Birth of a Dark Nation (40 page)

We boarded the elevator and pressed the
button for the sixth floor. We opened our toolboxes and gripped the
magnificent Glocks that Babarinde had gifted us before we left.
Specially equipped for regular, silver, and wooden bullets. I
secretly prayed I'd get to use them soon.

We got off the elevator and hurried down the
hall. The other offices were dark, long closed for the evening. We
saw light at the end of the hallway, where Dr. Zolotov's office
was.

Dante arrived at the door first, saw that it
was locked, and quickly jimmied it open. I went in first and Justin
covered me.

The lab was one large, open space, with lab
tables, chairs, and long countertops along the walls. The harsh
fluorescent lights showed a lab of organized chaos: notebooks and
laptops and boxes of data interspersed with microscopes and test
tubes. I noticed a dozen flasks of blood on the central island. I
fingered the flasks, picked them up, and smelled them. It was
definitely our blood.

A tall white man with a head full of curly
gray hair came out of a carrel in the back of the room with a mug
of piping hot coffee. He glanced at us and we raised our
pistols.

"Greetings, Dr. Zolotov," I said. He dropped
his coffee to the floor and the mug shattered. He raised his hands
up.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

"The better question is: what are you doing
here? Seems to me like this blood you have here belongs to us. We'd
like it back."

"What are you talking about? I am performing
legitimate-"

"Don't bullshit me, old man," I said, running
to the doctor in seconds flat. "I know who the fuck you're working
for! Now tell me right now what you're researching!"

Dante and Justin were at either side of the
doctor in moments.

"You don't work for Nigel," he surmised.

"Nope. You can consider me to be an
independent contractor."

"What do you want from me?"

"Tell me everything about your experiments on
our blood."

"I…I can't."

I grabbed his hand and squeezed it until I
felt the bone in his thumb pop.

"Argh!" he bellowed. He fell to the floor. I
squatted in front of him.

"Dr. Zolotov. As a scientist, I'm quite sure
you need both of your hands daily to conduct your dirty little
experiments. I get that. You're just doing your job. But I can
promise you that if you don't tell me what I want to know,
something else will get broken. And I don't stop at fingers or
limbs. Collarbones are especially fun."

My long finger traced a line over the
doctor's collarbone. I smiled as he trembled.

"I was contracted two years ago by Nigel
Artinian for blood research. He told me he would supply it as long
as I didn't ask any questions. At first, I was getting blood from
him and his…people." The doctor paused.

"You know what his people are, right?" I
asked. The doctor nodded.

"I didn't at first. I know now.
Vampires."

"Continue."

"I found out on my own because of the
experiments. The blood…rapidly dehydrated itself under ultraviolet
light. And when I took a vial into direct sunlight, it was an
almost instant reaction. All that was left was slime."

"Yeah, yeah, we know all about vampire blood.
Tell me what you discovered about our blood."

"There were similar properties.
Hyper-regeneration when disturbed. Resistance to stress on the
molecular level. But the blood you're referring to…it's different
on a genetic level."

"Go on."

"Humans, vampires, and…your kind…all have
nearly identical DNA when compared. But two things are happening
that make them different. First, humans lack one of the base pairs
that you and the vampires have in your DNA."

"What's a base pair?" I asked.

"It's like one of those rods in the double
helix in a strand of DNA," Justin said.

I stared at him.

"What? I took genetics in college."

"So, you and the vampires have a different
base pair. If a human receives a transfusion of vampire blood, the
vampire DNA will cause the human DNA to mutate into the dominant
strand. That's how vampires are made. But with your people's blood
and human blood, it never worked. The mutation never happened."

"You're special," Dante told Justin, who
tried to stifle a smile.

"Oh, for the love of God. And what about when
you mixed daywalker blood with nightwalkers?"

"Daywalkers?"

"It's what we call ourselves. Come on, doc.
Context clues."

