“Sit down,” Ryan said, motioning to a chair in the corner of the room, also fitted with lights and equipment. I sat.
“You,” he said to Gail. “Come with me.”
While I did my best to get comfortable without touching my hand to anything, Ryan went to the wall and began flipping switches. Gail stood next to him and cast nervous glances back over her shoulder at me.
Lights came on around my end of the room, and the whir of a ventilation fan started up. That was good, because once we’d stopped moving, the odor from my hand had quickly built to intolerable levels.
Ryan handed Gail a surgical mask and said, “Tie this on and stand over there.” He indicated the far corner, away from the chair where I sat.
Gail tied on the mask and backed over to the corner that Ryan had indicated. Ryan laid out an equipment tray on one of the carts, tied on a mask, and began scrubbing at a sink across the room from me.
“Are germs really a problem?” I asked, thinking of alleged vampiric immortality.
Ryan laughed softly, with an ironic lilt to it. “Depends on the germ. I can tell without looking, for instance, that under that rag on your hand, a herd of anaerobic bacteria are having a festival.”
“Ugh,” Gail said. From here I could see some of the color going out of her face.
“‘Ugh,’ is right.” Ryan shut the faucet off with his elbows and began the delicate procedure of retrieving a pair of surgical gloves from a tray near the sink. “You’re new, aren’t you.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Experienced vampires do not go around nursing advanced cases of solar necrosis. They usually have enough sense to feed right after the initial injury, before circulation shuts down completely.” He pushed a cart toward me with his foot. It bore an ugly selection of surgical instruments. “Take off your jacket and roll up your sleeve for me, would you?”
I did as I was asked, doing my best not to smear the contaminated Ace bandage against my clothes. The bandage itself was now stained, streaked with red and black, and every time my hand brushed something I could hear an ugly liquid sound.
“‘Feeding’ would have stopped this?” I asked as I manhandled my jacket. I left the holster and gun in place, and the Doctor didn’t comment on them.
“Most of the time, if you survived the sun in the first place. Fire’s a different story,” Ryan nodded.
I noticed Gail edging across the room to get a better look at what was going on. Ryan paid no attention to her. He kept talking, “But, you see, after the bacteria has a chance to do gross damage to the tissue, that’s something else. Would you place your hand over here?”
I did as he asked, placing my bandage-covered hand on the examination tray he indicated. He picked up a pair of scissors from his pile of instruments and began cutting away the bandage. “Don’t move.”
“I can’t.” My hand was an inanimate lump of meat.
Ryan talked as he worked. “If I had been doing my work in a research hospital, I’d know more than I do. Forty years as an individual doesn’t match ten in a well-equipped—This is bad.”
Gail’s eyes widened, and her hand went up to cover her nose and mouth.
Ryan had just peeled away a length of bandage with a pair of forceps. Beneath, my hand was pockmarked by greenish-black lesions that swelled up under the skin. The skin had broken in places, weeping thick noxious fluid. The meat where my thumb met my palm was entirely eaten away, leaving a moist ragged crater where the flesh had liquefied down to the bone.
“A human would’ve probably died of blood poisoning by now.” Ryan paused a moment, arrested by something other than the sight of the wound. The pause only lasted a minute before he began rambling again. “Now I was going to explain this to you, without getting into the spiritual gibberish—”
Ryan carefully removed the remains of the bandage as he spoke, dropping them into a stainless steel tray. He then retrieved another tray, slipped it under my hand, and used a bottle of clear liquid to wash the discharge erupting from the sores in my hand. I felt nothing.
“Aren’t you just going to cut it off?” I asked.
Gail made a strangled noise and turned away from the scene. I could hear her sucking deep breaths through her mouth.
When I looked down again at my hand, I couldn’t take my eyes off of what Ryan was doing. He would rinse a fleshy crater, then attack it with a small sponge clamped in his forceps. Each sponge only lasted a dozen seconds before he’d toss it in with the scraps of my bandage.
