by Tanya Huff
Her eyes silvered.
The job had just gotten personal.
*
The sun set at 6:03 pm.
Vicki blinked at the darkness, back in the world between one instant and the next.
The phone rang at 6:04.
Pulling it out of the adapter, she flipped it open and snapped, "What?"
"Ms. Nelson. I saw another one!"
"Duncan?" The reception inside a plywood box wrapped in a blackout curtain inside Mike Celluci's crawl space wasn't the best.
"This one didn't just stare at me, Ms. Nelson. It started walking toward me. It knew who I was!"
"Maybe it remembers how you taste." The words were out of her mouth before she could consider their effect.
"OHGODOHGODOHGOD..."
"Duncan, calm down. Now." A sort of whimper and then ragged breathing.
"St. George station. University line. They're spreading, aren't they?"
"So it seems."
"What should I do?"
"Do?" Vicki paused, half folded around, reaching for the folded pile of clean clothes by her feet. "You should stay out of subway stations." She snagged a pair of socks and began pulling them on. "What blood type are you?"
"What?"
Shimmying underwear up over her hips, she repeated the question.
"O—positive..."
She cut him off before he could ask why she wanted to know, told him she'd be in touch, and hung up.
Type O blood could be given to anyone because its erythrocytes contained no antigens, making it compatible with any plasma. Knowledge from before the change. After, well, blood was blood was blood; hot and sweet and the type, so not relevant.
A lot of people were type O.
Mike Celluci was type O.
*
The faxed sketch of the King-tic was lying on the kitchen table under an old bank envelope. On the back of the envelope, Celluci's dark scrawl: "If this isn't a joke, TRY to be careful. Better yet, catch one, use it to convince the city they have a problem, and let them deal with the rest. Call me."
Someone in Duncan's group had talent. Drawn on graph paper, the bug was almost three dimensional. Six legs but grouped around a single, spiderlike body. Feathery antennae, like on a moth, two eyes on short stalks, four darker areas against the front of the body that could be more eyes. It had a face, which was just creepy. Notes under the drawing described the color as urban camouflage, black and gray, different on every bug they'd seen. The size...
Vicki blinked and looked again.
Giant intelligent bloodsucking bugs.
Still, she hadn't expected them to be so big.
A foot across and another six to eight inches on either side for the legs.
Leaving the sketch on the table, she crossed the kitchen and peered into the cupboard under the sink. Picked up a package of roach motels, put it down again. Grabbed instead for the can of bug spray, guaranteed to work on roaches, earwigs, flies, millipedes, and all other invading insects.
All other?
Probably not, but it never hurt to be prepared.
*
"Mike? What've you got for me?" Had she still been able to blush, she would have at his response, but since she couldn't, she just grinned. "Stop being smutty and answer the question. Because I'm on the subway and do not need that image in my head."
Feeling the weight of regard, Vicki lifted her chin and caught the eye of the very bleached blond young man sitting directly across the train and let just a little of the Hunger show. He froze, fingernails digging into the red fuzz on the front curve of the seat. When she released him, he ran for the other end of the car.
She really hated eavesdroppers.
"Yeah, I'm listening."
An old woman had collapsed at the Bay Street station and died later at the hospital. Police were investigating because according to witnesses she'd cried out in pain just before she fell. According to the medical report she'd died of anaphylactic shock.
"An allergic reaction to something in her blood? What type? Yeah, yeah, I know you told me what type of reaction, what blood type?"
Type O.
*
"This isn't the actual size, right?"
"Of course not." Vicki smiled down at the TTC security guard and took comfort in the knowledge that she wasn't, in fact, lying. Not her fault if he assumed the bugs were smaller than drawn.
"I'm afraid I can't help you. I mean, Joe Public hasn't complained about anything like this and none of my people have said anything either." He handed back the sketch, smiling broadly, willing to share the joke. "You've seen one of these?"
"Not me. Like I said, I'm working on a case and my client thinks he's seen one of these."
"And you get paid if they're real or not?"
"Something like that."
"Not a bad gig."
"Pays the bills. What's wrong?"
"What? Oh, just an itchy ankle."
"Let me see." Not a request. No room for refusal. She loved the social shortcuts that came with the whole bloodsucking undead thing.
Two holes. Just below the ankle.
"Do you know your blood type?"
"Uh... A?"
More people knew their astrological sign than their blood type—useful if they were in an accident and the paramedics needed to read their horoscope.
She moved so that her body blocked the view of anyone who might be looking through into the security office—although most of them were trying to see themselves on the monitors. "Give me your hand."
He shuddered slightly as she wrapped cool fingers around heated skin, shuddered a little harder as her teeth met through the dark satin of his wrist. A long swallow for research purposes, another because it was so good, one more just because. A lick against the wound and a moment waiting to be sure the coagulants in her saliva had worked.
Lowering his hand carefully to the arm of his chair, Vicki smiled down into his eyes.
"Thank you for help, Mr. Allan. Is that someone pissing against the wall in the outside stairwell?"
His attention back on the monitors, she slipped out of the room.
