Free Chimera (Parasitology) by Mira Grant Page A

know what your deal is, and right now, I don’t care. I just want Paul back.”
    “You could go yourself.” The words were cruel before they were spoken, and they were crueler when they hung in the air between us, impossible to take back or ignore.
    “I could,” Carrie agreed. “But I wouldn’t make it three streets before something happened, and you know it. The patrols will come to your defense. I’ve seen it.”
    She was right. Colonel Mitchell was happy to keep me with the general population for now—pacifying his wife and reminding me of my place at the same time, until I was willing to be a good little girl and play by his rules—but he wasn’tgoing to let me get killed. Not while there was still a chance, however small, that I could be used to call Joyce back from the void where she existed now. So he set extra patrols on the streets around the house that had been assigned to me, and he made sure people were there to monitor my activities on the rare occasions when I dared to venture outside. I was probably the safest person in the Pleasanton quarantine zone, and I didn’t want it. I didn’t want the responsibility that was implied by Carrie’s face, or the burdens of being able to walk without fear of my fellow inmates. I didn’t want to be afraid of the soldiers who were supposedly protecting me. I didn’t want any of this.
    And what I wanted didn’t matter. Maybe it never had. “We could go together,” I said, one last desperate bid for something other than what she was asking me to do. I realized resentfully that she had never actually
asked
. She hadn’t needed to. All she’d needed to do was stand there and look at me, and allow my guilt to fill in the rest.
    “I don’t want to leave the house,” said Carrie. Her voice was meek, especially compared to that of the angry, anxious girl who had arrived here with me. Bit by bit, this place was wearing her away, reducing her to the bones of herself. I wondered if she liked who she saw when she looked in the mirror. “Paul might come back. I should be here when he comes back. I don’t want him to be scared because I’m not here.”
    That answer made sense, and I knew it was a lie, just as surely as she did. Paul wouldn’t be scared if he came back and Carrie was gone: He would assume she’d gone looking for him, or that she’d gone to get something else we needed, especially if I was gone too. She just didn’t want to go outside, where the world might take notice of her. Then again, why should she? The last time she’d gone outside of her own free will, she’d been seized and thrown into the back of a truck, and her worldhad changed forever. I sighed heavily, trying to keep my frustration from showing in my face. I didn’t do a very good job, I knew, but the effort seemed better than nothing.
    “All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”
    Carrie smiled. “I knew you would,” she said, and the worst thing was, she had known—and she hadn’t been wrong.
    Pleasanton was located in the deep East Bay, a sleepy suburban community that served both Livermore and San Francisco, feeding commuters into the tech and science industries thriving across the Bay Area. There had always been people who lived and worked at home, of course, but most of them had been keeping the city infrastructure functional, and when the sleepwalkers had overrun Pleasanton during the early days of the outbreaks, those people—and the infrastructure—had been among the first to fall. According to every soldier who’d been willing to give me the time of day, the selection of Pleasanton for the quarantine facility had been as much a matter of efficiency as anything else. By the time USAMRIID rode in with their tanks and their guns, there hadn’t been much of anybody left to fight them.
    I closed the door of our assigned home behind me as I stepped out onto the porch, breathing in the chilly December air, and for a moment, I was grateful to be exactly where I was.