Vampirus (Book 1) (32 page)

That weird tripping sense clicked on in his head and he saw Bob’s last moments. He saw who, or more precisely,
what
had done it.

He shut the door to the shed and smoked one of Stephani’s cigarettes
until the images faded and he relaxed.

Stephani wiped tears from her eyes. “It…it was RedEye
, wasn’t it?”

“No. It was Anne Stericki.” He pulled off the cigarette. “She was my neighbor. Now she’s one of them. But…but I think she did it because he told her to.”

Bob had tried to fight when the vampires came out while Luke was out cold beneath the coaling station. The undead had torn him up badly with their claws. Still, he managed to escape. It took him most of the night to make it back to the house where he waited outside the garage door for Luke to come back. He was still waiting there the next night at sundown. That’s when Anne had come for him.

Luke pushed it from his head. He went
into the garage and gathered the last of his stakes from his stockpile that Anne had not used on Bob. His duffel of goodies was out on the sled and Stephani followed him out there.

“
Stakes,” she said after a time, hefting her BowTech crossbow. “Of all things.”

He
managed a thin smile. “It just proves I’m not as smart as you.”

He grabbed some clothes, a box of shells for the .45 Smith, and packed them under the seat of the Polaris.
He took his duffel and walked up the sidewalk, remembering, thinking, feeling the cold down deep inside of him. There were a few flurries in the air, but it was the cold more than anything. That was the enemy today. The wind was blowing and moaning, the sun above just a hazy disk in the sky.

“Do you feel up to doing this today?” Stephani asked him.

“Yes.”

“
Where do we start?”

“
Anywhere.”

“
All right, let’s start with that one,” Stephani suggested.

The Stericki house.

Luke hesitated, not knowing if he could really go in there again. All he could think of was Alger and Anne. Alger who’d been an absolute yard-happy dipshit year after year after year and then had become his friend once the plague settled in; and Anne who’d always been nice, friendly, funny with the sarcasm she reserved for her husband and who, after death, had become a very methodical and cunning vampire.

And the last thing Bob saw in this world.

He had wanted to stake Anne all along, but now it was an obsession. He had to destroy her. Bob deserved that and so did all the others she parasitized.

Luke let his eyes wander from house to house and as they did so, he could feel that exhilaration rising in him, that electricity in his belly. His eyes did not blink and his
mouth hung open and the duffel dropped from his hand. The Corbetts and the Pruitts. The Moravecs and the Skorenskas. The Laskas and VanDannings. His neighbors.
His neighbors. He could see them. He could see the horror overtaking them…

From somewhere, perhaps miles away, he heard Stephani calling out to him, but her
voice was soon lost in the fog as he looked at the Skorenska house across the street.

He was…

He was going on a trip.

76

When Maddie Skorenska wakes pale and feverish in her bed to the thin, weak sunlight of a winter
’s morning, her first thought is of her triplets—Jade, Jenna, and Jonah—and how very quiet they are. But in her confused, reeling mind, Maddie is not truly surprised because as much as she has tried to pretend otherwise she knows her babies have the germ, that Vampirus has gotten to them as it has now gotten to her.

She listens to the flies buzzing on the walls.

She rolls over, away from the patch of sunlight that feels unpleasantly hot on her arm, and tries to think, tries to make sense of it all. She is surprised to find that Allen is not there as her fingers explore the empty quadrant of the bed. Then she remembers that he is dead. That the Army has taken him away. Was that last week or was it the week before? On previous days there were tears and grief and a crushing devastation that her husband was gone, but today there is only a quiet and easy acceptance.

The babies.

Oh yes, my loves, mama is coming, mama is coming.

Maddie stands up, the room spinning on its axis for a moment before stabilizing. Her blurring eyesight clear
s. She moves towards the window. The sunlight is too bright, too hot, it makes her stomach roil in greasy waves of nausea. With slender, trembling fingers, she pulls down the shade and a comfortable dimness descends and something in the back of her mind—embryonic, unformed, but gaining a macabre sort of definition by the day—whispers to her of dark earth, cool soil, and the enclosing confines of concrete entombment.

This makes her smile.

She stumbles out into the hallway, so tired, so weak she has to lean up against the wall for a time to steady herself. She tries to remember the last time she’s eaten and cannot. She tried some soup a few days ago but the smell made her sick and the taste made her shake with nausea. When she swallowed it, just few spoonfuls, it all came rushing back up with a thin, watery vomit that smelled positively rank and diseased.

“
Mama’s coming,” she says in a hollow voice that she barely recognizes as her own.

Her brain is reeling with conflicting thoughts and emotions—fear, guilt, horror, panic, worry—but none of it seems to make any sense suddenly as a shadow of stark alien impulses covers it, buries it in darkness. And for one frightening moment she cannot seem to remember where she is or what she is doing. There is something in the back of her mind, a subtle and worrisome sort of scratching at the back of her skull, that makes her want to run, to leap out the nearest window into the snow and shriek and whirl in the streets.

She nearly does…then her motherly instinct supersedes.

She
goes to the children’s room, stands in the doorway for a moment with a blank look in her eyes. Vague memories parade through her mind. Something concerning her and a man decorating this room, stripping old mustard-colored wallpaper and replacing it with a festive paper of dancing balloons and clowns. She can see them laughing, touching one another, overjoyed with the beauty of what they have brought to being and what the future will hold.

