Vampirus (Book 1) (13 page)

He was working his way through his second pot of coffee. He liked it strong and black. Sonja used to say that it
was enough to wake the dead. Luke found grim amusement in that now.

He
sipped his coffee.

S
tared out the window.

Waited
.

There was
nothing more. He envisioned a world where it would be like this night after night after night, a place where time had ground to a screeching halt and all clock hands were seized at midnight, shadows moving with the whisper of casket silk and Wakefield was a ghost ship bobbing in a dead sea. An unburied casket, lid sprung by white restless fingers, that rested uneasily in the open grave of the country which itself lay dead center of the cemetery that was the world.

There were
things happening tonight, but he preferred not to know about them. Earlier, there had been what sounded like a car crash followed by the blaring of a horn. Not too long after there were screams, deathly, hysterical screams that split the night. Not twenty minutes ago, he heard the long, lonely howl of a dog from several streets over. At least, he thought it was a dog. Given what was going on, maybe it was the baying of a wolf. He supposed that would have been more fitting.

He had
Sonja’s crucifix.

He did
n’t know if it would do any good. Even now, on the brink of the pit, he had no true faith. His agnosticism remained intact. If Sonja or Megan came through the door and told him to toss aside the crucifix like vampires often did in old movies, he would have. He would have done it without a second thought because, God, he was so tired and so very scared. And what terrified him the most was the idea of inheriting a dead world, of being the last man on Earth. It was too horrible to contemplate. He knew there were others, of course, lots of others, but at night when darkness enshrouded the town, it was all too easy to believe that he was the last one.

For
months he had fought tooth and nail against the idea of Vampirus being a
true
vampire plague. What about the others out there? Were there other lost, grim souls out there that were still in denial? He wondered if any of them had a natural immunity to the Red Death as he seemed to.

Sighing,
he closed the shades.

He
couldn’t stand staring out into the black formless marrow of the night any longer. Too many moving shadows. Sooner or later, he knew, his light would draw one of them in like a beacon and he didn’t dare look them in the face. At least, not until he was stronger. Looking on them would be like looking on Medusa and no man was strong enough for that.

He drank his
coffee.

He
clutched the wooden stake he had whittled from ash.

And he waited for his wife.

37

What Luke knew about vampires came mainly from watching old movies on rainy Saturday afternoons. After the Vampirus plague got rolling and the stories began to spread and his own wife and daughter fell ill with it, he did something he would never have done before: he went to the library and grabbed a couple books on vampires and superstition. The library was closed by then—the librarians were either sick, dead, or in hiding—but being that he was employed by Public Works, getting the keys had been easy enough.

He found that vampire folklore differed depending on culture, so he concentrated on Central/Eastern European beliefs. A lot of stuff from the old movies was crap as he suspected—there was very little on the erotic vampire thing and not one recorded case of hot vampire women with their cleavage bursting from
sheer nightgowns. Folkloric vampires were either walking corpses (and looked like them) or ghosts or a little of both. They were disgusting creatures, from what he read, that stank of the grave. They were often bloated like barrels from their feedings and blood ran freely from any and all orifices. They feared religious objects. They only came out at night. The preferred method of destruction was a stake through the heart (to not only destroy that organ but to pin them into their graves), though alternately you could tear their hearts out and burn them or cremate the entire body. It was a good idea to chop their heads off. Sometimes garlic could be stuffed in their mouths, lips sewn shut. Their coffins could be filled with hawthorn or wild roses, both traditional remedies for the rising of the undead. The coffin could be placed in running water because, according to tradition, witches cannot cross running water because it will dissolve their charms.

How much of any of that was true and how much was absolute bullshit was anyone
’s guess.

In his green notebook he wrote
:
I have to remember they’re not vampires, but Carriers. It sounds so much better, so much more sterile.

38

The day he decided to start killing them, he went down to Shallberg
’s Army/Navy Surplus and bought all the MREs they had left which was forty cases of 12 meals each. At three meals a day, it would feed him for over six months. He also picked up a couple Marine K-Bar knives, boots, jackets, gloves, handwarmers, axes, raincoats, a machete, two water purification kits, and even a set of Night Vision goggles. The guy working there—a young kid, face gone pale—was not surprised at any of it. Except for the rain slickers.

“
Expecting a downpour?” he asked.

“
Things might get wet,” was all Luke would say.

And maybe the kid understood a little bit better than he was letting on because his eyes had the hunted, trapped look of a cornered animal that knew its last breath was not very far away.

After that, he drove to Home Depot on the highway. What customers were in the aisles were pale and listless, wearing sunglasses, their hoods zipped up tight as if they wanted to minimize the exposure of sunlight or UV on their skin. They did not take their gloves off even inside. Not everyone was like that. Luke saw others like himself that were stockpiling. The way things were going, in a week or so, he figured, you could walk into Home Depot or any other store in town and take anything you wanted. There wouldn’t be anybody left to stop you.

But that day, the day he began killing them, even the cashiers were listless, pale things.

He used his VISA card because he had a pretty good feeling that with the way things were going he’d never have to pay a cent of it. So he bought flashlights, lanterns, bottled water, candles, lantern fluid, and something called a Legacy Seeds Bucket which had 23 different types of vegetable seeds so you could grow your own self-supporting garden. He grabbed two of those. He also picked-up a 6,500 watt Honda generator—the last in stock—which could provide all the juice he’d ever need when the lights finally went out.

