“Why are you doing this? Leave her. Let it end.”
“Leave her? Let her die? Oh no, that would be foolish, very foolish. You’re a scientist—don’t you want to know why their kind exists? You really want this last chance,” and the Director pointed at the truck, “her, to be destroyed without getting answers?”
“She’s a killer and we’re only food to her. She’s evil.”
The Director looked longingly at his pipe for a moment. “You’re wrong about her—she’s no more evil than I am. I know some of her history, this one. She has been on this earth for a long time.” He put his pipe in a jacket pocket and stared directly at Ryan. “Yes, we’re food to her, but so are cattle to us. Within her are solutions to diseases, cancers, and longevity. You’re a scientist my good man. This messy field business isn’t for you. You shouldn’t have tagged along with the tracking team.” And the Director again looked toward the truck backing up the road. “She will be very useful.”
“Useful? How? Five men, good men, just died, and how many others just in the last few years?” Ryan shook his head and took a deep breath. “You asked me to help you find them, to end the mindless killing and I did. Its last moments had some humanity, leave it at that.”
“Humanity you say? This one was always a bit different from the others. Yes, she had a small spark of humanity, always buried deep within that would surface at times. She’s a monster to be sure; she would consume either one of us without any pause. It’s her nature.” The Director turned and looked at the clean up taking place. “If I told you there was an opportunity . . . to change her, what would you say?”
“Change her into what? She can never be human again. I’ve seen the preliminary mapping studies of these things. Their coding isn’t even primate anymore. Any remaining trace of us in their genes is a ghost lost in time.”
The Director took his pipe out of his jacket again. “This one’s different, and I have plans for her.”
Ryan absorbed this turn of events. He wanted to say something, but the Director had already turned away, hurrying toward a blue sedan that had just arrived.
The truck, with their prize secured, continued down the road and disappeared as the first ray of sun broke through the early morning gloom of the Maryland countryside.
Ryan kept to himself during the long, cold drive back to the facility. The five dead agents had been gathered in individual bags for safe keeping until the pieces were handed over to their families with whatever fabricated story the agency would surely use. Five viewings with the caskets closed tight. The two agents riding with him glanced at each other, sharing quick moments of disbelief at what they had witnessed back there. They ignored Ryan, which was fine. His own mind still struggled to distill the reality of what had happened. He should never have demanded to accompany the forward team. The Director had been right, he wasn’t a field man.
They arrived at the facility just after noon. They pulled into the gate and were immediately waved through. The driver took them around the main building and came to a stop by a large open loading bay at the southwest corner. Ryan got out and walked to the rear to help carry out the dead.
“You’re not needed here,” the driver said.
“These men saved my life.” Ryan tried to push past the driver.
More agents began to swarm around the truck and attend to their fallen comrades.
“Just go back to your lab,” another agent said. “We can take care of our own.”
The driver stepped in front of Ryan. “You don’t belong here.”
Ryan watched as a line of agents began to remove the bags of tragedy from the truck. “I just wanted to help,” he said, but they had turned their backs on him and began speaking softly to each other, shaking their heads. Maybe they already blamed him—field agents were always suspicious of his type. He didn’t ask and headed for his private quarters in the main building. He had an uncomfortable need to wash away the grease of death that had fused with his sweat.
A voice from his room intercom informed he was needed at the facility’s medical unit in ten minutes. It seemed a strange place to take her, a place to heal the living. He wondered if it would even be possible to keep her alive, or maybe the better question is: could they keep her undead? He finished getting dressed, quickly fussed with a comb and toothbrush, and left his quarters. Even as he closed the door his cell phone beeped. He glanced at the number—the Director was unbearably impatient. He also noticed that only four minutes had passed since the intercom message.
Ryan had never been inside this part of the facility before, and when he walked into the small waiting area he felt relieved. It was nothing more than an emergency clinic used for immediate life saving medical treatment for agents injured in the line of duty.
A tall, thin woman with short black hair streaked with grey greeted him. She wore a white, freshly pressed clinic jacket and had a blue spiral notebook in her left hand.
“I’m not a medical doctor,” Ryan said as he walked up to her. “I don’t think I can be of any help to you—to her.”
The woman smiled and motioned for him to accompany her. “Not to worry,” she said. “Your expertise is exactly what we need now.” Her voice had a low timbre that was pleasant to Ryan’s ear.
“And how’s that?”
She smiled again but didn’t say anything. He followed her along a short hallway and through a double door where they were met by two armed agents. They made a quick left down a longer hallway and finally came to a stop in front of a large, closed, steel door that reminded Ryan of a bank vault. He didn’t really want to pass through and have it close behind him. Not that he was claustrophobic—it just seemed out of place for a small government emergency medical center.
“Doctor Ryan.”
Ryan looked away from the door. “What is this?”
“Please present your ID badge to the locking mechanism.”
