Vampirus (Book 1) (25 page)

And that he knew was one of the biggest mistake
s he’d made.

Not just because of the horror it brought him but the living death it brought
Megan. Through misguided love and parental tenderness he had spared her the cleansing flames and condemned her to an eternity as a night-walking seven-year old ghoul, an evil ghost, a fucking leech that existed to drain the life from her victims. An invasive, pathogenic virus in the form of a little girl. That’s what he had done with his soft heart. The thing he had loved best in this world had become the object of the greatest horror he could imagine: his wife was out there, too, and he had loved her with his heart and soul while she was alive, but never did she have the power over him that Megan had.

That scared him.

Because he could fight the others, but his daughter was a different story.

Stephani went on and on about what she had done and Luke could feel her pain that was bone-deep and in his mind he could hear her words which had been the very ones he had told himself at the time:
What was I supposed to do, Luke? He was my boy, my baby boy…I couldn’t let them do that to him. I just couldn’t. When I let them take Burt and put him in the pits, it tore my guts out, but to put Petey in there…no, no, no, dear God in heaven, no, I couldn’t allow it. It would tear out my soul. You can live without your guts, Luke, but you can’t live without your soul. Can you understand that? Can you understand why I did what I did? Can you? Can you?

“
I can understand,” he told her. “Believe me I can.”

Stephani lit a cigarette as tear
s squeezed from her red-rimmed eyes. “I…I wrapped him in a blanket. I took him to my mom and dad’s house. They were both dead. I took him out in the garage and put him there under the shelf thinking I could bury him in the spring.” She laughed a cold, dry cackle. “Stupid, crazy, idiotic, bitch. I did it even though I knew what would happen…”

But tha
t was what love did to you and Luke understood it so well that he lived in Stephani’s skull as she poured out her torment, because her torment was his own. She waited after that, praying the Rosary like a good Catholic for her boy to be spared the evil of resurrection. She knew the old stories. She knew that the newly risen would come after their family first, they would seek their loved ones as they always had, knocking on their doors in the dead of night, standing there in the cerements of the grave. And why not? Grief is a terrible thing. The parting of death is traumatic. There’s nothing you want back more than your lost son or daughter or wife. Under normal circumstances if something from a tomb knocks at the door at midnight, you would not answer it. But grief has its own priorities and even if you know your beloved has returned as a festering malignancy, hope springs eternal and you
will
open that door, the depths of your pain will demand it, your suffering will compel you.

Three days after he was interred in the garage as it were, Petey came home.

He stood outside Steph’s locked bedroom door.
“Mama,”
he said.
“Please let me in. I’m so cold. I’m so so cold. I’m freezing.”

“
I…I can’t,” Stephani told him, everything inside her breaking apart like white ice. “Please go back…go back…”

“
Mama…please. I love you…open the door.”

“
No…” Steph sobbed. “Oh no…”

But already she had betrayed herself: she was standing before the door reaching for the knob. Then she looked at the rosary and forced herself back to bed.

He scratched at the door like a dog will scratch to get in.
“Mama, we can be together like always. It won’t hurt. Nothing will hurt again. You never feel anything again. There’s nothing. They make it so.”

Steph shook her head, but again betrayed herself:
“Come in, please come in…oh mama misses her boy…she loves him so much…”

The door did not open. Petey entered the room by slipping between the door and the jamb like a waft of dark mist and then he was standing there. His face was pallid, his eyes
huge and black and empty. He was smiling and she could see how his teeth had grown long and sharp in death. There were snowflakes in his hair. He held out his hands to her and they were pale with thorny yellow nails.

“
Mama,”
he said.
“Oh, Mama…”

He should have had her but she would not allow it. Her hand brought up the rosary and she told him to go back
, that he was no longer welcome in her house. He screamed and became a shadow that left the way it had come. She could hear him circling the eaves of the house like a fierce November gale or perhaps a banshee, screaming and screaming. Then he was gone.

“
When the sun came up,” Steph said, exhaling smoke, “I went to the garage. He was still wrapped in the blanket as I’d left him. His arm had fallen free but other than that it looked like he hadn’t moved. I carried him out into the sunlight and pulled the blanket from him. I heard him scream again and I ran until I couldn’t run anymore.” She sipped her coffee, spilling most of it. “I went back later…I saw something black and twisted in the snow. It was breaking apart in the wind.”

Luke
let her complete her tale and she seemed calmer as she got to the end and got it off her soul. The pain had been lanced and she needed that. Her story was like an instrument she strummed and she could not stop until she had finished her melancholy song and when she had, she burst into tears. Luke knew that the proper thing to do was to hold her, yet he was almost afraid to. He felt sick and weak. His breath would barely come. It was like the anguish pouring out of her was not hers alone, but his as well. All the sorrow and grief he’d felt was being channeled through her. He wanted to crawl deeper into his shell where it was cool and dark because he feared the light of her emotion and the glow of her heart. It shook the emptiness inside him and made him start to feel things he had not felt in months.

It
’s so easy to be a killer,
he thought.
So easy to be the beast of vengeance. To stuff yourself with hate and remorse and killer instinct and stake the undead. But it’s hard to come to grips with your feelings and admit your loss.

Knowing this
, he laughed at the boy inside the man and the man who would never really be anything but a boy. He took hold of her then, this woman who had been the girl of his dreams. He pulled her close and held her the way he had held his wife and daughter as they had died and felt Stephani melt into him and become part of him and that was the true face of his fear: emotional commitment. He was terrified to care and love. That path brought pain in the end. But she felt right in his arms and he did not let go of her.

