With a cry of horror, Father Esteban snatched up the dagger he had just set down and rushed across the room, tottering on feet whose circulation had not fully returned.
The nun tried to scream a warning, or perhaps a plea, but she could force no sound at all past the stricture in her throat. Her pale face had flushed red and was now turning a violent purple.
“Let her go!” bellowed Esteban, and he drove the blade of the knife toward the chest of the figure cloaked in drapes and darkness. But the figure hissed at him like a jungle cat and flung the writhing nun at him with unnatural force. Father Esteban had no chance to dodge and he took her weight full in the chest; then they were falling in a shrieking sprawl of arms and legs. Father Esteban crashed to the stone floor and Sister Sophia’s weight landed hip first onto his chest with a sound like breaking sticks. Pain exploded in Father Esteban’s chest, and his eyes filled with sparks of white fire.
The nun sagged down, unconscious. Esteban struggled to push her off of him, to see the attacker, to draw in a single breath of air. The slender dagger was still clutched in one hand but it was useless to him.
Then, without warning, the weight was gone. The intruder was there, his fists knotted in the nun’s black habit, and without even a grunt of effort he tore the black cloth apart to reveal the white undergarments; then he slashed and ripped these until the naked and innocent flesh of the nun was revealed. It was a horrible transgression, and Father Esteban bellowed in outrage and fury, but the intruder ignored him as he studied the young breasts and clean limbs of the nearly naked woman. The intruder smiled and nodded.
“Yes, she will do very well” he said, and pushed her roughly aside.
The hulking black figure then turned slowly toward the priest. His red robes swirled in the stiff breeze that blew in through the destroyed window. There was no mark, no symbol or badge on any of his garments, and they covered him entirely except for a narrow opening through which two intensely unnatural eyes glared. They were fierce and strange, their irises as blood red as his clothes.
Like the eyes of a rat.
Like the eyes of a demon.
“God!” cried the priest, the word torn from him, from the deep well in which the last of his faith dwelled. He stabbed at the attacker, lunging with his failing strength to try to plunge the needle tip of the dagger into one of those inhuman eyes. But the man—the thing, for it could not possibly be a man—caught the priest’s wrist. Then, with an almost casual jerk, he snapped Father Esteban’s wrist as easily as if the bones were late winter icicles.
Red hot agony erupted in the priest’s arm and he screamed.
He screamed in pain and in fury and in outrage at this attack, and at all that it meant. He knew who and what this man had to be. A Saracen, one of the Hashashin come to murder him, come to silence the voice of the Holy Church.
But he, Father Esteban, was wrong about that, as he was wrong about so many things; and for him, clarity and understanding came far too late.
The intruder released his grip on the priest’s shattered wrist and reached up to his mask, pulling the red cloth slowly away. Revealing his face.
Not a Saracen face.
The skin was pale, the features narrow, the lips thin. A European face.
But not that either.
When the intruder smiled, Father Esteban knew with all certainty that this man did not belong to any country. He did not belong to this world. Thin, colorless lips peeled back to reveal teeth that were yellow and crooked. And wrong.
So wrong.
Each was tapered to a point as needle-sharp as Esteban’s dagger. Not filed the way some of the African cannibals do. No … Father Esteban knew that these teeth, as unnatural as they were, were completely natural to this man.
This creature.
“For the love of God!” cried the priest, his terror and shock greater than the pain in his chest and wrist.
The thing bent closer to him and Esteban could smell the rancid-meat stink of its breath.
“Yes, Father,” said the monster. “All things are done for the love of God.”
That awful mouth stretched open as the red-eyed thing lunged at him.
There was a moment of white-hot pain, and then the colors drained out of the world and took sound and feeling with them, leaving Father Esteban floating in a sea of nothingness. As the darkness wrapped its cloak around him, a single word echoed in his mind, pulsing slowly with the fading beats of his heart.
Vampiro.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Mustapha’s Daily Goods
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 6:47 p.m.
My cell vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it and looked at the code on the screen. Mr. Church. Jamsheed excused himself and went out to his store so I could take the call.
I doubted it was good news.
“I heard from Bug,” Church said. “He’s located a device here in the States.”
“Where?”
“Louisiana.”
Bang. There it was.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Mustapha’s Daily Goods
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 6:48 p.m.
“Christ,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Bug initiated a MindReader search of cargo ships, oil tankers, fishing fleets, and other craft capable of carrying a large, shielded device. Backtracking through ports where cargo could be quietly shifted from one craft to another. These are routes and transfers that would not ring bells on any standard-security computers, so we got lucky.”
“Now give me the bad news.”
“It’s on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico a few miles off the coast of New Orleans. We confirmed the presence of a nuclear signature with a flyover. Low levels, which means it is likely shielded, probably not a danger to the staff aboard the rig, but too high to be anything other than what it is. I have two of our people doing a soft infil right now under cover of a random inspection of blowout preventers. The rig is about due for a check, so we caught that break.”
“Shit.”
