Nightwing (11 page)

Paine watched the power shovels browsing a quarter mile deep in the pit. Steel cables dragged jaws over blasted ore. Overflowing, the jaws swung up, wheezed, rotated to dump trucks, and regurgitated tons of low-grade coal. They looked like brontosaurs lethargically feeding in a dry lagoon.

“You wanted to see me.” Chee stepped aside from his group to Paine.

“Yes. I understand that all medical queries have to go through you.”

“Right.” The Navajo scratched his vest. It was hot by the strip mine. His eyes stayed hooked on Piggot.

“I’ve been doing a kind of biological survey—”

“Some other time,” Chee suggested impatiently. “I have an office, you know. Make an appointment.”

“Well, I have a photo to show you.” Paine blocked Chee’s view with a manila envelope.

“Excuse me.”

“Just take a look.”

“Some other—”

Paine slid the photograph from the envelope. The picture was a color blowup of a vampire bite, a clean crater two millimeters deep into richly vascularized human dermal tissue.

“Where the hell did you get that?” Chee reacted with anger.

“I—”

Chee grabbed Paine by the arm and forcibly led him another fifty feet from the lip of the mine. He started whispering furiously.

“What are you up to? Who gave that picture to you? I’m trying to do business here and all I need is some white son of a bitch like you busting up a million-dollar deal with some story about plague. You know what those men over there are going to do if they hear the world ‘plague’? You ever seen a limousine vanish?”

“I didn’t say anything about plague,” Paine said.

The long moment that followed turned exquisite for Paine. In fact, his picture was of a Mexican Indian who’d been bitten months before but he calculated swiftly and accurately.

“You have a photo like this, too,” he told Chee. “You have somebody with wounds like this and he has plague. Do you know what made those wounds?”

Chee didn’t answer.

“Then you’re very fortunate,” Paine said, “Because I know, and you’re going to hire me.”

That encounter with Chee at the strip mine was only the first. After, were more meetings at Window Rock and on the mesa, transfers of an unpublicized autopsy report from Chee and lists of equipment demanded by Paine.

Now, in the dozing heat of midday, Paine was searching for fleas.

The desert’s arroyos were still slightly dark, as if bruised by yesterday’s rain. Yucca stems vibrated through waves of warm air.

The Painted Desert appealed to Paine. He appreciated the false sterility that masked such desperate adaptations of life as limbless lizards and giant saguaros. More than that, he savored the loneliness, the sense that he could go days, months if he wanted, without seeing another human soul. Other people, no matter how different, were mirrors of one’s self. Paine wanted no reflections.

He drove over a sand dune to hard ground, where he stopped and climbed to the roof of the Land Rover. He’d seen one vulture earlier. This time through his field glasses he spotted two about half a mile up and two miles away, spiraling down a thermal. A third vulture joined them. Paine slipped down into the cab, throwing the glasses aside to get the truck into gear.

A matter of minutes could make his work a hundred times more difficult. Paine pushed the Rover up to 30, running over mesquite and crashing through sand drifts. Already, without glasses, he saw more vultures descending the thermal. A deep arroyo about six feet wide stretched in front of Paine. He swerved right, found a rise, and shoved his foot to the floor. At 40, the Rover cleared the arroyo, bounced stiffly, and continued over a drift.

Paine hit his horn. A mile off on a surprisingly green knoll was a truck in the middle of sixty or seventy vultures. Sheep carcasses covered the hill. Horn blaring, Paine drove into the scavengers, scattering them off his fenders. Red eyes staring out of black faces, the vultures hopped away, trying to gather air in their four-foot wing-spread. Paine braked and jumped out of the Rover, cocking his .45 as he hit the ground. He fired, taking the head off one bird. The rest scattered in a black wave, lumbering up. Paine fired again, straight up, just to keep them moving.

Death, he’d long ago learned, was not a moment of calm. Without the squabbling of vultures, the hill still resounded with the vibrant activity of flies. When he left the vultures would return, and mice and smaller birds, a whole chorus of scavengers great and small. He only hoped he was in time.

From the back of the Land Rover he took his aluminum case, which he spread open beside a lamb that had been reduced to head, feet, and a thousand flies fighting for room to lay their eggs. He tied on a surgical mask and slipped on rubber gloves. Around his waist he strapped a belt of his own design. In addition to a holster for his automatic, the belt carried in leather-and-felt cups an odd number of jars, syringes, scalpels, operating scissors, glassine envelopes, and a jeweler’s eyeglass.

