They Thirst (37 page)

"What are you laughing at?" he said sharply.

"Oooooh," Kim said in a little girl voice, "don't bite baby's head off, sweetheart. Why don't you turn in that alley, sugar, and let baby give you what you need?"

"Okay," he said. "Yeah. Fine." He turned off the boulevard but drove right through the alley onto Franklin Avenue.

"Hey! Where are you taking me?"

"You'll see," he told her, cutting across Franklin and driving north toward Yucca Street. "You just sit quiet, you'll see."

"Stop the car!" Kim said suddenly. "I want to get out!"

"No, you don't. You'll run away. I've looked for you for a long time, Bev, and I'm not going to let you go again . . ."

Dull terror hit the girl. Her breath quickened. "Let me out," she whispered and whirled to open the door, but one of the man's hands flashed out and caught her by the back of the neck. "DON'T DO THAT!" he shouted. "THIS ISN'T THE WAY ITS SUPPOSED TO BE!" He turned onto Palmero Street and followed it to a dead-end where a couple of dark apartment buildings stood. There was a mound of dirt and rubble piled at the center of a weed-infested lot. Kim was struggling, scratching at him now. "STOP THAT!" he shouted. "BEV, STOP IT!" She went limp for a second, and when his grip relaxed, she turned and dug her nails into his cheek, then leaped for the door again. He caught her hair and throat and pulled her back.

And then he realized the truth, as he realized it every time, every single time—this wasn't Bev. This was somebody who'd tried to fool him, somebody who was laughing at him. This was someone who was wicked and who could only be saved by the Master's touch.

"You're not Bev!" Roach said. "You're not, you're not, you're . . ." He reached down beneath the seat for the cloth and brought it quickly up into Kim's face. She gave a muffled scream and fought harder, but he wrenched her head back and pressed the wet cloth firmly against her nostrils.

And then he was caught in a blaze of headlights.

Palatazin and Zeitvogel had hit their lights at about the same time, and Zeitvogel shouted, "Police! Hold it!"

Benefield twisted around frantically. In the next instant he threw open the passenger door and kicked the blond out. She staggered to her knees and then pitched forward, unconscious. The Volkswagen's engine roared as the car plunged forward, then turned in a wild circle on the vacant lot and came screaming back along Palmero Street toward the makeshift roadblock formed by Palatazin and Zeitvogel's cars. The Volkswagen tried to turn aside at the last instant, but Zeitvogel accelerated and slammed into Benefield's side. The Roach scrambled out, his eyes enormous circles of fear behind his glasses. He started to run for the darkness as Palatazin leaped from his car and drew his .38. "STOP OR I'LL SHOOT!" he shouted. Benefield kept running. Palatazin fired into the air, and immediately Benefield fell to the ground in a trembling heap. Holding his gun at arm's length, Palatazin approached the man. "Hold it!" he said tersely. "Don't move, not even a finger!" Behind him he could hear the chatter of Zeitvogel's radio, and Farris came running up beside him like a bull.

When he reached Benefield, Palatazin saw that the man had contorted himself like a fetus and was sucking his thumb. Farris hauled him to his feet, snapped handcuffs on his wrists, and read him his rights. Benefield's eyes were glazed and empty, and he kept staring up into the hills.

Palatazin walked back to the empty lot and bent down beside the girl. Her breathing was ragged, but otherwise she seemed to be okay. On the ground near her there was a piece of cloth that smelled so strongly of the liquid substance they had found in Benefield's apartment that tears came to his eyes. Sirens were coming nearer. In another moment two prowl cars came roaring along Palmero Street, followed by an ambulance. One of the attendants broke open a plastic ampule under the girl's nose, and she began coughing; she sat up in another moment, rivulets of black mascara streaming down her face with her tears.

The night was filled with flashing lights and the metallic crackle of police radios. Farris was frisking Benefield at the side of a prowl car, and Palatazin put his gun away and came over to them.

The man was babbling like a lunatic, . . calling me, I hear him calling me, he's not going to let you do this, he's going to protect me, he will he will. . ."

"Sure he will," Farris said. "Now get in that car and shut your face."

