Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  He studied his old friend's nervous features, and understood now that despite his most vehement insistence to the contrary, Tobin had indeed snapped.

  "They relocated me to a private lab in Sterling, Colorado, but they still only brought me the samples. I thought I would be working with the patients. It didn't make sense. I demanded to see the source of the blood." He checked behind him again, the microphone picking up his increasingly ragged breathing. "So they showed me."

  Kajika grabbed the empty bottle of beer and tried to drain even a single drop, but his hand was shaking so badly it clattered against his teeth. He needed another beer, but couldn't avert his eyes from the screen.

  "They were keeping this little girl in a cellar. Not a lab or a hospital. A cellar beneath an old barn in the middle of nowhere. She was chained to the wall, crawling in her own excrement. They beat her, tortured her. Starved her. I was mortified, but they forced me to watch. Physically restrained me. I was so scared I couldn't have run if I tried. We watched her on a monitor outside the room. Greenish-gray images. Night vision cameras recording live on a secure IP address. They threw a rat on the floor in front of her. A rat for Christ's sake. She was so hungry she pounced on it and brought it right to her mouth. When she bit it, the thing screeched and went into spasms. It wrenched out of her grasp and flopped on the ground like it was being electrocuted. She waited until it was still. This little girl waited until it was dead and then carefully peeled its fur away from the muscle and consumed it. And the room was dark. Not so much as a window or a crack under the door. There was no way she could have even seen her hand in front of her face."

  "Dear God," Kajika whispered.

  "I didn't realize it at first, but they were subjecting her to such abuse, physical and emotional trauma, to force her genes to express themselves. Like tapping into her primitive fight-or-flight reflex. She didn't make a conscious decision to tear that rat apart, her body made it for her. They turned this little girl into a monster, and to make sure I would continue to do my job, they made sure I knew it was inside me too."

  Tobin picked up a flashlight from off camera and shined it across his face. His eyes flashed like the reflectors on the side of a highway. He clicked off the light and hurled it across the room with a cross between a roar and a sob.

  "I don't know how they infected me...but they did." He shook his head furiously. "I can't do this, Dodge. I can't, I can't, I can't. I can't be a part of something so...evil. And it's not just these little girls either. There are others. I've seen them. They made sure I saw them. There's no one who can help me, no one I can turn to. Except for you. Hopefully.

  "That girl. She's still alive. But she won't be for long. They're bleeding her dry. I don't know what I'll do if you can't help me, what I can do. I can feel it inside me. The blackness. The rage. I want her to die. I need her to die. Why do I feel like this?"

  Kajika realized he was holding his breath, but couldn't force himself to breathe.

  "If I can't save that girl, I deserve to die. Maybe I'm dead already," Tobin said. He turned away from the camera, his shoulders heaving, and then the screen went dark.

  Kajika stared at the black rectangle and debated playing the recording again, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, he rose and went straight into the kitchen and grabbed a beer, cracked it, and downed half the bottle. He returned to the living room and paced from one side of the room to the other, pounding the Coors without tasting it, mentally replaying his friend's bizarre ravings. Tobin had gone mad. Surely that was the case. There was no other explanation but to take the insane story as truth. Either way, people had died, including the man whose voice still echoed in his head.

  They only needed me for the protein coat. Our protein coat.

  Who needed the CV-IIIp, and for what reason? How had Tobin been drawn into this mess from the start? How did any of this pertain to the corpses they were pulling out of the desert like ticks from a deer's hide?

  He walked over to the window by the front door and pulled back the curtain.

  In his mind he saw images of a girl alone in the darkness, attacking a rat in a desperate act of survival, peeling its filthy coat from its carcass before gnawing away its wet muscles. Watched on a computer monitor by men whose eyes reflected its light like so many coyotes under a full moon.

  He thought of a retrovirus rife with twisted mutations traveling through the blood from one person to the next, and imagined the myriad other ways the infection could be spread with the right protein coat.

  IV

  Flagstaff, Arizona

  Carver was in the back seat, staring out the window at the open desert, wondering if anyone was staring back. Ellie sat beside him, alternately watching the landscape fly past and closing her eyes, only to pry them back open as soon as her head started to nod. He could only imagine what kind of terrors lurked behind her closed lids. His own demons waited behind his, but he had grown accustomed to them, for whether he liked it or not, he had chosen them.

  He held his phone in his hand, glancing at the small screen every few minutes, anticipating the return of the signal once they exited the steep valley.

  "What happened to us?" Ellie whispered. He had thought she was asleep again, but now she turned to face him, setting those crystal blue eyes upon him.

  "I think we just grew apart. Or maybe just grew up."

  "Did you ever meet anyone, you know, special?"

  "There were a couple close calls, but no. You?"

  "You don't meet too many decent men in the most remote corners of the world. There were a couple here and there who helped pass the time, but that's about it."

  Carver caught Wolfe watching in the rear view mirror, but said nothing.

