In the Heart of Darkness

by Reinke, Sara

  Shoulders hunched, he tried to look appropriately contrite as he followed Andrei into what had once been a bathroom. Mason already knew there was no running water in the building; he’d seen several 100-gallon potable water tanks in the kitchen, along with plastic-wrapped cases of bottled drinking water. He’d been instructed to piss into a hospital urinal; Sofiya had emptied it for him periodically with the sort of unaffected resignation that suggested she dumped all of the urinals on a regular basis for the men in the house. A portable toilet, the kind found in RVs or boats, was available if he needed it, or so he’d been told. The girls, on the other hand, all shared a single camping commode—little more than a toilet seat mounted on an aluminum frame, with a garbage bag hanging beneath it for so-called easy disposal.

  Without the need for a proper bathroom, the one on the first floor had been converted into a storage area. The toilet, tub, and sink had all been removed, leaving broken areas in the tile floor and ragged holes in the plaster through which severed plumbing lines still protruded. Metal shelving units lined the walls, and these were all neatly arranged with medical supplies. There was no plumbing, but there was electricity, and a pair of small, dormitory-sized refrigerators, both secured with padlocks, stood where the tub had once been. Andrei had squatted in front of one, and used another key from his collection to unlock it.

  Inside the fridge, Mason saw a small phalanx of glass vials; an assortment of medications on one of the shelves. A couple of plastic IV fluid bags rested inside as well; the antibiotics Andrei had been giving to Piotr.

  On another shelf, separate from the others, Mason saw another medicine vial. This one, however, had distinctive labeling—a stylized letter P set in white against a circular background of emerald green.

  The Pharmaceaux International logo—his father’s company. And although the vial could have held anything from vaccine serum to cancer-fighting medications—after all, Pharmaceaux was one of the world’s largest research companies—Mason knew that wasn’t the case. Immediately he thought of Phillip, of whatever secret project he and Nikolić had been working on together. That bottle is a part of it.

  With a curious frown, Mason stepped closer, but before he could get a better look, Andrei stood up, closing the refrigerator door. He held a bottle of morphine in one hand, and clasped the padlock with the other, locking it again. When he turned, he drew back as if surprised to find Mason standing behind him.

  “Sorry,” Mason said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Andrei seemed to recover; shaking his head once, he brushed past Mason. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  Mason watched him go to a nearby shelving unit and grab an empty syringe. “Yeah, I seem to be overstepping my bounds a lot today.”

  He’d hoped this might get him back on Andrei’s good side, but it didn’t seem to. The medic said nothing as he began to draw back some morphine, raising both the bottle and syringe to eye level so he could measure out the appropriate dose. With a sigh, Mason raked his fingers through his hair.

  “I’m sorry for out in the hallway,” he said. “I didn’t mean to push your buttons.”

  Andrei cut him a glance. “It’s not my buttons you need to worry about,” he said—a thinly veiled warning. Lowering the syringe, he turned to Mason. “You don’t want to piss Vladan off. Trust me on that. I just cut a slug out of Vučko Sokolović for it.”

  “That’s who got shot?” Mason asked and Andrei nodded grimly. “Julien told me he tried to rape one of the girls here.”

  “He tried to rape Sofiya,” Andrei corrected, and Mason drew back in surprise. “Vladan didn’t shoot him out of any kind of decency. He shot him because she’s devica—a virgin. He’s auctioning her off online, her…” He paused, struggling to find the right word. “Her innocence, yes? To the highest bidder.”

  Holy God, Mason thought in horrified dismay.

  “Vladan doesn’t do shit if it doesn’t benefit him in some way,” Andrei said—although Mason could have told him he needn’t have wasted the breath on that particular admonition. “He’s the coldest, sickest, most ruthless man I have ever met.”

  “Then why the hell are you helping him?” Mason asked. “Because he’s your old war buddy and you feel like you owe him or something? That’s bullshit, Andrei.” He stepped closer to the younger man. “You’re better than this, smarter than this. Why the fuck do you stay here?”

  “There’s no place else I can go,” Andrei said.

  “You have medical training,” Mason insisted. “You could build on that. Hell, you’re still young, only…what? Forty-something? Go to medical school. I’ll put in a good word for you at Harvard. I’ve graduated from there…several times, in fact. You might even still be able to apply your academic credits from when you were in school in Serbia.”

