“A couple of days after the first shot I got itchy,” the whore had told him. “Jenny told me to expect that, and not to scratch, but I couldn’t help scratching a bit. It keeps coming back, especially on sunny days, and I have to wear sunglasses all day except when it’s cloudy, but I’ve got more used to it and the pills help. I feel a bit nauseous too, mostly in the mornings—like I was pregnant. Lost weight nice and steady, but that’s partly the high-protein diet. I don’t mind the itching, really—it’s like I can feel it working. It is working.”
“Nothing else?” Brewer had asked, insistently.
“Only the dreams,” she told him. “Jenny warned me about those, too, but I like them. They’re fun.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Vampire dreams. Nightmares, some might say, but they don’t scare me.”
“Vampire dreams? What’s that supposed to mean?” Somehow, he’d wished he could be more surprised by the introduction of that word.
“Sometimes, I dream I’m a bat—well, not a bat, exactly, but something like a bat. Flying by night, seeing but not seeing. Other times, I’m more like a wolf. You should see the moon! Huge and red as blood. It’s great. The hunt, the kill, lapping up the blood. If that’s how animals feel, I want to come back as a lion. Jenny says it’s just the diet, but I reckon it’s memories of other lives coming to the surface. Why else would we all have the same dreams? These shrinks who take you back to Roman times and ancient Egypt are full of crap. We were animals for billions of years, you know, before we ever became human. Race memory, isn’t that what they call it?”
Brewer hadn’t bothered to inform her that neither bats nor wolves were numbered among the human race’s remoter ancestors. He had agreed with her that shrinks practising past-life regression were full of crap, but hadn’t added that in his opinion her own theory was by no means empty of it. He’d been too busy thinking about the dreams. They were the oddest thing of all—and thus, perhaps, the most significant. He remembered the haunted look in Jenny’s blue eyes. One reason why she’d taken him home was to make him see how well she’d done since he dumped her, but there had been another. Whatever had been done to her had made her anxious, and a little bit lonely.
Was that, he wondered, the effect of her vampire dreams?
Brewer hadn’t felt any itching yet, but he wasn’t in any hurry and he didn’t intend to go out in daylight until he had the problem cracked, at least insofar as it could be cracked by the equipment in the lab. Nor was he intending to sleep, let alone to dream. He was a chemist, after all; he had ways of avoiding the need for sleep at least for a couple of days.
He knew that he couldn’t go back to Andrew Marklow without a deal to make, and he wasn’t sure yet what kind of deal there was to be made. A promise of silence wasn’t enough, for him or for Marklow. Marklow wasn’t afraid that he’d go to the authorities—and not just because he figured Brewer couldn’t do that without imperilling his own illicit operation. Marklow wasn’t afraid, period. Brewer admired that, but it also made him anxious. Despite his chemical expertise, he’d never come close to mastering the art of not being afraid.
As things turned out, it didn’t take a genius to locate the stranger in the blood samples. The “chap” wasn’t a virus at all; he was something much bigger. If he’d had a cell wall he’d have qualified as a bog-standard bacterium but he didn’t. The only label Brewer knew that might apply to him was rickettsia.
The only rickettsia Brewer knew, even by repute, was the one which caused Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but when he went to the on-line encyclopedia he found that there were a hundred more on record—none of which bore any very intimate resemblance to the one that had now taken up residence somewhere in the vicinity of his brain, and was presumably reproducing like crazy as well as retuning his endocrinal orchestra.
There were, Brewer noted, two significant properties that rickettsias had. Having no cell walls, they were immune to antibiotics. By the same token, however, they were very difficult to transfer from host to host. That was why Rocky Mountain spotted fever, although incurable, hadn’t ever managed to cause an epidemic. People who caught it had it for life—which hadn’t been very long in the days before doctors developed palliatives for the nastier symptoms—but they didn’t usually pass it on to others. Even their spouses weren’t significantly endangered; it wasn’t an STD. Theory said you could only get infected through a open cut—or, of course, a hypodermic syringe, dumb or smart.
Brewer hesitated for a few minutes before giving the information he had gleaned to Johanna and Leroy, but he figured that the time for keeping things strictly to himself was past. Until he had been infected himself there’d been no urgency at all. Now that he had found out that what he had was exactly the same as what the whore had—and presumably, therefore, exactly what Jenny had—the urgency was somewhat less than it might have been, but time was still pressing. He needed all the reliable help he could get.
“If you want a DNA-profile of something that big,” Johanna pointed out, “it’ll take us weeks. Maybe months. Even if it’s a variant of one of the recorded species we’d have to start from scratch. Nobody’s ever sequenced a rickettsia—or if they have, they haven’t published. Do you think the pill-proteins are products of the rickettsial genes?”
“No,” said Brewer. “I suspect that the pill-proteins are meant to alleviate some of the symptoms of the rickettsial infection.” If that was true, it wasn’t good news. It meant that he needed the pills himself if he were to enjoy the benign effects of his minuscule passengers without suffering the downside of their presence in his system.
