Blood Born Read online

  The exiled Washington Post ran an exposé on the military’s practice of arresting women from the quarantine zone who were suspected of being pregnant. What happened to due process? it asked. Why can’t their families have any contact with them? Seemingly in answer to its own question, other articles about confirmed bigfoot pregnancies remained grim: so far, all women pregnant with them had died. If the baby didn’t attack and kill the mother at birth, the mother still expired from shock and hemorrhaging. The only consolation, if you could call it that, came from the lone National Guardsman who always stood by during a birth, holding his sidearm in ready position until he delivered the infant’s coup de grâce.

  Reading about all this, Christina Randall again thanked her stars that she’d survived the bigfoot’s rape—and was still childless.

  She folded the newspaper in her lap and relaxed in the lawn chair she had placed at the entrance of her tent. Across the narrow avenue, two shirtless children shot each other with water pistols, trying to cope with the oppressive July heat. Randall and these children and Margaret Connolly, who lived the next avenue over, were all residents of Tent City Alpha 26. It was a refugee camp at Fort Story, an Army base in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

  For now, she wasn’t a police detective, although they’d allowed her to keep her gun—really Officer Heager’s old gun—in a padlocked footlocker beneath her bunk. She wasn’t anything, really, other than Christina Randall, a recovering rape victim and refugee from the DC quarantine zone. It was nice to have a break from her responsibilities.

  The footlocker holding her gun now was also packed with her other meager belongings, ready for the trip to New Jersey to stay with her mother. Mom was expected to arrive that afternoon to pick her up. (“You’re doing all the driving on the way back,” Mom had warned. She’d sounded irritable, but Randall knew she was pleased her daughter was coming home.)

  Randall looked up as Margaret Connolly approached. Little clouds of dust exploded from beneath each footstep. “I got your note,” Margaret said. “Are you leaving today?”

  “Just as soon as my mother arrives. Here, have a seat.” Randall pulled out the second Army-issue chair from behind the tent flap. “Actually, I’m not looking forward to the drive. We have to divert all the way out to 81 because the Beltway and 95 are still closed around DC.”

  Margaret looked her over for a moment. Perhaps she was noting that they both wore the same humanitarian-issue, cream-colored T-shirts and khaki shorts. Except for the sweat stains at their armpits and necks, they both looked like some sort of cross between desert Army personnel and coffee-flavored creamsicles.

  “You look well,” Margaret said. “Did you hear anything back from that specialist?”

  She was referring to the endocrinologist the Army had brought in to examine Randall three days ago. The appointment wouldn’t have happened if Randall didn’t tell them she’d been raped by a bigfoot but had escaped becoming pregnant.

  “He was pretty interested in my blood sample. After the bigfoots assault somebody—I mean, rape,” she still had trouble saying the word, “and they do that second bite, they inject some sort of—he called it a retrovirus—to change the mother’s body. Otherwise she can’t support a rapid pregnancy.”

  Margaret nodded. “I’ve been wondering how that was possible. Go on.”

  “The retrovirus does all kinds of stuff. The biggest thing is it causes a massive production of that hormone you said I was lacking, progesterone? Actually, it doesn’t cause that hormone directly but another one. I can’t remember the name of it. Human something-something or other.”

  “Human chorionic gonadotropin.”

  Randall smiled. “Yeah. That. Anyway, the retrovirus alters the mother’s DNA.” She hooked a thumb back at her footlocker. “He gave me these horse pills I got to take every six hours to bring me back down to normal. The upshot is I no longer have that estrogen-dominance condition you were talking about. The bigfoot’s bite after he . . . um, assaulted me, effectively cured it.”

  “Hmm. Well, I don’t know about that. I think you better still see a doctor once you’re at your mother’s. And you still have your fibroids.”

  “Oh, I agree, but it’s still nice to know something good could come from this. Actually, my problem now is morning sickness. I guess that’s a side effect of progesterone?”

  “It is.” Margaret gazed at her folded hands. She looked like she wanted to confess something difficult. “I take it they’re done with your debriefing?”

  “Oh, yeah. A whole lot of gratitude there for all we’ve done, let me tell ya.” Randall rolled her eyes. “I think I’m through with that place—all of them.”

  “You’re done being a cop?”

  “No, just that I’m burnt out on Fairfax County. I don’t feel like going back to work in an area where it’s going to be like the aftermath of a hurricane. Once they reopen it, I might just clean all my shit out of my apartment, put it into storage, and go on a walkabout. Clear my head. I mean, I know there’s still some loose ends I gotta tie up. I owe a date to the post office guy for his help, for one thing, and maybe one to Josh Heager. So . . . I don’t know, maybe I will stick around. I just need a change. Maybe see the world a little bit, visit some old friends. I hardly have anyone in my life. I want that to change. I damn near killed myself on this job. I need to get out for a while.”

  “I feel the same way. I can’t bear the thought of going home. Seeing Daniella’s bedroom. . . .” Margaret trailed off as her eyes filled.

  Randall grimaced. She’d forgotten that another person sat there with feelings of her own. “How are you doing?”

