Symbiont

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Chapter 16 NOVEMBER 2027

We couldn’t bring much. Traveling fast meant traveling light, and we were already going to be contending with a burden much larger than either of us would have voluntarily carried: Dr. Banks, who was almost sure to try running as soon as we were away from the factory. On one thing, however, I dug my heels in.

“We have to take her,” I said, gripping Beverly’s leash so tightly that I could feel the leather biting into my hand. Beverly herself sat calmly by my feet, tail thumping and snout canted upward as she gazed adoringly into my face. We were going on an adventure. That was all she knew, and all that she cared about.

Nathan frowned. “She’ll slow us down.”

“She’ll warn us of any sleepwalkers we don’t see,” I countered. “I can’t pick up on their pheromones as well as they can pick up on mine, and I know I smell like something interesting enough to follow. But their pheromones upset the dog. She’ll bark her head off before anything can grab and eat us. That makes her worth however many potty stops she needs to make along the way.”

“Sal—”

“We need weapons, Nathan. Much as I hate to say it, Beverly is a weapon now. She’ll attack anything that wants to hurt us.” And if USAMRIID ambushed us, having a dog along would broadcast, loud and clear, that whatever we were, we weren’t sleepwalkers. It might buy us a few minutes before they shot us in the head.

“Mom’s sending Fishy with us,” said Nathan. “He always carries a gun when he’s in the field, and he doesn’t really believe that any of this is happening. The man has no fear.”

“That’s swell,” I said. “I want more.”

Nathan looked at me for a long moment before he sighed deeply. “We don’t have to do this.”

My eyes widened. “Yes, we do! We need to get Tansy back. I’m taking the dog, but that shouldn’t be enough to make you change your mind. We have to do this.”

“I know. It’s just…” Nathan stopped for a moment before he said, “Look, Sal. I won’t pretend not to worry about you. I worry about everything now. I worry constantly. We’ve been like this little… this little island of science surrounded by a world that’s falling to pieces. It’s like we’re on the Island of Doctor Moreau crossed with ‘Masque of the Red Death’—they’re stories,” he added, seeing my confusion. “One was about a man who made animals into men because he wanted to prove that he could do it, and the other was about a bunch of people who locked themselves away from everything when the plague came to town, and they danced and celebrated and drank while everyone else was dying. But eventually the men turned into monsters, and the plague broke through the walls. Both stories end the same way.”

“Everybody dies?” I guessed.

Nathan nodded. “They’re cautionary tales, I guess. Sometimes I feel like my life is a cautionary tale. So please, forgive me when I seem like I’m being slow to adjust. I’ve adjusted more in the last months than I thought was possible. Bring Beverly if it makes you feel better.”

“It does, and that means we’re bringing the dog,” I said blithely. “I already made sure Adam has Minnie. He’ll take good care of her.”

“Good.” Nathan shouldered his pack, full of equipment I didn’t understand and first aid supplies I was all too familiar with. “Do you have everything you need?”

I turned and looked at the room that hadn’t been home for nearly long enough, and that I was probably never going to see again. Then I shouldered my own pack, looked back to Nathan, and nodded. “I do,” I said.

He offered me his hand. I took it with the hand that didn’t hold Beverly’s leash, and we walked away from everything, moving toward the distant, terrifying future.

Getting from Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory to the ferry terminal was easier said than done. On paper, it was a relatively straight five-mile shot down Tennessee Street to the waterfront. From there, we’d be able to navigate the short, clearly labeled streets around the docks to find what we needed. Fishy and Fang both agreed that what we needed was the actual ferryboat: it was not only designed to be relatively easy to steer, but it was made to handle the shoals and waves of the open bay, while most of the smaller, privately owned craft were likely to capsize if the water got choppy. California didn’t have much of a winter compared to the rest of the world, or even the rest of the country, but we did get more wind in November and December. Since a cold, wet shark encounter wasn’t going to help anything, it was better if we grabbed a boat that was big enough to do the job.

Dr. Banks complicated things. After a lengthy discussion with Fang, we had decided to cuff his hands in front of him for the journey. It would leave him relatively defenseless—not good—but it would also make it less likely that he would run away. Yes, any USAMRIID soldiers who happened to intercept us would immediately know that he’d been taken prisoner. That was a small price to pay for not losing him in the maze of streets that was downtown Vallejo.

Fishy was coming with us: Fang was not. Which brought us to the next problem on our rapidly growing list:

We didn’t have a security team. We only had one assault rifle between the four of us. And we had to travel almost six miles total, most of it through territory that had been ceded to the sleepwalkers, if we wanted to make it to the water.

“My biggest recommendation to you is take it slow, take it quiet, and whatever you do, don’t make any noise that isn’t strictly necessary,” said Fang, walking with us toward the exit to the parking garage. “The van is ready for you, but you should abandon it when you reach the harbor. The sound of the engine will just draw more sleepwalkers.”

“This is inhumane,” said Dr. Banks, giving another yank on his cuffs. “You can’t honestly expect me to stay quiet while your people treat me like a common animal.”

“You can’t honestly expect ‘my’ people to let you stay in the van if you insist on making noise,” Fang countered. He placed his hand between Dr. Banks’s shoulder blades, giving the older man a hard shove. Dr. Banks staggered forward a few feet before he managed to stop and turn, shooting a venomous glare back at Fang, who smiled serenely. “You must understand my position, Doctor. You have never benefited me in any concrete manner. You have neither improved my life nor changed its course in any positive way. What you have done is knock everything I had ever planned for myself askew, trapping me in a future I neither designed nor desired. So please, enlighten me. Why should I recommend mercy when you’ve never deigned to show any to anyone else?”

Fishy yawned extravagantly. “You’ve been hanging out with the mad doctor too long,” he said, digging an elbow into Fang’s side. “I think making speeches is contagious.”

“It’s fun to watch you all treat Dr. Banks like a chewy toy, but I think we should probably get going,” I said, surprising everyone—even myself—with the assertiveness in my tone. Fang actually looked impressed. “We don’t want to be crossing the Bay after dark, and I really don’t want to land in San Francisco after dark.”

“Ah: that will be the next challenge,” said Fang. “There should be vehicles near the Ferry Building. If nothing else, building maintenance has to have had something they could use to pick up parts when necessary.”

“Hold on a second,” said Fishy. “What do you mean, ‘should be’? Don’t you know?”

“I don’t know everything,” said Fang. He ignored Fishy’s irritated muttering as he continued: “We can’t exactly scout the site before you go there. I will recommend you check the dock before you land. If you drive into the middle of a sleepwalker mob…”

“We all know how that ends,” said Nathan. He clamped a hand down on Dr. Banks’s shoulder. “It’s going to be fine. We’ll go to the ferry, cross the water, find a vehicle, go to SymboGen, find Tansy, and then do the whole thing in reverse. No problem.”

Fang raised an eyebrow. “Do you actually believe any of what you just said?”

“I believe that’s the plan,” said Nathan.

“I believe we’re never going to find out whether it works until we try it,” I said.

Dr. Banks turned his head, glaring at each of us in turn. “You fools are going to get us all killed,” he said. “If I survive this, I’ll be telling my lawyers about you.”

“Don’t be silly, Steven,” I said. His head snapped toward me, expression going startled. I smiled. “There are no more lawyers, remember?”

“And remember whose fault that is.” Fang gave him another shove. Nathan pulled him along, and Fishy and I fell into step behind them as we walked away, leaving Fang standing alone in the lobby. I managed—somehow—not to look back. It would have felt too much like admitting that we were never going to see him again. So I didn’t do it.

I just walked.

Getting into a car was stressful for me under the best of circumstances. The stress just increased when Nathan shoved Dr. Banks into the back of the van and climbed in after him, leaving the front seat for me… and for Fishy, who slipped behind the wheel like it was only natural for him to be seated there. I froze, my hand on the door handle, and shot a hurt, bewildered look at Nathan, who shrugged apologetically.

“Fishy’s the best urban driver we have,” he said. “I’m sorry, Sal. I’d do it if it wouldn’t slow us down.”

“Don’t worry your head, pretty little tapeworm girl,” said Fishy blithely as he reached up to adjust the mirror. He was short enough that everything had to be shifted a little, creating a complex chain of minor changes that took him long enough that I was able to talk myself into getting in and buckling my belt. He cast an encouraging smile in my direction. “I’m a great driver. I almost never crash into anything I wasn’t aiming for.”

I made a small, involuntary squeaking noise.

From the back of the van, Dr. Banks’s voice slithered forth, venomous and beguiling: “You may be scared of something as simple as a little car ride, but Sally wouldn’t even have noticed that she was moving. You should really try to get in touch with your inner human, Sal, if you want to survive this brave new world.”

“Shut up,” said Nathan. His command was followed by the sound of a body being shoved back against the seat.

“There’s no need to get rough, boy,” said Dr. Banks. “I’m just trying to help the little lady, that’s all. Since none of you can be bothered to do anything of the sort, it seems like it’s my fatherly duty.”

“The fucked-up road show is now prepared to get rolling,” said Fishy blithely, seemingly immune to the tension that was thrumming through the air. “Please keep your hands, arms, heads, and children inside the ride at all times. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to get bumpy out there.” He hit the gas like it had personally offended him, and we went peeling out of the garage at a speed that sent my heart into my throat, where it anchored, still pounding. The drums seemed louder than they had ever been, so loud that they threatened to rupture my eardrums from the inside out.

I closed my eyes and reached for the hot warm dark, seeking the safety and serenity that would allow me to make it to the waterfront with my sanity intact. But the dark wasn’t there. All I found was the inside of my own eyelids, a plain, undifferentiated darkness that offered neither safety nor isolation. I reached again, trying to find the one thing that had always been there for me, since even before I woke up in the hospital. I was born in the hot warm dark. I existed in its embrace, and it kept me from the things that wanted to hurt me. So how was it possible that I couldn’t find it now?

Calm down, Sal, I told myself. This is what he wants. And that was true, wasn’t it? Dr. Banks didn’t want me to have anything that he couldn’t manipulate or control. He was trying to make me lose touch with myself with his lies about Sally still being locked somewhere in my mind. It was my mind. Not hers. Not now, and not ever again.

The third time I reached out, the dark reached back to greet me. I tangled the idea of fingers into the idea of hands, and then I was plummeting down, down, down into the hot warm dark, where it didn’t matter how fast we were moving or how dangerous the things we were doing were, because I was safe and home and far away from everything but the drums that were my own pounding heart. I was alone. I was safe, because I was alone.

Wasn’t I?

Sally? It was a stupid question to ask, even if I was only asking it of the silence at the center of myself—and the silence wasn’t really silent, was it? The drums were always there, so constant and so unvarying that they might as well have been silent. It was hard to put words on the things I saw when my eyes were closed. They were built into my DNA, never intended to be expressed in things as limitless or as limited as words. Are you there?

There was no reply from the hot warm dark. I was alone there, like I had always been alone there, and there could be no answers unless I gave them to myself.

A hand touched my shoulder, pulling me back up out of the darkness and into the frame of flesh and bone and sinew that I had stolen for my own. I sat up a little straighter as my skin settled around me, and I opened my eyes, expecting to see the waterfront stretching outside the van like a watery promise.

Instead, what I saw was an intersection packed with the smashed remains of a six-car pileup. There were no sleepwalkers—at least not at the moment—but there was also no way for us to get the van through. I blinked, and then twisted to look behind me. Nathan looked grimly back, his hand still resting on my shoulder.

“I waited as long as possible to wake you,” he said. “I think we’re going to have to abandon the van.”

“I’m not getting out of this seat,” said Dr. Banks mulishly. I got the distinct impression that he’d already made this statement several times while I was down in the hot warm dark, and that he hadn’t budged since the crisis began. That was almost reassuring. Even when things were at their worst, some people could be counted on to be absolutely terrible.

“Then you’re going to be the delicious filling in a big metal bonbon,” said Fishy cheerfully. His words were accompanied by the sound of a rifle slide slotting into place. I glanced at him and grimaced when I saw the assault rifle in his hands, held as casually as a child’s toy. He grinned at my grimace. “Don’t worry. I have plenty of ammo, and if I start running out, we can always smash vases and jars until we find more.”

“Life isn’t a video game,” I said. It seemed like such a logical thing, but from the look on Fishy’s face, it was anything but. I bit my lip and turned back to Nathan, asking, “There’s really no way around?”

He shook his head. “We’re about a mile from the ferry launch, and all the roads are like this. I think a lot of people tried to get out of Vallejo this way. The quarantine must have stopped them.” He left two things unsaid: that the quarantine’s efforts to keep the infected contained could easily have included sinking the boats, and that if this many people had been here at one time, there was no real way of guessing how many sleepwalkers were still around, hungry and hiding from the hottest point in the day. They didn’t care for direct sunlight much, probably because it made it harder to sort their pheromone instructions from the things their eyes were telling them. It was harder to avoid hunting your own kind in daylight.

I didn’t question how I knew that. I just did.

“So we’re going to walk?” I asked, in a small voice.

“I most certainly am not going to walk,” said Dr. Banks.

“Says you,” said Fishy amiably.

“Um.” I worried my lip a bit more between my teeth before I asked, “If we manage to get Tansy, how are we going to get her back to the lab?”

“Mom gave me a list of places that might be suitable to hide out with Tansy until someone finds us,” said Nathan. “Once we have Tansy, we’ll lie low until we’re found by someone from the lab. After that, we’ll find a way to get Tansy to the new lab, or Mom will send a truck to get us.”

“Oh.” This was sounding like an increasingly bad plan. But I’d known that when I made it, hadn’t I? It was already too late.

