Vampirus (Book 1) (16 page)

Though he hated dozing during the day and wasting the light, it was nearly impossible to sleep at night. When he did it was a thin sleep. The slightest noise was like thunder. He often came awake sitting up in bed, listening, always listening, knowing he had heard something but not knowing what it was. The blackness of night was not only coveting but crushing. It was woven from a mesh of silence and it was that very silence that made his ears hurt as he strained to hear something in it. Very often it was only the snow brushing the windows or the wind in the trees outside, but sometimes there were other things that he could not fathom. More than once he was certain that someone had whispered his name
as he slept.

The night after he watched Ronny Hazek twist in the sunlight, he was certain he heard noises from his daughter’s room. But when he went in there, trembling inside, there was nothing but a near-certain sense of invasion. If someone had been there, they were not ready yet to reveal themselves.

45

The night Sonja came out of her grave
, Luke was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at his reflection in the window as he had done every night since he had interred her. Not taking her (and Megan) to the pits for cremation was not only wrong, but more along the lines of blackest sin, he later realized. Sonja had been a Lutheran like all her people and she had a crucifix that had been given to her upon confirmation by her Austrian grandmother. It was a family heirloom that dated back to the days when Lutherans, like Catholics, displayed crucifixes prominently in their homes. The church meant a great deal to her. She believed implicitly in its teachings and had Megan going to Sunday school so she could follow her mother’s path.

Luke, however, was a different matter.

His agnosticism could not accept that any living man or woman had knowledge of the supernatural and he instinctively distrusted people who claimed they did. He was tolerant of Sonja’s beliefs because unlike about 90% of the Christians he knew, she really believed. Most went to church because it was traditional to do so. It was a social gathering, like joining the Elks or the Moose Lodge. They claimed to believe, but the doubt was always in their eyes along with a nice sprinkling of hypocrisy.

Regardless of how he felt about such matters
, he held onto Sonja’s crucifix, wondering if there was any real power behind it or if it only had power over those who believed in it.

Sonja had believed in it.

So while he had no faith in religious items himself, he had to wonder if she could be driven off by the sign of the cross simply on the basis of her own belief. To be on the safe side, he also had a wooden stake, a hatchet (he had sharpened it until he could slit paper with it), and Alger’s .45 Smith & Wesson.

He had considered again and again
going out to the holding tomb at Salem Cross Cemetery and staking his wife and daughter and maybe lopping their heads off. But the idea was repugnant and unthinkable. He could not possibly desecrate their bodies in such a way.

Even if it meant…well
, even if meant something bad might happen.

Now it was too late and he knew it.
They had already been in the house once and he was honestly surprised they hadn’t come for him immediately. Again, if the folklore held true, they should have come after him first. But Sonja had been very careful in life and maybe she was equally as careful in death.

As he waited there, his rational brain
chided him, of course, for acting like some kind of peasant straight out of the Middle Ages. But its arguments pretty much fell flat because he had seen things that made him question scientific fact and kick logic into the back seat.

On around two that
night—more than a mere vigil, but a
wake
—he began to drift off. He gave it up and went upstairs and went to sleep. He drifted off immediately which was rare, more a matter of complete physical exhaustion than anything else. He had not been asleep long when he came awake in a gravid paralysis of utter fear. He did not know what had woken him, not then, but he was bathed with cool sweat and his heart was racing.

After a moment or two
he managed to lift his head scarce inches from the pillow. He could hear nothing, yet he had the most appalling feeling that something horrible had just happened. The house was silent. He could hear the wind blowing outside, an occasional dusting of snow thrown against the window opposite his bed. Other than that, there was nothing. And that’s what bothered him. Because something had disturbed his sleep and that something had broken the stillness of the sleeping house and whatever it was, it was out there somewhere. He could feel it waiting. The silence felt almost artificial. As though what had entered the house were holding its breath.

Listen.

Yes, though the bedroom door was closed, he could hear something down there he had not detected at first. The wind. He was hearing it not only outside his window but downstairs. Wind blowing in through the front door. It had been opened and something had entered the house in the dead of night. And now he could smell it: like cold salted meat and rotting hides. Inside him, his blood thickened like sour milk. There were hot wires burning in his chest. He could barely breathe.

Someone
was coming up the steps.

They
made no sound, yet in the cellar of his soul he could hear their shuffling steps quite clearly.

With slow simmering terror, he realized that
they were standing outside the door like Roderick Usher’s cataleptic sister in
The Fall of the House of Usher.

He became certain at that point that it was not a
who
out there but an
it.

He could hear s
omething dropping like clots of melting snow.

The doorknob jiggled.

With one aged, palsied hand he reached out for the stake, the crucifix, praying out loudly in his head to a God he was not even certain he believed in. The door swung open and in the thin moonlight he saw a hand that was bleached white with fingers like pale ribbons of dusty gauze.

It was Sonja.

She entered the room like a cluster of shadows, standing there at the foot of the bed, white and rising like a Welsh corpse candle, something molded from colorless wax. He could hear her breathing and it was a long, low sibilance like wind through a cornfield. He could see her eyes and they were glossy red.

And she was younger.

She had been thirty-three years old when the plague claimed her, but now she looked like a woman of twenty, having rejuvenated herself on the hot blood of innocents. Her blonde hair was shining over her shoulder with captured moonlight, her cheekbones high, her complexion flawless. Her mouth was red, the lips swollen, the teeth behind them perfectly white. Her eyes were not red at all now but that same electric shade of blue that had always made him feel weak in the knees.