“Infection?” Johanna echoed, anxiously. It was one of the words that always sounded alarm bells in a lab like this, even when nothing was cooking but everyday commercial products sent for routine checking.
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “You can only catch it through an open cut, and it’s difficult even then. This one’s supposed to be benign, but there has to be a catch.”
“There’s a catch all right,” she said—but she was only talking about the ‘98 protocols regarding the legality of engineering human-infective agents. Nobody expected them to hold, even in the medium term. Everybody in the business knew someone, somewhere, who was working in the confident expectation that the new millennium would bring in a whole new set of rules and regulations, elastic enough to license anything provided only that it were done discreetly. Andrew Marklow might be ahead of his time, but not that far ahead of it.
The only problem, Brewer thought, was that breaking into other people’s labs and shooting human-infective agents into their carotid arteries couldn’t meet anyone’s definition of “discretion”.
“I don’t need a gene map,” he told Johanna. “I just need everything we can get before nightfall.”
“What happens at nightfall?” she asked.
“I have to see a man about a disease,” he replied, as the phone at his elbow began to ring. He picked it up immediately, but it was only a message telling him where to go to collect a message from Talinn.
~ * ~
It was Jenny who answered when Brewer presented himself at the door of Marklow’s building, and Jenny who came to the apartment door when he’d negotiated his way through the various layers of security. The first thing she said to him was: “You’re a thief.”
“And you’re a whore,” he said, “but we’ve both been taken for a ride. Your boyfriend always knew I’d come looking for him. He didn’t move in on my operation to make a little extra money; he did it to attract my attention.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Bru,” she replied—but he wasn’t flattering himself. He knew that he’d already been pencilled in for recruitment when Jenny’s urge to show off and rub his nose in what he’d lost had kicked things off prematurely. Sooner or later, he’d have been invited up here, and presented with a offer he couldn’t refuse.
The man who called himself Anthony Marklow was standing by the window looking out over the
river. He didn’t offer to shake hands and he didn’t offer Brewer a drink. Nor did Jenny; she just went to the sofa and threw herself down in an exaggeratedly careless manner she’d probably borrowed from some American super-soap. Brewer remained standing, so that he could meet Count Dracula face to face.
Brewer was reasonably certain by now that Marklow was Count Dracula—maybe not literally, but as near as made no difference. His friendly neighbourhood hackers hadn’t managed to prove the case—in fact, they’d been so embarrassed about their failure to come up with anything concrete regarding Marklow’s true identity that they’d forsaken half their fee, which had only left them enough stuff to stay high till 2020—but the void of information they’d exposed was far too deep to be any mere accident. The fact that computers had only been around for a couple of generations meant that, in theory, the early history of anyone over fifty could be utterly untraceable, but the absence of anyone behind the Marklow mask was far more pronounced than that.
“You said that you weren’t convinced when Jenny told you I was serious about the genetic revolution,” Brewer said, when the other transfixed him with those dark persuasive eyes, “but you did want to be convinced, didn’t you?”
“I was interested,” Marklow admitted. “It’s time for me to move my personal project on to a bigger stage, and it would be very convenient to have some expert help.”
“You took a big risk,” Brewer said. “Suppose I were to start looking for a cure? I could find one, you know, given time. Just because rickettsia are immune to conventional antibiotics doesn’t mean that they can’t be stopped. Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite ‘em ...”
“And little bugs have littler bugs, and so ad infinitum” Marklow finished for him. “It is a problem. You’re just a small-time hack with delusions of grandeur but there are plenty of researchers out there with the equipment and the knowledge necessary to tailor a virus to attack the agent. I’ve been safe from harassment for a long time, but the race will soon be on again.”
‘“Again?” Brewer queried. He was pretty sure that he knew what Marklow meant, but he wanted confirmation.
What the vampire meant was there had been a time when he had been utterly ignorant of the nature of his own condition, quite incapable of controlling it. In those days, he must have been very vulnerable, even though the legions of would-be Van Helsings who’d have staked him, beheaded him or burned him undead had even less understanding than he had. Brewer still wanted to hear him confirm all that, and he also wanted to know what sort of timescale they were talking about. He wanted to know how long Count Dracula, alias Andrew Marklow, had been undead, because he wanted to know what kind of life-expectancy he and Jenny might now have—or might yet obtain, as the prototype was refined and perfected.
For the time being, though, Marklow had no intention of giving too much away. First, he wanted to hear what Brewer had to say—and if the expression in his eyes was anything to go by, what Brewer said was going to have to be good. The age of Jurassic crack-dealers might be long gone, but there were still plenty of individuals in the world who could and would kill without compunction, and without the least fear of reprisal.
