Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  I’m flanked by two underfed youths with straggly beards and, if I didn’t know better, a look that says “Inbreeding keeps it in the family.” One of them carries a torch plucked flaming from the fire. They don’t need it to see, hell, they don’t need fire at all, but I recognize in the building of the bonfire a remnant of their warm days, a little thing to hang onto. A memory of back when, of kids playing at grown-ups, of a time when heat meant comfort, meant life. Creatures pretending one day there might be light.

  The falls are a couple of minutes walk away, down a path strewn with sticks and pebbles, occasionally hidden by touchy-feely ferns. When we reach the bottom, there’s a shallow pool and a whole lot of spray where the water crashes down. One of my escorts points to a break in the foliage, right next to the cataract; the other pushes me roughly forward. My Docs slip and slide on the damp rocks. I keep my balance though; with a head in one hand, a sword in the other, and Barry cursing me the whole while it’s no mean feat. I walk around behind the curtain of wet and see an entrance, a glow coming from inside it like a jack-o’-lantern.

  There are no torches here, I notice, but the walls glow. Phosphorous? I wait until we’re far enough down the tunnel for my guard of honor to not hear.

  “Barry, you ungrateful bastard. I carry your sorry metaphorical arse all the way here, nearly get eaten by a mutant possum, and this is the thanks I get?” I shake him by the hair and glare into his blue eyes. “You think I’m an hors d’oeuvre?”

  “Calm down. Wait—possum? Is that what happened to my nose? You let a possum eat my fucking nose?”

  “Focus, Barry. Seriously, do you think I’m going to drop you in the all-healing, all-fixing pond so you can serve me up to that lot?” I shake him again and he winces. “Or are you gonna snack on me yourself?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Once I’m whole again, no one’s going to mess with you.”

  “You didn’t answer me!”

  “I might need a little blood when I’m done,” he admits. I give his head a good rattle and a few choice profanities, and he yells, “Not much! Not much! Just a little to top up. I promise!”

  “What are we talking? A thimbleful? A shot glass?”

  “Just a—bit. Terry, I promise I won’t drain you, I won’t turn you.”

  What choice do I have? The devil I know or the ones I don’t.

  The pool is at the bottom of the slope, in roughly the center of a small cavern. The liquid in it is milky-white with the same sheen as mother-of-pearl, and the smell is a little like household cleaner. A bit bleachy—more Domestos than Dettol.

  “What’s that?” I ask, trying not to breathe too deeply.

  “Stuff. You know—stuff.”

  “You knew about this how?”

  “Stories, Chinese whispers, old diaries—your lot aren’t the only ones who keep records, you know. Nothing precise, nothing exact, just hints.” “You read our diaries?” I shouldn’t be surprised.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m a bad person. Throw me in.”

  “But what if it doesn’t work?”

  “Not really in a position to be picky, am I? Fountain of youth, a wellspring, a cauldron of plenty. There are legends and they all say it brings life.”

  I don’t point out to Barry that strictly speaking he has been for some time well and truly beyond the usual span of any creature. Well and truly outside the spectrum of what we call “life.”

  “So,” I say, “life?”

  “Life. Now hurry the fuck up and toss me in.”

  I walk around the edge. It’s about five meters across and bubbling enthusiastically. If I drop him, maybe he’ll just drown—this is a bit deeper than the esky—which still leaves me with a problem.

  “Here’s the deal, Barry: I’ll put you in but in return you let me go. I’m no one’s lunch, I’m no one’s slave, I’m gone. I’m out. I do whatever I want.”

  “Terry …”

  “You want life or not?”

  “Yes, fuck it!” He gives a growl of frustration. “Alright. Agreed. I can find better than you at the local whorehouse anyway.”

  “Touché.”

  I kneel beside the pond and lower Barry in, resisting the impulse to drop him from a height to see how much of a splash he’ll make. Some of the fluid leaps up like a nipping fish and lands on my fingers. It stings like ice. I grit my teeth and keep going, don’t release the head until he is thoroughly submerged.

