The Vampire Club (17 page)

“
Point it in there and leave the rest to me.”

I took a peek into the disabling wound. Couldn’t really see much. “We’re going to have to turn him on his side.”

“
Got to hurry. And I am not sure I want to touch this thing.”

“
Look, somebody had to take Jesus down from the cross, didn’t they? Don’t be afraid of the miracles in your midst.” That sounded like something the professor would say, and I wasn’t sure it was appropriate, but it worked.

Dial, rather roughly and with me cringing, repositioned the vampire. I almost chastised Dial for the roughness, but there really wasn’t any time. Besides, the only way to hurt a vampire was with the dastardly silver bullet already embedded in its flesh.

The only impression I really had of the vampire thus far was his complete and utter lifelessness. Now on his side, his left arm hung awkwardly behind him like a rag doll’s, he actually looked more like a cuddle toy than a dangerous predator of the night. Albeit, a fairly creepy cuddle toy.

Back to the hole. “Dial, shine the light directly into it.”

He did so and I saw what I expected to find. Yep, the silver bullet. If the vampire hunters knew that silver had this effect on vampires, why didn’t they, say, throw them into the ocean with a thousand needles of silver in them like an acupuncture experiment gone berserk? Or coat them with silver paint? Or remove their fangs and give them silver dentures....

I cupped his side with my left palm, amazed at how thin he was. And I knew the reason: there wasn’t an ounce of blood in him, it having drained through the bullet wound.

I had to hurry. Too much thinking, celebrating, analyzing. They were coming. I could hear them clearly, even if I didn’t have Dial’s supersonic ears.

With the tweezers, I entered the hole. The bullet was lodged, I believed, against a rib, and upon further probing, I realized it had shattered bone. The bullet itself, however wasn’t lodged into any skeletal crevices, and once I had a grip on it, I was able to pull it free rather easily.

It came out clean and shiny.

“
Jesus!” said Dial.

And together we watched the wound close before our eyes, the skin knitting itself like in one of those time-lapse films. But this was no flower bloom or cloud formation or traffic pattern. It was skin. Vampire skin. Centuries-old skin, rejuvenating itself as we watched.

“
He’s still unconscious,” said Dial.

“
No blood. He needs blood.”

And with that I pulled out my funnel and hose.

“
Cut your wrist!” I shouted.

“
What?”

“
Just kidding.” I pulled out what I had so ingeniously packed before: bags of blood stolen from the university’s medical clinic.

“
Here they come,” Dial said in a whisper, staring down the lighted hall.

Around a bend in the hall came bouncing lights.

“
You hold the funnel to his lips and I’ll pour.”

Dial turned the vampire—Jesus Christ! I still couldn’t believe it! A real vampire!—onto his back. I parted his languid jaw, curiously noticing his pure white lips, put the rubber hosing between his teeth—and almost shit my pantaloons when I realized I was staring at his inch-and-a-half canines. With shaking hands, I gave the funnel to Dial to hold, and I tapped the clear plastic tube into the first of the bags.

Feet drummed on the wooden floor.

Christ! Got to hurry
.

I emptied the first bag into the funnel and almost immediately a noise escaped from the vampire, like the sigh of wind after a long desert night.

Oh, God. It was working. It had all been a theory, classroom discussion, and it was working. Blood by any means.

“
Quick!” I shouted. “More blood!”

I ripped open two bags at once and poured them at the same time. Dial jerked for some reason or other and some blood went down his hand.

Color had immediately returned to the vampire, and his eyelashes flickered. Most horrifyingly beautiful, his tongue protruded a little, swaying like a grub worm.

I saw the vampire hunters in my peripheral vision as I opened one more bag and emptied it into the funnel.

A hand grabbed my shoulder and yanked me away, the bag and hose flung across the floor, splashing precious drops in the dust.

“
Goddamned vampire lovers,” grunted a VVV beast.

“
Dial, you’re a traitorous whore!” said another.

I was ready to die, my final sacrifice made, my life seemingly complete. My one mission in life was fulfilled, so I could go happily.

But maybe death is never the end.

The vampire sat up.

Chapter Forty

“
Shit! It’s alive!” Grandmaster bellowed. “Anyone think to bring any silver bullets?”

“
Not me. Wow, so that’s what they look like,” said one of his men.

“
We’ve never used them before,” said another. “We’re second string, remember.”

“
Yeah, they all be in coma long before we be VVV,” said a third.

“
Shut up, you fools!” Grandmaster then whispered to one of the goons, who promptly took off down the hall.

The vampire might be immune to regular bullets, but we weren’t. Almost a dozen guns were aimed at us. I strained against the grip of the goon who held me, nodding at the vampire to make him understand whose side we were on.

He noticed me. His wide, curious, red eyes rolled slowly onto me—a rather humbling and nerve-wracking experience, I might add, because he was looking at me sort of like a hawk looks at a field mouse.

“
Excuse me, uh, sir, but I believe that fellow running over there went to fetch some silver bullets, meant, of course, for you.”

“
Did you feed me?” he asked quietly, his voice cracking.

“
Yes, sir, that would be me.”

“
Holy shit,” Grandmaster said. “It’s talking.”

A few of the men backed away, though their guns were still pointed at the vampire. Grandfather must have sensed their anxiety. “Hold your fire. With all these stone walls, the ricochets will kill us all, and the vampire will escape. Wait for silver.”

The vampire looked me straight in the eye for no more than a second, but it felt more like two seconds and then a lifetime. Then he smiled. “You know me. So what do you propose I do?”

