The Midnight Vampire Trap Page 2

  “We’ll burn you!” called a mortal voice from beyond the wavy lights. “We’ll burn you like we burned that young one at the docks! Do you believe me?”

  Furious, beyond words, Desmond could only glare, the phrase Turn, hell hound whispering through his mind. He nodded.

  “In that case,” the voice continued, suddenly dropping back into a light, almost amused tone, “In that case, Cousin, I think this one belongs to you.”

  And the wall of wavy green light in front of him altered, a black shape appearing in it, a black shape that resolved itself into the completely unexpected form of a woman in a white lab coat, her hair pulled back in a bun, an unflattering swoop of hair across her temple. She had a machine on her back and a rifle-wand in her hands. She raised the wand.

  “Hello, movie star,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

  4

  Eleanor Explains the World

  Desmond opened his eyes, blinking against the bright, white light. He was lying on his back on the floor of a large, sterile room, high ceilinged, white walls and white floor. Green light humming faintly between the double panes of reinforced windows. He was wearing the clothes he’d worn at the theater. His forearms still hurt, the burns smarting.

  Rolling over, he saw the legs of a white plastic chair, the legs of a white plastic table, a cheap cloth bag such as the ones given away at grocery stores, and a woman’s feet encased in ugly, practical shoes.

  “Good morning,” said Dr. Eleanor Warner. “Or rather, good evening. It is now 5:06 P.M. on November first, and you have been unconscious for fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes.”

  Desmond raised himself onto an elbow. “You shot at me,” he said.

  “I shot over your shoulder,” Eleanor replied. “While you were distracted by me, one of the men shot you from behind with a tranquilizer dart loaded with,” she consulted a paper on a clipboard, “24.82 cc’s of pharmaceutical-grade heroin.”

  Desmond was silent, processing that, and almost instinctively began taking inventory of the woman before him. Late twenties, early thirties. Straight bones, clear skin, adequate body weight. None of the obesity that so incongruously marked the poor in affluent America. Teeth straight, possible orthodontia. No visible plastic surgery, but then, given her short, unmanicured nails, lack of cosmetics and hideous shoes, aesthetics were obviously not a priority to this one. Clunky eyeglasses. Mousy hair pulled back into a tight bun behind and looped in that unflattering swoop in front. Faint, unplaceable accent. Respiration accelerated, heartbeat ditto.

  ‘She’s excited,’ Desmond thought to himself, ‘But she’s not afraid…’

  “Oh,” Eleanor continued, “Do you see the boxes on the walls?”

  Looking up, Desmond did indeed see the boxes on the wall, looking much like audio speakers, bland and innocuous.

  “Those boxes are capable of emitting the same radiation as that which burned you last night. If you make any move toward me or to escape, they will burn you where you stand. Any attempt to tamper with them or to hack their control codes will be taken by the system as an attack and they will fire automatically. Do you understand?”

  Desmond said nothing, silently contemplating strangling her with the handles of her grocery bag, boxes or no boxes.

  “Oh, and,” she continued. “In case you were thinking of reading my mind…” she raised her hand to her forehead, lifting the flap of hair covering her temple and exposing the pink weal of a recently stitched wound, “It won’t work. I have an implant in my brain preventing it.”

  Enough of this. Desmond rose to his feet, towering over her, angrily dusting himself off.

  “Look,” he barked. “I don’t know who you are or what you think you know, but I am a U.S. citizen, and I am very well connected! I want a telephone, now. I want my lawyer. I want the police! I want--”

  Sighing, Eleanor reached into the pocket of her lab coat, removed a small diabetes-testing lancet. Twisting off its plastic cap, she jabbed the exposed point into the pad of her left index finger, and held out the resulting drop of blood.

  Desmond stopped mid-rant. Unfed for a day, the smell of the blood rocked him, hunger instantly rising.

  “Well?” said Eleanor. “What is it?”

  “It’s…blood,” Desmond replied, struggling to sound as if it made no difference to him.

  “What color is it?”

  Desmond stared at her. What? “It’s red,” he replied, as if speaking to a very slow child.

