Vampirus (Book 1) (17 page)

“Bob…easy now,” he said.

The dog cocked his head, whimpered and came slinking over with his tail tucked between his legs, his head held low. Luke went down on his knees. “It’s okay, Bob, you know me. I’m a friend.” For a moment there he thought Bob had gone rabid, but it wasn’t that at all. Bob came over to him, friendly as ever, putting his paws up on Luke’s shoulder and peering at him with sad eyes. He continued to whimper and Luke knew without a doubt that he had been through something awful, that he was in fact sobbing out the depths of despair in his canine soul.

“It’s okay, Bob. You’re with me now,” he said, nearly choking up on his own words. “It’s okay, it’s all right. We’ll take care of each other.”

After he had soothed Bob a bit, he left him in the living room and went to look for Cliff. Bob did not follow him, which was very unusual. He had the feeling that Bob would not have come with him even if he tried to drag him along. That dog was frightened. Something had happened and it had terrified him. Luke could just about imagine what that might have been.

The door to Cliff’s bedroom was shut. There were deep scratches in the
panel. Bob, apparently, had been trying real hard to get in there. Luke opened it and felt the cold right away. Even the door itself was cold. And with good reason: the window was open.

Cliff
was on the bed.

Luke
heard Bob finally come down the hallway but he would not approach the bedroom. He stayed in the hallway and barked.

Cliff was fully clothed. B
lood was soaked into the mattress and sprayed over the face of the dresser. Droplets of it had coagulated on the headboard. He had been bled white, his throat torn right open. There was no doubt that he was a corpse. His violation had been no subtle midnight sip at the throat, but a devastating and violent bestial attack.

First Nicole, now Cliff.

Nicole said Anne was standing outside in the snow calling to her. She said she was in her room at night, standing over her.

Yes, he could remember Cliff telling him that in the driveway that day. Nicole had gone into the burning pits, so it wasn’t she that had come for her husband. It was easy enough to put together, of course. Anne had come to the window and he had
let her in. By then it was too late for him. Far too late. Anne had attacked with fury, emptying him like a fucking cup. She practically swam in his blood. All the while, Bob must have been outside the door hearing his master being killed and going ape shit because he could not get in to protect him.

You gotta find Anne. If you get no others, you have to destroy her.

He went over to the window and saw a bloody handprint on the sill. He pulled the window closed for all the good it did. Bob was moaning out in the hallway now. He knew his master was dead. He had known last night. Luke went over and stood by the bed. Anne had left her calling card: a dozen or so dead flies.

As Luke looked closer, he saw that Cliff’s mouth was filled with them.

Though it appalled him to do so, he pried open Cliff’s cold mouth with his fingers. Even with his gloves on, he could feel the chill coming off him. He turned his head to the side and flies fell out of his mouth.

He
was as white as the proverbial sheet. Luke saw no signs of the Red Death—no sores or open pustules, no self-inflicted scratches or cuts, just that bitten-out throat. He had been healthy. Maybe like Luke himself, he was somehow immune to Vampirus. Anne had fixed that, of course. The only question was: would an immune victim stay dead or would the virus—if virus it was—reanimate him?

Luke was no coroner,
but he had seen his share of corpses in the Gulf War. If he had to guess, he would have said Cliff had been dead at least eight hours. If that were the case—and the dried blood attested to that, it would take more than a couple hours to dry up that much of it—then he knew from his medical training that rigor should have set in by now. In three or four hours it became very noticeable and by eight or ten the limbs were board-stiff.

Cliff’s limbs were loose and floppy. It wasn’t a good sign.

Luke went over and dropped himself into a chair in the corner.

Goddamn Anne.

Goddamn fucking leech.

He wondered how many others in the neighborhood she had drained
. He wondered, not for the first time, if she had gotten Megan and Sonja. They both had the germ, no doubt of it, but he had the darkest feeling that Anne had helped things along. True, he had never seen any bite marks, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. It was quite possible, given his state of mind and the state of his overwhelming denial, that he had purposely not looked for them. He couldn’t be sure. He never really examined their throats or their wrists and he wondered if that was negligence on his part or something deeper, some subconscious drive that did not want him to see.

As he sat there, he thought about Anne.

