Chapter Thirty-Two

When Krysty led Ryan down the long sweep of stairs to the dining hall, through the large vaulted doors, he felt her start with surprise.
"All here," she whispered. "Thomas, Mary and Elric. And another one. Older. Looks real sick."
Norman was at their elbow, smelling of patchouli oil. He nudged Ryan in the ribs from the other side. "Honored, you should be. First time I've seen Mel-moth Cornelius down here for a meal in must be thirty or forty years."
Doc heard the muttered message. "Melmoth?" he said in his deep, booming voice. "Melmoth was the wanderer, was he not? Are you, too, a wanderer, sir?"
The voice was as dry and dusty as a windblown papyrus, so quiet it hardly seemed to stir the air. "I have not been more than fifty miles from this place all my life, Dr. Tanner. It is you who should be called the wanderer and not I."
"How so?"
Ryan could feel the crumbling health of the man. The room was brimming with the flavor of the tomb, a scent of the solitary damp of the graveyard.
"How so?" repeated the head of the Family. "We had access to all manner of data. And your name featured among it, Dr. Tanner."
"What data? You mean on disk up in the redoubt? What sort of stuff and nonsense would they have about me?"
"Born in Vermont in 1868 on the feast day of Saint Valentine."
His voice changed, got stronger. "Norman, that oil lamp, third along, is in need of trimming. You should know by now how our eyes are affected by any kind of Where was I, Doctor?"
"Just told me my birthday, but I knew that, anyway. Anything I don't know?"
"Do you know the circumstances of your wife Emily's death? Or of what happened to Rachel and bonny little Jolyon? I suspect you do not."
Mildred was glancing at Doc when Melmoth dropped his bombshell, and she saw a blank and horrified shock on his features. He actually turned white and staggered a few steps, steadying himself on the high carved back of one of the dining chairs. Mildred began to move toward him, but he made a swift, fighting recovery.
"You suspect correctly, Master Melmoth. It was information that I tried for many a long day to drag from the files of the whitecoats. But they had sealed it and locked it away with great cunning. You have this information?"
"I can tell you that your son and daughter both died in the same year that you were trawled as a glimmer of light in the seething blackness that was Operation Chronos."
"And Emily?"
Mildred looked from Doc to Melmoth, seeing the cavernous cheeks and the palsied hands, the ruby eyes, set in caverns of wind-washed bone, and a trickle of what could only be blood dangling bright at the corner of the trembling lips.
"It had gone from the files, Dr. Tanner."
"You bastard! Raising my hopes and then plunging them into an even deeper abyss."
"No, no, that was not my intention. There was a massive comp failure in Redoubt 47, our birthplace, as it were, during the long winters. We realized too late, or we could have recalled information from it. Your tragedy, Dr. Tanner, is that you can remember virtually nothing. Ours is that we remember virtually everything."
"And you can't remember what happened to my family?" Doc's voice was quavering with tension and shock. "Forgive me, but I find that difficult to believe."
Ryan was sitting down, listening to the argument, trying to work out some puzzling arithmetic. The long winters that Melmoth mentioned had been around eighty years ago, and he was talking about it as if he, and the others, had been alive and active at that time. From everything that Ryan knew about the Family, it obviously wasn't possible.
"You know about the Totality Concept?" Ryan asked, eager to discover the parameters of their wisdom.
"Of course. But we were only a small part of it. As was Cerberus and Chronos. My brothers and sisters and I were formed as a result of what was known to the government whitecoats as the Genesis Project."
Doc was sitting, and he looked up at the name. "I heard about it. Casual words dropped when they should have been caught. Genesis. Gene manipulation. Some kind of triple-secret genetic engineering."
"The books."
Everyone turned to look at Mildred. Ryan squinted, becoming increasingly certain that the tiny spots of light he could see in his injured eye were really there and related to the number of dimmed oil lamps he could smell around the galleried room. He tried to concentrate on them, but they wriggled sideways like mercury under a thumb.
"You found our private library of scientific and mystical works, Dr. Wyeth," Mary said. "We knew that you'd been there. We saw your aura, which you left behind. There is nothing hidden from us here."
Ryan caught another glint as he stared toward the woman, and he remembered that Krysty had mentioned a polished silver ring in the shape of a skull worn on her hand.
"So, if you're all so bastard all-powerful, why did you want us here?" Ryan asked. "And why did you have to use me the way you did?"
Krysty answered in a loud, ringing voice. "I think I know, lover."
Elric interrupted her. "I said that she had the seeing power and would put us to the risk. I said she should have been terminated with extreme prejudice."
"Ah, the old, familiar security euphemisms," Doc said. "Yes, I remember them well."
