“You haven’t even begun to convince me that we shouldn’t haul ass out of here right now,” Celluci growled. “You,” he jabbed a finger at Henry, “are operating on half a tank. And you,” the finger moved to wave in front of Vicki’s nose, “are about three pints short.”
“Not that much,” Vicki protested, although from the way she felt, she wasn’t going to bet on it.
Celluci ignored her. “We
all
look like we’ve been through the wars. Let’s just clear out of here and leave the mopping up to the police.”
“Mike . . .”
“Don’t
Mike
me. And I want that wrist of yours looked at by a doctor before you get gangrene in it and have to have your fucking hand chopped off.”
“The wound won’t infect,” Henry said with quiet assurance. “And
I
am going to the lab.” He stretched out both arms. Although the bruising had faded from purple to green and the broken bones in his hand had begun to knit, the marks of needles were still very evident. “If, as you say, Catherine didn’t move me until late afternoon, any samples, any test results, will be there. They have to be destroyed.”
“Oh, come on, Fitzroy,” Celluci sighed. “No one’s going to believe anything these people say after their attempt to play Dr. Frankenstein has been discovered.”
“I can’t risk that.”
Celluci looked from Henry to Vicki and back again, then he savagely shoved both hands up through his hair. “Jesus, there’s nothing to choose between you. All right, all right, we’ll go.”
“I said
I
was going,” Henry pointed out. “You don’t have to come with me.”
“Fuck that,” Celluci told him bluntly. “We went through too much to find you. You’re not moving out of our sight until we stuff you back in that god-damned closet come morning. Unless? . . .” He raised an eloquent brow.
Henry half smiled. “You’re both perfectly safe. Although I still hunger, Vicki’s blood was more than enough to return my control.”
Celluci’s hand rose involuntarily to the place on his throat that Henry’s teeth had grazed. Angrily, he turned the motion into an abrupt gesture at the wall of wiring and electrical panels. “We still shutting off the power?”
Vicki nodded and instantly regretted the motion as her head seemed to want to keep on falling. “The reasons for doing it haven’t changed. If there’re any more of those. . . experiments in this building, I want them shut down.” She paused and swallowed, hard. Dr. Burke had said her mother was up and walking around. It wouldn’t be so easy to turn her mother off; to see that her mother died a second time. “We should have about forty-five minutes on the emergency lighting—not that it’ll make any difference to me. Plenty of time to get to the lab, do what we have to, and get out. Then the police can handle the rest.” She caught Celluci’s gaze and held it. “I promise.”
“Fine.” He moved toward the comer of the room where a thick plastic pipe came through the wall and disappeared into a metal box about two feet square. “This is the main feed, so this must be the main disconnect box.”
Close behind him, Vicki peered over his shoulder. “How do you know? I thought your father was a plumber?”
“It’s a guy thing, you wouldn’t under. . . Ow! Damn it, Vicki, that was the last bit of unbruised flesh I had.”
“Had,” Vicki repeated, flicking on her flashlight. “Just pull the switch.”
The switch, about a foot long and rust-pitted down its entire length, refused to surrender so easily. “This thing,” Celluci grunted, throwing his weight on it, “hasn’t been moved since they wired the building.” He managed to force it down to a forty-five-degree angle but could budge it no farther. “I need something to lever it with. The pipe we used on the door . . .”
“May I?” Henry reached past Celluci, wrapped long pale fingers around the switch, and slammed it down in one, fluid motion, snapping it off at the base.
The light in the electrical room went out.
“I thought you hadn’t regained all your strength.” Celluci squinted in the circle of illumination thrown by Vicki’s flashlight.
Henry, who’d stepped back to shield sensitive eyes, shrugged, forgetting for the moment that he couldn’t be seen. “I haven’t.”
“Jesus H. Christ. How strong
are
you?”
Resisting the urge to brag, to further advance himself over a rival who had somehow become much more, Henry settled for a diplomatic, “Not strong enough to get free on my own.” Which was, after all, only the truth.