“I’ll yell if you try to take me out of this vehicle,” cautioned Dr. Banks. “I’ll scream. I’ll bring every sleepwalker in miles down on your heads.”

“Our heads,” I corrected. “They’ll be coming down on your head, too, and you’re the one who’s wearing handcuffs, so I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it very much. I can run pretty fast, and Fishy has a gun, and Nathan—”

“I can run,” said Nathan.

“Nathan can run,” I helpfully parroted. “Beverly will be totally fine, she’s a dog, nothing runs for its life like a dog. But you’re just going to be an old tired guy in handcuffs and dress shoes, which means you won’t be able to keep up.”

“I don’t need to run faster than the zombie horde,” said Fishy blithely. “I just need to run faster than you.”

Dr. Banks was starting to look pale and sweaty. “You wouldn’t do that to me,” he said. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “You wanna try me?”

The look Dr. Banks gave me was midway between panic and disbelief. “Oh, no, Sally. You can’t fool me like that. You would never leave a man to die like that.”

“I’m starting to think that being a person has nothing to do with species, and everything to do with how you comport yourself,” I said, finally unbuckling my belt. “I would go back for Beverly.” The Lab lifted her head at the sound of her name, making an inquisitive buff sound. I smiled at her reflection and picked up her leash from the dashboard. “Beverly has earned the right to be considered a person. You haven’t. Not only would I leave you here to be torn apart, I would enjoy it. Dead men don’t hurt people. You’ve hurt too many of the people I care about. Maybe it’s time somebody hurt you for a change.”

“I think she means it,” said Fishy helpfully. “The chimera are a helper class, but that doesn’t make them good guys. There’s no telling what she’ll do if we’re going into a cut scene.”

For a moment, Nathan, Dr. Banks, and I were united in looking at Fishy like he had just lost his mind. The moment passed, and Nathan said, “This is pointless. Sal, get Bev. We’ll leave Dr. Banks here, and we’ll leave the doors open. Let the local sleepwalkers get up close and personal with their creator for a change.”

“That’s really sweet of you,” I said, and slid out of the van, cutting off any reply from the back—at least until I walked carefully to the side door, my feet crunching on the glass-covered street. Beverly rushed out as soon as the door was open, her tail wagging so hard that it seemed to wag the entire van. I crouched down to put her leash on, glancing up when I was done.

Nathan had his seat belt off and was sliding out of the car, his feet crunching somewhat louder than mine had, due to the difference in our sizes… and Dr. Banks was scooting along the seat as he followed, his face pale and splotched with patches of hectic red, like he was on the verge of having a heart attack from sheer fright.

I should have felt good, seeing him brought down to the level of the people he had treated so poorly. All I felt was tired. I straightened, Beverly’s leash held loosely in one hand, and raised my eyebrows.

“Well?”

Dr. Banks scowled at me. “You were a good girl,” he said.

I shrugged. “Things change. Are you going to behave?”

“I’ll stay quiet. I won’t attract any unnecessary company. I won’t try to run away.” The words seemed virtually dragged out of him, like they caused him physical pain to utter. Shooting me one last, betrayed look, he added, “All this ends when we get back to SymboGen. I’m not going to be your prisoner forever, no matter how much of an upper hand you have right now.”

“If you were smart, you would have kept that last part to yourself,” said Fishy amiably, stepping around the front of the van and reaching past Nathan to pull Dr. Banks out onto the street. Fishy kept hold of Dr. Banks’s shoulder as he turned a wide, toothy grin on the rest of us. I managed, barely, not to cringe away.

“Well, come on,” said Fishy. “Let’s go trigger a boss fight.”

It was easier to let Fishy take both the lead and custody of Dr. Banks: after all, he had the assault rifle, combined with a loose approach to reality, and would probably handle either an escape attempt or an attack better than Nathan or I would. Nathan had a pistol, produced from somewhere inside his lab coat—and I didn’t want to think about how long he’d been carrying that, or how many opportunities he’d been given to use it—while I had Beverly. In a world full of sleepwalkers, she was one of the most effective weapons we had. Anything that tried to sneak up on us would find themselves confronted with an angry, protective canine.

The drums that normally accompanied me on any tense occasion were silent, which only made the tension worse. Crows cawed from overhead or strutted through the broken bits of glass littering the street, picking up the ones they liked best and flapping off into the distance. We passed an office building with broken windows on the third floor, and a whole army of crows lined up on the windowsills, watching us walk by with their beady, judgmental eyes.

“I don’t know how the crow population around here will fare after the first winter without people,” said Nathan, in the neutral “science voice” he always used when he wanted to impart something he thought was interesting. “They’re scavengers. They’re smart, but it’s no question that they’ve benefited from the corpses and unprotected Dumpsters since the epidemic began. Their normal food sources are going to drop off, and they’re not going to be renewed.”

“See, there’s a great reason to save the world,” I said. “Save the human race, save the crows.”

Nathan smiled a little. I couldn’t see his eyes—the sunlight glinting off his glasses was making that impossible—but he seemed strangely relaxed, considering the circumstances.

Then again, some of our best times had been like this. Just him and me and the world around us, and whatever was going to come would come. I reached over and slipped my free hand into his, squeezing lightly. Nathan cast another smile in my direction.

“About that wedding—” he began.

Beverly started to growl.

It was a small, constrained sound at first, pitching forward from the back of her throat into the resonating chamber of her mouth. Then her lips drew back, exposing her teeth, while the growl grew steadily louder, becoming impossible to ignore. Even Fishy heard it. He stopped, pulling Dr. Banks to a halt alongside him, and turned to look quizzically back at us.

“What’s up with the dog?” he asked.

“Sleepwalkers,” I said curtly, trying to scan the street around us without losing any forward momentum. Beverly was continuing to growl, making it difficult to focus.

Fishy’s sudden grin didn’t help. “Excellent,” he said, and let Dr. Banks go completely as he raised his rifle into position.

“Remember the mission,” snapped Nathan. “We need to get to the ferry.”

“Nothing says I can’t have a little fun first,” countered Fishy, and began to move again.

The street around us remained mercifully deserted. If it stayed that way, Fishy might not need to pull the trigger; we might make it to the ferry without killing anyone. Please stay that way, I silently prayed, resisting the nearly overwhelming urge to start peering through the darkened, frequently broken windows around us. Looking would only terrify me more when I failed to find any sign of what we might be dealing with. So I didn’t look. I clutched Beverly’s leash and I watched the street, and I waited for all hell to break loose.

It wasn’t like we could just explain what we were doing here and expect to be allowed to go on our way: there was no reasoning with sleepwalkers. All we could do was kill them, and then tell their corpses that we were sorry. I was willing to bet that for Fishy and Dr. Banks—maybe even for Nathan—the tragedy would be in killing something that used to be a human being. The tapeworms didn’t even come into the equation.

It must have been nice to only have to worry about one-half of the being you were killing. When I had to kill a sleepwalker—something I’d only been forced to do twice so far, and that was twice too many as far as I was concerned—I wasn’t just killing a husked-out human being. I was killing one of my own siblings, one that hadn’t been as lucky as I was. Sally Mitchell had provided me with the perfect host in which to grow and thrive. Without her, and without the life support that had sustained her body while I acclimated myself to what I had become, I would have been just like them. Just another sleepwalker, shambling aimlessly until someone like Fishy came along and put a bullet in my head.

Beverly’s growl grew deeper without getting any louder, until it seemed to be coming from her entire body at once. The four of us pressed closer together without discussing it, using one another for cover and support at the same time. I peered around Nathan’s shoulder, looking for any signs of motion, anything that might tell me whether an attack was actually coming.

Then, with as little fanfare as a radio coming on, the silence in my head changed forms, going from a simple absence of drums to the soft, warm buzz of someone there. It was the same feeling I had when Adam was in the room with me—the feeling that I used to get, if a little weaker and harder to identify, when Sherman or Ronnie was nearby. The part of me that was tapeworm enough to be wired for receipt of pheromones was picking up on the presence of my cousins, identifying them for what they were without bothering to consult the bigger, slower monkey-mind that controlled the basic functions of the body.

Sleepwalkers.

“There are two groups of them,” I said dazedly, distracted by the threads of data that were slithering their way through my conscious mind. “The bigger group is up ahead, and the smaller group is coming in from the west. They all know that we’re here, but they’re still moving slowly—more slowly than they should be, when there’s prey available.” I paused, understanding dawning, and said, “I think they know we might be dangerous. I think that means they might be learning.”

“That’s not something to sound happy about,” snarled Dr. Banks.

Nathan seemed to share my amazement, and my hesitant joy. “Yes,” he said. “It really is.”

If the sleepwalkers were learning, then they were forming connections with the human brains where they lived. They were retaining information in a way that tapeworms couldn’t, and they were doing it despite their faulty initial connections to their hosts. Maybe not all sleepwalkers had the capacity to learn—maybe not all sleepwalkers could be taught, no matter how great the incentive—but if any of them had that potential, maybe the line between chimera and sleepwalker wasn’t as absolute as we had always assumed. Maybe some of them could be saved.

Then three figures emerged from between the buildings up ahead, and the time for abstract contemplation was over. Beverly seemed to lose her mind, lunging against her leash as she barked and bit at the air, presenting a full threat display to the sleepwalkers who were now running toward us at a terrifying clip. The one in the center—a female, still wearing the tattered remains of a floral housedress—moved faster than the others, a sign of a strong brain/body connection. The others followed. She was probably our “smart” sleepwalker; she was the only one with the coordination to swerve around the obstacles in her path, while her companions tripped over every hubcap and bit of shredded tire. That also raised the question of whether she had been somehow controlling them, using her greater intellect—relatively speaking—to keep them moving at her pace as she led them toward the promise of a meal.

“Get down!” shouted Fishy, taking aim at the onrushing sleepwalker. He didn’t move or seem particularly worried; he just braced the butt of his rifle, making small, precise adjustments to his stance as he lined up the shot. He might as well have been at a shooting gallery, not standing in a debris-riddled street with a barely sentient woman rushing toward him, ready to rip out his throat.

Beverly gave one last fierce yank on her leash, ripping it out of my hands, before she took off for the woman, still barking frantically. I didn’t think: I just reacted. In that moment, I was no different from the sleepwalkers, single-minded and unswerving in the pursuit of my goal. “Beverly! Heel!” I shouted, and ran after her.

Behind me I heard Fishy swear as I blocked his shot. I didn’t care. The woman was a danger, but I wasn’t going to lose my dog.

Beverly was faster than I was, especially across flat ground. She leapt, hitting the woman squarely in the chest with both forepaws and sending her crashing to the ground. The sleepwalker woman didn’t even try to hold Beverly off. She just struggled to get back to her feet, seemingly oblivious to the dog that was sitting on her chest, snarling and barking angrily.

I grabbed Beverly’s collar, hauling her backward. The sleepwalker came up with her, lips drawn back and teeth exposed… and then she stopped, looking at me blankly. There was a spark of something in her eyes that could have been confusion.

Fishy’s gun barked once, and one of the two sleepwalkers that had been following the fallen woman went down, his head exploding into a haze of red mist. I flinched but didn’t turn, forcing myself to keep my eyes locked on the face of the woman in front of me. There was a bruise on one cheek, so purple and livid that it looked more like makeup than an injury, and I could see her clavicle clearly through her skin. She hadn’t eaten in a while. None of them had. She tilted her head slowly to the side, making a crooning noise deep in her throat.

Beverly was still barking. I tried to focus past that. “I’m Sal,” I said. “I know you can hear me. I know you can tell that I’m family. Do you have a name? Do you know who you are?” Maybe we had been missing chimera because they were concealed among the greater sleepwalker population, effectively going feral in their efforts to stay hidden. Maybe there were chimera everywhere, and all we needed to do was start looking for them.

The woman bared her teeth and hissed at me. She lunged, and her head seemed to explode, sending bits of skull, brain tissue, and shattered tapeworm everywhere. I shrieked, recoiling. Not fast enough; bits of her showered both me and Beverly, leaving me feeling sticky and contaminated.

“Sal!” Nathan shouted. He ran up bare seconds after her body hit the ground. I stared down at her, unable to take my eyes off the white loops of tapeworm squirming weakly against the red wetness of her blood. Nathan followed my gaze. There was a horrified pause before he said, “Oh, God. Her implant… there was almost no brain tissue left.”

I stared at him mutely, unable to quite comprehend what he was saying. Fishy trotted up behind us, pulling a protesting Dr. Banks in his wake, and peered down at the remains of the sleepwalker. “Looks like her growth limiter broke,” he said, sounding entirely too cheerful about the idea. “It’s sort of like spaghetti, don’t you think?”

“And here I didn’t think you could make it any worse,” muttered Nathan.

Make it worse… I shook off the veil of disgust that had settled over me, standing up straighter and trying to look like I hadn’t just been on the verge of vomiting as I said, “There are at least two more on their way here, and we just made a lot of noise. We need to get out of here.”

“Sal’s right,” said Nathan. “Fishy, are we clear?”

“You mean ‘are we about to get eaten alive by pseudo-zombies conceived by a creative team with an obsession for body horror’?” asked Fishy blithely. “Oh, we’re golden.”

There wasn’t much that any of us could say to that. We resumed our march into the deserted city, moving away from the site of the slaughter as quickly as we could without attracting even more attention.

