Vampirus (Book 1) (30 page)

Towards the end, he woke in the darkness,
white with fear. Something was in the house, something was moving like a stillborn breath of October. He knew it and his heart leaped in his chest.
Move! Get up! Make ready! Do something!
But as he tried, he grew weak and fell back into bed, panting. He could hear the dead winter night circling the house like a banshee moaning at the eaves. But it was not the wind; it was something more. Then he could hear it coming up the stairs: quiet, careful, a thing of stealth and stolen midnights. The old house grew uneasy with the invasion. It held its breath, then let it out in a cool sibilance of despair. Joists creaked. Beams groaned. The brick chimney made a whispering sound. It was the sound a deserted house would make at three in the morning: ghost-memories parading down its warped hallways in stocking feet, hands sliding down banisters, laughter from a distant room, the shifting of heavy trunks in the attic, whispers on the back porch.

Yes, the sound of invasion, something breaking the fabric of night.

Luke lifted his head off the pillow and for once it did not pound. Okay. A weapon. Something he could strike with, but he knew there was nothing. His heart slammed in his chest, his limbs shook, shivers ran down his spine, his breath strangled in his throat.

The door opened and a form stepped in.

It was Stephani, just Stephani, but for a moment it was something else, something hideous and hungry in the form of a bent old hag with hair like trailing cobwebs and a face carven from yellow wax, teeth gnashing and claws dragged over the wall like ten penny nails. Hallucination. That’s all. That’s all. Stephani came over to him. “Can’t you sleep?” she asked.

“
I thought I heard something.”

“
You heard me. I was double-checking things.”

“
I thought it was something else.”

“
It wasn’t.”

He expected to drift
back off immediately or break into a sweat as he always did, as if the mere effort of speaking were too much. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“
I catnap,” she admitted. “Ever since…ever since this started I haven’t been able to sleep much.”

They chatted for a few minutes then he went out again.

The next morning he awoke and it was like he had never slept, like maybe he had only pretended to be unconscious. Regardless, it was over and he knew it. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the nightmare form of Aunt Lucy hovering over him, an evil ghost in a rotting shroud, crooked teeth jutting from pale gums.

But it was over and he let it be over.

It was all a bad dream and like any dream it would fade in time. He would let it fade because it was for the best. Somehow, in the blackness, he had found a single shaft of light and followed it out of the graveyard darkness and into the world of the living. He knew that light was Stephani. He had lost his own wife and daughter and now here was something else to covet and protect; he would not leave her to fight alone.

“
You look better,” Stephani said.

“
I think I might live. But I’m hungry.”

“That’s a very good sign,” she said, her eyes wet.

He swallowed. “Bob…did Bob come back?”

She shook her head.

When she went to get him some broth, wiping tears from her face, fraught with guilt that was unnecessary but deep-hewn, he took inventory of himself and knew that despite being a bit weak and dizzy-feeling in the head, he would be okay. Yet…something had changed. Something had shifted inside him and it would never be the same again.

He could not put a name to it.

He only knew that he
was
different. The virus hadn’t been able to claim him, but its legacy was still there. No, he would not sleep by day and knock at windows by night. This was a subtle thing, but it was there. It troubled him so he closed his eyes and remembered, trying to make sense of all that had happened.

But there was no sense to it.

Count RedEye had spared him. He was supposed to go home where no doubt Sonja and Megan were waiting for him. Maybe a dozen others led by Anne Stericki. The only thing that had saved him was coming here and RedEye had tried to punish him for that by putting Aunt Lucy on him. But that, it seemed, hadn’t worked either.

But Bob…where was Bob?

If they got him, they would have done horrible things to him, to that kind, loyal, smart old dog. The idea of that brought Luke as much pain as he’d known since his wife and daughter had passed away.

He calmed himself, letting his mind drift away.

It did not just drift, it rocketed right out of his skull.

73

He sees Anne Stericki in her deathbed, breathing shallowly, grinning into the night. In the room down the
hall, Alger sobs in his sleep but she is oblivious to him. The virus is raging hot through her body, her conception of the world she occupied for so long is narrowing. It is being blocked out by the malefic shadow of something much bigger than herself, much as drawn shades block out the painful rays of the sun. There is a sound at the window and though she makes no sound, her lips part and form the words she must say, must utter into the velvet blackness of forever night. The window slides open and a rustling crow-black form slides into the room. It hovers over her like a human buzzard, its breath stinking of violated caskets and graveyard ditches. She coos words to it and it seizes her left hand in long yellow fingers that are colder than death. Its presses an unclean, gray-lipped mouth to her wrist and nips it with needle-like incisors. When the blood flows, it sips at the opened artery almost daintily as its black, pointed tongue jabs the wounds, widening them until her blood runs in hot, salty, crimson rivers that it battens its mouth to, gulping down obscenely, slobbering and sucking. Anne, barely alive, runs one trembling hand over its scabrous, narrow, rodent-like face, touching the blue-white flesh almost tenderly. She looks into its hollow-socketed eyes, which were a gelid white like bulging frog-spawn when it came into the room and are now a juicy ruby-red, luscious and bleeding. She smiles at her own desecration that is darkly sweet and secret. Had she been sane, she would have screamed…

74

Luke opened his eyes.

First, the dream of the town dying.

Now
, one of Anne Stericki being drained by some malevolent haunter of the dark who could only be Count RedEye himself…or
itself.