She had been a very good, patient person and just about everyone in the neighborhood had wondered what in the hell she was doing with Alger who was considered a right pain in the ass. But Anne had loved him and he had loved her in his own way. Though Alger was pretty average, possibly even dowdy as far as looks went, his balding pate and glasses giving him the look of a stressed-out accountant or middle management type, Anne was nearly striking. She was tall, thin, heavy-breasted, her lips seductively full and her eyes a beautiful violet. She might have been a knock-out if she dressed for it and put some make-up on to accentuate what she already had, but things like that didn’t interest her. She spent most of her summer days in her garden dressed in baggy shirts and jeans, her pale orange hair pulled back into a ponytail. If she were aware of her looks, you would never have guessed it.

Luke had liked Anne.

She was very friendly, very funny with a perpetual sarcastic dry wit, and also very smart. She had a Masters Degree in education, but she wasn’t much interested in the halls of academia, preferring a part-time position as a substitute teacher. She couldn’t have children and was okay with it, applying her mothering skills to her garden. She had an amazing mathematical brain and could solve the most difficult anagrams and Sodoku puzzles in a matter of minutes as well as doing six-digit long division in her head.

That’s essentially
who Anne Stericki was.

What she had become
now, Luke figured, was anyone’s guess. If she woke from the sleep of death with her faculties intact, or even partially so, she was going to be a very methodical and dangerous vampire. Maybe some of the others were nothing but walking appetites, but she would be more in the Dracula category: an apex predator, cunning and vicious with a love of sport and mind games.

She would not be easy to locate, but somehow he had to find her.

But that brought Luke back to the matter at hand: Cliff Corbett and what he was going to do about him. If there were any chance he would rise, then Luke would have to destroy him. Yet, the idea of unnecessarily desecrating a corpse did not sit on him well. He was still too human for that, too hamstrung by moralities and ethics.

Which left only one possibility.

If he really wanted to know if Cliff was going to become a Carrier, then there really was only one way to find out.

47

It was suicidal, of course.

It was a downright stupid idea.

But if he wanted to fight them, then he would need to understand them. Know your enemy and all that, he figured.
Basic Marine Corps knowledge he’d had shoved down his throat and packed up his ass at Parris Island.

He grabbed a couple cans of Alpo for Bob and a bag of dry food and they went over to his house. Bob stuck close to him, eyeing the houses in the neighborhood warily. When they got there,
he refused to eat until he scoped out each and every room. He got very nervous at the closed door to Megan’s room and absolutely skittish around Luke’s bedroom.

He knows,
Luke thought.
He knows they’ve been here. He can smell or sense the undead even when they haven’t been somewhere
for days. Their comings and goings might be mysterious to humans with their limited senses, but they can’t fool a dog. I bet with some training, Bob could sniff every last one out.

Bob scratched at the cellar door.

He would not settle down without a trip down there. By that point, Luke trusted in the dog’s sniffer quite completely. If Bob wanted to cast for scent in the basement, then so be it. He clicked on the lights and Bob led the way down, pausing at the bottom of the steps and sniffing around. Luke let him do his thing. He went into the junk room and nosed about at the old coats hanging there, boxes of stuff Sonja had been packing away for Goodwill—Megan’s old things—and boxes of Halloween decorations that Luke had put away not that long ago. He investigated the Christmas decorations that had never gone up this year and would never go up again. He found a purple inflatable ball that had belonged to Megan and he gave it a nudge with his nose, watching it roll across the floor.

To Luke,
it was the most singularly haunting thing he had ever seen. It was as if Bob had picked up her scent, recognized that she was now gone. He would not play with the ball even though Luke knew he was crazy about playing with
any
ball. Luke remembered throwing it around with Megan in the backyard and the memory was like a knife in his guts.

Stop it, just stop it. You can’t keep tormenting yourself with the memory of her.

But it was not so easy. She lived in his heart and his absolute love for her made him silently bleed every day.
Dear God, my baby, my sweet angel.
He had to lean against the wall as emotion overcame him. Bob sensed it right away and came over, nudging him with his cold nose, his eyes huge and sad. Together, they shared pain that was beyond words.

Enough.

The hunt was resumed.

Bob
sniffed around by the woodstove, was intrigued by something in the woodpile, probably the scent of a long-dead mouse. He lost interest in that and checked out the bar and stools, the ping-pong table, the dartball boards that had belonged to Sonja’s grandmother. Nothing of interest there either. His sniffer led him to the utility room and he checked out the hot water boiler and water heater, the washer and dryer and stationary tub.

