Dark Moon Rising

by James M. Thompson

Genres: Horror; Supernatural suspense; Dark Fantasy

Synopsis

The author of The Elijah Pike Vampire Chronicles and Anthrax Protocol unleashes a terrifying tale of medical science gone awry—and a horror beyond imagining unleashed . . . Dr. James Wilcox is one of the nation’s foremost pediatric neurologists. Yet his expertise is useless in the face of his own brain tumor. Removing it will cause James to lose his senses of smell and taste and suffer from mood disorders for the rest of his life. Then a miracle arrives in the form of Dr. Albert Stern, lauded for his achievements in sensory augmentation in primates. Dr. Stern is more than willing to apply his radical procedures in an attempt to cure James' condition. The surgery is a success. In fact, it has the unprecedented result of heightening the rest of the patient’s senses to superhuman levels. But there are side effects that no one could have predicted. Something slipped into Stern's chromosome matrix. Something with a homicidal disposition and an appetite for fresh-killed meat. Something that hunts by night . . . “If you read one horror book this year, read this one!” —William W. Johnstone on Night Blood “A terrifying mix of real medical science and vampire folklore.” —Fred Bean, author of “The Hangman’s Tree” on Night Blood

Release date: May 30, 2017

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 354

Sample

Earlier that same day

There was a standing-room-only crowd in Conference Room C-3 deep beneath the ground at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The fort was the home to USAMRIID, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. As the Department of Defense’s lead laboratory for investigating the medical aspects of biological warfare defense and offense, USAMRIID conducted research to develop vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics for laboratory and field use in the event of an attack on the United States.

Virtually every man and woman in the room was an MD, a PhD, or both, and all were involved in formulating strategies, information, and procedures for medical defense against biological threats to the U.S.

“I just don’t understand it,” one of the scientists said to a man standing next to him in the doorway.

His companion cocked an eyebrow and gave a half smile. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit that there was something you didn’t understand, Carl.”

Carl chuckled. “I’ll agree, Fred, it’s not a common occurrence, but I looked up the curriculum vitae on our speaker today and it says he is an MD with a combined specialty of neurology and neurosurgery and that his major field of research is in diseases and injuries to the central nervous system.”

Fred nodded as the line they were in inched forward another couple of feet. “Yeah, so?”

Carl shrugged. “It just struck me as odd that such a man would be the keynote speaker today since his field has absolutely nothing to do with chemical or biological warfare.”

“What was his name again?” Fred asked, grunting as he managed to push his way forward to grab a couple of empty chairs at the extreme rear of the room.

“Stern. Dr. Albert Stern,” Carl replied, sighing with relief when he took his seat next to Fred.

The room quieted as a tall, cadaverous-looking man who was thin to the point of emaciation stood and strode confidently to the front of the room to stand next to a screen. The speaker had coarse, uneven features and his thick jaw and rather long face made him look more like a common street thug than an internationally acclaimed scientist.

Fred elbowed Carl and whispered, “His name should be Karloff with that face.”

Carl shushed his friend and stared at the speaker, anxious to find out what a brain surgeon would have to say that would interest a bunch of microbiologists and chemists.

Dr. Albert Stern smiled out at the crowd, or at least his features curved into what would have been a smile for anyone else. On him, it more closely resembled a grimace of pain or indigestion.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen . . . fellow scientists,” he began. “I am here today to enlist your help in an experiment that will undoubtedly usher in a new age of incredibly sophisticated medical treatment.”

He glanced at the screen next to him and it lit up with a multicolored representation of a DNA double helix molecule, one every scientist in the room had seen thousands of times.

“The stuff dreams are made of, gentlemen and ladies,” Stern said, his eyes glittering as he stared at the screen. “This is the basis for every life on our planet, and we are this close”—he held up his hand with his index finger and thumb an inch apart—“to unlocking the key to the very mystery of life itself.”

There was a murmur among the crowd, for no one had heard the slightest inkling of this in any research papers published in the last year.

“What the hell is he talking about?” Carl whispered.

Fred didn’t answer, though he too wondered just what rabbits this man was going to pull out of his sleeves.

“For the past five years,” Stern continued, “my team and I have been working on a project to map the human genome in its entirety, and we have almost finished our work. We now know the precise location on the human DNA double helix of virtually every gene involved in our inherited characteristics.”

