Children of the Night

by Dan Simmons

  Kate hurried to her office to begin planning for her team and the project ahead. She worked feverishly, almost obsessively, although she did not admit, even to herself, that it was because each time she closed her eyes she saw the pale face and dark eyes of the intruder. If she allowed time to think of anything except work, she saw those black eyes fixed on the sleeping form of her son.

  Kate and Tom met with the young police detective on what should have been Kate’s lunch break on Tuesday. The detective’s name was Lieutenant Bryce Peterson and now, in daylight, Kate noticed that not only did he wear a beard and sloppy clothes, but his long hair was pulled back in a ponytail—what Tom referred to as a “dork knob.”

  The meeting was not enlightening. The lieutenant’s questions went over areas that both Kate and Tom had answered before and the detective had nothing new to tell them.

  “You’re sure that you didn’t know the suspect?” said Lieutenant Peterson. “Even casually?”

  Tom sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair, a movement that Kate knew usually warned of an imminent loss of temper. “We don’t know him, never met him, haven’t seen him before, aren’t related to him,” said Tom, his blue eyes hard. “But we could pick him out of a lineup if you caught him. Are you any closer to catching him, Lieutenant?”

  The detective tugged absently at his mustache. “You couldn’t find a match in the computer…”

  Kate had been slightly surprised that she and Tom had watched images tick by on a VDT the evening before; she had expected to pore through mug shots just like the old TV shows. “No,” she said. “None of the pictures looked like the man.”

  “But you’re sure you could identify him if you did see him again?” asked the lieutenant. His voice was vaguely nasal, vaguely irritating.

  “We said we could identify him,” snapped Tom. “You tell us what the hell happened to him.”

  The lieutenant flipped through some paperwork as if the answer were there. Reading the upside-down papers, Kate could see that they were about some other case. “Obviously the thief was wounded, but not so severely he could not escape,” said the lieutenant. “We have notices out to all area hospitals and clinics in case he seeks aid there.”

  “Wounded?” said Kate. “Lieutenant, this man was shot three times, at close range, by a shotgun.”

  “Twelve-gauge Remington loaded with number-six shot,” Tom added dryly.

  “By a shotgun,” continued Kate, attempting and succeeding to keep her voice low and reasonable. “The first shot opened up his chest and did serious damage to his throat and jaw. The second shot almost took his left arm off and left ribs exposed. Lieutenant, I saw the damage. God knows what the third blast did to him…and the fall. You saw yourself that the cliff is almost vertical there.”

  The police detective nodded and stared at her blankly. His eyelids were heavy with that tired, hooded look that some men affected; Kate knew women who found that look sexy…she had always thought that it signified stupidity. “So?” said the lieutenant.

  “So why are we talking wounded?” said Kate, her voice hard. “Why aren’t we asking who carried his body away, and why?”

  The lieutenant sighed as if fatigued by the questions of amateurs.

  Tom set his hand on Kate’s forearm before she said anything else in anger. “Why do you call him a thief?” he asked softly. “Why not kidnapper?”

  The young cop looked up, eyes heavy. “There’s no evidence that the suspect was attempting a kidnapping.”

  “He was in the nursery!” shouted Kate. “He was reaching for the baby!” Lieutenant Peterson stared at her impassively.

  “Look,” said Tom, obviously trying to find some middle ground to keep the discussion from deteriorating further, “we understand that there are no prints because the guy was wearing gloves. His face isn’t in your computer. But you have blood samples from the rocks and plants in the ravine…bits of clothing that tore on the way down…couldn’t you use that? Or give it to the FBI?”

  The lieutenant blinked slowly. “Why do you think the FBI would be involved in a local matter?”

  Kate ground her teeth. “Doesn’t the FBI usually get involved in kidnappings or attempted kidnappings?”

  The lieutenant did not blink. “But, Doctor Neuman, we have no evidence that this was an attempted kidnapping. You live in a wealthy area. Your home has lots of expensive art, electronic equipment, silverware…it’s an obvious target for—”

  “Come on, Kat,” said Tom, rising and taking her hand. “Your lunch hour’s up, my patience is used up. Lieutenant, you let us know if there’s any news at all, OK?”