“
Easy,” Luke said. “It’ll be okay. Easy.”

But did he believe that? Did he really believe that? At that moment,
yes,
and it was enough. Let the fear and uncertainty that would come later take care of itself. Making a connection with another human being warmed him in places he did not know he was cold. He held onto Steph and the joy he felt was bigger than anything he had known in a long, long time. She unlocked him and he felt himself sobbing over the loss of Sonja and Megan and after a time it was hard to tell who was holding whom.

Twenty minutes later, they broke it off before their communal commiseration became something else that they were definitely not ready for.

He remembered the last time he had seen her. What he had said. “You should come with me so neither of us will be alone.”

But she shook her head.
“I can’t.”

Luke felt something going cold in him again.
“No?”

“
My Aunt Lucy is upstairs,” she said. “Her heart’s bad and she can’t take care of herself. She’s an old woman. She hasn’t been right since this started. I can’t leave her.”

“
No, of course not.”

“
I don’t think she has much time left. She hasn’t been doing very good.”

They discussed that situation and decided they would leave things as they were for the time being. Luke thought about moving in there, but Stephani had not asked him to and he wasn
’t going to force the issue. If she wanted him to, she would say so. And if she didn’t…well, maybe he was reading more into all this than there really was. As much as he wanted to warm to his feelings for her (which literally seemed to come out of nowhere) he knew he had to maintain his façade. It was important to who and what he now was.

H
e checked his watch. It was 3:15.

“
You have to leave?”

“
Yeah. There’s one more thing I have to do before sunset.”

“
Can’t it wait?” Steph said. “I could make you something to eat.”

Food sounded good, but he refused it. Maybe next time. There was too much to do and if he stayed and got comfortable with the domesticity of the situation it might make him happy and fat and lazy like a tomcat sunning itself on a window ledge. He could not allow that. He was not going to hunt any more Carriers this day. He knew that much. But he desperately needed to get out to the burning pits.
That’s where he got most of his gasoline: from the big tankers parked out there in the snow. The fuel had been used to burn the dead. The National Guard was gone now, but their fuel was conveniently left behind.

“
Please stay,” Steph said.

He shook his head. He wanted to. He very much wanted to. But he had the weirdest feeling that he needed to get out to the pits and he had long since
learned to trust the instinct and intuition that kept him alive. This was important only he could not be sure why.

“
Will you come back?”

“
Yes.”

He kicked the snow away from the front door so it could be shut and locked and then left. She watched him leave and it had been hard not to meet her eyes, but he knew if he did he would never leave again.

He walked out into the snow, still pulling his gloves on.

Bob wasn’t too happy about leaving, but once he got out in the fresh air, he began to do his happy dance
: jumping and leaping for joy.
On the road again, Luke. Just you and me gettin’ her done. That’s the way.

The fresh air cleared Luke’
s head and narrowed his mind.

The feelings were fading and he felt better. He was seeing the world the way it really was and that hardened him. It wasn
’t about love and relationships, friendship and comfort any longer; it was about survival and the cold, grim actions that it required. That’s all there was and maybe that’s all there ever had been when you pulled away the fancy crepe and pretty cotton candy floss. In his mind he saw towns and cities that were graveyards, buildings nothing but night-cool mossed headstones rising against the moon above.  He saw the Dance of the Red Death. He saw the moon-pallid faces of the walking dead with their huge, black, empty eyes like mirrors reflecting the soulless vacuum within.

And then he
saw Stephani.

Pr
etty, green-eyed Stephani, a shiny dark braid thrown over one shoulder. She was laughing. She was smiling. She was kissing him. And then she pulled away and her face went the color of old cemetery marble. Her eyes were not green now, but yellow and luminous, her teeth long and sharp and white as death itself. Then it wasn’t Stephani at all. It was Sonja holding out pale hands to him with nails blackened by the tomb, touching him with grave-cold fingers. She smelled of black earth and casket linings. There were maggots in the folds of her shroud.

“
My darling,”
she said.

64

The air was icy as he drove out to the burning pits.
The faster he drove, the more the wind bit into him until his face felt like white glass that might break apart at any moment. But it was good. It refreshed and enlivened him and he sucked the glacial air into his lungs in great hungry gulps, mainlining on the invigoration it provided. He needed to clear his head. The last thing he expected when he crawled out of bed this morning was to be dealing with the kind of emotions Stephani had inspired in him. Not her fault, of course, it was just that he had locked it all away deep inside for so long that to have it come running out of him again was almost physically painful.

Stephani.

He didn’t know what to think of her. She needed help and he would help her. There was no doubt of that. She was a friend (and heart-throb) from high school and he hadn’t really thought of her much while he was with Sonja. They were happily married. He never strayed. He never wanted to. Sonja was beautiful, wise, and wonderfully unique in so many ways.

But she
’d been gone two months now,
over
two months.

And it wasn
’t until he held Stephani in his arms that he realized how very, painfully lonely he had become. The crazy thing was, he could feel that teenage crush taking hold of him again and was that the stirrings of love or just the connection with a living, breathing woman? A little of both, he figured. But mostly it was the grief. Because they had both been through nearly identical traumas. Fate had a way of throwing people like that together, fusing their destinies into one.