Tainted Blood

by Ferrel D. Moore

  “Bullshit,” said the Instructor. “I mean really good, humpa-humpa stuff; you know what I’m saying?”

  Hauck held up a hand.

  “I think I see what we need. There is no way, of course, to calculate the effect of gas on the beast.”

  “Everything’s got to breathe,” said the Instructor.

  “The only thing we do not know is how much it will take to put it to sleep,” said Hauck as though the Instructor hadn’t spoken.

  “Maybe we should just flat out kill it. Poison it, I mean. Why take a chance?”

  “Too risky,” said Hauck. “My operatives may be there. If they aren’t with him, I doubt Drogol will show up.”

  “Or if we get him cornered we take him out with a rocket launcher. Or if we can get a line on where he’s at, we blow the whole place up. He might be able to dodge a few bullets, but he ain’t getting away from a rocket.”

  “That’s not the way.”

  “I know, I know, you’re worried about calling down those pricks at Homeland Security on us.”

  “We can’t expect them to ignore an explosion in Detroit. Detroit’s on their watch list so they’ve got the personnel and resources to take us down.”

  “Then we gas it. You want this thing dead? Then don’t fuck around with knockout gas. I should have known better. It ain’t good to be nice. We use poison gas and get it over with.”

  “No,” said Hauck. “I won’t kill my own people.”

  “Who we talking here? This Zoe? She your girlfriend or something? You banging her?”

  Hauck could feel Traxler staring at him, but refused to acknowledge the awkwardness of the moment. The Instructor looked at him with just the shade of an innocent smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

  “No. I’m not banging her. She’s an agent, nothing more.”

  “How about the other chick? What’s her name? She going to be there?”

  Damn the old man, thought Hauck.

  “I don’t know if she will be or not. We don’t even know if we can set in play another controlled meeting with Drogol yet.”

  “What’s her name again?”

  Hauck let out a long, painful sigh.

  “Sveta.”

  The old man crossed his hands behind his back and began to move idly about the room, paying attention to a pistol here, a grenade launcher there, and occasionally picking up a knife and holding its blade up to a light as though looking for imperfections.

  “So, you banging her?”

  “No.”

  “You want to?”

  “Sveta’s an agent,” snapped Hauck. “Nothing more.”

  “Got it bad for her, huh? Well here’s the deal, slick. That thing in the video? It ain’t rolling over and passing out because we ask it to. And we don’t kill it, it sure as hell is going to kill us. You getting this?”

  “I will not murder my own agents,” repeated Hauck.

  He had about enough of where the conversation was leading.

  Traxler moved over to a computer and began typing, trying to stay out of the line of fire. The Instructor walked past him and stopped to stand before a piece of quarter inch thick diamondback steel plate. He turned to look back at Hauck, as though waiting for him to say something. Without warning, he spun back to face the steel plate and his fist shot out so quickly that Hauck only saw a blur. The crack of his calloused knuckles against steel rang out like a dull bell.

  “What in God’s—” said Traxler.

  He spun his chair around and was staring in disbelief at the fist-sized dent in his piece of metal.

  “Hauck’ll pay you for it,” said the Instructor with a dark grin. “I’m just letting off a little steam. I didn’t come all this way to babysit. You agree with me, Rudolph?”

  “I respect both of your opinions,” said Traxler. His eyes were locked on the impossible dent.

  “You’re so full of shit. And Hauck, you get this straight—my old lady hates your guts and I’m beginning to get pissed off at you myself. You used to have a brain so I liked you, but now I think you’re going soft in the head. If your women are stupid enough to be in close with that thing when we go after it, then they’re just going to have to die unless you can think of something better. Besides, didn’t that one bitch turn on you?”

  “She was out of the loop. She didn’t know how she fit into the plan. I can see how she might have misinterpreted events. I might have done the same myself.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She’s a good soldier in a bad situation.”

  “We’re going to have to gas them all anyway.”

