American Blood: A Vampire's Story (2 page)

They arrived at the facility just after noon. They pulled into the gate and were immediately waved through. The driver took them around the main building and came to a stop by a large open loading bay at the southwest corner. Ryan got out and walked to the rear to help carry out the dead.

“You’re not needed here,” the driver said.

“These men saved my life.” Ryan tried to push past the driver.

More agents began to swarm around the truck and attend to their fallen comrades.

“Just go back to your lab,” another agent said. “We can take care of our own.”

The driver stepped in front of Ryan. “You don’t belong here.”

Ryan watched as a line of agents began to remove the bags of tragedy from the truck. “I just wanted to help,” he said, but they had turned their backs on him and began speaking softly to each other, shaking their heads. Maybe they already blamed him—field agents were always suspicious of his type. He didn’t ask and headed for his private quarters in the main building. He had an uncomfortable need to wash away the grease of death that had fused with his sweat.

A voice from his room intercom informed he was needed at the facility’s medical unit in ten minutes. It seemed a strange place to take her, a place to heal the living. He wondered if it would even be possible to keep her alive, or maybe the better question is: could they keep her undead? He finished getting dressed, quickly fussed with a comb and toothbrush, and left his quarters. Even as he closed the door his cell phone beeped. He glanced at the number—the Director was unbearably impatient. He also noticed that only four minutes had passed since the intercom message.

R
yan had never been inside this part of the facility before, and when he walked into the small waiting area he felt relieved. It was nothing more than an emergency clinic used for immediate life saving medical treatment for agents injured in the line of duty.

A tall, thin woman with short black hair streaked with grey greeted him. She wore a white, freshly pressed clinic jacket and had a blue spiral notebook in her left hand.

“I’m not a medical doctor,” Ryan said as he walked up to her. “I don’t think I can be of any help to you—to her.”

The woman smiled and motioned for him to accompany her. “Not to worry,” she said. “Your expertise is exactly what we need now.” Her voice had a low timbre that was pleasant to Ryan’s ear.

“And how’s that?”

She smiled again but didn’t say anything. He followed her along a short hallway and through a double door where they were met by two armed agents. They made a quick left down a longer hallway and finally came to a stop in front of a large, closed, steel door that reminded Ryan of a bank vault. He didn’t really want to pass through and have it close behind him. Not that he was claustrophobic—it just seemed out of place for a small government emergency medical center.

“Doctor Ryan.”

Ryan looked away from the door. “What is this?”

“Please present your ID badge to the locking mechanism.”

Ryan observed a stainless steel cylinder sticking up out of the floor to the side of the door. A glass window formed a small rectangle on the cylinder’s top. Ryan unclipped the ID badge from his jacket and passed it in front of the glass pane. He found it amusing that grocery store technology controlled the door’s locking mechanism. Amused, but not surprised. He also used available off the shelf technology to keep costs down on occasion. After all, these were thrifty times, even for the government. The door silently opened and the woman led him inside. And just as he feared, the door closed behind him with the same silent efficiency as when it opened.

Ryan paused as they entered a 1980s biohazard unit similar in design to the facility at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The ambient lighting had been turned down and the ultraviolet disinfection lights were off.

“This unit has been in stand down since 1994,” the woman said. “We only use it for occasional isolation measures if there’s an immediate need.”

“What kind of need?” Ryan asked and continued walking.

“Nothing sinister,” she replied. “A public center like an airport or government office might get something suspicious in the mail, or a package is found all by its lonesome. There’s no active research taking place.”

“You mean not until today,” Ryan said.

The woman stopped and offered her hand. “I’m Siri Lei.”

“Okay, Doctor Lei,” he said, grasping her hand. And Ryan discreetly looked at the woman. She appeared to be an Asian mix and nearly as tall as he was at six foot one. He couldn’t begin to guess her age, although her facial expressions revealed a gentle dignity conveyed through her dark brown eyes.

