Tomorrow Sucks Part 22

Vaylance struggled with the weight on his chest and found it was a dead man.

"Over here!" he called to the voices.

Someone was moving the heavy tent cloth, and then strong hands reached in and pulled him from the wreckage. Vaylance then helped his rescuer, a large man in an ill-fitting black infantryman's uniform, to clear away the remains of the tent and find the wounded men.

"Shamil's broken through the front here," said the burly soldier as he hefted a stump-legged patient.

"Go and find me a wagon to move the wounded," Vaylance ordered.

Vaylance began to check his patients, who were lying scattered about on the muddy ground. Several of them had died, perhaps from shock or suffocation when the tent was. .h.i.t. A cannon ball whistled overhead and burrowed into the clay of a nearby embankment. Suddenly he realized Dr. Rimsky was missing. He blundered back into the tent and floundered amid the fallen poles and tent cloth until he found the doctor lying face-down. He was wet all over and the smell of fresh blood hung heavy on the night air. Vaylance turned Rimsky over and saw where a tent pole had slashed an artery in his arm. He found the doctor's medical kit and began to work, quickly removing the pole and applying a pressure bandage to the wound. He prayed that the bleeding would stop.

Then he heard the approach of wagon wheels. The big soldier was back with two others, and they began to load the wounded into the cart. Vaylance lifted the doctor gingerly and placed him in the wagon. Then he climbed up and stayed at the doctor's side as the wagon creaked slowly over the soggy ground. By two hours past midnight they had reached an encampment of supply wagons.

A tall grimacing officer with epaulets on his shoulders approached the wagon on horseback.

"We are the Fourth Medical Unit," said Vaylance, "or rather what's left of it. The doctor is wounded. I am the surgical a.s.sistant."

The officer nodded and called to some men by the supply depot. In an hour theyhad the tent up and had made the patients as comfortable as possible. There were six patients left, including Dr. Rimsky. As Vaylance made his rounds, he was encouraged to see that one of his patients with the leg amputated at the knee was doing well. The man's fever had responded to an infusion of willow leaves, and the stump was healing without infection.

Vaylance was worried about Dr. Rimsky, however, and he decided to re-dress the wound. But when he set the new bandage in place, he saw where the blood still oozed to darken the fresh white cloth. And he realized his hunger. The nearness of blood was beginning to affect him again. He hastily finished the dressing and stepped out of the tent to gaze at the moon. The moon waned in the eastern sky, a thin scimitar of light. In a few nights would come the dark of the moon, the blood-moon, as his people called it.

The Varkela had originally been horse nomads of the Eurasian steppes, wandering from tribe to tribe, exchanging their skill at healing for the blood-price. For centuries they had survived, one here, a few there, in close a.s.sociation with humankind, yet always a race apart, a secret brotherhood. According to oral tradition, they had served in the legions of Attila the Hun around 400 A.D., and when Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis, invaded the Russian frontier, he found tribes that still employed the services of the old Varkela leechman. By Vaylance's time they had mostly died out or had interbred with humankind to the extent that the old genetic traits had been diluted out. One occasionally ran across Varkela characteristics among the Circa.s.sian people of the Caucasus or their Tartar neighbors on the steppes. Every now and then, a youth would have those dark, seductive eyes that seemed to exert so much power over the beholder. Or there would be a Tartar brave with such uncanny ability to train horses that people would say of him, "He speaks the horses' language." Blood-need was of course extremely uncommon. One Circa.s.sian folktale tells of the wolf-minded Tartar maid who lures a Cossack youth away into the night to drink his blood.

The Varkela had left their imprint on the Slavic racial memory in the form of Vampire stories.

By their strange nocturnal habits and their state of daylight dormancy, they had been regarded as "undead," the nosferatu. The old Greek word for Vampire, "Vrkolakas," may be a corruption of Varkela, the children of the night.

As the gray dawn appeared, Vaylance left the medical tent and sought out the officer he had seen earlier. He found the man sitting on a wooden crate, cleaning a small flintlock handgun that rested on his knee. The officer forced a wet rag down the small bore with a straight alder stick, and with loving hands he polished the smudges of powder burn from the browned metal flashpan. His well-fed gray mare stood patiently tied to the supply wagon. It raised its head and swiveled its ears toward Vaylance, making a barely audible nicker. Vaylance scratched the animal's poll."A fine animal you've got here," he said. Then he proceeded with his lie: "I must go to a nearby village and seek sheeting to make bandages. Could you please a.s.sign someone to stay with the wounded until I return?" He hoped this would be a good excuse to sneak away and take his daytime sleep. He no longer had Dr. Rimsky to explain away his odd habits. The taciturn officer nodded and continued his polishing. Vaylance turned to take his leave, then added: "By the way, your horse has a stone wedged in her left fore hoof."

