by James Fahy
His voice sounded tinny and far away, as though through a bad telephone connection in a storm.
“The retardant’s holding. Her vitals have evened out but she’s lost too much blood. These wounds…”
He sounded desperate.
“I can help.”
It was Allesandro’s voice – rough and ragged-sounding, his accent thick – and suddenly there was an arm in my view. It was bare and white, still badly blistered here and there but already healing. There was a fresh, messy wound across the wrist, already dripping blood.
“Drink,” I heard him say thickly, and he lowered his arm onto my face.
He seemed weak, almost about to stumble. I thought I saw someone behind him, helping him to stand as though he was drunk. Griff?
Instinctively, I tried to turn my face away but his other hand caught me. His grasp was soft but firm, cradling my head.
“It’s okay. It won’t make you like me, I promise. It will heal you. Drink, or you will die.”
He held my face firmly against his arm until I opened my lips and closed them around his wrist. I could taste the salt of his skin on my lips as his blood flowed into my mouth. I drank. I fought the urge to retch as my throat filled with the metallic taste of pennies and blood.
I drank and drank until I passed out again.
28
I woke again.
I didn’t know how much time had passed but the lights were low in the lab, as though everyone had gone home for the night. Only the rat cages and the soft private lamps over each workstation were illuminated. That didn’t mean much in Blue Lab. It could have been one in the morning or three in the afternoon for all I knew. That was one of the pitfalls of working four levels underground. On the plus side, I seemed, however, to be alone, not a monster, and not dying.
I sat up carefully. I was still on the mortuary slab at the back of the lab. It was the closest approximation we had to anything resembling a hospital bed. The lab was very quiet around me. After my semi-fugue and the chaos of the trip here, it was odd to be surrounded by silence.
I found I was dressed in a white lab coat, and nothing else. Luckily, it was quite big and covered everything from neck to knee. My hands went tentatively to my throat where the Pale had torn into me under Carfax, afraid of what I might find there.
There was no wound, no ragged tear. I checked my arms. No puncture wounds where the claws had slashed into me, just small red crescents like old bruises. I felt … fine. Importantly, I didn’t feel like a homicidal bloodthirsty creature which was a definite plus. I was still human … I thought. I seemed to have my mind back.
I slid slowly off the gurney, testing carefully to check my legs could hold my own weight. I was a little lightheaded, but not as though I had just almost died a few times over. It was more like I’d had a sugar rush from one too many M&Ms.
Vampire blood, I thought. It’s the new hair of the dog.
Griff appeared out of nowhere, popping his head around the corner of the cubicle space. He must have heard me moving around. So I wasn’t completely alone after all.
His hair looked a little wild and he had dark circles under his eyes. I pulled my lab coat tighter around me self-consciously, acutely aware that I was naked underneath. And yes, I was also aware how ridiculous my prudishness was considering I had recently been thrashing around on the floor in my own blood, foaming at the mouth.
My assistant stared at me. I stared back. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“Doctor Grace,” I said, my voice sounding small in the quiet lab.
“Welcome back Doctor Harkness,” he replied hoarsely.
We stared at each other some more, both of us deeply uncomfortable.
“Epsilon?” I asked eventually, when the silence had become deafening.
I watched his Adam’s apple work a few times before he answered. He was staring at me like he’d never seen me before. His eyes looked red.
“My revised version, yeah,” he said eventually.
He looked scared like he was about to get a scalding from the teacher.
“Brad’s still alive and well,” he added reassuringly, obviously wondering if I might be concerned about imminently exploding.
A reasonable concern, I’m sure you’ll agree.
“We’re not cleared for human testing of course but…”
He looked helpless. He ran his hands through his shaggy hair.
“There wasn’t much choice, Doc. You were … turning. I was … we were losing you.”
