The Basement -- Saturday, February 23, 1991, 12:40 AM

Prestor’s Townhouse basement / Capitol Hill storm sewers / Grant Street / Five Points apartment Denver, Colorado

The concrete was cold against the back of his skull. That was the first thing. Not a thought – a temperature. February at five thousand feet, slab floor, and Flash’s body reporting facts before his brain had signed back on.

He opened his eyes. Brick ceiling. Lab light on a chain, the filament doing that slow amber throb that means the power is about to go. Smoke in the room, thick enough to taste – chemical, not wood. Something electrical had burned first, and the building was catching up.

He sat up. His knee didn’t catch.

That registered before the rest of it: the knee that had ended everything four years ago, the knee that still woke him at 3 AM in the apartment over the po’boy place, the knee he’d been negotiating with since the fourth quarter of a game that didn’t matter anymore. Gone. Not better. Gone. As though the joint had been replaced by a joint that had never been injured.

The room came in pieces.

Brick walls on four sides. Steel table with a centrifuge bolted to it, the rotor arm still ticking down. Chromatography columns on a rack. Cold storage unit against the east wall, door hanging open, frost on the lip. Vials in a wooden rack, stoppered, labeled in handwriting too small to read from here. A clipboard on the floor near the centrifuge, paper curling in the heat.

Seven other people.

Terri was closest – three feet to his left, already sitting up, already looking at the equipment. He knew her by the back of her head before she turned. Five years of Tuesday mornings in the office, five years of her reading whatever room they walked into before he’d finished shaking the first hand. She was reading this one now. Her lips were moving. Cataloguing.

Ten feet beyond Terri: a woman in a charcoal blazer doing chest compressions on a man in shirtsleeves. The man’s badge caught the lab light – gold shield, Denver PD, clipped inside the jacket. The woman’s face was controlled in a way that meant it was about to stop being controlled. Flash did not know her name yet but knew what she was. Prosecutor. The posture, the jaw, the way she was working the compressions like she was cross-examining the man’s sternum.

Against the far wall: a tall man in a tweed overcoat, standing already, one palm flat against the bricks. Moustache. Wire glasses. Something in the way he held his head – tilted, listening to a frequency the rest of them couldn’t reach yet. Flash had seen his photograph once, in a file Jenny Bingham had left on the conference table. Import business. Marcus something.

And crouched behind the cold storage, half-hidden by the steel table: a woman holding a child. The woman’s hands were wrapped around the girl’s ears. The girl was not screaming anymore. She had been, recently – Flash could see the residue of it in the girl’s throat, the rawness. Now she was silent, and her mother was whispering something Flash’s ears picked up from across the room as clearly as if she’d spoken into his chest.

Baby don’t look. Baby don’t look.

He heard the heartbeats. Irregular percussion – the woman’s, fast and shallow. The girl’s, faster. The man on the floor, weak and skipping. The cop.

Not Terri’s. Not Marcus’s. Not the tall blond man folded against the wall with his shoes on the wrong feet and his shirt soaked through. Not his own.

Terri turned. Her face was the same face, the same Terri, but the eyes had a green refraction in the lab light that hadn’t been there Tuesday.

“Arnold. Arnold, your eyes.”

The door at the top of the stairway glowed orange around the seams.

“We have to go. Now.”

It came out in the cadence he used on buyers. Firm, warm, close the gap between the ask and the yes. The room turned toward him. Marcus crossed to the south wall – palm flat on brick, the same listening posture – and said, without looking back: “This wall is cold. The other three are warm.” Then quieter, almost to himself: “Sewers run under Capitol Hill. The map’s wrong, but they’re there.”

The blond man – Emerson, the bank, the loan – was pressed against the far wall with both hands flat behind him. He was not going to move. The woman with the cop was pulling her husband up by his armpits. The cop was blinking, trying to assemble the word where.

The door at the top of the stairs widened by a finger’s width. Orange light spilled down like a liquid finding its level.

“Start breaking the south wall.”

Flash hit the brick with his shoulder. Something moved. Not enough. The bruise registered wrong – distant, like a fact about someone else’s body. Terri was beside him, hands on his arm, pulling. “Arnold, your hands –”

“Shut up, Terri.”

Bon Vivant reflex. Smiled when he said it, the same smile he gave the Brewery bartender when his tab was past the limit. The wall didn’t care about his smile. He hit it again. Harder. A hole opened – fist-sized, cold air rushing through, mineral-wet, sewer-stink.

