“It was my call,” Murphy said. “I didn’t want word getting out. This place has been enough of a circus already.”
Darryl was still fuming, but after he’d sputtered out a few more words of protest, and they’d managed to apologize and calm him down, he went on with his disquisition. “Well, their blood—that’s including your Miss Ames, who I’d really like to meet sometime, now that I’ve finally been voted into the inner circle—isn’t like any human blood I’ve ever seen.”
“In what way?” Charlotte asked. To Michael, it sounded as if she was the one holding something back. How could they ever solve this puzzle if everyone had separate and secret pieces?
“It’s not just depleted of the red cells,” Darryl said. “It’s actively consuming them. It’s as if this blood were from cold-blooded creatures trying to become warm-blooded, as if reptiles, or some of those fish I’ve been dredging up from the bottom, were trying to emulate mammals by ingesting hemoglobin—but failing at it over and over again, and having to then replenish their supply.”
“Which they can only get from other human beings?” Michael suggested.
“I’m not so sure about that. The species barrier should make that the case, but this is such a strange disease that I can’t actually confirm it. Someone suffering from it would probably make no such distinctions. The anemia would become so great, they would try to rectify it with anything available, like a drug addict scrambling for any kind of a fix.”
“But how can they keep going at all,” Charlotte asked, perched on the edge of her folding chair, “without red corpuscles to carry the oxygen through the bloodstream? Their organs would stop functioning, and their muscles and other tissues would decay. Wouldn’t they just run out of steam?”
“That’s close to what Ackerley described in the notes he wrote in the meat locker,” Michael interjected.
It was Charlotte’s turn to look puzzled—what notes?—but Michael just gave her a wave to indicate he’d fill her in on all that later. There were way too many secrets still.
“He said he had the sensation of being oxygen-deprived,” Michael went on, “as if his lungs weren’t filling, no matter how deeply he breathed. And he said he needed to blink a lot, to clear his vision.”
“Yes, that would make sense,” Darryl said. “The ocular mechanism would be compromised, too. But I’ll say one thing in favor of this blood—it is amazingly, stupendously recuperative. Per milliliter, it’s loaded with more phagocytes than—”
“English, please,” Murphy interrupted, and Lawson nodded in agreement.
“Cells that consume foreign or hostile particles,” Darryl explained. “Like a little cleanup squad. So if you couple that feature with its ability to extract whatever it needs from any outside source, you’ve got a very neat and self-regenerating system. Theoretically speaking, as long as its raw supply is periodically replenished with new blood—”
“Its host can go on forever,” Charlotte concluded.
Darryl simply shrugged in acknowledgment, and Michael felt as if a cold hand had reached inside his shirt to brush his chest. They were talking about these “hosts” as if they were the anonymous subjects in some medical experiment, but in fact they were talking about Erik Danzig and Neil Ackerley and, most important of all, Eleanor Ames. They were talking about the woman he had discovered in the ice, and brought back to life—a woman he had played the piano with, and interviewed on tape—as if she were some creature from a horror flick.
Another silence fell, as the revelation and its ramifications made themselves felt in the room. Michael himself experienced an odd twinge of vindication. If anyone had still been harboring any doubt about the validity of Eleanor’s story, if they were still questioning how she might have survived for so many years, frozen beneath the sea…
But it did leave another question—what, if anything, could be done to remedy the disease?—unresolved. Michael knew it was what they were all thinking.
Finally, the mood was broken by Murphy, who leaned forward, his fingers steepled on his desk, and said, “What’s wrong with having her go cold turkey? What if she were confined and medicated and tranquilized—you guys have more drugs than you know what to do with—until the need just went away?”
Darryl pursed his lips and tilted his head skeptically to one side. “If you’ll forgive the analogy, that would be like denying insulin to a diabetic. The need wouldn’t go away. The patient would simply go into shock, a coma, and die.”
“Then how are we supposed to keep her adequately supplied?” Lawson asked, voicing the question they were all pondering. “Start a blood drive?”