I wanted to protest, to tell them I was the same person I had been for the whole journey. I didn’t say anything. I just stopped at the lip of the truck and said, without looking back, “I’m Sally Mitchell, sir.”
“Excellent.” Sergeant Hinton turned away from me. “Private? Secure the prisoner.”
I didn’t have time to dodge before the cattle prod hit me in the small of the back, and everything dropped away again.
This time when I woke up, it was to a hose pointed straight at my face, dousing me in lukewarm water. My scalp felt like it was on fire. As I sputtered and squinted and tried to move away, I realized there was someone holding my hair. They were holding me up by my hair. My hands were cuffed behind my back again, my clothes were gone, and the rough floor of the room around me dug into my knees, hard and sharp and painful. I screamed, or tried to; the water flowed into my mouth, reducing the sound to a pained gurgle.
“Stop the water!” shouted a female voice. Blessedly, someone listened: The water stopped.
I spat out as much water as I could before I took a shaky breath. More water promptly found its way into my lungs. I began to cough, and the hand that was holding my hair let go, dropping me to the wet floor. I couldn’t catch myself with my hands cuffed behind me. I fell face-first onto the rough concrete, still coughing, unable to catch my breath.
Sounding almost bored, the same female voice spoke again: “Roll her onto her side. If she dies, we’ll catch hell from the Colonel.”
“Yes, Sarge,” said the man behind me. Hands gripped my shoulder, rolling me onto my side. I kept coughing, but less fiercely now. The hands released my shoulder and thumped me soundly on the back. I retched, water boiling up from the back of my throat and spilling down my chin in a thin, vomitus stream.
After that, I could breathe, if still not terribly well. My throat was as raw as my knees. My entire body felt loose, like the slightest disturbance could jar me out of it for good. I wasn’t sure what it was about the electric shocks that did that to me, but one thing was for sure: I didn’t want to experience that again.
I tried to lift my head, to see either the person who was physically abusing me or the owner of the voice commanding it, but the muscles in my neck refused to obey. I was as helpless as a day-old kitten, without the benefit of fur to keep me warm or a loving shelter staff to keep me safe. All I had was this place, this room, and I didn’t feel like either of the people who were in it had my best interests at heart.
There was a loud sigh. “Larsen, get her on her feet,” commanded the woman. “We can’t take her to the quarantine drop looking like this.”
“We shouldn’t be taking her to the quarantine drop at all,” said the man. He slid his hands under my arms and hauled me to my feet, leaving my head to loll limply against my chest. He was fully clothed: As he lifted me, I could feel the zips and buckles of his tactical gear against my skin. Why would anyone wear full body armor into a shower with a defenseless girl who could barely move her own head?
“Your opinion on the subject has been noted, Private,” said the woman.
I struggled again to lift my head. This time, I managed to shift it just enough to let me see the person who was giving the orders. She was tall, thickly built, and wearing the same tactical gear as the man behind me. She was also scowling at me, an expression of unadulterated loathing on her face.
“You going to give me an opinion too, kid?” she demanded.
I didn’t feel up to speaking. I wasn’t sure my mouth would have obeyed me if I’d tried. So I didn’t say anything. I just hung there, helpless in the arms of the man behind me, and wished death upon her with all my parasitic heart.
“Good,” she said, and stepped closer. “Colonel Mitchell wants you brought to the lab. It’s our responsibility to get you cleaned up and ready for him. But here’s the thing. Some of us? We know what you did. We know who you’ve been working for. We know why you’re his Hail Mary, and we’re not going to tell him not to use you, but we’re not going to help you fuck us over a second time. You got me? You traitorous little whore, you got me?!”
She was screaming by the end, and I realized, finally, what I’d done to earn myself this kind of treatment: to make them hate me so.
