“Every man in my family has had allergies, even unto the seventh generation,” he said, winning himself a laugh from the largely conservative crowd. They appreciated a good Bible reference every now and then, as long as he didn’t go too far and start to slip into proselytizing. The heady days of the twenty-teens were behind them, and while God still had a place in the American heart, He was increasingly less welcome in the political arena. No one wanted to be perceived as trying to drum up another Tea Party. But a few little reminders that Paul Moffat was a man of faith always went over well. “Me, I have two dogs. Big shaggy things. My kids love them, my wife—or at least my wife’s vacuum cleaner—hates them, and you know what? I’ve never had so much as a sniffle. You could say ‘there’s a man who’s had good luck,’ but I know better.”
Paul paused, smiling genially at the crowd, giving them time to snap the pictures he knew they were aching to take of him. Man of the people, politician you can talk to—he was happy to take whatever title they wanted to apply to him, as long as it was a positive one—and he worked hard to make sure that they were always positive.
Later, the few people who were able to review their shots would notice the odd lack of focus in his eyes, or the way the corner of his mouth was twitching—just a little, not enough to see with the naked eye, but more than enough for the camera to catch. The camera was always looking, and unlike Paul himself, it was never going to lie. Not for the sake of expediency. Not for the sake of anything.
In Paul Moffat’s descending aorta, something moved.
Progress through the body was slow, especially for something the size of a mature D. symbogenesis tapeworm. Paul’s implant was more than three feet in length, slightly thicker than a ribbon—a ribbon that moved in small, fluid undulations. It pulled itself along more through instinct than anything else, heading inexorably toward the only destination that could fulfill its instinct to protect its newly forming sense of self. The blood flowing around it pushed it backward, but it persevered. Although this implant did not know it, it was the third to have attempted the long, slow transit through the body of Paul Moffat. The first two had chosen the vena cava as a safer means of transport, mistakenly risking their lives on what seemed, in their mindless questing, to be a kinder current. The deoxygenated blood had killed them as surely as they had intended to kill their host. They had decayed and been flushed from the body with no one the wiser.
But this worm, the third worm, burrowed from Paul Moffat’s digestive tract up into the largest vein in the body, the vein responsible for carrying life-giving oxygen to the rest of the organism. Passage was slow. That didn’t matter. It was, by that stage in the process, also inevitable.
“You see, when I was a boy, I was so allergic to anything with fur that we couldn’t even take me to the state fair. Can you imagine that? An all-American boy unable to attend his own state fair because just getting within two hundred yards of the 4-H exhibits would see him sneezing his face off.” Paul paused for effect. The audience laughed uproariously.
The pause stretched longer. Paul opened his mouth to continue with his anecdote, and froze. The world seemed to have gone out of focus while he was catching his breath, and now he couldn’t get it to come back.
Inside Paul’s body, the implant had reached the end of its long and arduous journey. Bit by bit, it forced itself through the small opening at the base of his skull, shoving and chewing its way into the space that would be its new home. With every bite it took, a little more of Paul Moffat—who he had been, who he had dreamt of becoming—was devoured, gone to feed the worm that he had willingly nurtured in his own flesh.
His mouth closed, only to open again. No sound emerged. His aides, who had been relaxed and enjoying the familiar sight of the mayor in his element, began to tense and watch him carefully for some sign of what was going on.
They couldn’t see the true problem. The body of the implant blocked vital blood flow to the brain, causing minor lesions and cell death, even as the worm itself chewed larger holes into the surrounding tissue.
By the time Paul Moffat moaned and shambled down from the platform, arms outstretched and grasping for the people in the front row, the man he had been was quite mercifully dead. He would not see his body biting into the throat of a local businesswoman; he would not be aware of the pheromone signals his skin was now emitting as they began to awaken the sleeping parasites in the people around him. He was, in his own strange way, spared.
The rest of the world was not so lucky.
STAGE 0: PROPHASE
When looking for someone to trust with your health, choose SymboGen. Because if you can’t trust Nature, who can you trust?
Here I am.
-
—I repeat, the city of San Francisco has been compromised. Reports of infected individuals are coming in from all parts of the county, and attacks have been witnessed on buses, trains, and ferries heading into other parts of the Bay Area. At the current rate of exposure, all infection-prepped individuals will be compromised within the next twenty-four hours. USAMRIID’s evacuation efforts are ongoing, and are centered around the organization’s Treasure Island base. Other rescue and evacuation efforts have been put in place by state and local authorities, but all have thus far failed to gain traction. In several cases, members of the rescue teams have joined the sleepwalkers in their attacks.
The CDC has a team incoming, and all staff currently on the grounds are being scanned for signs of tapeworm infection. Antiparasitics are being handed out by the doctors, along with any prescription medicines which will become necessary once the worms have been purged. It’s unclear how much good this is going to do. No one knows how far the infection has already gone.
God, my head hurts.
The structure of the evolving D. symbogenesis parasite is as fascinating as it is horrifying. It seems to change from generation to generation, belying the asexual nature of classic tapeworm reproduction. I’m not sure where the tendency toward mutation was introduced—it doesn’t match with any of the admitted genetic sources, and Mom has no reason to lie to me at this point. She got what she wanted, after all. We’re here, with her, and the tapeworms are taking over the world.
That’s not fair. I’m sure this isn’t what she wanted. I’m sure she had more sense than this. At least, I want to be sure…
Chapter 1
SEPTEMBER 2027
Dr. Cale’s lab might have been concealed in an abandoned bowling alley, but she’d clearly never seen that as a reason for her equipment to be anything less than state-of-the-art. The MRI scanner was kept in a private room, and was as elaborate and complex as anything they had at SymboGen. I tried to focus on how surprising it was to see a piece of machinery that complicated in a place like this as I shed my clothing on the floor and allowed Nathan to help me into the scanning bed. I’d been through this process before. It made it easy for me to lie still and close my eyes, pretending that none of the last few weeks had happened; that everything was still normal, that I was still me, and not the thing that I was desperately afraid I was becoming. Or worse, the thing I was even more afraid I had been all along.