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:
Melanie shook her head when he was done. He seemed so happy. “I don’t want to know any more,” she said.
She had been eight years old that remarkable night. She stayed up late, spent the evening baking cookies, playing board games, and watching TV with her parents, and promised herself that when she grew up, every night was going to be just like that.
Stephen’s head trembled a bit. His hands grew tremulous in his lap, and he looked at them, as though unable to will them to stop. Then his eyes found hers again.
“Melanie,” he said. “I am dying. But not quickly enough. I am afraid I might become dangerous. I’m afraid I will frighten you.”
“Please,” she said. His words forced the tears from her eyes, but she could not tell him to shut up.
“He’s changing me. I don’t know how long I can resist. But I’m afraid the time may come when I would want to harm you.” She shook her head, but he went on. “You shouldn’t come here alone anymore.”
She sat still and listened to his harsh breathing as her tears blotted one after another upon the glazed white floor.
Prescription
The tablet tone woke him and he came to lying flat on his office couch. He felt for his bag on the floor. He opened his tablet screen and concentrated on it. His head felt full of sand. “Who is it?”
“Suzy Lumen, Dr. Maryk, from Cyber. Director Pearse’s tablet accessed the central computer net earlier this morning. I’m sorry — we missed it.”
Her words rallied him to consciousness. The head and shoulders of the large blind woman wearing a headset filled his window. “Where did it go?” he said.
“They were into the system for just over nineteen seconds, unfortunately not enough time to trace. They went right to the bureau master address list and downloaded sixty-four percent of it, breaking off the connection at the letter Q.”
Q followed P for Pearse. “Is the director’s address updated to the Tank?”
“Let me check,” she said. Maryk waited. “Yes, it is. Would you like me to cut the intruder out of the system now? I can delete Director Pearse’s tablet code and fence them out of the Genetech.”
“No,” Maryk said. “I need to preserve that link. However tenuous.”
He closed his tablet and slumped back against the couch. He remembered his apartment but not the return to the BDC. Melanie must have driven. She must have helped him into his office.
His cascades were growing more and more intense. Zero’s virus was inestimably potent.
He had only two sets of white cotton shirts and black pants inside his office closet. He took one and carried it with him through the parking lot outside to the adjacent laboratory building where he deconned in a UV hold and changed clothes.
Dr. Carla Smethy was assistant head of pharmacology and yet she sat behind the same desk in the rare-drug clearinghouse of Building Six, Room 161, as she had six years before. Her black hair was tinged with gray and small lines textured her brow and the corners of her lightly painted lips. She was no more pleased to see him than she had been then.
“I need a prescription run,” he said. “By physician, going back ten days.”
Her chair turned as she crossed her legs beneath her desk. “Fine,” she said. “All I need is a court order, or proof of authorization from the attending physician.”
“I have neither. Let me give you the Ap’s name. Pearse, Stephen D.”
She looked at him probingly but the name worked. She pulled on a pair of eyeglasses and typed into her keyboard. The desk unit responded in an assertive female voice, “Searching now.”
“How is Stephen?” she asked while they waited.
Maryk searched his mind for an appropriate answer. He was still searching when the computer spoke again. “Ready.”
She looked at her desktop screen. “There are three prescriptions.”
“How recent?”
“Two in a Florida clinic two days ago, and one in Atlanta last night.”
“Last night? The patient’s name?”
“Watson, Robert.”
It was an uninspired pseudonym. “The drugs?”
“Fentanyl, two days ago, and Baniciclovir, brand name Banix. I believe that is a relatively new varicella zoster treatment.”
Zoster was the virus that caused chicken pox. After infection it retreated into the nerve ganglia at the base of the skull and remained latent until normal aging or a depressed immune system reactivated the virus into what is commonly known as shingles. Symptoms included acute paroxysmal neuralgic pain. Banix was one of the drugs cited in the information distributed at the Plainville conference.
“For postherpetic neuralgia,” she went on. “It’s an NMDA-blocker.” NMDA receptors on cell surfaces signaled pain transmission up the spinal cord to the brain. “A painkiller, a comfort drug.”
Maryk nodded. Zero was in significant pain. He had, gone right out after the World Congress Center exposure and used Stephen’s name to prescribe himself a patient treatment for the effects of his own virus.
“No unfilled prescriptions?”
“No,” she said. “But Banix is only two years out of FDA and still strictly regulated. Ten doses maximum per person. This Watson’s got only one refill left.”
This explained Zero’s inactivity between the Waffle House infection and the World,Congress Center. Fentanyl was a powerful opiate. Zero had narcotized his human side and spent the time holed up in his car somewhere riding out the effects of the drug.
The human side of Zero was dying.
Char
I knew exactly what was happening to me. That was perhaps the most insidious thing of all. I knew exactly what was happening and what was to come.
I had self-diagnosed shingles. Due to the morphine — Peter had tended to me while I slept — there was none of the characteristic ophthalmic pain, described by many sufferers as being like an intense toothache in the eye. There were however telltale dysesthesias, or phantom pains, such as the sensation of cold water running down my face, and I could not ignore the impulse to continually brush imagined water away from my cheeks and chin. My overloaded nerves were transmitting conflicting messages up the spinal cord to the thalamus of my brain, which was doing its best to cope with the information at hand.
Morphine. It was lovely. Morphine did not eliminate the pain, but rather compartmentalized it, so that pain remained but was a separate issue. Whenever the twinges became too sharp, I self-medicated using a thumb switch attached to my IV tubes and the dose regulator above. Then the hand shaking and neck throbbing went away. Peter was taking good care of me. I could only wonder at the degree of pain Zero was experiencing.
I was weakening. Pharyngeal ulcers were taking root in my throat, and in time I would lose the ability to swallow my saliva. My urine spilled into a catheter bag, an oily, purple drool, portending liver failure, said to be a uniquely painful event. I had accrued so much specialized knowledge in my thirty-seven years, and all of it was now draining away. Memories drifted past me on a kind of farewell tour, not flashing before my eyes but rather swirling together like so many different colors of paint, stirred into dreams. In one, the corridors and offices of Building Sixteen were filled with everyone I had ever known — family and friends, colleagues and patients, all my living and dead — passing me by without a word. I had left the door to my office wide open, but no one stopped in.
I awoke outside my oxygenated berth, seated on a high-backed wheelchair, tired and groggy. The wall screen played an underwater scene of coral reefs and schools of bright tropical fish, meant to be soothing. In designing the Tank as a place of comfort, I found that to that end I had failed. There were no reflective surfaces inside the Tank, in order that the ill would not despair at the sordid sight of their own disfigured face-, even the stainless steel fixtures were dulled. All communications in and out were monitored for signs of depression, and suicidal tendencies. I was a prisoner in a dungeon of my own design.