I peek over the edge of the grave, but she’s not in there either. And there’s no way she’s fast enough to have escaped from view in three seconds. Not if, as Viktor reassured me a couple of times, she and I are the same sort of being.
“Where did she go!” Clara shouts, repeating herself.
“She’s just… gone,” I say, as nothing more clever is coming to mind. I find myself staring at the ground where she’d been standing a moment earlier. The imprints of her shoes are still there. It’s just that Eve has ceased to occupy them.
“How?” Clara asks. She’s getting a tad hysterical.
“If I knew how she did that, I’d do it myself,” I point out.
“But—.”
A second alarm sounds, up near the front entrance of the camp. This snaps me back into the situation like a slap across the face. There will be time later to ponder the implications of what we had just witnessed, but to get to that point I’m going to have to figure out a way to survive the next few hours.
Clara’s not quite there yet. “It’s impossible!” she insists.
“Oh, absolutely,” I agree. “But we can talk about it later. Like, not when we’re about to get killed. We have to get out of here. Now.”
“She—”
“Clara. Now.”
* * *
Running from building to building, we use the cover each structure provides us as well as we can. And each step that takes us closer to the center, also brings us closer to the sounds of utter mayhem. Alarms are sounding, guns are firing, people are screaming. It seems like it’s happening all around us.
“Are we under attack?” Clara asks as we run.
“You could say that.”
“By what?”
We reach the corner of one of the larger inner buildings. An unused physics lab. I peer around the corner to see if the center compound is occupied. It doesn’t appear to be.
“What made that noise?” Clara continues. “The screaming you said you’d heard before. What was that?”
“That was the sound of a demon being eviscerated.”
“Jesus.”
More gunfire, to our right and pretty close. We hear a man scream before abruptly losing his voice and—based on the somewhat sickening noise that follows—his life. It’s nice to imagine I’m hearing Bob Grindel being killed, but more likely it’s a security team member. They’re probably all over the place by now, as one’s patrol assignment tends to go out the window when one is fleeing for one’s life. It’s another variable to consider.
“It’s eating,” I say, noting the sucking sounds. “Quickly.”
Taking Clara by the hand, I lead us in a sprint over the remaining distance to the center. Clara pulls free and stops when she sees the four huts.
“You had Iza open all the doors,” she notes. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”
“She didn’t need to tell you,” I say.
“You didn’t trust me?”
“Of course I didn’t. Would you?”
She thinks about it. “Maybe not.”
A noise, that might be described as howling on multiple frequencies, cuts through the air. It’s from behind us, roughly where we heard the death of a man a minute earlier.
“It’s coming,” I say. And the lab’s too far away, assuming the door isn’t unlocked. I push Clara into the nearest doorway—for cell number three—and follow her in, closing the door behind us. And then we hold our breath for a thirty count.
“It’s gone,” Clara whispers.
“Maybe.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s a vampire,” I say. “A very, very hungry vampire. They were keeping it in the second cell.”
“There’s such a thing as vampires?”
“Sure.”
It takes her a couple of seconds to readjust her world view and then, “Why the hell are we headed into the middle of the compound?”
“We can’t climb that fence,” I say. “And even if we tried, is that where you want to be when the vampire comes by? Better to find a place to hide until it’s all over.”
“So… wait. What is this room for?”
She’d taken her eyes off the door for long enough to have a look around. I follow her gaze.
The inside of the third cell looks like the interior of an intensive care ward. (Or rather, what they look like on TV. I’ve never been in one.) The room is full of tubes and wires and machines for registering vital statistics. A large bed takes up the very center of the room. The bed’s empty.
“You’ve never been in here?” Clara asks.
“Nope. You?”
“No. I wonder who it was for?”
“I heard moaning coming from this cell. Maybe there was another experiment going on. One I didn’t know about.”
“But on who?” she reiterates.
“Dunno. They’re not here now. And we all know Bob likes to destroy things when he’s done with them, so…”
We hear some more gunfire. I’m beginning to think everyone on the base is armed with an automatic weapon except for me.
“Sounds like that’s a good ways off,” I say. “We should try and chance it now.”
“Chance what?” she asked. “We’re safe here, aren’t we?”
“I’d feel safer in the lab,” I say. Which is sort of true, as the lab is built of sterner stuff and has a big metal door and all that. But I have another reason for wanting to get in there.
I crack open the door and do not end up savagely killed, so I try opening it wider. Still no sudden death. We step out. More screaming from somewhere to our left, and definitely not too close.
“There are like forty or fifty people here,” Clara notes. “Is it me, or does it sound like every one of them is being killed one-by-one?”
“It’s not just you.”
I turn the corner past the row of huts and nearly trip over what’s left of Ringo. Clara nearly does the same, and then in seeing what she had avoided she immediately starts screaming. I clap my hand over her mouth as quickly as I can.