  Margaret shook her head. “I’m not doing well at all. But my life’s going to change, too.”

  “Do you have any family?”

  “Not really. Daniella was all I had.” She looked into the sky.

  Randall hesitated, then tore off a corner of her newspaper. She scribbled down some numbers. “Here’s my mother’s phone number and my cell—really Josh Heager’s cell, but I’m borrowing it. You can give me a call whenever you want to, all right?”

  A tear fell from Margaret’s eye as she accepted the paper. “Thank you. I really appreciate it. I . . .” She sighed and seemed to get a hold of herself. “I’ve been in touch with the CalPark corporate office. They’re giving everyone at the clinic their normal salaries and benefits while the clinic is closed. I’ll stay with them long enough to get myself organized, but then I’m resigning.”

  “That’s good. I don’t blame you.”

  “I might go into private practice. Or I don’t know, maybe I’ll join you on that walkabout.” She smiled, but the strain of it looked like it hurt her.

  Randall nodded and swallowed thickly. “I’d like that.”

  “There just has to be some meaning to come out of all this. I can’t accept she died for nothing.” Margaret looked away and took another deep breath. “I wonder how my cat’s doing.”

  “Your cat?”

  “Gemini. The last I saw him was over a week ago, at my house. I hope he’s scrounging some food for himself.”

  Randall smiled. “That’s as good a reason to go back as any.”

  “Maybe I’ll become a veterinarian. I hear a lot of them are quitting these days.”

  “There ya go.”

  “I just don’t like CalPark anymore. . . . Do you know if they’re under investigation?”

  Randall shook her head. “No, and I don’t think they ever will be. The feds never really bought my story about Nick Schaefer, especially since I didn’t follow procedure in detaining him and searching his office. I got no evidence.”

  “But didn’t you say he made a scene behind your police station? He jumped into the air, and—”

  “The only other eyewitnesses besides me are dead. They all died at the Catholic school.”

  Randall didn’t add while rescuing your daughter, but she didn’t have to. Margaret’s eyes filled with tears. Randall grasped her hand. “Hey, hey, it�
�s not your fault. It’s not Daniella’s fault, either. What happened, happened. It’s over now.”

  “It’s not over. He got away.”

  “And he’s going to do what, go back to being an evil scientist? Not while I’m around.” Randall gaveled her fist on her knee. “Don’t you worry. I have a shit list I keep of names. Every few months, routinely, I run those names through a bunch of national databases and search engines. If he ever shows his face again, I’ll be on him like flies on shit. Guaranteed.”

  Margaret laughed and wiped a tear from her eye. “You’ll always be a detective. I know you will.”

  Randall grinned. “I guess so. But I’ll be the first detective who volunteers time as a sexual assault victim’s advocate.”

  Margaret smiled back before a distant look clouded her expression. “Randall—that second bite from the bigfoots. The one that injected the retrovirus.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did the Army specialist say that that’s what had to happen in order for the mother to give birth successfully?”

  “Well . . . no? I don’t follow you.”

  “Let me put it this way. Have there been any cases of a woman giving birth to a bigfoot baby and who did not receive the second bite?”

  Randall stroked her chin, thinking it over carefully. “No. I don’t think so. But I didn’t read all the M.E. reports coming in. The news always talked about two bites. I do know that all the girls at Fairfax Hospital were bit twice: once before the rape to taste-test and make sure they’re ovulating, and once after the rape to inject the retrovirus. I think it’s safe to assume they were all bitten twice.”

  “I see.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  Margaret folded her hands in front of her as if in prayer. “Did you read the medical examiner’s report on Frederica Wolford? What did it say?”

  Randall tried to think back. Across the street, the kids playing water gun wars finally tired of their game and went inside. “Yeah, I think I did, eventually. And yes, I think she was also bitten on the neck. Once or twice, I don’t remember.”

  “So, who bit her? I thought she was the original victim. There weren’t any bigfoots before her.”

  “That’s right. At least, that’s what Schaefer told me, but he was a liar.”

  Margaret raised her hands and let them drop as if to say, What are you, stupid? “Could it have been Schaefer?”

  “You mean, did he bite her?” Randall blinked in shock. “I guess he could have. I don’t know.”

  “You did say he had some of the creatures’ abilities.”

  “I’d always assumed that’s because he experimented on himself. It’s impossible to know, Margaret, not without finding him.”

  Margaret shook her head, obviously frustrated.

  Randall thought she had a point, but there was just no way to confirm the theory. It did raise a disturbing possibility, though. What if restarting the epidemic was as easy as Schaefer’s simply raping and biting someone new?

  Margaret crossed her arms. “He said science isn’t natural.”

  “What?”

  “When I spoke to him at the office that first night. I was there writing an opinion piece for the paper in rebuttal of Reverend Williams, who said science isn’t natural. Schaefer gave me some unsolicited advice.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That’s the strange part. He said I should ask Reverend Williams where he thinks science comes from, if it’s not a natural outgrowth of us as a species. The idea was to box the reverend into saying that it must come from God if not from us.”

