Bathed in Blood

by Alex Archer

  Neither was a particularly pleasant thought.

  She moved closer until she stood right next to one of the beds, and nearly recoiled when she saw the state of the patient resting within.

  The woman was horribly gaunt, her flesh stretched tight across bones that stuck out like daggers. Her eyes were sunken in her head, her lips shriveled to nothing more than thin gray lines and her skin was the color of a New England November sky. Much of the woman’s hair had fallen out, and Annja could see bandages wrapped around the woman’s fingertips, most likely where she’d begun losing her nails.

  If it hadn’t been for the steady rise and fall of the woman’s chest, Annja would have been sure that she was dead. As it was, she wondered just how much longer she had to live.

  The woman was wired into a variety of monitoring devices, with electrodes attached to her head, face and chest. Two different IV lines were pumping fluids into her left arm, but the IV bags themselves didn’t indicate what medication they contained.

  As she stepped away from the IV bags, a loud click came from the other side of the bed. The click was followed by the hum of activating machinery.

  Curious, Annja walked around the bed to investigate.

  What she saw brought her up short.

  A pumping device, similar to those used to remove the fluids from a body during the embalming process, sat on a small cart. Tubes running from the pump and filled with a pinkish fluid disappeared beneath the sheet covering the woman’s lower body. Another tube, this one filled with a deep red liquid, ran back out from under the sheet to a collection container resting on the lower level of the cart.

  An image of the strange puncture wounds on Marta Vass’s thigh sprang to mind, and Annja reached forward and lifted the sheet that was covering the woman’s body with trembling hands.

  Just as she’d suspected, the first tube ran from the machine to a plastic port set into the woman’s inner thigh, right about where the femoral artery would be. The second tube ran from the same spot on the woman’s other thigh back to the collection unit.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening. The device was pumping some clear-looking fluid into one side of the woman’s body and forcing her blood out the other. From the bruises Annja could see up and down the woman’s legs, it was clear this wasn’t the first time it had happened.

  Stone’s question rang in her head: When will the harvesting procedure begin?

  From the next bed in the pod came a click similar to the one she’d heard moments before, followed by the same hum of machinery starting.

  Then another. And another and so on until there was a humming sound coming from each bed in the group.

  With growing horror, Annja turned and looked at the other patients lying in the beds nearby. All of them were in similar condition, gaunt and skeletal, like starvation victims, except here their life and vitality were being stolen away by the ticking machines at their sides.

  Annja wanted to tear the tubes out of their flesh, but she didn’t dare. Who knew what would happen if the pump was abruptly shut off?

  She stood there, frozen in place, uncertain as to what to do.

  It took her a moment, but she managed to shake off her paralysis and turn to face the next pod of patients. Afraid of what she would find but knowing that she had to look anyway, Annja headed in that direction.

  This group wasn’t as bad as the first, though Annja would have been hard-pressed to call them healthy. Their skin was jaundiced and appeared tight in some places, mostly around the mouths and eyes, but there was none of the sunken, wasting-away look that characterized the first group of patients.

  Annja stepped over to one of the beds. It was occupied by a blonde woman who looked to be in her early thirties. Her hair was brittle, but she still had most of it and she seemed to be breathing a little bit easier than the others.

  Annja bent down next to her.

  “Hello?” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  There was no response from the woman. Not even a twitch of recognition that someone was close by.

  Annja tried again, a little louder this time.

  “Can you hear me? I’m here to help you.”

  Still nothing.

  Reaching out, Annja took the woman’s hand in her own. Her skin was cold, as if she had ice water running through her veins.

  The woman didn’t respond to her touch.

  Annja was starting to have some suspicions about just what was in those IV bags. Sedatives fed directly into their bloodstreams on a regular basis were sure to keep the patients—cut the nonsense, she thought, call them what they are: prisoners—unconscious and therefore under control at all times.

  It would also keep them from protesting their own slow but steady deaths.

  A white-hot rage burst into flame deep inside Annja. Not only was someone murdering women, but the victims were also being tortured to drive a company’s profits.

  She was going to put a stop to this or die trying.

  Annja gently laid the woman’s hand back down on the bed and was about to turn away when something about the patient in the next bed caught her attention.

  She frowned and stepped closer.

  The woman looked familiar...

  Annja racked her brain for where she might have seen her before. The woman was dark haired with sharp features made all the more angular from what she was experiencing at the hands of her captors. Annja guessed her age at about twenty-five. The woman’s eyes were closed, but Annja had the feeling they’d be a deep brown...

  Her eyes. That was it!

  Annja had seen this woman staring out of a photograph in Novack’s file. The image had been a haunting one, the photographer capturing the woman’s mournful expression at just the right moment, and it had stuck with Annja as a result. So had the woman’s name—Belinda Krushev.

