Swann waited for the bullets to fly, for them to swarm through the dusty air of the small house, for them to sting. To wound. To kill.
But the vampires did not fire.
Not a single gun.
Not a single shot.
They were getting smarter than that.
Swann had warned of this.
He had warned them.
The lead V-8 shooter made it all the way through the living room and into the kitchen before the first bombs went off.
"VULPES" PT.2
Gregory Frost
— 12 —
In the dream she was scaling the wall of ice. Harry Gordon and John Bail were climbing alongside her. Harry had something like twenty axes on his belt. She looked up, and the wall ran up for miles. As soon as she saw that, her joints began to ache, shoulders and elbows as she struck, caught, struck, caught. She went up the sheer face of it like a spider. Nothing was going to stop her, not even exhaustion. She would not be left trapped on this climb.
Harry said, “There’s nothing wrong with you, nothing at all.” He sounded like Vincent. She paused and looked over at him. John Bail was right beside her, and he’d transformed. He had silvery irises, like movie special-effect eyes, and his hands had become claws. She scrambled up faster, but he stayed beside her. He wasn’t even climbing, just floating against the ice. “John, stop it!” He laughed. “Harry!” she cried. Harry had been her de facto protector over the four months. Looking after her had provided a sort of safe intimacy for him. Now he swung beside Bail and sized her up with the same silvery eyes. He said, “What’s a little poison in your blood?” Then he soared up the ice, leaving John alone beside her.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.” He reached over and wrenched her left arm, pulling the ice axe free. He tried to bite her wrist but she tore loose from his grasp. She dangled from one axe, kicking with her crampons to find purchase, but they only scraped and scraped as if the ice had turned to stone. He cackled with delight and reached for the other arm. She swung her left and buried her axe in the side of his head. Bail didn’t bleed at all and seemed only mildly surprised. He looked her in the eye. “That won’t help,” he told her, and then lunged. She let go of the other axe, tipped away from the ice wall and plummeted toward the black sea below. Zipper fall, she thought. She could not survive it.
At the point of impact she awoke. The bed was bouncing beneath her as if she had floated up to the ceiling and then dropped. She hadn’t had a falling dream since she was a teenager.
It was daylight. The apartment was silent. Either her grandfather was still abed after the late night, or else he was gone and she’d been so deeply asleep she hadn’t heard. She lay there until she had shaken the dream off. Then she got up.
Miraculously, she felt fine, even strangely energized, like an echo of how she’d felt after making love with Costin. She could have put on a track suit and gone running. Maybe she’d been so exhausted that she had finally overcome her jet lag, which didn’t really make much sense.
On the way to the kitchen she glanced in the mirror to be certain her dark hair hadn’t turned completely white. It was still the same spade shape. Maybe there was a tiny fleck more. Her cheek, on the other hand, was purplish and yellow, swollen and wincingly tender.
Her grandfather had left her laptop on the kitchen table where she sat. He had been in her computer? That was unusual.
She opened it. The screen came to life with the front page of Agentia de Investigata Media, and its one word headline: VAMPIRI!
Why ever did he want her to see this? She lit a burner for hot water, then sat down to read. According to the thumbnail column, the so-called vampire plague was spreading. Cases had been reported not only in New York but all across North America. She clicked to see the full article. Halfway through, it quoted a Dr. Margaret Ruiz, an epidemiologist. She was convinced that some form of infectious agent was responsible, and in the following paragraph speculated that the cause could even be an old bacteria or virus “possibly reintroduced as a result of global warming, released into soil, water, or air through melting glacial ice.”
Ruksana sat back, repelled by the words on the screen. Melting ice. Decebal had read the same article while eating his honey and bread and must have seen the same implication as she: that she had been infected in Antarctica, and it had turned her into one of these so-called vampiri. If she believed that, then she must turn herself in to some authorities somewhere. Not the police. They couldn’t possibly comprehend.
The team … If she was infected, then so were the others — at the very least Harry and Vincent and John. Maybe Kwasi. He had handled the samples.
The tea kettle began to shriek. Abruptly she found herself at the stove, lifting the kettle from the burner. She’d moved — how had she done that? Her thoughts had been elsewhere, but she had no memory of jumping up, could not find the memory.