A hand in the first row went up, causing Stern to scowl at the interruption. He forced the look of irritation from his face and finally nodded his head. “Yes, Dr. Wright?”

Dr. George Wright, who was the head civilian scientist at USAMRIID and in charge of most of the scientists and their various research projects, asked, “How can that be, Dr. Stern? We’ve all heard of the human genome project announced a few years back, but everyone had assumed it would take ten years or more to map out the millions of genes in human DNA.”

Stern’s scowl faded and he smiled again. “True, Dr. Wright, but that was before the defense department loaned me two of their ten-million-dollar Cray Supercomputers. By hooking the two supermachines up in tandem, we were able to finish the project much quicker than anyone could’ve anticipated. In fact, since we finished the project on human DNA, we’ve gone on to mapping out the DNA of many of the animals that exist among us.”

He glanced at the screen and the picture changed to one of a fetus, pink and red and yellow, lying on a towel still connected to its amniotic sac. Stern used a laser-pointer pen to direct a red dot onto the head of the fetus. “As you know, fetal brain tissue is undifferentiated, unburdened with the immune pointers and chemicals that make it impossible to transplant tissue from unrelated people into each other. Part of my work lately has been to combine genes for specific characteristics from one animal with fetal brain tissue and then to introduce this tissue into a primate and cause the primate to assume the new characteristics and abilities transmitted by the fetal DNA.”

Now there was more than a murmur among the crowd, it was more of a gasp and then an excited rumble as the spectators whispered among themselves. This was truly what some people called playing God.

“Now, even though the process doesn’t always work,” Stern said, raising his voice to combat the elevated sounds in the room, “we’ve had just enough success to make our government want us to keep trying.”

He glanced at the screen and the picture changed from the fetus to one of a chimpanzee holding a seven-hundred-pound gorilla above its head as if it weighed only a few pounds.

In the next picture, the chimpanzee was ripping the gorilla to pieces with its bare hands, its long canine incisors stained with the dead gorilla’s blood.

“Can you imagine a thousand soldiers with the strength of a gorilla, the speed of a gazelle, and the viciousness of a lion or tiger?” Stern asked, his lips curled in a half smile but his eyes as black and cold as coal.

“This is all . . . very interesting, Dr. Stern,” Dr. Wright said, a look of disgust on his face as he quickly averted it from the gruesome picture on the screen. “But why are you telling this to us?” He looked around and spread his arms to encompass the scientists gathered in the room. “After all, the most sophisticated organism most of us work with is a microbe.”

Stern clicked the remote in his hand and the screen again changed, this time to show a bunch of bacteria and some bacteriophages mingling together.

“You microbiologists have for years now been transferring genes from one bacteria species to another by means of bacteriophages.” He shrugged and spread his arms out wide. “With the resurgence of the religious right in this country, using fetal brain tissue in medical research has become something of a political hot potato. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get Congress to authorize money for this research, so our mutual bosses in the defense department have decided that if we pool our research, perhaps we can accomplish the same results using bacteria to transfer the genes rather than fetal brain tissue.” He paused and then added, “Using bacteriophages would also lower the cost and complexity of the procedure by eliminating the need for surgery on the brain, thus making the technique much more available than it currently is.”

Dr. Wright shook his head, his face pale and drawn. “I . . . I’m not sure this is the correct forum for this to be discussed, Dr. Stern. And I’m equally unsure of the ethics and propriety of this line of research.” He stood up and pointed his finger at Stern. “Personally, I think the idea of playing God with human beings and their genetic code is abhorrent in the extreme! The government had the foresight to ban cloning of human beings, Stern, and this is even worse.” He continued to shake his head back and forth. “No, I can’t let you bring this abomination into our labs!”

He squeezed past the people next to him and strode up the aisle, his back ramrod straight and his face flushed as he stalked out of the room.

Stern’s eyes narrowed and his lips compressed into a white line, until with a force of will, he relaxed his features and turned to the crowd. “I’m afraid Dr. Wright thinks our research is much further along than it is. Right now, we are just exploring the possibilities of gene transfer among primates by using bacteria and bacteriophages.” He smiled benignly. “Surely this is no more playing God than removing a malignant brain tumor so a child can live or giving someone with pneumonia an antibiotic to stop the infection from ending the patient’s life, is it?”

When he heard the sympathetic murmur from the crowd, he spread his hands. “Now, are there any questions or comments about my presentation?”

