by Tanya Huff
Panting through locked teeth, she groped for the flashlight and suddenly realized she wasn’t alone.
Her vision consisted of only a very narrow path along the floor, illuminated by the flashlight and bound by the disease that had destroyed her sight. Into that path shuffled a pair of feet wearing new track shoes with velcro tabs. Beyond horror, Vicki froze, unable to move, unable to think, unable to look away as the feet shuffled toward her. When they stopped, she could also see sweatpants covering the legs from knees to ankles. The creature by the box had been wearing sweatpants, but she could still hear the sounds of fighting. . . .
Finally, she got her fingers closed around the rubber grip and, clutching it like a talisman, she slowly forced herself to straighten.
Her mother looked down at her, much as her mother had looked down at her a thousand times before. Except this time, her mother was dead.
She felt reason slipping away and scrambled desperately for its edges. This was her mother. Her mother loved her. Dead or not, her mother would never harm her.
Then the dead lips parted and a dead mouth formed her name.
Too much.
Henry heard the scream, turned, and ran toward it. Still half blind, his sense of smell useless in corridors saturated with abomination, he raced back along the path of Vicki’s terror and came up facing a dead end.
Howling with rage, he doubled back, senses straining for the touch of her life to guide him.
“VICKI!” Celluci threw himself against the door in impotent fury. Again, and again.
And again.
Mouth dry, heart pounding in the too-small cage of her ribs, Vicki slowly backed away. Hands reaching out for her, her dead mother followed. The harsh illumination of the flashlight accentuated the death pallor and threw tiny shadows beside each of the staples across Marjory Nelson’s forehead.
Her feet continued moving for a moment before Vicki realized she wasn’t going any farther, that the distance between them was closing. The cold metal curve of the isolation box pressed into the small of her back. Go around! she thought, but she couldn’t remember how. She couldn’t take her eyes off the approaching figure. Nor could she turn the light away in the hope that it would disappear in the darkness.
“Stop!”
Vicki jerked, the sound slapping at her.
The dead woman, who had been Marjory Nelson, dragged herself forward one more step, then had to obey.
“Stay!” Catherine, with number nine following close behind her, entered the lab, squinted as she crossed the beam of light, and glared around. “Just look at this place. It’ll take days to get it all cleared up.” She kicked at a fractured bit of circuit board and turned on Vicki, her movements nearly as jerky as her companion’s. “Who are you?”
Who am I? Her glasses were sliding down her nose. She bent her head until she could push them up with the index finger of her injured hand. Who was she? She swallowed, trying to wet her mouth. “Nelson. Vicki Nelson.”
“Vicki Nelson?” Catherine repeated, coming closer.
The tone sent a knife blade down Vicki’s spine, although the grad student was still outside the boundary of her vision. This person is insane. Crazy just wasn’t a strong enough word for the fractures in Catherine’s voice.
Leaving number nine in the shadows, Catherine crossed into the cone of light and stopped just in front of where Marjory Nelson strained against the compulsion holding her in place. “Dr. Burke told me about you. You wouldn’t stop snooping around.” The pointed chin rose and the pale blue eyes narrowed. “She wouldn’t have tried to terminate the experiments if it wasn’t for you. This is all your fault!” The last word became a curse and she threw herself forward, fingers curved to claws, claws reaching for Vicki’s throat.
Self-preservation broke the paralysis. Vicki threw herself sideways, knowing she wasn’t going to be fast enough. She felt fingertips catch at her collar, had a sudden look into the pit of madness as, for an instant, Catherine’s contorted face filled her vision, then all at once, found herself staggering back, no longer under attack. Sagging against the support of the box, she raised the light, searching for an explanation.
Catherine dangled from her mother’s hands then was tossed, with no apparent effort, to one side.
It was the sort of rescue that small children implicitly believed their mothers could perform. In spite of everything, Vicki found herself smiling.
“Way to go, Mom,” she muttered, trying to catch her breath.
Number nine had not understood what the other who was like him was about to do.
Then he heard her cry out as she struck the floor.
She was hurt.
He remembered anger.
Number nine’s first blow shattered ribs, the crack of breaking bone gunshot loud, splinters driven into the chest cavity.
That first blow would have killed her, had she not already been dead. She staggered under the impact but managed to remain standing. The second blow knocked uplifted arms aside, the third threw her halfway across the lab.
Vicki struggled to keep the battle in sight, bracing herself on the box and playing the flashlight beam over the room like some kind of demented spotlight operator at a production more macabre than anything modern theater had to offer.
Nutrient fluid dripped from the ruin of number nine’s hands, violence having finished what rot had begun. Glistening curves of bone showed through the destruction of his wrists. He used his forearms like clubs, smashing them down again and again.
Vicki watched as her mother’s body slammed into a metal shelving unit, shelves and contents crashing to the floor. A number of the glass containers seemed to explode on contact with the floor, spewing chemical vapor into the air to mix with the smell of decay. As number nine lurched forward, Vicki could stand it no longer.
“For chrissakes, Mom!” she screamed. “Hit the bastard back!”
