Pale Death

by Aimée Thurlo

  Several documents setting up the operation and security procedures, avenues of research, and other details were stored on the CD. They also found a lengthy document prepared by Prescott which stated that Stewart Tanner had been brought to their hastily prepared facility as a uncooperative prisoner, and had been very difficult to deal with because of his extreme physical capabilities.

  Prescott had stated that Tanner had to be kept bound and sedated most of the time in order to keep him from overpowering his handlers, and that if the man ever got the upper hand, people would die. Prescott pointed out that Tanner had become increasingly enraged and violent, and if he ever managed to escape the facility, he could be counted upon to take out his anger on virtually anyone.

  After a half-hour survey of the information on the CD, Diane sat back in the chair she’d placed beside Lee and the computer monitor. “This pretty much confirms what we already know, though I’m almost relieved that there’s no mention of a Patient Alpha. To most people this will probably be as credible as the Blair Witch Project. Anyone reading this will seriously doubt Dr. Prescott’s mental state.”

  “I’m sure Prescott realized that too. But it was the only way to protect himself and the others if things went south. Who’s more to blame, Tanner, or the people who tortured him? I also notice that Prescott didn’t name his superiors—like this vague ‘director.’ I wonder why?” Lee took the CD from the computer, then turned off the machine. “What do you want to do with this?”

  She brought out the jewel case, Lee inserted the CD, and handed it to her. “He might have been more afraid of his boss than he was of Tanner,” Diane said. “I’m going to mail this to my Albuquerque home address. Until we learn which feds are behind this, we won’t know who to trust.” Diane stuck the case into her jacket pocket.

  “In the meantime, Tanner is out there somewhere and we need to put a stop to him. What next? Any suggestions?” Lee glanced around the living room. It was dark outside now, and he wouldn’t have to freshen up his sunblock before they left.

  She turned out the lamp beside the computer, making the room very dark. “We’ll use the radio in my unit to contact all the other agencies and see how the search for Tanner is going. We’ll have to stick to the obvious facts—the man escaped from the laboratory, killed five people, and is extremely strong and dangerous.” Diane started to move across the living room and bumped into a chair.

  “Take my hand,” Lee offered, reaching out for her. “It’s not a man-woman thing, it’s because I can see and you can’t.”

  She grabbed his hand firmly, then accompanied him into the kitchen. “That the only reason?” she asked quietly.

  “Of course not.” Lee opened the back door, then stopped, turning the button in the knob so it would lock when he closed it.

  “Good.” Diane went ahead of him, letting go of his hand after giving it a squeeze.

  Lee closed the door, turned, then noticed Diane had frozen in place, watching a shape at the far end of the house. Then the shape moved. The sun was down, but there was still enough light to reveal Stewart Tanner, wearing a hooded sweatshirt.

  “Stay here and don’t let him get close,” Lee whispered harshly, pulling out his pistol.

  The vampire disappeared around the corner of the house, so Lee holstered his pistol and followed—indirectly. He jumped up, grabbing on to the top of the porch, then swung onto the roof. He ran up to the crown of the house and looked down onto the yard, trying to determine if Stewart had moved away from the building.

  Not seeing anyone except Diane in the backyard, Lee knew that the vampire was staying beneath the eaves of the house. Out of view, the vampire could have run around to the front of the house or be waiting just around the corner at the end where he’d seen him first.

  Lee ran to his left and jumped to the ground at the opposite end of the rectangular structure, hugging the wall and looking to his right. Lee knew Stewart couldn’t be around back, or Diane would be making some 9mm noise by now. That still left the front or far end.

  Lee heard a loud crunch, like snapping timbers. “Tanner’s in the house,” he yelled, fearing that the vampire was going to run through the building, burst out the back door, and take Diane by surprise.

  CHAPTER 5

  Diane had jumped away from the porch and was covering the back door. Spotting motion to her left, she swerved around, her pistol ready.

