Manitou Blood (16 page)

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Authors: Graham Masterton

Tags: #Horror, #Vampires

BOOK: Manitou Blood
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He felt the ship turning into the wind, and for a long time his right shoulder was pressed painfully hard against the side of his coffin. But then it righted itself, and began to sail reasonably steadily, although it wasn't long before the endless rising and falling made him feel nauseated. He tried to remember the last time that he had eaten, and what it was, but he couldn't.

It was then that he heard somebody clambering on the coffins all around him.


Help!
” he shouted. “
Help, I'm still alive!

The clambering noise stopped, but he was sure that the person was still close by. He waited, holding his breath. “Help,” he whispered. “Please, for God's sake, get me out of here.”

A long time went past. Then he heard a high, trembling voice say, “
Tatal nostru carele esti in ceruri . . . sfinteasca-se numele tau
. . .”

Tatal nostru!
It hit him so hard that he felt as if somebody had punched him in the stomach.
Tatal nostru
! The same words that Susan Fireman had been chanting, and the young man in the emergency room, too!


Let me out here!
” he screamed, hammering even more furiously with his fists. “
Let me out of here! Let me out of here!

“Sshh,” said a woman's voice, very soft, and very soothing. “Ssh, Frank—you've been having a nightmare, that's all.”

He struck out wildly with his right arm, but instead of hitting the side of his coffin, he knocked his nightstand, and his digital alarm-clock tumbled onto the floor.

“What? What's happened?” he croaked, and opened his
eyes. It was still night, but streetlight was shining in through the half-open window. It must have been raining outside, because shadowy drops of water were crawling across the ceiling like amoeba. He could hear the
whip-whip-whoop
of ambulance sirens, and people shouting.

He sat up. Susan Fireman was sitting on the end of his bed wearing one of his white shirts, her hands in her lap. He stared at her. He couldn't remember if she was still alive, or if she was supposed to be dead. Her eyes glistened so pale that she looked as if she had been blinded.

“Frank? It's only me. You were having a nightmare.”

“What time is it?” he asked her. She didn't answer so he had to lean over the side of the bed to see the red numbers of his digital clock on the floor. 11:57. Three minutes to midnight.

“Are you all right?” Susan Fireman asked him.

He eased himself into a sitting position and massaged the back of his neck. He felt as if he really had been shut up in a coffin, bruised and scraped all over.

“I thought you'd gone,” he told her.

“Of course not. I'm going to stay here to take care of you, Frank.”

“Is this a nightmare, too?”

“What do you mean?”

“You—everything—the epidemic. This feels like a nightmare inside of another nightmare.”

Susan Fireman held out her hand to him, palm upward, as if she were offering him the answer to everything. “All life is a nightmare, Frank. The only difference is that some of us never wake up.”

Frank sat for a moment with his head bowed. Maybe this wasn't real. Maybe it was still last night, and he hadn't yet woken up and walked to the hospital through Herald Square. Maybe there was no silver-painted mime and no regurgitated blood. Maybe there was no citywide massacre.
Maybe
tatal nostru
were just words that he had picked up unconsciously from a passing patient, or the radio playing in a taxi.

He looked at Susan Fireman for a moment.
You look as though you're sitting on the end of my bed but maybe you're not
. Without saying anything to her, he stood up and walked through to the kitchen, and switched on the lights. The kitchen was modern and stark, with black granite worktops and a stainless-steel oven by Smeg. The only decoration was a tall, triangular glass vase, containing a single arum lily, blood-red.

He went to the fridge and took out a bottle of Perrier water. As he reached up to one of the shiny black cupboards to find himself a glass, he became aware of Susan Fireman's reflection. She was standing on the opposite side of the counter, her arms by her sides.

Without turning around, he said, “Listen, Susan, I don't know if you're alive or if you're dead, or if I'm dreaming, but I'd really prefer it if you left me alone.”

“I can't do that, Frank.”

Frank poured himself a glass of fizzy water and then he turned around to face her. “This is
my
nightmare. That means that you have to do whatever I tell you, doesn't it?”

