Draculas (44 page)

The gun
boom
ed but had nowhere near the kick of that pistol Clay had handed her.

She opened her eyes and saw the dracula on the pavement. She was about to congratulate herself when she realized it was still alive, if that was what you could call whatever it was, and trying to regain its feet. But it couldn't. Shanna had shredded its knee.

"Lower your weapon!" shouted a voice behind her.

She turned and found herself facing the muzzles of half a dozen guns of various shapes and sizes and a chorus telling her to drop it. She laid the shotgun gently on the pavement. After all, Clay loved that thing.

"
Now
you listen!" she said.

A soldier who looked like he was in command got in her face. "What do you think you're doing, firing that here?"

Shanna jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "One of them was getting away."

A couple of the soldiers looked past her. She could tell by their expressions they'd never seen a dracula before.

"Get Doctor Driscoll," the officer said.

A few minutes later a woman, one of the civilians from the big trailer, appeared. She stared at the dracula with virtually no reaction, not a hint of surprise.

After a few seconds she said, "Dispose of it."

The officer motioned behind him and a soldier with a flame thrower appeared.

"Light it up," he told him.

The soldier hesitated, then sent a stream of liquid fire at the thing, engulfing it in flame. It screamed, spasmed, rolled on the ground, then lay still.

Shanna turned away and retched. That had once been a person...

She turned back to the woman, Dr. Driscoll. "Is that the only way to stop the infection?"

The woman stared at her with an alarmed expression. "Infection? Who said anything about infection?"

"It's obvious."

"It's nothing of the sort."

And then it hit Shanna. Dr. Driscoll hadn't been repulsed by the dracula. She'd been expecting it. "You've seen this before, haven't you? You knew about this."

"Who are you and where do you get your wild ideas?"

"I was in there. I saw--"

"In there? In the hospital?" The doctor signaled to the soldiers. "Lock her in quarantine."

A pair of them grabbed her, one by each arm, and were dragging her toward the trailer when four of the hospital's third-floor windows facing the parking lot blew out, belching flame and filling the air with bits of glass and charred flesh.

"Clay? Oh, no! Clay!"

There was a frightening moment when the whole building shuddered from some sort of explosion. One of Clay's toys? Or had the cavalry finally arrived?

Jenny continued to stare up at the military helicopter. Over the din of the rotors she yelled, "Down here!"

It hovered directly overhead, and she watched one of the bay doors open. Then they began to lower a rescue basket down on a cable.

No...not a rescue basket.

What the heck is that?

The soldiers who had been escorting her--a euphemism--to the trailer had seemed as shocked by the explosion as she. She'd tried to use their distraction to escape but they had too secure a grip on her. They'd pulled her inside and stuck her in what they'd called "the quarantine room."

It looked improvised in some ways--a featureless space with no decorations and half a dozen one-piece polymer chairs. But the small, fixed window that had to be at least an inch thick said otherwise. The best thing about that window was it faced the parking lot. Shanna had her nose pressed against it now, hands cupped around her eyes to shut out the room light, straining to see what was going on.

What had happened? An explosion could mean only one person: Clay. But what could he have been carrying to blow out a wall like that? Better not to think about it. Who knew what Clay carried in his bag of tricks?

The door opened behind her. She turned to see four disheveled-looking kids being herded into the room by the same two soldiers who had brought her. They moved away and Dr. Driscoll stepped into the doorway. She held a squalling baby in her arms.

"Here," she said, holding it out to Shanna. "It's a girl."

Not knowing what else to do, Shanna took her. One look at her face told her it was a newborn.

"What--?"

Dr. Driscoll sniffed. "I don't do babies."

Shanna had done a ton of babysitting as a teen. She knew that cry.

"She's starving."

"We have nothing to feed it."

"But--"

"She must be quarantined with the rest of you. Deal with it."

She shut the door.

