AfterAge (38 page)

Bill gestured angrily at the piles of papers on his desk and the culture dishes with their failed contents along the countertop. "Well, I'd welcome a different suggestion," he snapped. "Or maybe you'd prefer to explain to my uncomprehending mind just what it is about a vampire's
dead
body that enables it to invisibly manufacture a toxin which nullifies any decomposition bacteria it encounters." He slammed his palm on the desktop. "I'd love to have your input."

“All right," Jo said. Oblivious to his anger, she wandered to the far end of the cultures and peered at the dishes that still contained living cultures. "It won't make any difference to your work if you force Deb to feed." She glanced at him, her stone-gray eyes unreadable. "Except it will destroy her. For eternity." She picked up the nearest Petri dish.

"Hey," the physician protested. "Put that down."

"The Bible tells us that bread is the staff of life," Jo commented. She set the dish back on the countertop and looked speculatively at the equipment around them, then pulled a small golden flask from her pocket and held it up for Perlman to see. "But what is flour and yeast without water? No more than a fine white powder—with potential."

Bill frowned. "I don't follow." He had thought that Calie, with her unsettling sense of second sight and quiet, almost desperate passion was the strangest woman he'd ever met; now he realized how naive that assumption had been.

"That's what you have here," Jo said patiently. "Powder, in the form of your germs—"

"Bacteria."

"Bacteria. You just lack the proper ingredient, or
catalyst
, to get it going."

Bill gave an exasperated sigh. "You're not making sense. You don't know anything about bacteria or how they grow. Bacteria require a medium that's conducive for growth and reproduction. A source of carbon, vitamins and salts, oxygen—"

"Exactly," Jo interrupted. "You're growing your bacteria in the wrong medium. Try this instead."

"What is it?"

She gave him a sidelong glance. "Water, of course. From St. Peter's."

"You're kidding." When she didn't answer, he glared at her. "I don't have time to play corny games, young lady. Your belief is touching, but I need results, not faith." He folded his arms. "Maybe you think I'm cruel, but the only way I can see to progress is to feed that woman in the bomb shelter and see what kind of metabolic changes take place."

Jo smiled ruefully and unscrewed the flask's top. "You won't even try it? I thought scientists would try anything."

"It won't work," he insisted. "Not only is it a waste of time, it'll ruin a perfectly good culture. Not enough of those things I mentioned a moment ago are present in simple H
₂
O. This kind of bacteria uses dead organic matter as a food source, not water."

"I realize that," Jo said gently, and for a crazy instant he believed she knew exactly what he was talking about. “All you need is something to get it going."

"Exactly. And water just isn't it."

She turned her back to him and leaned on the counter, looking down at Perlman's cultures. "Well," she said at length, "let's try just one, shall we?" Her slender fingers quickly twisted the top from the closest dish.

"Absolutely not!" Perlman exclaimed. He scrambled up and tried to reach around her. "I'm down to only two pure cultures. If those are contaminated, it'll take a week to be sure I have another pure—
stop that!
"

Too late; she'd already splashed a couple of drops of water into the open dish. "There," she said with satisfaction. "Fifteen minutes, and it'll be ready to give to Deb."

"Damn it, Jo! Now I only have one dish! That means I can't do anything until I'm sure a pure strain will grow from it!"

"You don't need them anyway," she said. "Look."

"Don't be absurd," he said curtly. "You can’t see a saprobe without a microscope." He smacked a closed fist against his forehead. "God, I can't
believe
you did that!"

"Can't see a what?" Jo asked mildly.

Perlman sighed.
What good would it do to be angry with this child?
"This bacterium is a saprobe," he answered patiently. “An organism that can exist in a low air environment and uses nonliving animal matter as food."

"Ah," Jo said. "That's what these are?" She waved her hand at the dishes. “And the dead animal then—"

"Decomposes." It was a simplified but basically sound explanation.

"What will this do to
living
things?" She picked up the dish to which she'd added water and brought it close to her nose.

"Nothing," Perlman responded. "If it's present at all, it's a symbiotic relationship." Jo looked at him quizzically. "The person would only be a vehicle for movement," he explained. "A protective carrier. Like bats—they carry hydrophobia but don't contract the disease themselves, yet the fleas living in their fur do."

"Ah," Jo said again. She went to the other end of the counter and began unscrewing the tops from his discounted cultures and pouring tiny drops of water into each.

"Jo, those are dead," he said. "Nothing will do those any good." For safety's sake, he hurried to the counter and whisked away the Petri dish containing the last pure culture.

"That one's already been done," she commented as she twisted the top back on the flask, then shook it lightly. "Still a little left." She set it on the counter.

"What do you mean, 'already done'?" he challenged. "You never even opened it!"

"Nevertheless." She smiled at him. "Men of science are always so . . ." She touched a finger against her mouth pensively.

"Skeptical?" He held up the second dish and examined it, then mentally cursed as he realized what he was doing. There was no way it could be contaminated.

Could it?

"Why don't you put this one under your microscope?" She offered him a dish.

"There's nothing to see," he insisted. "The bacteria that were there were absorbed by the vampire skin I added, and most of that dissolved in the daylight when I brought it up here."

"Would the bacteria still be in the stuff that's left?" she asked.

"Of course, but it's dead. It looks like burned paper.”

“Will you show me?"

"Look," he said. "These cultures are ruined—"

"You have something more important to do in the next five minutes, Dr. Perlman?"

He pressed his lips together. "Fine." He took the dish from her and made a quick scraping, then pushed the slide under the lens. "Put your eyes here, turn this knob to focus the view."

