Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  He saw a tablet lying on its side across the room. It was dented and dirty and stank of Zero. Maryk picked it up off the floor and righted the screenZero had called up a layout of the BDC. Building Thirteen was highlighted.

  Maryk started to see it then. The Genetech brain powered the BDC's life functions. It coordinated everything from climate control to employee schedules to internal security-including the security of the dangerous pathogens vault of Building Thirteen.

  Maryk stepped back. Suddenly Stephen's conversation with Zero made sense.

  Heritage. A sort of homecoming. We are all who are left here.

  Maryk fumbled open his own tablet. All bureau tablets functioned as satellites feeding off the power of the Genetech's digital network.

  His screen came on normally and Maryk gripped the sides of the casing in relief. The Genetech was still sound.

  Then the screen began to flicker. It flared white until the characters were no longer comprehensible. Icons began blurring and drifting like ice melting off the screen.

  Zero's virus was confounding the DNA core of the Genetech brain.

  He had infected the BDC.

  Maryk dropped the diseased tablet and raced out of the room.

  Building Thirteen was five buildings away.

  The Labyrinth

  There was no way she would be a sifting duck in Maryk's office with Zero on the loose. She ran out into the halls, hoping to find an exit out of the BDC, but quickly became lost in the endless, unnumbered corridors. She was making her way through the labyrinth when the ceiling lights started to fade. The hallway dimmed and the hum of the air-conditioning went dead, as though there had been a power outage. She stood in darkness for a long moment, then the lights began coming back on again, but not all of them, and not all at once. She heard a whisking sound behind her as a fire door at the end of the hall was released from its magnetic clip. It slammed shut.

  Lights flared brightly here and there inside the empty offices, as though some kid somewhere was fooling with the switches, Then a ceiling sprinkler came on and pinwheeled a cool spray of water onto her waist and legs.

  She moved out from under the spray, along the wall and through double doors into another hallway with overhead light filaments crackling, alternately dimming and flaring. A fire alarm bleated two shocking reports, answered by similar honks in the distance, and it was like some sort of short-circuit chain reaction. The hall emptied into a sun-filled, third-floor catwalk. She could see the various connected buildings from there, and lights flashing inside each one.

  She held her handbag at her side and continued into the next building, looking for exit signs as she ran past labs with sensors droning on and off and automatic doors sliding open. Some lights flared too brightly and popped, glass tinkling inside the lamps, and she stayed closelto the wall as she hurried toward the stairwell, and down two flights of stairs.

  She came out into a carpeted side corridor of glasswalled offices and saw a figure in the flashing fight in front of her, moving away.

  For one crazy moment she thought it was Stephen Pearse. Then the lights changed and she saw the hunched figure and his familiarly dirty nylon jacket.

  Zero heard her behind him and turned. His red eyes were wide in the varying light, his decayed mouth open and shadowed inside. Melanie screamed. She pitched back from him and turned to run away down the frenzied hall, but her handbag strap jerked her back, and his hand closed around her right arm. She rocked and fought him but his grip was firm and he pulled her closer to him. She kept fighting. She was trying not to look at him, but his hand was right there on her sleeve, bruised and ungloved.

  He forced her around to face him and said something, but the alarm bleated and drowned out his voice. She veered away as far as she could. His head was bare. The dry gray skin of his face was split open with glistening sores, and then the lights flared and she saw the blistered flesh on his neck and chin, slick with sweat, livid and pulsing somehow, as though creeping over his diseased cheeks. "Nice," he rasped. She could see deep into his mouth, past his twitching red-black tongue and all the way down into the guttural workings of his throat. Frothy saliva glistened on his chin, and she thrashed even more. The stink of his putrescence appalled her as his abominably bloodsoaked eyes roamed over her body.

  He jerked her around, and against all her will began forcing her down the hall. He was stooped and frail, dying even, but possessed the strength of the insane. "Melanie," he breathed.

