Civil Blood_The Vampire Rights Trial that Changed a Nation

by Chris Hepler

  The lights blink over the Folger lobby. Cue audience. Well-dressed adults walk to the theater past the display cases of Shakespearean memorabilia. Under glass are two swords: not the domesticated fencing foils used by actors but Elizabethan-era rapiers, wild and long and with an edge that can flick off an ear. I finger the container of needles in my left jacket pocket. Weapons change over the years: intent, never.

  Simon Walter Davis tested positive for the antibodies for European Bat Lyssavirus-4, the virus that causes VIHPS. The syndrome is not listed in any disease directory, and the epidemiologists that run the tests at the Benjamin Rush Health Initiative have never heard of it. I have committed the symptoms to memory: overwhelming hunger, violent urges, bone ossification and muscle attachment, significant synaptic plasticity and phenomenally accelerated cell regeneration. As for the blood, and their consumption of it, that's a separate lecture.

  I see a balding pattern, Davis-like, not far from the exit. It would not be out of character for Davis to be a wallflower—he was allegedly infected eleven days ago, and headaches and nausea often put a damper on vectors' sociability. Another percentage—I honestly forget how much, it changes so often—are uncomfortable seeing people from their pre-infection lives.

  The man in the corner is not my quarry. I turn on my heel and hurry to the Reading Room. Oak bookshelves, balconies, chandeliers. No cover but desks.

  I spot an unkempt beard. Most vectors have trouble concentrating in the first weeks after infection, and Simon Walter Davis is neither well-dressed nor well-groomed. He probably has no clue what he's infected with, but he knows something is wrong. He's concentrating so much on acting normal that he misses it completely.

  I am fairly good at acting normal.

  He moves through the stragglers, eyes downcast. Then, he looks relieved: he sees a familiar face. His conversation partner has a sport coat and the short limbs and muscular build of a wrestler. They head off together. Not to the theater.

  Vectors like isolation. It takes no imagination to figure out why.

  I try not to run, try to keep the coldness from my face and eyes. If Davis knows the building, he might be headed for the gardens. Though vectors are often too nervous to do anything within shouting distance of a crowd, "often" is a very thin shield. Vectors and criminal masterminds have little in common.

  Three people block my way. Living static.

  "—you should have been here for the First Amendment March. It had everyone from every adult film ever made—"

  "—I was. That's that time I got hit on. We're nose-to-nose in the subway. I mean, like here, and not only was he a porn director, it was fetish, and then he starts asking what spas I've been to, and I'm not sure if I should take it as a compliment—"

  "—it's totally a compliment—"

  "—and then the Metro conductor's like, 'Next stop, Dupont Circle,' and the whole train goes, 'YAWHOO—'"

  I glance over. Though I am tall and quite distinctive, Davis has no idea who I am and so does not flee at the sight of me. He is intent on his conversational partner. Their talk would be audible if it weren't for the theatergoers who have wandered into my face.

  "—so, that's my experience with demonstrations."

  "What about you? You ever been in a march?"

  The three twenty-somethings look at me. I fake it. "Two. One for stimweb control, one for water rights." My politics range yellow rather than blue or red, but D.C. is deep sapphire on the electoral map, so the answer helps me blend.

  There. Davis is leaving with his friend, a viral transfer in the making if I've ever seen one. But the three chatterers are drunk and interpose.

  "God, another one who wants to get away from me."

  "Yeah, why might that be?" says the woman, who is popping Vitamin C from a bottle. "Don't let him scare you, whats-your-name."

  "Roland," I say. I have forgotten the last person I spoke to, so I use my standard alias. "I do sanitation."

  She doesn't miss a beat. "So, I guess you can take a lot of shit?"

  "I don't need public appreciation," I say. "If you'll excuse me, I'm with him." I point to a cluster of four men. I slip past the trio, smile and, as I reach the next cluster, clap one man on the back as he goes by, completing the illusion of a friend. While the man tries to place me, I make for the restroom, cutting across voices.

  "—her statements are so out-there. She wants the Freedom Forever candidacy—"

  "—but that's what actors say, right? Nobody's a villain in their own mind—"

  The crowd thins as the audience flows slowly to their seats. Cold molasses.