Marcus laughed, quiet and private. “You felt it. It moved. It actually moved.” His hand went to the brick after Flash’s strike, pressing where the mortar had cracked.

The woman in the charcoal blazer spoke from across the room. “Mr. Simpson. Whatever you’re about to do, think about it first.”

Flash didn’t.

The third hit landed different. Something in his arms that hadn’t been there before – not strength, not adrenaline, something deeper and colder, a current running below the muscle. The wall gave. Marcus could put his whole arm into the hole. “Concrete pipe. Three feet wide. Runs east-west. Three-foot drop.”

Flash looked at his hands. The knuckles had split on the first hit. Now they were closed. He watched the last quarter-inch of skin seal over the bone like wax filling a mold. The girl behind the cold storage made a small sound. Her mother’s whisper: Baby don’t look. Baby don’t look.

The fourth hit opened it. A three-by-three section of century-old brick let go all at once, and Flash grabbed the lip to keep from falling through. Sewer dark. Water sound. The cold air of February at five thousand feet pouring up through the gap like the building was exhaling.

Behind him, the stairway door failed. Flame came down the rail in a sheet, slow and purposeful, finding the oxygen in the basement.

Flash turned to the room. “Move.”

He picked Emerson up. The man weighed nothing – one hundred and sixty pounds of banker and ruined shirt, and Flash carried him to the breach one-handed and set him on his feet and pushed him through. Marcus loaded himself, dropped, splashed. Terri after.

The prosecutor – Monica – stepped sideways out of Flash’s path to the child. A deliberate, measured step. “Take the girl first.”

Something shifted in Flash’s chest. Not thought. A warmth that had nothing to do with temperature, a pull, and the woman holding the child looked at him and her grip changed. Not loosened. Changed. From barrier to offering. Flash crouched, scooped both – the woman on his forearm, the girl on his bicep, the girl’s pigtail brushing his jaw. They weighed nothing. The girl’s fingertips found his cheek.

“You’re cold,” the girl said. She said it to herself, not to him.

The woman said: “Sir. Thank you. Sir.” She said it twice, the same words, same register.

He lowered them through the breach. Marcus’s hands took the weight from below.

Monica was still standing between Flash and her husband. The cop – Vince – had the Beretta out now, low at his thigh, safety off. Not aimed. Not yet. His eyes were trying to assemble a story from the data and failing.

Flash moved. The room made the wrong noise – a compression, a skip in the sequence of seconds, and he was across the basement before anything else happened. He twisted Vince’s wrist at the radius. The bone broke. The Beretta left Vince’s hand and Flash tossed it backhand toward the breach, heard it clatter into someone’s grip in the pipe below.

He grabbed Vince by the belt and the back of his collar and threw him through the hole. Marcus’s voice from below: Got him, got him. Vince’s first word, muffled by the pipe: Monica.

Monica stood at the breach. Flash offered his hand. She looked at it.

“Mr. Simpson. We’re not done.”

She went through on her own.

The basement was fire now. Joists cracking overhead, the centrifuge table buckling. Flash grabbed the clipboard from the floor, the vial rack from the east wall, the black metal case from the cold storage – label in French handwriting, Anti-Body #2 – Test – Reference: Klondike?, the question mark in a different hand. A leather-bound book on a shelf by the cold storage, spine blackened from decades of handling. He grabbed it.

A joist came down behind him. He dropped through the breach into eight inches of February runoff.

Eighty feet east, a cast-iron grate. Flash hit it from below and the mortar cracked around the curb and the grate slid onto a snowbank. He pulled himself out and crouched on the sidewalk and lifted them through one at a time. The woman first – she handed the girl up ahead of herself, then came. Terri. Emerson. Monica refused the hand. Vince last, one-armed, gray-faced.

Seven people on a Denver sidewalk at four in the morning. The air was twenty-eight degrees and thin. Two blocks west, the townhouse was gone. Three engine companies on Grant Street, red lights painting the snow.

They walked east, away from the trucks, away from the crowd of bathrobed neighbors gathering on the opposite sidewalk. A man in pajama pants had his kid on his shoulders, both of them watching the fire. The kid was eating a granola bar.

Terri’s voice, low and close: “Arnold. Don’t look. Don’t slow down. Keep your face forward.”