“I borrowed SEAL Team Six to work a coordinated operation with Riptide Team out of Miami. Aunt Sallie will coordinate it from the TOC at the Hangar.”
“When do they hit it?”
“The president is making that decision now.”
“Who’s stalling, him or you?”
“Me. I talked him out of giving an immediate go-order. We now know that the devices exist, and that the U.S. is on the list. I don’t want to hit one and have that serve as a signal for our enemies to trigger the other devices.”
“No joke. During my interrogation with Krystos, he said the Sabbatarians were trying to prevent the Red Knights from destroying the world, and he wasn’t talking about a global suckfest. His crew think that these Upierczi freaks are the ones with the nukes.”
“Aunt Sallie told me that you forwarded a theory along those lines,” he said, “so I’ve arranged for Dr. Hu to join us. I’m conferencing him in now.”
“Swell,” I said.
“I heard that,” said Hu.
“It was an expression of great joy,” I said. “I’ve missed you and longed to hear your voice.”
“Eat me.”
Church sighed heavily, which effectively silenced the sniping war.
The only person at the DMS who disliked me more than Aunt Sallie was Dr. William Hu, the head of Church’s vast science and research department. Hu was a couple miles beyond brilliant, and he had what would have been a fun pop-culture sensibility if it wasn’t for the fact that he was a totally amoral asshole. If there was a plague totally unknown to science that was killing thousands of people an hour, Hu was as happy as a kid on Christmas morning because he had a new toy to play with. By comparison, Hu made Dr. Frankenstein look like Jonas Salk. Granted, Bug had some weird detachments from the real world, too, but Bug had a heart. I’d need a full autopsy of Hu before I believed he did, and I’d pay for that procedure right now.
For his part, Hu once descri
bed me as a “muscle-headed mouth breather.”
“Doctor,” began Church in a rather more commanding voice than usual, “I would like you to give Captain Ledger some useful feedback on his theories.”
I heard Hu quietly mumble the word “theories.” “Sure,” he said.
“First up, what the hell are the Upierczi? Are they vampires?”
“I’d need to dissect one,” Hu said, sounding jazzed at the thought, “so I can only speculate on whether the model of the traditional vampire is medically possible. It isn’t. Not as Hollywood shows it. Therianthropy is—”
“Whoa—what?”
“Therianthropy,” he said, pronouncing it slowly for those of us on the short bus. “From the Greek therion, meaning ‘beast’ and anthropos, meaning ‘human.’ Creatures who can change their form. Also known as ‘shapeshifting,’ but it’s mythology, not science. Refers to creatures that could change shape from animal to human, or human to animal.”
“Like vampires turning into bats.”
“And werewolves, which would be subclassified as lycanthropes. Folklore’s filled with crap like that. You got cynanthropy, which is transforming into a dog, ailuranthropy, turning into a cat, yada, yada, yada. There is no evidence of any credible kind that humans can transform.”
“What about sunlight?”
“Possibly. Photophobia is a fear of sunlight and a morbid fear of it is called heliophobia, but Auntie said that your ‘theory’ was that these Upierczi have increased resistance to radiation. That would contradict a fear of sunlight unless the fear was purely psychological and not physiological.”
“Isn’t that likely here?” I asked. “If we’re going to talk about vampires of any kind existing, even if they’re just faking it somehow, then they are going to have to be aware of the myths and legends.”
“Okay,” he agreed grudgingly, “there are a couple of takes on that. Either the Upierczi are some kind of vampire, in which case their unusual nature inspired some of the legends about what we popularly think about vampires. Storytellers, campfire tales, and fiction writers filled in the rest.”
“Or, maybe the Upierczi deliberately provided their own disinformation campaign,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” he said, but I knew I’d scored a point.
“Could a human subspecies have a greater tolerance for radiation?” I asked.
“Sure. Not to the point where they can juggle isotopes, but we’ve seen a pretty big range. Some of the exposure studies after Chernobyl and Fukushima show that.”
“Enough for them to live in a postnuclear environment?”
“That would depend on where the nukes detonate, both in relation to prevailing wind and ocean currents and to actual proximity to the highest concentrations. When Chernobyl melted down everyone thought that the area around it would be a total dead zone, but we saw plant growth return much more quickly, and also the return of animals and birds. Nature loves to adapt. Now … another factor in species survival would be the number of nukes. If the Upierczi live anywhere near one of the blast zones, it’s doubtful they would be able to withstand the doses. However, if they are removed from the blast zones, it would be up to their unique biology as to how soon they could reinhabit those areas.” He paused. “We’re looking for seven nukes worldwide? That would not pose a lasting threat even to the normal human population.”
“It wouldn’t?”
“Well, I mean a bunch of people would be toast. Worst-case scenario from the five we already know of, including New Orleans, would be maybe fifty million dead from the blasts, maybe two hundred million dead in two to forty years from cancers. That’s nothing matched against the six and three quarter billion who wouldn’t die.”
“That’s ‘nothing’?”