The road to the village branched, and Vaylance took the less traveled fork. Soon he was ascending a small hillock that was heavily wooded. The increasing light made it hard for him to see, and he welcomed the shadow of the trees. He found a dense thicket where he hoped he would not be discovered, and burrowing into the underbrush, he flattened the gra.s.ses and made a place to lie down. He drowsed, pondering his troubles. He might have to transfuse Dr. Rimsky, his dearest friend, yet he feared to take the risk without further knowledge. He would have to risk dream walk to find the answer. The trouble with dreamwalking was that he never knew where he might end up, and he needed someone else to help him do it, but it was the only course open to him. With resolution, Vaylance stopped breathing, slowed his heart and loosed his soul into the void.

He felt as if he were lifted up above the gently rolling hills of the Russian countryside, and he could see the grove where he slept far below. Then the landscape shimmered and disappeared, and in its place came the flat, dry gra.s.slands of the open steppe. A yurt, a tentlike dwelling, stood like a b.u.mp in the flat plain, its felt cloth sides rippling in the wind. A few scruffy horses were grazing nearby, and a two-humped Bactrian camel lay sunning itself, its face toward the wind. The surroundings shimmered again, and Vaylance found himself inside the arched cane poles of the yurt. On a wicker couch lay an old man, whose leathern Tartar features, windburned and ancient, did not change, but acknowledged the presence in the yurt.

"My son, do you dreamwalk?" asked the old man.

"My father, I greet thee from the void," answered Vaylance. "I feel myself being pulled forward in the river of time, and I need your help." Vaylance explained his predicament to his father.

"The last time something like this happened," said Freneer, the father, "you almost brought back that unclean woman as your blood-love. You know I am against these outblood liaisons of yours. Favarka's been dead a long time, and I think you should take another mate. I am seeking a Varkela wife for you. You must consider, Vaylance, that we are dying out as a race; if the young men do not produce offspring, the 'old knowledge' will die with us."

"I don't intend to let you breed me like a horse, Father," said Vaylance. "Right now marriage is far away from my thoughts. I must find a way to save Dr. Rimsky."

"And yet you let that Russian doctor study you like some species of beetle-but I know he is your friend and I will help you-but you must promise to choose somewolf-minded girl, just as I chose your mother Odakai."

Vaylance remembered his mother, a Varkela woman who had left the steppes to live in Moscow, where she practiced as a medium and spiritual healer under the name of Anna Varkeerovna. He had lived with her until he was about thirteen, learning French and English in the drawing-room society of Moscow, and then she had taken him back to the steppe to study leechcraft with his father. One night on their journey to the steppes she had come across a wolf-cub which she had picked up and carried for a while across her saddle bow, saying to her young son: "This is the soul-beast of your blood-love, Vaylance." His parents insisted on a pedigree.

"Very well, a wolf-minded girl," Vaylance agreed, "but in my own time, Father, and in my own way."

"Well, then," said the old leechman, "let us begin." He took his staghorn rattles from the altar and sat cross-legged on the rug. Beating the horns together, he began to croon softly in the old language.

Vaylance sat on the rug opposite his father and concentrated on Dr. Rimsky.

Gradually the singing got softer and Vaylance felt time, like a river, flowing around him. He let go and drifted with the current. Then he did not hear the singing anymore; in its stead came a sound like rushing water in his ears. He entrusted himself to the forward dream and waited.

III.

Myrna sat up with a start. A face at the blood bank window was enough to jolt her from her reverie.

"Got a live one for you down in admitting!" said the intern, offering Myrna tubes of blood. "Not bleeding now but he seems to have lost a lot somewhere along the way. Hematocrit of sixteen. Dressed like he was going to a costume party. Also he didn't have any I.D. So we just gave him a number. And if you haven't already guessed, we want it STAT."

Myrna fed a sample to "Clarabelle" and got a reading: Hematocrit 15.9 percent, white cell count 4000.

"He won't live long at that rate," she said, as she plopped the tube into the centrifuge to spin. She was most concerned about the low hematocrit, the volume of red blood cells expressed as a percentage. Normal for an adult male was 45 percent.

At 15.9 this patient wasn't doing at all well.

When the centrifuge stopped turning, Myrna retrieved the tube of blood, separated the serum from the clot and prepared to type the sample. She added typing serum, spun the tubes and frowned."d.a.m.n it! He doesn't type," she said, looking at the mixed-field agglutination in the A tube. "Must be a weak subtype of A; either that, or someone's been mixing A and O together." Uncertainty about a blood type was about the worst problem a tech could have when blood was needed for a transfusion.

