The Vampires Of Livix Twin Pack (Volumes #2 & #3)

by Smith, J Gordon

“This is where we pre-mix the additives. We keep a negative pressure inside to clear the air of any dust coming off the dry materials.” As he spoke, a worker in a white jump-suit slid a big paper bag off a stack of similar bags on a pallet. The worker banged the end of the bag against a large spike that ripped the paper open and dumped the contents down a small ramp and into a big hopper. I watched him repeat this a dozen times with this bag and then three trips with another type of bag and then pulling some levers to drip in syrupy materials and other liquids. The worker closed the hopper and pressed the cycle start. Massive motors under the floor worked at twisting and kneading the materials. Other liquids metered into the mix including, “That is plain old filtered water.”

  We watched dials on the control board monitoring pressures and temperatures of the mix and readouts marked the progress of the batch. “This next step we siphon off blood to mix with this to transform it into a thin slurry. When that dial reads the correct viscosity, we know it’s time to flood the mixer with the rest of the blood. Then run it into the final line with the milk and pasteurization and bottling.”

  “There it is.” said the quality control specialist.

  The motors groaned under the floor as they sped up and received a fill of raw blood. Like shrinking down and standing on the control panel of my counter-top blender while it crushed ice.

  Garin picked up one of the bags, it said, “Vermilion Genomics.”

  The second scientist said, “Those bags are dropped down that chute and they go through a grinder to eliminate the paper waste. We sell the used paper to recyclers.”

  Garin shouted over the rising pitch of the motors, “Have you looked at recyclable containers?”

  “We have but we need to ensure they are really clean, and transport here and back gives us some dust contamination sources. No one likes finding a half dissolved mouse in the bottom of his or her pop can. The disposable bags are heat treated prior to filling and sealed at the factory until we empty them.”

  “What about the outside of the bags?” I touched the rough brown paper bag that Garin held.

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “Can something on the outside of the bag make its way into the mix?”

  The workers purged another mixer and began refilling it by busting open more bags into the hopper.

  “No. If coated with debris our workers are instructed and know to call a supervisor over.” The quality control specialist reached for a white binder on the control board and flipped open to a page that blazed Operator Instructions across the top with the various tasks required to complete the manufacturing steps. Including a dozen measurements and charts marked by the workers. “These charts show us if any important trend develops before the process gets out of control. We can predict our quality levels before something unexpected and costly happens.”

  The second scientist tapped Garin’s shoulder and pointed to readout next to the stand the pallet sat on. “The pallet stand is tied into the computer control system so that if a worker forgets if they put eleven or twelve bags into the hopper, twelve being the target, the system will warn them if the weight on the pallet changes too much or not enough. Error proofing systems to ensure exactly twelve bags are used to mix a batch.”

  “Good method and simple.”

  “The best error proofing systems are simple.” The quality control specialist waved us forward through another set of doors and into the final mixing and bottling line. “Here the bottles are heat sealed and the final manufacturing date codes are applied with this laser marking system. We can tell down to the hour when bottled and then go back through the system to identify the production data and traceability for any subcomponent used in creating the final recipe.”

  Blue bottles shot out of a blow molding machine like popcorn, funneled into a trimmer, and then fed the bottling line. Garin pointed out accumulator areas on the belts and lifter finger systems, the fill and capping process, washing and labeling and boxing. Efficient and amazingly rapid. The violence I saw firsthand at the slaughterhouse ended up filling these little blue bottles and looking nice and friendly with artfully designed labels.

  “We take random samples from pallets and cases and test them in the lab for any number of things. From color through cleanliness and nutritional facts to ensure we make the same product no matter when or where it’s opened.”

  “Looks good.” Branoc and Garin turned to go with the group back to the conference room. I took a few steps backward looking up at one of the huge tanks. Up in the ceiling rafters I saw a maintenance worker watching us intently. But I thought she might be concerned we break something that she would have to fix. I caught up with the group.

  Back in the conference room with the door closed, we could talk easier with the plant noise shut out.

  Garin said, “From my work in other industries, you keep on par with quality levels I’ve seen.” Their quality control specialist beamed. “But I’m concerned incoming materials could be contaminated without anyone catching them.”

  “We do spot check audits of the materials.”

  “Have you found anything that matches the poison in the sample bottles?” Branoc pointed at the two bottles on the conference table.

  “No. We cannot find any traces of that metal in our system. I’d expect such contamination to still exist but it’s confined to that single batch.”

  “Did any of the subcomponents blend across several bottle batches?”

  “Generally no. We widen the batch number to include such streams and then narrow the code by the hour produced.”

  Branoc said, “What chemical sources could that metal, which your lab has identified as the main component of the poison, have originated from? Could it be shavings off a worn piece of equipment?”

  The first scientist said, “I’d laugh if this wasn’t such a serious subject but that’s a metal used in electric vehicle battery technology. It also happens to kill vampires after additional chemical treatments. We don’t have any of that equipment, materials, or needs at our facility. It’s a real mystery to me how that could have entered the product stream –”

  “And a worrisome mystery for us.”