Ryan observed a stainless steel cylinder sticking up out of the floor to the side of the door. A glass window formed a small rectangle on the cylinder’s top. Ryan unclipped the ID badge from his jacket and passed it in front of the glass pane. He found it amusing that grocery store technology controlled the door’s locking mechanism. Amused, but not surprised. He also used available off the shelf technology to keep costs down on occasion. After all, these were thrifty times, even for the government. The door silently opened and the woman led him inside. And just as he feared, the door closed behind him with the same silent efficiency as when it opened.
Ryan paused as they entered a 1980s biohazard unit similar in design to the facility at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The ambient lighting had been turned down and the ultraviolet disinfection lights were off.
“This unit has been in stand down since 1994,” the woman said. “We only use it for occasional isolation measures if there’s an immediate need.”
“What kind of need?” Ryan asked and continued walking.
“Nothing sinister,” she replied. “A public center like an airport or government office might get something suspicious in the mail, or a package is found all by its lonesome. There’s no active research taking place.”
“You mean not until today,” Ryan said.
The woman stopped and offered her hand. “I’m Siri Lei.”
“Okay, Doctor Lei,” he said, grasping her hand. And Ryan discreetly looked at the woman. She appeared to be an Asian mix and nearly as tall as he was at six foot one. He couldn’t begin to guess her age, although her facial expressions revealed a gentle dignity conveyed through her dark brown eyes.
“I know who you are, of course. I’ve reviewed all of your reports to the agency.”
Ryan considered this. “All right, Doctor Lei what—”
“Please call me Siri.”
Ryan half smiled at her. “Okay, Siri . . . so what is your involvement with this project?”
“I was a staff epidemiologist with the World Health Organization before joining the
agency seven years ago,” she replied as they continued walking. “My specialty is the historical study of infectious disease.”
“So what’s an infectious disease specialist’s angle here, or is there something that I haven’t been told?”
“Well, Ryan,” he found it quirky that she used his last name but he didn’t mind. She seemed pleasant enough. “I’m also a trained physician, which is useful considering our guest’s condition. What do you think turned her into this, creature?”
“A bite on the neck?”
“Maybe.” And Siri chuckled. “Of course she could have been bitten on an arm or leg if she had been turned by another vampire,” she continued. “These things are extremely nasty and will bite anyone, anywhere, of course.”
“Hmm, of course, but what’s your involvement with this project?” he asked again.
They came to a small air lock. Siri opened the door and stepped inside. Though it was a squeeze, Ryan joined her and closed the outer door.
“I’ve been with the project from early on,” Siri replied, casually. “I’ve been conducting an historical review of the infection all the way back to the index case.”
“What infection?” Ryan asked.
“Becoming a vampire is a process of infection. My research group identified the causative agent four years ago.”
This stunned Ryan. He had reviewed hundreds of hours of data. He knew what an infectious process looked like at the genetic level. The DNA from these creatures didn’t appear human. They had thirteen extra pairs of chromosomes that had a peculiar habit of cross-linking with each other. These changes could be detected on the time scale of minutes depending on the speed of the sampling schedule. It wouldn’t surprise him if it happened within seconds or even shorter intervals.
“A bacterium did this to her genome?” Ryan asked. “It just doesn’t seem possible.”
The air lock finished cycling.
“From what we’ve been able to determine it all started around 125 A.D. when a leper caught a cold.” Siri opened the inner door and led Ryan inside the isolation unit’s main floor.
“Vampires are lepers?”
“No, vampires are vampires,” she replied. “But their line begins with a leper who . . . well, who still lives today.”
They entered a long corridor with rows of large glass observation windows along the walls to his left and right. The floor and walls were made of light grey concrete. The air had an unpleasant odor from the repeated use of sanitizing aerosols. Two armed agents stood next to the first observation window to his right, twenty feet from the air lock.
Siri acknowledged the two guards and gestured for Ryan to join her as she walked up to the observation window. Ryan stopped and stared through the glass. A large, transparent sphere placed on a metal base sat in the middle of a room surfaced with stainless steel panels. Three technicians busied about as they attended to the complicated maze of pipes and wires that fed into metal fittings embedded in the sphere’s material, most likely an acrylic. The sphere was filled with a brightly lit, pale, amber fluid and suspended within the fluid was her . . . the female vampire.
“There’s your leper, Ryan, or at least the thing that was a leper almost two thousand years ago.”
A cloud of red appeared to one side of the fluid and slowly dispersed giving the entire sphere an eerie glow. The female had been immersed in human plasma and at timed intervals injectors delivered whole blood into the sphere. She floated in the most precious fluids of the human body. As he continued to stare at the sphere and its occupant the red tinge slowly faded away back to the original amber glow of the base plasma.
“So this is how you heal a vampire?”
“At least one way,” Siri replied.
“She’s absorbing the blood,” Ryan observed. “That’s incredible. Who came up with this thing?”
Siri chuckled. “You did.”
