Winter's Mermaid (Mermaid Series Book 1)

by Dan Glover

  "The tales of my kind speak of a time in the distant past when our species arose from common ancestors. If we are successful that may once again be so, my darling Karen."

  "I never told you how sorry I am, Lady Lily."

  "And what is it you are sorry for?"

  "I should have helped you escape, Lady Lily. You asked me to help you but instead I kept you locked up. I abhor what I did. I just want you to know that."

  "Is there something to be achieved by this remorse you feel, my remorseful Karen?"

  "No, I suppose not."

  "You wished to learn the secret of my species and our long lives, is this correct?"

  "Yes, that and how you infected my species with such a deadly disease."

  "Now you have your answers, do you not?"

  "I suppose I do, yes."

  "Well then, what is the cause of your regret, darling Karen?"

  "I regret the time you spent as a prisoner."

  "Time hasn’t the same meaning to my species as it has to yours. This you will learn as the centuries pass. Please, think no more of it. Let us plan for the future of our races and not dwell upon the past."

  Chapter 5—The Chase

  Hector's jowls quivered with rage.

  "It has to be an inside job, Karen."

  About the only person in the entire compound that Hector seemed to trust right now—besides himself—was Karen, his long-time partner and part-time lover whom he recruited right out of medical school over a dozen years ago.

  "That's possible. But we did hand-picked every single person who has any contact at all with her; you know that, Hector."

  Karen too suspected someone helped Lily escape and she understood why they would do so as well. She felt the allure for the woman too. For the last two weeks it was all she could do to keep her distance from Lily. Karen didn't trust herself alone with the creature for even a minute or two. She knew the consequences of such a liaison.

  "It somehow manages to escape the cell, remove the ankle monitor without setting off the alarm, walk through three sets of locked doors, elude the guards on the way out of the building, and then scales an electrified fence three meters high with a dozen strands of razor barbs at the top. Don't tell me all that's all been done without help, a lot of help."

  For all the good it did him Hector continued to rage—a typical male response to a lack of control. Karen spoke soothingly to help allay his suspicions. His lack of size seemed to make men like Hector more animalistic than men of stature... a Napoleon complex, she supposed, though according to her research Napoleon was actually of average height for his life and times.

  Hector's high forehead was beaded with sweat and the shine was accentuated by male pattern baldness causing his hairline to gradually creep back to the top of his head. When she first met the man he still had a smattering of hair. Now it had vanished like the shine off an old penny.

  Since his nose was basically just two uneven slits in the center of his face he rarely wore the glasses he required to see. His contacts made his eyes a bloodshot red which only added to his dour countenance, especially when he got worked up like this. He wore a graying goatee to hide a weak chin but he never remembered to check it for spilt breakfast. A piece of something yellow and disgusting dangled off his moustache whiskers. Karen wondered if she should say something but decided not to.

  "Or she could have dressed up in a uniform, Hector, and walked right out the gate at the end of the shift. That is the only way she could have managed an escape, in my opinion."

  "It is not a she, Karen! Christ, when will you get that through your head? We're dealing with a goddamned dangerous creature here. Now it's loose. Even if it looks female, it isn't. You know that as well as I do.

  "Besides, how did she get out of the isolation cell? Who was guarding her? Have we checked the videos of last night? We need to get a handle on this, Karen, and your wild speculations aren’t helping us to do that."

  With his jowls continuing to shudder, spittle flew from Hector's lips, bitter droplets corrupting the sun beams piercing the windows though he seemed oblivious to it. Karen knew better than to argue with him when he worked himself up into such a state. She couldn't help but focus on his mouth. It reminded her of something dead. Thin pale lips barely moved as he spoke and his tiny teeth made it appear as if he had none.

  "You're right, Hector. I guess I kind of got used to her... I mean, it... while working so closely together for the past seven years. We've checked all the videos. They show nothing. According to the log report, Lily was in her cell at lights out.

  "She normally sleeps late so her absence wasn’t discovered until noon when they brought her breakfast and she didn’t appear. Our people suited up in bio-hazard garb, went into the isolation chamber, and she had vanished."

  "Come on... that doesn’t make sense, Karen. That creature is as solid as we are. It can't walk through walls or disappear into thin air. Someone had a hand in this."

  "She... I mean...it... has probably gone home to renew herself. You know that, right Hector?'

  "Of course I don't know that. How can you know it?"

  "During our interviews she once told me that her species renew their bodies every seven years and only in the waters of her home. She said the homing instinct is so strong that they'll do anything to make the journey... anything, Hector."

  Lily had told her a great deal more but Karen could see no reason to share that information with Hector, at least not at the moment. Lily told Karen that she was the last of her kind, or so she believed. On her last visit to Lake Baikal Lily found no sign of others. The renewal brought with it the urge to multiply so she was forced to intermingle with villagers living near the Lake's shores.

  Sickness and death resulted from such acts, but not right away. It was only after Lily had gone back to the depths of Lake Baikal that the symptoms appeared. Apparently, as long as Lily stayed close by, no one fell ill.