“Again, if you were human.” A sponge tossed. “The infection that created you—I was about to explain—has some pseudo-regenerative capabilities.” More rinsing.
“Infection?”
Fresh sponge. “Vampirism is a result of, or a complex related to, an infectious entity somewhat akin to a virus.” Swab. “Unlike a virus, it doesn’t destroy the cells it infects, quite the opposite in fact—it can infect dead tissue and revive it. I’ve never had the resources to analyze it properly, I don’t even know if it is alive, or simply some extremely exotic collection of proteins.” Toss. “But this entity infects every cell of your body now, and every cell needs it to survive.” Wash.
“That caused this?” I still stared at my hand. It looked as if I’d run it through a garbage disposal. It was puffy, discolored, and perforated by sores that sank though flesh, muscle and bone.
“The dissolution of that pseudovirus caused it.” Ryan said. “This thing is photoreactive. UV B breaks it down fairly quickly, and direct sunlight can trigger a chain reaction from the surface all the way down to the bone. All tissue along the way dies off, and the natural decay process starts.”
He dried parts of my hand with a final sponge. He retrieved a scalpel. “It’s medieval to do this without a local, but I’ve never found an anesthetic that works properly.”
“I don’t feel anything in my hand.”
“Not yet,” Ryan said, and began cutting. He cut around the worst of the lesions, slicing ragged black flesh away from the lips of the wounds. I finally looked away, toward Gail.
She was facing away from us, leaning on the examination table. I felt a wave of empathy for her; she shouldn’t have had to be here for this. As I watched, she turned around and waved weakly at me, as if to say she was all right. I noticed that she kept her gaze locked on my face, never looking down toward my hand.
Doctor Ryan never stopped talking. “What I have to do now is isolate whatever tissue in your hand that hasn’t had its gross physical structure destroyed. That tissue can be revitalized back to something like life.”
“Something like life?” I asked and looked back at him. I caught sight of the bones in the base of my thumb. They appeared to be eroded. I turned away again.
“Infected cells are hardier—survive everything but destruction of the cell membrane—they can radically alter their own function, but they don’t reproduce.”
“How can my body replace tissue that dies off—” I was about to say “naturally,” but there was nothing natural about this.
I suspected the answer before Ryan provided it. “Human blood, living whole human blood. You ingest it, the blood itself is infected and incorporates itself into your own tissue. Blood’s the only medium that’s readily absorbed, but any properly suspended solution of intact human cellular material could do as well.”
“Has to be human?”
“Nonhuman cellular material can be infected, but can’t be absorbed. There are a few species that can be carriers, but none are suitable for feeding from. And as far as I know, the infection results in vampirism only in humans—and then only in select cases.”
He kept cutting as he talked. I felt nothing but the occasional twinge along my wrist where the living tissue stopped. I kept glancing back to see him removing ragged strips of red-black, unrecognizable as flesh, and dropping them into the waste tray. The smell was beyond belief. I had to cease asking questions because breathing made my eyes water.
I kep
t looking back at Gail, occasionally forcing a smile. By now she had backed away from the smell herself, back to the corner Ryan had put her in.
Somehow, Ryan managed to stand the smell, talking all the while. “With no intervention, the infection only thrives in a particular type of host—and then only after death. And then only if death follows swiftly after infection. In most humans this entity can’t survive the first twenty-four hours in a living host. Though, if another infection weakens the immune system, the entity can survive much longer.” Ryan’s voice took on the same distant tone it had had when he’d mentioned blood poisoning. I had the feeling he was remembering something specific.
He turned my hand over, resting the perforated back on a gauze pad. He began working to excise the rot from the meat of my palm. “If a susceptible host does die while infected, the infection spreads like a brush-fire through the whole body. Much faster than the normal decay process. Often too fast for rigor, or even lividity, to set in. The infection actually reanimates the tissue.”
