Vampirus (Book 1) (2 page)

The door
opened and the smell of sweet putrescence came rolling out in a moist wave. It smelled like something had turned in there, like tomatoes and peppers gone to a juicy pulp of black decay.

Penney stepped back.
“I can’t…I can’t go in there, Luke,” he said from behind his mask, his face shiny and sallow, pulled so tight over the skull beneath it looked like it might rip. Sweat ran down the bridge of his nose. It was ice-cold. “I just can’t do it.”

Luke nodded, understanding all too well, and stepped in
to the room. The light from the rec room gave precious little in the way of radiance. What he saw was simply a junk room with piled cartons, some plastic lawn decorations up against the wall, coats hanging from the beams above. But that stink…it was almost palpable. If it had been summer, he would have thought a squirrel crawled into the walls and died, boiling down to bones and fur.

But this was November.

The furnace was still going, but it was an old house and it was chilly in the cellar with its concrete block walls. The smell did not belong and especially in that room which was noticeably colder, so chill in fact that he could see frosting plumes of his breath.

He moved
in deeper, spotting a canvas tarp in the corner with the bulges of shapes beneath it. It was pulled against the back wall as if whoever had put it there was seeking the darkest, coolest spot possible. As Luke approached it, he could feel each and every one of his forty years sneaking up on him, making joints stiffen, bones creak, and muscles tense. The atmosphere of the room was somehow malevolent and he could almost feel pale shadows sweeping around him, brushing their cold fingers against the back of his neck.

He grabbed the tarp and
pulled up one corner, holding out the lighter so he could see what was beneath like a grave robber peering into a coffin in a midnight tomb.

A little cry esca
ped his throat, the nausea in his belly spreading out and filling his throat with a slow-sliding grease.

Lester Paduk lay
there. He was wearing jogging pants and a flannel shirt that was open to the waist. His wife was laying next to him, completely naked, the nipples of her breasts just as gray as her lips. And sandwiched in-between, their two children, Chelsea and Ryan, both white as tombstone marble.

As Luke crouched there, his heart banging away in his chest and his hand holding the lighter trembling badly, he tried to imagine
a set of circumstances where they would all lie down and die like this together and could not. Maybe in bed…but down here? That meant somebody must have arranged them and covered them. But that seemed pretty unlikely which meant…well, which meant they must have done it themselves.

“
C’mon, Luke…my fucking skin’s crawling,” Penney called out to him.

Luke swallowed.
“They’re in here. They’re dead.”

Penney called out to him again, but he ignored him. He could not ta
ke his eyes off the corpses…not a moment ago they’d looked gray and bleached and dead, but now, dear Christ, was it his imagination or did they lay there rosy-cheeked and full-blooded like they might wake at any moment?

Penney called out again.

Swearing under his breath, Luke turned and told him to zip it. He only averted his eyes for a moment but when he looked back they had changed again.

Not Les
.

But the boy. He was smiling, lips pulled into a vulpine grin that was awful to look upon.

And Les’s wife…Jesus, her eyes were wide open, huge and dark and sparkling, all pupil, no whites.

Luke dropped the tarp and stumbled from the room, feeling things he could not properly catalog. The plague was the plague. You expected it. You expected death. You expected corpses…but you did not expect them to be playing games with you.

Something was happening here.

Something impossible.

5

He didn’t really get worried until about a week after he’d found the Paduk family lying in state beneath the tarp. That’s when he saw footage of soldiers burning bodies in Philadelphia and Chicago, Newark and San Francisco. That’s when it started to creep into him, getting into his blood like a cool death-feeling poison. That’s when he started getting scared. That’s when he started sleeping with one eye open—when he did sleep—like a gunfighter in the old west.

Because night was no longer just night anymore.

Out on the Internet, there were stories about things seen walking around after dark in London or creeping about in the subway tunnels of NYC. There were even tales that would make your skin crawl about entire villages being turned into ghost towns. Luke wrote it off as tabloid shit and left it at that. He had to think about his wife and daughter.

He had to be sensible.

Sonja wasn’t liking it, of course. Sonja was religious. She wasn’t hardcore but she did not deny the existence of things like the Devil. “It’s moving so fast, Luke. They say it’s a germ…but I think it’s more than just a germ,” she said to him one night while they lay in bed, a cooling sheen of lovemaking sweat still sweet on their naked skin. “A month ago, it was just stories. Halloween stories. But now it’s everywhere and it’s spreading. I don’t like it. I’m afraid.”

Luke held her closer.
“They’ll find a cure. It takes time.”

“
Are you so sure there
is
a cure for this?”

He knew where sh
e was going with that so he politely tried to steer the conversation into more harmless avenues. “It’s just a bug,” he said.

“
Is it?”

“
Yes, it is.”

She shook her head.
“It’s more than a bug I’m afraid of, Luke. It’s what carries it and what
spreads
it.”

“
Sonja,” he said. “Don’t pay attention to that crap out on the Internet.”

“
People are saying things, Luke. Not just out on the web but here in Wakefield. They’ve seen things.”

“
Ghost stories. They’re scared. It’s understandable.”

But she was scared and so was he.

And day by day, things only got worse.

The country was in grave peril.

When they first called Martial Law nationwide, people were shocked. For a time they took to the streets in protest. There were shoot-outs and insurrections and pitched battles. But in the end the soldiers always won. And with Martial Law in effect, you could be gunned down for the slightest provocation.

