Once Bitten

by Reinke, Sara

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Have you been talking to my secretary?” John asked.

  From the other end of the line, Gough sputtered like an engine trying to stall out in mid-rev. “What?”

  “My secretary,” John said. And because this wasn’t politically correct, and Sandy would have pointed this out to him had she been standing anywhere within immediate earshot, he amended, “My administrative assistant. Sandy. Cute girl. Blonde. Nice legs. A little on the kooky side.” He shook his head. “Never mind. Did you call my office before my cell? Talk to her? Because you know, last night, she said almost the exact same—”

  “Listen to me!” Gough resumed screeching emphatically, making John wince as he drew the phone back from his ear. “You’ve got coagulative necrosis in the underlying tissue, branching out from the centralized points of more liquefactive necrotic lesions where she bit you. Organelles in all of the affected cells are releasing lysosomes which can further the cellular deterioration, resulting in massive and systemic necrotization of previously contiguous tissue.”

  John sat there for a moment. “Was that Latin again?”

  “The bite wounds,” Gough snapped. “The tissue around them is dead, isn’t it? It’s turned black. And you’ve got grey lines shooting out from it, spreading wider all the time, like a spider web.”

  Now the sarcastic smirk withered from John’s face.

  “There’s numbness there, probably all down that entire side of your body, right? A pins-and-needles kind of tingling in your fingertips and toes? A sudden hypersensitivity to sunlight? That’s happening to you, isn’t it? Right now, you’re probably sitting in the dark with your sunglasses on because even a hint of sunshine burns your eyes.”

  John glanced around at the shadow-draped cabin, all of the curtains tightly drawn. He didn’t remember leaving his sunglasses on once he’d come aboard, but as he drew his hand to his face now, he realized that he had. There they were, right where he’d left them, perched on the bridge of his nose.

  “Are you listening to me?” Gough cried.

  “Yeah.” John nodded, even though Gough couldn’t see him through the phone line. His voice came out hoarse, somewhat ragged and he cleared his throat, forking his fingers through his hair.

  “Lucy went through this,” Gough said. “She told me about it, documented it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She took pictures of herself. Every day, she’d email me a new one. I’ll send them to you right now. Hang on.” From the other end of the line, John heard a rattling and rustling, as if Gough dug around in a drawer or moved things hurriedly around on top of a cluttered desk. “She showed me what was happening to her, how she was changing.”

  “Changing,” John repeated.

  “Into one of them,” Gough said. “Here, I’m forwarding you her emails. They should start coming through in a minute.”

  John hit the Send/Receive button and waited as the poor old laptop tried to download the large image file attachments. Gough yammered on and on the entire time, but John didn’t really listen.

  “…swelling due to the release of cytoplasm and intracelluluar content after the plasma membrane breaks down…”

  The first of Gough’s emails arrived, and John opened it to find a digital image of Lucy topless, facing the camera. The photo was in no way provocative, not only because her breasts had been cropped out of the frame, but because it revealed a ghastly ring of bite wounds on the side of Lucy’s neck, the most prominent being a pair of deep, ragged holes remarkably similar to John’s own wounds.

  “…lysosome production seems accelerated somehow, though I can’t be sure of the mechanism without closer examination of a tissue sample…”

  Like John’s, Lucy’s wounds seemed to be the nexus of a wide circle of bruised, necrotic-looking flesh.

  “…organelles with acidic hydrolases that normally break down old or damaged cells, bacterium and other organisms…”

  In the subsequent photographs, John could clearly make out thin, dark tendrils that fanned out in a spider web pattern, following the underlying capillary system in Lucy’s skin. Within its circumference, Lucy’s pale skin looked mottled and inflamed.

  “…attacking contiguous cells leafing to extensive DNA hydrolysis, vacuolation of the endoplasmic reticulum, cell lysis…”

  She’d labeled each image in the email subject line. Day 1 showed the gruesome wounds, red-rimmed and angry looking, but the surrounding skin otherwise unaffected. Day 2 showed the underlying swelling and darkening beginning to develop. By Day 3 the darkness had turned nearly black, those thin, fingerlike projections beginning to twist and twine their way beneath her flesh.

