Outside, they, and not Wolff’s soldiers, were the real agents of the night. In retrospect, Mac’s contact with the creatures had been like receiving a personal message from the dark. He could not shake the feeling that sentient beings had surrounded him and looked right into his brain, using senses like those of some alien race. A bite from any of them was clearly deadlier than cobra venom, and yet there seemed an even more frightening intellectual quality about these beasts.
Why the fuck didn’t they kill me? he wondered. And how long until Wolff puts an end to my reprieve?
He had determined to force himself into an hour or two of uninterrupted sleep, but the shrieks in the night allowed the zoologist’s imagination to flit too easily over thoughts of what Wolff must have done to Bob and Yanni. After becoming slowly accustomed to how the war had erased everyone he loved, his brief reunion with Bob Thorne was an unexpected lifeline back into a saner world—back to humanity. The line had been cut the moment Wolff showed off the Russian machine gun, with its unmistakable signature of arctic camouflage. Until that moment, Mac really did feel as if he were becoming human again.
Now there was hardly anything left to live for. Nothing except revenge and the mission.
CHAPTER 19
Carrier
Some of those who rush into this madness do not realize that they are foolish, but think they are wise. . . . Do not think of them as human beings, but consider them as animals. For as animals devour each other, so also people like this [shall] devour each other . . . since they love the delights of fire, they are slaves of death.
—GOSPEL OF DIDYMOS JUDAS THOMAS (FIRST CENTURY A.D.)
January 28, 1944
5 A.M.
It was not the tragic way the boy had died that kept Wolff and Kimura awake through the night; it was not the disturbing manner in which vascular and muscular systems had failed in the end, causing the child to vomit up portions of his own stomach. What kept the pair manically alert was the realization that these manifestations resembled disease processes. Wolff and Kimura, driven by motives that would remain unknown to historians and anthropologists of the future, loved the delights of fire, and pestilence, and human suffering. Trapped either by the genes that rendered them “born rotten,” or by their times—or trapped by some obscene combination of both—they had willingly (indeed, gleefully) become slaves of death.
Colonel Wolff wore a puzzled expression as he stared down into the boy’s lifeless eyes. “How can a human body sustain such bleeding?” Wolff asked the corpse. He paused, as if waiting for a reply, then turned his attention yet again to a pair of odd-looking wounds—half a centimeter across and located midway between the child’s right ankle and the back of his knee. Bitten from behind, he thought, noting that the wounds were still oozing blood, so many hours later. Why hadn’t they—?
The sound of a scalpel hitting the floor drew the colonel’s attention to an adjacent table and he peered over the top of his surgical mask. Clumsy heathens, he thought. Nearly five hours had passed since his men had brought the bodies down from the hill. But even now, two members of Dr. Kimura’s medical team, their isolation-suited arms buried below their elbows in gore, continued to probe the flayed-open remains of the old woman. Wolff knew that any ill feelings he might have harbored toward the Japanese scientist and his men were meaningless. What was important was the fact that they were clearly well versed in the biology and chemistry of death.
Wolff leaned in closer, examining the strange wounds again, this time with a hand lens. They’re not puncture wounds, he thought, noting instead that divots of flesh had been removed with apparent surgical precision.
What could have done this?
Kimura entered the room carrying a tray of microscope slides and blood samples. Immediately, everyone, including Wolff, looked up from his work.
The odd-looking man said something in Japanese to his colleagues, who exchanged glances but made no reply. Kimura turned toward the colonel.
“This is no typical anticoagulant,” he said in fluent German. “Not a chemical, as delivered by the bite of a leech or mosquito. In this case the bleeding was definitely caused by a bacterium.”
“Then we are looking at an infection,” Wolff said.
“Yes, and no,” Kimura answered. Handing the tray to an assistant, the physician nodded toward the body of the boy. “The microbes entered through those cutaneous wounds,” he explained. “Once inside the circulatory system, they initiated massive hemorrhaging, all within minutes. This process is absolutely unique.”
Wolff spoke through his mask. “But the animal experiments we performed last night—none of the lab rats bled out after being inoculated with the boy’s blood.”
“Nor did the last of the American Rangers exhibit any ill effect when I repeated the experiment on him,” Kimura added. “Our vivisection proved that. The young woman who was with the boy also remains uninfected, and I’ve injected her three times already.”