Vampirus (Book 1) (21 page)

No answers.

There never could be answers.

He
got up and, swallowing down his unease, took hold of the baby and found that he actually had to wrestle it from the stiffened grip of its mother. The corner of her lips trembled in a momentary tic as he did so.

He grabbed the child by the ankles and carried it down the hallway and to the front door. He refused to look down on it because he knew those eyes would be on him, staring, teeth anxious to dig into his throat and the tongue wanting only to lap at a ruptured artery. He brought it out onto the porch and it began to writhe immediately as the weak
February sunshine struck it full. It moved with a convulsive, boneless locomotion like a wind-up toy and Luke tossed it away. It landed with a fleshy thump on a patch of ice, rolling over and over.

Like a boiling pot, vile-smelling steam rose from it in twisting yellow-green plumes as it flopped and thrashed on the cracked ice. It slid around in a ghastly half-circle, tiny
hands with blackened nails scratching for purchase, legs kicking, lips pulled back from snapping teeth as it made a low bestial growling that soon became a high-pitched almost feline mewling. Its bulging eyes rolled madly in their sockets. Its face hitched up in agony, corded and seamed and hideously like that of a wizened old man at the point of dissolution.

As its eyes filmed over and fell in, its head rose one last time from the ice and its voice, tiny and pathetic and tortured, shrieked out one final cry:
“Mamamamamamamama—”

And then it went still for a split second before expanding with the gases of putrefaction, its flesh going purple and blue.
He could hear its skin stretching with a squeaking rubbery sound like a balloon inflated to the point of bursting. And then it did burst, its abdomen shearing open with a distinct popping noise and the cold winter air carrying away a wave of hot, moist decomposition.

That was it.

Bob let out a long, low howl in the house.

The child was twisted and blackened, limbs curled, mouth wrenched open and hollowed eye sockets wide.

Luke turned away from it, horrified and disgusted as always. He made it maybe three or four feet into the house before dropping to his knees and trembling as he hyperventilated and fought down waves of nausea.

When he made it back to the bedroom, the woman had moved.

Not much, but somehow she must have sensed the death of her child and it stirred her corpselike slumber. Her lips had peeled back from her fangs and one hand was hooked in a gnarled claw. In her eyes there was something noxious and hostile that was beyond mere hatred. They followed him like the eyes in old paintings as he came for her, grasping her ankles and dragging her down the hallway.

He tossed her near the mummy of her child and it all began again.

58

He woke that night from an oddly peaceful sleep, which was really just a matter of physical exhaustion rather than any peaceful sense of well-being. Bob was in bed next to him and he hadn’t even heard him jump up because he was so completely out of it. The dog was shaking and with good reason: the undead were outside the house in great numbers, shrieking and howling and baying like wolves, screaming into the night. It was an absolute chorus of the damned outside.

Luke
lay there, stroking Bob and listening to it. He tried to shut it out but it was impossible. It was just after three a.m. Hours yet until dawn. He was just as terrified as the dog.

After it went on for thirty minutes or more, he took Bob downstairs to the cellar where the concrete walls would block much of the noise out. He took his .45 and a stake with him, Sonja’s crucifix because it gave him a connection to her, a spiritual strength that he sadly lacked.

On their way down, the screaming got louder as if maybe the Carriers knew that they had roused him and filled him with terror. He had not pulled the drapes in the living room and dozens of them crowded up to the picture window, watching him with flat reptilian eyes, their gray teeth shining in the darkness. They screeched his name, hissing and yowling, sounding very much like fighting cats in the night.

Downstairs, he shut the cellar door and locked it.

He lit a lantern and Bob and he checked every room to make sure none of them had gotten in. They hadn’t. Megan’s sheet was still lying on the floor of the old furnace room. It did not appear to be touched.

Down there, the shrieking was quieter.

He fed more wood into the stove and the low blaze fanned up. Bob and he sat on the carpet a few feet away from it and basked in its glow. Luke got some water for both of them and then broke into one of the boxes of beef jerky. Bob loved it. Luke didn’t know if it was good for dogs or not, but Bob relaxed as he chewed on it.

Luke smoked and watched the dog, knowing he loved his old mutt. It wasn’t the same sort of love he had known—and still knew—for his wife and daughter, but it was real enough. The dog made him feel calm, chased the loneliness away, and made his heart leap with joy at his antics. And this disturbed him because he knew the undead would slaughter Bob in the worst possible way if they got at him. That dog would have fought twenty of them to protect Luke, but if they got the chance they would kill him.

And they would do it to weaken Luke himself.

That’s what their game was. They
couldn’t get at him—he hoped—so they would torment him. That’s why they were howling outside. They were vulnerable during the daytime, but at night he was the terrified rabbit that hid in its hole and they would do anything to multiply the fear he felt and rob him of his sleep. They knew that sooner or later, the anxiety and terror and lack of rest would finish him. Maybe they didn’t
know
it exactly, but they certainly sensed it.

But I won’t weaken, you filthy bastards. I won’t. And day by day I’ll
kill more of you and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about that.

He stroked Bob and they chewed jerky and around five the undead gave it up for the night. There was still plenty of darkness left, but they had better ways to spend it
apparently.

59

There were things
he had been putting off for too long and mainly because the very idea of them depressed him. He had been cleaning out neighborhoods far and wide, one house at a time. He had already destroyed over sixty of them and that was just scratching the surface. The snow was the real problem. When spring came, it would be absolute fucking genocide for them. But that was months away. Before then, there were things he had to take care of.

