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:
The few who did look at her or attempted to speak, she could not face. She tried, but her cheeks and forehead burned and she looked guiltily away. These conscious few terrified her, because they could see what was coming for them.
At one cot, Maryk pulled the sheet off a dead man. The corpse’s thinned arms were straight at his sides and his hands and his mouth were open, as though he were holding a musical note just above the human range. BioCon agents with tablets on their arms arrived like census takers, and Melanie pressed back against the railing, out of their way. A few of the agents looked her over: She was suitless; bizarre. She felt like the only person on the moon who could breathe.
The stench was sickening and Melanie turned away. Across the gap lay a facing row of more cots and more dying men, their sickly flesh glowing in the white light. BioCon agents in yellow suits rolled instrument carts past them along the path of riot debris.
When she looked back, they were lifting the dead man off the cot and into, a black bag unzipped on the floor. His arms, crossed awkwardly over his blistered stomach, fell open as they moved him, and at once he looked so withered and empty. They laid him inside the thick black plastic with his red eyes still staring, his mouth still twisted open in silent song. Maryk knelt at his feet and unlocked a black clasp from around his ankle: an electronic quarantine bracelet. She remembered it all from Plainville.
Men lying on neighboring cots stared at the scorched undersides of the parapets above them with mouths dropped open, as though trying to harmonize with the dead they were soon to join. One man’s head rolled to the side, his red eyes loose in their sockets, fixing questioningly on her.
She started moving then. She was rushing away. She pushed past the nearest suit and pulled herself hand by hand along the red railing, away from Maryk, back to the steel doors.
Inside the first door, deep blue lights came on humming. She brought her hands up around her head as though to wave off the images of the cell block, but was afraid to touch anything, even herself. The blue lights died finally and the humming ended and the door clicked open and she ducked between two suited persons waiting to enter. She pulled at the wrist tape over her gloves, tearing away at her protective coverings as she searched for an empty room to cry in. She found one, and inside ripped the cowl and the layers of cotton and plastic from her face like bandages, dropping them to the floor. She covered her stinging eyes with her bared knuckles as a wave of nausea made her gag, and she started blindly forward, striking the desk with her hip before reaching the chair. She buried her face in her bare, powdered hands and sat like that for a long time, weeping, for the mystified dead and dying, for her own helplessness, and for her family and herself, and how sick she had once been.
When she looked up again, Maryk was standing in the door. He came ahead and set his tablet and black bag on the desk, then plunked down the dead man’s anklet. It was oily with green disinfectant, metal and round with a locking piece that shaped it into a capital Q. Melanie pushed away.
He pulled a chair over next to her without a word and opened up his tablet on the desk. He tapped keys and pulled from his bag a syringe, a sealed dish about the size of a can of tuna, and the small, blood-testing, PCR gadget.
“Arm,” he said.
She swiped at her eyes and complied silently.
“Sleeve,” he said.
She rolled up her sleeve. Her skin was bruised from all the bloodletting.
That was it. There was no I told you so. The abasement of a blood test was humiliation enough. Maryk gripped her arm and fastened a rubber tourniquet tightly around her tender biceps.
A window opened on Maryk’s tablet. She heard Dr. Pearse’s hoarse voice, as distinct as though he were there in the room with them. “Hello, Peter,” he said ghostily. “How goes the battle?”
She could barely see Dr. Pearse, his face long, his shoulders thin and sharp. She saw whiskers growing stubbly along his cheeks, light gray, nearly Maryk-white. He seemed to have aged even in the few hours since Melanie had left him. She felt a sort of confederacy with him since their private meeting, and wished he could see her there.
Maryk answered, “Contained. Another closed setting — same as Orangeburg, same as all the others.”
Dr. Pearse sounded pleased. “It will end as the rest.”
Melanie’s hand had begun to throb. Maryk uncapped the syringe and she looked away, finding a crucifix on the wall. She had stumbled into the prison chaplain’s office. Through the side window she could see out into the main hallway and a corner of the high, round guard station. On the monitors there, yellow suits attended to other sheet-draped bodies in other units in other parts of the penitentiary.
Dr. Pearse sounded enthusiastic. “I’m through scanning for engineering markers — the gamma-amino methionine hydrolase, et cetera. It’s there, Peter. The human component I predicted.”
“A graft,” Maryk said.
“No, Peter. Much more substantial than that. The Plainville RNA payload is insidiously complex, but it is a genetic code like any other, and I’ve broken it. Fascinating virus. It isn’t merely resilient in adapting to changing environments, Peter: It is dictating the terms. It is re-jiggering nature and natural selection in order to ensure its survival. This thing is shuffling its own RNA makeup.”
“I don’t care how fascinating it is, Stephen. I want to know what you’ve found.”
“It’s there,” he said. “As I told you it would be. You know how I wish it were not true. But Plainville contains verifiable complements of your DNA.”
Melanie didn’t know what to make of this, and she wouldn’t, until Maryk explained it to her later. For now, she was just listening.
“Impossible,” Maryk said, but with surprisingly little force.
“I know your genetic makeup pattern better than I know my own. How else could your DNA be in the Plainville virus? It’s the PeaMar transfusion and girl with vitiligo. It has to be.”
Melanie felt the tourniquet release, and the pressure on her forearm eased, warmth returning to her wrist and hand. She hadn’t even felt the needle stick. She looked back as Maryk emptied the tube of her blood into the sealed plastic dish. He mixed it with a few drops of clear fluid.
“Here’s what I have,” Maryk said. “Looks like everything originated with a guard. He had just returned to work from a family camping vacation in the Carolinas. He was too far gone, but someone managed to get to his nine-year-old son who was still coherent. Standard contact tracing Q and A, minus the sexual queries.”
Dr. Pearse was excited. “Yes?”
“A man. The boy said his father pulled over for a motorist stranded on the side of the highway. Which highway, the boy didn’t know; he didn’t even know which state. The father got out alone to offer assistance, and the motorist got out of the car to join him under the hood. The man apparently was ill. Exactly how ill is not clear, but very thin, the boy claimed, dressed in a medical mask, gloves, and what he described as a small, colorful hat without a brim, perhaps Re a toque.”
“Yes! That’s what Twenty-six was wearing in my bedroom.”
Maryk looked at him. “You’re certain?”
“Of course I am. No other description?”
“No, and nothing on the car. But while they were waiting, the nine-year-old asked his mother if he could get out and go to the bathroom. He didn’t really have to go, he admitted to us; he was just bored. She let him go down the highway incline by himself.”
Dr. Pearse sounded excited again. “Of course.”
“The boy saw them standing together over the engine, as men do. He recalled two peculiar things about their conversation. One was that the motorist showed a lot of interest in the father’s employment: what kind of prison it was, what his duties were as a guard. The other was that the sick man asked, twice, how far the father’s penitentiary was from Atlanta.”