Читать книгу Blood Demons - Richard Jeffries - Страница 12

Chapter 5

The event elicited a scream from Rahal that could be heard out in the gardens.

Before it even started, Key was charging for the appartement du roi doorway, while Lancaster was stabbing buttons to establish ear-comm contact with the others.

“The clinic, now, with whatever restraints you can find!”

The screams continued, changing from surprise to terror, as Key raced down the Hall of Mirrors, passing even Nichols as she came in from the south, and then Gonzales coming in from the east. They didn’t call him Speedy for nothing.

Daniels and Safar soon joined the race, the straps the Arab was holding and the spear Daniels was carrying slowing them down.

“What, what?” the big man called from the back of the pack.

Key was too intent on speed to answer, but not Lancaster, who came running up from behind Daniels.

“You know that dead child?” he grunted between huffs.

“What about her?”

“She’s not dead anymore,” he gasped.

The information hit Daniels like a water balloon, straightening his posture and doubling his speed.

Nichols was just a few steps ahead of Key as they reached the examination room, and what the redhead saw caused her to slide across the floor, waving her arms to maintain balance.

Key grabbed the side of the door to make sure he wouldn’t make things worse—giving him just enough time to register the image of Rahal whirling around the room, waving her arms as if she were being attacked by wasps, while the angelic, naked child was tearing at her hair and face with her little claws.

“Fuckaduck!” Daniels bellowed as he all but inadvertently launched Gonzales into the room. The mechanic used the momentum to try grabbing at the child’s tiny waist to pull her off Rahal, but as soon as his fingers touched the flesh, the child launched itself onto him instead.

“Hijo de puta!” he all but screamed as the tiny fingernails clawed at his eyes. He staggered back, clutching at the thing scrabbling around his shoulders—scraping down his neck and chest with her curled toes.

Rahal had dropped to the floor, clearly in shock, but she was still not so far gone that she couldn’t turn to look at the others in astonishment. A part of her mind had wanted Key to catch her, or at least comfort her, but he was too busy yanking the others inside.

“Close the door, close the door,” he seethed. “Don’t let the thing out!”

Lancaster, who didn’t think of protecting himself for a second, yanked the door closed behind him. “Fan out,” he barked. “Surround it. Surround him!”

Nichols was on the other side of the area before Lancaster had even stopped speaking. Safar looked helplessly at the straps in his hands, but he didn’t drop them. Key scoured the room for anything that could effectively help, as Daniels jumped forward, dropped the spear, and clamped onto the child atop the lurching Gonzales with both meaty paws.

But in the moment between the time his hands slapped and his fingers constricted, the child let out an unearthly yowl, squirmed and spun at the same moment, then whirled away from them—smacking into the floor and sliding under a Multix Digital Radiology Imager. They all heard her hit the wall with a solid thud.

Daniels yanked the disoriented Gonzales behind him protectively. Nichols skidded backward, bending down to see if she could spot the child. Lancaster stood tall, with his back to the door, his phone to his ear, his thumb ready to dial. Safar looked from the machine to Key and back again. Key stood in the center of the room, equidistant from the door to the machine, his back bent, his hands out in an “everyone chill” position.

The only sound in the room was Rahal’s repeated gasping breaths.

Then Key pointed at Safar, and when Safar nodded, Key pointed at the scrubs bin—the laundry receptacle Rahal used to put her dirty clothes in—then held up a forefinger in a “wait” position.

“Maybe she’s unconscious,” Rahal started to whisper, but stopped when Key made a sharp “quiet” motion.

He then tapped Daniels on the back. When Daniels looked at him, he made a slow “follow my lead” motion as he started edging toward the digital imaging machine. A moment later, Daniels moved unerringly behind Key, like a baseball umpire behind a catcher, while Safar started edging along the far wall toward the scrubs bin.

Lancaster saw what Key was planning, and didn’t like it. But because he could think of no better alternative, he stayed silent.

Key, Daniels, and Safar took another step—Nichols watching their progress carefully, ready for anything.

“She’s just frightened,” Rahal started to suggest, but then hushed when Gonzales urgently gripped her shoulder as he kneeled painfully behind her.

Key paused, so the others did as well. They held their breaths as he breathed deeply, then quickly dropped to his stomach and shoved his right arm under the machine.

For a second, nothing happened, then Key’s face tightened as he swept his arm back and forth under the machine as if he were trying to scrub the floor clean. Then they all heard an enraged, trapped hyena squeal, and saw Key convulse on the floor before he yanked his arm back.

