Cogs in Time Anthology (The Steamworks Series) (27 page)

“How much longer? When will you arrive?” she cried.

A few minutes, not much longer. Help me.
 The small voice in the air sounded neither alive nor dead, it existed without a physical presence. Fear sat in the woman’s throat. Her pain changed to desperation. For the voice came from within her and belonged to a female.

The woman had little time. She pulled herself to a sitting position. Her stomach distended and twisted as she tried to stand. “Stay,” she commanded. “It is not safe for you here.” She pulled a blanket to cover her naked form, but the pains of labor threw her to the cold ground. She groaned like an animal as she crawled to the locked door. The pressure grew and she tried not to push. Blood leaked from her body, welling around her ankles.

She held her breath and bit into her lips. Grasping the rough wall, she struggled up into a standing position. Her belly contracted as she slid back down. Trying again, she pulled over a carved wooden priest’s chair. Balancing on the red velvet of the seat, she stretched to the open window. Another contraction. She bent and breathed through the agony. 

Stay where you are!
 
She commanded her child as she slithered through a window, landing in the large bushes below. In her pain, she cared nothing for modesty. Her naked round form ran through the garden gates of the old cemetery. 
Stay! 
She willed the daughter with every ounce of strength. 
It is not safe for you.

“I am coming to you, Mother. Don’t leave me alone,” the girl’s voice whispered into the wind.

“I will not give you up,” she promised in return. She curled upon the ground by the door of an old mausoleum. She pushed and breathed. Nothing. She moved to a squat, her knees bent as she balanced on her feet, staring into the dark sky. The sounds of wolves sung in the night. Her body, stained with sweat and blood, swayed as she pushed to expel her daughter.

“A girl,” she whispered into the wet grass. “Impossible.” Somehow, the child would be her daughter, and she would not give her back to the Society to destroy. For she knew, she knew the Society had forbidden female births. Whoever had left her there, alone, must have also known.

As her back arched and thighs quivered from strain, she howled out in pain, her cries were in a strange dissonant harmony with the wolves. A slippery wetness oozed from her onto the dark earth. She instinctively blocked the baby from exiting. Then nothing. Blackness covered her eyes and mind. Her body relaxed, she felt like a rubber band.

“No,” she said, barely audibly. “I will not give her up.” She closed her eyes and fell into a silent and dark world, her mind entering another realm of awareness.

As she came to, a butterfly clung to the window of the strange dim room. She did not know where she was; her body still heaved with late pregnancy and the violent contractions of imminent delivery, yet she felt nothing anymore.

“This could be the one,” whispered Mordecai from behind the blackened glass window. “The one to destroy our balance.” His eyes, barely crinkled along the sides, stared into the belly of the woman. “Virginia?” he spoke through the intercom, his sudden voice calling her name, startled her.

“Who are you?” she asked. “I am cold. I need to be covered.” She lay, unclothed upon a metal gurney, a white sheet beneath her. Along the walls of the room, microscopes and beakers lined the tables.

“Did you not keep your medical appointment with the Society?” Mordecai’s voice boomed, demanding answers to the how the pregnancy developed, unnoticed by the High Table.

“I don’t remember,” she lied. “You should know. It’s your Society!”

“Cover her foul human form, please.” Two vampires, medics, entered the dim chamber. One covered her with a thin white clinical sheet; the other drew a blue curtain around her body. “That is better,” said Mordecai.

“How did we miss her?” Castille, Mordecai’s assistant, worried. He paced behind the glass observation area. “This child is ready to be born. We may not be able to do anything.”

“Virginia had no idea she was laden with a girl child,” said Draegan from underneath a spherical dome in the medical laboratory. “The sex chromosome virus transmuted the XX to XY. But it is only effective on one child. Look again, Mordecai. Virginia is carrying twins.”

Mordecai had brought Draegan to be detained as a special prisoner in The Society’s Genetics and Medical Research Lab. As a precaution to keeping the young vampire there, Mordecai installed an impenetrable 15 x 15 foot glass dome, guarded by two of the fiercest and strongest of the old Phoenix clan. Within the dome, he had set up a tranquilizing gas release valve. At any moment, if ever necessary, a heavy concentration of etherized chloroform would subdue Draegan’s unsavory activity with a simple pull of a lever.

Virginia’s fingers began to twitch as Mordecai concentrated on the undulations of her belly. “Call the crone,” he shouted. The old vampire woman, Draegan’s nursemaid, was a gifted midwife. “She will help us deliver the boy safely and dispose of the girl.”

“You can’t dispose of the girl,” Castille objected. “The humans are becoming suspicious that no female vampires are being born of the breeders. It won’t be long until they suspect we are still experimenting with genetics and altering viral matter.”

“We have to take that chance. What do you suggest? We welcome our destroyer into the Society?”

“I must let you know, England’s leaders suspect we haven’t kept our vow to refrain from genetically modified science. Our own women have been rendered infertile. We use breeders who, over time, will dilute the purity of our DNA strands. And now, right here, we have a chance for a vampire daughter. A true vampire, one of us, who we can raise as we wish, who can be mated with the best of our clan, and can strengthen us.”

The crone entered the room. “Hello, Mordecai,” she rasped. “You in a bit of a bind are you?”

“Deliver to me the boy. Reject the girl.” Mordecai turned to leave the room.

“Sir!” yelled Castille.

“Enough. Speak of it no more.”

The nursemaid walked behind the curtain. “Free her,” she said to Mordecai. “I can’t deliver a healthy boy if the mother can’t move. Release her.”

Mordecai obeyed. Virginia felt her body return to her control, first her feet, and then a burning wave pushed up her body. As soon as she regained control and feeling, she screamed in pain.

