I groaned.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” said Nathan. He paused. “Are you awake? If you’re not awake, just don’t respond. But I’d really prefer it if you were awake.”
I licked my lips, which were somehow dry and gummy at the same time. “How long was I out?” I managed to croak, and felt ridiculously proud of myself for accomplishing that much. Everything was still a little gray around the edges, but it was no longer in danger of being swallowed up by shadows, and I thought that was probably a good sign.
“Two hours,” said Nathan. I heard him get up. His footsteps moved away, followed by the sound of the fridge door opening and closing. Then the steps returned, moving toward me with purpose. “I’ve been monitoring your vital signs. Your pulse has remained mostly steady, though you should have gone to the hospital, given how much blood I’m guessing you lost.”
“No hospitals,” I whispered, alarmed.
“No, no hospitals,” Nathan agreed. He sat down on the edge of the couch, setting something on the coffee table. There was a smudge of blood on his chin, and his hair was even more disheveled, making him look younger and lost. “It was killing me not to take you there, but given what we’ve seen so far today, I think it would have killed us both if I’d tried getting you to the ER. Not to mention the danger that the police would get involved.”
Possibly forcing him to choose between leaving me there and getting arrested, depending on what story SymboGen was spinning about the break-in and theft of their data. I grimaced. “Thank you.”
“No thanks needed. We’re in this together.” He kissed my forehead tenderly before asking, “Do you think you can sit up if I help you? I want you to drink some juice.”
“I think so.” I took his arm, making note of the clean white dressing on my wrist as I did so, and allowed him to half help, half pull me into a seated position. The room swam briefly out of focus, and then swam back just as quickly. “Oh, wow. Oh, ow.”
“Are you dizzy?”
“A little bit,” I said, starting to nod. I realized at the last moment that it would be a bad idea, and turned the motion into a semi-bob of my chin instead. Even that was enough to make my head spin. “Everything’s a little gray around the outside.”
“As long as it’s just gray and not black, you should be okay.” He picked up a glass of orange juice from the coffee table, offering it to me. “This will help.”
“I’ve given enough blood voluntarily to know that orange juice doesn’t equal instant recovery,” I said, and took the glass. My hand was shaking. I willed it to be still, and once I was sure I wouldn’t spill juice all over the floor, I raised the glass to my lips. Sweetness flooded my mouth, almost strong enough to make me gag. I did choke a little, before forcing myself to keep on drinking.
“The better it tastes, the more you need it,” said Nathan. He grimaced wryly, and added, “Except when it goes too far, and you feel like you’re turning into a hummingbird. And no, orange juice isn’t an instant restorative. But you didn’t lose enough blood to need a transfusion, thank God, or we would have needed to go to the hospital no matter how bad an idea that was. This should give you enough of a boost that we can get back to the car with the dogs.”
“Thank you for not being willing to let me die in our kitchen,” I said, and took another drink of orange juice. “Has anyone noticed the body in the stairwell?”
“Not that I’ve heard. The building’s been pretty quiet since you passed out. As for the rest of the city…” Nathan shook his head. “I turned the news off when I realized that it was just getting worse. We’ve passed some sort of critical mass of sleepwalkers. More and more of the implants are waking up.”
I looked at him solemnly as I sipped the juice, trying to force myself to choke every last drop of it down. There was no way any of this was a coincidence; not with Sherman on the loose, not with his team of doctors dedicated to championing the cause of D. symbogenesis over the cause of the human race.
I was almost relieved to realize that the thought that he was doing this on purpose made me sick to my stomach. I might not be human, but I still knew right from wrong. That was no small accomplishment, given the circumstances.
“Sal? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think it was just reaching a critical mass that triggered this,” I said, setting the empty juice glass back on the coffee table. Nathan was right about one thing: while I still felt shaky and weak, I no longer felt like I was going to collapse back into unconsciousness at any moment. “This is Sherman. He was so mad, Nathan. I think he really expected me to go with him. To just throw up my hands and say, ‘I understand now, I’m really one of you,’ and let him lead me to his secret lair beneath the city.”
“If his secret lair is under San Francisco, the first big earthquake will solve this problem for us,” said Nathan. There was a brittle edge to his voice, like he was joking because he didn’t know what else to do. “Do you really think Sherman could do this?”
“I think Sherman doesn’t consider himself human, and he doesn’t see dead humans as dead people,” I said. “He was pretty clear on that point when we were at SymboGen. He wants to be the dominant species. He wants us to be the only things that live here. And we know that sleepwalkers trigger other sleepwalkers. If you wanted to spread them through the city like… like a real disease, all you’d need is a few index cases to scatter around the streets. They’d go wandering and anyone they encountered who was on the verge of going over would succumb.” It was so simple, so elegant, and so horrible that I could barely believe that Sherman, who had always been kind to me, could possibly be behind it.
But then, I’d thought we were both human in those days, and he’d been playing along with my assumptions, hadn’t he? It was easy to pretend to follow social rules when you didn’t really believe that they applied to you.
“God.” Nathan got up again. This time the dogs followed him into the kitchen. He returned with the bottle of orange juice, refilling my glass before he set the bottle down on the table. He also had a package of Fig Newtons, which he held out to me. “Eat as many of these as you think you can stomach. If you’re right, and Sherman is doing this, we need to get the hell out of this city.”
“He doesn’t know where we live,” I protested, taking the cookies.
“No. But USAMRIID knows that there’s an outbreak in San Francisco, and they don’t know yet exactly how the sleepwalking sickness is being spread. They don’t know that lockdown is already a lost cause. If they decide to quarantine the city…”
I blanched. My father—Sally Mitchell’s father—was a career army man. He had reached the rank of colonel before he retired from active duty and took over the local branch of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been releasing me from his custody in exchange for a possible cure for his daughter, Joyce. His only surviving daughter, I realized with a pang. She wasn’t really my sister. Somehow that was worse than knowing that he wasn’t really my father. Unlike Joyce, he had always held himself a little bit apart from me, and now I knew the reason why: he had known all along that Sally was dead, and he had been monitoring me to see how the tapeworm in my driver’s seat reacted. He’d turned his little girl’s corpse into a science project for his country.