Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  "We should fan out and look for the others," Carver said.

  "They aren't here. They knew we'd try to track Locke by his GPS beacon. This was just a distraction to buy them more time."

  "Time for what? We beat them. We found the retrovirus. We know where they're breeding it. We know it's in the flu vaccine. I'm sure by now they're already being pulled out of hospitals and destroyed. There's no way they'll be given to patients. And Dreck's dead, so they won't get another shot at this. The fish will be killed, the virus eliminated, and they'll be left with nothing."

  "So it would seem," Hawthorne said, "but we still have our work cut out for us. Locke and Archer are still out there somewhere, as are Heidlmann and Darby."

  "And they still need to eliminate us," Carver said.

  "We need to look at this objectively. Locke and the others have maybe been missing for four hours now. Dodge has been dead for nearly one of those. That leaves three hours during which they presumably broke into the hotel room, moved them to a different location, and brought Dodge back here. So wherever they took the others can't be more than ninety minutes away. Factor in the time it would take to move Archer and Locke into a secure location and the time it would have taken to set up and kill Dodge, and we're dealing with a radius of roughly sixty miles."

  "The others are already dead," Wolfe said.

  "If they were, they'd be down here as well," Hawthorne said. "There was something else planned for them."

  "Then we're wasting time," Carver said, turning away and pointing the light back into the tunnel. He veered right at the junction and started to jog. They still needed to make sure there were no more bodies down there; they couldn't leave without being sure.

  Behind him, he heard Wolfe ask in a soft tone, "We aren't just leaving him here...like this, are we?"

  * * *

  Between the three of them, it took another fifteen minutes to clear the underground tunnels. As they had suspected, they had found nothing, save a handful of partial footprints in dried blood leading to the doorway to the main building. The door had been unlocked, the security system disarmed. They had climbed the staircase into the main lobby of the HydroGen office building and walked right out the front door into the parking lot. There was no time to waste on the circuitous route through the woods, so they ran down to the highway and followed the shoulder to where they had parked the Caprice.

  There was another car behind theirs in the dirt lot, a newer model red Mustang with a National Car Rental sticker on the bumper. Washington plates, recently washed. The silhouette of a man behind the steering wheel, the windshield reflecting what little of the setting sun pierced the banks of clouds. Carver's first thought was that some tourist had been drawn to the trailhead, but he knew better. The moment they reached the lot, the man opened the driver's side door and climbed out. He shielded his eyes from the glare, but Carver would have recognized him anywhere.

  The man strode directly toward him.

  Carver didn't know what to say when the man stopped and he stood face to face with Jack Warner.

  His father.

  IV

  Elsewhere

  Consciousness returned with crippling waves of pain, making the prospect of closing her eyes again and welcoming the darkness more appealing by the second. She was so cold. Shivering did little to generate heat beyond the burning in her ankles. If she still had feet, Ellie imagined they were a mottled shade of bluish-black. She didn't know how long she had been there, but with each subsequent breath she took, each droplet of blood that dripped into the collection basin from the catheter in her arm, she drew that much closer to spending the rest of her life in this hell.

  There was no voice to scream. Even what little saliva she managed to accumulate only felt like acid sliding down her throat. And there was no energy left to rage against her bonds.

  This was it. Either the man cut her down, or she was going to die like this.

  She wished she could cry, but her body couldn't spare the moisture for tears.

  Her eyes closed. When she opened them again she was in the middle of an unending desert littered with sun-blanched bones, only they were no longer human. Strange amalgams of man and animal: skulls with horns and tusks; knees that bent the wrong way; fingers and toes capped with talons; scapulae with the framework of vestigial wings. She walked over them with the cracking sound only dried bones could make until she collapsed on the sand. Somewhere in the distance she could hear the gentle tapping of fluid dripping to the sand.

  Plip...plip...

  Only now her eyes were open again. If they'd ever really been closed at all.

