This Darkness Got To Give

by Dave Housley

  “What does that mean?” he said.

  She made a neutral noise. People could be so irritating. He had removed himself so completely from the normal interactions that he’d forgotten how annoying they could be. People vacillated, lied, made “eh” sounds when you asked them a direct question. He could be behind the wheel right now, driving the van out on some open highway, listening to “Cassidy” or “Sugaree” and watching the little stores and churches and barns roll by. Minding his own damn business.

  “If I walked out right now…” he said.

  The girl looked up. “Oh, you’re free to go,” she said.

  “Really?” Cain said. He took a tentative step.

  “Sure,” the girl said.

  Cain took another step.

  “As long as you’re cool staying how you are. With it still in you, I mean.”

  He stopped. He hadn’t really thought about it much, had obsessed over that one moment of weakness, but as for what exactly was making him do this, what had changed, it seemed like no more use worrying that over than the biology of the original change.

  “What is in me?”

  She closed the lid on her computer and turned to face him. She was really quite pretty, he thought. In another time, another life…But he wasn’t that person anymore. He was, well, that was the question.

  “How to explain this to a layperson?” she said, leaning back and stretching. “You know that it was the dose. What was in there was…well, it was a combination of things. Really fucking clever, actually, chemically…” she smiled briefly and shook her head. Her tone had changed and she sounded like a teacher explaining something to a room full of graduate students.

  “And?” he asked.

  “Right,” she said, sitting up and moving forward, suddenly animated. “So long story short, two major effects: a kind of tracking component, a connection between the two of you. Between anybody, really, whose body contains certain variations, one in particular, of the ergoline family.”

  “Ergoline?”

  “Like, LSD is part of the ergoline family. Where this all started. So everybody reacts to that, right? Or, that’s what we’ve seen. We don’t want to say everyone, but it’s been twenty years he’s been working on this to one degree or another. They’ve been working on it.”

  “They?” Cain had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Government,” she said. “This shit goes back decades.”

  “What does it have to do with…people like me, though?”

  “Vampires,” she said. “Right. The other thing is, well, this is the thing we don’t understand much about. But it seems that these same synthetic ergoline compounds interact with certain chemicals that only you—or, those like you. Vampires. Certain chemicals that only you have.”

  “It…what?”

  “Well, it’s, as I said, really quite clever. With the connection, the mind part, he can stimulate the other part, the part that needs blood, that wants to revert back to what we have been calling ‘the natural state.’”

  Cain sat down. If he could have cried, he would have. He hadn’t reverted back to who he used to be, or worse, to some animal. It had been something else all along. And he had known that, had relaxed and let the current of it carry him along until the bloodlust was sated. But he knew now that he was not that. “Animal,” he said. “That’s what it felt like. Like a heavy weight was lifted and I was…how did you describe it, again?”

  “In the natural state?”

  “Natural state,” he said.

  He let the phrase sit between them. The girl looked out the window. The crowd was thinning, those who wanted to go had gone into the show by now.

  “So why are you telling me all this?” he asked.

  “Finally he asks the million dollar question.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m not really happy with the evil scientist path we’re headed down right now, she said. “I helped you for a reason.”

  “Did he know that?” Cain said. “That you were helping me?”

  She sat back and opened the computer again. “He did and he didn’t, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t,” Cain said. Now he was remembering all of it, how frustrating people could be, why he’d chosen to go off on his own in the first place.

  “Well,” the girl said. “It’s going to have to be enough.”

  “So what we do now?” Cain asked.

  She closed the computer again and checked her watch. She opened the cigarette pack and examined its contents. “Head into the show?” she asked.

  Chapter 46

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Jenkins sat under a tree and watched the uniforms doing their jobs. There were at least twenty of them, another handful of guys in bad ties and cheap khakis. Murder police. Collecting their own data, trying to make sense of what had just happened in their own limited way. He could imagine the gossip. Vampires. Federal agencies. Double murder. They didn’t know the half of it.

  The kid sat a few feet away. He could have been anybody, some Deadhead wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time, like that poor girl. She was maybe a few years older than David. That sound, skin ripping.

  He was two partners down and no closer to getting at the one who had done all the killing, the one who was sick. He knew now, though, that Portis was really who he was looking for, the person pulling the strings. The one who was sick, the one who had killed Crabtree and the others, the biker, was probably just as scared as Tibor had been in those final moments. He wondered what it must feel like, being controlled by something else, someone else, all this time. All that killing. Jesus, he thought, it must be terrible.

  So Portis was the one controlling the situation. But why?

  “He was coming for me, wasn’t he?” Jenkins said.

  The kid just stared.

  “You hear me?” Jenkins asked.

  “Yeah,” the kid said. “He was coming for you.”

  “You diverted him? To the girl?”

