by Tanya Huff
“Fresher bodies!” Donald almost shrieked the words. “Are you crazy?”
“I’ve come to believe that the sooner the bacteria are applied the better they do.” Her fingers danced over the keyboard. A moment later she offered him the printout. “I’ve graphed the time factor against the life of the bacteria and the amount of repair they were able to do. I think you’ll find my conclusions to be unquestionable. The fresher the body, the longer it will last, the greater the chance of complete success.”
Donald looked from the papers to Catherine and his eyes widened with a sudden realization. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before. Maybe the money and recognition Dr. Burke kept talking about had interfered. Maybe the whole godlike concept of raising the dead had clouded his judgment. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to see.
When he looked number nine in the eyes, he saw a person and that was pretty terrifying. When he put Catherine under the same scrutiny, he didn’t recognize what he saw and that was more terrifying still. Heart pounding, he stood and began to back away. “You are crazy.”
His shoulder blades slammed up against number nine. He whirled and screamed.
The sound hurt.
But he had learned how to make it stop.
Donald clawed at the hand wrapped around his throat, fingernails digging into dead flesh.
Catherine frowned. It looked very much as though number nine had merely responded to Donald’s scream. The sound appeared to hurt him, so he stopped it. Without further data, the obvious conclusion was that the young man last night had also screamed. Still, number nine was applying last night’s lesson to a new situation and that was encouraging.
The wet noises were better. Quiet would be better still.
He tightened his grip.
Release! Release! The command had been implanted. Number nine would have to obey. The word roared inside Donald’s skull, but he couldn’t force it out. His vision went red. Then purple. Then black.
Number nine looked down at what he held, then up at her. Slowly, he straightened his arm, offering the body.
She also looked down. Then up. Then she nodded, and he knew he had done the right thing.
“Put him on the table.” As number nine moved to obey, Catherine saved the program she’d been working on and loaded Donald’s brain wave patterns into the system. She’d needed a fresher body to test her hypothesis and now she had one. The perfect one. Even the bacteria had already been tailored.
Except the bacteria were in her other lab down in the subbasement because Dr. Burke had told her to stop wasting valuable experimental time on something that wouldn’t be used.
She could put the net in now and then go for the bacteria or she could go for the bacteria and leave Donald where he was or . . .
Moving quickly—whatever she did, time was of the essence—she opened the isolation box that had held number eight. If she put him in here, she could at least keep him cold while she ran downstairs. Decision made, she touched number nine lightly on the arm.
“Put him in here.”
Number nine knew the box.
The head went so.
The feet went so.
The arms lay straight at the sides.
“Good.” Catherine smiled her approval, lowered the lid, then switched on the refrigeration unit. She didn’t bother latching the box. She wouldn’t be gone long. Pushing him gently, she guided number nine up against the wall and out of the way, “Stay here. Don’t follow.”
Her rubber soled shoes made no sound against the tile as she sprinted for the door.
Stay here. Don’t follow.
He wanted to be with her, but he did as she said.
Henry glared at the fire door. Obviously, he couldn’t go into the building the same way the creature had come out. Although he might be able to work his way around the lack of an external handle, he could do nothing about the alarm. From the outside, he couldn’t even destroy it. Somewhere, there had to be another way in.
Plywood covered the first floor windows between the wire grilles and the glass and a quick tour of the entrances showed them to have been similarly barricaded and wired besides. Frustrated and back by the fire door, Henry shoved his fingers behind the lower edge of a grille and gave an experimental tug. If the direct approach is necessary . . .
The bolts pulled out of the concrete and the side bars began to bend, metal screaming.
Bad idea. He froze, listening for reaction. In the distance, he heard leather soles slap against concrete and felt two lives, coming closer. Stepping away from the building, he became part of the night and waited.
“. . . so he said, ‘Chicago? In four? You’ve got to be out of your mind. I’ll bet you twenty bucks they don’t even make it out of the quarterfinals.’ So I took the bet and in a couple of days, I’ll take the twenty.”
“Ah, man, how can you think of hockey at a time like this?”
“A time like what?”
“Baseball season, man. Opening day was the sixth. You got no business thinking about hockey, talking about hockey, playin’ hockey, after baseball season starts.”
“But hockey season isn’t over.”
“Maybe not, but it should be. Shit, this keeps up they’ll be giving out ol’ Stanley’s cup in June.”
They wore the uniform of university Security; two men bracketing forty, both with flashlights, both with billies in their belts. One of them carried his weight forward on his feet, daring the world to try something. The other balanced an impressive gut with enormous shoulders and arms. They passed inches from the shadow where Henry stood and never knew they were observed.
“This the door?”
“Yeah.” The steel rattled under a slap from a beefy hand. “Some asshole genius student probably cutting through from the new Life Sciences building.”
“Cutting through? In the dark?”
“What dark? They keep one in four lights on in there just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“Beats the hell out of me, but the place still has power.”
