Hunter's Kiss

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘We believe it’s a new drug,’ Dione said. ‘Something called Apollo. Her behaviour is what flagged this to us.’

  ‘Well, we’re setting up to send SWAT in. The survivors have been taken to Mount–’

  ‘We diverted them to Harlem,’ Dione interrupted. ‘There are some specialist physicians there who can handle possible side effects. We believe this drug may be contaminated in some way and we’re taking no chances.’

  The sergeant frowned. ‘No wonder you SCU people are on this. Do I need to worry about anyone else who’s been in there?’

  ‘Check for signs of anyone who has contacted the subject. Have them taken up to Harlem and make sure they see Doctor Winthrop, Doctor Drake, or Doctor Tully. To be on the safe side, make sure anyone with body fluids from in there on their skin are checked out. Tell anyone with blood on their clothes to wear gloves and launder their uniforms.’

  ‘Shit! It’s that serious?’

  ‘We don’t know, Sergeant. I am, hopefully, taking this far beyond the realms of caution. But do you really want to end up like the woman in there?’

  ‘Point taken. I’ll get on it.’

  ‘Good. My partner and I are going in.’

  ‘Ahead of SWAT?’

  ‘Ahead of SWAT, yes. I have the authority to go over your head on this, but I’d really rather not have to get authoritarian about it.’ Dione smiled at the bulky man with his salt-and-pepper hair and moustache. The hardened cop melted just a little.

  ‘It’s your funeral, I guess,’ the sergeant said, and then walked off to check the teams who had already been inside.

  ‘How did you manage to get Winthrop, Leanne, and Lisa set up as “specialists” at Harlem?’ Mike asked as he strapped on his vest.

  ‘Mary did some string-pulling, and Winthrop is quite convincing when he’s on topic. Besides, we actually have authority from the city to deal with this and Winthrop is listed as a local CDC representative. That was something that came out of the NYPD, by the way. We had the contacts to set it all up, but they wanted us covered if some weird subspecies developed that was… I don’t know, transmissible by air.’ Dione was removing rather than adding to her outfit. Her coat came off to reveal the jumpsuit she had worn in the Candle.

  Mike picked up his shotgun. ‘Let’s hope that never happens.’

  ‘Quite. Hold on.’ Dione picked up something which looked like a segmented, metal collar. ‘Strap this on. She’s likely to go for the throat, and if she gets the upper hand, all she’ll do is break her teeth.’

  ‘What about you?’ Mike said, putting down his weapon again to buckle the gorget on.

  Dione pulled the zip on her suit from between her breasts all the way up to her throat. ‘Scale all the way up,’ she said. ‘I think she’ll recognise me as the greater threat, but I can’t be sure. Not with the brain damage this stuff does. Ready?’

  ‘As I’ll ever be.’

  They marched off across the tarmac and paused outside the club’s doors. There was a rope lying on the ground, still stringing together the chrome poles which had held it off the ground. The rush out of the club when the violence started had taken care of that in a hurry. There was also blood smearing the smoked glass door.

  ‘We go in,’ Dione said. ‘If we can’t see her, you break right, I’ll go left. I know Winthrop would like more material to work with, but you take no chances. If you see her, blow her in half.’

  Mike checked his shotgun, nodded, and they pushed through into the club.

  The foyer was empty and quite brightly lit. They looked into the coat check area and saw nothing, sensed nothing, so they moved on into the main club floor. There was a ring of an upper floor above them, but plenty of tables and the bar where their target could be hiding, and there was no immediate sign of her. Mike glanced at Dione, saw her nod, and they split.

  The lighting here was dim, shady in fact, and visibility, to Mike, was bad. To Dione, it was probably daylight, he figured, but he was having difficulty. The music still blasting out of speakers around the room, some sort of heavy rock riff, made hearing useless. He strained his eyes and kept moving, checking under tables as he went. Who knew where the woman could be hiding?

