“You don’t have to feel any obligation to me just because — we’re the only ones left.”
His eyes were bleak as he looked at her, and he felt a brief stirring of guilt at her words. Why should I doubt her? he told himself. If she’s infected, she’ll never get away alive. What’s there to fear?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I — I have been alone a long time.”
She didn’t look up.
“If you’d like to talk,” he said, “I’ll be glad to — tell you anything I can.”
She hesitated a moment. Then she looked at him, her eyes not committing themselves at all.
“I would like to know about the disease,” she said. “I lost my two girls because of it. And it caused my husband's death.”
He looked at her and then spoke.
“It’s a bacillus,” he said, “a cylindrical bacterium. It creates an isotonic solution in the blood, circulates the blood slower than normal, activates all bodily functions, lives on fresh blood, and provides energy. Deprived of blood, it makes self-killing bacteriophages or else sporulates.”
She looked blank. He realized then that she couldn’t have understood. Terms so common to him now were completely foreign to her.
“Well,” he said, “most of those things aren’t so important. To sporulate is to create an oval body that has all the basic ingredients of the vegetative bacterium. The germ does that when it gets no fresh blood. Then, when the vampire host decomposes, these spores go flying out and seek new hosts. They find one, germinate — and one more system is infected.”
She shook her head incredulously.
“Bacteriophages are inanimate proteins that are also created when the system gets no blood. Unlike the spores, though, in this case abnormal metabolism destroys the cells.”
Quickly he told her about the imperfect waste disposal of the lymphatic system, the garlic as allergen causing anaphylaxis, the various vectors of the disease.
“Then why are we immune?” she asked.
For a long moment he looked at her, withholding any answer. Then, with a shrug, he said, “I don’t know about you. As for me, while I was stationed in Panama during the war I was bitten by a vampire bat. And, though I can’t prove it, my theory is that the bat had previously encountered a true vampire and acquired the vampiris germ. The germ caused the bat to seek human rather than animal blood. But, by the time the germ had passed into my system, it had been weakened in some way by the bat’s system. It made me terribly ill, of course, but it didn’t kill me, and as a result, my body built up an immunity to it. That’s my theory, anyway. I can’t find any better reason.”
“But — didn’t the same thing happen to others down there?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I killed the bat.” He shrugged. “Maybe I was the first human it had attacked.”
She looked at him without a word, her surveillance making Neville feel restive. He went on talking even though he didn’t really want to.
Briefly he told her about the major obstacle in his study of the vampires.
“At first I thought the stake had to hit their hearts,” he said. “I believed the legend. I found out that wasn’t so. I put stakes in all parts of their bodies and they died. That made me think it was hemorrhage. But then one day–”
And he told her about the woman who had decomposed before his eyes.
“I knew then it couldn’t be hemorrhage,” he went on, feeling a sort of pleasure in reciting his discoveries. “I didn’t know what to do. Then one day it came to me.”
“What?” she asked.
“I took a dead vampire. I put his arm into an artificial vacuum. I punctured his arm inside that vacuum. Blood spurted out.” He paused. “But that’s all.”
She stared at him.
“You don’t see,” he said.
“I — No,” she admitted.
“When I let air back into the tank, the arm decomposed,” he said.
She still stared.
“You see,” he said, “the bacillus is a facultative saprophyte. It lives with or without oxygen; but with a difference. Inside the system, it is anaerobic and sets up a symbiosis with the system. The vampire feeds it fresh blood, the bacteria provides the energy so the vampire can get more fresh blood. The germ also causes, I might add, the growth of the canine teeth.”
“Yes?” she said.
“When air enters,” he said, “the situation changes instantaneously. The germ becomes aerobic and, instead of being symbiotic, it becomes virulently parasitic.” He paused. “It eats the host,” he said.
“Then the stake– she started.
“Lets air in. Of course. Lets it in and keeps the flesh open so that the body glue can’t function. So the heart has nothing to do with it. What I do now is cut the wrists deep enough so that the body glue can’t work.” He smiled a little. “When I think of all the time I used to spend making stakes!”
She nodded and, noticing the wineglass in her hand, put it down.
“That’s why the woman I told you about broke down so rapidly,” he said. “She’d been dead so long that as soon as air struck her system the germs caused spontaneous dissolution.”
Her throat moved and a shudder ran down through her.
“It’s horrible,” she said.
He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn’t that odd? He hadn’t thought that for years. For him the word ‘horror’ had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliche. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.
“And what about the — the ones who are still alive?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “when you cut their wrists the germ naturally becomes parasitic. But mostly they die from simple hemorrhage.”
“Simple–”
She turned away quickly and her lips were pressed into a tight, thin line.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“N–nothing. Nothing,” she said.
He smiled. “One gets used to these things,” he said. “One has to.”
Again she shuddered, the smooth column of her throat contracting.
“You can’t abide by Robert’s Rules of Order in the jungle,” he said. “Believe me, it’s the only thing I can do. Is it better to let them die of the disease and return — in a far more terrible way?”
She pressed her hands together.
“But you said a lot of them are — are still living,” she said nervously. “How do you know they’re not going to stay alive?”
“I know,” he said. “I know the germ, know how it multiplies. No matter how long their systems fight it, in the end the germ will win. I’ve made antibiotics, injected dozens of them. But it doesn’t work, it can’t work.
You can’t make vaccines work when they’re already deep in the disease. Their bodies can’t fight germs and make antibodies at the same time. It can’t be done, believe me. It’s a trap. If I didn’t kill them, sooner or later they’d die and come after me. I have no choice; no choice at all.”