The condition of the three sleepwalkers we’d seen so far explained why we weren’t being rushed: they had been malnourished and coping with injuries even before they got to us. The human body is exquisitely adapted to its environment. It has hands to grasp and eyes to see. It is capable of communication and complicated thought. But it’s not very well designed for roaming naked through the ashes of a city, walking barefoot on broken glass because it no longer understands shoes, eating whatever rotten, stinking things it can find because it no longer understands the concepts of “food poisoning” or “indigestible.” The sleepwalkers had been monsters when they first awoke, ripping apart people who didn’t have implants, and people whose implants hadn’t managed to awaken yet, with their bare hands. Now they were just… sad. They were sad, broken things that had once been people and were never going to be people again. Even the ones like the woman, who had still possessed a glimmer of cunning and coherent thought—enough to plan, enough to hang back and assess the situation reasonably—were too broken to be fixed.

Beverly tugged on her leash as we walked, clearly uneasy and eager to be someplace safer. Things rustled and moved in the shadows, making my nerves even worse, but the small, strange part of my mind that said “sleepwalkers here” was quiescent. We were safe, for now. That didn’t mean we could stop moving.

“There should be a restroom or staff break room at the ferry launch,” said Nathan. He pitched his voice as low as he could, trying to keep it from echoing through the empty streets and notifying the local sleepwalkers as to our location. “We can get you cleaned up before we head for San Francisco.”

I grimaced. The blood had dried on my cheeks and throat; it cracked and pulled whenever I moved my head. “We can’t afford to waste the time. I’ll be fine. I’m trying to pretend that it’s just pasta sauce, but that’s sort of hard,” I murmured. “It sure doesn’t smell like pasta sauce. It smells more like dog food. That doesn’t make things better, you know?”

“I know,” said Nathan. He glanced around us, assessing the nearby buildings. It was almost automatic now, for both of us, and that hurt my heart a little. We used to be able to go for walks because we wanted to be together, we wanted to relax and enjoy each other’s company, we wanted to move. Now we spent all our time out in the open looking for cover and planning escape routes, like a failure to know exactly how to get out of every situation could be fatal.

To be fair, it probably could.

At least Dr. Banks was staying quiet. I turned my attention briefly to him, since Nathan was checking the buildings around us and I knew that there were no sleepwalkers close enough to worry about. I’d been afraid that Dr. Banks would blow our position just for the sake of screwing us over, but he was moving as carefully as the rest of us, and his cheeks were pale and tight with strain. It looked almost like he was having an epiphany of some kind, something deep and slow and moving entirely beneath the surface. A subclinical understanding.

And then I realized what it had to be. “You’ve been in your lab this whole time, haven’t you?” I asked, pitching my voice just loud enough for him to hear me. “All of this has been academic. Like Fishy pretending that it’s all a video game so he doesn’t have to deal with how real it is.”

“I’m not pretending anything,” said Fishy.

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything.

Beverly started to growl.

All heads swung toward the dog, and Nathan asked, cautiously, “Sal…?”

“I’m not picking up on any sleepwalkers, but I’m not radar,” I said, panic spiking in my throat, still unaccompanied by the sound of drums. Their absence was making the world seem terrifyingly quiet, like it had been stripped of its sound track for the first time in my life. “They could be all around us and if the wind was blowing the wrong way, I might not know.”

“We’re going to die,” moaned Dr. Banks.

The sound of a gun going off was amplified by the buildings around us, which turned it from a simple boom into a long, echoing crack that bounced off walls and vibrated against windows until it seemed to have no single direction; it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The same couldn’t be said of the bullet, which slammed down into the pavement in front of Fishy’s feet with the accuracy of a sharpshooter—or maybe the blind luck of someone who was firing wildly at the intruders in their dangerous, postapocalyptic world.

“Shit,” snarled Fishy. “It’s not sleepwalkers, it’s survivors. Run!” And with that, he was in motion, his grip on Dr. Banks’s elbow never slackening. Dr. Banks had no choice but to keep up, and that meant that Nathan and I had to do the same, or risk being left alone and unarmed in the streets of Vallejo.

My time with Sherman had actually done me some good, unbelievable as those words sounded even inside my own head: before he’d taken me captive, I would never have been able to handle a dead sprint down a deserted, debris-cluttered road. Now I kept up with ease, running alongside Beverly rather than being towed along in her wake. It was Nathan who fell slightly behind, forcing me to shorten my steps rather than leave him alone in the street.

There were two more gunshots, as omnidirectional as the first, their echoes rolling down the avenue like thunder. We kept running, and when Fishy shouted, “Left!” we turned, pounding down a smaller alley without losing more than the barest shreds of speed.

Beverly snarled, and the feeling I had come to recognize as my sleepwalker detection sounding off fizzed as if my brain had been carbonated. “Sleepwalker!” I shouted, just as a hulking, filthy figure shambled out from behind a Dumpster. Fishy didn’t break stride as he swung his rifle around and put two bullets in the man, one in his throat, the other in his forehead. The sleepwalker fell back, the feeling of presence in my head snapping off like a switch had been flipped. Fishy laughed, and a cold feeling raced across my skin, like he had finally started making sense and I really didn’t want him to.

There wasn’t time to explore that feeling, or even begin consciously feeling it. We were still running, and with gunshots behind us and sleepwalkers potentially up ahead, stopping to think would have been a good way to get somebody killed. Probably Dr. Banks, who was huffing and struggling to stay upright as Fishy hauled him along. He had always struck me as being in excellent shape, but how much of that was thanks to his implant siphoning off the extra calories he ingested and keeping him from needing to watch his cholesterol? His cheeks were bright with exertion now, not pale with fear, and he was starting to have trouble breathing.

“We’re almost there!” shouted Fishy, who wasn’t even breathing hard. Out of all of us, he was the only one who seemed to be benefiting from this run. He looked more alive than I had ever seen him, and the grin on his face was unwavering.

“Why are people shooting at us?” demanded Nathan.

“Fear, panic, protecting their shit, I don’t know!” Fishy actually laughed. That cold sensation raced across my skin again. Dr. Cale had been very clear about the fact that Fishy was not participating in the same version of reality as the rest of us. Until this moment, I hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that I was crossing the city with an armed man who didn’t believe that I—that anyone—was actually real.

This day just kept on getting worse, and I was ready for it to stop anytime now.

Nothing else lunged out at us as we ran down the alley and onto a new street, and there was the water, glimmering calm and deep, deep blue in the sunlight, like a sheet of glass stretching out toward the distant shape of San Francisco, its skyscrapers and bridges rising like ghosts out of the fog. We all stumbled to a halt, even Fishy, briefly shocked out of our headlong flight.

“Here we go,” murmured Nathan, and I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t say anything at all.

-

Chapter 17 NOVEMBER 2027

The ferry landing was abandoned. Private watercraft lined the dock, some of them half submerged, others clearly ransacked for whatever food or medications might have been stored on board. A dead woman lay, naked and fully exposed, on the deck of the nearest sailboat. Her skin was blackened and full of holes, showing the depredations of the crows and seagulls; her eyes were two dark pits in the stripped circle of her skull, staring up into the sky until time or a storm washed her away and left the clouds once again mercifully unobserved.

I paused as we passed the dead woman. Then I stooped down, taking quick, shallow breaths through my mouth as I peered closer at her skeletal visage. There were streaks of withered off-white in the dark where her eyes had been; the looping segments of her implant, dried to fishing line by the sun. “She was a sleepwalker,” I said. “I don’t know what killed her.”

“Hunger, maybe, or thirst,” said Nathan. “This is salt water. If she didn’t have the intelligence to realize that she couldn’t drink it safely, she could have died of dehydration within sight of the sea.”

It was a terrible way to go. I wrinkled my nose as I straightened, and turned to see Dr. Banks and Nathan both looking uncomfortable and upset. Only Fishy still looked calm. To him, this was just so much scene setting, background data that would tell him the severity of the crisis before it was casually dismissed as unimportant to the greater game.

I had never hated someone for being deluded before. I was starting to consider it where Fishy was concerned. “We should keep moving,” I said.

“The ferry landing is just up ahead,” said Fishy. He retook Dr. Banks’s elbow. “Come on, Dr. Frankenstein. Let’s roll.”

“Don’t call me that,” snarled Dr. Banks… but he didn’t resist, and he didn’t pull away. Like the rest of us, he understood that strength was a matter of numbers now—and more, he recognized that maybe arguing with the man who had the assault rifle was a terrible idea.

Beverly’s nose was virtually glued to the ground, inhaling all the scents of the seaside as we walked. I felt a pang of guilt as I realized how much time she’d been forced to spend inside since all this began; a few excursions to the rooftop garden weren’t the same thing as running wild and free the way she used to, back when she lived with a man who liked to jog in a world where people didn’t suddenly go feral and start trying to destroy everything they’d ever loved. It wasn’t just the humans who had had their lives completely turned upside down by the advent of the sleepwalkers. It wasn’t just the people who’d made the problem who were going to be suffering its effects for years to come. Dogs, like Beverly, and cats, like the ones back at the shelter—any domestic animal, anything we’d bred and raised to depend on us—they were going to be paying for it too. Their lives were never going to be what they’d been before the sleepwalkers woke and started demanding their own freedom of movement.

Sure, maybe I should have been worrying about bigger things than my dogs, but my dogs’ lives were something I could, at least superficially, control. How was I supposed to save Tansy if I couldn’t even take care of a dog? “Sorry, Bevvie,” I murmured. Beverly, sniffing raptly at a patch of seagull poop, ignored me.

Nathan glanced my way. I offered him a small, slightly apologetic smile. Explaining my thoughts would have taken too much time and involved too much talking, and neither was a good idea right now.

“Nathan.” Fishy’s voice was low but it carried well, holding an authority that made both of us turn to see what he wanted. He shoved Dr. Banks back toward me. The man who used to represent my greatest fears took a few stuttering steps in my direction before stopping and turning back to Fishy, a scowl on his face.

“Now you see here—” he began.

Fishy raising his rifle and leveling it on his face made Dr. Banks stop midsentence. He took another step backward, toward me, and stepped in Beverly’s much-valued patch of seagull poop. She made an irritated snorting noise. “Sal, you’ve got babysitting duty. Nathan, I know you have a handgun. I need you in the ferry launch with me. We have to check the boats for seaworthiness, and that’s going to be faster if we’re not dealing with the baggage.”

“Gonna pretend you didn’t just implicitly lump me and my dog into ‘the baggage,’” I said blandly.

Fishy’s shrug was unapologetic. “Sorry, Sal. Them’s the breaks. Well, Nate? Come on, boy, the sooner we launch this boat, the sooner we can get you back to mama.”

“We’re not launching anything until everyone is on board,” said Nathan. He hadn’t budged, and his hands were balled at his sides, clearly telegraphing his unhappiness with Fishy. “You understand that, right? We’re all going to San Francisco.”

“I got it,” said Fishy. “Are we going to stand out here arguing about shit, or are we going to get shit done, son?”

Nathan frowned before turning to look at me. “Can you handle keeping an eye on him while we check the boat?”

I nodded. “I’ll be fine. If he tries anything inappropriate, I’ll push him into the water. That’ll teach him.”

“Don’t push me into anything,” said Dr. Banks.

“Sal, if any sleepwalkers come…” said Nathan, ignoring Dr. Banks entirely. I wished I had the same option.

Forcing a smile, I said, “I’ll scream. Now go.”

“All right.” Nathan kissed my forehead before pulling the handgun out of his jacket and turning to Fishy. “Lead the way.”

I didn’t like Fishy’s grin. I didn’t like it one bit. But we didn’t have another option, and so I didn’t say anything; I just stood there, Beverly’s leash in one hand, and watched as the two of them slipped into the building that housed the entrance to the ferry.

Dr. Banks waited until they were gone before he turned to me, expression going imperious, and said, “Untie my hands.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, thank you for asking nicely? But that wouldn’t be in my best interests.”

“I’m defenseless,” he said. “Are you trying to get me killed? Untie my hands.”

“I’m not trying to get you killed, but I’m also not sure why you think I’d be upset if something happened to you.” The drums were finally back, beating their old familiar tattoo inside my veins. I didn’t have time to be relieved about their return. I was too busy trying not to let Dr. Banks see how nervous I was about standing here alone with him, with no one to save me if he decided to rush for me. I was much smaller than he was, and my only weapon was a dog who was much more interested in sniffing the dock than she was in keeping an eye on him.

“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.

“They’re going to be crushed,” said Nathan, sounding horrified. I turned to see him standing next to me at the rail, Beverly sitting by his feet. They looked so normal, like they had no place in this scene. It was hard to believe that any of us did.

“They’re going to drown,” I said, not arguing so much as adding to the risks that the sleepwalkers faced. I turned, trying to get my bearings on the ferry deck. We were standing in an open space, with plastic benches stretching behind us and a metal roof overhead, both providing protection from the elements and creating a secondary seating area. Dr. Banks was sitting on one of the benches, glaring at us like that would somehow change his situation. “Where’s Fishy?”

“The… I don’t know what you call it on a boat. The cockpit is over there.” Nathan gestured toward the front of the ferry.

“Watch Beverly,” I said, and took off running in the direction Nathan had indicated, weaving around benches and a single coil of weathered rope. I quickly ran up against a wall, which wasn’t something I expected to find on a boat. Moving along it brought me to a door, and through the door’s single clear aperture, I saw Fishy, standing behind a bank of controls I didn’t understand. I tried the door handle, and found it locked.

“Fuck,” I muttered, and knocked on the clear opening.

Fishy didn’t turn.

“Double fuck,” I amended. This time I beat both my fists against the actual metal part of the door, setting up a din that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for engine noise. Fishy’s shoulders tensed for a moment before he turned, squinting at me. I waved.

It only took him three steps to cross the small cabin and wrench the door open. He didn’t wait for me to step inside or speak before he was running back to his controls, turning his back to me once more. “What is it, Sal?” he demanded. There was an edge of strain in his voice that was decidedly unusual for the usually laconic technician. “I’m sort of busy getting us out of here alive.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “The sleepwalkers that followed us here are still trying to attack the boat! They’re going to be killed!”

