Vampirus (Book 1) (9 page)

But he did his best.

He took her body out there in broad daylight. No one tried to stop what he did and he would have hurt them if they had. But there was no need because not only was no one around out at The Cross, the rest of the town was just about as dead. Luke saw one car pulling into a driveway and a pickup truck loaded with furniture high-tailing it out of town.

Run, go ahead and run, it
’s the same all over, you idiot.

He saw a guy snowblowing a sidewalk and a couple people bundled up in parkas chatting in a little group on
Main. But that was it.

Wakefield was about three inches from the grave and a foot from Hell, the way he was figuring things.

After his little service at Holy Cross, he drove the streets in something of a daze, badly wanting to find his center but having no idea where it might be located.

It was hard to believe that a year ago the Christmas season was in full bloom and the streets were busy with shoppers and money was changing hands and Salvation Army Santas were collecting donations in little red buckets on the street corners. And it was even harder to believe that his girls were alive then and they had a tree up and presents wrapped. God, Megan had been so excited. Before she was born, Christmas had kind of lost its sparkle for him, but Megan brought it all back. And then some.

Twelve months ago the house was filled with hope and laughter, Sonja was playing Christmas music all day long, baking cookies, and Megan was writing letters to Santa and his own existence had some meaning.

Now there was nothing
, so he went home and got drunk, passing out in Sonja’s rocker by the window.

Long after
midnight, he was jarred from his sleep by something, which must have been a dream. His eyes opened for a moment or two. The night was quiet.  Godawful quiet. Like waking in a vacuum.

What? What did I hear?

Winter brought a drawn-out silver stillness to the night that could not be replicated any other time of the year. A cool silence when the wind stopped blowing and the world was cold and hollow, suspended and breathless. The only light was the light of the moon playing off the snow and the dancing hellfire of the Auroras at the horizon. The only movement was the subtle shadow-play of iced tree limbs on a moonlit wall.

That
’s what it was like when he woke: a deathly, almost unnatural stillness.

He blinked the sleep from his eyes, trying to swallow down something like a black bubble of dread in his throat. His skin was cold and hot. He was sweating and shivering and then he knew why: because he heard it again. So close it went up his spine like fingernails and so distant it sounded like it was echoing up from vast tomblike silences.

Singing.

A
sweet and mournful singing that was beautiful and sad. Through the picture window he thought—for one fraction of a moment—he saw a narrow shadow standing beneath the oak tree in the front yard, but when he blinked it was gone.

It must have been a dream or a nightmare.

That’s all he could tell himself the next morning, because ever since Megan and Sonja passed away God knew he’d been having crazy fever dreams about eyes staring at him, bright shining eyes outside the window. So it had been a dream. He even went out in the front yard to check when the sun was up, but there were no footprints beneath the tree. The snow was undisturbed.

It could not have been real, any of it.

Who would be singing out there in the dead of night?

It made no sense and, maybe, it made all the sense in the world. For the one thing he would not and could not admit to himself was that he recognized that soft and windy voice.

It had been Sonja’s.

27

The frosty perfection of a winter morning sky—boundless, endless, lathered white with clouds—dirtied and made imperfect, smudged with soot, stained by two rising plumes of smog that gathered, hanging over the town, an enshrouding smoke ghost flaking away into a black rain of crematory ash that fell over field, farm, and outskirt.

That’s what you could see from any vantage point in Wakefield: the smoke from the burning pits and corpse factories rising up like the filth from foundry stacks. The snow and reduced visibility of the past few weeks had concealed it but now that mask was removed like Poe’s Red Death and everyone who looked up could see the bleak and forbidding Grim Reaper visage growing in the sky.

It looks like an omen, a really bad one,
Luke thought upon seeing it.

Alger said the Army was doing the burning out at the old dump on
Hollow Creek Road. Luke decided it was worth investigating. The house was like a tomb without the girls. For so long he’d been taking care of them, seeing to their needs by the hour, and now that they were gone his life was an absolute sullen emptiness punctuated only by the ticking of the clock.

Maybe he needed to see the pits.

Maybe it would ground him to the unpleasant reality of his new world because Alger had been right about one thing: he
was
out of touch.

Hollow Creek Road had been carefully plowed and was rutted from the passage of heavy trucks
. The closer he got, the more the fields and wooded white hills were speckled with dark ash. When he was a quarter mile from the dump, he pulled off into the trees where the wind had worn the snow down to a few scarce inches and yellow slivers of grass poked out.

As
he climbed through the scrub and pines, the ash lying over the snow got heavier, darker, and he could almost feel its grit on his tongue and in his throat. The rising black towers of smoke were like pillars in the sky and the soot high above blocked out what there was of the sun, casting long black shadows over the white drifts. Now and again the wind would change direction and bring an acrid stench of burning bodies that nearly put him to his knees.

