By Joe McKinney
Timbuktu, Mali
September 19th
For five days, Walter Laurens, who worked as the West African Regional Control Officer for the U.S. Department of Military Sciences, had been unable to make contact with his top agent.
A week of silence.
Not unusual, by itself.
Dr. Miriam Bloch worked in some remote areas of the Sahara Desert. Communication wasn’t easy, even with advanced DMS technology.
She’d been given the cover story of a doctor working on Ebola for Doctors Without Borders, but her real job was to learn everything she could about the bayi species of vampires that had recently surfaced among the Tuareg people of Northern Mali, and as the Tuareg were semi-nomadic, she was constantly on the move.
A few missed calls were understandable.
Except that, over the last four months or so, the quality of her work had become erratic. Her progress reports were often incomplete, failing to answer even some of the more obvious questions, and more than once Laurens had been forced to ask the same question several times, over several emails, before she finally addressed it satisfactorily. She was still the best doctor in West Africa—she’d delivered his own son, Roger, after all—but he was worried about her. So he got in his Land Cruiser and headed north on one of the few roads that led out of Timbuktu.
He traveled most of the afternoon on bad roads, arriving in the Tuareg village with less than two hours of usable sunlight. The village was a typical one for the Tuareg nomads, consisting of twenty large, domed huts with patchwork roofs and low grass walls. Their openings were barely tall enough for a child to walk through without stooping, but Laurens knew from past experience that once inside the hut was large enough for a family of ten or more. A village this size could easily hold three hundred men, women, and children. Big for a Tuareg community.
Only there was no one around.
He turned off his vehicle and squinted through the windshield, looking for any signs of movement.
Nothing.
He climbed out of the vehicle and stared about at the quiet huts, the vacant doorways. A breeze carried a cloud of dust through the village, but that was all that moved. He couldn’t help but feel that something was very wrong here. During his last three years in Africa, Laurens had been in countless villages like this one. There were always chickens and dogs running around, always children chasing each other through the grass, laughing and shouting the way kids do.
But there was nothing here.
No old women shelling beans, no old men watching him through the slits in thick black veils. The Tuareg were nomads. They could uproot a village at a moment’s notice and take their lives on the road, but that didn’t look like what had happened here. They’d left too many valuable things lying around, washtubs and portable stoves, things they’d never leave behind.
So where was everybody?
“Hello?” he called out.
Nothing.
He turned around in a slow circle, studying every doorway. “Hello?”
Not even a dog barking.
Laurens walked over to one of the huts and stuck his head inside—and immediately recoiled from the stench of death. He backed away from the opening and took several deep breaths, face pinched in surprise and disgust.
He pulled his pistol, steeled himself, and ducked back inside. It took several moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but once they did, he could see the hut was empty. The smell was bad, but there were no bodies, no blood, just round, woven rugs on the floor and empty nests of blankets where the former occupants had spent their nights. There was no sign of a struggle.
And yet, death was here.
He explored the other huts and found the same sickly sweet stench of rotting flesh in each one. No bodies, though. Confused, he went on searching, and had just cleared his eighth hut when he saw Miriam Bloch’s Land Cruiser crashed in a ditch and covered over with dusty grasses and twigs.
He rushed into the ditch, throwing the vegetation aside. Inside, he saw blood on the driver’s seat and on the steering wheel.
And that was when it hit him.
He was staring at a full-blown crisis.
Miriam was a friend. There weren’t many Americans in northern Mali, and everybody knew each other, even if they weren’t connected to the Agency. But he wasn’t concerned about a missing friend right now.
Miriam was a DMS agent, privy to classified information. She carried the sum total of the DMS’s knowledge of the Ice Virus in her head, everything from how to slow its progression in an infected person to how to weaponize it. Part of the reason he’d been deployed here was because of the volatile political climate in the region. Here in Mali they had local tribal warfare, and French colonial influence, and Islamic extremists like al-Qaeda, Ansar Dine, and even ISIL, all competing for a slice of the pie. If any one of those groups had seen through her cover story and taken her hostage, the DMS was going to have to bring in the big guns.
He was about to renew his search when his phone rang.
It scared him so badly he nearly cracked off a shot.
He fished the iPhone from his pocket and read the caller ID. Kathy, his wife. He took a deep breath, collected himself, and answered.
“Hey, babe,” he said, forcing his heartbeat to stop racing.
“Hey,” she said. She sounded tired. “You okay? You sound stressed.”
“No,” he said. “I’m good here. Just cleaning up a few things at work.”
Though Kathy had been with him since he transferred from the State Department to the Department of Military Services ten years before, she’d never been told what he really did for a living. She knew he maintained a cover story as a geologist for a local salt company, but that was all she knew.
Laurens could hear their son crying in the background, and he could almost picture her in their kitchen back at the American compound, Roger on her hip, both hands on the fussing baby, phone sandwiched between her cheek and shoulder as she tried to do everything at once. He’d dragged her all over the globe on DMS business, and she’d never complained. Even here in Mali, where they had Sharia law, and women were treated like garbage, she kept her chin up. She was a trooper.
Better, he suspected, than he deserved.
But she hadn’t slept well since Roger came along. She’d had blackouts and memory lapses. He’d woken up several times in the middle of the night to find her missing from the bed. More often than not he’d found her near the front door, eyes open and walking around, but still asleep.
