Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  First things first, what did he know? Tobin had been a world-class geneticist; maybe not a genius, but certainly close. He had known the genome of the Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, the Chinook salmon, like the back of his hand. Precisely where to modify the growth patterns and with which combination of genes. While others treated the minnows with hormones, Tobin found a way to make the fish produce the hormones themselves. It was the same template Kajika had used to create the Quetzalcoatl, but Tobin had always dreamed of a grander design. He had envisioned replacing the damaged and mutated chromosomes responsible for birth defects with normal sections of DNA, of modifying the charted loci responsible for certain cancers. They were the dreams of a beneficent god.

  So how had everything fallen apart?

  Kajika could no longer access the HydroGen database, and a cursory perusal of the public site had revealed nothing of significance. Searching the web by name produced tens of thousands of websites, nearly all of them relating to the carnage in Colorado. It was as though everything good Tobin had done had been shoved aside to make room for the demon he had become, a man the world found infinitely more fascinating than the man who had helped protect the wild population of salmon and taken a notable step toward ending world hunger. But that wasn't what people wanted to hear. Mankind was a runaway train to oblivion, its passengers trampling each other in the aisle.

  This was getting him nowhere.

  He ran through his email inbox for the tenth time, then checked the deleted messages file in case he had accidentally sent it through by mistake. Nothing. He scrolled through his old work file, which he hadn't been able to bring himself to expunge, and smiled when he opened the last email he had received from Tobin. It contained a picture of beautiful people raising their glasses in celebration around a champagne fountain; congratulations of sorts for his early retirement, well-wishes for the life to come in Arizona. Tobin had inserted text beneath the revelry to read: don't become a drunk. Kajika laughed, a bittersweet sound. That was Tobin's sense of humor, and, God help him, Kajika loved him for it.

  Swiping a tear from his eye, he opened his spam folder in the hope that his computer had seen fit to file anything from Tobin with the mess of discount prescription, fake Rolex, and penis enlargement offers. There were journal renewal reminders, invitations to join friends at various networking sites, and all kinds of inconsequential garbage. He was going to have to set the box to purge more frequently. It wasn't as though he was stupid enough to click the link in a PayPal scam or confirm his credit card number and expiration date with Amazon dot com, but still he felt violated. There was even an email from the Denver Public Library, in a state he had only visited at cruising altitude. Denver, Colorado. It was dated eight days prior. He clicked on the email.

  The body of the message was a form overdue reminder, signed by Frances McCarty, Senior Librarian, but above it were three brief sentences. No salutation and no separate signature. Just thirteen words.

  I didn't know. Not until it was too late. Tell Jesus I'm sorry.

  Kajika stared at the single line, reading it and rereading it, shaking his head.

  He had no doubt Tobin had sent it, but what was it supposed to mean? Was it an admission of guilt, a cry for help that had come far too late? A spiritual reconciliation, the acceptance of his fate in hell? It was disjointed, cryptic, not at all like the ordinarily eloquent Tobin. And he definitely hadn't known his friend to be religious in the slightest. In fact, quite the contrary. Tobin had believed they held power over the notion of God, stripping away His "magic" with each gene they improved, each phenotype they successfully amended. He had even gone so far as to name their first genetically engineered Chinook salmon--

  "Jesus," Kajika whispered. Tobin had named the largest fish from their first project Jesus, a product of his dry sense of humor. But why would Kajika tell a dead fish--? Maybe everything he had read was true. Maybe somewhere along the line, Tobin had snapped and become what the world believed him to be.

  Kajika minimized the email window and stared blankly at the search prompt on his home page before finally typing "Jesus" and initiating the search. There were more than five hundred thirteen million matches, and "Jesus Fish" barely narrowed the field. "Jesus Salmon" still left him more than three and a half million sites he could never hope to scour in his lifetime.

  He leaned back, pounded the last of the beer, and chased it with coffee now only a few degrees warmer.

  He searched "Jesus Chinook Salmon." Fifty-seven thousand sites, none of them a direct match. He was grasping at straws now, trying to vindicate a friend whom he now feared might have been subjected to the kind of mental deterioration that would have led him into a bloodstained cellar with a circular saw in his hand.