  “It’s me, don’t shoot,” he said, quickly ducking back.

  “Damn. Don’t do that,” Diane cursed, lowering her weapon.

  He stepped into sight and waved her toward him. Together they moved away from the house, her covering the back door, and him the front. Then Lee heard the whinny of a horse. He looked out into the pasture beyond the fence in the front of the house, and saw a running figure.

  “Crap,” Lee yelled. “He faked us out. Get the car.”

  Diane turned and ran toward their vehicle while Lee took up the chase. Tanner was already more than a hundred yards away, sprinting at a speed Lee knew he couldn’t hope to match. Vampires had it over half vampires in every Olympic event except thinking.

  Gamely Lee followed, hoping to keep the fugitive in sight, but Stewart raced to the highway, jumped into an old pickup parked by itself on the shoulder, and pulled away in a cloud of dust before Lee could get close enough to read the tag.

  A minute later Diane came up in her vehicle and Lee jumped inside. “He had an old pickup parked by the road. He’s heading for Farmington. Now we can equal his speed. Catch his ass while I call it in.”

  Diane nodded, and accelerated down the highway at pursuit speed. Lee buckled his seat belt, then grabbed the radio mike. Within thirty seconds, every law enforcement unit on Farmington streets knew about the older model silver Ford F-150 Tanner was driving.

  “That bastard can run faster than the Bionic Man, Diane. If we had any doubts he’s a full vampire, they’re gone now. Tanner must have been looking for the same thing we were after—confirmation of what was really going on over at that lab.”

  “What’s the point now—for him? Even if he can prove they were torturing him, that won’t get him off the hook for killing Lynette and the others,” Diane argued, not taking her eyes off the road, though she’d slowed a bit after entering the city limits.

  “Yeah. Things might have been different for him if he’d escaped and not hunted them down.”

  Diane was quiet as they searched the western section of the city, which spread up from the river into the mesas and foothills along the valley. Once in a while, a call would come from a Farmington patrolman or a San Juan county deputy, pulling over a vehicle that fit the general description. But each time, it turned out to be a false alarm. After a half hour, the calls slowed and she pulled off the road in a residential area and parked. A small apartment complex occupied that section of the block, and they could see every vehicle. None was a potential match.

  “Do you suppose Tanner will stop killing now that he’s taken care of those who were responsible for what happened to him?” Diane asked.

  “Tanner knows how he revealed his vampire nature to the feds, and that the list of those who know about him exceed those employed at the facility. I’m sure he’s trying to find more names and addresses—not only for revenge, but so he can ensure his own survival.”

  Diane nodded. “Makes sense. And because of that, we have to find out who’s responsible for turning his life into a living hell before they either end up dead or engineer the mother of all cover-ups.”

  “There’s something else they have to do—get Tanner back, or get him dead—before the secret gets out to the public, or even worse, to whatever government agency they’re competing with for power and resources.”

  “You don’t suppose the Bureau is responsible for these vampire experiments?” Diane turned to Lee, her voice low.

  “You were the one called to deal with it,” Lee said with a shrug. “But no, I don’t think so. Whoever did this is probably concealed by layers of cove
r, much more than we saw in Prescott’s home files. We know it’s very unlikely that the CDC or a health agency would come up with this. Just the suggestion that they believe in vampires would destroy their reputations. That’s always been my best fallback story, you know. The truth about something like this cannot be taken seriously.”

  “So that leaves an organization with a lot of resources—one that’s perfectly willing to do something that sounds stupid,” Diane replied. “That narrows it down quite a bit.”

  “Yeah. It’s either a major television network, the current presidential administration, or the CIA. They’d be my first choice, based upon the unbelievable stories I’ve heard about them from the Cold War.”

  “How do we establish any of this? Our only recent contact with ‘The Company’ is very dead. And amazingly enough, a vampire was the one responsible for that one too.”

