The Mammoth Book of Dracula (94 page)

“A simple mixture of base metals that destroys the nervous system,” Duffy explained. “They’re alive but they can’t move. Not anything significant, anyways. They can open and close their eyes, and sometimes they try to speak ... but it’s all a jumble of incoherence.”

Blaumlein looked at the naked man, then across at the hanging bodies and, finally, at Tom Duffy. “You sound different. You’ve dropped—”

“The accent? I’m an educated man, Mister Blaumlein. That’s not to say I’m any better than the rest of the folks here in Pump Handle ... I just know more. Mildred and me, we’ve picked up some of the local colloquial parlance but when I get to talking about my work, well ...” He assumed a hillbilly stance. “Don’t seem natural not to give it its due gravitas.” He laughed, straightened up and affected a quizzical expression. “Know what I mean?”

Blaumlein nodded.

“Come on, time-to-go time, I’m afraid.”

Blaumlein struggled and locked his legs. “Wait!”

“What now?”

“Let me join you ... let
me
drink the treated blood.”

Duffy shook his head. “We need one more body. They die—heart failure, embolisms and so on—nothing we can do. And when their hearts are not working, they cease to be of any use. Whatever else happens, we have to keep the supply of new blood flowing into our Mayor.”

“But I’m young ... I can-—”

“Age doesn’t come into this. The blood gives youth no matter what the age of the person drinking it.”

Blaumlein looked around at the townsfolk. “Is this it? Is this your full number?”

Duffy nodded.

“What does one more matter?” He suddenly had a thought. “And you can have the guy in the truck—
my
vampire . . . and you can have the triplets. You said you only needed
one
more. This way you’ll have even
more
than you need.
And
you’ll increase your own number.”

“Yes, and we’ll increase the number depending on the Mayor.”

“But I can drive... there are the trucks ...” Blaumlein realized that these were poor bargaining tools. There were undoubtedly people here who could drive ... and they would have the trucks anyway when they ... He tried not to think of that. “We can travel ... I’ve seen lots of towns, on the way here, places we can go back to for fresh supplies ...”

Duffy thought for a moment and looked across at the others. Eleanor Revine shrugged.

“He does have a point there, Tom,” Mildred Duffy said. There was something about the way she raised her eyebrows that Blaumlein didn’t like. He couldn’t figure out what it was, but he knew he didn’t like it.

Duffy nodded and relaxed his grip. Then he removed his hand completely from Blaumlein’s shoulder and stepped back. Blaumlein rubbed his arm and shoulder, trying to get the circulation going again. “Okay,” Duffy said. “But there’s something I haven’t mentioned.”

Duffy walked around and stood with the other townsfolk. “There’s one myth about vampirism that’s absolutely true. Crucifixes, garlic, silver ... all that stuff means diddly to us. But we cannot expose ourselves to the sun.”

Blaumlein frowned.

“You see where I’m heading with this?”

Now Blaumlein shook his head. But the smile he had been feeling started to fade.

“The deal is you take us to these places. We’ll fix up the trucks so we can travel during the day without fear of exposure ... but you’ll have to be manacled. Just for security’s sake.”

“But... how can I do that? Take you around during the day?”

“The sun won’t bother you, Mister Blaumlein,” Duffy said softly. “You won’t be drinking any of the treated blood.”

“Hey, now wait a minute ... we agreed—”

“You’re in no position to bargain, I’m afraid. But for the record, you sold yourself on the basis of chauffeur duties. We won’t always be able to travel at night—distances being what they are—so the services of someone who can take sunlight would be valuable. But...” He shrugged. “The choice is yours. Life and some driving responsibilities, or ...”

Blaumlein glanced up at his wife’s body. It wasn’t much of a decision at all. Not really.

Duffy reached under the table and pulled out a thick-linked chain with manacles at each end. He walked over to Blaumlein and stooped to fasten one of the manacles to his ankle. “Time for our rest now, Mister Blaumlein.” He moved across to the first of a series of metal posts attached to the rail for the plastic sheeting and fixed the second manacle. “Sleep well. We’ll see you in the evening.”

“But... but what about food?”

“Food? Ah, yes. That was what you came here for after all. There’ll be cabbage soup for supper. Then we’ll go down to the trucks and bring back the others. Tomorrow we can start to make plans for travelling.”

The townsfolk filed out of the barn. The last one to leave—the boy: Billy something—stopped and smiled coldly at Blaumlein. “I knew he wasn’t a
real
vampire.”

To Joe Blaumlein, the huge barn doors closing sounded for all the world like a stone slab being pushed over a crypt entrance.

He turned around and saw his wife’s eyes, sleepily staring straight at him. As the whispering started, he remembered he still had two bullets left.

<>

~ * ~

F. PAUL WILSON

The Lord’s Work

F. PAUL WILSON resides at the Jersey Shore and is the author of forty-plus books and nearly a hundred short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers and virtually everything in between.