  Belinda was one of the woman Novack had claimed were missing. The police, of course, disagreed. According to the official report, she’d most likely run off with her boyfriend, who’d gone missing at the same time. Since they were both over the age of eighteen, the police had told the families there was little they could do. That had been the status quo for almost a year until Novack had come along and added her to his list as a possible murder victim.

  Looking down at her now, Annja was pleased that Novack had been only partially correct. Belinda might have fallen victim to foul play, just as Novack had suspected, but there was still time to keep her from the list of those Stone and company had killed.

  Having found one of the women on Novack’s list, Annja guessed there were probably more. She moved from bed to bed, staring at the women’s faces, trying to match their features with her memories of the photographs in Novack’s files. She’d managed to identify five other matches when she came to the bed containing the ward’s newest patient.

  Csilla Polgár.

  The woman looked much like she had when Annja last saw her, though there were several fresh bruises on her face. Like the others, Csilla was hooked up to both a pair of IVs and a blood pump, though in her case the pump unit hadn’t yet been switched on.

  Annja stared at Csilla in disbelief, astounded that she was here rather than in police custody.

  Inside her head the pieces of the puzzle began to click together.

  Stone was running some kind of research and development operation to generate an expensive and much-desired product. That much was clear from what Stone had said back in Annja’s cell. Whether Stone was working on behalf of Giovanni Industries or just using them as a cover, Annja didn’t know.

  The operation required something that was only found in a select group of women, and given what she was seeing around her, most likely found in the women’s blood. Extracting it was apparently an all-or-nothing process, otherwise Stone and company wouldn’t be kidnapp
ing the women and then faking their deaths to keep anyone from looking for them.

  The women, of course, were not dead, not yet at least, but there was little doubt in Annja’s mind that was how they’d end up once Stone took whatever it was she needed from them.

  Radecki, and most likely the medical examiner, Petrova, were in on the operation. Annja was convinced of that. There was no way for them to have pulled this off without someone on the police force and in the medical examiner’s office. The autopsy reports she’d seen had been signed off by Petrova, so he was the logical culprit. Others might be involved as well, particularly within the police and other emergency services, though Annja had no way of knowing that for certain yet.

  And she couldn’t prove anything. Like Novack before her, she’d be laughed out of the department if she went to the police now. She needed something concrete, something that would prove she wasn’t making wildcard accusations against a multibillion-dollar corporation with more lawyers than she could shake a stick at.

  Annja’s gaze lifted from Csilla’s bed to the observation windows overlooking the medical facility.

  She knew just where she could find what she needed.

  26

  Radecki sat at his desk, staring at the clock. He’d told the nurse to bring Creed’s sample directly to his office so he could personally oversee the processing of the test results.

  That had been half an hour ago.

  How long did it take to draw some blood? he wondered with more than a little impatience. Either the nurse was goofing off—something she’d pay dearly for if he found out that was the case—or something had gone wrong.

  Given how much trouble Creed had been so far, Radecki would bet on the latter.

  Best if he went down and had a look for himself.

  Radecki opened the top drawer of his desk and removed the stun gun he kept there. He’d used it a couple of times to subdue some of the women they’d taken from the streets, and he liked the way it put down even the most aggressive targets. He thought it might be handy should Creed prove difficult. He slipped the weapon into his pocket, then got up and walked out of his office.

  The halls were empty because the few employees working at this hour were assigned to the residential wing until the next shift. That was fine with him; he couldn’t stand interacting with the idiots Stone hired to handle the drudge work. How anyone could convince themselves that they were involved in legitimate research, given what they were doing to these women long-term, was beyond him, and yet those half-wits had apparently managed to do so. Radecki didn’t believe that self-delusion was an acceptable indulgence.

  Many of the technicians had been promised a hefty bonus should they reach the stated goal of artificially replicating the catalyst in the patients’ blood. Radecki knew better. That bonus would never be awarded, never mind cashed. Success or failure, the working stiffs would end up with their contracts terminated in the most literal sense of the word, and he would be laughing as he cleaned up the mess.

  He suspected that Stone would get rid of him as well, when the time came, so he’d taken steps to protect himself. The guards employed throughout the facility were his men, not hers. If worse came to worst, he was confident they would follow his orders rather than Stone’s. If the operational structure was ever put down on paper—which it wouldn’t be, not as long as Radecki was in charge of project security—Stone’s name would certainly be at the top of the chart. But as with many kingdoms down through the ages, the real power was not in the hands of the one sitting on the throne. Radecki played chancellor to Stone’s queen. He stood behind her, hidden in the shadows, and he was quite happy with the arrangement.

  Lately, however, she’d started to make him nervous. He suspected that her behavior was a byproduct of the formulation they produced, one of the reasons he wasn’t in a hurry to try it out himself. Stone had first been exposed to the test product—a deep red cream that reminded Radecki of lotion—by accident, but when she’d seen how it rolled back the hands of time, making her skin look years younger, she had started using it on a regular basis.

