Chimera (Parasitology) by Mira Grant Page B

jitter.
    I shifted positions, trying to put more of my body between them and Paul without being obvious about what I was doing. The pheromone tags were continuing to get stronger. It would all be over soon. “Why? He’s sick. Why are you pointing guns at him when he’s just sick? Guns don’t make sick people better!” I didn’t have to work to add the panicked whine to my voice. It came entirely on its own.
    “He’s sick, yes,” said Lieutenant Robinson. “We cannot offer medical assistance with you between us and him. Please move away from your housemate.”
    “That doesn’t look like medical assistance,” I said, pulling one hand away from Paul in order to indicate the guns. “That looks like you’re going to shoot him.”
    “We’re going to do everything we can to help.”
    Paul moaned.
    Lieutenant Robinson stiffened, his posture changing to something more closed and military. “Move away from the target! That is an order!”
    I didn’t comment on how Paul had just gone from being my housemate to being “the target.” I didn’t need to. I just turned back to him, and watched the last of the clarity slip out of his eyes, replaced by incomprehension and hunger. So much hunger. In the span of a second, Paul went from a man who didn’t know what was happening to him but was willing to fight against it to an appetite big enough to eat the world. His jaw dropped, tension going out of it. He moaned again.
    “Paul?” I whispered.
    He lunged for me.
    I scrambled backward as quickly as I could, nearly tumbling over myself as I moved out of range of his teeth. Some sleepwalkers experienced a period of disorientation or even unconsciousness when they took over their human hosts, hence thename, which had been coined following the earliest outbreaks. Others had a more violent response, and went straight to trying to do what they did best: eating. Paul was apparently one of the lucky ones.
    A hand grabbed my arm, yanking me farther back, and then the sound of gunfire consumed the world. Paul didn’t have a chance. He didn’t seem to notice, though: He just kept advancing, even as the bullets struck his body, reaching for me with hands that could never hold enough to feel full.
    When the damage became too much for him, he fell, and he didn’t move again. The smell of gunpowder and blood filled the alley, wiping away the pheromones that had betrayed Paul’s position in the first place. I twisted to find Lieutenant Robinson holding my arm. He didn’t let go.
    “That’s two you owe me,” he said. “Your father wants to see you now.”
    Under the circumstances, there was nothing I could do but nod meekly and let him take me.

We have a problem, and I don’t know what we’re going to do to solve it.
    I’ve moved my technicians and interns to bottled water for now: I have teams scouring every big box store and grocery outlet in a twenty-mile radius for more. It’s not going to last forever, and we don’t have a purification system set up for the tap water. The tap water! We let ourselves become too trusting as a species, and this is what that sort of thing gets you. It gets you tapeworms in your drinking glass, and a battleground inside your body.
    Even Adam has to avoid the faucet. I’m still trying to culture these eggs, and I don’t know whether they’d attempt to take him over. His integration with his host is solid, but that doesn’t mean he’s prepared for that sort of internal war.
    Thank God we caught this before we lost anyone. As it stands, we’ve burned through a lot of antiparasitics, some of which had to be administered more aggressively than I like, and people are scared. People have a reason to be.
    Of all the things I thought to be afraid of, I never thought to be frightened of the water.
    —FROM THE NOTES OF DR. SHANTI CALE, DECEMBER 2027
    Mom is terrified. She tries to hide it, but she’s not good at concealing her emotions: She never has been. Maybe that’s why she’s always