His novels regularly appear on the
New York Times
Bestsellers List. He was voted Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. He has also received the Bram Stoker Award, the Porgie Award, the Prometheus and Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards, the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention, the Inkpot Award from ComiCon, and is listed in the 50th anniversary edition of
Who’s Who in America.

Over eight million copies of his books are in print in the US and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He has also written for the stage, screen and interactive media. The author’s latest thrillers,
Ground Zero
and
Fatal Error,
both star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack, while
Jack: Secret Histories
kicked off a young-adult trilogy starring a fourteen-year-old Jack.

Vampires finally rule the world. They use humans as either slaves or livestock, but there are still a few who have the courage to fight back against their undead masters ...

~ * ~

AND WHAT ARE you doing, Carole? What are you DOING? You’ll be after killing yourself, Carole. You’ll be blowing yourself to pieces and then you’ll be going straight to hell. HELL, Carole!

“But I won’t be going alone,” Sister Carole Flannery muttered.

She had to turn her head away from the kitchen sink now. The fumes stung her nose and made her eyes water, but she kept on stirring the pool chlorinator into the hot water until it was completely dissolved. She wasn’t through yet. She took the beaker of No Salt she’d measured out before starting the process and added it to the mix in the big Pyrex bowl. Then she stirred some more. Finally, when she was satisfied that she was not going to see any further dissolution at this temperature, she put the bowl on the stove and turned up the flame.

A propane stove. She’d seen the big white tank out back last week when she was looking for a new home; that was why she’d chosen this old house. With New Jersey Natural Gas in ruins, and JCP&L no longer sending electricity through the wires, propane and wood stoves were the only ways left to cook.

I really shouldn’t call it cooking, she thought as she fled the acrid fumes and headed for the living room. Nothing more than a simple dissociation reaction—heating a mixture of calcium hypochlorate with potassium chloride. Simple, basic chemistry. The very subject she’d taught bored freshmen and sophomores for five years at St Anthony’s high school over in Lakewood.

“And you all thought chemistry was such a useless subject!” she shouted to the walls.

She clapped a hand over her mouth. There she was, talking out loud again. She had to be careful. Not so much because someone might hear her, but because she was worried she might be losing her mind.

She’d begun talking to herself in her head—just for company of sorts—to ease her through the long empty hours. But the voice had taken on a life of its own. It was still her own voice, but it had acquired a thick Irish brogue, very similar to her dear, sweet, dead mother’s.

Maybe she’d already lost her mind. Maybe all this was merely a delusion. Maybe vampires hadn’t taken over the entire civilized world. Maybe they hadn’t defiled her church and convent, slaughtered her sister nuns. Maybe it was all in her mind.

Sure, and you’d be wishing it was all in your mind, Carole. Of course you would. Then you wouldn’t be sinning!

Yes, she truly did wish she were imagining all this. At least then she’d be the only one suffering, and all the rest would still be alive and well, just as they’d been before she went off the deep end. Like the people who’d once lived in this house. The Bennetts—Kevin, Marie, and their twin girls. She hadn’t known them before, but Sister Carole felt she knew them now. She’d seen their family photos, seen the twins’ bedroom. They were dead now, she was sure. Or maybe worse. But either way, they were gone.

But if this was a delusion it was certainly an elaborate, consistent delusion. Every time she woke up—she never allowed herself to sleep too many hours at once, only catnaps—it was the same: quiet skies, vacant houses, empty streets, furtive, scurrying survivors who trusted no one, and—

What’s that?

Sister Carole froze as her ears picked up a sound outside, a hum, like a car engine. She hurried in a crouch to the front door and peered through the sidelight. It
was
a car. A convertible. Someone was out driving in—

She ducked down when she saw who was in it. Scruffy and unwashed, lean and wolfish, bare-chested or in cut-off sweatshirts, the driver wearing a big Texas hat, all guzzling beer. She didn’t know their names or their faces, and she didn’t have to see their earrings to know who—what—they were.

Collaborators. Predators. They liked to call themselves cowboys. Sister Carole called them scum of the earth.

They were headed east. Good. They’d find a little surprise waiting for them down the road.

As it did every so often, the horror of what her life had become caught up to Sister Carole then, and she slumped to the floor of the Bennett house and began to sob.

Why?
Why had God allowed this to happen to her, to His Church, to His world?

Better question: why had she allowed these awful events to change her so? She had been a Sister of Mercy.

Mercy! Do you hear that, Carole? A Sister of MERCY!

She had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, had vowed to devote her life to teaching and doing the Lord’s work. But now there was no money, no one worth losing her virginity to, no Church to be obedient to, and no students left to teach.

All she had left was the Lord’s work.

Believe you me, Carole, I’d hardly be calling the making of plastic explosive and the other horrible things you’ve been doing the Lord’s work. It’s killing! It’s a SIN.’

Maybe the voice was right. Maybe she would go to hell for what she was doing. But somebody had to make those rotten cowboys pay.

~ * ~

King of the world.