Mortal Lock

by Andrew Vachss

  “In cash.”

  “How do I know—?”

  The man raised the pair of black aluminum suitcases he was holding, one in each hand. “One million dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Weighs approximately three hundred and fifty pounds. I added some metal for ballast and split it into two parcels, to make it easier for you to carry.”

  “You expect me to believe you just walked through this neighborhood after dark with—?”

  “You’re a scientist,” the man said, putting the suitcases down. “I don’t expect you to take anything on faith. But you can verify what I just said. Open them.”

  The young Asian walked over to the twin suitcases. He tried to lift one, but he was unable to move it from the floor. The man flicked his right heel. One of the suitcases fell onto its side. “Open it now,” he said. “They’re not locked.”

  The young Asian man popped the latches. The suitcase was filled with neatly banded hundred-dollar bills.

  “They’re all odd lots,” the man said. “No sequential serial numbers. Untraceable. Grab as many as you need to run your tests. Go and get them checked out. Any way you want.”

  The Asian man looked up from where he was kneeling over the money. “I’m a biochemist, true enough. But what you’re asking, it’s outside my field. AIDS research is a specialty, and—?”

  “They said you were the best.”

  “Who said?”

  The man didn’t respond.

  “Even if I … could find something. Something that might work … it would have to be tested. The process would take several years, even with that so-called FDA speedup.”

  “I don’t need it to be approved.”

  “Look, no offense. But, for that kind of money, you could hire a whole team of experts.”

  “I have,” the man said.

  “Ah. You realize that whoever finds an actual cure for AIDS is … beyond rich. So what you’re doing, you’re gambling, right? Betting a million against more money than a computer could count.”

  “You find the cure, you can keep it,” the nondescript man said. “Just give it to me, the formula; then go publish your papers or whatever it is people like you do.”

  “I never heard of—”

  The Asian man suddenly realized he was alone in the room. With a million dollars in cash.

  “How did you get in here? Past the …?” the woman in the black silk business suit demanded.

  The nondescript man was silent for several seconds. Then he said, “What you do here, is it for real, or is it a scam?”

  “Are you serious?” the woman said, indignantly, tossing her immaculately coiffed hair. “Our clinic is the most—”

  “Do you cure AIDS? Yes or no?”

  “I don’t know how you got past security,” the woman said, a faint Germanic trace within her perfect English, “but that hardly entitles you to such confidential information.”

  “I don’t want confidential information,” the man said. “I don’t care if you’re running a scam. I just want to know if your stuff works.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “If it works, I’ll pay you whatever you want for it,” the man said. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll just leave, and you’ll never see me again.”

  “I—”

  “But if you say it works, and you’re lying, I’ll come back. Nothing you have here, nothing you can buy, nothing on this earth will protect you. If you run, I’ll find you. Wherever you go, wherever you hide, I’ll find you. And I’ll kill you.”

  The woman sat still, considering. She had devoted her life to the manipulation of emotion, and prided herself on standing above such petty human weaknesses. I must calculate the probabilities, she thought to herself. Logic is the ultimate weapon.

  The woman knew top-quality professional guards were posted tightly around the Swiss clinic’s mountain location. She knew ultramodern intrusion-detection devices were seamlessly interwoven throughout the building. And yet …

  Motionless, the silent man watched her.

  There was a panic button under the Persian rug only a few inches from the toe of the woman’s cobra-skin shoe. And a custom-made little semiautomatic pistol in her top desk drawer.

  The nondescript man waited.

  “It doesn’t work,” she said.

  “How much of it is true?” the nondescript man asked the ancient crone. If standing in six inches of filthy water with the subway’s third rail only a few steps behind bothered him in any way, it was not apparent.

  “How much?” the crone cackled. “It is all true.”

  “The only thing they can live on is human blood?”

  “Yes.”

  “They die if exposed to daylight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only a wooden stake through the heart can take them out?”

  “Yes.”

  “And anybody they bite becomes one of them?”

  “No! Were that so, they would already have overrun this earth. Only some.”

  “How can—?”

  “It cannot be predicted. Some of those taken become the undead. And some just … die. A human’s death.”

  “They don’t have any—?”

  “What? Super powers? Like in a horror tale? No. They cannot fly, they cannot change into bats. They appear as they did before they became the undead. But they do not age.”

  “So you could keep one … caged?”

  “Yes. But it would die if it were not fed.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you, human? You are the first to pass through the portals, but that signifies only that you can walk in death. I know what you paid to ask me your questions. So you are a man with great skills and no—what do mortals call it?—conscience. You paid what was asked, so human life means nothing to you.”

  The crone touched one eye with a long, gnarled fingernail. “There are many such humans,” she said. “They often take lives for their own amusement. But only a small few kill for payment, and even fewer do so with continuing success. That much I understand. What you understand is not known to me.”

  “I need to find some,” the man said.

