Mira Grant - Symbiont

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.