Vampirus (Book 1) (8 page)

“
Who?”

But Alger would not say.

20

When Luke got home from Alger
’s, he checked on Sonja and Megan. Nothing had changed. Except maybe himself. Deep inside he was thinking things he did not dare put into words. After an hour spent staring out at the storm, he took two sleeping pills that knocked his lights out for six hours. Somewhere in the night he thought he heard someone knocking at the front door downstairs.

But it must have been a dream.

21

The storm petered out around noon the next day, but the wind still blew in fierce gusts. Luke forced himself to eat some soup and that’s when he heard a rumbling that shook the windows. Trucks were rolling up the street. Olive drab Army vehicles. Armored tacticals and Humvees with a 2.5 ton plow truck out front clearing the way. The trucks stopped and soldiers in white Hazmat gear climbed out. They were all carrying M4s, looking up and down the streets from behind their masks. Luke watched them go from house to house, knocking on doors. Very few opened for them. They didn’t kick any doors in or anything, but that was coming. He knew it was.

When they knocked on the door, Luke answered it. He
was thinking of hiding, pretending no one was home. But there was no point. He’d been getting medicine from the hospital like so many others and he was certain their names were on a list somewhere. The guy who came to the door was a staff sergeant with the Wisconsin National Guard, 32
nd
Infantry. He wanted to know if there were any dead in the house. They—the Guard—were tasked with collecting bodies.

“
What are they doing with them?” Luke asked.

“
They’re being buried to stop the spread of the germ,” was all he would say.

Luke pressed him
with questions but he was your typical pushbutton military automaton. He knew the sort. He’d spent plenty of time with them when he was in the Marines.

Buried? This time of year?

Bullshit.

The ser
geant said they’d be back, but Luke had no intention of opening the door for them again. Sonja and Megan were not dead but if things got desperate enough, he didn’t think such things would matter to the jarheads in charge: they’d just grab anyone that didn’t move fast enough.

Good God. Body wagons. Siege
mentality. It was fucking Medieval.

22

Megan was slipping away.

Lying in her bed, she looked like a skeleton covered in the thinnest veneer of flesh. She was pallid, her skin a waxy, colorless membrane. It took real effort for her to draw in a breath. Luke couldn’t get any food into her. He didn’t know what the hell to do. How was a man supposed to sit there while his daughter died a slow, lingering death? How was he supposed to go on and face the days to come with such memories and such horrible guilt?

He held her hand for over two hours, just watching her. Her flesh was hot and moist to the touch. She trembled and cried out now and again with dreams. All he
really could do was hold onto her as he sat there in her room which was a womb of memories while tears rolled down his face and struck the back of his hand. There were posters of Tinkerbell and iCarly on the walls, Junie Jones paperbacks spilling from the bookshelf, Baby-So-Real and Littlest Petshop toys in the corner, abandoned. He could remember good times that made his heart ache and his soul bleed: reading to Megan before bed when she was smaller,
Fox in Sox
and
Ten Apples up on Top
and
In a People House.
He would make up crazy voices for all the characters and she would laugh and laugh, fresh from the tub with that sweet baby shampoo smell to her. Then they’d turn off the lights and he’d cozy her, making up crazy stories until Sonja would come up the stairs and say, all right, Luke, she needs to get to sleep. And sometimes by then he was already asleep himself, holding his daughter, warm and content with the love of her.

Seven-years old. Seven fucking years old.

And dying.

Dying.

His guts were being ripped out and he didn’t know what to do, God help him, but he did not know what to do. Sometimes he couldn’t stop crying and other times, there were no tears left.

She woke around two in the afternoon for a few moments, putting her blue eyes on him. Those eyes had been brilliant as a summer sky not a month ago
but were now worn, glazed, used up. He could literally hear his heart breaking.

“
I see him in the corner, daddy,” she said.

Luke wiped the tears away, because he had to be strong.
“Who, baby? Who do you see?”

She stared off into space.
“The man, the man. He was standing in the corner the other day…now he’s at the end of the bed. He keeps getting closer. I’m afraid.”

There was no one there. It was a fever dream, a hallucination. That
’s all it was and all it could be. He had to keep telling himself that. He could not read too much into it or let himself start believing that the Angel of Death had come for his little girl.

There
’s limits. Limits to what I’m willing to accept and I can’t accept that, because if I did, if I did…

Megan closed her eyes after that.

He was doubtful she would ever open them again.

He could almost feel the icy shadow of what waited for her lying over the bed, growing longer, closer, darker with intent. The knowledge of which made him want to lay his wrists open.

23

Peggy sent him another YouTube video.

It was called
“The Walking Dead of Whisper Lake.”

This one showed a bunch of people walking through a nighttime snowstorm in some little decimated town in
Utah. It was captured by an automated night vision device that was similar to the NVDs he himself had used in the Gulf. The picture was green and pretty grainy, but there was no getting around one thing: many of the people in it were naked. Naked in the snow, marching along with their heads cocked weirdly to the side like they were listening for something. It gave him the shivers. There was something very creepy, very strange about them.