  “Vampires? You need to find vampires?” The crone shook her head, weighing the absurdity of the problem she had been asked to solve. “Ah!” she said suddenly. “You want revenge, is that it? One of them took one of yours, yes?”

  “No.”

  “No? Why else would you want—?”

  “I want to feed them.”

  The crone’s eyes narrowed as she regarded him. “You cannot be one of those insane children who worship foolish myths to play at sex. Your face is not painted; you do not dress in their fashion; you are too old. And your eyes—”

  “I want to feed them,” the man repeated, with no change of inflection.

  “Why?”

  “I know what it costs to speak to you. I will pay you with more of that. I know you don’t want money.”

  “More lives? You will take more lives for me, just to feed some of … them?”

  “Yes.”

  The crone said nothing for several minutes. The nondescript man remained motionless.

  “You have three sundowns to make your offering. Then come back here,” the crone said, finally. “And bring your food.”

  “It could be done, I guess,” the black man in the blue lab coat said. His plastic name badge read: Roger Rolange, Phlebotomist. “But a full swap? That could take, hell, a damn week, maybe. You can’t just pull one supply out and pump the other in, understand? You need to have it done a little bit at a time. Maintain the pressure at both ends, monitor the signs, keep a—”

  “Why couldn’t you do it all at once?” the nondescript man asked.

  “Theoretically, I suppose you could,” the black man said, closing his eyes in concentration. “But both patients would have to be anesthetized; you’d have to monitor real close and get ready to abort if it wasn’t working. So you’d need a separate supply for each and a full team, plus a …”
/>   Something about the surrounding silence alerted him. When he opened his eyes, the nondescript man had vanished.

  “Titanium? You know what that would cost?” the squat, muscular man asked. His shaven head displayed a tattoo of a lightning bolt, lancing through the number 88.

  “It wouldn’t weigh much, though?” the nondescript man asked him.

  “Weight, that’s a relative term. Of course it wouldn’t weigh much, compared to steel. For the size of what you want, it would still take superhuman strength for a single person to even move it an inch, much less transport it. And the mechanism you want, well, it’s simple enough, that’s right. No more complicated than the way we used to catch pigeons when I was a kid. Just a box held up with a stick, a string attached to the stick. The pigeon goes to get the food and …”

  “Is he—?”

  “No,” the nondescript man told the crone. He rolled the skinny man’s body off his shoulder and placed him on the ground, face up. “He’s alive. Just weak, that’s all. I need to leave him here while I—”

  “They are not here yet. You have come before the time we agreed, and—”

  “I know. I have five more to bring. And one at a time is the best I can do.”

  The man turned away, and started back down the subway tunnel.

  In less than an hour, six men were laid out on the floor of the tunnel.

  “Come to me!” the crone whispered.

  The nondescript man watched as the creatures materialized out of the darkness. He focused on their faces, memorizing the features of the one female and three males, moving his eyes from one to another.

  “There they are,” he said, gesturing toward the six bodies lying on the tunnel floor. All were in various stages of consciousness, but none was capable of movement.

  Fangs bared, one of the vampires launched himself at the nondescript man, hands extended to claw. The man’s hand flashed and the vampire staggered backward, a wooden stake embedded in his chest. The other vampires watched without emotion as he briefly struggled before he crumpled into a small pile of ash.

  “Not me,” the nondescript man said, pointing. “Them.”

  One of the men on the floor managed to scream weakly before he was taken.

  The nondescript man watched, motionless. When it was over, he said, “I will bring you more in three days. On the same terms, all right?”

  “Yes,” the crone replied. “If you wish.”

  “But it has to be these same ones,” the man said, pointing at the sated vampires. “Especially her.”

  The female vampire smiled. She was young and curvy. “My name is Darnetra,” she said, twitching her hips. “Do you like me?”

  “Yes,” the nondescript man said.

  “Don’t say another goddamn word to me about your ‘monsters,’ ” the powerfully built, jowly man in a rumpled plaid sports coat glared at the much younger man in a blue uniform.

  “But, Sarge, I’m telling you—”

  “Listen, kid. I don’t have time for your stupid little wannabe informants, what do you call them, again? Goths?”

  “That’s right. And the word is—”

  “Son,” the older man shook his head sadly. “Even if there were vampires suddenly popping up in Manhattan, it wouldn’t be close to our biggest problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I got my informants, too. Real ones, not crazed kids with white paint on their faces. And you know what mine tell me?”

  “What?”

  “That the most dangerous guy on the face of this earth is back in town.”

  “Who is—?”

  “You know what they say about this guy? When he shows up, nobody knows why, but somebody’s gonna die. A whole lot of some-bodies. That’s his business: making bodies. He hasn’t been ID’d in New York for a long time now, but we still got wants and warrants out on him for the one job we can connect him to, for sure.”

  “Which is?”

  “His parents,” the older man said.

  “You have come seven times now,” the crone said. “Each time, you pay the price. Will you tell me why?”

  “I want Darnetra.”