But Benefield turned his full gaze onto Palatazin. "He won't let you put me away! He knows what you're doing! He sees everything, all the wickedness in the whole world!" He looked up into the night past Palatazin's shoulder. "Master!" he called out and began to sob. "Master, help me! My life is yours! My . . ."

"Get in!" Farris said, shoving Benefield into the backseat.

The cold slowly crept over Palatazin. Had the man said
Master?
Did he mean God or . . . something else? He looked through the window at Benefield, who had his face in his hands, as if ashamed. The prowl car backed along Palmero, turned, and then disappeared into the night, leaving Palatazin staring into the darkness. Slowly he turned and gazed up at the Hollywood hills, a cold wind suddenly rushing past him like something huge and invisible. From far away he thought he could hear a dog howling forlornly.

"Captain? You going back to Parker Center?"

Palatazin looked over his shoulder at Zeitvogel. "No. Let them put Benefield on ice for a while, and I swear if anybody calls the press in on this thing before morning, I'll have him walking a beat on Selma Avenue!" He ran a hand across his forehead. "I'm going home to get some sleep."

Zeitvogel nodded, started to walk away, and then stopped. "Do you think we've got the Roach?" he asked quietly.

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"I hope we do. If not, we sure busted our asses for nothing. See you at the office." Zeitvogel raised his hand in good-bye and walked away toward his now-battered car.

"See you," Palatazin said. He gazed back into the darkness, feeling as though he were being watched by a presence that was slowly gathering strength.
Where was it hiding? What was its strategy? When was it going to strike? Could Benefield supply any of the answers to those questions?
Palatazin paused a moment longer, feeling the hairs standing up at the back of his neck. Then he walked to his Ford and drove away.

Mother of Mercy Hospital was an old, ten-story chunk of brick and glass in Monterey Park about five minutes away from the San Bernardino Freeway. At five minutes after four
A.M
. the parking lot was quiet, and most of the building's windows were dark. The last real trouble in the Emergency Room had ended an hour ago, when the police had brought in eight or nine members of the Homicides and the Vipers who'd started swinging knives at each other at the Matador Drive-In. Three of them were cut pretty badly and needed whole blood transfusions, but the rest were patched up with bandages and Mercurochrome and hauled off in a police van. It had been an easy night—a couple of traffic accident victims, one gunshot wound, a child who'd mistaken a jar of ant poison for honey, assorted broken bones and sprains, nothing really out of the ordinary. But tonight the Emergency Room staff wanted to stay busy so they wouldn't have time to think about the gossip they'd been hearing all night from assorted nurses and orderlies about those fifty-seven people lying in the isolation ward on the tenth floor. Nurse

Lomax said that not one of them had a drop of blood in their bodies. Paco, an orderly on the ninth floor, had said he'd seen some of those bodies twist and writhe like mad things, yet they had neither heartbeat nor pulse. Hernando Valdez, an aged janitor and a renowned voice of wisdom in the hospital, said their skin was like marble, and you could see the trails of collapsed veins beneath it. He said they were
maldito,
cursed things, and it would be best not to be around when they awakened from their evil sleep. Nurse Esposito said everything about them was dead except their brains—when electrode contacts were placed on their scalps, jagged spokes were displayed on the electroencephalograms.

The Emergency Room staff agreed—whatever was going on, it was
muy misterioso.

So none of them spoke when Dr. Miriam Delgado, her eyes still puffy from a brief and uneasy sleep, came through the Emergency Room entrance and stepped into the elevator without acknowledging any of them. The lighted numerals at the top of the door advanced to "10."

Dr. Delgado had received a telephone call about twenty minutes earlier from Mrs. Browning, head nurse on the isolation ward. The woman sounded extremely puzzled. "Dr. Delgado, there's a change in several of the patients. We're getting increased EEG readings." Delgado was thankful to return to the hospital; in her sleep she'd dreamed of those terrible eyes staring at her through transparent, milky lids like the eyes of sleeping reptiles. They seemed to be surrounding her, spinning in a mad circle like the baleful lamps of some out-of-control carnival ride. When she awakened, she was shaking and could not seem to stop.