  I try to straighten up, withdraw my arm, but I feel sharp teeth in my wrist. Barry, you bastard. That, however, is the least of my problems: the water has me. Blood spurts from my nose and turns pink as it hits the milky pond. It’s like I’m in the grip of an electrical current. It tugs at me and tugs at me until I over-balance and it pulls me beneath the surface.

  I feel as if I’m dying forever.

  My last sight before I’m overwhelmed is Barry’s head tossed and churned, jumping about like popping corn. Angry fingers of fluid force their way into my mouth and race down my throat, filling my lungs like inhaled fire. My skin seems to peel off, each hair follicle is a tiny pin in my scalp. Surely my eyes burst.

  When it stops hurting, the water lets me go.

  I crawl out and lie on the surprisingly warm rock. I’m whole, intact if somewhat soaked. I rub a hand against my shin, right where the possum bite was and feel…

  And feel …

  Nothing.

  I roll up the leg of my cargos and strip away the bandage. There’s just a pink mark that might have been a scar but fades as I watch. The katana is where I left it, and I pick it up, prick at my finger with its sharpness. Something silver oozes out from the cut and just as quickly the opening closes over.

  A great spout of water comes from the pool and a body lands not far from me, gives a displeased groan.

  Barry, whole again, tall and handsome and muscular and …

  And no longer pale as if he tries to tan beneath the moon.

  He rolls on his back, coughing, making a noise like an espresso machine. He breathes. I poke at him with the katana. A tiny drop of blood blossoms on his skin and he swears. Rich, fresh, oxygenated, living blood.

  “Oh, Barry,” I say. “You were right.”

  He sits up, runs his hands over his arms and legs, wondering, not understanding. “But…”

  “It does give life, Barry. You’ve been dead a long time.” I can’t keep the laughter out of my voice.

  “But … Fuck!” He stands up, pacing. “Okay. I don’t have to outrun them, I just have to outrun you.”

  “Here’s the thing, Baz, I don’t think they’re going to be interested in me anymore.” I rise, do the thing with the poking and the quick silvery bleed. “Close as I can figure it, nature abhors a vacuum. The pond finished what you started, taking my blood and all, then … replaced it.”

  I start up the path, cast a look behind, “Long time since you’ve been meat. How’s it feel?”

  MAGDALA AMYGDALA

  Lucy A. Snyder

  Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the dark urban fantasy novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her most recent books are Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide (Post Mortem Press) and Soft Apocalypses (Raw Dog Screaming Press). Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese and has appeared in publications such as Apex, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Weird Tales, as well as anthologies Hellbound Hearts, Dark Faith, Chiaroscuro, GUD, Chiral Mad 2, Best Horror of the Year, Volume 5, and others. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.

  With “Magdala Amygdala” Snyder takes us into a near future in which a form of vampirism has “gone viral” …

  “I was bound, though I have not bound. I was not recognized. But I have recognized that the All is being dissolved, both the earthly and the heavenly.”

  —The Gospel of Mary Magdalene<
br />
  “So how are you feeling?” Dr. Shapiro’s pencil hovers over the CDC risk evaluation form clamped to her clipboard.

  “Pretty good.” When I talk, I make sure my tongue stays tucked out of sight. I smile at her in a way that I hope looks friendly, and not like I’m baring my teeth. The exam-room mirror reflects the back of the good doctor’s head. Part of me wishes the silvered glass were angled so I could check my expression; the rest of me is relieved that I can’t see myself.

  Nothing existed before this. The present and recent past keep blurring together in my mind, but I’ve learned to take a moment before I reply to questions, speak a little more slowly to give myself the chance to sort things out before I utter something that might sound abnormal. My waking world seems to have been taken apart and put back together so that everything is just slightly off, the geometries of reality deranged.

