“Isn’t that obvious?” Siri looked down at the floor. “That one imprinted with nearly everyone before they knew what was happening. Three of her victims died willingly. . . my husband was one. That’s why we needed to see how you’d react. We didn’t have a choice.”
“I’m so sorry, Siri . . . and I’ve been acting like a selfish jerk.”
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault. We just didn’t know the full extent of these creatures’ abilities.” Siri reached out and gently touched Ryan on the arm. “It’s important that I continue his work . . . it was the last thing he said to me before he died.”
Ryan gave Siri a warm smile. “Then that’s what we are going to do. Let me see where she’s going to be held. I’ll need to be ready for her.”
Chapter Three
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
—Charles Darwin, English Biologist
By 10:45 PM, one of the isolation unit’s larger observation rooms had been transformed into a secure holding cell for their guest. The walls and ceilings were covered in half-inch sheets of high quality stainless steel. A series of drains ran down the center of the grey concrete floor from one wall to the other. The only fixture was a large shower head located on a side wall directly above one of the floor drains. A plexiglas barrier with several rows of two inch holes had been erected to separate the female from the researchers. It was a cage, nothing more.
Only the transfer personnel were allowed inside the isolation unit during her removal from the sphere. Once removed, she would be cleaned up and secured inside her new prison. Ryan had watched the process on a TV monitor placed outside the vault door. The attending technicians injected a final large dose of allicin into the plasma. The female went into a short-lived seizure and became motionless after ninety seconds.
Ryan became concerned that it may have been too effective and killed her when the large vault door swung open and he was waved inside along with Siri and the Director.
The female had been thrown face down on the hard floor of her cage by the transfer team; her skin was still wet from the hose-down she had been given before being discarded like a lifeless doll. A grey patient gown lay next to her. The men couldn’t be blamed for their rough handling. She had killed five of their own and in their world she needed to be put down for good by a rain of high caliber lead.
Ryan stood next to the barrier looking for a sign of movement, but she appeared totally inert. The strong odor of industrial disinfectant assaulted his eyes and nose. Special lighting from above reflected off the stainless steel walls with a soft reddish-yellow glow. The Director and Siri studied the feeding apparatus, one intrigued, the other disturbed by its simplicity.
“So she just needs to place the other end in her mouth to receive her meal?” the Director asked. “While the donor sits on this side filling that container above the two small pumps?”
“We’ll have to see how it goes,” Ryan replied. “I’m sure it will have to be adjusted, but it should do the job. It’s as direct a way to provide her with human blood as I can think short of letting her take an actual bite out of someone . . . which we don’t want to happen.”
“No we don’t,” Siri agreed. “How does the donor know when she’s given enough blood?”
“See that shut off valve by the reservoir?” Ryan asked, ignoring Siri’s little quip. “All you have to do is turn it like this and the flow stops. There are also two flow meters in line with each other that’ll sound an alarm when a full pint has been delivered.” Ryan flicked a switch and a loud electronic beep started. “You hear the alarm. You shut off the valve, nice and simple.” He turned the alarm off.
“It seems simple enough,” the Director said.
“Your recruits should be able to handle it,” Ryan added. “It’ll take about ten minutes to deliver the target volume. Those two peristaltic pumps are metered to provide an even flow. The station is run by that laptop which can calibrate the delivery rates on the pumps to suit her needs.”
Siri inspected the laptop’s display. “You had time to write the software to run this thing?”
“Of course not,” Ryan said. “I’m using an old version of HP Chemstation. I’ve used it to run these types of pumps before, just not for this . . . this application.”
“It’s downright unsettling,” the Director cheerfully added. “Someone sits here on this side and watches her on the other side feed on their blood. Not something for the squeamish. No, it’s downright macabre.”
Siri didn’t seem to fully approve of the setup. She kept looking at it from one end to the other, shaking her head. “What exactly is she putting in her mouth on her end?”
Ryan handed her a spare valve assembly. “Once she puts this in her mouth she’ll need to apply about five pounds of bite force to open the valve.”
“Why five pounds?”
“It’s a guess.”
Siri rubbed the valve with her thumb. “It’s plastic.”
“I formed the mouthpiece out of low-density polyethylene and then molded the spring valve into the middle. I made spares since I don’t know how gentle she’ll be with it. She might rip it to shreds the first time with her fangs and I’ll have to try a tougher material.”
“That’s if she’s willing to feed like this.”
“Oh, don’t worry Doctor Lei,” the Director said. “These creatures are always willing for fresh blood.”
Siri continued to study the valve as it sat in her palm. “It looks like a mouthguard. Why not just use all metal from the start?”
Ryan scratched the back of his head. “To be honest, I don’t know. Which would you rather bite down on? Hard metal or a semi-soft plastic?”
“It’s very considerate of you,” the Director said. “I’m sure you’ll get everything figured out.”
“And now what?” Ryan asked. “You’ve got this creature here . . . what are you going to do with it?”