“Try thinking big picture once in a while,” said Hu smugly.
“Are you—”I began, my voice rising.
“Don’t start,” warned Church. “We don’t have the time for it.”
I bit down on the things I wanted to say to Hu, and he was probably grinning at the other end of the phone, thinking that he’d just scored by having me yelled at by the teacher.
“What if the Upierczi stay underground?” asked Church.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “In graves or—”
“In tunnels. We have some intelligence that they live, or at least lived, in tunnels.”
“Well,” mused Hu, “rock and dirt are great insulators as long as they aren’t part of a contaminated water table or underground river.”
“In deserts?” I asked.
“Pretty good place to be. Again, though, they’d have to be away from water or, if Rasouli’s intel is right, away from the oil sands.”
“New topic,” I said. “Physiology. The Red Knight I fought was faster and stronger than me. Not just a little, either. What’s the upper range of human potential?”
“Impossible to say,” answered Hu, “because it depends on too many factors. Muscle density, bone density, and overall cellular structure. We keep pushing back the limits for fastest and strongest all the time, and I’m not just talking steroids. Every Olympic Games you have new world records set. There are going to be some extreme limits, of course. Human bones and muscle will never allow someone to bench-press a ton or outrun a sports car, but there is a whole lot of wiggle room; and that’s before we get into gene therapy. Remember the Berserkers from the Jakoby thing. They were big men who received DNA from silverback gorillas. Granted, it caused other mutations and it was a long way from healthy for the subjects, but in the short term those men were much stronger than ordinary humans. Now, if we talk natural mutation in terms of physical potential, that will vary, and we’ve seen average guys who are surprisingly strong and bulky guys who don’t have the strength to open a beer bottle. Like I said, I’d need to cut one of these guys to pin it down.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “What can I use to fight them? Those Sabbatarian freaks had hammers, stakes, holy water, and garlic.”
Hu snorted. “Forget holy water unless the Upierczi actually believe in it.”
“Why would that make a difference?”
“It wouldn’t, except psychologically,” said Church. “They’d fear it or try to evade it, which might open up an opportunity for you.”
“What about the stakes and hammers?”
“I expect,” said Hu, “that would work on anybody. If you don’t have a gun, a big pointed stick is worth a try.”
“And garlic?”
“Hm. Might be something to that. I did a search through the literature, and, though garlic allergies aren’t that common, there is plenty of documentation.”
“Fatal allergies?” I asked hopefully.
“Not usually. Most garlic allergies are a form of contact dermatitis. Chefs get it once in a while when they get garlic oil or dust in a cut. They present with patterns of asymmetrical fissures on the affected fingertips, maybe some thickening and shedding of the outer skin layers. In really rare cases that can progress to second- or even third-degree burns. Actually it’s a component of garlic, the chemical diallyl disulfide, or DADS, along with related compounds allyl propyl disulfide and allicin. You find all three in other plants in the genus Allium, too, like leeks and onions.”
“So what do I do, ask the Red Knights to make me some garlic bread and hope they have an accident with a knife?”
Hu laughed despite himself. “If the Upierczi have a congenital allergy, that could be in our favor. It’d be better if you could get some dust or oil directly into their lungs or bloodstream. That’s probably why the Sabbatarians threw garlic in your face. If you breathed it and you were a Upier, then you might go into anaphylaxis. Then they’d go all Buffy the Vampire Slayer on you and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Hu said. “The kicker is that we don’t know if garlic is a genuine allergen to them or if that’s more disinformation. You’re going to hav
e to figure that out on the fly.”
“Swell. Anything else you can tell me?”
“Nothing that isn’t blind speculation. We don’t have the data to do more than speculate.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” said Church, and he dropped Hu out of the conversation. “Any other thoughts, Captain?”
“Just one. What are the chances that the Iranian government is behind this whole thing? I know Rasouli gave me the flash drive, but I can see how he could be pulling a fast one: planting nukes in Iran and in the States and tipping us off so that we find them.”
“To what end?”
“To whitewash their reputation. They discover a global threat and reach across political and religious differences to join with us in a joint operation that proves to the world that they’re part of the solution and not the core of the problem.”
“Why do so covertly?”
“Because if it goes wrong they can plausibly deny any involvement and probably dump it all on us. After all—we have the original flash drive now, and we have people operating inside their borders without permission. We flub it, they have proof; we don’t flub it and we can both retroactively spin the story that this was all a hush-hush joint operation from the jump.”
“Chasing Hugo Vox is turning you into a cynic, Captain.”
“Hard to stay optimistic with a bunch of nukes ready to pop,” I pointed out.
“I could accept that Rasouli is behind it, but not as an official representative of the Iranian government,” mused Church. “They couldn’t afford to come within a million miles of such a plan. It would do irreparable political harm to the sitting party.”
“What about a move by an opposition party or a dissident group?”
He considered. “It would take enormous resources and would be ultimately self-defeating.”
“Only if they pulled the trigger.”