Chimera (Parasitology) Read Online Free PDF Page B

petri dish and production line, and he’d never said a word. Not until it was profitable for him.
    Sherman was playing a very long game, and the necessary conditions for victory involved the destruction of mankind and the replacement of their rule with his own. Dr. Cale wasn’t going to let him do that. Neither, if I could help it, was I.
    The conversation in the truck was continuing, growing more urgent by the minute. “What about the transfer point?” demanded the woman with the toddler. “They have to move us from the truck to the quarantine, right? We can run then. We can just break away and run.”
    “Bang fucking bang, Gloria,” said one of the men she’d been captured with.
    She shot him a poisonous glare. “Not in front of the kid,” she snapped.
    The little girl wasn’t originally hers, then. That explained the differences in their appearance—the child was at least three shades darker than the woman, which could have been a matter of paternity, adoption, or recessive genes, but was more likely, under the circumstances, to mean the woman was taking care of a child whose parents had been killed. Or who had started killing. SymboGen implants were cleared for all humans, all ages, genders, and weights. There was a good chance the little girl had an implant. I watched her across the truck, looking for signs that her eyes were coming unfocused or going cold. I wished I had a dog. They could accurately predict when someone was about to go sleepwalker—something that neither humans nor chimera could do.
    USAMRIID wasn’t using dogs. I wondered why not, and whether they had even realized how useful dogs could be when it came to catching the early stages of a tapeworm takeover oftheir host body. I decided just as quickly that I wasn’t going to tell them. If they were really reacting to all outbreaks and escape attempts with deadly force, regardless of the situation, I didn’t want to give them any more ammunition than I absolutely had to. Dogs could be used to capture more humans, and ferret out more sleepwalkers who weren’t hurting anyone. And I didn’t trust them to take
care
of their dogs. I wasn’t going to be responsible for opening a new avenue of animal abuse.
    And none of that mattered. They had me now. One way or another, I was going to wind up giving them a lot of ammunition. The only question was whether I was going to answer their questions honestly, giving them ammunition that could actually be used, or whether I was going to start lying to them.
    “She doesn’t care if I cuss,” said the man. “Her own mom tried to chew her face off and left her stuck with the babysitter. A few swear words aren’t going to fuck up her world any worse than it already is.”
    The little girl moaned and buried her face against the woman’s—Gloria’s—shoulder. It was a human sound, filled with confusion and pain, rather than the hollow hunger of the sleepwalkers. Most of the people around us still flinched, and more than a few of them glared at the man, like he was solely responsible for their growing sensitivity to such things.
    “Don’t look at me like that,” he said, settling against the truck wall. “The world is fucked up. We did that. We broke it because we were too lazy to take our allergy meds and monitor our own health. All I’m doing is trying to stay alive in the pieces that remain.”
    “Fuck you,” said Carrie dully.
    “Please,” said Gloria. “Please, not in front of the kid. Please.”
    Her quiet plea was enough to silence the others. The truck drove on, and we rode in silence, each of us sinking down intothe pits of our own thoughts. The drums hammered in my ears, providing me with some small comfort. I only wished that I could believe the humans around me had something similar. But they didn’t, and I didn’t have any way to help them, and so we just rode on.
    I don’t know how long the drive took. There were no clocks in the truck, and if anyone had a cell phone that was