“Quiet down,” I whisper, “Or you’ll bring it right to us.”
I get a nod of understanding from her, so I pull back my hand and kneel down to examine the remains.
He came to final rest on his side, or at least the largest portion of what’s left of him did. One of his arms has been torn completely off, both his legs are broken and lying at some fairly strange angles, and it appears as if several internal organs have been removed with a blunt instrument. It looks like he died in horrible pain, and for a second, I actually feel sympathetic.
I roll the torso. This causes more of the viscera to roll out onto the ground, and I hear Clara actively attempting to control her gag reflex. I also learn the answer to my own personal age-old question: demons do have hearts. I see Ringo’s with my own eyes. But that’s less important than what else I find—the key ring, still attached to his belt. I pick up the ring.
“Adam?” Clara says, her voice freaking out all over the place. “How… are vampires that strong? I mean…”
“They get stronger and faster as they get older,” I say. “This one must be pretty old. Now keep your gun ready. We just need to make it to the lab.”
Chapter 27
At a full sprint, it takes us only about thirty seconds to cross the gap to the door of the laboratory. Feels like a whole lot longer. Unsurprisingly, it’s locked.
“C’mon, open it,” Clara says nervously. I’m holding the key ring up in the light to see if there are any markings to help me identify the correct key. But if there is an indicator, I can’t see it. So I just start trying out keys. There are roughly twenty to choose from.
If things had gone according to plan, Iza would have opened the door—for me and Eve rather than me and Clara—before freeing the hungry vampire that’s probably seconds away from eating us both. Iza’s nowhere to be found, but at least I have the key ring. It almost balances out.
“Just shoot it open,” Clara
says.
“It’s a steel door,” I point out. “That’ll waste bullets, make too much noise, and the ricochet will probably hit one of us.”
“Shh! Listen.” More automatic gunfire could be heard to our left. Two, maybe three different shooters.
“It’s not anywhere near us,” I say.
“How do you know?”
“What do you think they’re shooting at?”
All the damn keys look identical. I can’t even imagine how something as big and stupid as Ringo could be expected to tell them apart.
“So what’s with the uniform?” I ask, as much to keep her from panicking, as out of actual curiosity. Or maybe I’m trying to keep myself from panicking.
“I got it from the laundry,” she says distractedly.
“How’d you pull that off?”
“Easy. I’ve had free run of this place since I got here.”
“Yeah?” Five keys and no luck. It’s going to end up being the twentieth one I try.
Clara says, “Bob was trying to get into my pants. Guess he figured that’d be easier if I didn’t think of him as a complete son of a bitch. So he took pains to not treat me like a captive.”
“He told me you were here because you wanted to be.”
“Yeah, he told himself that, too.”
“How about the gun?” I ask. “Or did you find that in the laundry also?”
“It’s a loaner,” she says.
“Somebody loaned you an automatic rifle?”
“You’d be surprised what a cute girl like me can get away with in a camp full of men,” she says with a smile, sounding a bit more like the Clara I remember from New York.
“I knew Helen of Troy,” I point out. “So, no, I’m not all that surprised.”
Eleven. If Ringo doesn’t have the key to the lab on this ring, I’m not so sure what my next step is going to be. As it is, we’re frighteningly exposed under the lab’s door stoop light.
“They teach you to fire it, too?” I ask, regarding Clara’s gun.
“I had a few lessons. Target practice out in the desert.”
“They seem to have taught you well.”
“Not really. I meant to kill Bob, not just wound him. Are you almost done?”
“It has to be one of these,” I insist, more for my own benefit.
She stiffens up. “Someone’s coming!” she whispers. I’m on my fifteenth key.
“Hang on…”
She raises her gun. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the barrel shaking all over the place. We’re cutting this close.
And then the lock clicks and the door opens. Seventeen turns out to be the lucky number. I grab her and pull the two of us into the antechamber.
“It’s running for us!” she shouts.
We throw our combined weight on the door and spin the lock. After a good long pause in which nothing happens other than the two of us not breathing, we relax.
“You saw it?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe. Somebody’s out there, that I’m sure of.”
“This door should keep it out,” I insist, patting the door, “Until it runs out of easier victims.”
“This was your plan? How were you going to keep it from killing you?”
“It’s not the best plan in the world. Come on.”
I lead her through the next door.
In order to get into the lab proper, one has to go through three sets of double doors. The first set is the one we just locked. The second set of doors is glass, and they separate the antechamber from an area called a walkthrough. The purpose of the walkthrough is to keep airborne contamination down to a minimum. After the doors leading into it, there’s a second set of doors leading out of it, and at no time can both sets of doors be open.
