Siri walked over to a technician attempting to repair the leaking plasma supply. “Just get a mop and clean up what you can.” The spilled plasma had formed a large puddle on the stainless steel floor.
“Can’t say I like the way it smells in here,” Ryan said and pointed to where some plasma had leaked into an electrical connection box which had begun to smoke. “The air filters can’t keep up.”
“What do you suggest?”
“I think you’re on the right track,” Ryan said. “Mop up what you can.”
Siri looked at the same technician. “Bring an extra bucket.”
As Ryan continued to inspect the sphere’s external fittings a single question kept interrupting his thoughts. “How will she be removed from this thing? And please don’t tell me you’re going to let her crawl out of it when she wakes up.”
“I’ve approved a protocol for her extraction. It should be safe for everyone, including her.”
“Don’t be surprised when she regains consciousness she’s in a lousy mood.” Ryan stepped away from the sphere and looked at Siri. “Unless you think she’ll be happy waking up inside this thing.”
Siri calmly pointed past him.
Ryan turned back toward the sphere. The female met his gaze; her eyes wide open and alert. How long had she been looking at him? One more thing to add to his list of things he didn’t need.
“You do understand how strong she is?” Ryan asked.
“I know she’s unusually strong.”
“That’s an understatement. She rolled a van over on its side like it was like a toy.”
“I’ve seen the video,” Siri said. “After she pushed the van on its side you crawled out through the broken windshield and when the male ran at you, one of the agents got him with a grenade a second before our female here killed him.”
“I know what happened. I had a front row seat.”
“That agent saved your life.”
“They all did.”
Siri sighed and shook her head. “Everything, the capture, what happened to the men . . . it all went wrong.”
“And that’s why we shouldn’t be in here.”
“Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere.”
“What’s keeping her so manageable?”
Siri came alongside. “Her system has its own unique set of pharmacological responses.”
Ryan forced himself to turn away from the female’s stare. He again studied the maze of tubes and wires around the sphere and located a small osmotic pump being fed from a drip bag.
“What’s being injected?”
“It’s an aqueous solution of diallyl thiosulfinate at a rate of one hundred milligrams per minute,” Siri replied.
Ryan gave the injector a hard look. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“Are you surprised?”
“DTS . . . that’s allicin.” And Ryan gave Siri a disbelieving look. “The main active component of garlic?”
“That dosing will keep her calm,” Siri said. “But she’s fully awake, and can even move if she wants.”
Ryan frowned at Siri. “Then why doesn’t she just break out of this thing?”
“She doesn’t have her full strength, yet. The allicin interferes with her voluntary motor pathways, we think. Almost a light paralysis, but her mind is unaffected.”
“Vampires and garlic,” Ryan muttered as this common myth was revealed to be true.
Siri shrugged and then pointed past Ryan. “She certainly seems to be interested in you.”
Ryan took a needed deep breath and stepped closer to the sphere. The female continued to stare at him as she floated naked in her liquid prison. Perhaps five feet eight and one hundred thirty pounds, he guessed. The features of her face were elegantly proportioned with her large, almond shaped eyes complimented by her high cheekbones and full lips. Her smooth skin exquisitely followed the contours of the underlying muscle. Her legs had a slightly exaggerated length that only added to her unique beauty. And her hands were lovely with slender fingers ending in long, light-pink nails. If Michelangelo had sculpted a lover for David this is what he would have created. Yet to Ryan she looked so delicate within her small prison. It was all deception. She had the strength of five men when needed and was inhumanly fast.
Her regenerative abilities continued to amaze him. He could see that her ruined shoulder had completely healed, the gaping wound fully closed. Only a slight variation in color remained, and it, too, would soon vanish. The entry holes from the bullets that had pierced her skin also had vanished. He looked toward the bottom of the sphere and noticed for the first time the small pile of spent shells that had been expelled from her body. He then moved over to the right side of the sphere and looked down. Her left foot, which had been ruined by an explosive shell, showed no signs of trauma, the sensuous curve of the arch restored. Her lovely breasts expanded and relaxed as she took steady breaths from the small respirator placed between her lips. And completing the visual was her long, dark hair that gently floated about her head.
Ryan glanced at his watch. “She’s been in this thing for eighteen hours now and she’s almost fully healed.”
“She does have interesting abilities,” Siri said.
“I’d call her remarkable.” Ryan again looked up at her—she never took her gaze away from him. It was undeniably captivating. He tried to figure out the color of her eyes, but the plasma filtered out the ambient light’s shorter wavelengths and made her large pupils appear as dark, reddish circles. He wondered if she was beginning to hunger when she reached out with her right hand and touched her fingers to the inner wall. Ryan raised his hand and placed it on the sphere matching his fingertips with hers. She removed the respirator from her mouth and formed a word with her lips. He studied her for a moment and recognized that she was repeating something over and over.
A single word.
Why.