  Jesus had been from batch A, female twenty-six. The fry had been tagged as soon as they were large enough. Jesus had been test subject A26-016. He typed it into the search box. There was a direct match at www.a26dash-016.freenet.com, so he clicked through. The right third of the screen was filled with Google ads, the larger portion to the left with a single picture. There were no clickable links. The picture was of an old lady holding a hand of cards in her knobby claws. Her face had been replaced by that of a grouper, its floppy mouth hanging open. The caption read: no, you go!

  Kajika dragged the scroll bar on the right side up and down, but there was only the image. No other writing of any kind. He moved the pointer across the screen over and over, looking for anything he might be able to click to unlock some sort of hidden function. Surely the picture wasn't the only thing there. The arrow became a finger for a split-second before reverting to form. He moved it more slowly through that section of the image, until the tip of the arrow pointed at the broach at the woman's breast and became a little hand with the index finger extended. With a left click, the screen dissolved, and was replaced by a plain black page with a single sentence in white.

  Please forgive me, old friend.

  He clicked the words and the frame became white. The QuickTime logo flashed in the center before opening a small window, beneath which were the controls to play a video.

  Kajika's hand shook. The cursor shivered in response as he lined it up with the triangular play button. He drew a deep breath, and started the recording.

  Tobin's face appeared, shadowed, the room behind him pitch black. His old friend looked like death: his cheeks patchy with untrimmed growth, the whites of his eyes solid red, the bags beneath so heavy his whole face appeared to droop. His bangs stood up in front from repeatedly running his fingers through them. He grimaced as though passing a stone and ran the back of a trembling hand under his glistening nose.

  "Hey, Dodge," he said, glancing back over his shoulder into the darkness, a horrible snapping motion. "I need your help. What else is new, huh?"

  Tobin chuckled, the pitch too high, sharp-edged. His right eye twitched.

  "There's no one else I can trust. No one."

  He looked over his shoulder again, then leaned forward toward the camera so that all Kajika could see were his eyes, nose, and mouth, all washed out and distorted by the lens. Tobin continued in a whisper that crackled with static.

  "I messed up, man. I messed up bad."

  Tears streamed down his cheeks and his lips quivered.

  "I didn't know they were going to die."

  II

  28 Miles East-northeast of

  Flagstaff, Arizona

  Killer.

  Seeing the same word painted in blood on a mirror hundreds of miles from the original had shaken him. Carver had dabbed his finger into the word to convince himself he wasn't imagining it, and had drawn his fingertip away damp. Fresh. There wasn't a doubt in his mind. The letters appeared to have been written by the same hand, but that couldn't be possible. Could it? Schwartz was dead. Carver had never been more certain of anything in his life. The man had died in his arms, dribbling blood onto his back, whispering a vicious epithet before slumping to the floor. It hadn't been a ghost that had smeared blood
on the abandoned police car and driven off in the waiting truck. That was an act of the flesh, but if Schwartz hadn't risen from the dead, then what did this mean?

  The same man who had been in the room where four children were slaughtered had been responsible for the bodies hanging in the smokehouse and sprawled across the porch. Carver had always sensed the connection between the two crimes, but had suspected two distinct killers. Now he was staring at the possibility they might be one and the same, brutal killings enacted in entirely different manners, against all the conventional rules. What then did that imply about Schwartz? Had they been partners? Carver's mind was reeling and the few pieces of the puzzle formerly in place were now scattered.

  He returned to the house on the road, limping with the cactus needles in his socks. His pants and jacket were brown with dust. Even now he was sure he felt worse than he looked.

  Ellie opened the door when she saw him approaching and climbed out of the sedan to wait, crossing her arms over her chest. A bitter chill had descended upon the formerly sweltering desert, creating an altogether different world. The clamor of voices had silenced the coyotes and owls, and the dust stirred by their arrival had settled again.