  She heard soft breathing, now easily distinguishable from her own wheezing.

  "Can you hear it?" a voice whispered.

  Plip...ploop...

  "That's the sound of life. The blood contains everything we are. It's the seed for an entire species. Even a single drop generates ripples in the gene pool that spread throughout the entire world. And those ripples grow larger and larger until they become waves. Every tsunami begins somewhere as a single drop."

  She felt the warmth of his breath on her forehead, and then his lips. They lingered almost lovingly before disengaging.

  "Soon you will be gone, and the others won't be far behind you. Then it will just be me, sitting alone on the shore of a once placid sea, making ripples that will one day become waves."

  Elliot understood. The only people who even knew he existed outside the select group privy to his birth were dead. Buried in the desert, hanging in his smokehouse, or chalk outlines on his porch. Those of them who were like him had all been drawn together to be killed, all of the surviving twins from the abduction thirty years ago. That had always been the plan. They were the evidence of a crime yet to be committed.

  But why not simply shoot her or stab her and be done with it? What was the point in dragging it out so long by bleeding her dry? Were the others down here somewhere as well, similarly strung up by their ankles, slowly bleeding to death?

  He wanted their bodies to be found after the fact, found drained of every last drop of life. Their bloodlines irrevocably severed forever.

  "Are you still with me?" he whispered, the disembodied words reaching her as though from a great distance.

  She wasn't sure whether she was or not. The pain was fading, in its stead numbness. She no longer shivered, but found herself waiting for the black hole inside of her to yawn wide and draw her into the void.

  "Don't worry. Your life will not have been in vain."

  The voice trailed her into an unconsciousness from which she feared she would never awaken.

  V

  Redmond, Washington

  "Jack--," Carver started, but the older man cut him off.

  "There's a time and a place for this conversation, my boy, and this is neither." He turned to Hawthorne. "Dodge?"

  Hawthorne nodded once.

  "Then the others can't be far from here," Jack said. Carver was amazed how quickly Jack had asserted himself and taken control of the situation. This was a side of Jack he'd never seen before, disimpassioned, hard. Even Hawthorne seemed to have deferred some of his authority to Jack. "We need to figure out where they are, and we need to do so right now."

  He held out a sealed manila folder and threw it down on the hood of the Caprice. The name on the folder was Avram Dreck. Jack opened it and pulled out the pages. The top sheet had a photo of Dreck and all sorts of statistical data from height and weight to eye color. He riffled through the pages until he found what he was looking for. Separating those four sheets from the rest, he spread them out on the hood and crammed the rest back into the folder.

  "Dreck is listed on the title of four properties. The first is the Dreck-Windham Corporate Headquarters, which we can eliminate right now. The second is his primary residence." He pointed at the full-color picture on the upper half of the page. "Just over ten thousand square feet on twenty-two acres just south of the Washington border. Time-wise, it's a stretch, and
considering that his wife and his forty year-old son live there year round, we can cross it off the list as well."

  "How do you know we're looking for a property Dreck owns?" Carver asked. "They could be anywhere for all we know. An abandoned house, a warehouse, in the middle of the forest--"

  Jack locked eyes with Carver and silenced his protests with a look. This was a different man entirely than he had known growing up.

  "Dreck didn't appear on our radar until yesterday, but it looks as though he helped smuggle Heidlmann into the country roughly thirty years ago. Records indicate he passed through customs in Mexico around the same time as Heidlmann. We can only assume he helped hide Heidlmann all this time. If they're kindred spirits as we suspect, they would have remained in close proximity, especially now that their plans are so close to completion."

  "Then it would have to be one of the other two properties," Wolfe said. "What else do you have?"

  "There's an apartment in a ritzy building in downtown Seattle, but I don't see it as an option. It's too high-profile, too visible. Considering he only purchased it two years ago, my guess would be that Dreck stayed there from time to time when he wanted to follow the progress at HydroGen," Jack said. "That leaves us with a six-thousand square foot vacation home on sixty-five wooded acres about thirty-eight miles northeast of here outside of Verlot."

