Draculas (17 page)

Fuck! Fucker fuck frick fuck! Fuckleberry!

His leg twisted just a bit, because, apparently, it hadn't hurt quite enough before.

Ignore the pain...ignore the pain...imagine that your leg is a mighty redwood, standing straight and tall...

Goddamn my leg hurts...

He pushed through a swinging door. A sign overhead read
Rehabilitation Therapy.
Ah, yes. He'd get to know this place well...in another hospital, of course.

He heard the draculas rush right past the door. Then a scream. They must've found a more helpless victim.

Squeak...squeak...squeak...

Not the squeak of Benny the Clown's shoes. A different squeak.

Though Randall didn't have time for stopping and gaping, he couldn't help but stop and gape as the dracula in a wheelchair rolled across the room toward him.

BEING wealthy, Mortimer Moorecook had thought he'd understood power.

But he hadn't truly known it until now.

He was fast, with the speed and reflexes of a jungle leopard. Pouncing and tearing. Drinking and devouring. Going from hospital room to hospital room, attacking patients, staff, visitors.

He could see in the dark. The talons on his feet and hands were so strong he could climb walls, even hang upside-down from the ceiling. He bolted into a woman's room, her screams like hot fudge on a sundae, her supple, weak flesh unable to push him away as he sank his fangs into her warm, wet neck.

Seeing her fear, feeling her revulsion, was a rush better even than the sex he'd so desperately missed. But even more wonderful than that was all the precious blood blood BLOOD BLOOD BLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOOD...

STOP!

He released the girl he'd been slurping, even though she still had some blood left. She'd been dead for a few minutes, but if he drank all of her blood, she wouldn't turn.

Moorecook wanted them to turn. He wanted as many of his kind as possible.

When not overwhelmed by bloodlust, he was capable of higher brain functioning. He knew he was different from the others he had created. Smarter. Better. Still evolving, in a different kind of way.

The others sensed the difference. They attacked one another, but gave him a wide berth. He'd even been able to screech at them, get them to follow some rudimentary orders.
Direct them where to go.

He found three of them on the third floor, fighting over a pathetic pool of blood on the tile floor. Mortimer hissed, clacking his teeth together, commanding them to follow. They avoided the gunfire, going down an empty stairwell, slinking outside into the parking lot.

There were many cars. Cars meant chances for humans to escape.

Moorecook couldn't allow that. He showed them how to attack the tires. Directing them to each car, biting and tearing through the rubber treads with the sound of thunderclaps as they popped.

As they were finishing up, Mortimer heard the distant bray of police sirens, closing in. He directed his brood to hide near the entrance. Two went into the bushes flanking the ER doors. One crouched behind the BLESSED CRUCIFIXION HOSPITAL sign. Moorecook easily scaled the wall and pressed into a corner like a gecko, letting the darkness hide him.

Three police cars pulled up, two men in each. They exited their vehicles with practiced skill. Alert. Armed. Cautious.

They didn't even get a single shot off.

His brood attacked from all sides, slashing their talons, snapping their jaws. Moorecook hung down, his feet gripping a security camera, snatching a cop trying to run into the building. He pulled him up to his perch and bit into his face, tasting his blood and his bubbling screams. Moorecook chewed into his skull until his prickly tongue pierced down through bone and cartilage and sinew all the way to the carotid artery.

He drank until the man was empty--he was too damaged to turn--then leapt down on his brood, hissing and chasing them off, ensuring that three of the cops would join his brethren.

More. They needed more.

The bigger their numbers, the harder they would be to stop.

Mortimer stared up at the moon, painfully bright in the dark sky. He listened to the squawk of a police band radio, then leapt into an open car and ripped the radio from the dashboard. As he did, three of his talons broke off, revealing nubby white bone beneath the skin.

How curious.

There was no pain. In fact, something deep and primeval in him had expected this to happen.