  White light flashed like strobes of lightning at the front of the house, through the open door of the smokehouse, and between the side boards of the weathered building as cameras made permanent the nightmare, memorializing it from every possible angle. Carver had seen it once, and that was more than enough. He wouldn't soon forget.

  "What's happening?" Ellie asked, turning toward the smokehouse.

  "We were too late. He had a truck waiting in the wash. Probably drove right past us on our way in."

  "Any earlier and that could have been you down there by the house. Us, Paxton."

  "I'm sure that was the plan."

  He looked downhill at the porch, which was now a frenzy of activity. Officers performed an orchestrated dance, studying the bodies without touching them, standing aside for the photographs of the crime scene and ducking back in. Hawthorne was nowhere in sight, but the interior lights glowed through the curtains inside the house.

  Carver led Ellie down the path, skirting the scene on the porch to enter through the open rear door into the kitchen. Carver heard the flies first, and was transported. The sink was overflowing with filthy dishes, a cloud of bloated black insects fighting over the dried and stinking chunks of crusted food, furry with white and green mold. Dried blood was smeared all over the counter, the gas stove dotted with gobs of shriveled meat. The smell struck him and he had to cover his mouth and nose.

  Passing from the kitchen into the main room, he was finally able to take a shallow breath. More flies spun lazily over the nearly barren room, alighting on the lone threadbare couch, food-crusted coffee table, and the pile of clothing in the corner, before rising again. There was a television in the corner, the screen showing the extended coverage of the exhumations in the desert without the benefit of sound. Light flashed through the curtains beside the front door. The hallway to the right led to a bathroom and what could only be a bedroom at the end, from which he heard muffled voices.

  Ellie's hand found his, their fingers lacing. It was a small comfort he pretended was for her benefit.

  The bathroom housed a rust-rimmed claw-foot tub. A plastic hose had been run from the spigot to a white showerhead clipped into a mount on the wall above. More angry flies swarmed the pink-tinged water. The drain was clogged with a massive clump of hair.

  None of the other agents acknowledged him when he stepped into the bedroom. They were too busy scrutinizing the contents of the room, which had been converted into something more reminiscent of a surgical suite. There was no bed, in its stead a long silver table with drains dividing the uneven surface into thirds. It was the only thing in the house that shined, polished to the point it reflected the lamp suspended over it on a retractable arm. There was a machine attached to an IV stand beside it, a boxy unit with pressure gauges and flow rate monitors, from which various tubes dangled to the floor. The label on its face was still intact: FMS 2000 Rapid Infuser. The carpet had been ripped from the floor, the concrete foundation treated with a non-porous coating to make it smooth, easily scrubbed. There were empty IV bags on a shelf beside small vials of the blood-thinner Heparin. A wire basket held an array of surgical implements: scalpels, forceps, clamps, spreaders. There was an autoclave perched beside it. On the shelf beneath were boxes of sterile syringes and needles of varying gauge and length, bottles of iodine and alcohol, surgical thread and suturing needles, size eight sterile gloves, gauze, and other items Carver didn't recognize. There was a stack of Styrofoam coolers in the corner and a case of liquid-cooled silver canisters with LED temperature readouts.

  "They're siphoning the blood and shipping it somewhere else," Carver said.

  "You think?" Wolfe said. "Now I'm really glad you're on board. We never would have figured that out without you."

  "Enough," Hawthorne snapped. "Just do your job."

  Wolfe removed his glasses and turned a slow circle, surveying the room. Carver flinched when those unnervingly blue eyes passed over him, and understood why Wolfe never removed the glasses. It was almost as though they were outside the normal range of human iris color.

  Carver's breath caught. He turned around so as not to betray his thoughts with his expression. Wolfe's eyes looked like those of a Siberian husky. Locke was unnaturally hairy, his teeth just a little too large for his mouth. The twin to a man who had killed twenty-two indigents with similar jaws. What in God's name was going on here? He pretended to study the drainage pipes retrofitted from the table to the wall and the hose mount a moment longer before again facing the others, his face a blank mask.

  He hoped Jack had learned something new and useful. A quick glance at his phone revealed he had two new messages, but no signal with which to retrieve them. He pocketed it again and looked at Hawthorne. Unlike the others, he had no abnormal physical traits outside of the scars.