The truck stationed on the hill didn’t even have wheels, it was on blocks. The windows and windshield were smeared with blood from the inside. Paine grasped the handle of the door and stepped aside as he opened it.

No one fell out. There was no body in the cab, although the seat and floor were covered with dried blood. Paine was disappointed, but at least the profusion of blood stains was a good sign.

He walked among the sheep. As many as a hundred carcasses littered the hill, most of them ripped open by the activity of coyotes and vultures. The ground was torn up. He lifted a carcass with his boot and uncovered soil discolored by a dark pitch smelling of ammonia. That was better. He moved on in this pastoral setting until he found a ewe less disturbed than the rest. Although she was disemboweled, her intestines strung out on the grass, a fluttering of her nostrils showed she was still clinically alive. Paine squatted next to her. Some vultures landed to pick at farther away sheep. He paid them no attention.

The forward area of the ewe’s chest was striped by shallow gouges seeping blood. Paine held a jar upside down almost flush over the wounds. Between the open lid and the wounds he stroked a paper card. A minuscule activity began developing in the jar. He moved the jar and card over all the wounds and then screwed the top on the jar. He fixed the jeweler’s loupe in his right eye and held the jar up to the sky. Eight, nine fleas hopped against the glass.

There were over two hundred different species of fleas in North America alone. Magnified, the parasites of the Order Siphonaptera shared a basic equipment: wingless bodies, powerful legs, bristles in rows, and the sucking mouths that bestowed their Latin name. There were four species in the jar. Mice that had nibbled on the wounds had left rodent fleas,
Xenopsylla Cheopis,
eyeless fleas with double rows of bristles. The coyote that had ripped open the ewe had deposited two species: common Dog Fleas, rounded, with a moustache-like mouth comb; and blunt-headed, eyed Carnivore Fleas. There were two specimens of the last species. They had eyeless, helmet-shaped heads. A mouth comb like mimic teeth. Bat Fleas.

For a moment, Paine was stunned by the magnitude of his luck. Overhead, the vultures watched him squat by other sheep and collect more specimens, and when he stowed them in his truck and drove away the birds all descended again through the rising air of the thermal to finish that work nature designed them for.

Controlling his excitement, Paine drove slowly.

Life was unfair. Usually, only the poor and geniuses realized this but Hayden Paine was admitted to the fact with his father’s death. It was Joe Paine who was the really first-rate immunologist, Joe Paine who back in ’44 led the Rockefeller Institute team that identified a mysterious paralytic disease killing hundreds of thousands of cattle annually as vampire-transmitted rabies. All the other authorities claimed the bat was an impossible vector. Under a microscope, the so-called
derriengue
virus didn’t look exactly like rabies. Besides, rabies invariably killed its host, yet the majority of vampires thrived on the virus that infected them. It took Joe Paine to prove that the rabies virus had mutated under the influence of its bizarre host and that the vampire alone of all species on earth was not vulnerable to rabies.

Joe Paine’s abilities hardly ended there. Chee was terrified of plague? In 1967, the Paines, father and son, were in Saigon to study a disease raging among the refugees of the beleaguered city. Joe Paine overcame American and Vietnamese obstructions to identify the disease as bubonic plague carried by rat-infested rice. A small item among the horrors of war: there were 5,547 cases of plague in Vietnam in 1967.

But always for Hayden Paine it came back to the caves. He suffered from claustrophobia. One step into the dark and his heart doubled its beat. The condition had come on gradually, accreting with experience. In the first year of vampire work with his father, the claustrophobia paraded as nervous energy. The second year, without understanding why—he’d been on spelunking expeditions with his father even as a boy—Paine had trouble breathing. By the end of the second year, adrenaline flowing like nitro through a bloodstream dark with lack of oxygen, he began passing out. The third year was the worst.

