Long Dark Night Read online

  Faced with Vance, all I could manage to do was quiver.

  Two

  Morning traffic downtown was light. I recognized these streets; it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to reach the hospital.

  The first time I’d been there, I’d been terrified. Pain had radiated down my arms and through my hips, like menstrual cramps from hell. At first the doctors had thought I must be having a heart attack. Then they’d been sure of it. A few heavily-medicated days later, they’d found that what we’d thought was childhood asthma was actually a heart defect. I’d had the thing since I was born, but it had taken fifteen years for it to finally decide to kill me.

  Better I should have died then than to be here now.

  Vance must have followed my same thoughts, but he came to a different conclusion. “I’m glad you’re back with me,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  It was all I could do not to go fetal. I drew deep breaths—unnecessary, but calming. He was toying with me, like a wolf with an injured calf. I wondered if this was where all those stories about werewolves and skinwalkers came from. When it came to Vance and me, it was crystal clear who was the predator and who was the prey.

  I pushed myself back into my seat, holding myself as far away from Vance as possible. He didn’t touch me—he just sat in his seat across from me, one foot resting on his knee.

  Outside the tinted windows, a woman in the car next to us was staring. She probably thought the limo contained someone famous. She’d be speculating even now about whom she might see if the glass wasn’t so dark.

  “Do you hate me for killing him?” Vance asked.

  I glanced at his eyes. They were a dark brown, so close to black that his irises were almost indistinguishable from his pupils. I squeezed my knees tighter.

  Did I hate him? Hate was a burning emotion—a passion, a rage. I didn’t have that left in me anymore. Not after what he did to me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good. You’re safe now. I’m going to take care of you.”

  I could see the top floor of the hospital over two streets of office buildings. Vance had named the hospital Saint Januarius Medical Center, after the patron saint of blood banks—his idea of a joke.

  The sun crested over the mountains beyond the hospital roof, beams of light streaking onto the streets. There was a sight I hadn’t seen in months. I leaned toward the window to get a better look. Even dimmed from the tinting, the sun shone so brightly my eyes stung.

  I jerked back reflexively. Looking out a normal window, that much sunlight would have burned me enough to put me in bed for a month. Prolonged exposure would burn me completely, leaving nothing but ash. As it was, my skin still felt tight and dry from my exposure to the false dawn.

  A slow ache crept over my skull—one that had nothing to do with the sunlight. I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours, and I needed blood. But Vance’s men had stuffed my bag into the trunk. I should have downed some at home while I’d had the chance.

  We pulled up to the hospital and wound around the driveway toward the back, to the employee parking. The last time I’d pulled up to this building, I’d been alive. Living, breathing April went into the hospital and never returned. I closed my eyes, hugging my arms tighter around my ribs.

  I expected the limo to park in Vance’s executive spot in the underground parking. Instead, it approached a pair of dock doors at the back of the hospital—the kind businesses use for shipping and receiving. The doors rolled up, revealing a long driveway heading under the hospital.

  I knew exactly where we were going. Zeke had been there, and he’d told me about it. In the depths of the hospital, beneath radiology and the morgue, Vance kept something deeper, accessible only by a hidden elevator buried in the back of the lowest levels. Or by this driveway, supposedly for deliveries.

  The limo slipped in, and the dock doors closed behind us. The driveway was slim—only wide enough to fit the limo, with barely two feet on either side. There must be another exit somewhere. The limo couldn’t reverse this way. I wondered if the other door was farther off and more hidden, in case Vance needed to escape.

  The limo pulled up next to a pair of sliding doors and stopped. Vance’s driver walked around and opened our door. Vance got out first and motioned for me to follow, and I did, if only to get out of the small enclosed space and into the larger one. The sliding doors opened, revealing an elevator—another enclosed space. Vance dropped a hand on my shoulder, leading me in.

  I floated in space, no longer attached to my body now that Vance had a hold on it. I felt the pressure of my feet against the floor, but not his hand, not my shoulder. I was suddenly lost in a dream that wasn’t mine.

