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:
Faith was a commodity now. Faith could be bought and sold. Devotion was something paid to fan clubs, political parties, corporate affiliations, home teams. The cartel of religion had been broken up only recently by the heterodoxy of a man named Darwin. My heart and soul care for worms and nothing else in the world just at present. This from a man who had once studied for the clergy. And like dominoes the myths of creation fell. The next day faith began trading on the open market.
Science was the defining knowledge of the time. Science had disproved religion and therefore had become religion. Its temples were third-floor laboratories in faceless glass buildings in industrial parks. Solutions to the mysteries of creation were being discovered under a microscope and not in books or upon an altar. Science had stroked the face of God and not perished. Now it was asking for a sample of His blood.
Maryk recalled the small church on a hill that his parents had taken him to as a boy and the hours spent playing on the wooden floor of the rectory while his mother answered telephones that rang and rang.
All the ancient beliefs had been debunked. But Plainville had ripped away the twenty-first century’s veil of human sovereignly and now the questions were once again beginning to outpace the answers. The world that had consumed its creator suddenly found itself revolving frightened and alone.
Maryk surfaced as though from a trance. He looked up and saw servers coming around with salads. Solbin was already well into his speech. Maryk tried to retrace his thoughts but the thread disappeared.
He shut his eyes a moment. His lids were heavy like theater curtains. It took some effort to raise them again. He looked at Melanie and the room drifted in his vision. She was two seats away from him.
He could not reach her from where he sat. He pushed back his chair and reached for his bag. He placed his other hand on the table. He stood unsteadily.
Melanie sat back as a green-gloved waiter slid a small salad down in front of her. She sensed Maryk rising near her as she reached for her knife and fork, but ignored him until his hand gripped the back of her chair. His other hand swept her salad plate to the center of the table with a clatter. “Hey,” she said.
He was leaning over her. Maryk had no scent, she noticed, no after-shave or hair spray or food smell, not even sweat. If he wasn’t near bleach or some other chemical cleanser, he was entirely odorless.
“He’s here,” Maryk said.
Melanie did not understand at first. Then she looked out with a start at the hundreds of people seated in the room. At least half of them wore gloves and masks, as did the servers moving table to table.
“How do you—?”
She saw the languor in Maryk’s gray eyes and understood. He was cascading. It was a bad one, and at once she became crazy with fear. Zero was in the room with them. She tried to stand but Maryk was in her way.
“Got to kill him,” he said heavily.
She was struggling with her chair. “Get everybody out. Yell fire!”
She was frantic. Maryk let go of her chair but she couldn’t get out. His foot was still in the way. He opened his bag clumsily and dropped his tablet onto the table, opening it, sluggishly working the keys. His message read ZERO HERE. BLOCK EXITS.
He sent the message to his agents downstairs and collapsed the screen, straightening, wavering as he scanned the crowd.
“Do something,” she told him, trying to get out.
Maryk licked his lips. “We’ll screen them at the door,” he said. “Trap him. You wait here.”
“No way,” she said. But as he moved off toward the dais, she looked across the large room and saw how many tables she would have to pass, alone, to reach the side exits, and decided to remain where she was. Zero could be anywhere. Melanie was a statue of a young woman gripping the sides of her chair. She scanned the audience and watched for anyone moving or watching her. As she did, an uncomfortable silence crept over the room.
Maryk was walking stiffly behind the chairs along the dais to the center podium. The speaker sensed the ripple in the audience’s attention, then turned and saw Maryk and awkwardly announced him. Silence fell over the vast room as Maryk stepped to the podium.
He must have struck it with his knee, because the microphone went thud and the noise reverberated wall to wall. Maryk stood there a moment staring, his hair shining platinum in the large image of his face projected behind him.
“Sorry to break this up,” he said archly. A thin, inappropriate smile appeared. “But we’ll need to cut this short now, due to...”
His voice trailed off. Melanie followed his gaze to the rear of the long room. In the shadows in back, a figure stepped back from one of the tables and began moving away.
It was a man. He was a slow-moving man wearing an oversized waiter’s uniform and a standard food server’s face mask. He was small and gaunt and gaining speed as he moved across the rear of the room to the side. He moved like. a man and yet not like a man, striding purposefully, abnormally, and Melanie felt a scream rising in her throat.
A glass pitcher of water shattered behind her. People gasped as Maryk scrambled over the dais onto the floor and rushed toward her, wide-eyed.
She stood out of her chair to get away but Maryk grabbed her arm. “No,” she said, pulling back, but he had his bag in the other hand and was already propelling her through the room. Somebody screamed. Doctors and scientists leapt out of their chairs, and a table toppled over as people rushed to get out of their way. Somehow she stayed on her feet as they moved.
An alarm pierced the air. They reached the rear of the long room just in time to see, around a sashed curtain, a fire door closing.
Maryk pushed her into the alarm bar of the door. It opened and they were inside a white stairwell and stumbling down white concrete steps. Maryk was half leaning on her for support, his full weight pulling down on her shoulder, and she was buckling underneath him. They tripped like that down half a flight of stairs.
She looked fleetingly over the railing down into the vertical shaft. She saw a hand wearing a dirty latex glove sliding along the railing below.
Zero was right below them. He was getting away. She stopped resisting Maryk then, realizing that if he stopped Zero there, it would all be over. The virus would be stopped, and she would be normal and free again.
“Come on!” she yelled over the keening alarm, thrusting her thin arm around Maryk’s broad back to push him, and they clambered down the stairs along the railing. She looked into the well again but did not see the hand; then they turned onto the last flight, stumbling down two and three steps at a time.
Maryk elbowed through the door at the bottom. It was a short, empty corridor and they rushed along it, turning right as the alarm faded behind. He stumbled through the door at the end, and they were inside a kitchen.
A large dishwasher chugged steam. She followed Maryk past racks of clean dishes, and saw him breaking open his bag. A syringe appeared in his gloved right hand.
They turned past wire shelves stocked with industrial sized cans of tomato paste and wide-mouth jars of pickles and fruit salad. A figure had turned a corner at the left end of the room in front of them. They ran around food carts to follow, reaching the corner, surprising him as he came back. Maryk surged forward suddenly with the syringe raised knifelike in his hand, but it was only a busboy, a Hispanic kid holding a wet rag, and he saw Maryk and whatever homicidal look was on Maryk’s face and flailed backward, knocking a rack of dirty pots to the floor.