Ryan slowly shook his head and moved closer to the sphere until his face nearly touched the acrylic. “I don’t know why,” he said, mouthing the words. And she nodded ever so slightly. At that moment another unit of blood dispersed into the sphere. And through the red shimmer of her liquid world she smiled at Ryan. Not an entirely nice smile, and not entirely evil, but somewhere in between he thought. Her reaction to the blood injection was interesting, almost a reflex. At what level was she in control of her desires? And besides her desire for blood did she also have other desires, possibly human desires?
The red glow took longer to fade as the needs of her flesh diminished. But even after the blood had been fully absorbed she continued that alarming smile for another moment and then placed the respirator back between her lips.
“Ryan?”
“Sorry. It’s all just so . . . she’s . . . I don’t know.” Ryan shrugged and turned to look at Siri who seemed to be studying him, intently.
“The Director wants to know if you’ve thought about the feeding situation. She’s going to be out of that chamber in a few hours . . . we can’t keep up with the allicin, it’s building up in her system and could kill her, we think.” Siri handed the latest test results on the female’s blood chemistry to Ryan.
He looked over the information and whistled, mostly to himself. The data indicated, as expected, elevated allicin levels in her system, it trended upward: apparently her system had no mechanism for breaking it down, this was interesting. But the rest of her blood results disturbed him.
“Her biochemistry doesn’t make any sense to me,” Ryan said as he continued to study the data.
“Did you expect it would?”
“I didn’t expect this.”
All of the most common parameters were way off target, at least for a normal human. She had been absorbing whole blood for nearly a day and the results pegged her white blood cell count at five times normal. Platelets were zero. Her blood pH indicated a state of severe alkalosis. Her hemoglobin and hematocrit read off the scale and the dissolved oxygen levels were five times that of a normal human, which in a peculiar way agree
d with her hemoglobin being so stratospheric. The carbon dioxide level was a fraction of normal. And yet there she serenely floated about, even smiling at him. By all accounts she should be dead, not merely undead. What is undead, anyway? Ryan wondered.
“Ryan, the feeding issue?”
Ryan handed back the test results. “I’ve been thinking about a solution,” he replied. “It’ll be safe and it should work. I’m not sure how much blood she’ll need. The data I’ve been given indicates she’ll need blood nearly every night. It also recommends that she obtain blood directly from a living human host as often as practical. Tell me how you people could possibly know that?”
“She’s a vampire. What else are we going to feed her?”
“Maybe we can just give her blood right out of the plastic storage bags.”
Siri remained silent.
“How do you know she won’t just drink it that way?”
“I don’t know, so let’s try it with her,” Siri replied.
“Maybe we can supplement her diet with live animals, occasionally, or is there more information that you’ve been holding back?”
“I’m not holding anything back.”
“Oh Christ, Siri, that thing has been used before and reassembled. You actually thought I wouldn’t notice? Just the dosing of the allicin is a red flag. This is all—it’s all bullshit.” Ryan lifted his hands and swept them in a large circle. “I need to know everything. How many vampires have you people captured?”
“We caught another female a few years ago. We tried this same setup at another facility, but in the end it died. We couldn’t figure out how to feed it safely. Not to mention that it killed half the staff before it was over.” Siri picked up a notebook next to her workstation. “I took over the management of this project following that tragic event.” Siri stepped up to the sphere and looked at the female. “If you don’t have something in place in the next forty-eight hours we may have to terminate her. We just can’t take any chances, not this time.”
Ryan slowly nodded. “All right, I need to see where she’ll be held and I’ll need access to the lab’s stores immediately. And I need to start now. I’ll do most of the work over at my lab in the molecular science building.”
“Anything else?”
“No, but getting donors in here willing to feed her . . . good luck with that.”
“Never underestimate the Director when it comes to getting people to do what he wants,” Siri said. “He’s lined up a group of second year agency recruits that have signed a special agreement that gives them a hundred dollar bonus for every donation.”
“A hundred bucks to give blood to a vampire. That’s twisted,” Ryan said.
“It gets worse. They don’t know she’s a vampire. They’ve been told she needs to take fresh blood, orally, because of an accidental exposure to a new biochemical agent the agency has been working on.” Siri shrugged. “What can we do? We need the donors.”
“These men are going to think that they’re helping her?” Ryan asked. “Your Director is unbelievable. He could probably teach a vampire how to lie.”
“Let’s go talk, outside,” Siri said.
Ryan locked eyes with the female again, her head tilted slightly, and her expression was one of contemplation. She purposely ran a hand through her hair and allowed it to lazily drift to one side. She also twirled her healed foot in slow circles, almost playfully. It took more effort than he would have liked, but he turned away from her and walked out of the room. No one noticed that she continued to stare in the direction of the door after he had gone.
As soon as was outside the room Ryan stopped for a moment and took a deep breath, and then another. “I feel tired, like I just spent a whole day reading.” Ryan realized that the female back in the room was affecting him. It wasn’t unpleasant as much as unnerving.
Siri stood quietly for a moment and watched as Ryan composed himself. “It’s called mind-lock,” she said.