  Andrei laughed with very little humor. “You don’t understand. I can’t go to medical school. I can’t go anywhere, do anything, except this. Except stay with Vladan. I may be a better man now, as you say, and smarter, da, but twenty-two years ago?”

  With a heavy sigh, he turned away. Mason thought he meant to leave, dropping the matter altogether, but instead, Andrei closed the door to the supply room.

  “My unit was sent to the Foča region of eastern Bosnia in June, 1992,” he said quietly, keeping his back to Mason, his hand pressed lightly against the door. “Vladan Nikolić was Narednik…my commanding officer, like a…Sergeant, you say? We were told that the Bosniaks there…they were like vermin. We were sent to take their land, to reclaim what was rightfully ours, they told us. I believed them, you see? I was nineteen years old. I was very young and very foolish.”

  Mason remembered hearing about the Bosnian War on the news during the early to mid-1990s, and the brutal ethnic-cleansing campaigns—tantamount to genocide—that Serbian forces had carried out against the area’s Muslim minority. Entire villages had been burned to the ground. Thousands of men and boys were forced from their homes and murdered in cold blood; thousands more were forced to flee, while women and girls were enslaved, raped brutally, and systematically by the Serbian soldiers.

  Was Andrei a part of that?

  “You have no idea,” Andrei said softly, hooking his fingertips against the door as if bracing himself for a physical blow. “The things I saw. The things I did. I’m sorry for them now. With all of my heart, I am sickened and ashamed. But I can’t take them back. They can’t be undone.” He looked over his shoulder at Mason. “In 1997, my unit was tried in abstentia by the International Crime Tribunal, every man who served with Vladan in Foča. We were each sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and Vladan to thirty. Since then, there’s been even more charges—crimes for which we’ve yet to be tried.”

  “That’s why you’re all underground,” Mason said, and Andrei nodded.

  “For someone like Vladan, it’s nothing to disappear,” he said. “Through his uncle, he has all the money he needs. He can buy new papers, a new name, everything, anytime he wants. For me, it’s not so easy. And I know without him—his money, his help—I’d be caught.” He looked at Mason, a pleading expression on his face. “I know what’s waiting for me. I know it’s what I deserve. But I…I can’t face it. Not yet.”

  “Maybe I can help you,” Mason said. “Maybe we can help each other. Get me out of here—help me and Julien escape—and I’ll go to the mat for you. My father had contacts with the State Department. I can make some phone calls, call in some favors…” His voice faded as Andrei smirked.

  “I saw Vladan rape a girl with his bayonet in the village of Kalinovik. She wasn’t any older than our little Sofiya, and he tore her apart. I stood there and watched him—I did nothing to stop it. They called him Vladan Probadač after that—Vlad the Impaler.” He arched his brow. “You think any of your father’s State Department friends want that kind of blood on their hands?”

  Mason didn’t answer; he merely stared at Andrei, sickened and dismayed.

  “Vladan liked that name—Probadač,” Andrei
said. “That was what they called Dracula, too. The real Dracula, I mean. Vladan was obsessed with things like that, legends about the strigoi, vampires. I grew up with the same stories when I was a kid, but Vladan…he swore to me they were real. Told me that he’d met a strigoi, and how fast he was, how powerful, how strong. How he could read your mind, talk to you inside your head, kill you from across the room with little more than a glance. He never got sick, never grew old, and he could heal from just about any wound.” He met Mason’s gaze gravely. “He meant your friend.”

  “Julien?” Mason blinked in surprise.

  “Vladan had met him several years before the war. He told me the strigoi—your Julien—was the reason he’d enlisted in the Army. He’d caused trouble for Vladan somehow with his uncle, and Draško sent Vladan away. That’s why Vladan hates him, why he’s here. But he admires him, too, in a jealous sort of way. He…” Andrei paused, looking thoughtful. “Vladan covets him. Da? To have that kind of power, to control someone who does…to Vladan, they’re the same.”

