The Blood Artists

Maryk nodded, in front of her. “That sounds about right.”

“Life-saving blood,” she said. “Don’t forget. I’m to be protected, no matter the cost.”

“I won’t forget.”

They passed the first Plainville plants again. BioCon agents in yellow suits were uprooting them and hacking them into manageable pieces.

“Oren Ridgeway took me to my senior prom,” Melanie said.

Maryk turned. He looked at her.

“Believe me,” she said, “it wasn’t my idea. I tore up all the photographs in long, thin strips, one of the last things I did before going to college. I was leaving the ‘old me’ behind. It didn’t work.”

He waited for her. She had expected a barrage of questions, but she realized that hers was just one of many shocks he had received that day.

“My parents arranged it,” she said. “He was four years older than I was, and just back from his college graduation. The town outcast type, but a total loser. Oren was a crusader, an environmental nut. My dad took pity on him — my dad liked people with ideals. I had no boyfriends, I was just a fat pudge. And my mother was so excited...” The memory intensified, and she had to shake it off. “He made the corsage himself From his own garden. It looked like a bright pink cabbage on my flabby chest. We danced one dance together. One. He danced like a freak and spent the rest of the night boring his old teachers, the chaperones, while I sat alone at the table feigning interest in my napkin.”

She didn’t tell him about the goodnight kiss at her door: her turning away at the last possible moment, and Oren’s chapped lips — he had an ugly habit of gnawing on them — just glancing the edge of her cheek.

She shuddered. “Oren didn’t like people,” she went on. “He said people were ruining the earth. He said we had been given this great gift, and we were just stomping all over it.” She felt a lopsided smile spread across her face, like maple syrup over a pancake. “I was thinking, maybe, this could remain just between us.”

The island came into view up ahead, and they landed and Dr. Freeley led them along a winding pathway of torch stakes bunting black smoke. Maryk said nothing. They passed one of the gnarled Plainville trees, and Melanie felt like she was walking through one of her own freakish paintings.

Dr. Freeley said, “This ‘Zero’ worked quickly. We just got a stolen car report from Yulee. A white Dodge Auriga, stolen out of somebody’s driveway three streets back from the rest stop. An older model, zero-four. No Automap function or Global Positioning Receiver, and no theft retrieval — nothing traceable. The car is old enough to run under the current technological radar. I got in touch with the state police. They wouldn’t do roadblocks — said they couldn’t risk exposure to their men — but they’re setting up checkpoints, remote cameras to record cars and plates. It’s visible enough. It should at least keep him off the main routes, and pin him to this corner of the country. I put an Infectious Contaminant Bulletin out to every police organization in the southeast. They know what to do if they find the car.”

“Which is — get away, and call us.”

They came to the rear of the black canvas laboratory. Three BioCon agents were kneeling around something half-buried in the swamp floor. “We just found him,” Dr. Freeley said. Melanie made out a torso and part of a head, blistered and blackened with decay. “The missing hiker. Looks like Zero was feeding on him.”

Melanie shook her head. She swooned with the heat and the monstrousness of Zero and backed out to the path lined with burning torches. Suddenly the swamp didn’t seem large enough. The state of Georgia and the entire world didn’t seem large enough. But as much as she hated to admit it, she did feel safe with Maryk; that is, safe from everything except Maryk himself.

He came back out alone and they went to the front of the laboratory. BioCon had cut open the front length of the canvas so that the tents were open to the island. The wooden tables, littered with Plainville remains, resembled a gypsy marketplace cluttered with horribly spoiled produce. Melanie saw a jar containing what must have been the hiker’s left hand, and a wire-bound notebook propped open with Plainville flowers pressed into its pages, malformed petals and leaves that were hideous and yet, at the same time, madly beautiful.

Dr. Pearse tottered around the crude, plant-strewn tables, mumbling excitedly to himself. His gaunt face was glossy with perspiration from the heat, his eyes blinking strangely and fast. He looked even weaker under the hot sun. He teetered around the tables, and beckoned to them with a stiff hand as they approached.

“He’s learning,” he said proudly. “He was learning about himself, his own virus. He wants to know everything. He was curing out his virus through these infected plants, like Stanley with tobacco leaves, purifying it, crystallizing it, and refeeding it to the rats. He was nurturing his disease, crossbreeding it, over and over, hoping to trip a mutation: a strain that would not infect so thoroughly and so abruptly. Zero was trying to extend his latency period.” He limped to another table without his cane, where he had evidently filleted a Plainville plant stalk into hundreds of garish slices. “But of course — what virus wouldn’t, if it could? The longer a host remains viable, the longer it can spread the infection. He wants to become invincible.”