I nodded slowly. I knew exactly how close I had come to being lost. If the vampire hadn’t gotten me here in time, tearing through the city like the proverbial bat out of hell…
“Allesandro? Is he…”
“The vampire’s fine,” Griff replied, a little curtly I thought, but I didn’t have the energy to wonder about this right now. “Resting. He was pretty burned up. I’ve been watching him while he’s sleeping.”
He hesitated, looking embarrassed as he realised how odd that sounded.
“Observing his condition, I mean,” he stammered. “He’s healing faster than anything I’ve ever seen. I mean, you can literally see his skin reforming. Two hours ago he was covered in third degree burns-and now? Bad sunburn. His rate of regeneration is astonishing.”
Griff was a scientist at the end of the day. It didn’t matter how much weird the world threw at us, we will always want to study it. We can’t help ourselves. We’re the ones who run toward erupting volcanoes, measuring tools in hand, while everyone else runs the other way.
I was leaning against the gurney, my legs crossed at the ankle, still hugging the lab coat closed.
“Erm … where are my clothes, Griff?”
“Oh,” Griff’s face reddened. “That wasn’t me! That was Lucy. They were ruined, Doc. Blood, some kind of rank sewage, and burned up in places where the GO had carried you in. She had to pretty much cut you out of them. We put them through the incinerator.”
Of course, Lucy. I hadn’t hallucinated about her then.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“She went home to get you a change of clothes. She’s swinging by mine too, for you know, the dead guy. He was in as bad a state as you almost. Not infected, of course. I don’t think the vampires are susceptible but still, he was a mess. We burned all his stuff too but then he set most of his clothes on fire talking a stroll down the security corridor.”
“He’s called Allesandro,” I said, walking towards Griff, slightly unsteady still. “Not the dead guy, not the GO – Allesandro. Where is he?”
Griff gestured over my shoulder.
We have three morgue cubicles in the lab; big, oversized silver lockers. We’ve never needed to cold store anything larger than a dog before. I saw that one of the drawers was now closed.
“It’s the daytime boss,” Griff told me. “He had to sleep, or whatever it is they do when the sun’s up. I think it speeds up their healing too.”
I took a moment to register the fact that there was a butt-naked vampire asleep in the dark corpse drawer behind me. It didn’t faze me as much as you would expect. The last few days had been all kinds of strange. I was kind of getting used to it.
It was odd to realise it was the daytime. It had been dark when Allesandro brought me in. I must have been out a long time while Griff administered the Epsilon serum and let it take hold, working through my system, undoing the work of the virus.
I took a moment to consider the magnitude of what we had done.
“We are in so much trouble,” I muttered. “We have a GO in the lab. The lab designed to keep GOs out. This breaks every possible level of protocol…”
I suddenly remembered something from my fugue; the security guard hitting the floor upstairs at the main entrance.
“Jesus! Mattie!” I yelped.
“It’s okay!” Griff said, his hands raised reassuringly. “It’s okay. Your crispy vampire just put him under or something, Jedi mind tricks. I’ve been up to check on
him once you two were both, you know, stable. He was reading his newspaper. He doesn’t even remember anything. As far as he knows, I think he thought he fell asleep in his chair for ten minutes, that’s all.”
Griff looked concerned, glancing at the drawer behind me.
“I didn’t know the GOs could do that to people,” he said in a low voice.
“Oh, they have all kinds of fun skills we know nothing about. Trust me,” I said, “I’ve been sampling their less fun party tricks.”
“Anyway, he’s been off shift for a while now,” Griff told me. “It’s nearly five o’clock.”
I shuffled over to a seat at the nearest workstation and collapsed into it. My mind was still reeling. I put my head in my hands, rubbing my eye sockets with my palms.
“Doc, you know at some point you’re going to have to tell me what the hell is going on,” Griff said, turning to lean against a desk.
I looked up at him. His face was earnest, serious and worried.
“It’s one thing pretending there’s nothing wrong while you don’t show up for work and then take me casing our boss’ house. It’s quite another when an undead on-fire GO bursts into the lab carrying your body and telling us that you are turning into one of the Pale.”