“Sounds like I’m doing better than you,” he said. “He sounds fussy.”
“It’s the colic again.”
“And you? How’d you sleep?”
“Not too good. It was a rough night.”
He stepped into another hut and gagged a little. He put his free hand under his nose.
“Walter?”
“I’m here,” he said. The stench was overpowering. “I’m sorry you can’t sleep.”
“Maybe tonight’ll be better. When are you coming home?”
Something caught his eye over at a back corner of the hut. Laurens crossed the hut and knelt down next to the nest of blankets where Dr. Miriam Bloch had, until recently, made her bed. There was no pillow, no pictures of home. The only concession to her foreign status, besides her medical journals and her tablet, was a pile of laundry. Mixed among the t-shirts and khaki shorts he saw black, lace-trimmed panties and sports bras, things no Tuareg woman would ever wear.
“Hard to say,” he said, lifting a pair of the black panties on the tip of his finger. There was no blood on her clothes. “I’m thinking I might be a while.”
“So, we’re on our own for dinner?”
He let the panties fall to the ground. “Yeah, sorry, babe.”
“Just come home to me,” she said.
“Fast as I can.”
“Love you.”
“In love with you, babe.”
Laurens hung up the phone and went back to examining Miriam’s tablet. It was password protected, which was standard DMS security protocol. He’d have to wait until he got home to jailbreak it.
He rose from her bedding and was about to go on searching when he spotted the Blue Woman at the far end of the room.
Laurens froze.
One of the bayi vampires.
Only this one was dead, a bib of clotted blood streaking her chest. It looked like a giant chunk of flesh had been ripped out of her neck.
He stared at the corpse, fascinated, despite his fear.
He’d seen pictures, of course, mainly in Miriam’s emails, but this was the first time he’d seen a bayi face to face.
My God, he thought, they really are blue.
The change in skin color was actually just a stain from the blue dye in the ceremonial robes they wore. They were real vampires, of course, as real as the Crimson Queen herself. But unlike their counterparts in Tuareg folklore, they weren’t witches that fed off the blood of children.
They actually ate the same foods as everybody else in their village.
They did take nourishment from the communal emotional energy of their village, but exactly how that worked was not very well understood. What made them really unique, and justified the DMS presence in West Africa, was how accommodating they were. They’d allowed Miriam access to every ceremony, every private council. Even their late-night potion making parties.
Whereas other vampire races around the world had declared war on humanity, the Blue Women had made themselves an open book.
They’d even provided her with blood samples for her studies.
And it was from those samples that Miriam had done her best work. She’d managed to trace the antigenic shift in the Ice Virus from its patient zero source in Michael Fayne to the three women in this village who had become bayi.
Work, Laurens was told, that might one day stop the transition of future vampires.
Unfortunately, their spirit of cooperation did little good now that they were dead.
So sad, he thought. This could set the DMS back months.
He turned away from the corpse and, as he was walking back to the opening, his foot caught on the large rug in the center of the room. He tripped and nearly fell. Looking back, he realized that he had kicked enough of the rug away to reveal a hastily placed trapdoor in the floor.
He put Miriam’s tablet down and pulled the rug out of the way.
Laurens couldn’t tell how many bodies were inside the pit. The spaghetti bowl mess of severed arms and legs and bloodstained faces might have been ten people, maybe twenty. He couldn’t really tell. They’d all been hacked to pieces. Arms and legs were broken in half. Juts of bare bone extended from a few of the broken limbs. Though his stomach was turning in knots, he knelt down and studied the remains. He saw odd gouges on a few of them, and looking closer, he confirmed his worst fears.
They were teeth marks.
He turned away from the pit and careened into a wall. It gave a little, but held his weight. Laurens stood there for a minute, his head a soupy mess, his gut twisting in knots.
He just couldn’t process it.
The bodies, the broken bones, the teeth marks… it was all too much.
He managed to climb through the low opening that led outside and staggered into the fading sunlight.
The ground still felt like it was pitching beneath his feet.
He couldn’t quite catch his breath.
He looked around at the other huts, and remembered the stench he’d encountered in each of them.
So many innocent people dead.
He bent over and vomited.
# # #
He pulled into the driveway at the American compound long after dark and realized he barely remembered the drive home. His mind was still back in the village.
He hadn’t even noticed night had fallen.
Laurens climbed out of the Land Cruiser and started across the courtyard to his flat. Floodlights lit his way down gardened paths. The landscapers had been busy planting new flowers along the walkway and around the main fountain, but he barely noticed the splash of color.
All those bodies. All that blood.
A baby cried from the stairs off to his right, shaking him out of his thoughts.
Turning, he saw Sarah Galloway, one of Kathy’s friends, trying to squeeze her way through the door. In her hands she juggled her writhing daughter (it was Jessica, or Jesse, something like that) born just two weeks before Roger, and a box that was way too big for her. It looked like she was about to drop everything.
“Hold on,” he said. He trotted over, took the box. “Here, I got it.”
“Oh, thank the Lord, that’s so much better.” She readjusted her grip on her daughter and straightened her veil. “I was losing my grip there.”
“Where’s this going?” he asked.
