Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (60 page)

H
e plummeted forty feet screaming. Rain stung his eyes, but he saw the sidewalk rushing toward him. In the second before impact, a hand fastened to his ankle and lifted. He first slowed, then reversed direction. The
manananggal
worked her wings and carried him away.

Over rooftops and furiously swaying trees. His body whipped in the storm and turned gray-cold. He couldn’t breathe. His arms hung like wet sleeves. The
manananggal
screeched and either lost her grip or let him go. He caught the wind like a sheet and was blown sideways, landing in a palm tree, tumbling then onto a steel roof that clattered beneath him. He bled from so many wounds. His right leg was broken and twisted beneath him. The wind rolled him across the roof and he fell twelve feet to the street below. Floodwater broke his fall. He floated belly-up and was reminded of dead insects in a certain basin filled with dirty water.

Nobody on the street. Abandoned vehicles cluttered the road. Rain fell into his open eyes and bounced off his chest. He sank beneath the surface and emerged a second later, blinking and gasping. The flowing water carried him between vehicles and he wondered if he could use one of them to hide in. He saw the creature through flashes of rain. She looped in the sky.

“Please,” David said. He rolled onto his front and grabbed the door handle of a small car turned sideways in the road, driver’s window open. He pulled himself inside, screaming as his broken leg
was bumped and pulled. Water flooded the car, but he was protected somewhat from the wind and rain. He could breathe, at least. More importantly, he was—hopefully—hidden from the creature. He crawled onto the backseat and wept.

She’ll find you
, he thought, teeth clenched, shivering.
Just like she found you at the hotel. Tracked you like a bloodhound. She knows your scent.

“Please . . .”

Do you believe now? Or are you still in denial . . . the way you deny your actions, your sins?

He buried his face in his hands and screamed.

Are you sorry?

“Yes . . .
yes
!”

A now-familiar screech that was not the storm, but equally real, and more feared. David lowered his hands. He looked through the open window and saw the
manananggal
land on the roof of a jeepney, maybe thirty feet away. She folded her wings and peered through the darkness, the swirling rain. Her yellow eyes tracked left to right, looking for him.

David moaned and lowered himself into the water behind the driver and passenger seats. Only his face broke the surface, like a floating mask. His heart hammered so hard that he imagined the water trembling, ripples forming. His blue lips moved silently.

Please . . .

She screeched again, the sound cutting through the storm. A palm tree fell nearby and the force of it nudged the car through the water. It caught the current, and David cried out—couldn’t help himself—as it edged toward the jeepney. He raised his head and braved a look. The
manananggal
tasted the air with her long tongue. Her eyes searched brightly. The car bumped another vehicle, turned a slow circle, but kept moving toward her.

She extended her wings and hovered, arms hanging.

David held his breath and slipped beneath the water. He bled and trembled. But for this storm—this act of God—he would be on a plane back home. But for this creature—decidedly ungodly—he would be in his hotel room, blissfully sinning.

He heard his heartbeat, felt his guilt, banging . . . banging.

I’m sorry.

He imagined safety, happiness, comfort. Not his Toronto home with its luxury furnishings, but his wife. She gave him these things, and so much more. The only thing she couldn’t give him—and what he desperately wanted—was a child. But it didn’t matter. Angie was, in every other way, everything he needed.

I’m so sorry.

The little car struck the heavier jeepney and stopped. David came up for air. He wiped his eyes. The windshield was blurred with rain, but he saw her terrible wings clearly.

S
he pulled him through the open window and he was too limp to fight. High into the sky, the storm ebbing now, still ferocious. Her tongue lashed over his open wounds and came away red. She bit off three of his fingers and dropped him. He landed on a concrete wall, back broken. The
manananggal
circled and swooped and plucked him—dead from the chest down—into her strong arms and carried him to the outskirts of Palla.

The rain forest here had been partially cleared, not by the storm, but by harvesters, forest mowers, and forwarders. There
was
storm damage, though: two glaring billboards had been blown to the ground. One depicted the site’s shimmering future. The other brandished the land developer’s name and logo. The
manananggal
dropped David on this latter billboard. He landed faceup, his body buckled. The final precious beats of his life were spent watching the creature tear him apart. She chewed off his withered penis and swallowed it, grinning. She gobbled his testicles, then thrust her hands
into the wound between his legs and tore upward, unzipping him to the sternum. His guts flopped out and steamed. She fed on them and he felt nothing but the pain inside—the pain of loss, fear, and understanding. He blinked rain from his eyes and died.

The
manananggal
licked her lips, spread her wings.

Blood covered most of the billboard. It pooled across the company logo and part of the name.

Above David Payne’s separated corpse, in a font designed to catch the eye, the word
REALITY
.

S
he landed in Manila on time, but her connection to Palla was delayed. She knew it would be; the city was on its knees after the latest storm. Damage was estimated at one hundred million US dollars. Sixty-three dead. Reporters the world over said the same thing: a tragedy indeed, but nothing—a mere breeze—compared to Alayna.

Angie sat on a hard chair at Manila’s airport, head down, locked in her grief. She waited six hours and finally boarded her flight. It was late evening by the time she arrived in Palla. She’d arranged transportation from the airport—had been told not to trust taxi drivers in foreign countries. A woman traveling on her own should take few chances. A
pregnant
woman should take none.

They had been trying for six years. David—who claimed to always get what he wanted—insisted they
keep
trying.
I want this
, he’d said to her.
I’m not giving up.
She’d had surgery to open her fallopian tubes. Two failed IVFs. Doctors told her she had only a 2 percent chance of natural conception. She felt unworthy. Unwomanly. It broke her heart.