  She thrashed and flailed, trying to twist out of his clutch. "Get off me-" He worked his arm up against her shoulder and propelled her forward. She swung back with her heel as they moved and caught him somewhere in the shin, and he grunted and stooped lower, and further wrenched her arm. Her shoe heel found him again, sharply this time, and then with a sudden lurch he jerked her to one side and bashed her against the wall.

  She came off it stunned. The disorientation was immediate, and she saw before her now a veering passageway filled with sparkling pastel rain.

  He shook her and she rattled. Her lungs were seizing up.

  She used her free hand against the wall to keep from falling and being dragged. The arm he gripped was dead to her now. He moved her down the hall too quickly for her to fight. She heard his pained moans. "I took Maryk's friend," Zero said. "I took his home. Now I take his work."

  They came to a catwalk between buildings. Zero pushed her through the doors and at once pulled her to his side, using her as a shield to block out the deadly sunlight beating down upon the walkway. "Building Thirteen," he said. "A vault. Viruses from all over the world, held in limbo. A monument to the myth of human superiority."

  She remembered them talking about it: Building Thirteen, the germ bank.

  She pulled and struggled, trying somehow to pivot him into the virus-smashing sunlight. "Smallpox," he said. "Imprisoned there. My genetic offspring. It can repair me. I will meld with it, and see this to the end."

  They emptied out of the catwalk into the next crazed building.

  Pain seized him and ripped through his body like a revelation, then passed and let him go. "And you will lead my charge, Melanie."

  The salacious way in which this obscene, malignant, repellent, gloating freak sucked on her name turned her stomach. "You're dying," she spit out, kicking at him. "Your body's dying."

  "What I am will live on."

  "You're" -- she struggled -- "crazy."

  Zero yanked down on her arm and the sudden pain made her cry out.

  He stopped and held her there in the manic hallway, a sprinkler raining down on them from above, and he spun her so that she had to look -at him. The muscles of his emaciated face crawled and twitched and his open mouth spewed strings of drool. His other bare claw came up to grip her shirt over her shoulder. She thought he was going to touch her face, and there wasn't anything she could do to stop him. Her lungs were going flat again. "You don't know," he groaned curiously.

  "Get off--"

  "I already have a new host. I live on in you."

  She heard the words, but it was the satisfaction she saw in his hideous face that stopped her. She hung there in the hallway like a balloon losing air, slowly going limp. "Inhaler," he told her. "At the airport. You lost it on the stairs. I put it in Maryk's bag."

  Melanie remained still, not fighting. She remembered Maryk taking her inhaler away after he regained consciousness. Spasms of nausea and revulsion, self-revulsion, crept like the sickness itself beneath her skin, and she lapsed immediately into the mind-set of the sick. It was a reflex action, like gagging. The repulsion and the self-loathing.

  It all came back.

  She looked at her hands. This ungodly thing lived within her now, was breeding inside her.

  Zero pawed at her shirt, though she did not feel it. "No fear now," he said.

  She sagged there in the hallway, envisioning the illness that awaited her. His grip eased on her dead arm but she did not move. She looked into his staring eyes, inches from her own,
and the blood that boiled within them, and saw what she might become. His bloated tongue writhed, gums bleeding black, lugubriously, as he stared with carnal satisfaction.

  Her throat bucked and she began to wheeze. She was getting air, but only in the form of shallow, strangled gasps. He reached up to the back of her neck and was going to touch her skin now, and it no longer mattered. He wanted to pull her face closer. His mouth and throat yawned open.

  She heaved suddenly and doubled over, as though trying to draw breath from the carpet. "Inhaler," she gasped.

  Her handbag still dangled off her elbow. She twisted open the catch with her good arm and felt around inside as he waited over her, his filthy hand tousling the hair on the back of her head, "Yesss," he groaned.

  Her fingers closed tightly around the cylinder of Mace. She brought it out and up to her mouth, hidden from him, as though she were about to inhale.

  She turned her hand and aimed the white stream at his face. It spattered off his nose and gums before finding its way through his obscene, gaping mouth into his unprotected throat. Zero wailed and thrashed backward but Melanie kept at him, the stream splashing off the mouth he could not close, steaming into his eyes and searing the open sores on his cheeks.