“How is that my problem?” He glanced over his shoulder only long enough for me to see that he was serious, and then turned his attention back to the water. We were still driving through the shadowed depths of the ferry launch, which seemed unreasonably long for what was essentially a glorified waterfront garage. “I know the mad doctor thinks of those things as her kids, and while she’s welcome to her fucked-up family reunions, I don’t see any need to worry about them. Every sleepwalker that dies now is one that won’t be waiting for us when we get back.”

I stopped. His perspective was callous but accurate in at least one regard: we needed the sleepwalker population to go down if we wanted to come back this way. And I still couldn’t see that as a good enough reason to kill them all. “You’re not going to do anything?”

“What do you want me to do, Sal?” For the first time, he sounded genuinely tired. “I stop the boat, they swarm up here and kill us all. Plus this whole damn suicide mission was for nothing, which would be one hell of a bummer. I don’t have an air horn or anything, and they’re not raccoons; they wouldn’t just scatter even if I did.”

“An air horn,” I said. The words had sparked an idea that was as improbable as it was unlikely to work. It was all that I had. “Thanks, Fishy, you’re the best.”

“Whatever, kid.” He didn’t look around as I ran back out of the room, returning to my place on the deck next to Nathan.

He hadn’t moved while I’d been gone. Neither had Dr. Banks. Beverly was trotting up and down along the rail, tail up in a warning position, pausing only to fire off menacing volleys of barks at the sleepwalkers below.

Running back to the rail, I gripped it with both hands, leaned over as far as I could without getting myself grabbed by a sleepwalker, and shouted, “Go home! All of you! Go back where you were! Leave! Go!”

It felt uncomfortably like yelling at a cloud to stop floating through the sky, and about as likely to work. Most of the sleepwalkers kept attacking the side of the boat, a constant, unyielding assault that sounded like a hundred men with hammers trying to beat their way through the hull. But some—not enough—stopped, tilting their heads back as they looked at me with dead, dull eyes. Anything in them that still understood language was slaved to their parasitic driver, and that parasite was responsive to the pheromones I was putting off. According to Dr. Cale, I was what all the sleepwalkers had been trying to become when they tried to take over their hosts, and that meant that they would listen to me. I’d seen it work at least once. Now I just needed to make it work more.

“You’re not safe! Leave!” I began waving my arms in a swooping, visually arresting semaphore that would hopefully not only hold their attention, but make it easier for me to spread my pheromone trails. The motion of the boat was also helping: it would blow the air past me, carrying the command I was trying to convey to the waiting crowd. “You have to leave! Go!”

“Now I know the girl’s gone loony,” said Dr. Banks, sounding more disgusted than anything else. “You can’t tell a worm what to do. You can just hope the worm doesn’t eat you up in the process of going about its wormy business.”

“It’s working.” Nathan sounded awed. I followed his gaze, still waving, still trying to get my pheromones into the air. Some of the sleepwalkers were backing away from the boat, pushing their way through the crush of the crowd as they moved back to open ground. Still more were pulling away from the edges of the mob, beginning to slouch away, heading for the exit. “My God, Sal, it’s working.”

“Not on all of them,” I said, and waved harder. “Go! Go on! Shoo!”

Sudden light flooded the deck as we passed out from under the shaded part of the ferry launch. The dock still continued, and too many sleepwalkers were shambling along it, smashing their hands against the hull. Maybe one in five had listened to my desperate command that they withdraw… but one in five was better than none. Those were the ones who might be most equipped to learn how to subdue their violent urges.

The ferry began to pull away from the dock. Sleepwalkers toppled forward, falling into the water with a series of small splashes. Some of them clawed at the boat as they fell, trying to stabilize themselves, and still the others pushed their way forward, sending even more sleepwalkers to their deaths. The boat continued inexorably on, sucking sleepwalkers under in its wake. I made a small whimpering noise, clapping my hand over my mouth to keep myself from screaming, but I didn’t look away. We had done this, with our maddened race through the city to the waterfront. We were the reason these people were drowning. The fact that we hadn’t asked them to come didn’t make any difference. I owed it to them not to look away.

Nathan’s hand settled on my shoulder, reassuringly warm and steady. I leaned against him, and together the two of us watched the sleepwalkers fall, until the end of the dock appeared and we sailed onward, out of the darkness and into the uncertainty of the light.

-

Chapter 18 NOVEMBER 2027

The air was thick with sea spray, making it almost like we were sailing through a salty mist, even though the water was open on all sides. It had been long enough since the crisis began that any ships that had capsized out here had been given plenty of time to either fully sink or simply wash away with the tide, leaving us with few obstacles as we cut a course straight toward the distant spires of San Francisco. We were all going to be soaked before we made it back to land. Somehow, that didn’t seem to matter very much.

After the excitement of getting through Vallejo, riding the ferry into the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay managed to seem almost peaceful, like it was the least of all the available evils. Sure, we were bouncing from wave to wave, sometimes with a force that made my teeth rattle in my head, but we weren’t being chased by anything. That alone was enough to let me sit down on one of the hard plastic benches, slumping forward until my forehead rested against my knees, and breathe. Beverly curled at my feet, her head on her forepaws and her tail occasionally thumping against the deck. It was a small, comforting metronome, almost as regular as the drumbeats in my head, and it made it even easier for me to relax.

Soon enough, we’d be in San Francisco. Soon enough, we’d be past the point of no return, barreling into the future with no way back to the past we’d left behind us. But for right now, we could breathe.

Nathan sat down beside me, announcing his presence by resting his hand between my shoulder blades and saying, “Fishy confirmed that we have a full tank of diesel. We should be able to make it to the shore without any problem.”

“It’s a good thing Fishy knows how to drive a boat.” I lifted my head just enough to turn and peer up at Nathan through the fringe of my hair. “I guess we’d still be trying to figure out how to get across the water if he didn’t.”

Nathan grimaced. “As it turns out… this was his first time.”

I sat bolt upright. “What?” The motion disturbed Beverly. She scrambled to her feet, ready to run or stay as I commanded.

“He just told me. He’s never actually operated a real boat before, but he assumed the controls couldn’t be too difficult compared to piloting a remote drone around the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, so he didn’t bother to provide that little bit of data until after we had left the dock.” Nathan’s grimace deepened. “I would talk to Mom about her hiring practices, but since they basically boil down to ‘are you human, implant-free, and/or not actively trying to murder us, great, here’s your lab coat,’ I don’t think it would do very much good.”

“Neither do I,” I said gravely. With no more fanfare than that, I burst out laughing. Nathan blinked at me, his expression slowly fading into a look of profound confusion.

“I thought you’d be more stressed-out right now,” he said. “The water’s pretty rough.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t like being in a car,” I said. “We’re on a boat. If we hit something or flip over or whatever, I can just swim away.” There were almost certainly safety concerns I wasn’t thinking about, because I didn’t know what they were. The simple fact of the matter was that being on the water didn’t frighten me the way that being on the road did. The phobia I had been given as my penalty for taking Sally’s place only seemed to hold sway on land.

That thought was sobering in at least one regard: we were almost certainly going to need to steal a car or van in order to move through the remains of San Francisco, which had been hit even harder than Vallejo by the sleepwalker plague. Sherman had triggered at least one outbreak there that I knew of, and the nature of the implants meant that that initial outbreak would have had a domino effect throughout the city, impacting thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. We’d never make it to SymboGen on foot. One way or another, I was going to be in another car today, probably being driven by Fishy.

“I guess that’s true,” said Nathan. He glanced back over his shoulder. I knew that he was checking on Dr. Banks, who had been sitting as far from us as the layout of the deck allowed ever since we left Vallejo. “I don’t trust him.”

“Neither do I.” This was it: this was the moment where I could tell Nathan what Dr. Banks had said about me still being Sally on some level, just repressed and locked away by trauma and socialization. I took a breath. “Nathan, I—”

“Sorry to disturb you kids, but you may want to move to the front of the boat.” Fishy’s voice blared from the speakers set in all four corners of the overhang that sheltered us from the sky. It was warped and distorted, becoming almost more crackle than words. “I look forward to your helpful contributions.”

Nathan and I exchanged a look. Then, without a word, we got up and made our way to the front of the boat as fast as seemed safe. The ferry bucked and rolled with the waves, making our footing less certain than it could have been. Still, we made decent time to the front of the boat, and stopped there, both of us frozen by the reality of what we were seeing.

The Bay Bridge was straight ahead, and it was packed with sleepwalkers. They jammed the lower deck, crushed up against the pylons that held the span in place. The fence designed to keep people from toppling off the bike path had been broken in several places, and sleepwalkers fell in an almost steady stream, vanishing with neither sound nor trace into the black waters below. There was always another sleepwalker jockeying to take their place, hands outstretched in angry need. It took me a moment to realize what they were trying to accomplish. I clapped my hands over my mouth, torn between pained laughter and angry tears.

The cables that supported the bulk of the bridge were alive with crows. I had never seen so many of the scavenger birds in one place. They were packed together until their bodies were almost indistinguishable from one another, ruffling their feathers and occasionally taking off in brief flurries of wings that were almost negative reliefs of the waves below. Black water and white foam met empty air and black bodies, flashing from place to place with arrogant slowness. They were taunting the sleepwalkers, driving them to unthinking suicide.

“Why are the crows doing that, and why aren’t the sleepwalkers eating each other?” I asked, baffled.

Nathan might not have heard me—between the roar of the engines and the crash of the waves, it would have been easy for my small voice to go overlooked—but he was asking himself the same question, because he said, loudly enough for me to hear, “The pheromone tags must keep the sleepwalkers from recognizing each other as food. The current will carry the bodies back to the beach. Maybe in San Francisco, maybe the surrounding islands. Either way, they’ll wash up, and there won’t be any fight left in them. Easy pickings for an enterprising crow.”

“That’s horrible.”

“That’s nature.” Nathan turned. The window leading to the control booth was right behind us; I could see Fishy through the thick glass, still happily manipulating the controls that he had freely admitted to barely understanding. He hadn’t crashed us yet, which was better than I could have done. Nathan cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Just steer around the breaks!”

“Yeah, genius, I’m already on that.” Again, Fishy’s voice came from the speakers, which must have been installed for the convenience of the commuters who used to ride this boat to and from work every single day. It seemed like a singularly cold, wet way to spend a commute. “Here’s my question: what do you want me to do about the sharks?”

There was a long pause while both Nathan and I tried to puzzle through that statement. Then—again in unison—we walked back to the rail and leaned forward, peering out.

A body floated by to my right. It was a woman, her dead, empty eyes staring upward at the unforgiving sky. Then, with no fanfare and no immediate cause, she was gone, disappearing under the surface like she had never been there. I took a breath, preparing to say something, and stopped as the woman reappeared… only now she was missing much of her right arm, and as I watched, a flash of gray fin signaled the return of the shark that had taken it, coming back for more. The woman disappeared again. This time, if she resurfaced, she didn’t do it where I could see.

I took a big step back from the rail, shuddering. “That’s really creepy,” I said.

“That’s fascinating.” Nathan was still in his initial position, leaning so far over that he looked like he was in danger of pitching overboard at any moment. “There were probably some minor chemical spills when the luxury boats and such sank—a natural consequence of any emergency that leaves people with time to put out to sea—and that would have killed off a lot of the local fish. Sharks start getting desperate, and then they discover that the crows have established an all-you-can-eat cafeteria near the bridge. It’s elegant. Nothing goes to waste.”

“They’re eating people,” I said, in case Nathan had somehow managed to miss that.

“Yes. That’s probably for the best—if sleepwalkers are going off the bridge at that rate all day, without the sharks disposing of the bodies that miss the current, we’d be sailing into a solid mat of corpses.” Nathan finally turned away from the water. The salt spray had crusted on the lenses of his glasses, rendering them virtually opaque. “It’s unpleasant, I know, but it’s a good thing, honestly. It’s going to help us make it to land without any major difficulties.”

“I thought you were supposed to be the human one here,” I said, and turned, walking back to the benches without saying another word.

Nathan didn’t follow me.

It took us almost an hour to sail across the Bay, and that was with Fishy pushing the ferry’s undermaintained engines as hard as he could, squeezing every last ounce of speed out of the straining machinery. When we were maybe a quarter mile out from the shore he began to bleed off speed, and his cheerful voice blared over the speakers once again: “Lady, dog, and gentlemen, we are now approaching the Port of San Francisco, where I will attempt to park this boat without actually destroying the historic San Francisco pier. If I fail in my attempt, you can be comforted by the knowledge that this boat was designed to absorb collisions without killing commuters, so we’ll probably all live, but we probably won’t like it.”

“Oh, yay,” I muttered.

Fishy continued: “Once we have reached the Ferry Building and, again, hopefully come to a safe and secure stop, we will need to refill the tank, as we’re basically out of gas, and may have to paddle the rest of the way. Thank you for sailing with Oceanic Apocalypse: when the world ends, we get you there anyway.”

The speaker clicked off. Dr. Banks groaned, offering a heartfelt “Oh, thank God, he shut up,” to no one in particular. I smothered the urge to chuckle. Laughing openly at his discomfort wasn’t going to do us any good, no matter how much I wanted to do it.

Nathan walked around the corner of the cabin, looking at me uncertainly for a moment before he came and sat down next to me. I reached out and took his hand, twining my fingers firmly through his.

“Do you know how to refuel a ferry?” I asked.

“No, and I’d be willing to bet that Fishy doesn’t either, but I’m sure he’s seen it in a video game.” Nathan squeezed my hand. “We’ll be okay. We’re almost there. We’ll get to SymboGen, we’ll get Tansy back, and we’ll go home. Wherever that is by now.”