Again, his mind had gone on a trip and no longer did he believe it was simple fever delirium left over from the bite Aunt Lucy had given him, some lingering after-effect of the infection itself. No, this was nothing as simple as hallucination. The infection had p
assed. His body had beaten off Vampirus. Maybe he would never know why, but it had and he was healthy again, he was whole, and the
trips
—as he called them—were not part of the sickness. That was gone now. Whatever they were, they were part and parcel of who he now was.

Sitting there
in Stephani’s house, staring out the window at the snow, he realized how rigid he was. The muscles of his stomach weren’t just tight, they were clutching hard like a fist. He forced himself to relax, to unwind inch by inch. Whenever he came out of a trip he was like this.
Easy.
Breathe in, breathe out. Better. Yes, this was the legacy of the bite. He pressed his fingers to the puncture wounds at his neck. They had healed, yet he could still feel them. And when he went on a trip, they tingled, sometimes they burned. It was connected. It was all connected.

The trip he had taken was incredibly vivid as they all were.

They seemed to come and go with shocking regularity. He had them during his illness and he was still having them. Three-minute mind movies that came at night, in the day, whether he was sleeping or wide awake. Each time he would come out of them gasping and terrified.

He had
had visions of burning pits and corpse factories, death-dancing plague victims, empty towns and cities…and now Anne Stericki being drained by that thing.

Coming out it, he
felt a rage inside of him for Vampirus, for its invasion and infecting of the body of the world, the death and horror and madness it had unleashed. The grief. The pain. The terror. But more so, he felt an absolute ice-cold hatred for the Carriers themselves. Maybe, realistically, he should not have hated them for they were victims, vectors the virus used to spread itself…yet he did hate them. He wanted to kill every one of them.

It
’s not all of them you want, though, now is it? You want Sonja and you want Megan and Anne, of course. There’s no peace of mind until your wife and daughter are returned to death and you know it.

“
Yes, that’s the priority,” he said aloud. “That has to be the priority.”

He reached over for Stephani
’s cigarettes and lit one, drawing in deeply. It tasted like shit, but the smoke was not what he wanted: it was the nicotine. Even now, his smoking was sporadic…but the nicotine, yes, now there was a miracle drug if ever there was one. Caffeine couldn’t hope to compete with it. Already, he could feel his thoughts sharpening, his powers of intuition focusing, his brain working like a machine.

“
Are you talking to yourself again?” Stephani asked as she entered the room. “I just threw a few logs into the woodstove.”

“
You don’t have to do that anymore,” he told her. “You have a man in the house now.”

She smiled at that.
“I prefer to feel useful.”

She sat next to him on the sofa and they held hands. Her own was smooth-skinned, delicate-feeling in his own callused mitt, the fingers long and thin. It felt good to hold her hand, this woman who had been his high school fantasy and was now his friend and lover. This woman who had shot a crossbow bolt into the hag that was feeding on him and then selflessly nursed him through the infection at great danger to herself. He still missed his own wife, but Sonja was gone now and Stephani was here. He drew strength from that because he knew Sonja would not want him to be alone.

“Did you have another one?” Stephani asked.

He nodded, pulling
off the cigarette. “But I’m beginning to understand.”

“They’ll go away. You went through a lot.”

“No,” he said, “It’s more than that. That bite did something to me, Steph. I’m not the same person I was before. Something in me has changed.”

“
You’re scaring me.”

He almost laughed at that.
Scared? This woman?
The one who had killed her vampiric aunt, dragged her corpse out into the snow and beheaded it, then still had the energy—and sanity—to nurse him through his malady. It was hard to imagine her being scared. In his eyes, she was tough, capable, and infinitely resourceful…but not scared. He decided then that fear was part and parcel of their existence in the world of the thirsty dead. It was not something to cringe from; it was part of their toolkit. What was fear anyway? Just instinctive terror, an early warning radar system that tried to keep you safe from harm. No, it was an instinct to be cultivated, a faculty to be developed.

He told Stephani what he
had “tripped out on” and then said, “It was lucid. It was crystal clear. I’m seeing things I could not have seen before the bite. I think…I think I can see things and know things I couldn’t before.”

She did not look incredulous at the possibility.
“Like you’re psychic?”

“
I don’t know. Maybe in a way…but not in the common sense. It’s there, like flashes of light in my head, a switch being turned off and on…but I can’t control it. At least not yet.”

But when I can, my dear, when I can…I have a feeling I’ll be very dangerous to them.

He had to turn away from Stephani’s green eyes because they were too filled with questions, with doubt, and with anxiety. She did not like the idea that the bite had left something behind in him, heightened some sense. It scared her. It really did. Maybe she thought that it wasn’t over, that the virus could still take him. But he wasn’t worried about that. He had beaten it with her help. This…whatever it was…was not something to be scared of. Like anything else, it was a tool now and he would use it. It made him think of Sonja out there. Megan, too, but mainly Sonja. How disgusted and offended she would have been to know she would become a vampire after death…it was in direct contradiction to everything she was and everything she believed in. In his mind he could see her wandering through the snow and wind, clinging to the shadows, drunken with blood and driven by cold appetite, a vessel filled with stark evil.

The suffering in her soul would be beyond measure.

He pulled off his cigarette and butted it. “It’s time to get back to work,” he said. “Every one of them we get will be one more that won’t get us.”

“
Are you sure you’re up to it?”

“
I think I’m up to it like never before.”

She sighed.
“All right. Let me get my crossbow.”

He loved the crossbow thing
. It had never occurred to him. But Stephani had been on the archery team in high school. She’d been number two or three in the state on the longbow. Since then she’d taken up target practice with the crossbow and bear hunting with the compound bow. It was hard to imagine her out in the woods stalking bear, but she had been good at it. There was something predatory in her. She was a little huntress by nature.