  Most of my memories before the virus are as insubstantial as dreams; the strongest of them feel like borrowed clothing. The sweet snap of peas fresh from my garden. The crush of hot perfumed bodies against mine at the club and the thud of the bass from the huge speakers. The pleasant twin burns of the sun on my shoulders and the exertion in my legs as I pedal my bike up the mountainside.

  The life I had in those memories is gone forever. I don’t know why this is happening to humanity. To me. I’d like to think there’s some greater purpose, some meaning in all this, but God help me, I just can’t see it.

  “So is the new job going well? Are you able to sleep?” My doctor shines a penlight in my eyes and nostrils and marks off a couple of boxes. Thankfully, she doesn’t ask to see my tongue. It’s the same set of questions every week; I’d have to be pretty far gone to answer badly and get myself quarantined. The endless doctor-visits wear down other Type Threes, but I hang onto the belief that someday there might be actual help for me here.

  I nod. “It’s fine. I have blackout curtains; sleep’s not a problem. They seem pretty happy with my work.”

  My new supervisor is a friendly guy, but he always has an excuse for why he can’t meet with me in person, preferring to call me on his cell phone for our weekly chats. I used to bounce from building to building, repairing computers, spending equal amounts of time swapping gossip and hardware. After I got out of the hospital, I went on the graveyard shift in the company’s cold network operations center. These nights, I’m mostly raising processes from the dead, watching endless scrolling green text on cryptic black screens. I’m pretty sure the company discreetly advised my quiet coworkers to carry tasers and mace just in case.

  “Do you feel that you’re able to see your old friends and family often enough?” Dr. Shapiro asks.

  “Sure,” I lie. “We meet online for games and we talk in Vent. It’s fun.”

  For the sake of his own health, my boyfriend took a job and apartment in another state; we speak less and less on the phone. What is there to say to him now? We can’t even chat about anything as simple as food or wine; I must subsist on bananas, rice, apple juice, and my meager allotment of six Bovellum capsules per day. The law says I can’t go to crowded places like theaters and concerts. I only glimpse the sun when I’m hurrying from the shelter of my car’s darkly tinted windows to monthly 8:00 a.m. appointments with my court-ordered physician.

  So I’m striding up the street to Dr. Shapiro’s office, my head down, squinting behind sunglasses, when suddenly I hear a man in the park across the street shouting violent nonsense. Or he used to be a man, anyhow; he’s wearing construction boots, ragged Carhartt work overalls, and a dirty gray T-shirt, all freshly spattered with the blood of the woman whose head he is enthusiastically cracking open against the curb. He howls at the sky, and I can see he’s missing some teeth. Probably whatever he did for a living didn’t pay him enough to see a dentist. But his skin looks flush and smooth, so much healthier than mine, and for a moment I envy him.

  He stops howling and meets my shadowed stare, breaking into a gory, gap-toothed smile. The kind of grin you give an old, dear friend. I’ve never laid eyes on this wreck before, and the woman beneath him is beyond anyone’s help. They both are. I don’t want to be outed, not here, not like this, so I pretend I don’t even see him and stride on.

  A few seconds later, I hear the spat of rifle fire and the thud of a meaty body hitting the pavement, and I know that the SWAT team just took out Ragged Carhartts. They’re never far away, not in this part of town. And once they’ve taken out one Type Three, they don’t need much excuse to kill another, even if you’re just trying to see your doctor like a good citizen.

  “Oh, God,” a lady says. She and another fortyish woman are standing in the doorway of an art gallery, staring horrified at the scene behind me. They’re both wearing batik dresses and lots of handmade jewelry. “That’s the third one this month.”

  “If this keeps up, we’ll have to close.” The other woman shakes her head, looking gray-faced. “Nobody will want to come here. The whole downtown will die. Not just us. The theaters, the museums, churches—everything.”

  “I heard something on NPR about a new kind of gel to keep the virus from spreading,” the first woman replies, sounding hopeful.

  I keep moving. Her voice fades away. People still talk about contagion control as if it matters, as if masks and sanitizers and prayers can stop the future.

