Mira Grant - Parasite

“Where are we going to go from there?”

“Away,” she said, vaguely. “Don’t be dumb, okay? I can’t say, ‘Oh, golly gee, Sal, we’re going to Disneyland ’ while we’re still on SymboGen property. Who knows what they’ve decided to bug around here? Banks was a paranoid dick before he had anything to be paranoid about. Now…” She shook her head. “He’s got more to be paranoid about than any other man alive. If I were him, this place would be so buggy, it would be a…” She stopped. “It would be something really buggy.”

“Right. Right.” I looked around the garage again, fear gnawing on my ribs like a rat with sharp, sharp teeth. I looked back to Tansy. “Sherman’s a tapeworm?”

“Yeah. I thought we covered that.”

“Sherman was a tapeworm all along?”

“The whole time you’ve known him, yeah. He left the lab like six months before you had your accident. I don’t know who he convinced to hire him here. Chave used to give us reports, before she went and got all eaten by the cousins, and she said he was pretty good at his job. Unhealthily interested in you, but she did what she could to run interference there.”

I glared at her. “You could have told me.”

“Why?” She sounded honestly confused. “He was a nonfactor. We didn’t know he was all about fomenting rebellion against his human creators. Honestly, I figured Banks had him cut up after he got picked up in that outbreak sweep you told us about. And what would we have said? ‘Uh, by the way, you totally don’t believe Tansy and Adam are tapeworms in human suits, but you should know that that dude Sherman you’re so fond of is one, too, so maybe be a little careful around him if he’s not all dead and stuff.’ It wouldn’t have done any good. It would’ve just confused you. I don’t like confusing people.”

“Yeah, well next time, confuse me. I’d rather know what’s going on.”

Tansy gave me a quizzical look. “You sure about that?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“Well, then, have I got some news for you.” She started walking again. “The exit’s this way.”

“That’s your news?” I demanded, following her.

“No. But not much else is going to do us any good if we don’t get out of here alive.” She led the way into the dark, and I followed. There was nothing else that I could do, and I had come too far to turn back now. Even if I wanted to, there was a string of locked doors behind me, separating me from everything I’d ever known.

The only way out was to keep moving forward.

The sewers were dark and hot. That was enough to put me at ease, despite the smell around us. I followed Tansy. Her steps were silent as we moved through the sucking slime of human waste. My steps splashed and made horrible slurping noises, like my shoes were trying to bring the entire sewer with them every time I picked up my feet. Tansy glowered at me, her expression barely visible in the gloom, but she didn’t shush me. Even she knew that there would have been no point.

I was starting to think we weren’t going to encounter any of Dr. Banks’s security when we turned a corner and there they were: two men in black uniforms, each with a flashlight and a gun. They never had a chance. Tansy shot the first man before either of them had a chance to react to our sudden appearance, and shot the second while he was still fumbling with the safety on his pistol. They went down hard, and she made her silent way over to kneel between them, studying the holes she’d made in their foreheads.

Then, to my absolute horror, she holstered her right-hand gun and stuck her index finger into the first man’s skull, wiggling it around for a moment. I gaped, my stomach rolling. It got worse when she pulled her finger out and stuck it in her mouth.

When she repeated the process with the second man, I turned away and vomited messily into the muck.

She was back on her feet when I turned to face her again. She was smiling. That didn’t help. “They’re both human, although this guy,” she kicked one man’s foot, “wouldn’t have been for too much longer. Still, explains why they went down so easy. They didn’t hear us coming the way they would’ve if they’d been cousins.”

“What are you—”

“Come on.” She started forward again, dismissing the two corpses like they didn’t matter anymore. To her, I guess they didn’t. The men were dead. They weren’t any fun to play with once they were dead.

I swallowed hard, spat once to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth, and followed after her. The open eyes of the dead men seemed to follow me, and I was more relieved than I could have believed possible when they passed out of sight behind us.

We passed no more security guards. My relief grew. Tansy had acted to keep us from being detained—or worse, since now I’d shown that I was willing to betray Dr. Banks at the request of people I barely knew—but that didn’t mean I wanted her shooting anyone she didn’t strictly have to. She enjoyed it a little too much for me to be comfortable with it.

Finally, we reached a drain feeding illegally out into the salt estuary under the cliffs near the Golden Gate Bridge. Tansy climbed out and started casually up the nearest hiking trail. I scrambled after her, feeling infinitely more conspicuous, even though I wasn’t the one carrying the guns.

A familiar car was parked at the top of the cliff, an even more familiar form standing next to it. Nathan’s hair was blown back by the wind coming off the water, and his hands were tucked deep into the pockets of his jacket. My relief grew so great that it felt like my body would be unable to contain it, like it was going to break loose and float away. I started to step out into the open—

—only to come up short as Tansy’s arm shot out and caught me across the chest, blocking any further progress. “Tansy, what the hell…?”

“Shh,” she said. “Look.” She nodded into the gloom behind Nathan.

I looked, and felt my blood go cold.

A mob of sleepwalkers was assembling in the greenery behind him, moving slowly but inexorably forward. We might reach him before they did. Then again, we might not.

“Trust me,” said Tansy. “Can you do that?”

“I…” I stopped, swallowing. “I can try.”

“Good. Now, when I say ‘run,’ you run. Got it?” I nodded. She smiled. “Good. Run!” Just like that, Tansy’s arm was no longer barring my way, and she was sprinting away, laughing maniacally as she closed on the sleepwalkers. Nathan turned toward the sound of her voice, and could only stare as she ran past him, slid across the hood of his car, and opened fire on the oncoming mob.

It wasn’t a fair fight by any definition of the word. There were more of them than Tansy had bullets, but they weren’t armed, and she had an uncanny knack for headshots, which dropped them like stones where they stood. She plunged into the mob, pausing only long enough to howl, “ Get Sal in the car and get out of here! ” Then she was gone, covered by the bodies of the sleepwalkers still on their feet. It didn’t seem to matter that the tapeworms motivating the sleepwalkers were her cousins; they clawed and grabbed for her all the same.

Nathan recovered quickly, and had the passenger side door open by the time I reached the car and flung myself inside. He twisted the key in the ignition, shouted, “Seat belt!” and hit the gas before I even had time to close the car door.

We went bouncing and shuddering over the uneven ground of the parking lot. I got my belt clicked home just before our tires dropped down to the street, and we were rolling smoothly into San Francisco, away from Tansy and the sleepwalkers, away from SymboGen… away from everything.

Nathan didn’t try to talk to me until we were halfway across the Bay Bridge. I assumed we were heading for Dr. Cale’s. I didn’t care as much as I thought I was supposed to. Glancing over, he asked, “Did you get it?”