Vampirus (Book 1) (29 page)

For there was a corpse upstairs.

Again, he tried to move but it was hopeless. His eyes found the window across the room and the curtains were pulled aside. He could see them out there: the undead. Discorporeal things drifting about, nothing but shades that steadily became white faces with unblinking cataleptic eyes.

The light…the yellow light was coming from across the room and it was coming off the figure that had entered the doorway. It was Aunt Lucy. It had to have been Aunt Lucy. She was wearing a white shift speckled with grave earth and her face was yellow, puffy with rot, eyes blanched white and sunken with death. The yellow glow was coming from her. It emanated from her waxen flesh as she drifted into the room five or six inches off the floor.

Luke
began to squirm on the floor, crying out silently for Stephani but she was gone. The stage was set: it was him and this night-hag.

She drifted closer, a stink of cold hate blowing off of her.

Her breath was cold like the air of a morgue as she reached out to him with gnarled yellow hands, lips parting to reveal sharp, hooked teeth that she would sink into his throat. The yellow incandescence coming from her brightened until it filled the room with a saffron phosphorescence and he was drowning in it as she hovered over him, her shift decaying into ribbons and strands and moldering threads until she was like some fluttering, wind-blown mop of snaking tissue and grave-cloth as she fell over him, smothering him in charnel darkness.

69

He
came fully awake in a panic, but it only lasted for a moment or so because he knew it was just a dream, nothing but another twisted, crazy dream and he’d been having them for months by that point…except, he wasn’t sure then on the edge of fright that it
was
a dream and if it was, then why did he feel like he was still caught in it? The shadows moved around him like black smoke and he felt small and helpless as a darkness gathered around him and his nerve endings became like a million-billion tiny ears listening and listening as he caught a scent of something like flowers dried in a book: sweet but fragmenting and dry.

Stephani…oh, help me, Stephani…please…

70

He could feel hot, sour breath on him. The breath of an animal that had been chewing upon dead things, green and soft. It was a wolf, he knew then, a huge mangy wolf with a bristling white pelt and huge green eyes which were feral and starving, absolutely mad with hunger. It could smell his fear and that only seasoned its appetite as it pressed its muzzle to his throat and began to lick at the warmth it found there, its tongue finding the throb of an artery and favoring it.

Nipping at it.

Sniffing it.

Savoring it.

Its slavering jaws parted and its fangs brushed against his throat, just breaking the skin.

This is it.

This is how it ends for you.

Not the voice of the beast, of course, but his own. The wolf had him and held him and he was powerless to stop what came next. He knew it was one of them because he was paralyzed and that
’s the way they liked to do it: get their prey laid out like this so they could feed leisurely. Supine and defenseless. That’s why they came at night. Not just because they couldn’t tolerate the daylight and were immobile themselves during the daylight hours, but because sleeping prey was so much easier…and particularly after they drained their willpower away.

Luke could not move.

He kept trying to do something,
anything.
But he was paralyzed. The beast had him and he felt its teeth piece his throat, sliding in like icicles, so cold, dear God, so unbelievably cold and he could do little but shudder and gasp at the agony of it as he was lost in the misty green eyes of the wolf.

And then—

“GET AWAY FROM HIM!”

A voice shouting.

The wolf pulled away from his throat and snarled, baring its ensanguined teeth. Luke felt droplets of his own blood drop onto his cheek. But then he saw. It was not a wolf, it was an old woman. It was Aunt Lucy bending over him, her maw bright red with his blood. She was a hunched-over thing with a face like a hollowed-out gourd, a hag smiling with a skeletal grimace, red juice running from the corners of her mouth. She was gaunt and rat-like.

She rose up, still bent over, a human rodent stalking its prey.

She opened her mouth and a red slime oozed down her chin.

“
Forgive me,” Luke heard Stephani say in a voice breaking with sobs.

Then
she brought up the crossbow and as her aunt hissed at her, fangs flashing and eyes blazing with corruption, she aimed it and put the bolt right through her chest. The impact slammed Aunt Lucy back and she fell into the fire that still burned high. She crawled out, flames in her hair, smoke and steam funneling from her. And when she rose to her feet, Stephani charged, slamming the bolt all the way through and Aunt Lucy screamed with a manic, cheated rage.

And outside, a hundred voices screamed with her.

When Luke opened his eyes again, Stephani was bandaging his throat. Aunt Lucy was curled up in the corner like the desiccated remains of a spider. Stephani’s eyes were blank of hope as she looked at him. “I couldn’t sleep. I went downstairs for some food to make you breakfast with…she was on you when I came back.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “It’s my fault. I should have known better. I should have staked her and dragged her outside. It’s all my fault.”

And Luke wanted to say,
Oh no, no, no, I know how love blinds, I know it, I know it, I know it…
but it was like he didn’t have a voice. Like it had been stolen and when he tried to speak there was only a dry, airless wheezing. He kept touching his throat even though Stephani told him to leave it alone. The bite was burning. He could almost feel the contagion in him running like a cool and poisoned sap. He made his voice work: “Get…when it’s light, get me back to my house. You can’t be around me. I don’t want to…infect you.”

But if Stephani was going to do that, she made no sign and by then Luke fell into darkness.

