Vampire Blood (33 page)

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“Jenny? Jenny, are you in here?” Jeff whispered urgently, his flashlight’s ray of light flitted across the bars of another filthy cage—this time with someone
alive
in it—shattering the velvet blackness and lighting up Jenny’s upturned bloody and abused face.
She’d been beaten! His Jenny.
In her arms was her mother’s prone form. For a moment the horror of what he was seeing threatened to drive him crazy.
But she was still alive!

“It’s me, Jeff.” She released a great sigh of relief, her dirty fingers reaching out to him, and an expression of relief claiming her face.

His warm hands closed on hers through the slats.

“You came after me!” She gasped unbelievingly.

“Yes, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out where you’d gone to. Thank God I woke up soon after you’d left.”

“Thank God,” Jenny smiled through bloody lips.

“Would have been here sooner, but I had trouble with your dad’s car.” The beam of his flashlight illuminated other cages. “Oh, Jenny, what the hell is this place? These cages. God, the stench! The bodies.” He gulped, still panting from exertion, his mind reeling as his eyes darted around, horror-stricken.

“You got that right. It’s hell.
Please get us out!”

He was staring at Jenny’s mutilated face, at her mother’s still body.
“They got your mother, too.”
Then he pulled himself together. “Jenny, are you able to walk? Are you all right?”

“I think so. Now that you’re here, I will be. My mother’s the one I’m worried about. She’s unconscious and needs a doctor.”

“What happened to you two?”

“Irene,” she enunciated the name with obvious hatred, “kidnapped me as I was leaving the theater after seeing Michelson. Then she bludgeoned my mother half to death and brought her here, too.” Her eyes hardened in the flashlight’s beam, and she whispered, “Joey wasn’t lying, Jeff. They’re really
vampires
, swear
to God. They’ve been living down here, sleeping during the day. They’ve been abducting people. Feeding on them or killing them at their leisure. It was they who murdered the Albers and my father.” Her voice was hollow. “They were the ones who attacked Joey.”

“Vampires, yes, I believe you, Jenny. There are
coffins
in the next room. They’ve been down here in the basement all the time.”

“Yes, but don’t worry about it now. I’ll tell you everything later. We’ve got to get out of here before they come back.” Jenny’s voice was frantic with fear.

“You’re right.” He was inspecting the place, playing his flashlight into the corners and into the other cages, as he shone the beam on the decaying bodies.

Jenny stifled a cry. None of them seemed to be moving, or even alive.

“My God,
those poor people,” he breathed as he covered his nose with the edge of his shirt and peered into the nearest cage. The smell of rotting flesh gagged him. He was afraid he was going to throw up. Jeff checked the other cages, and when he returned, he said, “They’re all dead, I’m afraid,” dismay in his voice. One of the dead bodies, or pieces of it, was Sheriff Samuels. The uniform tipped him off. He didn’t tell Jenny, though.

The people that had been locked in the cages would never make it out, he grieved. He willed himself not to think about it. It hurt too much.

Jenny looked down at her mother’s placid, but remote face. “She might not make it.”

“She’ll make it.” Jeff tried to sound like he believed it.

“We’ve got to go,” Jenny said again. “Irene’s not here now, she went out looking for
you.
If she doesn’t find you, she’ll go after Joey again. She told me so. We’ve got to get to him before she does.”

“Okay. We’re out of here.” Discovering the outside latches on the cage, he fumbled with and undid them and swung open the door. He helped pull an unsteady Jenny and her unconscious mother from the cage and into his arms. “God, Jenny, what happened to your face? Does it hurt much?”

“A little.” She winced. “It won’t stop bleeding. I think I need stitches, buy it’ll heal. I’m more worried about Mom.”

He scooped her mother’s limp body into his arms. Jenny held the flashlight so they could see. They scrambled up the basement steps through the darkened theater lobby, Estelle in Jeff’s arms. They prayed with every step that Irene wouldn’t reappear until they were gone, and that the other vampires were too busy to note their absence.