There was nothing in his blood, type A blood, that wasn't supposed to be there.
The old woman, type O, had died from an allergic reaction to a foreign substance in her blood.
Mike, type O, had a foreign substance in his blood.
If Duncan Travis also had a foreign substance in his blood then it would safe to assume the King-tics were specifically marking specific blood types. She should check Duncan for markers, find a B and an AB who'd been bitten and...
Screw it. Discovering if they were only marking Os or marking everything but As wouldn't help her find the bugs any faster. The fact that they were marking at all and that she couldn't think of a good reason why, but could think of several bad reasons was enough to propel her into the crowd of commuters and down into the Bloor station.
The fastest way to find something? Go to where it is. National Geographic didn't set up all those cameras around water holes because they liked the way the light reflected off the surface.
If the King-tics fed off subway station crowds, then Vicki'd stand in crowded subway stations until she spotted one, no matter how much the press of humanity threatened to overwhelm her. At least at the end of the day, they all smelled like meat rather than the nasal cacophony that poured out of the trains every morning.
Oh, great. Now I'm hungry.
Everyone standing within arm's reach shuffled nervously away.
Oops.
Masking the Hunger, she ran through her list of mental appetite suppressants.
Homer Simpson, Joan Rivers, Richard Simmons, pretty much anyone who'd ever appeared on the Jerry Springer Show...
Her mouth flooded with saliva as the rich scent of fresh blood interrupted her litany. A train screamed into the station, the crowd surged forward, and Vicki used the Hunger to cut diagonally across the platform, less aware of the mass of humanity moving around her
than she was of the black and gray shadow scuttling across the ceiling. With the attention of any possible witnesses locked on the interior of the subway cars and their chances of actually boarding, she dropped down off the end of the platform and began to run, just barely managing to keep the bug in sight.
Duncan was right. For a big bug, the thing could really motor.
Then it turned sideways and was gone.
Gone?
Rocking to a stop, Vicki flung herself back against the tunnel wall as another train came by, the roar of steel wheels against steel rails covering some much- needed venting. Eleven years on the police force had given her a vocabulary most sailors would envy. She got through about half of it while the train passed.
In the sudden silence that followed the fading echoes of profanity, she heard the faint skittering sound of six fast moving legs. A sound that offered its last skitter directly over her head. All she had to do was look up.
Unlike the King-tic in the drawing, this one had a membranous sac bulging out from the lower curve of its body. Inside the sac, about an ounce of blood.
Vicki's snarl was completely involuntary.
Both eyestalks pointing directly at her, the bug brought one foreleg up and rubbed at its antennae.
Again the feeling of being weighed.
And wanted.
The eyestalks turned and it flattened itself enough to slip through a crack between the wall and the ceiling.
Easy to find handholds in the concrete since the city had trouble finding money to repair the infrastructure people could see. Anything tucked away underground could be left to rot. Pressed as flat as possible against the wall—What good is saving the world if you lose your ass to a passing subway?—Vicki tucked her head sideways and peered through the crack at what seemed to be another tunnel identical to the one she was in. In the dim glow of the safety lights, it looked as though the shadows were in constant movement.
King-tics.
Lots and lots of them.
Probably nesting in an old emergency access tunnel, she decided as something poked her in the back of the head.
Turning she came eye to eye to eye with another bug. After she got the girly shriek out of the way, she realized it didn't seem upset to find her there, it just wanted her to move. Backing carefully down two handholds, she watched it slide sideways through the crack, briefly flashing its sac of blood.
Hard not to conclude that they were feeding something.
She slid the rest of the way to the tunnel floor, waited for a train to pass, and began working her way carefully up the line. If the bugs were using that crack as their primary access, that suggested the main access had been sealed shut. Twenty paces. Twenty-five. And her fingertips caught a difference in the wall.
The TTC had actually gone to the trouble of parging over the false wall, most likely in an attempt to hide it—or more specifically what was behind it—from street people looking for a place to squat. The faint outline of a door suggested they hadn't originally wanted to hide it from themselves. Forcing her fingers through the thin layer of concrete, Vicki hooked them under the nearest edge and pulled, the crack hidden in the roar of a passing train.
Under the concern, plywood and a narrow door nailed shut.
The nails parted faster than the concrete had.
Feeling a little like Sigourney Weaver and a lot like she should have her head examined, Vicki pushed into the second tunnel.
It wasn't very big; a blip in the line between Yonge and University swinging around to the north of the Bay Street station, probably closed because it came too close to any number of expensive stores. Although the third rail was no longer live, it seemed everything else had just been sealed up and forgotten. The place reeked of old blood and sulfur.
Well, they certainly smell like they came from a hell dimension.
Closing the door behind her, Vicki waded carefully toward what seemed to be the quiet center in the mass of seething bugs.
The bugs ignored her.
They can't feed from me, so they ignore me. I've done nothing to harm them, so they ignore me. I also feed on blood so they... Holy shit.
Duncan Travis and his group had been certain there'd be a queen in the nest. They were just a bit off. There were three queens. Well, three great big scary somethings individually wrapped in pulsing gelatinous masses being fed by the returning blood carrying—no, harvesting—bugs.
