American Blood: A Vampire's Story Read Free Page B

before joining the agency seven years ago,” she replied as they continued walking. “My specialty is the historical study of infectious disease.”
    “So what’s an infectious disease specialist’s angle here, or is there something that I haven’t been told?”
    “Well, Ryan,” he found it quirky that she used his last name but he didn’t mind. She seemed pleasant enough. “I’m also a trained physician, which is useful considering our guest’s condition. What do you think turned her into this, creature?”
    “A bite on the neck?”
    “Maybe.” And Siri chuckled. “Of course she could have been bitten on an arm or leg if she had been turned by another vampire,” she continued. “These things are extremely nasty and will bite anyone, anywhere, of course.”
    “Hmm, of course, but what’s your involvement with this project?” he asked again.
    They came to a small air lock. Siri opened the door and stepped inside. Though it was a squeeze, Ryan joined her and closed the outer door.
    “I’ve been with the project from early on,” Siri replied, casually. “I’ve been conducting an historical review of the infection all the way back to the index case.”
    “What infection?” Ryan asked.
    “Becoming a vampire is a process of infection. My research group identified the causative agent four years ago.”
    This stunned Ryan. He had reviewed hundreds of hours of data. He knew what an infectious process looked like at the genetic level. The DNA from these creatures didn’t appear human. They had thirteen extra pairs of chromosomes that had a peculiar habit of cross-linking with each other. These changes could be detected on the time scale of minutes depending on the speed of the sampling schedule. It wouldn’t surprise him if it happened within seconds or even shorter intervals.
    “A bacterium did this to her genome?” Ryan asked. “It just doesn’t seem possible.”
    The air lock finished cycling.
    “From what we’ve been able to determine it all started around 125 A.D. when a leper caught a cold.” Siri opened the inner door and led Ryan inside the isolation unit’s main floor.
    “Vampires are lepers?”
    “No, vampires are vampires,” she replied. “But their line begins with a leper who . . . well, who still lives today.”
    They entered a long corridor with rows of large glass observation windows along the walls to his left and right. The floor and walls were made of light grey concrete. The air had an unpleasant odor from the repeated use of sanitizing aerosols. Two armed agents stood next to the first observation window to his right, twenty feet from the air lock.
    Siri acknowledged the two guards and gestured for Ryan to join her as she walked up to the observation window. Ryan stopped and stared through the glass. A large, transparent sphere placed on a metal base sat in the middle of a room surfaced with stainless steel panels. Three technicians busied about as they attended to the complicated maze of pipes and wires that fed into metal fittings embedded in the sphere’s material, most likely an acrylic. The sphere was filled with a brightly lit, pale, amber fluid and suspended within the fluid was
her
. . . the female vampire.
    “There’s your leper, Ryan, or at least the thing that was a leper almost two thousand years ago.”
    A cloud of red appeared to one side of the fluid and slowly dispersed giving the entire sphere an eerie glow. The female had been immersed in human plasma and at timed intervals injectors delivered whole blood into the sphere. She floated in the most precious fluids of the human body. As he continued to stare at the sphere and its occupant the red tinge slowly faded away back to the original amber glow of the base plasma.
    “So this is how you heal a vampire?”
    “At least one way,” Siri replied.
    “She’s absorbing the blood,” Ryan observed. “That’s incredible. Who came up with this
thing
?”
    Siri chuckled. “You did.”
    Ryan jerked his