  "It's well within the radius," Hawthorne said.

  "I think that's where they are," Jack said.

  "If we guess wrong," Carver said, "Ellie and Locke are as good as dead."

  "They're as good as dead already," Jack said, his voice lacking any trace of emotion.

  * * *

  Within minutes they were on the highway again, streaking toward where Carver hoped Ellie and Locke had been taken, unsure of exactly what to expect when they arrived. They had all been gathered by conspiring forces to be eliminated. Carver had never been this scared in his life, but the anger superseded it. There had been so much death, so many innocent lives extinguished in the name of genocide, and he needed someone to hold accountable, someone to pay.

  Wolfe had made the call to the police to report Kajika's death and provide the location where they would find his body. Upon doing so, every trace of his usual cockiness and levity vanished. He drove the Caprice with Hawthorne riding shotgun, right on the tail of Jack's Mustang. Jack drove like a man possessed, weaving through traffic, while Carver sat beside him, a million questions trying to force their way out. Thus far he had managed to vocalize none of them. His emotions were in turmoil. He wanted to be as far away from Jack as he could, and yet he wanted to take him by the throat at the same time. So much of this could have been prevented had he known the truth from the start. Kajika's death, Mondragon's murder, and whatever fate may have befallen Ellie and Locke.

  Focusing his thoughts, he put voice to three words.

  "Who is she?"

  "Who?" Jack said, swerving onto the shoulder to pass a tractor-trailer and then jerking the car back onto the asphalt.

  "My mother. The woman who raised me."

  "This isn't the time."

  "This is the time, Jack."

  Jack glanced at him from the corner of his eye.

  "She's your mother, Paxton. Maybe not biologically, but in every other sense of the word. She's the one who tucked you in at night and made sure there was always food on the table. She's the one who read to you and rocked you when you couldn't sleep. She's the one who gave up her life in Arizona to move closer to you, to be with her son, in Colorado. She's also the woman who sacrificed a very promising career as a Federal Agent to devote her every waking moment to protecting and caring for you."

  Carver was silent.

  Jack gunned the engine when the highway opened to a straightaway.

  "And my real mother?"

  "She was the most amazing person I've ever known. The only woman who could ever understand me. I loved her with all my heart, and they took her from me. Not a day goes by that I don't miss her, that I don't wish she was still here."

  An expression crossed Jack's face that reminded Carver of the man he had known all his life, and then it was gone.

  "What do you now about my brother?" Carver asked when it was apparent Jack wasn't going to elaborate.

  Jack stiffened, the muscles in his jaw clenching.

  Carver waited patiently for a reply. He had nearly given up when Jack finally spoke.

  "Only that he's my son, and I've been searching for him since before he was even born. Do you have any idea what that's like? To know that your child is out there somewhere and you can't find him despite tapping into every available resource, that the people who took him were doing terrible things to him, things to which no one should be subjected, especially a helpless infant? I would have given my life a million times over to save him. There's nothing I wouldn't do just to see him even once with my own eyes."

  "Why didn't you just tell me, Jack?"

  "You may not believe me, but it's always been my job to protect you, as a father, whether you were aware of it or not," Jack said. "And nothing I could have said or done would have prepared you for this."

  "But I would have had a father, not just fictional memories of a dead man who never even existed."

  "The moment anyone learned you were my son, you would have been in danger. They would have stolen you from me again and done who knows what to you. And don't think for a second that I enjoyed watching the son I loved more than anything else in the world growing up from afar. I was there for you every chance I got, not too much so as to draw undue attention, but enough that I never missed a significant moment in your life. I was there even when you didn't know it. So you go ahead and be as angry at me as you want, but don't you ever--ever!--blame the woman who raised you. She was everything to you that I couldn't be, and for that I will forever be in her debt. If you need to blame someone, you blame me, but I don't intend to lose another son, so you'd better believe you're stuck with me whether you like it or not."

