Vampirus (Book 1) (15 page)

You know damn well what it is,
he told himself.
You felt it at Alger’s house when you found Anne lying in bed and you felt it at the King house when you found Linda. It’s the same thing that crawled up your spine and into your guts when you found Lester Paduk and his family under the tarp.

Yes, he knew that it was.

They were here somewhere: the Carriers. Hiding in some dark corner or maybe tunneled down into the salt itself.

A car door slammed outside and he nearly leapt out of his skin. He went to the door and saw Billy McReady stepping out of his cruiser. There was another deputy with him. A young guy, big and bristling with muscle. Luke didn
’t know him, but he thought his name was Beech or Beecher. Something like that.

“
Over here,” he called.

Billy and his deputy crossed the road.

“Christ, you’re the last guy I expected to see here, Luke,” he said.

“
Well, Stubby’s running a one-man show so I’ve been doing some plowing for him.”

“
He around?”

“
No, out to the Power Plant.”

Luke noticed that Billy wasn
’t clutching his rosary, but he still had that blank, worried look to his face. He kept smiling as he chatted, as was his way, but it was artificial. The sort of grin a dying man might offer his loved ones from his hospital bed so they would not think he was suffering, even though he was in great discomfort.

“
Oh, Luke, this is Sonny Beech. He’s new, but we’re breaking him in.”

Luke made to shake hands with him, but Sonny wouldn
’t have it. “Sorry,” he said in a flat monotone. “With the germs and all, you understand.”

“
Of course.”

Luke nearly laughed.
Sonny Beech.
His parents must have been some real smartasses. He turned towards the open door of the Refitters building and whatever humor he felt evaporated. Without asking Billy and his deputy to follow him, he stepped back in there and it settled into him right away…a sense of despair and hopelessness. He figured a cancer ward or a leper colony might feel that way, places where disease ran unchecked and malignant.

Billy and Sonny followed him in there.

“You looking for something?” Sonny asked.

Luke breathed in and out.
“Yeah…I guess. Only I’m afraid that I might find it.”

Neither man questioned this. In their hearts, they knew, and that was more than enough.

Luke walked over to the far wall.

There was a door there that led into a long narrow storage room where the work crews kept everything from concrete forms to spools of electrical wire. He tried the knob and it was locked. Just making contact with it made him certain that he had tracked down the source of
contamination. It was behind that door. It was practically thriving in there.

“
It was never locked before,” he said.

Sonny said nothing.

Luke could hear Billy swallow. “You need to get in there?”

“
I’m thinking it might be a good idea.”

“
Well, we’ll just have to wait until Stubby comes back,” Sonny said, as if he were relieved. While Billy had gotten closer to the door with Luke, he had stepped even farther back as if whatever was in there might seep through the wood itself.

“I don’t think there’s a key for it,” Luke told him.
“In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s not.”

Billy stepped forward and tried the doorknob. “Let’s invite ourselves in then.”

“I don’t think we should,” Sonny said.

“Well, nobody asked you.” Billy pulled out his 9mm and Luke stepped back as he fired a couple rounds through the old lock. “That’ll do it.”

Luke stood directly behind him as he pushed the door open. A vile, cloying odor of sweet decay came wafting out in a hot, moist wave and they all stepped back. It was the same sort of stink that had come off of Pauly Crossik that night at Salem Cross and it was just as inexplicable: it was far too cold for a smell like that. It was the sort of dead animal stench you might smell at high summer if a vole or a rat had died in an abandoned shed, slowly putrefying in the hot darkness, but it had no place in January. None at all.

Luke tried the light
switch, but no light came on. “Burned out,” he said.

Billy pulled a
small flashlight from his Sam Browne belt and shined it around inside. He panned the ceiling and saw immediately that the fluorescent tubes had been shattered. Luke sighed. It was just like the Paduk house. He stepped inside with Billy. Sonny did not follow them.

“I’m not going in there,” he said. “I just…I can’t do it, okay?”

He looked like ice that was on the point of shattering. Billy just nodded and led Luke further into the shadows that seem to crawl around them in thick coils. The smell was worse the further they went in. The confined air of the storage room was nearly juicy with it as if they were following threads of rot to some immense fruiting body, the black pulsating heart of the contamination that blighted the entire building.

Billy shined his light back and forth with steady, revealing arcs.

Nothing had changed since the last time Luke had been in there. Lumber and concrete forms were piled along the left wall, shovels and rakes and brooms hanging from pegs on the opposite side, a center island running down the length of the room that was made of huge spools of wire and bundles of snow fence. There was a workbench heaped with curbing spikes and concrete floats. There was a well-thumbed stack of skin magazines and an obligatory girly calendar on the wall that was three years out of date.

“There’s one of them in here,” Luke heard himself say. “We have to be standing almost on top of it.”

“One of what?” Billy asked.

“I think you know.”

There was no argument on that. They moved to the far end of the room where they found unused street signs encased in cardboard, streetlight globes, and a collection of huge folded tarps. As they got closer, the smell got stronger, not so much decay now as an earthy, composting stink of the sort you might acquaint with the undersides of green mossy fallen trees. There was another workbench and beneath it, a form beneath a badly stained drop cloth.

“Shit,” Billy said.

Breathing in and out, almost dizzy from the pungent smell, Luke got down on his knees. His heart was pounding and his skin felt so tight he thought it might split. He didn’t have enough spit by that point to even swallow.

“Hold the light steady,” he told Billy.

He reached under the bench and pulled the drop cloth free.