The child was the barracuda, Key’s hand was the worm. Key hurled the child back with such force that it flew off his fingers, leaving a spurt of flying blood, directly into Daniels’s arms. But the big man didn’t try to run with it. Instead he immediately hurled it back the way it had come—only this time directly at the maw of the laundry bin that Safar was holding up toward him like an expert lacrosse player.

By then Key was there, grabbing the top of the bag, twisting it closed, and knotting it.

“Hold it, hold it!” he barked at Safar as the bag started twirling and scrambling around the floor.

“It’s not holding!” Nichols yelled. “She’s tearing through it like rice paper!”

It was true. The child was hardly in the trap before her little fingers started shredding the cloth like razors.

But then Nichols was there again, shoving the straps Safar had dropped back into his hands. Safar started frantically wrapping the tearing bag with the leather bands. But as fast as he could buckle them, the child was starting to rip them with both her hands and her teeth.

By then Rahal was scrambling through the closest medicine cabinet, her trembling fingers trying to prepare a sedative injection. “Hold her,” she cried. “Just a few seconds more—!”

Key slapped Daniels toward the child’s feet as he dropped to his knees by her head. Both grabbed at the thrashing child’s ankles and wrists, but they were just too small, slippery, and surprisingly strong. The thing was snarling like an animal that was not even close to being trapped, and Key could see why. Despite their size, age, intelligence, experience, and all their efforts, they were losing. It was only a matter of seconds before the child would be free again.

Like a slippery eel, it was just about to clear their hands, straps, and cloth when a large, lattice cross-hatched, metal can slammed down over it like a cage, trapping it on the floor.

Charles Lancaster sat heavily on top of it, keeping it tight over the squealing child. It was the wrought-iron garbage can from his office. He had had it made extra large and extra heavy because of the sheer amount of refuse he created. As the child managed to slide it, and Lancaster, an inch back and forth, Gonzales and Daniels jumped forward to hold the edges down with all their might.

Key fell back, Rahal crouching by him, holding the prepped sedative raised in her right hand. Nichols helped a shaken Safar off the floor. Then they all stayed where they were, trying to comprehend what had just happened. They looked to Daniels for a wisecrack that would relieve the tension, but even the big man seemed at a loss.

But then the room filled with the last sound any of them expected. It was the most plaintive, mournful, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking sobbing they had ever heard. They looked down, incredulously, to within the wrought-iron cross-hatching where the naked, angelic girl was curled into a fetal position, crying like a lost child.

* * * *

“Shit.”

Morty Daniels said it like it was a three-syllable word from where he lay in the intensive care unit of the clinic. They were all in there—in, or on, separate beds. The Chinese doctor Lancaster had on call—an amazing woman who insisted they call her Helen—had marveled at the equipment on hand, tended to Rahal, and was waiting in the cafeteria.

Now Rahal was testing each of them thoroughly, whether the child had broken their skin or not. And, given what they had just experienced, they all sat still for it. But several of them would swear that they could hear Key’s brain whirring. Lancaster apparently had a better muffler.

The anesthetized child was in the quarantine unit—“wrapped up and strapped down,” as Daniels put it. Lancaster had the Q.U. built to exacting specifications—ones he had personally double-checked, given the reputation of certain Chinese construction engineers.

“Don’t worry,” he had assured Key. “The bad ones are executed.”

“The bad ones who are caught are executed,” Key had reminded him. Even he knew about the train bridges and elevated highways that had collapsed from rampant under-bidding, inferior materials, and bribery in the recent construction boom.

But the Cerberus Q.U. was designed to contain everything from germs to any other prehistoric predators they might encounter. Key couldn’t help feeling that this child might be a bit of both. “Shit indeed,” he echoed Daniels. “What’s the protocol?” he asked Lancaster.

Rahal answered. “I’ll be checking your vitals every hour. Dr. Helen will be checking mine.”

“How long?” Daniels asked, unable to keep a slight whine out of his voice.

“As long as I can,” she told him. “As long as you’ll let me.”

“As long as necessary,” Lancaster informed him with no uncertainty. Daniels nodded with equal certainty, and not even a hint of pouting.

“What should we be looking for?” Nichols asked, unable to keep a slight fear and doubt out of her voice.

“To paraphrase you,” Key responded, “you’ll know it when you see it. Or, in this case, feel it. Anything out of the ordinary, but especially visions, hallucinations, even unusual dreams. Nothing is too small to mention. Do not, whatever you do, try to slough it off, downplay it, or tough it out.”

“Who, me?” Daniels challenged with a grin.

“Especially you,” Key replied.

Lancaster sat up, realized what he was about to blurt, then slowly leaned back. “Elaborate,” he suggested carefully.

