Vampirus (Book 1) (28 page)

But there had been.

Out of his peripheral vision he caught a momentary glimpse of something with huge ink-black wings like a predatory prehistoric bird. It angled off over the rooftops and was gone before he could really catch a good look at it.

The game was changing.

He wasn’t supposed to go to Stephani’s; that wasn’t part of the design.

A scudding of gray-white clouds was moving in overhead and what light he had from the stars would soon be gone. The clouds were puffy, swollen like some old feather mattress bursting its seams and letting loose a flurry of down. It wasn
’t that, of course, but snow. A heavy fall of it drifting earthward.

Keep going. Don’t worry about it.

It seemed there were more vampires in the street.

They were moving in closer now. They were fixed on one solitary object: him.

He saw an oil-black form veer over the treetops.

He was certain he had not imagined it.

He looked up again and saw something like an immense graveyard vulture with midnight-black plumage sweeping in to feed, to get at the last good strips of red meat left on the carcass of Wakefield, to pick at its bones and lick them clean.

He blinked his eyes and it was gone.

Riven with fear now that was sharp and glacial and cutting, he knew he had seen it. Maybe he was
supposed
to see it. And he could not say with any certainty that it had been flying…it almost seemed to be
crawling
along the shroud of the sky like an immense bat creeping up the bedsheets of a sleeper.

Gone again.

Luke didn’t know how much longer he could hold it together. Whatever was in the sky—and he could give it cute comic book vampire names like
Count RedEye
all he wanted but that hardly summed up the true tenebrous nature of that night-flying abomination—it could take him anytime it so chose.

He looked around for it as the vampires moved in closer.

It was gone.

Then it was there, a black shape blown into fragments by the wind.

Then gone again.

He saw it roosting in the tops of denuded trees.

He saw it atop the steeple of a church flapping like a black flag.

And its eyes…those livid red eyes staring down at him. They punched into him like bullets, made him feel weak and drunken, his mind a perpetual motion machine of dread, thoughts and emotions tumbling over one another. A fog that was as red as those malefic eyes seemed to be filling his head and he could not be sure what he was doing or where he was going—

Shut it out! That thing is trying to get into your mind!

Yes, yes,
yes!
That was it. He blocked it out but it was not easy, RedEye was pushing harder now and there was a dull and uneasy throbbing in the back of Luke’s skull. The wall he had put up was like masonry crumbling under the assault of chisels and hammers. It was only his wits that had saved him from the undead again and again, but now at the time of greatest need they were failing him. He couldn’t seem to string together a single rational thought.

Of course not, you fucking fool! It
’s RedEye’s doing! You’re under psychic attack and he’s pouring it on so you can’t think, you can’t reason. He’s trying to reduce you to a childlike level of pure primal unreasoning terror so that you’re no better than a little boy frightened of the dark or a superstitious peasant out of the Middle Ages crouching fearfully in his dark European hovel, fearing the night and the shapes that stride in it. Once he gets you there, rational thought and logical action will be impossible. Then you’ll fuck up. Then you’ll make a mistake.

His will is greater than yours.

You better accept that like David accepted that Goliath could stomp his ass into the ground any time he saw fit.

So, since he couldn
’t really think and all there was in his head, besides the threading pain of invasion, was that voice taunting him, he did not try to think. He didn’t try at all. He let his instincts do the thinking and his body reacted in kind. It seized the grips of the Polaris and cracked the throttle open. By God, he’d barely been moving, but now he was making up for that as the rustling shadows of the undead crowded in like black-and-white ghosts, hungry eyes like silver in the pale moonlight, mouths open and steaming for blood.

He
cut down an avenue, zipped between two houses, found a street and opened up the sled until he found the intersection of Cherry Hill Road. In the back of his head he wondered if people were hearing him out there and wondering what sort of maniac was out on a sled in the dead of night.

As he made
Cherry Hill, he saw that dark shape flying above him, following him like the moon follows a lone walker. The clouds overhead were a web of gauze and the shape was a huge thick-bodied spider astride it, watching him, waiting to drop down on him by one ethereal thread.

Stephani
’s.

There it was.

Don’t think about it, just do it.

The undead were thronging in the streets in ghosts trains, pale wraiths emaciated by death, so gaunt they wore their skins over their jutting skeletons like hides stitched and sewn from gray canvas and stretched over frameworks of graveyard poles. Their starving faces and huge empty eyes watched him, long white hands reaching out as he passed but never snaring him. Driving through their numbers was like taking a dark ride in one of those spookhouse crash cars at a carnival. It gave him the same sense of terror and exhilaration; all that was missing was the fun.

RedEye was getting closer and he knew it.

Luke could feel the freezing pall falling over him.

RedEye was coming now.

He was coming to drain him dry.

Luke braced himself as the sled flew over the snowbank and rolled to a stop mere feet from Stephani’s door. And then he jumped off, slipping in the snow, finding his feet and pulling himself up the porch as something landed on the roof above, spreading its shadow with a sound like the rotting masts of a ghost ship in a high gale, flapping and flailing.

He had seconds, bare seconds.

He pounded frantically on the door. “STEPHANI! LET ME IN! IT’S LUKE FOR GODSAKE!” He kept beating and beating with both fists. “HURRY! HURRY! THEY’RE COMING! OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”

He did not dare turn and look because already he could fill the grave chill of them sweeping up and over him as they moved in, reaching out for him, pale mouths slicked by gray tongues, yellow eyes like lanterns glowing in ebon catacombs, lips pulling back from wolflike teeth.