I looked up at him as he set down the instruments. He looked at my palm. He nodded to himself and looked back at me. “So far so good.”
I lowered my gaze to what was left of my hand. I had trouble accepting it as part of my body. Large patches of flesh had been eaten away down to the bone, as if it had melted. The edges of the wounds were now razor-sharp, thanks to Ryan’s scalpel. There wasn’t nearly enough blood, and any remaining skin was now snow-white with occasional streaks of discoloration.
“The structure of the remaining tissue should be intact enough to allow reinfection. If all goes well, your hand should reform itself and expel the remaining damaged tissue.”
Ryan took the tray of waste and dumped it into a metal door set into the wall. An incinerator, I supposed. He stripped off his gloves and tossed them in after the waste. That done, he returned to the sink and scrubbed again, and replaced his gloves.
“This is where this may begin to hurt,” he said as he picked up a large hypodermic needle.
He swabbed my right arm, and sank the needle into a vein. “I have to use fresh, infected blood,” Ryan said. “The patient’s own is always the best to use when the damage is this grave.” Then, slowly, he withdrew blood from my arm. The blood didn’t look quite right to me. It seemed thicker and darker than it should’ve.
That wasn’t the part that hurt.
What hurt was when he began injecting the blood into the remaining flesh of my dead hand. I felt nothing at first, as he slid the needle through the edges of the largest wounds. But at the third injection, the permanent ache in my wrist began traveling down toward my fingers. Sensation began returning, a pins-and-needles sensation of restricted circulation.
Then, as the hypo was emptied of its blood sample, leaving white trails of flesh pock-marked with needle tracks, I began to feel the raw ends of the nerves.
“God,” I gasped, breathing again.
“Dad,” I heard Gail say. She ran toward me.
My hand twitched. It was on fire. I could feel it burning everywhere Ryan’s scalpel had cut. I could feel the blood he’d injected, rivulets of lava running under my skin.
I stared at my hand, teeth clenched, and watched as Ryan’s miracle happened. Pink color began to creep down my arm, past my wrist, and to the strips of flesh still connected to my hand. My wounds began to bleed.
I felt the now-familiar sensation of skin tightening and flesh flowing. The lips of the wounds stretched and flowed across naked bone and tendon, knitting together with their neighbors. It felt as if my skin were being torn off my hand, and then stapled back into place. If I hadn’t been riveted by the sight of newly vital flesh, the pain might have made me black out.
But, after a subjective eternity, I sat, exhausted, with an intact hand resting on a gauze pad soaked with blood and plasma. I stared in disbelief as I clenched it into a fist.
“Good Lord,” Gail said from my side. She had seen the entire process.
Ryan leaned over and swabbed off my hand. “Let me see,” he said.
I let him take my hand and prod it. As he did I marveled at the sensation of feeling in my hand again.
22
Doctor Ryan’s treatment, and his nonstop dialog, answered many of the physical questions about blood and regeneration. Even so, for all his scientific jargon, his explanations seemed incomplete. I was a vampire because I was a susceptible host for the vampiric pseudovirus, and had “died” shortly after being infected with it.
But what made Kane Tyler a host susceptible to vampirism? Ryan could offer me no clear answer beyond the fact that it involved the time since infection, the physical state of the host, and environmental factors up to and including the state of mind at the time of death. A susceptible host was a rare phenomenon, and that was how the vampiric pseudovirus could evolve, and propagate without destroying the host population.
At least until social forces overwhelmed the evolutionary ones. Ryan mentioned, almost off-hand, that most vampires were now made as the result of a conscious decision by their creator. Apparently, any human, susceptible or not, would become a vampire with a sufficient infusion of infected blood.
Ryan indirectly answered a few of my more obvious questions. Regeneration or not, “dead” or not, most of the organs in my body performed the same functions as they did before, only at a much lower level of activity. The infection impregnating my flesh took up most of the slack of a slowed metabolism, and my blood now had the duty not just of oxygenating tissue, but of replacing it as well.