71

In his dream that is not a dream, he sees Wakefield lying stark and cold like an unburied corpse, the streets that are its limbs sprawled stiffening in the winter winds. Trees droop beneath heavy blankets of white, clods of snow drop into the unbroken drift. It is midday, but the town is silent like the concrete depths of a crypt. Doors are shut, windows bolted, homes lined up like tombstones frosted white. The sky is the color of cobwebs. It seems to hang just above snow-heaped rooftops and ice-slicked steeples. Out on Castle Avenue, cows mull about. Unmilked and loose, they have wandered from outlying farms where their owners lie barely breathing behind shades pulled to keep the sunlight at bay. The cows paw at the snow. They wander through town, succumbing to the cold and starvation, dropping in snowbanks and side streets. In houses, the dead and dying outnumber the healthy and living. They tremble with fever, delirious and sweat-soaked, eyes like opaque balls of glass. They scratch at bedsheets and moan through graying lips as the pox sores of the Red Death open up like suppurating boils in their faces and chests and necks. The blood that trickles free is watery, a thin serous discharge hot with communicable virus. Some of them scream. Some foam at the mouth. Others disgorge clots of black-red glutinous blood. Each night, as though answering the siren call of lost souls upon the wind, many crawl out of windows and drag themselves out of doors and gather in the streets to dance beneath the cold eye of the moon. Most are dead within the hour. Street to street, avenue to avenue, the olive-drab trucks of the National Guard move sullenly up drifted roads like Medieval corpse wagons. Blank-eyed soldiers in Hazmat suits stained with the discolored drainage of the dead go house to house, dragging out bodies and tossing them up into the hoppers of the trucks, piling them atop dozens and dozens of other cadavers. Once the hoppers are filled, the trucks move in solemn formation like coffin trains out to the charnel pits of Hollow Creek Road to be cremated. Here, the pyres blaze through day and night, black smoke rising in rolling, stinking clouds that rain gray ash and charred bits of bone down over Wakefield. When the sun drops over the horizon and night sweeps over the town neighborhood after neighborhood, the trucks stop rolling. Those who dared the streets hurry behind closed doors where they shiver and wait for dawn as long-armed shapes rise from the snow and creep from cellars and crawlspaces and narrow attic breezeways. Throughout the night, they knock on doors and scratch at windows…and many of them are invited in.

72

In the depths of sickness, there is no time. It ceases to exist. Maybe it tick-tocks in some distant place like the low murmur of a heartbeat, but for the infected it is an abstract concept. There is only the sweating, distorted febrile dream that when sleeping you are awake and when awake that you are sleeping.

How many times in those days that might have been two or three or five or six or even one long feverish year of yellow illness Luke came awake and said again and again, “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid,” he did not know. But it became a mantra. He tried to tell Stephani again and again of the headaches and weakness, the chills that froze him and the fevers that melted him, but there were no words to describe how he felt and no mouth to speak them with. His eyes were open a lot and looked around a room he had never seen before. The curtained window. The water stain on the ceiling in the shape of Italy. The nightstand. The picture on the wall of peasants working in a harvest field of amber wheat. And Stephani, of course, always sitting there, watching him with eyes narrowed like chipped emeralds. He could hear her voice speaking sometimes and it soothed him, though he could not comprehend the words. Like an infant hearing its mother, only the tone was important and the love behind it.

He thought of the vampires, of course.

During lucid moments he thought of nothing else. He knew the virus was in him and his body was fighting against it, but whether that would be enough he did not know. Yet, a calming voice spoke in his head from time to time told him that just because he had the virus did not mean he would become one of them. The virus was deadliest when the person in question was parasitized by a Carrier again and again, so much blood drawn off that they were in a severely weakened state and death was a given, the virus speeding it along. The virus sometimes killed the old and the very young without the help of a Carrier, but in normal healthy adults it was usually a combination of the two…though not always. Aunt Lucy had been destroyed so she would not come for him again. This is what the voice told him. It also told him that if he really fought, that if he really wanted to survive, he would.

Stephani treated the bite at his throat daily, washing it and disinfecting it, and that felt good because it cooled the wound which very often burned unmercifully. The fact that he felt pain from the bite was a good thing, he figured. When you felt no pain, it meant the virus had the upper hand and your body had admitted defeat. Stephani moved around like a spirit, making little sound as she cared for him. He often trembled and moaned and it felt like shards of ice were growing in his belly. It was only her hands that chased it all away and made him breathe easy and rest.

In those lucid moments, he would almost feel like himself again and Stephani would ask him how he felt and what she could do to make him feel better.

But he would say,
“If it goes bad, do what’s right.”

“
I will.”

“
Don’t say it like that. Like it’s nothing. Think about what I’m saying.”

“
It’s all I think about, Luke.”

“
If I die, get me out of here. Use a stake. Use an axe. Make sure I don’t walk again or I’ll come after you.”

“
I know what to do.”

And that would make him shake his head until the fever sweat ran and he thought he was going to drown in its brine. Yes, yes, yes, Stephani knew what to do but love blinds and he could feel her love for him, the devotion and care…
but would she be strong enough to do the thing that must be done when the time came? He could only hope.

Well into the third day, Luke woke to the taste of blood in his mouth and he knew he had bitten through his lip. It was nothing, nothing, but it was
not
nothing because the blood did not taste unpleasant as it once had…for a moment it was darkly sweet and rich, teasing liquid copper ambrosia and he wanted to fill himself with its honey, he wanted to drown in it and bathe in it and soak it up like a sponge until he was round and leaking like a cask of dark red wine. But at the same time it pleased him, it offended him. And he did the most ludicrous thing: gathering all his strength, he slapped himself in the face again and again until his cheeks burned and the fatigue of it all dropped him into unbroken slumber.

And as he drifted off, he thought:
Is that what it’s like for them? Do they switch gears and suddenly love the taste of blood? Is that how it is?

Sometimes he would wake in the dark watches of
the night and even though he knew Stephani was sleeping across the room, his loneliness was like steel cutting into his belly. It was then he would feel them outside, watching the house as they always watched it, and he would feel like prey swimming in a dark pond with predator fish wheeling around him making ready to bite into him. Were they at the windows? At the door? They were always looking for an opening. Sooner or later, one that Stephani had innocently invited in years before would show up and renew the invitation.