  "So what now?" Carver asked. "The killer's probably two states away by now."

  Hawthorne abruptly turned to face him. Their eyes locked. "Don't pretend to be stupid. You know exactly what we need to do."

  "We follow the blood, find out where it was shipped. Figure out why."

  "You already know why."

  "But we don't know the purpose. Somebody's covering his tracks, cleaning up after some bizarre experimentation, but there has to be more to it than that. He isn't just hiding the blood. He's harvesting it. He could have just let it run down the drain and we'd have never been able to trace it. Something about it makes it valuable. This isn't just about preventing us from finding the retrovirus. Somebody's still working on it, fine-tuning it, making whatever microscopic changes need to be made for it to produce the desired result."

  "And what do you think the end result might be?"

  Carver was struck by a bolt of comprehension. He now understood that this was far bigger than a string of murders spread across the country.

  "He's creating a new race."

  III

  Verde River Reservation

  Arizona

  Kajika could only stare at the monitor, watching his friend from beyond the grave, a man he had never truly known. He felt a twinge of pity, sorrow, but mostly he felt numb. Hollow. There was dampness on his cheeks before he knew he was going to cry.

  "They offered me the opportunity of a lifetime," Tobin said, his voice quavering. "Not just fish, Dodge. Humans. You know that's what I wanted all along. To make a difference. Cure cancer. End birth defects. I knew it was illegal, but I couldn't help myself."

  Tobin looked over his shoulder again as though expecting someone to be there, then turned back. He was jittery, twitchy, lending the impression of someone strung out on possibly more than sleep deprivation and caffeine.

  "There's not much time, so you have to listen. These people...they're dangerous. And they're everywhere. There's no one I can trust. You don't understand. They're e
verywhere, everywhere."

  He's lost it, Kajika thought, not without remorse. This was his fault. He hadn't been there when Tobin had needed him.

  "They used to bring me blood. From it, I'd harvest the retrovirus. I'd evaluate the host chromosomes for the proper patterns and mutations, send the results back, and wait for them to tell me what modifications needed to be made to the virus. Believe me, there were very few. They already knew what they were doing.

  "At first, I couldn't figure out why they needed me. All I was doing was verifying their results, but I finally figured it out. What kind of idiot am I?" He pounded his palm against his forehead, hard. "But by then it was too late. There was no turning back."

  There was a long moment of silence, punctuated by the sound of Tobin's sniffing. Kajika found himself glancing back over his shoulder toward the front door. The wind had risen, tossing grains of sand against the shell of the house, making the front porch squeak as though beneath carefully transferred weight.

  "They told me the retrovirus was going to be used to correct aberrant chromosomes. That they'd isolated the factor that produced the dramatically lower incidence of cancer in patients with Down's syndrome, and were just looking for a way to deliver it. I believed them. God help me. I believed them."

  His words trailed into a sob. Mucus rolled down over his glistening lips.

  "The virus was changing the chromosomes at all the wrong loci. I thought I could fix it, but that wasn't what they wanted. That wasn't what they wanted at all. They already had it the way they wanted it. They only needed me for the protein coat. Our protein coat."

  Kajika furrowed his brow and shook his head. They had developed the CV-IIIp protein coat solely as a means for the virus they used to alter the salmon fry to survive in the colder temperatures of an aqueous, saline substrate. It was a complicated arrangement of icosahedrons, a twenty-sided shape composed of triangles that approximates a sphere. A standard virus has one icosahedral protein envelope that encloses the genetic material, but they developed a way to enclose one such protein coat inside another, and inside another still. Even the minimal amount of friction between the envelopes generated enough heat to allow the virus to survive in temperatures as low as forty degrees for nearly seventy-two hours before degradation occurred, and more than a full week at room temperature. If whoever this cryptic "they" was wanted to deliver the retrovirus, they had no reason to look beyond a simple syringe and needle. There was no benefit to cold aqueous delivery for humans. It risked compromising the virus and potentially killing it altogether.