"Sounds complicated," Soloman said, studying her eyes.
"That's nothing," she replied evenly. "Cain has recumbent anabolic steroid reserve cells, internal carpal and forearm titanium bosses and organic modifiers that hyper-concentrate viral-induced muscle fibers. He could punch a hole through a steel door. And, to top it off, his outer stratum corneum is infected with a multiviral factor, specifically an altered strain of the Marburg virus. It's something we call HyMar. And that virus, gentlemen, makes Cain a walking time bomb."
Soloman understood the ramifications because he had dealt with the destruction and theft of biological weaponry before. What he knew was that Marburg was the one that even scared the bio-warfare specialists. No one knew where it came from, its vector, or a cure. They just knew it killed 99 percent of the people it touched and it did it ugly.
Ben leaned back, his cigar dead-cold. Clearly, shock had removed him from the conversation. Perhaps because he couldn't trust himself to speak. But Soloman was concentrating furiously: "Why did you infect Cain with a strain of the Marburg virus, Doctor?"
"Because the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon gave me a mandate to create the ultimate soldier, Colonel. And the funds to do it."
"And did you do it?"
"Yes," she said quietly. "And then some."
"How long do we have to find Cain, Doctor?"
"Ten days" was her answer and genuine fear, for the first time, entered her voice.
"And if we don't?"
"Then," she replied, "Cain will be able to walk through the largest city in the world, Colonel, and kill everyone in it."
***
"Ah, so pleasant," the giant murmured. "I love cathedrals. They remind me so much ... of home."
Seated in the half-light of the edifice, the towering image of the Crucifixion dominating a far wall, he rested before he continued, smiling faintly: "Yes, such an aroma of death."
He lifted a hand, slowly flexing it into a massive squared fist of incalculable power, power obvious even with the simple contraction. Staring, the trembling priest watched the movement, trying not to reveal his fear. But clearly, the strength in that taloned hand could kill without effort. The giant laughed again and tenderly reached out to turn the priest's head, staring into his face.
Terror, pure and concentrated, burned vividly in Father Lanester's face as he looked into the giant's horrific countenance. Then the priest closed his eyes, as if he could not endure what he saw.
There was a rumble, like an approaching storm and then the giant murmured, "Feoh othila ansux, osgeo mannz kano?"
Father Lanester violently shook his head, "No, no, please, I—"
"Oh, I am so sorry," he whispered. "You do not understand Runic? No ... of course not. Hmmm. Perhaps we should try Latin? Do you understand Latin? Cognovi te a facie inimici?"
"Yes!" Father Lanester shouted, eyes tight. "I know you are the enemy! Esto mihi, Domine, turris fortitudinis!"
The giant frowned, menacing. "Yes, Father. I am sure that ... he ... will be your strength. But times change. Believe me." He smiled. "Then again, perhaps we should leave Latin. Such dreadful repetition. We can speak any language you wish. I know them all. Of course, I would prefer to avoid Aramaic. I had a terrible experience with it ... once." His horrific face lightened in humor. "Why don't we try German? Kannst du nicht treu sein?"
"Yes! I can be faithful to God!"
"No," the giant said soothingly, gently caressing the priest's head as he would caress a lost dog. "Meine Handpuppe profane, du hast nicht treu sein konnen."
"Yes!" the priest said, fear choking his throat. "Yes! I have been faithful! I do not know you! I do not know you! You have no part of me! I am a priest of Deus et Dominus—"
Clamping his hand over the priest's face, the giant shut the words.
Anger hardened his brow and his aspect was suddenly darker, violently intensifying the surrounding shadows. "Please do not speak that name again in Latin, Father. It disturbs me ... somewhat. And if you insist, I shall remove you of the burden of your tongue, to ensure your silence. I would not mind. I am quite famished."
Carefully he removed his hand from the priest, a massive hand that easily covered the face and forehead. And for a moment the priest stared fearfully up into the horrific countenance.
"You ... you cannot speak the name," he whispered.
