"I--assumed as much," she said. "We had guns."
"Then you must know bullets have no effect on vampires.
"We were... never sure," she said, then went on quickly: "Do you know why that's so? Why don't bullets affect them?"
He shook his head. "I don't know," he said.
They sat in silence listening to the music.
He did know, but, doubting again, he didn't want to tell her.
Through experiments on the dead vampires he had discovered that the bacilli effected the creation of a powerful body glue that sealed bullet openings as soon as they were made. Bullets were enclosed almost immediately, and since the system was activated by germs, a bullet couldn't hurt it. The system could, in fact, contain almost an indefinite amount of bullets, since the body glue prevented a penetration of more than a few fractions of an inch. Shooting vampires was like throwing pebbles into tar.
As he sat looking at her, she arranged the folds of the robe around her legs and he got a momentary glimpse of brown thigh. Far from being attracted, he felt irritated. It was a typical feminine gesture, he thought, an artificial movement.
As the moments passed he could almost sense himself drifting farther and farther from her. In a way he almost regretted having found her at all. Through the years he had achieved a certain degree of peace. He had accepted solitude, found it not half bad. Now this--ending it all.
In order to fill the emptiness of the moment, he reached for his pipe and pouch. He stuffed tobacco into the bowl and lit it. For a second he wondered if he should ask if she minded. He didn't ask.
The music ended. She got up and he watched her while she looked through his records. She seemed like a young girl, she was so slender. Who is she? he thought. Who is she really?
"May I play this?" she asked, holding up an album.
He didn't even look at it. "If you like," he said.
She sat down as Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto began. Her taste isn't remarkably advanced, he thought, looking at her without expression.
"Tell me about yourself," she said.
Another typical feminine question, he thought. Then he berated himself for being so critical. What was the point in irritating himself by doubting her?
"Nothing to tell," he said.
She was smiling again. Was she laughing at him?
"You scared the life out of me this afternoon," she said. "You and your bristly beard. And those wild eyes."
He blew out smoke. Wild eyes? That was ridiculous. What was she trying to do? Break down his reserve with cuteness?
"What do you look like under all those whiskers?" she asked.
He tried to smile at her but he couldn't.
"Nothing," he said. "Just an ordinary face."
"How old are you, Robert?"
His throat moved. It was the first time she'd spoken his name. It gave him a strange, restless feeling to hear a woman speak his name after so long. Don't call me that, he almost said to her. He didn't want to lose the distance between them. If she were infected and he couldn't cure her, he wanted it to be a stranger that he put away.
She turned her head away.
"You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to," she said quietly. "I won't bother you. I'll go tomorrow."
His chest muscles tightened.
"But... " he said.
"I don't want to spoil your life," she said. "You don't have to feel any obligation to me just because--we're the only ones left."
His eyes were bleak as he looked at her, and he felt a brief stirring of guilt at her words. Why should I doubt her? he told himself. If she's infected, she'll never get away alive. What's there to fear?
"I'm sorry," he said. "I--I have been alone a long time."
She didn't look up.
"If you'd like to talk," he said, "I'll be glad to--tell you anything I can."
She hesitated a moment. Then she looked at him, her eyes not committing themselves at all.
"I would like to know about the disease," she said. "I lost my two girls because of it. And it caused my husband's death."
He looked at her and then spoke.
"It's a bacillus," he said, "a cylindrical bacterium. It creates an isotonic solution in the blood, circulates the blood slower than normal, activates all bodily functions, lives on fresh blood, and provides energy. Deprived of blood, it makes self-killing bacteriophages or else sporulates."
"When air enters," he said, "the situation changes instantaneously. The germ becomes aerobic and, instead of being symbiotic, it becomes virulently parasitic." He paused. "It eats the host," he said.
"Then the stake--" she started.
"Lets air in. Of course. Lets it in and keeps the flesh open so that the body glue can't function. So the heart has nothing to do with it. What I do now is cut the wrists deep enough so that the body glue can't work." He smiled a little. "When I think of all the time I used to spend making stakes!"
She nodded and, noticing the wineglass in her hand, put it down.
"That's why the woman I told you about broke down so rapidly," he said. "She'd been dead so long that as soon as air struck her system the germs caused spontaneous dissolution."