by Dan Simmons
“You know,” said O’Rourke, his voice flat, “that we only have your word that your parents were killed.”
“Mm-hmm,” agreed Lucian. He handed the penlight to Kate. “Thank you,” he said as she held it steady. He opened a door and slid the long tray out. Lucian lifted the sheet.
“Kate, do you recognize?” said Lucian, his voice very tight.
“Yes.” The last time she had seen Lucian’s father, the man had been complimenting her in French, laughing, and pouring more wine for everyone at the table. Now it looked as if his throat had been cut in two places. His skin was very white.
Lucian closed the drawer and opened the one next to it. “And this?”
Kate looked at the middle-aged woman who had blushed with pleasure at Kate’s invitation for the Forsea family to visit her in Colorado when Lucian brought them over after finishing medical school. Mrs. Forsea had done her hair especially for their afternoon meeting. Kate could still see a curl of the graying hair. The throat wounds were almost identical to her husband’s.
“Yes,” said Kate, grasping O’Rourke’s hand and squeezing without meaning to. What if they were actors? Not really Lucian’s parents? The whole thing a complex plot? Kate knew better.
Lucian slid the drawer shut.
“Is this what you wanted to show us?” said O’Rourke.
“No.” He fumbled with the ring of keys and unlocked a heavy steel door set in the far wall. It was colder and darker in the next room, but Kate could see glowing dials and diodes illuminating a low, metal cylinder that looked like one of the steel watering tanks she had seen on ranches in Colorado. The surface of the tank was bubbling and broiling.
Two steps closer and Kate stopped, her hands flying to her face.
“Jesus!” breathed O’Rourke. He raised one hand as if to cross himself.
“Come,” whispered Lucian. “We’ll take the final sample.” He led them forward.
The steel tank was about three feet deep and seven feet long and it was filled with blood. At first Kate could not believe it was blood despite the color revealed in the dim light and the obvious viscosity, but Lucian had watched her reaction and said, “Yes, it is whole blood. I stole it from District One Hospital and other places. Much of it comes from the American relief agencies.”
Kate thought of the dying children who had needed whole blood transfusions while she was working in Bucharest the previous May, but before she could snap something at Lucian she saw what floated in the tank just beneath the roiling surface.
“Oh, my God.” She had whispered. Now, despite her horror, she leaned closer to peer into the tank, squinting in the red and green glow from the dozen or so medical instruments that clustered at one end of the trough, insulated leads and cables flowing into the bath of slowly bubbling human blood.
It was…or had been…a man, naked now, eyes and mouth wide open as the face floated just beneath the surface. Different parts of his body gleamed in the oily light as unseen currents in the blood moved him to the surface and then let him submerge again. He had been slashed almost to pieces with what looked—to Kate’s eye, trained to trauma wounds—to have been a large, bladed weapon.
“A sharpened shovel,” said Lucian, as if reading her mind.
Kate licked her lips. “Who did it?” She knew what Lucian would answer.
“I did it.” His gaze seemed normal, neither angry nor penitent. “I found him alone, knocked him on the back of the head with a long-handled shovel… I think you call it a spade…and then chopped him up as you see.”
O’Rourke crouched next to the tank. Kate could see droplets of blood spattering the back of the priest’s hand as he clutched the steel rim. “Who is he?”
Lucian raised his eyebrows. “Didn’t you guess? This is one of the men who murdered my parents.” He moved to the oscilloscope on the metal cart next to the tank and changed the display by throwing a switch.
Kate stared at the corpse in the tank. The man’s left ear was missing and that side of his face had been sliced open from the cheekbone to chin; the neck was almost severed—she could see the spinal cord as the body bobbed slightly—and there were massive gouges on his upper shoulder, arm, and chest. Kate could see exposed ligaments and ribs. The body had been opened up at the waist and the interior organs were clearly visible…
The body opened like a medical student’s cadaver.
Kate looked at Lucian. Then she noticed for the first time what the electronic monitors behind him were monitoring.
