The Mammoth Book of Dracula (73 page)

“How the fuck should I know?” the youth wailed, with patent sincerity. “I just... you’ll have to ask the girls. Jenny talks to the girls, not to me. If she gives them something, they sure as hell don’t tell me.”

With the forefinger of his free hand Brewer pulled his collar down and pointed to the side of his neck, where there was a blue mark that would soon turn purple, and then brown. Simon’s frightened eyes followed the gesture with mesmeric concentration.

“Have you seen anyone sporting marks like this?” Brewer asked.

“Sure,” Simon told him. “I thought it was funny—the doc doesn’t usually shoot stuff into a person’s neck, and you wouldn’t think the girls would do it to themselves. Why ... ?” He stopped, evidently wondering how the mark on Brewer’s neck had got there but not daring to ask.

“How many?” Brewer wanted to know.

“I’ve seen three,” Simon said, implying that there might be dozens or hundreds more. “Why the neck?”

“Maybe he doesn’t have time to get them to roll their sleeves up,” Brewer replied, drawing the point of the syringe an inch or two away from Simon’s throat. A more likely explanation was that the target was the carotid artery, which would feed the drug straight into the brain—except that his brain still seemed to be working normally. He wasn’t high and he wasn’t dopey; whatever had been shot into his flesh hadn’t been a psychotropic. Maybe the hit had been aimed at one of the brain’s associated bodies. If so, the pituitary had to be the favourite with the pineal close behind. The pituitary was the master gland, the dispatcher controlling the hormonal couriers which kept the body in order. The pineal still carried an aura of Cartesian mystery that had intrigued a legion of modern investigators.

Simon freed one of his naked arms from the duvet and reached out to push Brewer’s hypodermic even further away. Brewer let him do it; if the boy had known anything more about Marklow he’d have spilled it.

“How long has Jenny looked the way she does now?” Brewer asked.

“Don’t know,” Simon replied, yet again. “She started coming around three, maybe four months ago. Every three weeks or so. Like I say, she doesn’t talk to me. Just to the girls. I didn’t know she was with the creepy guy, at first. I saw him pick her up one night. I’ve seen them together a couple of times since, always after dark. I thought...” He trailed off, as if no longer certain of what he had thought.

“Why
creepy,
Simon? What’s so creepy about him?” Brewer realized as he posed the question that it might be important. “Creepy” wasn’t the kind of word people like Simon usually bandied about; it was a whole generation out of date.

“Short for creepy-crawly,” Simon said. “It’s those eyes—the way they can make you feel, like spiders running down your spine. He makes out he’s being generous—free samples, nice prices—but there’s something
behind
it all. Not exactly a threat, not like
you’d better deal or else...
more like
I
know you better than you know yourself.
What would
you
call him?”

Brewer thought about the impossibly dark, impossibly empty but unsettling eyes. “I don’t know,” he confessed. He thought about Jenny’s miraculously blue eyes and marvellously clear skin, and added: “Whatever he’s come up with, it cuts deeper than happy pills or dream machines.”

“I could try to get some for you,” Simon said. He was obviously anxious to make up for petty treasons past now that he knew what Brewer was capable of, violence-wise.

“You’re too late,” Brewer told him, grimly. “I already got my free sample.” He went to the drawer where Simon kept his collection and grabbed a handful of the advertising cards. He threw them at Simon, then went back for a second handful.

“I want a number, Simon,” he said. “I want to meet a girl with a bruise just like mine but older—a
lot
older.”

Simon was about to protest that he hadn’t any idea which girl went with which card, but he thought better of it. He was a dedicated hobbyist, after all; he had a collector’s pride. It took him a couple of minutes, but he found what he was looking for. Brewer took it.

“You’d better get that great gaping hole in your window fixed,” Brewer told the boy. “There’s a terrible draught in here.”