“But this isn't your nightmare. This is
everybody's
nightmare.”

“What do you mean?”

“You'll find out, when you pass over, too.”

“I don't have any intention of ‘passing over.' ”

Susan Fireman came up very close to him, and lifted her hand to touch his cheek. He swatted her away as if she were an irritating blowfly.

“Oh,
Frank
,” she chided him. “You don't have any choice. None of us has any choice.”

“I need to go back to sleep,” he said. He was talking to himself, not to her. “I need to go back to sleep, and wake
up for real. This is still Monday night and none of this has happened.”

“You can deny it all you like,” she said. “But the sooner you accept it, the better. There's a dark cloud moving over us, Frank, like a great black bird's wing, and it's moving very fast. It won't be long now, and the daylight people will be gone forever.”

“Bullshit,” Frank told her. “None of this has happened.” He lifted his glass but for some reason the thought of drinking water made his mouth feel greasy. He emptied the Perrier down the sink, put the glass back in the cupboard, and walked back to his bedroom, leaving Susan Fireman standing in the kitchen. He lay down on his wrinkled sheets and closed his eyes. If he could only sleep, then Susan Fireman would vanish and everything would go back to normal.

Five minutes went past, but he was still wide awake. It was obvious that things were different, and that something had gone badly wrong. After midnight, Manhattan always echoed with car horns, and firetrucks bellowing, but it was never as noisy as this. Tonight, the screaming of sirens never stopped—siren upon siren, like the hallelujah chorus from hell. He could hear barking noises, too, like people trying to break doors down with axes; and the terrible crackle of glass breaking; and a deep, intermittent rumbling.

He opened his eyes. It was 12:11 in the morning. Susan Fireman was still there—standing in the doorway, watching him.

George Gathering had asked him to report back to the Sisters of Jerusalem at 2:00
A.M
.
Well
, he thought,
even if this is a nightmare, I can't get to sleep in it, so I might as well take a shower and get dressed and go back to the hospital
.

He sat up again.

“No luck?” asked Susan Fireman.

“This isn't a nightmare, is it?” said Frank. “Even if I
do
get
to sleep, I'm not going to wake up and find that I never met you.”

“No, Frank, you're not.”

He stepped out of his front door into the sticky, noisy night. It couldn't have rained very hard, because the sidewalks were drying out already, but the humidity was almost tropical.

There were no taxis anywhere in sight, so he started to walk. He had left Susan Fireman in his apartment, standing in the hallway, still smiling at him. He had asked her not to be there when he got back, but she had simply said, “Time will tell, Frank. Time will tell.”

The blue-painted man who had been clinging to the mailbox had gone, but the rain hadn't been heavy enough to wash away the pool of blood that he had left on the sidewalk. There were bloody handprints, too, leading across the street, so it looked as if the man had crawled away on his hands and knees, and not so long ago, either.

Frank wondered for a moment if he ought to follow the handprints, to see where they led. Maybe he could save the blue-painted man, after all. But then he decided that he would be better employed at the Sisters of Jerusalem, taking care of as many people as possible, instead of tracking down one man, just because he had a conscience.

He walked south on Second Avenue, which looked comparatively quiet. There was almost nobody around, even though the sidewalks were strewn with broken bricks and and sparkling glass. Everywhere, there were abandoned shopping carts, some of them still filled with looted televisions and bottles of liquor and designer jeans. Human greed never ceased to amaze him. It was the end of the world, so people went out and stole televisions.

He was just about to cross Thirty-ninth Street when he heard somebody call, “
Help me!

He turned around and saw a girl of about fifteen years
old, crouched in a drugstore doorway. Her blond hair was matted with blood, so that it looked pink, and her white T-shirt was caked with blood, too.

“Help me!” she repeated. Her voice was a high, breathy scream. “Sir—please help me! I'm burning up! I'm
burning!

Frank approached her. “I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do to help you here. Do you think you can make it to the Sisters of Jerusalem? Do you know where that is? I'll see what I can do for you there.”