  The truth is, unless you’ve been living in some isolated Tibetan monastery, you’ve already been exposed to Polymorphic Viral Gastroencephalitis. Maybe it gave you a bit of a headache and some nausea, but after a few days’ bed rest you were going out for Thai again. Congratulations! You’re Type One and you probably don’t even know it.

  But maybe the headache turned into the worst you’ve ever had, and you started vomiting up blood and then your stomach lining, and when you came out of the hospital you’d lost the ability to digest most foods and to make certain proteins. And in the absence of those proteins, your body has trouble growing and healing. The enzymes your DNA uses to repair itself don’t work very well anymore.

  Sunlight is no longer your friend. Neither are X-rays. Even if you quit smoking and keep yourself covered up like a virgin in the Rub’ Al Khali, your skin cracks and your body sprouts tumors. Your brain begins to degenerate; you start talking to yourself in second person. Sooner or later, you develop lesions on your frontal lobe and hippocampus that cause a variety of behaviors which will lead to your friendly neighborhood SWAT team putting a .308 bullet through your skull. That means you’re a Type Two, or maybe a Type Three, like me.

  If you’re Type Four, we aren’t having this conversation. Unless you’re a ghost. You aren’t a ghost, are you? I don’t think I believe in them. But if you were a Type Four, your whole GI tract got stripped. I hope you were lucky and had a massive brain bleed right when it got really bad, and you never woke up.

  I’m pretty sure I woke up.

  “Do you find yourself having any unwanted thoughts or violent fantasies?” Dr. Shapiro asks.

  “Of course not.” I try to sound mildly indignant.

  There’s one upside, if it can be called that. If you lived past all the pain and vomiting, the symptoms of your chronic disease can be alleviated, if you consume sufficient daily quantities of one of a couple of raw protein sources.

  If the best protein source for you is fresh human blood, congratulations, you are a Type Two! Provided you have a fat bank account, or decent health insurance, or are quick with a razor and fast on your feet, you can resume puberty or your athletic career. Watch out for HIV; it’s a killer.

  If, however, the best source for you comes from sweet, custard-like brains … you are a Type Three. Your situation is much more problematic. And expensive. You better have a wealthy family or truly excellent insurance. Or mob connections. Otherwise, sooner or later, you’ll end up trying to crack open someone’s skull in public. The only question then is if you’ll get that one moment of true gustatory bliss right before you die.

  I have excellent health insurance. There’s
no bliss for me. What I and every other upstanding, gainfully employed, fully-covered Type Three citizen gets is an allotment of refrigerated capsules containing an unappetizing gray paste. Mostly it’s cow brains and antioxidant vitamins with just the barest hint of pureed cadaver white matter. It’s enough to keep your skin and brains from ulcerating. It’s enough to keep your nose from rotting off. It’s enough to help you think clearly enough to function at your average white-collar job.

  It is not enough to keep you from constantly wishing you could taste the real thing.

  “I was wondering about something,” I say, as Dr. Shapiro begins to copy the contents of her survey into the exam room computer.

  She stops typing and gives me a wary smile. “Yes, what is it?”

  “My medication. I feel okay, you know? But I think I could feel … better. If I could have a little more?” I’m choosing my words as carefully as possible. My tongue feels thick, twitchy.

  I can’t talk about the cravings I’m feeling. I can’t mention wanting more energy, because nobody in charge wants someone like me feeling energetic.

  I wonder if there’s a sniper watching from behind the mirror on the wall; has he tightened his grip on his rifle? Are gas canisters waiting to blow in the air conditioner vent above me? My skin itches in dread anticipation.

  Dr. Shapiro hedges. “Well, I know there’s been a shortage of raw materials these days.”

  I swallow down my impatience and worry. The capsules are ninety-eight percent cow brains, for God’s sake. Probably they can squeeze a single human brain for thousands of doses. I can’t imagine the pharmaceutical companies are running short of anything.

  “Could you check, just the same? Could you ask for me?” I sound meek. Pathetic. The opposite of hostile. That’s good.