  And therein lay the rub.

  From what he could tell, the cream was not only changing her on the outside—making her look like a woman two decades her junior—but it was changing her on the inside, as well. Now, he was no scientist, but even he knew that sudden, drastic changes, even beneficial ones, to any single aspect of a complex system had the potential to throw the entire thing out of whack. And he was starting to see that very thing with Stone. She was making brilliant leaps of deductive logic and advancing the project, yes, but she was far more short-tempered and aggressive, often to the point of violence, than she’d been six months ago.

  The formulation was taking a toll.

  He just hoped she could hold it together long enough to figure out how to artificially produce that one key ingredient. So far they’d been able to locate enough women with the genetic marker and harvest what they needed, but they couldn’t go on doing that forever. They were already finding it difficult to select appropriate targets, and if Novack and Creed were any indication, they couldn’t keep their operation hidden forever.

  At least Novack was out of the way, he thought with a satisfied smile as he boarded the elevator. Soon Creed would be, too, and he could relax and wait for it all to be over.

  Radecki took the elevator down two floors and got off on the lowest level of the complex, where the test subjects were held. At Creed’s cell he glanced in the window as he reached for his key card, only to have his heart skip a beat when he saw that Creed was no longer hanging from the hook where he’d left her.

  He pulled out the stun gun and switched it on, then swiped the key through the card reader. When the lock clicked open he went through the door quickly, glancing to either side to keep from being ambushed.

  The nurse he’d sent to take the blood sample, Phillips, lay on her side against the nearest wall, out of sight of anyone looking into the room from the hallway. She was still breathing and didn’t have any apparent injuries, so he didn’t give her more than a passing thought. He’d send someone down to help her back to the dormitory section and that would be that.

  Right now, he had to find Creed.

  The ropes that had bound her lay in the middle of the floor, neatly cut in two.

  There was no sign of the prisoner herself.

  Radecki cursed beneath his breath, then turned and hurried out of the room. He needed to find Creed before Stone realized she was missing. If Stone got it into her head to come down and question the prisoner and found Creed had escaped, all hell would break loose. It was just the kind of setback that might send her completely over the edge.

  Any other escaped prisoner would make a beeline for the exit, if they could find it, that was, but he had a hunch Creed would be different. She’d been dogging their heels ever since she’d rescued one of their discarded subjects and he didn’t see any reason that she’d give up now. Not while she was right here, in the heart of their operation.

  If anything, he expected her to keep hunting for answers now that she was so close to them.

  That meant she could be anywhere in the complex. The place was too big to search effectively on foot, but thankfully he didn’t have to resort to such extreme measures.

  There were better, faster ways of searching the facility and they didn’t involve the chance of running into Stone in the process.

  Radecki headed for the elevator and the security control center on level B.

  27

  Stone’s office.

  That was where she would find the answers she needed; Annja was certain of it. Now all she had to do was get there.

  She looked down at Csilla’s bruised face.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be back for you,” she told her, taking the woman’s hand in her own and giving it a gentle squeeze. She had no
idea if Csilla could hear her, but she didn’t feel right just leaving her alone without saying something. If Csilla was aware, even peripherally, beneath all the drugs she was being given, Annja didn’t want her to think she was being abandoned.

  “I’m going to get some help, but I’ll be back,” Annja told her. “Just hold on.”

  It was hard to turn around and walk away, but Annja did it anyway. If she was going to put a stop to this, she didn’t have a choice.

  At the far end of the ward was another staircase, similar to the one she’d taken earlier. Annja hoped it would lead her to the offices overlooking that portion of the ward.

  Her hunch proved correct.

  Conscious that the clock had started ticking the moment she’d set foot outside her cell door, Annja hurried along the hallway, passing several doors until she came to the one she thought was Stone’s.

  Taking the key card from around her neck, she slid it through the slot.

  There was a low beep, but the signal light on the lock remained red instead of turning green. She tried it again, deliberately sliding the card at a slower pace, but ended with the same result.

  The door stayed securely locked.

  Annja worried that the card reader was tied into the security system and that repeat failures might trigger an alert of some kind, so she stopped trying after the second failed attempt.

  The card would have made things easier, but she didn’t need it to get inside. She had her own special tool for that.

  She shot a quick glance up and down the hall to be certain no one had come along while her attention had been on the lock. Then she called her sword to hand, pulling it from the otherwhere with just a thought. As always the weapon made her feel more powerful, more confident, and she felt her spirits pick up just by gripping the hilt in her hand. She put the tip of the sword into the space between the door and the jamb, right where the electronic lock was situated, and then she drove the weapon forward while bearing down to the left.

  The blade went through the lock with ease, and the door popped open with sharp crack.