She obeyed, carefully adjusting the focus, then studying the slide. "I thought you said these bacteria were dead."

"They are."

"Doesn't look that way to me. But then I'm not a doctor." She raised her gaze to him. "Care to see?"

To humor her, Perlman stepped up and peered through the viewer, then gasped. The slide was covered with moving, familiar
Clostridia
, yet each was encased in a sort of thickened, protective plasma membrane, or a sheath of the type found in iron bacteria. "What happened here?" he asked in bewilderment. He fumbled the slide free, then hurriedly prepared another from the newest of the culture dishes. "This is incredible!" He straightened, then picked up her flask, fumbling at the unexpected warmth of the metal. "What's
really
in this?" he demanded. He dropped it back on the counter. "You mean that all I needed was
water
and all this work meant
nothing
?"

"It contains water, Doctor, as I said before, but don't ever think your efforts were wasted. After all, the water's always been there, hasn't it? Without you to make the bread and yeast, it would still be just . . . water." She turned to leave and for an instant the sun transformed her hair to a sheet of glowing white. "You can go downstairs and give it to Deb. She's sleeping quite soundly, so it’s safe for you to go alone. Don't . . .” She hesitated. "Don't let Alex know just yet."

Though he wanted badly to turn and glance at the windows, Perlman could only stare after Jo as she stepped out the door and disappeared down the hall.
How odd
, he thought as he finally turned to the panes of glass that had been the lab's source of daylight for many, many months. How pretty the sun's rays had been as they'd highlighted her hair. Though he knew he should hurry down to the shelter and Deb, it still took a few minutes to pull himself away from the windows.

Everybody knows the sun doesn't shine from the north.

REVELATION 13:7

And it was given unto him to make war. . . .

~ * ~

"We want everybody ready first thing in the morning," Alex said. "Make sure all your equipment—weapons, flashlight, whatever—is set out tonight. We should walk into Hanley-Dawson no later than eight. There we pick up the torch and the tanks and go on to the Mart."

"What time will we get to the Mart?" asked Elliot. He and the others looked at Alex expectantly.

"Nine o'clock," Alex guessed. "It's not that far." His gaze searched out McDole. "You're sure the torch works?"

"Well," the older man said, "we know it's got pressure. Elliot fiddled with it—"

"—but I really didn't know what I was doing," Elliot finished. "I figured if I kept going I'd probably blow up the place. I never used anything but propane in shop class."

Alex's forehead creased. "We'll find out tomorrow. An outfit like that is bound to have a couple of spare tanks anyway." He looked around. "What else?"

"How long to get the chains off?" McDole asked.

"I can't answer that without knowing what they're made of. My guess would be only a few minutes each."

"And the people won't get burned?" Ira asked.

Alex shook his head. "It's a directed flame. For the sake of speed I'll go through a couple of links away from the skin, and we'll cut the rest off when we get back here."

McDole held up a hand. "Getting them loose may not be the hardest part," he reminded them. "We still don't know how many people are actually there. It could be fifteen or thirty. No one's seen them all, not eyed—his gaze flicked to Alex—"Deb. Chances are they're probably weak and sick. They may or may not be able to walk, and they'll probably get frantic when they see us." He laced his fingers on the table. "We don't know what we're getting into here. The guard may be armed and he may fight. Every decision you make will be critical, so be careful and be
sensible
. No heroes—we don't want to hold any memorials next week." They all nodded grimly.

"What if it's still raining?" C.J. asked from the window. "Do we go anyway?"

"No." At Alex's surprised look, McDole thumped a knuckle against the map spread on the table. "It's just too risky. Cold, wet weather will triple the odds that we'll leave a track or imprint somewhere that could be followed, and God knows what it'll do to the travel time."

"And dragging those folks through the rain won't help anything," Ira commented.

"Exactly" McDole sat back "The object is to get everyone back here alive and safe, and if we have to wait for a dry day, then we wait." He leaned forward again, his expression grave. "We can't leave
anyone
behind, understand? Or we'll have to move both the people here and the ones we rescue."

"Christ," Elliot muttered. "How could we leave anyone anyway?" His mouth was tight. "Imagine being there and watching everyone else escape, knowing you're the only person left to face those creatures. Talk about a nightmare!"

"So we're set?" Alex looked at them, then glanced toward the door. "What's that?"

"Sounds like the doctor." McDole rose and walked to the stairwell, then his eyebrows lifted. "He's mighty excited."

There was a clattering on the stairs and Perlman burst into the room. "We've got it!" he cried. He waved a syringe and McDole flinched away from the swinging needle.

"What?" Alex asked warily.

The physician grabbed his arm and grinned, his eyes wide and wild.

"The way to kill the vampires!"

~ * ~

"This is it." Calie and Louise joined the group as Perlman raised the syringe for everybody to see. "Suspended in a glucose solution. It's safe, effective, and I tried it an hour ago. I've actually seen it work."

"What does it do?" Louise asked.

"It makes them decompose, the way a human body does when the person dies," Perlman answered. "The way they should have when
they
died."

"That's great," McDole said doubtfully. "But what do we do now? Ask if they want a shot?"

Perlman chuckled. "Watch." There was a collective gasp as he plunged the syringe into his arm, dispensed its contents, then drew out the needle. From his pocket he pulled a small packet containing an alcohol-soaked piece of gauze and dabbed at the spot. "I just became a passive carrier."

"It's not going to make you sick, is it?" Calie's face was frightened.

"It’s not going to make anyone sick—anyone living, that is. To put it simply, it feeds only on dead flesh. In or on a living organism, it stays dormant."