~ * ~

When his staff turned up the following morning Brewer told them to drop everything else and concentrate on a rush job. They didn’t ask any questions; they would assume that it was an industrial espionage job beyond the pale of legality but it wasn’t the first time they’d done that kind of work and it wouldn’t be the last. They went to it with a will; it was a welcome break from the usual routine.

It only took Brewer fifteen minutes to recover the data Jenny’s boyfriend had erased. As soon as he had it he passed it on to Johanna. “If you can figure out what they’re for,” he said. “You win a nice prize. You won’t find anything like them in the patent files, but there has to be something, somewhere, which will give us a clue. A protein is a protein is a protein.”

“Any clues?” Johanna asked.

“They might be something to do with tissue rejuvenation, but not in any of the conventional approaches.”

She raised her eyebrows at that and glanced at the little bladder-packs on his desk, which were full of rich red blood. He nodded. “Same sort of filing,” he said. “Field tests are already under way. That’s why we have a lot of catching up to do. The compounds you’re looking at are probably supportive; I’m going after the chap they support.”

That was another clue and she acknowledged it with a nod. She knew that a “chap”, in this context, was probably a virus vector—something that had to be kept in a suspension containing living tissue.

If Johanna saw the mark on Brewer’s neck she didn’t give it a second glance; she probably thought he’d spent the night with a girl. He
had,
of course, spent the last few hours of darkness with a sleepy whore, but she hadn’t been in the least amorous. She’d been very expensive, but not by virtue of her business acumen; her reluctance to talk had been perfectly genuine—but she was, after all, a whore. It had only been a matter of fixing the right price.

The whore hadn’t known Marklow’s name. She’d only seen him three times. He’d been very polite, she said, but there was something about those eyes—as if they could look right
into
you and see the blood coursing through your veins. Jenny had persuaded her to take part in the “secret experiment”, using her own improved appearance as a lure. The drug had been pitched to her as a cosmetic treatment, not as any kind of elixir of life: plastic surgery without the knife.

“A couple of days after the first shot I got itchy,” the whore had told him. “Jenny told me to expect that, and not to scratch, but I couldn’t help scratching a bit. It keeps coming back, especially on sunny days, and I have to wear sunglasses all day except when it’s cloudy, but I’ve got more used to it and the pills help. I feel a bit nauseous too, mostly in the mornings—like I was pregnant. Lost weight nice and steady, but that’s partly the high-protein diet. I don’t mind the itching, really—it’s like I can feel it working. It
is
working.”

“Nothing else?” Brewer had asked, insistently.

“Only the dreams,” she told him. “Jenny warned me about those, too, but I like them. They’re fun.”

“What kind of dreams?”

“Vampire dreams. Nightmares, some might say, but they don’t scare
me.”

“Vampire dreams? What’s that supposed to mean?” Somehow, he’d wished he could be more surprised by the introduction of
that
word.

“Sometimes, I dream I’m a bat—well, not a bat, exactly, but something
like
a bat. Flying by night, seeing but not seeing. Other times, I’m more like a wolf. You should see the moon! Huge and red as blood. It’s great. The hunt, the kill, lapping up the blood. If that’s how animals feel, I want to come back as a lion. Jenny says it’s just the diet, but I reckon it’s memories of other lives coming to the surface. Why else would we all have the
same
dreams? These shrinks who take you back to Roman times and ancient Egypt are full of crap. We were animals for billions of years, you know, before we ever became human. Race memory, isn’t that what they call it?”

Brewer hadn’t bothered to inform her that neither bats nor wolves were numbered among the human race’s remoter ancestors. He had agreed with her that shrinks practising past-life regression were full of crap, but hadn’t added that in his opinion her own theory was by no means empty of it. He’d been too busy thinking about the dreams. They were the oddest thing of all—and thus, perhaps, the most significant. He remembered the haunted look in Jenny’s blue eyes. One reason why she’d taken him home was to make him see how well she’d done since he dumped her, but there had been another. Whatever had been done to her had made her anxious, and a little bit lonely.