Twice, Jenny had to stop, leaning against him, on the verge of fainting. She forced herself to remain conscious. She said there were things she had to do.

Then they were out in the parking lot.

“My car’s gone.” Even in the dark they could see it wasn’t where she’d left it.

“They must have disposed of it,” he said, “but your dad’s station
wagon is
right over there. I had no key and had to hot wire it, baby it to keep it running, but I got here.”

“You always were a fast thinker, but you won’t have to do that again. I know where the extra key’s hidden. He always kept one in the car, in case.” She told him where to find it. As they drove away, Jenny prayed aloud, “Oh God, I hope Irene and her friends don’t find us before the sun comes up.”

Jeff just flashed her a worried frown. He didn’t need to answer.
Me, too.
It was in his eyes.

Heading for the hospital, Jenny concocted a story for the doctors in the emergency room about her mother’s condition. She’d say she’d been mauled by stray dogs. Then she came up with a scheme to smuggle both Joey and her mother out after the doctors had tended to her.

“What about you?” Jeff asked.

Jenny’s fingers tenderly explored the puffiness on the side of her face. They still came away bloody. “Maybe a few quick stitches, if we have the time, but I have no intention of wasting time over myself. We’ve got to get in and get out, fast. Irene could be at the hospital right now. Drive faster, Jeff,” Jenny ordered, shivering. “Michelson said Irene has gone over the edge, so I’m not taking any chances. We can’t be anywhere before dawn that Irene can find us, nor can we leave my mom or Joey where Irene can get at them when the sun sets again.”

When they were pulling up to the hospital, Jeff heard Jenny crying beside him in the predawn. She was rocking in the seat, her arms tightly embracing her mother, her face buried in her hair.

“Jenny?”

Her face lifted up to him, a pale bruised moon shape streaked with tears and grief. “She’s dead, Jeff. My mother’s dead.”

He kept driving, his jaw clenched. He laid a gentle hand on Jenny’s shoulder and said nothing, letting her cry in peace. There were no words he could give her that would change anything.

After a while she remarked sadly, “At least now they’re together. Mom and Dad. Just like they wanted. Like she said they would be. Perhaps now they’re happy. There’s no money problems in heaven, is there?”

“No,” he replied. “There isn’t.”

They left her mother’s body in the back seat, covered with one of the blankets Jenny had found in the rear of the station wagon. It was still dark enough so that no one would notice it. They’d be back with Joey and on their way again in minutes.

The hospital was tomblike. It was easy to slip by the half drowsing nurses at the main desk. They tiptoed past, when their heads were turned, and into Joey’s room.

“We’re taking you out of here to a safe place where Irene can’t get you,” she whispered, though Joey couldn’t hear her. He was in a deep sleep. Drugged, probably. Thank goodness the IVs and tubes had been disconnected. His coloring and his breathing seemed normal, too.

They carefully carried him out of the room and down the hallway. As luck would have it there wasn’t one nurse at the nurses’ station. They must have all been with patients.

“What about your face, Jenny?”

“I’ll tend to it later. I trust my gut, and right now, its screaming for us to get out; I’m listening.”

They slipped out one of the side exit doors and around the building to their car. It was easy.

“Where do we go?” He checked in the mirrors. Irene could be hunting for them right now.

“To the farmhouse. I don’t think Irene will think we’d go back there, but to be safe, we’ll go down into the cellar. Dad never locked it. It won’t be comfortable, but it will do until the sun comes up.”

They hid the car in the woods behind the farmhouse and moved Joey and Estelle’s body into the cellar.

It was an old fruit cellar, small and narrow, with doors that closed in on it at ground level.

“No, no lights,” Jenny cautioned, as he switched on the flashlight. He turned it off.

It wasn’t easy getting to it in the dark.

“Just follow me. I know the way well enough.” Jenny gave directions as they stumbled through the yard and down into the cellar, bumping into things once in a while.

Making a pile of the rest of the blankets from the car, they laid them under Joey on the table her mom had once used to stack her home canned supplies on and covered him. The cellar wasn’t much cooler than an air-conditioned room, so Jenny hoped Joey wouldn’t be the worse for it.

