The Mammoth Book of Dracula (90 page)

Billy Kendow had his bedroom windows opened wide, feeling the pleasant cool air drifting through with smells of night-time undergrowth and rain-soaked foliage. He looked across and, just for a second, half expected to see the red-nosed clown out of his old reading book, waving a klaxon horn and shouting to him

put down that rabbit, boy and roll up, roll up why dontcha for the show that never ends

but there was only the night and the darkness. Maybe he had imagined it. But then, there it went again,
harrrnk!, harrrnk!,
echoing across the fields. Then two more, the first one sounding momentarily farther away and then, with the second, nearer. Not a lot nearer, but definitely nearer.

“Ma!” Billy shouted, eyes staring wide at the window, picturing the highway across the fields. “Didja hear
that?”

“I sure did.” His mother’s voice sounded tired, kind of uninterested. “Just a truck, honey. Nothing to get too excited about. Tom Duffy’ll’ve heard it. No need for excitement.”

But no, there was a need. Those air horns signified more than just some dumb old truck-driver finding a tattered and mildewed map and taking the dog’s leg short-cut across from the crater-marked 124 onto US64, which, so other people aiming to pass through Pump Handle had often said, seemed to have withstood the worst of the bomb storm.

Bomb storm.

Seemed to Billy like a funny thing to say, but that was what it had been like. Even
he
could remember it, and he had only been around two, three years old. Just bombs falling like rain, silver needles dropping out of the sky and turning everything on the ground to mush ... the way—or so his mom always told everyone—that Billy himself used to turn his supper of grits and potatoes and vegetables and meat into a thickly textured goo of no distinct colour. Only a wash of browns and whites and greens, each one taking on some of the characteristics of the one next to it.

It had been a long time since they’d had those suppers, Billy thought now. A long time since anyone in town had even seen an outsider. But the sound of the truck horns—it
had
to be truck horns—suggested that people were here again. And more people than just one truck. It was more than that. It
had
to be. Those
harrrnkh
were exclamations, promises of life and of survival, proud cries of
here we are, come see us...
and there were surely more than one. And it had been so long since anyone had passed through Pump Handle ...

“Maybe they’re bringing us food and provisions ... real food ... and—” He quickly scrolled through his head at the other things he hoped such mythical cargoes might contain. His eyes lit up. “—and comicbooks, ma ... maybe they’ll bring us comicbooks.”

“Trucks wouldn’t be stopping here, Billy, leastwise not of their own accord. Ain’t no provisions delivered any more,” she said, “and there ain’t nothing to stop here
for,
more’s the pity.” There was a clanking sound from the kitchen as Billy’s mother shouted, “And there ain’t no comicbooks, Billy. You know that. Not since the war.”

Billy carefully returned the rabbit he had been playing with to the small cage on the makeshift table at the foot of his bed, walked across to the window and stepped out onto the flat-boarded roof section. Breathing in the night smells of jasmine and hollyhock, he looked to the sky. Way off to the west, over towards Memphis maybe, the sky was black and threatening rain. But here, the air smelled good, clean and fresh and full of opportunities.

It even felt different somehow ... expectant, maybe. He sniffed the breeze and breathed in the aroma of the plants and the soil and the grasses and the trees. Even that composite smell felt excited, somehow ... the way Billy was feeling himself. He threw his head back and smiled at the starry sky.

Something
was
coming. Something was coming
tonight.

He grasped the balcony rail outside his window. “I’m going out, Ma,” he shouted. “Going out to see what it is.” And with a single leap, he was down on the ground and running across the grass, his mother’s voice drifting behind him but unable to catch him up, running fit to burst towards the spiralling funnels of light that twisted and turned into the night sky as whatever was coming weaved their way around the perilous bends of Jesmond Hill.

At the stile at the edge of the field that gave onto the blacktop, Billy stopped and leaned on the fence. Two uprights to his left, the fence had long ago disintegrated and rotted into the thick mulshy weed that made up the field. He didn’t need to cross the stile to get onto the blacktop but it felt right... felt like the way it must have felt all those years ago before the bomb storm.

Billy looked left along the road leading into town. Alongside the road, he could see the silent shapes of other townsfolk making their way towards him. Over to the right, he could hear the faint drone of motors getting louder and, mixed in amongst it, there was music. Billy laughed and slapped his thigh. “Hot dog!” he shouted to the uncaring night. This was really turning out to be something, wasn’t it? Real trucks were coming to town. And, from the sound of them, they were going to be a whole heap of fun.

When the first one edged around the final section of Jesmond Hill, onto the straight that led directly into Jingle Bend and then town and then right out again about a minute later, Billy climbed onto the stile and started waving his arms about his head, whooping for all he was worth. First up came a flapping tarpaulin, then came the polished black of the cab, then the windshield, then the hood, the grill and, at last, there it was in all of its dusty buckled splendour.

It spoke of far-off places and untold adventures; it smelled of prairie campfires and coloured rain; and it looked like a slant-eyed beast from his brother’s stories, whispered long ago late at night when pain kept sleep at bay. It might have seen better days, this ‘gleaming carriage of excitement’, but to Billy it was just the finest collection of sights and sounds and smells that he had ever seen in the whole of his short life.

Billy had been still all but toddling when the first bombs were dropped, China holding good its promise to deal straight with the aggression shown it by the US. And there were the Iraqis and the Iranians and the Turks and…

...
and every other power-mad asshole with strength or inclination enough to draw breath and pass wind ...

his father had said to him on one of those long-since endless nights of swirling smoke and constant thunder.

Both of which amounts to the same, young Billy,

he had continued,

‘ceptin’ the one smells a sight worse than the other.