  The sudden rush of vampire made him stop and look around. Dione was invisible somewhere in the darkness on his left and he was fairly sure he had not sensed her. He was about to call out when he saw their target. The woman, dressed in a matching set of black bra and panties with the remains of a dress hanging about her shoulders, launched herself from one of the tables, aiming right for Mike. He reacted, turning and firing without thought. The slug struck her left thigh, burying itself in the meat before exploding and ripping her leg apart. The impact sent her tumbling and she smashed ungracefully into a table, smashing it beneath her, but neither the loss of her leg nor the impact appeared to be stopping her. She let out an inhuman screech, definitely rage, and tried to regain her feet. Mike pumped two more rounds into her chest and her body ripped open like a piñata, bits of bone falling at his feet from her ruined ribcage. He watched from barely two yards away as the animal fire in her eyes died away.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Dione asked from just behind Mike’s right shoulder, and he jumped.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Don’t… do that.’

  ‘Sorry. Never been that close to someone when they died?’

  ‘No. She was… I suppose saying she wasn’t human is redundant, given she was a vampire, but she was more like an animal than a vampire. But there was still some sort of intelligence there and it just… faded out of her.’

  Dione nodded. ‘I sincerely hope that you never get used to watching that happen.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘I’ve been seeing it for twenty-five centuries. Yes, I’m used to it. I like to think I regret it every time, but I’m lying to myself when I do. This one, however, was pointless.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘I don’t know, yet. We’ll find out and add her to the list of people whoever is making this drug needs to answer for.’

  ‘Okay. What now?’

  ‘Crime scene, in hazmat suits, come in here and bag what’s left of her for Winthrop. We go to Harlem. We need to be checked for signs of contagion.’

  ‘There isn’t really any contagion though.’

  Dione flashed him a grin. ‘No, but we need to keep up appearances, and I didn’t think you’d be so reluctant to see your girlfriend. Or avoid the clean-up.’

  ‘Oh, well, when you put it like that…’

  18th January.

  ‘The things I do for you,’ Leanne said as she took Mike’s blood pressure.

  ‘Oo us wanna et ma shir uf,’ Mike said around the thermometer Leanne had stuck in his mouth.

  Leanne smiled. ‘Of course I did. I’d prefer it if you had to do this naked, but we can’t all have what we want.’

  ‘Igh.’ Leanne popped the thermometer out of his mouth. ‘You think Lisa has Dione stripped to the waist?’ Mike added.

  ‘I think they have a different kind of relationship. It’s more likely that Dione has Lisa stripped to the waist.’

  ‘Oh. Am I healthy?’

  ‘Your blood pressure is a little high. Adrenaline, perhaps.’

  ‘Yeah, something like that. Can I put my shirt back on?’ Leanne peered at him while she carefully wrapped up the pressure gauge collar. ‘Leanne?’

  ‘What? I’m thinking about it.’

  Mike narrowed his eyes at her briefly and reached for his shirt, daring her to stop him. He was almost disappointed when she did not, but they did have work to do. With Mike dressed, they walked out of the cubicle to see Lisa exiting the next one, straightening her scrubs as she did so. She glanced at Mike and Leanne, and her cheeks coloured a little.

  ‘Told you,’ Leanne said under her breath.

  Dione emerged from behind the curtains with a smirk on her lips, and patted Lisa on the behind as she walked past. ‘All fit and ready for duty?’ Dione asked.

  ‘No pr
oblems,’ Leanne replied, ‘though his blood pressure was a little high.’

  ‘Strange, so was Lisa’s. Let’s go see if Winthrop has anything.’ She waited for Mike and Leanne to close up with her before adding, ‘You didn’t have any trouble with the administration, did you?’

  ‘Doctor Winthrop had a lot of very impressive credentials and asked for us specifically because we had “prior knowledge of the case.” There wasn’t much they could say. In a way, it’s quite prestigious for the hospital. We were the only ones with the staff to handle it.’

  ‘Good. I’ll remind them of that when I talk to them.’

  Winthrop was taking care of the last of the wounded when they found him. They had had to operate a triage system with the worst victims handled first, so the girl, who barely looked old enough to be in a nightclub, only had a few scrapes and a cut on her right shoulder. Her outfit had fared worse than her body.

  ‘In my day,’ Winthrop was saying, ‘a girl your age would never have been allowed out in a skirt that short.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the girl mumbled in reply, sounding suitably contrite.