  “Yes for us all.”

  I nudged Garin, “metal like silver?”

  “What looks like silver but might be toxic?”

  “ … Mercury?”

  Garin touched his finger to his nose.

  “What should we do to track down the source of this stuff?” Branoc gripped the conference table.

  Garin added, “What form would that material likely enters your process? A liquid slurry or a bubbling gas or solid chunks?”

  “Most likely a powder from metal reduction in the petroleum industry making gasoline.”

  The first scientist turned to the second, “An opinion. If someone mixed the powder with another liquid chemical then it could be delivered as easily and silently too. Something like mercuric chloride salts or methyl-mercury mixed with water-based fluids.”

  “Are we looking for a coffee can quantity or a tanker truck amount?”

  “Oh definitely something on the order of a coffee can, maybe a five gallon pail if they wanted to ensure a rapid broad spectrum kill.”

  The quality control specialist remarked, “We ran the sample through a bench pasteurizer and it gets stuck in the pressure filter.”

  The scientist added, “Adding it after the pasteurizer could get it into the bottles –”

  “But the system is closed before the pasteurizer and after that point until the capped bottles are packed in cartons.”

  “A diverter loop exists so we can take the pasteurizer off-line for any repairs or filter replacement without draining the whole production system, which is expensive and messy. So that is a possibility. But we didn’t find any other high levels of bacteria or other contamination in the unopened sample that might suggest that.”

  We sat silent for a few moments.

  Branoc said finally through the appare
nt silence, “I think we have enough background for now. We have your cards to contact you with any follow up questions.”

  “This report for you Mr. Branoc includes our analysis results of these two sample bottles, which would not have passed our final bottling line audits by the way, and the batches of raw materials and workers that had been involved in creating the batch of Massai they came from.”

  “So only a single batch?”

  “Yes. A single batch that spanned about three hours on second shift.”

  We left the Massai plant and got back in Branoc’s car.

  “Garin, I thought you told me silver did not harm vampires.”

  “Silver has no effect. Old wives tale.”

  “But why mercury?”

  Branoc said, “It accumulates in people and then in vampires that consume them. Like people avoid a lot of fish, vampires avoid a lot of people living on coastal areas with a lot of fishing.”

  “It’s where the whole fantasy about silver coated weapons and silver bullets and everything came from. Mercury looks like silver and so the myth transferred.”

  “Hard to make a bullet out of mercury though, unless you freeze it.”

  “We can usually taste it.”

  “But not some forms that mix subtly. The Massai drinks are full of flavor and they can hide it.”

  “But it’s not so violently poisonous for vampires; it’s generally an accumulative condition. Not as quickly corrosive and deadly as we saw.”

  Garin unfolded the piece of brown paper he tore from one of the empty additive bags in the mix room. “We need to go here next.”

  The maintenance worker slid her hand into her coveralls pocket. She pressed an auto-dial button on her phone and slid it to her ear, “They left. Body language shows they don’t know anything yet. Checking process details looking for clues. I’ll confirm with the lab techs later as if I’m looking for gossip on our visitors. One of the vampires took a slip of paper from the bags … Yes, those bags. They might be over to see you soon. Tschuss.” She returned her phone to her pocket, picked up the canvas bag of electrician’s tools, and faded into the bowls of the facility. A conveyor line control box kept defaulting and locking the operator out of line J6. Probably a short inside the box from their spilled coffee, “How they manage to do that a couple of times a month on a rain-proof lockout box I’ll never understand.”

  -:- Eight -:-

  “Like they say, Vermilion Genomics Incorporated uses a trade secret formula with more than a dozen chemicals, herbs, and spices. Your badge cannot open our vault to reveal that. Not even I, as the CEO of this company, know more than half the ingredients. All to protect it against duplication.”

  Branoc sat in the stuffed leather chair and looked passed the CEO and his perfectly combed hair through the window and over the cedar forest that covered the hills around the plant. “Your product ended up in these bottles that poisoned vampires. Shaking the rest of the vampire community’s confidence, endangering the human population.” Branoc motioned to the two sealed samples from the same carton as those shared with the Massai manufacturers.

  “So we feed on them?” He turned to me in the hard-backed secretary chair that he pulled out for me before his wide desk, “Apologies, miss. This is unfortunate.” The CEO pressed his intercom, “Nancy, call Memphis out of the lab. I have a project for him.” Nancy’s voice acknowledged. Then he added for Branoc, “Memphis is our lead researcher and production technical expert. We’re a small company and we run lean. This is an unfortunate event.”

  Memphis strode in with his lab coat draped over his arm. A tall rail-thin man with close shaved features including his receding hairline. But a vampire nonetheless. “What’s up Harold?”

  “Can you take these two bottles of Massai and test them? Somehow a poison entered the manufacturing lot that killed many vampires, quite violently from these fine people’s description. Can you figure out what it is and if it could have entered our production process?”

  “Sure.” He reached for the bottles and collected them by their necks between the fingers of one hand.