Moorecook was the first. He'd been infected by the original source. That made him special.

He knew he was going to change into something else.

Something even more powerful than what he already was.

Something that would allow him to infect the whole world.

HUNGRY again.

So hungry.

Oasis moved through a corridor. The hospital lights had gone out and come back on, though much dimmer. Just these soft blue lights above the doorways, which left lots of shadows.

She didn't like shadows. The dark scared her even though she could still see so much better than before.

She came around a corner and stopped.

A big sign on the wall read, THE BIRTHPLACE.

Oasis moved carefully down the corridor.

She'd learned her lesson. You couldn't just go running into things when you were a little girl. Adults were strong and mean, and none of them wanted to share their red candy.

She passed a woman lying on the floor, but the others had gotten to her and been thorough.

Finally came to a set of double doors. She hooked a talon through the handles and pulled.

They didn't budge.

She looked up at the window in one of the doors--the glass had been broken out, and someone had stapled a piece of paper across the opening from the other side.

She reached up, punched a talon through the paper, thinking there must be something really good on the other side of these doors if someone had gone to the trouble to lock them.

She crouched and jumped.

Got her arms halfway through the window frame.

She struggled to pull herself the rest of the way inside.

It was a tight fit, really tight, but she had a good feeling now that she was going to make it through.

SO
stubborn!
he thought as he led Shanna down the stairs.

Didn't she realize that two people had a much better chance of survival when both were armed? But no. She was too scared to pack even a little heat.

He didn't understand fear of guns. Guns eased fear. They were equalizers.

"Are you mad at me?" she said, close behind him.

Lucky for them, all the stairwells had battery-powered emergency lights. Still, he didn't want any shooting in here, especially with a shotgun. A miss would send buckshot ricocheting every which way.

"No, honey. I understand."

And he did, sort of. First time she ever pulled a trigger she killed someone she'd known. Even though that person had no longer been the person she'd known, it still had to give one pause.

"I wish I were like you."

"Now
that's
a surprise."

"I mean with guns. You seem so at ease with them."

"Shanna, I've been preparing all my life for this moment."

"What do you mean?"

"My daddy. He was what people called a survivalist."

"You mean with the bomb shelter and the freeze-dried food and...?"

"The guns? Yep. The whole nine yards. He bought the whole package. And he made all of us buy into it too." He remembered the emergency drills, the nights spent underground in the shelter, the constant target practice. "At least until we were old enough to go out on our own."

"What was he afraid of? Aliens? Minority uprisings? Islamic fanatics? Economic holocaust?"

"None of the above. Daddy was old school. For him it was commies."

"Commies? But--"

"I know, I know. But he believed they tore down the Berlin Wall to fool us. They never let go of their quest for world domination. Especially the Chinese commies--they were the ones who scared the crap out of my daddy. Because there's so many of them. He kept saying, 'They're coming, Clay. A human tsunami. They'll overrun us because we won't be able to shoot fast enough.' Can't tell you how many times I heard that."

Shanna gave a soft laugh. "He wasn't so off about the Chinese, just about
how
they'd take over."

"What do you mean?"

"They're practically buying the country."

"Yeah, well. Daddy prepared us for
invasion
. We grew up to think he was crazy, but he wasn't. It's happening right now. Except it ain't commies, it's these monsters."

They reached the ground-floor landing and peeked through the slit window in the steel fire door. Empty--at least as far as he could see. But instead of opening the door, Clay turned to Shanna. He dug in his pocket, pulled his truck keys from where they snuggled up against the ring box, and handed them to her.

"All right. Here's the plan: We're gonna cut our way through the ER to the parking lot. When we reach my Suburban, you're gonna jump in and hightail it out of here. I'm gonna stay."

"But--"

"That's it. No discussion. I've got to hang around until the staties arrive, and that shouldn't be long. When they get here, we'll team up and clean up this mess. But a couple of things first. You called Moorecook 'patient zero,' said he started all this. From what you said, it sounds like he cut himself on purpose to get this going. Any idea why?"