She didn’t know what else to do.

Her mother’s body they wrapped in a blanket and lay gently in a corner.

They crouched together in the murky cellar, Jenny fighting away her obsessive fear of the dark as they talked in conspiratorial voices.

“What do we do when it gets light?” he asked.

“We go upstairs and call Laurie to come and take care of Joey. Tell her some of what’s going on, and then we go back to the theater and destroy
them.”
There was a bone chilling fury in her voice that he’d never heard before.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“What else can we do? We can’t go for help, even if they’d believe us,” she stated acidly. “By the time we’d convince someone to get over there, they’d just be
gone.
Like all the other places they’ve butchered in.” She shifted towards him, as he held her in the earthy smelling cellar. “Jeff, we have no choice, we
have
to
exterminate them.
We can’t allow them to live. Any of them. We can’t allow them to go on doing what they do. Terrorizing. Mutilating. Killing.”

“So ... you think we can kill a bunch of devious blood-thirsty vampires that have probably been at this murdering of humans for a very long time and have gotten away with it? Us? You and me by ourselves?”

“I know it’s dangerous but we have to try. What other choice do we have? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to become a fugitive and run, hide, the rest of my life. Do you?”

“No.”

“So are you with me?”

“Yes.”

It made her uneasy to think of killing Michelson. He’d saved Joey’s life, after all, but for Jenny there was now only black and white. Michelson was a killer like the rest of them. A vampire. A night creature of eternal evil.

“You’re right, Jenny,” Jeff said. “We have to find a way to destroy them.”

“I want revenge for Mom and Dad, and the others,” she swore, her voice full of determination. “I’d rather die trying to destroy them than not to try at all.”

His voice was low and passionate. “I told you I’d never run out on you again, didn’t I? But I’m warning you now, we may not come back. There’s no room for mistakes.” His voice faltered. “We’ll probably only get one chance.”

“I know, Jeff.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him hungrily, gratefully. When the kiss was over, she said, “Together, we’ll make it. I know we will.”

He kissed her again and held her close, aware that it could be perhaps one of the last times. “God, I wish I had a cigarette and a hot cup of coffee, some food. I’m hungry as a bear. Chilly for some reason, too.” It didn’t make it any easier knowing it was all up there above them, just feet away. It might as well have been miles.

“When it gets light,” was all she said.

They tried not to think about food, snuggling deeper into each other’s arms.

“You got a plan?” he probed a little while later, laying a kiss on the top of her head.

“Not exactly.” Her laugh was sour. “It’s funny, years ago when I wrote those horror books, I never in my wildest nightmares ever thought I’d be in just such a situation as I’d put my characters in or using any of the information I’d researched.”

“You and me both,” Jeff groaned.

“I know what kills them, according to all the legends. A stake in the heart, loping off their heads or keeping them from their coffins after sunrise. Bullets of silver. A few other things. In fact,” Jenny’s voice grew excited, “right after my first book was published, one of my obsessed readers sent me something that might be of some real help ... a
vampire-killing kit.
”

“A what?” Jeff laughed this time. It sounded eerie in the dirt cellar.

“Remember, it was a small wooden box about eight inches long, and oh, five inches deep or so. It had a sort of gun in it in the shape of a cross. Thinking of the silver bullets brought it back to me. There were silver bullets in it, too. Round ball-like ones. I thought it a strange thing to send me. I thought it was a joke, but it was genuine and very old, an antique, from the early nineteenth century, I believe. Beautiful. Probably worth something. That’s why I kept it.”

“Well, where is it?”

“I’m trying to remember what I did with it. There was even a book with it. Now that would be helpful.
What
did I do with it?” She fell silent for a few moments. “Oh, I know. After we divorced it was probably with that stuff Mom and Dad let me store in their attic. I had boxes and boxes, nowhere to go with them.” Her eyes darted upward. “It’s here. Upstairs in the attic. As soon as it gets light, we’ll go and find it.”