Chapter 3
He did not attempt to stop me nor fight me. After a few seconds, I realized I was not taking any blood from him. In fact, I could not taste anything remotely alive beneath my fangs so I pushed him away and sniffed the other two. Neither of them had any blood in their bodies and for the first time, I looked into them and never saw the bright crimson of a beating heart.
“What are you?” I burst out and Cabor gripped my arms with a force that no human ever possessed. He easily held me on the bed.
“We are medical technicians sent to help you,” Cabor returned.
“Are there any live people in this place?”
“Of course. Until we learn if you were sent here to cause conflict, we were ordered to interact with you to protect our people.” He raised one hand to his neck and inspected the damage my teeth had made on it. “What is the meaning of such actions, Tobias?” He questioned. “Were you attempting to…eat me? Are you a cannibal?”
“No!” I protested but felt the cravings creeping up on me. I was going to die from hunger in the city under the ice if all the…things I saw were like him. I couldn’t tell through the windows if the rest of them were flesh and blood or like him. I whispered that I was not human anymore; that I needed blood to survive and my statement intrigued him. This prompted the three of them to examine me again, scanning me a dozen different ways and they poked me with sharp needles as the female took blood from me. I could not protest, Cabor easily held me down with one hand on my chest and the other on my belly.
“Hmmm,” he muttered to himself. “I had assumed that his physiological changes were due to the divergence of the species since the Fracture but not having a database to examine before him has limited my conclusions. His makeup also suggests that it is a recent conversion and not a genetic one.”
“What are your findings, Cabor?” A disembodied voice asked somewhere near my head.
“I do not know, Councilor Remy. His body temperature is much lower than the standard norm, his heartbeat and, respirations are almost non-existent. His blood is…peculiar to say the least. It appears to be blood but there are particles within it that do not correspond to WBCs and RBCs yet it is definitely alive when it and he should not be.”
He examined the wound after removing the bandages. Although he poked and prodded me, it did not hurt as badly as when I awoke. “The tissues are healing at an incredible rate, even faster than the tissue regenerator could perform. Councilor Remy, the arrow I removed was in his heart. By all rights, he should be dead. I have no explanation.”
“I have read of such creatures in the archives,” another younger and hesitant voice said. “Voracious, seductive beasts that lived on human blood. They were destroyed by sunlight and wooden stakes through the heart.”
“Not silver?” The tech asked.
“No. That was reserved for the man-beasts that claimed to become doglike creatures. They transformed by moonlight.”
“Shall I terminate him then, Councilor Remy?”
“Do you believe we can control this one? Make use of him if we release him back out on the green? You can wipe his memories of this place?”
The technician hesitated before he answered. “I’m not sure of anything about this one, Councilor Remy. He is totally unlike the other specimens I found or like you.”
“Put him on ice. Study him until you come to a decision and then inform the Council. We will make the final choice on your recommendations.”
“As you wish,” he bowed his head and went back to work on me. The first thing he did was inject me with something that turned my vision into a reddish fog and their voices became a drone that I could not decipher. I vaguely felt them stripping me to lie on a cold flat table of metal where my arms and legs were bolted away from my trunk. Things like metal spiders climbed up and down me, sticking thin metal arms and fingers in my nose, mouth and other places. I couldn’t move or do anything but let slow tears of humiliation drip down my cheeks. His face loomed over mine; his eyes were enormous dark pools that reflected my own image back at me.
I saw the twin streaks of red falling down the moonscape of my cheeks, saw him reach out a finger the size of a tree and touch me. Saw his crater of a mouth opening and knew he was saying, ‘tears of blood’ even though I could not hear his words. I drifted in a nightmare of knowing I would have been better off if I had died up on the glacier and not falling into the hands of these…mad men and their creatures that looked like men.
I felt nothing but the pressure against me. They were not inflicting pain on me for the sake of pain. At least, not where I could feel it. I wondered idly if I would wake up or they would…terminate me while I was unconscious and unknowing. Somehow, that seemed even worse than being tortured to death.
I wanted to live. Desperately and suddenly, I wanted to get up and run screaming from this strange place buried under the ice and to go home, to meet whatever fate had left for me there. I would rather die out under the Newland sun facing that death than to be put out unknowingly like a snuffed candle.
In my sleep, I thrashed and struggled out from under what I perceived as a spell holding me trapped. I tapped into the magic force that I knew ran through this land, that I knew powered the Border Wall and created the Mist. I found it here too, buried along with the city, buried under the ice as if they too used it to power their culture even though they called it something different. I opened my eyes in the dark and saw the room as if it were bright daylight.