Shanna shrugged. "He was terminal with cancer. Maybe he was trying to prolong his life."

"By turning into a
monster
?"

"You're assuming he knew what would happen. I can't believe he'd want to become the thing I saw in the lobby."

"Can you tell me anything else? I'm going to have to fill in the staties on what I know, and the more I know, the better. Even if you don't think it's important, tell me."

Shanna pursed her lips, and her nose crinkled in that cute way that indicated she was trying to make a decision.

"It's kind of complicated, Clay."

"I can handle complicated."

"Okay. You ever heard of a secret society called the Order of the Dragon?"

"That'd be a no."

"It was formed in the early Fifteenth Century, ostensibly to fight the Turks and Ottoman Empire."

He winked. "You mean the people responsible for the furniture you rest your feet--"

"Hang with me, Clay. Members of the order were called Draconists. Around this same time, the black death was raging throughout Eurasia. Today, historians and scholars believe it was the bubonic and pneumonic plague that caused the black death, but there has been no absolute evidence to support this hypothesis, only educated guesses. My contention, based on all the research I've done for Mort, is that the black death caused dracula-like symptoms in some of its hosts, especially in people with certain genetic precursors. Certain royal bloodlines."

"You lost me, girl."

"I'm saying the black death, in some cases, caused a mutation, resulting in vampirism."

"Mutation. Got it. Like in
Blade II
with Wesley Snipes. Remember the scene with Ron Perlman when he--"

"Do you want to talk about movies, or about what I think is going on?"

Clay would have preferred movies, but he needed to hear what she had to say. "Okay, tell me what's going on."

"The son of Oswald von Wolkenstein, a member of the Order of the Dragon, was afflicted with horrific dental deformities. While the Draconists were killing vampires, Oswald hid his son, kept him chained up in a cellar. But the son escaped, went on a killing spree, ending up in Transylvania and causing a dracula epidemic. Ever heard of Vlad the Third of Wallachia?"

Clay knew that from the Coppola flick. "That guy who went around impaling folks?"

"Exactly. Legend has it that Vlad, because of his brutality, was the original Dracula, but my contention--"

"Just love how you contend everything. It's cute."

"Clay!"

"Sorry."

"So my um, my..."

"Go on, you know you want to say it."

"I hate you...
contention
is that he didn't impale thirty thousand of his innocent subjects and countrymen. He impaled thirty thousand of these monsters in an epidemic started by Oswald's son! Vlad saved his country! And what better way to stop these monsters than to impale them on twenty-foot stakes, immobilized so they starved to death?"

An explosive round to the brain pan was a lot better, but they didn't have that hundreds of years ago.

"What about Oswald's son?"

"Vlad caught him finally, beheaded him, and buried his head in a field in the Romanian countryside."

Clay smirked, finally getting it.

"You going to tell me that Oswald's son's skull is the same skull your buddy Mort paid several million for so he could bite himself? Didn't he need those genetic precursor thingies?"

Shanna's eyes got wide. "Shit! How'd I miss that? Mortimer's robes! They all have an Ouroboros insignia on them! A dragon eating its own tail! That's the symbol of the Draconists!"

"So old Mort is a Wolkenstein."

"He's got the bloodline, and the genetic precursor. Do you know what that means?"

"That we need to kill the son of a bitch."

"It means Mortimer's not only predisposed to getting this disease, but perhaps he also carries the antibodies within him."

"Huh?"

"He carries the virus that makes the vaccine."

"You mean like a shot?"

"Yes, Clay. Like a shot."

THE children had begun to scream when the lights went out.

Their screams lured the draculas to the storage room door. They thumped and scratched and pounded on it, jerking and rattling the knob, pressing up against the square window in the door and blocking out the faint emergency lights from the playroom, which plunged the closet into complete darkness.