  The kid turned to look at him. He really was a kid. He should have been going out to bars and chasing girls, applying for shitty jobs or whatever you did with a master’s in religious studies. “It’s hard to describe,” he said. “I tried to block it, kind of. Get in between them. There’s a kind of…energy? From one, the little guy who looks kind of like a scientist or whatever, to the other. I could feel it when your friend…you know. This time I could put my own, like, energy into it. I tried to shield him, to stop it, even, but I couldn’t…”

  “He did it on purpose. The girl. He knew we were armed, knew what I would do.”

  The kid nodded. He played with his bracelet. “I know,” he said.

  “Can you feel anything now?” Jenkins asked. In the background, he heard drums and guitars, the old Buddy Holly song “Not Fade Away.”

  “A little,” the kid said. “Almost like a vibration. An aftershock.”

  “If you got closer to him, it would get stronger?”

  “Maybe?”

  “And the biker. The other…vampire, the one who killed Crabtree. Can you feel him, too?”

  The kid paused. “I think so,” he said. “A little. I don’t know. I feel something, but I don’t know if I should even, you know, with how bad this went, if I should…”

  Another siren getting closer. Jesus, did they have to use it? They were going to scare them all away, scatter Portis and the biker and the whole goddamn parking lot to the winds again. An undercover car pulled up and an older man got out. He wasn’t wearing a uniform but he didn’t need one. He was straight federal, even the Deadheads could probably see that. Jenkins wondered if it was the same suit, or if the man had a closet full of black suits and black ties.

  “Nutter,” the man said, shaking Jenkins’ hand. He nodded to the boy. “Let’s talk,” he said. “Few things I think you should know.”

  Chapter 47

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Pete picked at
his cuticles and stared at the floor mats.

  “You’re doing a good job here,” Nutter said. “We’re following. We know what you’re up against, or part of it, at least. We’re putting some pieces together.”

  Pete shook his head. “I don’t know it’s true I’m doing a very good job. People are dead.” He thought about the first time he’d seen Nutter, that profile on Glatfelter Hall. He remembered the tingling in his fingers, a feeling like he wanted to go see the man on the steps. Was Nutter doing it, too?

  He should have run. It all sounded so crazy, but he’d allowed his ego to be stroked, to believe that he was special, that there was some destiny waiting for him. What would I be doing now, he thought, if I had just said no? Watching television? Doing laundry? Maybe applying to doctoral programs, working through the paperwork in some library. Now people were dead. He had some kind of…connection…to a mad professor and a killer biker vampire. The whole thing would be ludicrous if he hadn’t just seen another person’s throat ripped out, an old police officer literally shrink up into a pile of ashes when Jenkins staked him.

  “Your parents,” Nutter said, and Pete jolted. His parents? “You’ve been told they died in a car accident. That’s not exactly the truth.” His voice had softened, the first time Pete had heard that tone. It made him nervous. He looked back at the floor.

  “One car accident on the Schuykill Expressway. April 21, 1972,” he said, the words familiar, like a psalm or a prayer might be, he thought, for normal people.

  “What you’ve been told is not exactly the truth,” Nutter said. “They were participating in an experiment. Government experiment. They were agents. Federal. Like you.”

  “Like me?” Pete said. His mind was reeling and he felt light. The tingle had started up again in his fingertips and he could feel something like static hissing inside his head.

  “There was an accident. Controls that should have been in place were ignored. It was a long time ago. This is germane in that it is believed—well, it had been believed and now I feel confident saying that we know.”

  “Believed what?”

  “Your mother may have…your mother did, I believe, pass on some of the biology of the experiment onto you.”

  “Pass some of…” Pete pulled at the hair on his arms. This was not a dream. He heard the hiss of the nitrous dealers nearby, the jangle of music playing out of cars and boom boxes. He wondered if he could fill himself with enough nitrous to float away, out past the parking lot and the stadium and everything that had happened so far. He wondered what Sunny was doing right now.

  “Peter,” Nutter said. “You okay?”

  He looked at his own dirty feet, pulled at the hair on his arms again. This was happening. He nodded.

  “Your parents were involved in an experiment. They were being injected with a protocol, a drug that altered their body chemistry. Your body, your blood, it has some of those same elements. Ergomine derivatives, to be specific. Not that it makes a difference. They’re in your, in your chemistry. That’s why you can…what would you call it? Sense when these people are near. That’s why you are connected to Dr. Portis and the vampire, the one who is sick, the one causing all this trouble.”

  “He’s not really the one causing the trouble, though,” Pete said. “You know that.”

  Nutter nodded. Something in his face changed and Pete wasn’t sure if it was the man controlling his mind, putting ideas in it, or if he really felt sorry for Nutter in this moment. “We do,” he said.

  There was a knock on the window. Jenkins. Pete could tell he didn’t like Nutter, something he guessed had to do with different branches of the government, the secrecy of the Invasive Species Division.

  “If you two are finished with your big important talk,” he said, the sarcasm plain in his voice. “I’m two partners down right now and I’d like to catch some bad guys.”