  “Why?”

  Why was blood red? He didn’t know, he’d never thought about it. Blood was blood.

  “Because of, because of, um, the hemoglobin.” Who knows where he’d picked that up, but there it was.

  “Yes, the hemoglobin.” Eleanor smiled, as she bandaged her finger. “Which, as the compound word implies, is made up of two basic parts. Globular proteins, globin… and flat, circular arrangements of nitrogen, carbon and hydrocarbons called a porphyrin ring.”

  Pulling a remote control from her pocket, she touched a button and a slide appeared on a white wall, a diagram of letters in a circular shape, connected by single and double lines. In its center, a smaller circle, colored red, was labeled “Fe.”

  “This is a diagram of the porphyrin ring found in the hemoglobin of red-blooded animals,” Eleanor said. “The central atom, in red there, is an atom of iron. It is these iron atoms that give blood its red color and, as you could no doubt tell us, its distinctive, metallic tang. And the interesting this about that,” she said, “Is that you only find these porphyrin rings two places in nature. This is one of them, in hemoglobin. Here is the other one.”

  A touch of the remote, and an almost identical slide appeared, identical save that the central circle was now green, and labeled “Mg.”

  “This is the other porphyrin ring found in nature,” Eleanor reiterated. “This…is chlorophyll. Mr. Sharpe, what is chlorophyll?”

  “It’s stuff in plants,” Desmond answered, momentarily baffled.

  “What does it do there?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, beginning to lose his patience, “it photosynthesizes!”

  “Yes.” Eleanor smiled again. “It photosynthesizes. Or, in other words, it reacts to the light of the sun. Tell me, Desmond: can you think of anything else that reacts to the light of the sun?”

  Desmond fell silent, the horrible feeling of dread that had briefly visited him in the graveyard returning, bringing with it the feeling of terrible inevitability…

  “The rings on the wall,” he whispered, Max’s cautionary droning coming back to him.

  “Yes,” Eleanor said. “The rings on the wall.”

  “You killed Tommy!” Desmond said.

  “I had to,” Eleanor replied.

  She touched her remote again, and the wall was filled with images from King of Vampires, images of actors dressed as vampires crawling out of graves, taking victims, burning in the sun.

  “You made a movie,” Eleanor said, “and you starred in it yourself, saying on the one hand that you really are a vampire but on the other carefully preserving the option of deniability, that no, you’re just an actor playing a vampire. But it is all real, isn’t it? Everything depicted in King of Vampires actually happened, at one point or another in history, didn’t it?”

  Desmond remained silent, the voice of his lawyer, Cynthia, in his head, hissing “Zip it!”

  Another touch of the remote and the image on the wall zooms in on a vampire burning in the sun, his body exploding in a brilliant flash of light.

  “And out of all the images in your movie, the one that most interests me is this one. Not only do you burn, you burn with a flash.”

  She turned back to Desmond. ‘The central atom in hemoglobin is iron,” she said. “The central atom in chlorophyll is magnesium. Ever see magnesium burn?”

  “Magnesium flash bulbs,” Desmond breathed, memories from the 1930s to ‘60s rising.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. “Very good. Magne
sium burns, Desmond, and it burns with a bright, white flash.”

  She returns to her chair, and gestures for him to do the same. Twisting around, Desmond sees a plastic chair behind him. He sits.

  “That,” Eleanor says, “is enough for the formulation of a hypothesis, enough to desire a sample of vampiric blood to run though a mass spectrometer. But wanting a vampire’s blood and getting it are two different things. Fortunately for us, there exists in the world a vampire who was egotistical enough to make a movie about his own life. Your film is playing at over twelve hundred cinemas even as we speak, but if you wanted the midnight show, you had to go to the Galaxy. We staked out regular screenings of your film here in L.A. and identified the people who were going to it over and over. The model of midnight audience-participation films already existed: we provided the venue and funding. Your vanity did the rest.”

  “It was a trap,” Desmond said.

  “Yes.”

  “Was it all fake?” Desmond said, and at first Eleanor frowned, but then her brow cleared.