  He hit the wall wildly and went down, keening and scrabbling away.

  Melanie dropped the Mace and felt her way backward into a side passage, away from Zero, then sensed movement behind her. Two yellow arms wrapped her in a bear hug before she could turn, lifting her off the floor.

  She was carried kicking down the side corridor away from Zero. It was not Maryk. She screamed and got off an elbow before the arms released her and she could turn.

  It was a bespectacled man sealed inside a contact suit. His head was round and perfectly bald, with no eyebrows, no follicles even on his eyelids, his face hairless and sallow inside the hood. "Maryk's patient," he guessed, coming forward breathlessly. "My name is Geist."

  The lights along the ceiling flickered and attracted his round eyes.

  "What is happening?"

  "It's him -- Zero."

  There was a thump and a wail from the connecting hallway, and Geist's black rubber hands pulled at her shoulders to keep her from fleeing.

  "Building Thirteen," she said, pushing at him. "Smallpox.

  He says he can fix himself " Geist's face went wide. "Of course," he said. His frightened eyes frightened her. "But where is Maryk?"

  Her chin was quivering and she shook her head to stop it. "I don't know."

  Geist's chest heaved inside his suit. His eyes were bright and devout as he stared down the length of the flashing hall. He pointed her the other way, to a pair of doors behind them, "Building Thirteen," he said. "We'll block it somehow. You'll show me..."

  Melanie followed Geist's stare then and saw that Zero had turned into the corridor. He was hunched and seething, groping along the wall toward them.

  Geist's hand reached out and found her shoulder. He gripped it as though he was going to pull her near, then instead pushed her toward the doors. "Go," he said.

  He moved to head off Zero as the creature came slumping and spitting down the hall. The last thing Melanie saw was Geist standing and waiting with his black rubber hands empty and open at his sides, like a gunfighter who knew he was overmatched. Then she turned and ran down the short hallway into Building Thirteen.

  Grand Mal Seizure Maryk raced from building to building as the lights in the corridors convulsed around him. He charged through Engineering and could smell Zero there. The spasms of light and sound were intensifying. He rushed under streaming sprinklers into a side corridor that served as a shortcut to Building Thirteen.

  A body inside a yellow suit lay twisted at the end of the hall.

  Splashes of blood dripped down the side walls and darker drops led away from the contorted body to closed double doors beyond.

  It was Geist. The yellow fabric of his suit had been rent apart in long ragged slashes and his hood was ripped off and tossed aside.

  Zero had torn open Geist's neck.

  Geist's eyes moved within his battered head. Blood pushed faintly out of his throat, His mouth opened and Maryk knelt by him in the frenzied light. "With her," Geist whispered.

  Zero was with Melanie. She knew then that she was infected.

  Geist's eyes fixed in his bald head. "I hurt him," he said.

  "Thirteen..."

  Geist died staring at the flashing lights. Maryk straightened in the paroxysmal corridor and lunged at the bloodied door.

  Building Thirteen She tried to outpace the sick stench of Zero that enveloped her, racing dizzied and headlong under the yellow-and-black warning signs -- CAUTION RESTRICTED AREA -- announcing Building Thirteen.

  An ocular scanner ran continuously under a monitor flashing alternately "ACCESS CONFIRMED" and "ACCESS DENIED." Bolts twitched in the open doors as she rushed inside, down a short, dim hallway into a vast room of throbbing lights.

  The vault was an immense block of black steel filling the entire three-story building. It was surrounded by a wide hexagonal casing of thick, transparent plastic that ran from the floor up to the high ceiling. Heavy corrugated tubes ran out of the top of the vault, which must have provided the deep freeze. There was only one way in through the protective shield, and of course it was an ultraviolet light chamber, a pulsating gateway of glowing blue light. Twin steel doors stood open on either end.

  Silver, barcoded disks studded the high front face of the monolith.