Though it pained him a great deal, he went through the neighborhood knocking on doors. None were answered. Each
house would have to be cleaned out and he had put it off for far too long. The last house he went to was the Stericki house.

He figured there was a chance that Anne had gone back there, thinking it was safe. He wanted badly to get her and end her reign of terror for once and all. He left Bob at home (something Bob, of course, wasn’t too happy about). But he worried about the dog. Though Bob loved to come with him and sniff them out, Luke worried that the stress was taking its toll on him. He didn’t seem to sleep much and some days he just picked at his food.

It’s ageing him as it’s ageing you.

Luke didn’t bother knocking at the Stericki door.

He fought his way through the drifts and used Alger’s shovel to clean off the porch so he could get the front door open. Inside, it was cold. Like a refrigerated tomb. But even so, he could feel the noxious pall of the undead. When they were around, the atmosphere of a place soured like milk.

He
checked out the cellar.

He checked all the rooms downstairs.

He looked under beds and in closets, under any suspicious heaps of blankets or clothes. He even looked up the chimney because in his research he had read a vampire novel where one of them hid in a chimney. Nothing and nothing. Upstairs, room by room by room. He even checked the bathroom because he had once found a Carrier sleeping in a tub.

It was the same as it had been the last time he was there.

But he wasn’t relieved.

There was one or more of them here and he could feel them, feel the taint they brought to the house. Finally, knowing he had to, he brought up a ladder from the basement and decided to look around in the attic. It was the one place he had never
investigated. There was a vampire on the premises, he knew, and if it wasn’t anywhere else, it had to be up there.

Lantern in hand, he climbed the ladder and pushed up the attic t
rapdoor. It swung back on hinges with a slamming noise that echoed through the house. As soon as it did, that roiling black putrescence came rolling out at him.

“Jesus,” he said. “That smell.”

It was like sticking his face into the belly of a dead woodchuck that was looping with worms. He let the stink settle until it wasn’t quite as bad. One trick he had learned from watching CSI shows was to shove Vicks Vap-o-Rub up his nostrils. The only thing he didn’t like about that was it took days to get the medicinal smell out of his nose. He went without, despite the tremendous stench that was nearly palpable in the air.

His heart booming heavy in his chest, he went up into the attic. It was pretty Spartan: naked beams overhead, a few planks laid over the joists and blown insulation, not much else. Not so much as a box or an old trunk. The air in the lantern light spun with thick motes of dust. Luke’s throat was scratchy, his mouth dry.

I know you’re here. Fucking show yourself already…

The smell did not
dissipate; it thickened until it seemed that the air in the attic was saturated with it. It was almost violent. He came around the chimney stack and there was a form stretched out under a sheet. He did not hesitate, he snatched it away.

It was Alger.

Or something
like
Alger.

He was still dressed as he had been the night he visited Luke, but he had been feeding especially well. He was swollen like a pickle in a barrel, a great saturated sponge soaked with blood. It leaked from his mouth and nostrils, even from his ears. He lay in a frozen pool of it as if it had been leaking from his ass
as well. His eyes were open and they had gone a dark, juicy red like cherries. They bulged from their sockets like they might explode if pricked. He was so bloated from his gluttonous feedings that his parka had burst open and the buttons of his shirt had popped free.

He was an engorged leech.

The stink of dark sweetness coming from him was heady in the air: the smell of blood, rich and coppery and sickening. But as bad as that was, it was positively minor in comparison to his appearance which filled Luke with absolute loathing and repugnance. In the books he had read, this was how they claimed vampires often looked when their coffins were opened.

Sweating, gagging on the smell, his stomach rolling over on itself,
he thought:
This is what they are at their core…fucking bloodsuckers, leeches, disgusting parasites. I wish the vampire romance writers could see this, all the women who read Stephanie Myers and Ann-fucking-Rice and the rest of that silly bullshit. I wish they could look at the true nature of these things.

But unfortunately, most of them probably looked much like Alger now, he knew. In the end there were no sweet kisses in the night but slobbering mouths
and death-puffed lips.

He
sat there staring at Alger, pitying him as much as he was offended by him.

Though his skin—which appeared
to be stretched to the bursting point—was of an even whiteness, it was blood-red just beneath, the cheeks ruddy, arteries and veins distended like fat, sluggish worms. He was so swollen that his face was straining over the skull beneath, the nose widened, the lips like two rubbery tubes pulled tight. The interesting thing was that despite the horror of his physical condition, there was no getting around one thing: he was regenerating just as Sonja had. If it hadn’t been for the bloating, he would have looked twenty years younger. The wrinkles and pouches of his face were gone, his once-balding pate now covered in lustrous brown hair that was thick and full, barely touched by gray at the temples.

It was incredible.

Absolutely incredible.

But it had to end the
same way and Luke knew it. He unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out a stake and his sledgehammer. He expected to feel something, some pain at what he was about to do. Alger had been his friend after all.

But this
wasn’t Alger; it was a tumescent human spider fattened on the blood of its victims.

Carefully, Luke
placed the tip of the stake just left of the sternum. He gripped his hand tightly on the shaft. He brought the hammer up. “Forgive me, Alger,” he said, and gave the hammer a vicious overhand swing.

What followed was horrible beyond belief, much worse than anything he had seen thus far. It was like pi
ercing a high pressure hose. The stake went in easily and Alger seemed to explode. Blood shot up from the entrance wound in great surging gouts and jets, spraying up onto the rafters and covering Luke in a red eruption. It flowed and gurgled and splashed. It gushed from Alger’s screaming mouth and spurted from his nostrils and evacuated from his ass with a wet farting noise.