The Blood Artists

Maryk drove slowly out past the front gate. The lights of the assembled media came on and flooded the entrance but then went off again when they saw that it was just another BDC van. He rolled through the BioCon checkpoint and took his time down the darkened road until he was certain he was not being followed. Two roads later he was on the county route doing eighty.

Freeley sat next to him with her window open. Her glistening suit exuded Pheno and bleach as she replayed the surveillance camera scene for him on her tablet.

“They were left alone for less than a minute,” she told him. “One cut himself purposefully on the arm. His blood threat was their ticket out.”

On the tablet screen he watched a replay of the three inmates breaking through a locked door. He watched them confront a suited BDC technician and force him behind the wheel of a van as they piled into the back.

“No one saw them at the gate,” Freeley said. “They hid in back until they were cleared through. All three were up for murder.”

Maryk roared past a yellow pickup truck full of farm kids who cheered the van’s speed, “How healthy are they?”

“We had them on Milkmaid’s serum, but it was too late. Each was starting to fail.” She consulted a grid map on her tablet. “We’re six minutes behind them. Less than twenty miles from New Orleans. They’ll try to disappear there.”

Maryk regripped the wheel. He forced the pedal and the van shook as his speed climbed to ninety miles per hour. “They’ll try to break off the quarantine anklets first,” he said, He felt the tires slide as he veered sharply around a turn. “They need to switch vehicles. They need clothes.”

Freeley said, “There’s a naval station in the area. We could call ahead, throw roadblocks up around the city. New Orleans and vicinity means over a million people.”

Maryk simply shook his head.

She monitored the electronic anklet trace on her tablet. Then: “They’re turning off. Stopping. A residential road, only three addresses.”

“How far outside—”

“Ten miles outside New Orleans. Four minutes ahead of us.”

Maryk reached the turnoff in just under three. He cut the engine and rolled in along a thin dirt road until he saw the van parked beside a converted barn-garage next to a house. The house was two stories high with weathered wood siding and a new wraparound porch. It was dark. The land in back was considerable and neither of the other two houses was in sight.

They slipped out and crossed to the getaway van. Maryk looked in through the parted rear window curtain and saw the technician lying bloodied and motionless over the wheel hump. His suit was shredded around him.

Freeley started around to the rear of the house while Maryk walked to the front. He climbed two steps and crossed the wooden porch to the door. It was unlocked. He opened it and the door swung wide and banged against the jam and swung back rattling. He made no attempt at stealth. He heard the sound of footsteps shuffling inside. Then he heard nothing.

The black spots on the wood landing inside the door were drops of pathogenic blood. He stepped onto the shadowed threshold with his bag in his right hand.

A short hallway ahead of him led to a larger room with windows showing the rear porch and the long backyard. A flight of stairs to his left climbed to the second floor. To his immediate right was a sitting room. He could make out chairs and a fireplace inside. The chain curtain over the mouth of the fireplace was swaying.

Maryk entered the doorway. He stood there and listened. “Come out,” he said.

A hefty shadow in an orange prison jumper rose from behind the wide back of a brocaded chair. It was a large man and he kept rising. He gripped the sides of the broad chair and muscled it across the dark wood floor to show that he didn’t usually hide from anyone. The chair toppled over a short bookcase and glass shattered delicately. Then the house was silent again. Maryk listened to the prisoner’s breathing and watched his shoulders heave.

The prisoner waggled a finger. “Come on here,” he said. “I’ll just breath in your face.”

Maryk reached down and unfastened the buckles of his bag. He noticed lesions on the man’s thick neck and heard the fluttering of his dissolving lung tissue. He saw the characteristic early-stage masking of the face. Standing across the room from him was a hulking virus in an orange prison jumpsuit.

Maryk set his open bag down on an end table. “You made the mistake of killing your only hostage,” Maryk said. “Looks like no one is home.”

The prisoner shifted and the farmhouse floorboards creaked. His voice was ludicrously low. “You’ll do just about fine.”