David had been in the Philippines for only a few days when she found out. She had woken that morning feeling different. Nothing she could put her finger on. Just . . .
different
. She went immediately to the bathroom cabinet and took out one of the pregnancy tests she kept on hand. Peed on it without expectation. Fell trembling to her
knees and cried tears of disbelief when two blue lines appeared in the little window.

Angie came close to calling him right away—didn’t care what time it was in the Philippines or what he might be doing. After some thought, she decided to wait for his return home. She wanted to
feel
his reaction, not just hear it. She’d bought a pacifier and had the due date printed on it. The plan was to pop it into his mouth when he closed in for that first kiss.

The storm—Diwata—had raged eight thousand miles away but still managed to turn her world upside down. Instead of giving David the child he so desperately wanted, she was flying to the Philippines to identify and bring back his body.

The driver was waiting for her at the airport in Palla, holding up a misspelled sign—
PAIN
—written in blue ink. He spoke English but chose not to. They drove into the city in silence, passing countless scenes of devastation and loss. Angie clutched her belly instinctively. The setting sun drew orange shades across the sky.

The buildings leaned into one another, as if huddled, as if afraid.

T
he woman standing by the side of the road wasn’t a typical hitchhiker. Most are young men, then there are a few young women, plus a small number of older men. The woman who had carefully positioned herself some twenty yards before the rest area with her thumb outstretched belonged to the almost nonexistent category of older women.

My ability to see in the dark has improved significantly since I became infected, so in spite of the November twilight, and the fact that the woman was standing outside the beam of my headlights, I could see that she had medium-length gray hair, and blue eyes with an alert expression, which is unusual in hitchhikers.

Her only luggage was a scruffy rectangular rucksack, yet she was wearing an expensive quilted jacket suitable for use in the mountains, and designer boots. She would have looked more at home on some exclusive Alpine trek rather than by the roadside somewhere between Härnösand and Sundsvall.

It was this discrepancy in her appearance and my curiosity rather than the thirst for blood that made me slow down; the air brake hissed as I maneuvered the truck into the rest area where I had slept through a short winter’s day just two weeks earlier.

I flashed the brake lights a couple of times to indicate that I really had stopped to pick her up. I could see her in the wing mirror, jogging alongside the forty-foot trailer. I leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door. A couple of seconds later, her face appeared above the seat.

“Hi there,” I said. “Where are you heading?”

“South.”

I smiled and nodded in the direction of the highway. “That’s pretty obvious, but where exactly?”

“Does it matter?” Before I had time to reply, she asked another question. “What’s your destination?”

“Trelleborg.”

She glanced back at the trailer. “The docks, I guess?”

“Correct.”

“Excellent.”

She swung herself up onto the step with surprising agility, the rucksack slung over her shoulder; she settled down on the seat and pulled the door shut. Our brief conversation hadn’t exactly told me a great deal about her.

If she meant mainland Europe when she said “south,” then my offer of a ride all the way to Trelleborg should at least have made her pretty happy, if not ecstatic. After all, we were talking about a distance of some six hundred miles that she was going to be able to cover in one fell swoop, and yet she had accepted the information as self-evident, just one fact among many others.

As I put the truck in gear and drove out of the rest area with half an eye on the trailer, I decided that for the time being I would assume that “south” meant “away.” That she didn’t have any particular destination in mind but just wanted to get away from the place where she happened to be at the moment.

The irregular roar of the old V-8 engine became a steady hum as I changed up to cruising speed and zoomed along the highway into the night.

Perhaps I would drink her, perhaps not. I had many hours ahead of me in which to reach that decision.

Last year, I clocked up twenty-five years as a truck driver, trucker, slave to the highway. I did my first trip with a provisional category-C license burning a hole in my pocket when I was twenty-two. Pet food from Värtahamnen in Stockholm to a wholesaler in Västberga. Only a year or so later, I gained my CE license and was able to start driving articulated trucks. Since then I’ve acquired my ADR certificate, which allows me to transport hazardous material, and taken a couple of courses on how to handle goods and livestock. To put it briefly, I can drive anything at all from point A to point B, and I can also load and unload the truck by myself if necessary.

It’s a profession that is full of contradictions; maybe that’s why I like it. On the one hand you’re free, your own master, yet on the other, you’re totally ruled by driving regulations and timetables. Everything is highly technological, with GPS and computerized tachographs, yet at the same time it is utterly primitive. Pick this up and move it to there. You’re kind of omnipotent out there on the road with forty tons behind you, but you’re also the most vulnerable when it comes to ice and snow, accidents and holdups.

But I have spent twenty-five years in the industry without being involved in anything more serious than the odd dent and scrape, and a few pallets that came off because they hadn’t been properly secured. Of course I’ve had a few close shaves, and admittedly I’ve run into or over just about every breed of wildlife in this long, narrow country of ours (because it certainly
is
long and narrow, I can confirm that), but nothing more. I’m a good driver, that’s all there is to it.

Bearing in mind what I’ve just told you, I ought to be forty-seven years old. It’s true that I have lived for forty-seven years, but I am no longer quite so sure about this age thing. I’m almost starting to
believe that I could carry on driving up and down these roads forever and ever. I’ve been wondering whether to switch to another haulage firm to avoid arousing suspicion.

Only the day before yesterday, Lena in the office said: “Jesus, Tompa, you look younger with every passing day!” She meant it as a compliment, but it took a real effort for me to smile and say: “Have you forgotten to put your contact lenses in?”

I don’t think I’m getting younger, but I do believe I’m not getting any older. I stopped at forty-three. Which means that to those who are aging normally, like Lena, it can look as if I’m getting younger. People might admire that for a few years, but only up to a certain point. I have to be careful.

“W
hat are you driving?”

We had just passed Sundsvall when my passenger broke the silence. I dragged myself back from the landscape of diffuse images that constituted my brain’s daily diet while I was on the road.