Gone, gone, gone.

She sees another shape in her mind that obscures the memory. This shape is dark and fluid and she cannot say that it is a man exactly. She can only see the eyes, which are red and luminous as he moves towards her bed and presses his cold lips to her throat.

But then it
’s gone, too. In her mind there is nothing…just drifting fuzz.

Maddie scratches at her head, pulling out strands of hair with her long, splintered nails. She rakes red welts down the side of her face. She stares down into the crib with glassy, unfocused eyes. She touches the punctures at her throat and they give her secret pleasure beyond name.

What, what what—

Her babies, her wonderful perfect beautiful babies, Jade, Jenna, and Jonah, the triplets, sleeping side by side in harmony like cold fish in a bucket.

Cold?

Yes, yes, Maddie looks across the room and the shade is moving. The window is open. Now why would the window be open? Brushing dead flies from the sill, she lifts the shade and the December sunlight hits her and she gags, gasps, nearly goes down to her knees. Cool sweat rolls down her face as she shuts the window and—thankfully—pulls the shade down.

Back to the children.

Somewhere in her brain there is a voice crying out in pain at what she is seeing, trying to warn her about something, but Maddie does not hear it. She looks down at her angels sleeping side-by-side, moon-faced, pale as cream, pink lips like juicy blossoms, their bright blue eyes wide open and staring up at the ceiling, sightless and soulless and somehow malignant.

A fly, sluggish from the cold crawls across Jenna’s lips.

Maddie pulls the baby blanket up to their chins, smiling down at their dead faces, never once seeing them for the leeched husks they are and never once noticing the puncture mar
ks in their soft, white throats or the bloody handprint on the crib rail that belongs to Anne Stericki.

Maddie kisses their cold heads and stumbles off to bed.

Sleep. She needs sleep.

She knows she will feel better when the sun goes down.

77

The entire neighborhood.

Anne spread it through the entire fucking neighborhood.

Many had the germ already, but that didn’t stop her from fastening onto them in the night and sucking at their throats, drawing off blood from their already dangerously weakened bodies. Some of her victims went into the burning pits, Luke figured, but not all of them. He was certain, for a fact, that if he were to go over to the Skorenska house he would find Maddie and the triplets.

“I’m not going to do that,” he
said out loud. “I…I just can’t bear that. Not yet.”

He realized Stephani was staring at him. She had watched him come out of his trip and now she was watching him talk to himself. “What can’t you bear?”

“To go into the house over there,” he said, jabbing a thumb in its direction. “I know what’s waiting there and I know who caused it.”

“We don’t have time today anyway,” she said. “It’
s almost quarter to five.”

H
e checked his watch. He had 4:46.

He wondered then how long the trips actually lasted. He had assumed only a few minutes or so, but apparently they were like some kind of fugue or trance that went on for some time. When he saw Maddie and the triplets, it must have been in real time. How long had it taken her to wake up, to realize that Allen was dead, to finally get out of bed, stumble drunkenly down the hallway, confused and disoriented, and make it to the triplet’s room where she stood staring down at them for God knows how long? A healthy individual could have done the whole thing in minutes, but Maddie was hardly healthy.

“How long was I gone?” he asked Stephani.

“On your vision?”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

She shrugged. “About twenty minutes. I was thinking I might have to throw you on the sled and take you home if you didn’t come out of it.”

“When I see the things it must be in real time.”

“What are you talking about exactly?”

“The trips, the visions. I’m gone with them for however long the actual incident took place. I’m like a fly on the wall. I’m seeing something that has already happened and I’m seeing it in real time.”

“Is that important somehow?”

“I don’t know.”

But, yes, it was important. If it w
ere fifteen minutes to sundown, say, and he went on a thirty minute trip, then he was going to be in trouble. He sighed. He didn’t like any of it and he did not want any of it. Life was hard enough these days without going out of your head for extended periods of time and with very little warning. What good was any of it really? Where would any of it get him? Did it empower him in any way to know that Count RedEye had torn grooves in the wall of his house? Did it get him anywhere to know that Anne had indeed been slaking her thirst in the neighborhood, going from house to house? It was confirmation of what he already suspected, but it really advanced him in no way that he could think of. It just turned anxieties and worries into reality and that gained him nothing.

“We should go, Luke.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Tomorrow we can come back and start
early, go house to house and do what has to be done.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

He turned away with her in the direction of the sleds and he seized up. He could not move. It was like he was welded to the spot. He wasn’t going on a trip exactly, but a bolt of utter fear had shot through him. His heart skipped a beat and then another. A hollow terror rushed from his belly up into his chest. His mouth was opening and closing. No, this wasn’t a trip, this wasn’t knowledge of something that had already happened, it was something else. Something right now. Something important.

“Luke,” Stephani said. “Good God, are you okay?”

“Yes,” he managed.

He stood there and something in him turned him around, making him face down the block at the houses down there. He was like a compass needle being drawn to magnetic north.

The Pruitt house. You better get to the Pruitt house.

He ran over to the sled and grabbed his duffel and stumbled through the snow down the block. Stephani was calling out to him, but he was not listening now. He could not hear her. His mind was focused and directed at something in the Pruitt house. He fought through the snow and up the porch, vaguely hearing Stephani trying to catch up with him.

As soon as he got the door open, he smelled the corruption.

Yes, it was here.

Something was here.

The one he sought was hiding here.