"The name?" the giant rumbled. "Yes. In this form, Father, I can indeed speak the name. Yes, I can speak the name of ... of ... of Dominus!" His teeth gritted before he smiled again, more an illusion than the truth. "For in this form I am more human than not – as you can see. But the verging of life and death has always been closer than any of you knew." He laughed at the priest's terrified gaze. "Just like a miracle."
"What ... what do you want?"
"I want a document sealed in the Secret Archives hidden in the sub-basement, beneath the cellar. A document entombed in the vault with the seal of Archbishop Markus in 1936. I want the document for the Castle of Calistro ... which belongs to me."
"B-but why do you need it?" The priest was shaking so violently he almost fell from the steps. "It is sealed! It is cursed! If you are really him then you would not need it!"
"Ah," the giant answered, "but I am not what I was, Father. Being human ... has its limitations. Even now, my mind, or what survived the merging, is childlike and diluted from my truly glorious state, though I continue to grow moment by moment. I remember little of what I knew, so I need time to acclimate myself to this form. And, to make it even worse, I have discovered that I cannot contact my flock. I am severed from my world." He laughed. "Yes, Father, my mind is broken and ragged, still healing from the merging. Some things I remember in full, but they are not the things I need. Though I can still speak to you of so much you do not know. So much that, when I leave you, will never bless you with sleep."
The priest paled as the giant smiled.
"I can tell you of my poor, pathetic Pazuzzu's long flight through that hateful void to light upon the gate of Babylon, inspiring the fools to destroy the Hebrews," he added casually. "I can tell you how my servant, Belial, soared on wings beneath the moon as he laughed at the funeral pyres of Tel-Engedi where those hundreds of thousands were burned alive, father and son, mother and daughter holding each other in their arms as they delivered their lives to a cloud that took the sun from the earth for a year. Yes ... and what a lovely aroma it was." He laughed. "I can describe those last, singing screams of children thrown into the burning belly of Molech in the dying days of Carthage before that effete snob, Scipio, brought down one of the walls for the glory of expendable Rome. And I can tell you more than that. I can tell you of those fools, Peter, who are not what you think, even though—"
"But the Nazarene defeated you!" the priest shouted.
Silence.
Long ...
Longer.
"So and so," the giant finally mused, "the Nazarene."
A rage beyond hell glazed his eyes. His voice was a voice of caverns consuming the dead. "Yes, unconquerable to the very end. And wiser than a serpent. Deceiving ... deceiving even me ... with the fate of the universe in the balance. A singularly horrific experience, I assure you. But then the Nazarene and I are fated to war again, Father, so let us speak of more pleasant things." He laughed, diabolical music. "Let me tell you of those glorious celebrations orchestrated by my faithful children Lilith, Incubus, and Succubus. Let me tell you of the exquisite carnal pleasures they inspired upon Sodom and Egypt and Askalon – unimaginable pleasures that put the Romans to shame. Pleasures that shamed even the sheer animal ecstasies of the slave baracoons of my servile Thoth-Amon who made the prideful mistake of slaying Saul only to be eaten ... by worms. Yes, and there is so much more. More than you mortals could ever—"
A grimace.
With a bestial growl of pain the giant bowed his head, appearing to fight a ravaging injury. His eyes were closed tight as he slowly reached out, grasping the priest by the arm as if he could c
rush the bones with effortless strength. Then he lifted him from the ground.
"Come, Father," he whispered. "I need my pretties."
***
"This doesn't make sense," Soloman said, tossing the file onto the table. His eyes were flat. "You people were keeping oxygenated blood circulating in what, in essence, was a dead man."
"I'm not sure that I follow you, Colonel."
"Call me Soloman."
"Thank you. Call me Maggie."
"My point," Soloman continued, "is that Cain—or whatever made Cain what he was—was no longer in that body."
"But his brain wasn't damaged."