Carl raised his hand. “Dr. Stern, what is the minimum number of genes you can transfer at one time?”

“That’s an interesting point, Doctor,” Stern replied and he began to go into a detailed answer.

As soon as the questions from the scientists had all been answered, Stern walked out into the hallway and pulled out his cellular phone. He was so angry that his hands shook when he opened it and tried to punch in some numbers. How dare that sanctimonious son of a bitch dare to question his ethics or the propriety of his research? The phone made a funny beep and the words Signal Failed appeared on the screen, showing he was unable to get a connection this far underground.

He grimaced and grabbed a phone off a nearby wall and angrily punched in a series of numbers. After a moment, he said simply, “We may have a problem. I need to talk to you as soon as I can get aboveground and get to a secure line. Stay near your phone.”

The first time the symptoms appeared, Dr. James Wilcox was in the middle of a delicate operation on a brain tumor. He was wearing his operating spectacles, 4X magnification in the large lens and 10x magnification in the elongated binocular-type lens that stuck out of the lower half of the regular lens like fingers, and was in the process of sucking tumor cells out of the brain of a small boy.

When the metal suction tip he was using to suck out the tumor cells and hopefully leave as many normal cells as possible suddenly wavered in his vision and turned into two suction tips, he quickly raised the metal tip off the surface of the child’s brain and took a deep breath, squeezing his eyes shut against the sudden vertigo the double vision caused.

He blinked a couple of times and turned his head to the side so the circulating nurse could mop his brow with a pad to soak up the tiny beads of sweat that had begun to form. He was stalling for time, trying to figure out what could be wrong with him. Perhaps he was coming down with the flu, though he’d had no previous indications of illness and he’d taken his flu shot back in September.

His first surgical assistant, third-year resident Sydney Coleman, looked up from the wound and stared at him, her eyebrows raised above the edges of her surgical mask while her green eyes bored into his. “Something wrong, Jim?” she asked, concern evident in her voice at this break in procedure. Sydney was holding a sponge-stick she was using to keep cerebral spinal fluid from coursing down the brain and obscuring his vision.

Jim blinked a couple more times and with a silent click his double vision disappeared and there was only one Sydney staring across the table at him instead of two.

“No . . . no, everything’s hunky-dory, Syd,” he said, bending back down over the open skull in front of him. “Just a minor crick in my neck.”

As the suction tip began to sing its slurpy song again and tumor cells by the millions were removed from the boy’s brain, Jim spoke without moving his eyes from the wound. “Dick, how about turning that music up a little bit? I love CCR and ‘Bad Moon Rising’ is one of my favorites.”

Dick Hummel, the anesthesiologist at the head of the table, turned and raised the volume on the boom box attached to the top of his anesthesia machine until John Fogerty was belting out his song at over forty decibels.

Hummel shook his head and sniffed in disapproval. A lot of surgeons liked music while they operated, but most kept the volume just barely audible, and almost none of the more delicate operators like neurosurgeons and orthopods who did spinal surgery allowed any music or even casual conversations in the operating suite in order not to be distracted. Never one to keep his opinions to himself, Dick said, “I don’t know how you can concentrate with that caterwauling going on, Jim.”

Hummel was known to favor either classical music or occasionally country-western music, but never rock and roll. “Besides, you’re only barely thirty years old,” he added. “Most of this shit was recorded before you were born.”

Without looking up, Jim asked, “Have you ever listened to the music of the seventies and eighties, Dick?”

Hummel snorted derisively. “Not hardly. That disco shit was worse than rock and roll.”

Jim smiled beneath his mask. “Oh, so you couldn’t dance either,” he commented dryly.

Hummel laughed. “Well, I do know that I got laid a lot less during disco, but maybe that was because I was married at the time and not because I had two left feet on the dance floor.”

Syd groaned audibly as she gently used her small retractors to open the edges of the dura mater covering the brain a little wider so Jim could reach a tiny outcropping of tumor there. “Here we go again,” she said in a low, feminine voice. “More macho sexist bullshit from the misogynist at the head of the table.”

Hummel was known throughout the surgical suite for his continual grousing about women in general and marriage in particular, though he had a perfectly delightful wife and he treated her like a queen. Everyone knew it was just posturing and teasing when he badmouthed her, her dress, her cooking, and her treatment of him in general.