Catherine frowned down into the microscope. There had to be a way to use the regenerative properties of the vampire’s cells to extend the limited life of her bacteria. Once found, she could tailor new bacteria for number nine and keep him from decomposing like all the rest. She looked up and shot a smile across the room to where he sat patiently watching her from the edge of the bed.
All at once, the lights went out and the constant hum of her computer was swallowed by the silence that swept in with the darkness.
“It’s her!” Catherine gripped the table tightly with both hands until the world steadied. “She’s done this. She wants you to die.” Knocking over her stool, she stood and stumbled to the door, arms stretched stiffly out before her. A moment’s fumbling with the lock and she stepped out into the hall.
At each bend of the corridor, battery-operated emergency lights provided enough illumination for movement.
“This has gone far enough. We have to get to the lab. Come on,” she called back over her shoulder. “We’ll stop her together.”
Number nine could just barely see her outlined in the doorway. He stood and slowly shuffled toward her.
Together.
He wished he could see her better.
Gaze jerking from one shadow to the next, searching out the possibility of Dr. Burke, Catherine never noticed that number nine’s eyes now shone in the darkness with the faint phosphorescence of rot.
Fifteen
The sudden darkness hurled Dr. Burke up against the wall, heart in her throat, palms prickling with sweat. She could feel the jolt of adrenaline eating away at the alcohol-induced distance and struggled to calm herself. Being sober, in
this
building, was no part of her plan.
“I knew, I knew, I knew I should’ve brought the resht . . . of the sec. . . ond bottle,” she muttered, her voice very nearly lost in the passage of throat and teeth and lips it had to negotiate before it could clear her mouth.
The equally sudden appearance of light from the battery-operated floods at each end of the hall brought a victorious wave of Donald’s jacket. “Ha, ha! Let’s hear it for modem engin . . . eering! Power goes off, emer . . . gency lights. . . go on. Rah! Damn good thing they did, too,” she continued, stumbling forward again. “Never find the damn lab. . . otherwise. Wander around here for. . . days. Maybe even . . . months.”
She squinted down the length of the corridor. “Speaking of . . . which. Where the hell am I?” It took a moment’s concentrated effort before she recognized the upcoming t-junction. The left wing, after crossing a lecture hall and going down a small flight of stairs, was a dead end, she thought, but the right, with a little luck, would eventually lead her to the back door of the lab. The small wooden door led into the storeroom; they’d never used it, but Dr. Burke had seen to it in the beginning that she carried the key.
“Maybe I knew something like this was. . . going to happen,” she confided to a fire extinguisher. “Maybe I was just being. . . prepared for crazy-Cathy to pop her. . . cork.”
And were you prepared,
asked the voice of reason,
for what happened to Donald?
Not even a bottle of single malt whiskey could shut the voice up, but it did make it very easy to ignore. So Dr. Burke did.
While Vicki could see the emergency lights as white pinpricks in a black shroud, her companions apparently found them more than sufficient illumination. Given that Henry needed so little light, he could probably see quite clearly, and she knew from experience that Celluci had better than average night vision. God, how she envied them; to be able to move freely without fear of misstep or collision, to be able to see movement in the shadows in time to . . .
To what?
Vicki pushed the question away and concentrated on not outpacing her circle of sight. Although she kept the flashlight beam trained closely on the floor in front of her so as not to blind the two men, she allowed a small part to overlap onto Henry. After everything they’d been through—everything all three of them had been through—she wasn’t letting him slip into darkness just because of her lousy eyes.
Henry was safe.
They’d saved him.
Her mother was dead, but Henry was alive and he was safe with them.
That made up for a lot.
Breathing heavily, Celluci’s hand tucked into the elbow of her good arm, she followed the little bit of Henry out of a stairwell and squinted up at the red pinprick in the darkness that had to be the exit sign. “You guys sure this is the right floor?”
“I’m sure.” Henry’s voice was flat and atonal. “The stink of perverted death is strongest here.”
