Blood Hunt (37 page)

“
That’s the mystery I’ve yet to solve...why we’re created. All the virus needs for reproduction is zombies. We’re actually counter-productive because we tend
not
to reproduce. I’ve been thinking that originally the virus intended us to be caretakers, looking after the zombies and — ”

“
Blood provides the massive infusion.” The one pertinent fact in her lecture.

She frowned. “You have no intellectual curiosity about your origin? Fine. Because you bit me, I knew you would rise again fully functional...and I decided to see what would come of that.”

He gave her a sardonic smile. “Now you know; what’s coming of it is your arrest for murder.”

Lane sighed. “I’ve told you, you can’t arrest me. There’s no way to force me back to San Francisco and no jail that can confine me. Accept it.”

“
No!” There had to be a solution, a way to make her answer for Adair and Mossman’s deaths.

She sighed again. “All right. Suppose you do manage to arrest, try, and imprison me. Having accomplished the purpose for which you’ve insinuated yourself into Baumen and my mother’s life, what are your future plans?”

“
I have none. I don’t expect to be around. There’ll be no reason for it.”

She eyed him thoughtfully. “You mean you plan to destroy yourself?”

If it did not occur naturally. “My life is already destroyed. I detest what you’ve made me. Once I’ve seen you face judgement I want out of this existence.”

Lane’s breath wrapped white around her and melted away into the mist. “Do you? When there’s such a wide and wondrous world out there? A world I’m betting you’ve never seen.” Her voice turned musical, floating across to him along with the light spicy-musky scent of her perfume. “You lived in a seaport, but did you ever think of boarding one of the ships docking there and sailing away on her? Wouldn’t you like to see wonders like the Himalayas above Kathmandu or climb to the temples of Tibet? Or walk the Great Wall of China and explore the ancient ruins of Karnak and Zimbabwe? Poling through the Okavanga Delta in Africa at flood time there is such richness of life that it makes your throat ache, and there’s nothing more awesome than the migrations in the Serengeti, when the plains stretch like a sea of grass and herds of wildebeest and zebra stretch as far as the eye can see. Even the Sahara has raw, stunning beauty...dunes, rock outcroppings, wildlife where you’d think none could exist. In the heat waves you can almost see the cities of ancient civilizations that existed before the sand buried them.”

In movement almost too fast to follow, she came over the car and down beside him, voice dropping to a whisper. “There’s a city in northern China with a winter festival every year that fills the city with ice sculpture, not snowmen but pure, clear ice chiseled into a wonderland of heroes and mythical animals and castles, and ice arbors with ice benches to sit on. Vienna, Rome, and Copenhagen aren’t like they were before the war, but they’re still beautiful, and Beijing, Mecca, and Sri Lanka. You shouldn’t miss Venice, where all greatest glass craftsmen work. There’s so much out there a human life span isn’t enough to explore it all...but ours is.”

The vision dazzled Garreth...places that had always been just names, that he never dreamed of visiting. He and Marti talked about a trip to Hawaii, but listening to Lane made him realize how foreshortened his horizons were. To see all those places...to have time enough for it —

Reality cut the thought short. “One problem. Travel takes money, which I don’t have.”

“
I
do
, blood of my blood,” Lane crooned in his ear.

He felt as if someone jabbed him with an electric prod. It jumped him sideways away from her. “Is that what you expected by letting me live...a companion? There is no way in hell that is ever going to happen!”

“
What a pity.” She smiled at him. “Or maybe not. You want two things, you say: justice and death. I can give you one...you dumb mick!” Fast as a striking snake, she grabbed the front of his jacket and drove her knee into his crotch with a force that lifted him off his feet, then hurled him to the ground to lie curled in blinding agony. “I’d kill you right now except people have seen me with you and I won’t shame my mother. But you’ll have that death you want before the night is out.” She ripped his radio off his belt and strode away, calling back from the mist, “Consider yourself a walking dead man.”

Duel

1

Garreth struggled to stand, to pursue Lane, but could not even make it to his knees, only continue to huddle gasping and cursing...at himself as well as her. Dumb mick, all right. Damn right the maiden was powerful. When the hell was he going to get that through his thick skull. He had been kneed in the nuts before, but never with vampire power behind the knee. After this, he reflected, the pain of passing through a door qualified as no more than discomfort.

What felt like hours later he managed to drag himself up the car door and climb in. To sit huddled over the steering wheel. Despite how he hurt, he needed to concentrate on his next move. The lady of ice and steel was out there planning how to kill him. Possessing his radio enabled her to track him and pick where to attack. Being aware of that, however, he knew when to watch for her. The radio might even prove an advantage, luring her to him. By which time he hoped he had a way to deal with her.

Belatedly he became aware of his car radio...Doris calling his number. From the anxiety in her voice, she had been doing so repeatedly. “
Seven, respond
!”

He thumbed the mike button and tried to make his voice normal. “Seven Baumen.” Not succeeding. He sounded more in Maggie’s vocal range.

Doris shot back, “
Seven, do you need assistance?
”

Duncan radioed, “
What’s your twenty?
”

“
The cemetery. I’m 10-4.” That came out better. “I lost my radio and just returned to the car after failing to find it. Do you have something for me?”

“
Come pick up a radio first.
”

Since Doris saw how he limped up the hall to the radio rack, he gave her a quick lie. “I was in foot pursuit of a skeleton and Grim Reaper and tripped and landed astraddle one of those narrow old tombstones. I’ll be fine. What’s the call?”

Duncan had taken the one originally intended for him, but now they had a mother anxious because her fourteen-year-old daughter, who was supposed to be home from a Halloween party at ten, was now almost an hour late.