A stake through the heart, as long as it remained in place preventing regeneration, would pretty surely kill me. Same for decapitation. My body could withstand an extreme amount of purely mechanical damage—a gunshot, stab wound, a broken arm—and rebuild itself. But anything that destroyed large masses of tissue—fire, acid, or sunlight—would cause my body no end of grief.
To hear Ryan speak, the whole subject of vampirism had no claim on the supernatural. Ryan had a ready answer for all the physical stigmata, and what he said fit well with what Gabriel had deigned to explain about the subject.
But there were things that Doctor Ryan did not explain and, with his point of view, things I doubted he could explain. He didn’t explain how I could look into someone’s eyes and push his or her mind in a particular direction. He didn’t explain the fire I had seen behind Sebastian’s eyes, or why I felt an unease around his rosary and not my daughter’s. He didn’t explain why I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. He didn’t explain why I could see blood as a luminescent fire that turned slowly black as it died.
He did not explain why I could sometimes feel the emotions of people around me, like ripples carried upon the wind.
After all the poking and prodding, Ryan released my hand. “I’ve done all I can tonight. Nerves take more time to regenerate than other tissue. If you could stay here the night, I’d like to look at it in the morning.”
I took my hand off the tray and clenched it a few times. There were a few aches deep in the bones, and it trembled when I moved. It was gaunt and skeletal, but a miraculous achievement all the same.
“You might want to wash that off,” Ryan waved over to the sink. He yawned. “I’ll tell my granddaughter to set up the guest rooms for both of you.”
I looked at Gail and said, “Just for me. My daughter won’t be staying.”
“Dad,” Gail said at me in a harsh stage whisper. I looked at her and shook my head aggressively. “No.”
Ryan didn’t seem to notice the exchange between me and Gail. He yawned again and nodded. “I’m too old to keep these hours,” he muttered.
He waited for me to wash my hands before he led us up. He locked the door to the basement after we emerged. “I’ll let you see your daughter out yourself. I must see Leia and get some sleep.”
Once Ryan was out of earshot, Gail glared at me. “I go through all this to see you, and you’re sending me away? How can you do that?”
I put my arm around her sho
ulders and started walking her to the door. “I don’t know if you’re safe here.”
“I thought you were friends with that guy.”
“Please, Gail, I don’t know everything that’s going on here.” I took her out the front door and led her up the walk to the Chevette. “But I do know that I’ve been mixed up with people who’ve killed your mom, and who would’ve killed me but for some fluke, and I’m no longer sure who those people are.”
When we reached the Chevette, she looked at me and said, “Then come with me, Dad. We can both leave here, get away from Sebastian and everyone else.”
I shook my head.
“Why? Why are you going to stay here? He fixed your hand. It’s all right now—”
I kissed her on the firehead. “I need to find Cecilia, and Childe.”
“But her dad wants to put a stake through her heart.”
“Then I have to find her before Sebastian does, don’t I?”
We stood there for a long time. Her breath trailed off into the night. The air from my own lungs was nearly invisible. She reached down and took my left hand in her own. “You’re so cold, Dad.”
“I’ve been colder.”
“I don’t think I believed it until I saw your hand. Whatever I said, it wasn’t real until that happened.” Her grip was tight, as if she were afraid I might run away. “They did this to you, the same people who killed Mom?” She looked at me with shiny eyes.
“I think so,” I said. “I don’t remember what happened. The ... transition left some gaps in my memory.”
“God can’t damn you for this, can He? You didn’t have a choice.”
It wasn’t a question I expected from her. I didn’t know how to answer her; there were times in the past three days that I felt my soul descended to near-irredeemable depths. “If we’re damned, it is for our actions, not some opportunistic infection.”
Gail didn’t let go. “What have you done, Dad?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” Gail said. “I can see the weight in your face, the way you look at me. You can carry guilt like a badge.”
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