“What a friggin’ waste of money.”
“No shit. Maybe if they turned off the lights and saved the dough they could afford to tear this ratbox down and build that parking garage.”
“A parking garage? Now, man that’s a building we could use around here.”
From the Parthenon to the parking garage; how much further can civilization deteriorate? Henry wondered as the patrol moved on. Hands shoved into his pockets, he turned toward the new Life Sciences building, a brightly lit contrast to the dark and boarded structure it had replaced. So the buildings are connected. The creature went into the old and Dr. Burke works in the new—along with a couple of hundred other people. Just exactly the sort of not quite information that Vicki and Celluci have been collecting all day.
Let’s see if the night can find some answers for them.
The guard at the front entrance noticed only the brief touch of a breeze that ruffled her newspaper but missed the movement that had made it. Once inside, Henry headed silently for the lower levels at the north end of the building. As the connection had not been visible, it had to be underground.
In the basement, he crossed a scent he knew. Or rather, the perversion of a scent he knew. He’d spent the last three days in the dark of Marjory Nelson’s closet surrounded by her clothes and the stored bits and pieces of her life. The scent of her death, robbed of its peace and twisted back into a grotesque existence, clung to the tiles and paint much the way it had clung to the apartment window.
It led him to the passage, through it, up a flight of stairs, down a hall, up another flight of stairs, across an empty lecture hall with scars in the floor where the seats had been. Finally, it led him to a corridor, so thick with the stench of abomination, he could no longer separate individual paths.
Halfway down the corridor, a razor’s edge of light showed under a door.
He could hear the low hum of electronic equipment, he could hear moto
rs, and he could hear a heartbeat. He couldn’t sense a life.
When he tried to step forward, his legs refused to obey.
Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, bastard son of Henry VIII, had been raised to believe in the physical resurrection of the body. When the Day of Judgment came and the Lord called the faithful to Him, they would come not only in spirit, but also in flesh. He had gone to chapel nearly every day of his seventeen years, and this belief had been at the core of his religious upbringing. Even when his royal father had split from Rome, the resurrection of the body had remained.
Four and a half centuries had changed his views on religion but he had never been able to fully rid himself of his early training. He had been raised a sixteenth-century Catholic and, in some ways, a sixteenth-century Catholic he remained.
He couldn’t go into that room.
And if you’re not going to do it, who is? A bit of wood trim splintered beneath his fingers. Michael Celluci? Will you give him that much? Give him the opportunity to ride to the rescue while you cower in superstitious terror? Vicki, then? What of the vow you made to keep this from her?
He managed a step, a small one, toward the door. Had his nature allowed him to sweat, his hand would have left a damp signature on the wall. As it was, his fingertips imprinted the plaster.
Legend named his kind undead but, in spite of how it had appeared to the medical establishment of his time, he had changed, not died. In that room, the dead were up and walking. Robbed of their chance for eternal life. Removed from the grace of God. . . .
I will not be ruled by my past at Vicki’s expense.
The door was unlocked.
The room it bisected was enormous, stretching half the length of the hall. Henry raised a hand to shield sensitive eyes from the brilliant white glare of the fluorescents, noting as he did how the windows had been carefully blocked to prevent any of that light from escaping and marking the room as in use. He recognized almost none of the equipment that filled much of the available space. Fictional precedent aside, the working of the perversion obviously involved more than a scalpel and a lightning rod.
Perhaps I’d recognize it if I wrote science fiction instead of romance, he mused, moving silently forward accompanied by the demons of his childhood.
The stench of abomination had become so pervasive it coated the inside of his nose and mouth and lungs and spread like a layer of scum across his skin. He could only hope he could eventually be rid of it, that he wouldn’t be forced to carry it throughout eternity like an invisible mark of Cain.
There were brass tanks lined up below the windows, shelves of chemicals, two computers, and a door leading to a small and mostly empty storeroom. The door leading out the other side of the storeroom was locked.
Finally, unable to avoid it any longer, Henry turned toward the slow and steady beat that he’d been all too aware of since he’d entered the room.
The creature stood behind a row of metal boxes, eight feet long and four feet wide. Too large to be coffins, they reminded Henry of the outer sarcophagus that had kept an ancient Egyptian wizard imprisoned, undying, for three centuries. Most of the electrical noise that Henry could hear came from the boxes. The mechanical noise came from the creature.
Cautiously, Henry slid along the wall, never in its direct line of sight. When he drew even with the creature, he paused and forced himself to acknowledge what he saw.
Unkempt dark hair fell back from a long line of face where green-gray skin wore the look of fine-grained leather and a black-threaded seam stitched a flap of forehead down. A nose that had obviously been broken more than once folded back on itself above purplegray lips no longer able to close over the ivory curve of teeth. Even taking the desiccation of death into account, the muscles were wiry and the bones prominent through the navy blue tracksuit. It had been a man. A man who had not been very old when he died.