“STEPHANI! PLEASE!”

Then the door rattled and he distinctly heard the sound of bolts drawn and
a chain pulled aside and then it was opening and he looked at Stephani whose jade eyes were wide with terror and he thought about the incredible chance she had just taken as he fell through the door, gasping, panting,
“I’m still human, I’m still human…I’m not one of them.”

He looked back once as
she slammed the door and the undead were everywhere, not a crowd of them so much as a storm of gloating faces and leering eyes and starving mouths grinning, misting and ghostly and breaking apart in the wind like sea-fog blown in over a lonesome headland.

67

Later, sitting by the fire, the frost finally melted from his beard and his mind clear, he thanked her. Thanked her for taking such an awful chance. But that just proved how human she was. She was not a cold, greedy thing like those outside; she was warm an
d caring.

“
How did you know?” he asked her as he sat wrapped in a blanket, the warmth finally getting down into his bones.

“
Your voice,” Stephani said. “Your voice. The tone of it, I guess. I heard how desperate you were, how scared you were…they can’t mimic a voice like that.”

“
I guess you’re right.”

“Besides, I heard your snowmobile.”

He smiled.

Stephani by firelight: her smooth face lit in flickering orange and yellow, shadows clinging beneath her high cheekbones and the hollows of her huge green eyes. Her lips were moist, full. She pulled some of the blanket from him and wrapped herself in it with him.
“You don’t mind sharing, do you?”

He could barely speak because he was a teenager again and
midnight fantasies rolled through his head, catching spark and igniting dry tinder until he felt himself begin to burn. She sensed it and she pressed her lips against his own and there was pure joy in that.

But as a man with ethics who still loved his dead wife, he pulled away.
“I didn’t come here for that,” he said.

“
Yes, you did.”

“
No, it’s not like that.”

“
Of course it is.”

And that
’s all it took for them to join there before the fire, both lonely and wanting and needing something to clear the pain from their minds if only for a short time. The coupling was quick, born of necessity, but if passion can be gauged by intensity then they burned the world down. When it was over and the hunger was sated, she leaned herself on one elbow and smoked a cigarette and he looked at her breasts which were marvelously round and firm. He looked away. It was silly: he’d just made love with this woman…yet, something in him told him he wasn’t supposed to be staring at them.

“
I’m not embarrassed,” she said.

“
Of what?”

“
Of you looking at me.” To prove it, she pulled the blanket away so he could see her breasts completely. “I like it.”

And he did, too. How many women he had looked at that were cold and gray, he could not remember. How many breasts he had positioned a sharpened stake over, he refused to remember. But they were shells, cocoons of evil vapors, and never once had they moved him. But Stephani moved him. It had been a long time since he had known a warm female body, felt a female touch, or looked into female eyes. It was easy to be owned by them. In fact, it was
quite painless.

Stephani pulled off her cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“My Aunt Lucy died,” she said.

“
I’m sorry.”

She shrugged.
“She was driven out of her head by all this. It’s probably better that her heart finally gave out.”

“
I suppose.”

“
In the morning will you…?”

“
I’ll take her somewhere. Is she upstairs?”

“
Yes.”

Stephani tossed her cigarette into the fire and curled back up with him after throwing in a couple more logs. She fell asleep in his arms ten minutes later but it wasn
’t so easy for Luke because he was thinking of that corpse upstairs. Sleeping in the same house with one was not easy. They were no longer harmless things. But Stephani said it was her heart so it must have been her heart. If a Carrier had gotten to her, there would have been marks. Then again, just because there were no marks did not mean she hadn’t picked up the virus somewhere. Vampirus was no different than any other virus in that aspect; it could survive independent of a host.

Steph loved her aunt and you better know that. She was her only surviving family. Mad or not, Lucy was everything to her. And love like that wears blinders and you know it. Maybe you should go take a look at that body, just to be sure. Because Vampirus doesn
’t affect everyone the same way. Sometimes it’s the madness and horror of the Red Death and sometimes it’s the silent pale death that took your wife and daughter. Just to be sure, maybe you ought to go up there and look.

He figured that was a good idea.

He would wait until Stephani was deep asleep, then he’d go look for both their sakes. But by the time she was out good, he’d fallen asleep himself.

68

He came awake to a dark and pungent odor like the lining of a casket saturated with corpse slime. The air around him was dark and vaporous with it. His limbs felt heavy, thick, and as he tried to sit up he was sluggish like a diver trying to move in the pressures of the deep sea. His eyes became aware of a dull yellow light that was not the good, warm light of the fire but the yellow of congealing corpse-fat dripping down the stem of a candle. The dark pungency was sweetening now and he smelled flowers: orchids and roses rotting on the floor of a tomb.

His mouth opened and his voice tried to speak one word:
“Steph…Steph…”

But she was gone and his fumbling numb fingers soon proved this, finding nothing but a limp cool blanket where her body had been. He tried to call out to her again, but his voice would not come. It was nothing but a dry rasping that could not make it past his lips. He was alone. He was alone in the house and maybe in the world and though his mind kept telling him it was probably just a dream, he did not believe it.

The only thing he knew for sure was that he was alone.

Though not entirely.