  This feeling, too, was familiar.

  He stood over me as we descended. The four elevator buttons had no numbers, but he knew which one to press.

  The elevator doors opened up onto a tight hallway lined with doors. The place reeked of hospital—Vance must have his people sterilizing the place, just like the workers did upstairs. That didn’t make sense, though. Corpses couldn’t catch diseases.

  As we walked down the hall, I could feel corpses past the doors on either side of us—one per room. A few of them paced; as we passed one room, the corpse beat on the inside of the door, wailing like a monkey. This close, I could sense the details of his face—his jaw hanging slack, his eyelids unblinking. He’d probably been starved past bloodlust—with no food or flesh to eat, his mind would warp until he went permanently insane, rushing at every living thing to devour it, like some zombie in a Romero movie.

  As we passed one of the doors, I heard the squish of a corpse throwing itself at the door as hard as it could, and the scrape of his nails clawing at the handle. When I was young, I remembered my dad reading me a story from One Thousand and One Nights, where a man fought off a horde of flesh-eating ghouls and then enslaved them. That was us all right. Maybe we had more in common with the old legends than I sometimes thought.

  Another corpse wailed. I could sense through the wall that he was digging his own nails into his skin, clawing gashes even as they healed over and over. I was starting to feel sorry for lab animals. I wondered if PETA would do protests for the ethical treatment of the undead, if they knew about this.

  Was this what he intended to do to me?

  Behind the next door we passed, the corpse remained perfectly still, not a muscle moving. But he wasn’t dead. If he’d been dead, I wouldn’t have been able to sense him at all.

  Vance pressed down heavy on my shoulder, bringing me to a stop. This door had a living man on the other side of it; I couldn’t see him, but I could smell him. Vance had beaters down here—real, living people with working hearts. But this one wasn’t afraid. He smelled too clean, like he’d scrubbed his hands nearly raw. All people smelled hot and tasty, like really good barbecue wings, but each had its own distinctive blend that shifted subtly with extreme moods, like fear, or anger. It never failed to make me miss the scent of my own living body—the one that had clung on my clothing for days after I was turned. This was what I hadn’t expected about being dead: your scent dies last.

  Vance pushed the door open, and the man looked up from his computer screen. He was in his mid-thirties, and had tight curly hair. He wore a white lab coat, and was poring over a spread sheet.

  “April,” Vance said, “this is Dr. Lyle Browning.”

  I didn’t know what I needed with a doctor, especially a living one. Zeke said that Vance didn’t work with the living. If he needed you, he turned you cold, and then he took what he wanted. But then, Vance kept me alive, too. For a while.

  Lyle turned and looked me over. “This is the specimen you told me about,” he said.

  My skin crawled. He wasn’t that kind of doctor.

  “This is April,” Vance said.

  “Of course. Hello, April.”

  I swallowed. Strange that Vance would insist that I be called by my name when he treated me like little more than an animal.

  “Lyl
e used to do research upstairs,” Vance said. “But he’s moved down in the world.” Vance pushed me into the room, guiding me over to a stool near Lyle. “Take good care of her,” he said to Lyle. “She’s very important to me.”

  “Of course,” Lyle said.

  Vance smiled. “I’ll let you two get to work.” He left, shutting the door behind him.

  Lyle was only a few feet away. I could smell the blood under his skin, feel it pulsing with every heartbeat. My head pulsed along with it.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  I expected that to scare him, but he simply nodded. “We’ll get you some blood as soon as we finish our tests.”

  “You’re going to do tests on a hungry corpse?” I asked. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “You won’t suffer any negative effects from it, don’t worry.”

  “I meant for you.”

  Lyle smiled. “You’re small. Security down here is very good. I’d have you restrained before you broke my skin. Besides, judging by your composure, you still have a few hours left before you frenzy.”