Her mother turned, head lolling on a neck no longer capable of support, met her daughter’s gaze for a moment, then bent and ripped free one of the shelves’ flat metal struts. Holding it like a baseball bat, she straightened and swung.
The ragged end of the steel bar caught number nine in the temple, shearing through the thin bone and into the brain. Gold gleamed for a second as the neural net tore loose, then number nine reeled back and collapsed.
The bar rang against the tile. Marjory Nelson swayed and crumpled, as though invisible strings had been cut.
“MOM!” Vicki stumbled forward and threw herself to her knees. She couldn’t hold her mother and the flashlight both, so she shoved the latter in under her sling and dragged the limp body up onto her lap. The diffuse light, shining through the thin cotton of Henry’s shirt, wiped away all the changes that death and science had made and gave her back her mother.
“Mom? Don’t be dead. Oh, please, don’t be dead. Not again. . . .”
Too much damage. She could feel the binding letting go.
But there was something she had to do.
“Mom? Goddamnit, Mom. . .” Pale gray eyes, so like her own, flickered open and Vicki forgot how to breathe. She shouldn’t have been able to see their expression, but she could, could see it clearly, felt it wrap around her and for one long moment keep her safe from the world.
“. . . love you. . . Vic . . . ki . . .”
Tears pooled under the edge of her glasses and spilled down her cheeks. “I love you, too, Mom.” Her vision blurred and when it cleared she was alone. “Mom?” But the gray eyes stared up at nothing and the body she held was empty. Very, very carefully, she slid it off her lap and stroked the eyes closed.
Her mother was dead.
She started to shake. The pressure grew, closing her throat, twisting her muscles into knots, tossing her back and forth where she knelt. The first sob ripped huge burning holes in her heart and held as much anger as grief. It hurt so much that she surrendered to the second, curled around the pain, and cried.
Cried for her mother.
Cried for
herself.
Number nine lay where he had fallen. The anger was gone. Although he had no way of knowing that the neural net had stopped functioning, he dimly understood that the part that was body and the part that was him were now separate.
He stared up at the ceiling, wanting. . .
. . . wanting. . .
Then the view shifted and she was there.
Catherine gently turned number nine’s head to face her.
“I can’t fix you,” she whispered, drawing her finger softly around the curve of his jaw, alternately tracing flesh and bone. “You were going to stay with me forever. I wouldn’t have let her shut you down.” She smiled and tenderly pushed a flap of skin back into place.
“You were,” she told him, voice catching in her throat, “the very best experiment I ever did.”
He wanted her to smile.
He liked it when she smiled.
Then she was gone.
He wanted her to come back.
Slowly, every movement precisely performed, Catherine got to her feet. Every step carefully planned, she advanced across the lab. She paused at the jagged length of steel, still lying where it had been dropped, bent, and lifted it from the floor.
The end torn from the shelf gleamed, polished and pointed by the force that had ripped it free.
She held it up and smiled at it.
The flat metal bar cracked across Vicki’s bent shoulders and smashed her to the floor. The world tilted and instinct took over as, gasping in pain, she managed to squirm around to face the assault, shoving her glasses back into place.
The flashlight twisted in the folds of cloth and somehow finished pointed straight up, a miniature searchlight. It lit the gleaming end of steel descending toward Vicki. But not in time.
Sixteen
Henry heard the pounding as he raced down the corridor leading to the lab, heard it and would have ignored it had it not been accompanied by a fine libretto of Italian profanity. He rocked to a stop in front of an old paneled door, saw that the doorknob had been bent down in such a way as to render it nonfunctional, and solved the problem by bracing one hand against the wall and yanking the entire mechanism out of the wood.
The door crashed back and Celluci exploded out into the hall, the force of his exit throwing him to his knees.
Grabbing him by the collar, Henry hauled him to his feet, blocking the resulting flurry of blows with his other arm.
Celluci’s snarled challenge broke off as he finally recognized the vampire. “Where the hell were you?” he demanded.
“Finding my way back,” Henry answered coldly. “What were you doing in there?”
“Trying to get out.” The tone matched exactly. “I heard Vicki scream.”
“So did I.”
Together they turned and ran toward the lab.
As they raced through the doorway, the bloodscent hit Henry an almost solid blow, too close now to be masked by either decay or the alcohol vapor still seeping into the air. Far from replete, the Hunger rose. For Vicki’s sake Henry held it, and forced it back; he couldn’t help her if he lost control. While he struggled to maintain reason, Celluci pulled ahead.
It seemed there were bodies all over the room, but Celluci only saw one that mattered. Sprawled on her back to one side of the isolation box, Vicki lay motionless except for the purely kinetic jerk that occurred when a blow landed. He saw the steel bar go up and come down, then, howling in inarticulate rage, he grabbed the pale-haired woman by the shoulders and flung her behind him.
“Your fault, too!” Catherine screamed, launching herself back, the jagged end of the bar dripping crimson.
There was no time for Celluci to prepare himself for the attack. Then, all at once, there was no attack.
