this establishment, Dr. Banks, and while I appreciate that you may have some designs on the old owner, she’s not coming back,” I spat. “This body is under new management. My management. I am the only one who decides what I do—not you, not Dr. Cale, and not the ghost of Sally Mitchell. She died, I lived, and you don’t get to call her back because you’ve decided that she’d be more convenient. Do you understand me? She’s not. Coming. Back.”
“I understand you perfectly,” he said. His voice was quavering, just a little—just enough to make me believe that he was listening. Good. He needed to listen.
The fizzing feeling in the back of my mind was getting harder to ignore. I paused, tilting my head down as I tried to focus. As soon as I paid attention to it, it snapped into perfect clarity. My eyes widened as my head swung back up, giving me just a second of staring into Dr. Banks’s terrified eyes.
“Sleepwalkers,” I whispered, and turned to bolt for the ferry launch, his shirt still clutched in my hand. He stumbled to keep up, while Beverly ran ahead, pulling her leash to its absolute limit. I didn’t dare let her go. She might have gone to find Nathan, or she might have doubled back and gone for the hated sleepwalkers, which needed to be destroyed if we were going to ever be safe. She was a good dog. She would protect us if she could, which made it all the more important that I make sure I kept protecting her.
The door was unlocked, and still slightly ajar from where Fishy and Nathan had slipped inside. I hip-checked it open, shoving Dr. Banks through, and paused only long enough to turn and close the door firmly behind me. It wouldn’t slow them down for more than a few minutes if the sleepwalkers knew that we were inside the building: they couldn’t manage doorknobs or anything complicated like that, but they were very good at smashing things, and from the way my head was fizzing, there were at least a dozen on their way to us, maybe more. These were the ones who had managed to eat and survive in an abandoned city. They would be weak and maybe even wounded. They would also be desperate.
The urge to survive is a powerful thing. It can drive even the most primitive of organisms to do things that should have been impossible, because they don’t want to die. If there was any way for the sleepwalkers to get into the ferry launch, they would do it.
Dr. Banks was still standing a few feet away, looking stunned and uneasy. I grabbed his elbow before he could move, pulling him with me deeper into the building. “Come on, we need to find the others,” I said, and for once, he didn’t argue.
The ferry launch was the sort of airy, mostly insubstantial building that always seemed to be cold, even at the height of summer, with large panes of glass set into the roof to compensate for the lack of artificial light. The silence inside seemed absolute, even though Dr. Banks, Beverly, and I weren’t doing anything to stay quiet. Beverly’s claws clacked on the wooden floor with every step she took, and Dr. Banks clomped, his feet slamming down with what felt to me like an unnecessary degree of force.
Empty plastic benches stretched out on either side, some with jackets or backpacks discarded on them, as if their owners were going to be back at any moment. A few vending machines loaded with candy bars or chips lined one wall; a hole was punched in the largest of them, although the machine’s contents remained almost entirely intact. Vandalism, or the aftermath of some fight that hadn’t ended well? There was no blood. I chose to take that as a good sign. It was better than the alternatives.
“Think your boyfriend ditched us here as so much deadweight?” asked Dr. Banks conversationally. “Or maybe that curly-headed fellow decided to put a bullet in his brain and take the boat to San Francisco all by himself. You can’t surround yourself with crazies and expect them to behave like normal people. It’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to them, either. They’re just not wired that way.”
“Shut up,” I said tonelessly. I knew he was just trying to get under my skin, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. I couldn’t. If I did, I was going to lose the thin string of composure that I had remaining, and then things were going to get ugly. “Places like this usually have separate rooms for staff and maintenance, to keep from freaking out the passengers. We just need to find them.”
“Listen to you, sounding all logical and reasonable. It’s almost like you think you’re really a person.”
“Oh, good, we’ve moved on to nastiness and spite. That’s so much easier to deal with than smarm.”
Dr. Banks glared at me, but before he could come up with a response, there was a loud banging noise from behind us. I whipped around, just in time to see the door shudder inward as it was hit again from the outside. The fizzing feeling in my head was gone, replaced by a constant bubbling roar. The sleepwalkers were here.
“Run,” I whispered, and let go of his arm, and took my own advice.
Leaving him to run on his own might have been cruel, but for the first time, I wasn’t worried about him trying to escape. I was worried about whether we could get to our people alive, and whether the boat would be ready, and I wasn’t going to let him slow me down. Neither was Beverly. The airflow wasn’t good enough to have started her barking yet, but she could tell that I was worried, and she was a good dog; she was responding to my fear by putting everything she had into the run, heading down the length of the dock.