“I know who you are, of course. I’ve reviewed all of your reports to the agency.”

Ryan considered this. “All right, Doctor Lei what—”

“Please call me Siri.”

Ryan half smiled at her. “Okay, Siri . . . so what is your involvement with this project?”

“I was a staff epidemiologist with the World Health Organization before joining the agency seven years ago,” she replied as they continued walking. “My specialty is the historical study of infectious disease.”

“So what’s an infectious disease specialist’s angle here, or is there something that I haven’t been told?”

“Well, Ryan,” he found it quirky that she used his last name but he didn’t mind. She seemed pleasant enough. “I’m also a trained physician, which is useful considering our guest’s condition. What do you think turned her into this, creature?”

“A bite on the neck?”

“Maybe.” And Siri chuckled. “Of course she could have been bitten on an arm or leg if she had been turned by another vampire,” she continued. “These things are extremely nasty and will bite anyone, anywhere, of course.”

“Hmm, of course, but what’s your involvement with this project?” he asked again.

They came to a small air lock. Siri opened the door and stepped inside. Though it was a squeeze, Ryan joined her and closed the outer door.

“I’ve been with the project from early on,” Siri replied, casually. “I’ve been conducting an historical review of the infection all the way back to the index case.”

“What infection?” Ryan asked.

“Becoming a vampire is a process of infection. My research group identified the causative agent four years ago.”

This stunned Ryan. He had reviewed hundreds of hours of data. He knew what an infectious process looked like at the genetic level. The DNA from these creatures didn’t appear human. They had thirteen extra pairs of chromosomes that had a peculiar habit of cross-linking with each other. These changes could be detected on the time scale of minutes depending on the speed of the sampling schedule. It wouldn’t surprise him if it happened within seconds or even shorter intervals.

“A bacterium did this to her genome?” Ryan asked. “It just doesn’t seem possible.”

The air lock finished cycling.

“From what we’ve been able to determine it all started around 125 A.D. when a leper caught a cold.” Siri opened the inner door and led Ryan inside the isolation unit’s main floor.

“Vampires are lepers?”

“No, vampires are vampires,” she replied. “But their line begins with a leper who . . . well, who still lives today.”

They entered a long corridor with rows of large glass observation windows along the walls to his left and right. The floor and walls were made of light grey concrete. The air had an unpleasant odor from the repeated use of sanitizing aerosols. Two armed agents stood next to the first observation window to his right, twenty feet from the air lock.

Siri acknowledged the two guards and gestured for Ryan to join her as she walked up to the observation window. Ryan stopped and stared through the glass. A large, transparent sphere placed on a metal base sat in the middle of a room surfaced with stainless steel panels. Three technicians busied about as they attended to the complicated maze of pipes and wires that fed into metal fittings embedded in the sphere’s material, most likely an acrylic. The sphere was filled with a brightly lit, pale, amber fluid and suspended within the fluid was
her
. . . the female vampire.

“There’s your leper, Ryan, or at least the thing that was a leper almost two thousand years ago.”

A cloud of red appeared to one side of the fluid and slowly dispersed giving the entire sphere an eerie glow. The female had been immersed in human plasma and at timed intervals injectors delivered whole blood into the sphere. She floated in the most precious fluids of the human body. As he continued to stare at the sphere and its occupant the red tinge slowly faded away back to the original amber glow of the base plasma.

“So this is how you heal a vampire?”

“At least one way,” Siri replied.

“She’s absorbing the blood,” Ryan observed. “That’s incredible. Who came up with this
thing
?”

Siri chuckled. “You did.”

Ryan jerked his eyes away from the glass. “What? I’d remember designing an incubating chamber—a vampire incubating chamber that injects blood into a big ball of human plasma.”

“And yet it’s true all the same,” a voice from behind them said.

Ryan turned as the Director emerged from the air lock. “Explain!” he demanded.