“Oh, you don’t have to go to any trouble, Walter. Frank’ll be right back. He told me I was trying to do much, but you know us girls. Always so impatient.”
He offered her a bland smile. He didn’t much care for the Galloways. From what he could tell they were Bible thumpers. Her husband Frank was a chemist. He worked for the same salt company as Laurens, though he didn’t have any Agency connections at all.
Still, they were all Americans. They were all strangers in a strange land and all that crap. He had to be polite to stay in character.
“It’s no bother,” he said. He motioned with the box. “Where do you want it?”
But before he could start moving, Frank appeared around the corner. He ran forward, took the box, and gave his wife a look so lovingly and playfully reproachful that Laurens had to stop himself from rolling his eyes.
“Thanks, buddy,” Frank said, nudging him with an elbow. “Women, am I right?”
Laurens nodded.
“I was so lucky he was there,” Sarah said. “I thought I was going drop everything.”
Frank leaned forward and rubbed noses with his daughter. “Don’t you listen, sweetie pie. Momma wouldn’t drop you.”
The little girl cooed happily. Ordinarily, Laurens would have had little patience for public affection like that, but it made him think of Kathy. He’d left her alone with the baby, again. She was doing all the work, and doing it in a land controlled by Sharia law. They treated women like garbage here, and for a girl whose temperament was better suited to the bright lights of Dallas than the hot African sun, it had to be hard on her here. No wonder she wasn’t getting any sleep.
But before he could think too deeply on it, his attention was pulled toward his Land Cruiser.
The back door was hanging open.
He hadn’t left it like that.
“You know, it sure would be nice if you and Kathy would join us for dinner some night. When are you guys free?”
Laurens barely heard him. “Huh?”
“I think it’d be just swell to get the kids together for a play date,” Sarah said. “Little Roger is getting so big.”
“Yeah,” Laurens said distractedly. “Yeah, he’s pretty huge. Excuse me, would you?” He motioned toward his vehicle. “I need to check something over here.”
“So, maybe dinner this weekend?” Frank called after him.
“Yeah, sure.”
Laurens walked around the back of the Land Cruiser and looked inside, and felt his heart rise into his throat. Amid the tarps and ropes and tools and all the rest of it in the truck’s backend was a thick pool of blood.
Blood everywhere.
His mind raced, even as his lip curled in disgust.
A baby cried from an open window and Laurens half turned toward the sound. Kathy and Roger were still waiting for him.
“Hey, Walter,” Frank called from his vehicle. “You okay, buddy?”
Laurens gave him a wave, but he wasn’t okay. Not even a little bit.
Whatever had hunted and killed the people in that Tuareg village was here now, in the American compound.
He had brought it back with him.
# # #
Laurens opened the door to his flat and found Kathy sitting on the couch in their cramped little common room. Even after all this time in country, he couldn’t make himself call such a place a living room. Roger was on the floor in front of her, on his back, sleeping with his tiny fist in his mouth.
She looked up at him and smiled. Her eyes were rimmed red from exhaustion.
“How long’s it been since you got any sleep?” he asked.
“I took a nap earlier.”
“I mean real sleep.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. He’s beautiful, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Laurens said. “He’s gonna like growing up in Texas.”
She smiled. It was that same patient, yet pained smile he’d been seeing for months now.
“It won’t be long, I think. Another few months.”
“I promised I’d follow you to the ends of the Earth,” she said.
“Yeah, but I didn’t mean to take you literarily. I’m hoping we’ll be cycled back home soon.”
He put a hand on her shoulder and she bent toward him, her cheek resting on his arm. “I’d like that,” she said. “But it’s okay, Walter. As long as we’re together.”
“I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” he said.
“I don’t either. Just lucky, I guess.”
His phone rang. He took it out and checked the caller ID. The Home Office. A message flashed on the screen. PROGRESS REPORT ASAP.
“Damn. I gotta take this.”
She nodded. “Try not to be up too late, okay?”
He took Miriam Bloch’s tablet and went to the spare bedroom the DMS had converted to his study. The jailbreaking software on his laptop cut through her tablet’s security lock in seconds. He scrolled through the home pages, exploring her apps at random. She had several social media pages, but it had been almost two weeks since she’d visited any of them. There were over a hundred unanswered emails in her three different accounts, including several from him. Her medical apps were stale too. It was like she’d essentially dropped off the grid.
He did find something curious when he went through the history on her Safari browser, though.
Lilith.
She’d done hundreds of searches on “Lilith” and “estrie” and “Jewish vampires.”
Curious.
He’d heard the name Lilith, of course, back in college, but he didn’t really know anything about her. His time in the DMS had made him a quick study of folklore, though, and it only took him a few minutes reading through some of the websites Miriam had visited to come up to speed.
According to Jewish tradition, she was supposed to be the first wife of Adam, though apparently she refused to be subservient to him, which may or may not have had something to do with her refusing to have sex with him in the missionary position—the folklore sources weren’t clear on that point—and that got her kicked out of the Garden of Eden. She then retreated to a cave and became some type of demon. The folklore wasn’t entirely clear on exactly what type of demon, though, and in the various artist renderings he found she was sometimes a beautiful and highly seductive girl, usually nude, like a porn star with a devil’s tail, while in others she was a weathered hag with wild hair and a baby’s severed arm in her teeth. New mothers and their newborn babes were apparently her favorite meal, though she would also eat men from time to time.