You guys haven't missed a cliché, have you?
Sucker bet that the blood being drained down between three frighteningly large pairs of gaping mandibles was type O. The workers could probably feed on any type—since they seemed to be biting across the board—but they needed that specific universal donor thing to create a queen.
Like worker bees feeding a larva royal jelly.
And Mike laughed at me for watching The Magic School Bus.
As she shifted her weight forward, a double row of slightly larger King-tics moved into place between her and the queens. Apparently, their tolerance stopped a couple of meters out. Not a problem; Vicki didn't need to get any closer. Didn't actually want to get any closer. Like recognized like and she knew predators when she saw them. The queens would not be taking delicate bites from the city's ankles, they'd be biting the city off at the ankles and feeding on the bodies as they fell.
A sudden desire to whip out the can of bug spray and see just how well it lived up to its advertising promise was hurriedly squashed. As was Mike's idea of grabbing a bug and presenting it to the proper authorities—whoever the hell they were. Somehow it just didn't seem smart—or survivable—to piss them off while she was standing in midst of hundreds of them. Barely lifting her feet from the floor, she shuffled back toward the door, hurrying just a little when she saw that all three queens had turned their eyestalks toward her.
Odds were good they weren't going to be confined by that gelatinous mass much longer.
So. What to do?
Closing the door carefully behind her, she waited, shoulder blades pressed tight against the wood as another train went by. Options? She supposed she could always let the TTC deal with it. It would be as easy for her to convince the right TTC official to come down to the tunnels for a little look as it would be for her to convince him to expose his throat. Not as much fun, but as easy. Unfortunately, years of experience had taught her that the wheels of bureaucracy ran slowly, even given a shove, and her instincts—new and old—were telling her they didn't have that kind of time to waste.
Still, given that the King-tics were nesting in the subway system, it seemed only right that the TTC deal with it.
*
Vicki picked up the garbage train at Sherbourne. There were no security cameras in the control booth and coverage on the platform didn't extend to someone entering the train from the tracks. Tucking silently in behind the driver, Vicki tapped him on the shoulder and dropped her masks.
And sighed at the sudden pervasive smell of urine.
"Your hands! Blood all over your hands!"
"It's not blood," she sighed, scrubbing her palms against the outside of her thighs. "It's rust. Now concentrate, I need you to tell me how to start this thing."
"Union rules..."
Her upper lip curled.
"... have no relevance here. Okay. Sure. Push this."
"And to go faster?"
"This. To stop..."
"Stopping won't be a problem." She leaned forward, fingers gently gripping his jaw, her eyes silver. "Go join your coworkers on the platform. Be surprised when the train starts to move. Don't do anything that might stop it or cause it to be stopped, forget you ever saw me."
"Saw who?"
*
Mike was watching the news when Vicki came upstairs the next evening. "Here's something you might be interested in. Seems a garbage train went crashing into an access tunnel and blew up—which they're not wont to do—but unfortunately a very hot fire destroyed all the evidence."
"Did you just say wont?"
&nb
sp; "Maybe. Why?"
Just wondering." Leaning over the back of his chair, she kissed the top of his head. "Anyone get hurt?"
"No. And, fortunately, the safety protocols activated in time to save the surrounding properties."
"Big words. You quoting?"
"Yes. You crazy?"
She thought about it for a minute but before she could answer, her phone rang. Stepping away from the chair, she flipped it open. "Good evening, Duncan."
"How did you know it was me?"
"Call display."
"Oh. Right. But yesterday...?"
"You called before I was up. It's pretty damned dark inside a coffin."
"You sleep in a coffin!?"
"No, I'm messing with your head again. I expect you've seen the news?"
"It's the only thing that's been on all day. You did that, didn't you? That was you destroying the nest! Did you get them all?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"They shit sulfur, Duncan. They were pretty flammable."
"But what if some of them were out, you know, hunting?"
"They hunt on crowded subway platforms. No crowds in the wee smalls."
"Oh. Okay. Did you find out where they came from?"
"No. It didn't seem like a good idea to sit down and play twenty questions with them. And besides, they just seemed to be intelligent because they were following pretty specific programming. They were probably no smarter than your average cockroach."
"But giant and bloodsucking?"
"Oh, yeah."
Vicki had no idea what he was thinking about during the long pause that followed; she didn't want to know.
"So it's safe for me to go back on the subway?"
"You and three million other people."
"About your bill..."
"We'll talk about it tomorrow in the coffee shop— we should be able to get into the area by then." She looked a question at Mike, now standing and watching her. He nodded reluctantly. "Seven thirty. Good night, Duncan."
Mike shook his head as she powered off the phone and holstered it. "You're actually going to charge him?"
"Well, I'd send a bill to the city but I doubt they'd pay it—given that there's no actual evidence I just saved their collective butts. Again." Demons, mummies, King-tics—it was amazing how fast that sort of thing got old. She followed Mike into the kitchen and watched a little jealously as he poured a cup of coffee. She missed coffee.
