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:
Maryk stood. “What do you mean, you feel close to him?”
The tablet toned in Maryk’s hand. He stared at Stephen a long moment before opening it.
“Freeley,” he said.
No window opened on the screen. He adjusted the display in the bright sunlight. The video feed had been disabled at the source’s discretion. The modern task bar indicated that he was connected to a call and listed the sender as a land-line public pay phone from an area code outside Georgia.
The voice that answered him was garbled and fluidy. “Dr. Peter Maryk?”
“Who is this?”
The caller made a rumbling noise that failed to clear his throat. “You have found my laboratory.”
Maryk went suddenly cool in the beating sun.
“I saw you in that alley sewer,” the voice went on.
Melanie’s face was bloodless. Her hands were flat against her chest as she backed away. Her fear checked Maryk’s and reminded him who he was. “Then you know I’ve got Milkmaid.”
The groaning voice said, “Did you find my hiker yet? Or what’s left of him. I fed him some of your guinea pigs’ blood before showing him to my garden. His death was merely enhanced. Your blood solution failed.”
“You are wrong. It has not failed Stephen Pearse.”
“Pearse is dead, I saw to that. You’re covering it up like the rest.”
Stephen was staring at Maryk dead-eyed. Maryk’s mind was reeling. His sense of rational balance and the natural order of the world were being challenged. He needed confirmation. “How did you get out of Orangeburg?”
“The hospital?” Another throaty rumbling. “Double doors, foamed walls. All to protect against microscopic viruses escaping. But if a man-sized virus got into a yellow suit from the supply room? No one would even look at his face. He could walk right out the door.”
“Would you recognize Pearse’s voice?”
Maryk turned the tablet around to Stephen. Stephen was in shock. He spoke hesitantly to the virus that had infected him.
“Ridgeway?”
Maryk turned the tablet back to himself. “Pearse lives,” he said. “He’s right here, standing next to me outside your laboratory. He lives because I’ve got Milkmaid. It’s not enough just to have the blood. It’s the serum treatment. She cures you. Milkmaid is viable and I’ve got her antibodies. Which means I’ve got you — whatever you are.”
“I am the Messenger. What you call ‘Plainville’ is the Message.”
Stephen came forward then. “Tell me,” he said, “how did you contract this? Was it a girl, a teenage girl?”
Silence for a moment. Stephen seemed to hang in the air.
The voice said, “So it was you who sent her to me, Doctor. Perfect.” Stephen’s gaze slipped to the ground. “You don’t sound so healthy, Dr. America. And if you were, you would be right back on TV again.”
Stephen’s gaze only deepened.
Then the voice said, “Hello, Melanie.”
Melanie shivered. She looked at Maryk and shook her head and mouthed a frantic No.
But a hard grin steeled Maryk’s nerves. “She is with me at all times,” he said.
Zero chuckled gurglingly. “Not many public phones these days,” he said. “I’ll be long gone by the time you arrive. Perhaps I could leave you a little something to remember me by.”
Maryk heard the sound of a telephone cord being twisted.
“A man here waiting for the phone. Middle-aged, wearing a beige raincoat. His tablet battery must have run down. He’s not looking in on me right now because he hates sickness. He hates sick people.”
The metallic cord twisted again.
“He is lazy and fat. He’s meat to me, understand that, Maryk? The world is full of meat. You cannot stop the Messenger. You cannot stop the Message. The Message will always get through.”
There was the sound of something rubbing against the receiver. Then a click and the droning dial tone of a broken connection.
Stephen stepped backward. He found the bench against his legs again and slumped down upon it.
Maryk said, “What was that noise at the end?”
Stephen’s face was blank and drawn. “Him licking the receiver.”
Melanie gasped behind them.
Maryk paged Freeley and gave her the telephone number to be traced. He told her to divert BioCon to the caller’s location on a Biohazard 4 and to shut down any airports within a thirty-mile radius. Then he dialed the pay phone number. It was busy and he dialed again and this time it rang through.
A voice answered: “Yeah, hullo?” Winded and annoyed.
“Get out of there,” Maryk said. “Get out of there and get everybody away from this telephone—”
Freeley and the BioCon unit moved in and took over the swamp island and Maryk left Stephen at the lab under their protection. He traveled with Melanie by helicopter to the site of the outbreak.
The public telephone was located in one of a pair of antiquated folding door booths beneath a slowly rotating Waffle House restaurant sign on a highway roadstop in Yulee, Florida. The booths were currently sealed in nylon and the walkway linking the restaurant to the gas station and the public toilets was being foamed. The entire rest area was cordoned off from the highway and bustling with yellow contact suits.
The man on the telephone had hung up from Maryk and made a second call before moving into the Waffle House for a late breakfast or early lunch. Zero’s description was dead-on. BioCon caught up with him before his third cup of coffee. Forty-seven customers and waitstaff to be transported to the federal hospital in Jacksonville.
Zero was described as “slight” and wearing a sullied white windbreaker, loose brown pants, hiking shoes with dried mud on them, dirty latex gloves, and a snug “African pattern style” toque covering the top of his skull but for a few wild strands of silver-gray hair visible in back. He was about five feet five, one hundred to one hundred ten pounds, and wore a white cotton surgical mask.
A light blue Ford Prescience in the parking lot matched the make and Vehicle Identification Number of an automobile that had been parked two blocks away from the Penny University that night in Boston.
Behind the restaurant was an enclosed grass playground of swing sets and trees. Clumps of discolored grass spaced like striding footsteps grew out of the healthy grass in thick looping spirals like a spreading mold. Shrubs lining the swing set were misshapen with overgrowth and already blooming madly. The leaves of a tree branch hanging over the parking lot were alabaster white and shaped uncannily like hands whose fingers had been broken and splayed.
The playground was sick. Zero had fled through there to the residential neighborhood beyond. BioCon was sweeping it but would find nothing. Zero was not looking for more victims. He was looking for a car.
Maryk opened his tablet and brought up the old Audubon photo of Ridgeway. Pictured was a tweedy-looking young man with curly brown hair wearing short pants and a safari shirt. He was posed with one boot on a mossy rock. Both forearms were crossed on his bent knee and he held a wild fern leaf in one hand as he gazed out proprietarily over the swamp.
Maryk felt the stirrings of a cascade. His body was systematically executing its own infected cells in order to rid itself of Zero. Maryk would need an amphetamine dose in order to work through the day.
He returned to the whining helicopter and Melanie. The only way he could guarantee her safety now was to keep her at his side.
“He’s real,” she said as Maryk reached the door. “Isn’t he?”