  She assumed that each disk was the top cap of a thermos-like canister housing frozen viruses or bacteria. Roving yellow lights lit up long, double-hinged robotic arms jerking and sliding on runners inside the shield. The arm nearest her flexed outward, steel fingers opening wide, then it pivoted and at once struck the face of the vault, rapping its bolt knuckles against the black steel, before careening back along the runner and whamming against the plastic shield just over her head, wham wham wham! Melanie ducked and backed off, though the dense plastic barely shuddered. The arm turned and formed an impassioned fist and continued thrashing.

  There was a desk console just outside the UV chamber entrance, a control station for retrieving banked thermoses. Strings of nonsense code ran down its twin monitors.

  The lock mechanisms of the steel doors kept popping madly. She had to defend the entrance to the vault. She looked around for a weapon, something to wield. The ultraviolet lamps began heating up inside, humming fiercely, and she blocked the intense blue glow with her arms as sensors went off blaring inside the entrance chamber. She felt the heat until the lights dimmed again and the humming eased. The alarms died away, and she heard a noise behind her like a grunt, and turned.

  Zero's hunched form moved through the hallway, and Melanie staggered back in fear. She had to figure out some way to stop him.

  She needed to find some solution that would kill them both.

  He emerged into the mad light of the room and the mammoth vault awed him. His eyes were bleary and entranced. She saw blood on the side of his neck and a long cut along the back of one hand and a deep slash over one of his knees.

  He came toward her, his Mace-swollen eyelids heavy over his raw eyes.

  He was hurt now. He was weak. "Melanie," he gasped.

  She set herself between him and the entrance to the vault. As repelled as she was by the oily blood basting his wounded neck, that had to be her target. The blue light of the UV chamber flared again behind her, and its energy somehow steadied Melanie. She made fists of her small, trembling hands.

  A figure had moved out of the dim hallway behind Zero. Melanie thought at first that it was Maryk, but the blazing blue light distorted her view. Not until the figure was right behind Zero did Melanie see that it was Stephen Pearse. He was racked with disease, suffering incredibly, his face drawn of all being-and yet somehow he was staggering forward with his cane through the roaring blueness.

  Somewhere he had found the strength to stand and move toward them.

&nb
sp; Zero stopped in front of her. He saw the recognition dawning in her eyes and watched dumbly, twitching, as she took one step back from him and out of the way. Stephen raised the cane behind Zero's shoulder as the drone of the lamps became deafening. Zero began to turn just as Stephen brought the cane around. He caught Zero over the ear with the flat of the handle.

  The crack was awful. Zero coughed a spray of blood and stumbled foot over foot to the side, then at once collapsed to the floor.

  Stephen, reeling from his own momentum and the force of the impact, swayed the other way, but did not fall.

  Melanie circled blindly around them, screaming through her hands.

  "Stephen!"

  His red eyes lolled in their orbits as he steadied himself. He gripped the cane by its long end and started back toward Zero. Zero had risen to one knee, threads of gore falling from his rotted mouth.

  Stephen sagged toward him and he brought the cane around and up again, but with less force this time, striking Zero on the shoulder. He tried a third time, and Zero raised a forearm and batted the cane away. It spun out of Stephen's hands and went clattering away along the floor.

  Stephen reached out as though to grasp him, but Zero got to his feet and lashed out first, striking Stephen in the center of the chest, and Stephen crumpled. Melanie heard his frail ribs snap like stalks of celery. Zero staggered over him, reaching down, and Melanie could see the outline, through shirt and skin, of Stephen's protruding ribs.

  Zero pressed against the exposed bones. Stephen's head flopped in soundless agony. "Stop!" screamed Melanie, but no command could touch Zero's savagery. Stephen's head flailed and struck the floor, and she heard a soft crunch as his fragile cheekbone gave. Zero straightened, pulling back his foot to kick Stephen, and Stephen watched this with no expression on his smashed face. Zero kicked him in the stomach and Stephen expelled a bubble of blood, and sagged, and Melanie thought that breath was his last.