Shanna turned to the kids and, over the baby's screams, pieced together a disjointed story about a guy with a chainsaw--had to be Jenny's Randall--and a "guy with a big cool gun"--no question who that was--who had saved them and put them on the helicopter.

"Only four of you?"

They nodded and began to cry. Not a good question.

The door opened again, revealing neither the soldiers nor Dr. Driscoll. Instead, a good-looking guy in green scrubs and longish brown hair stood there, smiling.

"Hello, Shanna. I'm Doctor Cook, a pediatrician. I've come to check over the baby."

He reached for her and Shanna gladly relinquished the screaming child.

As soon as Dr. Cook cradled her in his arms, she stopped crying. Shanna looked to see if anything was wrong but she had her eyes open and was staring at the doctor.

"That's amazing."

He smiled again. "I have a way with children."

Something familiar about him, but she couldn't put her finger on it.

He glanced up and down the hall, then looked her directly in the eyes. "You don't belong here. I'm stepping outside. You can come with me if you wish."

"But the kids--"

"Will be fine. This is a one-time offer."

Shanna didn't know about this. "I can just walk out?"

"The military personnel are distracted at the moment. That is only temporary, I assure you. Come."

He turned and walked toward the rear of the trailer. Shanna followed, saying, "But I came in--"

"Two entrances."

He led her to a door that opened on the side opposite the hospital. Three steps down and fifty feet across the pavement put them on the edge of the trees bordering the parking lot. He turned and stared toward the hospital. She followed his gaze and saw the soldiers withdrawing deeper into the lot, away from the building.

"Are they leaving?"

"Hardly."

He pointed up to a helicopter, much larger than the TV station's, hovering over the hospital roof. Its flashing lights revealed a long, bulky cylinder hanging vertically from a cable as it was lowered to the roof.

"Is that something to haul away survivors?"

"Hardly." His tone was grim as he repeated the word.

She glanced at him--so was his expression. She again had that sense of deja vu--that somehow she'd seen him before, that they'd met before.

"What is it, then?"

"They call it an 'autoclave.'"

She'd heard Dr. Driscoll mention that, but still had no idea what it was.

"That's no help."

"In medical facilities, it's a device used to steam sterilize medical instruments."

She shook her head. "I'm not following."

"No reason you should. I didn't understand either, so I eavesdropped. It's a giant shaped charge. When detonated it will shoot a plasma jet down through the hospital roof with irresistible force at a speed of eight-thousand feet per second. The jet will penetrate each of the floors like an anti-tank missile melting through steel armor plate. The air in the hospital will heat to ten thousand degrees, sterilizing the entire structure."

Shanna heard the words as she watched the helicopter ascend from the roof and fly off without its cargo, but they weren't making sense.

...plasma jet...ten-thousand degrees... sterilize the entire structure...

And then--

"Oh, my God! They can't! Clay's in there!"

BY the time she realized that the object they had dropped on the roof was a bomb--a huge, army-green charge--Jenny had just enough time for a belly laugh. Randall would have appreciated the irony of surviving a dracula outbreak only to be killed by the good guys.

He snatched up the Taurus and began wiping her off. Poor girl was a mess--blood, plaster dust, and who knew what else.

He hugged her to his chest. "Hey, baby. Gonna take you home and get you cleaned up and oiled and good as--"

He heard a boom from above and then a blast of heat like a solar flare fused Alice to his chest and his last thought was how they'd be together forever.

Shanna began to run toward the parking lot. She had to find Dr. Driscoll, had to convince her not to--

The roof of the hospital exploded in an incandescent flare. The boom and shockwave stopped her in her tracks and she watched in horror as the windows and walls of the fourth floor belched flame and debris, followed almost immediately by the third and second and first. Every entrance, every exit blew its doors and shot flames like giant blowtorches.

And then the floors began to collapse--first the roof onto the fourth, then the fourth onto the third, pancaking all the way down to ground level, leaving only a flame-riddled cloud of smoke and dust and debris on the far side of the parking lot.