He shook his head, as though he still didn’t quite believe what had happened.
“Lucy claims she knows the vampire guy, from some club or other you two went to? Since when do you go to vamp clubs? Am I the only person out of the loop here?”
I sighed, and rubbed my eyes again.
“Could you get me a coffee, Griff?” I said. “We’re not leaving the lab until the sun goes down and I can talk to the deeply sunburned vampire taking a nap in the fridge over there. I need some answers myself and I’m not letting him out of my sight until I get them, so I might as well tell you everything while we wait.”
He looked at me expectantly.
“Seriously, Griff,” I said, smiling weakly. “Coffee. It may take a while.”
I told Griff everything, from start to finish. From Allesandro turning up at the lecture to the alley outside Carfax and all the insanity between. Cabal, the Black Sacrament, the Bonewalker, the bodies, the Pale. My list of horrors seemed endless as I poured it out to him. In retrospect, I reflected, it had been a pretty rough couple of days.
The only part I left out of my story was my clandestine trip down to the MA level and what I had found down there. I’m not quite sure why but I figured he would have enough to deal with digesting our immediate problems without discovering that certain divisions of our employer, our very government, were responsible for mass civilian executions in the name of war. Something told me this was very, very dangerous information to have.
I had tried to keep Griff and Lucy out of this. To keep them safe, I supposed. I supposed that was irrelevant now.
To his merit, my assistant barely interrupted me, except with the occasional outburst of shocked expletives. He seemed genuinely surprised by my thumbnail sketch of Veronica Cloves. That figured. All anyone ever saw was her earnest, trustworthy, reassuring face on the DataStreams. As the spokeswoman of the Cabal to the media at large, she was practically lovable.
I thought of Lucy, our ditzy chipper lab assistant by day, leather-clad vampire-worshipper by night; Cloves, hardly the beatific charmer once she was off screen; Oscar, the nicely turned-out rich boy with the world at his feet, slumming it undercover as a submissive blood junkie.
And then there was Allesandro, smooth-moves gigolo by trade, seemingly selfless action hero by choice. Even the other vampires I had met, Jessica and Helena, were hardly what they seemed, their gothic image just a false front to pander to our expectations.
Somehow, I found it more disturbing that they had been holding me in a dungeon looking like they had just stepped out of Harvey Nicholls. You expect to be tortured by leather wearing, chain-clad monsters. It was more disturbing when the violence came from someone dressed like a schoolteacher and sipping a macchiato.
Finally, I thought of Gio; the self-styled lord of Sanctum lovingly welcoming his darling Helsings, the mortal children, into his domain each night while secretly hating them all.
Honestly, I wondered if anyone in this town was what they seemed.
Did Griff have a double life too? Right now it wouldn’t have shocked me to discover that when he wasn’t running maths through the system or tinkering with his vintage car, he was moonlighting as a high-wire, fire-eating trapeze artist.
But I doubted it. Griff was the most honest, dependable person I’d ever met. We had worked together for nearly four years. He had never questioned me once. He was loyal to a fault. Now he sat, holding his untouched coffee with both hands. It had gone cold while I had been talking. His face was pale.
“She’s really dead then?” he asked. “Trevelyan? And that other woman, the one who’s been all over the news yesterday, Coleman, right? This vampire group calling themselves the Black Sacrament, they killed them both … for their teeth?”
I confirmed this with a nod.
“They have Oscar Scott’s too,” I said. “I don’t know if they’ve killed him yet. I hope not.”
“From what you’ve said, he sounds like a prick,” Griff muttered, looking unimpressed.
“Oh, he is,” I nodded in happy agreement. “But that doesn’t mean he deserves to die, just for being stupid. If people were killed for that, there would be less of a housing crisis in the merry walled cities of good old Britannia. They wanted mine too – my teeth. This Bonewalker they have, they’re using it for some kind of magic sacrifice or offering; I don’t know, whatever the hell you want to call it. They can do things we can’t imagine, the Bonewalkers. I just don’t know what it is the Sacrament are trying to achieve.”