“Your mom likes putting labs in recreational facilities. First the bowling alley, and then the candy factory. She’ll have to top that somehow,” I said, and giggled. “Do you think she’ll take over an amusement park next?”

“Roller coasters are a way of showing reverence to physics; she just might,” said Nathan.

“It’s adorable how you two delusional little fuckers think you’re going to walk away from this,” said Dr. Banks. His voice came from directly behind our bench. I flinched and twisted to look, not letting go of Nathan’s hand. The unkempt, handcuffed CEO of SymboGen Inc. was standing on the deck between our bench and the next, leveling a malicious look in our direction. He rolled easily with the pitch of the boat, shifting his weight between his ankles and toes in a graceful motion that I would have needed weeks to master. Still glaring, he continued: “You’ll be lucky to make it off the boat. Even if you get a car, what happens then? SymboGen is a secure facility. You’ll never get through the doors. Not unless I help you.”

“You’re going to help us, Dr. Banks,” I said calmly, swallowing my anger and my fear and my dislike of having him loom over me like he had the right to think of himself as my superior. He wasn’t my superior. He hadn’t been for a long time, if ever. “We already went over this. If you want to walk away in one piece, you’ll help us get into SymboGen, help us get to Tansy, and help us get away. Then we’ll let you go. You’re our hostage now.”

“You didn’t raise these arguments before we left Vallejo,” noted Nathan.

The boat was making a slow turn, angling toward a steeple-topped building on the far shore. What I could see behind Dr. Banks as the shifting ferry brought the shore into view was heartening: nothing moved there except for seagulls and crows. We might actually be sailing into something shaped almost like safety.

Dr. Banks snorted. “As if I would have said ‘this is never going to work’ when Surrey was sitting right there, threatening to have me taken apart for spare parts? Your mother’s a real piece of work, Nate. She’s a real-life Frankenstein, and she’s going to pay for what she’s done to the human race. You might do well to remember that, and start shifting your loyalties appropriately.”

“Wow. Does USAMRIID have that many cameras pointed at the coastline?” I made a show of twisting around and peering toward the closest pier, taking advantage of the moment to scan for sleepwalkers. I didn’t see any. I also didn’t see any visible monitoring equipment—and when you’re fighting an enemy that operates on instinct, not intellect, why would anyone bother making their cameras or microphone pickups hard to spot? Subtlety was no longer necessary.

I twisted back to face Dr. Banks. “You’re already practicing your speech for when you sell us out.”

“It’s about time you accepted the reality of your situation, Sally my dear. There’s two miles of city between us and my doors, and there’s no telling how many walking dead men are packed into that distance. Let me go. Uncuff my hands and let me contact my people. They’ll send an extraction team, and if you’re willing to roll over on the good doctor, they’ll be happy to cut you a deal.” His smile was a terrible thing, filled with teeth and shadows. “She’d roll over on you, you know. She’s never been loyal to anything she didn’t make in a test tube. You probably came closest to her affections, Nate, but a womb isn’t the same as an incubator to a woman like her. You never stood a chance.”

Nathan’s mouth was a thin, hard line. I clung tighter to his hand. “I know exactly where I stand with my mother, but I thank you for your concern. As for your request, you had plenty of time to negotiate while we were back at the lab. This is the mission you agreed to. I hope it kills you.”

He stood, still holding my hand, and pulled me with him as he walked away from Dr. Banks, across the deck, and into the small control room where Fishy was now frantically pushing buttons, flipping switches, and generally flailing, such that he seemed to fill all available space even before Nathan and I wedged ourselves inside.

“The brakes are good, but we’re really low on gas,” said Fishy, without turning to see who had joined him. I guess his options were pretty limited. “That’s making me nervous, especially since I don’t know what the pumping equipment is going to look like, or whether they’d have anything canned in case of emergency.”

“Earthquake kits,” I said. “I’d think the ferry people would want to be prepared for an earthquake making it unsafe to visit the gas station.”

“Good thinking!” Fishy yanked on a lever and finally stilled, putting his hands back on the wheel. The Ferry Building loomed directly ahead of us, seeming untouched by the changes to the city around it. It was a landmark, a place to visit for the Saturday Farmer’s Market or to buy expensive artisanal cheese, and just seeing it was enough to take a little of the tension out of my shoulders and loosen a little of the twisted panic that was knotted in my gut. If the Ferry Building was still standing, then not everything had changed. Most things, maybe, but not everything.

Fishy continued, blithely unaware of my relief: “The employee lot is off to the side. Most of the people who worked the ferry took public transit to work—which is sort of funny if you think about it—but there were always a few who needed to have a vehicle, for one reason or another. The odds are definitely with us that someone drove in and then got slaughtered, or turned sleepwalker, and didn’t need their keys anymore.”

“What if the keys aren’t in the car?” I asked anxiously. “Do you know how to drive without keys?”

“Do you actually know?” added Nathan. “Seeing it in a game of Grand Theft Auto isn’t the same thing.”

Fishy laughed. There was an odd underpinning of exhaustion to the sound, something I would have taken as completely normal from Nathan or even Dr. Banks, but which sounded out of place in Fishy’s normally jovial tone. “Yeah, I actually know,” he said, pulling back on another lever. The boat bled off a few more notches of speed, sliding smoothly under the canopy of the Ferry Building’s landing zone. We were almost there. “My wife—Laney—was a genius when it came to spreadsheets and numbers and knowing how your insurance policy worked, but she was a little bit of a space cadet when it came to remembering where she left her keys. I learned how to hot-wire a car after the third or fourth time she lost them so completely that we couldn’t figure out how we were going to get home. It was a challenge. I like challenges. I always have.”

I frowned a little, glancing uncertainly at Nathan. He gave a little shake of his head, signaling for me to stay quiet, and in this instance, listening to him seemed like the better idea.

“Once we have a car, the two of you can take Dr. Banks and head for SymboGen,” continued Fishy calmly. “I’ll stay with the boat, make sure we don’t get overrun with sleepwalkers or taken out by survivors or anything cliché and inconvenient like that.”

“But what will we do once we have Tansy?” I asked, alarmed. Our plan hadn’t involved Fishy staying behind.

He glanced back over his shoulder. “Bring her here. If I can’t stay docked, I’ll at least stay close to the shore, so you can see me. Then we’ll just have to find a place where you can park and I can pull in close enough that you can get on board. It’ll be a fun challenge.”

“A fun challenge,” I echoed faintly. I felt like I wanted to be sick. Throwing up would have been a terrible idea, but that didn’t make it any less appealing. That horrible hot/cold mixture was forming in my stomach again, and the drums were getting softer, harder to hear, which struck me as bad in some way I couldn’t entirely define.

“Tansy is going to be on life support,” said Nathan. “Putting her in the water could kill her.”

“Which makes it all the more important that someone stay with the boat.” Fishy turned the wheel delicately to the side, and we slid in along the dock as if our boat had been intended to sit there all along: the missing piece of an elaborate puzzle. “Welcome to San Francisco.”

Only one of the other ferry bays was occupied, by a boat that was half submerged and still taking on water through the gaping hole in its side. I had no idea what could have done that to one of these sturdy, metal-plated craft, and I didn’t want to know. The dock was clear, and nothing moved in the shadows. That was what really mattered to me, at least right now: that we were, for the moment, alone.

“Sal?” asked Nathan.

I nodded tightly and left the cabin, moving to the rail. Dr. Banks said something, but his words were washed away by the roar of the engine as Fishy did whatever he had to do in order to lock us into place, and so I just kept walking, turning my back on the scientist who had helped to make me. When I reached the edge of the boat I stopped, resting my hands on the railing, and closed my eyes, trying to listen with everything I had. The noise didn’t matter; my ears weren’t a part of this.

Pheromone trails are funny things. They’re both immediate, generated by bodies in motion, and left behind by bodies that have already passed. Ants use them to keep track of each other. Cats use them to claim things as part of their territory. And tapeworms use them, in a strange, incomprehensible way, to communicate. I didn’t know what an unaltered tapeworm would have to say, but I knew what the sleepwalkers were saying with their pheromone trails, and hence one of the things that I was saying to them when they happened to cross my path—maybe the most important thing:

Here I am.

The air in the Ferry Building was stale, thick with salt and a faint, sweet foundation of decay. There had been sleepwalkers here—I couldn’t have explained how I knew that, because the knowledge didn’t come with any accompanying words. Neither did the knowledge that they weren’t here now. The water was too close and too bitter, and it got too cold at night. They had been driven deeper into the city, or at least away from the dock area. What that was going to mean for the rest of our journey, I couldn’t say.

I let go of the rail and turned, unsurprised to find Nathan and Dr. Banks standing behind me. “There’s no one here but us,” I said. “It’s an enclosed space, though. There could be a hundred sleepwalkers outside and I wouldn’t know about it.”

Dr. Banks sneered. “Leave it to Surrey to build an early warning system that can’t work through walls. What use are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I guess I’ll have time to figure it out. Where’s Fishy?”

“He’s shutting down the engine, and then he’s going to come help us find a car,” said Nathan. “It should be a minute or so.”

The slow rumble of the boat beneath us died, leaving my feet tingling at the sudden lack of vibration. Fishy trotted out from the cabin, waving to make sure we knew that everything was all right. Beverly jumped, pressing herself hard against my legs. For one terrible moment, I expected to hear her growl come ripping through the still air of the Ferry Building like a condemnation. This was going too easily: something had to go wrong. That was how things went for us. Wrong.

Fishy slowed as he drew closer, and Beverly did not growl. “Are we clear?” he asked.

“No sleepwalkers in the building, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way, especially after we open a door,” I said. “I can’t be sure they’re not at the front, either. I’m still figuring out how all this works.”

“As long as they leave me alone long enough to get some fuel into this baby, I’ll be fine,” said Fishy, patting the side of the ferry. He was smiling, calmly and consistently.

I didn’t like that expression—something about it was off, somehow, although not in a way that would have meant he was going into conversion—but it was Nathan who spoke, asking, “Are you feeling all right, Fishy? I didn’t expect you to volunteer to stay behind.”

“Yeah, I’m good,” said Fishy calmly. “It’s all good. See, this is where we split the party to deliver the MacGuffin”—he pointed at Dr. Banks, who looked more confused than affronted—“and cure the zombie plague that’s been destroying mankind. You guys are running into a series of cut scenes. If I stay here with the boat, I’ll either get an unstoppable wave of enemies to fight, or I’ll be ready when you come back with the final boss fight in tow. Either way, I’m good.”

I frowned. It took me a moment to puzzle through what he was saying. I’ve never really liked video games. They moved too fast, and involved too much violence. I was happier with cartoons and audio books when I needed something to keep me entertained. “You’re really sad, aren’t you?” I ventured.

“Not anymore,” said Fishy. “I’m probably going to die today. Thanks for that.” He thrust his hand out at me, fingers spread. I blinked. Then I took it, and shook. He beamed. “I’m pretty much ready to log out and go home. Now let’s find you guys a car.” He pulled his hand away and loped off toward the stairway that would grant him access to the deck. I stared mutely after him, not sure how I should respond.

Dr. Banks did it for me. “You know that boy’s a few kittens short of a litter, right?” he asked. “Not sure I’d feel good about leaving him with my escape route, if I were you. Not that you’re going to make it back here to use it. It’s just a matter of principle.”

“Yes, because crossing the city with the arrogant bastard who brought about the end of mankind in order to increase his profit share is so much better.” Nathan grabbed Dr. Banks’s arms, ignoring the older man’s protests, and hauled him after Fishy.

I took one last nervous glance over the side of the boat, tightened my grip on Beverly’s leash, and followed them.

-

Chapter 19 NOVEMBER 2027

The garage where the employee vehicles were kept was locked, which made no sense to me—who stops in the middle of an apocalypse to make sure everything is safe and secure from looters? Fishy dispatched the lock with a single swipe of the crowbar he’d acquired from somewhere, knocking it to the ground with a loud clattering noise that made the rest of us wince and look around, waiting for an attack. I still wasn’t picking up on any nearby sleepwalkers, but as I had tried to explain to Dr. Banks, my funny sort of radar was neither tested nor proven to be completely reliable. It was a mad science party trick, and like all party tricks, I had to assume that sometimes it could fail to work the way it was supposed to.

Fishy slipped into the garage. A moment later his voice drifted back like a ghost out of the darkness, saying, “The lights are out, but I think we’ll be okay.”

That was our cue. I slipped in after him before Nathan could push in front of me, letting Beverly’s curiously sniffing nose lead the way. Her sleepwalker radar was more reliable than mine, and if she started barking, we’d know that we needed to get the hell out.

High windows were set around the edge of the garage roof, allowing the watery San Francisco light to ooze inside, seeming almost liquid as it clung to the corners of the room and trickled down the walls to outline the shapes of the cars and trucks that had been safely tucked away by their owners before those owners went on to meet their fates. The air smelled ever so subtly of decay, and I was glad for the darkness, glad for the shadows that concealed the corners and the secrets they might hold; Beverly wasn’t barking and my private radar wasn’t ringing, which meant that nothing else lived in this space. If a sleepwalker had been trapped inside, they had long since starved to death. I didn’t think that was the case, though. I was pretty sure the lock Fishy had so carelessly destroyed had been placed by someone who then entered the garage through another door—something small, something overlooked in our quick, goal-oriented search—and finished things in the only way they could. Someone who wanted to die with dignity.

Fishy didn’t seem bothered by the smell. He moved from vehicle to vehicle, cupping his hands around his eyes as he peered through the glass. “Can’t see a damn thing,” he announced, and kept moving. “Start looking for unlocked doors. One of these bastards has to still have the keys in it.”