A cheer went up from the watching soldiers and she wanted to kill them. Instead, she began to cry. Huge, wracking sobs shook her to her toes.

Clay... she felt the ring box in her pocket pressing against her thigh. A good man, a hero, and no one would know. Not that Clay would care. No, wait. Those kids would know. They'd remember the guy with the big cool gun. Clay would love to be remembered that way, but--

She felt a hand on her shoulder and spun--Dr. Cook.

"You'd better go," he said.

She wiped her tears. "Where? How?"

"Walk into the woods and keep going. Don't look back, and don't go home."

"Why not?"

"They'll be looking for you."

"Who are 'they?'"

He frowned as he stared at the trailer. "I don't know. And I don't know how they learned about--" He cut himself off with a quick shake of his head and looked at her. "Whoever they are, they don't want you running around. You weren't locked in that room because they thought you might be infected. You've seen too much. They want to contain you."

"But where can I go?"

"Anywhere but here. Please. Get away now."

"Why are you doing this? Why do you care?"

He hesitated. "You seem like a good person. And... I'd like to know you better. But that can't happen if you're locked away. Now go--please."

She turned and hurried into the woods with no idea where she was going. But as the trees swallowed her, a slow-burning anger replaced her grief. They killed Clay Theel, a good man who'd asked to marry her. Squashed him like a bug. Where did they get off thinking they could get away with that?

She thought of Clay's father. After they'd worn each other out in bed, she used to listen to Clay talk about his "daddy" and what a nut he was. But a survivalist type might be just what she needed right now. He deserved to know that his son was dead, and how he died. And he'd be the type to believe
why
he died.

Where had he said Daddy lived?

Up near Silverton?

That was where she'd head.

"You
are
hungry, aren't you," he cooed to the infant in his arms. "Well, we'll fix that."

His canine teeth extended. They were so much better than the previous, unwieldy set he'd shed in the laundry room less than half an hour ago. This new form was superior. His thoughts were clear, focused. And he looked human. Better than human. Better than his best days on Wall Street. He would blend in much better than those monsters.

Better still, he was young and healthy again.

He bit the tip of his index finger and watched the blood well into a good-size bead, then put touched it to the baby's mouth. She made a face at first, then began to suck.

"Looks like we've got our work cut out for us, little one. We seem to have experienced a setback on the way to a brave new world, but it's only temporary. We'll get there eventually, and you'll play a big part. Oh, yes, little one. I have big plans for you."

Joe says:
While brainstorming on the phone with Blake, we got to talking about what would happen if the dracula contagion could infect animals. That led to his rat scene with Adam, and this scene. The idea was to make the contagion a cause for not only vampires, but werewolves. Dracula bites dog, dog bites man, man becomes wolfman. But it just didn't fit, and seemed tacked-on. If we do write
Draculas 2
, this might be a sub-plot. Or this might become another book called
Werewolves
...

Jeremiah Fisk took another swig from the bottle of Early Times and switched off his television with a scowl. For the past hour he'd been watching the media speculate on what exactly had happened at the Blessed Crucifixion Hospital. First they'd called it a rabies outbreak. Then it was a fire. Now they were saying it was a natural gas explosion.

"Gas explosion my ass," he said.

Fisk lived near the hospital, just a few miles away as the crow flies. He saw the cop cars speed past. Saw the military vehicles.

He also heard the BOOM--strong enough to knock his bowling trophies off his shelves--and saw the fireball shoot up into the sky, bigger'n the Republic Plaza in downtown Denver. Ain't no way that wasn't some kinda army bomb.

Fisk padded into the kitchen, and stepped barefoot into something warm and wet.

"Goddammit, Zeke!"

He squinted at the floor, saw a smear of blood. His goddamn German Shepherd. Must have killed something else. Last time it was a rabbit that Zeke had half-eaten then hid behind the sofa. Fisk only found it because it had begun to stink.