Bloodborne

By Margo Bond Collins

NEARER OBLIVION

As a youth, Lili Banta ignored her grandmother’s cryptic warnings to avoid the Houston children outside their Filipino community, and when many of those children fell ill, Lili ignored the whispers that a vampiric aswang walked among them. But Lili can ignore those rumors no longer. Returned as an adult to work for the Quarantine Station of the Centers for Disease Control, she is plagued by dark, bloody dreams that consume her nights and haunt her days. And a strange yet familiar illness has attacked the city’s children. An illness only she might cure.

On temporary leave from the FBI’s vampire-hunting unit, Agent Scott Chandler accepts his friend and colleague’s request to help investigate a series of interlinked murders and illnesses in Houston. But the task will be harder than expected. The beautiful doctor from the CDC assigned to him is a distraction, both in body and heart, and a monster stalks the night—closer than they can possibly imagine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Boroughs Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944262587

Book preview

Chapter 1

Lili

Oatmeal always makes me think apocalypse.

Not the kind of apocalypse I’m actually likely to witness, spread through droplets so small they can’t be seen by the naked eye, by germs so tiny that they might as well be science fiction to most people.

And not the kind we thought we were getting when the vampires showed up a few years ago—though something weird happened in Dallas recently, so the vampires have been hiding out for the last several weeks. No one knows why, for sure, but I know that the guys in the ER are thankful for the drop in neck traumas and exsanguination victims. And I was glad the hospital had a small isolation ward specially created to watch ex-sang patients overnight, to be sure they didn’t turn. It made my job as a consultant for the CDC easier.

No, when I’m confronted with the prospect of oatmeal, I begin to think how useful it would be in a world where scavenging became the norm—like one of those zombie movies where people slide through grocery stores throwing food items into baskets, racing to gather as much as they can before the shambling horde attacks.

I’m just saying. I tucked a few strands of dark hair that had escaped my bun up under my scrub hat. When the inevitable zombie apocalypse hits? Go for the oatmeal. It’s lightweight and nutritious, can be eaten alone or used to make easy-to-carry cakes, can even be eaten uncooked. It’s pretty much the perfect post-apocalyptic food.

That assumes, Dr. Will Manning said as we scrubbed in at the sinks in the small anteroom that led into the isolation unit, that either there is someone out there doing all the hard work of growing and then milling it—or whatever it is you do to oats that turns them into oatmeal—or that there are few enough people around that the stores are still chock-full of oatmeal packets, ripe for the picking. He wrapped the paper gown ties around behind him, crisscrossing them around his waist and tying them in the front.

You’re missing the point, I said, pulling a pair of sterile, blue, non-latex gloves out of the dispenser on the wall and snapping them on one at a time, checking to make sure they covered the wrists on the sleeves of my own white paper gown.

So what is the point? He reached around me for his gloves.

That it’s important to pay attention to how we can use the things around us. My voice grew muffled as I tied on a surgical mask.

So let me get this straight. With his hip, he bumped the button that opened the door into the unit. You’re in a hospital full of medical equipment—he gestured in a circle over his head, taking in all of Houston General—and you’re obsessing over the post-apocalyptic value of oatmeal?

I narrowed my eyes, staring at him hard as I nodded. I bet they’ve got a ton of it over in the cafeteria. We’d be set for life.

He snorted and shook his head as he moved through the door and toward the computer on a stand immediately inside.

I followed him, consciously switching over to professional mode. Okay, I said. Go over it again—what is it you’ve got here?

Will shook his head. I’m telling you, it’s the weirdest damn thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like the poor kid has malaria and dengue fever at the same time—but not exactly. As soon as we knew what we had on our hands, we put him into contact isolation and moved him into the ex-sang hall.

But you didn’t go public, I said. Thanks for that—it makes my job simpler.

Will shrugged. Ours, too. Whenever there’s an outbreak of any kind, the ER gets overrun with people assuming they have it.

He logged into the computer and pulled up a file.

I’ve seen the slides, I said, reaching past him and clicking through to the images he’d sent to me the day before. Viral and parasitic at the same time. The slides flickered past: first the images from the electron microscope of the virus, bumpy and globular, and then the parasites, bigger and more easily imaged, the stain making them look like purple rings inside the blood cells.