Keeping a lookout for soldiers, feeling like a commando sneaking into enemy territory, he approached the dump from the west, through crowded stands of maple, hemlock, and juniper. When he was a hundred feet from the dump boundary, the snow was no longer white. It was gray stove ash and fireplace soot speckled with black fragments that might have been bits of charred bone.

There was still time to go back, but he was going to see it through.

Ahead was a wooded rise. The pit w
ould be on the other side. Half way up, using saplings to pull him forward through the dirty snow, a furnace-hot blast of air hit him dead in the face and he almost went over.

Jesus, that stink, that horrible stink.

In his mind, it smelled like burning hair and burnt chicken and blood boiled to steam. Gagging, he pulled himself up all the way and peered through the treeline, keeping himself in the shadows of the heavy brush.

The pit.

It was easily fifty feet deep and stretched for over two hundred yards in a jagged gully like some horrible festering wound cut deep into the flesh of the earth. Down there were green Army bulldozers and front-end loaders, excavators and dump trucks and fuel tankers all parked amongst camouflaged shacks and trailers in a wide clearing where the snow had been scraped back in mounded hills. Two roads—one in and one out—led back to Hollow Creek.

The heat and stink made his eyes water and his nose burn. The heat had melted much of the snow on the hillsides and the trees were draped with icicles from the constant melting and refreezing. The soldiers below were wearing Hazmat suits and gas masks. And the pit itself…good God…forever burning and blazing like a coke oven, all that twisted-up, stick-thin cordwood and kindling smoldering and popping
in the flames.

This was the corpse factory.

This was the plague pit.

The human pyre.

Luke had to stick his face in the snow now and again to breathe clean air when the wind shifted and the stink and gritty black smoke came blowing right up at him. He watched dump trucks emptying loads of corpses onto the hardpack. The dozers shoved them into the pits and then the fuel trucks hosed them down with hi-test and the flames came mushrooming up in seething hot fireballs that singed his eyebrows and the heavy growth of beard at his chin.

He
realized then that the pit must have served the entire county. That’s how it was being handled. Gripping a tree with one hand, scant precarious inches from the edge of the pit, he looked down into that raging, incinerating hell and all he could think was:
mothers, sisters, daughters, sons, brothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins—

It looked like a scene from Treblinka or Chelmo.

His parka dusted with ash, face blackened by soot, his stomach roiling from the stench of cremation, he half-walked and half-stumbled down the hillside and through the woods. In his blind, manic flight, he tripped over stumps and fallen logs and thought more than once that he was asphyxiating on the stench. When he reached his truck, it was covered in a fine uniform layer of gray ash. In the rearview mirror, his face was so dark that all he could see were the staring, shocked whites of his eyes. He looked like a coal miner fresh from a deep, dirty seam.

He drove down
Hollow Creek Road in something of a traumatized daze, soot on his lips and tongue and down his throat. He could actually taste what they were burning in the plague pit. More than once he pulled over and shook with dry heaves.

But it was only the beginning of that particularly dark day.

As he got close to town, he saw something equally as disturbing and absolutely incomprehensible. On both sides of the road there were single-file trains of people, hunched-over like papery mantises, hair blowing in the wind, staring catatonic eyes punched like dark holes in their chalk-white faces. They paid no notice of him in their gloomy march. They were dressed, semi-dressed, and completely undressed, their skin bluing in the cold. They moved on in sluggish trains like sleepwalkers heading in the direction of the dump.

There were hundreds of them.

Can you give this a rational slant, too, Luke?
he asked himself deep in the confines of his slow-humming brain.
Can you wrap your brain around this, swallow it, ingest it, and vomit it up some perfectly mundane, perfectly logical reason for why these people are marching to the plague pits? Just another seriously skewed, fucked up symptom of Vampirus or is it something more? Are those roasting bodies a magnet to their demented, hysterical minds? A siren song that draws them closer to their own obscene Mecca where they can be closer to their god, the dark Lord of Plague Pits and Cremation and Empty Graves?

But he couldn
’t think anymore. He just could not think.

Feeling something sinister in the air that was many hostile leagues beyond the plague itself, he could not stop shaking.

28

Later that day, when his mind began to work again, to drag itself from the slow and toxic cycle of self-destruction, Luke got out his battered green notebook and wrote the following:

*This is a list of people I need to check on:

1. Alger Stericki (haven
’t heard from him in some time)

2. the Pruitts (Doug was calling me every day, been weeks now)

3. the VanDannings (unusually silent)

4. The Skorenskas (I
’m worried about Maddie and the triplets)

5. The Moravecs

6. The Corbetts

7
. The Laskas (even though Emil Laska is crazy)

8
. The Crossiks (if I have the guts)

9
. The Kings (not in the neighborhood, but fuck it)

29

On December 23
rd
, the hospital closed.

After some 135 years of continuous service,
Bayfield County Memorial Hospital closed its doors because most of the staff had fallen ill or left the area. Word had it that its load of patients were being either transferred to or under supervision of the Army Medical Corps.

