Free Chimera (Parasitology) by Mira Grant

were so simple, with no room for ambiguity, no hidden meanings or concealed intent. Here, in this glorified cage, I had finally met people who spoke like parasites: quick and brief and uncomplicated. I could have thrived in an environment like this one, if it hadn’t come with such a terrible cost.
    “Oh,” I said finally.
    We all took turns leaving the house and going out into the streets to scavenge for the things we needed. There were food trucks twice a day, and USAMRIID doctors who came around to dispense medicines and check on the sick or wounded, but they didn’t provide many of the basic necessities of life, considering them “frivolous” or otherwise low-priority. Sanitary supplies for the women. Toys for the children. Condoms and birth control for the people who had depended on their implants for contraception, and who couldn’t fight the primateurge to seek comfort in the arms of their own species. I had walked in on Paul and Carrie several times, some by accident, others out of sheer curiosity. I had never seen people having sex before. When I slept with Nathan, I was always too much in the moment to observe. In those moments, I was a mammal like any other, and my origins didn’t matter in the least.
    They fucked with their eyes closed and tears running down their cheeks, and they clung to each other like the world was ending. Paul had opened his eyes once and seen me standing there, watching them. He hadn’t said anything. He’d just looked at me, sorrow and understanding in his eyes, until I’d been forced to turn away.
    I hadn’t walked in on them since then.
    “What time did he leave?”
    “Just after breakfast,” said Carrie. “Gloria’s little girl was crying again. He thought he’d seen some Otter Pops in one of the convenience stores. Most adults won’t eat them—they don’t register as food—and he said he’d try to pick them up while he was out. That was hours ago.”
    The little girl didn’t have a name. The woman who had found her, Gloria, had tried name after name on the child, looking for something she would respond to. The rest of us had done the same, dredging up names from our past that we thought were pretty, but that weren’t attached to losses so bright and recent that hearing those names over and over again would hurt. The child had refused them all. Somewhere out there was her real name, and until we found it, she wasn’t going to let us call her anything. She still treated Gloria as her primary caretaker. The rest of us were acceptable substitutes, when necessary.
    I’d never spent much time around human children before. Puppies and kittens, yes; infants and toddlers, no. It was refreshingly similar, and confoundingly different at the same time. We all catered to her every whim. She was our tiny queen,and if she had wanted Otter Pops—whatever those were—then of course Paul would have volunteered to get them for her.
    “Oh,” I said again. Then, with a slow, almost morbid dread gathering in my stomach, I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
    Carrie just looked at me for a moment, and her expression was so oddly similar to the one Paul had worn when I watched them making love that it was all I could do not to turn my face away, cheeks burning with conditioned shame. I didn’t want to be as human as I was. The people who had created me had made sure I didn’t have a choice.
    “The soldiers treat you different because of who you are,” she said finally. “You try to pretend they don’t, and we try to let you, because we have to live with you. Things are hard enough here without us being at war against ourselves. But they won’t shoot you if they find you in the wrong part of the camp. They might even give you a ride home.”
    I didn’t say anything. She was telling the truth: There was nothing I could do to change that. The fact that they would kick the living crap out of me before giving me a ride really didn’t matter.
    “Please, Sal. I don’t