As far as we can tell, it’s exactly like the Yvonne’s Disease outbreak twenty years ago, Will said. Our diagnostic equipment is better now, and we still can’t figure out if we’re looking at a primary and secondary infection, or if it’s all the same damn thing.

I remember it. My voice was quiet.

You do? Will asked, startled.

I grew up here, remember. I was a child the last time it came through—the schools shut down for two weeks. My grandmother had recently come from the Philippines to live with us, and she used to say that Filipino children were immune. No one in my neighborhood got it, so it was some weird thing that happened only to the white kids.

She also used to say it was the aswang, the night-monster, coming to punish the bad children.

But I didn’t mention that—bogey-man stories designed to keep Filipino children in line wouldn’t save anyone here.

With a shrug, I glanced one last time at the slides. Let’s go see the patient.

# # #

Hi there, Kenny, Will said to the wan, red-haired boy huddled beneath the covers. The child was seven years old, I had noted on his chart, though he didn’t look more than five or six.

The boy’s parents, both swathed in protective masks and gowns, sat huddled on uncomfortable chairs crafted out of antimicrobial metal. Kenny’s hand rested limply in the mother’s gloved palm.

Hi, Dr. Manning. The father’s voice was calm, but over the mask, his blue eyes were pinched and tight. Any news?

This is Dr. Lili Banta, from the CDC—the Centers for Disease Control. Will gestured at me. I asked her here to consult on the case. He propped one hip against the edge of the bed, not quite sitting down, but giving the impression of joining the small family group in their isolation. It was a gift, that ability to make the patients understand that he was on their side—one that I’d often envied. Right now, he was using it to put Kenny and his family at ease.

I’ve known Dr. Banta for years and we’ve worked together before, so I know you’re really going to like her. His eyes crinkled under the mask, and I could imagine the dimples that flashed with the smile. So I’m going to have you sit up and lean forward to let her see your back.

The boy followed Will’s instructions, and I peered at the red bumps scattered across his skin. Okay, I murmured, helping him lie back again and pulling out an otoscope. I clicked the switch. Follow the light with your eyes.

Sluggish pupil response. Yellowed sclera. Patchy red rash.

So what will you do next for him? the mother asked, her eyes following my motions closely, as if by monitoring his care, she could control the illness that was wasting her child away.

I glanced at Will. Patients—and worse, patients’ mothers—were his area, not mine.

Right now, we’ll continue monitoring Kenny closely, he said, his voice falling into a cadence that was both professional and soothing.

But you won’t even tell us what it is. The mother broke off into an inarticulate sob.

We’re still looking into a number of possibilities. I might not have Will’s comforting touch, but this woman needed facts to hold onto. I could offer at least something resembling details. We are still running a number of tests. However, what is happening to Kenny is not new. We’ve seen it before.

And no one knew what it was then, either, a tiny voice in the back of my head whispered.

Kenny’s father leaned forward. What does that mean, exactly?

It means we are working to devise a treatment that is specifically tailored to what is happening with Kenny right now, Will said. He will have the best possible care.

# # #

You think the kid’s going to die, don’t you? I asked Will after we had stripped off the isolation gowns and were scrubbing back out of the ward.

He sighed, and the sound took me back to our residencies, when we were making rounds through the pediatric units. We were supposed to build up emotional immunities, but Will never really did. It was part of what made him so good with the patients.

It was also part of what had torn us apart ten years earlier—his inability to let go of work at the end of a shift.

I had said then that his decision to specialize in pediatric infectious diseases was a bad idea—that he had too much empathy, and that working with children who were likely to die would end up killing him.

It was our last big blow-up, not long before we finished our initial residencies and headed off into our specializations. In reply, he had said—but not shouted, not Will; when he was really angry his voice dropped so low I could barely hear it—that it might not kill me to try to have a little empathy for anyone.

I had moved out that day, and less than a month later I had moved on to another city, another hospital, another life as an epidemiologist, working more and more with slides and community behavioral patterns, and less and less with individual patients.

I preferred it that way.

So the phone call almost a week earlier had surprised me. I could use your expertise, Will had said, his warm baritone still drawing me to him, as it did everyone.

Of course, I had said yes. Still, after all these years.

The warmth had leached out of his voice now. You’d know better than I would. But unless we figure it out? he said. Yeah. The kid will probably die.

