The Blood Artists
- Автор: Хоган Чак
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-688-15622-0
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Blood Artists». Краткое содержание книги:
“Wait!” he said, reaching for her.
But she was past him, running up the alley toward the street. She went ten or twelve steps before headlights swung in front of her, brightly sweeping the slicked walls as a large car bumped over the corner into the alley, bouncing on its suspension, bearing down upon her. She stopped and threw out her hands, and the car skidded to a stop, fishtailing to the brick wall. The passenger door swung open and barred her only exit. The shadow of a large man emerged.
Her bag. She went into it madly, up to her elbow, fumbling for her Mace.
He closed the car door and stepped forward through the headlights. Behind her, the dark-haired man’s footsteps scuffed off the wet curb.
“Mace,” she whispered crazily, jogging the contents of her bag, and her hairbrush and gum wrappers spilled out onto the tar. She backed sideways from the headlights to the wall, her lungs beginning to contract.
The man from the car strode through the rain-filled beams with a thick, quick leg. He appeared impossibly large before her, his face lost in shadow, the headlights catching his white hair and giving it an odd glow.
White hair.
Her breath left her. Something happened to her then, like a thing opening or unfolding inside her.
She found her inhaler again and flung it away desperately, digging deeper, shaking her bag, backing up against the wet alley wall in his shrinking shadow, dizzy with revelation and a lack of air. She trapped the cylinder in the corner of her bag finally and whipped it out. She fooled with the safety guard over the trigger, fooled with it, fooled with it, then got it free as his shadow fell over her.
His hand closed around her hand and the Mace. She looked up and saw his face then, the cool gray eyes, the plunging nose. It was the face that was always missing from her paintings. Something overturned inside her, a revolution of head and stomach. Her neck bucked as her chest contracted, and she pitched forward.
She vomited. She was gasping for breath, sagging, her legs bowing beneath her as his hand remained around hers, the only thing holding her up.
Behind her, breathless:
Where was she? Outside?
Then, from above — deep, strange, stem:
Sloppy. The last thing we needed was a commotion.
Melanie choked on a hollow groan. Her vision swam as her body went limp. The headlights shining on the man’s black shoes drifted and twisted, and then abruptly stopped twisting, and the dark rain stopped falling all at once.
The girl passed out. Maryk held her dangling by her hand. “Psychosomatic,” he explained to the others. “Put her in the car.”
They took her from him. Pasco came off the curb with an explanation. “I lost her inside,” Pasco said. “She was hidden in back behind the counter. I thought something might have happened.”
Maryk held up a gloved hand to stop him, “We have people taking down plates and VIN numbers?”
“Every vehicle within a three-block radius.”
“I want the names and addresses of everyone inside. Then shutter this coffeehouse, or whatever it is, for one week. A health hazard, to cover your blunder. Make it real.”
Another Special Path agent nearby looked up from her tablet. “We’re into her apartment. Everything’s quiet.”
Maryk was kicking the vomit off his shoes. “Start packing it up then. Take special care with any paintings. They are to be delivered directly to me.”
He was looking into the alley as he said this. He saw a shadow flicker across the dim light at the far end where the alley curved.
Maryk turned to Pasco. “Where does the alley go?”
“Nowhere,” Pasco said. “It’s a dead end.”
Maryk unbuckled his black bag. “Wait with her,” he directed.
He started into the alley alone. He passed the door to the coffeehouse and pulled a small syringe from his bag as he rounded the short curve.
The cul-de-sac ended at three high brick walls. A security light was trained down upon the buckled tar. Dumpsters and cracked pallets and flattened cardboard boxes lay in the dull shadows along the slowly weeping walls.
Maryk moved to the center of the light. There was a faint odor of decay distinct from mere waste or spoiled food. The scent was animal. It smelled as though something had crawled in there to die.
A manhole cover shifted as Maryk stepped over it. The clink reported loudly off the high walls.
Maryk got down on his knees on the wet tar. He worked a gloved finger inside the hole in the iron disk and tugged. It did not budge. A grunting second effort raised the disk just enough so that he could grip the cover and drag it up and over the lip of the manhole.
It was black space inside and he could just make out an iron ladder leading down. There were scuffs on the top few rusted rungs where shoe bottoms had stepped. Maryk left his bag next to the hole and started down the ladder with the syringe. He had no flashlight. The clank of the rungs echoed as he descended into darkness. He dropped the last few feet to the bottom with a quiet splash.
The echo told him there were widening tunnels on either side. Maryk listened to the dripping water without taking a step in either direction. He felt the sensation of being watched but then decided he could not entirely trust his senses. His claustrophobia was already narrowing the dim circle of light above him.
He pulled himself one-handedly back up the rusted ladder and out of the dark mouth of the hole. He stood in the open air of the empty alley with the rain falling straight around him. The syringe remained low at his side like a knife.
The Living Machine
They returned to the BDC that night and Maryk broke off from the rest and made his way alone to Building Seven. He descended to the subbasement and passed through the five staging rooms into the netherworld of B4.
Stephen’s gurney was pulled away from the aquarium window to the edge of the work counter. His eyes were closed and the white bedsheet rose and fell between the black straps buckled across his chest, waist, and thighs.
Maryk brought up his chart and inspected the six different intravenous lines. He exchanged bags and feed bottles. Stephen’s blood pressure had stabilized and the nitroglycerin drip was no longer warranted. Maryk wondered at Stephen’s unexplainable progress. He prepped a dosage out of an upturned ampule and uncapped a y-valve in Stephen’s right forearm.
Stephen’s red eyes stopped him. He was watching Maryk and Maryk froze with the hypodermic in his hands. Stephen’s eyes were bright. He appeared to recognize Maryk. “Am I dead?” he said.
These were the first words they had exchanged in years.
“You’re in the B4 lab,” Maryk said. “At the BDC.”
Stephen swallowed. Speech was painful. “The lab?”
Maryk nodded. He finished the serum injection. “Safest right now.”
Stephen’s head turned back and forth on the pillow. His range of movement impressed Maryk. He realized that Stephen was shaking his head.
“Not Plainville,” Stephen said hollowly. “Still alive.”
Maryk held the empty ampule for Stephen to see. The label read MILKMAID. “Only because of this.”
“Serum,” he recognized. “Code names.”
“That’s all over now,” Maryk said. “Two of them are dead. Murdered. We don’t know why.”
The muscles in Stephen’s depressed face strained against his flesh. “Why straps?” he said. His hands clutched emptily at his sides.