Mira Grant - Symbiont

“Or they’re going to go to sleep. That’s what most of the ones at the hospital did.” He sounded hopeful.

“Only with the ones you found alone. Have any of the mobs stayed calm or gone to sleep of their own accord?”

Nathan hesitated before shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No, that hasn’t happened. But we don’t have that big of a sample set. We’re still finding different forms of interaction. It depends on the strain of D. symbogenesis that’s set up shop inside each of those people’s brains. Some of them are peaceful. Some of them aren’t.”

“Is there anything that could tell us what strain they’re infected with?”

“No.”

“Then drive .” I actually reached out and shook the wheel with one hand, ignoring the thin jet of panic it sent snaking through my belly. “We need to get the dogs, and we need to get out of this city. If it’s already this bad…”

“Sal, you’re not going to like what I have to do.”

“I know.” I pulled my hand off the wheel, closing my eyes as I shrank back down into my seat. “If I start screaming, just ignore it. Get us home.” I closed my eyes.

“I love you,” said Nathan, and he hit the gas, weaving around the milling bodies as he aimed for the gap in the barricade. He was trying not to hit them. He almost succeeded, although we clipped a few as we passed. I felt bad about that. Not bad enough to ask him to stop. Some of the police yelled and waved their arms, but most of them were too busy with the sleepwalkers to pay attention to the commuters who were just trying to get away. Things were falling apart.

If the screech of tires when the car stopped had seemed loud, the squeal of tires against the pavement as we accelerated was louder than anything else in the universe: louder than the sirens, louder than the drums, even louder than my pained screams. I clapped my hands over my eyes, turning the wash of red inside my eyelids into solid black. Nathan drove, and I screamed. That was how it had to be.

Nathan’s first turn took us hard to the right, toward Market Street. He picked up speed as we drove, until I had no idea how fast we were going or how many turns he had taken. I bent forward, resting my forehead on my knees, and screamed until my throat was raw as sandpaper. It hurt, and I tried to focus on the pain as I continued to scream, choosing that over the frantic, irregular movements of the car. We were going to crash at any moment, I just knew it, and when that happened, we were going to die. We were both going to die.

At least this time, it’s going to be your accident , I thought, a thin line of rationality drawing itself across the black and red landscape of my fear. It wasn’t as reassuring a thought as I had wanted it to be.

“Almost there, honey!” shouted Nathan. The words barely penetrated the fog.

San Francisco is a smaller city than it seems from the outside, miles and miles of streets packed into a relatively narrow stretch of land. It’s possible to walk there for hours without ever seeing its borders. At the same time, if someone knows the territory, knows what they’re doing, and doesn’t mind violating a few traffic laws, it’s possible to drive across the city in less than twenty minutes.

If there was a traffic law that Nathan didn’t break in those twenty minutes, I didn’t know about it, and my terror wouldn’t allow me to open my eyes long enough to find out. The car screeched to a halt, the engine cutting off, only to be replaced by sudden silence. The drums were still pounding in my ears, but the screams had stopped. It took me several seconds to realize that it was because I had stopped screaming.

Cautiously, I removed my hands from my face and opened my eyes, looking around. We were parked behind Nathan’s—behind our apartment building, catty-corner across two spaces in a way that was guaranteed to alienate our neighbors.

“Can you move?” asked Nathan.

I nodded wordlessly.

“Good. Then let’s move.” He opened his door and jumped out of the car before slamming it closed behind him, moving with an urgency that I wasn’t used to seeing from my usually staid, scholarly boyfriend.

My back was a solid knot of tension as I forced myself to sit up, undo my seat belt, and open the car door. I started to stand, only to fall to the ground as my knees refused to bear my weight, sending me sprawling. Nathan ran toward me.

“Sal! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” I grasped his offered hand, using it to pull myself back to my feet. My palms and knees were stinging. Gravel had cut through my skin, leaving the heels of my hands red and raw. I laughed a little, wincing at the faint edge of hysteria in the sound. “Let’s remember to grab the first aid kit, okay?”

“Okay,” said Nathan, keeping hold of my hand as he kicked the passenger-side door shut and started toward the building entrance.

I let him lead, and focused on listening as hard as I could to our environment, looking for any sign that we were not alone. I could hear cars driving by, and the distant sound of sirens—but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. We were far enough away from the bridge exit that I couldn’t be hearing those sirens, and San Francisco is a city with a lot of sirens. Police cars, private security, ambulances, they all made up the constant background noise of the city. I was probably just hearing one of those, and not a sign that the crisis was getting worse in our immediate vicinity.

A thin line of ice curled and uncurled in my belly, almost like a new kind of parasite. You don’t really believe that , murmured that little inner voice, and it was right. I knew the situation was devolving around us, and we didn’t have very long. Maybe pressuring Dr. Cale into letting us go home had been the wrong thing to do… but we couldn’t leave the dogs. They needed us, and unless the world was burning, that wasn’t a trust that I was willing to break.

There were no moans on the thin, smoke-scented air. Even if the mob of sleepwalkers was spreading, it either wasn’t here yet, or it wasn’t attacking yet. We had a little bit of time.

Nathan got the door unlocked and tugged me inside. I let go of his hand and took the lead down the hallway to the stairs. We didn’t even discuss using the elevator. The mob by the bridge had drawn the fragility of our situation into sharp relief, and the last thing that either of us wanted was to be trapped between floors if the electricity suddenly cut out.

The stairwell was silent save for the soft clicks of our shoes against the steps, and the sound of Nathan’s faintly labored breathing after the third floor. Neither of us was in the best of shape, but at least my tendency to walk when I couldn’t get a bus somewhere meant that I did all right with things like “walking up eight flights of stairs.” By the time we reached our floor, his face had taken on a distressingly plummy cast, and he wasn’t talking anymore, just nodding when I looked back and asked if he was all right. I paused on the landing, my hand on the door handle, and waited for him to catch up.

“I don’t think we should go through until you catch your breath,” I said. “We don’t know what’s up there.” Nathan’s building had a limited number of apartments per floor, and most were occupied by single residents or couples, rather than entire families. I wasn’t certain how many people we shared the floor with, but I knew that it was less than ten. That was a good thing, because most of them were also young urban professionals, the kind of people who thought that no price was too high to pay for the opportunity to avoid needing to take a sick day. The kind of people the SymboGen implant had been virtually designed for. If they had started their cascade into sleepwalker-dom…