# # #

It took me a long time that night to fall asleep. It was strange to be back in my Inang’s—my grandmother’s—house, to hear the sound of my mother’s slippered feet shuffling across the linoleum as she put away the last of the dinner dishes, to listen to the Late Show playing in the living room. I hadn’t even known Will was in Houston when I had taken the job with the CDC Quarantine Station, a position I had accepted primarily because my mother—my Inay—would never leave Houston, entrenched as she was in its large Filipino community. And I wouldn’t want her to. It had always been assumed that I would come home someday, though I think Inay would have preferred it if I had done so as a general practitioner. And Inang would have hated my choice of specialties if she had lived to learn about it. I could almost hear her spitting the words out, using my full name to show her displeasure: Viruses, Halili?

I closed my eyes, thinking of Kenny.

A virus and a parasite?

The images from the slides slipped across the insides of my eyelids again as I drifted off to sleep.

A light fog drifted across the purple-stained parasite, and I blinked as I looked up. An unlit street rolled out in front of me, darkened houses forming indistinct lumps off to the sides, moonlight glinting from the windows of cars parked in the driveways.

A bright blue light shone out through a house window, and I drew closer to it, slipping across the grass so quickly that it blurred beneath me. At the window, I paused, barely long enough to wonder how I could possibly get through it, and then I was inside a child’s bedroom. Bunk beds with hangings designed to look like a castle were nestled in one corner, a short ladder leading up to the top, where tousled blond curls peeked out from under a pink blanket. Bending down, I saw a second child sprawled atop a green comforter on the bottom bunk, as well.

The blue glow shining through the window originated from the child on the bottom bunk—a preteen, maybe eleven or twelve years old, with a heart-shaped face and a wide mouth with generous lips, relaxed and partially open in sleep.

A sound like a thousand chittering whispers reverberated in my head. This one, this one. She can hold us. Keep us. Grow us.

Conception, my own voice echoed back to me. Gestation. Birth.

This one, the voices replied.

Leaning over the glowing child, I brushed her hair off her neck and extended my tongue, long and sharp, until it slid in through her skin. The girl twitched and whimpered when it pierced through to the artery, tracing down toward her heart, but she stilled as the glands inside my jaw began working, pumping liquid out even as I inhaled her scent into me. She smelled of warm, clean sweat, of grass and sunshine.

But those smells were slowly overwhelmed by the scents of the night, dark and hot.

Any sound she made was lost in the quiet tik-tik-tik of the poison moving into her and the sound of the voices in my head.

For a moment, the high-pitched babble coalesced into one multivalent voice.

Not poison.

Not death.

Power, not pain.

Life.

The blue glow slowly faded from the child, and I pulled my tongue back into my mouth, pausing only to lap away a few blood droplets, black smears in the darkness.

The taste of sunshine had disappeared, leaving only the flavor of the moon—deep and rich, but no longer calling to me.

The voices had disappeared, as well.

With a thought, I was back outside the house, and I knew that I had to return home quickly. The approach of dawn burned against my skin as I unfurled my wings and leapt into the sky.

A single word beat inside my head, in time to the thump of my wings against the air.

Aswang.

# # #

Sitting straight up in bed, I gasped and threw myself back against the headboard, the thud dying away along with the remaining shreds of my dream.

But the word still ricocheted through my mind.

Aswang.

Until yesterday, I hadn’t thought of the term in years—not since I’d left Houston for med school in Maine, determined to get as far away from home as I could.

But this resurgence of the same odd illness that had swept my city years before was apparently also dredging up the old stories from deep in my subconscious: the aswang, a vampiric woman who lived a quiet life by day and fed on children in the night, flying back home on bat wings right before dawn.

My unconscious mind had clearly also expanded on the idea, casting me in the role of aswang and adding schizoid conversations with a chorus of internal voices.

Great. I’m insane in my dreams.

And I’m a monster.

Shuddering, I wiped my hand across my gritty, raw eyelids.

Thank God I learned to get by on relatively little sleep while I was in med school.

In the bathroom, I held open my eyelids for eye drops, hoping to wash away some of the red that rimmed my gaze. Once in the shower, I leaned my forehead against the cool tile while the warm water pounded against my head and back.