I had told Griff about the DataStream clip which had arrived at the lab with Trevelyan’s teeth; the angry ranting of the guy with the pliers. I was pretty sure by now this was Gio. The portentous warnings that the ‘sun would rise’. It hardly sounded like a vampire-centric threat.
I had expected anger from Griff, or at least resentment that I had hidden all of this from him until now. Naturally, I was surprised when, instead, he put down his cup and slid his hands across the desk, taking hold of mine reassuringly.
I looked up at him, confused.
“Don’t worry Doc,” he said with a small grim smile. “We’ll figure this out; you, me and Lucy. We’re a team, right? It’s what we do. It’s what friends do.”
I stared at him in blank shock for a moment. His hands squeezed mine. I felt very tired.
So far I had enemies, dubious acquaintances and questionable allies. I hadn’t considered adding friends into the equation. I suppose part of my overall problem is that I never had.
I squeezed his hand back silently.
The doors to the blue security corridor suddenly swished open and Lucy came in, rolling a small pink travel suitcase behind her on wheels. I noticed it had a black Hello Kitty stencilled on the side. Of course it did.
She saw me sitting at the table and let out a small yelp. Before I could say anything, she dropped the case and ran across the lab, flinging her arms around me and gripping me in an unexpected hug.
While she squeezed the life out of me and I fought to politely disentangle myself from her, Griff went to fetch the suitcase.
“Oh my God, don’t you ever do that to us again!” Lucy babbled. “You scared the shit out of us! We thought you were dead, and then I thought you must have gotten into trouble at the club the other night and I felt awful because after the fire, when we all got thrown out, I couldn’t find you and I went on to Bat-tastic because they have half price jello-shots on weekdays and I met this really cute guy, but he ended up being a douche, then I went to my sisters and I was so drunk, seriously drunk that she made me stay over and I slept right through and missed work and I didn’t even call you to see if you got home okay and I lost my phone in the club, then when you came in tonight with that vampire guy from the club and you
were both bust up I could have died!”
“Lucy!” I said, prising her off me. “Slow down.”
She hugged me again for a second then let go, blinking at me with wet eyes.
“I’m sorry, Doc,” she said. “I’m such a moron. I shouldn’t have left you at the club. Your vampire guy escorted me out. He said he was going back in for you, but then you didn’t come out and neither did he, so I figured you two had … you know…”
Her eyes flicked from Griff to me. She raised her eyebrows knowingly at me in what I supposed she thought was a discreet manner.
“… Gone off somewhere together? So I ditched you.”
“It’s okay,” I insisted, releasing her from her soul-destroying guilt. “I’ve been worried about you.”
I glanced over at the suitcase that Griff had wheeled over to us.
“Please, God, Lucy, tell me there are clothes in there.”
Lucy nodded enthusiastically.
“For you and … him,” she said, giving me a knowing smirk. “God, I nearly died when he burst in here carrying you. What a shock! You should have heard Griff squeal!”
“I didn’t squeal!” Griff blustered angrily.
“I thought he was going to wet himself,” Lucy said, grinning. “Your vampire guy is standing there, smoking and flickering like a roman candle. He was actually on fire!”
She fluttered her hands excitedly
“God, it was like something out of a horror movie. He’s still pretty hot though, if you’ll excuse the pun. So yummy, just carrying you in like that, all draped in his arms, shirt burned right off. I’m so jealous!”
Jealous of me foaming at the mouth and almost dying, because I got to be manhandled by a barbequing vampire? I chose to ignore this and took the suitcase from Griff’s hands.
“Oh yes, clearly he has smouldering down to a T,” I agreed. “That’s ultraviolet light for you.”
I took the case into the semi-privacy of the small booth where we had found Angelina the rat’s disastrous end. I tried not to think about that as I pulled out the clothes Lucy had brought. Mercifully, there was nothing too outlandish. I settled on black pants and a white wool sweater, with black ankle boots.