His arm darting out faster than mortal eye could follow, Henry caught Catherine by the back of the neck, wrapped his other hand around the top of her head, and twisted.
The pale eyes rolled up. For the second time that night the metal strut rang against the tile as it fell from fingers suddenly slack.
Tossing the body aside, Henry threw himself to his knees, his hands joining Celluci’s as they frantically searched for the wounds below Vicki’s blood-soaked clothing.
The iron bar had torn a chunk of flesh from her left shoulder and had scored the right side of her ribs in two places. Ugly wounds, all three, but hardly fatal.
Then they lifted her fingers out of the puddle between hip and thigh.
“Jesus!” Henry pressed his hand down on the spot and met Celluci’s wild gaze. “Arterial,” he said quietly and strained to hear her heart above the painful pounding of his own.
The blood spattered across the flashlight lens made Rorschach patterns on the ceiling.
Number nine lay, head to one side as she had left him, waiting for her to come back.
And then she was there.
But she didn’t see him and she didn’t smile.
“Fifteen minutes. It takes fifteen minutes to bleed to death from that kind of wound.”
“I know that!” Henry snapped. He had her heartbeat now, but it was frighteningly faint.
“Of course you do.” His fingers trembling, Celluci looped the arm of her glasses back over the curve of her ear. “You’re a fucking vampire. You know bleeding. So do something about it!”
Henry glared at him. There was no way to do a tourniquet in the joining of torso and leg. No way but direct pressure to stop the bleeding and he was already doing that, even if he did it too late. “Do what?” he demanded, sure there was nothing else he could do.
“How the fuck should I know! You’re the fucking. . . Jesus!”
Pulled by the intensity of Celluci’s terrified stare, Henry twisted around. Across the lab, by the wall of boarded up windows, one of the bodies rose slowly to its feet.
One of them had killed her.
Killed her dead.
The anger number nine had known before was less than nothing in comparison to what he felt now.
My gun? Where the hell is my gun? Swatting aside panic, Celluci scanned the floor and finally spotted it almost under the cavader’s feet. Fucking great . . .
Scrambling to his feet, he launched himself forward, dove, got both hands around the weapon, rolled, and pulled the trigger at almost point-blank range.
The bullet plowed through the putrefying tissue with almost no loss of velocity and rang against the brass casing of the oxygen tank directly behind. It ricocheted up the curve, hit the next tank, and sprayed bits of the valve across the room. Oxygen began to hiss free.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Still on the floor, Celluci crabbed back. Although pus and fluid and God-knew-what poured from the hole, the dead man continued to shuffle forward. “What the fuck do you think this is? A fucking James Cameron movie?” His hands were shaking too hard to try a head shot. He watched his second round blow a chunk from the outside curve of the thing’s thigh without any noticeable effect. “Goddamnit, stay dead!”
The third round passed through the abdomen again, rang against brass and sparked.
All hell broke loose.
Henry threw himself over Vicki.
Celluci flattened.
The explosion sent chunks of the oxygen tank flying through the air like shrapnel. Several of the larger chunks slammed into number nine, cutting him into pieces.
He remembered dying.
The last time, she had been there when it was over.
He hoped she’d be there again.
With a whoosh, the alcohol vapor in the air ignited, then the alcohol, then the desk.
Then the emergency light shut off.
Celluci picked his way back to Vicki’s side. “Fucking place is on fire. At least we can still see.” He squinted at Henry, the pale skin of the vampire’s face and chest just barely visible in the flickering light. “You okay?”
“Yes.”
“Vicki?”
Henry hesitated, praying he’d hear something different, knowing he wouldn’t. “She�
�s dying.”
“Fuck that!” Ripping off jacket and shoulder holster, Celluci yanked his shirt over his head, ignoring the buttons. Folding most of the fabric into a rough pad, sleeves dangling, he shoved it at Henry. “She said your saliva causes clotting.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Spit on this and tie that wound off. We’re practically on top of a fucking hospital. You get the bleeding stopped and we move her.”
“It’s too . . .”
“Do it!”
Although he knew it would make no difference, Henry took the shirt and bent over the jagged hole. Michael Celluci had lived less than forty years and still thought death could be fought. Four and a half centuries had taught a different lesson. In a battle between love and death, death always won. He could feel Vicki’s life ebbing, knew that nothing they could do would change that.
His fingers maintaining pressure, he covered the still bleeding gash with his mouth. At least when she died, he would have contact with her blood. He pulled the touch, the taste, the scent of her into memory. You are mortal, my love. I always knew you’d die, but I never dreamed we’d have so little time . . .
Suddenly, Celluci’s fingers were in his hair and the contact broken.
“I said wrap it, Goddamnit. Not fucking take what she has left!”
Henry drew bloodstained lips back off his teeth. “Get your hands off me, mortal!”
The explosion had jerked Vicki back out of the twilight zone of pain and darkness she’d sunk into. She hadn’t thought it was possible to hurt so much and still be alive. She could hear the two men arguing and fought against the weight hanging from her tongue.