  Lieutenant Peterson gave them his best Don Johnson look.

  In the car, driving her back up the hill to CDC, Tom opened the glove compartment and handed Kate a small wooden box. “Open it,” he said.

  She did, and said nothing, only looked at her ex-husband.

  “Nine-millimeter Browning semiautomatic,” Tom said. “I got it from Ned at the sports shop. We’ll go out after work tomorrow and practice with it. From now on, it stays in the nightstand drawer.”

  Kate said nothing. She closed her eyes, saw the pale face and black eyes, and—for the hundredth time since early Sunday morning—tried not to start shaking.

  Susan McKay Chandra arrived in Boulder on Thursday and was not happy. Kate had always thought the virus expert beautiful; Chandra had inherited her Indian father’s small stature, mocha skin tones, and jet black hair, but her bright blue eyes and fiery temper were a gift from her Scottish-American mother. That temper was in the ascendant during the thirty-minute ride from Denver’s Stapleton Airport to Boulder.

  “Neuman, you have no idea how important the HIV work I’m doing in Atlanta is,” she snapped at Kate, who had told the van driver she would pick up the virologist.

  “Yes, I do,” Kate said softly. “I monitor everything of yours that comes across the net and read the Bulletin abstracts even before they go to hard copy.”

  Chandra crossed her arms, not mollified by praise. “Then you must know that it’s sheer idiocy to drag me out here on some half-assed project while every week my team does without me may cost thousands of lives.”

  Kate nodded slowly. “Look,” she said. “Give me two hours. No…make that ninety minutes. If I can’t convince you by noon, I’ll buy you lunch at the Flagstaff House, get you a first-class ticket on the three P.M. Delta flight back to Atlanta, and drive you to the airport myself.”

  Chandra’s blue eyes were not hostile, merely unrelenting. “Tough talk, Neuman. But I’ll take you up on it. I’m afraid that nothing short of the Second Coming is going to convince me to stay away from my team.”

  As it turned out, it took a little less than an hour of going over the data in Kate’s office. “Jesus H. Christ,” Chandra all but whispered when they had reviewed the last file. “This child may be the biological equivalent of the Rosetta Stone.”

  Goosebumps rose along Kate’s arms. “You’ll stay then? At least until we get an idea how to isolate this retrovirus?”

  “Will I stay?” laughed the other woman. “Just try to get rid of me, Neuman. How soon can we get into the Class-VI here?”

  Kate glanced at her watch. “Will ten minutes be soon enough?”

  Chandra stood a moment at the window, staring at the Flatirons. “Why don’t we say ninety minutes. I think I’ll buy you dinner at Flagstaff House. It may be a long time before either one of us takes time for a civilized meal again.”

  The letter from Lucian arrived four days later. Kate read it after coming home from work at nine-thirty P.M., almost too tired to check in on Joshua in his newly repainted nursery. Then she took a shower, said goodnight to Julie, went into the study where Tom was preparing his checklist for a Canyonlands trek, and sorted the mail. The sight of Lucian’s letter made her heart skip in a strange and unexpected way. It had been sent via International Federal Express.

  Dearest Kate and Little Joshua:

  The summer prog
resses in Bucharest, the markets are much emptier than when you were here, the terrible heat is here, and so am I. There will be no residency in America; at least not this autumn. My uncle and his family cannot afford to make the loan to me, my father has much fame as a poet but no money (of course! he is a poet!), and no U.S. university has offered to sponsor me despite your eloquent (if true) letter of recommendation praising me as the most exciting discovery since Jonas Salk.

  Ah, well, enough of my troubles. I will spend another fun-filled winter in beautiful Bucharest and then begin the application process again in the spring.

  And how is my favorite hematologist and her new son? I trust this finds you both well. I would be concerned for Joshua’s condition if I did not have unlimited faith in your medical abilities, Kate, as well as in the almost miraculous resources, medically speaking, in the U.S. of A.

