Out For Blood 2

The Beginning.

In 1919 Thomas Martins was twenty-one-years-old when he moved from Columbus Ohio down to Charleston West Virginia, at a time when Charleston was young and its’ people naïve. Martins was tall and his features striking, he had thick black hair down to his shoulders, his cheek-bones were high and his chin was long and square, he looked almost Roman. He was always dressed in a suit, mostly a black one, but occasionally he would wear grey. In his mind Martins was a physician, a surgeon of some worth, and he had the false paperwork to prove it.

He would have qualified as a brilliant Doctor had Professor James Banks of the Franklin University in Columbus not found him using stolen cadavers to practice his skills on. He was subsequently expelled and felt he had no choice but to flee Columbus through fear of Banks informing the authorities. Banks however did not inform them, he didn’t want the University’s good name being dragged through the mud.

After Martins set up his practice in a little shop on the corner of Starling Drive and Davidson Avenue in South Charleston he soon became known as “The Wonder Doc”, as word of his miraculous cures spread through Charleston. The deaf could hear, the blind could see, and the lame threw away their crutches, nobody knew however that the patients he had cured were homeless people that he had paid and were in fact up to a homeless standard quite healthy people, he was acclaimed by some as the “Second Coming”. He soon acquired a following, and that following donated a substantial amount of cash to Martins.

Martins gladly took their money, and after a few months had bought himself a large house on Ruth Street just off Pennsylvania Avenue in Elk Hills North West Charleston. It was a six bedroom Victorian red brick house built in 1864; the style known as the ‘Second Empire’ was two storeys high with a mansard style roof, which was heavily pierced with dormer windows featuring very elaborate surrounds. Below the Mansard roof were the red brick walls, two large bay windows dominated the front of the house with a large white front door between them. There was a small front and large rear garden but Martins wasn’t a gardener, the more he allowed them to overgrow the more privacy he would gain.

The only rooms in the house he used were his bedroom, although he didn’t always sleep in it, sometimes he would fall asleep at his desk whilst working. The bathroom and kitchen he would use occasionally, but the most important room to him and the reason he bought the house was the basement; the room he would use for his other work. It was almost the whole floor area of the house with a dividing wall across the centre. One side he furnished as a small living area, the other he used for his work.

None of his followers knew of the house and Martins wanted to keep it that way. They saw him as their saviour, and because of that he began preaching to them. He would rent a large hall and twice weekly he would talk to them, preach to them how he saw the human race and its numerous faults, faults forced onto it by its so called creator. Faults he would one day banish from each and every tormented soul that took his hand and walked beside him. He would preach of the shortcomings of God, and how he made man not in his own image but in the image of a weak and pitiful creature that would eventually succumb to the ravenous jaws of time. Because Martins spoke ill of the bible and its preachings’ it cost him many of his followers. The few that had remained loyal were baptised by Martins, literally. And he named them “The Collective”, his “Collective”.

Martins’ had a plan; he wanted to be like the God he so often ridiculed, he wanted to become immortal; a ritual or method, or maybe a formula of some sort. He experimented with all manners of foetal fluids, from unborn lambs and calves but nothing was coming close. Martins avidly kept notes on his work, making sure everything was recorded properly in his journal in case he had to refer to an earlier attempt. Then came his ultimate atrocity, withdrawing fluid from the brainstem of a half-term aborted human foetus. A foetus he himself had fathered.

Martins chose his companions carefully from within his Collective, and those companions ranged in age from twelve-years of age, up to nineteen-years of age. The only proviso being that they could produce young. He would take them as his wives, eleven girls in all although never actually wedding them, and it was these pregnancies he would terminate and then extract the fluid from. All this he would do in his surgery in South Charleston. When and if the girls were ready to produce again, they were once more made pregnant, out of the eleven girls up to six could be with-child at any one time.

Martins performed his experiments in the privacy of his basement; he would run his tests on fruit flies by introducing different formulas into their diet and adding more chemicals and more proteins, as well as mixing passed results with new formulas. Although the flies lived for over six months longer than those not treated, and had almost doubled in size, they had one flaw, cannibalistic tendencies. The fruit he fed them went untouched; when he introduced fresh untreated flies they lasted no more than a matter of minutes before they were empty shells, then dismembered and eaten by their brethren.

Some months had passed and Martins had begun experimenting with Rats which gave him similar results. He injected one of the Rats with his latest formula, and after twenty-four hours he introduced a second untreated Rat. Within seconds the first Rat had attacked the second and bitten it severely on the back and neck. Martins then separated the two; again a day later he removed the partition and again the second Rat was attacked. He noted down that neither food no water had been touched by the treated Rat but thought little of it. He separated them for a second time, and this time he injected the injured Rat with his formula. Twenty-four hours later he returned to the cage, he was astounded to see the injuries to the second Rat had completely healed, no scars and no missing fur. Again he removed the partition, this time neither Rat had shown any signs of hostility toward the other.

This was more than Martins had hoped for, he realised the formulas life extension properties were causing cell regeneration, which is why the formula actually worked. Now old cells wouldn’t merely die off, they would be replaced by new cells, any part of the body that would normally become old and tired would endlessly renew itself. He had created the elixir of life. Martins now felt his formula was ready for its first human test subject, and who better than he. The violence that had manifested in the flies and the Rats he knew he could control, after all, they were mere insects and rodents. He on the other hand, was a genius.

Martins prepared himself for days; he knew what the next logical step had to be, but was apprehensive. He also knew logically that a human test subject other than himself should be found and used. He needed time to think, he locked up his basement and decided he would take an evening stroll in an attempt to clear his mind in order for him to decide the next important stage in his work. Should he test the formula on himself? Or should he find someone else?