She backed away from the tank with an involuntary intake of breath. “It’s alive,” she whispered.
O’Rourke glanced up, startled, and then wiped his hands on the side of the tank. “How could this poor—”
“It’s alive,” Kate whispered again. She walked to the instruments, ignoring Lucian. Blood pressure was flat, heart rate was so low that it registered little except the occasional spasm of a random surge as the cardiac muscle moved blood through its chambers and back into the medium of blood that surrounded it, and the EEG was like nothing she had ever seen: alpha and theta spikes so irregular and far apart that they might as well have been messages from some distant star.
But not flatline. Not brain dead.
The thing in the tank was in some state more removed from reality than sleep, but more alert than a coma victim. And it was definitely alive.
Kate looked at Lucian again: still the friendly, open expression and the soft smile. The smile of a murderer. No, the smile of a sadist perhaps.
“They slaughtered my parents,” he said. “They hung my mother and father by their heels, slit their throats as if they were swine, and drank from their open wounds.” He looked back at the corpse in the tank. “This thing should have died a century ago.”
Kate moved back to the tank, rolled up her sleeves, and reached in with both hands, her fingers sliding through lesions and broken ribs to touch the man’s heart. After half a moment there was the slightest movement, as of a swallow stirring slightly in the palm of one’s hand. A second later, there was an almost indiscernible movement of the man’s whitened eyes.
“How can this be?” asked Kate, but she knew…had known since she herself had pulled the trigger of Tom’s shotgun and then seen the same man again on the night of the fire.
Lucian gestured at the instruments. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. It’s why I can’t leave the medical school.” He waved at the body in the tank. “The legends say that the nosferatu come back from the dead, but the fact is that they can die…”
“How?” said O’Rourke. “If this man is still alive after this…savagery, how would you kill one?”
Lucian smiled. “Decapitation. Immolation. Evisceration. Multiple amputation. Even simple defenestration…if they fell far enough onto something hard enough.” The smile wavered. “Or just deny them blood after their injuries, and they’ll die. Not easily, but eventually.”
Kate frowned. “What do you mean, ‘not easily’?”
“The retrovirus feeds on foreign blood cells in order to rebuild its own immune system…or entire physical systems,” said Lucian. “You’ve seen it on the micro level at your CDC lab.” He opened his palm toward the tank. “Now you see it on the macro level. But…” He walked to a multiple-IV feed above the tank and unclipped the drip. “Deny it fresh blood, host blood, and the virus will feed on itself.”
Kate looked at the man in the tank. “Feeding on its own cells? Cannibalizing its own blood cells even though the retrovirus has already transcribed the DNA there?”
“Not just the blood cells,” said Lucian. “The J-virus attacks whatever host cells it can reach, first along the arterial system, then the major organs, then brain cells.”
Kate folded her arms and shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense. It has no survival value for the person at all. It…” She stopped, realizing.
Lucian nodded. “At that point the retrovirus is trying to save only the retrovirus. Cannibalism allows a few weeks’ grace time,
even while the body is decaying around it. Perhaps months. Perhaps…in a body that has been transcripted for centuries…years.”
Kate shuddered.
O’Rourke walked to the instruments, then back to the tank. His limp was visible. “If I understand what you two are saying, then a strigoi could linger in a type of physical Hell for months or more after clinical death. But surely he couldn’t be conscious!”
Lucian pointed to the EEG. Where Kate had palpated the man’s heart, the brain waves had shown a definite series of spikes.
O’Rourke closed his eyes.
“Are you torturing this man?” asked Kate.
“No. I’m documenting the reconstruction.” He opened a drawer in one of the carts and handed Kate a stack of Polaroid photographs. They looked like standard autopsy photos—she could see the steel examination table under the white flesh of the corpse—but the man’s body was much more mutilated than it looked now in the tank. There were deep wounds in the photographs where only livid scars were visible on the actual torso.