  “What about me and Edith? Does he want to control us, too?” Mason asked, but Andrei shook his head. “Come on, you have to know something. I saw a vial from Pharmaceaux—my father’s company—in that refrigerator. What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know,” Andrei insisted. “I never knew anything about that, not until Vladan brought you here.” He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “I’ll talk to him. Maybe I can convince him to let you and the woman go when she’s finished with her work. You’ve been a help to him, and he knows it. Maybe he’ll agree. But your friend…” He shook his head again. “Vladan will never let him go. He’s waited half his life for this. If he can’t keep the strigoi, he’ll kill him.”

  * * *

  “I want you to keep an eye on our patients for awhile,” Nikolić told Andrei when he and Mason had returned to the cramped upstairs bedroom. He stood with a soft groan, as if sitting in the wooden chair for a prolonged period of time had stiffened his knees. “I think it’s time Dr. Morin and I had a chat together, just the two of us.”

  He reached for Mason, but Mason drew back, his brows narrowed. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  Andrei had warned him not to try Nikolić’s temper, but he had no desire to be alone with the man for any length of time. He shot Andrei a glance, hoping for rescue, but the medic had squatted down in front of Piotr and had his back to Mason, either deliberately trying to stay out of the conversation, or wanting to keep his face out of the splatter zone if Nikolić decided to start shooting again.

  Piotr still looked glassy-eyed, but as Andrei leaned forward, reaching for the IV site at his left inner elbow, something in the young man’s dazed demeanor shifted. He cut his gaze from the floor to Andrei, and Mason’s keen ears picked up on a sudden shift, a quickening in his heart rate. His eyes appeared black—not just his pupils fully dilated like a human’s on the juice, but larger, as if extended beyond their natural perimeters, almost like a Brethren’s. He didn’t have fangs, but his entire mouth suddenly appeared flushed, his lips and gums bright red, glossy with saliva as he began to drool.

  The same way our mouths become inflamed, the way we hyper-salivate when the bloodlust comes over us, Mason thought, wondering again just how much of the juice Nikolić had given the kid overnight. Just like one of the Brethren.

  “Dr. Morin,” Nikolić said, the tone of his voice suggesting he was trying to soothe a malcontent toddler. “If I intended you any harm, don’t you think I might have already done it?” He chuckled. “You don’t trust me, I know. I haven’t given you any reason to. I also know you have questions—lots of them. I’d like the chance, if I may, to try and answer some. And perhaps, in the process, earn a modicum of your trust.”

  Fat chance, asshole, Mason thought, but he bit back the sharp retort. He didn’t have any cards outside of Andrei to play when it came to bidding for his release or escape. Getting into Nikolić’s good graces—letting the big man believe he’d won Mason over—might just be the ace in the hole he’d been hoping for.

  Judging by the fact that Andrei shot him a glance from over his shoulder, his brows raised, he was thinking along the same lines. What the hell, that look seemed to say.

  Mason cut his gaze toward Nikolić for a long moment, his brows crimped with defiance, before he finally huffed out a short, sharp breath. “Alright then,” he muttered, making a show of relenting. “It’s not like I’ve got anything else—”

  From behind him, Andrei uttered a sharp, startled sound that abruptly ripped up octaves to a shrill, agonized scream. Mason whirled just in time to see Piotr knock the medic to the ground, as he launched himself off the bed. His back hunched over Andrei, Piotr landed hard atop him, the floorboards shuddering with the impact. He’d tucked his face against Andrei’s neck, and when blood sprayed up between them, a bright, grisly geyser, Mason realized.

  His neck—holy shit, he’s biting Andrei in the neck!

  “Hey—!” he cried, and without thinking, he sprang forward, grabbing the kid roughly by the shoulder. As he tried to haul Piotr off of Andrei, the younger man reared back. This time, Mason knew it was no illusion, no trick of the lights—his eyes were black, his pupils fully distended. His teeth were bared in a furious snarl with sinewy scraps of skin and muscle dangling between them. His face was blood-smeared from the nose down; he’d managed to tear deep enough into Andrei’s throat to reach one of the bigger blood vessels nestled within.

  Holy shit! Mason thought again, just as Piotr reached up, clamping his bloody hand over Mason’s. He swung his arm, sending Mason flying across the room. Mason slammed into the wall, then crashed to the ground, landing in a shuddering heap, face-down.