  Hauck rubbed his hand across his forehead and wished that Zoe would make contact and tell him what the hell was going on.

  *****

  “You want to know what I think?” asked Yuri.

  “No,” said Evgeny. “I only want to hit my target. Thinking is no good for accuracy.”

  “It must be boring inside your head.”

  “It is very peaceful,” said Evgeny.

  Yuri watched the sniper cleaning his rifle. For a squat, solid man, Evgeny’s fingers moved across his weapon like a violinist’s across a Stradivarius. Deft, graceful and purposeful. An act of love to bring forth the essence of the instrument for the musician, an act of will to bring forth the end of another’s life for the sniper.

  They were in a converted firehouse built in the early nineteen hundreds. The dull metal pole that ran between the floors was so discolored from neglect that it looked like a giant pencil lead instead of a fireman’s pole. The windows onto the street were tall and arched at the top as though taken from an old church. A six foot neon-ribbed picture of Elvis Presley flashed above a wet bar put in long after the firehouse tenants were dead and gone.

  Eight of Hauck’s men rotated in and out of the building. Two were downstairs with the vehicles, Yuri, Evgeny and two shooters called Filipp and Feodot rested in their cots. A heavyset woman named Alyona and a Georgian man named Bagrat were out following down leads and making arrangements for Hauck.

  Yuri sat in a leather and chrome chair, his feet propped up on a thick wooden conference table while he stared idly at a row of screens and rubbed his cast with his free hand.

  “This is starting to itch.”

  “You took so many pills you can’t feel your arm,” said Evgeny. “So how can it itch?”

  “No, I mean it. It’s like poison ivy.”

  “Quit whining.”

  “I’m not whining,” said Yuri. “I mean it, I can feel it itch.”

  “Take another pill.”

  “I don’t need another pill. I need answers. I wouldn’t itch if I had answers.”

  “What answers? You talk much but you say nothing. You are like American television.”

  Yuri swung his legs down to the floor, sat up straighter and glared at Evgeny.

  “You’re so smart, you tell me. What kind of thing is this that we track? You don’t miss. I know that. You know that. So how come it didn’t go down?”

  “I hit it,” said Evgeny.

  “Hit what? A werewolf? A ten foot tall werewolf? And silver and mercury do nothing to it? What kind of werewolf is that? What if … what if it isn’t a werewolf at all? That’s all I’m saying.”

  “You keep saying the same thing all of the time.”

  “That’s because I have no fucking answers. I have no information to even start looking for an answer.”

  Evgeny held up two gray-black sections and snapped them together as smoothly as if he’d been born doing it.

  “So what,” he asked without looking up, “is your question?”

  “Okay, here is what has been nagging at me ever since we started this project. Say you were a Russian.”

  “I am Ukrainian.”

  “Thank you, Evgeny, for sharing that with me. But if you were Russian like this Drogol.”

  “He is Siberian.”

  “Russian, Siberian—”

  “Not the same.”

  Yuri looked at h
im in surprise.

  “Maybe something there, okay, I give you that. But let’s stick with Russian for now. Why would Drogol leave Russia after so many years to come to the United States?”

  “Easy,” said Evgeny. “He comes here to hide from Anna Kazakova and Hauck.”

  “Ah, but why to Detroit?”

  “A good place to hide.”

  “Think about that, my sniper friend. A six foot six Russian with hair like a wild man comes to Detroit. Does he fit in so well?”

  “No,” admitted Evgeny. “He is like a polar bear in Africa.”

  “Exactly. So you see my question—why is he here? If we could figure that out, maybe we could use it to catch him and stick a spike up his ass.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I will guard the door,” was all he said to finally convince her.

  A quick shower.

  A quick meal.

  A mug of coffee, real coffee.

  Three minutes for the shower. Two to get dressed. Five minutes for food and coffee. Ten minutes total and she was off and running. Showered, fresh clothes, fed and caffeinated. Jacked with cash and weapons and a vehicle, she could go anywhere in the United States without crossing a border.