They didn’t know about Sherman. They didn’t know about Ronnie and his clever knives, or Kristoph, the bruiser who never spoke but could probably have crushed a man’s skull in his bare hands if he had ever wanted to. As far as they were concerned, I had found a way to escape from their quarantine facility all by myself, and I had killed a bunch of people on my way out. People they worked with, knew, probably even liked. It was no wonder they hated me. If anything, it was a wonder they hadn’t arranged for my “accidental” death on the way from SymboGen to wherever we were now.
The woman nodded, looking satisfied. “Good. You got me.” Then, with no more warning that a slight tensing of her shoulders, she drove a fist into my stomach so hard that it knocked what little air I had out of me. I gasped, bile rising in my throat, and she stepped back just in time to avoid getting splattered by the thin stream of vomit as I upchucked on the floor in front of me.
“I should make you eat that,” she said in an almost genial tone. “Instead, I’m going to be merciful, because I want you to remember that it can go one of two ways from here. It can go hard, or it can go easy. Now, let me be clear, you’re not going to enjoy either option. Both of them are going to suck for you, and you deserve it. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be smart if you chose the easy way.”
I wheezed, trying to suck in enough breath to let me speak. My lungs didn’t seem to be cooperating. I realized that I didn’t care. She could punch me as much as she wanted. She could break my ribs and smash my fingers and I would be fine with that, as long as she didn’t hit me with another electrical shock. I still felt like the world was out of joint and not quite working. The first shock had been the worst thing I’d ever experienced, and the fact that I didn’t have better words for the feeling of electricity running through my body was a testament to how shaken I was. The second shock had been even worse. Two in one day had been almost more than I could stand. A third shock…
I was genuinely afraid that a third shock would kill me.
“I’m going to take that as agreement. Just to be sure, let’s check.” She stepped neatly forward and drove her fist into my stomach again. I didn’t throw up this time. I just sagged limply against Private Larsen, and wondered whether this was ever going to end.
My response seemed to be what the woman had been hoping for. She smiled, and there was murder in her eyes. “Excellent. Now here’s how it’s going to go. You’ve been cleaned, and you’ve been sterilized. We took blood while you were out, and that’s heading off to the doctors, so that we can be sure you’re not bringing anything nasty into our kennels. That’s all that happened. Do you understand? No one hit you. That would be entirely inappropriate, and we don’t allow things like that here. No one would dream of laying a finger on Colonel Mitchell’s little girl, even if she were a traitorous bitch who’d killed several of our own. If you think those things happened, you’re wrong. Nod if you understand me.”
Slowly, laboriously, I forced my chin to rise just enough to let me drop it back down against my chest. Even that much movement exhausted me, leaving me temporarily grateful for the arms that held me away from the cold, damp floor. Private Larsen might mean me nothing but ill. Honestly, I didn’t care, as long as he didn’t drop me again.
“Good girl,” said the woman. “Private, take her to her clothes. Dress her yourself if you have to. Her father expects her within the hour.”
“Yes, Sarge,” said Private Larsen. He hoisted me higher, with a rough “Come on,” and started walking toward the door on the far side of the room. My feet dragged against the floor, leaving layers of skin behind. My toes, raw and abraded, ached and stung. The sensation was centering, reminding me of the existence of my extremities. Remembering them meant remembering all the things b
etween them and my brain, and bit by bit, I felt my arms and legs begin to come back online. I twitched my toes and straightened my fingers, confirming that they belonged to me. Everything responded like it was supposed to—a little slow, maybe, but it was still there, and it was still mine. Right now, that was good enough.
I let myself remain limp as Private Larsen dragged me through the doorway and into a small changing room. The longer they wanted to underestimate me, the better. More and more, I was coming to realize that not all action was good, and not all inaction was passivity. Sometimes the bravest thing I could do was refuse to move.
He dumped me onto a bench, knocking the air out of me yet again. That was starting to become a habit. I moaned when the wood bit into the bruises that were forming on my stomach, but I didn’t move, not then, not when he removed the cuffs from my hands, and not when he scooped up an armload of fabric and dumped it unceremoniously on my back.