“I took a little nap before I came out,” Brewer said, hoping that he sounded sufficiently relaxed. “I wanted to see what the dreams were like. I wasn’t convinced that anything could actually do that: play dreams inside a man’s head like tapes playing on a VCR. But that’s what animal dreams are like, isn’t it? In animals the arena of dreams is straightforwardly functional; it’s for practising instinctive behaviours and connecting up the appropriate neurochemical payoffs. It’s for putting the pleasure into the necessities of life. For a few minutes I even wondered whether the whore might be right and it might actually be an ancestral memory of some kind, secreted into a vector by accident... but that still didn’t make sense. Bats and wolves aren’t related that way.”
Marklow nodded, but there was no sign of approval in his brooding stare.
“After that,” Brewer said, “I wondered about the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin—alien DNA strayed from a meteorite or a crashed UFO—but that was only because I’d watched too much television. The real answer was much simpler. I only had to remember the other disease which operates the same way—and works the trick even though it’s a mere virus, fifty genes short of a chromosome.”
He paused for dramatic effect. It was Jenny who obligingly said: “What other disease?”
“Rabies,” Brewer told her. “You see, the rabies virus isn’t very infectious. Even if it’s dumped straight into an open wound with a supportive supply of saliva it frequently fails to take, and in order to achieve that it has to bring about some pretty extreme behaviour modifications in its victims. Hydrophobia, reckless aggression ... a whole new set of meta-instincts. That’s the price of its survival. It’s a hell of a clumsy way to get by. Who’d have thought that a mechanism like that could have evolved twice? Perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps the virus is just a spin-off from the rickettsia. Perhaps what you and I have is the Daddy rabies, and the one the mad dogs have is just the prodigal son.”
“I don’t have any kind of rabies,” she told him, frostily. She wasn’t nearly as outraged as Brewer had hoped she’d be.
“No,” Brewer said, “you don’t—not as long as you keep taking the palliatives. Even then... this is a carefully engineered strain, selected to keep the good effects while losing the bad ones. But Mr Marklow has a kind of rabies—don’t you, Mr Marklow? You have the original—the kind of rabies that our ancestors called vampirism.”
“I had the disease which your ancestors called vampirism,” Marklow riposted. “Now, I only have a modified form of it which is much more like the strain with which the subjects of my field-trial have been infected. You might say that I’d been cured, provided that you weren’t too fussy about the definition of the word cure. I’ve traded an awkward but valuable infection for its civilized cousin, which is equally valuable but far less awkward.”
“How much less awkward?” Brewer wanted to know.
“Did you bring the results of your analyses?” the ex-vampire countered.
Brewer pulled a sheaf of papers out of the inside pocket of his jacket. It was only a dozen sheets of A4 but there was a lot of data packed into the dozen sheets and he’d summarized his conclusions very tersely.
While Marklow looked at the data Brewer studied Jenny, searching for the slightest indication of an unfortunate side effect. The mark on her neck told him that she still needed booster shots—that even if it were shot right into the carotid artery the rickettsia still had difficulty taking up permanent residence in the brain and its associated structures—but that wasn’t bad news. If he were to carry forward Marklow’s grand scheme for the remaking of human nature he could certainly maintain his supplies of the rickettsia, given that he had a readily available culture-medium.
“That’s good,” Marklow said, when he’d scanned the familiar information and read the judgmental comments. “Your staff evidently make up an effective team, and you obviously trust them. How much of the whole picture have you let them see?”
“They know that there’s a whole new approach to rejuvenative technology and life-extension—and they have enough of a basis to start their own research along the same lines, individually or in alliance. They don’t know that the new approach is really an old approach. They know I got the data from somewhere else but they think it was one more commission. They don’t know that it was a gift from Count Dracula. They don’t know that one of the blood-bags was mine, so they don’t know I’m a carrier. How much less awkward?”
Marklow smiled. It wasn’t a particularly predatory smile. “I no longer have any real compulsion to bite or stab my fellow creatures and apply my slavering lips to the wounds,” he said. “The dreams still frighten me a little— I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to take the innocent pleasure in them that my new generation of converts can—but they’re no longer a curse that I
have to fight with every last vestige of my strength.”
He paused briefly. The expression in his eyes was unfathomable but his voice was gentle and regretful. “I did have to fight it, you know,” he said, sounding as if he genuinely wanted to be believed. “It was the price of survival in the modern world. I had to remain hidden, unknown ... I had to become a figure of legend, a mere superstition. I saw what happened to others of my kind who couldn’t master their appetites. There are a thousand ways to die, you see, even for ... someone like me. We did our best to spread rumours to the contrary, but our rumours always had to compete with theirs. The confusion worked to our benefit, in some ways, but not in others ...
“I’ve been alone for a long time, but I knew that science would save me. I knew that there would be a revolution some day that would allow me to transcend my monstrousness and become a true immortal. I knew that when that happened, I could rejoin the human race and become its benefactor, changing evil into good. I knew that there would come a time when I could look for company again—for congenial company.”
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 54