  Carver didn't know what to say. He felt betrayed, but if he put himself in Jack's place, could he honestly say he would have done anything differently?

  The highway wound up into hills so thick with evergreens that he could see nothing beyond. Way off in the distance, the snowcapped cone of Mount Olympus towered over the treetops, and for just a second he smelled apples.

  Jack gnashed his teeth with a screech.

  "So you were born in Auschwitz," Carver said.

  "This conversation is over."

  "You have a twin."

  "Yeah. He's buried in a little wooden crate the size of a shoebox in Poland. An emaciated baby who never had the opportunity to live."

  "And you have animal genes in your DNA."

  "Focus on the task at hand, Paxton."

  "I am, Jack."

  "You're wasting time."

  Jack veered from Highway 92 North onto the Mountain Loop Highway, heading east-southeast. It wouldn't be much longer now.

  "They turned the other twins into monsters," Carver said. "Ross, Grady, Covington. Mine is responsible for bleeding fifteen people to death. Chopping up innocent little girls, Jack. Mummifying eleven others in a smokehouse over the course of a decade. There were even two more still hanging from the rafters in there. And there were the policemen who were literally torn apart. Mondragon. Kajika. I need to know everything you know. I need to understand what we're up against, and that starts with what's inside of you."

  Jack took a sharp left way too fast, and the car hurtled from the asphalt onto a gravel road. The rear end bucked to the side before regaining traction on the grass on the slanted shoulder, the barbed-wire fence bordering it gouging lines through the Mustang's paint. Another quarter-mile and Jack slammed on the brakes. He guided the car off the road and over a fallen section of the fence into a small meadow. They parked beside a cluster of firs that screened the vehicles from the road.

  Wolfe pulled in beside them.

  "Haven't you figured it out yet?" Jack a
sked. He opened his door, but didn't climb out. His eyes stared through the windshield, unfocused. "They were trying to make monsters. The greatest weapon in any war is fear. If you take away the will to fight, your enemy will crumble. That was the whole point, to create soldiers who would inspire so much terror in their opposition that they would cower in their homes or run from battle, soldiers who weren't bound by the rules of engagement, who would come under the dark of night and tear people apart with their hands and teeth. This was a time when the Germans were preparing to seize the entirety of Eastern Europe and they weren't thinking short term. They were planning complete world domination, and what scared Eastern Europeans, Paxton? What element of their heritage would have terrified them to the point of never even considering rising in revolt?"

  Carver closed his eyes. He felt the weight of Jack's stare upon him in the moment of revelation.

  Carver thought of his brother. He had wanted Carver to know who he was up against every step of the way. He had shown him the face of the killer in the mirrors, shown him the truth of his lineage through the DNA on the scalpel, and he had shown him from the start what was inside of him.

  The exsanguinated bodies.

  The desiccated corpses.

  The answer had been hidden in them all along.

  The obsidian figurines.

  The bat.

  "Christ," Carver whispered. "They were trying to make a vampire."

  VI

  Denver, Colorado

  The seizures had begun within ninety minutes of Marshall's call to the CDC. At first, they had been unwilling to believe him, and had even hung up on him once, but the evidence he had provided had been incontrovertible. Every federal officer and local law enforcer had been mobilized and assigned to the various hospitals and clinics that had received shipment of the flu vaccine. They were to confiscate every single unit, minus those that had already been distributed to the staff. Fortunately, all facilities were required to keep comprehensive lists of every person treated with the vaccine. Marshall imagined he'd be spending the rest of his professional career tracking the hundreds to thousands who had received the vaccine early throughout Colorado and Wyoming, as his counterparts in other states undoubtedly would as well. It didn't matter though, not in the grand scheme of things anyway. They had prevented tens of millions of children from becoming like the four little girls, who had been robbed of their lives as though they meant nothing, but whose deaths now had meaning.