Chimera (Parasitology) Read Online Free PDF Page A

town?” The question sounded incredibly naive. I still wanted to know the answer. Pleasanton was one of those places that had always struck me as being as innocuous as its name: sleepy and suburban and filled with malls and car dealerships and families, not close enough to San Francisco to really be subjected to population crush, not far enough away to be suffering from a bad economy. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect place to live, but it had always looked that way from a distance.
    “The slightly less good part of town,” amended Paul. “It’s the bad part of town now.”
    “Everything is the bad part of town now,” said Carrie.
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “Aren’t you safer there, with people who you know aren’t infected?”
    “Those things will just kill you,” said Paul. “It’s an awfulway to die, but that’s all that happens. You change or you die. Humans are worse. Humans are terrifying.”
    “Humans will hurt you because they want what you have, not because it’s their instinct,” said Carrie. “We should have stayed hidden. We should have stayed safe. We knew how to survive where we were. Here… here, we don’t know anything.” She buried her face in Paul’s shoulder again, and none of us said anything. It felt like there was nothing left for us to say.

Break the mirror; it tells lies.
    Learn to live in your disguise.
    Everything is changing now, it’s too late to go back.
    Caterpillar child of mine,
    This was always life’s design,
    Here at last you’ll find the things you can’t afford to lack.
    The broken doors are ready, you are very nearly home.
    My darling child, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.
    —FROM
DON’T GO OUT ALONE
, BY SIMONE KIMBERLEY, PUBLISHED 2006 BY LIGHTHOUSE PRESS. CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT.
    I don’t know why I keep pretending this book is going to be published someday. “Dr. Cale, the woman who betrayed the human race, tells all in her explosive memoir.” That’s not exactly something that’s going to fly off store shelves: not unless we’re talking about 300 pages of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” over and over again, and as I discussed earlier in this volume, I am not sorry. I’ve never been sorry. I’ve said it—Lord, have I said it—but I’ve never meant it. That justisn’t how I’m made. When my parents combined the genetic material that would become Surrey Kim, they included genes for brilliance, for ambition, for curiosity… but they forgot to include the genes that would have taught me regret. What’s done is done. We live with it, and we move on.
    What’s done is done. I have learned to live with it. Now is the time when we move on, and when we ask the world, “Well? What’s next?” Because there has to be a form of equilibrium somewhere on the horizon: There has to be at point at which the systems currently in motion find a way to rest. There
has
to be.
    —FROM
CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD
. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.

Chapter 2
NOVEMBER 2027
    W e stopped three times during our drive. Each time, the back of the truck was pulled open by a group of grim-faced men in uniform, who would then proceed to throw more passengers into the vehicle with as much compassion as the people at the animal shelter where I used to work showed to the sacks of dog food. They added one passenger at our first stop; three at our second; and finally seven people at our third, including a woman who was wrapped almost completely around a toddler, limbs rigid, like she was forcing her body to act as a human cage. Of the eleven people who were thrown into the truck, only the toddler hadn’t been hit with a Taser. She sat on the bench, crying huge, silent tears while the rest of us helped her mother uncurl and shake herself back into the moment.
    None of the people who had been thrown in with us sharedmy slow recovery from the shock. They weren’t
happy
—I don’t think anyone could be
happy
about getting zapped with