Ryan jerked his eyes away from the glass. “What? I’d remember designing an incubating chamber—a vampire incubating chamber that injects blood into a big ball of human plasma.”
“And yet it’s true all the same,” a voice from behind them said.
Ryan turned as the Director emerged from the air lock. “Explain!” he demanded.
The Director walked up to the glass and tapped at the window. The closest technician looked up and gave a quick wave. The Director appeared pleased with himself. He had an invariably wonkish personality, but he now seemed almost friendly.
“Oh, what was it called?” the Director seemed to ask himself. “The—the fish bowl. Yes, that’s it, the fish bowl. Your colleagues called it that, isn’t that so? Ryan’s fish bowl.”
Ryan looked back at the sphere and realized it had been staring him in the face the entire time. Eleven years ago during his post doctorate work at MIT, he had designed a small acrylic chamber to synthesize genetic materials for research purposes. The department chairman had derisively called it “Ryan’s fish bowl” at the informal meeting to cancel the project’s university funding.
It really did look like a large goldfish bowl being attacked by a dozen snakes made of glass and steel. The controlling software had been a nightmare to write and finally debug to the point where it ran without the operating system crashing every few minutes. It might have actually worked, but the project only achieved the prototype stage when a financial review recommended pulling the funds. Ryan recalled that his original chamber had been the size of a basketball.
“Where did you get such a large sphere?” he asked. “That’s not a stock item. It would take weeks to mold it and let it cool, not to mention getting the damned thing polished.”
“But it is a stock item,” Siri said. “What do you think those small undersea submersibles use as pressure chambers for their occupants? We even used the same locations for the fittings.”
Ryan tried to get a handle on the moment, but even his hardened analytical abilities had reached overload. Death, blood, vampires, horror chambers, his own—albeit partially innocent—duplicity in the events of the day rattled his understanding of the known world. And now the door to a New World opened before him and it felt menacing, ready to swallow him if he dared to enter. He looked at the sphere again.
“Is she going to live?” he asked.
“If we can keep up the supply of human blood during the healing process we expect her to make a full recovery,” Siri replied. “Of course this is terribly expensive. We’ve already used up our primary source for the plasma and she’s all but consumed our type O whole blood.”
“We’re arranging for other sources,” the Director said, reentering the discussion.
“You’re having issues with antigen binding because you’re injecting blood directly into the plasma,” Ryan said, ignoring the Director. “You shouldn’t be using the gamma globulin fraction at all, I’d guess.”
“We didn’t have time to get this fully thought out,” Siri replied, casting an awkward glance at the Director who raised an eyebrow. “There aren’t many sources with a thousand plus gallons of fractionated plasma sitting around—besides, it seems to do much better regenerating with type O. She seems to prefer it.”
“What about when she finally wakes up and discovers she’s a captive?” Ryan asked. “What about when she needs to feed? Do you think she’s going to just sit still while you give her an IV drip?”
“That, Doctor Ryan is why you’re here,” the Director said. “Your first task is to figure a way to feed her, without killing anyone, or at least without her killing anyone, if possible. The agency already has enough explaining to do . . . we don’t need any additional scrutiny right now.”
“And how long do we have until she’s healed and wakes up?” Ryan asked.
“At her current rate of recovery no more than seventy-two hours,” Siri replied. “Maybe less. There’s no way of telling.”
“Her kind has been captured—even caged before—for short periods,” the Director said. “Don’t be fooled, she’s helpless for the mo
ment, but soon, very soon . . . .” The Director stepped right up to the glass and began to quietly talk to himself. The man had a strange habit of ignoring others at his whim.
Ryan stared at the female as she floated within her fluid embrace. He wondered what lay ahead for himself, for everyone. As she regenerated her largest wounds had already started to close and fill in with newly synthesized flesh. He knew that vital information had been withheld from him, but he also knew he could find answers to her existence. She might be a creature of deception in the larger world, but at the molecular level he could discover her secrets. Unless, of course, they ran deeper than he could ever imagine.
Chapter Two
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
—Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
The next morning Ryan was back inside the isolation unit with Siri. The presence of two armed agents by the door only added to the sense of danger within the room.
“You don’t seem to approve of our work,” Siri said.
Ryan shook his head as he examined the sphere’s external fittings and plumbing. “This thing is a mess.”
“The techs assembled it a few days ago and filled it with plasma yesterday during her surgery,” Siri said.
“Why was she even in surgery?”
“I didn’t attend,” Siri replied. “But they wanted to clean up some of her larger wounds and make sure the tracking sensors weren’t damaged.”
“You know about the sensors?”
“I’m aware of your contributions to the project.”
“It seems that you are.”
“So what do you think of the chamber?” Siri asked.
“It looks like it was cobbled together using a lot of guess work.” Ryan had squirmed himself in between the maze of external plumbing. “Sloppy. No wonder the thing is leaking plasma everywhere.” Ryan had to contort his upper half to free himself.
American Blood: A Vampire's Story Page 2