  Karen was fascinated by Lily's story. She sensed a novel kind of disease, one which might well win her the Nobel Prize for medicine. She knew the kind of man Hector was, however. He would steal her ideas for his own credit. So she determined it best to stay quiet, at least for now.

  "So it has gone back to Russia... is that what you're telling me, Karen?"

  "In my opinion, yes."

  "But how could it travel without any identification papers? It has no passport, no money. How could it survive, much less make that kind of journey? It couldn’t board a plane without a ticket. Lake Baikal is thousands of kilometers from here. No, Karen... I'm positive that thing is holed up somewhere close around this area. We'll continue the sweeps until we find it."

  "We were lucky once, Hector. Believe me when I tell you she is on her way home."

  There was no way Hector knew Lily as well as she did, otherwise he would have realized the creature would never stay in Great Britain. Hector, ever the pragmatist, studied Lily objectively, as if he could learn her secrets by finding them under a microscope. Karen, on the other hand, studied Lily as a friend and a confidant.

  Karen was part of the team who found Lily washed up on the shores of Lake Baikal, near death. Karen was the only member of the team who realized what they had found... a creature that had lived in myth for thousands of years and yet which had never been studied.

  Hector received a call seven years ago from Sergei Pomovich, a colleague in Russia. A strange epidemic had broken out on the shores of Lake Baikal. Villagers were dying from a heretofore unknown parasitic infection that seemed to pertain to an unknown rhythm of nature.

  The villagers told odd tales of creatures emerging from the Lake at periodic intervals. These creatures had insatiable sexual appetites; they preyed upon both males and females. After the creatures were appeased they disappeared back into the deep waters of the Lake. Soon, telltale signs began appearing on the victims and one by one they all died.

  Since it appeared to be an isolated incident more rooted in folklore than science Hector se
nt his protégée, Karen, and a couple other interns instead of bothering to go himself. She took pride in the assignment, doing everything in her power to ferret out the causes of the illness that had beset the villagers. It seemed to have no cure and the villagers were right... the disease was always terminal.

  When they stumbled across Lily, Karen considered keeping the find to herself. Reason soon intruded, however, so despite her misgivings she called Hector two days after arriving by the shores of Lake Baikal.

  "We've found something amazing, Hector! You have to come out here and see!"

  "Come on, Karen. What could you have possibly found that's so amazing that I would jump on a plane and fly half way around the world? You know how busy I am."

  "Trust me, Hector... you're going to want to see this in person."

  When she picked him up at Ulan-Ude airport near Lake Baikal, Hector was in as foul a mood as Karen had ever seen. While she was driving to their destination he complained to her how wires were hanging out of the ceiling in the Aeroflot plane he was forced to fly in and how the cross winds had nearly caused the plane to crash.

  "This better be good or you're fired, girl."

  "Come on, Hector... would I have called you if it wasn’t? This is the find of the century... maybe in the whole of human history. You'll see."

  She drove him to an enclosure surrounded by a hurricane fence set upon a steep mountainside. Stopping to unlock the padlocked gate she got soaked to the skin. Of course Hector didn’t offer to help. Inside a corrugated building, she showed her boss what all the fuss was about.

  "We got lucky, sure. But I've always believed people make their own luck, Karen. We were in the right place at the right time. That's good science, not luck. And what makes you think you know that creature any better than I do?"

  She considered telling him that 'we' didn't find anything. She found it. Soon she knew the 'we' would become 'he' who found the creature. Still, she sensed now was not the time to start that argument, one she couldn't win.

  "Remember, I analyzed her psyche. I talked with her every day over the past seven years. And yes, you can argue she isn't a human being and therefore has no right to be called female. But she's one of the most amazing people I've ever met. Why not just let her go home, Hector. That's all she wants."

  "My God, Karen... you helped her escape, didn't you."

  "Come on, Hector, I'd never do that to you. She is as important to me as she is to you. She's being drawn home by her instincts. Nothing can stop her. And believe me... I'm not the only one around here who's noticed she's a woman. The last few months she's been putting off these vibes... Jesus, I can't even describe it."

  "It's been gone two days now. How far could it go in that time? I mean, if what you say is true and it's trying to get back home."

  "That depends, Hector. Like you say, she has no money, no real skill set. She'll have to rely on the goodwill of strangers. She'll travel incognito, of course. She's very alluring right now. I'm sure she could talk most men into doing anything for her, and probably most women too.

  "It wouldn't be difficult for her to hitch a ride into Europe. I'm guessing she'll try talking to drivers at truck stops, entice them with sex. She could leave England on one of the ferries. No one checks identification too closely on a lot of those scows. Once in Europe she could hide in the sleeper compartment of a truck or train easy enough to cross borders.

  "Now, if I were her, I'd jump on a train once I got to Europe. You can ride all the way to Lake Baikal on the Trans Siberian Railroad. And again, money might be an issue but in her state of mind she'll manage to persuade someone to help her."

  "Keep talking, Karen."

  "I say we go back to Lake Baikal. If she beats us there, then we're officially screwed. But if we beat her there, we might be able to recapture her. Rather than flying, I suggest we take the train... we might be able to track her more closely that way."