“Sixteen days ago,” said Lucian. “And I’m almost sure from the data that the reconstructive process is accelerating. Another two weeks and he’ll be whole and hearty again.” He chuckled. “And probably a little bit pissed at me.”
Kate shook her head again. “The simple question of body mass…”
“Every gram of body fat is converted, absorbed and reabsorbed and gene-directed to fill in as building material where needed,” said Lucian. He shrugged. “Oh, you wouldn’t get the whole man back if I cut off his legs or removed his pelvis…mass redistribution has its limits…but anything short of that and…voilà!” He bowed toward the tank.
“And they need fresh blood,” said Kate. She glared at the medical student. “Is this Joshua’s fate?”
“No. The child has received transfusions, but as of the time he left Romania, he had not partaken of the Sacrament.”
“Sacrament?” said O’Rourke.
“The actual drinking of human blood,” said Lucian.
“That’s sacrilege,” said O’Rourke.
“Yes.”
“The shadow organ,” muttered Kate, Then, louder, “When they drink the blood directly, the J-virus carries out the DNA transcription and immunoreconstruction more efficiently?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lucian.
“And it has other effects? On the brain? The personality?”
Lucian shrugged. “I’m no expert on the effects of psychological and physical addiction, but—”
“But the strigoi…change…after they’ve actually drunk human blood?” said Kate.
“We think so.”
Kate leaned against an oscilloscope. Random spikes pulsed green echoes onto her skin. “Then I’ve lost him,” she whispered. “They’ve turned him into something else.” She stared at a dark corner of the large room.
Lucian moved closer, lifted a hand toward her shoulder, then dropped it. “No, I don’t think so, Kate.”
Her head snapped up.
“I think they’re saving Joshua for the Investiture Ceremony,” he said. “That will be the first time he partakes of the Sacrament.”
Father Michael O’Rourke made a sarcastic noise. “You’re suddenly quite the expert on matters strigoi.”
“No more than you…priest,” Lucian snapped back. “You Franciscans and Benedictines and Jesuits, you watch and watch and watch…for centuries you watch…while these animals bleed my people dry and lead our nation into ruin.”
O’Rourke stared without blinking. Lucian turned away and busied himself with the IV, resuming the drip.
“You can’t just leave it…him…here,” said Kate, gesturing toward the tank.
Lucian licked his lips. “There are others who will benefit from the data even if I die. Even if all of us die.” He whirled at them and clenched his fists. “And do not worry. There are few of us in the Order of the Dragon who have survived, but even if I die someone will come here and cremate this…this dracul. There is no way that I will allow it to live and prey upon us again. No way at all.”
The medical student removed a large syringe from the drawer, extracted blood directly from the body’s neck, resumed the IV drip, locked both the inner door and the morgue, and led them upstairs to the lab. He finished the assay in ten minutes and showed Kate the results: three normal samples and one teeming with the J-retrovirus attacking introduced blood cells.
Lucian led them out of the lab, out into the rainy night again. Kate breathed deeply in the parking lot, allowing the soft rain to wash away the stink of formaldehyde and blood from her clothes.
“What now?” asked Kate. She felt exhausted and emotionally brittle. Nothing was clear.
Lucian turned on the single wiper blade, its squeak timing the night like a metronome. “One of us should stake out this man’s house.” He held up Amaddi’s slip of paper.
“Let me see that,” said O’Rourke. He looked at the slip of paper in the dim light, blinked, and then laughed until he collapsed against the hard cushions of the backseat.
“What?” said Kate.
O’Rourke handed back the slip of paper and rubbed his eyes, “Lucian, does this man work for the ONT?”
Lucian frowned. “For the Office of National Tourism? No, of course not. He’s a very rich contractor who dabbled in the black market for heavy equipment…his state-supported company erected the presidential palace and many of the huge, empty buildings Ceauşescu ordered built in this section of the city. Why?”
O’Rourke looked as if he was going to laugh again. He rubbed his cheek instead. “The name… Radu Fortuna. Is he a short man? Swarthy? A thick mustache and a gap between his front teeth?”