Flash kept his face forward. Something in the back of his throat wanted what the kid’s father had. Not the kid. Not the granola bar. The heat. The pulse in the man’s neck, visible at this distance in this darkness, and Flash could count the beats without trying.

He kept walking.

On Grant Street, the cohort came apart.

Monica took Vince north. Her arm under his, his broken wrist cradled against his chest, the prosecutor’s walk eating distance. Over her shoulder, not turning: “Mr. Simpson. We’re not done.”

Emerson drifted south. Hyatt cabstand. Shoes still on the wrong feet. He did not say goodbye.

Marcus set his own terms. “I’ll come by your place tomorrow night. Sundown.” Hands in his overcoat pockets, the Beretta-shaped weight visible at his back, and he walked toward Curtis Park. Flash could hear his footsteps for three blocks.

The woman – Mavis – stood on the sidewalk with the girl. She did not walk toward the fire trucks. She did not walk toward anything. She held the girl’s hand and looked at Flash and said: “Sir. The little one says thank you. Sir.”

The girl said nothing. Her eyes were on Flash’s hands, the hands that had carried her, the hands that had broken the wall. She was not afraid. That was worse.

Flash and Terri walked to the IROC.

The dome light caught Terri’s eyes when she opened the passenger door – green, bright, reflective, the same thing Flash saw when he looked in his rearview mirror and his own eyes flashed back. They looked at each other. Neither said anything. There was nothing to say about it that the color hadn’t already said.

The items were on the bench seat between them: clipboard, vial rack, black case, journal. The IROC had been running for six hours – he’d left it on outside the Brewery, engine idling, heat blasting, the girl he’d been walking out already fading from memory. A quarter tank gone. The rest of the night.

North on Logan. The heater pushing air that Flash couldn’t feel. Streetlights on timer, half of them out. Denver at the dead center of February, and the city at this hour was empty in a way that made it look like a diagram of a city instead of one.

Three blocks in silence. Then Terri: “Arnold, are you hungry?”

“I’m fine.”

He was not fine. The thing in his chest that had wanted the man on the sidewalk wanted him now in the car, wanted him on every block they passed, wanted the shape in the bus shelter on Colfax and the silhouette crossing four blocks ahead and the memory of the girl’s pulse where her fingertips had touched his cheek. He was a mile from his apartment and the distance was full of people he could hear breathing.

Five Points. His apartment over the po’boy place on Brighton Boulevard. Up the back stairs, Terri ahead of him, items in his right arm.

Second-floor landing. The neighbor’s door. An old man in a recliner – Flash caught it through the wall, through the door, the heartbeat and the cigarette smoke and the TV light. He knew the man by silhouette, not by name. Retired warehouse worker. Pall Mall. Cat.

The hunger hit him the way a hit used to, the ones he hadn’t seen coming, the ones that rearranged the sequence of what he’d planned to do next. He set the pile of items on the landing floor. Three steps to the neighbor’s door. Behind him, Terri’s voice: “Arnold no, that’s a person –”

He didn’t parse her.

The door folded inward on the first hit. The strike plate came out of the jamb in a single piece. Inside: the recliner, the old man, the muted TV throwing blue, the Pall Mall trailing smoke from between two fingers. A tabby cat on his lap went sideways and vanished under the kitchenette counter.

Flash was across the room before the man’s mouth finished forming the first letter of what the hell.

His teeth rearranged. He did not feel them move. He felt them arrive. Through the skin of the man’s neck like foil. And then the blood was in his mouth and it was not like anything he had ever put in his mouth, not whiskey, not water, not any girl’s mouth at 2 AM – it was the thing that the word food had always been trying to describe and failing because the word had been attached to the wrong substances his entire life.

The old man’s heart failed at forty-five seconds. Flash felt it stop. The rhythm changed, went ragged, went thin, went to nothing. He kept drinking until there was nothing left to drink.

He came back sitting on the man’s chest in the reclined recliner. The TV was on mute. The cat was watching from under the counter, eyes flat and patient, not afraid. Not afraid was worse, again.

Terri stood in the broken doorway. Both hands flat on the jamb. Her eyes flashing green at the TV light.

“Arnold.”

One word. His name. Not a question, not an accusation. An identification. Letting him know who he still was, if he wanted to be.

He put the old man in his bed. Pulled the blanket to his chin. Closed his eyes. The skin was already cooling at a rate that didn’t match what Flash knew about dead bodies, which was nothing, but the speed of it registered anyway. As though the heat had never belonged to the man and was returning itself to the room.