  "Maybe when this is all over," she said, "we could at least keep in touch."

  "Yeah. I'd like that. I don't have too many people in my life worth keeping in touch with."

  He held out his hand and she took it. She leaned her head on his shoulder.

  "So what happens from here?" she whispered, stifling a yawn.

  "I wish I knew," Carver said. He wanted to say something more reassuring, but he knew she'd see right through him. The truth was he didn't have any idea how to proceed. No matter what they did, they remained a step behind the killer. And now he was forced to try to comprehend a motive beyond his wildest dreams, a killer attempting to create a new species from the old.

  He answered his phone in the middle of the first ring.

  "Damn, Carver. Where the hell have you been?" He recognized Marshall's voice immediately. "I've been trying to get ahold of you for an hour."

  "I've been out of cell range. I didn't even know I was back in until the phone rang. What do you have for me?"

  "I told you the four victims had animal DNA at certain loci on specific chromosomes. I did a little more research and figured out, in theory anyway, what kind of function they might have served."

  Carver listened silently while Marshall provided wild speculations about little girls who could potentially see in the dark, produce venom in their salivary glands, and survive for long stretches at a time in a state of hibernation. With each successive word, the conjecture became less and less fantastic, while only the day before he would have questioned Marshall's sobriety. Now his own theory was beginning to take shape, still hazy and insubstantial, but like a grain of sand in a clam, something far bigger had begun to take form. Based on the evidence in the house he had just left, he believed someone was trying to engineer a superior race. Now the girls in Colorado substantiated that supposition. A retrovirus had been used to alter specific chromosomes and institute the desired traits. Perhaps during the days in captivity they endured a series of tests before their blood was harvested and their bodies hacked apart to hide the evidence. The manner in which their remains had been found had been meant to send the authorities chasing shadows. And the supposed resolution with Schwartz had been a gift with a big fancy bow. What he needed now were the genetic profiles of the
mummified bodies. If his hunch was correct, they would find not only the presence of the retrovirus, but animal genes as well, probably even at different loci on the chromosomes, another stage in the development of the virus. Perhaps it was time to pay another surprise visit on the genetic engineer who just happened to stumble upon the bundled corpses. There was more than coincidence at work here, and whether Kajika Dodge knew it or not, he was right in the thick of it.

  There was still one nagging variable for which he couldn't account. He looked at Ellie, the lights of the suburbs now comets streaking past behind her, and studied her sleeping face, hoping to see something he hadn't noticed before.

  "Are you even listening to me?" Marshall said.

  "Send me every shred of data you can scrounge. Everything. As soon as I hear anything about the PCR results from Phoenix, I'll have them forwarded to you."

  "I'm definitely no expert on retroviruses. What do you expect--?"

  "You'll figure it out. You're by far the smartest guy I know."

  "Easy, Carver. Your nose hairs are tickling my sphincter."

  "And one more thing: see what you can dig up on a guy named Kajika Dodge and his old company HydroGen."

  "Friend of yours?"

  "Acquaintance of significant interest."

  "I'm on it."

  "Thanks, Marshall. Stay safe."

  "Don't go all soft on me now, Carver," Marshall said, and terminated the call.

  Carver dialed the preprogrammed number to access his voice mailbox and played the messages. The first was from Marshall, with which he had already dealt. The second message piqued his curiosity. While he replayed it, his phone confirmed receipt of a large data file with a beep.

  "What's the good news?" Wolfe asked.

  "I was thinking now might be a wonderful time to call on our Navajo friend."

  "The good Doctor Moreau? Why the heck not?"

  Carver scrolled down to the number from the last incoming call and dialed.

  V

  Sinagua Ruins

  36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona

  Special Agent Karen Manning hugged herself. The temperature had dropped so quickly she had been caught unaware. The tent had retained the day's heat in sauna fashion, a stark contrast to the barren region without. She missed her house, her warm bed, and wondered if she'd see either again anytime soon. The prospect of being out in the desert much longer was debilitating; the isolation, the lack of fresh coffee, the way the wind would suddenly rise to tempestuous gusts and then fade to nothing again. It was an entirely different planet it seemed, as though rather than being just four hours from home, she had been abandoned on Mars.

  Despite herself, she was acutely aware of the corpses surrounding her. While she had literally examined hundreds during her career, she had never worked on so many at once, and certainly not under these circumstances. Crimes of passion, where it was generally only a matter of finding evidence not nearly so well concealed to implicate the significant other or lover, shootings, stabbings, drownings, all the normal crimes inherent to the nature of a supposedly civilized society. She had investigated them all with clinical precision and detachment. This was her first real exposure to the kind of serial killer she generally only heard about on the news or read about in the true crime novels she fancied, her guilty pleasure. This was a separate beast entirely. There was no clear-cut motive. No cheating husband or battered wife, no element of jealousy or greed. There was no weapon to be found cast into the bushes or in a nearby Dumpster, no signs of immediate remorse or fear leading the killer to hurriedly abandon the scene of the crime, making the classic mistakes that resulted in rapid apprehension. This killer was far too smart for that, too organized. The amount of foresight and planning was frightening. There was usually a ritual involved with the bodies of the victims: skinning, eating, stuffing, sexual violation, but this killer tended to them almost lovingly after torturing them to death. Unlike so many, this was a calculating man well within his right mind. A man who could walk down a busy street, sit on a PTA board, or help an elderly woman with her groceries without betraying the demon lurking beneath. And that made him all the more terrifying.

