The Hunger (28 page)

“Orientation problems?”

She shook her head. “Consistent with fever and loss of sleep. I’ve been up all night.”

Tom asked a question that had been much on his mind. “How did she do it?” He couldn’t imagine Sarah sitting still for such a thing.

“When I went to her house we had coffee, then I woke up in her bed in a . . . state of confusion. I took a shower and left. But tonight I remembered more — a — a — sort of thing standing over me with a blood pack — quite strange.”

“Hypnosis and drugs.”

“I agree. The combination fits my symptomology.”

“Phyllis, why don’t you draw a couple of hundred ccs and we can get to work.” Phyllis prepared a syringe and withdrew the blood from Sarah’s unwounded arm.

“It looks good.” In gross blood disease there is sometimes a change of color or consistency. Sarah’s blood was a rich purple-red, completely normal. Tom found himself hoping for the first time that nothing was
really
wrong. So far the symptomology was reassuring, except for those hallucinations. But there was something about Sarah’s tone of voice he didn’t like. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling that she was holding something back. “What kind of hallucinations?”

“Visual, mostly. I went out, I was terribly hungry. If you can believe it I want up to McDonald’s on Eighty-sixth at three.” She sighed. “I’m hungry now, as a matter of fact.”

“What kind of hallucinations?”

She flared at him. “I told you! That creature with the blood pack! God, Tom, you can be persistent. Let’s talk about it later, I really can’t deal with it right now.”

Phyllis had transferred Sarah’s blood to ten test tubes. “One through eight are treated with anticoagulant,” she said. “Nine and ten are clear.”

“I’d like to pitch in. I can’t just sit here waiting, it’s making my flesh crawl. Let me do the centrifuging.” Phyllis handed Sarah two tubes of blood. She placed them in the centrifuge, adjusted the rpm gauge, closed it, and flipped the switch.

“Listen,” Geoff said, “it’s harmonizing with Mozart.” He had turned on his radio a few moments before. Tom almost screamed at him to get on with it, then forced self-control. Geoff was right to treat the situation lightly. Panic and professional standards of practice don’t mix. He looked at his Sarah, bending over the centrifuge, still a bit pallid, perhaps slightly swollen, her face sharply intent on her work.

Phyllis prepared slides, placing a drop of blood on each and smearing it to a thin film. Each slide was numbered and slipped into a rack beside Geoff’s microscope. “I’ll do a reticulocyte count first,” he said. That made sense to Tom, it would tell them at once if any internal bleeding was taking place. If the blood was type-incompatible, hemorrhage was certainly a possibility.

“Set up a Westergren tube,” Sarah said. “We’ll want the sedimentation rate.”

As Phyllis prepared the tube, Tom mentally ran down the list of reasons for doing a sedimentation study. He couldn’t understand why Sarah would feel a need to know about possible infection and inflammation. “It takes an hour,” he said, “and it’ll mean two hundred ccs just on that. I think we’ll have apparent pathological signs if the infection proceeds out of the arm.” The beautiful arm.

“Methuselah showed an elevated sedimentation rate before the end.”

So that was it. She hadn’t forgotten about the connection between Miriam Blaylock and the dead ape. She must be thinking that she was about to go the way of Methuselah, poor woman. He wished to God that he could somehow reassure her. But it would be a waste of effort with Sarah. Once she got an idea it took a lot more than reassurance to convince her she was wrong. The worst of it was, he didn’t feel so certain himself. The physicists had long since dispensed with commonly held notions of coincidence, replacing them with more elegant and truer ideas of space-time as a whole event, a woven continuum. In the light of such concepts the relationship between Miriam’s appearance and Methuselah’s death was not only accidental, it wasn’t even coincidental. It followed as certainly as one brick after another in a wall, or the spewing of radiant poisons beyond the horizon of critical mass.

The centrifuge wound down and Sarah removed the now-separated tubes of blood. “Is there somewhere she can lie down?” Tom asked. She was rapidly losing all color.