“Why?” I asked. I moved toward the nearest van at the same time; there was no point in waiting for an answer before I started trying to help.

“Because otherwise I’m teaching one of you how to hot-wire a car, and trust me, that’s not the sort of skill you pick up in one lesson.” Fishy pulled on the door of a pickup truck, scowled, and moved on. “Someone needs to wait with the boat; it’s not going to be either one of you; it’s sure as shit not going to be Dr. Frankenstein; that means we need a car with keys.”

“This one’s open.” Nathan’s call came from the other side of the garage. I turned, peering through the gloom, and found him standing next to the dark bulk of what looked like a minivan. “No keys.”

“What’s the make?” asked Fishy.

“Io.”

Fishy actually grinned. “Pre- or post-auto drive?”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know that? It’s an Io. I can’t even tell what color it is.”

“Wait right there.” Fishy half jogged across the garage, neatly sidestepping around Beverly, to join Nathan at the open van door. He peered inside the vehicle, seeming to look more with his hands than with his eyes—which made sense, given the darkness—and finally announced, gleefully, “You don’t need keys or a crash course on how to hot-wire a car. All you need is one short and a screwdriver.”

“What?” said Nathan.

“What?” I said.

“You spent a lot of time in prison before the world got messed up, didn’t you?” said Dr. Banks.

Fishy ignored us all as he turned and walked over to the wall. Bumping, clattering sounds traced his progress, making me wince. It was hard to know how much of the noise he was making would be audible outside the garage, but even a little could very easily be too much, under the circumstances. There was one final clatter, louder than the rest, and then Fishy was trotting back, holding something long and pointed in one hand. “There’s always a toolbox in a place like this,” he said, pushing past Nathan. His upper body half vanished into the van, and for a few moments the only sounds were the drums beating in my eyes and Fishy rustling around in the front seat.

There was a click. The van’s engine turned over, and the headlights came on, throwing the front half of the garage into terrible clarity. A man was slumped against the wall on the right, only a few feet away from the bench and open toolbox that Fishy must have been rummaging through. The man’s throat had been slit, and the words “I’m sorry” were written on the wall in what I strongly suspected was his blood. I shuddered and looked away.

Fishy didn’t appear to have noticed. He was enthusiastically explaining the art of using a screwdriver in place of a key to Nathan, periodically leaning back into the van to give the screwdriver a twist or jiggle, for reasons I couldn’t understand and didn’t particularly want to learn. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, waiting for them to be done, waiting for the moment when we could start moving and put this dark, dead space behind us.

Beverly began to growl.

It was a low, almost inaudible sound at first, easily overlooked under the chatter from Fishy and the questioning replies from Nathan. I stiffened, trying to turn my senses outward, looking for pheromone trails or… or whatever it was that I actually looked for when I did that. I found nothing. But Beverly was still growling, the sound increasing in both volume and urgency, and she didn’t do that without cause. “Guys?” I said.

They ignored me.

Beverly pressed herself hard against my leg. Her eyes were fixed on the open garage door, and her ears were flat against her head, giving her a distinctly predatory cast. “Guys,” I said again, louder this time. “Something’s upsetting Beverly.”

That got Dr. Banks to pay attention to me, at least. “Is it sleepwalkers?”

“I don’t know. I’m not picking up anything, but I don’t know if I would. I think we should be moving.”

“In a second,” said Fishy.

Beverly continued to growl, still getting steadily louder. For the first time, I felt that odd ping at the back of my head that meant sleepwalkers coming, sleepwalkers nearby—but it was so much stronger than I had expected it to be, especially with so little lead-in, that it might as well have meant sleepwalkers here.

“We don’t have any more seconds,” I said, urgently. “We have to go now.”

The urgency in my voice must have been enough to catch his attention; the outline of his head appeared above the dashboard of the van. I turned, dragging Beverly with me, and ran toward the others. Dr. Banks saw me move and moved with me, and for one glorious moment, I thought we were going to be okay: we had moved fast enough, we had made it out of the path of oncoming danger.

And then the sleepwalkers of San Francisco, who had had quite a long while to grow hungry as they roved the hills looking for things to fill the holes that could never be filled, hit the open door of the garage like a wave. Their bodies blocked out what little light there was in an instant, and everything became the shouts and shoves of my companions as we tried to get ourselves into the van. I wound up in the back, holding on to Beverly with all my might as I struggled to keep her from leaping out of the vehicle and tearing off into the fray. Nathan pushed Dr. Banks in after me and slammed the door.

The front doors were still open. “Come on, you idiot, get in the car!” shouted Nathan.

Fishy. Fishy was still out there. “I’m good!” he shouted back. “Go, I’ll hold them off!”

“The damn fool’s going to kill us all,” snarled Dr. Banks, and for once he and I were in perfect, terrible agreement. Then Nathan was in the driver’s seat, and was reaching across the van to grab the back of Fishy’s shirt and haul him into the front passenger seat, somehow managing to lift the smaller, stockier man with nothing but a grunt of strained protest. The sleepwalkers were closing fast, and the buzz in my head that told me they were coming was a clanging bell warning me of a five-alarm fire. It was becoming physically painful. I bent forward, clasping my hands at the base of my skull, and tried to will the sound away.

Someone’s hands were pressed between my shoulder blades. They weren’t mine. With Nathan and Fishy in the front seat… I realized who was trying to comfort me a bare second before he spoke, and I stiffened, wishing there were any way for me to remove myself from the situation. There wasn’t. With the alarm bells screaming in my head, I would have been doing well to sit up.

“Concentrate, Sally.” Dr. Banks’s voice was low and soft, so close to my ear that he had to have been leaning forward to whisper to me. That went with the presence of his cuffed hands on my back. I could hear Nathan and Fishy shouting at each other. There was no help coming from that quarter, not until they had a chance to breathe and realize what was happening. “She’s distracted right now, and I know you’re in there. I know you’ve always been in there. This is your chance. Take a deep breath, and come back to us.”

I wanted to slap his smug face away from me. I couldn’t bring myself to move. The alarm bells were still ringing, but in their clamor I could also hear an absence of sound: the drums had stopped, leaving the world missing its natural backbeat. That was horrifying, in a way I couldn’t entirely define.

“Sally.”

He sounded so sure of himself. Like he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all he had to do was keep calling her and she would appear. Sally, with her human upbringing and her human ideas about the world. Sally, who wasn’t afraid of riding in cars, and who had never experienced the collapse of civilization, or the discovery that she wasn’t what she believed herself to be. Sally, who was as alien to me as I was to her, but whose body I had taken over without so much as a by-your-leave.

Sally, who had tormented her family to such an extent that her father was willing to let me play cuckoo in his nest, while her sister had never questioned “her” sudden, total change of personality; had, in fact, looked upon it with gratitude and relief. Sally, whose taste in friends was such that her boyfriend hadn’t even been able to stick around to see whether she was going to recover—one hint of difficulty and he was out the door, moving so fast that he might as well have left contrails in his wake. Sally, who had left the mansion of her body empty and waiting for me, because she just couldn’t cope with existence anymore.

Maybe Dr. Banks was right about her memories being locked somewhere in the soft gray folds of the brain that had once belonged to her, but he was wrong about at least one thing: Sally didn’t live here anymore, and no matter how hard he tried to convince me, I was never inviting her to come back.

“Hold on!” shouted Nathan. The van leapt forward. I heard—and felt—the impact of soft bodies against the hood as we slammed into the leading wave of sleepwalkers. Their moans filled the world, drowning out the alarm bells triggered by their presence. I seized on the sound, trying to use it to anchor myself to the real world again. My head was a cacophony of unwanted stimuli. One by one I shunted them aside, looking for the one that would allow me to move again. I wanted Dr. Banks away from me. His hands on my back were a sick, dead weight, more repulsive than the army of sleepwalkers now trying to claw their way inside to reach us.

Their moaning changed pitch and timbre as we rolled forward, forcing the sleepwalkers to either stand aside or be crushed under our wheels. These were the ones who had been smart or canny enough to stay alive in the ruins of San Francisco: more of them seemed to be moving aside than staying in our path. I forced my head up, off my knees, and croaked, “Crack the windows.”

“What?” Nathan’s voice, sounding bewildered and no small bit dismayed.

“I need you to crack the windows.” Forcing my eyes to open came next. I stared down at the mud-smeared floorboards, trying to will myself to keep moving. “The sleepwalkers… if they knew I was here, they might be confused enough to back off. Just a little. I don’t want to hurt them if we don’t have to.”

“You stupid little cunt.” Dr. Banks spoke softly enough that I knew the others wouldn’t hear him, not with the sleepwalkers moaning outside and the van still straining for escape. It didn’t matter: I could hear him, and I wouldn’t forget. He removed his hands from the middle of my back, and it was like a terrible burden being lifted away.

After that, it was almost easy to sit up, turning a glare on Dr. Banks in the process. He shied back, pressing himself against the door. My expression must have been fiercer than I thought. “Get away from me,” I said. “Never touch me again. Nathan? The windows.”

“On it,” said Fishy. The windows in the back rolled down maybe an inch and a half, allowing the moans of the sleepwalkers outside to fill the cab. Beverly’s growls became frantic, full-throated barks, almost drowning out the moaning from outside.

“Shh, Bevvie, it’s okay,” I said, patting her on the head before climbing up onto the seat, kneeling. I leaned forward, pressing my lips against the opening in the window, and took a deep breath. The stench of decay and unwashed human bodies assaulted my nose, almost gagging me. Most of them were ripe with urine, gangrene, and worse. I forced myself to keep inhaling until my lungs began to ache. Then I exhaled, trying to breathe my pheromones into the garage. We were still rolling slowly forward, Nathan struggling with the wheel as he fought to get us out into the open without doing irreparable damage to our only means of transit.

I breathed in again, breathed out again, and kept my eyes on the sleepwalkers surrounding the car, willing them to “listen” to the messages coded into my biochemistry, written in protein and chemical chains on my breath. I was a chimera; I was their social superior, just like a termite queen was superior to the drones that filled her hive. They would listen to me. They would listen to me. They didn’t have a choice.

Apparently, some of the sleepwalkers agreed. The ones closest to my open window slowed, their heads tilting at an alien angle as they canted their eyes upward, looking for the source of the pheromone trail. I kept breathing, trying to spread the command to calm down as far as I could.

One of the nearest sleepwalkers opened his mouth, not to moan, but to shape a word. The sleepwalkers around him did the same, and bit by bit, the stillness spread, replaced by dozens of sleepwalkers exhaling a single syllable:

“Saaaaaaaaaaaaaal.”

“Because that’s not creepy,” snapped Fishy. He didn’t roll the windows back up. That was something. “Nathan, I think you can go a little faster. They’re not attacking us right now. Take advantage of that.”

“We can’t drop you off, you realize,” said Nathan. The van sped up a bit, nudging sleepwalkers out of the way. Most of them were clustering around the sides of the vehicle now, shoving at each other as they tried to get closer to the windows. If I’d been claustrophobic, I would probably have been climbing the walls. As it was, I was sort of amazed that the humans weren’t. I guess the need to stay alive was taking priority over the need to freak out completely.

“I know,” said Fishy. “We’ll have to find another way to refuel the boat, assuming we can even get back to it with this mob here.” He sounded surprisingly calm for someone who was riding through a mob of angry trans-human attackers. I guess believing that nothing around us was real was helping him in at least that one regard.

“You people are an affront to the human race,” snarled Dr. Banks.

I turned away from the window to look at him, eyes narrowed. “We only need you for a little while longer, you know,” I said. “It’s up to you whether we let you go after your people give us Tansy, or whether we take you with us when we leave so that we can throw you to the hungry cousins out there. You made them. Maybe you should have the opportunity to really get to know them.”

Dr. Banks paled, his eyes going wide. He didn’t say anything else, and so neither did I. I just turned back to the window and resumed breathing through the crack in the glass, trying to keep the sleepwalkers calm long enough for us to escape the garage and drive onward into a bigger, more dangerous future.

The sleepwalkers clogged the Presidio, but forming the mob that had rushed the garage seemed to have denuded their numbers: once we were away from the water the streets were empty and motionless, filled with abandoned cars and the occasional desiccated corpse. Most of the bodies we passed looked like they’d been partially eaten before decay reached a stage that left the meat useless. Pigeons scattered in front of us, and I saw what looked like a pack of wild dogs disappearing down an alley, there and gone too fast for me to be sure of what I’d seen. I left the windows cracked, listening for the sound of moans. Depending on the wind, it might well reach me before the sleepwalker pheromones did.

The buzzing in my head had stopped. That was nice. The smell of decay from outside the van hadn’t abated, although it was more distant now, diluted with salt and with the undefinable, stony smell of San Francisco itself. I settled cross-legged on my seat, watching out the window and waiting for our next obstacle to present itself.

“Sal, are you all right back there?” Nathan raised his head as he spoke, his eyes seeking mine in the rearview mirror. There was an air freshener shaped like a dolphin hanging there, and I felt a brief pang of sorrow for the person who had hung it, who had never come back to get their van and drive it safely home. “I’m sorry we had to drive out of there like that. I know I didn’t give you enough notice.”

“It’s all right,” I said, offering what I hoped was an earnest smile. “I barely noticed. I was busy trying to keep the cousins from shredding the van and us with it.”

Now Nathan blinked, his eyes widening a little in the mirror. “Sal… you’re not wearing your seat belt.”

“What?” I looked down at my unrestrained middle, belatedly realizing just how accurate my words had been: I had barely noticed when we started to move, and I was barely noticing it now. Apparently, the life-threatening reality outside the vehicle was bad enough to keep me focused on the things that actually mattered, and prevent me from having another of my attacks. “Oh.” I buckled my seat belt before looking up again and meeting Nathan’s eyes in the mirror. He looked concerned.

