Mira Grant - Symbiont

“What?” He followed my gaze to the end of the hall, and then looked down at the wild-eyed, growling dogs, who had taken on that stiff-legged posture characteristic of canines defending humans since the dawn of time. He paled. “Oh. Fuck.”

“I think we may have to take the stairs.”

“I don’t know if we can get there,” he said slowly. “One of those doors is between us and them.”

“Oh.” Things had seemed almost hopeful only a few seconds before, even if “hope” had been redefined on the local level to mean “slightly less bleak.” Now, with an unknown number of sleepwalkers approaching, it was difficult to muster anything but resigned despair. “I don’t know what to do, Nathan. None of my remedial education classes covered how to escape in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.”

Nathan laughed once, a single short, sharp bark that actually distracted Minnie from her growling long enough to give him a quizzical look. “Surviving the zombie apocalypse was an incredibly popular topic of discussion with the folks I went to college with. Too bad no one ever came up with a simple solution for ‘zombie apocalypse, genetically engineered parasite variant.’ I’d be the savior of the human race if they had.”

I was opening my mouth to answer him when the first moan drifted around the corner at the end of the hall, followed by another, and another, until it sounded like an entire mob was shambling our way. At least none of them was saying my name—not yet, anyway. Whatever half-decayed connection allowed the sleepwalkers to recognize me as a chimera was present, but no one had given them a word to hang on what I was. Not that awareness of our relationship would keep them from attacking me. As the man in the stairwell had proven, they could recognize me and still want to rip my throat out with their teeth.

“Nathan…”

“I know.”

We both backed up until we were pressed against the closed elevator doors, holding to the dogs’ leashes for dear life. I could deal with the fact that I was probably about to die. The fact that I was still weak from blood loss meant that I would almost certainly die first, saving me from needing to see what my tapeworm cousins would do to Nathan. But I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the dogs ripped to pieces by the sleepwalkers. The dogs could do a lot of damage before they were killed. The sleepwalkers barely acknowledged pain. They would win.

“You know, in all my wildest dreams, this was never how I imagined I would die,” said Nathan. He sounded almost wistful. “I mean, I assumed you would be there, but that it would either be one of those ‘dying in bed at the ripe old age of a hundred and twenty, my beloved wife by my side’ situations, or a freak surfing accident while we were on our honeymoon.”

“You surf?” I paused. “Wait, honeymoon?”

“I surf,” he confirmed. “And yes, honeymoon. I mean, assuming you said yes when I finally got up the nerve to propose.”

“If we get out of here alive, you should try it,” I said.

Nathan smiled sadly, and said nothing.

The first of the sleepwalkers shambled into view, moving toward us with slow, implacable purpose. The dogs were still growling, but louder now, like they still thought that they could somehow dissuade these unwanted intruders on their space through volume alone. My insistence on grabbing the knives suddenly seemed like a child’s demand for a security blanket. We were two people with kitchen cutlery and no training, and I was already injured. All we could do with those knives was slit our own wrists and hope that we bled out fully before the sleepwalkers ripped us apart.

“I’m really glad I got to know you,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Nathan. “Marry me?”

The elevator doors opened.

We were pressed flat against them, and when the support suddenly left our backs, we toppled over, taking suitcases, terrarium, and dogs with us as we tumbled into the elevator. Luck was with us for the first time since we’d left the lab: there was no one already inside, waiting to take a bite out of our tender flesh. I squeaked shrilly, surprised and disoriented. Nathan scrambled to his feet, slamming the heel of his hand down on the door-close button. I managed to sit up just in time to see the blank, emotionless faces of the sleepwalkers blocked out by the closing elevator doors.

Beverly and Minnie stopped growling, their belligerence transforming instantly into confusion. Minnie sat down, beginning to scratch her ear with her hind leg. I picked myself up from the floor, pausing to right the luggage and make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. My heart was hammering in my chest so hard that it hurt, and for once it didn’t sound like drums at all—it sounded like the heartbeat of a mammal, panicked beyond reason and confronting its own mortality.

Nathan was standing squarely in the middle of the elevator by the time I finished getting to my feet. His carving knife was in his hand, and his shoulders were shaking, betraying the depth of his distress. It was weird to realize that of the two of us, I was probably the one handling things better. Then again, I was also the one who was accustomed to the world being turned on its head. Nathan liked his routines. He was used to things being just so, and even dating me hadn’t changed that. My chaos hadn’t intruded on his daily life—not until recently, anyway.

“Nathan?” I kept my voice low, like I was speaking to a panicky animal. In a way, maybe I was. My still-pounding heart was doing its best to remind me that humans were just animals, as subject to the whims and whimsies of biology. The fight or flight response was wreaking havoc with both of us.

I’d always wondered why I sometimes passed out before I really panicked, despite everyone I knew working almost exactly the opposite. If “I” was a separate beast from the brain that stored my memories and emotional response, though, it started to make sense. Too much adrenaline flooded the mind, and I got knocked out of the synaptic loop, resulting in a loss of consciousness but not total loss of cool. Inefficient. Doubtless unintentional, too. So much about my design was.

“We don’t know what the lobby’s going to look like.” Nathan’s voice was soft, uninflected—virtually dead. If I hadn’t known that he’d never been fitted with an implant, I would have rethought my position on panic when I heard him speak. “If there are sleepwalkers there, if it’s dangerous, take the dogs and run. I’ll hold them off so that you can get away.”

“And go where? Nathan, I can’t drive. I never learned, and even if I had, I’d never be able to make myself drive away and leave you. We could run off down the street, but if the situation is that bad, we’d just be eaten by the next swarm of sleepwalkers we saw. We’re staying with you. We’re staying together . That’s the only way that we’re going to get out of this. Together.” I forced myself to smile. “Besides, you know your mother would kill me if I called her from the Concord BART Station and said, ‘Hey, I left your son to die but I made it to the train, do you think you could come and pick me up?’”

Nathan chuckled.

The floor indicator counted down from three to two.

My hands were full, and I didn’t dare let go of anything I had. Nathan had already dropped his suitcase, and the mere fact that he would prioritize my dog—our dog—over the only personal possessions he had been able to save made me even more certain that marrying him was the right course of action. He didn’t care that I was a tapeworm in a human skin, but he cared about proper leash etiquette. I was never going to find a more perfect man.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

The counter reached one with a soft “ding,” and the elevator doors opened to reveal an anticlimactically empty lobby. I blinked, unable to believe what my eyes were seeing. Only Minnie tugging on the leash as she eagerly tried to pull me out of the elevator to the walkies she assumed were waiting for her snapped me out of my fugue.