Myrna had seen a reaction like this only twice before. Once had been when a patient of type O blood had been mistakenly given type A. The other had been when she had been new on the job, just out of training school. An intern had brought her a specimen to type for a "friend." She had at first been puzzled until she looked at the name on the tube. "I. M. Nosferatu." Then she had to laugh. Someone was pulling her leg. The intern had mixed A and O together as they might be expected to occur in the stomach of the fict.i.tious Mr. Nosferatu. It was the ultimate vampire joke.

The man would have to be transfused with such a low hematocrit. So Myrna decided the best thing to do would be to collect a fresh specimen and repeat the tests. Hopefully someone had made a mistake the first time. She filled a tray with the tools of her trade: sterile needle encased in plastic, rubber tourniquet, vacutaner tubes, cotton swabs, alcohol and skin tape. Then she took the elevator to the intensive care unit.

The sweet, sickly odor of the patients. .h.i.t her as she walked into the ICU. The most critical patients lay in full view of the nursing station, looking like a row of strange vegetables planted in a garden of wires and plastic tubing. The heart monitors peeped every few seconds, and electric recording devices hummed in the background.

"Hi, Rose," she said to the older woman at the nursing station. "I need a new specimen on your Mr. Number 3489."

"First door on your left, " said Rose, "and good luck. I don't think he's got any blood left."

She had expected him to be unconscious when she entered the room, but he was awake and looking at her. He looked to be about thirty, with a s.h.a.ggy crop of black hair and the most striking dark eyes that glowed faintly as if there were light inside of him. There was something too intimate about looking into those eyes.

And then Myrna had one of those occasions that people in her family called "second sight." She seemed to see a woman, wearing a Cossack's baggy clothing and a fur cap, sitting astride a horse facing into the wind. In the crook of her arm was a wolf cub. The woman stroked the cub and turned her head toward Myrna and smiled at her with those same large dark eyes. She spoke a few words and then the image faded. Myrna realized she was standing there staring at the patient, who regarded her with a whimsical smile.

"This must be an English hospital and you are the leech," he said. He had an accent, although she couldn't place it, and she instinctively knew that he used the word "leech" in its oldest sense, the archaic term for "doctor."

"I suppose you could call me a leech of sorts," she said, "but I'm not a doctor, I'm a medical technologist. And this isn't England. You're in America, friend.""America!" he exclaimed. "I thought there were only wild Indians and revolutionaries living there. What year is this?

"Nineteen seventy-nine," she said.

"My G.o.d!" he said. "When I went to sleep it was 1845."

"What did you do, fall asleep in a time machine? Or are you Rip Van Winkle?"?

"Neither, I hope," he said. "If things are what I think they are, then I'm dreamwalking, and I'm not really here."

"We'll see about that," she said tying the tourniquet around his arm and swabbing vigorously with alcohol. She stuck the needle into his arm and pushed the vacutaner down snugly, breaking the vacuum. Blood was sucked into the tube. Suddenly he clenched his arm, causing the needle to pop out leaving a little trail of red. His hand closed over her wrist tightly.

"Do not take from me, little blood-thief," he said. "I don't have enough to give."

"You don't understand," she said. "I must test your blood for the right type and do a crossmatch. Then they will give you a transfusion because you have lost much blood."

"I have not lost any," he said. "But I have need of it. I have not taken blood in a month." After divulging this bit of information he stared at the few drops of blood in the tube. Perplexed, he said, "Perhaps I'm really here and Rimsky is over one hundred years dead." He lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He seemed to be concentrating on something very far away. For a moment she seemed to see his image fade before her eye so that she thought she could see through him, and then he was back, solid as before.

"It's all right," he said. "I can still hear my father's voice if I listen."

Something very odd was going on here. She wrinkled her brow and studied him for a moment. Then businesslike and efficient, she retied the tourniquet.

"I don't know what's happening," she said, "but whatever it is, my time-travelling friend, you had better give me some blood so I can get back to the lab, or you are going to be one sick turkey." She tried to maintain a calm appearance as she bent over him to obtain the specimen.

There was something about this woman that attracted Vaylance. For a brief moment, when he had looked into her eyes, he thought he had seen the "look of the wolf." And there was something else. Beneath the civilized odor of cologne and talc, he detected a fragrance, imperceptible to human-kind, of something definitely feral, as wild and sweet as the crushed leaves of his medicinal herbs, and this excited him.

It called to mind a verse from one of the great Varkela love poems. He converted it into English in his mind and came up with: "Ah, woman, the scent of thy wolvish c.u.n.t hath turned my head." It was intended as a compliment, but was definitely not the sort of thing one said to an English-speaking lady in his time; so he kept it tohimself.