To Luke it was further evidence of the collapse of the system. Medically,
Wakefield was now on its own. Not that he was surprised because hospitals were closing all over the country as the infrastructure imploded and the government fought to steady itself on its last legs.

Things were bad. In fact, they were beyond bad.

Cell phones were down, landlines barely operating. Local calls were one thing, but long distance was getting to be hit and miss.

Luke stopped down at the garage and was grateful to find Stubby still manning his post. He said the Public Works Department now consisted of him, Milt Penny
, and Johnny K. They only had one electrician left. Two guys working the water department and only three at the power plant.

“
The town will fold within the month, Luke, and there ain’t a thing you and I can do about it.”

“
What’s the city council planning on doing?”

Stubby laughed.
“There ain’t no city council. A couple of them left, but the others have died or are sick. Place is a fucking graveyard. No disrespect to you and your girls, of course. They were sweethearts, the both of them. I know what it’s like. My Marion went into the pit last month.”

So
, the way Luke was figuring it, either he went into survival mode here pretty quick or it was all over and his deathbed promise to Sonja wouldn’t amount to beans. And when he thought about what she had said, about him going on and giving their deaths meaning, he realized it was about the only thing stopping him from putting a shotgun in his mouth.

Oh, baby, if you only knew what it
’s like now. If you only knew.

The I
nternet was spotty. Sometimes it was working and very often it was not. This is what he learned from it on those days when it was up and running:

—the P
resident was supposed to address the nation very soon.

—cities in
Europe were burning: Budapest, Hungary; Graz, Austria; Krakow, Poland; Bratislava in the Czech Republic. Dozens of others. No communication coming out of those places. CNN said it was probably arson.

—The
UK had sealed its borders; no one in or out; Wales was particularly hard hit; Luke saw a video on YouTube somebody shot in Cardiff—dump trucks (lorries, actually) heaped with corpses moving down a main thoroughfare. He counted twenty trucks. It looked like something out of the Black Death.

—Chicago was practically a ghost town now; same for Boston, same for LA, same for Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Norfolk and Philly; Kansas City was a graveyard—unburied dead everywhere. Nobody was daring to go in there (especially after dark, they said on the message boards)

—there were flies everywhere, even in northern cities. Not outside, of course, but infesting houses. Luke saw a pic of windows black with them. Again, a few flies might wake up in the winter on a sunny day, that wasn't unusual…but this many? It had to be connected. Somehow. He was killing dozens every day in his own house.

—and speaking of vermin: people were saying rats were swarming everywhere. Some dude posted a feed from
Times Square—no people, but hordes of rats running wild. There were so many at Broadway and 53
rd
you could have walked across them and never touched pavement.

—and speaking of NY, twenty people disappeared on a subway train in Midtown Manhattan including the motorman.

—similar incidences had occurred on the London Underground and the Paris Metro.

That
’s what he knew of the outside world. 

Things were happening everywhere and the world he
’d known his whole life was crashing and burning. Sonja wanted him to go on, to keep fighting. But what did that mean now? Fight to survive, he supposed. But survive for what? What would the world be in six months or a year? A bird-picked bone heap?

You made a promise,
he told himself in no uncertain terms,
and you will see that promise through. Get your back up and shit straight and do what has to be done. There’s going to be other survivors out there and Sonja would want you to help them. Start stockpiling and arming yourself. Get ready for the end. Survive it.

Vampirus, of course, was bugging him.

He could think of nothing else. That anthropologist on TV had said that historical pandemics were also times of vampire hysteria. You could go out on a dozen blogs or message boards, he knew, and read all the vampire stuff you wanted. Some of it was silly Mickey Mouse shit that would make you laugh (assholes with fake fangs, capes, and comic book names like Dread Sepultura and Crow Ravenwood saying it was
their
time, the children of the night), but some of it was disturbing. Things you could not laugh off. On the message boards, for example, people were not discussing vampires as folkloric creatures or speculating on their
possible
existence, they were
certain
they existed and that
Vampirus
was bringing them out of their graves. And for the most part they seemed like ordinary well-adjusted people, not a bunch of dipshit Goths with whiteface and black lipstick living some silly vampire fantasy (when they weren’t working the window at McDonalds, that was, or greeting people at Wal-Mart).

And that
’s what really disturbed him about it all.

Things were happening and he knew they were happening, but it was not easy for him. He
’d been a hard-headed agnostic his entire life. For him to believe in the walking dead was inconceivable…yet, he’d seen some things and heard about others that pushed him closer to belief. But he couldn’t go all the way. Not without proof and he feared that might be coming next. But the idea of his wife and daughter walking around out there somewhere…it was absolutely fucking obscene.

One thing that was bothering him was that
Alger had not been around.

That was funny.

Strange.

Luke had called
him a couple times but there had been no answer.

Better take a walk over there, see what
’s what,
he told himself that evening.