“I can't! I can't move! My skin's burning!”

He hunkered down next to her. She was snub-nosed and boyish-looking, and he would have guessed that she had Chinese blood in her. She was shaking wildly, and her little eyes were darting from side to side as if she felt that she was being hunted.

“You'll have to come to the ER,” Frank told her. “I can't treat you here in the street.”

She reached up and clung to the sleeve of his linen coat. “You
can
help me, I know you can. Please, come closer, and I'll show you.”

Frank tried to pull himself away. “I'm sorry. But there are hundreds of other people who need my help just as badly. I'll help you walk to the hospital, but—”

Without warning, the girl pulled at Frank's sleeve and dragged herself onto her knees. “
Aaaaahhhhhhhh
!” she screamed at him. She swung back her right arm and Frank saw glass flashing. He raised his left elbow to protect himself, but she cut right through his sleeve, right through his shirt, and sliced into his skin. She lifted her arm again, but Frank shoved her away with all of his strength, and she crashed backward through the drugstore window, breaking the glass and knocking over a display of lipsticks and face creams. A carousel of sunglasses fell over, too.

The girl shuddered, and one of her legs kept kicking, as if she were being electrocuted. Frank stepped back, holding his arm. Blood was running through his fingers but when
he looked inside his sleeve he saw that the girl hadn't cut him too deeply. He hesitated, grimacing, wondering what he ought to do next. The girl lifted her head a little, but then it dropped back again, and her leg stopped kicking. She was probably dead, and Frank decided to leave her where she was. Whatever Susan Fireman had said, this was still a nightmare, and the Hippocratic Oath didn't apply to nightmares.

He started to jog west toward Lexington, and then southward again to Thirty-seventh. About six or seven blocks downtown he saw sixty or seventy people stampeding across the street, howling and yipping like a pack of hounds, and then he heard the prolonged pop-crackle-popping of gunfire. A woman shouted at him from an upstairs window, “
You! Yes, you, you bastard! Don't you go running away!
” but when he turned into Thirty-seventh Street he was on his own again, and there was nothing but litter and broken boxes and overturned Dumpsters.

Frank could hear the crowds outside the Sisters of Jerusalem from at least four blocks away. Two cars were burning at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh, filling the street with black oily smoke, and six or seven people were lying on the sidewalk, their heads covered by coats and blankets, obviously dead. Blood was running across the sidewalk and into the gutter, and a guilty-looking brown-and-white mongrel was lapping it up. People were running in all directions, and what was frightening was how quiet most of them were: Only a few of them were shouting or whimpering, and the rest were all serious-faced and wide-eyed and silent. Even when they collided with each other they seemed not to notice—just stumbled, and carried on. To Frank, it felt as if the whole city had turned into a madhouse.

Outside the hospital the street was so crowded that he had to force his way forward with his shoulders and his elbows;
and several times he had to seize people by their clothing and drag them to one side. Every now and then, one of them would suddenly vomit up a fountain of blood, which splashed over everybody around them, but few people seemed to notice, or to care. Here, there was much more screaming and arguing and much more panic, but people were still milling around and bumping into each other as if they had no idea what to do.

Some people were chanting, “
Tatal nostru, carele esti in ceruri
. . .” but not in unison, so that the streets sounded like a vast chicken battery.

After several minutes of struggling, he managed to reach the police barrier. A raging black man in a red woolly hat tried to pull him back into the crowd. “You wait your turn, man! You wait your turn!” but Frank pushed the man's shoulder, and when he staggered backward the man was immediately dragged away by the hysterical crowd, as if he had been swallowed by a raging sea.

Frank ducked under the barrier. As he straightened up, he was confronted by two cops in riot helmets, swinging nightsticks. “Back behind the line, buddy! The hospital's full! Go home, and stay there!”

Frank said, “Wait up! Wait! I'm a doctor, I work here.” He pulled out his wallet and held up his ID. “I'm supposed to be on duty.”

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