In an age of sophisticated torture there is no more effective tool than claustrophobia. It combines elements of suffocation, desertion, blindness, and isolation from reality. All these elements operate in a cave, except that they are reality. When Paine entered a bat cave, his heart was already racing, each beat a muffled alarm. As the light of the entrance evaporated, his lungs became twin vacuums and his limbs numbed. With every step he felt the cave closing behind him. The glow of his helmet lamp was a ghostly moon without reference to him, like a glowworm in a coffin. Past the threshold of panic, he forced himself deeper into the cave, seemingly more steady as his sanity folded in. Within goggles, his eyes bulged. Even as he tried to concentrate on the techniques of ropework or spreading a mist net of superfine thread, he tasted his hot and salty terror. Then someone would set off a flash and the cave would erupt into a whirlwind of panicked wings. When the sound of the wings and the lower-pitched cries of the bats made a dizzying roar, only then, occasionally, would Paine let go his scream of terror.

He wasn’t stupid enough to think he was a coward. Unfortunately, he was intelligent enough to know the reason he returned to the caves was to mimic his father, and that in imitating a better man, he was a farce.

No matter how many caves he went into and how competent he seemed, the secret panic blossomed. Until he took risks just to keep his eyes from straying to the enveloping dark. No one knew except his father, which was why Joe Paine had to go along when others hung back.

So, unfairly, in that Mexican cave, it was the better man who’d died. Not without a parting gift, though. Like dross from a fire, Paine’s panic fell away and was gone.

The desert sand had the quality of compacted ash. A desert, to Paine, was a land that was burned and constantly burning. For Paine, a relief compared to night.

After thirty miles of driving, he stopped in the shade of a canyon of stark, yellow walls and set up his laboratory. Like his belt, it was a construction of his own design. Aluminum poles screwed horizontally onto the top rear of the Rover and telescoped backwards fifteen feet to supporting poles rooted in the dirt. Over this structure he hung a fine wire mesh tent that zipped tight around the open doors of the Rover and at an entrance flap at the other end. He staked the mesh taut to the ground through eyeholes spaced every six inches; the whole effect was of a cocoon growing out of the truck. Inside this cocoon he set up tables and equipment. From the Rover’s refrigerator, bowls of blood culture gelatines. Test tubes. Rubber-stopped jars of killing solution. Microscopes and slides. A square black box two feet high with a front hooded by black crepe. Alongside the box, he placed the jar of specimens from the sheep.

He pulled the black hood aside and uncoiled an extension cord from inside the box to a dry cell battery he’d placed under the table. A frosted white light panel—the type used for X rays—glowed underneath an acetate map of the Navajo-Hopi reservation. Paine removed the map. With a clean scalpel he cut into the flesh of his little finger and milked three drops of blood onto the glowing panel. Over the blood-specked panel he set a clear plastic cover that had one circular, threaded opening. He picked up the specimen jar, shook it gently, counted the fleas at the bottom of the glass, and carefully unscrewed the lid, sliding a paper card between lid and jar. He turned jar and card over and slid the card away as he screwed the jar into the plastic cover. Then he set a microscope over the panel and pulled the crepe hood over the back of his head.

Magnified by 20X, the fleas lurched uncomfortably within the confines of the panel and cover. The heat of the glowing panel, though, spread the rich vapor of an abattoir. Antennae twitched and the hair of their palps stiffened. The sighted Dog and Carnivore Fleas were first to move towards the balloon-like drops of blood, but the blind
X. Cheopis
and Bat Flea joined the rush. There was enough for all. Sheaths pulled back from sucking stylets, which plunged into the walls of the blood.

At 50X, the bodies of the fleas were transparent. Paine watched a stream of red flow through stylet, esophagus, and pour into the stomach. The walls of the pharynx and gullet expanded and contracted, pumping the blood in. He studied Dog Flea, Carnivore Flea, and
X. Cheopis
before focusing on one of the two feeding Bat Fleas. A red stream flowed through the stylet, swirled and flowed back out again into the blood drop. The Bat Flea was sick, vomiting up its food, dying slowly from starvation. At 75X Paine could see why. A gelatinous mass was blocking the esophagus, distending it so that the valve action was malfunctioning, sucking as much blood out of the flea’s stomach as it brought in. The second Bat Flea suffered from the same blockage.

Paine unscrewed the jar from the cover and slipped in a gloved hand. He tweezered one Bat Flea and crushed it in a bowl of blood culture gelatine. The second Bat Flea he picked up carefully in the tweezers and held over a slide as he squeezed the stomach. A red strip shot over the slide. Paine dropped the flea in a killing solution. He screwed the jar back on the cover.