The elevator doors slid open on the tenth floor. Dr. Delgado stepped out and walked along the green-walled corridor toward the nurse's station. Her brain was still buzzing from her dream as well as from all the heated conferences she'd been involved in yesterday with everyone from Dr. Steiner to Dr. Ramez, the head of the hospital. The theories had flown hot and fast; diagnoses were formulated and then just as quickly discarded. The press had been nosing around, but the hospital's public relations man had been able to keep them at bay, for the time being at least. Which was a relief to Dr. Delgado for she needed time to find out just what they were dealing with here. A virus? A contaminant in the water pipes? Some element in the building's paint? In the air? One of the nurses had found precisely spaced puncture wounds on three of the victims, but not all in the same place. Two of them were wounded in the throat, a third at the crook of the elbow. The others were bruised and some had ragged cuts on their faces or at the backs of their necks just beneath the hairline. The nurse had offered a valid speculation—snakebite. But so far none of the victims had reacted to any antivenom serum.

Dr. Delgado reached the station, halfway between the elevator and the white door with the sign that said ISOLATION—NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT WHITE BADGE. The first thing she saw were case files scattered across the floor. A blue coffee cup had fallen from the desk and cracked into several pieces. On the desk itself there were coffee-stained papers, and a pencil holder had spilled over.
Damn it!
she thought angrily, staring at the mess,
what's going on here? How could these night nurses be so incredibly sloppy?
She tapped the little bell on the desk and waited, but no one came along the hallway to answer it.

"Ridiculous!" she said aloud and walked on past the station through the white door. The isolation ward consisted of a series of large rooms cut by a central corridor; there were large, plate-glass windows through which Dr. Delgado could see the mystery disease victims lying side by side, hooked up to IV tubes and bloodbags and as many electroencephalographs as Dr. Delgado's staff had been able to beg, borrow, or steal. She watched the green spikes jump and realized with a surge of excitement that most of them were showing almost double the amount of brainwave activity as they had when she'd left the hospital last night. Were they finally reacting to the IVs and the blood transfusions? Was it possible they were beginning to come out of their odd comalike state? She walked to the door marked ISOLATION I and took a green surgical mask in a cellophane packet from a stainless steel tray. She tied the mask in place and then walked through into the ward.

The room hummed with electric circuitry and the cluttering of the EEG monitors. Dr. Delgado stopped at each bed to watch the spikes gathering strength, though she was still unable to find pulses when she felt for them. Those eyes, like the forming eyes of embryos, seemed to be staring right at her through the closed lids.

And at the far side of the ward, she saw that five of the beds were empty.

She hurried over to them, her heartbeat racing, and saw the tangled mess of torn tubes and wires that had been ripped out of arms and scalps. A few bloodbags, totally dry, lay scattered on the floor.

"Madre de Dios!"
she whispered, and was startled by the sound of her own voice. "What's going on here?"

She was answered by the rising noise of the EEGs, their thunderous chattering like a din of crickets, swelling to a hideous crescendo. She whirled around, somehow imagining she'd seen a furtive movement out of the corner of her eye. But the bodies in their white-sheeted beds lay motionless, the electroencephalograph noise now like eager communication between them. It was maddeningly loud, as if the bodies were shouting at one another. She clapped her hands to her ears and hurried for the door.

She had almost reached it when one of the bodies—a middle-aged Chicano man with a pendulous belly and rattlesnake eyes—sat up in his bed, ripping the electrode contacts from his scalp and the IV tube from his arm. He grabbed for her, yanking her backward by her coattail as she screamed in dazed horror. Across the room another body stirred and sat up. Then another, stretching as if waking up from a long
siesta.
A woman with gray-streaked hair plucked her bloodbag from its hanger and bit greedily into it, spraying blood in a thick arc. As the thing pulled Dr. Delgado toward the bed, she saw the pale-lipped mouth open, and in that dark cavern were gleaming fangs wet with hideous fluids. She almost fainted in shock, but she knew that if she did she'd never wake up again. She wrenched free, ripping one arm of her coat loose, and ran for the door. The things came after her, leaping out of their beds, their white hospital shifts flying around them.