Chimera (Parasitology) Read Online Free PDF

that much raw voltage—but they sat up quickly, getting their bearings back. One of the men threw up in the corner of the truck before slinking guiltily back to sit beside the woman and the toddler. Most of them were crying. No one looked happy to be there.
    One by one, the newcomers revealed how they’d been caught. Looting a supermarket that still had an active alarm system. Running from a pack of sleepwalkers in a public park. Trying to find a CVS that had children’s cold medicine on the shelves. That last was the young woman with the toddler. She glanced guiltily at the child as she spoke, as if she was questioning the wisdom of trading freedom for cold medication.
    None of them had any possessions beyond the clothes on their backs, not even the little girl, which seemed odd to me. When I saw children that age, they almost always seemed to have a doll or a toy truck or stuffed bear. This little girl had nothing, and she clung to the woman she was with like she was afraid that even this last scrap of comfort would be taken away from her.
    “No one’s managed to escape in weeks,” moaned one of the men, closing his eyes as he slumped against the wall of the truck. “They’ve shored up the fences and increased the patrols. There’s no way anyone is getting out of there once they go in.”
    “So we escape from the quarantine facility,” said Paul stoutly. “I’m sure it’s possible.”
    “Oh, it’s possible,” said the first man. “Some lady escaped from the quarantine facility months ago, and killed almost a dozen men getting to the exit. They have instructions at the quarantine facility now. They start with ‘shoot,’ and they end with ‘to kill.’”
    I managed not to squirm, even though I knew I was probably the woman he was talking about. I had been held in aquarantine facility the first time USAMRIID had captured me. Sherman had somehow managed to infiltrate the team that transported me to the facility, and hadn’t even waited a day before he’d come for me. He’d come with a full team. One of them, Ronnie, had been dealing with some anger issues. He was the one who had killed those soldiers. Not me, even though they’d died so that Sherman could have me all to himself.
    At the time, I’d been grateful for the rescue. I’d even stayed grateful once I was aware of the lives it had cost—at least for a while. Sherman had a way of stomping the gratitude out of people.
    It wasn’t a surprise that Sherman had been able to infiltrate USAMRIID: In some ways, it would have been more of a surprise if he hadn’t. Sherman Lewis was a man with a talent for getting into places where he wasn’t needed, wanted, or allowed to be. He’d started when he got into the skull of the body he inhabited. Like me, Sherman was a chimera. Unlike me, he couldn’t access the hot warm dark, and he hadn’t been able to take his body unassisted; he had been Dr. Cale’s second surgical protégé, following on the heels of my eldest brother and her first successful chimera, Adam. Sherman had been intended to show her that the process was stable and dependable and could be repeated. He’d shown all those things.
    He’d also been the first one to show her that her children could be—would be—disloyal. He’d left her lab immediately after Sally Mitchell’s accident and had been waiting for me at SymboGen when my head finally cleared. I’d known Sherman for literally years before I’d become aware of my own nature. He’d been my friend and my guide through a world that was bigger and more complicated than it had any right to be. I’d always felt safe in his presence, like Sherman of all people would always understand what I was dealing with, and better, like he would be able to explain it all to me. He
got
me in a way that very few people ever could. Finding out the real reasonswhy had been, in some ways, a greater betrayal than finding out that I wasn’t human. He’d known all along that I was his sister in