The rest of the lab, then, is what’s referred to in the parlance as a clean room. This I find comical, because I’ve always likened science to its predecessor—alchemy. I knew a lot of alchemists, and not one of them ever worried about cross-contamination. If anything, one tended to need a bath after spending time in an alchemist’s lab.
Once in the walkthrough I peer into the lab, which is pretty easy to do, as every wall is glass at this point. The laboratory is lit dimly by a moderate selection of fluorescent lights and table lamps. And it looks like a few experiments are still running, based on the various indicator lights on the equipment. But, as I’d hoped, it’s deserted.
When Grindel first bought this place out, he had the interior tailored to Viktor’s specifications. The second floor was removed—Viktor said the ceiling was a mess of loose particulate matter, which I remembered because I don’t know what particulate matter is—and replaced with a new drop ceiling. All the walls for separate rooms were also removed, making it one giant space. Areas are now defined by counters and equipment. And one curtain, off in the right corner of the lab, hiding an examination table. I spent a good deal of time on that table being poked and prodded. To that end, the curtain is for privacy. There are a couple of female lab techs, but even if it were an all-male staff, it would still be no fun being the only naked guy in the place.
“What are we doing here?” Clara asks. “Other than hiding from the vampire.”
“I’m reclaiming some private property,” I say. I open the inner door of the walkthrough. “Do me a favor. Stand here and hold this door open.”
“Okay.”
“And loan me that gun.”
She hands over the M-16. I take it and use the butt of the gun to shatter the glass in the outer door. Then I go to work on the lock.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.
“Making sure we’re not interrupted.”
It takes me a couple of minutes to adequately destroy the locking mechanism on the door. That accomplished, I enter the lab. Clara lets the door close. I hear the lock engage.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s get to work.”
* * *
I learned an awful lot about cell biology and genetics during my month of daily visits to the lab. About eighty percent of it went completely over my head—especially the theoretical aspects—but I paid attention and asked enough questions to make it seem as if my curiosity was very general, instead of highly specific. It helps that scientists apparently love to talk about what they do. (Alchemists were the same way.) I imagine this comes from not having many people to talk to—outside of other scientists—that would actually look interested in the minutia.
Among the things I learned was where all the samples of my body’s cells are being kept and what I would have to do if I wanted to destroy them.
Having Clara with me, rather than Eve, is actually a huge bonus. Of course, according to the original plan, Clara is supposed to be securing transportation right about now. But you take what you get.
“You’ve been here before, right?” I ask her.
“Couple times,” she admits.
“Did you see their computers?”
“Yeah. Pretty standard.”
“While I’m busy, do you want to see if you can find all of the data they’ve been accumulating over the past month?”
“I just have to turn it on,” she says.
“Yeah, but my point is, I probably wouldn’t know how to do that.”
“Right. Okay. What are you going to be doing?”
“Just hurry,” I say.
Ten minutes later I’d collected all the samples I could find—both my blood and Eve’s—and deposited them into a fairly convenient and very large biohazard waste bucket.
“So. All-mother?” I ask, while searching the cabinets for a nice big jug of bleach.
Clara’s still typing away at the computer. “It’s what we call her,” she says simply.
“Cute name. Aside from the disturbing religious undertones, I almost like it better than Eve.” I open a refrigerator, because I can’t remember if one is supposed to keep bleach cold or not. The answer appears to be no, but I do find a useful collection of diseases.
Viktor and his team inflicted every virus and bacteria on me that they could get their hands on, and when they were done, they tried inventing new ones to see what effect they would have. None of them did a thing regardless of the concentration. I found this mostly annoying, but it was also sort of cool. Having some very smart guys actively trying to infect me with something, and failing, is a pretty big ego boost.
I pocket a vial of chicken pox and move on.
“So, do you want to explain to me what happened earlier?” I ask Clara.
“Not so sure you want to know,” she claims.
“Sure I do.”
“It’s kind of complicated.”
“You mean you’d rather not upset me while I’m packing a gun,” I offer.
“Mine’s bigger than yours,” she says. “But no, I just meant that while committing industrial espionage and running for our lives from a homicidal vampire, I might not have the time to be able to explain it with the proper degree of nuance.”
“Here it is,” I say. In one of the cabinets holding an array of fairly benign liquid compounds, I discover two big jugs of bleach. I pull them both out and carry them to the waste bin.
“I’ve got all the files,” she says. “What do you want to do with them?”
“Can you delete them?” I ask.
“I’ll try.”
I start dumping the bleach over all the stuff in the bin. As I understand it, this is the only way to totally destroy the cells, right down to the DNA. I discovered this by asking one of the scientists how they went about ensuring there was no contamination on reused slides.
“So what you mean is,” I begin, picking up the earlier subject, “you think it might be bad, at this juncture, to admit your whole goal from the time we met, was finding and rescuing Eve, even to the point of putting my life in jeopardy. Is that right?”
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