At least when she wasn’t seducing them in their sleep.
Going back to the home screen, something caught his eye.
There was an app there called Story Journal. He called it up, but found only two videos. The first was a short one dated four days earlier and the second was a longer one dated the next day. The first had a run time of thirty-eight seconds, while the longer of the two had a run time of nearly nine minutes.
He called up the shorter one first.
Dr. Miriam Bloch appeared in close-up. She was sitting on her sleeping mat inside the hut where Laurens had found the dead Blue Woman and the half-eaten corpses. The tablet was resting on her knees, and she was holding it with both hands, like the steering wheel of an out-of-control car.
She looked crazy. Wild hair, trembling lips, eyeballs that bounced around like bees inside a box.
“Holy shit,” Laurens muttered.
Now, he was beginning to see why her work was suffering.
Several times she tried to speak, but failed. She couldn’t seem to focus, couldn’t remember the words to say what needed to be said. Laurens’s grandfather had died of Alzheimer’s years earlier, and he remembered the man struggling in frustration and bootless rage to remember who he was and who the people around him were. It was the same haunted look Miriam Bloch was giving the camera now.
“I can’t fucking think!” she screamed, and it came so unexpectedly, Laurens flinched away from the tablet.
By the time he’d recovered his composure, the video was over.
Rattled, he had to force himself to watch the second video.
And immediately wished he hadn’t.
Same pose as before. Same wild hair, same crazy, leering gaze. Only this time, she was covered in blood. It ran from the corners of her mouth and turned her hair into a sticky, matted mess.
Except now she was smiling.
Gone was the tortured self-doubt, the painful struggle to grasp for words. She was breathing hard, like a woman aroused.
The first thing she did was turn the camera down on her bare legs. She’d taken off her khaki shorts, and the camera caught a glimpse of small black panties, but it didn’t even register with Laurens.
His gaze was focused on her legs.
Her hairy legs.
She ran the palm of her hand from her knee up to the top of her thigh, then turned her bloody hand to the tablet’s camera. “See that,” she said. “Stuff is sharp as shark skin. That’s new.”
Then she turned the camera back to her face.
And smiled.
And sat there.
The smile gradually fading.
For about a minute and a half.
“I think I did a pretty good job covering up the mess. They’ll need a cleaner team out here, but I think I made it easy on them. Walter Laurens… God, you’re an officious little prick, you know that? I never fucking liked you. Still, I made it easy for you. Fucking dickless son of a bitch.”
Her head swung on her neck like a drunk about to pass out. She didn’t appear to be lucid. She seemed, to Laurens, to be in a world all her own.
Lost.
And then she rallied. She shook her head, stared at the camera with renewed intensity, and said, “Anisha, the lead bayi. The Blue Woman. You know what she tried to do? Stupid bitch came at me with an amulet. Can you believe that? Like her religion means shit to me. My people were writing the fucking Bible while hers were still trying to figure out how to make a hut stand up on its own. I ate her throat. Ripped her a new one.”
She held up what could only have been the lower leg and foot of a very small child, like she was saying the toast at a wedding.
“I feel good now.”
She dropped the leg and ran a hand through her wild, blood-matted hair. She looked like some horrible caricature of a woman aroused.
Then her wild stare turned to something keenly intelligent, yet wantonly needful. Laurens had seen that look before, or at least thought he’d seen that look, on other women, in other rooms.
It was the throw me on the bed and fuck me look of a hundred wet dreams.
It was the desperate, reckless, shameless look of a drunken one-night stand.
And though he hated himself for it, he felt a stirring in his crotch that made him grab his cock and readjust himself.
He was so hard it hurt.
“Walter,” Miriam said. “Walter, baby. I know you’re watching me. I’ve seen you watching me. You could have me, if you want me.”
On the video, she began to open her blouse, one button at a time.
She let the camera follow her hand as she undid the buttons, inch by inch revealing the blood-soaked tatters of a sports bra.
Then the tablet must have fallen from her hand, for there was a sudden blur of movement, and the next moment the camera was staring, out of focus, at the ceiling of the hut.
Off camera, he heard grunting and snarling, and the sounds of meat getting wrenched from the bone.
That view held for four minutes and twenty-nine seconds.
And then, with only seconds left on the video, Miriam leaned over the tablet, blood dripping from her mouth, and smiled once more.
“Hey, Walter, I made this for you. It’s all for you, baby. I know you want some. Come and get it. I’ll give it all up for you.”
With that, the video ended.
Laurens stared at the screen for a long time, trying to process it all.
Finally, he swiveled his chair around and powered up his desktop. The device was a secure link-up to the DMS servers back at Quantico, and his only direct link with the eggheads at the Crisis Intervention Labs.
The technician on the other side of the link was holding a cup of coffee, and looked utterly unconcerned. “Hawthorne here.”
“I’ve got a problem,” Laurens said, doing away with the preamble. “I need help.”
“Specifics.”
“One of my agents has transitioned,” he said. “I need one of your V-8 teams.”
# # #
Laurens was up the next morning before sunrise. He left Kathy turning restlessly, but mercifully asleep, in their bed, Roger in the cradle next to her side of the bed, and went to the kitchen to make himself some scrambled eggs.