  He was right, of course. I hadn’t eaten in about twelve hours, which meant I still had an hour or two before I got really uncomfortable—three or four before I lost complete control, and perhaps six before the damage became irreversible.

  “What are you going to do to me?” I asked.

  Lyle swiveled around on his chair, opening a cabinet and pulling out a syringe and several vials, and stretching thin latex gloves over his hands. “Just a few tests,” he said. “Routine, really.”

  “You test a lot of kidnapped girls.”

  “Vance provides a large sample of test subjects for my research, yes.”

  Lyle kept lining up his vials, smiling as if we were talking about a picnic. I was beginning to see why Vance worked with the man, if not why he kept him alive.

  With Vance gone, I’d found my voice again. But now I needed a plan—some way to get out of here before he came back for me. I might be able to get Lyle to help me, but only if I convinced him to be on my side.

  “Are you a prisoner here?” I asked.

  “No,” Lyle said. “Vance chose me because of my work on cancer cells. They’re remarkably like your undead cells, only more common, of course.”

  Zeke and I used to play this game whenever we were out in public. We’d pick out a stranger, and ask ourselves, if that person was a corpse, when and where would they be from, originally?

  Lyle was easy. He’d have been turned in Nazi Germany. Probably working for Hitler’s paranormal research division.

  Lyle gripped my arm in his gloved fingers and bent it across the desk to give himself access to my veins. I thought about resisting, but forced myself to relax. The way to get on his good side was to let him have what he wanted.

  Lyle swiped my forearm clean with a swab of cotton—though I assumed that was more to preserve the quality of his sample than to prevent infection.

  “So Vance lets you leave whenever you want?” I asked.

  “I go out with an escort once a week or so,” Lyle said. “But I prefer to stay here. There’s so much work to be done.”

  A happy prisoner. Vance’s favorite kind.

  Lyle’s needle slid easily into my arm—I could feel the glide but not the pinch I remembered from my IVs in the hospital. Instead of flowing up the tube, my blood refused to move until Lyle sucked it out with the syringe plunger. The liquid he pulled from me was pale pink.

  “That doesn’t look like blood,” I said.

  “Not as many red cells,” Lyle said. “Though your platelet count is much higher than that of the living.”

  Lyle seemed to understand all this. Vance was a businessman, not a scientist. If he knew what kept us walking after death, he didn’t care enough to share.

  As soon as Lyle let go, my flesh healed, pushing the needle from my arm. Good thing, too. Lyle didn’t appear to be concerned about my comfort.

  I could see why Vance moved him downstairs.

  “Do you know what we are?” I asked him.

  “I’ve been working on a medical term for it,” Lyle said. “I’m sure the PC police would like to call you an Undead American, but at the moment I’m leaning toward homosinepulsim. What do you think?”

  “It’s a mouthful. What’s it mean?”

  “It’s Latin,” Lyle said. “For man without a pulse.”

  “Clever,” I said. “But I’m a girl.”

  “Ah, yes,” Lyle said. “I’m sure that will also be a common complaint.”

  “You can explain it, though,” I said. “You can explain undeath with science.”

  “Everything can be explained with science,” he said. “Your body doesn’t grow. But it also doesn’t die, except by specific means. Given the way the condition vectors from person to person, it’s probably caused by a pathogen.”

  “Probably. But you don’t know.”

  He looked affronted. “Not yet. Once I publish my findings, I’m hoping to expand my research to discover the cause.”

  I shook my head. Vance would never allow research about us to be published. He had far too much to lose. “You’ll never get to tell anyone about it.”

  Lyle’s expression grew snide. “In fact, I’m going to present a paper on it at the World Stem Cell Summit next year.”

  “Vance will never let you go.”

  “It was his idea.”

  That startled me. Vance killed anyone who even thought about exposing us to the public. He had to have other plans for Lyle. He was probably going to turn him before he could make it to the conference. “Vance will say anything to get what he wants,” I said.

