Vampirus (Book 1) (22 page)

By then, covered in filth, Luke was screaming, too. He brought the hammer down again and again until the vampire was most surely impaled, its heart split in two like a cl
oven rotten apple.

Alger’s entire body whipped and writhed like he was being electrocuted. Every inch of him was tense and straining. It was like his skeleton was trying to tear its way free. His screams became the
squealing of boars. His fingers scraped at the joists below. A bubbling black fluid vomited from his mouth and a gray sludge spilled from his nostrils, enveloping his face in snotty threads. A moaning and sucking sound came out of his throat and he split open. Luke saw the seedy, stringy guts within, but they were not yellow this time, but red and black, dissolving into a muddy bile-colored ooze. His hands fumbled at the stake and a vile, stinking gas rushed out of him with a wheezing sound.

He trembled.

Slime coursed from him.

His eyes popped like the juicy cherries they were.

A great gassy black bubble expanded at his mouth and then it, too, popped.

Alger—or more precisely the thing had
become—was dead, destroyed, ended. His left hand rattled against the black flooring beneath with a sound of a man drumming his fingers and that was it. His face looked like a black, furrowed prune sucking into itself. His entire body seemed to deflate and go loose and slopping.

Luke sat there on his ass three feet away, covered in gore and drainage. He could taste bile in his mouth and he knew he had vomited at some point. His eyes were wide, his lungs gasping
for air. Blood dripped from the tip of his nose and ran from his hair. A trickle of it coursed down his spine. Droplets of it rained from the rafters overhead.

Grabbing his duffel and hammer, he
made it down the ladder and downstairs before he let out a cry and ran from the house, diving off the porch into the fresh white snow. He grabbed up handfuls of it and rubbed his face and hair with it until he felt marginally more clean, more human.

Down the street, he could hear Bob howling as if he could sense
his torment and disgust and self-revulsion. It took him some time before he could stand up without pitching over. He crawled through the snow for ten feet before he could get his legs under him.

He had thought it would be bad staking Alger.

He was wrong: it was worse than anything he could imagine.

60

Wakefield
slept like the dead beneath its shivering shroud of white and the only thing that disturbed its slumber was Luke Barrows out on his Polaris, cutting down roads and flying over snowbanks, seeking out the pestilence by day that in turn sought him out by night.

Over a week had passed since he destroyed Alger and in that time, he had approached the killing of vampires with an almost obsessive zeal. Whereas a month before destroying a few of them a day was all he could handle, now he was killing at least seven or eight, sometimes as many as dozen. His daily high was sixteen, but he tried not to think about it in those terms.

It was a cold morning and by ten the mercury had climbed to 1
5
° before flatlining and staying there. The world was white and wintery, the sun barely making a showing in the hazy sky. The wind rose and fell, scattering the night’s snow and a scrim of ice particles down empty, drifted roads and against silent houses. It bit into his face and sent chill fingers up his spine but it hardly deterred him. Sometimes it sounded like something feral and alive out there searching for warm-blooded prey, bearing down on the town with hunger; other times as he stood out in front of lonely farmhouses outside of town, it was just a low droning in the distance like a generator on standby.

For all intents and purposes,
Wakefield was a dead town.

It had the hollow, haunted feel of a ghost town.

But he knew that while it was those things, it was not untenanted.
They
were here. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. There’d been roughly 5,000 people in Wakefield as of the last census (something the city fathers hadn’t been happy about because they’d managed to lose 2,000 people since the previous one, mainly because the chair factory that had been purring along steadily since before the Second World War had finally closed its doors) and by Luke’s figuring, if even a third of them died of the pandemic and were cremated out at the pits, that still left a lot of fucking vampires out there. Of course, he knew they weren’t
all
bloodsuckers. There were normal human beings out there but most of them were in hiding, protecting their own. And there was one good gang of hunters out there because he’d seen the results of their work: gape-jawed corpses staked in the snow.

Still…there were
potentially several thousand of the undead and that was unsettling. Better than Chicago or New York where there were conceivably
millions
of them…but still, not something he liked to spend much time thinking about.

A hundred, a thousand, two
-thousand,
he thought.
What’s the difference? I’ll find them, one by one. I’ll drag them screaming into the light and stake them in their graves.

One thing that did bother him
however was that the Sheriff’s Department downtown was empty. No sign of Billy McCready or anyone else for that matter. Same for Public Works. There was every possibility Stubby was holed up at his house and maybe Billy was at his place. Both were out in the country and he had checked neither.

By eleven
that day, he’d already put down three of them and it hadn’t been easy.

Some days he
’d pull them out from under beds or find them holed up in closets and it would be real easy to drag them out and stake them or throw them out into the sun. Other days, he had to work for it…especially when he came upon some that were sly and crafty.

Today
was one of those days.

He
and Bob had been working Cherry Hill Road for what seemed weeks now. It was a major artery of Wakefield and snaked its way east to west, cutting right through the town itself. He found a house that hadn’t been checked off on his list. He saw no footprints in the snow, neither old nor new, no depressions as of a well-trod trail. That was always a good sign. The front door was open and he searched the bedrooms upstairs with Bob at his side, the living room and dining room and kitchen, closets and cubbies…nothing.

But Bob was growling, sniffing about. The undead were here, somewhere.

Bob got excited at the cellar door.

It was locked from the other side and no amount of battering on his part could make it budge.
If he had the shotgun with him, he could have blasted it open but he’d left it at home.