The narrow chest rose and fell, but it gave no indication it was aware.
Sweet Jesu! Henry took a step forward. And then another. Then he turned to face it.
Its eyes were open.
Number nine waited. She would be back soon.
He saw the strange one enter the room and he watched the strange one come closer.
The strange one looked at him.
He looked back.
Snarling, Henry broke contact and jerked away.
It was alive.
The body was dead.
But it was alive.
Whoever has done this thing should be damned for all eternity and beyond!
Trembling with anger and other emotions less easily defined, Henry dropped his hands to the lid of the box in front of him. Marjory Nelson, Vicki’s mother, had to be in one of these. He no longer knew what he would do when he found her.
We give them to Detective Fergusson. So easy to decide in the abstract.
And what will Detective Fergusson do?
He opened the box.
The smell of recent death, free of any taint, rose with the lid and for an instant Henry hoped—but the body in the box had never belonged to Marjory Nelson. A young Oriental male wearing a band of purple finger marks around his throat, eyes bulging, tongue protruding, lay stretched out in the padded plastic hollow. He’d been dead for such a short time that the flush of blood caused by strangulation had not yet left his face.
Marjory Nelson suddenly became of lesser importance. She had already been lost and he could do no more for her than find her. This boy he could save.
Moving quickly, he closed the staring eyes then slid his arms behind knees and shoulders and lifted the chilled body free. The weight meant nothing but the load was awkward and he had to shuffle sideways until he cleared the row of boxes and could turn.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Drowning in the stink of abomination, Henry hadn’t scented her approach nor, with ears tuned only to a heart that should be making no noise, had he heard her. In no mood to be subtle, he raised his head to meet her eyes, to order her away, and found behind a surface veneer of normalcy nothing he could touch. Her thoughts spiraled endlessly; starting nowhere, going nowhere.
Pale eyes narrowed. Pale cheeks flushed. “Stop him,” she said.
Hands clamped onto Henry’s shoulders and yanked him back. Across the top of his head, he could feel death breathing. This is not life! his senses screamed. His skin crawled in revulsion. He lost his grip on the boy, felt himself lifted and slammed down onto a surface that gave beneath the force of the blow. He twisted and looked up in time to see the lid coming down.
“NO!”
“He’s not back yet.”
Celluci jerked away, head snapping up painfully, muscles suddenly tense. “Wha . . . ?”
“He’s not back yet,” Vicki repeated from the center of the living room, arms wrapped tightly around herself. “And it’s nearly dawn.”
“Who’s not back? Fitzroy?” Shoving his fist in front of a jaw-cracking yawn, Celluci glanced down at his watch. “6:12. When’s the sun due up?”
“6:17,” Vicki told him. “He’s got five minutes.” She kept her face and voice expressionless, reporting the facts, just the facts, because if she gave the screaming panic clawing at her from inside any chance to get free she was horribly afraid she’d never be able to control it again.
Celluci recognized the defense. There wasn’t a cop on the planet who hadn’t used police training to cover a personal terror at least once. The ones who cared too much used it frequently. Occasionally, it started to use them. Joints protesting, he heaved himself up out of the armchair he’d fallen asleep in, muttering, “How the hell do you know when the sun comes up?”
All at once, a terrifying possibility hit him. Had Fitzroy been . . . been . . . his mind shied away from the whole concept of sucking blood, of feeding. Had Fitzroy been with her long enough that she was becoming like him? Wasn’t that how it worked? He shot an anxious glance at the mirror over the couch and was relieved to see her reflection
still in it. Then he remembered that it had reflected Fitzroy just as clearly. “You’re not turning into a . . . a . . . one of them, are you?” he snarled.
Vicki pushed at her glasses with the back of one hand. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“How do you know that sunrise is at 6:17?” He wanted to cross the room and shake the answer from her and barely managed to hold himself back.
“I read it in the paper last night.” Her brows drew in, confused by the unexpected attack. “What is your problem, Mike?”
She read it in the paper last night. “Sorry, I, uh . . .” The surge of relief was so intense it left him feeling weak and a little dizzy. He spread his hands in apology and sighed. “I thought you were becoming like him,” he said quietly, “and I was afraid I was going to lose you.”
Drawing her lower lip between her teeth, Vicki stared at him for a long moment, although in the dim dawn light she could barely make out individual features. With no resources left to throw at denial, she could sense his caring, his fear, his love—and knew he put no conditions on it, no conditions on her. To her surprise, rather than diminishing her sense of self, it added to it and made her feel stronger. Even the panic over Henry calmed a little. Her eyes grew damp.
I am not going to cry.
Shoving the words past the lump in her throat, she said, “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Good.” He heard, if not acceptance, at least acknowledgment in her tone and was content for the time to leave it at that.
The room grew perceptibly lighter.
Vicki turned toward the windows, arms wrapped tightly around herself once more. “Open the curtains.”