  By the way, did I ever tell you the joke about the time our late, unlamented Supreme Leader and his wife went into a district hospital to have their hemorrhoids tended to by a non-Party physician?

  I did? Odd, I don’t remember telling that one.

  Kate—something strange and a little disturbing happened last week.

  You remember that I was earning money this summer as a teaching assistant in Dr. Popescu’s advanced anatomy class? Well, it has been boring, but it allowed me to take out some of my frustrations by wielding a scalpel. Anyway, one of my less enjoyable tasks is to go early to the city morgue and sort through the unclaimed bodies there and choose the best cadavers for the new students. (This is where five years of training and my family’s fortune has brought me.)

  Last Friday I was going through the cold-storage lockers in the morgue, trying to make my selection from the usual assortment of deceased drug addicts and unclaimed accident victims and peasants who died from malnutrition, when I found a bizarre case. The corpse had been brought in a few weeks earlier, was still unclaimed, and had been marked for cremation the day after my visit. The official cause of death was “multiple lacerations due to accident,” but it only took one look to know that this man had not died from any accident.

  The corpse had been drained of blood. Not of most of its blood, but all blood. Kate, you know how difficult this would be in an accident. The body was that of a man in his mid or late fifties. There had been more than a dozen pre-mortem incisions made into his torso, legs, wrists, and neck. All cuts were dean—almost as if administered by scalpels—and all were near major arteries. There was one atypical wound, very messy, running from his left ankle, splintering the lower tibia and fibula, and then repeated on the right leg and ankle. Around the smaller wounds, there were strange secondary lividity patterns. Strange, that is, until I suddenly realized the method of death.

  This man had been lifted upside down and impaled on something much like a slaughterhouse hook which had been passed through the major bones of his lower legs. While he was hanging there, still alive from all evidence, one or several people had administered these expert slashes along major arteries. The amount of blood lost in a short time must have been amazing.

  But even more amazing—and disturbing—was the cause of the indentations and lividity networks around these wounds. They were teethmarks. Not bites, but more like extreme hickeys where more than half a dozen mouths had simultaneously fastened around these wounds and held lips and tongues in place during the ingestion of this man’s blood. How much blood did they teach us is in the human body, Kate? About six quarts, I think.

  But there is more to this delightful Romanian tale. The man’s face was battered and disfigured, but still recognizable. It was our missing Deputy Minister whom the papers had theorized had fled to the West with several thousand dollars in baksheeshed American money. It was your Mr. Stancu, Kate—the helpful bureaucrat with the dead novelist’s name. The man who expedited your and Baby Joshua’s visa in such unprecedented time.

  Well, Mr. Stancu will be expediting nothing anymore. I told no one of this grisly bit of business. Mr. Stancu was cremated in the paupers’ ovens the next day.

  Why am I bothering you about this terrible thing on what I am sure is a beautiful, sunny Colorado day?

  I’m not sure. But be careful, Kate. Watch over yourself and our tiny friend. This is a bad place, and sometimes there are things happening here which not even I can joke about.

  With love from Bucharest,

  And Lucian had drawn a cartoon of a large smiley face under a raincloud.

  For several minutes Kate sat holding the letter and staring out the window at the darkness where the porch lights did not reach. Then she rose, walked past where Tom was bent over his gear spread out on the study floor, went down the hall to the bedroom, slid open the nightstand drawer, and took out the loaded Browning. She was still sitting there on the edge of the bed, holding the pistol, when Tom came in half an hour later.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE summer of 1991 was as wet and rainy as anyone in Boulder could remember, but still, by late August, the foothills below CDC were brown, the meadow beyond Kate’s house was dust-dry and browning, and lawns in town needed daily watering. Just as the local children were heading back to school on the week before Labor Day—a schedule which Kate, born and raised in Massachusetts, found appallingly premature—the stormy weather disappeared and the forecast changed to a regular schedule of hot, dry, summer-like days.