"Oh… Well, when we mixed those two, there was
another reaction, but not a full mutation. A process occurred
temporarily that produced side effects that suggested a mutation.
Namely, a temporary immunity to the effects of sunlight. But it
didn't last."

"Would you say your experiments failed,
then?" Dante asked.

"My work has been extraordinary. I learned
things and saw things I'd never see without Nigel. We had a
breakthrough recently. We discovered that your daywalker blood has
a binding agent that doesn't appear in humans or vampires. It's
almost like a virus. It's harmless in you and in humans, but it
practically disintegrates in vampires. Whatever allows you to walk
around in the daylight just refuses to cooperate with vampire
physiology. I call it the Redemptive Agent."

"Redemptive? Why?"

"Because it prevents your strand of vampirism
from being a curse. You get all of the benefits of the disorder but
you can still function in society, in the sunlight."

"The Redemptive Agent," Justin repeated.

"What now?" Dante asked me.

I pondered this new information for a moment.
I stood up and walked away, glancing at shelf upon shelf of
notebooks and journals.

"All this data…all this is related to your
experiments?"

"Yes, it is. Groundbreaking work. Years of my
life."

"You know we're going to have to destroy it,
right?"

"Please, please don't."

"Dr. Zolotov, you should have never been
brought into this at all. I do apologize. Hopefully, your insurance
will cover this."

"Insurance?"

"Yes. You do have fire insurance, right?"

The good doctor began to weep.

"Come now, get yourself together. Nigel swore
you to secrecy anyway, it's not like you were going to get a…what
do you call it…Justin, that thing that Martin Luther King got?"

"Nobel Prize?"

"Yes. Doctor, you weren't getting a Nobel
Prize for this."

"Sir, let me make a proposition to you. Let
me work for you instead. Maybe I can figure out a way to induce
mutation from daywalker to human? Wouldn't you like that?"

I laughed.

"Sir, we already have the key to that, and
his name is Justin."

"Hi." Justin waved.

"But we simply cannot allow you to continue
these experiments on our people. Firstly, because it's wrong. You
might not have been drawing the blood, but you didn't question
where it came from. You knew Nigel Artinian was sinister from the
start. But because he was paying you on time, you didn't question
it. Hmm? Didn't even want to know how he was getting these vials of
blood or who he was torturing to get it. Did you? Did you?!"

I smashed my hand on top of the doctor's,
shattering his bones. He screamed.

"Secondly, you've taught us a lot today. But
your research ends here. Nigel probably wants you to stabilize the
Redemptive Agent, doesn't he?"

The doctor nodded.

"I thought so. Well, we can't have that. The
minute that nightwalkers can walk around in the daylight is the end
of the world as we know it. Nightwalkers are evil. You think the
word 'bloodthirsty' just came out of nowhere? It was meant for
them. It defines their essence. You make the Redemptive Agent work
for them and you've signed your own death sentence and that of your
entire people. I so wish you had found us first. I wish that my
people could have employed you. You might not have been as wealthy
as you are with vampire money, but maybe you'd be able to sleep
better at night. I'm sad that this is how you have to learn the
difference between a nightwalker and a daywalker."

"What's the difference?" Dr. Zolotov spat.
"You've crippled my hands and you'll destroy my practice.
Everything I've worked for down the drain."

I laughed again.

"The difference between a vampire and a
daywalker? A daywalker might let you live. Good day, Dr. Zolotov.
Justin? Seal it with a kiss."

Justin's fangs popped down and the good Dr.
Zolotov screamed. Dante stifled his mouth and Justin dug deep into
the doctor's neck. His jaw raised and dropped with each gulp.

I looked around the office once more. There
was more data here than we could possibly carry, but we had to take
as much as possible. I couldn't make heads or tails of it, but
Babarinde would appreciate it. We'd need his hard drives, too.

"Doctor?" I called out.

"He's already unconscious," Dante
responded.

"Shit," I said. "Hopefully, he wasn't dumb
enough to back up his data on a cloud drive. Justin? Justin!"