  ‘At the risk of sounding like a dirty old man, things are much better than they used to be.’

  The girl gave a small giggle. ‘I don’t think you’re a dirty old man, Doctor.’

  ‘Thank you. You may find, however, that you catch a better class of young man by leaving a little more to mystery.’ He glanced around as he heard the curtain shift behind him. ‘Take Detective Hunter here. Even at her most risqué, she always leaves something to the imagination.’

  ‘You are a dirty old man, Doctor Winthrop,’ Dione told him.

  ‘It’s nice of you to say so, Diana. Haley here, and all the others, are showing no sign of any contagion. Of any kind.’

  ‘Thanks, Doctor,’ Haley said. ‘That’s good to hear. It was pretty bad in there. I don’t think I saw the one who started it. I heard someone say she just went crazy. Some new drug.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Dione said. ‘It’s called Apollo. You might like to pass the word around to your friends. The stuff kills.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t touch drugs.’

  ‘That’s very good to hear, Haley,’ Winthrop said. ‘A beautiful young lady like you should not be messing with chemicals. They are a good way to lose those looks.’

  Haley blushed. ‘Um… If I feel any odd after effects… Uh, who do I contact?’

  ‘Call the hospital. If they believe I’m needed for consultation, they’ll call me.’

  ‘Okay… Thanks.’ And she hopped off the bench and hurried out with her cheeks still glowing.

  ‘You’re old enough to be her mother’s grandfather,’ Dione commented.

  ‘Sweet young thing,’ Winthrop said with a sigh. ‘I treated two bites. I believe Leanne and Lisa treated another one each.’

  ‘Two,’ Lisa said. ‘I finished one up just before Dione came in.’

  ‘No signs of vampire virus in any of them. Whatever happened to this woman, her virus was essentially disabled.’

  ‘You’d better check the kills,’ Dione said, ‘but I expect the result will be the same. So we have something which eats away your brain and wipes out the virus’s ability to create new vampires.’

  ‘Something, I think, which actually attacks the virus, rather than the host. The loss of brain function is likely to be due to necrosis as the virus fails.’

  ‘That has to be engineered,’ Leanne said. ‘If something like that existed naturally, you’d have known about it before now. And there’s the link to the drug distribution. Someone made this specifically to target vampires.’

  ‘That’s why it’s so cheap,’ Lisa put in. ‘Something like that can’t really be as cheap to manufacture as it seems they’re selling it for. They’re deliberately keeping the street price low to increase demand and ensure someone feeds on a user.’

  Dione glanced at Mike. He shrugged. ‘I can’t fault the logic. I think she’s right. Both of them, in fact. Someone’s distributing a drug that gets you high and ends vampires, in a very messy, public manner, if they take it or feed on someone who has.’