  He heard Andrei scream again, a gut-wrenching, agonized sound, and struggled to sit up. His head swimming from the brutal impact with the wall, he stumbled dizzily to his feet. Piotr was astride Andrei again, and the poor medic fought wildly beneath him as again, the younger man buried his face into the torn meat of Andrei’s neck.

  “Pomozite mi!” Andrei shrieked, driving his fists vainly into Piotr’s head, clawing and ripping at his hair. Mason didn’t need any translation of his cries: Help me!

  “Piotr, stop!” Nikolić roared, stooping over the boy and grabbing him roughly by the shoulders. He was a large man, and strong, but in that moment, even at half Nikolić’s size, Piotr—overcome with the bloodlust—was even stronger. He whirled toward Nikolić, and with a single swing of his remaining arm—as if batting away a mosquito—Piotr knocked him backwards. Nikolić floundered, off balance, then fell onto his ass. Before he could do more than lift his arms toward his face in feeble defense, Piotr sprang at him, tackling with NFL-grade proficiency and brute force.

  Nikolić bellowed out an inarticulate garble of Serbian curse words as he tried to ward off Piotr’s attack. Piotr lashed out at him like a rabid dog, groping and pawing with his blood-slickened hand as he tried to pry Nikolić’s arms away from his head and neck. When at last, he settled for sinking his teeth into Nikolić’s forearm, clamping down like a rat terrier on a ham bone and drawing blood, Nikolić howled in pain.

  Mason scrabbled forward, seizing Andrei beneath the arms and dragging him backwards. There was blood everywhere, bright and glistening in broad pools on the floor, splashed and splattered all over the walls, soaked and stained in Andrei’s clothes. The smell of it might have ordinarily appealed to Mason, inciting the bloodlust within him, but in that moment, instead it repulsed him, turning his gut in a taut, heart-sickened knot. Piotr had gnashed through Andrei’s carotid artery—one of the largest in the human body—and even as Mason clapped his hands over the gory wound, shoving down with all of his might, he knew it was hopeless.

  “Andrei…!” he gasped in horrified dismay. “Oh…oh, Jesus…!”

  Andrei had stopped struggling; hell, he could barely move from the massive blood loss. His eyelids had drooped to a heavy, dazed half-mast. He face had gone ashen, his breathing ragged. He reach
ed up for Mason’s hands and uttered a low, feeble groan.

  “Hold on,” Mason said to him, leaning over, trying to help his friend cling to life, using his hands to force it to remain within Andrei’s battered form. “Stay with me, Andrei, do you hear me? Stay with me!”

  He felt something poke him as Andrei caught him by the wrist. He blinked in surprise, his vision blurring with tears, at the remote control device to his collar that Andrei offered him.

  “Take…it…” Andrei gasped. Blood peppered from his lips as he spoke, his voice little more than a broken, strained wheeze, and Mason didn’t need telepathy to sense the younger man’s fear.

  “Andrei,” Mason whispered as the medic pushed the controller at him. He clapped his hand atop Andrei’s, holding onto him fiercely even as Andrei relaxed beneath him, his fingers slackening, the remote slipping from his grasp. His head lolled to the side, his eyes fixed at that sleep half-mast, and the weak flutter of his breath fell still.

  The report of a gunshot ripped through the narrow confines of the room. Mason turned and saw Piotr on his feet again, stumbling back from where Nikolić lay sprawled on the floor. Nikolić held a gun in his hand, thrust upward between them, and even as Piotr retreated, he uttered a hoarse, furious cry and fired again.

  Piotr lurched as the bullet struck him, but regained his footing before toppling to the ground. He snarled like a feral animal, then lunged for the door. Just as he reached out to grab the handle, it flew open as a pair of armed guards, alarmed by the ruckus, charged in. One of them squawked in breathless surprise as Piotr grabbed him by the throat, jerking him forward and off his feet. That startled sound became a pain-filled screech as Piotr lashed out, clamping his teeth into the man’s face.

  Nikolić screamed at his men in Serbian, even as the second guard staggered back, his eyes wide in bewildered fright. His comrade continued to shriek, his arms and legs thrashing, as with a wet, horrible rip, Piotr bit off his nose, along with most of his upper lip.