Hummel cast a disbelieving glance at the circulating nurse. “Can you believe that, Mary? A little snip of a girl who’s barely dry behind the ears and with absolutely no knowledge of either men or marriage has the effrontery to contradict her elder when he makes a profound statement about the perfidity of women and the unnaturalness of the marriage act.”

When Mary just shook her head, Hummel continued, turning his attention back to the operating team. “That reminds me, Sydney, my girl. Do you know why women smile at weddings?”

Syd groaned again and stage-whispered to Jim, “Do I have to answer him, Chief?”

Jim chuckled as he continued to work on the tumor. “You’d better, or he’ll just keep on going on and on and on with one-liners like the Energizer Bunny.”

“Okay,” Syd said, she too keeping her eyes on her work while she talked. “Why do women smile at weddings?”

“’Cause they know they’ve given their last blow job,” Hummel said with a maniacal laugh.

In spite of herself, Syd laughed too. Jim bit his lips and kept his laugh contained, though he suspected there was some truth to the joke. He was single, having only been out of training for a little over a year, but a lot of his friends seemed to have the same ideas about marriage that Dick espoused, so he fully intended to remain single at all costs. Not that that would be hard, since he worked almost fifteen hours a day trying to get his fledgling neurosurgical practice up and running.

Syd shook her head, but her hands remained rock-solid and didn’t move a hairbreadth. “That’s just like a man,” she said. “That little head of yours is all y’all think about.”

“Is not,” Dick said. “There’s sports, liquor, and gambling, all of which rank right up there with sex.”

“You must be out of Viagra to be talking like that,” Jim said sarcastically.

“Well, I said right up there,” Dick amended. “I didn’t say they were equal . . . and I have absolutely no need to use Viagra, thank you very much!”

“What a shame,” Sydney said, sighing audibly.

“What’s a shame?” Dick asked, falling into her trap.

“It’s a shame that God gave you men two heads and only enough blood to fill one at a time.”

Jim started to reply, when he suddenly felt his stomach do a flip-flop and he almost vomited into the wound. He stepped back from the table and tilted his head back and took a couple of deep breaths, trying desperately not to throw up. Jesus, he thought, what’s wrong with me?

“Jim,” Syd said, her voice really worried now. “What is it? You’ve suddenly gone as white as a ghost.”

He managed to reply, “Give me a minute, Syd. My stomach’s suddenly gotten very upset.”

“I bet you ate lunch in the hospital cafeteria, didn’t you?” Dick asked, commenting on another favorite target of his wit.

Jim swallowed several times, his mouth suddenly full of saliva. He knew that was a sign that his stomach was going to empty very soon.

He handed the suction tip to his scrub nurse and stepped farther back from the table, whirling and heading for the door as quickly as he could walk. “Hold on, everyone,” he managed to say. “I’ll be right back.”

He barely made it into the doctors’ restroom before he was violently ill, throwing up into the toilet. He felt as though his very guts were coming up and he retched and gulped and retched again and again until he was lying drained on his hands and knees on the floor of the restroom, resting his cheek against the cool porcelain of the toilet.

As he sat there, his mind working overtime, a tiny icicle of dread began to worm its way up his spine and into his head, making him shiver as though he had the flu.

A first-year medical student could put this together, he thought. Symptoms of double vision, sudden vertigo and nausea, followed by projectile vomiting . . .

“Jesus, please let it be meningitis and not a tumor,” he silently prayed.

The door opened and Dick Hummer walked in, his eyes troubled. “You okay, boyo?” he asked, using the stage Irish accent he and Jim sometimes put on when talking together.

Jim slowly wagged his head. “I don’t think so, Dick. Would you see if there is anyone else who can take over for me in there?” He glanced up. “I don’t think Syd is quite ready to handle finishing up by herself just yet.”

“Sure, pal,” Dick said, casting another worried look over his shoulder as he opened the door. “I saw Tony Frank in the lounge having lunch a while ago. Maybe he’s still in the building.”

“Thanks, Dick. If I get to feeling better in a few minutes I’ll come back in there.”

A little over an hour later, Jim had canceled his afternoon office hours and was in his apartment staring at the telephone, wondering whom he should call. He had to speak to someone or he was going to bust, but he wanted to make sure whomever he talked to about his symptoms would keep their mouth shut—at least until he was sure of what was going on. Nothing could kill a practice faster than rumors of illness or unfitness among his colleagues about a doctor. If this got out, his referrals would dry up faster than a rain puddle in the desert.