It hurt to be in there and Luke had purposely avoided the room since the death of Megan and Sonja. He had dropped their clothes an
d bedding down the laundry chute and there they were on the floor. Emotion seized him again and he fought it away. Strange. There was Megan’s Barbie comforter, fitted sheet, and pillow case…but the flat sheet was missing. Though it hurt him to do so, he knelt down and looked through the laundry, most of which belonged to his dead wife and daughter.

The flat sheet was not there.

But he knew he had dropped it down the laundry chute. Bob sniffed around at the things Luke looked at it. He made a sound in his throat and he was off again, nose close to the floor. He followed the scent through the cellar to the old furnace room where a forced-air furnace had once brooded. There was nothing in there now. Bob went right to the door and began pawing, making a low whimpering in his throat.

Feeling impossibly tense, Luke threw the door open and turned on the light. Megan’s sheet was spread out on the floor. Bob sniffed it and jumped back, growling. Luke just stood there staring at it, wondering how it had gotten in
there.

But he knew.

God yes, he knew.

He could see where a dirty body had laid upon it leaving a gray imprint. There were a scattering of dead flies in the folds. Not Sonja or Megan as he’d first thought, but Anne. Anne Stericki had been hiding in his basement up until quite recently.

She wanted you to find this. She wanted you to see this. It’s all part of the game. Hide-‘n’-seek. Catch me if you can. She wanted you to know that she’s one step ahead of you and always will be.

Luke just sighed. All those many nights she could have had him, but it wasn’t time yet and it wasn’t part of the game. Anne wanted to build his fear and apprehension until he got confused and disoriented, then her success would be that much sweeter when she bit into his throat and drained him. In life, she had played anagrams, Sodokus, and mathematical puzzles; in death, she played people. She was a stalking feline and the game, the hunt, stealth and concealment and
the final kill, were everything to her.

You dirty, stinking bitch. You’re time is coming.

“C’mon, Bob,” he said. “Enough of this.”

Together, they went up the stairs and Luke watched happily as his new friend wolfed down a can of Alpo. They were going to be a team, a very successful team, and he knew it.

48

But first there was the Corbett house and what waited there.

Bob knew something was up. He stuck very close to Luke’s side the later in the day it became. Maybe it was the coming night and the fear he held of it, but Luke figured he knew
something was up. Border Collies were known for their intelligence and Bob was probably even a bit smarter than most. His instincts were exceptional. About an hour before sunset, Luke took him out to the garage and made a nice bed for him out of a sleeping bag. Bob hung his head and dragged his ass all the way out there. Luke lit a fire in the little woodstove for him. The garage was well insulated and he would be warm out there until dawn, if it came to that. He opened another can of food for him and left out plenty of water.

Bob sat on the sleeping bag with that sad look in his eyes.

Hell, it was more than his eyes but his whole body. Every inch of him was slouched and melancholy. He kept eyeing Luke, moving his brow up and down in the way dogs do that gives the impression of eyebrows. In Bob’s case, it seemed more than an impression. The dog was sad and disturbed. He seemed to know exactly what Luke was up to and he feared it. He kept whimpering in a very distraught sort of way.

“Don’t worry, Bob,” Luke told him. “I’ll be back.”

I just hope I can still walk in the daylight.

In the house, he
packed what he would need in a nylon duffel: several two-foot pine stakes, his hatchet, the short-handled four-pound sledgehammer, Alger’s .45, two flashlights, and several candles. He threw in a couple bottles of water just in case and then he was ready.

On a whim, he stopped by the Stericki house and gave it a quick once over to see if Anne was about. He didn’t have time to check the attic. Anne had a little digital voice recorder and he took that with to keep a record of what he was doing.

Finally, he crossed the street to the Corbett’s house.

A light snow was coming down and the temperature hung at a near-constant 2
0°
Fahrenheit. He was more worried about Bob than himself. He had originally thought of bringing him with, but if Cliff did indeed rise, the last thing he needed was Bob getting protective and attacking him. Luke had a pretty good idea that a vampire could quite easily gut a dog if they were threatened.

He stepped into the Corbett house and checked it out room by room by room to make sure that if anything woke up at sunset it would only be Cliff. One would be more than enough to handle.

Satisfied, he locked all the doors and secured all the windows. It wouldn’t stop them, but it made him feel better. He turned on every light in the house because unnecessary shadows he did not need.

Finally, he went up to Cliff’s bedroom.

Nothing had changed. He set his bag down, took out a hammer and stake and set them on the table along with the hatchet and .45. Then he got comfortable and played around with Anne’s digital recorder until he figured out how to work it. It was voice-activated and that was exactly what he wanted.

