Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (30 page)

“No, at least, I don't think so.”

“He's probably going for Banaker. Probably go right for his office on the top floor,” said Briggs. “Let's take the elevator, hurry!”

When they came to the next landing, the three vampires caught the elevator on Briggs's hunch. Briggs was certain that Stroud was bent on killing Banaker as much as Banaker was bent on killing Stroud. Just before the elevator was about to close, a nurse raced toward them, shouting for Briggs, but the doors closed on what she was saying.

“Your office has been trying to reach you! Two of your men ... dead ... at Doctor Magaffey's!”

After the door closed Briggs felt a hot shiver race along his spine, and while he nor any other vampire ever perspired, he felt that uneasy odor that his body exuded whenever he was particularly harried or low on his food supply. He'd been waiting for his replenishment to begin when Stroud's Jeep had torn up the parking lot, banging into his own car.

“What was that she said?” Briggs asked the two attendants.

“Something to do with Magaffey,” said one.

“No, she said two of your men were dead.”

Briggs thought about Whiley and Buttrum over at Dr. Magaffey's offices. Dead? Impossible. But the elevator ride to the top floor seemed now interminable as his mind kicked over the possibilities. If he added up, Stroud had dispatched three vampires in a matter of hours.

Stroud knew the rules of infiltration and camouflage, and that when in Rome...

He'd taken great pains to present himself as just another of the Banaker Institute family. Although it was an ill fit, he'd gotten hold of one of Magaffey's white lab coats, which covered the worst of his wounds until the coat became blood-soaked. He'd located stairwell underpasses and a linen closet to stow his firepower close to his target and diversionary target. Before leaving Banaker Institute he meant to display some of his talents, primarily in explosives. But first he must locate his primary target. He calculated his chances of getting out of this place, but it made him lose heart to do so, so he terminated the calculation. He knew he could not very well destroy the entire hospital complex, that there was too much of a chance that some of the patients in beds here were still as human as he was. The blood bank was their only hope of an effective weapon against the number of vampires here.

He'd wisely chosen the stairs, assuming they'd be used less. He found the floor where he now recalled seeing the blood bank.

Someone was coming down the corridor he stepped into, and the fact he was carrying Magaffey's jar made him even more conspicuous than he already was. He grabbed an unattended gurney, placed the S-choline plainly in view on top, and pushed it along. Two vampire doctors passed him without giving him the least notice. They seemed engaged in a conversation revolving around a technique of surgery one felt to be an improvement over earlier methods. Stroud caught only snatches of their talk, but it was fiendish in its overtones, more by virtue of the fact he knew what they were. He also knew that for what he was contemplating, he could be locked up for life, possibly sent to the electric chair.

He came around a corner and saw the sign over a door that designated this area the blood center. Taking the clear liquid solution, cradling it in his arm as if it were a child, he pushed through the door. There was a 
thrum-thrum-thrum
 noise on this side of the doors that'd been masked out in the hallway. The churning noise of rhythmic machinery lulled the mind here. It reminded him of being in a downtown laundromat in Chicago when all the machines were in use at once. The place was a maze of outer rooms where “donors” gave willingly of their blood, and labs where the bone marrow was extracted. The corridors between these rooms, labs, and offices led him closer and closer to the source of the humming machinery. If anyone saw him or was watching him, he did not know of it. For a moment, the S-choline firmly in his hands, he forgot his mission and the place he was in as his mind locked on the comforting, seashore sound of the machines ahead.

He very likely passed some white-coated monsters in human form, but he did so with such determination and the look of a man who knew where he must be, that no one questioned him.

It was going too easily, he felt, when the corridor led to a glassed-in area that overlooked an enormously large machine squatting below him in a sunken area. A quick calculation led him to realize that the blood bank area linked up with the morgue. Two and two added up to the fact that when someone died at Banaker Institute and his body was sent to the morgue to be prepped for burial or autopsy, or whatever, that the vital red fluid was not simply washed from the corpse along with all other bodily fluids, but pumped in here, to join with the enormous vat of blood being filtrated and enriched through the bone marrow and vampire gene components.