The Director walked up to the glass and tapped at the window. The closest technician looked up and gave a quick wave. The Director appeared pleased with himself. He had an invariably wonkish personality, but he now seemed almost friendly.

“Oh, what was it called?” the Director seemed to ask himself. “The—the fish bowl. Yes, that’s it, the fish bowl. Your colleagues called it that, isn’t that so? Ryan’s fish bowl.”

Ryan looked back at the sphere and realized it had been staring him in the face the entire time. Eleven years ago during his post doctorate work at MIT, he had designed a small acrylic chamber to synthesize genetic materials for research purposes. The department chairman had derisively called it “Ryan’s fish bowl” at the informal meeting to cancel the project’s university funding.

It really did look like a large goldfish bowl being attacked by a dozen snakes made of glass and steel. The controlling software had been a nightmare to write and finally debug to the point where it ran without the operating system crashing every few minutes. It might have actually worked, but the project only achieved the prototype stage when a financial review recommended pulling the funds. Ryan recalled that his original chamber had been the size of a basketball.

“Where did you get such a large sphere?” he asked. “That’s not a stock item. It would take weeks to mold it and let it cool, not to mention getting the damned thing polished.”

“But it is a stock item,” Siri said. “What do you think those small undersea submersibles use as pressure chambers for their occupants? We even used the same locations for the fittings.”

Ryan tried to get a handle on the moment, but even his hardened analytical abilities had reached overload. Death, blood, vampires, horror chambers, his own—albeit partially innocent—duplicity in the events of the day rattled his understanding of the known world. And now the door to a New World opened before him and it felt menacing, ready to swallow him if he dared to enter. He looked at the sphere again.

“Is she going to live?” he asked.

“If we can keep up the supply of human blood during the healing process we expect her to make a full recovery,” Siri replied. “Of course this is terribly expensive. We’ve already used up our primary source for the plasma and she’s all but consumed our type O whole blood.”

“We’re arranging for other sources,” the Director said, reentering the discussion.

“You’re having issues with antigen binding because you’re injecting blood directly into the plasma,” Ryan said, ignoring the Director. “You shouldn’t be using the gamma globulin fraction at all, I’d guess.”

“We didn’t have time to get this fully thought out,” Siri replied, casting an awkward glance at the Director who raised an eyebrow. “There aren’t many sources with a thousand plus gallons of fractionated plasma sitting around—besides, it seems to do much better regenerating with type O. She seems to prefer it.”

“What about when she finally wakes up and discovers she’s a captive?” Ryan asked. “What about when she needs to feed? Do you think she’s going to just sit still while you give her an IV drip?”

“That, Doctor Ryan is why you’re here,” the Director said. “Your first task is to figure a way to feed her, without killing anyone, or at least without her killing anyone, if possible. The agency already has enough explaining to do . . . we don’t need any additional scrutiny right now.”

“And how long do we have until she’s healed and wakes up?” Ryan asked.

“At her current rate of recovery no more than seventy-two hours,” Siri replied. “Maybe less. There’s no way of telling.”

“Her kind has been captured—even caged before—for short periods,” the Director said. “Don’t be fooled, she’s helpless for the moment, but soon, very soon . . . .” The Director stepped right up to the glass and began to quietly talk to himself. The man had a strange habit of ignoring others at his whim.

Ryan stared at the female as she floated within her fluid embrace. He wondered what lay ahead for himself, for everyone. As she regenerated her largest wounds had already started to close and fill in with newly synthesized flesh. He knew that vital information had been withheld from him, but he also knew he could find answers to her existence. She might be a creature of deception in the larger world, but at the molecular level he could discover her secrets. Unless, of course, they ran deeper than he could ever imagine.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

—Albert Einstein,
Theoretical Physicist

T
he next morning Ryan was back inside the isolation unit with Siri. The presence of two armed agents by the door only added to the sense of danger within the room.

“You don’t seem to approve of our work,” Siri said.

Ryan shook his head as he examined the sphere’s external fittings and plumbing. “This thing is a mess.”