  It was like looking into a mirror, watching the evolution of his own wounds. By Day 4, her pallor was ashen, her face gaunt, her hair stringy and dirty, her eyes sunken, shadowed and haunted.

  Help me, she’d written to Gough. Oh, God, Mike, please, make it stop.

  “You need to go to the hospital,” Gough said, jerking John’s attention back to him in full.

  “I’ve already been,” John said. “They gave me an antibiotic, told me I was anemic.”

  “You’re not anemic, you’re dying,” Gough said. “Go back again and tell them you need a blood transfusion. They need to do a hemoglobin count. You’re probably down to at least eight grams per deciliter, maybe a little more. A normal adult male is anywhere between fourteen to sixteen. Your body is oxygen starved. You’re already feeling lightheaded, right? Weak? Dizzy spells? It’s going to get worse. In the next twenty-four hours, without a transfusion, you won’t be able to stand up. Do you understand? Your body is shutting down, system by system. Whatever the bite does to you, it’s more than the blood loss. It’s something in their saliva, a venom, a contagion. I don’t know.”

  “And a blood transfusion will stop it?”

  “No, but it will slow it down. I think. I don’t know. All I know is if your hemoglobin stays too low for too long, your heart gives out and you die.”

  “And then I turn into a vampire.” John couldn’t believe he was even playing along with this.

  “No, you’re already turning into a vampire,” Gough said. “Look, as near as Lucy and I were able to figure, they don’t usually leave someone alive after they feed from them unless they do it on purpose to change them. So they wait for you to die, and maybe they come back and feed from you a time or two more, just to hurry things along. And if they don’t kill you, the process will eventually complete. You’ll become a vampire in full.”

  “You said I had two days,” John said.

  “Exactly, yes,” Gough replied. “And that’s why you’ve got to get to the hospital as soon as possible. Lucy stopped emailing me pictures after the fourth day, but I was able to get emails through to her for two days past that, six all together.”

  “So if the blood transfusion won’t stop it, what will?”

  “There are lots of ways, according to folklore, but they all center around the destruction of the master vampire before you fully succumb to the bite wounds and die.”

  “The master vampire,” John repeated. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. What next?

  “Yes. The first one, the one who made the rest,” Gough said. “I think vampires must live in family units, like a wolf pack or a bee hive. Remember my article? Even back in Victorian times, people claimed vampires preyed on family members. I thought it was because diseases like tuberculosis are more easily transmitted in close-knit units, like extended families, but I think it’s because vampires can only feed where they’re welcome. Where they’ve been invited.”

  “This is crazy,” John muttered, shaking his head. Then more loudly, he said, “So I have to kill the master vampire, whoever that may be.”

  “Oh, I know who it is,” Gough said grimly. “Lucy told me. Boyd Wilder. He’s the one who bit her. You just have to get to him, preferably in the daytime, when he’s not as strong, when he’s limited on where he can
go, what he can do.”

  “And then what?”

  “According to most folklore, you have to pierce him through the heart with a wooden stake,” Gough said. “I looked all this up for Lucy. Hold on. Let me find my notes.” More loud rustling from the other end of the line, then Gough said, “Not just any wood will do. It has to be ash, maple, hawthorne, blackthorn, buckhorn or aspen.”

  “Aspen, maple, foghorn, leghorn. Got it.” John rolled his eyes skyward.

  “This is important. You have to drive it through in one continuous strike. Got that? One blow to get it through their breastbone and pierce the heart.”

  “One blow, pierce the heart, got it. Anything else?”

  “Then you cut the head off,” Gough said.

  “Don’t you think that’s sort of overkill?” John asked.

  “No. And you can’t just use a hacksaw or a meat cleaver,” Gough said.

  “Oh, damn. Because you know, in the trunk of my car, I always happen to carry…”

  “You have to use a gravedigger’s shovel.”

  John blinked. “A what?”