He had every right to be. Things were moving fast now, and with Dr. Banks in the mix, any deviation from the norm was cause to worry.

Dr. Banks himself still had not received the memo about behaving decently if he wanted to stay alive. He sneered first at me and then at the front of the van, apparently directing his disgust at Fishy and Nathan combined. “We’re almost to SymboGen,” he said. “That means we’re on my turf now, and you’re going to be sorry that you decided to start this with me.”

“You’re the one who came to us, Doctor,” said Fishy languidly. “That was a stupid choice and you knew it was a stupid choice, which means it must have been the only choice you had. You could have sent your USAMRIID buddies in to snatch Dr. Cale or Sal or even Adam if you just needed data. You could have carted us back to your precious company for disassembly on your own terms. You didn’t do that. Either you couldn’t do it, or your relationship with the United States military isn’t as cuddly as you want us to believe it is.”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything.

I turned to look at him, frowning slowly. “You keep trying to convince me that I’m still Sally,” I said. “Why is that so important to you? You never tried to do that before.”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything.

“Colonel Mitchell. Is he still in charge of the local branch of USAMRIID? You know, big guy, thinning hair, sort of old around the eyes—and oh, yeah, Sally’s father. Is he still the one calling the shots? How much oversight does he have at this point? He used to tell me his men would follow him to the end of the world. Was that more than just hyperbole?”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything.

San Francisco continued to roll by outside our windows, broken windows, empty doorways, and the constant, distant smell of rot accompanying us across the city. I unfolded my legs, trying to make myself look a little bit less childish as I leaned closer, invading Dr. Banks’s personal space, and asked, “Are you trying to make me be Sally because you promised her father that you could bring her back to him?”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything… but his eyes cheated away and to the left, the same way Beverly’s did when I caught her digging in the laundry, and I knew that I had found my answer.

“We should leave you on a corner for the sleepwalkers,” I said, disgusted. “You didn’t come to us because you needed to know how to stabilize Anna. You came because you wanted me.”

“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” Dr. Banks’s voice was dull, like he couldn’t even find it in himself to sneer anymore. “I came for the reasons I gave. Anna won’t stabilize, and the ‘chimera’”—he made the word sound dirty—“market is going to be huge over the next few years. With as many people as have died in this little public relations nightmare, SymboGen will need a new product—a new name to go with it, of course, but no one’s going to shut us down. We have too much money, too much power…”

“And you’ve shifted too much of the blame,” I interjected.

Dr. Banks glared at me, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Your kind are as good a cash cow as any. The goodwill I might be able to gain with Colonel Mitchell by handing you back to him is a minor concern. Not nearly as important as stabilizing that little girl.”

“But you told him you could bring Sally back, didn’t you?” Nathan kept his eyes on the road. I wanted to hug him, to chase the bitterness from his voice. “I know what it’s like to pursue your funding, Dr. Banks. I was just a kid when Mom was really dealing with the hard-core academia, but I’ll never forget the way she promised those men the moon and the stars if they’d just put their money in her hands, rather than in the hands of her competitors. You told him that because of the way Sal converted, you could bring back the original personality, even though that would normally be impossible—and of course, no one but you could ever manage such a feat of scientific glory. He needed you if he wanted his daughter back.”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything. But he didn’t deny it either, and under the circumstances, that was just as damning as a confession would have been.

San Francisco was a city riddled with makeshift blockades, roadblocks, and destruction. For every open street there were three more that had somehow been stopped up by either the police or the locals, before they went off to meet whatever fate was waiting for them in the foggy hills. I hoped that whatever had happened to them—and even in a situation like this one, where the end seemed virtually preordained, there were still so many things that could have happened—it had been quick, and had left them with little time to suffer.

Maybe that was the most terrifying thing about Dr. Banks’s attempts to convince me that Sally was still in my head, buried under trauma and scar tissue. The idea of being a prisoner in my own body, unable to change anything, but able to see and understand everything that happened, was horrifying. At least when I’d been an implant, I hadn’t really understood what was happening to me, or to the body I inhabited. The cousins were just tapeworms driving broken minds around the world. They weren’t jailers for the humans whose bodies they had taken over. To think anything else was to invite madness.

We stopped on the Presidio to let Nathan get out and Fishy get behind the wheel. Nathan transferred an uncharacteristically silent Dr. Banks to the front passenger seat and got in next to me, putting a hand on my knee without saying a word about why he thought I might need the comfort. I sighed, shifting to rest my head against his shoulder. Beverly mirrored the sound a moment later, and I had to clap my hand over my mouth to smother my giggles. For better or for worse, we were driving into the unknown. Yes, it was a trap, but wasn’t everything a trap these days? I couldn’t think of the last time I’d experienced something that wasn’t a trap in some way. Even Nathan and my dogs were traps. They made me want a life I probably wasn’t going to ever have, and a world that had been buried because of the circumstances of my birth.

“Sleepwalkers at three o’clock,” reported Fishy. “They don’t seem to realize we’re here, but I’m going to take the next few blocks a little faster. You kids may want to hang on.”

“Okay,” said Nathan. Fishy accelerated. I felt, rather than saw, Nathan twist around to peer down at me. He asked, “Are you sure that you’re okay?”

“I’m pretty sure, and that’s better than I was expecting,” I said. “I feel numb, more than anything else. I don’t think I have the energy to be scared anymore. Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll have some screaming nightmares about this later.” If there was a later.

Nathan chuckled, reaching up to stroke my hair with one hand. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“You’re never having another nightmare,” said Dr. Banks. “Things in jars don’t have nightmares.”

“You’re such a charmer, I totally understand why people let you talk them into swallowing live worms,” said Fishy calmly. “Now shut the fuck up, or I’ll dump your useless ass on the street corner.”

“You can’t keep threatening me forever, boy,” said Dr. Banks. “Eventually, you’ll have to either act on your words or admit that you still need me too much to waste me on a bit of petty revenge.”

“I know which one I’d prefer,” said Fishy. The van sped up a little more, the soft whir of the engine filling the cab.

I sighed and closed my eyes. I could feel the faint buzz that notified me of sleepwalker presence at the back of my head, like the blood there was carbonated and fizzing against my skull. It was almost comforting, now that I knew what it was and what it really meant. The sleepwalkers would have a harder time sneaking up on us now, at least while I was awake—and I had Dr. Banks to thank. It wasn’t until he’d brought Anna into the building that I’d really begun to understand what I felt around Adam, and around Sherman and the others.

Sherman had to know that we could detect each other. Maybe that was the real reason he’d kept me isolated from his people the way he had: he hadn’t wanted me to develop this little party trick any faster than I was going to on my own. I didn’t know what useful applications it would have had back in his mall, but there must have been something I could have done with it, if I’d understood what those occasional flashes of disorientation and awareness really meant.

“You’ll never lie to me, will you, Nathan?” I asked, quietly, trying to keep the pair in the front seat from overhearing.

“I promise I’ll do my best not to,” he said, and that was somehow better than an outright pledge to never do it, ever, under any circumstances would have been: he was human, and fallible, just like all of us. He could make mistakes. Pretending that was never going to happen wouldn’t do anybody any good, but it could leave us unprepared for what was yet to come.

In the front seat, Dr. Banks made a small noise that was neither scoff nor snort. I lifted my head to see what he was looking at, and stiffened, the drums suddenly beating loud and angry in my ears. All the fear I hadn’t been feeling flooded into me at once, leaving the small boat of my courage floundering on the tide.

SymboGen was directly in front of us, standing like a shining beacon of enduring civilization among the ruined and smoking wreckage of the city. It looked… it looked like nothing at all had changed, like everything was business as usual and anyone who claimed that there was an emergency going on was just crying wolf. The late afternoon sun gleamed off the unbroken windows of the high-rise, and the gated parking lot was filled with cars. That was the only thing that broke the illusion of perfect normalcy: there were several olive drab army convoys parked in among the hybrids and electric cars, which looked like candy-colored jewels next to their larger, more functional cousins. From what I could see, even the exterior landscaping was still perfectly maintained.

“You couldn’t even let the gardeners go home to their families, could you?” The question seemed nonsensical, but it was the only thing I could think of to say. Nothing would have put the sheer incongruity of the scene into words, and so I didn’t even bother to try.

“They were safer staying with us, and they recognized that.” There was a shifty note to his voice that made me suspect he wasn’t telling the full truth, that there’d been a lockdown or something that kept those low-level employees on the grounds until it was too late, and there was nowhere else for them to go. I didn’t bother calling him on it. When had he ever told us the full truth, about anything? Even when his own life was on the line, Dr. Steven Banks was still trying to play the angles.

“That’s why I chose Dr. Cale’s brand of monster over yours, you know,” I said quietly. “At least she was always honest about what she was.”

Nathan’s hand tightened on my knee, but he didn’t contradict my assessment of his mother. I think we both knew her too well for that.

Dr. Banks stiffened but didn’t say anything.

Fishy broke the silence. “Gee, will I be glad to go back to crazy science land, and no longer be sharing a van with the issues party,” he said, amiably, and started down the hill toward SymboGen.

The buildings around us seemed cleaner somehow, like they had been cleared out before they could take anything more than superficial damage. I kept a tight hold on Beverly’s leash, watching warily for signs of ambush. It wasn’t until we were almost to the front gates that I realized the fizzing sensation in my head was gone. There were no sleepwalkers nearby, unless Dr. Banks was holding some inside the building for further study. If they were in airtight rooms—and they would have to be, to keep them from upsetting each other—I wouldn’t be able to pick up on them. The thought was sobering. If he got me into one of those rooms, no one would ever find me.

I didn’t have time to dwell on that new and disturbing idea. Fishy pulled up in front of the security gate. I was somehow unsurprised to see that it was still manned, although the two men who were waiting to check our IDs were wearing full SWAT gear and carrying assault rifles—a far cry from their careful inoffensiveness of days past. Fishy rolled down the window.

“Afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. “As you can see, we have your fearless leader captive. You want to go ahead and buzz us in?”

“Sir?” asked one of the men, sounding utterly baffled as he peered past Fishy to the handcuffed form of Dr. Banks. Confusion was an understandable sentiment. Fishy was pretty darn confusing when you weren’t prepared for him.

“I’m their hostage, Kirk,” said Dr. Banks, sounding more annoyed about the situation than anything else. “Go ahead and let us in.”

The man—Kirk—blinked. “Do you want me to notify Security?”

“Uh, hostage-taker right here, remember?” said Fishy.

Both men ignored him. “It won’t be necessary,” said Dr. Banks. “I’m in no immediate danger. Just open the door.”

“Sir, this goes against the protocols that you established—”

“I know full well who established the protocols, Kirk,” said Dr. Banks. A hint of steel had crept back into his tone, stiffening and sharpening it. This was something he knew how to deal with: a disobedient subordinate was easy pickings. “Now let us in, or you’ll have your termination slip by the end of the day. And you know what that means.”

Kirk went pale. “Yes, sir,” he said, and retreated to the booth with his companion. The other man flipped a switch. The gate rolled slowly open.

“Man was pretty terrified of being fired,” observed Fishy, as he restarted the engine and rolled forward through the opening.

“Any staff whose family was able to survive the initial outbreak and survive the trip to SymboGen has been allowed to have that family stay here with them,” said Dr. Banks. “Living space is tighter than we would prefer, but sheltering those people was the only humane thing to do.”

“I bet it also made an excellent PR opportunity,” said Nathan.

“Not as good as it should have. People kept getting distracted by the chaos on the streets.” Dr. Banks sounded disgusted. How dare people die when he was trying to capitalize on showing some basic human decency? “Anyway, everyone who works here knows that space is limited, and that we’re doing serious research to try to resolve the problem. Anyone leaving my employ will have a choice between heading to the official government quarantine facilities in Pleasanton, or being turned out onto the street to do as they will. It’s remarkable how many have chosen the latter.”

Fishy pulled into a parking space near the building and twisted to stare, openmouthed, at Dr. Banks. Nathan and I did the same in the backseat, neither of us quite able to process what the man was saying. Finally, Fishy managed, “You mean you’re turning them out to die just because they don’t work for you anymore?”

“Resources are limited,” said Dr. Banks coolly. “Can you really tell me your precious Dr. Cale would do any differently?”

Fishy shook his head. “You are a piece of work. Let’s get you back into your ivory tower so that I can go back to where the monsters are the only thing I have to worry about fucking me over.”

It was strange to be climbing out of a vehicle in the SymboGen parking lot like nothing had changed; like the world was still the way that it had always been before. The doors would open automatically at our approach, releasing a gust of perfume, while tinny elevator music played in the distance. And Chave would be there, my straight-laced, by-the-book handler in her impeccable business attire, ready to take me off to whatever tests and appointments they had scheduled for me…

But Chave was dead. She had been a double agent for Dr. Cale, and her implant had eventually decided to take her over. I’d never known her well enough to really miss her, but I’d known her well enough to grieve for her. That would have to be enough.

Nathan took the hand that wasn’t holding Beverly’s leash and squeezed it firmly. I squeezed back, and together, the four of us started toward the doors to SymboGen.

The closer we got, the more apparent it became that the illusion of normalcy was just that: an illusion. The grounds were still being maintained at a minimal level, but none of the dead or dying flowers had been replaced. It was late November; the flower beds should have been a riot of poinsettias, and every hedge should have been dripping with tinsel and no-break glass balls. Instead, the early fall plants were still in place, being coaxed along to keep things looking as functional as possible.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. “Who are you keeping up appearances for?” asked Nathan. “Who could possibly be looking at your hedges right now?”