As she bent over him, he observed that her hair was piled up on her head and held in place by a clip. The nape of her neck was lovely and vulnerable in the half-light, and he felt a strong urge to press his lips to her inviting throat and sink his cat-like teeth into the pulsing artery. Thinking this way caused him to have an erection, and he smiled inwardly at his attempt to stifle the impulse. This Christianity that he practiced was more difficult than the shamanistic religion of Freneer, his father. One of the saints had called the body "brother a.s.s," an appropriate term for his, as it sometimes went stubbornly astray.

She finished drawing the blood sample and left the room, taking her fragrance with her. If she gave him blood, he would have to give her something in return. He knew some members of his race, especially those in the Balkan countries, stole blood like vile insects, giving neither love nor leechcraft in return.

It had been a long time since he had shared blood-love with a woman. Service in the Czar's army did not provide many opportunities. He had counted himself lucky when at the age of 17 he had won the love of Favarka, a full-blooded Varkela.

Women were so rare that he'd shared her with another older man, according to their custom, but she'd called him "favorite." She was ten years dead, but he sometimes thought of her and the times he had laid his head on the soft fur between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

He still carried the small scars where Favarka in her pa.s.sion had marked him hers with love bites.

Back at the lab, Myrna fussed with her test tubes and got the same frustrating results. Holding the tubes up to the light, she saw little red flecks in the typing serum.

"This will have to do, I guess," she said.

Dr. Meyer was waiting at the window, impatiently drumming his fingers along the countertop.

"You'll have to sign for this one," said Myrna.

"That bad, huh?" he said.

"He doesn't type," she said. "I called my supervisor and she said give O-negative packed cells. At least he doesn't have any serum antibodies that I can detect."

"Maybe it's a hypoimmune response," said Dr. Meyer.

"You know, that guy is weird. 'Crit of 16, and he sits up in bed asking me questions all night. I'm surprised he can move his mouth, let alone sit up. You'd better loan him one of your books on blood-banking. He's asking things that are over my head."

At 5:00 A.M. when things had quieted down, Myrna was washing out the tubing on the auto-a.n.a.lyzer. She was finished and just about to get a cup of coffee, when she heard it. She did not exactly "hear" it, for there was no sound, but the definitewords came to her: "Come to me," they said.

She got her coffee and sat down at the lab bench to think this over.

"Come to me."

It was a voice inside her head pleading subtly but insistently. It was him. It had to be him.

Her curiosity compelled her sufficiently that when Ernie the security guard came by, she asked him to watch the phone while she went upstairs.

The ICU was quiet except for the beep-beep of the heart monitors. When she entered the room, her patient was lying back on the bed with a smile on his face and a little white tooth projected over his lower lip. He had taken the IV needle from his arm and placed the tubing over one of his teeth. The blood bag, hung on a rack overhead, was emptying visibly. He seemed quite pleased with himself.

"You didn't come right away," he said. "That means you are somewhat wolf-minded-sit here." He pointed to the bed. His voice was quiet, but she could feel the command in it. And she felt an overwhelming desire to obey his commands, especially when she looked into those dark, seductive eyes. Somehow she resisted: he would not have fun at her expense. What is happening, she thought, is that he is trying to control my mind. With an effort, she raised her eyes from his.

"Suppose I refuse," she said.

His spell was broken, but he didn't look at all unhappy about it; in fact, quite the contrary.

"You know, you're one of the few people who can do that?" he said. "This is even better than I'd hoped." His eyes appraised her carefully, with a certain longing, laced with self-confidence.

She detested his smugness. "You'd better get that needle back in your arm before a nurse catches you."

He heaved a languorous sigh and winked at her.

She shivered and walked determinedly from the room. Halfway down the hall, she heard it again: "Come back."

The h.e.l.l I will, thought Myrna.

"Please?"

No!

He was ecstatic to think that he could find a wolf-minded girl in this place.

At 8:00 a.m. Myrna went home from the hospital. She unlocked the door to her small apartment, crossed the room and turned on the television to keep her company. A blink of light, and the Morning Show came on. A psychiatrist was being interviewed about the effect of modern technology on the psyche. "We may find,"

he was saying, "that man needs mythology more than all the conveniences of ourmodern age." Myrna left the voices mumbling behind her, as she took the few steps to the kitchen. She stooped to open the small refrigerator that fitted under the counter and peered among the cottage cheese cartons and plastic-wrapped packages. She selected a package of two-day-old chicken, removed a drumstick, and shut the door.

Her small breakfast finished, she turned off the TV and opened the bedroom door. In one corner stood a clothes hamper stuffed to overflowing, and in the middle of the room lay a mattress under a heap of blankets. Beside it were piled the books she was currently reading. There was also the letter from Terry, in which he complained of her inability to say the word "love." The most she would say to someone she felt close to was, "I care for you." She had written back to him: "There is something wild in me that won't be caged by love."