“The techs assembled it a few days ago and filled it with plasma yesterday during her surgery,” Siri said.

“Why was she even in surgery?”

“I didn’t attend,” Siri replied. “But they wanted to clean up some of her larger wounds and make sure the tracking sensors weren’t damaged.”

“You know about the sensors?”

“I’m aware of your contributions to the project.”

“It seems that you are.”

“So what do you think of the chamber?” Siri asked.

“It looks like it was cobbled together using a lot of guess work.” Ryan had squirmed himself in between the maze of external plumbing. “Sloppy. No wonder the thing is leaking plasma everywhere.” Ryan had to contort his upper half to free himself.

Siri walked over to a technician attempting to repair the leaking plasma supply. “Just get a mop and clean up what you can.” The spilled plasma had formed a large puddle on the stainless steel floor.

“Can’t say I like the way it smells in here,” Ryan said and pointed to where some plasma had leaked into an electrical connection box which had begun to smoke. “The air filters can’t keep up.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I think you’re on the right track,” Ryan said. “Mop up what you can.”

Siri looked at the same technician. “Bring an extra bucket.”

As Ryan continued to inspect the sphere’s external fittings a single question kept interrupting his thoughts. “How will she be removed from this thing? And please don’t tell me you’re going to let her crawl out of it when she wakes up.”

“I’ve approved a protocol for her extraction. It should be safe for everyone, including her.”

“Don’t be surprised when she regains consciousness she’s in a lousy mood.” Ryan stepped away from the sphere and looked at Siri. “Unless you think she’ll be happy waking up inside this thing.”

Siri calmly pointed past him.

Ryan turned back toward the sphere. The female met his gaze; her eyes wide open and alert. How long had she been looking at him? One more thing to add to his list of things he didn’t need.

“You do understand how strong she is?” Ryan asked.

“I know she’s unusually strong.”

“That’s an understatement. She rolled a van over on its side like it was like a toy.”

“I’ve seen the video,” Siri said. “After she pushed the van on its side you crawled out through the broken windshield and when the male ran at you, one of the agents got him with a grenade a second before our female here killed him.”

“I know what happened. I had a front row seat.”

“That agent saved your life.”

“They all did.”

Siri sighed and shook her head. “Everything, the capture, what happened to the men . . . it all went wrong.”

“And that’s why we shouldn’t be in here.”

“Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere.”

“What’s keeping her so manageable?”

Siri came alongside. “Her system has its own unique set of pharmacological responses.”

Ryan forced himself to turn away from the female’s stare. He again studied the maze of tubes and wires around the sphere and located a small osmotic pump being fed from a drip bag.

“What’s being injected?”

“It’s an aqueous solution of diallyl thiosulfinate at a rate of one hundred milligrams per minute,” Siri replied.

Ryan gave the injector a hard look. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“Are you surprised?”

“DTS . . . that’s allicin.” And Ryan gave Siri a disbelieving look. “The main active component of garlic?”

“That dosing will keep her calm,” Siri said. “But she’s fully awake, and can even move if she wants.”

Ryan frowned at Siri. “Then why doesn’t she just break out of this thing?”

“She doesn’t have her full strength, yet. The allicin interferes with her voluntary motor pathways, we think. Almost a light paralysis, but her mind is unaffected.”

“Vampires and garlic,” Ryan muttered as this common myth was revealed to be true.

Siri shrugged and then pointed past Ryan. “She certainly seems to be interested in you.”

Ryan took a needed deep breath and stepped closer to the sphere. The female continued to stare at him as she floated naked in her liquid prison. Perhaps five feet eight and one hundred thirty pounds, he guessed. The features of her face were elegantly proportioned with her large, almond shaped eyes complimented by her high cheekbones and full lips. Her smooth skin exquisitely followed the contours of the underlying muscle. Her legs had a slightly exaggerated length that only added to her unique beauty. And her hands were lovely with slender fingers ending in long, light-pink nails. If Michelangelo had sculpted a lover for David this is what he would have created. Yet to Ryan she looked so delicate within her small prison. It was all deception. She had the strength of five men when needed and was inhumanly fast.