“Put these on,” he said. “I’ll be right outside the door when you’re finished.”
I couldn’t resist the urge to lift my head and blink at him, confused.
He smiled. I finally recognized him: He was the boy with the acne from outside the truck when we had first arrived, the one who’d been holding a gun too big for his frame. He didn’t have that gun now. Somehow, that didn’t make him look any less terrifying.
“I’m not helping you,” he said. “If you take too long, I’ll tell the Colonel you weren’t willing to come out of the dressing room. I don’t know where you’ve been all this time, and I don’t care. Your little terrorist summer camp is over. It’s time to come back to the real world. And I’m not worried about leaving you alone. What’s the worst that you can do? Hang yourself with a pair of sweatpants? If you wanted to do that, you’d be doing the rest of us a favor. Feel free to take yourself out of the way before somebody else has to.” He pitched his voice lower as he spoke, keeping it from cracking again. It was obvious that he was trying to be tough. I couldn’t even hold his words against him. He sounded too much like his Sergeant, a woman who believed that she had every reason to hate me.
Then he turned and swaggered out of the room, slamming the door behind himself, and I was alone.
Even with my muscles back under my control, it took me too long to sit up. It felt like my body was arguing with itself, unsure of the order in which things were meant to be done. I tried to ride out the fight, not taking sides. My muscles and tendons and bones had come to me pre-used and already well aware of their capabilities. I was happy to work with them, to exercise them and feed them the things they needed to grow, but that didn’t mean I needed to inject conscious thought on a system that had always worked perfectly well without me.
As I finished sitting up, I realized there was another advantage to letting my body set the pace. There was no way I wasn’t being monitored right now. I turned my head slowly, scanning the top of the walls, and was rewarded halfway around the room when I spotted a small, boxy protrusion that had nothing to do with the shape of the room itself. There was no light to give it away, but I knew a camera when I saw one. I forced my eyes to keep traveling, not letting them know that I had spotted their surveillance device. The longer they kept underestimating me, the better.
My hands shook as I dressed myself: plain white panties, sweatpants, a sports bra with no underwire, and a loose blue cotton top that looked more like a doctor’s scrubs than anything from my own closet. The tennis shoes had Velcro straps, and they were still almost too much for me. I was all too aware of the industrial nature of the clothing that had been chosen for me. There were no drawstrings or internal supports that I could pull out and use for weapons. If not for the USAMRIID logo on the thigh of the sweatpants, I could just as easily have been getting dressed for prison.
My wet hair was drying in corkscrew curls and tangles that would take me hours with a brush to work out. I pulled my fingers through it once, wincing as they snagged on the solidifying knots, before I turned and walked to the waiting door.
Private Larsen was waiting outside. He looked me once up and down, sneered, “You can’t even make yourself presentable, can you?” and grabbed my arm, pulling me with him as he started down the narrow concrete hall and toward another, waiting door.
I didn’t fight. Passivity was the best weapon I had at this point, and if they’d been intending to kill me, they would have done it in the shower, when it could have been most easily written off as an accident. No, whatever USAMRIID and Sally’s father intended for me, it required I remain among the living for at least a while longer. I wasn’t happy. My feet were scraped and sore, and I could feel the bruises forming on my stomach, making every breath an ordeal. But I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of seeing how scared I was, or give anyone an excuse to hit me again.
Private Larsen didn’t look happy when we reached the door. I was willing to bet he’d been hoping for resistance on my part. “This is where I leave you,” he said, and opened the door, shoving me roughly through. I stumbled, barely keeping my balance, and looked up only when a hand clamped down on my shoulder.
“What took you so long?” asked Sergeant Hinton. He directed a flat look at the door which was swinging closed behind me. “Did you encounter any trouble getting cleaned up?”
