Manitou Blood by Graham Masterton Page A

insatiable thirst for fresh human blood, which has led them to kill acquaintances, friends and even their own children. Once they have satisfied their thirst, however, they seem to be overtaken in a few hours by violent nausea and cardiac arrest. Seventeen of those afflicted have so far died, and I’m afraid that we’re expecting many more.”
    A black woman reporter pushed a microphone into his face. “Sir—do you think you’re getting any nearer to isolating the cause of this outbreak?”
    The official shook his jowls. “All I can tell you at this time is that it bears absolutely no resemblance to any known disease, and in fact it may not even
be
a disease, in the generallyaccepted sense of the word. We have CDC and Medcom specialists working flat out to identify it, with the assistance of senior pathologists at every major hospital in New York.”
    â€œSo what can the public do to protect themselves?”
    â€œOur advice is for people to continue about their business as normal, but to watch closely for any signs in yourself or others of a burning sensation of the skin, or of hypersensitivity to sunlight, or of strong or unusual thirst.”
    I swallowed Guinness, and burped. In spite of the sirens outside, I was starting to think,
this has to be a put-on, surely?
An updated spoof like
The War of the Worlds
. Like,
vampires?
Oh, right.
    But then the CDC official glanced down at his notes and said, “I am also told that a reliable early indicator of the so-called ‘vampire’ condition is nightmares. These frightening dreams usually start three or four days before the crisis, and are associated with a feeling of claustrophobia, or being shut in a box, as well as a strong sensation of motion sickness, as if the sufferer were on board a ship.”
    I slowly sat up. I heard another ambulance, speeding up Sixth Avenue; and then another; and another. A handheld news camera showed a young woman on her knees on the sidewalk outside FAO Schwarz, vomiting blood. Then they showed a man being rushed through the doors of the Sisters of Jerusalem hospital, his clothes smothered in scarlet, like the victim of a bomb blast.
    Jesus, I thought.
Nightmares
. That was exactly what Ted had been suffering from—and the same kind of nightmares, too. Shut up in a casket, on an oceangoing ship. Then I thought: What if this
was
an infectious disease? Ted had been standing only two feet away from me, and I had been
breathing the same air
. I had shaken hands with him, and the chances were that microscopic droplets of saliva had sprayed out of his mouth when he had talked to me.
    I hurried through to my bathroom, soaked my faceclothin scalding water, then squeezed it out and pressed it over my face. I shouted out
ahh
! when I did it, because it was so goddamned hot, but if there were any viruses on my skin, this would fix them. If
I
couldn’t bear it, neither could they.
    After a few moments, however, I thought: Just a minute, if my séance with Singing Rock had shown us anything at all, it had shown us that Ted’s nightmares hadn’t been caused by a virus at all, but by some malevolent spiritual presence. A presence that I had actually seen for myself, tall and dark and stretched-out, and sliding through my bedroom door. I peeled off the facecloth and stared at myself in the mottled mirror that hung over my basin. I looked hot. I looked very hot.
    What the hell was I supposed to do now? Call Ted, and warn him that he was just about to turn into a bloodthirsty vampire? Call the CDC, and tell them that all of their experts were wasting their valuable time, because the “vampire” epidemic wasn’t caused by a virus, but by some kind of spiritual manifestation?
    I could imagine myself trying to explain it. “Like, I contacted this dead Sioux medicine man I used to know, and asked him to lure this malevolent spirit into my bedroom, which he did. Unfortunately my client was