The first door on the other side of the hall was closed. I stopped before turning the doorknob, pressing my ear against the wood and listening for any signs that I wasn’t alone in the house. I didn’t hear anything. I turned the knob and pushed the door slowly open. The room on the other side was utterly destroyed, but what I could pick out through the light filtering in from the street below seemed to imply that it had belonged to a teenage girclass="underline" everything was frilly and pale, washed out so that I couldn’t tell its original color. Most of it was also broken, thrown to the floor and crushed by some angry hand. The tattered remains of posters still blanketed the walls, and what water remained in the fish tank near the bed was foul and dark with mold. I noted all this dispassionately, the bulk of my attention going to the room’s single largest fixture:
The window.
It was closed, rendering the room stifling and somehow septic-smelling, like something had been left in here to rot, but the light seeping in from below was strong enough that I knew it would give me a good view of the street. I could find out whether it was safe for me to leave the house and go looking for a pay phone. I stepped into the room, drawn to that window like a moth to a flame.
Something moaned in the dark. It was a small, weak sound, but it was still enough to bring me to an instant halt, my back going so stiff that it pulled at the wounded muscles in my thighs and made me want to start moaning. I bit my tongue to keep from making a sound and turned, as slowly as I could, to face the farthest corner of the room.
My eyes were adjusting to the dim light. As I peered into the corner, it began slowly resolving from an indistinguishable jumble into distinct shapes. That long, broken pillar was a piece of the bed. Those soft mounds were the comforter, humped up and caked with something foul. And the skeletal collection of joints and angles in the middle of it all was a human being, eyes sunk deep into a skull that was barely contained by a thin panel of tight-stretched skin, hair almost completely ripped from its scalp. I couldn’t tell its original gender: it was naked, but so huddled over that it could have been male or female. Not that it really mattered. The figure was clearly on the verge of death, having been locked in this room so long that its body had already cannibalized every useful bit of tissue that it could without shutting down essential systems. I didn’t know how long it took the average person to starve to death, or how big this one had been when the door shut and the food stopped coming, but regardless, they didn’t have much longer.
The sleepwalker—because there was nothing else it could have been; not with a closed, unlocked door being the only thing between it and freedom—opened its mouth and moaned again, weakly. It didn’t try to get out of its nest. I didn’t think it could have moved if it wanted to.
I bit my lip, staring at the figure in the corner. It didn’t moan again. I wasn’t sure whether that was because it was too weak, or because I had stopped moving and it could no longer tell where I was. Either way, it didn’t seem like it was going to come after me anytime soon. I turned my back on it and resumed my trek toward the window, looking out on the street below.
I’m not really sure what I was expecting after the situation at the hospital and the number of people who had been shoved into USAMRIID’s quarantine. Some part of me had still been holding out the hope that this would all just go away, and the world would return to a semblance of normalcy. I put a hand over my mouth, blinking rapidly to prevent the tears that were welling up in my eyes from clouding my vision. Normalcy was no longer an option, assuming it had ever been an option in the first place.
There were no cars moving on this suburban street, and the few lit windows on the houses around me were all on the second floor, meaning that anyone who was still awake and alive was staying as far from ground level as possible. That made sense.
The street belonged to the sleepwalkers.
There were only about twenty of them in my view, although that didn’t mean that there weren’t more hiding in the bushes or skulking in the long shadows down the sides of those same houses. They were of every age and race, from small children to a man I guessed had to be in his eighties. All of them shambled along with the same mindless lack of purpose, their hands held slightly out in front of them as if to ward away obstacles. While I watched, two of them bumped into each other, patted one another’s arms, and finally joined hands before shambling on in tandem. This neighborhood was no longer the property of the human race. Its successors had taken over.
There was a faint moan from behind me. I whirled, suddenly convinced that the sleepwalker in the corner had managed to get loose and come after me. The bright specks of its eyes glared from the exact spot where I’d seen them before. I took a deep breath, trying to calm my pounding heart. “It’s okay, Sal,” I whispered, earning myself another moan from the sleepwalker. “Unless you’re going to feed it, it’s not strong enough to come after you.” I felt bad about reducing the sleepwalker to an “it,” but that was technically true of the tapeworm part of the composite, and I wasn’t going to sex the human half just to get the proper pronouns.
Still. This room looked like it had been designed for a teenage girl. If she was the sleepwalker, she’d been locked in here when she converted. Either she had been able to shut the door before her parents could get to her or she’d been the first to go, transitioning while she was asleep or otherwise distracted. No matter what had happened, most of her belongings were probably in here with her, and teenage girls had cellphones.
I began feeling my way along the top of the dresser next to the window, moving cautiously in an attempt to keep from cutting myself on the broken glass that had been knocked from the empty picture frames still studding the walls. I found a charger plugged into the wall about halfway down the length of the dresser, its unconnected end seeming to taunt me. There had been a phone in this room. This dark, dangerous room with the watching sleepwalker still occasionally moaning from its place in the corner.
“Steady,” I murmured, as I disconnected the charger and stuffed it into my pocket. I knew the house still had power. If I could find the phone, I could call for help.
A rustling sound from the corner dragged my attention back to the sleepwalker. It was trying to work its way free of its nest, its withered, wasted limbs refusing to support its weight. As it moved, it revealed enough of its chest for me to identify it as the teenage girl whose room this had been. I felt a little better about that. She had already been robbed of her humanity and her future; the least I could do for her was think of her as the woman she had been before one of my cousins burrowed into her brain and destroyed her.
“I’m sorry about touching all your stuff, but I don’t think you could tell me where your phone is,” I said apologetically, and resumed feeling my way along the dresser. “I wish you could. I’m sorry this happened to you.”
She moaned again, even more weakly this time. It was sort of nice not to be alone, since I knew that she wasn’t going to attack me: if she’d been capable of getting to her feet, rather than just rustling around in her nest, she would have done it already. I had a body packed with nutrients and fat, and I could have kept her alive for a good long time if she’d been able to get to me. I felt bad about that too—it was like I was waving a steak in front of a starving man—but since the steak was what was keeping me alive, I wasn’t going to share. It was terrible that her fate and mine had taken such different directions, but it wasn’t my fault. I just wished that there was something I could have done to fix it.
Honestly, I wished I had any idea who could have fixed it, or whether anyone was going to try. Dr. Cale was hard to predict. USAMRIID was all about humanity, and Sherman was all about the tapeworms, but humanity made the tapeworms—humanity brought the whole situation down on their own heads—and the tapeworms were taking things that didn’t belong to them. No one was completely in the right. No one was completely in the wrong, either.