  “A gravedigger’s shovel,” Gough said again. “Then you take silver nails and hammer them into the vampire’s temple, navel, forehead and the nape of its neck.”

  “What, like casing nails? Roofing nails? Press-on French manicure?”

  “Mr. Harker, I’m being serious.”

  “It’s John, and so am I.”

  “After you drive in the nails, you have to use a silver knife to cut open the vampire’s veins.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Uh, all of them, I guess

  “What if I hit an artery instead?”

  “I don’t think that matters. Then you carve open its chest and remove the heart. You have to burn it immediately on a rock.”

  “Its chest?”

  “Its heart.”

  “On a rock?” John closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, behind which a dull, throbbing ache had stirred again. “So is that something I’m going to have to lug around with me or do vampires usually keep one around, you know, just in case?”

  Gough was quiet for a long moment. “You don’t believe a word I’m saying.”

  At this, John laughed. “What makes you say that?”

  “Mr. Harker, I’m trying to help you. It’s not my life’s ambition to make a complete, paranoid ass out of myself.”

  “That’s a shame, because you’re doing a remarkable job at it,” John assured him.

  “I’m trying to save your life,” Gough said.

  “I am not turning into a vampire,” John said.

  “Mr. Harker, please.”

  “Look, Dr. Gough, I appreciate you sharing all of your whacked out theories with me, really I do. I get it—you’re jealous of Boyd Wilder because he was banging your girl. But to try and convince me to knock off this guy just because he—”

  “I’m not jealous of Boyd Wilder,” Gough exclaimed.

  “Oh, come on. How many times do you think epidemiologists get to hook up online with hot little Show Me! strippers?”

  “I’m not—”

  “And as a former police officer, I really feel obliged to tell you at this point in our conversation that soliciting a homicide is as felonious as doing the deed yourself. And soliciting it over an unsecured cellular line, where the cops don’t need anything more high tech than a baby monitor to listen in, is just down right stupid.”

  Gough sputtered for a moment. “I…but I wasn’t…”

  “There are no such things as vampires,” John said. “There’s no Easter Bunny, no Santa Claus.” He started ticking off on his fingers. “No UFOs, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, ghosts, goblins, unicorns, leprechauns, mermaids, jackalopes or any of that other happy horseshit. I have some kind of infection from where Lucy bit me while strung out on meth, and in another day or two, these antibiotics are going to kick in and get rid of it.”

  Gough said nothing at first. Then, in a small but grave voice: “In another day or two, you’re going to be dead, Mr. Harker.”

  “Well, then, at least I’ll get some peace and quiet,” John muttered, snapping his phone shut.

  ***

  He dozed off, although he didn’t remember doing so deliberately. In retrospect, as he lay in the hospital later and considered things, it seemed like he’d simply leaned his head back against the cabin bulkhead and closed his eyes, exasperated by his conversation, or lack thereof, with Michael Gough.

  “Vampires,” he’d muttered and that must have been about the time he dozed off, because he really didn’t remember much after that until that demonic dog of Ethel Merriwether’s, Twinkles, began barking outside.

  John’s eyes flew wide at the first throaty rowf-rowf-ROWLFs, and when he jerked, a crick that had formed in one of the muscles abruptly seized on the right side of his neck. He grimaced, cupping his hand against the throbbing knot, trying to rub it. From outside, presumably aboard the Cookie’s Cutter, Twinkles continued a ferocious, wet-sounding serenade.

  “Stupid dog,” John muttered. He leaned across the bunk bench for the nearest window and drew the curtains aside. He was surprised to see that dusk had settled, and the world beyond the plexiglass was draped in shades of rose and plum as the last hints of orange sunlight disappeared from both water and sky.

  What the hell? he thought, because it sure didn’t feel like he’d been sleeping long, maybe five minutes, ten at the most. His conversation with Michael Gough had lasted twenty minutes, tops. Which would mean he’d been napping aboard the Quagmire for nearly eight hours.

  Jesus Christ.

