Free Chimera (Parasitology) by Mira Grant Page B

Everything smelled like rain, and the grass on the lawns around me was patchy and brown, where it hadn’t been churned into a muddy froth by passing feet. California winters are gentle compared to most of the rest of the country. If our quarantine zone had been almost anywhere else, I would have been standing in snow outside a house where the electricity was intermittent and the hot water didn’t always work.
    Not for the first time, it struck me that the rest of the country was probably in real, serious trouble, and that if this crisis didn’t either pass or come to a head soon, a lot more humanswere going to die for reasons having nothing to do with the sleepwalkers. The sleepwalkers were going to be dying too, if they hadn’t already started. Their minds might be parasitic, but their bodies were mammalian, soft and warm and susceptible to frostbite and the weather. They’d freeze before they ever understood what was happening to them.
    I took a deep breath and stepped down off the porch. The world didn’t end. I took another step forward.
    The screamer was gone, leaving the sidewalks empty on either side of the street, but I could feel the eyes watching me from the windows. I inhaled instinctively, looking for traces of sleepwalker pheromones. I didn’t find any, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything: I still didn’t fully understand my connection to the cousins, and I’d only been beginning to develop my ability to detect them, when things had gone to hell and I’d wound up in USAMRIID custody. They could be all around me, standing just slightly downwind, and I would never know.
    This was supposed to be a secure quarantine zone. I was safe. I had to be safe.
    I took another step, and just like that, I was walking, moving with quick, anxious purpose down the walkway to the sidewalk, and then down the sidewalk toward the part of town where Paul had been heading. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye as I passed the windows, and I did my best not to turn toward them. The people who were hiding inside didn’t want me to see them, and I was willing to respect that. They had so little left to call their own; the least I could do was allow them to keep what remained of their tattered privacy. I walked faster, and then I was jogging, enjoying the open sidewalk and the smooth, untroubled stretch of my legs. I was still getting stronger. It had started when Sherman had held me captive, and it had continued since then. It was like learning the provenance of my body had finally made it acceptable for meto turn it into something new, something other than the soft, untested thing that Sally had deeded to me. This was
my
body now, and it was going to do what
I
needed it to do. And what I needed it to do was run.
    My feet slammed down against the pavement as I continued to pick up speed, and each impact was like a door closing somewhere behind me. I might never find my way out of here; I might never make it home to Nathan and Adam and the rest of my family. The broken doors were still open for me—they would always be open for me—but passing through them required the freedom to reach them, and that wasn’t something I had right now. I could run for the rest of my life, however long or short that was, and never reach the place I wanted to be.
    But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do some good. I was a chimera in a nest of humans, and I had been created to improve their lives. Maybe not like this, maybe not with eyes and hands and the freedom to make my own decisions, and yet I still felt like maybe they needed me. We didn’t create humanity, after all. My parasitic ancestors had been perfectly happy for thousands of years. They had never woken up and thought
we need to create a whole new species to make sure that we’re okay.
It was hard not to look at the humans, with all their advantages and strengths, and feel just a little bit sorry for them. They were so
bad
at living in their own world.
    Take Carrie, for