Vampirus (Book 1) (23 page)

She trembled while
trying to rise but fell back down.

The blood that flooded from her mouth
went black and oozed like sludge. Her jaws snapped shut, fangs hanging over her bottom lip.

Luke got well away from her
at that point.

She swelled up like she was inflated with helium and then there
was a squealing eruption of gas from her mouth. She discolored quickly, sinking down into the pooling blood, becoming purple and black, her lips retreating from her teeth, eyes sinking away, a morbid gray graveyard fungus sprouting from her face and furring her breasts.

The stink was hot, violent, and repulsive.

He did the other woman and the boy in the same fashion. Then he took all their heads off with a hatchet and tossed them away out into the rec room where the sunlight found them and made a curious yellow steam rise from them as they shriveled brown like dried prunes.

Sick as always
, the smell down there making his stomach crawl, he stripped off his bloody garments and shoved them out the window with the face shield and followed them out into the bright white world. He stuck his face in a snowdrift and washed his hands with fresh drift.

He sat
dazed like that for some time as snowflakes drifted down and melted on his face. Bob licked him and nuzzled him. He was a good friend in the worst of times.

“
Okay,” Luke finally said. “We better get moving. We can’t waste daylight.”

Washing his rain
slicker and Playtex gloves off with snow, getting the blood that did not freeze and fall off, he climbed to his feet and dragged himself back to the snowmobile. He felt like he was eighty years old.

61

By
noon, he bagged four more.

They were easy kills. Two of them, both elderly men,
Bob found in a garage sleeping behind a woodpile. Luke dragged them out into the sunlight and let them burn. They both writhed and shook and steamed, but other than that they went back into death nearly without a fight. And that was just another thing that he had learned: when you staked them, they got violent like wounded animals; but when they fried in the sunlight many of them never seemed to wake entirely from the corpse-like dormancy of diurnal sleep.

The other two he got were a young couple laying in their bed beneath heavy blankets as they had done in life, clutching each other like lovers. He figured they had been in their early twenties. Although he did not know the guy, the girl had worked the counter at Donut World and she still wore her uniform. There were smudges of flour or powdered sugar on it along with darker stains of a more ominous variety. Her name tag said
CRYSTAL. Luke stood there, holding the corner of the blankets he’d pulled off them, wondering how it had happened. Had she come home from work expecting a quiet evening when her boyfriend fastened himself to her neck? Or had he been woken in the night by her?

Sighing, Luke threw the blankets to the floor.

Then remembering how sometimes they tried to squirm back into them, he tossed the blankets out in the hallway. Then he yanked the heavy drapes from the window and the direct sunlight hit them. The result was instantaneous: they both let out a hoarse croaking sound and began to squirm and flop, arching their backs, heads thrashing from side to side. They smacked into one another on the bed, got tangled in each other in a flurry of limbs and obscene boneless gyrations like mating snakes.

The girl fell of
f the bed and hit the floor with a loud
thud
and continued to move with a frightening worming sort of motion, not attempting to propel herself with her legs or arms, but moving with a repulsive side-to-side motion like a serpent. Her lips shivered open and Luke saw her fangs, the fat black tongue trembling behind them. Steam hissed from her that stank like boiled blood. Her skin went from a uniform white to a pebbly yellow striated by a livid purple vein networking. It began to split open like dry earth, an inky fluid seeping forth. Green mildew grew over skin and she began to swell up. She kept trying to find a patch of darkness with her mindless, wormlike squirming. She bumped into walls and the dresser, the back of her head pounding against the closed closet door. She continued to bloat up with the gases of putrefaction until the buttons on her uniform blouse popped free, one after the other, flying like pellets and striking the walls.

No cover to be had from the burning, infernal sunlight, her back arched one last time and her mouth opened, her teeth sliding from retreating blackened gum
s and she made a piercing, almost mewling sort of sound before vomiting out a gray slushy bile of rot. Then she went still and the only sounds were from her flesh continuing to split open as it went furry with mold, sagging off the bones beneath which had become unpleasantly prominent.

Her boyfriend had also hit the floor, but he wormed his way under the bed. Steeling himself against the stink, Luke dragged him out into the sunlight and when he tried to tunnel under it again, he flipped the bed against the wall. That did it. There was no cover and he went in a similar fashion
as his girlfriend.

Outside, Luke painted a huge red cross on the front door with spray paint.

Another house cleaned.

He
’d been at it nearly two months by that point and had cleaned over a hundred houses. But it was thankless work because even though he vanquished the original residents, others often came back to take their places. Regardless, he had a running body count of over 150 by that point. He had steeled himself to the job at hand, desensitized himself, but it never got easy. It never became a simple and mindless chore that did not affect him.

His next stop was a saloon, a little neighborhood place with the amusing name of Sudz.
He could remember it going by three or four different names since he was a kid. He hadn’t been in there for ten or twelve years and that had been for a bachelor party in the back room.

T
he door was open and he went in, Bob at his side.

They
checked it out carefully, found nothing. No Carriers sleeping under pool tables or hiding out with the stacked cases of booze in the back. The bottles of Jim Beam, Cutty Sark, Captain Morgan’s, and UV Blue still waited attentively behind the bar. Cases of longneck bottles had shattered from the cold. The freezer was full of frozen pizzas, which were just as cold as the day they’d been put in there. Luke took them all and put them in his scavenging bag out on the sled. He went back inside and took a couple frosty shots of Jack Daniels, staring up at the calendar behind the bar. A buxom blonde in a swimsuit. He looked at her image for some time, knowing he should be feeling lust but in his mind there was only an image of her rising at night to feed.

