Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

“Her case was referred to us,” said George. “Well, not referred, so much as her blood, kind of, got in the hands of one of our forensic pathologists. At the request of the pathologist in Iowa City. Our folks discovered minute traces of that venomlike stuff.”

“Why wasn’t I told about that?” asked Louise, suddenly angry.

“You just were,” said George. “And keep it to yourself, because not even your local pathologist has been told.”

“It was murder, then,” she said.

“Well, sort of.”

“You can’t sort of murder somebody!”

“Well, as it turns out, yes, you sort of can.”

She stared at him, waiting for an explanation.

“Well,” he said, “the attorney general’s office thinks there may be an outside chance that this critter may not actually be doing this intentionally. You know, kisses a girl, she goes all gaga, and whatever it is thinks, gee, I’m a great kisser.”

“Seriously?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned, anyway. But it’s something we have to settle before we can make it a crime. Act and the intent, ya know. Whatever we’re dealing with has to know, or reasonably anticipate the effect, and then do it anyway. Then it’s murder.”

They drove on, into a sky darkening with rain clouds. A thunderstorm, coming in from the northwest, was beating them to Iowa City.

“You’re gonna keep telling me it was a vampire who did these,” said Louise. “Right?”

“Yeah.” George looked over at her. “Because it was.”

She stared at him. “ You are fuckin’ nuts .”

“There are times when that would be a comfort,” he said, seriously. “You’re being told this because we hope you can be instrumental in our investigations. I know it’s not easy to buy in to this, but you pretty much have to, because it’s true.”

“Right.” She pursed her lips. “Okay, so why are we headed to IC?”

“To show you the next victims, we think. The student body has lots of, ah, susceptible people.”

“So you know who is doing this?”

“We have, ah, indications. High degree of probability. We don’t have enough to support a charge against it, or him, or whatever. Not yet. But we will.”

“Give me a minute,” she said.

A light rain began as they were passing the Williamsburg Interchange, and she spoke again. “Okay. Background.”

“Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “That whole venomlike diagnosis thing? That got it started. It was referred to CDC in Atlanta. They told us, well, what to look for.”

“It’s nationwide?”

“Not quite. But they’ve found the same evidence in seven states. They described the circumstances of all the victims, including their social activities. Turns out that this venom shit is an STD, more or less.”

“Let me get this. . . . This vampire dude, he has venom instead of semen? He screws them to death, right? Come on. That’s just gross.”

“Oh, no. Just has to be direct contact with mucous membranes. That’s how the predator—because that’s what they are, predators—that’s how the predator transmits it. A kiss . . . getting saliva in contact with a mucous membrane, that’s all it takes. The gland that secretes the venom, or whatever, seems to be located right alongside the salivary glands. They say that a normal autopsy would never discover ’em.” George attempted to lighten it up just a bit. “Hell, I suppose it can be transmitted if it spits in your eye.”

She sighed, loudly. “Just when I think I can get a grip on this, you toss something else in.”

“Think how we felt as it developed,” he said. “And it gets worse. The CDC people say that the specimen they have there, male, is just about completely sterile. And they tell me that if he was gonna mate with another like him, they’d have a . . . well the term they finally gave me was a mule .”

She just stared.

“We’ve never seen a female, but we think they exist. CDC believes they’d be the same, though. Fertility-wise. So they need to mate with humans.”

“I knew we’d get to the sex thing. I knew it.”

“Not the way you think. They need to have lots of, you know, episodes, before they can have a successful reproduction. So they just keep doing it, and that’s what gets the victims into an overdose kind of state. With the venom. And they just can’t recover.”

“That,” said Dillman, “makes no sense at all. If they were pregnant, then they’d kill them, and that would be the last thing they’d want.”

“CDC thinks pregnancy brings some kind of immunity. Fetus is immune, of course, and it transfers to the mom through the blood or something.” He glanced over at her. “Hey, that’s just what they said. Beats the shit out of me altogether.”

“So, like, it’s federal? And accidental to boot?”

“First, that does explain why Norma is at the academy this week, doesn’t it? We don’t usually rate having the FBI as a participant.” George moved into the right lane. “No accident, though. This critter, it uses people, exhausts them, burns them up for what it considers their failure. The sample at CDC said that he’d get furious after so many attempts with a gal and he’d just step up the frequency in kind of a rage. He had to know what the result would be. Sometimes in just a few months. Sometimes over a period of years, depending on its particular whim, I guess.” He swerved right to get to their exit. “I have no idea how it works. The medical folks probably do. I do know that the chronic fatigue is the most remarkable symptom. It can really be deadly without, you know, being the cause of death. Three here in Iowa we believe just zonked out when driving. Killed in the wrecks, or died shortly after. One died when, according to witnesses, she just seemed to be in a daze and stepped out into traffic without looking. The baseline here is that we find out about it when the victim dies. So far, we’ve never examined a living victim, because we just can’t know who they are.” He took Exit 244, bringing them into Iowa City on Dubuque Street. The rain had become steady, and the background sounds of the wipers were a kind of comforting accompaniment. “The Iowa victims so far have all been female, under twenty-five, attractive, eager, and more trusting than not. Look around . . . see any potential victims?”

“We have a couple thousand freshmen who that would fit, every year.”

“Exactly. Where else would you find a similar group?”

“Any university town.”

“And that’s where we find these critters. Vampires, for want of a better term. But there are those who think that it’s just exactly what they are, or at least what’s referred to in some of the legends.”

“Why Iowa?”

He snorted. “Well, ya know,” he said, confidentially, “we’re a simple folk.” Old joke. “But for real . . . not so many cops, not so many nut cases. Nut cases, we find, tend to spoil their game. You actually get nut-case vampire hunters, for one thing. Weird people. That’s why they’ve kind of migrated out from the major metro areas, and headed for flyover country.” George turned right on Church, then left on Clinton. They were passing a row of dormitories on one side of Clinton, and some fraternity houses on the left. As they reached the first dorm, they slowed. “That’s where she lived, right?”

“Currier Hall,” said Louise. “Top floor, above the entrance there.”

He glanced at his watch. They were early. “Want to see where we think she was first contacted?”

“You know that?”

“We think so,” he said. They drove on.

“So, let me get this straight, nobody has ever actually seen one of these things, right?”