The banging continued behind me, as did Dr. Banks’s labored footsteps and occasional gasps for air. The end of the building was looming. I angled myself toward the single door in the wall, putting my hand out so that I could hit it without slowing down. Like the entrance, it was slightly ajar. I hoped that was a good sign.
Fishy and Nathan looked up from their examination of a large, white-sided boat when I came bursting through the door from the ferry launch. They had opened a hatch in the hull, revealing a rusty but sound-looking engine on the other side. Fishy blinked. Nathan frowned.
“Sal, what in the—”
Dr. Banks ran through the door three steps behind me. He whirled as if to close it, only to realize that his hands were still tied. With one vicious kick, he banged the door back into place. The slam shuddered the frame. Eyes wild, Dr. Banks turned to the rest of us and spat
, “They’re everywhere. They couldn’t get the door down, so one of them punched through the fucking wall.”
“Sleepwalkers,” I added, not quite needlessly. Sleepwalkers were bad, but they didn’t have guns, which meant they weren’t quite as bad as survivors would have been.
“Shit.” Fishy shut the hatch in the side of the boat, latching it with a quick, clever twist of his fingers. “We have fuel and the engine looks good, but I’m worried about our rudders. We don’t have any way of testing them to see if anything’s jammed down in there. They could blow halfway across the water, and where would we be then?”
“Less dead than if we stay in a building that’s about to be flooded with sleepwalkers,” I said. “How do we get onto this damn boat?”
“Follow me,” said Fishy. He picked up his rifle from where it had been leaning against the hull and took off at a loping run, heading for the front of the boat. The rest of us followed, even Dr. Banks. Under the circumstances, it was the only sensible thing we could have done.
Access to the ferry when it wasn’t prepared for loading passengers was through a narrow door near the front of the boat, leading to an even narrower set of steps that connected the dock to the deck. When the ferry was loading passengers the whole back end opened like some strange metal flower, but that process took time, and time was something we no longer had.
Fishy was the first up the narrow steps, calling back, “I’m going to get the engine started! Nate, worm-girl, make sure we’re not tied down!” And then he was gone, following whatever interior blueprint he had to the captain’s chair.
Nathan went up second, and crouched down to pat his knees and cajole, “Come on, Beverly, there’s a good girl,” as our dog hunched and whined, unwilling to climb such a steep, unfamiliar stairway.
“Leave the damn dog,” snarled Dr. Banks. “Let me up.”
“We’ll leave you before we leave her,” said Nathan. He patted his knees again. “Come on, Beverly. Heel!”
She looked back at me and whined. Then she stiffened, sniffing the air, and growled—a long, low sound that seemed to have too many edges. I winced.
“Not now, Beverly, please. Just go. Go, so we can get out of here.”
Dogs are smart, in their own unique canine way. She heard the panic in my voice and reacted the way she always had: by trying to take away whatever was causing it. Since Nathan was high and I was low, clearly our separation was the problem. She scrambled up the steps, rudderlike tail slapping against the plating on either side. When she was halfway up I let go of the leash. She slammed into Nathan, not expecting her own acceleration, and twisted to give me a bewildered, slightly betrayed look. I was supposed to be holding on to her. That was the way this worked.
Not this time. I stepped to the side, allowing Dr. Banks to rush into the channel, and gave him a shove when his lack of hands seemed to be leading to a fall. He didn’t thank me. He just kept running, knocking Nathan and Beverly aside as he sprinted onto the deck. I turned to look back toward the door. It was shuddering on its hinges, and this time the sleepwalkers weren’t going to be able to break through the wall; there was only one way they were coming at us.
“Sal!” Nathan sounded like he was on the verge of panic. “Get on board!”
“Check for ropes holding us to the dock!” I shouted back. “I’m going to see if I can slow them down.” It was a stupid idea. Every inch of me knew that it was a stupid idea. But the sleepwalkers were starting to listen to me, even if it was only for a few seconds at a time, and maybe a well-placed command to stop could keep them from rushing the boat. Not forever. Just long enough for Fishy to get the engines turned on and get us the hell out of this deathtrap.
“Sal!”
“Go!” I kept my hand on the door, ready to jump onto the boat and slam it behind me. The stairs didn’t retract. What I was planning might not be safe, but it wouldn’t get me killed unless I was stupid or mistimed getting on board.
Nathan didn’t shout again. I glanced up the stairs and saw Beverly’s worried black face peering back at me, her ears perked forward in canine confusion. I offered her a wan smile but didn’t talk to her, not even to tell her that she was a good dog. She might have decided that was her cue to come to me, and I wasn’t going to try getting both of us on board without time to do it properly.