“Sorry, chief.”

He set the recliner upright. Put out the Pall Mall. Found a dry food bowl on the kitchen floor and filled it. Topped off the water. Shut off the TV and the lamp. Locked the apartment from outside and wedged the strike plate back into the jamb until it held.

Terri kept the keys.

They climbed one flight. Flash’s apartment. The door he’d locked six hours ago, when the girl from the Brewery had still been a possibility.

Terri spread the items on the kitchenette table the way she arranged samples in the lab – vial rack center, case right, journal left, clipboard in front with intake forms face-up.

Top form. Flash read his own name.

Subject: FS-04. Name: Arnold Lyle Simpson. DOB: 02/17/1960. Address correct. Knee injury listed – right anterior cruciate, the one that wasn’t there anymore. Next-of-kin: Charles Simpson. Deceased. Flash hadn’t updated that line on any form in seven years. The signature at the bottom was his. Indistinguishable from his. He did not remember signing.

“There are five of these,” Terri said. She was standing over the table, both hands flat on the surface. “We were not kidnapped. We signed up.”

Vince’s form. VB-00. Witness: J. Prestor. The dosage column read one-quarter standard. Terri’s finger on the number: “A quarter dose. He gave Vince a quarter of what he gave us. Vince was the test.”

The woman and the girl were not on the clipboard. No form. No subject number. Flash understood this without Terri explaining it. They had not been subjects. They had been materials.

Terri pulled a vial from the rack and held it to the light. Dark liquid, too thick for saline, too dark for any plasma Flash had ever seen in a hospital. “This is not a synthetic compound. This is blood. Processed. Other people’s blood.” She set the vial down. “He injected us with other people’s blood at midnight in a townhouse basement.”

She put her hand on the journal. Leather cover, cracked and blackened.

“There’s a name for what we are. I’ve known it since the basement. I’ve known it since you put your fist through the wall.” Her voice was steady. Chemist-steady. “Do you want to say it or do you want me to.”

The case opened on a foam interior. One ampoule, sealed at both ends, clear liquid. Three empty recesses where three other ampoules had been. A folded paper tucked into the lid.

The paper: top half in the same French handwriting as the vial labels. Dosing notes. Bottom third in English, different hand, the pen pressed too hard – the letters denting through to the back. A letter from someone who signed himself “RK.” Klondike. Offering himself as a test subject. The handwriting got worse toward the end, the letters tighter.

I have been someone’s hand for three hundred years. I would rather die a free man than continue as I am.

Terri read it twice. “He hadn’t sent it yet. No envelope. No fold from mailing. He kept it in this case with the single dose of the thing Prestor was going to test on him. Prestor had already prepared the dose.”

The journal was French. Ninety-plus years of consistent handwriting, the same hand from the late 1800s to entries dated this month. Terri turned pages. Found the diagnostic page – a diagram, circles and arrows, labels in a chemist’s notation. She read for ninety seconds. Flash counted the seconds by the refrigerator’s hum.

She sat back. Both hands flat on the table.

“Vampire, Arnold.”

She said it flat. Once. A chemist labeling a beaker.

Prestor had used the word in French for a century. He believed he’d been made into one. He believed he could unmake what was made. The Anti-Body was the unmaking – ninety years of work, never tested on a living subject. Then he’d made five test subjects, and someone had killed him before he could test it.

The diagram showed a progression: Sujet to etat vampirique to Serum to Sujet – restauration humaine. And a fourth circle, off to the side, connected by arrows that ended in question marks: Anti-Corps #2.

Terri continued. The vials. The processed blood. “He mixed sources. Multiple sources. He took blood from however many other vampires he had access to, and he combined them, and he injected the combination into us.” She touched one of the vials. “He made us out of pieces of other people.”

Flash looked at his hands. The knuckles were smooth. The skin was cool. The knee that had ended his career was whole and silent. The old man downstairs was in his bed with the blanket pulled to his chin, and Flash could still taste him – copper and iron and something older, something that tasted like a word he didn’t have.

4:58 on the stove clock. Refrigerator hum. The journal open on the table. Terri’s hands flat on the surface. Outside, the thin Denver dark leaning toward morning.

Something in Flash’s chest stretched. Not the hunger. Not the strength. Something that had been there all along, pressed flat behind his ribs, waiting. It didn’t need him to name it. It had been called the wrong thing his whole life and now someone had finally gotten it right.