He went back outside, circling around in the deep snow of the yard.
Bob was leaping his way through, not making very good progress. Luke dug through a drift and found a cellar window that was blacked-out from the other side. He found another window like that, then another. It was all he needed to see. He kicked in the three windows he found, letting in the air and sunlight…what came blowing back out was a hot stench of moist rot and dry, sweet decay.

There was only one thing that smelled like that
.

Bob was barking madly by that point and Luke had to sit there with him, stroking him until he calmed down.

“It’s all right,” he told him. “More of the same.”

When Bob was
sufficiently mellowed, Luke tossed his duffel of goodies down into the cellar and then squeezed his way through a broken window, something that was not real easy in his heavy parka and boots. He slid through and dropped onto a sofa. He was in a rec room of sorts. A dusty, dirty place that had been unused for years even when people lived there.

Bob peered in through the window, not liking any of it very much.

“Man your post, pal,” Luke told him.

He stooped over and examined some of the glass he
’d kicked in. Spray paint. The windows had been spray painted a flat black from the inside. Very cunning. It was the sort of thing Anne Stericki might have done.

On top of a dusty TV set was a can of Krylon spray paint.

There were grubby black fingerprint smudges on the white can. Whoever had painted the windows had gotten some on themselves in the process.

The stink down there made him wrinkle his nose and grit his teeth.

He took a flashlight out of his duffel and found the stairs. The door at the top had been boarded-over very meticulously. No way he’d have ever gotten through it. Just no way. Even the shotgun wouldn’t have been much use.

He found a small cubby-like bathroom, an unused bedroom, then some kind of game room with a pool table in it. On it,
lying beneath a heavy musty-smelling comforter were three corpses. Two middle-aged women with a small boy sandwiched between them. They slept stiffly with arms at their sides. Their faces were all clown-white with ghastly staring eyes that were shiny and blank with that horrible catatonic glare to them that Luke often referred to as
Bela Lugosi Eyes
. The boy had abundant freckles and they had gone black in death, standing out against his white flesh like tiny inkspots.

Luke just stood there, staring down at them, knowing they
’d have to be staked. He might get the boy through the window but never the women and the idea of having to handle them made his stomach roll over.

Keeping his gloves on, he examined their hands.

He was glad he could not feel the porcelain skin. Sometimes it felt too much like human flesh and other times like rubber or thermoformed plastic mocking the same.

“
You’re the one,” he said, holding up one of the boy’s hands. There were black smudges of spray paint on his fingers.

Luk
e always made a point of studying the cunning ones in some depth, forever wondering what made some of them such adept and calculating predators while others were just hungering dead things with barely enough sense to get out of the sun.

He turned the boy
’s hand over and as he did so, the boy’s lips curled up in a smile that made something catch in Luke’s throat. He dropped the hand and stepped back. No, the boy was still a corpse and would be until he was staked or sundown came. These were the only things that could break them from their slumber.

Yet…he
was still smiling.

The mocking, wooden grin of a puppet.

Luke told himself it was simply reflexive action, but there was such an air of hunger to that smile that he could not make himself believe it. He took the woman on the left first. She was swollen with blood much as Alger had been. Like some fattened, bloated spider astride a web of leeched flies. Trickles of red had run from the corners of her mouth and from one nostril. Her fingers were stained pink like she’d squeezed the juice from ripe cherries. He took out his K-Bar knife and pushed her lips back. Her teeth were red, too, the spike-like incisors looked like they’d been dipped in red wine.

He turned away from her, putting his knife away.

He took out a stake, his hammer, and the rest of his equipment. After Alger, he’d learned to wear protective gear. He stripped off his gloves and parka, unfolding a black rain slicker and sliding on yellow Platex gloves. He put on the dental face shield and made ready.

The woman was no longer pale: her cheeks were rosy with life. Her lips no longer gray but plump and pink. Other than those staring, cadaverous eyes, she looked very much like a woman asleep.

Now you want me to think you’re not a monster. That you’re just a woman and if I believe that you’ll get inside my head and I’ll happily curl up next to you. Then when the sun goes down…

He had seen it before, of course. Sometimes they did that. They looked like corpses, but if you turned your back on them they suddenly
became very life-like. Was it some “natural” defensive mechanism? Did it mean they were aware of your presence in their dead, dreaming brains and were trying to disguise themselves as harmless sleepers? Or was it some sort of hypnotic thing that existed only in your mind? An image they projected? Luke did not know.

The woman was dressed in flannel pants and a Wisconsin Badgers hoodie. Feeling like a deviant, he pulled the hoodie up until her breasts were revealed. Blood had leaked from her nipples, he saw. He positioned the stake properly to the left of the sternum, clutched it tightly, and brought up the hammer. It had a heavy dead blow weight of over four pounds.

Clenching his teeth, he exhaled and brought it down.

There was the shearing, fleshy sound of penetration, and blood began to flow from the wound as
the woman began to thrash. She writhed and hissed, teeth snapping, letting out a shrill agonized squealing. Blood gushed from her punctured chest, it ran from her mouth and nostrils and filled her eyes until she cried tears of it. Gouts of it shot into the air and sprayed against his face shield. Her hands clawed wildly, blackened nails scratching against his slicker. He brought the hammer down again and felt it go right through her and into the felt covering of the billiard table. She vomited out a spurt of blood that shot right over his left shoulder.