  “What does that mean … ‘want’? You want her as a man wants a woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand humans cannot mate with—”

  “I want her. Only her. Tell her, the next time I come, I will bring her exactly what she wants.”

  “You know this? What she wants?”

  “Yes. Darnetra wants women. Plump women, but not fat ones. I will bring her some. No fewer than four. And then I will have her.”

  “You are not a man,” the crone said.

  “I’m a little scared,” Dawn said.

  “Fear is not a god,” the nondescript man said. “It is an enemy.”

  “Have you ever …? Oh! I know. When they were—”

  “You are no longer a little child,” the man told her. “Your time will come soon. Then we will fight, together.”

  “Truly?”

  “I promise.”

  “I couldn’t bring them all the way here,” the nondescript man told Darnetra. “They weighed too much. You said plump, right?”

  “Yesss.…” the vampire said, licking her lips.

  “They’re a thousand yards or so back the way I came. Will you come with me?”

  “I saw what you did to Tortrine,” she said. “How do I know you won’t—”

  “If I wanted to kill you, I could do it anytime I wanted to,” the man said, looking toward the crone. The old woman nodded her agreement.

  “What do you want?” Darnetra asked.

  “I want you,” the man said. “I want you as I have never wanted any woman.”

  Darnetra locked eyes with the man before her. Finally, she reached out her hand. The man took it, exchanging a final, bargain-sealing look with the crone.

  They walked down the subway tunnel together, around a series of turns. “There they are,” the man said.

  “Ummm!” Darnetra replied, dropping the man’s hand and running toward them.

  She was deep into the first one’s jugular when the titanium cage dropped over her.

  Twenty-four hours passed before the nondescript man returned. “It’s a trade,” he said, speaking through the bars of the cage.

  “Trade?” Darnetra snarled. “You tricked me.”

  “Yes. And, by now, you know you can’t get out. The others of your pack, they can’t move the cage. Or they won’t, I don’t know which. They haven’t even tried to come for you. So I know you’re not a tribe. Each one is only for itself.”

  “Why did you—?”

  “You have to feed to live,” the man went on, as if she had not spoken. “But I don’t know how long you can go between kills. So that’s not the threat.”

  The man came closer to the front of the cage. “This isn’t either,” he said, pulling a sharpened wooden stake from inside his coat. Darnetra shrank back against the far wall of bars.

  “This is the trade,” the man said. “The people whose blood you’ve been feeding on, the ones I brought you, they all had AIDS. Full-blown AIDS. I got them right out of the hospital’s terminal ward. A couple of them were only hours from death when you took them.

  “But their blood didn’t kill you. Any of you. I don’t have the time to find out if it eventually would. I’m betting it would not. There’s something about the way you process blood that makes you immune. Or kills the virus. Either way is just as good.

  “I don’t know much about it, and I don’t have the time to learn. So what we’re going to do is this: you are going to swap your blood with a human. A human who is HIV-positive. I don’t know what will happen. Maybe your blood will cure her. Maybe it will turn her into … what you are. Maybe it will kill her. But it’s her only chance, so there is no choice. Any fight is better than surrendering. And when you are surrounded, anyone you attack is an enemy.”

  “But what about me?” Darnetra said. “I would b
e getting human blood. I can’t—”

  “You probably can,” the man said. “I’ve been asking a lot of questions, and I think I know, now. You feed off the blood of humans; you should be able to live off it, too.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “You vampires can’t be born, right? If you mate, you can’t make a vampire baby. So you were something else, once. Before you got taken. Maybe the human blood will turn you back into that.”

  “Into what? A human dying of AIDS? I won’t—”

  “It’s not your choice,” the man said. “I can’t bring a whole hospital down here. Even if I could, it wouldn’t be … clean enough. So you have to come with me. Or die right here.”

  “Die?” she sneered, disdainfully. “Even without food, I can last for—”

  “Only a few more hours,” the man interrupted. “Then I pull another lever, and the sunlight comes right in. You’re just under a subway grate. Only that plate above you blocks the light.

  “So what you’re going to do is this: You’re going to turn around, and back toward me. You’re going to put your wrists through that slot in the bars,” he said. “For these”—holding up a pair of handcuffs. “Then I’m going to open the cage, and you’re going to come out. If you try to bite, I’ll put this stake in your heart before you can take a breath.”

  Darnetra watched, silent except for her eyes.

  “Then you’re going to climb into this,” the man said, showing her a black Kevlar body bag. “You can’t bite through it. I’ll carry you, while it’s still dark. When you wake up, you’ll be indoors. No sunlight.”

  “What if I don’t cooperate?” she spat at this … whatever he was. “What good are your threats, then? You can kill me, but I’m no good to you dead.”

  “The next one will be,” the man said. “Or the one after that. See, like I said, there’s one thing I found out about you vampires. You’re not a tribe. You don’t care about anyone except your own selves. So I’ll just get the old lady to bring me some more, until I find one who will take the chance.”