“We’ve discussed this, Doctor Ryan. She has many unique abilities and I want you to discover the mechanisms that allow these abilities.”
“For what purpose?”
“This country loses too many field agents every year. If her talents could be reproduced it would give us an advantage in a world that grows ever more dangerous to our country’s very existence.”
“And what if her abilities can’t be separated from the need for blood?”
“I’m not concerned with trivial issues,” the Director replied. And with that he left the cell, talking to no one in particular as he went.
“How close to being ready is it?” Siri asked.
Ryan stopped fussing with his invention and looked at the female still lying motionless on the concrete floor less than ten feet away. Video cameras covered every angle of her cell. She would be under a constant twenty-four hour watch. He wondered how she would respond to such a lack of privacy. One thing he had recognized during the last two frantic years as he helped track down these creatures is that they were driven to be extremely reclusive so they could stay hidden from the society on which they fed.
Ryan finally shrugged. “She’s absorbed an incredible amount of human blood in the last thirty hours. I think we can at least try an animal first, just in case she wakes up hungry.”
“We received a dozen healthy rabbits this morning from a local farm,” Siri said. “We’re lucky Easter is only two weeks away. And our Director also arranged to have some dogs spared from being euthanized due to over-crowding at a local shelter.”
“Yeah? He’s a real humanitarian. PETA will probably nominate him for an award.” Ryan didn’t hide his disgust. “It’s definitely a government operation . . . we’ll try a rabbit first.”
Siri took another glance at the feeding station and walked out of the observation cell. She returned a minute later with a plump, fuzzy, brown and white rabbit that had a dark patch of fur surrounding its right eye. She went over to the pass through compartme
nt, unbolted the door, placed the rabbit inside, and calmly closed the door and slid the large bolt in place.
For a tense moment the two scientists watched for any reaction from the female. The rabbit just sat in its enclosure innocent of its new predicament.
Ryan looked around for a clock—all the rooms had them, except this one.
“Why don’t you go get some rest?” he asked Siri. “I’m going to finish up with the pump calibrations and run another control. I should be done in another hour.”
Siri smiled and sat down next to Ryan, she began rubbing her scalp with her fingers. Her features were a pleasant mix of Asian and something else he couldn’t quite nail down. When she smiled she appeared Chinese he thought, but at other times when in a more serious mood her face appeared Scandinavian. Whatever her ethnicity, Ryan liked her.
“Have you given any thoughts to her origins?” Siri asked.
“Yeah, thought about it, but that’s all.”
“Have you seen anything in the genome studies that suggests a cause?”
“We need to see her mapping,” Ryan replied. “Mycobacterium leprae has some odd quirks about it as you know. It’s impossible to culture in the laboratory since it has a strange habit of dropping genes as it divides.”
“But you still managed to map its genome.”
“Only after trying for three years.” Ryan pulled up a chair. “The problem is it needs a living host to replicate. You’re the expert on the history of infectious diseases. Tell me how a leper with a cold can become that?” Ryan pointed toward the female. “And how do you know this leper was her? How do you know anything about her? Unless she kept a two thousand year old diary that you haven’t told me about.”
Siri thoughtfully looked at the ceiling for a moment. “Her name is Calida Villena and she was born in 101 A.D. in the Valencia province of Spain along the Mediterranean coast.”
“It all started in Spain?” Ryan asked as he sat down.
Siri nodded. “She was the oldest daughter in her family. She had a Greek mother and an Iberian father. At the age of twenty-two she was banished and sent to an adult leper colony in central Valencia.”
“So how did she come in contact with the disease?”
“The Roman’s established a series of military posts in this region,” Siri replied. “And just like any invading army of the time they brought with them slaves and disease. How Calida became infected is unknown.”
“I look at her and it just seems impossible that she had leprosy, or that she was born in 101 A.D.”
“We know this is her because of the leper mark on the bottom of her right foot. This province had a strange practice where they would tattoo lepers with a unique mark that identified both the individual and the colony.”
“It’s depressing,” Ryan said.
“The practice was peculiar only to this province,” Siri said. “The mark was how the colony leaders made sure that each member received the donations of food and clothes from their family. Women were usually marked on the bottom of the right foot, men on the left.”
“Why the bottom of the foot?”
“The Romans thought the human form possessed a certain purity. Only criminals and the condemned were branded. The bottom of the foot was a kind of social compromise. Of course as the disease progressed feet and hands could be reduced to stumps and the lepers would be remarked on their backs if they lived long enough. But in these forced labor colonies the life expectancy was at most a few years.”
“I read that during the thirteenth century lepers had to wear wooden bells to warn everyone nearby,” Ryan said. “They were treated like animals.”
“Sometimes much worse.”
Ryan looked over at the female. “The data I have on these creatures is limited to the molecular level. I never had any context from a historical point of view.”