  But first she had to know.

  Hot water ran over her naked body. She ran one trembling hand over her face and neck to wipe away the grime. The other hand held her pistol wrapped in a clear plastic bag that stopped just before her elbow. Her weapons and cash duffel were tied off inside a black garbage bag. She moved quickly, worried that she was making a mistake, taking chances she didn’t need to take. She was a fool to do this, but she had been too dirty and ragged to go back onto the streets. People would notice and remember her. Maybe a cop.

  Sveta closed her eyes and quit thinking.

  She scrubbed herself with mechanical efficiency, and then slowed to simply enjoy the heat and pulse of the water. Somewhere within the underground complex was a boiler or a means to heat the water. How this had all come into being, how it was maintained, all of this she put aside for the simple languor and comfort of a hot shower.

  From somewhere outside the door, she heard a deep, throaty growl and she stiffened.

  She heard Drogol’s voice.

  “Grigor,” he said sharply. “Leave Ilya alone. Go hunt the rats and leave your brother be.”

  Wolves, Hauck had said. He kept wolves in Moscow.

  With a turn of her wrist, she turned off the water.

  “Is it safe to come out?” she called.

  “If you are dressed, certainly,” came the reply. “Sometimes my pets can be temperamental, but they are always obedient to me.”

  From inside the garbage bag that protected the duffel, she withdrew a towel and began to dry herself. When she finished, she dressed in black jeans, black boots, black shirt and sweater and then threw on her black leather coat. Her hair was short and she brushed it quickly. On a good looking woman, much was excused. And Sveta knew she was a good looking woman.

  Duffel over her shoulder, pistol held before her with the barrel up; she pushed open the door to the shower. Drogol stood twenty feet away, his back to her with his hands at his sides as though standing at attention. He stood before an odd assortment of crystals that glowed with soft, shifting colors.

  “Beautiful, are they not?” he asked without turning around.

  “What do they do?”

  “Truly,” he said as turned around and spread his arms out, “I do not know. There are mysteries within this place that elude me. Still, it is here that exists whatever hope I have of finding a cure for this curse that the new god of your world has sent down upon my head.”

  Sveta holstered her pistol.

  “I don’t have much have time,” she said. “Are you going to start talking so I can understand you or am I going to have to leave?”

  “Come, walk with me. Listen to me, and I think you will either stay, or run for your life.”

  “So long as we walk towards the stairs leading up to the surface.”

  Drogol nodded.

  They walked side by side through stands of bizarre equipment that Sveta couldn’t understand or recognize. There were what looked to be giant vacuum tubes. Blinding white lightning bursts spontaneously erupted within them from to time to time with whip-like cracks that startled her. Drogol looked around the room, lost in thought, oblivious to the mysteries surrounding him.

  “I am Siberian originally, and at first, as you must no doubt know. From there, I went to Moscow and gained notoriety. A simple mistake for a simple man. I was an embarrassment to the royal family in unfortunate ways, but they kept me close when, through me, God took mercy and healed their child. Again, you are Russian and know all of this.”

  Struck by an impossible thought, Sveta said, “This place is like a picture I saw of Edison’s laboratory.”

  “Very good, child,” laughed Drogol.

  Sveta glared at him, but he gave no notice.

  “I was, I admit,” he continued, “in a desperate state. A decadent city like Moscow was no place for a holy man. I had fallen under its spell. Its debauchery dirtied my soul. So I decided to return to the Siberian forests in shame, to confess my fallen state to God, and seek him out among the innocent trees of Tunguska, where many a holy man has found again their faith.”

  Sveta touched his sleeve.

  “I don’t believe,” she said, “that you are Rasputin. I don’t believe that I am the reincarnation of Alexandra. But I do believe you must hurry. I cannot stay here long. We both have a price on our head and they will eventually find us if we stay in one place too long.”

  Drogol looked tired for the first time. His shoulders slumped just a little, and the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes seemed to deepen with sadness.