Her regenerative abilities continued to amaze him. He could see that her ruined shoulder had completely healed, the gaping wound fully closed. Only a slight variation in color remained, and it, too, would soon vanish. The entry holes from the bullets that had pierced her skin also had vanished. He looked toward the bottom of the sphere and noticed for the first time the small pile of spent shells that had been expelled from her body. He then moved over to the right side of the sphere and looked down. Her left foot, which had been ruined by an explosive shell, showed no signs of trauma, the sensuous curve of the arch restored. Her lovely breasts expanded and relaxed as she took steady breaths from the small respirator placed between her lips. And completing the visual was her long, dark hair that gently floated about her head.

Ryan glanced at his watch. “She’s been in this thing for eighteen hours now and she’s almost fully healed.”

“She does have interesting abilities,” Siri said.

“I’d call her remarkable.” Ryan again looked up at her—she never took her gaze away from him. It was undeniably captivating. He tried to figure out the color of her eyes, but the plasma filtered out the ambient light’s shorter wavelengths and made her large pupils appear as dark, reddish circles. He wondered if she was beginning to hunger when she reached out with her right hand and touched her fingers to the inner wall. Ryan raised his hand and placed it on the sphere matching his fingertips with hers. She removed the respirator from her mouth and formed a word with her lips. He studied her for a moment and recognized that she was repeating something over and over.

A single word.

Why.

Ryan slowly shook his head and moved closer to the sphere until his face nearly touched the acrylic. “I don’t know why,” he said, mouthing the words. And she nodded ever so slightly. At that moment another unit of blood dispersed into the sphere. And through the red shimmer of her liquid world she smiled at Ryan. Not an entirely nice smile, and not entirely evil, but somewhere in between he thought. Her reaction to the blood injection was interesting, almost a reflex. At what level was she in control of her desires? And besides her desire for blood did she also have other desires, possibly human desires?

The red glow took longer to fade as the needs of her flesh diminished. But even after the blood had been fully absorbed she continued that alarming smile for another moment and then placed the respirator back between her lips.

“Ryan?”

“Sorry. It’s all just so . . . she’s . . . I don’t know.” Ryan shrugged and turned to look at Siri who seemed to be studying him, intently.

“The Director wants to know if you’ve thought about the feeding situation. She’s going to be out of that chamber in a few hours . . . we can’t keep up with the allicin, it’s building up in her system and could kill her, we think.” Siri handed the latest test results on the female’s blood chemistry to Ryan.

He looked over the information and whistled, mostly to himself. The data indicated, as expected, elevated allicin levels in her system, it trended upward: apparently her system had no mechanism for breaking it down, this was interesting. But the rest of her blood results disturbed him.

“Her biochemistry doesn’t make any sense to me,” Ryan said as he continued to study the data.

“Did you expect it would?”

“I didn’t expect this.”

All of the most common parameters were way off target, at least for a normal human. She had been absorbing whole blood for nearly a day and the results pegged her white blood cell count at five times normal. Platelets were zero. Her blood pH indicated a state of severe alkalosis. Her hemoglobin and hematocrit read off the scale and the dissolved oxygen levels were five times that of a normal human, which in a peculiar way agreed with her hemoglobin being so stratospheric. The carbon dioxide level was a fraction of normal. And yet there she serenely floated about, even smiling at him. By all accounts she should be dead, not merely undead. What is undead, anyway? Ryan wondered.

“Ryan, the feeding issue?”

Ryan handed back the test results. “I’ve been thinking about a solution,” he replied. “It’ll be safe and it should work. I’m not sure how much blood she’ll need. The data I’ve been given indicates she’ll need blood nearly every night. It also recommends that she obtain blood directly from a living human host as often as practical. Tell me how you people could possibly know that?”

