Parasite

Banks was coming back out of his office to see me. I had been dismissed, and I knew it. “Tell Dr. Banks that I am not happy with him right now.” For a lot of reasons, only some of which I was ever planning to discuss with him.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I shuddered and started walking again, Nathan by my side. The doors slid smoothly open to allow us to exit the building, and the jasmine-scented San Francisco afternoon reached out to embrace us.

The world felt dirtier and more complicated as soon as we stepped outside the artificial environment of the SymboGen building. For a company that was built on the hygiene hypothesis, whoever was responsible for the SymboGen interior decorating had chosen a surprisingly sterile palate. The plants were overgroomed to the point of seeming artificial, and filtration systems were everywhere, attached to the small scent-diffusion units that pumped the perfume into the air. I had never seen anything out of place.

Even here in the parking lot things were cleaner than they should have been. The white lines were bright enough to be freshly painted, and the asphalt was so black that I would have assumed it was fresh if it hadn’t always looked like this. The landscaping was pristine. After what had happened inside, all that cleanliness was oddly chilling. It felt like a knot loosened in my chest when we reached Nathan’s car, with its muddy wheels and fast-food wrappers in the footwell.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Sal?” asked Nathan. “You’re pale.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think I am okay.” It wasn’t reassuring, but then again, it wasn’t intended to be. I tried never to lie to Nathan, even when it was something as small as claiming to be “fine” when I wasn’t. He always caught me, and I always felt terrible for having tried to deceive him.

“Do you want to stay at my place tonight?” Nathan kissed my forehead, squeezing my fingers at the same time. Then he let me go and walked around the car. The alarm chirped, signaling that the locks were open.

“I can’t. You heard the officer—my things are being sent to my house, not yours. I think my parents will panic if they get that kind of delivery without me being there to explain it to them.” I opened the door, sliding into the car. It was a relief to sit down after standing for so long. My legs promptly went limp, making me worry that I’d need Nathan’s help if I ever wanted to get up again.

Nathan got into the driver’s side, closing the door behind himself. “Do you mind if I come home with you, then? I don’t want to leave you alone, and it would be nice to spend some time with Beverly.”

“That would be fine,” I said, and smiled.

Then the weight of my betrayal crashed down on me. Sherman was infected—or worse, Sherman was dead—and here I was smiling at my boyfriend, happy at the idea of spending an afternoon with him and the dog I had stolen from another infected man, another man who might be dead.

Wait. Chave and Beverly’s owner had been infected with the same thing. I’d seen both of them succumb, and they had followed the same pattern. “Oh my God, is this my fault?” I whispered. My lips seemed numb, like they were barely attached to my body. “Did I get Chave sick? Did I get her killed?”

“Sal, what are you talking about?”

“Did they tell you anything about what happened inside the quarantine?”

“No, just that it was some kind of lab error, and you’d been exposed.” Nathan was looking at me with blatant worry, not bothering to conceal it. “What do you mean, is this your fault?”

Suddenly, I didn’t want to be explaining this where we were; not on SymboGen property, where someone could realize that they hadn’t forbidden me to tell my boyfriend the truth about what happened. I could ignore my phone if it started ringing—or I would have been able to, if they hadn’t taken it away from me. I couldn’t ignore somebody pounding on the window nearly so easily. “Drive. Please. I’ll explain while you drive.”

“All right, honey. Just take some deep breaths, and tell me what’s going on, okay?”

“Okay,” I said… but I didn’t say anything else until the SymboGen building was one more piece of the skyline receding behind us, and there was no chance that we’d be overheard. “Okay,” I repeated.

“Sal?”

“I’m sorry, I just…” I took a breath. “It started out as a pretty normal visit to SymboGen. Lots of tests, Dr. Banks trying to convince me he had my best interests at heart, lots of people running lots of tests on me…” I closed my eyes as I continued talking, recounting the events of the day. I didn’t strictly need to tell Nathan everything—he would probably have been happy with just what happened in the cafeteria and afterward—but I wanted to ease into it, and I wanted to remember Chave and Sherman the way I’d always known them. Chave was never my friend. That didn’t mean she deserved to die the way she did.

Besides, telling him everything meant pointing out Chave’s absolute lack of any symptoms, right up until the moment where she had every symptom and lost herself in whatever strange infection had claimed her mind. There should have been something, some sign to indicate that everything was not okay. There hadn’t been anything at all.

Nathan asked occasional questions, but for the most part, he let me talk. When I came to the part about the cafeteria, he made me repeat the walk from the elevator three times. I didn’t mind. We were both looking for something that could explain what had happened, and neither of us was finding it. Then I reached the worst part of the story, and he stopped asking questions. I spoke, and he drove, and SymboGen fell farther and farther into the distance.

Finally, he said, “Sherman was showing no signs of getting sick when you saw him?”

“No, none. He looked kind of upset, but—we all did.” I opened my eyes, turning to face Nathan. “He was worried about me.”

“He was your friend. Of course he was worried about you.” Nathan tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “I would have been worried about you, too, if they hadn’t left me waiting in one of the ninth-floor lobbies for an interview that never came.”

I frowned. SymboGen was the global leader in parasitology, both in research of existing species and in the lucrative development of new strains. Other companies had tried to repeat the success of the Intestinal Bodyguard, but none of them had been able to get their claws into the market. Nathan’s career was never going to move beyond a certain point if he couldn’t get a job at SymboGen—and after my recounting of the day, we both knew why he’d been called in for the interview. It had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with keeping me where Dr. Banks could see me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Nathan flashed me a very quick smile. He took one hand off the wheel, reaching over to briefly squeeze my knee. “It’s not your fault. I wouldn’t want to work there anyway, if it meant that Dr. Banks had managed to get you under his thumb full-time. I’m pretty sure punching your boss in the throat is an excellent way to get yourself fired.”

“You say the sweetest things.”

“I mean them.”

“That helps.” I sighed, sinking back into my seat. “I can’t stop thinking about Sherman. What if he’s scared? What if they haven’t told him what’s going on?” What if he was dead? But my mind shied away from that thought, refusing to fully process it. Sherman wasn’t my best friend. He wasn’t even someone I saw outside of SymboGen. But he was kind to me, and I didn’t want him to be hurt.

“Sal… it sounds like Chave had the sleeping sickness. If SymboGen has a test for it, they haven’t shared it with the local hospitals yet. I think that if they know Sherman is infected, it’s because he already started showing symptoms.” What Nathan didn’t say was that no one who developed symptoms had yet recovered, or awakened from their disconnected state. Cases were still rare, but there had been enough of them that we were starting to understand a little bit about how the sickness worked. The victims got sick. They didn’t get better.

But still. “I don’t know if SymboGen has a test or not. They didn’t draw blood or anything. Dr. Lo ran a light wand all over me, watching for some sort of reaction from my skin, but—Nathan!” He had suddenly twisted the wheel, sending us skidding into the next lane. Horns blared as he got the car back under control, and kept blaring as I screamed, trying to go fetal despite the seat belt restraining me. I curled tighter, continuing to scream.

We were going to die. We were going to crash and die, and even when I felt the car stop moving, that didn’t matter, because we were going to have an accident, and we were going to die. I was going to die again, and this time, there wouldn’t be any medical miracle to save me. We were going to die we were going to die we were going to—

“Sal!” Nathan tightened his hands on my shoulders, hauling me out of the dark pit I had suddenly fallen into.