Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (8 page)

I awoke in the dark, dry everywhere but between my legs. This time, I had indeed voided my bladder.

There were no stains on cot or carpet, no marks on my clothing. My watch had gone dead, but the wall clock read 7 PM. I’d been incapacitated for roughly an hour and fifteen minutes. My muscles were slow in responding, and my knees buckled the first few times when I tried standing. I crawled to the door, and hauled myself upright by the knob.

I knew I had to locate the blood before it could infiltrate the quarantine room or commune with anyone else. I assumed it was traveling through the ventilation shafts. I examined myself in the mirror; when the spasms in my hands and knees had subsided, I cleaned up and changed.

I made myself walk down to the nurse’s station. A candy striper sat at the desk, engrossed in a personal phone conversation. I signaled to her to hang up. “I need you to page Dr. Randels. Tell him to meet me at my office immediately.”

She nodded, her bright burgundy nails clicking on the numbers, though her eyes never left my face. After a moment, her voice rang out through the hospital. She hung up. “Is there anything—” I stepped into the elevator and pressed the basement button.

I leaned against the mirrored steel wall of the elevator car as it descended, my eyes turned inward. I felt hollow inside, and knew I’d always felt that way and never faced it. I considered the possibility that the blood might have found Randels before it got to me, and might use him to aid its escape. I could only hope I was the only one with whom it had shared itself.

As the doors opened, I began to run, which made me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. I slid past Jane Doe Cykes’ cell and fell sprawling. My arms flailing, I hit the floor face first. My left eyebrow burst open upon impact; the blood that flowed over my eye was drab brown, tasted thin and cold, inanimate.

I struggled to get up as the phone rang by her door. It trilled unanswered, jarringly out of sync with my pulse. I grasped the knob and found it locked. I would have to call maintenance and order them to shut off all airflow to the basement. I answered the phone.

“Shields, is that you? What’s going on? I’m up here at your office, and the receptionist told me—”

“The girl has an inherited condition that makes her a potential carrier of viral infection. We’ve got to isolate her completely.” I jerked at the doorknob again without success. Blood was trickling down my face faster than I could blink it away. “Do you have the key to her cell?”

“I’ll be right back down, Shields. Don’t go anywhere this time.”

I hung up. My vertigo subsided. The hallway was empty of personnel and equipment, but I recalled seeing a fire axe in its case in the stairwell. Pressing my face against the glass, I tried to make out any movement in the dark cell. A sickly green line arced and dove in the blackness to display the girl’s pulse rate. All else was still.

I jogged down the length of the hall, hands out before me in the dark. As long as I kept up forward momentum, I could stay upright. I wrapped my coat around my fist and punched the glass. It shattered on the third or fourth try, and I cut myself on the loose shards as I pried them out, then took the axe.

The elevator opened as I was lurching back to her cell with the axe cocked over my head. Randels popped out, a nurse beside him. He cringed behind her as I came at them.

I barely kept my footing as I pivoted and hacked at the window. The second swing went wild and I slipped again. The axe launched from my hand and crashed through the safety-glass.

Randels came shouting out of the elevator with the nurse close behind. I got to my feet and threw one leg over the windowsill. The axe was lodged in the wall above Jane Doe Cykes’ head.

Randels punched me in the throat. I gasped and slipped from my straddling position into the cell, at the foot of her bed. Glass grated under my weight, biting into my skin, drawing more blood. Randels dug for his keys.

The air recirculator gurgled.

Randels opened the door and came in holding a flashlight out in front of him as if to ward wild animals away, the nurse creeping dutifully behind him. His brow knitted as he squinted around, then his features were eclipsed by a splatter of darkness and his arms flew to his face.

I know what the videotapes showed. The hospital claimed they never existed, but I saw them before they were destroyed. I could not be made, then, to explain what they showed. For a long time, they formed my only memory of what went on once I entered the girl’s cell.

On the tape, I stood beside Jane Doe Cykes’ bed and leaned over her, hands outstretched as if to drink in the moonstone glow of her skin. My mouth opened and closed spasmodically, my eyes rolled back in my head, and I vomited blood all over her. From out of the gash in my brow and the lacerations in my palms came fans of crimson spray like the fountains of severed arteries.

Blood cascaded out of me in a serpentine arc, and into the girl in the bed. I swiped at it, but my hand passed through the stream and emerged as dry as desert sand.

Jane Doe Cykes opened her eyes. The blood pummeled her and formed lakes in her lap, between her arms and torso, in the ravine where her rib cage gave way to her concave abdomen. Her mouth gaped and crimson jewels came pouring into her, gathering like to like with the eerie prescience of living mercury. A fountain of blood swirled and drained into her lips, and I threw myself upon her, taking her in a deep kiss.

I choked and lost control of my body, but somehow managed to hold on to her. Some of the blood flowed into my lungs, but came right back up, gushing out my nostrils. It was like trying to stifle a hearty New Year’s Eve puke. I bit through my lips, trying to hold her back, licked and frantically bit her cold, waxen lips to steal her back. I might have eaten her, if Randels hadn’t clawed at my shoulders and dragged me back.

I was losing her. Blood spat from my mouth, bubbled out of my sinuses, wept from my pores and flew across the room to the bed. She had only used me as a vessel to reach her daughter. With all we shared, she could still hide inside me, use me, and slip away—

I was too weak to resist as Randels grappled me into the corner of the cell. His teeth chattered in my ears, but he could not even speak.

Jane Doe Cykes seemed to grow, to swell, to ripen, as she absorbed the red reservoir in the bed. The girl disappeared beneath its surface. A voluptuous black-red woman lay upon the spotless sheets now, the secret form of the goddess who had slept in the veins of the
bruja
, visited upon the daughter from my unwitting lips.

Randels relaxed his grip and I elbowed him in the face.

I knelt before her, my arms out in surrender. “Take me! What are you waiting for? I can help you escape, I’ll be your host, just don’t leave me! You need me!”

Jane Doe Cykes stretched to bursting with an ocean of singing blood. She was breathtaking as she drew herself up and flowed to the door, her face stolen from Jane Doe Cykes’ body and reproduced as a negative framed in locks of fluid hair undulating to the beat of her heart.

After all the inquests, the civil trial and the APA review, the incident was explained away as inexplicable. The lab technician found unconscious in my closet, the vessel by which she came to my office, could shed no light on the events. The security tapes were, of course, not entered into evidence. Jane Doe Cykes was never seen again.

Dr. Randels and I both took medical leaves after the last review, he to resume drinking, I to decode the Cykes journals. Others, FBI cryptographers and a retired Army Signal Corps officer among them, tried to break them, but their skill had no personal impetus behind it. I have succeeded, at least partially, where others failed because I desperately needed to. Where I have achieved little else, I have solved at least a fragment of the mystery.

“Host A is unaware of the symbiote in her bloodstream. Interactions between the two organisms seldom take place above a cellular level, and conventional tests cannot discern any abnormal presence, though Host A attests to feeling a ‘holy spirit’ inside her when she performs her ritual cures. I believe Host A’s perception of stimuli from the outside world acts as a buffer between the host and the symbiote, suppressing any macromolecular contact. It sustained her, worked miracles through her, loved her, though she never knew it.

“If this buffer could be removed by the screening out of all stimuli from birth, the host’s perceptive sphere would be turned entirely inward, a world unto itself. In perfect darkness, they might find each other, and develop mutual comprehension, symbiotic consciousness, even a means of life support that would render nutritive intake obsolete. Host B, my darling Ruby, nears the end of her gestation period, which should make such an experiment feasible at last. Such a life will truly be a gift, when one considers the alternative to which we are all condemned.”