“Come to bed,” he heard his
voice say, knowing he wanted her like he had never wanted her before.

Wordlessly, she slipped beneath the sheets next to him and he looked into her face and nearly screamed. She was not beautiful. Her milky white complexion was almost phosphorescent like glowing corpse-gas rising from a grave. It was set with the scars and punctures of the Red Death. She looked like a living marble obelisk, a stone graveyard angel webbed by white threads. Her breath was ice-cold with the sickly-sweet smell of mortuary perfume, her eyes blood-red and translucent and filled with a shocking vulpine hunger. She was grinning, lips pulled back from graying gums, upper incisors grown long and gnarled and yellow.

As she reached out to snare him with splintered black nails, Luke threw himself to the floor, realizing he’d already dropped the crucifix and now clutched only the stake.

“
My darling,”
Sonja said in raw, ragged voice that sounded like her throat was filled with wet leaves.

She was under the sheets, worming forward like some human slug, getting closer, rising up now like a wraith from a burial ground, covered in the sheet which she wore like a shroud.

Luke ran at the door and hit it, knocking himself down and nearly out as he heard the slow rustling behind him. The door was closed. It had never been opened: his wife had slid between the door and jamb as only her kind could. He gripped the doorknob and threw the door open and stumbled out into the hallway.

“
Wait for me, my love. Wait for me.”

Hysterical and nearly mad, he
moved down the steps, his brain raging with echoing noise, his feet clumsy and slow as though he were stuck in a dream. It was as if he were moving sluggishly through tidal currents, fighting his way down with every step.

He looked back once and only once.

Sonja was coming down the steps in her shroud. It was billowing around her like it was filled with October wind, rustling and flapping. She didn’t seem to be so much walking down towards him as drifting. A malignant ghost in search of a throat to batten onto.

Megan was waiting there for him at the bottom.

She was still wearing the nightgown from her deathbed…except it was stained with gore and drainage. Dried whorls and splotches of blood were crusted on her chin and splashed up on her cheeks accentuating her corpse-white skin. Her eyes were like luminous pale green wicks floating in oil, her teeth gray and sharp.

“
Daddy, do you want to play with me?”

“
GET OUT!” he shouted. “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE! YOU DON’T BELONG HERE ANYMORE!”

In his stocking feet,
he ran from the house and fell into the snow. Dressed only in jogging pants and a T-shirt, he knew he wouldn’t last. He saw his truck in the driveway. His keys were in it as they were always in it, something Sonja had warned him about and something he had ignored. He jumped in the cab and turned it over. Sonja and Megan were looking in through the driver’s side window. The truck stalled twice in the driveway with the cold, but then he got it in gear and four-wheel drive and pulled away down the street.

By then, they were in the street: his neighbors, those that had died and not gone into the burning pits.
Alger was there with Anne whose eyes were huge and glowering. Her laughter was like broken glass ground into concrete.

Luke drove through town and out to the mai
n highway which had been plowed. He drove until dawn. Sometime later, he came home and there was no evidence that his wife and daughter had come in the night. He went out to the holding tomb at Salem Cross where he had put their bodies, but they were gone.

46

An infection,
he got to thinking,
that’s what this is: an infection. Like a malignancy invading the body and taking it cell by cell only the body in this case is the town and its cells are people.

Yes, it made sense, his analogy held true.

The infection was spreading and something had to be done before Wakefield was nothing but a diseased mass. He figured that if he could get together enough survivors, they might just have a chance. They could go neighborhood to neighborhood eradicating the dead like unsightly weeds, yanking them up by their black roots, dragging them out into the sunlight and staking them when there was no alternative. Billy McCready would help. Stubby might, too, and maybe Cliff Corbett. There had to be lots of others who’d stand with him and fight.

He’d start with Cliff.

Luke was actually feeling very positive about things for the first time in many weeks when he knocked at Cliff’s door. There was a chance now. Just a chance, but it was better than nothing. With a lot of hard—and grisly—work, they might just be able to save the town. Maybe Billy could get the National Guard involved. Maybe, maybe. Each day that passed, he knew, Wakefield inched closer to its grave and got that much nearer to the point of no return. There were many cities and towns out there that were graveyards now. If they didn’t act and act fast, Wakefield would be one, too.

He knocked on Cliff’s door and there was no response.

He pounded and hammered on it.
C’mon, goddammit, Cliff, this is important.

The only sound inside
was Bob, Cliff’s Border Collie, barking his head off.
Barking?
No, Bob was going absolutely berserk in there. Luke had never heard him carry on like that. Bob was easy going, good natured, and quiet. He rarely barked unless he was really excited and that was usually when somebody stopped by for a visit and he felt the need to herald their approach with great tail-wagging joy.

Shit.

Luke tried the door and it was open. That wasn’t necessarily a bad sign, but it wasn’t a particularly good one either. He let himself in cautiously. Even though Bob was a good dog and they had become pals through the years, he was still a dog and he sounded pretty wild and frantic and he might decide to defend his territory.

“Cliff?” Luke called out. “Cliff? It
’s Luke from down the block.” Even Bob had stopped barking now. The silence was heavy.
“Cliff?”

He edged his way fu
rther in, looking in the living room and seeing nothing…nothing but Bob peering from behind the couch with hackles raised and teeth bared. He looked as vicious as any animal Luke had ever seen.