Tainted Blood
Page 27
“You have created another creature,” said Hauck. “Now it, too, runs the streets killing innocents.”
“Another? Yes, it is this wretched curse. The wolf-beast bites and who lives to see another day will turn at the next full moon. That is the legend.”
“Is it true?” asked Sveta.
And it hit her at that moment. Here, in the underground complex, they were talking to the being who days before had been on a killing rampage, leaving hundreds of dead behind as evidence of his monstrosity. Was this what the judges at Nuremberg felt like when they talked to Nazi war criminals?
“It is true,” he said. “Some legends are true and some are imaginings, but this one is true. Some do not turn, though, ever in their lives. No one has ever known why. But if they have children after having been bitten, old, very old legends tell us that their children will transform. Not at once, but on a special night of alignment when the full moon burns pale red in the sky, that night the curse overtakes them. Each full moon from then on, they will be under the curse and will … become a monstrosity.”
He turned to Hauck and said, “Remember well what I have told you. You must sever that one’s head to destroy it. There is no other way.”
Hauck seemed to go rigid.
“Now, I will kneel and pray, then you must do as I told you,” Drogol told Sveta.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Do not let me die at the hand of a man with no heart,” he replied.
And then he knelt and began to pray.
“Father,” he began, “I have confessed my sins to you and now accept the blade of justice which will restore me to a true man again by freeing me from this curse. I—”
Hauck kicked him square in the side of the head, knocking Drogol onto his side.
“What did you say?” Hauck spat.
He kicked him again in the face.
“Tell me, you bastard. Tell me again, what did you say?”
Sveta grabbed his arm to pull him away.
“What are you doing?” she shouted. “Get hold of yourself.”
But Hauck was like a wild man. He threw her off and went to kick Drogol again, but Drogol was up and on his feet. His face was contorted with a terrifying look of rage.
“You dare kick me, a holy man, while I pray for my release and salvation? I will kill you with my own hands.”
Drogol rushed forward and grabbed Hauck by the neck, lifting him into the air and shaking him. Hauck’s machete dropped to the platform and he began beating at Drogol’s arms.
“Stop,” screamed Sveta. “Stop it, both of you.”
She pulled out her pistol and aimed it between them.
“You stop or I swear I’ll shoot both of you.”
Drogol, at that moment, his face flush with hatred, began to change. She saw the dark shimmering she had seen before. With a sudden, growing sense of horror she threw away her pistol and pulled her machete out from its sheath. She stepped toward the two men but could not find a way to swing at Drogol without killing Hauck. Drogol was walking around the stage still shaking his enemy. Hauck was turning color. He’d scrunched down his neck to stop from being strangled, but Drogol’s grip was too powerful for that to work for long.
Sveta’s mind burned through scenarios but couldn’t come up with anything. With each passing second, the twisting darkness spread further over Drogol. Soon it would be too late. She would have to risk killing Hauck.
But before she stepped forward she saw a flash of movement onto the stage followed by a glint of polished metal. There was the little man with his sword. Drogol’s head dropped to the platform and rolled away before his lifeless hands let go of Hauck. Drogol’s body stood for a few seconds more before falling over.
*****
Sveta pulled Hauck into a sitting position. She lifted his chin to examine his throat and saw Drogol’s fingerprints. Hauck coughed and gagged and crawled away to throw up.
“You see why they pay me the big bucks,” said the Instructor.
Sveta stared at him. He was the craziest man she had ever met.
“I think so,” she said.
“Another couple seconds and Hauck would have been dead, too. I cut it kind of close,” he admitted.
Nothing can ever be more surreal than this moment, Sveta thought.
Drogol’s head lay there, blood seeping onto the platform from the neck. His body lay fallen with his arms outstretched and his legs together like a horrifying religious symbol.
“You want I should throw that head over the side?” asked the Instructor.
Sveta sat down, exhausted. She laid her machete next to her.
“Machete’s good, but you got to know how to use it,” he said. “You okay, Hauck?”