  Garin said, “We’d like to get a tour of your facility too, to see if any issues are apparent.”

  Memphis said, “There won’t be any issues. We run a lean process here with better ability to trace components than Massai does. That’s not any bravado or any mark against Massai; they have a nice well-run facility.” He stepped toward the door, “Harold, have Karoldine give them the tour while I test these.”

  “Thanks Memphis.” He pressed the intercom button, “Nancy –”

  “– she’s already on her way.”

  “Thanks.”

  They gave us hard hats, safety goggles, ear plugs, vapor masks, steel toe-clips over our shoes, and bright neon mesh vests. “This is a lot of safety gear.”

  “They want to know where the visitors are at all times.”

  “And hear us coming.” We clomped down the stairs and down the hallway toward the plant floor like a battalion of warhorses stamping along a cobbled alley.

  Pulverizing grinders took rough mixes of limestone chunks and other dry materials and ground them, pounded them, and mixed them. Dozens of materials mixed in the ball mills before being vacuumed into hoppers. Over the noise Karoldine shouted to us, describing the process of mixing materials. Several bags had mystery contents packaged from separate subcomponent suppliers at a third party that didn’t know the details of the materials. “Everything is bar-coded and traced in our corporate databases.”

  Garin pulled out the strip of brown paper he tore off the Massai process bags, “This is what Massai ran today. I wrote here the lot code they showed us for your shipment that went into the contaminated bottles.”

  Karoldine took the paper from him and walked to a computer terminal on the floor. They covered the membrane keyboard with another silicone shroud to protect it from dust. The monitor hung inside a clear plastic. She pressed function keys flipping through several screens and then got an input box. She punched in the codes and other serialized numbers scrolled down the screen. She wrote on Garin’s paper one lot number, “This is our internal lot code tracker that matches the Massai records.” She gave the paper back to Garin and copied that code with a key-stroke and then another key combination brought up their plant’s instant messenger system. She copied the number into the box and sent it to Memphis. “This will help Memphis once he knows what he is looking for.”

  Karoldine showed us the floor worker logs and the up to date completed control plan checks. None of us saw anything suspicious. Certainly some unknowns existed because of the secrecy in their formulation protections but otherwise nothing appeared as a problem source. I trusted Garin’s manufacturing expertise and his general science and engineering background and nothing seemed to make him flinch or express concern.

  Karoldine’s phone buzzed at her hip holster. She popped it out and looked at it. “Memphis has some results to show you.” She strode toward Memphis’ lab, pressing through the swinging door into the highly air-conditioned lab. Beakers, pipettes, bottles, and flasks with Bunsen burners and tubing running everywhere covered the benches. Several other lab technicians, a mix of vampires and humans, worked at the various tables checking incoming, outgoing, and in-process materials against a host of quality evaluations. Karoldine walked briskly through another swinging door and into a secondary smaller lab behind. As I rushed through to keep up, I saw one of the techs, “Phil” by his name badge, staring at us.

  Memphis stood in front of a computer monitor. “This is a spectrum analyzer for the chemistry involved in this first bottle sample.” He pointed to an angry purple spike about two-thirds the way across the screen among many other smaller spikes in green. “The purple spike is your poison, mercury based.” He flipped to another screen. “These are the chemical analyses of the batch you gave me this morning, next to our matching batch data that shipped to Massai that they used in filling these bottles. As you can see, no purple spike.” He t
yped some additional commands on the computer and then moused through a few options that popped up. “Now here is the accumulated analysis of every batch we’ve produced in the past three years layered on each other,” he clicked the purple line screen again, “and you can see that where the purple line shows up is a wide blank region on everything we’ve shipped, no chemicals even close to it. There are other gaps the bottle sample fills on the screen because of the chemicals in milk and blood and the other mixes that Massai incorporates into their end-product.”

  “Could someone have slipped it in before bagging?”

  “No. It’s a sealed system because even then you see how the dust sifts out into the air of the plant. We run filtration systems to keep the air quality better for the workers and constantly seek any leaks to seal shut.”

  “Any equipment cleaning chemicals or system purge treatments?”

  “This poison is pretty unique and not allowed in general chemicals, cleaning or otherwise. It’s a bad toxin, and manipulated into greater effectiveness, I’d say.” Memphis brought up another set of screens. “These are our audit test results – we take a spear sample from each pallet of product before it goes out and we retain those samples plus test results and nothing shows here.”

  “Can you retest the samples?”

  “Our testing proves extremely repeatable. We won’t find any difference.”

  “Could they have swapped the results?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Repeating the same sample for two different batches or someone falsifies the test results that get entered?”

  “Our system checks for errors, duplicate results are flagged, missing results are flagged, out of range results are flagged, most test data is automatic so we even avoid transcription errors. As I said, we run tight here. We have an incentive most manufacturers never have. I don’t want a flock of angry vampires at my door if a mistake happens somewhere. A herd of humans can be eliminated but vampires are strong and demanding. No, we are serious about keeping our product and data safe.” He turned from the screen, “Only one thing bothers me.”