He watched it three times in a row and it must
’ve been a trick of the light or some kind of digital encoding error, but at times many of them faded into the shadows or shifted from shadows into people. The ending was the killer, though: they all stopped, turned and stared at the camera. Then, one by one, they just faded away and were gone. Then the image of the street whirled about like the camera was being violently jostled. And right at that point, there was one quick, fleeting glimpse of what looked like the face of a teenage girl—part of it anyway. Luke saw hair hanging and a single eye that was very black and shiny like something from a Japanese horror flick. Then the feed went dead.

It was the eye that haunted him.

He freeze-framed it and just stared at it while his skin crawled.

Never had he seen such a blank, soulless eye in his life. It was like staring into the eye of a stuffed elk.

24

Megan died on the morning of December 17
th
.

She died in Luke
’s arms.

She was trembling badly and he held her, clutching her thin disease-wracked body to his own as if his own strength and health might shield her. But it did not. At the end she opened her eyes and looked into his face. There was pain in those eyes, pain and horror and confusion…yes, certainly confusion because he was her daddy and he had always chased away the night terrors, any fears she had or threats to her well being. But now…at the end…when she needed him to protect her this one last most important time, he was impotent. He was weak. He could not fight off the death that was taking her and laughing coldly in his face. He could not save his little girl and that
’s how a great and necessary part of him died with her, leaving him soft and helpless, less than a man in the final analysis.

Megan reached out and brushed his cheek with her cold little fingers as if to comfort him, as if she knew this was something that not even he could fight. She trembled one last time and died staring up at him.

His baby was gone.

His heart was fr
ozen, stopped dead.

He could not let go of her for hours.

All that was left was a cheated hatred, an angry remorse colored by guilt and framed in grief. He lived after that day, but he was never truly alive again.

25

Two days later, he still
could not straighten out his head.

He could not get a grip on reality.

He could not sleep.

He could not eat.

The world had a grim gray sameness that matched the color of his soul and he could only lay on Megan’s bed and cry. The pillow and blankets smelled like her, and the loss of his angel made him shake and cry out, his eyes red and wet and bleeding.

He heard Sonja wake up in the late, late afternoon and he stumbled to her side, doing his best to pretend nothing was wrong, that their child had not died, that there was not a great empty hole eaten through him. Sonja was barely holding on. She did not need the shock. It would kill her. Megan had been the only thing she was staying alive
for
, the only thing that gave her misery meaning.

Sonja
’s hand was cool and soft to the touch.

Luke held onto it and he could almost feel the last threads of life fighting beneath the skin, weakening, fraying.
Her eyes were upturned, almost Asian, the most perfect blue he had ever seen, a soft powder blue. A gift from her Austrian grandmother that was passed down to Megan. Those eyes had owned him from the first time he had looked into them.

And when he looked into them that day, there was still an intensity to them he could not deny.
Please, oh God please, Sonja, don’t make me tell you, don’t make me put the pain into words—

“
Luke,” she said, her breath rustling in her throat. “Tell me about Megan. How…how is she?”

The lie that came unbidden from his panicked mind was too big to fit through his mouth and came out fragmented in bits and pieces:
“Fine…she’s…yes…doing better…fine, I think…I mean…”

A single sparkling tear fell from Sonja
’s left eye and ran down her cheek. He could see a devastating shadow pass over her face: she
knew.
“She’s gone, isn’t she? My baby is gone?”

He
couldn’t keep the act up; he simply didn’t have the strength. He buried his face in her soft wheat-colored hair and sobbed. It all came out of him and he was helpless to stop it. Dear God, his wife was on her deathbed and here he was pulling the last threadbare rug out from beneath her. She held him and they cried together, cried for the loss of their perfect angel. He did not let go and Sonja would not let him.

“
You have to go on, Luke,” she said. “There are things that need doing and you have to do them.”

“
I can’t…I can’t live like
this,”
he sobbed. “I’m not strong enough…I’m sorry, but I’m just not strong enough.”

She trembled with a subtle whimpering.
“Yes, you are. Don’t give up…give our deaths meaning and fight…do you hear me?
Fight
…promise me you will…whatever comes next…
promise me
…”

He
promised and she held onto him and stroked his head as she had done in other bad moments. Even a month in a sickbed could not sully her, for she still smelled as she had the first time he held her—like a fresh summer wind blown through fields of hollyhocks and wildflowers. As weak as she was, she hummed a melancholy song into his ear as her grandmother had once done for her. It was a traditional Austrian lullaby that Sonja used to sing to Megan when she was sick or scared at night. It was called
Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf:

“Sleep, baby, sleep.

Your father tends the sheep.

Your mother shakes the branches small,

Lovely dreams in showers fall.

Sleep, baby, sleep.”

And as the humming faded, so did Sonja. She went limp in his arms, gasping out a final, despairing breath. And that was how she died. He held her, needing more than ever to be connected to her. He kissed her cheeks, her hair. When he set her down he screamed at the top of his lungs, hating a god who could allow something like this to come to pass.

His wife and daughter were gone.

They were his strength, his blood, his wine and bread and he was never, ever hungry.

Now he would starve.

Now he would stuff himself on a banquet of guilt and cold, ugly hatred.

26

He
took Sonja out to Salem Cross and found a place for her next to Megan. Though he was not a religious man—and what hope in a just and caring god that might have existed within him was now extinguished—Sonja had been a Lutheran as were all her people and she never missed a Sunday. So he read the 23
rd
Psalm over his wife and daughter, first in English and then in German as Sonja would have wanted it…even though his German left something to be desired.