“As soon as I got near the child,” Key informed him, “it was as if the cement wall I had made to cover my emotions started to crack.” He looked over at Rahal, who was taking Gonzales’s vitals. “I’m thinking you felt it too, didn’t you?”

Rahal stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“The way I was acting.”

“Oh,” she said, seemingly distracted by trying to read Gonzales’s blood pressure. “Yes.” She sought the right words before continuing. “You were uncharacteristically intense, even repetitive. You usually choose your words more carefully and only make your point once.”

Key nodded. “I was agitated, unfocused, even confused. For absolutely no reason that I could see, the child’s proximity had”—now he searched for the right word—“it had unnerved me.”

“Could it have been the situation?” Lancaster asked. “Just that, nothing more?” It was clear that he didn’t want his team leader to be vulnerable.

“Joe has spent a lifetime separating what goes on inside his head from what’s going on outside his head,” Daniels contended flatly. “This guy could win a chess game in a carpet bombing.”

Key nodded in appreciation of the compliment. “I’ve told you,” he said to Lancaster, then glanced at the rest. “I’ve told you all, the mental is not separate from the physical. If the body can be attacked, so can the mind.”

Daniels smiled grimly at Nichols. “Like I told you, it’s all a muscle, baby, the whole human shootin’ match.”

“So that’s what we’re dealing with here?” Gonzales asked.

“That’s what we may be dealing with here,” Key countered. “But it’s more important than ever to keep reading your own mind, and keep it wide open until we’re more certain.” He sat up on the diagnostic bed. “You got the accessories I asked for now?” he asked Gonzales.

Gonzales sucked in his breath. “Just in time,” he answered. “I was preparing to bring them over when the alarm sounded.” He nodded at Safar, who brought a case over to the center bed, laid it on the padding, and opened it.

Inside were fourteen fingerless gloves, seven dickies, and seven bike shorts. The gloves reached up to mid-forearm, the dickey down to below the sternum, the bike short to the knee, and all were made of a lighter gray, nearly copper material. They were obviously designed to cover the human body’s major arteries.

“Under armor?” Daniels suggested.

“Righter than you may know,” Key commented, stepping over to the other side of the bed.

“Glad you added the ‘may,’” Daniels muttered while twisting over for a closer look.

“Batal hazar,” Rahal said under her breath as she joined the others.

Key purposely didn’t look at her with narrowed eyes, but his self-control had no effect on Safar, who did. He knew she had said the Arabic phrase that could be translated as “stop joking, you have got to be kidding me.”

“It’s the truth. Not a single photo of the man in Sujanpur was in focus,” he said quietly, and directly, to her. “Not one.” She did not react to, or look at, him, but her expression shifted as if she were thinking they had all lost their reason.

Lancaster picked up on the undercurrent. “You will all wear these from now on, twenty-four-seven. No exceptions, no excuses.”

“They’re made from a special material,” Gonzales assured them. “Slim, pliant, and comfortable as silk but hard as steel.”

“Made by the same company who created Cali-brake,” Lancaster informed them, referring to the revolutionary bulletproof material their uniforms were made of—which was one of the many patents Lancaster had rescued from repression by corporations more interested in status quo than progress.

“Even in the shower?” Daniels inquired disingenuously.

“Even in the shower,” Gonzales said proudly. “Wash and wear. They dry even faster than skin. And, believe it or not, they make Cali-brake’s wicking capabilities even more effective.”

Daniels grinned. “Better living through science,” he commented while reaching for the biggest size—the ones obviously made for him.

“I only wish that were true,” Rahal said worriedly, stepping back.

Key looked over to her, but said nothing. Lancaster knew that was his responsibility. “Elaborate,” he said knowingly.

“That girl in there is the victim,” Rahal announced with certainty. “She may be infected with whatever the man who stole her was infected with. There are cases on record of sleeping sicknesses that were mistaken for death, and of infections that cause extra strength and speed.” She stabbed a finger at Nichols, who looked on with concern. “But these are all natural. These are all real. They are not the result of some fairy tale ekimmu or blood-sucking vampire!”

“And no one said they are, Professor Rahal,” Lancaster replied in a voice that was as calm as still water and as hard as graphene. “But until we know what happened to that child, and that man, we live with the motto ‘better safe than sorry.’” He pointed directly as her, but not unkindly. “It is your job to find out what has happened, and what is happening, to that poor girl.” He motioned to the others. “It is their job to stop it from happening to anyone else.”

The seven core members of Cerberus stood silently, looking at each other. Then Eshe Rahal fell to one knee and, in a long-delayed release, started to sob.