He checked his watch, then started talking:
“I made a promise to you, Sonja, and here’s where I really start keeping it. I don’t think you would approve of what I’m about to do, but I need intelligence and there’s only one way to get it, my darling. I’ve already watched one of them die, so I know the direct sunlight thing does indeed kill them just like in the old movies and those books I’ve been reading by that kook Montague Summers. Tonight, will be an acid test. I hope nothing happens, but I got this funny feeling that something will.”

He
paused and sipped some water. He reached into his pocket and found a pack of cigarettes that had belonged to Alger. He hadn’t smoked in the five years before Vampirus hit, then he started again, sporadically. Sonja would have been pissed. But he needed something to mellow him out. Bad as they were, the nicotine had a way of keeping your mind sharp and your body awake.

Pulling off his cigarette and exhaling, he said,
“Okay, Sonja. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, sunset here in this part of Wisconsin is 4:45 pm. That means by 5:15 it should be full dark out. There’s no twilight this time of year as you know. Day dies quickly and night drops in its place. It’s now 4:12 pm. Even with the lights on, the shadows are growing thick. It’s hard to talk like this when you can barely even swallow. Scared? Yeah, I’m fucking petrified.”

A few more swigs of water, then a few drags off his cigarette.
“This is a really stupid time to bring this up, but as a kid I was afraid of vampires and werewolves and all that shit. I had a cousin—Jimmy? You remember Jimmy? He got drunk at our wedding and puked on your aunt—who was into all that scary shit. Monsters and horror movies and Stephen King and all that weird stuff. I loved Jimmy because he was funny. Funny as all hell. What I didn’t like were sleepovers at his house because we’d always have to watch horror shows. Gah. I dreaded them. I’d have awful nightmares about Frankenstein hiding in my closet and Dracula walking around up on the roof. Sounds silly, I know, but it wasn’t silly back then. Christ. I remember when we’d go Trick-or-Treating, there was this house where these two girls always dressed up like vampires. They were older than us, teenagers. They’d wear the white gowns, put in the fangs, paint their faces white, smear blood all over their mouths. It was just a lark for them but they fucking TERRIFIED me. I used to be afraid to look out my bedroom window on Halloween night because I thought they’d be out there waiting for me. Of course, Jimmy…hah, he’d always make sure we got there at goddamn sundown. Christ, why am I even talking about shit like this?”

He stopped blabbing on and on. He had to calm down and face this entire thing rationally and scientifically. In those old movies Jimmy always insisted they watch at
midnight, Van Helsing was never afraid. He was always one cool customer. You never saw Peter Cushing freaking out. He was always on top of things. Though Luke liked to keep his smoking down to three cigarettes or less a day, he had another one.

“It’s
4:29 now. The shadows are getting very long. It’s still pretty light out, but it won’t last much longer. It’s taking everything I have right now not to gather up my stuff and run right out of here. Poor Bob. He’s all alone. How could I leave him all alone after what he went through last night? I’m chain-smoking now and that’s not doing me any good. The nicotine is making me nervous and fumbly. No more smoking. Between the nicotine and my nerves, my heart feels like it’s skipping in my chest. Time for some deep breathing exercises to calm down.”

He
did just that. After a few minutes, he began to relax. He had to keep mellow here and channel Van Helsing. He had to be cool like Peter Cushing. In charge and ready to fight.

“Okay,
4:43 now. Still nothing. The sun is down but it’s not really dark out yet, just kind of dim. I just looked out the window. The snow looks gray. A few lights have come on. One of them is over at the Skorenska’s. I’ve been meaning to go check on Maddie and the triplets. It should have been my priority. That just shows you where my head is at. There’s a phone here and the landlines, local calls anyway, seem to be working. I could call Maddie right now, but I can’t afford to distract myself. Something is going to happen and I know it.”

He sipped some
more water and waited. He put the .45 on his lap and waited for dark. It was going to be a goddamned long night. He was getting so nervous it felt like he was plugged into a wall socket.

“
4:59 pm. Getting dark outside now. I just opened the closet door to make sure nobody was hiding in there. I even looked under the bed. That’s how it is for me right now. I feel like I’m on the verge of a nervous fucking breakdown. The only thing that helps is channeling hate. Hatred of losing you and Megan, hatred of what those things are doing to this damn town. I have to keep hating. It keeps me sharp. Christ, the shadows are everywhere even with the nightstand lamp on. I’ve removed the shade for better light. It feels like something is crawling up my spine.”