“I’m going to live, I think. I’ll be off of solid foods for a while,” he said, massaging his throat, “but I’ll make it.”
“That’s good, that’s real good, now what do you say we get out of here? We can still blow it up on the way out if you want.”
The Instructor walked over and kicked Drogol’s head off the platform like it was a football.
Sveta recoiled in horror.
“Can’t forget the body,” said the Instructor.
Sveta turned and crawled toward Hauck to avoid seeing the old man throw it over the side. She took a rag out of her pocket as an offering.
“Thank you.”
“Now tell me what the hell that was all about? You almost got us all killed.”
Hauck leaned forward and covered his face with his hands and sat there, saying nothing.
“What’s the matter with him? He sick?”
Sveta waved the Instructor off.
“What happened, Hauck, why did you go off like that?”
After a few moments more of silence, Hauck got to his feet with Sveta’s help.
“I have a son,” he said finally.
“You got a kid?” said the Instructor. “Congratulations but so what?”
With trembling fingers, Hauck opened his high collar and pulled his shirt open, revealing the scar Sveta had seen earlier.
“In the prison, when we were attacked, Drogol bit me.”
“But—”
“I have a son,” he repeated. “And he was brought here by Anna Kazakova. He was our child.”
She looked at him in horror.
“You and Anna Kazakova?”
“Before the disease took her, when she was younger, she was a very beautiful and powerful woman. She was older than me, and she was my superior, but she was—”
“No shit,” said the Instructor.
“She raised him. Time passed and there was no way for me ever to have contact with him. I was not a part of his life. But she brought him here days ago to find Drogol. The night that the second beast killed Evgeny, there was a red moon, just as he said. He caused my son to have his curse, too. I hated him more at that second than I thought I could hate anything or anyone. If I could bring him back to life again I would do it just so we could kill him again.”
They stood together on the platform for a long time before leaving.
On the way to the stairs, the Instructor said to Sveta, “I heard some more scratching from that cabinet lying on its side and I was going to stick my sword through it and poke around, but I didn’t.”
“Good,” said Sveta.
At the door that Mishka’s men had blown apart, Hauck removed the detonator from his pocket.
“When we leave here, it’s over,” she said to him, laying a hand on his arm.
He shook his head.
“No, he’s my son. I can’t ignore what I know. I can’t call the authorities anymore. I have to find him. There must be some way to stop him, some way to help him. I abandoned him once. I can’t do it again.”
“Let it go, Hauck,” said the Instructor.
“I can’t,” he said simply. “This is for me to do alone.”
“The missus is going to hate you for this, you know that? She already hates you. I stay here
looking for your kid and she’s going to blow a gasket.”
“You don’t owe me anything. I would be dead back there without you. Sveta and I both would be dead without you.”
“You hear that, girlie? What do you think of that?”
Sveta laid a hand over Hauck’s, carefully choosing the hand without the detonator. She looked at him for a long time before saying, “I told you I started this with you and I’m going to finish it with you. And if you hold off on pushing that button, Yuri might be able to find something down here to help save your son. Drogol must have left notes. He said he found something in alchemical literature that had to do with colloidal gold and for years it kept his transformations in check.”
“Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully.
“But Hauck,” she said.
“Yes?”
“If you lie to me again or hide something from me, I’m going to shoot you.”
Hauck smiled for the first time since she’d met him. He looked out over the complex and then said, “It could make a good base of operations, you know. We would have to rebuild it, but it could work.”
He put the detonator back in his pocket and they entered the hallway.
“I’m going to have to go home every now and then to get laid,” said the Instructor as they walked. “I’m just saying.”
About the Author
Ferrel Moore is a Michigan writer specializing in dark fiction. His stories have appeared over the years in anthologies from Elder Signs Press and Sams Dot Publishing. A lifelong passion for the martial arts and esoteric pursuits frequently find their way into his writing.
His new novel The Ghost Box will be out in 2012. Currently, he is working on the sequel to Tainted Blood, which is tentatively titled The White Death.
You can contact him via his blog at
thewriterandthewhitecat.blogspot.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34