Alien Hunger 01 — The Basement

Prestor’s Lab, Denver November 14, 1992 — 10:07 PM

The floor was concrete, which I noticed before I noticed anything else. Smooth, cold, the kind of pour that costs money. There was a woman screaming somewhere to my left.

I catalogued the room before the smoke got worse. Lab setup – serious work, not a garage project. Centrifuge on a steel table. Chromatography equipment. Cold storage units, door hanging open. Someone had spent real money here, and someone else had set it on fire.

The hunger hit me like a gear shifting.

I know what adrenaline feels like. I’ve taught its biochemistry forty times in a classroom, mapped its cascade on a whiteboard. This wasn’t that. This was older. Something that lived in the hind-brain of animals that have no cortex, no Latin names for things, no ethical framework beyond feed. It had my hands. It had my legs. I watched myself cross the room and I understand, academically, that I was still in the room and still moving, but there was a layer of glass between the part of me that could observe and the part of me that was doing something terrible to the woman on the floor.

She fought. I held her. I’m a hundred and thirty-two pounds and she had thirty on me and none of it mattered.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

I had a word for what I was doing. The part of me that was still cataloguing, still reading the situation the way I read lab results: here is what is happening, here are the variables, here is the outcome if you do nothing. I spent everything I had to make myself stop, and after what felt like a geological period of time it worked.

She was breathing. Her daughter – six, maybe seven, crouched behind a steel table – was screaming hard enough to lose her voice. I backed away and hit the centrifuge table and stood there with my hands open and my mouth tasting like rust and something else I don’t have a word for yet.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said.

Neither of them believed me. I didn’t particularly believe me either.

The fire was in the walls. I made myself look at the lab equipment instead of the woman I’d hurt.

The intake form was on a clipboard near the cold storage. My handwriting. My signature on a consent form that, reading it now, I would not have signed if I’d understood what I was consenting to. The column headings were in someone else’s hand: compound concentration, delivery vector, metabolic response, observed phenotype. I was the observed phenotype.

United National Bank of Denver. Post-It note on the inside of the cold storage door, next to a key hook that was empty. “Liverman” on a label on a box of slides. I spent thirty seconds I didn’t have memorizing the room, then I went to find a way out.

The trapdoor should have been near the furnace – basement-beneath-a-basement logic, the logic of a serious installation. I went toward heat and found more of it than I’d planned. My right forearm hit something metal and I made a sound I haven’t made since I broke my collarbone at twenty-two. The skin had a texture I recognized from burn cases. I filed that away too.

I found the water heater by logic and worked left along the wall until I found the hatch. Then down, then through, with the little girl I’d grabbed without asking and the woman telling me she could walk herself, thank you very much, though her voice had the quality of someone who was in shock and didn’t know it yet.

The parking lot was November. I’d forgotten about November.

I called 911 from a payphone a block away because my purse was still in Prestor’s lab. I told them there was a fire, two injured civilians, and I gave my name because the operator asked and I am someone who answers questions when asked them.

I hung up and drove away before the sirens arrived.

I drove for a while without any particular destination. The radio said something about the election. I turned it off.

Duke was standing outside the Broadstreet like the night belonged to him personally. Short, broad, a quality of attention in the way he stood that made me think of people who have been in situations where inattention costs them. He looked at me and I looked at him and something passed between us that I don’t have a word for yet, though I suspect I’m going to have to develop a vocabulary for a lot of things fairly quickly.

“You’re new,” he said.

“I was just going to drive past,” I said.

He handed me a card.

I went inside with him because I had nowhere else to go, and because the alternative was driving around Denver until I ran out of gas or ran out of night.

Edward Williams had the kind of face that people with that kind of face learn to use. Composed. Attentive. The face of someone who has been having conversations in rooms like this for a long time. He listened to everything I told him about the lab without looking away from me once. The intake form. The bank name. The Liverman slides. The missing key.

I’d run an empathy read on him the way I sometimes read a room full of parents at a school board meeting: looking for the angle, the performance, the thing they actually want. I found something I hadn’t expected, which was that he seemed to mean what he was saying.

“You’re Gangrel,” he said. “Thirteenth generation. The serum – Prestor’s process – is not how this is usually done. But the biochemistry achieved the same result.”

“What result,” I said.

He told me I was a vampire.

I stood up. I said something like OK, I know this is a joke now, what the hell is wrong with you. The Jester thing – deflect with absurdity, make it ridiculous, make it a bit I can walk out of when I’m ready. It’s a reliable technique. It has gotten me out of a lot of situations.

“Give me your wrist,” I said.

He gave me his wrist.

No pulse.

I sat back down. I put my hands flat on my knees and looked at the table.

He kept talking. He said things about the city, about his role in it, about what it meant for me to move through Denver without causing incidents. He named Klondike and I filed it away for later. He said the serum might be retrievable. He said Prestor’s research existed somewhere and that finding it was in both our interests.

I listened. The information got filed in the same cold place I’d been filing everything else since I woke up on that floor. I’d process it when I had the processing capacity. Right now that capacity was fully occupied with not doing anything irreversible.

Outside the windows, somewhere past the city, the sky was starting to think about morning.

I slept in a room in Edward Williams’ house because there was no longer any version of the night where I drove home and went to bed.

In the morning – if that’s still the word for when I wake up, which is a question I’m choosing not to answer yet – I would find out what a United National Bank safety deposit box contained and whether “Liverman” was a name that knew what Jacob Prestor had done to me.