Siri nodded and watched the rabbit turn around in its plastic confines. “I’m sure you’ve at least seen pictures of severe cases. It can become impossible to tell a man from a woman, or one individual from another if the infection is severe enough.”
“I’ve seen what the disease can do, but how can you have such accurate information about her?”
“It took years to research and assemble into a definite history,” Siri said. “That’s what I do.”
“Tell me everything.”
“There are records from the Roman prefect who administered this region that detail the flow of goods in and out of these colonies.” Siri looked down at the female and then turned toward Ryan. “Hadrian was in power and he started a policy of excessive taxation on the empire’s outer regions.”
“Why?”
“The building of his wall along with the construction of an immense villa in Tibur drained his coffers. His army nearly revolted because he couldn’t pay the soldiers. So Hadrian started to raise taxes, and that meant maintaining meticulous records on the flow of goods.”
“They taxed the leper colonies?”
“Hadrian needed to raise money so he ordered special taxes on the outer reaches of the empire.” Siri replied.
“I don’t know. It seems pretty barbaric.”
“A lot of the blame rests with the Roman governor for this area of eastern Spain—he’s the one who started taxing everything in sight.”
“I guess it’s really no different than what we do today,” Ryan said. “Even the sick in our society are taxed. We’re not much better than the Romans.”
“We’re not, but it’s because of these tax records, which were discovered during a dig of a Roman villa in Valencia, that we can identify her.”
“It’s remarkable.”
“And here’s where it gets real interesting as far as she is concerned. There are notations in these records of a sudden decrease in tax collections from a colony inhabiting a series of caves in central Valencia along the Serpis River. This colony apparently mined special red and yellow salts found in the caves that were used for coloring glass and glazes for tiles.”
“What type of salts?” Ryan asked.
“Their Latin names only describe them as being red and yellow, why?”
“Hmm, there’s something about early yellow salts to pigment glass that means something to me somehow . . . go on.”
“Roman society always had a high demand for pigments to color glass and tiles,” Siri said. “And these notations reveal that the members of this colony had all come down with a terrible coughing sickness that stopped the production of these salts. The tax records then take a strange turn.”
“It can’t get any stranger.”
“A die off of the colony members began, each death noted in the tax records by recording the date of the death along with the name of the family. Just simple book keeping, really.”
“Over how long did these deaths occur?”
Siri sighed then rubbed her eyes. “For one hundred forty-four days a note is made every two to three days that another death had occurred and the name of the family was entered. On the last day of these notations there is a final entry. It simply notes that a single woman without disease and a condition the recording scribe called solus terreri, was re-marked and removed from the colony. All the other members were dead. There was just this one survivor and she was disease free. And her name was recorded on the ledger.”
“Calida?” Ryan asked. “And what happened to the other lepers, the ones that died? Is there any reference to what killed them?”
Siri leaned forward in her chair. “The dead—nearly all of them—were found with bite marks in various places. They were described as being nihil sanguis.”
“She had an available food source and she took advantage of it,” Ryan said. “Where exactly are these caves?”
“Unfortunately the Romans were shaken up by this and they completely abandoned the mining of these salts,” Siri replied. “The exact location of the caves is a mystery.”
“But you’re positive it’s her,” Ryan said. “She’s that Calida?”
/> “They re-marked the survivor by placing the Roman numeral one next to the original colony mark. It signified that she was the one, the only one, left from the original fifty seven members of this colony.”
Ryan walked over to get a closer look through the plexiglas at the female lying face down on the floor. And there, as he intently focused on the sole of her right foot, faint, but still visible, he could see a red mark next to the Roman numeral one.
“My God, it’s her.” Ryan placed his hands on the plexiglas. “To have survived for so long like this. And she’s the index case of this infection? Vampirism?”
“There can be no doubt that she’s the first,” Siri said. “There are additional glimpses of her through history. She returned to her family after leaving the colony and remained with them for a short time, but she seems to have disappeared not long after a series of mysterious deaths occurred.”
“She would need blood.”
“Of course she would. Her need for blood has allowed us to track her over the centuries.”
“It’s amazing that she hasn’t been caught until now,” Ryan said.
“Oh, but she was,” Siri said. “She next makes a brief appearance around 395 A.D. in central Syria where in the early 1920s, archaeologists discovered a crypt with the skeletons of three men in simple stone sarcophagi. Several thin marble tablets written in Palmyrean were found in a small wooden box resting behind a stone wall that had collapsed during the excavation. Its lid was lying on the ground, broken. The tablets were an account of a woman who had been captured but escaped before her execution for the crime of murder. When archaeologists reconstructed the broken lid they discovered two marks had been roughly carved into the wood.”
“The same marks on her foot you’re going to tell me?” Ryan mused. “They captured her, but they had no idea what she really is.”
“It was a close call for her,” Siri acknowledged, “and she had others, but by the thirteenth century she entered eastern Afghanistan and from that point again disappeared until she made it to the New World in the early years of the eighteenth century.”
American Blood: A Vampire's Story Page 4