He cracked them into a pan and was running a fork through the yolks when he heard a lot of yelling down in the courtyard.
Laurens turned off the burner and listened.
More yelling.
A man’s voice.
He ran downstairs to the courtyard. Dawn was breaking over the city, and first light was filling the narrow gaps between the apartments. Off to his left, his neighbor Frank was staggering around like he’d just taken a hard hit to the head. He was completely nude and yelling nonsense at the top of his lungs.
He saw Laurens and raised his hands like he was offering up a gift and dropped to his knees.
Laurens ran over to him.
Only then did he notice that the man’s groin and hips were soaked with blood. “What… what is this?”
“They’re dead.”
Laurens didn’t need to ask any questions. He took in the blood on Frank’s crotch and knew instantly what had happened.
Miriam.
She was here.
Laurens glanced up the stairs, toward Frank’s apartment, and drew the pistol from his waistband. “Wait here,” he said, and headed up the stairs.
There was blood on the door. It was standing open. Laurens kicked the door out of the way and charged inside. He made it just a few steps inside before he stopped, turned his head, and covered his mouth with the back of his hand.
Sarah and her child were in pieces.
A trail of blood and scattered body parts led into one of the bedrooms. Laurens raised his weapon and called out to Miriam. “I know you’re in there. Miriam, come out. I want to talk to you.”
No answer.
“Miriam, I can help you.”
Again, nothing.
He pushed forward, trying not to step in the gore.
He searched the apartment, but the bedroom was empty. So too were all the others. He took one last look around, grabbed a pair of jeans and a t-shirt from atop one of the dressers, and went back downstairs.
Frank was still on his knees, sobbing, too blind with pain to notice the others who had gathered in their doorways to stare. He handed Frank the clothes he’d found upstairs. “Put that on. The police will be here in just a minute.”
“They’re dead,” Frank said. He kept looking at Laurens like he hoped someone would tell him it wasn’t true.
“Put your clothes on, Frank.”
Then Laurens turned to face the gathered onlookers. They all looked stricken, all of them but Kathy. She was holding Roger on her hip, and the look on her face was completely inscrutable.
“Somebody call for the police,” he said.
# # #
A twelve-man Vampire Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism Field Team flew in from Stuttgart, Germany, later that afternoon. They were dressed as house painters, but with their chiseled physiques and direct, no-nonsense bearing and the numerous black Pelican boxes they brought with them, they weren’t fooling anyone.
No sooner had they entered the compound than their leader, a tall, severe-looking Army captain named John Stevens, led Laurens upstairs, ordered him to sit down, and demanded a full briefing. He wanted to know everything. Not just Miriam Bloch’s physical description and the nature of her work with the Ice Virus, but the personal stuff too. Did Laurens have a sexual relationship with her? Had she ever expressed feelings for him in the past? The questions went on and on.
While the young captain debriefed him, the rest of his team busied themselves around the office and the apartment and down in the courtyard, running wires and installing laser beam trip wires and a whole host of cameras.
“Looks like your people already know their way around,” Laurens said.
“We started reviewing the on-scene surveillance when we got notice we were being mobilized here,” Stevens said.
“Oh.” One of the soldiers was watching a video on a laptop. It showed Kathy walking around their bedroom in the middle of the night. Frowning, he turned back to Stevens. “What about relocating my family to a safe house? I was told you’d take care of that.”
“Already working on it. Your wife and son should be on the way there in about twenty minutes.”
Laurens nodded. “So, what’s the plan after that?”
Stevens motioned toward the doorway.
Standing in the doorway was a young woman wearing some of Kathy’s clothes. She definitely didn’t look like Kathy, though. She was every bit as hard looking as Stevens was, and Kathy’s baggy t-shirt couldn’t hide the bulge of a weapon on her hip.
“This is Lt. Deguara. She’ll be assisting with the trap.”
“Trap?” Laurens said.
“The estrie prefer newborns and their mothers as their prey. We’re hoping that’ll lure our target to us.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, once you lure Miriam here, what will you do?”
Stevens frowned. “Mr. Laurens, make no mistake about it. We did not get called out here to take prisoners. We are here to exterminate your problem. We will lure the target here, we will engage the target, and we will kill it. You understand that, don’t you? When you called for us, that was the course you chose.”
Laurens swallowed the lump in his throat, then nodded.
Stevens nodded. “Now, if you don’t mind.” He hooked his thumb toward the door. “My team has a lot of work to do.”
“Oh. Oh, okay. Sure.”
Laurens stood up uncertainly. He waited for Stevens to say something more, but the man’s attention was already directed toward a laptop with a lot of complicated, shifting graphics on it.
The message was clear.
He’d been dismissed.
# # #
Kathy was waiting in the hallway, just outside the door.
Their eyes met, and in an instant he knew that she’d overheard everything. “That woman took my clothes,” she said.
“Just for tonight. These people, they’re professionals.”
“Professional killers, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
Kathy wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself. She swallowed hard, looked at him, and then just as quickly looked away.
“Babe, this is what I do. I’m a spy.”
“I know that,” she snapped. And then, more softly, “I heard.”