“Yeah, great,” Ryan said. “I skimmed the data regarding this psychic nonsense and pretty much discounted it as, well, nonsense. The data is way out there. It’s too speculative.”
“And what do you think now? You stared at her for nearly twenty minutes.”
“That long?” Ryan winced as if he were in pain. “That’s incredible.”
“And how do you feel?”
“Hmm, I’d have to say the experience is rather nice while it’s happening. It’s when I turned away from her by my own choice that I felt mentally slapped. Not to any great degree, but it’s definitely the effect.”
“How do you think she does it?”
“Who knows?” Ryan slowly straightened up. “At the most fundamental level I suspect everything about her obeys known physical laws.”
“Which ones would they be?” Siri sounded amused.
“These psychic abilities, in simplest terms, are an exchange of information,” Ryan replied. “Do you follow?”
“Go on.”
“Look, in its most basic form information is either matter or energy, or a combination of both. There has to be a way to measure it. Even the most fundamental particles can be detected and measured to some degree.” Ryan stopped for a moment, looked back toward the observation window. “We’ll need to bring in someone with a better understanding of elementary physics.”
“That will be difficult,” Siri said. “The Director wants to keep this project—the fact that we have her—tightly compartmentalized.”
“I don’t know everything,” Ryan said, exasperated. “There are areas of study that will need other specialists.”
“Who do you recommend for studying her mental abilities?”
“No one comes to mind, but there was a paper I read last year by a physicist who had done research on telepathy using the EPR paradox as a model.”
“What is that?” Siri asked.
“It’s an argument put forth by Einstein and two other physicists, Podolski and Rosen, that attempted to show how our understanding of quantum theory is incomplete.”
“You think this has something to do with her mental abilities?”
“Einstein believed information couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light, but at the quantum level that’s exactly what appears to happen.”
“I don’t see the connection between her mental ability and this EPR analogy.”
“We would call what she’s doing—doing to me—telepathy, which has never been demonstrated, right?”
“She’s demonstrating it right now.”
“Exactly, and this particle physicist presented a mathematical model supporting something he called quantum telepathy—faster than light information transfer between two subjects. I read it but the math was extreme, even for me.”
“Even for you?” Siri asked with an easy smile. “So you really don’t know everything?”
“Hardly. I’ve come to the conclusion that we know nothing about what she is. My scientific ego is pretty fragile right now. No need to pile on.”
“Okay Ryan, I’ll make a recommendation that we’ll need additional help. Like our Director, I can also be persuasive.”
“Just try your best, I guess.”
“Don’t show me too much confidence, but just so you know why you’re here . . . I recommended you.”
“Uh, and how’s that?”
“The Director wanted Adrian Marstani.”
“Marstani? He’s a flake.”
“He’s extremely competent, we both know that.”
“Hmm, so why did you want me?”
“Your molecular work on mycobacterium, mainly.”
“I only studied leprae because of its strange behavior on a genetic level. I’m not an expert on the disease itself.”
“And does she look like she has leprosy?”
“I see your point,” Ryan answered.
Siri nodded then said, “You’ll need to start taking one of these daily.” She handed him a plastic vial containing small purple pills. “Everyone is to star
t taking them as long as she’s here in this unit. We suspect that her mind-lock ability will only get stronger.”
Ryan inspected the label on the vial: Delta-2(9)-THC was printed on the label next to an expiration date. “You’re kidding. Our only defense against this mind-lock is pot pills? Everyone is going to walk around stoned so she can’t do this trick of hers? I can’t work that way.”
“These are an analog,” Siri instructed. “Their effects are completely sub-clinical. All they really do is disturb the right binding sites in specific target areas of the brain, short-term memory, mostly. Have you noticed that our techs never even glance at her?”
“I noticed. I’m not familiar with a sub clinical preparation for cannabis. Why didn’t you give me these pills before I walked into that room?”
“We needed to see how you would respond. Consider it a test.”
“How’d I do?”
“You passed, barely.”
“Yeah, and how’s that?”
“You were able to leave the room.”
“Can we stop with all of this—this nonsense, yet?” Ryan asked. “I mean every time I turn around there’s another line of agency need-to-know I have to cross.”
“Can you trust me?” Siri asked. “Nothing has been done to trick you or keep any information away from you. We needed to see how you’d respond to her, at least initially, because of what happened between the two of you yesterday.”
“That doesn’t make any sense—nothing happened between us. It was me watching her die. It’s that simple.”
“How long did you hold her hand?”
“I didn’t time it—I don’t know, a few minutes.”
“Usually, well always, really, when a female touches a human she releases prions from her skin. You’ve seen the data on this. The prions make the victim more susceptible to these mind-locks and what follows.”
“Am I infected, or am I missing your point? Good Lord! Mad Cow disease is caused by prions.”
“You don’t appear to be infected, so relax,” Siri said. “But don’t you think it’s a little odd? She chose not to imprint you. They always do. It’s instinctive.”
Ryan paced around for a moment. “What happened at that facility with the other female?”
American Blood: A Vampire's Story Page 3