Was that, he wondered, the effect of her vampire dreams?

Brewer hadn’t felt any itching yet, but he wasn’t in any hurry and he didn’t intend to go out in daylight until he had the problem cracked, at least insofar as it
could
be cracked by the equipment in the lab. Nor was he intending to sleep, let alone to dream. He was a chemist, after all; he had ways of avoiding the need for sleep at least for a couple of days.

He knew that he couldn’t go back to Andrew Marklow without a deal to make, and he wasn’t sure yet what kind of deal there was to be made. A promise of silence wasn’t enough, for him or for Marklow. Marklow wasn’t afraid that he’d go to the authorities—and not just because he figured Brewer couldn’t do that without imperilling his own illicit operation. Marklow wasn’t afraid, period. Brewer admired that, but it also made him anxious. Despite his chemical expertise, he’d never come close to mastering the art of not being afraid.

As things turned out, it didn’t take a genius to locate the stranger in the blood samples. The “chap” wasn’t a virus at all; he was something much bigger. If he’d had a cell wall he’d have qualified as a bog-standard bacterium but he didn’t. The only label Brewer knew that might apply to him was
rickettsia.

The only rickettsia Brewer knew, even by repute, was the one which caused Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but when he went to the on-line encyclopedia he found that there were a hundred more on record—none of which bore any very intimate resemblance to the one that had now taken up residence somewhere in the vicinity of his brain, and was presumably reproducing like crazy as well as retuning his endocrinal orchestra.

There were, Brewer noted, two significant properties that rickettsias had. Having no cell walls, they were immune to antibiotics. By the same token, however, they were very difficult to transfer from host to host. That was why Rocky Mountain spotted fever, although incurable, hadn’t ever managed to cause an epidemic. People who caught it had it for life—which hadn’t been very long in the days before doctors developed palliatives for the nastier symptoms—but they didn’t usually pass it on to others. Even their spouses weren’t significantly endangered; it wasn’t an STD. Theory said you could only get infected through a open cut—or, of course, a hypodermic syringe, dumb or smart.

Brewer hesitated for a few minutes before giving the information he had gleaned to Johanna and Leroy, but he figured that the time for keeping things strictly to himself was past. Until he had been infected himself there’d been no urgency at all. Now that he had found out that what he had was exactly the same as what the whore had—and presumably, therefore, exactly what Jenny had—the urgency was somewhat less than it might have been, but time was still pressing. He needed all the reliable help he could get.

“If you want a DNA-profile of something
that
big,” Johanna pointed out, “it’ll take us weeks. Maybe months. Even if it’s a variant of one of the recorded species we’d have to start from scratch. Nobody’s ever sequenced a rickettsia—or if they have, they haven’t published. Do you think the pill-proteins are products of the rickettsial genes?”

“No,” said Brewer. “I suspect that the pill-proteins are meant to alleviate some of the symptoms of the rickettsial infection.” If that was true, it wasn’t good news. It meant that he needed the pills himself if he were to enjoy the benign effects of his minuscule passengers without suffering the downside of their presence in his system.

“Infection?” Johanna echoed, anxiously. It was one of the words that always sounded alarm bells in a lab like this, even when nothing was cooking but everyday commercial products sent for routine checking.

“It’s okay,” he assured her. “You can only catch it through an open cut, and it’s difficult even then. This one’s
supposed
to be benign, but there has to be a catch.”

“There’s a catch all right,” she said—but she was only talking about the ‘98 protocols regarding the legality of engineering human-infective agents. Nobody expected them to hold, even in the medium term. Everybody in the business knew someone, somewhere, who was working in the confident expectation that the new millennium would bring in a whole new set of rules and regulations, elastic enough to license
anything
provided only that it were done discreetly. Andrew Marklow might be ahead of his time, but not that far ahead of it.

The only problem, Brewer thought, was that breaking into other people’s labs and shooting human-infective agents into their carotid arteries couldn’t meet anyone’s definition of “discretion”.