  “How do I tell you a lifetime of pain and suffering and exile and, yes, longing, in only a few moments. You asked who I am and what this place of hope and horror is and how it came to be. It is the secret of why we are both hunted, woman. Leave if you must. Run away if you are afraid. But if you wish to understand your enemies, to know what they do not know so that you can use it against them to save your life, then listen. Simply listen.”

  It was, she felt, an insoluble problem—dangerous for her to stay, but perhaps more dangerous for her to leave without hearing what he had to say.

  “Go on,” she said reluctantly.

  He started walking again, leading them past the suspended bells, and then stopped. When he turned to her, his gaze was focused far away on a distant past.

  “I went to find the God that I had once known, but instead, in that Siberian forest, I found the god of this place. I found the god that the whole world would come to worship. You look at me as though I speak in riddles, but I tell you what I found in that Siberian forest was not God, the Father or God, the Son of my faith. Neither the Son of Man nor the Son of Heaven. That day, on June 30, 1908, I came face to face instead with the father of science, the religion with no soul that possesses your world. There, starving and exhausted, as I rose to my feet to beseech God, I saw the largest, most ferocious and rabid wolf I had ever seen charging toward me like a demon from the Pit. I know now that it was a bodark—a werewolf. But before its foaming jaws seized me, the very air came alive with a surge of energy unlike any the world has ever known.”

  “What are you saying, Drogol? You’re not making sense. Just spit it out.”

  “It was a burst of energy one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Over eighty million trees were flattened in an area over eight hundred miles square.”

  “The Tunguska meteor. Every Russian knows of that. You tell me nothing new.”

  Another grim laugh as painful memories floated through his eyes like dark clouds.

  “It was no meteor.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “It was a beam of energy sent around the world by a madman. A madman the world now reveres. All the way on the other side of the world Tesla, the g
reat Nikola Tesla, tested his death ray at that very moment, aiming for the Arctic Circle but instead scorching the countryside where I stood. I became his sacrifice to the god of science. You look at me as though I am mad, but I am not mad. This is history, woman, and unlike you I have not only read about it, I have lived it.”

  With an abrupt turn he grasped her arms and squeezed them hard. He stared into her eyes with an intensity that shot through her like a jolt of electricity.

  “It ripped my very soul from me. I felt the fabric within my spirit tear wide as if my soul was split by a hatchet. And something, something dark and ravenous, something malevolent and insane from the other side stared through me from its world of nightmares into our own. Through my eyes. Through my eyes, I tell you. It saw the rabid wolf-beast leaping at me and in an instant it pulled that wild animal within me and consumed its disease. The energy field increased so quickly that the world around me lit with painful, blinding black radiance, and then, I was no longer there.”

  “Let go of me,” said Sveta. “Or I’ll shoot you.”

  But his eyes burned with conviction and he clung to her as though she were a lifeline. He was mad. She could see that plainly now. Yet he exerted a magnetic pull on her that she could not explain. He believed what he said with an intensity that was beyond question.

  “Suddenly,” he said, “I was in a dark world of horrors. A world of dark caverns and ever burning liquid rocks. A sulfurous, smoky mist hung in the skies and pale skinned monsters with glowing red eyes and leprous skin hunted in the eternal night of that wretched landscape. Always they hunted. And I knew that I was no longer on this earth.”

  Sveta tried to pull away, but his strength was too much for her. She could have fought him, but his eyes held her in place.

  “I saw herds of animals running, always running from gibbering creatures. Screams bloodied the night like the red phosphorescent fungus that grew everywhere.

  “Can you imagine the overwhelming terror that gripped my soul? I searched the forests of my youth seeking divine epiphany and thought I had been cast into Hell itself by God. I did not know that I had survived the greatest disaster in mankind’s history by being thrown into another dimension because of Tesla’s energy machine. I thought that God himself was judging my sins and sentencing me to eternal damnation.”