None of it lasted. The germ was making the rounds and no one wanted to cluster together in crowds if they could avoid it. People were dying in numbers. Soon enough they didn
’t even raise an eyebrow as the plague trucks came for bodies to burn in the pits.

They
had given in and given up.

But what choice was there?

The authorities kept saying the germ was viral in nature, even though they hadn’t been able to isolate it. The CDC, WHO, the Army Medical Research Institute, and every similar lab and agency across the world were working day and night, they said, to find a cure. But people were sick everywhere and Luke imagined the biomedical people were dropping just like everyone else, sealing themselves up in webby cocoons of plague, waiting for the kiss of death. By the time they found a vaccination or a pill, he feared there wouldn’t be anyone left to give it to.

Things were getting worse by the day. W
hen the germ made itself known in October and proliferated through November, he and his family avoided it. Thanksgiving, what there was of it, found Sonja, Megan, and he healthy and strong, uncontaminated.

Then the first week of December, Megan got sick.

Sonja took care of her and she got sick.

Then Luke watched over both of them
like a mother hen brooding over her eggs, waiting for it to find him, to reach out with cold white fingers and infect him. But it didn’t happen. For the past two weeks he’d been taking care of them and nothing yet. The hospitals were overcrowded, they were turning people away at the door as their own staff fell ill. There was nothing to do but nurse his wife and daughter at home. He did what the medical people told him. He gave Sonja and Megan injections of antivirals twice a day, kept them clean and the rooms antiseptic, got food into them whenever he could…and for all that, for his work and tears and despair and sleepless nights, he watched their temperatures spike, looked down in horror at their gaunt faces and staring, glassy eyes, knowing it would not be long for either of them.

The only
thing that he was thankful for was that they never went hysterical like some and went jumping around out in the streets. It was hard to imagine anything more gruesome than that.

If they died—and he knew in the cold blackness of his heart that they would—then he wanted to go
, too. Life without them would be a meaningless gray existence. He did not want that.

He wanted the quiet and silence of the tomb.

6

A pounding at the door shook him from the shadows of his own mind and the thin sleep he found there. He dragged himself to the door and opened it, the wind cool and fresh in his face.

A soldier in a badly-stained white Hazmat suit was standing there. He looked like some kind of cyborg in his mask.
“Do you have anything for me today?” he asked.

“
No, nothing,” Luke said, shutting the door.

The soldier cared not.

The plague truck at the curb was already heaped with the dead. Luke could see a few trailing limbs dangling from beneath an olive drab tarp that snapped in the wind. They had plenty. So far, they hadn’t been forcing themselves into houses to extract corpses from the arms of loved ones or from death houses where the plague had taken everyone, but it was coming.

If the soldiers themselves did not get infected, that was.

The truck rolled on down the street and Luke sank to the floor, sensing death getting closer, coming to steal his girls away into the night. Knowing there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do about it, he began to sob.

All day long
, it seemed, the trucks rolled through the snow, white-gloved fists pounding at doors and goggle-eyed masks peering through curtained windows. These were the collectors of the dead, faceless soldiers given a task that would have been morbid and unthinkable a scarce year ago but was now a matter of practicality.

Good and bad, they said on the radio, good and bad. A double-edged sword cutting in both directions and drawing blood. Good, in that the December cold would theoretically sl
ow the spread of the pestilence; but bad, in that people were crowding in houses now to escape the weather and the germ would pass freely from person to person and hand to mouth.

Luke figured there were guys like him all over the country—and the world, for that matter—wandering around in a sort of fuzzy daze, scratching their heads, trying to make sense of things, trying to put the madness into some kind of uneasy perspective and failing miserably.

He came into this world innocent and pink-cheeked, but as to how he would leave it…well, that’s what scared him. So far he didn’t have the germ, but how long could that last? How long before he was hopping around out in the snow, drooling and delusional, or lying pallid and glassy-eyed in bed sliding inch by inch towards the grave?

7

One theory after another was making the rounds, trying to explain it all. One of the most interesting was that the pandemic was of extraterrestrial origin.

Though the germ had still not been isolated, they—the medical establishment—felt it was most certainly a virus of some type. The theory was this: that many of the great pandemics of history were caused by extrate
rrestrial spores. These spores were bacteria upon which nasty viruses had hitched a ride. Viruses were so small that literally thousands of them could fit comfortably on a single bacterium. When a bacterium detected that conditions were hazardous to its survival—like the cold depths of space—it began the process of sporulation: the formation of a tough, durable outer capsule called an endospore which was resistant to cold, radiation, just about everything. Dormant within this shell, the bacterium could theoretically sleep for a hundred years or a hundred thousand years.

The scientists on CNN—one a biogeneticist, the other a virologist—claimed that every 300 to 350 years, the orbital path of the Earth carried it through a massive
“Virosphere” of alien spore particles, possibly billions or trillions of these endospores, upon which stowaway viruses were hiding. Where these spores originated from no one could say, just out there somewhere in the great beyond. When the Earth passed through this Virosphere, the spores—some at least—were seeded into Earth’s atmosphere. Ordinary endospores were re-activated by favorable environmental conditions. Sunlight, for example, and a warm atmosphere would do it, breaking the cycle of hibernation. Then, the bacterium would begin metabolizing anew, rupturing the endospore case, and in the process, releasing the viral bodies which would seek new hosts. The human race, in this case.