“Hush,” said the crone. “I will do my best with you, but you must save your energy for the expulsion.”

“Expulsion?” asked Virginia.

“Delivery,” she answered. “I am Ivy, I will help you.”

“You are a child snatcher! You will take my son from me! And kill my daughter!”

“Keep quiet,” Ivy stepped between Virginia’s legs. “I am no murderer. I was the one who hid you. Hush now.”

“I don’t understand, I don’t remember.”

Ivy reached deep within Virginia’s body and cupped the head of one of the infants. “Push, push quietly.”

Virginia tried to restrain her body, but her belly pushed anyway. Within moments, a small undersized boy was born.

Draegan laughed from behind his glass prison. “Look at what you are breeding, Mordecai. Undernourished weaklings!”

The small infant was whisked away to an incubating basinet. Its small, red hands were covered in miniature mittens to keep him from scratching his face as he whimpered quietly.

Ivy put the scissors, bloodied from the umbilical cord, back on the metal side table. Once again, she reached into Virginia. Virginia moaned with pain. “This one is breech,” said Ivy. “I will need to cut the mother.”

“Don’t bother,” said Mordecai. “I am not interesting in either one of them. Take her from here, Ivy. Deliver her elsewhere and remember what I said about the girl.”

“Get rid of her?”

“Precisely.”

Ivy placed her hand on Virginia’s stomach as she wheeled her from the room. She swept back the damp curls from Virginia’s forehead. “How will you cut me?” Virginia grabbed Ivy’s hand. “Don’t hurt me or my daughter. Leave me and I will deliver her myself.” Madness and hysteria took root in Virginia’s mind. “What will they do with my son?”

“Hush. I lied to Mordecai. Your baby is not breech. I am taking you to the River Thames. Do not push!”

“They will know you lied. They will see your plan! They are prophetic!” said Virginia.

“They are also arrogant men,” the crone answered. “Not unlike your human men. It will not cross their minds that they could ever be outwitted by an old woman.”

“What about my son?” pleaded Virginia.

“I cannot help you with him. He belongs to them.”

“And my daughter?”

“She belongs to me.”

“What will happen at the river?”

“You will be quiet and you will find friends.”

***

Mordecai sat in his office. Before him awaited papers for him to approve regarding the future of genetic modifications. An application for the secret manipulation of the human gene to increase the red blood’s iron content, sat in front of him, waiting for his approval. He pensively reached for his quill.

 
Does this violate the Vow of Peace? 
He fingered the papers in front of him. 
No, a stronger blood supply will make stronger vampires. I need sated vampires, not hungry fiends at my High Table.
 He skimmed the proposal until he came to the sections marked RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS. Under the heading were the two words: HIGH and UNKNOWN.

As he dipped his pen into the Ink of the Governance, his vision skewed and fogged, as if he wore incorrect lenses. He saw a girl, a toddler, sitting alone and unguarded by the River Thames. Her chestnut brown hair was pulled under a bonnet, and her gray eyes looked into the wake of the water. “I command the sun, the wind and the skies,” the young girl spoke as she turned to the full moon.

Mordecai’s face flushed. He could not risk another female to be born; the only vampire who could prevent another live birth was the devil himself, Draegan.

***

Draegan also witnessed Mordecai’s vision. He saw the skies pour venom onto the Society. The rain poured in large, black drops as if death itself had been liquefied and sent down to greet them.

“You want to know who the girl is, don’t you?” taunted Draegan, as Mordecai came to see the new vampire boy, gaunt and undernourished.

“I need you to make sure no more are born.”

“You want me to murder them?” Draegan asked nonplussed.

“I want you to make certain that the transformation from female to male, in the womb, is more effective! I can’t have these plus or minus statistical errors.”

“Perhaps inoculating the breeders with a new retrovirus….Yes! A vaccine that rejects the X-carrying vampire seed.”

“Make it happen, Draegan. And be swift.”

“And in exchange?”

“Freedom.”

***

Draegan witnessed the mutation as it destroyed the vampire X sex chromosome in the Petri dish. Inoculating the human women would be a risky and dangerous venture. It could take years to understand side effects and adverse reactions. Yet, as he injected the estrogen-X virus into the human ovaries, he witnessed a strange resulting molecular instability. When Draegan injected the ovary with the compound, the host ovary mutated, unexpectedly absorbing the compound. “Damn,” whispered Draegan. “Only the eggs should receive the mutation.”

“What?” asked one of the guards.

“The women’s cellular membrane are mutating, not just the DNA of their eggs.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. All is fine,” he answered. 
It means this retrovirus isn’t contained. It spreads. 
Yet he still wondered what it could imply, as he continued to inject each egg in the Petri dish with the retrovirus.

“Is everything according to the design?” asked a research vampire sitting at the mainframe analog.

“Yes. Nevermind,” said Draegan. 
As long as it prevents female births, my freedom is secure. Mordecai can deal with the after effects.

***

Ten young women, all around the age of twenty, were brought in for the genetic trial. Draegan’s research team selected itinerant serving girls, unlikely to be missed in the event of possible failure.

“We’re to be paid handsomely,” said Justine, the youngest of the group. “And I don’t even mind living here for nine months. It’s better than home.”

“The beds are lovely,” added Karina, an effervescent chubby girl with a cheerful disposition. “And all we have to do is produce a vampire baby,” she giggled. “I hope we get to pick the father!” Both girls erupted in laughter, making crude motions with their hands.

“You like the vampires? I heard they aren’t allowed to touch you. That they can’t…” Justine moved onto Karina’s bed and whispered in her ear. “I think they must just hand you their…”

“Oh stop! What’s the fun in that?”

“Maybe we are too seductive for them,” Justine joked. “We are the chosen vampire temptresses.” They both erupted in peals of laughter.