"Quiet, brother." The order was layered with a silky menace, from Melmoth.
Krysty laughed bitterly. "We all thought you were some kind of vampires. Seemed triple stupe. Fantasy world. But it wasn't stupe, was it?"
Thomas said gently, "No, it wasn't. We thought you particularly, Krysty, would make that deduction. It was unfortunate that Johannes found we left no clear image on his film. We don't truly understand that ourselves. Something to do with our inverted electromagnetic field."
"You need human DNA samples to continue your rotten lives." Krysty was on her feet, at Ryan's side, almost shouting. She was leaning on the table, and he could feel the vibrations through the tips of his fingers from her shaking anger. He casually let his right hand drop out of sight, to rest on the butt of the SIG-Sauer, hoping that J.B., Jak and the others would see the gesture and realize that they were racing toward great danger. The Family wasn't like any ordinary quartet with ordinary weaknesses. But just what were the limits of their power?
Doc was also up on his feet again. "Blood! Just like real vampires. When you were What was the weasel word you used about that?"
"They said 'formed,' Doc," Dean said.
"Indeed, sweet boy, indeed they did. Formed. Sent before your time, part made. Malformed is a better word for obscene mutated anomalies like you four. Four? Is that all there are? You must all be the same age, give or take a year or two. My, Melmoth, how sickly you look."
"I am near death," Melmoth replied. "What you short-timers call death. There were twelve of us formed in the laboratory of Redoubt 47. The apostles of tomorrow, we were called. One by one we have succumbed to sickness, transmitted from you norms. Now there are only four of us left to carry on."
"Can't you carry on milking the poor devils from Bramton of their precious body fluids?" J.B. asked. "That's what you've been doing all these years, isn't it?"
"They have become too weak and inbred for us," Melmoth replied. "We need fresh blood and fresh genetic sampling to enable us to live on for another hundred years."
"Why they let you?" Jak asked. "Why not chill years ago?"
"A good question, Jak." This time it was Thomas who spoke. "We had hoped when we were first aware of you that you might possibly be one of us. From another gene pool. Perhaps from another lab somewhere else in Deathlands. Then we saw that you were just a common albino freak."
"Fuck you and your grandmother too," Jak replied. "And didn't answer question."
"Why have the cattle of the ville never risen against us, Jak? Oh, but they have, haven't they, Sister?"
"They have tried, let me see, at least a dozen times since skydark."
"And failed?" J.B. queried.
"Not every time," Melmoth replied. "We have had losses, despite our strengths."
"Strongest man in the world can get chilled by a five-year-old with a .22 blaster," Ryan said. "There are so many of them and so few of you."
"They fear us." Mary was walking around the room, dimming the oil lamps one by one. "We can move against them, among them, silent and unseen. And we can make them pay the blood price any night."
"Or any day?"
"No, Dr. Tanner, any night."
"As our sister says," Melmoth stated, "the one weakness in our makeup, apart from the incessant draining of our DNA, is that our sight is sharp as an eagle's in the dark. Poor as a cave bat's in the noontime sun."
"You've kept the poor men and women of Bramton as your slaves for nearly a hundred years!" Mildred was unable or unwilling to hide her disgust.
"And the children," Mary added. "There are not many of those now. But they are the sweetest and most fresh and tender for our purposes."
Ryan pushed his hands down on the table. "I guess that they aren't our concern."
He stood. "They have to make their own luck, good or bad. And we have to move on."
"It will be dark before you can get to the redoubt," Melmoth said. "A dangerous time."
"That a threat, you sick, sickly bastard?"
"Threats are for the impotent."
"We have the firepower to take all of you out in a couple of seconds. Can't you see that, you stupe?"
"I see, Ryan." The old man's voice seemed to be getting stronger. "I see better than you do."
"Seeing won't turn aside a 9 mm full-metal-jacket round."
Ryan was taken by surprise at the reaction from all four members of the Family. They laughed, sounding as if they were genuinely amused.
It was Thomas, walking around the table, who replied. "Turning aside a bullet isn't necessary for us, Ryan Cawdor. You have felt the touch of our power. Bullets can't harm us."
The calm confidence was unsettling.
"You saying you're immortal?" J.B. sniffed. "Never saw a living soul didn't go down under a bullet."
"We are not like any other life-form on the planet," Thomas stated. He had stopped on the far side of the room. As near as Ryan could figure, the strongest of the Cornelius Family was now standing close to Dean. He felt a prickling of discomfort.
"Enough talk." Ryan said. "We leave at dawn."
"We don't think so," Elric said.
There was a flurry of movement, and Ryan heard his son cry out in pain and shock, the sound quickly muffled.
"No," Thomas stated. "We don't think so."