This was a moment of decision. I could tell the truth, and hope he would believe me even when everything told me that he wouldn’t, or I could cleave to the story I’d been given—the one that bought me access to an “easy way” that came with bruises and vomiting in the shower, but might get me through to the other side with my lungs still inside of my body. “I felt sick,” I said. “I don’t like being shocked. Please stop shocking me.”
“It’s an interesting thing about electroshock therapy,” he said, removing his hand from my shoulder and motioning for me to follow him down the hall. “We were using it on some of the early victims, back when we thought we were dealing with a purely psychological problem. We found that it incapacitated them as well as it did unaffected individuals—maybe even better, since the worms that have taken them over depend on the electrical activity of the brain to function. Some of them never regained control of the bodies they’d stolen. We could see them thrashing on the MRI, and when we opened the skulls of those individuals, the parasites were incredibly agitated. But they weren’t in charge anymore. We started using Tasers for crowd control immediately.”
“Can’t… can’t normal people be hurt, too? There was a little girl in the truck with me.” I had to struggle to keep the horror from my voice. He was talking about creatures like me becoming prisoners in their own stolen bodies, unable to move or communicate—trapped. I didn’t know how much sleepwalkers were capable of coherent thought. No one knew that, not even Dr. Cale, and she had created them, even if it had been an accident.
If electric shocks could strand sleepwalkers, they could do the same to chimera. The only difference between us was the precision of our connection to our human hosts. The idea of being lost like that…
I’d been frightened before, and I was sure I’d be frightened again. Before that moment, I hadn’t really understood what it was to be terrified.
“Some people have died, yes, but there are always casualties during times of war.” There was something almost gentle about Sergeant Hinton’s tone, like he was trying to make me understand a complicated fact of life. “We can’t afford to look at winning and losing in terms of single bodies anymore. We have to look at the bigger picture.”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing I could say. The drums were hammering in my ears, screaming danger, screaming that I needed to run away as fast and as far as I possibly could. It was a pity there was nowhere for me to go.
The hall we were walking along was all industrial linoleum and plain concrete walls, making me suspect that we were back at the Oakland Coliseum. As a building, it had been originally designed to hold sporting events and concerts by bands big enough to number their fans in the millions—the sort of
place that was literally visible from space when it turned all the lights on. As a government asset, it was massive, self-contained, and capable of generating the bulk of its own power needs even under normal circumstances. The only thing more tailor-made for this sort of large containment-and-quarantine situation would have been a teaching hospital, and most of those had been overrun during the early days of the crisis. This was the best thing the government was going to get, and they weren’t going to let it go without a fight.
I wondered if they’d been able to get the bloodstains out of the concrete in the loading dock where Ronnie had done the bulk of his delicate, brutal work. I somehow didn’t think it would have been appropriate for me to ask.
Sergeant Hinton steered me along the hall with the calm assurance of a man who simply couldn’t believe I would try to run away from him. It wasn’t even a matter of my being his prisoner, although I absolutely was: Any attempts to flee would have resulted in my death or incapacitation, while he’d have been able to go along like nothing had happened. Would Colonel Mitchell be pissed? My gut told me “yes,” even as my head tried to argue that he’d be relieved to have me out of the picture. Somehow, he’d been able to keep his people from realizing I was anything other than an ungrateful daughter who ran away to be with her boyfriend and his bioterrorist mother. They thought I was also a mass murderer, but that was somehow less important than the fact that they believed I was a human being. If I died in transit, he would never have to tell them the truth.
Then again, if they kept electrocuting me, they’d figure out I wasn’t a normal human girl sooner or later. Normal human girls don’t react to Tasers by losing all use of their bodies. Of all my many tells, that was the one that suddenly seemed to be the most dangerous.
We stopped outside a plain wooden door that looked like it would lead to an office or backstage area. Sergeant Hinton gave me a frank up-and-down appraisal before he said, “Colonel Mitchell is the ranking officer at this facility. I recognize that he’s your father, but we will not tolerate insubordination at this time. It’s bad for morale. I’m sure you can see why, under the circumstances, morale has become extremely important.”