“I’ll tell you if I need to be admitted,” she snapped. “I know this place has hospital facilities.” She put the tubes in a rack and started drawing out the various blood components with a pipette.

“Let me see a slide of whites,” Geoff said without moving from his microscope. Sarah quickly prepared one, placed it in the scope’s receiving tray. Tom admired the superb laboratory technique being displayed by the three of them. By Sarah in particular. All of his caring and love was surfacing. What bravado she had. “I want another slide,” Geoff murmured. “Wright’s stain, please.”

There was a silence while he examined it. “I observe foreign leukocytes.” Tom felt a wave of new anxiety: this was confirmation, ugly and real. Miriam’s blood was actually running in Sarah’s veins. “The eosinophilelike cell is present at a concentration of about three percent. Pseudopodial activity is high. The cell is thriving.”

“What is the concentration in Miriam’s own blood?” Sarah asked. Her tone was clipped. She was forcing calm.

“Eighteen percent.”

“You mentioned pseudopodial activity. What’s taking place?”

Geoff leaned back from his microscope. The fluorescent lighting overhead threw his face into shadow. His forehead glistened. “It appears to be consuming your blood,” he said carefully, “and reproducing cells of its own kind.”

MIRIAM AWOKE FROM THE first peaceful Sleep she had experienced in days. It was nine
A.M.
At once she
touched
, sensing for John’s presence. Her whole body jerked with the intensity of the feeling. He was here, and in a highly charged emotional state.

He was exultant.

She frowned, confused. The clarity of the
touch
told her that he was nearby, probably inside the house. She shrank against the head of the bed, looking desperately around the room. But it was empty. His happiness apparently wasn’t because he had managed to defeat her defenses and get into the house. She checked the control panel in the footboard of the bed. All the alarm indicator lights were green. He hadn’t used any conventional mode of entry. And the electrostatic barrier hadn’t been activated. The motion sensors told a different story. There were indications of movement in the basement at 3:52
A.M.
, in the front hall two minutes later, in the attic at 4:00. They revealed a slow progress from the bottom to the top of the house. And from 3:59 to 5:59 the steel shutters that protected her bed had been closed, responding automatically to the unexplained motion in the house.

So he was in the attic. As well that she had abandoned sleeping there. When the time came she wouldn’t have the difficulty of hunting him down. But why did he exult so?

She decided to
touch
again, hoping to catch some emotional clue to what he was doing. Of course, care would have to be taken. John was sensitive to
touch
. She didn’t want to alert him to the fact that she was awake.

She cleared her mind, closed her eyes, opened her inner eye wide. Then she sought John’s place in her heart. The
touch
sprang out of her, connecting with powerful and complex emotions. John was overwhelmingly sad, angry, but most of all he was filled with wild glee.

He was savoring the fruits of victory.

Why?

She inventoried the possible reasons for his happiness. He had successfully entered the house against her will. Not sufficient cause. He had gotten to the attic, perhaps to the room where the chests were kept.

She almost laughed aloud when she realized what he must be planning. Let him do his worst. How ironic that what he must perceive as a great threat was actually going to be helpful to her. John, waiting for his big moment in the attic, could safely be forgotten. And that was well. She had much more pressing matters to attend to.

It was going to be a difficult day.

She set about turning off the various devices that protected her during Sleep. In the past, finding safe places to Sleep had been an obsession with all of her race. During the greatest period of persecution, when they were being hunted down by experts, burnt, garrotted, walled up in tombs, they took to hiding in graves, lying among corpses to avoid detection. As often as not, they were followed even there, dragged from their hiding places, and destroyed by having wooden stakes hammered into their hearts.

Miriam turned off the electrostatic barrier and the alarms, then deactivated the steel shutters that surrounded the bed itself if danger threatened. Her theory was that hiding was a far less effective deterrent than fortification. Before electronics Miriam had kept a kennel of killer dogs.

She dressed quickly, unlocked the bedroom door, and looked out. Dawn filled the upper parts of the house with golden light. She was beginning to feel hunger again, but she had no time for it now. She wished that she was already with Sarah. Without Miriam’s help the woman would go mad, unable to satisfy her own hunger, unable to stand the agony.

