by Lee Isserow
“Why would you ever need to saw into yourself?!” Ben exclaimed, almost dropping the scalpel at the grisly concept.
“Only the once... but that's a story for another time!” MacGaulty said, chuckling, and putting the saw back down. “First things first...” He gestured with his right hand holding a mimed knife, cutting up his left wrist.
Ben took a deep breath, and held the sharp blade between his thumb and middle finger, as he had seen his new mentor do earlier.
“Just the slightest bit of pressure... remember; Four litres out, one litre in.”
Ben looked down at his wrist, the skin was paler where the blade was resting on the surface, he was applying pressure, but not enough to cut.
“Come on, you can do it.”
Ben swallowed hard, a nervous chill coming over him, and he tried to apply more pressure, but the hand with the blade wasn't obeying his command. Frozen in place by fear and anticipation of unimaginable pain from cutting into his flesh.
“It's not as bad as you think,” MacGaulty said, chuckling. He raised his wrist and showed him the bright red gash he had carved. Prodded at it. “Barely stings once it's done; four litres out --”
“-- One litre in...” Ben said, taking deep breaths, and tried to force the knife into his skin, but it wasn't happening. His hand was shaking, so hard and fast that the blade was quivering against his wrist, cutting thin white lines back and forth on the uppermost layers of skin, but none deep enough to beckon the monster forth.
The knife slipped out of his sweaty fingers and clanged against the floor. He looked down at it, and realised he was drenched in sweat. He had failed, and his heart sunk at the idea of letting MacGaulty down.
Steve knelt to pick the blade up with a sigh, craned his neck and caught Ben's eyeline, smiling. “We'll try something else then,” he said. “Nothing wrong with taking things slow.” He rose back to his feet with a grunt. The girth of extra fluids sloshing around his system appeared to be a strain on his legs and back. “Take off your shirt,” he instructed.
Ben did as he was told, and Steve looked at the wound running up the new recruit's abdomen. It was dry now. A thin, crusty brown line that didn't look anything close to the painful, deep laceration it had been just days previous.
“The 'Goblins don't need a deep cut to come out,” MacGaulty said. “Any cut will do. Deep and long is just more efficient. But that scab there...” He ran his finger up the dried blood. “Scraping that off will barely pinch, and that's as much blood as the wet stuff is. Breaking that will wake it up and make the ugly bastard come out and say hello!” he chuckled again.
Ben took the scalpel from him and held it to the scab running along his gut. This was going to be easy, he told himself, taking a deep breath.
The blade slipped under the dried blood with ease, cracking the surface as it tore it away from the pale skin it was attached to. He saw a bead of blood start to form at the tip of the cut, where the scab had been picked away from his flesh. It was tiny at first, could fit on the head of a pin, but started growing quickly. It was soon twice the size, then three times, ballooning up, hanging off his body, increasing in bulk with every passing moment.
“Four litres out, one litre in,” Steve whispered.
It was the size of an apple, bright and red and glimmering in the white room's light, then it was the size of a grapefruit. Ben heard the scalpel clang off the floor, but couldn't remember dropping it. His eyes were fixed on the ball of blood growing from his gut, the size of a watermelon, then the size of a beach ball.
Ben couldn't take his eyes away, and only caught MacGaulty's smile in the reflection on the solid mass of crimson that was expanding out from the small cut on his belly. It continued to grow and grow, and Ben was starting to feel light-headed. He realised he wasn't thinking the mantra, and forced it through his head. Four litres out, one litre in. Four litres out, one litre in. Over and over, he repeated the words as the balloon grew in size.
“That's it!” Steve bellowed. “You're doing it!”
The bright red sphere burst open at the front. Giant, angry jaws of dried blood snapping in Steve's direction, like a demonic three dimensional pacman. Ben panicked that the viscous creature was going to devour Steve. He tried to pull it back in, forgot to repeat the mantra, and it started growing bigger and angrier.
“Calm down.. Remember the mantra...” Steve said.
Ben started getting light headed, he fell to one knee, and forced the words through his head. Four litres out, one litre in. He tried again to pull the creature away from Steve, but the monster burst free of his body, connecting to his wound by only a thin, frail thread of blood that led back to the small cut in his abdomen. It snapped its massive jaws open and closed, lunging for MacGaulty, but never made contact with him.
It seemed to sniff the air, know that Steve was not prey, and then retreated back to its source, shrinking in size as its mass started filtering back into Ben's body. The thread between it and Ben disappeared into them both, and soon it was gone. The only sign it ever existed was a tiny bead of wet blood at the top of the scab.
“Not bad for a first lesson, eh!” Steve said, chuckling to himself. He left the room briefly, as Ben caught his breath, regained his strength, and forced himself back to his feet, pulling his shirt back on.
MacGaulty returned with a glass of orange juice and handed it to Ben. “Letting a 'Goblin out does murder on the blood sugar...” he said, as Ben sipped at the sickly sweet juice.
Sipping wasn't replenishing the sugar fast enough. He downed it and put the glass on the shelf under the window.
“Think you're ready to go again?” MacGaulty asked.