  In the restroom, I shut myself in a stall. Shadowing Davis directly is chancy. I have an alternative, if I'm fast. I pull the straps of my stimweb out from my sleeve and loop them over my fingers. I pin its baggy fishnet in place with the acupuncturist's needles I take from my jacket pocket. Unlike in Chinese medicine, here the needles go in the doctor, not the patient.

  I was a doctor once. What I do now is not medicine, traditional or otherwise.

  Two more needles go through the conductive web under my jacket collar and into the flesh of my ring finger. Touching thumb and ring finger together, I feel for the interrupted rhythm of qi flow.

  Qi? It's life's energy. It was elusive for centuries, until Dr. Jessica Ulan finally tamed it with technology and biofeedback. Remember Jess. She's the famous one for a reason.

  Thap-thap. My heart pumps blood, and I dial up the stimweb. Three-quarters of a volt circulates through my arm, a faster, pulsing twitch. Thap, thap, thap. I hold my right thumb and forefinger in a circle, making a ring of living qi. I concentrate: my thumb and fingers warm, signaling a dot of invisible energy growing in the center of the ring.

  The circle spreads out, shimmering like heat on a desert road. It expands in an ever-larger donut. For a qi function to last and grow, you need to balance opposing positive and negative energies, spin them like a record with a carefully calculated drop-off rate. I increase the stimweb's voltage by squares to keep the energy's expansion steady despite its diminishing power. When it flows easily through my body and reaches the stall wall, I kick the cybernetics.

  Roughly two dozen jolts go through my body from nanotech pulse-points. The effect on the biowave is like lighting an acetone fume, and the spiralling energy shoots out. I feel it flicker against a moving yang-within-yin field. My vector, outside the building but caught in the net. Davis has left by the street, not the garden. Going home.

  Like a tide leaving behind seaweed, the wave marks Davis. I feel a gentle tug drawing me closer while the stimweb keeps the function sustained. The chancy part, the long-range part, is done. Now, it's time to allay suspicion. I close my eyes and stroke my fingers over them: they tingle. I push my hair back. It warms my skull. This biophysical field is easier, a familiar function that toys with other people's perceptions. I check my reflection in the chrome of the toilet: irises gray, hair a sandy blond. The truth has been masked.

  A shudder runs through me. I am wet with sweat, and my saliva tastes like metal. Biochemical imbalance: hazard of the job.

  Checking outside the stall to ensure no one is near, I pull at my shoe. I produce a four-round magazine that fits in a hollowed-out steel heel. From my breast pocket, I pull a thick pen with ends that come off, forming a rifled barrel. From my jacket, a box that I twist, releasing an all-plastic pistol grip. I rack an eleven-millimeter Glaser into the firing chamber.

  The murmur of the crowd has stopped. I hear the chant of a chorus.

  Two households, both alike in dignity,

  In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

  From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

  Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

  Anchoring my personal qi field, I alter the biophysical radiation emanating from my hand. It shimmers in the bright light of the bathroom stall, and the pistol vanishes. Yes, my hand still reflects the same number of photons per square centimeter and other such dross. But with a con
cealment field radiating out from it, humans nearby won't register it as anything other than bare and empty, which makes it ideal for my line of work.

  I am a magician. I make people disappear.

  ◆◆◆

  The air outside is like a swamp's breath. Simon Walter Davis and his companion don't seem to mind sweating. They push a brisk pace down East Capitol Street, away from the eyes of his former colleagues. The streets are largely deserted, but my qi function is like a wire connecting us. I can fall back to a good shadowing distance. I dial the number for the hot van.

  "Hello."

  "I have a dog in heat." It's code. "Is this the number for animal control?"

  "It is not." The phone clicks as if hanging up. I stay on the line, allowing the F-prots to cue up their finder program. The van now knows exactly where I am in real time.

  Davis turns a corner, and I close the distance, staying only a block behind. Running three qi functions, I am in no shape to sprint for long, either toward or away. By all precedent, Simon Walter Davis will be nervous and irritable from the strange new senses flooding his brain. Being sick will only make him stronger, more capable of lashing out.