  Kate hardly noticed. The world outside her office and the CDC labs seemed more and more unreal. Rising before sunrise, at work by seven A.M., rarely home before ten or eleven at night, it might as well have been midwinter for all the sunlight and fine weather she had appreciated.

  She remembered a few non-research events of the month. Tom had lost his temper when she had shown him Lucian’s letter, wondering just what that “ghoulish son of a bitch” was trying to do, scare her to death?

  Tom had gone on his Canyonlands trek in August, but had called her whenever he could. After returning he spent a few days at the house but then moved his stuff to an apartment in Boulder, no more than ten minutes away. He still stopped by most evenings—at first to talk to Kate, and then, as her hours in the lab grew longer and longer, to check on Julie and Joshua before he drove home.

  There had been a few calls and visits from Lieutenant Peterson or the older sergeant, each time to report no progress. After a while she instructed her secretary not to interrupt her when the police called unless there were something new to report. There never was.

  Kate did remember the phone call she received at home near the end of the summer.

  “Neuman? Is that you?”

  It was almost midnight, she had just come in—dog tired but buzzing with excitement as usual—had checked on Josh, poured herself some iced tea, and was nuking a microwave dinner. The ring of the phone had startled her. The voice on the other end seemed vaguely familiar to her tired mind, but she could not quite place it.

  “Neuman? I’m sorry to bother you this late, but your babysitter said that you wouldn’t be home until after eleven.”

  “O’Rourke!” she said, suddenly identifying the soft Midwestern accent. “How are you? Are you calling from Bucharest?”

  “No, from that other drab second-world city… Chicago. I’ve rotated back to the World for a while.”

  “Wonderful.” Kate sat on a kitchen stool and set her iced tea on the counter. She was surprised at how happy she was to hear the priest’s voice. “When did you get back from Romania?”

  “Last week. I’ve been doing my dog and pony show at parishes around the country, trying to raise money for the ongoing relief program. It’s not so easy now that Romania has been out of the news for so long. It’s been a busy summer…newswise.”

  Kate realized how insane the entire year had been in terms of news. First the Gulf War and the national jubilation at its quick resolution—much of which she had missed during her Romanian stint—and now the upheaval in the Soviet Union. Two weeks earlier, the morning paper had heralded Gorbachev’s removal from offic
e because of illness. That night, when she had switched CNN on for the eleven-thirty headline news, word was that Gorbie was a prisoner and that the coup might be in trouble. The next time she took a break from lab work to check the news—Wednesday the nineteenth of August—Gorbachev was back in power, sort of, and the old U.S.S.R. was breaking up forever.

  Kate now realized that she had never taken time to wonder how all of this distraction and disruption might be affecting the orphanage situation in Romania. “Yes,” she said at last, “it has been busy, hasn’t it?”

  “How about you?” asked O’Rourke. “Have you been busy?”

  Kate smiled at this. She had almost grown used to the eighteen-hour days. It reminded her of her residency, although her body had been much younger and more resilient in those days. “I’ve kept myself out of trouble,” she said, wondering at why she used that phrase even as she heard herself say it.

  “Good. And how is Joshua?”

  Kate could hear the anxiety in the priest’s voice and realized that it took some courage for him to ask. When she had left the country she had promised to write and keep him informed about the child’s welfare, but except for one note in early June, she had not taken time to do so. She remembered how sick Josh had been when they had left the country and realized that the priest must half-expect to hear of the baby’s death.

  “Joshua’s good,” she said. “Almost all of the symptoms have been stabilized, although he still requires a transfusion about every three weeks.” She paused. “We’re doing some experiments on the cause of his problem.”

  “Good,” O’Rourke said at last. It was obvious that he had hoped to hear more. “Well, there is a reason for this late-night call.”

  Kate glanced at the kitchen clock and realized that it must be almost one A.M. in Chicago.

  “I’ll be bringing my plea for funds to the Denver Council of Churches next month—on September twenty-sixth, to be precise—and I wondered if you’d like to get together for coffee or something. I’ll be in Denver all weekend.”