Vampirus (Book 1) (18 page)

He waited, breathing in and out. All around town, the vampires were waking up, he figured. Sonja and Megan. Anne Stericki. They were all opening their eyes and giving praise to the night. By morning, the already teetering population of
Wakefield would be thinned even more. He swallowed down some water. Something was about to happen and he could feel it from the nape of his neck to his lower spine. The room was like a lagoon of unbroken shadows barely disturbed by the light itself.

“
5:13 pm. Almost full dark now.  I can feel something happening. My throat is dry as dust. My hands are shaking. Something is building in the air like a static charge. The shadows seem like they’re alive. I swear that I can see them moving, playing along the walls, and slithering out of the closet. They seemed to be concentrated on the bed and what’s laying on it. It looks like Cliff is being eaten by them. Oh Jesus…Cliff’s lips just opened.”

Luke was sitting forward in his chair now. He was frozen in position. The parting of Cliff’s lips was impossibly loud.
The air was filled with some cold, crawling energy. Its epicenter was the bed. It seemed to be radiating outwards from it in cold pulsations.

“5:17
. Full dark or near to it. Cliff’s hand just moved. The light is throwing a sort of exaggerated shadow of him against the wall. He’s not moving but, Christ, the shadow is. It seems to be sliding. I’m taking up the stake now. The gun is in my pocket. The hammer is in my right hand. Shit…he’s starting to tremble.”

Luke went over t
o the bed and it took every ounce of strength that he had.

Cliff was indeed beginning to tremble. The movements were minute as if some kind
of crazy electrical activity were going on just below the skin. His face was the color of cool autumn moonlight. The wound in his neck looked like a black crater. His lips were gray and split open with tiny cracks. They closed, then opened again. The inside of his mouth was impossibly pink. Luke could see how long his canine teeth had grown. Not just long, but hooked like those of a Fer-de-lance and just as deadly. There was a twitch in the corner of his lips. His brow seemed to draw downward, sinking his eyes in shadows. A grimace passed over his face.

His eyes opened.

They were blank white, the pupils like tiny dots.

He looked up at Luke and made a hissing sound, his black tongue playing over the spikes of his teeth.

He said one word and the sound of it was like a blade scraped over sandpaper:
“Luke.”

Luke could not even remember deciding to bring the stake down. It seemed that by the time he was aware of it, the stake was already in motion. He brought it down left-handed with everything he had and it must have been considerable because it pierced Cliff just left of the sternum and went in at least three inches.

Cliff let out a wild, screeching sound that filled the room and echoed around. His pale hands flopped and jumped and then clawed out at Luke. But by then, Luke brought the four-pound sledge down and nailed the stake square. The impact drove it all the way through and into the mattress beneath. What happened then was something Luke had never seen in any movie: Cliff split right open. From his sternum to his belly he opened right up and what was in there was some yellow, fibrous tissue that was like no human flesh he had ever seen before. It almost looked like fiberglass insulation or the guts of a freshly-carved pumpkin: yellow and seedy and stringy.

Luke fell back and promptly threw up.

Cliff kept screeching and it got louder and louder, seemingly beyond the volume human lungs could produce. Then he seemed to sink down into the mattress and his scream did not die out but fled from the room. Luke could hear it echoing down the hallway and down the stairwell like some escaping creature.

Then it was gone.

And as horrible as that was, it was nothing in comparison to what came from outside. It sounded like hundreds of screaming, wailing voices that rose up in a choir in the night. The undead felt his death and screamed their anguish all over town.

Then it was over.

The next thing Luke knew, he had the hatchet in his hand. Three quick chops and Cliff’s head was severed from his body. The staking and decapitation were remarkably bloodless. Of course they were: there was no blood left in him. The only fluid was a serous discharge that spurted out after the first hatchet chop. It sprayed out and spattered against the wall like snot. Cliff was just a corpse again that seemed to be sinking into itself. The fingers of his right hand had actually pierced the mattress and dug four deep trenches into it.

Half out of his mind, Luke gathered up his things and ran down the stairs.

He had the .45 in one hand and a stake in the other, the duffel thrown over his shoulder. He could not spend the night in that house. No way. Then he opened the front door and realized he had no choice.

The walking dead were in the streets.

49

The next three days after staking Cliff Corbett were busy ones.

He laid in three cords of wood for the stoves in the basement and the garage because he figured it was only a
matter of time now before the power went out. He went over to the Corbetts and got all the dog food they had for Bob and helped himself to six cases of bottled water and a chainsaw he found there. He stockpiled plastic five-gallon cans of gasoline, shells for the .45 Smith and Marlin, more canned and dry food, fresh meat and vegetables, more batteries and flashlights, prybars and lanterns and lantern fuel. He went over to Shallberg’s and bought up insulated winter boots and several pairs of Carhartt insulated coveralls. If he was going to be working out in the cold, there was no sense in being uncomfortable.

Then he set to work on the lathe in the garage making stakes. At first, his efforts were poor
and clumsy, but after turning out twenty of them he got very good at it. He liked them in two-foot sections. They were easy to transport, but long enough to grab onto and ram through the chests of Carriers.

In the next week, he destroyed sixteen of them.

Bob sniffed them out and Luke dragged them out into the light or staked them. He didn’t have the heart to start in his own neighborhood. Doing what he had to do was easier if they were strangers.

But sooner or later, he knew, he would have to go house to house on
13
th
Street. Sonja and Megan were out there somewhere and so was Anne Stericki.