Strategic exchanges had followed in quick succession. Billy’s brother, Troy, had told him night-time stories about England and the whole of what Troy called ‘the British Islands’ being sunk, about Europe being devastated—first by chemical bombs and finally by 200-mile-an-hour dust storms—and about how mainland USA (which was where Troy and Billy and his folks lived, Troy had said) was now a wilderness of broken buildings and city-sized potholes, and mile after mile of the strange coloured vegetation that had sprung up long after the final dust clouds had settled down and the smells of explosive and burned flesh had all but drifted away completely.

Troy had told Billy, late at night when they were lying in their cots staring out at the stars, that they’d come out of it better than most. Troy said he and their daddy had stood and watched the cloud rise from the first bomb, a beautiful pear-shaped swirl shot through with every colour in the rainbow, shimmering brightly ...

But Troy was gone, now. Daddy, too.

For a moment, Billy had felt a profound sadness, a bone-numbing hollowness that seemed to burn at the back of his throat, but it disappeared as soon as it had shown itself. It disappeared with the first of the trucks, pulling along the dusty road, throwing up all kinds of grit and dirt and soil behind them. Billy thumped a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand. “Hot
dog!”
he shouted, trying to get his voice above the sound of the straining motors and the pulsating music, loud thumping rhythms that made him want to shuck and jive his feet, made him want to cartwheel along the roadside, made him want to jerk his head so hard it would almost fall right off his neck...

This music, the sounds of it filled the whole of the road, maybe they filled the whole of what used to be the county ... hell, maybe it filled the whole world, drifting on the poisonous winds forever, fading maybe, getting softer and softer as it travelled, but always there. Always existing.

Why, not too long ago, a wild-eyed drifter—sporting enough burns to have fried any normal man into a blackened stump—had come into town with a bottle he’d found amidst the rubble of a place called Chicago. The bottle was covered with a thick gauze tied around with frayed string. Billy had asked what was in there and the man had told him

the sounds of the last day of the world, my friend

and then he had laughed loud and long, his mouth hanging wide and gums dripping yellow pus onto his tongue.

When the man had carefully removed the top from the jar, Billy had heard a hundred voices—no, maybe a thousand or a million or even a
thousand
million voices—all crying out in agony. He had run then, run away from the wild-eyed man, trying to drown out the despair of those cries ... trying to drown out the sound of the man laughing again, laughing for all he was worth as he placed the gauze around the jar once more.

No sound ever dies,
the man had called after him,
particularly the sound of death itself.

Moonlight glinted off the dusty black carapace of the first truck as it pulled up alongside Billy Kendow, suddenly jolting him back to the present. Eyes wide, mouth wide, senses wide open and shouting
feed me!
for all they were worth, Billy stared up at the cab and came face to face with a man chewing on a smouldering cigar.

The truck came to a stop right in front of Billy, its air brakes hissing and whining, and the man leaned out of his open window and looked at Billy. Then he looked around, up the road ahead and back over behind Billy, back across the fields to Billy’s house. “Where the hell are we, boy?” He waved an old, torn map at Billy and then threw it to the floor of the cab. “Map shows dots of towns on it but no names to speak of.”

“Pump Handle, sir,” Billy exclaimed, trying to imbue the words with some kind of significance. Like it was Valhalla or Bethlehem instead of a run-down collection of shanty houses that would have been perfectly at home getting on for a century ago in the dust-blown cardboard cities of the Oklahoma flatlands.

He pointed ahead along the road. “Up ahead a half mile or so. But there’s trees and stuff all across the road at Jingle Bend ... might need some help in moving them before you can make any headway.”

The man nodded. “Sounds good to me.” He looked aside to a scrawny and pale-looking woman sitting beside him. “Sound good to you, Deedee?”

The woman stretched her arms out in front of her and yawned fit to split her face wide open. “Anything gets me outta this goddam truck sounds good to me.”

“That settles it,” the man said to Billy. “Looks like we set up here.”

“Set up?” Billy felt his heart skip a beat.

“Sure.” The man jerked a thumb back behind him. “The Post Apocalyptic Shadow Show? Don’t you read?”

Billy stepped back and glanced along the tarpaulin covering the truck. There it was, in glorious swirls of white and yellow picked out by the headlights behind, a legend of typeface design, a blaze of curlicues and serifs, the words

JOSEPH AND DEIRDRE BLAUMLEIN’S

POST APOCALYPTIC SHADOW SHOW

and, below that,

SEE THE WONDERS THAT SURVIVED THE WAR!

and then, below various blurbs, a single line that made the blood rush to his face in sheer frantic anticipation:

COUNT DRACULA, THE LAST VAMPIRE!

Billy breathed in deep, a quick gasp of breath, and, almost choking as he tried to get the words out, he said, “Is that for real?”

The man in the cab was holding a cigarette to his mouth, his hands shaking. Billy could see that the man bit his fingernails, could see the little rounded stumps high above the nail, and the whitened quick of skin extending from beneath the nail itself. “Which is that, young fella?” the man said, holding a quivering match to the cigarette and drawing in smoke.

“This here.” Billy ran to the tarpaulin and pointed to the words. “This here about the last vampire,” he said.

“Sure is,” said the man. “And I’ll tell you all about him, too, if’n I kin just get this rig off the road. Can’t say as how you prob’ly expectin’ any other visitors—“ He paused and gave a wheezy laugh. “—but never pays to take chances, know what I mean?”

Billy shook his head and then nodded it, eyes wide. He had no idea what the man was talking about. All that mattered was the last vampire—and all of the other things, too, but the vampire was the one that most interested Billy Kendow. And the cheesy hand-drawn picture beneath it, of a middle-aged man—maybe around Billy’s father’s age, just before he died, maybe a little younger—with a high forehead and kind of sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, grinning menacingly off the tarpaulin, his lips pulled back to reveal two canine-sized incisors at either side of his mouth.