“I’ve talked to the team leader. They’re taking you and Roger to a safe house. You’ll be out of harm’s way.”
“Harm’s way?” For a moment, he thought she might cry. But she got hold of herself the next instant and choked the tears back. “I can’t believe this. Miriam… is she really one of those things now?”
“It looks that way.”
“And you think she’d come here? You think she’d try to hurt me and Roger?”
“She killed Sarah,” he said.
“And Jessica?”
“Yes, the baby too.”
“But she delivered Roger. Why would she want to hurt us?”
“She delivered Jessica too.” He glanced down the hall, where one of Stevens’s soldiers was waiting to drive Kathy and Roger to the safe house. He motioned to the man and leaned in close to whisper to his wife. “Kathy, this change Miriam went through, that all the infected go through. It changes them. It changed her. Not just her appearance, but her mind too. She probably doesn’t even know what she’s doing.”
That got her attention. She frowned at him, and for the first time since their long trip to the world’s farthest corners began, he thought he saw disapproval on her face.
“Can you really get her?” she asked.
“These guys are the best in the world at fighting vampires,” Laurens said. “They’ll get her.”
The soldier approached. “Sir,” he said, and turned to Kathy. “Ma’am, we’re ready for you now.”
Kathy nodded. She was about to follow the soldier back down the hallway, when she suddenly stopped and turned a desperate gaze on Laurens.
“What is it?”
“I just need to, Walter. I have to know. Do you love me? Are you mine?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”
“Say it, please. Say the words.”
“Okay,” he said. He took her shoulders in his hands and said, “Kathy, I love you. We’re gonna make it through this. I promise.”
# # #
Later that evening, Laurens and Captain Stevens were sitting in an apartment above a restaurant a few blocks from the American compound, watching a bank of video monitors. The team had set up cameras and listening devices all through the compound, and Stevens assured him that nothing could move in there without them seeing it.
Laurens was impressed.
The woman pretending to be Kathy was sitting in the nursery with a window open. The recordings of Roger crying played from the cradle, and every few minutes the woman would get up, lean over the cradle, and rock it gently. It even looked like she was talking to it.
She wasn’t, though. Laurens had joked with Stevens about how much she got into her part, but the young Army captain didn’t even crack a smile.
“She’s not pretending to talk to a baby,” he’d said. “She has proximity detectors in there. She gets information from these computers here and then relays that information to the rest of the team hidden throughout your apartment.”
“Oh.”
“When the target shows, she’ll be ready.”
“She can take a vampire all by herself?”
“She won’t have to,” Stevens said. “As soon as we get visual confirmation, the entire team will move in and engage. The target doesn’t stand a chance.”
“Miriam doesn’t, you mean.”
Stevens turned his chair toward Laurens and regarded him. Laurens felt like he was being summed up. “I want to show you something,” he said. He fished through one of his Pelican boxes, and came up with a photo.
He put it on the counter between them.
It was a picture of Miriam, a still lifted from the video chat where she’d gathered her hair up in both hands and told Laurens she’d do anything he had a mind for, even as the blood ran from the corners of her mouth.
Sitting there, staring at the picture, he felt the same confluence of disgust and sexual hunger that had so disturbed him the first time he watched the video.
“What is that supposed to be?” Laurens said.
“An object lesson.” Stevens put the picture down on the counter. “Dr. Bloch is an estrie, Mr. Laurens. She’s one of only six the DMS knows about. We do know a little about them, though. We know, for instance, that they are capable of producing powerful pheromones.”
“Pheromones?” Laurens scoffed at him. “That’s absurd. Pheromones require some form of direct contact. A smell or something. The only contact I’ve had with her in over a month is through the videos on her tablet.”
“Not true. You were in the village. You found her blood in the wrecked Land Cruiser. And, you handled her blood again when you removed the tarp from the back of your vehicle.”
“And again when I went into Frank and Sarah’s apartment.”
“Probably.”
“My God,” Laurens said. He looked at his hands. “Could I… be infected?”
“Anything is possible. We still don’t understand exactly how and why the virus strikes some people and not others. But I think we have more immediate problems.”
“Like what?” Laurens asked.
“I think it’s possible, based on what we’ve seen from other estries, that Dr. Bloch may have fixated on you. The pheromones are only released during sexual arousal, and I think it’s possible—I think it’s highly likely, in fact—that’s she’s fixated on you. This image certainly seems to suggest that she was aroused while thinking of you.”
“No,” he scoffed. “I told you, she’s never looked twice at me.”
Stevens shrugged.
Laurens leaned back and thought about that. He watched Lt. Deguara on the computer monitors, at the way she moved in his wife’s clothes, and a thought occurred to him. The first thing Kathy had said when Stevens’s team started tearing up their home was that another woman had taken her clothes.
Another woman had taken what was hers.
And Miriam had fixated on him.
People got nasty when they were jealous.
That was when it clicked inside his head.
“Oh my God,” Laurens said. He jumped from his chair, grabbed his phone, and called Kathy’s phone.
“What are you doing?” Stevens demanded. “This location is on lockdown.”
“Calling my wife,” Laurens said. He turned his back to the young captain, listening as two rings turned into five, and then to seven, eight. “Come on, damn it. Answer.”
He hung up.
