Free The Parasite War by Tim Sullivan Page B

cheek. "What is it?" he asked gently. "What's the matter?"
    "I'll tell you what's the matter. I was once diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic."
    Nobody spoke.
    "How long ago?" Alex asked.
    "Several years. Twenty years. Thirty. I don't know." The tears were streaming down her face now. "I don't know what's real."
    Alex put his arm around her. "You know as much as anybody else, Doctor."
    But Siegel didn't seem to hear him. She just continued to weep, staring out the window into the gathering darkness. She gave no sign that she knew he was there.
    Alex left her alone at last, retiring to the corner of the room where Jo was now sitting cross-legged on a mattress. "I think you opened a real can of worms there," he said. "What made you do that?"
    "Well, it struck me that we're making too much of all this. What Siegel was saying really doesn't make a lot of sense, when you get down to it. Now we know why."
    It seemed a harsh judgment, in a way, but it was logical. He pulled the curtain, a blanket hanging from a rope, that separated their section of the room, and lay down next to Jo.
    "There's one thing that still bothers me, Jo," he said after a while.
    "Oh?"
    "If they're just sick people, why don't they go inside the armory and get those guns? Even if they couldn't use them, it doesn't make any sense. They'd try, wouldn't they? If they've been transformed into something else, though, something that isn't really human, they might not understand how firearms work."
    "Alex, how could creatures that can cross billions of miles of space not understand something as simple as a gun?"
    "Well, maybe they just don't think the way we do."
    "They've had three years to learn."
    "True, but they've done a lot of other things in that three years without guns. They've conquered the human race. Making their flunkies use M-16s might not have seemed that important to them."
    "A disease has wiped out most of the population, Alex," Jo said with exaggerated patience. "That doesn't mean that there's some sinister purpose behind it."
    "No, I suppose not." He rubbed her back.
    "Alex, I think we're taking too many risks. If we lie low, this thing just might wear itself out."
    Maybe she was right. Maybe the worst was over. Maybe they were among the lucky few who would survive this terrible plague. He wanted to believe that, but experience had taught him that things rarely work out the way you'd like.
    "I don't know, Jo. We've been lying low for years, and look what's happened."
    "Yeah, we've lived while other people have died by the billions."
    "That's one way of looking at it."
    "That's the only way of looking at it, as far as I can see." She pulled away from him. "I want to live."
    Alex tried to touch her again, and again she pulled away from him.
    "Have you forgotten all the things we talked about yesterday?" he said sharply. "The future of the human race, and all that?"
    "Listen to yourself," Jo said. "You sound like a megalomaniac. The savior of mankind."
    "It does sound kind of stupid when you put it that way," he said. "But we've come this far. We have a group of people working together, and they're ready to fight."
    "What kind of group? We've been listening to the ravings of a woman who, in one of her more lucid moments, admits to being a schizophrenic."
    "She admits to having been diagnosed as a schizophrenic at one time. That doesn't mean that we should dismiss everything she says. She's very well educated."
    "Right." Jo emphatically rolled onto her side, facing away from Alex.
    "Well, whether you're with us or not, I intend to take that armory away from the colloids," Alex said, anger rising in his voice. "I'm going to teach these people how to fight, just as though they were raw recruits arriving in Baghdad."
    "I suggest you remember how that war went."
    "Yeah, I haven't forgotten it for one minute. This time, though, it's different."
    "Oh, and why is that?"
    "Because this time we're the Iraqis."
     

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    They moved out in the morning.