50

He had promised himself he would go look in on Maddie Skorenska and the triplets, so
he went over there about an hour after first light one morning. He had needles in his belly as he climbed the porch. Bob was tense, skittish. He knew there was something in that house. Maybe Luke suspected as much, but Bob
knew
it.

The door was unlocked and they went in together. Luke had to pract
ically drag Bob over the threshold. It was clear that he did not like it in the least.

The first thing Luke noticed was that the heat was off.

It was chill in the house, but there was no masking the stale, pervasive odor that was like old cornhusks locked in a dusty barn or books flaking away for decades in a moldering trunk. It wasn’t a putrescent stink as he’d encountered before but one of death suspended and held in check: dry, crumbling.

Bob started to growl.

“Easy,” Luke told him. If he could smell it, he could just imagine what it must have been like for the dog with his hyper olfactory sense. It must have been vile beyond words, a living yellow seam of dissolution.

Bob led him down the hallway and then sat down before a door, looking sheepish and scared
as he did whenever he found a Carrier.

Sighing, Luke went in
side and found Maddie right away. She was under the bed. He put his flashlight beam in her pallid, grinning face, and knew he couldn’t go through with it. There was just no way. He wondered vaguely what had happened to her, who had gotten to her, but he knew. In his heart, he knew very well.

Anne got to her. You have no proof of that, yet you know it
’s true. Anne probably came after the triplets who then came after their mother.

Again, no proof, but his belief was irrefutable. They
were all monsters, but Anne was the very worst of them. In Bram Stoker’s novel, Lucy Westenra was a real horror that fed off children, but it was Dracula himself that was the apex monster. Luke hoped that Anne would be as close as he’d ever come to the fictional count.

He put the light on Maddie again.

She was nothing but a fucking mindless leech now, but in life she had been very sweet. He knew if he had to destroy her, that the image of it would haunt him for years.

And therein
lay the problem with cleaning out the neighborhood.

They had all been his friends, some good friends and others just acquaintances, but he still had personal relationships with them all and that made it so much harder. When they cried out, it would be like he was hurting them. Maybe Van Helsing in the old vampire movies claimed that you were merely destroying a shell and setting a soul free when you staked them, but to see it, to really experience it, was to know that they died a second time in horrendous agony.

If you keep being weak and sympathetic, asshole, this goddamn town will look like fucking Transylvania in a month,
he chided himself.
You have to man up! If you can’t stake Maddie or Alger, then how the hell will you deal with Sonja or Megan when you find them? Are you going to subject them to a living hell as wandering, bloodthirsty shells or are you going to set them free?

The thing was, he just didn’t know.

He’d destroyed quite a few of them, but other than Cliff Corbett and Ronny Hazek, they’d been strangers. It was one thing to say
man up already,
but once you’d experienced the grim reality and horror of an exorcism—as he sometimes referred to them—it was quite another to put into practice.

He went out in the hallway and sat with Bob, put an arm around him because he really needed to feel another living thing up against him
. Bob, of course, was a big baby at heart and he snuggled instantly against him, looking into his face with big moony eyes like he was lovestruck.

Luke managed to smile. Only a dog could look at you with that sort of devotion. He sighed and lit a cigarette. “You ever watch any of those old vampire shows, Bob?” he asked. “The old ones where the vampires were scary? Back when they were monsters and didn’t look
like they stepped out of a 1980s Duran Duran video or off the cover of a fucking Harlequin romance? No, you wouldn’t have. Cliff was way too practical for shit like that. Well, I saw most of ‘em when I was a kid—against my will pretty much—and it always looked so easy on those shows. You got a bloodsucker in the neighborhood? Well, just stake ‘em and go on your merry way. But it’s not that way, Bob, it’s just not.”

And it wasn’t.

Every time it was bad, horrible beyond belief. He had learned after the first couple to go at it with an empty belly because the stench was so nauseating. He likened it to one of those nature documentaries where they show a mouse rot away with time-lapse photography. Flies crawl over the dead mouse. Then maggots hatch and ants and beetles start feeding on its little corpse. Soon enough, it’s been boiled down to fur and bones. Killing a vampire was much like that…except they putrefied in under a minute and you breathed it all in in a concentrated, gagging mist of carrion that put you down to your knees and dragged your stomach right up the back of your throat.

That’s what it was like.

And Luke didn’t care how tough and badass of a Van Helsing you were, when the stink steamed out of them and the blood gushed and the fluids sprayed up in the air, you were dizzy with it, your guts filled with cold sliding grease. Sometimes, he knew, you not only smelled it, but tasted it on your fucking tongue.

He didn’t want to think about what it was going to be like when he got to Sonja and Megan.

He smoked in silence and held onto Bob. When he was done, he butted his cigarette against the wall—Maddie was beyond caring about such things—and dragged himself out of the house before he got any bright ideas and found the triplets sleeping in their crib. That was something he could not bear to look upon.

As he walked down the snowy street to his own house, he felt hollow inside, his eyes wet with tears. There were hundreds if not thousands of them out there now. Even if he tracked them all down, good God, what would he be reduced to by the time it was over?

What kind of shell-shocked, mindless thing would he be?

51

One night he woke to Bob growling low in his throat
. The dog slept on a blanket next to the bed, ever on watch. It wasn’t the first night he had sensed them out there and alerted Luke to the same. Luke came awake, his eyes wet and bright as if he had not been sleeping at all but just laying there with his eyes closed. Maybe he had been. He couldn’t seem to remember what a peaceful sleep was. He came out of it instantly like an animal, ready to fight, flee, or defend what was his.

“It’s okay, Bob, it’s okay.”