On Earth's Altar

Chapter 11

Present

Melbourne, Australia

A thin and pale man cinched the hood of his parka and hurried through the rain of Carlisle Street. It was early on a workday evening. Cars splashed through puddles. Electric trams hummed along. Under the awning of a 7-Eleven store, a group of teenagers vaped and leaned back against a brick wall adorned with fresh graffiti.

The thin man hurried by and stopped at a darkened storefront a few doors down. Digging for his keys, he unlocked the door, doffed his hood and pushed in inside. Little bells jingled over his balding head as he wiped his feet on the welcome mat. Turning on the lights, he stooped to inspect the gilded Star of David and Hebrew letters painted on the inside of the window, making a mental note to have it touched up. Then he made his way to the back of the delicatessen.

Gryphus watched from a darkened alley. As soon as the Jew entered his deli, Gryphus crossed the street and peered in through the window. With gloved hands he pulled the door open a few centimeters before reaching up to stifle the bells before they chimed. Slipping inside, he wiped his feet on the mat and padded across the checkered tiles past the deli case to a door behind the counter. There he crouched, listening to the Jew as he talked to someone on his phone.

"Yes," he was saying. "They took my blood at the clinic, but what business is that of yours? . . . Danger? Who from? . . . I don't have any sons. . . . Who are you? Are you calling from the States? . . . Good, and don't ring me again!"

The door opened, and out stepped the Jew, face buried in his phone. He was taller than he had looked from across the street, but his shoulders were narrow, his skin fleece white. Gryphus clicked his tongue to get the man's attention then dropped him to his knees with a jab to the solar plexus. In a lightning move, Gryhpus wrapped a wire garrote around the Jew's neck and locked it off with a series of twists.

As the man writhed and clutched at his throat, Gryphus stooped to pick up his phone before it locked out. The call had originated from an unidentified number in the United States.

When enough time had passed, Gryphus dragged the Jew's lifeless body to the meat locker and propped it up between to hanging sides of beef, the rabbinical stamps still vivid in the fat. He stooped to hook something into the wire garotte around the man's neck, a tiny metal charm with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Then he unloaded his rucksack and got to work.

***

Sophea pocketed her phone and spied out from the forest eaves. Fifty yards of parched meadow stood between her and the back entrance of Numex research building C-1. Black security cameras dangled like bats from high on the concrete wall.

She hurried across the meadow, head bowed. Reaching the door, she swiped her ID badge, opened the heavy door and climbed the stairwell, her every step clanging on the steel steps.

Reaching her lab on the third floor, she donned a powder-blue lab coat and sat down at a workstation, suddenly chilled. Numex engineers insisted on keeping the room at twenty degrees Celsius, optimal running temperature for the GA-3, a hulking mass of machinery occupying most of the room.

"You ready to blow through this shit?" Chris Dowdy was Jonathan Avery's replacement, a twenty-two-year-old neo-punk with spiky, bleach-blond hair, a tongue stud and tattoos that snaked up his freckled arms, neck, and where else Sophea refused to guess.

Chris placed a Styrofoam shipping container on the counter and sliced through the packing tape with a boxcutter. Prying off the lid, he donned a pair of nitrile exam gloves and reached in through the swirl of dry ice fog to extract a frost rack of tiny plastic vials, maybe fifty in all, each containing a single drop of frozen blood. "Done with the pre-run check?"