Parasite (Parasitology, #1)(101)

The worst part of it was that he didn’t look like the sleepwalker who’d been at our back door, or the one outside the car. His eyes were still aware, still struggling to focus.

“Joyce, if this lab has security, this would be a good time to call for them,” I said, not taking my eyes off my father. He wasn’t moving. I honestly didn’t know whether that was a good sign, or a bad one. In dogs, that sort of stillness could be a precursor to an attack.

“What are you talking about, Sal?” She stepped forward, moving toward us.

I didn’t think. I just reacted, moving quickly to get her out of Dad’s reach. I grabbed her arm and jerked her back just as he began to move again, hands grasping at the air where she had been standing only a half second before. Joyce made a small, startled shrieking sound, one that dwindled almost instantly into a cough. Dad grabbed for the air again. I jerked her even harder away from him.

The other technicians were starting to look up from their work, abandoning the pretense that we could have a private family conversation in the middle of a busy government lab. That was good, since the alternative was their politely ignoring us while my father ripped us apart.

“He’s sick!” I shouted, pulling Joyce another step backward. Dad continued to follow us. At least he wasn’t moving very fast yet; he still seemed disoriented, like he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.

Fight it, Dad, I thought. That… thing… that’s taking you over, fight it for as long as you can. Let me get Joyce out of here.

Joyce finally seemed to understand the danger we were in. She stumbled as she got her feet under her, and then she was backpedaling on her own, no longer relying on me to pull her. “Daddy?” she asked.

“He was fine when we got here!” I said. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? He’d already been slipping, and I’d known that something was wrong, I’d known, and I’d ignored the signs, because… because…

Because I didn’t know what else to do. We were through the broken doors now, and the only ground left was the unfamiliar kind.

Dr. Cale said that once someone started showing symptoms of the sleepwalking sickness, it was too late for any treatment, because the parasite was already in their brain. But she would say that, wouldn’t she? Even if it wasn’t strictly true, she’d say it. The SymboGen implants were her children. She might not actively side with them against the human race. That didn’t mean she was going to go out of her way to figure out how to stop them from taking the things they wanted. Like bodies of their own.

The other technicians were in motion now, some of them running for the exits, others grabbing old-fashioned telephones from the walls and gabbling into them, presumably calling security. I yanked Joyce back another step before raising my voice and calling, “Does anybody have any antiparasitics? I mean really good ones? We need—” I cheated my eyes toward Joyce and asked, “What do you use for tapeworms?”

It seemed impossibly weird to be asking her questions when our father, clearly dazed, was shambling toward us like something out of a horror movie. Oddly, that seemed to help Joyce. This was too strange to be happening: therefore, it wasn’t happening. “Praziquantel,” she said. “It has some negative side effects, though, like—”

“Is one of the negative side effects death?” I demanded. “Because if it’s not, I suggest we get somebody to pump Dad full of the stuff right now.”

Joyce took her eyes off our father in order to blink at me in obvious bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”

I wasn’t sure whether sleepwalkers were capable of watching for an opening—if they were anything like as confused as Dr. Cale had implied, they might not be capable of anything beyond basic instinct, at least initially—but my father still took advantage of the opening when Joyce presented it to him. He lunged forward. He was fast. I was just a little bit faster. I grabbed her shoulders and yanked her hard away from him, leaving his hands to slap together on empty air with a flat, meaty sound that would haunt my dreams for days. Joyce yelped, as much with surprise as anything else, and fell over, upsetting two trays of instruments in the process. I barely managed to dodge in time to keep her from taking me to the floor with her.

The sudden flurry of movement seemed to confuse our father, who froze, his face swinging slowly toward me, then toward Joyce, and back to me again. I straightened slowly, raising my hands in front of me to show that they were empty. I don’t know what good I was expecting that to do. I wasn’t thinking particularly clearly by that point.

“Dad, you’re sick,” I said, enunciating each word as clearly as I could. “I need you to fight against whatever it is you want to do right now, and focus on the sound of my voice. There’s something we can do to help you be better, but it won’t work if you don’t focus on the sound of my voice. Can you do that for me, Dad? Can you fo—”

Without warning, he lunged. I squeaked, stopping in the middle of my sentence, and turned to run. He seemed to track by sound and motion. Joyce was frozen in terror. She wasn’t making a sound, and she wasn’t going anywhere. All I had to do was keep his eyes on me, and trust that someone would stop him before he could do something we’d both regret later.

Well. Maybe I wouldn’t regret it if he killed me. I’d be dead, after all. But I’d sure as hell regret letting myself get into this position if things got that far, in the time I had before oxygen deprivation resulted in my second clinical brain death.