  “Let’s think outside the box, and come up with possible scenarios of how Tanner gave himself away. Once we have a few of those, we can use the Bureau resources and the Internet to check out our theories. In order for a vampire to be discovered, somebody with federal connections must have seen Tanner do a vampire thing—then been able to provide enough evidence to get others to take action.” Lee lapsed into silence as he thought about it for a moment.

  “Okay, let’s brainstorm, and while we’re doing that, we can drive around some more and look for that silver pickup.” Diane started the engine, and eased back onto the road.

  They turned into one of the older neighborhoods, a boulevard with big, overhanging willow trees along a central median, and drove slowly down the block. Diane used the vehicle’s spotlight to check out the left side, but Lee didn’t need the extra help.

  They’d passed several houses and were nearing the next intersection when Lee heard the roar of an engine somewhere close. “I don’t see anyone.” Diane glanced back in the rearview mirror, then slowed and looked to both sides.

  When the sound continued to grow, Lee looked in the side mirror. A pickup was bearing down on them at high speed, its headlights out.

  “Turn!” Lee lunged to the left and grabbed the steering wheel, yanking it hard and throwing them into an unsettling two-wheeled slide.

  “What the hell?” Diane yelled, trying to regain control as the car spun around to her left. There was an explosive crunch as the speeding pickup clipped the left rear fender, and the car was jerked so hard they were thrown sideways. Lee scraped the top of his head on the window frame of the door as his head was thrown where the glass would have been if his window had been rolled up.

  “Whoa!” Diane yelled, her voice drowned in the squeal as the tires fought to keep traction. They continued to slide backward, and finally stopped with an abrupt thud against the curb. Their heads bounced off the seat headrests like crash dummies, then the engine died.

  Rubbing his head, Lee turned, looking for the pickup. It was already halfway to the next intersection.

  Diane looked over, shaken. “You okay, Lee?”

  “Scraped my noggin, but otherwise fit. How about you?”

  “I’m going to have some major bruises in places where it won’t show, but yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Then let’s get that bastard.” Lee grabbed the radio while Diane started the engine. She had to turn left to get into the intersection, then after another hard left, they raced down the boulevard in pursuit.

  “He was stalking us with his lights out,” Diane said. “Somewhere along the way he let us pass him, then he started following us. With his lights out, we—I—couldn’t see him, and you were too busy looking ahead. If you’d been driving, you’d have seen him coming, considering the way your vision works.” Diane shook her head. “Ow. That was stupid. Now I’ve got a headache too.”

  “You need to have a doctor look at that?” He glanced over at her, concerned.

  “No. Just keep your seat belt on.”

  Lee sent out a bulletin on the hit-and-run, and it wasn’t long before they got a call. The pickup had been located, abandoned, in the parking lot of the old library just north of downtown.

  “Tanner must be holed up somewhere now, and with his athletic ability, he’s going to be hard to find. There are enough backyards and homes with trees and gardens that he could avoid detection for days,” Diane finally said, pulling to the side of the road again, this time into a church parking lot.

  “Yeah, but he’ll have to be out of the sun by morning, and it’s nearly midnight,” Lee said.

  “I’m going to have officers take his photo into every late-night business that sells sunblock, and every other potential source as soon as they open tomorrow morning,” Diane said. “Even if he’s already shoplifted a bottle or two, maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll show up as missing on inventory.” Diane picked up her cell phone. “And his photo should be in tomorrow’s newspapers. I asked for cooperation from the press.”

  “The more people looking out for the guy, the quicker we’ll find him.”

  “I just hope no more people die confronting Tanner. Problem is, I’m not sure how to warn the officers helping in the search. If anyone does manage to put him down—and it’s not with a real destructive head shot, or to the heart—he’d get right back up again in a few minutes and be really pissed off.”

  “Tell everyone you enlist exactly what he did to that young woman doctor—breaking her bones, stake in the chest and all, then let them know exactly how he killed two security guards and disabled a third—while unarmed and in handcuffs. Hint that he’s all hopped up, like on drugs, so extreme force is needed. None of his victims’ relatives will be complaining if Tanner gets blown to pieces,” Lee reminded.