Ronny Hazek was under there.

Luke felt something sink inside of him. Good old Ronny. Lanky, weathered, and tough, he’d been tailgunning on a garbage truck since the 1960s and had no plans for retirement. “They’ll take this old man out in a box,” he’d once told Luke. He lay there in a gray work shirt and brown Duck bib overalls that were badly stained from his job. On his feet were scuffed, bright yellow gum rubber boots. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth set in a skeletal grimace. Blood was smeared over his chin and up one cheek, dark crusty stains on his shirt. With his silver hair swept back from his brow, his heavy mustache and jutting nose like an eagle’s beak, he looked oddly regal like Dracula himself.

“We better get him out of here,” Luke said, choking on his own emotions, remembering only too clearly how good Ronny had been to him when he started at Public Works, how he’d shown him the ropes and padded the way for him. He’d been a good guy, a real good guy. And when
Luke had been putting up his garage, Ronny had been there with him, day after day. Even when he was on vacation, he’d shown up at six a.m. ready to work. And all that without once being asked. That’s the kind of guy Ronny Hazek was.

Billy just shook his head. “Why, Luke?”

“Because we can’t leave him here.”

“What difference does it make?”

Luke understood what he meant; there were hundreds and hundreds of “people” just like Ronny in Wakefield, but it had to start somewhere. You couldn’t just pretend it would go away. “Because he’s a
Carrier,
Billy. And each one of them will infect a dozen others who’ll infect dozens more. Don’t you see?” He looked back at the corpse under the bench. “Besides, you knew Ronny just like I did. He was a good guy and he deserves better than to be one of those fucking things.”

There was no hesitation then.

They each grabbed an ankle and yanked Ronny out. Even through his bibs and rubber boots, they could feel the unnatural chill coming off of him. It was not so much like he was cold from the plummeting temperatures but like he was
generating
it himself.

Silently, they dragged
him out of the storeroom.

Though he wasn’t stiff as with rigor mortis, he seemed so completely dead it was hard to believe that he might reanimate at sundown. The idea seemed perfectly ridiculous. Like others Luke had seen, he looked somehow artificial
the way cadavers often did at open casket funerals after the mortician had painted and puttied them into a semblance of life…sunken, compressed, personality wiped free like words on a blackboard, as if death took something away that could never be replaced.

Sonny stepped back like they were dragging a cobra out by the tail. “Why didn’t you just leave it there? Why didn’t you?”

They ignored him. They dragged Ronny to the door and stopped.

“What…what do you think will happen?” Billy asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

Steeling themselves, they pulled him out into the light and dumped him on the ice of the drive. It began immediately. He trembled and shook, his entire body arching and flopping with the most horrible contortions. His eyes, still unblinking like those of a sleepwalker, exuded discolored tears and his face seemed to writhe with the action of the muscles beneath it. His mouth opened and closed, fangs gnashing and piercing his lower lip. Dark blood bubbled from his nose and he made a guttural hissing sound. His face began to blacken and split open like old leather. And then—

Then he moved.

Still not truly out of the death coma that held him, Ronny moved across the ice with a hideous serpentine motion that reminded Luke—unpleasantly so—of the Grinch sliding along the
floors of houses in Whoville. He did not use his hands or feet, but wormed side-to-side on his belly right through the door and into the darkness.

“Jesus,” Billy said.

Sonny cried out and there were two shots. Luke followed Billy through the door and they saw Ronny’s corpse laying there with two neat and bloodless holes in its back. They were smoldering from contact burns. Sonny was down on his ass ten feet away with a gun in his hand. There was a wild and irrational look in his eyes. Luke figured he was very close to killing them both out of sheer terror.

“Sonn
y,” Billy said slowly. “Drop that weapon. Do you understand me,
drop that fucking weapon.”

A sobbing sound in his throat, Sonny did.

Billy picked it up and helped him out the door. “Now, go wait in the car for me.”

“But it was moving, it was—”

“It’s a corpse, Sonny. It can’t hurt you.”

Sonny went out and Luke went over t
o the big garage door and thumbed the button. The door rose and light filled the building. Ronny had nowhere to escape to. He wriggled over the ice, a grayish steam rising from him. His fingers clawed at the floor, his head snapped from shoulder to shoulder. His body began to swell in his bibs like he was being pumped full of helium. His eyes fell in, his lips shriveled back from his gums, his face continuing to split open until the skull was clearly visible beneath. He let out a weird, shrill squealing sound and there was a great resounding
pop!
like the bursting exoskeleton of a monstrous tick heated over a flame.

He had literally ruptured from the inside out from the sudden and devastating release of gases of corruption. A black slime-like blood flooded out from him in a puddle. Clouds of foul steam hung in the air.

Billy and Luke stumbled outside into the daylight, sucking in lungfuls of fresh, cold air until their heads stopped spinning and their legs no longer felt like rubber.

“What…” Billy gasped “…what in the hell should we do with him?”

Luke looked back into the building. He could barely catch his breath himself. Other than the slime and steam and that godawful stink, Ronny looked like a collection of blackened sticks. His bibs were black, oily rags from the ichor that had boiled out of him when he burst open.

“Leave him,” he said. “Let the others know what’s going to happen to them.”

Billy said he’d be in touch. He went back across the road to his cruiser and Sonny. He looked like a defeated man. Luke watched the cruiser pull away, leaving him there with the awful reality of what they had done. Ronny was the first one. But he knew he wouldn’t be the last.

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