I stared blankly at the vampire. Dial shifted on the other side of the coffin and I automatically looked at him. He shrugged.
Great. Thanks a lot, Dial. Abandon me now.

“
We’re pretty much mortal but you’re pretty much golden at the moment.”

“
I’ve been away a long time. All I know is the sweet taste of blood on my lips.”

“
Disgusting creature,” Grandmaster said.

“
See what they’re like?” I said, as the goon twisted my arm a little more. “They want to wipe out and imprison your kind. That’s why they’ve guarded you so closely.”

“
And yet you have risked your life to free me?”

“
Er, yeah.”

“
Any special reason?”

We all seemed to be waiting for the runner, or at least the VVV members were, but they were also curious, too. After all, despite being oversized, highly trained killers, they were only human.

“
Your way of life is the ultimate rebellion against the norms of this world,” I said, almost as if I had practiced this speech many times over. “You live a life few will ever experience. You are worth preserving—you do not deserve to be an extinct species.”

“
Very noble.”

“
And you are a noble creature—I mean, person—I mean,
vampire
,” I said. “But they’re going to shoot you again with a silver bullet and you’ll return to virtual slumber. This may be your last chance to escape.”

“
Well, then,” he said, rising from the coffin and stretching a little, as if working the blood through his limbs. “We can continue this conversation later.”

I smiled as he half stepped, half floated down from the coffin, moving with a stiff elegance. The vampire hunters backed away. “We have your two rescuers covered, you filthy blood-sucker,” Grandmaster said.

“
I apologize for the filth, and I shall change shortly. I hadn’t expected such an abrupt burial.” The vampire winked at me. And that’s when I noticed his height. He wasn’t really as tall as he looked in the coffin. He was just long—his arms and legs and neck, long, all of them, and he didn’t look quite as noble with his ripped shirt.

Still, no sudden movements from him. Everything was very slow, relaxed, calm, even his breathing. Breathing? Did vampires have to breathe? Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I didn’t think so, in fact I knew at one time in my life I knew the answer. Now, so many things were crowding my attention.

“
I’m serious,” Grandmaster said. “We’ll kill these two vampire whores.”

“
What’s it to me?” Laumer said. “All the more blood for my feast.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, but what could I really expect? He didn’t wink that time.

Then, skidding around a corner was the errand boy. Grandmaster held out his hand. “A brief revival,” Grandmaster said. “And maybe we’ll bury your two girls along with you for company.”

The errand boy passed over a handful of silver bullets and Grandmaster loaded them into his .43 Stallion, a vampire-hunting revolver that looked like it had more than a dozen chambers. There were supposedly only five such guns in existence, made specially for silver bullets. The Vampire Laumer didn’t flit or try to change into a winged creature—if such a thing were possible—though he surely recognized the threat. Maybe all those years of dormant coma had dulled his reaction time, and we’d only managed to pump a few pints of blood into him.

The white-haired VVV leader loaded the gun with quickness and precision and something approaching joy, as if his purpose in life had been validated. He smiled as he pointed the gun toward the vampire at my side.

“
Welcome back,” Grandmaster said. “And goodbye.”

“
Kind of you.” The vampire’s smile showed fangs.

I instinctively flinched as Grandmaster’s finger squeezed the trigger of the .43 Stallion.

The vampire, had he still been standing in front of the coffin, would have, of course, been shot and placed back in eternal prison, and I assume we’d have been next, except our prison would have been death; but he was no longer standing there. Where he went off to, I really couldn’t say.

Chapter Forty-one

As I looked around to see just where in the hell he had gone, I noticed the vampire hunters were standing there looking at their empty hands.

No guns.

No bullets.

No wounds.

No pain.

No death.

This was good.

Question: where had the guns and the vampire disappeared to?

A presence manifested next to me. And here would be the answer, no doubt.

The presence was, of course, the vampire, and he stood as calmly as when he was standing there just a few seconds ago before disappearing.

In other words, he acted as if nothing had happened.

Or was I seeing things? Had I fainted on my feet? Was that possible?

But something did happen, because the hunters were no longer in ownership of their pop guns, and the goon who had been holding me was now several feet away. Dial looked as stunned as I was.

The vampire turned to me. “Problem, I believe, solved.”

“
What happened?” I managed to ask over Granddaddy’s cursing and the confused murmurs of the VVV.

The vampire seemed to smile, but I wasn’t sure. “Another time, boy.”

I did, however, catch a glimpse of his teeth. I wanted to sit with this vampire, this actual vampire, and talk with him, ask him all the questions that had been running through my mind all these years, put to rest all the myths and fiction. To know it all for sure.

“
Real time,” blurted Dial from the other side of the coffin. “They can move in real time, while we’re still in normal time.”

“
What the heck does that mean?”

“
Yeah,” someone said to Grandmaster, a little upset. “That should have been part of our training.”

“
You were merely to guard, not hunt,” Grandmaster said. “If you knew the truth, you might defect like Dial here. Vampires can move at a higher rate than we do. They enter into what is commonly called, and as the traitor has stated, ‘real time.’ For every movement we can produce in one second, the vampire in real time would have lived for one hour. They can exist beyond our time, not even a blur to our senses.”

I’d heard of such in my vampire studies, but the professor had discounted it as a violation of the law of physics. But the professor was nowhere around to dispute what had happened.

“
Don’t worry,” the vampire said. “I have left your guns in a safe place, where you are sure to find them...” After a dramatic pause, he erupted into a demented laugh. “In the next century!”