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:
“Getting around better,” he said, his voice stronger than before. “How are you?”
Now he was concerned for her. She broke the knot of her arms and moved to the counter for something to lean on. It was all too much suddenly, him being sick and super-pleasant, the sealed room, the swirling oxygen, and the slow-moving blue suits behind.
“I’m all alone,” she said. She meant that she had no one else to talk to.
“As am I,” he said. “Except, of course, for our mutual friend.”
He wore only the vestiges of a smile. Melanie nodded uncomfortably.
“He scares you,” Dr. Pearse said.
She placed her gloved hand on the counter, then pulled it back, then gripped her fingers as though burned. Maryk had succeeded in making a paranoid wreck out of her.
Dr. Pearse went on, “It is extraordinarily rare that a person excels at the very thing they were uniquely created for. Beyond aptitude or ability or talent — I mean a legitimate predisposition, a person born into... certain faculties who succeeds in exploiting them to their fullest capacity. And when this does happen, it usually creates a monster.”
His words shocked her. “Then why are you helping him?”
“Because Peter is our monster. And in helping him, I am helping others, and in that, perhaps helping myself. He has sent me back some new samples from Louisiana.”
He spoke of the blood samples as though they were sweets purchased at a bake sale. “What’s in Louisiana?” Melanie said.
He looked at her a moment. “They haven’t told you?” he said. He moved to a screen and gently prodded the keys. “The Plainville secret is out now. It’s all over the news.”
He turned the screen toward her, and Melanie forced herself to swallow the bile that had risen in her throat. A news server headline appeared, reading like a shriek over the image of a dark building seen through a chain-link fence and rolls of razor wire:
A sign posted on the fence bore the international biohazard symbol.
“The guards’ families,” said Dr. Pearse. “They were scared, so they went to the press. It means that the fight has progressed to a different level now.”
She was dizzy. “He’s there?”
“I’m told Peter’s team took off for Louisiana at first call.”
Melanie laid her hand over her stomach. For the past day and a half she had sat spitefully in her dormitory room like a little girl. She felt petulant and spoiled and deeply ashamed. She tried to imagine the prison in Louisiana, and instead saw the dead of Plainville, her parents and friends and neighbors, wasted and cadaverous and all watching her with rotting eyes, waiting to see if she would ever make something of the second chance she had been given.
“The virus keeps changing and changing,” Dr. Pearse said. “Look here.”
He changed the image on the computer screen, and after a moment she was able to focus.
Distorted, as though by the magnification of a powerful microscope, a small, spindly creature squirmed and twitched.
“This is the bug that’s eating me,” he said, nearly in wonder. “Look at how it moves. Simple enough to kill a virus with bleach and study it destroyed. This is our first look at live Plainville. Well — magnified one hundred and twenty thousand times.”
He moved closer to the screen and touched it, the distorted green light of the image shading his hand.
“I have made a discovery,” he went on. Melanie tried to pay attention. “Some of the RNA sites on the virus contain strands of human characteristic DNA codes — a human component of the virus. Just as I said it would.” He pulled his thin hand from the viewing screen and looked at it, front and back. “Just as I said it would.” He seemed to forget that she was there, lost in the world of his hands. For a moment, the triumph was gone. “Of course, I could move faster with a chemical gene splicer, but I’m making do. You are well represented here, too. Your cell cultures, anyway. Plainville burns through everything until it hits them. Miraculous, really.” He looked at the equipment surrounding him. “It is good to be back home inside a laboratory again. I was away from it for too long.”
He pondered that a moment. She saw then that his grins were not grins but rather the result of the fading architecture of his face. He turned to the long window, evidently viewing something other than the dim room beyond.
“Illness does have the effect of clarifying things, doesn’t it?” he said. “Life, or death. Sickness, or health. The ruthlessness of existence. I believe this must be how Peter views the world every day—”
She interrupted. “I’m going to give him my blood.”
Dr. Pearse’s red eyes returned to study her face. His grin, perhaps the only expression left available to him, flickered. “Good,” he said, nodding slightly. “Yours to give. But not to him: to the people who need it.”
The immensity of her situation rose up around her again, overwhelming her. She sank against the console. “Why me?” she said. “Out of all those people, why did it have to be me? Look at me.” She looked at herself “Why did I survive?”
“You are proof that the virus is not irremediable. You survived, so there is hope that others might survive.” His knuckled hand went lightly to his chest. “That I might survive.”
“But why me?”
“All that is required of you now is to live, to remain healthy.”
She nodded, agreeing with him at first. Then she stopped nodding. “No,” she said. “You’re wrong. Living’s not enough. I’ve been living for more than four years now, and it’s gotten me nowhere. I’m different, he tells me. He’s right. How can I use that?”
Dr. Pearse was distracted by the monitor image of the wriggling virus. She moved in front of it to regain his attention.
“You said something about helping the ill,” she said.
He regripped his cane and prodded at the smooth cement floor. “That was just a suggestion. This situation rarely presents itself. The immune can go into these breaks. Survivors sometimes make the best investigators.
“But I don’t know a thing about viruses.”
“You could see to the sick. For them just to engage in conversation with someone not sealed inside a suit — you can understand the power of that.”
“But I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“You would. You’re doing it right now.”
She retreated along the counter away from his grin, then stopped. “I want to go there,” she said.
“It is a federal penitentiary. Perhaps you should wait for some other—”
“No more waiting. It’s been four years of waiting. If I agree to give Maryk my blood, then he has to let me go. He has to. You could contact him for me.”
“Ransoming your blood,” said Dr. Pearse. “Peter won’t take kindly to that.”
“I have to help. You’re not sitting here doing nothing.”
She had a valid point, and he knew it. “Then will you do something for me?” he asked. His stiff grin had faded. He leaned both hands upon the curve of his cane now, his blood-filled gaze commanding her attention. “Keep a close eye on him. Peter’s vocation has taken the place of his conscience. You don’t know what he is capable of.”
The Penitentiary
She had learned to cheat glances at the helicopter pilot’s control stick, anticipating turns and dips and bracing herself accordingly, gripping the soft sides of her seat as they swung around the prison perimeter. They buzzed the guard towers, each one abandoned. High-powered stationary spotlights crisscrossed the prison grounds and made the bales of razor wire stacked against the high chain fences glitter like rolled carpets of diamonds. The central building of Lewes Federal Penitentiary was stage-lit like an alien ship set down in a bayou. There was a black lake to the north, and swamplands all around, with long, spindly roads like black seams leading away, and small police lights clustered in the distance.