  He was out there somewhere at this very moment, perhaps even somewhere in the desert, watching her.

  A shiver ascended her spine and she suddenly felt exposed standing outside the tent. The wind howled and the tent flaps clapped, obscuring all but the sound of sand pelting the canvas. She could barely see the headlights of the news vans through the haze of dust, the last of which were now turning around on the other side of the barricade to seek shelter for the night. They'd be back soon enough, rolling across the sand with the dawn sun glimmering on their roofs.

  They were officially alone now. Just the two other ERT agents and her, each working a different cadaver in separate tents in the hope of one day returning to civilization.

  The clock was ticking. The Governor of Arizona, Stanley Rutherford, was always more than happy to be the center of attention, living his life in the strobe of flash bulbs, but not when it came to something like this. He wanted Arizona to be the center of national tourism for wonders like the Grand Canyon, the breathtaking landscapes, and the world-class golf courses in Scottsdale, not to arouse the morbid curiosity of the blood- and gore-seekers who thrilled in standing on the ground where someone's life had abruptly ended. Word had come down from the Director of the FBI himself, Cal Wilson, that their exhumations were to be wrapped up with the appropriate haste, and the bodies sent to the facilities in Phoenix to be studied where they couldn't be viewed, even from such a distance, on the evening news. Manning knew that rushing an investigation was how mistakes were made, and she wouldn't be able to sleep again if she knew that whoever had done this remained free on the streets to resume killing whenever he chose. She had her orders though, and so long as she remained ostensibly in charge of the remains, she retained some measure of control.

  The last of the headlights faded into the darkness, where the black buttes supported the starless sky.

  She felt unseen eyes upon her. Standing out in the open, spotlighted by the portable halogens, she was as comfortable as a prairie dog on a highway.

  At least she wasn't the only one still working. The governor's strategic phone calls had guaranteed the whole staff of forensics agents and technical staff back at the lab unlimited overtime, whether they liked it or not. She had expected resistance to ordering PCR tests on the corpses, but met with none. Apparently, for the sake of expedience, she now had carte blanche to run whatever expensive, time-consuming, and potentially unnecessary tests she so desired.

  And so far the results had been surprising to say the least. To her anyway, but not to others, those to whom she had yet to relay the findings. She would share what she had learned, but they were going to have to give her some answers of their own or by God there was going to be hell to pay, and she wasn't above calling in the tab herself.

  Manning ducked back into the command tent and poured the remainder of the lukewarm coffee from the communal thermos into her mug. One swig and it was gone. She mourned its passing with a Diet Pepsi that fortunately was becoming slightly colder as the night progressed.

  The satellite phone rang and she verified the number before answering.

  "It's about time," she said, taking another pull from the can before setting it on the cooler lid. "Did I interrupt your beauty sleep, princess?"

  "My hair's still in rollers and everything," Carver said. "I got your message. What did you find out?"

  She had only revealed that the PCR tests on the corpses had come back, not the results. Information was a valuable commodity. If she was going to get anything out of these agents who were supposedly on the same team, then she would have to barter carefully.

  "Not so fast, hotshot," she said. "I need some answers first."

  "That good, huh?"

  "You'll have to be the judge of that. First, I need to know how your friend Scarface knew to test for a retrovirus." />
  "Tell me what you learned and I'll give you what I know in return."

  Manning sighed and waited, but Carver offered nothing more.

  "Fine. What we have is a mutation of a classic epsilonretrovirus, the snakehead variety. It's easily identifiable by its arginine tRNA primer binding site, but its Gag, one of the nine proteins that help form the structural component of the retrovirus, doesn't resemble the coiled form of the snakehead so much as that of the genus lentivirus, which includes the human immunodeficiency virus. The reported incidence of the epsilonretrovirus in humans is non-existent, however you know all about the prevalence of HIV, which is suspected to have mutated from a simian strain. The odds of this kind of virus turning up in nature are about one in a centillion, and the chances of digging up a graveyard full of infected bodies are incalculable. So again, I ask, how did you know to test for something that by all rights shouldn't even be here?"

  "I have another question first."

  "You're testing my patience, Special Agent Carver. I can't even begin to do my job if you're keeping critical information from me, and I'm not opposed to reaching right down your throat and yanking it out of you."