"No, his brain wasn't damaged – not the neurons. But a man is more than the base electrical synapse of ten billion neurons." Soloman paused, frowning. "Tell me something," he continued, "where does thought come from?"
From her face, he knew she had no answer. "I know where you're going with this," she answered. "But I don't think a philosophical direction is going to help us."
"Let me decide that."
Hesitation.
"All right," she said, finally. "Nobody's able to localize the portion of the brain that originates thought. All we know is that 'thought' is inserted into the electrochemical flow of ions at some point in the axon. That's a long nerve tendril leading out of a neuron that communicates to other neurons. Are you theorizing that Cain's mind is gone?"
"I don't know what I'm saying. But something doesn't add up. Because you can't bring anyone back to life. It's impossible."
"But we did it, Colonel."
"You don't know what you did, Maggie." He didn't make his tone friendly. "All you know is that you took a dead man and made him into some kind of Frankenstein. But now it's loose and those morons that you work for expect Ben and me to stop it." He shook his head. "Why won't this HyMar virus kill him?" he continued. "Is Cain immune to the virus like he's immune to everything else?"
She was affected by his criticism but recovered quickly. "Cain is only immune to the mutated HyMar virus that we used to alter his genetic code. He's not immune to the original Marburg. The term for it is Viral-Engineering Manipulation."
"Sounds very benign." Soloman stared at her.
She blinked. "The ... the main DNA segment of the Marburg virus—the single most deadly virus on the planet—is about two thousand base pairs long. The rest of the strand is devoted to replication, direction, anaphase, whatever. But the main two-thousand-base-pair strand defines the characteristics of the virus. For instance, what the virus is going to do to the cells of its host. What it will give the cells. Now, in the telephase stage of mitosis there is a point called specialization. That's where a cell says to itself, 'I'm going to be a muscle cell.' Or, 'I'm going to be a white blood cell to promote healing.' And because the mutated Marburg, or HyMar, has human DNA buffers in it, the main strand has been redesigned and re-segmented into the virus to promote healing instead of cell destruction. That's why Cain heals up almost instantly from any wound. HyMar is constantly promoting him to a state of hyper-mitosis."
"That accounts for his healing factor," Soloman said. "What accounts for his strength? I've read this man's 201. Cain was strong before he died, but he wasn't this strong. Nobody is this strong!"
"Cain's strength was developed through the use of the Sulijuki Forest virus. It's taken from the western forests of Uganda." Her mouth tightened as she collected her thoughts. "To truly grasp this phenomenon, you have to understand that Cain was a freak of nature even before we altered his chromosomes."
"Why?"
"It's not in his file, but he had an exceedingly rare XYY coding."
"What's that?"
"That's what's known in science as the 'superman' trait," she said. "It's almost impossible for a male to possess two of the same chromosomes, but Cain did. That's why he was so strong in life, and the main reason he was selected for this experiment. But with the Sulijuki Forest virus we managed to denature a part of the second Y chromosome and bond it strand-sight onto chromosome 14, which hyper-concentrates muscle cells. Plus, to make him strong enough to rip a car door off its hinges, we inserted anabolic steroid reserve cells inside his thorax and upper arms."
Ben looked glumly away. "Damn," he muttered, "just when you thought it couldn't get any worse."
Soloman expressed nothing. "All right, Maggie," he replied, softening a bit. "Explain to me why he's so fast."
She ran a hand through her hair; Soloman saw faint beads of sweat on her forehead. "That was fundamentally a chemical alteration," she said. "Sodium and potassium and magnesium regulate the speed of synapses.What we did with him was simply increase the chemical levels until there was virtually no waiting period."
"But you never tested him, right?"
"No, we never had a chance."
"Then give me your best guess," Soloman concentrated. "How fast is he? What're his limitations?"