The sleepwalkers hit the door again, this time hard enough that the boom of impact resonated through the entire building. I tensed, turning just in time to see the door fly open and the swarm of sleepwalkers begin forcing their way inside. There were at least thirty of them, possibly more: they must have come from every inch of the waterfront, following the promise of food—and maybe, I had to admit, the pheromone trail that I was leaving just by moving through their world.
I can’t be Sally, I thought, almost nonsensically. Human girls don’t leave tracks like bees for their drones to follow back to the hives.
The boat under my hand gave a small hitch and then began to vibrate on an almost subsonic level as the first of the engines came on line. Beverly barked and withdrew, presumably to go to the end of the deck and bark more at the sleepwalkers.
“Good girl,” I murmured. The leading edge of the swarm was no more than fifteen feet away now—close enough. I raised my voice and shouted, with all the authority that I could muster, “Stop right there!”
And they stopped.
Not all of them, but four of the larger individuals. They had been at the front of the mob, and their sudden stillness ran another six up against immobility as they found their passage blocked.
“Stop!” I shouted again.
Three more stopped, and four more were barricaded. It was like a strange and potentially fatal math problem: if yelling at the onrushing cannibal zombies makes them stop moving, but it only works for X percent, how many times will you need to yell before safety is assured? Show your work, and don’t get eaten.
The vibration from the boat was getting stronger. It became audible as the second engine kicked in, suddenly roaring. That was good: that meant we were on the verge of getting out of here. That was also bad, because it meant that the engines were going to be pulling air, which would strip my pheromones from the air.
“Stay where you are!” I yelled.
Most of the sleepwalkers, against all odds, listened. Maybe it was the noise from the boat, making the area strange and potentially dangerous and keeping them from taking any major risks in pursuit of a single skinny dinner that they would need to split between them. Or maybe it really was the beginning of the next stage in our development. We still didn’t know how sleepwalker/chimera interaction was going to look, because we didn’t have the models for it.
“Sal!” Nathan’s shout came from the top of the stairs. “We’re clear!”
“I’ll be right there,” I called back, glancing toward him.
That was my mistake. The sleepwalkers might have been able to resist the urge to rush for me, but two bodies ripe and ready for consumption were a much bigger temptation. As soon as I took my eyes off them they moaned and began rushing forward again, moving with that eerie speed that they could achieve when they were focused on a goal. A goal like eating me alive. I looked back, screamed, and began scrambling for the stairs.
A hand caught the back of my shirt as I was stepping over the gap between dock and boat. I screamed again, thrusting one elbow backward with as much force as I could muster. The sleepwalker fell back, ripping the collar of my shirt in the process. I shoved myself forward into the tiny stairwell and slammed the door shut, pulling down the handle to lock it into place. The sound of hands drumming against the hull began almost instantly.
Twisting in that narrow, confined space was difficult, but I was able to do it, and was rewarded with the sight of Nathan’s worried face peering down at me from the deck of the ferry, his glasses askew and Beverly peeking over his shoulder like she was afraid that I would disappear. I forced myself to smile, aware that the expression would look artificial, but willing
to accept it if it meant reassuring the people I cared about.
“I’m okay,” I said. “They didn’t hurt me, and they actually listened when I told them to stop—did you see? Did you see them stop?”
“I saw you risking your life to buy us time we didn’t need,” said Nathan, leaning forward to offer me his hand. I took it, allowing him to tug me up the last few steps. “Please don’t do that again.”
“Can’t promise that under the circumstances,” I replied. He pulled me into an embrace, and I went willingly along with it, wrapping my arms around the reassuring barrel of his chest and inhaling the detergent and sweat scent of his shirt. I giggled, unable to stop myself.
“What?” demanded Nathan.
I pushed myself away, smiling up at him. “Just thinking about how we both need another shower.”
He blinked before smiling back. “Doesn’t seem like it happened today, does it?”
Something slammed against the side of the boat. My head whipped around, all traces of levity—and I knew that it had been artificial giddiness, conjured up by our escape and by the potentially false promise of temporary safety—fading. The slam came again before resolving itself into a steady tattoo of concussive bangs.
“Oh, no,” I murmured, and rushed to the side, peering down at the sea of sleepwalkers crushed onto the dock. They were beating their hands against the side of the boat, some of them using their fists, others slapping with open palms. A few were even biting at the metal, their teeth breaking against the implacable steel of the hull. We were moving slowly forward, gathering speed at what felt like an impossibly slow rate. The sleepwalkers were moving with us, and more were pouring through the door into the launch area, drawn by the sound of the boat’s engine as much as by our presence.