Read Chimera (Parasitology) for Free Online

still keeping time, they weren’t pulling it out. The cell networks were down. The phones were glorified wristwatches now. That didn’t mean the soldiers who’d sedated my fellow passengers would have let them keep their things. The absence of the little girl’s expected security object was the best indicator I could find that anything people had been carrying had been cast aside. Less to sterilize, I guess.
    Our first sign that things were about to change came when the truck screeched to a sudden stop, sending some of the passengers rocking forward while others gripped the bench seats and stayed exactly where they were.
    “Are we there?” whispered Carrie. “Are we at the quarantine?”
    Paul, who held her, said nothing.
    There was a clattering from the back of the truck, near the doors. All of us, from the oldest to the youngest, pulled instinctively away, pushing ourselves together in our need to escape from that terribly mundane sound. Then the doors swung open, and what looked like an entire platoon of soldiers was standing there. Some held guns that seemed too big for their arms. Others held cattle prods, their active ends sparking and crackling in the evening air.
    The sun was almost down. Or maybe it was almost up: this could just as easily be morning. I realized I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious after Colonel Mitchell had me electrocuted. Maybe I’d lost hours. Maybe I’d lost days.
    And maybe these men were here to take even more awayfrom me. Most of them looked young, their faces gaunt and their eyes haunted with specters I couldn’t even imagine. All of them looked grim, like they had given up hope of anything but this world, this place and time.
    “Everyone out of the truck,” commanded one of the men. His voice broke in the middle of the sentence. Based on that and the acne that was scrawled red and raw across his face, he was barely out of his teens, going through a delayed and possibly painful puberty. I hadn’t even realized it was possible to enlist that young… and maybe it wasn’t. There were always going to be people willing to trade a place in a cage for a gun and somebody they could point it at.
    No one moved.
    Another soldier stepped forward. This one was carrying a cattle prod. The sight of it made us all shrink back just a little bit farther. “My name is Sergeant Hinton. Will Sally Mitchell please come with me?”
    No one moved.
    Looking annoyed now, Sergeant Hinton said, “Sally Mitchell, we know you are present in this vehicle. We have confirmed your name on the manifest. If you do not present yourself, we will be forced to take steps to subdue the entire area before locating you. You won’t enjoy that. I won’t enjoy that. Some of my men may enjoy that. I’d rather not know. So if Sally Mitchell would please get
her damn ass up
and come out, of her own free fucking will, I would very much appreciate it.”
    Those cattle prods seemed enormous. They loomed in my field of vision like the answer to a question I had neither asked nor particularly wanted to have answered. Slowly, I pushed myself off the bench seat and walked on shaking legs to the mouth of the truck. The muzzles of the guns and the sparking ends of the cattle prods tracked me with every step I took. The people who had been my fellow passengers until only a fewmoments before—travelers on the same terrible journey that I was involuntarily taking—recoiled as I passed them, eyeing me with all the suspicion they had previously reserved for the men with the guns.
    I wanted to protest, to tell them I was the same person I had been for the whole journey. I didn’t say anything. I just stopped at the lip of the truck and said, without looking back, “I’m Sally Mitchell, sir.”
    “Excellent.” Sergeant Hinton turned away from me. “Private? Secure the prisoner.”
    I didn’t have time to dodge before the cattle prod hit me in the small of the back, and everything dropped away again.
    This time when I