  ‘Then we’d better find them,’ Dione said, ‘and ask them, politely, to stop doing it.’

  ~~~

  Lisa was still in A and E at seven a.m. making sure that those needing more long-term attention for their wounds were transferred to wards. With Dione and Winthrop out of the building, and Leanne catching some much-needed rest, Lisa’s main gripe with the state of the universe took hold and the task became more difficult than it should have. Basically, no one took an attractive, blonde, female resident seriously. Any of the components were bad enough, but combined together into one package… It was frustrating, and stupid, and she had tried to develop a philosophical attitude to it, but when it came right on down to it, Lisa could not wait to clear her residency requirement and get out of conventional medicine.

  So, when she felt vampire in her vicinity as a team of paramedics accompanied by a senior doctor rushed past her with a man in obvious pain on a trolley, her curiosity was piqued, but she said nothing immediately. The doctor did: he spotted Lisa and barked an order. ‘You! The girlfriend. Keep her out of our way and see if you can get her to tell you what he took.’

  Lisa made the mistake of looking around for the girlfriend, who appeared to be a pretty brunette girl whose looks were severely marred by the streams of mascara running down her cheeks. The gap gave the doctor the chance to rush onward and leave Lisa to clear up the mess, even though she had her own problems to attend to. But then the other problems were not especially urgent and this might be. Lisa figured the guy was a vampire, in which case he might be about to slaughter the medical team, or he was an Apollo user with an apparent overdose. Lisa closed in on the brunette.

  ‘Hello,’ Lisa said in her best friendly voice, ‘I’m Lisa. I’m one of the doctors, but don’t let that worry you, I’m really quite nice.’

  Tearful girls did not, thankfully, care about blonde hair or boobs. ‘Is Bobby going to be okay?’

  ‘Doctor Rowhampton is taking care of him, but it would be really great if you could help us with that.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, come on, there are seats through here. Maybe you’d like something to drink? Water, perhaps?’

  ‘I… I guess I could use… yeah.’

  With a plastic cup of water in her shaking hands, the girl sat down beside Lisa and sipped, shivering slightly at the cold.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Lisa asked.

  ‘Kennedy.’

  Kennedy and Bobby… right. ‘Okay, Kennedy, here’s the thing? It seems like Doctor Rowhampton believes that Bobby took something, a drug, and it’s affecting him badly.’

  Kennedy stared at her cup. ‘We never–’

  Lisa decided that if Bobby was a vampire, Kennedy was royalty, so… ‘I know about the Apollo, Kennedy. Right now, it doesn’t matter that he took something a little illegal. What matters is that we identify it and figure out why it’s affecting him like this.’

  ‘You know…’ Kennedy looked up, worried. Close up, she was not so pretty. The mascara hid a pale, drawn face that suggested a history with anorexia or drugs, or both. Her brown eyes were bloodshot and Lisa did not think that was just from crying. ‘He said he’d got something new, something w-wonderful. And it was. I felt like a goddess. We…’ A little colour developed in her cheeks and she looked down again.

  ‘Banged like rabbits?’ Lisa suggested. ‘I’ve seen what it does.’

  ‘Yeah. I let him do all sorts of things I normally wouldn’t and then it wore off. It wore off Bobby first and he’d already taken another tab when I came down. He was high and wanted to stay that way, keep going. It got scary. I begged him to stop, but he kept dropping them and… and it would end so fast after the first and then… He just started throwing up. He said his guts were on fire and then all his muscles started hurting. I called the ambulance… He took too much. Is he going to be all right?’

  L
isa pulled her phone from her pocket and flicked through her numbers. ‘We’re going to do everything we can to make sure he is, Kennedy.’

  ~~~

  Dione heard Lisa’s voice as soon as she walked in through the doors of the hospital. She recognised Lisa’s ‘I’m being reasonable and you’re being a prick’ tone too. It took quite a lot to get the blonde riled, but Dione had already worked out that male doctors over forty were among those things which frequently hit her buttons.

  ‘He’s suffering from systemic organ failure as a result of large-scale cell necrosis,’ Lisa was saying.

  ‘I fail to see,’ the man she was talking to, who looked like a forty-something male doctor, said in a tone which gave new meaning to patronising, ‘how you would know that, given that you have not, in fact, examined the patient.’

  Lisa lifted a hand and began ticking off symptoms on her fingers. ‘Myalgia, nausea, internal haemorrhaging, pulmonary oedema, tachycardia…’

  ‘Yes, but–’

  ‘I should listen to her, Doctor,’ Dione said, stepping up beside Lisa. ‘She actually knows what she’s dealing with.’

  ‘Who the Hell are you?!’

  Dione’s blue eyes went cold as she narrowed them slightly. The doctor took a step backwards. ‘Detective Diana Hunter, Specialist Crimes Unit,’ she said. ‘We were here earlier this morning dealing with a related incident and Doctor Tully is one of the few people likely to recognise the situation. I have our expert on his way in. I would appreciate it if you would take Doctor Tully’s advice on the matter and keep this man alive until Doctor Winthrop can get here.’

  ‘Try antivirals, Doctor Rowhampton,’ Lisa suggested. ‘Perhaps an integrase inhibitor.’

  ‘You’re saying this is a virus?’ Rowhampton asked.

  ‘I’m saying that the effect has similarities to a virus and an integrase inhibitor might slow it down.’

  Rowhampton bit his lip. ‘Nothing else is stabilising him. It’s worth a try.’ He turned on his heel and stepped back through the curtain behind him. A second later he was shouting orders.