Blood and Ice

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

December 21, 3:15 p.m.

“Vampires.”

The word hung in the air of Murphy's crowded office like a piece of rotten fruit, and no one wanted to be the first to taste it. Darryl had tossed it out, but Michael and Charlotte and Lawson just sat there, stunned, waiting for someone else to take the bait. It finally fell to the chief to break the impasse.

“Vampires,” he repeated. “That's what you're saying we have on our hands?”

“Only in a manner of speaking,” Darryl said. “I took some samples from Ackerley analyzed them, and they show the same remarkable properties I saw in the samples from Danzig.” Turning to Charlotte, he said, “And, by the way, they were the same properties as I saw in that sample you asked me to analyze. The one marked E.A.”

“Eleanor Ames,” Charlotte said, and when Murphy threw her a look like that's supposed to be a secret, she retorted, “As long as we keep operating in the dark, we're not going to get anywhere. Can't we all just get on the same page?”

And Michael had to agree. “Eleanor Ames is the name of the woman from the ice,” he explained to Darryl.

“Sleeping Beauty?”

“We found her at Stromviken.”

“How'd she get there?”

“By dogsled.”

“Yeah, but who took her there? And why?”

“She went on her own. With Sinclair, the man who was frozen with her.”

“You're missing my point. Who drove the sled?”

“They're alive,” Michael said. “They went there on their own. That's what I'm trying to tell you.”

Darryl laughed, and even slapped his knee lightly. “Right, yeah, okay. I thought we were having a serious meeting here.”

“We are,” Michael said, and when Darryl looked around, from Lawson to Charlotte to Murphy, and saw that no one else was laughing, the smile left his own face.

“Holy moly” he said, solemnly.

“Holy moly's about right,” Murphy seconded.

“And she's been quarantined in the sick bay ever since,” Michael added. He saw no reason to mention her little excursion to the rec hall.

Darryl looked around at them all one more time, just to make sure they weren't pulling his leg, but the sober expressions they still wore told him they were not. His next reaction was indignation. “And you didn't tell me? You all knew, and nobody thought I should be told, too? Especially since I was the guy who had to do all the donkey work back in the lab?”

“It was my call,” Murphy said. “I didn't want word getting out. This place has been enough of a circus already.”

Darryl was still fuming, but after he'd sputtered out a few more words of protest, and they'd managed to apologize and calm him down, he went on with his disquisition. “Well, their blood-that's including your Miss Ames, who I'd really like to meet sometime, now that I've finally been voted into the inner circle-isn't like any human blood I've ever seen.”

“In what way?” Charlotte asked. To Michael, it sounded as if she was the one holding something back. How could they ever solve this puzzle if everyone had separate and secret pieces?

“It's not just depleted of the red cells,” Darryl said. “It's actively consuming them. It's as if this blood were from cold-blooded creatures trying to become warm-blooded, as if reptiles, or some of those fish I've been dredging up from the bottom, were trying to emulate mammals by ingesting hemoglobin-but failing at it over and over again, and having to then replenish their supply.”

“Which they can only get from other human beings?” Michael suggested.

“I'm not so sure about that. The species barrier should make that the case, but this is such a strange disease that I can't actually confirm it. Someone suffering from it would probably make no such distinctions. The anemia would become so great, they would try to rectify it with anything available, like a drug addict scrambling for any kind of a fix.”

“But how can they keep going at all,” Charlotte asked, perched on the edge of her folding chair, “without red corpuscles to carry the oxygen through the bloodstream? Their organs would stop functioning, and their muscles and other tissues would decay. Wouldn't they just run out of steam?”

“That's close to what Ackerley described in the notes he wrote in the meat locker,” Michael interjected.

It was Charlotte's turn to look puzzled-what notes? — but Michael just gave her a wave to indicate he'd fill her in on all that later. There were way too many secrets still.

“He said he had the sensation of being oxygen-deprived,” Michael went on, “as if his lungs weren't filling, no matter how deeply he breathed. And he said he needed to blink a lot, to clear his vision.”