On the way there, Garreth swung by his place for a quick drink of blood. By the time he reached the call address — a block and a half from the high school, he noted — he walked normally.

“
I may know where your daughter is.”

They drove to the gym with the mother shaking her head. “You think Cici crashed the wedding reception? I’ve brought her up with better manners than that.” But when they stepped inside, she said, “Oh.”

“
Do you see your daughter?”

She pointed at a Wonder Woman and mini-skirted witch dancing to “Witchy Woman.” “That’s her and her girlfriend Tanya.”

Garreth made his way onto the dance floor and tapped Cici’s shoulder. “It’s midnight for you, Cinderella, and probably you, too, Tanya.” He pointed at Cici’s mother by the door.

The two girls exchanged looks of utter disgust and humiliation but left with Cici’s mother. Though to Garreth’s amusement, Mom seemed reluctant to go.

Before leaving himself, he had the French maid from the buffet table cut a slice of cake for Doris that gave her a whole section of castle wall with a window. Turning toward the door with it tucked in a small box the French maid produced from under the table, he met Anna’s daughter Dorothy.

“
You should have come in when you brought Mada back,” she said. “You missed her singing.”

Lane came back here instead of lurking out in town tracking him by radio?

“
I never realized how good she is. She sang that song that ends with: ‘These precious days I spend with you.’ Jason and Julie and almost every other couple were hugging and kissing, tears in their eyes. Then she brought the house down with that song Peggy Lee sings, ‘Fever.’”

After hearing her sing in San Francisco, then almost snare him into her Grand Tour, Garreth believed it. “Maybe she’ll sing again. Where is she now?”

Dorothy glanced around. “Around somewhere. After singing she started going from table to table visiting. I’ve never seen her so...friendly.”

A strategy to establish her presence here, he bet. While the reception remained in full swing, and it looked a long way from winding down — even the glimpses he had of Anna and Mary Catherine across the dance floor caught no evidence of them folding soon — everyone would assume Lane was somewhere in the room. But if he planted a suggestion for the crowd to call her for another song, could she appear?

“
Baumen Seven
.”

So much for trying that.

Doris wanted him to check out a possible prowler at Hammond’s.

On the way he dropped off her cake, but only nodded acknowledgment of her beaming delight as he thought ahead to the greenhouses. Yes, all that glass made a tempting target for vandals tonight. It also made an excellent site for Lane to ambush him.

Nerves strung tight, he worked his way around the buildings and through the bushes behind them, with his radio turned down to a whisper, peering into the mist for any movement. Listening hard for breathing, footsteps, for a whisper of branches moving unnaturally. Sniffing the air for Lane’s perfume. He saw no indication of either Lane or prowlers; smelled nothing suspicious; heard only Doris sending Duncan to a Country Club Drive address for reported vandalism. Then as he neared the front of the greenhouses again, he heard shrieks and a roar of exhaust pipes up 282. Scott and company still out and about.

Back in the car and able to relax, he radioed, “No contact.”

“
Now you have a 10-47 in Golden’s parking lot entrance.
”

Collisions could be expected tonight if people did not drive carefully. At least this one reportedly involved only property damage, no injuries. It was probably too much to expect the accident to involve Scott and his Trans Am.

At the Golden Bowling Alley, Garreth found not only no Trans Am but no accident at all...and no sign of vehicles that could have been involved in one. His nerves snapped taut again. The drivers might have left after examining examined their vehicles and deciding the damage was not worth involving the police...or wanted to avoid being brethalized. Or maybe Lane made the call to lure him here...even though he saw no way for her to ambush him. The mist did not reduce visibility enough to keep him from seeing her sneaking or charging toward him.

Still, climbing out the car to examine the ground at the parking lot entrance for skid marks or broken glass, he watched for her. On the car radio, Duncan reported no vandalism at the Country Club Drive address.

A crank call...or one intending to isolate him by sending his backup to the other end of town? If so, Lane made no use of the opportunity. Nothing came out of the mist at him but a Toyota Corolla leaving the parking lot.

Again he reported no contact.

While he parked under a light with the car doors locked and wrote up preliminary reports on Hammond’s and here, he listened to Doris send Duncan to the high school.

Ten minutes later Duncan came on the radio laughing. “
Be on the lookout for a
Friday the 13
^th
Jason costume, stolen off the person of the wearer outside the high school gym. Victim is unable to describe his assailant because he is unable to remember the assault, just waking up in the catering truck in his skivvies.
”

Garreth’s pulse jumped. Lane’s work! With the reception for an alibi and a disguise to hide her identity, she was free to stalk him. “Did the victim have a real machete with his costume?”

“
Negative
,” Duncan answered.

At least she could not attack him with that. He ought meet with Duncan — avoiding radio traffic Lane would hear — and warn him to approach anyone in a Jason costume with extreme caution, that the individual behind the hockey mask was many times more dangerous than the Jason Voorhees character.

Only, would Duncan believe that? Not likely. So he was probably safer thinking they had a mere prankster. Then if he encountered her, she might just incapacitate him...not kill him as she surely would if he pulled a weapon and acted macho.

“
Baumen Seven. Possible 10-96 at the sale barn.
”

Another prowler. Maybe for real this time. Maybe Lane.

With every nerve buzzing, he pulled out of the bowling alley lot and up 282 onto River Road...leaving his headlights off, turning his radio down almost to inaudibility. Building up enough speed to just coast into the big parking lot between the sale barn and the rodeo arena to the south, then wince at the crunch of his tires on gravel. To avoid the lighted front of the building, he parked along its side, then turned off the dome light and pulled his ignition key to prevent an interior light or key-in-ignition warning as he opened the door.