“It’s been important to downplay staff losses and their impact during this crisis,” said Dr. Banks. “The people we’re working with want to look at us and think that we’re weathering the storm without getting wet. It builds their confidence. You understand.”

“Image is everything with you people,” said Nathan. He sounded disgusted. I was just glad he was the one doing the talking. I wasn’t sure I would have been able to shape the words.

“Son, image is everything with everyone, no matter what you try to tell yourself.” The glass doors leading into the lobby slid smoothly open as we approached. The cool air that drifted out to greet us was perfumed—apple, orange blossoms, and fresh corn, a far cry from the sugary chaos of Captain Candy’s—but the music wasn’t playing. That was almost a relief. “Or are you trying to tell me you’d still be so interested in that little girl whose hand you’re holding if we took her pretty chassis away and handed her to you in a jar? You love the woman, but you love the look, too. Don’t think you’re any different from me.”

“I am different from you,” snapped Nathan. “I didn’t cut somebody’s head open and shove a worm inside to get the look I wanted. I fell for a miracle, not a science project.”

“Just keep telling yourself that,” said Dr. Banks, and he stepped inside.

The lobby was empty: they must have been running on a skeleton staff. That, too, made me feel a little better. Anyone who wasn’t here was probably either dead or in the quarantine facilities that Dr. Banks was using to keep his remaining staff in line. Either way, they would probably have been happy to return to work if it meant that their lives would also return to normal.

Dr. Banks stopped when we were halfway across the lobby. “Now’s when you untie me,” he said, a new serenity in his tone. “I’m home.”

“I’m not seeing where this changes anything,” said Fishy.

“Then you’re a fool,” said Dr. Banks. “I still haven’t decided whether I’ll let you have your girl. You’ll be pleased to know that I’m leaning toward ‘yes,’ since she’s useless to me now and you’ve given me something much better.” The smile he slanted in my direction stopped just short of becoming a leer. I managed, barely, to suppress my shudder. “That does lead to the greater question of whether I’m intending to let any of you leave here alive.”

“Dr. Cale thought of that,” said Fishy mildly. “Or did you genuinely think she just went ‘sure, I’ll let my son and his girlfriend and my favorite handsome, dashing, suave assistant go off with the man who killed humanity’ and pushed us out the door? I knew you were arrogant. I didn’t know you were stupid.”

For the first time since we’d arrived at the SymboGen gates, Dr. Banks looked uncomfortable. “What are you talking about?”

“Get us to the elevator and I’ll explain.” Fishy nudged his elbow. “Unless you’d rather stand right here until the timer runs out?”

“Timer? What timer?” Dr. Banks started walking again. He was virtually stomping as we crossed the floor, but no one came rushing to his rescue.

I wasn’t the only one to notice that. “Huh,” said Nathan. “No one’s coming to find out who we are or why we have you in handcuffs. I wonder why that is? I mean, everyone enjoys working for a heartless despot who treats human lives like tissue paper, right?”

“The timer I started when we left the boat,” said Fishy calmly. He gave Dr. Banks another nudge. “It’s amazing what you can do with C-4.”

“You can’t really expect me to believe that Surrey would let you blow yourselves up just to spite me.”

“Not us: me, and you,” said Fishy. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not inner circle. That’s cool with me, because I don’t feel like taking on that kind of responsibility. But I’m totally down with grabbing hold of you while Nate and worm-girl run for the hills, and letting my explosive buddy”—he patted his pocket—“do the talking for me. I’m tired of this game, Doctor. I’m ready to log off and go home. I don’t suggest you push me.”

Dr. Banks gave him a startled look before pressing the call button for the elevator. “Son, I have serious concerns about your mental health.”

“Suits me,” said Fishy amiably.

I hung back, leaning close to murmur to Nathan, “Does he really have a bomb?”

“Not that I know of,” replied Nathan, equally quietly. “He was originally planning to stay on the boat. But I honestly can’t be sure.”

“Swell,” I said.

The elevator doors opened. The four of us got inside. As soon as the doors closed, Fishy undid the handcuffs holding Dr. Banks’s arms. The handcuffs promptly disappeared into Fishy’s pocket, where they would wait until they were needed again.

“About damn time,” sniffed Dr. Banks.

If there is anything in the world more awkward than sharing an elevator with someone who hates you and considers you to be less than human, I don’t know what it is. Dr. Banks initially reached for the button that would have taken us to his office. I reached out and grabbed his wrist before I could think better of it, stopping him mid-motion.

“Tansy’s not going to be in your office,” I said. “She’s down in the lab, isn’t she? Take us there. That was the deal.”

“That was the blackmail arrangement,” said Dr. Banks. He yanked his wrist from my grasp and pressed the button for the lowest level of the labs. “Happy now?”

“No,” I said. “I’m here. I’ll be happy when I’m not here anymore.”

Dr. Banks shook his head. “You’d think that after all this time, you might have finally learned how to be grateful.”

“I don’t think you’re the man who’s going to teach me that.”

The floors slowly counted down as we descended. Beverly kept her nose pressed against the base of the door. She growled occasionally, not on every level, but on enough that I had a strong suspicion I knew which floors were being used for sleepwalker resource.

I tensed as we started to slow. Finally, the elevator stopped and the doors slid open, revealing the empty hallway. The drums in my head pounded harder than ever. The hall should have been packed with technicians bustling to and fro, their hands full of lab equipment and clipboards, while Sherman—the old Sherman, with his tailored suits and ready smile—waited for me to come into his care. This was supposed to be my home away from home, and instead it was just one more place that was never going to be the same again.

Nothing was ever going to be the same again.

Dr. Banks led us out of the elevator and down the hall, stopping at a door I had never seen open before. He produced a key card from inside his pocket and swiped it in front of the door, unlocking it. He grasped the handle, pausing to look at me gravely and say, “I’ll understand if you want to stay out here, Sally. I’m sure your boys can keep an eye on me.”

Something about his tone was hesitant, even tender, like he had dug through his false affection and his too-real scorn until he hit whatever deep bedrock of actual compassion he still had buried under the persona he had worked so long and hard to build. I lifted my chin, feeling the muscles in my jaw tighten, and said, “I go where they go. Tansy’s my sister. I owe it to her to be able to do this.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and opened the door, revealing a stark white operating theater. There was a narrow bed—more like a cot—in the middle of the room, and there, naked and strapped down, was Tansy.

Her head had been shaved, and tubes snaked out of her, carrying and delivering fluids. A large bandage covered the right side of her scalp, concealing whatever terrible incisions Dr. Banks had used to extract samples of her implant. She didn’t react at all to the door being opened, but I could see her stomach muscles tightening and relaxing very slightly as she breathed. She wasn’t dead yet. It was a fairly near thing.

“I’m going to kill you,” someone said, and I was only a little bit surprised to realize that it was me.

Nathan pushed past me into the room. Dr. Banks followed him. I stayed where I was in the doorway, one hand clutching Beverly’s leash, staring numbly as they bent over the bed where Tansy was lying. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t a lab or medical technician, I couldn’t help, and I couldn’t kill Dr. Banks for what he’d done—not if we wanted to get out of here alive, with Tansy, and back to the ferry landing without SymboGen security or USAMRIID forces landing on our heads. That was already going to be difficult and would depend at least partially on Dr. Banks’s willingness to let our insult against his person stand—and whether or not he believed Fishy really had a bomb. I was deathly afraid we were going to be fighting our way out… and I was also looking forward to it. Maybe, in the chaos, I could kill him after all.

I had never been excited by the idea of killing someone before. I was surprised to find that I didn’t really mind the emotion.

“All right, let’s get her to the elevator.” Nathan started rolling the cot toward the door. To my surprise, Dr. Banks was on the other side, helping him.

That surprise was short-lived. Dr. Banks opened his mouth: “You’ll keep your end of the bargain, yes? Once you have my Anna stabilized…”

“We’ll contact you and arrange her return. If we can stabilize her, which we may not be able to do. Yes, we will let you know either way.” Nathan sounded disgusted. “I know you can contact your government buddies and make up some reason that they have to find us whenever you want to. So we’re not going to give you cause to want to until we’ve had time to disappear.”

“I’ll be honest, son, I’m surprised you’re willing to trust me.”

“Don’t ever mistake this for trust,” snapped Nathan. “You want Anna back and stabilized, you’ll leave us alone long enough for that to happen—which means you’ll leave us alone long enough that we can disappear completely.”

“What makes you think I’ll wait that long?” Dr. Banks sounded honestly curious.

Nathan looked at him flatly. “My mother says you will. She’s a better judge of character than I am in at least one regard: she knows how to spot a weasel before it starts biting. If she says you’ll risk losing us now to get something better later on, she means it.”

Dr. Banks laughed. “Good old Surrey.”

Nathan didn’t say anything. He just put his head down and kept pushing.

The elevator was a tight fit with four adults, a dog, and the cot Tansy was strapped to. They’d brought her catheter stand and three IV poles as well as the bed itself, and Fishy and I had to work quickly to keep them from getting tangled in the loading process. Then we were heading back toward the lobby, and we were finally home free; we had Tansy, and we were going back where we belonged.

Everything was going to be okay.

The elevator dinged. Dr. Banks said, “I really am sorry about this.” And the doors slid open to reveal eight soldiers with USAMRIID patches on their upper arms, standing in a flanking position around Colonel Alfred Mitchell, their drawn rifles aimed directly at us.

“Colonel Mitchell,” said Dr. Banks. “You’re just in time.”

The rest of us didn’t say anything. There was nothing left to say.

-

Chapter 20 NOVEMBER 2027

For a long moment, no one moved. It felt like no one even breathed, like everything had been put on hold while the world rearranged itself around us. Then, calmly, Colonel Mitchell said, “Hello, Sally.”

In that moment, I understood. Understood what Dr. Banks had been trying to accomplish, and understood how it could be used to our advantage, if I was willing to do what I had already done once before. If I was willing to sacrifice myself in the name of saving the people that I loved.

Please understand, Nathan, I thought, and wished that there was some way I could explain to him what I was doing, and why I was doing it. It was the only option I had left, but that didn’t make it any easier, and that didn’t make it right. It didn’t make it not hurt.

I dropped Beverly’s leash, pasting what I hoped would look like a sincere smile across my face in the same moment. Taking a half step forward—which was harder than I expected, thanks to all the damn guns aimed at me—I swallowed hard, and asked, “Daddy?”

Everything seemed to stand still. Then, smugly, Dr. Banks said, “I told you I could do it. It was simple, really.”

“Sally?” Colonel Mitchell sounded like he was afraid of his own question, like he was afraid of asking it where anyone else could hear. “Is that really you?”

“My head hurts,” I said, which wasn’t an answer. That made it the perfect reply. I took another step forward, and still the men with guns didn’t fire on me. “Where’s Mom?”

The Colonel’s shoulders sagged—in relief or sorrow, I didn’t know, and my genuine fear that something had happened to Sally’s mother informed my performance, making it easy to take another two steps with stumbling quickness, one hand half reaching for him. The guns didn’t track me.

“Are you here for me?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, eyes flicking first to my outstretched hand, and then to the people still standing behind me in the elevator. I heard Beverly whine. Taking Colonel Mitchell’s gaze as an excuse, I twisted to look back over my shoulder.

Nathan was holding Beverly’s leash. He looked resigned, like he hated this as much as I did, but understood its necessity. That made my heart hurt, in ways I couldn’t entirely name. I was hurting him, and he was letting me go, because we would never be able to fight our way out of here together. Somewhere along the line, I had managed to teach him—unintentionally—that it was all right to let me go. That was a lesson I had never wanted him to learn.

If Nathan was resigned, Fishy and Beverly were confused. My dog was straining against her leash, struggling to get to me, while Fishy was shaking his head slowly from side to side, a scowl on his face. He was smart enough not to argue when there were that many guns pointed at him, but that wasn’t making him any happier with the situation. And as for Dr. Banks…

Dr. Banks looked proud of himself. That was the worst part of all.

I turned back to Colonel Mitchell. “You need to let them go,” I said.

His eyes snapped to me. “What?”

“These people brought me here because they wanted to get that girl back; she’s theirs, and Dr. Banks took her without permission. He came so that we could get me here safe. They don’t have any part in this. Let them go.” I took a deep breath. “And they have a bomb. They’ll kill us all if you don’t let them leave.”

“It’s true,” said Fishy. “Boom, baby, boom.”

Colonel Mitchell frowned slowly, and with every part of his face, eyes hardening and brows drawing downward until he was nothing but suspicion. I felt suddenly unsure, and wanted to run back to the elevator, where I would be safe, where I wouldn’t have to pretend to be someone I’d never met. Would Sally have requested the freedom of a bunch of people she didn’t care about? Joyce hadn’t liked her very much. She hadn’t been a very nice person.

I forced myself to keep looking at Colonel Mitchell. If I looked away, we were lost. “You have to let them go,” I said, slowly and clearly. “I’m very fragile right now. Any shock could cause me to go away again. Getting blown up would be a big shock.”

He narrowed his eyes. I held my breath. If he called my bluff…

But this was a man who had been willing to get into bed with the enemy on the barest chance of getting his daughter back. He wasn’t going to let me slip away again. Colonel Mitchell looked away first, then said, “Your friends are free to go. Steven, you’re with me.”

Dr. Banks didn’t try to argue. He was as trapped as the rest of us, even if he was the one who had originally built the cage. He crossed the floor to stand beside me, and we fell into step with Colonel Mitchell as he turned and led us away. I didn’t look back.

It’s all right, Nathan, I thought. I’ll find my way home. I always do.

The broken doors were open. We had so far left to go.