“She’s a vampire. What else are we going to feed her?”

“Maybe we can just give her blood right out of the plastic storage bags.”

Siri remained silent.

“How do you know she won’t just drink it that way?”

“I don’t know, so let’s try it with her,” Siri replied.

“Maybe we can supplement her diet with live animals, occasionally, or is there more information that you’ve been holding back?”

“I’m not holding anything back.”

“Oh Christ, Siri, that thing has been used before and reassembled. You actually thought I wouldn’t notice? Just the dosing of the allicin is a red flag. This is all—it’s all bullshit.” Ryan lifted his hands and swept them in a large circle. “I need to know everything. How many vampires have you people captured?”

“We caught another female a few years ago. We tried this same setup at another facility, but in the end it died. We couldn’t figure out how to feed it safely. Not to mention that it killed half the staff before it was over.” Siri picked up a notebook next to her workstation. “I took over the management of this project following that tragic event.” Siri stepped up to the sphere and looked at the female. “If you don’t have something in place in the next forty-eight hours we may have to terminate her. We just can’t take any chances, not this time.”

Ryan slowly nodded. “All right, I need to see where she’ll be held and I’ll need access to the lab’s stores immediately. And I need to start now. I’ll do most of the work over at my lab in the molecular science building.”

“Anything else?”

“No, but getting donors in here willing to feed her . . . good luck with that.”

“Never underestimate the Director when it comes to getting people to do what he wants,” Siri said. “He’s lined up a group of second year agency recruits that have signed a special agreement that gives them a hundred dollar bonus for every donation.”

“A hundred bucks to give blood to a vampire. That’s twisted,” Ryan said.

“It gets worse. They don’t know she’s a vampire. They’ve been told she needs to take fresh blood, orally, because of an accidental exposure to a new biochemical agent the agency has been working on.” Siri shrugged. “What can we do? We need the donors.”

“These men are going to think that they’re helping her?” Ryan asked. “Your Director is unbelievable. He could probably teach a vampire how to lie.”

“Let’s go talk, outside,” Siri said.

Ryan locked eyes with the female again, her head tilted slightly, and her expression was one of contemplation. She purposely ran a hand through her hair and allowed it to lazily drift to one side. She also twirled her healed foot in slow circles, almost playfully. It took more effort than he would have liked, but he turned away from her and walked out of the room. No one noticed that she continued to stare in the direction of the door after he had gone.

As soon as was outside the room Ryan stopped for a moment and took a deep breath, and then another. “I feel tired, like I just spent a whole day reading.” Ryan realized that the female back in the room was affecting him. It wasn’t unpleasant as much as unnerving.

Siri stood quietly for a moment and watched as Ryan composed himself. “It’s called mind-lock,” she said.

“Yeah, great,” Ryan said. “I skimmed the data regarding this psychic nonsense and pretty much discounted it as, well, nonsense. The data is way out there. It’s too speculative.”

“And what do you think now? You stared at her for nearly twenty minutes.”

“That long?” Ryan winced as if he were in pain. “That’s incredible.”

“And how do you feel?”

“Hmm, I’d have to say the experience is rather nice while it’s happening. It’s when I turned away from her by my own choice that I felt mentally slapped. Not to any great degree, but it’s definitely the effect.”

“How do you think she does it?”

“Who knows?” Ryan slowly straightened up. “At the most fundamental level I suspect everything about her obeys known physical laws.”

“Which ones would they be?” Siri sounded amused.

“These psychic abilities, in simplest terms, are an exchange of information,” Ryan replied. “Do you follow?”

“Go on.”

“Look, in its most basic form information is either matter or energy, or a combination of both. There has to be a way to measure it. Even the most fundamental particles can be detected and measured to some degree.” Ryan stopped for a moment, looked back toward the observation window. “We’ll need to bring in someone with a better understanding of elementary physics.”