Viktor’s too busy staring at the waste bin and the empty bleach cans with a widening look of horror to respond.
“Viktor?” I ask.
“I don’t know…” he says absently. “It was… we needed the oldest vampire we could find. For the purest… the purest sample of the virus.”
Using the butt of the handgun I whack the screw valve off the first tank. It starts whistling as the oxygen is released into the air.
On the other side of the room, spreading methanol all over about one quarter of the lab, Clara says, “I don’t get it. Why did you need a vampire?”
I whack the other tank open. “That was the missing piece, wasn’t it Viktor?” I say. “You knew what gene to turn on, but you didn’t have a way to transform all the cells in the body. Am I right?”
“Adam, please, whatever you are about to do, don’t do it,” Viktor pleads. Viktor is a portly, frail octogenarian who usually carries himself with something akin to dignity. That dignity has completely deserted him, and he’s on the verge of blubbering. I ignore him as well as I can.
I continue, mostly for Clara’s benefit. “But then somebody had a great idea. What if you took a blood-borne virus and used it to do the job for you? Whose idea was that, Viktor? Was that yours?”
“Please,” he repeats. Seeing the culmination of his life’s work being destroyed before his eyes has to be kind of tough.
“Okay, I get it now,” Clara says. She’s returned to the cabinet and helped herself to another bottle, while I’m busy spreading ethanol all over the near side of the room. She adds, “Someone gets infected by a vampire, it affects their whole body.”
“And it’s permanent,” I add. “The virus is almost perfect already, except it also makes the body especially sensitive to solar radiation.”
“Hey,” Clara says, “look what I found.” She’d opened up a drawer at one of the desks and is now holding up a bottle of whiskey. “Should I add it to the floor?”
“God, no,” I say. “I’ll take that.”
She tosses me the bottle, adding, “She always said alcohol was a weakness for you.”
“Eve? I guess she would know.” I take a good long drink. My goodness but I needed that. “She’s been shadowing me for an eternity. And if we get out of this alive, you and I are going to have a very long talk about her.”
“Can’t wait,” she says. “Are we about done?”
I look around. The oxygen content in the room has gone up markedly, and just about every surface has been covered with some form of flammable liquid. The fumes are making my eyes tear up, which is a pretty good sign that we’re done.
“Adam,” Viktor pleads, “what you are doing… you’ve no right. This can help so many people.”
“What do you mean I have no right?” I snap. “You had your turn to play God. Now it’s mine. Besides, I’ve already doused the cells in bleach. This part is just to make sure nobody picks up the pieces later.”
Clara, blissfully unconcerned with the philosophical consequences of our actions asks, “So how do we get out?”
“The emergency exit.” The lab has two, one in each corner. One day I leaned on one of the door’s bars to make sure they actually opened. They do, and they’re also hooked up to an alarm. You can’t imagine what kind of trouble that caused.
I say, “Viktor, in a few minutes, it’s going to be more dangerous in here than outside. I trust you know how to let yourself out.” Viktor lets out a little whimper. I guess that means he heard me.
I meet Clara at the exit and trade guns with her.
“Get ready to hit that door,” I say. Then I switch her gun to fully automatic and start firing indiscriminately into the room.
Creating a spark isn’t quite as easy as it looks in the movies, where every bullet that hits something flares brightly as if the world were made of flint. That not being the case here, I just go to town on the whole room and hope something somewhere flares up. I had less trouble creating fire in the Stone Age. But after several seconds—and following possibly permanent hearing loss—I manage to hit a piece of electronic equipment that sparks long enough to create the desired effect.
“Okay, go,” I say. Clara pushes the fire door open, alarms sound off, and out she goes.
I take one last look at Viktor. It looks like he’s going to stay and watch the place melt away. There’s no point in warning him again to get out. So instead, I screw open the whiskey, take another deep drag, and toss the bottle into the middle of the room. My last glimpse of the lab is of flames rolling across the floor like someone had spilled a big jar of pure fire.
I step out, shut the door behind me, and lean up against the side of the building next to Clara. I’m about to discuss the next step when she grabs my arm and squeezes hard.
“Don’t move,” she whispers urgently. “It’s here.”
Chapter 28
I remember a long conversation I once had with a vampire named Bordick, sometime in the late seventeenth century. He was one of the oldest I’d ever met, meaning we had a good deal in common with one another, because how often does one get to compare two-hundred-year-old war stories with someone else? We got onto the subject of the somewhat unfair public perception of vampires—a perception that was actually worse in the seventeenth century than it is now. It was Bordick’s theory that people, in overreacting to vampires, tend to create their own monsters. He meant this rather literally.
As he told it, sometime around his first century, the villagers of a small Latvian hamlet figured out what he was and decided to do something about it. So one afternoon they sealed up the crypt where he was spending his daylight hours. Without elaborating on why they did this—he wasn’t bothering anybody and had restricted his nightly drinking mainly to livestock—he pointed out that this is just about the stupidest thing you can possibly do to a vampire, because they don’t starve to death like people. They just get hungrier.
Hang out with a vampire who drinks a small allotment of blood two or three times a week and you’ll swear there’s hardly any difference between him and your average human. But one who hasn’t drunk in two or three weeks isn’t the best company around. The hungry ones tend to fixate on your neck a lot, which can be very uncomfortable, and it becomes obvious somewhat quickly that they aren’t listening to what you’re saying because they’re too preoccupied listening to your heart pumping. It’s like conversing with somebody who’s wearing a Walkman, only much more disturbing.
According to Bordick, anything longer than thirty days is utter agony. Two months and this constant pain spawns dementia. Longer than that and you’ve got a vampire who is, mentally, entirely too far gone to listen to any sort of reason whatsoever. So after a full calendar year sealed up in that crypt, Bordick was utterly out of his mind.
He couldn’t tell me how the crypt was reopened because he has no memory of it. His brain had stopped processing cogent thoughts. And his mind didn’t return to him until he woke up two nights later in a pile of bodies. Bordick had slaughtered the entire town. Over five hundred men, women and children, he claimed. It may have been an exaggeration, but the number of people wasn’t the point. The point was, never try to kill a vampire by cutting off its food supply, unless your goal is to create an indiscriminate, nearly unstoppable killing machine.
* * *
Standing motionless against the side of the laboratory building and staring at the creature huddled in the darkness fifty feet away, Bordick’s story is the first thing that springs to mind. I can hear small explosions as the empty plastic methanol and ethanol jugs detonate in the heat inside the lab. With the oxygen feeding the inferno, standing this close is going to ultimately prove to be a bad idea. But moving anywhere else doesn’t seem like such a hot prospect either.