Ben was watching the glass intently as a drop of the orange juice on the rim started careening down the outside of the glass towards the bright white shelf. He shot a finger out and caught it before it stained the paint, licking it from his finger.
He was ready. He had never felt more ready for anything in his entire life.
27
The Blood Squad already had a dorm room prepared for Ben, as if they knew he was going to agree to work with them long before he did. It was a little like a prison cell, but more comfortable than any cell he had seen whilst binge watching police procedurals. The mattress was firm, the top few inches seemed to be made of some kind of memory foam that cradled his body, but didn't let him sink into it too deep. There was a large fake window at the far end, just like in the conference room, with a bulb that mirrored the natural daylight outside. The door was never locked, and he had full access to a shower room, a small library with a selection of fiction and non fiction texts, and an all-in-one flatscreen computer that was connected to the internet.
Over the next few days, Ben found that he was less interested in reading or browsing than he was practising and learning how to control the creature that resided in his veins. Once he had got over his fear of cutting through his own skin, Steve told him that he was a quick study, picking it up faster than anyone he had inducted in the past. Ben wondered if he said that to all the new recruits, and would find out soon enough.
As his first week drew to a close, Ben was introduced to the latest batch of new recruits that would be trained alongside him. They were all as curious about their condition, and wanted to control it as much as he did.
Tess was the closest to him in age, and had been there the longest. It took her four sessions with Steve before she could manage to cut into her skin. Ben empathised with her, and it worried him how quickly he took to it. She had big, green eyes that were so shiny it always looked as though she was about to burst into tears at any moment. But there was a strength in her voice and the way she held herself that made her seem bigger and taller than her slim five foot three frame.
Nick was six years Ben's junior, but three times as wide, with a stubbly shaved head and a thin, pristinely kept goatee. He was more gun-ho about gouging into his own flesh than any of them. He had confessed to the others that he used to cut himself when he
was an angry, troubled teen, and had blacked out each time he had done so. It wasn't until he accidentally cut himself whilst working at a restaurant that he became aware of what was happening whilst he was blacked out. He woke up to discover the lifeless bodies of four other kitchen staff, and was arrested for the murders. It was only thanks to Nixon Ailes that he wasn't behind bars.
Ailes, it seemed, had saved all of them from a prison sentence. All of them but for Chris, whose first interaction with the Blood Squad was through Steve.
Chris was taller than the other three recruits, and a good decade older than Ben. The left side of her skull was shaven right down to the skin, right side flowing long and light brown. Chris was in the middle of gender transition when she first discovered the blood. Unlike the others, Chris didn't pass out when the blood first came to life. She stayed calm, and watched it emerge from a graze after being knocked off her bike. Deep breaths and mindfulness kept it from growing too large, and it receded into her body, but the whole thing had been caught on security cameras. When Chris got home, there were police waiting outside her door. She turned and ran, stayed out on the streets for a few nights before Steve just walked up to her out of the blue, introduced himself, and said he could help.
Unlike the others, Chris refused to cut herself, preferring to dig her nails into the old scab in her leg, letting the blood flow from there. Steve didn't seem particularly happy at her reluctance to cut, but had not argued the case for cutting, not at that point, at least.
MacGaulty continued to lead one-on-one teaching sessions with each of the newbies, instructing them how to control the blood with more precision and intent. When not in those sessions Ben was sat with other new recruits in a makeshift classroom for lessons, in which a variety of different scientists and analysts instructed Ben and the others in what little science they knew about the blood itself. Steve referred to the education segments of the days as 'Hogslaughts School Of Bloodcraft and Gore-zardry', which brought a wry smile to the lips of them all, given how these sessions were the very opposite of the magic of Hogwarts. Nothing but dry and dull lectures aimed at filling their head with science that Steve seemed to think was unnecessary. They were classes prescribed by Ailes, who deemed it just as important to understand why the blood acted as it did, as much as the practical application of the cutting and control.
It was an easy call to make, but each of the new recruits preferred the sessions with MacGaulty to the more formal schooling. The tutors chosen had nothing close to his charisma.
Michael Fairchild was one of the lead scientists in the department. He was a tall, thin man in his sixties, who seemed to want to suck every iota of fun out of the induction. He did not take kindly to the term Blood Squad, nor the term haemogoblin. Instead, Fairchild preferred the scientific term they had come up for the monsters that lived in the blood; vivi sanguinem, which he explained was Latin for 'living blood'. The new recruits found themselves deciding that neither term slid off the tongue, and took to calling them simply 'bloods', much to their tutor's disdain.
Fairchild spoke in a gravelly monotone as he lectured the reluctant students with what they knew about the spread of the infection. He didn't make an effort to be personable, reading from the screen of a tablet, barely taking his eyes off it for the two hour lecture in which he droned on about tracing vectors and observing spread patterns.
Ben and the three other new recruits could barely stay awake through his lecture, and even though a lot of information was imparted, all they came away with was that the infection spread via direct contact from blood to blood.
During the lunch break after the session, Ben and the others tried to trace back to where they each got infected. None of them could work it out. They had never had a blood transfer, and couldn't recall coming into contact with anyone else's blood.