She needed to calm down. All that pent-up energy — it had her bouncing in place. She needed to do something. She just didn’t know what. For the moment she poured water into her tea pot.
Someone rang the buzzer and pounded on the door at the same time. The muffled voice of Costin called, “Ruksana! Are you there? Open up, please! Ruksana!”
She flung back the door.
He rushed to her, wrapped his arms around her. “Oh, my God. You’re all right? Tell me you’re all right — oh, look at your face. Does it hurt? My sweetheart.” He kissed her other cheek, then stepped back and sized her up in her nightgown. The moment held a strange frisson of déjà vu, and she thought, I’m having too many of these — Costin and Decebal both. It’s something wrong.
“I’m all right,” she said without much enthusiasm.
Her hyper-energy seemed contagious. Costin came past her and went to the table. He shrugged off his leather messenger bag and coat, glanced at her laptop then back at her. “I was in the cybercafé, trying to repair my hangover, and there was a report on the TV about the dog attack at the university and they showed your car. I’ve been trying to call you for an hour.”
Her phone. It couldn’t be in the bedroom or she would have heard it. No one could sleep through Ride of the Valkyries. Her black coat was hanging on its peg in the entryway beside her. She lifted the nearest sleeve, noticing the brownish stain along it that she’d seen last night in the hospital. She dug her hand into the pocket. It was empty. So were the others. The phone hadn’t come home with her. She had no idea if it had been in the car or had ended up on the pavement or the lawn.
She explained as best she could what had happened after she stopped to get her mail.
At the end Costin said, “So the bastard got ripped by the dogs. I think I’ll start giving them kibble. He didn’t hurt you, then? Didn’t —”
“No, he hit me once. That was all, before the dogs, I guess.” That was more than enough.
“The police will have your phone. We should get it back — I’ll go with you.”
“Maybe in awhile. I need to eat breakfast, have my tea. I need to calm down, not get crazy.” She gestured at the teapot. “Do you want a cup?”
“Sure,” he said. “Fine.” He grabbed her around the waist again and pressed his head to her belly. “I’m just so glad you weren’t hurt.”
She understood what he meant. After that, perhaps in a gesture of trying to help calm her, he talked about the orchestra group and how they had taken their revelry to another bar, but she hardly heard. Despite her best efforts her thoughts kept drifting back to the laptop. Finally she turned it and launched her email program.
“Oh, I tried you there, too.”
Among the dozen messages were two from him with the subject “Where Are You?” She had intended to send an email to Harry, but her attention was caught by the flagged email above it, a message from Kwasi Nkrumha with the subject “URGENT!”
The message was brief: “Samples show mitochondrial activity. NSF wants to contact team members immediately. Call in!” He’d listed three international phone numbers. They looked to be from the US, probably government numbers.
“What is it?” Costin asked. She pushed the laptop to him. He stared at it, perplexed. “This is English,” he said. She remembered that he didn’t read English very well. She told him. “I don’t understand. Mitochondrial activity?”
“Mitochondria. They have their own distinct genome. Anthropologists use mitochondria DNA to distinguish evolutionary traits. At least that’s what I remember from university.”
“I still don’t see.”
“We brought back samples from the ice a few days before I came home. He is saying that, despite being in the ice for tens of thousands of years, the samples contain a living agency.” She thought of what the epidemiologist in the news had speculated, although she couldn’t comprehend how vampires formed an evolutionary trait. But if she had turned into one last night …
“Ruksana.”
Costin’s worried gaze met hers. She said, “I may have been exposed to something, and no one knows what the effects might be. And if I have, probably you have, too. And Decebal. Anyone I’ve come in contact with.” Already she was imagining the ripple effect of so many flights across so many international boundaries. Who had sat next to her on those flights? Or behind her or in front of her? And where had they flown? Who had she brushed up against in the terminals? And what if that were true for the whole team, all going home?
My God, it’s too late.
“But exposed to what?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t know, either. It could be nothing, just some ancient rotting seaweed or plankton. Just, they want me to contact them right away. All of us on the team that came home — we’re to call.” She could almost hear his thoughts as he tried to fold this information in with what had happened last night — how did a contaminant in Antarctica connect to an attack in a parking lot in Bucures¸ti?