“Can you explain it to me?” Siri asked.
“When I’m hunting and if I’m really hungry,” she replied and gazed directly at Siri, the first hint of malice in her voice, “I sometimes take more than blood.”
Ryan silently stared at her.
She looked at the barrier from one side to the other and pulled her hands away. She then raised her arms above her head and proceeded to sensuously stretch. Not even the patient gown could diminish her elegance. After a quiet moment Ryan noticed that she began to have trouble keeping her eyes open. She gently rocked back and forth. He looked at Siri who shook her head.
“What’s wrong?” Siri asked.
“The sun . . . it’s moving higher, I—I can’t fight the day, even in here.”
“I promise we won’t disturb your rest,” Siri said.
“We’ll just have to see . . . Ryan, can I ask you something?”
“What do you want?”
“Call me Calida. Okay?”
“Uh, yeah . . . sure.” Ryan watched her glide over to the cot and lie down. She alternately stretched her legs for a moment then turned on her side and propped her head up using an elbow.
“I need to sleep now,” she said, and her voice sounded tired but still possessed a silken timbre. “I’ll awaken just before sundown. We can talk more then for a short while, but once the sun is below the horizon I’ll be difficult to deal with. I’ll need blood. Bring a rabbit. Not that one, I like him.”
“We’ll do that,” Siri said.
“But only for tonight,” Calida said. “I’ll need human blood very soon or I’ll die. It’s your choice.”
Ryan noticed that her pupils had become bright red and she kept her eyes on him until they closed and she fell into a deep sleep.
“Calida?” Siri asked, “Calida . . . ?”
“It’s remarkable,” Ryan said. “Her inner clock is the complete opposite of ours.”
“What do you think she meant when she said she can feel the sun?” Siri asked. “How can she feel it down here surrounded by all this steel and concrete?”
Ryan shook his head. “Let’s go talk outside.” He looked at the one-way mirror and waved. The door’s lock disengaged.
“Why?”
“It just doesn’t seem right to be in here while she’s asleep. Besides, unless you have a wooden stake it’s probably best to let sleeping vampires lie.”
Siri raised an eyebrow, stood up, and walked over to Ryan. “She’s everything and nothing I expected at the same time. If that makes any sense.”
“She’s amazing and dangerous.” Ryan opened the door and just as Siri walked through he asked, “So what does her name mean? She asked you about her name.”
Siri stopped and thoughtfully looked at him for a moment. “It has two meanings. In ancient Greek Calida means ‘most beautiful,’ but from early Sanskrit, Calida is the servant of Kalika.”
“The name certainly fits her,” Ryan said. “She’s beautiful. And what’s the other meaning? The servant of whom?”
“The servant of Kalika.” Siri shook her head at Ryan’s blank stare. “Kali, the Hindu goddess of death.”
Ryan gave a low, humorless laugh. “Both meanings fit,” he said and followed Siri out and closed the door.
“Yet, over all I think we have a good start with her,” Siri said. “She talked to us and responded.”
“We’ll have to see how things go when she wakes up . . . and we’ll have to feed her,” Ryan said.
“I’m going to meet with the Director at one o’clock this afternoon,” Siri said. “I’ll give him an update on our progress this morning. If there’s a change in her situation you’ll be notified. Why don’t you go back to your lab and we’ll meet there before she wakes?”
Ryan nodded and Siri turned away and headed toward the air lock. After he heard the air cycling pumps start their low whine, he stepped over to the observation window and looked at Calida, still lying on her side. He felt a rising empathy toward her. Even with all of the death that had allowed her hollow existence for two millennia, he felt an emotional connection with her. What type of a person might she have become if fate hadn’t twisted her future into this unending night? Only a cruel world would steal from a young woman the feeling of the sun’s warmth on an early spring morning, or the innocent joy of playing in the waves on a hot summer day.
Chapter Five
“Your theory is crazy. But it’s not crazy enough to be true.”
—Neils Bohr, Danish Physicist
Ryan returned to his lab in the small molecular science building several hundred yards off the main road from the medical unit. It was just another cube of brown, government brick resting on the ground between patches of trees and open fields.
He walked into the laboratory and noticed his assistant motioning at him.
“What’s happening?” Ryan asked.
“You have to see this.”
His assistant was young, competent, and an avid listener of rap and hip-hop music that Ryan tolerated as long as he kept the volume down. He had been in the private sector for five years after graduating with a master’s degree in molecular biology from Cornell University before taking his current job with the agency.
Ryan walked up to the large monitor, studied it for a moment, and whistled appreciatively. “Okay Henry, I’ve never seen that configuration before.”
“Maybe it’s a contaminant?”
“Yeah? Of what?”
“Hey, I’m just prepping the samples and running the analysis,” Henry said. “Interpretation is all yours. Good luck with this one.”
“She has a normal looking helix, but there’s this outer structure encircling the helix on the plate. I don’t get it. It has to be an artifact from digitally processing the image.”