This was the central food processing plant for them. This was Stroud's primary target.

“What is that you have there?” asked a female voice behind him suddenly.

Stroud only slowly turned from the glass. Fumes like those of dry ice, giving off an eerie, ghastly pink cloud, rose from the square vat at Stroud's back now. He'd witnessed the strange red liquid slushing in one compartment, flushing and cascading through funnel tubes in another section of the vampire still.

“I ... beg your pardon?” asked Stroud.

“What is that you are carrying into the blood room?” She was a tall, raven-haired woman with piercing black eyes with an accent that might be that of a Rumanian. She was instantly suspicious. “Who sent you here? Who are you?”

“Doctor Banaker ... he sent me.”

“Oh?”

“Additives,” said Stroud, hefting the clear liquid in the jar. “Vitamins.”

“Really?” She was incredulous. “E, I suppose. You men.”

Stroud almost took a breath, when she said, “I'll just call Doctor Banaker. He said nothing of this. Highly irregular; no paper. Just a moment.”

Stroud allowed her to walk back to her office, eyeballing the catwalk over the vat just outside. From there, he could drop the entire jar into the works. A little glass in their diet wouldn't harm the bats any. But a phone call would alert the others to the fact this place, the source of their power, was his target tonight. She mustn't be allowed to make that call.

Stroud placed the S-choline in a corner and followed her, snatching out a hypo as he did so. She had her back to him, and he was about to jam the hypo into her when she wheeled, grabbed his hand with an almost superhuman strength and thrust him across the room. She screeched his name, realizing who he was now. “
Ststrooooouuuuud!
 Stroud!”

She next scowled and showed her fangs, her gums crawling with white worms. The hypo had gone flying to another corner of the room, so he snatched out the dart gun. He fired point-blank at the heart as she leaped for his throat, but she'd caused the dart gun to fire to one side, striking the wall, quivering there. She was still struggling with him as they fell through the door that led out into the main corridor on the other side of the blood bank. Here they struggled in an empty corridor before the elevator doors. An elevator was passing and Stroud, still in her clutches, snatched out another hypo and jammed the S-choline solution into her gullet now. At the same instant he slapped the elevator call button, the doors swung open and he shoved her into the car. Inside it, she screeched in banshee alto soprano, but just as the doors closed her white-uniformed chest exploded with blood from within, some of it shooting out into the corridor and onto Stroud's clothing, already encrusted with vampire blood.

Stroud saw his opportunity now, and he returned to the blood bank. Here lay Banaker's blood source, flowing through filtrating tubes and vats, great stores of it for the colony. It gave Stroud the first true belief in himself that he could put an end to Banaker and his kind; it also gave Stroud his first true indicator of exactly how large the enemy force was extrapolating from the size of the supply which was at this moment being run through final stages and packaged in robotic rhythm by the machines in the stainless steel room. Stroud guessed there must be as much as several hundred Andover citizens who were, like Ray Carroll, Banaker, and the others, vampires who'd learned to “be” human, until one of their number decided to do the “inhuman” thing. That meant a lot of blood-sucking leeches, and their number had been quietly growing for years. He shuddered with the thought that 
had he chosen not
 to return to Andover, then the numbers would've simply multiplied and multiplied as the human population dwindled.

Put up in pods in caves for such festive occasions as the Fourth of July and Labor Day and Thanksgiving.

Stroud's plan would work only if no one knew of his having gotten to this source. Thus far, neither Banaker nor any other fiend knew of the antivampire weapon that they'd stumbled onto. The fiends would not be expecting him to tamper with their food source, unless he triggered their thinking in this regard. The missing blood bank attendant's remains would not identify her soon. He had to make them believe that he had, all along, a different plan in mind--a more noisy, conventional, commando-type raid. It was for this reason he'd planted the charges below, just enough to do some damage to the morgue.