For some reason, Syd’s face kept intruding into his thoughts, until he realized it was because she was the perfect choice for someone to confide in: still a resident, she wouldn’t be friendly enough on a social level to let his secrets spill out in casual conversation with one of his colleagues, and yet she was knowledgeable enough about his symptoms to help him confirm his fears. Plus, the image of her startlingly beautiful green eyes peering over her surgical mask kept intruding on his thoughts. He’d seen her around the hospital floors and in the doctors’ lounge a few times, but today was the first time he’d had any extended contact with her. Maybe now was a good time to get to know her better.

He dialed the hospital switchboard number and tried to ignore the nausea and feeling of dread in his stomach. He had a sudden premonition that his life was never going to be the same.

Albert Stern pulled his Lexus sedan to a stop at the guard station box at the entrance to what was once the Brunswick Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine. Abandoned by the navy in 1992, the facility was taken over soon after that by the National Security Agency, the most secretive agency in the United States intelligence service. One prominent politician once faced impeachment and ruin rather than reveal to Congress NSA’s budget figures.

One of the guards, dressed in black SWAT fatigues, his face covered by a black mask, approached the car while another remained at the guard post, an M-16 trained on the driver’s-side window.

Stern handed the guard his specially laminated security pass card and the man swiped it through a portable reader he had in his hand. When the screen lit up with Dr. Stern’s picture and a green light pulsed, the guard gave a salute and said, “Welcome back, Dr. Stern. Good to see you again, sir.”

Stern nodded but didn’t smile. He had little time for making nice with underlings. He had much more important things on his mind.

He pulled forward when the metal pole blocking the road was raised and continued down and around several winding streets fronted by buildings that appeared to be abandoned offices and living quarters until he pulled out onto the airfield adjacent to the base.

Driving up to one hangar in a long row of similarly appearing hangars, he endured yet another checkpoint before he was finally allowed to get out of his car and enter the building. One of the guards got into his car and drove it off toward an underground parking spot a few hundred yards away.

In spite of his rather cold exterior manner, Dr. Stern’s chest always swelled with pride when he entered this, his own private domain. This was where his heart and soul were—the research facility made especially for him by the defense department of the United States. Of course, the appropriation figures for the airfield were buried in a twelve-hundred-page budget and seemed to be for the retrofitting of an aircraft carrier in a Boston shipyard.

The hangar housing Stern’s research had been divided into multiple rooms and laboratories on three levels at astronomical expense, and all because of his genius and dedication to his research.

The exteriors of all of the buildings on the naval air station property were kept looking derelict and abandoned, though most of the structures had been modernized on the inside and were in daily use. The perimeter defenses and alarms had been upgraded and modernized also, with laser motion detectors, sound sensors, and underground weight sensors that would register anything heavier than a rabbit.

Stern’s more mainstream research into curing diseases and treating brain injuries that he’d discussed at the meeting at Fort Detrick was carried out in the Maine Medical Center in Portland, but his secret and highly classified research into building a perfect soldier and fighting machine was undertaken here under higher security than the president himself enjoyed at the White House.

Stern nodded curtly, only occasionally smiling as the scientists and technicians he passed waved or called hello. When he entered his private office on the first floor, in the exact center of the facility, he took off his suit coat and put on his white laboratory jacket, feeling as if he’d come home at last.

His secretary, alerted by a buzzer on her desk that he’d entered his office, appeared through a side door with a cup of his favorite coffee in her hands.

Doreen Gay stood five feet five inches and was both beautiful and smart, a prerequisite for being Stern’s private secretary. She was also highly sexual and always ready to please him in whatever way he demanded, another and perhaps even more important prerequisite for working for Stern. He’d never married, always having been too busy with his education and then his research to find and woo a wife, but he had a voracious sexual appetite and some very kinky ideas about what constituted normal sex. Now that the government was picking up the tab for whatever he desired, he was not above spending loads of money to get the very best—and Doreen was certainly that. In fact, her secretarial skills were almost on a par with her abilities as a skilled courtesan. She was as intelligent as she was beautiful; Stern often bounced ideas off of her to get her reaction. So far, he hadn’t been disappointed in either her perspicacity or her bedroom skills.

He was sitting at his desk perusing the many computer screens that were arrayed to one side of his office when she leaned over to place his coffee in front of him. She noticed the way his eyes left the screens to take a peek down the front of her blo. . .