They were silent then and the only sound in the room was the rasping of the needle on the inner grooves of the record. She wouldn’t look at him, but kept staring at the floor with bleak eyes. It was strange, he thought, to find himself vaguely on the defensive for what yesterday was accepted necessity. In the years that had passed he had never once considered the possibility that he was wrong. It took her presence to bring about such thoughts: And they were strange, alien thoughts.
“Do you actually think I’m wrong?” he asked in an incredulous voice.
She bit into her lower lip.
“Ruth,” he said.
“It’s not for me to say,” she answered.
Chapter Eighteen
“Virge!”
The dark form recoiled against the wall as Robert Neville’s hoarse cry ripped open the silent blackness.
He jerked his body up from the couch and stared with sleep-clouded eyes across the room, his chest pulsing with heartbeats like maniac fists on a dungeon wall.
He lurched up to his feet, brain still foggy with sleep; unable to define time or place.
“Virge?” he said again, weakly, shakily. “Virge?’
“It — it’s me,” the faltering voice said in the darkness. He took a trembling step toward the thin stream of light spearing through the open peephole. He blinked dully at the light.
She gasped as he put his hand out and clutched her shoulder.
“It’s Ruth. Ruth,” she said in a terrified whisper. He stood there rocking slowly in the darkness, eyes gazing without comprehension at the dark form before him.
“It’s Ruth,” she said again, more loudly. Waking came like a hose blast of numbing shock. Something twisted cold knots into his chest and stomach. It wasn’t Virge. He shook his head suddenly, rubbed shaking fingers across his eyes.
Then he stood there staring, weighted beneath a sudden depression.
“Oh,” he muttered faintly. “Oh, I–”
He remained there, feeling his body weaving slowly in the dark as the mists cleared from his brain.
He looked at the open peephole, then back at her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, voice still thick with sleep.
“Nothing,” she said nervously. “I — couldn’t sleep.”
He blinked his eyes suddenly at the flaring lamplight. Then his hands dropped down from the lamp switch and he turned around. She was against the wall still, blinking at the light, her hands at her sides drawn into tight fists.
“Why are you dressed?” he asked in a surprised voice. Her throat moved and she stared at him. He rubbed his eyes again and pushed back the long hair from his temples.
“I was — just looking out,” she said.
“But why are you dressed?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He stood looking at her, still a little groggy, feeling his heartbeat slowly diminish. Through the open peephole he heard them yelling outside, and he heard Cortman shout, “Come out, Neville!” Moving to the peephole, he pushed the small wooden door shut and turned to her.
“I want to know why you’re dressed,” he said again.
“No reason,” she said.
“Were you going to leave while I was asleep?”
‘‘No, I–”
“Were you?”
She gasped as he grabbed her wrist.
“No, no,” she said quickly. “How could I, with them out there?”
He stood breathing heavily, looking at her frightened face. His throat moved slowly as he remembered the shock of waking up and thinking that she was Virge.
Abruptly he dropped her arm and turned away. And he’d thought the past was dead. How long did it take for a past to die?
She said nothing as he poured a tumblerful of whisky and swallowed it convulsively. Virge, Virge, he thought miserably, still with me. He closed his eyes and jammed his teeth together.
“Was that her name?” he heard Ruth ask. His muscles tightened, then went slack.
“It’s all right,” he said in a dead voice. “Go to bed.”
She drew back a little. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean–”
Suddenly he knew he didn’t want her to go to bed. He wanted her to stay with him. He didn’t know why, he just didn’t want to be alone.
“I thought you were my wife,” he heard himself saying. “I woke up and I thought–”
He drank a mouthful of whisky, coughing as part of it went down the wrong way. Ruth stayed in the shadows, listening.
“She came back, you see,” he said. “I buried her, but one night she came back. She looked like — like you did. An outline, a shadow. Dead. But she came back. I tried to keep her with me. I tried, but she wasn’t the same any more — you see. All she wanted was–”
He forced down the sob in his throat.
“My own wife,” he said in a trembling voice, “coming back to drink my blood!”
He jammed down the glass on the bar top. Turning away, he paced restlessly to the peephole, turned, and went back and stood again before the bar. Ruth said nothing; she just stood in the darkness, listening.
“I put her away again,” he said. “I had to do the same thing to her I’d done to the others. My own wife.” There was a clicking in his throat. “A stake,” he said in a terrible voice. “I had to put a stake in her. It was the only thing I knew to do. I–”
He couldn’t finish. He stood there a long time, shivering helplessly, his eyes tightly shut.
Then he spoke again.
“Almost three years ago I did that. And I still remember it, it’s still with me. What can you do? What can you do?” He drove a fist down on the bar top as the anguish of memory swept over him again. “No matter how you try, you can’t forget or — or adjust or — ever get away from it!”
He ran shaking fingers through his hair.
“I know what you feel, I know. I didn’t at first, I didn’t trust you. I was safe, secure in my little shell. Now...” He shook his head slowly, defeatedly. “In a second, it’s all gone. Adjustment, security, peace — all gone.”
“Robert.”
Her voice was as broken and lost as his.
“Why were we punished like this?” she asked.
He drew in a shuddering breath.
“I don’t know,” he answered bitterly. “There’s no answer, no reason. It just is.”
She was close to him now. And suddenly, without hesitation or drawing back, he drew her against him, and they were two people holding each other tightly in the lost measure of night.
“Robert, Robert.