“Not really. I meant to kill Bob, not just wound him. Are you almost done?”
“It
She stiffens up. “Someone’s coming!” she whispers. I’m on my fifteenth key.
“Hang on…”
She raises her gun. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the barrel shaking all over the place. We’re cutting this close.
And then the lock clicks and the door opens. Seventeen turns out to be the lucky number. I grab her and pull the two of us into the antechamber.
“It’s running for us!” she shouts.
We throw our combined weight on the door and spin the lock. After a good long pause in which nothing happens other than the two of us not breathing, we relax.
“You saw it?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe. Somebody’s out there, that I’m sure of.”
“This door should keep it out,” I insist, patting the door, “Until it runs out of easier victims.”
“This was your plan? How were you going to keep it from killing you?”
“It’s not the best plan in the world. Come on.”
I lead her through the next door.
In order to get into the lab proper, one has to go through three sets of double doors. The first set is the one we just locked. The second set of doors is glass, and they separate the antechamber from an area called a walkthrough. The purpose of the walkthrough is to keep airborne contamination down to a minimum. After the doors leading into it, there’s a second set of doors leading out of it, and at no time can both sets of doors be open.
The rest of the lab, then, is what’s referred to in the parlance as a clean room. This I find comical, because I’ve always likened science to its predecessor—alchemy. I knew a lot of alchemists, and not one of them ever worried about cross-contamination. If anything, one tended to need a bath
Once in the walkthrough I peer into the lab, which is pretty easy to do, as every wall is glass at this point. The laboratory is lit dimly by a moderate selection of fluorescent lights and table lamps. And it looks like a few experiments are still running, based on the various indicator lights on the equipment. But, as I’d hoped, it’s deserted.
When Grindel first bought this place out, he had the interior tailored to Viktor’s specifications. The second floor was removed—Viktor said the ceiling was a mess of loose particulate matter, which I remembered because I don’t know what particulate matter is—and replaced with a new drop ceiling. All the walls for separate rooms were also removed, making it one giant space. Areas are now defined by counters and equipment. And one curtain, off in the right corner of the lab, hiding an examination table. I spent a good deal of time on that table being poked and prodded. To that end, the curtain is for privacy. There are a couple of female lab techs, but even if it were an all- male staff, it would still be no fun being the only naked guy in the place.
“What are we doing here?” Clara asks. “Other than hiding from the vampire.”
“I’m reclaiming some private property,” I say. I open the inner door of the walkthrough. “Do me a favor. Stand here and hold this door open.”
“Okay.”
“And loan me that gun.”
She hands over the M-16. I take it and use the butt of the gun to shatter the glass in the outer door. Then I go to work on the lock.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.
“Making sure we’re not interrupted.”
It takes me a couple of minutes to adequately destroy the locking mechanism on the door. That accomplished, I enter the lab. Clara lets the door close. I hear the lock engage.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s get to work.”
I learned an awful lot about cell biology and genetics during my month of daily visits to the lab. About eighty percent of it went completely over my head—especially the theoretical aspects—but I paid attention and asked enough questions to make it seem as if my curiosity was very general, instead of highly specific. It helps that scientists apparently love to talk about what they do. (Alchemists were the same way.) I imagine this comes from not having many people to talk to—outside of other scientists—that would actually look interested in the minutia.
Among the things I learned was where all the samples of my body’s cells are being kept and what I would have to do if I wanted to destroy them.
Having Clara with me, rather than Eve, is actually a huge bonus. Of course, according to the original plan, Clara is supposed to be securing transportation right about now. But you take what you get.
“You’ve been here before, right?” I ask her.
“Couple times,” she admits.
“Did you see their computers?”
“Yeah. Pretty standard.”
“While I’m busy, do you want to see if you can find all of the data they’ve been accumulating over the past month?”
“I just have to turn it on,” she says.
“Yeah, but my point is, I probably wouldn’t know how to do that.”
“Right. Okay. What are you going to be doing?”
“Just hurry,” I say.
Ten minutes later I’d collected all the samples I could find—both my blood and Eve’s—and deposited them into a fairly convenient and very large biohazard waste bucket.
“So. All-mother?” I ask, while searching the cabinets for a nice big jug of bleach.
Clara’s still typing away at the computer. “It’s what we call her,” she says simply.
“Cute name. Aside from the disturbing religious undertones, I almost like it better than Eve.” I open a refrigerator, because I can’t remember if one is supposed to keep bleach cold or not. The answer appears to be no, but I do find a useful collection of diseases.
Viktor and his team inflicted every virus and bacteria on me that they could get their hands on, and when they were done, they tried inventing new ones to see what effect they would have. None of them did a thing regardless of the concentration. I found this mostly annoying, but it was also sort of cool. Having some very smart guys actively trying to infect me with something, and failing, is a pretty big ego boost.
I pocket a vial of chicken pox and move on.
“So, do you want to explain to me what happened earlier?” I ask Clara.
“Not so sure you want to know,” she claims.
“Sure I do.”
“It’s kind of complicated.”
“You mean you’d rather not upset me while I’m packing a gun,” I offer.
“Mine’s bigger than yours,” she says. “But no, I just meant that while committing industrial espionage and running for our lives from a homicidal vampire, I might not have the time to be able to explain it with the proper degree of nuance.”
“Here it is,” I say. In one of the cabinets holding an array of fairly benign liquid compounds, I discover two big jugs of bleach. I pull them both out and carry them to the waste bin.
“I’ve got all the files,” she says. “What do you want to do with them?”
“Can you delete them?” I ask.
“I’ll try.”
I start dumping the bleach over all the stuff in the bin. As I understand it, this is the only way to totally destroy the cells, right down to the DNA. I discovered this by asking one of the scientists how they went about