  The static in Pete’s head had increased, the tingle moving from his fingertips up his arms. His hands were fluttering and he didn’t try to conceal them.

  “It’s happening right now, isn’t it?” Nutter said.

  Pete nodded. “How does it work?” he said.

  “To be honest,” Nutter said, “right now, you know more about this than almost anybody on Earth, except maybe Dr. Portis. Or your friend Padma, of course.”

  Chapter 48

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  “Do you feel anything?” Padma asked. They were standing just outside the stadium, having passed through security but not yet entered through the massive doorways that led into the show. She really wasn’t sure what she was doing right now. She had played the two sides against one another for so long that she was maybe coming out on a third side, maybe on the side of this biker vampire who had killed nearly twenty people by her count. Of course, she had set him up with eight, maybe ten. The notes were in the computer.

  The biker shook out his arms, wiggled his fingers. She knew he wanted to relax but he actually looked like he was trying to make a bowel movement, something she knew they stopped doing after the change. “Feel anything?” she asked again.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated and she knew it wouldn’t work. She had read enough test results, seen enough grainy video to know that the ones who have to push would never experience the tertiary effects, would only be able to connect when called, and then only when somebody with experience and power was doing the calling. Unless Peter turned out to be more than what she thought was likely, Dr. Portis was the only person in the world capable of calling the biker.

  The band was wrapping up a song she didn’t recognize and the crowd roared. They segued into something familiar that she couldn’t quite place and the crowd noise doubled. She was always amazed at the crowds, the show inside the stadiums and out, every single night. It had been eight weeks now that she’d been following the Grateful Dead around the country, eight weeks of sleeping in the RV and late-night, real-subject experiments. It had been a month of tracking the biker after his dose, helping him feed, keeping notes in the computer, running what data they could run. In all that time, she was still amazed at these people, these old hippies and young kids and everything in between, coming out night after night expecting a miracle to happen in the form of five aging men with electronic instruments. She had come here an outsider, an agent or a scientist, maybe a little of both, and would be leaving an outsider.

  But what kind of agent facilitates murder? What kind of scientist tracks data and simultaneously reports back to a secret government agency on the nature and whereabouts of her subjects? What kind of person takes a subject into a Grateful Dead show in an attempt to track down her supervisor and end the research forever?

  She watched the biker struggling. He was no genius, that was for sure, but genius could be tricky. She knew that now.

  “You can stop,” she said. “You most likely have a limited capacity right now.” He looked crestfallen. “And that’s fine. That doesn’t mean anything, really. It’s more about dosage and time than anything else.”

  The biker relaxed, looked toward the entrance. “So now…” he said.

  She wanted to tell him everything would be okay. He had made it, in a way, made it through the change and everything that came next, the doubts and the questions, the answers that led many to suicide or what they had termed “rejection of the self,” an embrace of the situation so total that the subject was literally another person after they came to grips with the change. He made it through all of that, in his own weird way, and now he had been brought to a crossroads through no fault of his own.

  “I don’t know,” she said. His face tightened. Maybe he was smarter than she thought. He had made it this far. Why they tended to branch out on their own, to hide, tunnel down into a way of life the way this one had done, she had no idea. A kind of shame, maybe. She looked around at the people coming and going, the constant thrum of the music and the fans and the low hum of the stadium itself, all of it melding together like a single organ
ism, a machine with many gears spinning in different places.

  What kind of scientist abandons a project because she feels sorry for the subject?

  What kind of agent cuts off communication right when things are getting dangerous?

  There were sides on all sides. The biker was waiting for her to say something, to take some kind of lead.

  “Let’s go finish this,” she said.

  Chapter 49

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Cain followed the girl into the show. He wasn’t sure if it was the dose or that term—“natural state.” When she said it, he had a flash of recognition, the quick image of the hotel clerk’s face—scared and fascinated and something else. Resigned. For just an instant, he could smell the blood, feel the taste of it in his mouth, hot and sticky. He didn’t want to admit that it felt good. The girl thought it was shyness, embarrassment, but it was something much worse.

  Now he just tried to focus on the girl, focus on the mole on the right side of her neck, watch as it bounced along with her footsteps. The usual din was muted, a dim roar with tinkling in the background that he recognized only as a Weir song from one of the old solo albums. The girl, Padma was her name, he remembered, moved expertly through the crowd, slipping and sliding and winnowing through clumps of people.

  He paused and watched the white of her shirt retreat between two groups that he couldn’t quite make out, everything blurry and faraway except Padma and that white shirt and that mole steadily retreating. He took stock, held his arms out like a man slowly steadying himself. No vibration. He wiggled his fingers. Nothing. He tapped his feet, examined his arms. He turned his head thirty degrees and tried to focus on the blur of the crowd, honing in on a fleshy shape topped with something red some twenty yards away. Focus, focus, and then it was coming into shape, the rough edges sharpening into a fat biker, shirtless, in a red bandana. There was a blue glow coming off the man. An aura?