Enough.

While he was lost in thought, Bob was all business. He sniffed out the cellar door and began to growl, then bark, then whimper.

Luke
knew what he had to do next and he dreaded it.

There were no wi
ndows so it was as black as a mineshaft down there. He took a lantern with him and lit it at the bottom of the worn wooden steps. He could smell the undead right away. Even the cold of February could not cancel out the rank, fermenting stench of them.

It drove Bob into a frenzy of growling and snapping. Luke had to pet him for awhile so he’d calm down.

“Let’s just get it done, Bob, so we can get back out into the fresh air.”

C
reeping down in places like this that were utterly black and lacked windows to let the sunshine in was taking an awful chance. It was darker than night in the cellar. Who could say it would matter to the vampires? Would they only awaken at true sunset or was
any
darkness acceptable? Would the lack of discernable light activate them? So far, he knew, they had obeyed the laws of folklore concerning such things…but he feared what might happen when they didn’t. They were manageable in their daylight dormancy, but at night you didn’t stand a chance.

This is crazy and you know it.

Maybe it was. He could feel the threat and menace, but he accepted it the way a maker of explosives accepts the fact that he may loose limbs.

The cellar had a dirt floor and was crowded with a variety of discarded items: water-stained cardboard boxes, a heap of lumber against the far wall, a stack of old wooden dartball boards speckled with mold, a couple dirty signs from Sudz
’s annual summer picnic. As he moved forward, he could feel a rising apprehension inside him like the ticking of the bomb. Though it was cold down there and his breath came out in rolling white clouds, he could still smell the vampires. Their odor made Bob tremble.

Luke moved slowly forward, step by hesitant step knowing that the lantern was the only thing that kept the boogeyman at bay. If he tripped over something and dropped it…well, he
’d be trapped in the suffocating blackness with things that were perfectly at home in it.

So he moved with extra care.

Despite the cold, he could feel fingers of perspiration running down his spine. Motes of disturbed dust spun in the lantern light. All around him there was a fluid danse macabre of shadows. He was breathing hard and not from exertion. The stink became almost unbearable.

Bob barked.

There.

One of them was
lying in the dirt next to the furnace. He had been an old man, maybe seventyish. His face was pockmarked with old sores as if he had used lye as a facial scrub. Though his flesh was white as kidskin, his bulbous nose still bore the purple burst blood vessels of the veteran boozehound. His eyes were open. They looked like shiny white plastic in the light, the pupils like dark pinpricks. There was a smear of blood on his chin and two discolored fangs hung over his lower lip. Luke figured he probably slept down here even before Vampirus made him a nightwalker.

Hanging his parka on the furnace
, Luke donned his rain slicker, yellow rubber gloves, and face shield. He positioned the stake and brought the hammer down with a decisive blow. The old man shook and snapped his teeth, blood bubbling from the entrance wound. One more strike did it: the stake neatly severed his heart and he went still, stolen blood running from his mouth.

That was one.

The next one Bob found was around the other side of the furnace. It was a woman who had dug herself a little grave. She was nearly entirely buried in black earth, only her face and one ghostly white hand visible, the fingers spread out like the petals of a funeral lily. She must have buried herself back up each night.

Luke dug the dirt away from her chest. She was naked and filthy. Again, he positioned the stake and pounded it home. She did not die as easily as the old man. She came alive, thrashing and kicking, throwing up clods of earth and gagging out a mist of blood. Her fangs were long and sharp, mottled with dark spots like the tongue of a dog. Her yellowed eyes fixed upon him, her seamed gray face hooked into a grimace, she snarled at him, spitting out steam and blood and rancid breath.

Bob began to howl.

Luke
fell away from her because she was not dormant like the others: she had woken up. She was still sluggish with her daytime stupor, but there was no denying that her mind was awake and sentient. She looked at him with a flat, maniacal hatred. She rose up from her grave, hands fumbling at the stake.
“They have made shells of your wife and daughter! They sleep in the dirt!”
As terrified and shocked as he was, he knew he could not let her come out of it any more than she already had so he launched himself forward and slammed her back in the grave. He brought the hammer down and with two quick, powerful arcs he drove the stake through her.

She let out a wild,
piercing scream that became something almost like the baying of a hound and then she fell back into her grave, vomiting a gout of blood that sprayed against his face shield. She was dead again. He stumbled away with his light, gasping for breath and falling to one knee, trying to calm his heart, which was slamming away in his chest.

Holding the light up, he looked around…Jesus, five, six, no
seven
more of them: men, women, even two teenage girls tangled in a naked heap as if they had gone to sleep in some romantic embrace.

Bob was nearly chasing his own tail by this point.

Luke shook his head. “No more,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

He grabbed his things and
climbed up out of the cellar and did not pause in his manic flight until he was outside in the fresh cold wind, burying his face in a snowdrift. He tore off the gloves, the bloody face shield and the slicker, and fell on his back staring up at the hazy sky, just breathing, just trying to think, just trying to get his legs back under him. The entire time he could hear her scraping metallic voice in his head:

They have
made shells of your wife and daughter! They sleep in the dirt!

This was the first time one of them had ever woken like that in the daytime. They were supposed to be powerless. The woman had not come out of it completely or she would have attacked him, but she was awake enough to scare the shit out of him. He tried to tell himself that what she said was meaningless but he knew better. It had been very specific. Not a threat really, but a fact.