  “And that’s what it’s going to take, isn’t it,” Diane said, reaching down to her waist and touching the butt of her pistol.

  Lee and Diane spent the next few hours meeting with local law enforcement officers and setting up a command center. Then, around four in the morning, they decided to return to the laboratory near Kirtland to continue searching through the remaining files and CDs for anything on either Tanner or the agency behind the operation.

  Lee was driving now, and Diane was catnapping, having been up almost twenty-four hours straight as well as being drained emotionally by the loss of an old friend. Lee had been awake even longer, but he didn’t need much sleep anyway, only occasional rest from physical exertion—and a bite to eat. Calf or pig blood would be particularly tasty and nutritious right now, but with vampire talk everywhere, just having blood in his possession would raise too many eyebrows.

  He’d left the window open so he could hear, and was traveling slowly, keeping one eye in the rearview mirror, and another on the road ahead, looking for the turnoff that led, in a circuitous route, to the laboratory on the mesa to the south.

  Finally he saw the narrow gravel road, which ran between two apple orchards. Several old, traditional farms were in the area, though a lot of the old fields in the small communities of Waterflow, Fruitland, and Kirtland had succumbed to ugly, ur-banlike sprawl and relentless developers. Even the Navajo Nation was littered with housing in this area, though much of it was substandard.

  The sun would be coming up in a few hours. Lee thought for a moment where he’d been yesterday about this time. It seemed like years ago now, but at least nobody had died in that incident.

  He looked at the gnarled, gray trunks and branches of the old apple trees, and the few windfalls still on the ground. It had been a decent year for apples, but these trees looked old and neglected. At least the cottontails he saw hunkered down beneath the overhanging branches would be supplied with fall bounty.

  Lee slowed to cross an irrigation ditch. A culvert ran beneath the road, but the track was humped up into a small ridge that required care to avoid jostling.

  “We there yet?” Diane said with a mumble, opening her eyes and sitting up. “Sorry I dozed off.”

  “A mile or so to go,” Lee said, smiling. “You needed the rest, so don’t apologize.”

&nbs
p; Ahead, Lee could see a white SUV in the road, taillights on and all four doors open, but nobody was within view and he couldn’t see anyone inside either. There were no orchards this close to the river and the vegetation on both sides were typical trees and brush of the bosque. The closed-in nature made it a perfect place for an ambush, and suddenly his heart started beating a little faster.

  “What do you see?” Diane squinted. “Wish I had some low-light goggles.”

  Lee slowed the vehicle, then came to a stop, leaving the motor running. “You don’t suppose the criminal actually returned to the scene of the crime?”

  “Tanner? He went to Dr. Prescott’s home, didn’t he? But we got there first.” Diane picked up the vehicle’s radio mike and called Dispatch, asking them to connect her to the Navajo officers still on duty outside the lab. They’d been warned to increase their vigilance, and firepower, after what had happened earlier in the evening.

  She spoke for a moment, then ended the call. “The tribal cops heard gunfire in this direction about fifteen minutes ago, but stayed at their posts, fearing it was a diversion. They’ve already put in a call for more tribal backup, but their officers had to come from Window Rock and they’re still at least a half hour away.”

  “Then who’s in the SUV?” Lee squinted, shifted his POV, then saw something on the ground. “Looks like somebody’s down.”

  “We need to make a move, Lee. Tanner is probably behind this as well. He’s a cocky—bloodsucker. No offense.”

  “None taken. But let’s try and even the odds a bit. I’m going to add a little more light to the scene.” Lee turned to the right slightly, directing the headlights into the brush and undergrowth beyond the white vehicle. Then he turned on the spotlight, aiming the beam to the left. Now the area ahead and to both sides of the SUV were being illuminated to any non-vampires still alive.