  “Ah,” she said. “I see your concern. We provided the venue and the funding, but the rest of the show was up to your fans. So yes, Mr. Sharpe, to the best of my knowledge, the adoration was genuine.”

  For just a moment, Desmond closed his eyes, relief flooding through him, and in that moment a delighted smile flitted across Eleanor Warner’s face.

  “Well,” she said, her severity returning, “There’s no accounting for taste. Back to business. Tell me, Desmond, given what you’ve heard here today, given the similarity of the two porphyrin rings, given the flammability and brightness of magnesium, given the propensity of your kind to combust with a blinding flash, given all that, if I were to run a sample of your blood through a mass spectrometer looking for magnesium, do you think I might find it?”

  Answering carefully, Desmond said, “If all that were true, then yes, perhaps.”

  “Okay then. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that I do exactly that, and do find magnesium in your blood, magnesium, furthermore, still bound in the porphyrin ring structure, reacting in you just the way it reacts in plants. Let’s say I find that. The question then becomes, where did it come from?”

  “What?”

  “Where did it come from? At one point you were human, and human blood contains no magnesium. Then you underwent a vampiric transformation, and from that moment on have consumed nothing but human or animal blood…which contains no magnesium. I do a blood draw, and find enough magnesium to make you, under certain provocation, go up like a roman candle.”

  She touched the remote, and the King of Vampires images are replaced by the porphyrin ring structures, side by side, iron and magnesium, red and green.

  “In other words, if you start with these,” indicating the red rings, “and end up with these,” indicating the green, “then where did they come from?”

  “My,” Desmond began, then started again, “The vampire’s body, must be making it.”

  There was a long moment while Eleanor waited to see if the shoe would drop, and when it did not she once more touched the remote. The rings were replaced with a periodic table, iron colored red, magnesium colored green.

  “If that is true,” she said. “Then the vampire’s body is converting atoms with twenty-six protons into atoms with twelve protons. It is splitting atomic nuclei. Desmond? That’s nuclear fission.”

  Reaching into the grocery bag, she withdrew a small black box equipped with a gauge and a metal stylus. Switching it on, she placed it on the floor and pushed it toward him with her shoe, and the Geiger Counter went berserk, clicking and clicking and clicking.

  “You’re radioactive, Sweetheart,” Eleanor Warner says, “So no more pretending you’re just an actor. It’s how we tracked you from the theater to the cemetery; it’s how we’re tracking you right now. One of your traditional strengths has always been the ability to disappear? You no longer possess that. Once your radiation signature --a signature as unique to each vampire as a fingerprint, by the way-- was uploaded to the Global Positioning Satellites, which it was last night, there is no longer anywhere on Earth you can hide.”

  She touched the remote, the burning vampire returned. Rising, she stepped into the beam, the ghastly image projecting onto her face.

  “All nuclear reactions occur at a given rate,” she said. “In nuclear power plants, the rate is regulated by control rods which absorb excess energy. Remove the regulation, or apply extra energy, as we did, to you, last night, in the form of X-ray radiation…”

  She glanced over her shoulder, shrugged.

  “And just so you know, the radiation that burned you wasn’t the green stuff. The green stuff is visible light. X-rays are invisible. The green light was just there so you’d know where to stop. Oh, and all electro-magnetic radiation, regardless of frequency, travels at the same speed: one hundred, eighty-six thousand, two hundred and eighty-one miles per second. You’re fast, vampire… are you faster than light?”

  Desmond said nothing, because he did not have to. Because, really, hadn’t he known for decades this was coming? As the sixteenth century had become the seventeenth, and the eighteenth, and the nineteenth, and, Jesus, the twentieth with its wars and its advances and its man on the freaking moon, for crying out loud, hadn’t he always known this night was coming? How many times had he wondered, in passing, about whatever diabolical engine it was that drove his existence?

  “The Fire Inside,” he whispered, naming one of the songs in his movie.

  “Yes,” Eleanor smiled thinly. “That title was rather prophetic.” She clicked off the slides and silenced the Geiger Counter. Resuming her seat, she smoothed her lab coat.