“Yes, that would make sense,” Darryl said. “The ocular mechanism would be compromised, too. But I'll say one thing in favor of this blood-it is amazingly, stupendously recuperative. Per milliliter, it's loaded with more phagocytes than-”

“English, please,” Murphy interrupted, and Lawson nodded in agreement.

“Cells that consume foreign or hostile particles,” Darryl explained. “Like a little cleanup squad. So if you couple that feature with its ability to extract whatever it needs from any outside source, you've got a very neat and self-regenerating system. Theoretically speaking, as long as its raw supply is periodically replenished with new blood-”

“Its host can go on forever,” Charlotte concluded.

Darryl simply shrugged in acknowledgment, and Michael felt as if a cold hand had reached inside his shirt to brush his chest. They were talking about these “hosts” as if they were the anonymous subjects in some medical experiment, but in fact they were talking about Erik Danzig and Neil Ackerley and, most important of all, Eleanor Ames. They were talking about the woman he had discovered in the ice, and brought back to life-a woman he had played the piano with, and interviewed on tape-as if she were some creature from a horror flick.

Another silence fell, as the revelation and its ramifications made themselves felt in the room. Michael himself experienced an odd twinge of vindication. If anyone had still been harboring any doubt about the validity of Eleanor's story, if they were still questioning how she might have survived for so many years, frozen beneath the sea…

But it did leave another question-what, if anything, could be done to remedy the disease? — unresolved. Michael knew it was what they were all thinking.

Finally, the mood was broken by Murphy, who leaned forward, his fingers steepled on his desk, and said, “What's wrong with having her go cold turkey? What if she were confined and medicated and tranquilized-you guys have more drugs than you know what to do with-until the need just went away?”

Darryl pursed his lips and tilted his head skeptically to one side. “If you'll forgive the analogy, that would be like denying insulin to a diabetic. The need wouldn't go away. The patient would simply go into shock, a coma, and die.”

“Then how are we supposed to keep her adequately supplied?” Lawson asked, voicing the question they were all pondering. “Start a blood drive?”

Murphy snorted and said, “I can tell you now, it'd be a hard sell with the grunts.”

“But transfusions, from our present blood supply, could address the problem on a temporary basis,” Darryl suggested. He looked around at all of their faces. “Until we can figure out a cure- assuming one exists-I don't see how we can avoid doing something like that.”

“I think she may have a head start,” Charlotte said, and Michael guessed that this was what she'd been holding back. “A plasma bag has gone missing. I thought I'd misplaced it, even though I couldn't imagine how. But now, well, I guess I know what happened to it.”

Michael could hardly credit what he knew, in his heart, was probably true.

“That's just great,” Murphy said in exasperation. “Just great.”

Michael knew what was going through the chief's head-the endless reports he would have to write and the internal investigations he would have to conduct in order to account for all of this to his overlords. And how could he, really? They'd be carting him off to Bellevue in no time.

“And let's not forget that there's still another one out there,” Murphy added. “And he's still on the loose.”

The young lieutenant, Michael thought. Sinclair Copley.

“It's awfully dangerous out there,” Lawson commented. “Unless he made it back to the whaling station, he's probably at the bottom of some crevasse by now.”

“From your lips to God's ear,” Murphy said.

But Michael wasn't prepared to give up so easily, nor did he feel it would be right. Given all that this man had already survived, who was to say he had succumbed to the storm, or the polar extremes? Glancing out the window at the clear skies and the low, drifting snow, he said, “We've got a break in the weather. We could use it to mount a search. If we know anything at all about the guy, it's that he's got a powerful will to live.”

“And there's something else, too,” Charlotte put in. “We've got the most important thing in the world to him. Someone he'll want to get back-no matter what.”

The cold hand that had brushed across Michael's chest earlier suddenly brushed him again, and to his own surprise clamped down like a vise.

“Charlotte's right,” Darryl said. “When it comes to bait, we have the best.”