Once the transfusion was completed the body reacted in a predictable way. Before the advent of modern medical techniques the transfusion was a slow process, subject to the collapse of veins and infection from the crude apparatus available. Now it could all be done at once.

The physical effects would devastate Sarah’s body, but the psychological impact, as a new set of needs and instincts replaced her established human ways, would be catastrophic.

Miriam had nursed many of them through the agony of it and she intended to do the same for Sarah.

It would mean returning to their hospital, possibly to danger. They might try to capture her, even to kill her. If she was not very careful indeed she was likely to become their prisoner once she went back to Riverside. They would have ample justification to commit her, and the legal machinery was certainly available.

She could picture herself starving in agony as they prodded and sampled and tested. The trouble was, you didn’t die. You just got weaker and weaker until you ended up like the ones in the chests.

It took months to starve. King Charles IV of France had walled up twenty of her kind in a sewer where they were hiding in May of 1325. It was November before the last muffled wail was heard in the streets above. And even after that, they suffered.

She was clammy, trembling. For the first time in many years she was genuinely terrified. It had always been hard to do this, and Sarah Roberts was proving to be especially difficult.

But worth it. Well worth it.

She descended the steps. There was no time to call a limousine. She would have to break one of her rules of safety and take a taxi. Moving through her house, she checked the rooms for damaged belongings. John had left things alone, it seemed.

She examined the mosaic portrait of Lamia carefully. Miriam kept it with her always, to look into those resolute eyes and remember. Her mother had been strong. She devoted herself to the incredibly dangerous process of childbearing, for the good of the race. Miriam could still remember the last pregnancy, her mother gushing blood, her father trying to cauterize the wound, the puddles horrible on the floor. Her mother had died in a hide tent on a desert night when Egypt was still young.

Miriam opened the front door onto a luscious spring morning. She hurried up to Fifty-seventh Street. The first two cabs she saw she rejected. Too many rattles, drivers too tired. A third one was acceptable. She got in, sat well back, felt compulsively for seatbelts she knew would not be there.

Sitting in the cab, she considered what must be done. In her previous
touches
Miriam had experienced Sarah’s fierce will directly. The woman would not cease making efforts to save herself until she was beyond rational thought.

And yet it was that fine will that could blossom into a true hunger. Nothing less would suffice. Of course, it was going to be a struggle. Miriam consoled herself that she had never yet failed. True, some had died during the transfusion process, but not one who lived through the kiss of blood had long resisted her. And yet . . . she had never taken one with so much will or quite so good a mind.

Would she succeed this time?

Sarah must be made to realize that she could not save herself. When they were together Miriam could
touch
her deepest being, guide her, comfort her. It was not hard to transform a body, but the matter of capturing a heart was much more difficult.

Even with
touch
it was going to take time. She shifted uneasily in her seat, watching nervously as the cab went straight through a changing light, thinking of all the different kinds of danger she was being exposed to today.

For a long time she had known that her own mind was delicately balanced. She was so profoundly alone. She believed in her vulnerability to accident, but she had constantly to remind herself that humankind was also a threat. She had once seen a film of a tiger being captured in a net, and it had made a profound impression on her. Despite the gravity of its situation, the beast had remained calm and confident until the ropes actually sprang up around it. The men laying out the net seemed of little danger to the tiger, it having eaten one of their number the night before. That they might actually capture it was so far beyond its belief that they were able to do so.

The tiger spent its remaining years in a six-by-ten cage, the property of a circus.

What would she do if they brought out guards with guns to capture her?

Her heart began thundering as she considered the choices she would have. Die before the bullets or accept imprisonment.

She longed to abandon this whole endeavor, but she could not risk it. Sarah already knew far too much to be allowed to remain free.

She was fighting a wave of raw fear when the cab pulled up in front of Riverside. She paid her $3.50 fare and got out. The entrance that yawned before her was so prosaic, so human, it could not possibly be a portal of death.