Ran his hands through his hair. He felt laser focused, totally in the moment. And scared out of his mind.
“She’s probably sleeping,” Stevens said.
“She’s been a light sleeper lately,” Laurens said. “Can you call your people? Check on her please.”
“She’s at a secure location.”
“Call them,” he said. “Please.”
“I would have heard from my people if there was a problem.”
“Call them, damn it!”
Stevens’s expression turned hard, but he slipped on a headset and dialed the safe house just the same. He waited, listening, growing more and more upset with each passing second. Finally, he ripped the headset off his head and set it on the counter. “Damn.”
“Oh God,” Laurens said. “Captain, I need you to get me there right now.”
“Yeah,” Stevens said. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
# # #
The safe house, like every other building in Timbuktu, was made of dried mud and wood that turned gray from the sun almost instantly. It was a two-story home, a mansion by local standards, surrounded by high mud walls with shards of broken glass sticking up from mortar on the top. There was only one gate and the lead Suburban rammed that without even slowing down.
Laurens crept forward and watched the commando team disembark from their vehicles through the windshield. His driver exited the vehicle, carrying a huge machine gun. He hadn’t said two words to Laurens on the car ride over, but now he turned to Laurens and said, “You stay here. Captain’s orders.”
“That’s my wife and son in there.”
The man just nodded, then ran after the rest of the team.
Laurens slumped back into his chair and turned to the small bank of video monitors set up along one wall of the van. It wasn’t anything like the elaborate command center Stevens had shown him back at the American compound, but it had everything he needed.
Every member of the team wore a body camera, and their devices relayed the video feed back to the monitors in front of him. Even if he couldn’t go in with them, at least he could watch the whole affair play out by switching back and forth between the various monitors.
Laurens slipped on a headset and listened to the clipped dialogue of the team as they cleared walkways and colonnades and foyers.
They found the first body just inside the front door.
One of the local Tuareg men hired as security.
Laurens was watching Captain Stevens’s video feed at the time. It was dark inside the house and the team’s night vision body cameras turned everything a watery shade of green, but there was enough visibility for him to see that the man’s neck was ripped open.
Stevens knelt down beside the body and touched the corpse’s face.
“Still warm,” he said.
Using hand gestures, Stevens directed his team to split into three groups of two. The soldiers then moved out to explore the rest of the house. Laurens was still watching Stevens’s video feed when one of the other soldiers cried out in pain and was just as suddenly silenced.
Stevens and his teammates ran for the sound.
Laurens toggled through the various video feeds until he found the soldier who had let out the scream. The soldier, a man named Franklin, was on the ground, facing a corner, not moving. A few feet from him, his partner, a man named Gonzales, was also on the ground, his throat ripped out, a widening pool of blood spreading beneath his head. Moving across the frame was a pair of bare, hairy legs.
“Oh God,” he said.
Laurens toggled the monitor controls again until he found Stevens’s link. The man was leading what was left of his team down a hallway, their gear clattering softly as they raced toward a darkened doorway at the far end.
They hit the door at a run and burst into the room.
And saw their teammates dead on the floor.
Off to the left was Miriam Bloch. She was wearing nothing but a pair of black panties. She held a small, curved blade in her right hand. The night vision goggles made blood look black, and she was covered with it from head to toe.
“Move, damn it!” Laurens said at the screen. Stevens and his team were just standing there. “Come on, somebody move!”
But the men seemed transfixed, like their feet were rooted to the floor. None of them moved an inch, not even when Miriam advanced on the man standing to Stevens’s right. Stevens watched her, his helmet cam tracking with his gaze. Miriam approached the soldier standing next to Stevens and calmly, effortlessly, mercilessly, slashed the knife across his throat.
He fell to the ground, and still none of the other soldiers moved.
A deer in headlights.
They just stood there and got slaughtered.
Stevens was the last to fall.
Then Miriam rose from her bloody work and let the knife clatter to the floor. Whether it was Stevens’s rank or some other instinct that turned her attention to the young captain’s helmet cam, Laurens neither knew nor cared.
Laurens saw only her.
She captivated him, and even as a voice inside his head screamed that she was an obscenity, he wanted her. He felt utterly emasculated by her, even as his cock stiffened.
Then she knelt on the floor, on her hands and knees, and crawled toward the camera. It never even occurred to him that she was nose to nose with a man she’d just murdered. He saw only her. She was speaking only to him.
“Walter. Walter, baby. Where are you?”
She went down on her elbows, her ass rising.
“I know you can hear me.”
She gave her ass a shake.
“Just you wait ’till I find you, Walter. It’s gonna be delicious.”
The smile slid from her face. She stood up, the video feed catching only her blood-streaked, hairy legs as she walked out of sight.
Christ, what was he going to do? Kathy and Roger were in there, somewhere. The compound was equipped with a panic room. It was fireproof, assault proof. After Benghazi, the State Department had learned its lesson. But could it hold off a vampire?
He was going to have to go in there.
Something scratched at the side of the van.
“Walter.”
He froze. That was Miriam’s voice, teasing him.
The scratching got louder. It went around the back. Up the other side. He followed the sound, unable to breath, too scared to cry out.
And yet, strangely, fearfully, he wanted to be close to her.