  “Ha, that’s weak. If you use that logic, you could just as easily say science comes from the devil.”

  Margaret nodded. “Maybe that’s why he said he agreed with the reverend.”

  The two women regarded each other with pained expressions.

  Randall spoke what they were both thinking. “Just who in the hell is that guy?”

  Afterword

  Where Ideas are Born

  My story ideas are born any damn place possible. I’m not picky about those I raise to adulthood as long as I remain fertile. But you deserve a better explanation than that.

  I conceived one story while playing with my toddler son at the local tot lot. As I tried to keep him from picking up trash on his way to the playground’s slides, I noticed this hulking dude with tattoos beside a van. He was smoking a cigarette and watching my boy from behind mirrored sunglasses. Little warning prickles kept walking up my neck until Tattooed Dude turned to his child-snatcher van and hauled out . . .

  Yep, you guessed it. A child. Probably his. They entered the playground and proceeded to have a grand old time on the swings.

  When my shock wore off, I came home and wrote a short story, “It’s Just Business,” that contains that scene.

  So yeah, I’m a father. My life used to be Elmo, poopy diapers, and ultra-tight baby hugs around the windpipe, and in the years before my first child’s birth, when I wrote Blood Born, I spent a lot of time thinking about children and parenting and all the stuff that can go horribly wrong. That worry never stopped, of course. If little Owen’s—and later, Thomas’s—hand ever slipped out of mine in a parking lot, I immediately flashed to that scene in Pet Sematary where little Gage Creed runs into traffic to be creamed by a tractor trailer. I can testify that that feeling never completely goes away. (Get your noses out of your books and watch where you’re walking, boys. What did I teach you in jiujitsu about situational awareness?)

  Is it any wonder, then, that Blood Born deals with babies? Bad babies, of course. Babies conceived of brutal rapes and who come to term in just one week. Then eat their mothers. And grow to adulthood in just a few days to continue the cycle of rapes themselves.

  Blood Born falls into a body of stories I’ve written about parenting. “Cat’s Cradle” deals with the consequences of letting your cat sleep next to your pregnant wife’s belly. If your baby is born without a soul, don’t say I didn’t warn ya. “Maybe Monitored” started when I thought I heard strange voices in Owen’s room through the baby monitor. You can read all these stories and more in Dominoes in Time.

  So that’s Matthew Warner’s Idea-Trolling Suggestion #1. It’s a variation on the old “write about what you know” chestnut: write about what’s occupying your thoughts.

  There’s more to it than that, of course. I mixed some marketing considerations into Blood Born’s genesis. Such as, I wanted to reward readers of my previous novels by reusing a couple characters, namely Detective Christina Randall from The Organ Donor and the CalPark corporation from Eyes Everywhere.

  I also wanted to write a horror story that appeals to women. That meant strong, female protagonists dealing with a situation that targets women. And what could be more terrifying to a woman than rape?

  Sprinkled into that was my fascination with the Gaia theory—the idea of the Earth as an organism—and the paradigm of how a virus spreads. I learned in high school biology that when a virus invades a cell, it hijacks the cellular machinery to replicate itself, eventually causing the cell to explode and spread copies of the virus far and wide. I wondered how to represent such a thing if we took it up a frame of scale so that humans were the host “cells.” I concluded that a contagion spread by serial rapes and pregnancies was the logical choice.

  Blood Born is also a monster story, and like most Americans, I grapple with the existence of our bona fide monsters: the Osama bin Ladens and Donald Trumps of the world. I learned while living in the Washington, DC, area during and immediately after 9/11 that when the shit hits the fan in the nation’s capital, the federal government doesn’t just respond by cleaning the shit off the fan blades. It stuffs a cork up the ass of every life form within 500 miles, declares a moratorium on farts and other airborne pollutants, and borrows $14 trillion from China to invade places suspected of harboring chemical toilets.

  So, when a wave of strange animals starts impregnating every fertile woman in the DC area with creat
ures whom—for lack of a better moniker—the media label the Beltway Bigfoots, you can bet your bowel movements the government’s cure will indeed be worse than the disease, and, oh yeah, the baby will get thrown out with the bath water.

  Man, I’m glad to be living in the Shenandoah Valley now. Here, a subway is just a sandwich shop. But I still get stressed out being a father to babies and stories alike.

  So take a chance on my novels, will you? If you’re still hesitant, sample chapters and awesome book trailers for Blood Born and others can be viewed at MatthewWarner.com. And if that still doesn’t convince you, just lay your eyes on that sweet little boy pictured here with his daddy. You want him to eat, don’t you? I thought so.

  Thank You for Reading

  Please review this book on Amazon and Goodreads. A star rating or a sentence about what you think—good or bad—helps a title’s visibility and keeps authors and publishers in business.

  About the Author

  Matthew Warner is a writer in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. His most recent works include The Organ Donor: 15th Anniversary Edition from Bloodshot Books and Empire of the Goddess from Thunderstorm Books. He lives with his wife, the artist Deena Warner, and sons, Owen and Thomas. More info at matthewwarner.com.