  “We’ll see.” Lyle didn’t look worried, though. He was a prisoner, just like me, and he didn’t even realize it. He was too distracted by playing with Vance’s toys. “In the meantime,” he said, “I have work to do.”

  “So you’re Doctor Frankenstein and we’re your monsters.”

  Lyle smiled.

  “I didn’t mean that to be funny.”

  “I’m impressed, actually. Most people think Frankenstein is the monster.”

  That was true. “My Dad was a professor of English Lit.”

  “You’re smart,” he said. “I like that in a subject.”

  I tried not to visibly shiver. That’s all I was to him: a lab rat who might hold the key to his breakthrough, and one with whom he might hold a decent conversation while he did it. I remembered when my dad was feeling dramatic, he used to talk about what would happen to the world without literature. My students, he’d say, they don’t think poetry is relevant to them. But without it, they’ll all become emotionless robots, going about their lives without ever thinking of why.

  “When was the last time you read a poem?” I asked. He’d probably misunderstood “The Road Less Traveled" in high school and that was it.

  “I prefer science to poetry,” Lyle said.

  Of course he did. “So what are you going to do with the data?” I asked. “Besides present it, supposedly.”

  Lyle smiled proudly. “The possibilities are endless, really. Vance is hopeful we’ll be able to alter your physical composition. Make some modifications.”

  My life was bad enough. I really couldn’t imagine that the combined visions of Vance and Lyle were going to make it anything but worse. “What kind of modifications?”

  “Anything. Get rid of that pesky aversion to sunlight, for example. Bring back homeostasis. Get your heart beating, if you’d like.”

  If I’d had a heartbeat, it would have stopped right there. I’d given up hope of a cure long ago, but if what he said was true, if it was just a pathogen— “You can make us living again?”

  “No,” Lyle said. “Not living. Just better versions of what you already are.”

  I should have known better. “But you can make it so I can go out in the daytime, then.” Even that would do wonders for my quality of life.

  “No,” Lyle said. “At least, not yet.”

  Of cour
se. Even scientists could be dreamers. “So you’re failing.”

  Now Lyle glared. “A failed experiment is not always an inconclusive experiment.”

  Great. “Who pays for all this?” I asked. “Vance? The hospital?”

  “Vance’s corporation owns the hospital,” Lyle said. “So I suppose it’s all the same.”

  “And how many people know this place is here?”

  Lyle shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.” He pulled out a sticky label and added it to the vial, then wrote something on the side.

  Human sympathy didn’t seem to be one of Lyle’s finer points. If I couldn’t get him to feel sorry for me, maybe I could establish a common enemy.

  “Must be miserable working for a monster like Vance,” I said.

  “You keep using that word, monster. What does that mean to you?”

  “What?”

  “Do you see yourself as a monster? Or just Vance?”

  I sucked in my breath. “I’m nothing like Vance.”

  “What makes you different?”

  “I don’t hurt people.”

  “Yet you drink their blood to survive. It’s an interesting contradiction, don’t you think?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “I see you wear a cross. Another contradiction. Do you believe in God, or wear it for the irony?”

  I put my hand to my neck. The cross was the only thing I had left from when I was alive—a tiny silver charm on a thin chain. Some crosses were fancy, but mine was just two tiny little bars laid over one another. Zeke tried to make me give it up, but I wouldn’t.

  “It’s both,” I said. The truth was more complicated. The cross was given to me by my mother, who was Lutheran, though my father found his god in poetry, especially Tennyson, and so did I. But the irony didn’t escape me. Corpses weren’t afraid of crosses, nor any other religious symbol. I hoped that meant we weren’t evil, at our core. That maybe all the things that Tennyson wrote about crossing the bar and meeting God might still apply to me.

  Though I didn’t believe it, not really. If I did, I’d have thrown myself into the sunlight and been done with it.

  “It’s like that Blake poem,” I said. “Did he who made the lamb make thee? Just because there are corpses doesn’t mean there isn’t a god.”