Tess suggested that perhaps it was something that happened to their parents, or to them in-utero, but there was no way to confirm that. It would continue to be a mystery, for then, at least.
28
In the second week of their stay, their lessons with Steve became fewer, as he was called out on operations. The four of them were not cleared to know the details of these missions, so rather than having sessions with him, Ailes decided to double up on the lectures.
Fairchild returned to give them a lesson on the accelerated healing factor that the blood provided. Once again, the entire hour was read in a monotone from a tablet screen, and even though a wealth of knowledge was imparted, all the four of them came away with from the class was a single fact; their bloods could repair organ damage, but not brain damage.
The following day, Ailes came in to give them a tactical lesson, posing a theoretical scenario for them to come up with a solution. “A blood-driven male vector is observed entering a housing complex. There are forty apartments in there, over a hundred potential people he could kill or infect. There is only one way in or out, and there are security cameras at the entrance, elevators and stairs of every floor. How do you carry out the operation?”
The four students glanced at one another.
“Blood-driven?” asked Chris.
Ailes raised an eyebrow and picked up a tablet, looking through the schedule for their training. “Has MacGaulty not explained the blood drive?” he asked. The recruits shook their heads, causing Ailes to sigh. “What the bloody hell has he been teaching you then...” He slammed the tablet down on the desk and took a deep breath. “Ok, we'll step back a few steps then...” He reached down to the tablet, searched around on it, and after a moment, cast the display on the tablet to a large screen behind him. The image showed scans of three brains; a normal brain on the left; a brain with a thick barrier around the outside at the centre; and on the right, a brain that appeared to have tentacles surrounding it, holding the neural tissue tight in their grasp.
“The left brain is a regular uninfected brain,” he said. “The middle image is of an infected brain.” He took another sigh, then continued. “The right is a brain where the infection has been left to run riot, and has taken over control of the host. This, is the blood drive.” He pulled the chair back and sat down at the desk. “If you follow Mister MacGaulty's instructions, learn what he teaches, pay attention to every word he says...” He paused, switching to a quieter tone “Between those stupid chuckles...” Then resumed his normal speaking voice. “Then there is no reason you should stray beyond the middle stage. The infection cannot spread if you are at the reins.” He took another deep breath. “But, for those infected that do not have the gift of those lessons, the blood takes over, they become what we refer to as blood-driven. At that stage, all their human thoughts and desires are gone, they have one sole purpose, and that is to spread the infection.”
His eyes were fixed on the image on the tablet screen, he hadn't made eye contact with any of the students during his speech. Glancing up briefly, he registered that there was some level of disbelief amongst the recruits, and sighed yet again, returning his gaze to the tablet screen. After some gestures and typing, he opened Youtube and cast a video to the screen. “Perhaps this will work as an example,” he said.
The title read 'attack of the killer fungi'. There was no sound on the video, Ailes took to narrating over the top as he pressed play. “The ant here is infected with a spore. The spore takes control of the ant, makes it leaves its nest and climbs to the underside of a leaf. It latches on, and stays there, dies there, whilst the fungus does what it does, eventually bursting out of the ant's head, spreading spores to infect more ants to spread itself further and further.” He closed the video, taking one further deep breath, and rose back to his feet, turning to the screen.
“Whilst the sanguinem works differently, and is not a fungus, its sole purpose is to spread the infection. Hunting down blood-driven is the main task we do here at the department. Trying to stop this plague from reaching wider than it already has...” He turned from the screen and looked each of the students in the eye, one by one. “So, a blood-driven mal
e runs into an apartment complex. Over a hundred potential vectors reside inside. How do you neutralise the hostile without infecting any of the residents?”
The new recruits looked at one another, and between the four of them, hatched a plan to subdue the theoretical vector that was on the loose. A smile returned to Ailes' face as they discussed the mission. They were proving themselves the best and brightest that had walked through the doors, and soon, they would be ready for field tests.
29
Ben's next session was Steve was not in the white room. MacGaulty walked him in to a briefing room, with four tactical officers and a selection of analysts, sitting him down in the corner whilst Ailes laid out a situation currently in progress.
“Subject ninety seven has reared his head again,” Ailes said, no trace of the smile that Ben had seen when they first met. “After the attempt to capture him in Smithfields, we cannot allow him to escape again. Analysts are estimating that a further three probable vectors have emerged since he slipped through our fingers. Objective is no longer a capture, it's a kill.”
Ben looked over to MacGaulty, who paid him no attention. There was a worrying smile fixed on his lips, as if he was looking forward to facing off against this unnamed 'subject ninety seven'.
“A six man squad is to be dispatched. Griffiths is point, MacGaulty is going in first. You're taking Graham out on his first op, but he'll be at the rear, observational capacity only.”
Ben was shocked. He didn't expect to be taken out on a mission so soon, if felt like his training had only just begun. MacGaulty leaned over and patted him on the back. “First time playing out, boy,” he whispered. “It's gonna be a good show!”
His enthusiasm was perturbing, but Ben forced a smile to his lips to mirror MacGaulty's. If his mentor thought he was ready, then he was ready, whether he believed it or not.