  The hot van has restraints, but no one on my team believes in them.

  I withdraw the last section of my pistol from my pockets; a disposable silencer. Last night I downloaded its specs off some eternally mirrored Net site, slid them into a forgebox, and one nasty smell of burning plastic later, produced a small assembly line of muffler-shaped, killer Tupperware. Now, of course, it smells like hand soap from the bathroom sink, a precaution for a vector's sensitive nose. I thread the silencer and thumb the slide lock into place. It'll be a quiet shot, but I'll only get one.

  Simon Walter Davis hears none of this, intent on his companion.

  Davis and his friend turn in to a brownstone on East Capitol, through a low, decorative iron fence. I pause in the shadow of a tree and key in the emergency number. With a civilian out of sight, I must assume Davis is aiming for infection. But the F-prot program is strict: never confront a vector alone.

  My skin starts to sting a little from the functions as I wait the long minutes before the hot van pulls up. It's red and white with just the right amount of attention. The whole neighborhood will remember an ambulance but rarely any additional details.

  "Is he alone?" asks the driver, a former prison guard named al-Ibrahim.

  "No."

  Al-Ibrahim circles his finger in the air, and two F-prots open the ambulance's back doors. One unloads the gurney. The other dons yellow gloves, the kind a novice might mistake for a surgeon's or a dishwasher's. These go up to the shoulder. Deer hunters call them gutting gloves.

  That one, Breunig, comes with me to the door. I'm the specialist. Breunig leads the team. Hands-on, from the front. He has a touch-and-talk tablet ready. I remove my jacket and bind my long hair up in a fry-cook's net, then tuck it under a cap with a caduceus on it: EMT gear.

  I ring the bell, wondering what I will be interrupting. Davis, smoking weed and playing Scrabble? Vectors are often surprised, and that's the safest. Davis, interrupted during feeding? Happens all the time. It's wet and messy, every drop of blood turning a suburban living room into a biological minefield. Davis, reaping the rewards of a proposition? Plenty of them don't even get dressed to answer the door.

  There was an incident a year ago in Anne Arundel County where four vectors assaulted a jogger, Andrew Leyman, on the side of the road. One of them slashed Leyman's throat with a serrated plaster-saw and, using a Big Gulp container taken from a nearby convenience store, passed around a liter of his blood to the others. Not being direct from the wound, it didn't give them the energy they needed to live, but one vector later said under interrogation that it had a certain amusement value. When a young mother, Ani Sikorsky, saw the blood-splattered trio and sent her sport utility vehicle's brakes squealing, she froze in confusion for four seconds. In that time, two of the vectors tipped her SUV over with brute strength and tore the passenger door off. They then beat her to death within the confines of the vehicle because she screamed too loudly.

  The last member recorded it on digital video, again for the amusement value.

  Copies of this video are on file at Forced Protection's headquarters, where they have been used to effect several changes in procedure. The first meeting on the subject ended in a unanimous decision to show the video to all newly recruited F-prots. It was my suggestion.

  "Who is it?" asks Davis through the door.

  "Mr. Davis, my name is Doctor Albert Burks. We got a telephone call that someone was in distress here."

  The door opens. There is nothing protecting me. "No."

  "Really?" I see the vector's eyes flash to the gurney. "We received a call a half hour ago from this address, saying someone had chest pains. Trouble breathing."

  Davis looks like he has a headache. "No, I don't know who could have called..."

  I look behind Davis to the wrestler from the theater, now in undershirt and slacks. The man is on the couch, just reaching for a remote control. He looks unhurt. It's time to effect the second procedure change. "I'm sorry to take up your time, sir, but there are a few questions I have to ask everyone in the house as part of my job. Is there anyone here other than you two?"

  Davis glances back at his friend, flushed. "No, just us."

  I relax and let the locator function fizzle out. I have to be calm. Loose.

  "Can you sign here?" asks Breunig. "We need a record that someone in the household said no exam was necessary." He holds out the tablet.