He had to work fast. He looked for the controls to the blood filtration mechanism that cleaned the bone marrow. Watching the red liquid gush about the tubes made him think of Edgar Allan Poe's 
The Masque of the Red Death
. He located the control panel, shutting down the filtration system but not the packing system. He then stepped out onto the catwalk and made his way toward the middle to drop in the S-choline. Gaining this vantage, he poured into the large mouth of this giant strainer the entire contents of Dr. Magaffey's S-choline. He'd leave the rest of the work to the natural order of the machines, now that the straining, purifying process was shut down. Now he'd kill vampires via the help of the robotics here, as blood pak after pak was filled with the stuff so deadly to the vampires, and the S-choline unknowingly distributed.

Worried that he could still be discovered here, Abe Stroud knew he must set the diversion in motion. He turned on the catwalk to find himself facing one of them who'd come looking for the female vampire doctor he'd just killed. This one, a bull of a man, simply plowed a huge fist into Stroud's jaw, sending him crashing to the metal grillwork of the catwalk. Stroud was kicked once, again, repeatedly, as he tried to roll away. He then felt himself going over the side, knowing he'd drown in the pool of blood below him. Somehow, miraculously, a hand found a hold and he dangled there as the giant vampire laughed and was readying to stomp on his hand.

The pain from the life-threatening wound to his throat, along with the sheer strain of holding onto the rail, his body weight and gravity tugging him toward the churning vat of blood below him, all conspired to sap Stroud of his last ounce of strength and consciousness. But some inner resolve born of generations of vampire hunters before him, made him fight for his sight and his senses, despite the loss of blood and despite the overwhelming odds allied against him.

I've got to do something,
 he told himself, and in the wind and whirl of the machines, and in the turmoil, he heard the near buried whisper of Ananias's spirit telling him what to do.

Stroud fished for the reloaded dart gun, brought it up to aim just as the man-thing's foot was descending. The impact of the dart startled him, making him stop and stare at it. The man-thing looked curiously confused and dizzy moments before he stumbled over, his body sending up a splash of blood to where Stroud hung on. Stroud grabbed hold with a second hand and pulled himself to safety.

Beaten, his own white lab coat flecked with both his own and the blood of these things, Stroud tore away the lab clothing and watched it cascade down, following the vampire into the vat, lying atop the mixture for a moment before it was engulfed by the redness. All around him, here in the combining room, the heady fumes from the blood and marrow mix made him slightly dizzy, as if the air were made thin by the stuff. He knew he must get out now, standing here in his army fatigues. He knew he had to carry out the second part of his mission in order to make the first part successful. So he rushed from this place to the stairwell, careful once more not to be seen.

He dropped a flight to the morgue.

Briggs had accumulated more help from the staff as he and the attendants had rushed to Banaker's office, but before finding Dr. Oliver Banaker, Banaker found them. “You fools!” shouted Banaker. “He isn't here!” Banaker had amassed his own army of doctors and nurses. “Try the lower floors! Try the morgue, for bloody hell!”

Just then the elevator across from the one that had carried Briggs and the others pinged and slowly opened. The pires stared in at the bloody remains of one of their own just before the doors creepily closed, as if on cue, as if Stroud were controlling them, as if Stroud were winking in wry humor at Briggs and Banaker.

Suddenly, over the PA system, Stroud's voice rang throughout the building. “I have a little surprise for you, Doctor Banaker. Be patient, as they say, and your patience will be rewarded.”

“Bastard!” shouted Banaker. “He's making a mockery of us all! He's killed my son! Now this! Briggs, you get all your men over here, now!”

“I've already alerted them! They're on their way.”

“He's killed another of us,” moaned one of the white-coated attendants who'd come up with Briggs.

“How? How does he take a perfectly healthy pire and turn him into ... into what was on that elevator?”

“The man's not human,” said Briggs philosophically.

Banaker shouted at them all. “Bullshit! He's no match for our strength and numbers! If we just ban together! There is nothing superhuman or ... or supernatural about Abraham Stroud! His father and mother were killed by vampires, and so was his grandfather.”

“Father and mother?”

“Made to look accidental, but yes, the work of a special team I sent out after them. The boy, too, was reported dead, but as we have learned that was far from the truth,” explained Banaker. “My father took too damned much on faith. But bottom line here is that Stroud is mortal; he can be stopped. He must be stopped!”