The Cure

Chapter 35 -- Live Student, Dead Bodies

At the top of the dark stairway, Hector tripped over a body. His knees hit the carpet and his hands slapped cold tile. He rolled into the tiled bathroom as a gun barked and a bullet hit the wall outside. Shit! He scrambled away from the door until stopped by a bathtub. A shotgun fired. A man screamed and then there was silence. "Edna! Arvin's shot," he whispered, certain the vampires could hear him.

There was no response, no sound at all. Cautiously, Hector started to get up. He froze as he became conscious of a silent presence in the doorway.

"Stay in here," LittleHawk said softly. "There's one more."

Then she was gone, presumably on her way down the stairs although he didn't hear so much as a creak. Is Arvin okay?

Down the hall, shots rang out, someone groaned and a body crashed against glass. Hector heard a man's terrified voice.

"Who are you? What are you doing?"

"Making sure he's dead, darling. That comes before introductions."

Finkelstein! Not even trying to keep his voice down. Hector moved to the door. Safe to go out? Edna said "stay."

"Okay, this one won't bother us. My name is Isadore Finkelstein. More important is the name of my associate and your patient, Miss Bunny Baneful."

"She's here?"

Knowing Finkelstein would hear him, Hector cleared his throat.

"I regret not," said the vampire, "but she was wise enough to send me as her ambassador and to give me a photo of you taken in better days. I regret, Dr. Quintz, that we meet this way. Let me assure you that we will do you no harm."

"No harm? You're vampires! You just killed the men who were protecting me."

"Imprisoning you," said Finkelstein . "Once they determined you had no backup data beyond what they already had, they would have forced you to work for them or killed you."

"Mr. Finkelstein," Hector called. "Is it safe to come join you?"

"For the moment," said Finkelstein. "In the master bedroom. But we really must be going."

"Who's that?" Quintz demanded.

"One of my students. We had to bring him with us to protect him from involuntarily joining the undead. As a guidance counselor, I don't usually approve of exposing live students to dead bodies, but we'll do a lot of trauma work later. Hector?"

"Here." A flashlight beam caught him in the face as came through the doorway. Blinking, he barely managed to avoid the legs of Quintz's erstwhile protector, now dead on the floor. "Please lower the light." As the beam moved to Finkelstein, Hector glimpsed broken glass on a dresser behind where the vampire stood. Quintz's voice came from an armchair beside a large bed.

"You're not a vampire. What are you doing here?"

"Trying to stay alive," said Hector.

"Trauma," said Finkelstein with a nod for emphasis. "Actually, this fine young man has been attending our wilderness school for eight months and, as you can see, he is still very much in the pink. He is living proof we vampires can restrain our base impulses when we know that a warmblood is working for our benefit as well as his or her own. Of course, Miss Baneful has already demonstrated such restraint in her meetings with you, but we wanted to show you other vampires are equally capable."

"And you had to kill six or eight good men to show that?" There was no mistaking the anger in Quintz's tone.

"Regrettable." Edna LittleHawk's voice came from the doorway.

Hector spun around to face her. Quintz's light caught the broad forehead and troubled face of the Shoshone.

"But there was no other way to get to you," she said. "They tried just as hard to kill Bunny when she came to your office in the hospital. This rotten branch of DHS wants to wipe us off the face of the earth. We will do whatever it takes to survive until some day we can be cured. We want you to work with us to bring that day closer."

"Where are you taking me?" asked Quintz.

"We can discuss that in the car," said LittleHawk.

Hector looked over her shoulder. "Where's Arvin?"

"We own a hospital in Boise," said Finkelstein. "We can expand its laboratory facilities."

"Boise? Are you kidding? My lab's at Mass General."

"You can't go back there," said LittleHawk. "But we must leave now. When the dead men do not check in, reinforcements will come."

"I'm not going to hide out in some two-bit vampire hospital in Idaho," said Quintz.

"How's Arvin?" Hector demanded.

"He's downstairs," said LittleHawk. "Willingly or not, Doctor, you are coming with us. Take only what you absolutely need - and quickly."

"Is he hurt bad?" Hector asked.

"Go downstairs with him," she murmured to Finkelstein.

He's terminated! Blinking back tears, Hector pushed by her and was out the door, running through the dark hallway. He leaped over the corpse at the top of the stairs and, with one hand on the bannister, took the steps four at a time. The dead guard had been pulled into the house and the front door closed. Still clutched in his hand, a flashlight illuminated guns and stains on the floor. Hector pulled the flashlight from the dead hand and rushed from one corpse to another.

He found Arvin's body in the living room, laid out in front of the cold fireplace. Arvin's hair clumped like matted straw down to his closed eyes. His face was white and frozen with pain. LittleHawk had folded Arvin's hands across the wounds in his chest. Falling to his knees, Hector gripped his friend's icy hands and sobbed.

End of Chapter 35

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