Her face froze as she gazed to the side, calculating. "He doesn't have cheetah speed. But maybe ... a lion." She leaned back. "It would be eyes, hands, everything. He's probably at the level of someone when they touch a hot stove. Their hand is moving even before their nerves have identified why. It only lasts a tenth of a second with normal people, but Cain is at that speed constantly. He moves so fast that even he wouldn't know what he was doing if we hadn't modified his central nervous system with electrical enhancements. Of course, we had to provide a niobium-titanium skull shield to protect his brain from the overflow of magnesium and potassium that might have caused cerebral edema. The skull shield also protects his brain against traumatic impact."
She leaned forward, jaw tight. "Understand me, Soloman; Cain does have a weakness: it's the original Marburg virus. If you could reinsert the missing DNA strands in the HyMar virus hosted in his system, it would promote him to full-blown hemorrhagic fever in seconds. In other words it would take away his power on a molecular level."
Soloman almost laughed. "Well, Maggie, I don't think Cain is going to sit still while I give him an injection of the Marburg virus. And I'm not going to take a shot at him. What happens if I miss? What happens if the original Marburg is released in this ecosystem?"
She was silent, pursing her lips.
"If Marburg were inserted into this environment it would become an airborne disease a hundred times more infectious than the common cold." Her words were slow, as if she were thinking of the very real possibility. "Within two hours it would kill anyone who contracted it. On a geometric curve it would wipe out a city with the population and density of New York within twenty-four hours. Within forty-eight hours it would be in another half-dozen states and within a week there would be nothing living on this continent. A month after that, if it crosses the ocean on flights before this nation is quarantined, it could conceivably kill everything on the face of the earth."
General Hawken's hand was trembling violently as he raised his cigar for a vicious drag. He cursed aloud as he expelled the smoke, massaging a sweat-slick forehead.
Soloman took a deep breath. "I see. Well, then, let's move on. Does Cain have any other weaknesses?"
"Yes. There's one. And you might be able to exploit it if you're very, very careful."
Ben spat out a piece of tobacco. "Doc," he growled, "we passed 'careful' about five hundred miles back."
"What is Cain's other weakness?" Soloman asked.
Pain shut her eyes before she clenched her teeth.
"It ... it came out of a severe miscalculation," she answered. "The takeover of Cain's DNA by the HyMar virus led to something we didn't want to do. And I want you to know that I consider what we did a very, very tragic mistake. It was something we did only because we thought Cain would only be turned loose in times of war. And in that scenario the enemy would have been the only one ... the only one consumed."
Soloman's eyes narrowed. Her face was so tragic that Ben just bowed his head and shut his eyes, as if he knew something horrible was about to be said.
"We never anticipated it," she said
more softly. "We never anticipated that Cain's DNA would be so heavily damaged by the virus. We thought there would be a backflow, a point where the damaged DNA would recover. But it never did. His ribosomal RNA went into a downward spiral that we couldn't reverse, so we had to find a way to replace it in a battlefield situation. And we came up with a method but ... but ..."
"What are you saying, Maggie?"
She sighed. "I'm saying that Cain has to constantly replenish his human DNA. I'm saying that he has to—" She caught her breath, grimacing. "Dear God, forgive me ... but ... but Cain has to have fresh ... He has to have fresh human blood every day. And if, for some reason, he can't get fresh blood, he'll starve."
The guilt in her voice was tragic but Soloman revealed no shock, somehow knew.
"How does Cain get blood, Maggie?" he asked coldly.
"We modified him for it."
"How?"
She closed her eyes, bowing her head.
"With fangs."
***
An indestructible vault that not even the giant could have torn from the wall was opened and the priest collapsed to the ground, trembling. Deep beneath the cathedral, in the Secret Archives of the cathedral, they were surrounded by ancient texts, artifacts, letters, and long-hidden documents. It was a place of dark secrets, hidden power.
"I need the documents that give ownership to the Castle of Calistro in England," the giant murmured, staggering. He studied the shelves a long time, confused, for there was no filing system in the archives. Documents and testimonies were laid one upon the other, no numbering, no lettering to mark the sides. It was a wall of white and yellowed parchment in every direction, everything hidden in plain sight.
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