  "That's the best idea I've heard so far. Get that stupid assistant of yours to book us onto the first plane to Paris. We'll take the train to Moscow from there. Tell her to make reservations on the Trans Siberian Railroad for the two of us. Hell, we might even run into our little monster along the way."

  "Just the two of us, Hector? She could be dangerous. We should assemble a team."

  "No worries, Karen. I'll be prepared."

  Chapter 6—Back in Time

  Karen was astounded that the backup power generator still worked.

  The headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control was abandoned twenty years ago though from the desiccated corpses in the hallway it was clear some employees didn’t make it out of the compound. Perhaps they simply chose to die inside rather than outside... Karen had no way of knowing what her decision would have been had it come down to that.

  She expected there would be an odor of rotting bodies but the air tasted clean... perhaps the ventilation system had done its job of purifying the air before the backup generator had shut down automatically to conserve fuel. Then again, maybe the power had stayed on longer here than it had at Orchardton Hall.

  "I'm going into the quarantine area. Can you please accompany me, Natalia? Marilyn, if you wouldn't mind perhaps you and Lily can begin gathering the list of equipment we'll be taking with us? We'll meet you back up here as soon as we finish the process of thawing."

  She had always been uncomfortable giving orders... perhaps it was a byproduct of the years she spent first as a subservient child under the sway of a dominating mother and later as a thrall to a manic man bent upon making everything of hers into his.

  Even though Marilyn had once been her assistant it seemed wrong somehow to continue that relationship once the old world had passed away. Still, the woman seemed to enjoy being submissive and followed orders without talking back.

  Karen was ninety nine percent certain whatever parasite was harbored in the frozen body of Lance Adams was benign to her as long as Lily was nearby... still, she considered it an unnecessary risk for Marilyn to enter the chamber too. Besides, she was the only one who knew the procedure needed to retrieve intracytoplasmic sperm from Lance.

  Karen would rather keep things that way... something about Marilyn's mannerisms of late disturbed her. The woman seemed to have gotten it into her head that Karen was a godless heathen who needed saving from the devil.

  She doubted Marilyn was dangerous yet knowing the woman's past had sent off alarms in the back of Karen's head. There was no sense taking needless risks... not now, when they were on the brink of a major discovery.

  Of course, no one would know about their work, not like before. There were no prizes to be won and no acclaim to garner. Karen liked that, though. She had grown tired of trying to impress those who didn’t care about her.

  There was something liberating about doing the work simply for the sake of doing it. Once, she had dreamed of being a world renowned doctor. Now, she was happy to be just Karen.

  She was pleased to see the body was still frozen in its nitrogen bath, therefore their plan was workable. The equipment was amazingly free of dust and other contaminants. Karen tripped the preprocessor to begin the gradual warming as well as setting the desiccant unit to high in order to remove as much excess moisture as possible. Otherwise ice crystals could form inside Lance's body destroying any chance of retrieving a viable sample.

  The man looked like a frozen god, still and imposing as a summer storm brewing high over the moors. She always admired his body-builder physique, the six pack abs and thick arms. His face had that chiseled from stone look to it with high cheek bones setting off a firm straight nose and perfectly placed eyes.

  A soft whirring filled the chamber as the nitrogen liquid was siphoned off to be replaced with nitrogen gas preventing the body from thawing too quickly. So far as Karen knew, the harvesting of testicles from a frozen corpse had never before been attempted. Rather than thawing the entire body she planned on removing only the part she required.

  She slid the laminar flow hood over
the nitrogen chamber, sealed it, and locked it in place. Activating the mechanical forceps she maneuvered them over the still-frozen genitals securing them at just the right fracture point. One gentle tug was all that was needed to snap the testicles off.

  "Ouch."

  Natalia looked at her and grimaced.

  "Don’t worry, love... he can't feel a thing."

  Moving quickly now Karen transferred her prize into a thermos-size vial before inserting it into a thirty seven degree water bath; she knew some damage was bound to occur but she reckoned if she was fortunate, enough genetic material could be salvaged to impregnate a female cell. She wiped the vial with ethanol before inserting it into a padded carry-all packed with dry ice to keep the sample from deteriorating too quickly.

  The whole process took less than fifteen minutes. Back upstairs she saw Marilyn and Lily had made good progress. Looking over the equipment they had gathered she compared it to a list she carried in a pocket.

  "How are we doing, Marilyn?"

  "We've found everything you wanted, Karen. Did you get what you needed?"

  "I did. Now we have to get back to the castle pronto. I wish we could take the power generator with us but it's too large to handle. We'll have to use a portable generator for our laboratory back home."

  "The biggest problem with that is procuring fuel for it."

  "We'll manage. Where's Lily? Have we started loading everything?"

  "She said she wants to look at her old home while we are here. I didn’t know what to say or how to stop her."

  Guilt came roaring back. Karen hoped to avoid that but perhaps it was inevitable. She walked down the hall to the Plexiglas enclosure that was Lily's prison for seven years. Lily was standing outside of it with her hands on the window.

  "I never thought I would be in this position, darling Karen. I have never actually seen into the cell from this vantage point."