And it was there, filling the bottom of the cart with flashlight batteries, that he ran into Stephani Kutak.

Good old Steph.

Back in high school, he used to copy her papers in 10
th
grade algebra and she his in World Geography. The best thing about seeing her was that she looked healthy, untainted by the germ. Her cheeks had color, her lips were full and pink, her eyes burning with that green fire that had turned so many heads. But there was fear in those eyes and a tenseness around the mouth.

“
You don’t have it,” she said when she looked at him.

“
No. You don’t either.”

She shook her head and told Luke a story he had heard too many times by then: how her husband had gotten the plague, how he had died and went into the burning pits. And how she had a son and was terrified that he
’d get it as well.

“
If he gets it, I want it, too,” she said.

In a normal world, that might be pessimism, but these days it was only practicality. Luke understood her feelings perfectly because they had been (and still were) his own. What was the point in existing when everything you loved had died? It was like what they said about nuclear war. The lucky ones would die in the first five minutes.
In this case, the lucky ones had gone into the burning pits and the others (himself included) were now among the damned.

He told Steph about So
nja and Megan, carefully avoiding anything about the disposal of their remains. They hugged for a time and she told him how afraid she was.

“
You could move in with me, you know.”

Something in her eyes softened at the idea.

“I’m serious,” he said. “Alone we’re going to struggle, but together we might survive.”

“
I don’t know,” she said.

“
I’ve got the room, Steph, and no strings attached, of course,” Luke told her. “Believe me, I had a crush on you all through high school, but romance is the last thing on my mind these days.”

“
I’ll keep it in mind. Don’t be surprised if I come knocking,” she said, giving him a green-eyed wink.

“
Day or night, Steph. I’m only ten minutes away. I’ll help you.”

She was as happy for the connection as he was.
“Be careful, Luke. Don’t go out after dark. They…they knock at our windows at night.”

“
Who does?”

Those lovely green eyes burned lik
e fire. “Don’t play stupid. It’s just like in the movies: you have to
invite
them in. Watch out, though, those you’ve invited in before can come in anytime they want. Locked doors won’t stop them. They can slip through cracks.”

It was then, on the eve of the killing (or
eradication,
as he preferred to call it) that he started thinking about all the people he had invited in which was pretty much the entire neighborhood.

That night he dreaded sundown even worse than usual. But it wasn
’t just for himself but for people like Stephani Kutak and her son and all the others like them that were hiding out there, knowing that another period of darkness meant another night of horror that many of them simply would not survive. Because if the germ didn’t get them, the Carriers would.

39

The first vampire he tried to kill
was Anne Stericki.

If he had doubted the first time he had seen her that she was indeed undead, there was no doubting it when he returned.
She lay there, sprawled on the bed, the sheets beneath her dark with bloodstains. She still wore the blue nightgown, but it was torn, crusted with dark stains. Her flesh was corpse-white, almost shockingly so, but her cheeks were ruddy with life, her lips full and red. Dried blood was smeared over her face like war paint, it was streaked on her legs and across her belly, her hands were pink with it. There was a stick caught in her hair.

Luke stood there staring at her, repulsed physically and spiritually by what he was seeing. God, not a woman, but
a beast of blood, engorged and sated and grinning from her latest feast. Her belly was swollen like she was pregnant. Though he could not bear to touch her, he took the stake of ash he had sharpened and prodded her abdomen. It was soft. He pushed the stake down and the belly gave…and dark blood bubbled at her lips and ran from one nostril, a great quantity of it evacuated from her vagina and soaked into the sheets.

He nearly threw up.

And it wasn’t just the sight of it, as bad as that was, but the stink of putrescence and morbid infection that suddenly filled the room.

He had to step out into the hallway where the air was slightly more breathable.

But he had come to do something and he went back in, his belly light and fluttery with nausea and a humming noise in his ears. He positioned the stake to the left of her sternum and made ready. In movies, people seemed to automatically know how to do it, but he left nothing to chance. All morning he had practiced striking the stake so he would not miss it and break his wrist with the four-pound steel sledge he was using. He brought the hammer up, sucked in a breath of air, and swung it.

His aim was just off.

The hammer hit the stake, but glanced off it so the full force of the blow had not come down. Still, the tip of the stake went in. It punctured Anne’s left breast, skidding over her ribs, but doing no more damage than that. Yet, even so…the results were immediate. Anne opened her bloodshot eyes and her head thrashed from side-to-side on the pillow, her body arching, her limbs trembling. Her lips peeled back from fangs and more blood juiced from her mouth in a runny flow, spreading over her chin and down her neck. More blood not only coursed from the stake wound, but droplets of it dripped from her left nipple like milk.

He
ran from there and didn’t stop until he got outside.

He didn
’t have the strength to try again.

He was both hot and cold, shaking and nauseous.

That night, there was knocking at the doors and scratching at the windows and he had no earthly doubt of who…or
what
…it was. When daylight came, he went over to the Stericki’s. Anne was gone. She had relocated her hide. The stake was still there. Its tip stained red, it had been driven right into the mattress. It took some doing to pull it free.