  “Now,” she said, “for the bad news.”

  “The bad news?” Desmond gasped.

  “Where do you think you are?”

  “No.” Desmond said, the horrid certainty finally crossing his mind. “Oh, no.”

  “You are in a high-security cell in a research and development facility owned by the Consolidated Gas and Power Corporation, the largest private-sector provider of nuclear energy in the world. And they, um, own you.”

  “What?” Desmond yelled, all the shock and stress of the last hours colliding headfirst with the centuries of having his own way inside him. “They what?!”

  Eleanor, suddenly shaken, rose from her chair, started backing towards the door.

  “I understand the procedures aren’t that painful…” she stammered.

  “You filthy little bitch!” Desmond cried, losing his temper and flowing toward her.

  A split second later and he was crumpled on the floor in excruciating pain, his body burnt, his clothes smoking. Eleanor, meanwhile, released her held breath, her fingertips tingling, an involuntary acknowledgement of how close to death she’d just come. She took a moment, collected herself, then stepped over to Desmond.

  “That was a warning, vampire,” she said, her voice a little shaky, but then added the one thing she knew would most impact the vampire Desmond Sharpe:

  “The next time, it will be your face.”

  Gathering her belongings, she exited the room, the heavy door booming shut behind her.

  5

  Introducing Brian

  Dr. Eleanor Warner and her bearded cousin, Courtland Warner, attorney at law, sat across from Deke Hollingsworth, CEO of Consolidated Gas and Power, in an executive boardroom in CG&P’s Los Angeles regional headquarters. Deke’s best friend and COO, Charles (Chuck) Mahoney was also present, as were various CG&P suits, and a sandy-haired man, with the slightly seedy look of a graduate student, who sat at Eleanor’s right. A television monitor was built into the wall at the top of the room.

  “Right,” said Chuck Mahoney. Let’s get this briefing underway. Dr. Warner?”

  “First,” Eleanor said, “I’d like to introduce Dr. Brian Nicholls, my new assistant. He recently obtained his doctorate from Johns Hopkins, where his research focused on mitochondrial function. His disserta
tion was upon ATP formation. He also,” she smiled, “once took an undergraduate course in crypto zoology.”

  “Hello,” Brian waved, while a chuckle rolled through the room.

  “Having overcome his initial skepticism regarding our control specimen,” Eleanor continued, “Brian is now ready to join us in our queries. Speaking of which, our preliminary experiments have yielded very promising results. Mass spectroscopy of blood samples obtained from the specimen show a pronounced magnesium spike, and chemical analysis has shown that magnesium to indeed be bound in a porphyrin ring structure. Subsidiary experiments, into tissue regeneration and pain thresholds, continue.”

  Next to her, Brian looked at the floor, a faint flush suffusing his cheeks.

  “Our work now focuses on understanding the mechanism by which his body processes energy and in harnessing that energy,” Eleanor concluded. “Any questions?”

  One of the suits spoke up. “I still can’t get my mind around it. Cellular fission? How is it possible?”

  Eleanor smiled. “Brian?”

  “Well, it’s a question of scale,” Brian said. “Our own cells produce more energy than we can handle, did you know that? But we have a mechanism to deal with it, the electron transport system. Of course, we make energy by ripping the electrons off the outside of atoms, while he, apparently, makes it by ripping the atoms themselves apart… resulting in a much larger release of energy.”

  “Just how much energy are we talking about, Mr. Nicholls?” asked another suit.

  “We don’t yet have the final figures,” Brian replied, graciously ignoring the slight to his doctorate. “But, given that the fission of a single hydrogen nucleus releases more than one million times the energy than the combustion of an entire molecule of octane, in gasoline, I’d say we don’t have to worry.”

  There was a stirring in the room as all the energy-company executives shifted in their seats, as if their pants had suddenly become too tight.

  “More than enough to keep a ‘dead’ body up and walking long past a normal lifetime,” Eleanor enumerated. “To move with supra-human speed, to account for all the tricks his kind are famous for performing. And to accelerate healing, as our preliminary work has shown.”