“You think I would even let you look at this without backup,” Henry countered. “Go home and come back when you’re awake.”
Ryan chuckled to himself. When it came to presenting results Henry didn’t make mistakes. “Split the screen with hers and one of the images from another of her kind, preferably another female.”
Henry’s fingers blurred over the keyboard for several seconds. The display split in half and two images of DNA’s double helix captured under the probe of high energy x-rays were side by side. It didn’t take an expert in crystallography to see that the two images were different.
“This other individual’s imaging doesn’t have that outer shadow,” Henry said, outlining the image on the display with a pen.
“You’re right.” Ryan fixed his eyes on the images for several minutes. “It looks like a helix within a helix . . . a double-double helix.”
“A double-double?” Henry asked. “How does it unzip for protein transcription?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what about when the cell divides?”
“I don’t know.”
“Like I said, good luck with this one.”
“You’re not kidding,” Ryan said. “I can’t even speculate about this. The other females have the extra set of thirteen mitochondrial genes and their mapping has additional changes, but this one . . . she has an entire duplicate genome? She’s different than the other vampires.”
“Look at her base pairs.”
“I’m looking at it,” Ryan said. “Normal human DNA has about three billion base pairs—she’s got just over six billion. What does she need six billion pairs for?”
“Do you want me to switch to the mitochondrial DNA results?” Henry asked.
He again attacked the keyboard and a new window popped up. A list of numbers ran in two columns. In the first column were the results obtained from Calida. In the second column were values representing the human norms. Calida’s mitochondrial DNA had over thirty-four thousand base pairs. Again, double that of normal.
“Are you going to explain this to me?” Henry asked.
“Not in the next five minutes.”
“No hurry, I’m patient,” Henry said. �
��I also have some raw data on her muscle tissue. There’s an anomaly with her actin-myosin structure.”
“I expected that. There has to be a biochemical explanation for her strength.” Ryan began ticking points off with his fingers. “Add to our list of things to do a survey of her muscles’ ATP binding sites . . . density, etc. Rolling a three-ton van seems like it would take a lot of energy.” He stood up and studied the display for another moment. “I never thought it was going to be easy, but Jesus . . . these data are bizarre.”
“How did it go with . . . it?” Henry asked.
“We talked,” Ryan finally replied. “I’m going over the video tape later to make sure I didn’t miss something relevant, but other than that it was a good start.”
“It actually talked to you and Doctor Lei?” Henry asked.
“Yep, and it, is a she and has a name.”
“Even the Devil has a name,” Henry offered. “There’s Satan, for starters.”
“She’s not the Devil, Henry.”
“But at night it—she—behaves like one.”
“She isn’t like us, that’s for sure.”
“And her name is?”
“Calida.”
“That’s a new one.”
“You have no idea,” Ryan said, and he walked over to another workstation and sat down. “I want you to pull another set of her blood samples. We’ll calibrate the equipment with a fresh set of standards just to make sure we’re not being fooled by a gremlin.”
“I’ve already run it through three times,” Henry objected. “The data agrees within a three sigma deviation.”
“Look, we have time to be as methodical as needed. Let’s run a fresh batch and see where we are. If the new data sets agree with these we can move forward with obtaining better samples from her.”
“Do you understand that this means overtime?” Henry asked.
“By all means, go for it,” Ryan replied and laughed. Henry’s position was salaried as they both knew.
Ryan continued to work through the morning and into the afternoon. He was both relieved and disappointed that there weren’t any surprise communications regarding Calida. He again watched the video from the early morning. And as the day wore on he caught himself looking at his watch or the time display in the bottom right corner of his workstation.
At 4:25 PM Siri came over to his lab and updated him on her meeting with the Director. She also took a great interest in the x-ray crystallography plates that Henry had prepared from their first set of samples.
“Do you have any theories on how this helical arrangement might function?” She asked Ryan, who absently bit into a sandwich.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start.” He replied. “Henry here thinks we’re looking at the molecular fingerprint of the Devil. Isn’t that right, Henry?”
“That’s not what I said.” His assistant snickered. “What I did say was maybe if the Devil, who I don’t believe in, by the way, wanted to control us what better way than to tinker with our DNA.”
“Is that your working theory then?” Siri gave a half smile. “The Devil is a molecular biologist like the two of you?”
“Hardly.” Ryan gulped down the last of his meal.
“Well, I recommended to the Director your request to bring in that physicist who wrote the paper you mentioned,” Siri said. “He’s been contacted and he’s . . . well, he’s definitely on the fringe. But at one time he was considered to be a top theorist.”
“What’s he been told about Calida?”
“Only that we have a subject exhibiting signs of exceptional mental abilities,” Siri replied. “And we would like to rule out any unusual causes.”
“I’m sure he was given a nice retainer for his services.”
“He also has some specialized equipment he wants to bring,” Siri said. “Right now the logistics are being worked out. Figure five or six days until he gets here.”
“Where’s his equipment going to be setup, and how much is he going to be told about what she really is?”
