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:
A breeze swept through the loft and turned her head. She walked toward it, into the kitchen at the rear. Glass and dirt lay on the floor beneath a broken window, and Maryk stood outside on a long fire escape, over an elaborate vegetable garden laid out on the grate, overlooking the city. The clear plastic bubble covering the garden had been kicked in, the muddied soil torn up and the plants trampled, almost as though the dirt had been danced upon. The few vegetables that remained were budding into Plainville atrocities.
“He pissed on it,” Maryk said.
She wondered how he knew this as he climbed over the broken glass back inside. “My paintings,” Melanie said.
But he said nothing, moving past her and looking at his destroyed kitchen with a dazed expression. He reappraised his infected loft from where he stood, hands empty at his sides. A virus had broken into his home and contaminated everything he owned. He looked at her across the kitchen as though she were a stranger.
Whatever he had injected himself with was wearing off, the cascade now enveloping him like a gas. He had trouble locking the white door behind them as they left, and he slumped against the railing on the stairs, depending on her shoulder the rest of the way. On the sidewalk outside, she took his car keys from him, and he did not protest.
The gas tank was three quarters full. The thought of fleeing Atlanta forever was seductive, but fleeting. The seat belt held Maryk upright in the passenger seat, helpless and mumbling words beyond meaning. She got back onto the highway and followed the signs for Emory Hospital, back to the BDC.
The Tank
She listened to the hum of controlled air inside the Tank. Stephen Pearse’s eyes rolled open inside the incubator-like berth. “Melanie,” he said, muffled, like a dead man waking inside a coffin.
She unsealed and rolled back the glass top. His skin was tarnished with lesions and odd, lurid blemishes, and his fingernails had flaked off like his lost hair. He must have weighed less than she did now. His neck looked like thin rods bundled in rice paper. His clavicle was a bar that his head and neck had been set upon to rot, and a dark boil oozed over his right eye. His eyeballs were ghostly red and deep-set, and his pupils — misty, blue — were clouded as though with suspicion.
She brought him water and he sat up slowly and closed his ragged lips around the straw. She pulled over the room’s only chair to sit across from him, and he faced her from the padded bed with an eerie dignity. She began to tell him what had happened. He required every trivial detail, especially where Maryk was concerned.
She noted the slowness of his gray tongue and his fixed lips as he spoke. “Zero is sick,” he said. “He needed that treatment information given at the conference. Peter knows this now. Zero is running out of time.”
“Time for what?”
“Human time. The virus is mutating so wildly now that the human cells can no longer cope. His body functions are already running at minimum capacity. Zero is genetically sick, in a way we don’t yet understand.”
“He moved pretty quickly down those stairs.”
“All the doctors and virologists fighting his disease, all gathered in one place. He learned what he needed to know, then disposed of them. The genius of it. So like a virus. He is that much closer to clearing a path for a worldwide epidemic.”
“You’re so certain.”
The rods of Stephen’s frail neck tensed, and from time to time his eyes narrowed suddenly. He was evidently suffering much pain. “That is why he is here in Atlanta now. He’s becoming more desperate. It is like a race between these two concerns: the breakdown of his virus to where it will only infect humans, and the death of his human host.” Stephen nodded as though to confirm this. “The same race that is being run in me now.”
She didn’t know how to respond to his apparent enthusiasm for Zero. “Do you think, then, that Zero has forgotten all about me?”
The disease had carved Stephen’s face of everything except a crimson-eyed curiosity. He answered her regretfully, and yet there was something undeniably bright behind his eyes. “No,” he said.
She shuddered. “It won’t ever end. Will it?” She was near tears again. “Only now the creature after my blood is not Maryk, but Zero.”
“You can save him,” Stephen said.
She looked at him. She thought he meant Zero, “Save who?”
“Peter. There is still time. Has he told you the Meister story?
She nodded, confused. “The boy. Pasteur’s crypt.”
“He wants someone to vouch for him, to stand up for him after he’s gone.” His eyes lost focus a moment. “You’re only seeing the end of a person, the nadir in a long slide from humanity. The first time I met Peter Maryk, he was holding a cheap bouquet of flowers wrapped in pink saran. He was pursuing a girl in our American lit elective, a daughter of one of the big auction house families. She was beautiful; he never had a chance. Still, he pursued her, finding out her schedule and making certain their paths crossed between each class. He made a career out of social failure in those days-he went about it with such verve.”
His lips and tongue got in the way of his strained voice, but sentiment carried the words.
“Peter and I graduated the university together, Class of 2001. The millennium change came over our final holiday break. My parents were big political contributors in New York at the time, and we had received four tickets to the ball at the governor’s mansion. Having no date myself, I talked my father into mailing Peter a plane ticket to fly out from Washington to attend. It was a gaudy, splashy affair, but boring for the two of us. Borough representatives and old New York money, and there was Peter in a rented tuxedo, standing around like my bodyguard. He said later that that night was the first time he had ever heard the pop of a champagne cork; I’d grown up hearing it. We slipped out early, with no particular plan in mind except to get away and salvage the rest of the night. Champagne was in short supply all around the world, but abundant at the mansion, and we pinched a case of two-hundred-dollar Moët before hopping into my car. I drove an MG then; my parents, they spoiled me. One thing led to another and we found ourselves on the highway driving out to my family’s summer house in Amagansett.”
He seemed strangely happy, continuing as though in a trance.
“We installed ourselves in the sitting room just before midnight, a glassed-in porch facing the water. I’d not seen Peter drink before, and haven’t since. Midnight came and we toasted the television set, then switched it off to hear the cheers from the houses down the street, and went outside and raised our voices to the chorus. Fireworks thumped in the distance, unseen, the sky around us so bright and bare. We went down to the water, drinking straight out of our bottles. The sand was cold and hard. We stopped just before the foaming swash to toast the tide and the moon, and that was when Peter told me he was dropping out of school. He said he had decided to become a sculptor, and was trying to get up the courage to tell his parents over the break. Of course, no one sculpts anymore, but that was Peter. He shared this with me like it was some terrible secret — which, I guess, it was. We had only that one last semester left of school. But I was in no condition to talk him out of it, and in fact I’m certain I raised my bottle to his decision. He returned home the next day, and the truth is, I don’t know if he ever told them. He was back at school that January, working harder than ever, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I didn’t learn until April that his mother was sick. If Peter was close to anybody, he was close to her.”