“Yes,” said Lucian, puzzled. “And one of us should be watching his house around the clock.” He glanced at his watch. “It is almost eleven P.M. I will take the first shift.”
O’Rourke shook his head. “Let’s all go,” he said. “We’ll watch the house while we watch each other.”
Lucian shrugged and then pulled the Dacia out into the empty, rain-glistened streets.
Chapter Twenty-six
MR. Radu Fortuna’s home was hidden behind high walls in the Nomenclature section of east Bucharest. Large homes like this in the center of the city had long since been converted into embassies or offices for state ministries, but here in oldest and finest section of the city, Ceauşescu and his political heirs had rewarded themselves and the chosen of their Nomenclature with fine homes unchanged since the pre-war reign of King Carol.
“Shit,” muttered Lucian as he drove by the walled estate. “I should have realized from the address.”
“What’s the matter?” said Kate.
Lucian turned and went around the block. The streets here were wide and empty. “During Ceauşescu’s days, no one but the Leader and his Nomenclature cronies were allowed to drive here. This entire eight-block section was off-limits.”
O’Rourke leaned forward. “You mean you could get arrested just by driving here?”
“Yeah.” Lucian dimmed his headlights and came around the block again. “You could disappear just for driving here.”
“Did that change when Ceauşescu died?” asked Kate.
“Yeah. Sort of.” Lucian stopped and backed into an alley that was all but hidden by low trees, most still heavy with their sodden leaves, and bushes that had not been trimmed in decades. Branches scraped against the side of the Dacia until only the windshield looked out at the walls and gate and entrance drive of Radu Fortuna’s mansion. “The poliţie and Securitate still patrol here, though. It wouldn’t be a great idea to get stopped, since I’m certainly on their detention list and you don’t have any papers at all.” He backed the Dacia deeper until they were peering through scattered branches at the street.
The rain stopped after a while, but the dripping from the branches onto the roof and hood of the car was almost as loud. The interior of the Dacia grew cold. Windows fogged and Lucian had to use a handkerchief to wipe the
windshield clean. Sometime around midnight a police car cruised slowly down the street. It did not stop or throw a searchlight in their direction.
When it was gone, Lucian reached under the seat and brought out a large Thermos of tea. “Sorry there’s just one cup,” he said, handing the lid to Kate. “You and I will have to share the flask, Father O’Rourke.”
Kate huddled over the hot cup, trying to stop shaking. Since O’Rourke’s revelations about Lucian a few hours ago, the center of things seemed to have fled. She did not know who or what to believe now. Lucian seemed to be saying that O’Rourke was also part of some plot involving the strigoi.
She did not have the energy to question either of them. Joshua! she thought. With her eyes shut tightly, she could see his face, smell the soft baby scent of him, feel the silky touch of his thin hair against her cheek.
She opened her eyes. “Lucian, tell us an Our Leader joke.”
The medical student handed the Thermos to O’Rourke. “Did you hear about the time that Brigitte Bardot visited our workers’ paradise?”
Kate shook her head. It was very cold. She could see floodlights in the compound across the street glinting on coiled razor wire atop the wall. It had started to rain again.
“Our Leader had a private audience with Bardot and was smitten at first sight,” said Lucian. “You’ve seen photos of the late Mrs. Ceauşescu. You can understand why. Anyway, he begins babbling in an attempt to impress the French actress. ‘I am in charge here,’ he says. ‘Anything Mademoiselle wishes is my command.’ ‘All right,’ says Bardot, ‘open the borders.’ Well, for a moment Ceauşescu is…how do you say it?…nonplussed. But then he regains his composure and leers his monster’s smile at her. ‘Ahhh,’ he says in a conspirator’s whisper, ‘I know what you want.’ He winks at her. ‘You want to be alone with me.’”
Lucian took the Thermos back from O’Rourke and sipped tea.
The priest cleared his throat in the backseat. Kate wondered if his leg hurt him on cold, wet nights like this. She had never heard O’Rourke complain, even when the limp was very visible.