Free henri dunn 01 - immortality cure by tori centanni Page B

giving in to some inevitability. “Come with me.” My stomach roiled; I didn’t like it when Neha was cryptic. She turned and went deeper into the apartment, past a kitchen and down a hall. I followed her into a small office.
    A computer desk was against the window, with a behemoth of a desktop underneath it and several monitors and a keyboard on top. Against the side wall sat a second desk that was covered in paperwork. She pulled up a second chair and then sat at the keyboard and booted up the computer. Its fans whirred to life.
    “What is it?” I asked while it booted.
    “I need to show you something. But you need to promise not to get mad.”
    I gave her my best “you’ve got to be kidding me” look. “I’m already mad at you, Neha. You ruined my life.”
    “Madder,” she corrected.
    The computer finally booted and she clicked around, entering passwords, until she reached the right file folder. She clicked a video and it expanded onto the second monitor to play.
    The video screen displayed the words “Subject B,” and then the black dissolved to reveal a man at a table in a small, nondescript room. He was a vampire. His pallor and the odd brightness in his eyes alone might have given it away, but he showed his fangs. He signed a stack of papers and slid them across the table. There was a date and time stamp on the video. This had been recorded last December, in the middle of the night.
    He said something, but the sound was muted or absent. Neha appeared in the frame, moving behind the guy in a lab coat, wearing glasses, her hair longer than it was now. The man rolled up his sleeve, revealing more bone-white skin. Neha jammed the needle into his arm.
    I winced, bile rising in my throat. I remembered the prick of the needle and the sharp, hot pain that accompanied the injection. That moment of sheer helplessness as the poison permeated my veins is burned into my mind. And then came the sickness. The actual process was horrible and disgusting, my body purging the vampirism like some kind of bad seafood, but that moment of horror where I knew I was going to die and could do nothing to save myself, that was the worst part.
    On-screen, something flickered in the man’s eyes, maybe a moment of regret. His expression was more doubtful than horrified. He shifted in his chair and kept glancing down at his arm. And then he swallowed. And swallowed again. He tried to speak, but without an audio track it was impossible to say if he succeeded. He bent over and vomited. On the video, Neha handed him a bucket.
    In real life, Neha hit fast-forward and zoomed through hours of video of the vampire being violently ill. She hit play again just after he shuffled back in from the bathroom offscreen, looking gaunt, his cheeks sunken and his eyes bloodshot. He stared into the camera and mouthed something.
    “He asked if it was supposed to hurt,” Neha told me. Her tone was clinical, but there was a shine in her eyes that betrayed a hint of emotion. Regret? Hard to say.
    “This was before you jabbed me with the needle,” I said, appalled. She had known it would hurt like hell, and she’d still stuck me against my will.
    “It was before I perfected the formula. Watch.”
    I did.
    I shouldn’t have. I should have told her that I didn’t give a damn what her shitty science had done to this poor creature willing to play lab rat. But I couldn’t look away, either.
    He vomited again, on the table this time, but it was all froth and foam. No blood, no bile. And then he just died. Such small words for such a major thing, but there it was. One moment he looked miserable, and the next his expression turned neutral and the life went out of him. He collapsed onto the table, his face landing in the mess of pink froth.
    In the video, Neha stepped back into frame. She took a pulse on his wrist and let it drop. The video faded to black and the screen flashed the words “Subject B.” Time elapsed from injection to organ failure: 3 hrs 2