"Yesh?" he asked, blood dripping from his
mouth.

"If we take his computer, can you hack into
it? See if he backed up any data to a cloud?"

He nodded vigorously and tried to dig back
into the doctor's neck.

"Don't be greedy. Let Dante have some." Dante
scooted next to the doctor and took some gulps.

Within the hour, the building was burning. By
the time the fire department came, Dr. Zolotov's remaining work was
surely all destroyed. Yet, they found the good doctor and the
security guard sleeping soundly across the street, without a clue
as to how the attack had happened.

Dante and Justin snored in the back of the
van among the stolen computer equipment and files. They cuddled in
a spoon position that I'd often shared with Ogundiya over the
years. My brother, my best friend, my lover—but not my
ipsaji
. Wherever he was now was exactly where he wanted to
be: alone and introspective.

Our focus was on Aborişade. Ogundiya would be
found later if he wanted to be. I hadn't seen him in years.

I slept on and off in my king-sized bed while
Ogundiya lay next to me reading a vintage Batman comic book.

I heard a tap on the door.

"What?" I said through my pillow. Aborişade
walked in.

"I need to talk to you," he said.

"Yeah?" He sat down in a chair near my bed
and exhaled, clearly nervous to be having this conversation with
me.

"We've had a lot of adventures since we've
been in DC. Done a lot of things. Met a lot of people.
Helped
a lot of people. And I want to do more. I think
that's what my purpose is in life."

"Your purpose?" I asked, sitting up in
bed.

"Yes. There's more for me out there. These
people…these people need me. They need us. And I want to help them
somehow. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've come to a
decision: I'm leaving."

"So that's it? You're going to leave? Just
like that?"

"Yes. I have to."

"So you think you can just be some goddamned
superhero? Is that what it is? You wanna rescue kittens from trees?
Help old ladies across the street? Well, I've got news for you,
sir. We're not heroes. These frail creatures, these humans, are our
food. We drink them. They don't need you to be their savior. They
need a hero to protect them from you! You understand me? You are
the predator. And don't you ever forget that."

"We might need human blood for our long-term
survival, but our relationship is symbiotic. We've always been able
to feed from them and still let them live. Always."

"You think you're so special, so
altruistic…"

"I don't think that at all."

"And Babarinde always liked you best."

"Babarinde is letting me leave."

"Lies! He would never let you do something so
stupid."

"He would and he did. You can call him right
now if you want."

"Then he's a fool just like you!"

"I'm a fool for wanting to help? For wanting
to give back?"

"These cattle have given us nothing but their
blood!"

"They have given us wisdom. They've given us
knowledge. And they've shown us resilience. Not to mention hope.
That's probably their greatest gift to us."

"Hope?" I laughed, a genuine, hearty guffaw.
"Hope? In Africa, they showed us their greed. On the slave ship,
they showed us their cruelty. In Dominica, they showed us their
vengefulness. In New Orleans, they showed us their callousness. And
here, in Washington? Corruption. Deceit. Apathy.
Even—especially—among the black people here. Do you know how tired
I am of living in silence among people who have the world at their
fingertips but won't get up and fight for themselves to take it?
The slaves are already free, Aborişade, but they are too lazy and
lost to take what they're owed. If you want to fight for
that
, be my guest."

"You act like you weren't standing there next
to me in 1934 when we supported those Howard students protesting
against lynching. Remember? They stood there in the winter coats
with ropes around their necks in front of the National Crime
Conference. Or what about the March on Washington? Weren't you
moved then, when we heard Martin Luther King speak, in the flesh?
We witnessed watershed moments in human history—in black history.
There is hope for these people."

"What are you going to do, then? Pack a
knapsack and just start hitchhiking all across the country, looking
for problems to solve?"

"Maybe. I don't see why not."

"You're the dumbest fuck who ever lived."

Aborişade's face fell. He stood up and walked
toward my bedroom door.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," he said. I
heard him go into his room and shuffle things around.