  At least he could see what the dog was barking at now. His Girl Friday, the 57-foot-long behemoth Bayliner that had been conspicuously absent from the far end of the dock earlier that day was back again, apparently just now returning to berth. Lights were aglow from stem to stern, bathing the marina in cheery yellow illumination. A large, boisterous group of people were disembarking from the yacht, gathering on the swim platform and dock, loitering and laughing together. Just the sort of thing to set Twinkles on edge. He could see the dog out on the aft end of the Cookie’s Cutter, its massive paws on the railing again, its big, empty bucket of a head hanging out over the water as it barked.

  “Stupid dog,” he said again, shaking his head, snapping the drapes closed.

  Reaching behind him, he switched on a little clip-on lamp affixed to the bookshelves, then winced at the sudden bright glare. Fumbling, he slapped it off again, blinking owlishly at the residual globules of color and light dancing in front of his eyes in its wake.

  He checked his phone, which he’d tossed onto the bench beside him following his call from Gough. Two new messages.

  I didn’t even hear it ring, he thought, surprised and bewildered.

  The first message was from Sandy. “Hey, it’s me. I’m just checking in to see how you’re doing. Listen, I put some pork chops in the fridge this morning. Would you mind to put them in a pan—there’s a long glass one in the cabinet beside the sink—then pour some marinade over them? There’s a bottle of some kind of mandarin orange-soy sauce stuff in the refrigerator door. I’ll be a little late because I’ve got to stop by the marina. Gracie called. She’s coming home early from her shell-hunting expedition and I’m picking her up. I thought she could join us for supper.”

  At the mention of the chops, John grimaced, thinking of that morning at Little Pink, how he’d browned out, his mind growing foggy, and when he’d come to his senses, he’d been sitting on the floor, gnawing on one.

  Great, he thought. How am I going to explain that to Sandy?

  Because she would have been home from the office by now, back at Little Pink and well aware of what he’d done.

  Before hanging up, she’d added suspiciously: “You are still in bed, aren’t you, or at least some reasonable facsimile? Because you’re supposed to be resting. Doctor’s orders.”

  John winced again, deleting the message. The next one was from Mich
ael Gough.

  “Mr. Harker, I know you think I’m crazy.”

  John moved to press the seven button on his keypad and delete the message.

  “But please don’t erase this without hearing me out. Please.”

  At the desperate plea in Gough’s voice, John hesitated, keeping the phone at his ear.

  “Lucy told me once they taste your blood, they can find you anywhere,” Gough said. “They keep coming back. Boyd Wilder fed from her two or three times before she must have finally succumbed. It’s like they can track you by the smell of your blood or something. All they need is an invitation to come inside, wherever you are, and they can attack you again. That’s why it’s important—really important, Mr. Harker—that you do not open the door to Lucy Weston. No matter what she says, no matter where you are, don’t let her in.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” John didn’t erase the message, but he did snap the lid shut on his phone, cutting Gough off in mid-ramble. For a guy who’d seemed so reluctant to talk upon calling John, he sure didn’t know how to shut up once he got on a roll.

  He bit back a groan as he rose to his feet. That heavy numbness that had been spreading in a slow but steady circumference, radiating out from his wounded neck, had worsened during his nap. Now the entire left side of his upper torso, including his shoulder and arm felt leaden, like he’d been sleeping with it pinned beneath him, cutting off the circulation.

  Frowning, he shook his hand in the open air, trying to get some feeling back in his fingertips, even that annoying pins-and-needles variety, if nothing else. Then a soft sound drew his attention toward the main hatch, the faint but discernable sound of something scratching lightly against the door.

  “John.”

  A woman’s voice, soft as gossamer, floating across the cabin like a tuft of cotton caught on a warm huff of breath. At the sound of it, the hairs along the nape of his neck stirred, prickling lightly, and he felt light-headed.

  “John,” the woman said again, a delicate croon slipping through the narrow crack between the door frame and edge. As the word reached him, delicate as a fleeting caress, that woozy sensation grew worse and he swayed unsteadily on his feet, blinking dazedly at the hatch, the short set of steps leading up to it.