The scratching sound reached the passenger door and stopped there. Laurens was on his knees behind the front passenger seat, holding onto the headrest for dear life, and he still hadn’t taken a breath.
Her face appeared in the window, shiny with the blood of other men. “Walter,” she said, and scratched at the window. “Let me in, baby.”
He shrank into the dark, crippled with fear. “Leave me alone,” he said.
“You don’t mean that, Walter. You want me. I want you too. I can smell you. I want to taste you. Your skin… your tongue in my mouth. You would taste so good.”
Laurens crept toward the window, unable to stop himself. Her voice was a hook in his nose, pulling him closer. He climbed around the seat, and pressed his face against the glass. She was only centimeters away from him, her eyes glistening like wet obsidian.
“Come on, Walter. Let me in, baby. I want you.”
She suddenly snarled and punched the glass, sending a spider web of cracks out from her fist.
“And you know I don’t have to ask permission, don’t you?”
“Go away,” he said weakly.
“You are—”
She was cut off mid-stream. There was a flash of movement behind her. Something dark hit her hard in the back of the head, knocking her through the window. Glass erupted from the impact and clattered all over the dashboard as Miriam’s head and shoulders came through the window.
Laurens fell back, heart thudding against his ribs.
But Miriam wasn’t coming after him. Blood, her own blood, was spreading from cuts all over her face. Her eyes had turned glassy and she looked shocked and confused. He thought, maybe, he saw terror there too.
Then something pulled her from the window.
He heard the sounds of women yelling and fighting. A body hit the side of the van, rocking it on its springs. There was a scream, Miriam crying out in terrible pain.
Laurens heard a familiar voice. “That’s my man, you bitch. You can’t have him.”
Miriam’s next scream was cut short.
Silence settled over the yard. He heard nothing but the night wind blowing sand against the windshield, and after a long moment, he worked up the courage to step out the back of the van.
Miriam was dead in a heap, her neck sliced so deeply the back of her head was almost touching her spine. Staring at her, Laurens felt a hole in his gut, like the tether that had connected him to the young doctor had suddenly been cut.
It left him feeling empty.
He turned away.
Standing a dozen feet off was Kathy, mouth bloody, chest heaving. There was blood all over her blouse, but he hardly saw that. She was leveling a stare at him he’d never seen before. She looked utterly mad with rage, or lust, or something that was more than both of those emotions.
And then he saw her claws.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no.”
She watched him for a long moment without speaking, then turned and walked into the tall grass that had grown up around a nearby palm tree. She reached down and picked up their son. Then she headed back to the driveway, shaking first one hand and then the other. By the time she stepped back on the packed dirt of the driveway, her claws were gone.
She was Kathy again.
Covered in Miriam’s blood, but Kathy.
Reeling, he staggered around in a circle. A thousand questions raced in his mind. How did it happen? When? Miriam Bloch had delivered their baby. Maybe then. She was working with the blood samples from the bayi around that time.
Or maybe Kathy had infected Miriam. Miriam’s troubles started after Roger was born.
Once he made that mental jump—God, his wife, one of them!—the rest of the pieces fell in line. Her blackouts. Never being able to sleep. Her complaints of terrible headaches in the morning. Waking in the middle of the night and her not there in the bed.
Four months at least she must have hid it from him.
Finally, his legs couldn’t hold him any longer and he dropped onto his butt in the dirt and put his face in his hands.
When he looked up again, Kathy was sitting beside him, bouncing Roger on her knee, but watching him closely.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, his training took over.
The DMS had bugged his home. Had set up surveillance throughout the entire compound. And they’d done that even before Stevens and his team arrived.
Months before.
They had recordings of his son crying.
What else did they have? Did they know about his wife? He thought back to the video feed he’d seen earlier, about the security team that had been sent over to the safe house to protect his wife and son. He’d assumed Miriam had killed them.
He glanced over at his wife and wondered if that were true.
Her maiden name was Barry. Barry was an Anglicized version of O Baire, a name common all over Ireland. Celtic, he thought. What did he know about Celtic folklore? What kind of monster lived in her recessive genes?
He thought about how many times she’d asked him if he loved her over the last few months. So out of character for her to be so needy. And he watched her holding their child, still as loving as the first time she’d held the baby to her breast.
More so, even.
What kind of vampire was she?
“Leannan sith?” he finally asked.
She stopped moving her leg. Roger settled, cooing quietly. “That’s what I think,” she said.
Laurens looked at his son and smiled, but it was the smile of an exhausted man.
“Walter, are we… are we okay? Do you love me? Can you love me, after knowing this?”
He met her gaze. She looked like Kathy again, even though her hands were bloody. She’d gotten it all over Roger’s chubby little legs.
“How long has… have you…?”
“Since Roger was born, I think.”
“She infected you?”
“I think so.”
“Were you going to tell me?”
“I was so scared. I know the work you do. I’ve known for a while.”
He nodded, but said nothing.
“Walter, please. Do you love me?”
“You asked me that before,” he said.
“Please, Walter, I need to know.”
He knew what it would mean to say yes. He was a DMS agent, sworn to eradicate her kind. And she was a vampire, forced to feed upon his. She’d promised once to follow him to the ends of the earth. It looked like they’d finally gotten there.
To say yes would change everything.
So he took her hands in his, and gave his answer.