  "I suppose…" Davis says. As he hands the tablet back, I step to where I can verify that Davis's friend is engrossed in the TV and shoot Davis in the face.

  The unseeable pistol doesn't sound like a gunshot. The neighbors will hear something like a stone thrown against the floor. The bullet plows through the vector right into the apricot-sized brain structure that keeps him standing. He falls forward against the doorframe, and Breunig catches him and the tablet in one motion. I push in. Simon's friend turns to see, but the angle is bad. By the time he twists around like he means it, I'm on him.

  I press my palm to his head. Behind the push is a yin qi-function, a straight line instead of a circle. My body comes alive with electrostim points. The man blinks, as if that will clear his vision, but the signals in his brain are cracking like popcorn. He can't think through this.

  "Simon? Are you—whoa. Is Simon okay?"

  "Problem, sir?"

  "I can't… getting up is—" He struggles, but it's as if someone's pushing his brain down.

  "It's best if you remain seated," I say. The man keeps twitching at the overstimulation but no more. He is foggy but awake, excessively so.

  "Did you touch?"

  "What?"

  "Simon Walter Davis. Did you touch him? Did he touch you?"

  "Is something wrong with me? I can't—"

  "Sir, Mister Davis has been sick for some time. It's best if he is looked after in a hospital." The gurney clatters as the F-prots bring it up to the stoop. Everyone outside will see professionals doing their job. Reassurance is key.

  "Is this about the virus?"

  Great. I watched Davis to stop an assault, not to obtain a sidewalk confessional. But a well-placed question is more trouble to the Forced Protection Program than a whole neighborhood of vectors. The gun shifts in my hand; in all likelihood, the man is infected already—

  I make myself let go, coiling my arms over one another. This man is Forced Protection's mission statement. Unless Davis has bitten him, until the minute he shows symptoms, he lives. He didn't even see Davis fall. He is an us, until he becomes a them.

  My voice comes out pleasant. "Mister Davis may have said many things under stress, not all of them accurate. I'll need your contact information." The man stares. The flush in his cheeks might be from qi or fear… or fever. "Sir, have you been in contact with his bodily fluids?"

  "No. He just... he hugged me. He said he was afraid f
or his life."

  I give him my wearied stare, like an overworked orderly searching for a better bedside manner. I sit on the corner of the couch and use that sympathetic, low voice reserved for extremely bad news. "Mister Davis has an infection that settled in his brain tissue. I advise you to take what he said with a grain of salt. Now, I'll need some ID and to know what he told you about the virus." The man reaches for his wallet without thinking about how odd this all is.

  Shortly, the gurney is in the van. All that remains is for the F-prots to collect everything the vector might have touched. Simon Walter Davis's life goes into plastic biohazard bags; his pillowcases, his dirty dishes, his bedsheets. As for Davis's guest—Neil Berman, according to his license—I keep his brain spinning in neutral. All he can comprehend is that there is a voice of authority in the room, and it is a good idea to cooperate and wait.

  After copying down Berman's address and phone numbers, I make as if to hand the license back. As Berman reaches for it, I touch his head.

  For the rest of his life, Berman will never know exactly what happened next.

  I, on the other hand, have extensive experience classifying the properties of qi, the most essential being that the effects generated diminish with distance. When I touch Berman's head, that distance is zero, and hitting Berman's brain so hard that his memories of this night can't form becomes very, very easy. After as many functions as I've thrown tonight, easy is good.

  "You done with the surgery?" asks Breunig.

  "Yes." I shake out my hand. It is more than fevered-hot. Berman lies on the couch, temporarily unconscious from the bioshock. I have his home address, in case I need to pay him a visit in three days and see if he exhibits symptoms. Breunig hands me a kit, and I take a blood sample. Berman will wake up a few hours later, and he might remember there was an ambulance, but he will likely think he called it himself.

  Another F-prot pours lye onto the floor where Davis bled a few drops before being whisked onto the gurney. It won't kill the virus, but it masks evidence. I do one last sweep of the house before joining the others at the door. I leave on the electronics—when Berman wakes, it will seem as if he fell asleep in front of the TV.