“Don’t concern yourself with the details. The Director will take care of it.”
“We’ll see how it goes,” Ryan said, again looking at his watch.
Siri stood up. “Are we ready?”
“Okay,” Ryan answered. “Henry, finish up on the standards and go home. We can get started around the same time tomorrow.”
Ryan and Siri got their things together and left Henry to his work. As they walked from the building a small group of trainees jogged across their path. The sun hung low in the sky and would soon fall behind the trees. They walked in silence as they both prepared for their second session with Calida. She had made an impression on each of them but in decidedly different ways.
Ryan again found himself standing in front of the observation window. Calida paced around her cell. The guard unlocked the door and they went inside. Siri carried her notebook from the previous night and Ryan had a stainless steel tray with several small syringes, a unit of whole blood partially wrapped in a thermal foil bag, and some plastic tissue swabs.
Calida turned toward them and her long hair swirled as it caught up with her head.
“Hello Calida,” Ryan said.
“I thought I felt you coming.” She stopped pacing and pressed herself against the plexiglas. Her eyes fixed on his. “So you’ve brought me a present, how nice.”
“How do you feel?” Siri asked.
Calida continued to look at Ryan. “I feel good. I always feel good when the sun goes down.”
“You said we could talk again.” Ryan walked up to the plexiglas to where she stood.
“We are talking,” Calida said. “I do my best talking as the night goes on.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“Sometimes talking to someone can be very rewarding.”
“Do you require blood—do you feed—every night?” Siri asked.
“Don’t you?”
“And how much blood will you need?”
“As much as your heart can pump until it stops, I’ve already told you, Ryan.”
Siri went over to the same chair she used earlier and sat down. She opened her notebook and skimmed through several pages for a moment. “We want to learn about you before you changed.”
“Before I changed?”
“Yes Calida, before you became what you are now.”
“I was nothing before.”
“But you were once a child, a little girl, and then a young woman, you weren’t born this way.”
Calida’s eyes bored into Siri. “I was once a little girl . . . then a young woman, same as you.”
“Your mother and father . . . do you remember them?”
“Why do you need to know that? Did you wake up today and decide to be cruel to a vampire?”
“I told you that we want to help you,” Siri replied. “Tell us about when you were sent away from your home.”
Ryan sensed that Calida didn’t appreciate this line of questioning.
“Why?”
“You were sent away to live with others,” Siri continued.
“How do you know this?” The hypnotic quality of her voice disappeared, and she turned away from Siri. “You figured out what the marks on my foot mean. That happened so far in the past it’s no longer important.”
“You do remember what happened to you?” Siri pressed.
Calida stepped back from the plexiglas. She looked confused as she worked her upper teeth against her bottom lip before turning to Ryan. “Are those presents for me?” she asked.
“Uh, not exactly. I would like to get, I mean, I would like you to take one of these plastic swabs and, well, scrape it against the inside of your cheek.”
“Why do you want me to do this?”
“I would like a sample of your skin from inside your mouth.”
“Wouldn’t a little kiss be a much nicer way?” she asked.
“I just want a sample of you without anyone else in it.”
&nb
sp; “And is that bag of blood a reward if I do this for you?”
“No, you can have it whenever you want,” he replied, and walked over to the pass through and placed the bag inside. He closed the door and waited.
Calida stepped up to the pass through and glanced at the blood, but instead of taking it she looked at Ryan. “What do you want me to do?”
“Take the swab out of the plastic bag and gently scrape it along the inside of your cheek,” Ryan said. “Then you just put it back in the bag and give it to me.”
Calida looked down at the plastic bag in the pass through and was silent for a moment. Finally she looked up and said, “Such a simple thing . . . okay, I’ll do this for you.”
Ryan opened up the door again and placed the plastic bag with the swab inside the pass through next to the warm blood. He closed the door and Calida reached inside and removed the plastic bag. She then took the swab out and opened her lips. As she placed the swab inside her mouth Ryan caught a glimpse of her fangs. She slowly moved her hand back and forth several times and pulled the swab from between her lips. She then placed the swab back in the plastic bag, sealed it, and put it inside the pass through. She still made no attempt to take the blood.
“Thank you,” Ryan said, and opened the door and took his sample.
“How is this going to help me?” she asked, but her eyes focused on the blood.
“It will allow us to learn more about you so that we can help you,” Ryan replied.
“I’ve watched science confuse the world,” she said. “It makes human think they’re in control of what they don’t understand.”
“Science helps us find ways to prevent suffering and improve our lives,” Ryan said.
“Maybe it does, but it’s only ever been used to find ways to destroy what I am,” Calida said. “Science is a vampire’s enemy.” Calida opened up the compartment and took the blood. She held it to her face for a moment. “Mm, at least it’s warm.”
“That‘s a full pint,” Siri said. “It was donated twelve hours ago and is living blood.”
“Whose is it?”
American Blood: A Vampire's Story Page 6
