Чак Хоган - The Blood Artists

“And you will lead my charge, Melanie.”

The salacious way in which this obscene, malignant, repellent, gloating freak sucked on her name turned her stomach.

“You’re dying,” she spit out, kicking at him. “Your body’s dying.”

“What I am will live on.”

“You’re” — she struggled — “crazy.”

Zero yanked down on her arm and the sudden pain made her cry out. He stopped and held her there in the manic hallway, a sprinkler raining down on them from above, and he spun her so that she had to look at him. The muscles of his emaciated face crawled and twitched and his open mouth spewed strings of drool. His other bare claw came up to grip her shirt over her shoulder. She thought he was going to touch her face, and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop him. Her lungs were going flat again.

“You don’t know,” he groaned curiously.

“Get off—”

“I already have a new host. I live on in you.”

She heard the words, but it was the satisfaction she saw in his hideous face that stopped her. She hung there in the hallway like a balloon losing air, slowly going limp.

“Inhaler,” he told her. “At the airport. You lost it on the stairs. I put it in Maryk’s bag.”

Melanie remained still, not fighting. She remembered Maryk taking her inhaler away after he regained consciousness. Spasms of nausea and revulsion, self-revulsion, crept like the sickness itself beneath her skin, and she lapsed immediately into the mind-set of the sick. It was a reflex action, like gagging. The repulsion and the self-loathing. It all came back.

She looked at her hands. This ungodly thing lived within her now, was breeding inside her.

Zero pawed at her shirt, though she did not feel it. “No fear now,” he said.

She sagged there in the hallway, envisioning the illness that awaited her. His grip eased on her dead arm but she did not move. She looked into his staring eyes, inches from her own, and the blood that boiled within them, and saw what she might become. His bloated tongue writhed, gums bleeding black, lugubriously, as he stared with carnal satisfaction.

Her throat bucked and she began to wheeze. She was getting air, but only in the form of shallow, strangled gasps. He reached up to the back of her neck and was going to touch her skin now, and it no longer mattered. He wanted to pull her face closer. His mouth and throat yawned open.

She heaved suddenly and doubled over, as though trying to draw breath from the carpet. “Inhaler,” she gasped.

Her handbag still dangled off her elbow. She twisted open the catch with her good arm and felt around inside as he waited over her, his filthy hand tousling the hair on the back of her head.

“Yesss,” he groaned.

Her fingers closed tightly around the cylinder of Mace. She brought it out and up to her mouth, hidden from him, as though she were about to inhale.

She turned her hand and aimed the white stream at his face. It spattered off his nose and gums before finding its way through his obscene, gaping mouth into his unprotected throat. Zero wailed and thrashed backward but Melanie kept at him, the stream splashing off the mouth he could not close, steaming into his eyes and searing the open sores on his cheeks.

He hit the wall wildly and went down, keening and scrabbling away. Melanie dropped the Mace and felt her way backward into a side passage, away from Zero, then sensed movement behind her. Two yellow arms wrapped her in a bear hug before she could turn, lifting her off the floor.

She was carried kicking down the side corridor away from Zero. It was not Maryk. She screamed and got off an elbow before the arms released her and she could turn.

It was a bespectacled man sealed inside a contact suit. His head was round and perfectly bald, with no eyebrows, no follicles even on his eyelids, his face hairless and sallow inside the hood.

“Maryk’s patient,” he guessed, coming forward breathlessly. “My name is Geist.” The lights along the ceiling flickered and attracted his round eyes. “What is happening?”

“It’s him — Zero.”

There was a thump and a wail from the connecting hallway, and Geist’s black rubber hands pulled at her shoulders to keep her from fleeing. “Building Thirteen,” she said, pushing at him. “Smallpox. He says he can fix himself ”

Geist’s face went wide. “Of course,” he said. His frightened eyes frightened her. “But where is Maryk?”

Her chin was quivering and she shook her head to stop it. “I don’t know.”

Geist’s chest heaved inside his suit. His eyes were bright and devout as he stared down the length of the flashing hall. He pointed her the other way, to a pair of doors behind them, “Building Thirteen,” he said.

“We’ll block it somehow. You’ll show me...”

Melanie followed Geist’s stare then and saw that Zero had turned into the corridor. He was hunched and seething, groping along the wall toward them.

Geist’s hand reached out and found her shoulder. He gripped it as though he was going to pull her near, then instead pushed her toward the doors. “Go,” he said.

He moved to head off Zero as the creature came slumping and spitting down the hall. The last thing Melanie saw was Geist standing and waiting with his black rubber hands empty and open at his sides, like a gunfighter who knew he was overmatched. Then she turned and ran down the short hallway into Building Thirteen.

Maryk raced from building to building as the lights in the corridors convulsed around him. He charged through Engineering and could smell Zero there. The spasms of light and sound were intensifying. He rushed under streaming sprinklers into a side corridor that served as a shortcut to Building Thirteen.

A body inside a yellow suit lay twisted at the end of the hall. Splashes of blood dripped down the side walls and darker drops led away from the contorted body to closed double doors beyond.

It was Geist. The yellow fabric of his suit had been rent apart in long ragged slashes and his hood was ripped off and tossed aside. Zero had torn open Geist’s neck.

Geist’s eyes moved within his battered head. Blood pushed faintly out of his throat, His mouth opened and Maryk knelt by him in the frenzied light.

“With her,” Geist whispered.

Zero was with Melanie. She knew then that she was infected.

Geist’s eyes fixed in his bald head. “I hurt him,” he said. “Thirteen...”

Geist died staring at the flashing lights. Maryk straightened in the paroxysmal corridor and lunged at the bloodied door.

She tried to outpace the sick stench of Zero that enveloped her, racing dizzied and headlong under the yellow-and-black warning signs — CAUTION RESTRICTED AREA — announcing Building Thirteen.

An ocular scanner ran continuously under a monitor flashing alternately “ACCESS CONFIRMED” and “ACCESS DENIED.” Bolts twitched in the open doors as she rushed inside, down a short, dim hallway into a vast room of throbbing lights.

The vault was an immense block of black steel filling the entire three-story building. It was surrounded by a wide hexagonal casing of thick, transparent plastic that ran from the floor up to the high ceiling. Heavy corrugated tubes ran out of the top of the vault, which must have provided the deep freeze. There was only one way in through the protective shield, and of course it was an ultraviolet light chamber, a pulsating gateway of glowing blue light. Twin steel doors stood open on either end.

Silver, barcoded disks studded the high front face of the monolith. She assumed that each disk was the top cap of a thermos-like canister housing frozen viruses or bacteria. Roving yellow lights lit up long, double-hinged robotic arms jerking and sliding on runners inside the shield. The arm nearest her flexed outward, steel fingers opening wide, then it pivoted and at once struck the face of the vault, rapping its bolt knuckles against the black steel, before careening back along the runner and wham ming against the plastic shield just over her head, wham wham wham! Melanie ducked and backed off, though the dense plastic barely shuddered. The arm turned and formed an impassioned fist and continued thrashing.