“Henry . . .” Shaking free of Celluci’s grip, Vicki reached out and poked him gently in the hip with the side of the flashlight. “It’s going to be worse in the lab.” They’d told him about Donald down in the electrical room. All three of them had needed a moment to recover from the telling. “You can wait in the hall if you think it’s going to be too strong.”
“It’s only a difference of degree,” Henry told her abruptly, not turning. He could see the outline of the door at the end of the hall. “I might as well go into the lab because I can’t smell anything else even here.” Then he reached back and brushed his fingers over the warmth of her hand, softening his tone. “We’ve all moved past the time for running. Now it’s time to face those last few fears and . . .”
“And get the hell out of here,” Celluci finished. “Which we won’t do if we continue to stand here flapping our lips. Come on.” He caught hold of Vicki again and dragged her forward, forcing Henry to move ahead or be run down. If they lost momentum, they’d never get this finished. He hadn’t wanted to see anything finished quite so much in a very long time. “It can’t possibly be worse than the last visit, for any of us.”
Vicki tightened her hand around the barrel of the flashlight, giving thanks the grip was heavy ridged rubber. Her palm was so wet that a slicker surface would’ve squirted right out of her grasp.
Face our last few fears. Oh, God, I hope not.
The lab—possibly because it was such a large room, possibly because after a century of renovation the building just generally defied logic—rated an emergency light of its own.
“Well, thank God for small favors,” Celluci muttered as they entered. “I didn’t much want to be in the dark with
that
. ”
Vicki let her light lick over
that
, the stainless steel blazing momentarily then sliding into shadow again. All the horror lay in memory now for the body the isolation box contained was merely dead, and they’d all dealt with death before.
He’s really most sincerely dead.
She bit back a giggle and stomped down hard on the thought. It would be frighteningly easy to lose control.
Henry ignored the box and strode quickly down the length of the room to the one remaining computer, trench coat flapping back from his naked torso. With the power off, he had no way to tell if it contained the files concerning him, but he had to assume that if Catherine did the tests in this lab then she entered the data into this machine.
“Fitzroy.”
He turned, fingers already wrapped around a fistful of cables.
“You might want to clear this out of here as well.” Celluci offered him the wallet he’d picked up off the floor, various pieces of ID stuffed loosely inside. “Let’s not give Detective Fergusson a chance to cash in on the obvious.”
“Thank you.” A quick check, and Henry shoved it all into his coat pocket. “If the police managed to connect me to all of this, I’d have had to disappear.” One comer of his mouth twisted in the detective’s direction. “Maybe you should have left the wallet on the floor.”
Celluci mirrored both expression and tone. “Maybe I should have.”
Setting cables and monitor keyboard carefully to one side, Henry lifted the actual computer over his head and threw it into the comer as hard as he could.
Catherine jerked back at the sound of plastic shattering, eyes snapping open impossibly wide. “It’s her. She’s wrecking things.” Her fingers wrapped around number nine’s arm, molding imprints into the increasingly malleable flesh. “We’ve got to stop her!”
Number nine stopped moving, obedient to the pressure. He would do what she wanted.
From the lab up ahead came the sound of further destruction, small pieces being made smaller still until they were beyond all hope of repair.
“All right.” Catherine rose on her toes and rested her forehead on number nine’s skull just below where the staples held the cap of bone in place. “This is my plan. I’ll distract her, get her to chase me and lose her in the halls. You go in and get Donald. He should be viable outside the box by now. Don’t let anything stop you.”
He couldn’t feel her breath, warm against his ear and neck—the nerves in the skin had never regenerated—but he could feel her closeness and that was enough. He reached up and awkwardly patted her arm.
“I knew I could count on you!” She squeezed his hand in return, never feeling the tiny bones shifting out of their moorings, tendons and ligaments beginning to let go. “Come on!”
While Henry smashed hardware into progressively smaller pieces and Celluci snapped disks, Vicki, flashlight tucked under her chin, flipped through reams and reams of printout.
“Finding anything?” Celluci asked, reaching for yet another plastic square.