Vampirus (Book 1) (5 page)

“
She’s dead.”

“
She don’t look dead,” Alger said, his voice barely coming. “Shouldn’t she…blacken-up or go purple or something? Swell up? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?”

Yes, that
’s what was supposed to happen, Luke knew.

Her belly was firmly rounded, but other than that
he saw no signs of death. No lividity. No rigor. Nothing. The heat was on and the house was warm, but he smelled no putrefaction at all. Her face was uniformly white and bloodless, save for the smear of red at her lips and the hint of blush at her cheeks. It made no earthly sense.

“
Looks like she could wake up any time,” Alger said.

A fly revived by the heat walked across her cheek. It instinctively knew death. A dozen more buzzed at the window.

Her eyes were closed so Luke pinched one lid between thumb and forefinger and drew it back like a window shade. He gasped. The eye was blank, white, and almost gelid-looking, the pupil nothing but a speck of black like soot. He pulled his fingers away, but the lid remained open. He had seen the eyes of the dead many times and never had they looked like that.

“
Well?” Alger said. “You gonna tell me that’s normal?”

Luke ignored him, staring down at her, darkness filling him and wrapping itself around his throat
until he could barely breathe. His rational mind was having trouble with this, it was swimming upstream against a colossal superstitious dread that he could not necessarily put a name to. He only knew that it was active, ancient, and frightened.

It was late afternoon and the sun would be down within the hour. Already the shadows were thick in the room, tangling up like snakes, sliding out of crevices and sunless corners. That corrupt smell was suddenly stronger, unpleasantly pervasive. There was a dark sweetness to it that made him want to gag.

That inhuman eye seemed to be staring at him.

“
Let’s get out of here,” he said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

Which suggested things and he knew it. But even so, he would not allow his rational brain to connect with that ancient inner sense of impending doom where phantoms wheeled
, as if it might contaminate his good sense, foul his thinking brain, or give his fear a name.

They were almost out the
bedroom door when there was a thump behind them. In the silent house, they both jumped. Linda’s left hand had shifted. It had fallen from her waist and bumped against the wall where it lay unmoving.

They got the hell out.

Outside, Luke felt marginally better…at least until he saw the shadowy façades of all those houses waiting there.

They cut down
Cherry Hill Road to where it intersected with 12
th
Street and then cut off 12
th
onto Post Lane, which brought them back to 13
th
Street the long way. It was the scenic route. He wanted nothing better than to get home, but he needed to take a drive, needed to see some people out and about so he could shake the feeling that Wakefield was slowly becoming a cemetery. He saw some lights coming on in houses. One car idling in a driveway. That was it until they got far down Post to where it joined Springfield. There was a tanker truck parked right in the middle of the road. No flashers on, nothing. Springfield cut up to Sewer Street, which bordered the train yards where the warehouses and freight garages were. The truck must have been heading that way when it died.

As they got up alongside it,
they hopped out and saw the cab door on the driver’s side was wide open. There was no one inside. Just the empty cab, keys still in the ignition. The battery was dead.

“
Must’ve had some kind of mechanical problem,” Luke said, snowflakes powdering his face. “Maybe the driver was sick and wandered off. Maybe.”

Alger looked unconvinced.
“Sure. That must be it.”

They got back in the pickup and drove over to 13
th
. Stepping out into the gathering storm, they just stood there, wordlessly, in the blowing snow. Luke looked tense and Alger looked positively haunted.

“
I’m going to lock my door when I get home,” Alger said. “And I’m not going to open for anyone. You hear a knock at your door tonight, Luke, by God, you better not answer it.”

12

He hadn
’t been to work in weeks by that point and he didn’t suppose he’d ever go back. Just for the hell of it—and maybe out of the need to hear another human voice—he called the garage and Stubby was there. Stubby was the Public Works super and he told Luke that less men showed up every day and if they got a good blizzard, he didn’t know how he was going to handle it. Only Johnny K. and Milt Penney had been showing up regularly. Tiny Christiansen called in two weeks before and hadn’t been heard from since. Even old Ronny Hazek who’d been tailgunning on the back of the honeywagon for forty years—dumping trash cans into the hopper with the zeal of a twenty year old—hadn’t been in for three days. Garbage was piling up. Side streets were unplowed. There were entire neighborhoods without water.

“
Things are going straight to hell, Luke. Ain’t shit we can do but wait and see if it blows over.”

Sure.

Luke knew better. Things were at crisis stage. Even if the plague stopped tomorrow, the country would never be the same. It would be so depopulated that it would take years and years to get things moving again.

The economy was crashing on all fronts. People were dying, people were sick, others too frightened to l
eave their homes. Factories, mills, restaurants, saloons, and malls were empty. Nobody was producing and nobody was buying. Small towns were drying up, cities desolate. Banks closing their doors along with state and federal office buildings. There was nowhere to turn. The infrastructure of the country and the world at large had gone belly-up.

It really took something like this to illustrate just how weak and fragile was a country dependent upon a free market economy. When the money went, so did everything else—goods, services, employment, management of resources and people…all of it went into the shitter.

They were at the outer edge now, Luke knew, the very outer edge of what a government could hope to absorb before complete collapse ensued. Then it would be survival of the fittest.

How long, he wondered, before the electricity
went out?

Until the TV and
radio stations went off the air and the Internet crashed for good?

Until the Army dissolved
into armed bands?

Until the sto
ckpiles of medicine and food dried up and armed assholes were raiding in the streets taking what they wanted by force?

It was coming, he knew, oh God yes, it was coming.

13

One evening he took a ride to grab a few things at the store before there was nothing left. He was amazed at how desolate Wakefield was. By day, it was practically a ghost town, but by night…an absolute graveyard. He saw a police car and a tow truck, but that was about it. It was a cold night, but there should have been
someone
out walking a dog or something. There were 5,000 people in town and they couldn’t
all
be infected…or could they? Almost everything was closed. A few bars were open, but even their neon and Pabst Blue Ribbon signs had only snagged a few customers judging by the vehicles parked out front.

After he grabbed what he could at the A & P (which was mostly canned goods and boxed dinners, being that the fresh food just wasn
’t coming anymore), he stowed his stuff in the bed of the truck and had just jumped behind the wheel when he saw them: a group of eight or ten people whose number quickly swelled to thirty if not forty like metal filings drawn to a central magnet. Maybe it was that or the maybe the infected had some psychic shortwave—
come one, come all, it is the time of the dance.

Regardless, they came.

The first group was about what he’d come to expect in that it looked like when the hysteria got them they’d been in bed. Some were naked, half-naked, others in pajamas and robes. Kids, women, men, it took them all. Unless you actually saw it firsthand it was almost impossible to imagine a group of these
unfortunates
pouring into the streets in the December snow and biting wind and doing their dance.

As he sat there, they
jumped and whirled, turning circles and thrashing on the ground. Some of them looked like they were practicing some crude free-form ballet or interpretative dance because they moved with very studied, repetitious movements; others were just wild and screeching, tearing out their hair and scratching their faces until they bled.

There was n
o music.

Nothing but the wind, the cold, a few snow flurries, and a sliver of pale yellow moon rafting the clouds high above.

Luke was pretty much trapped because there was no way he could get out without backing over one or more of them and he did not trust them not to throw themselves under his wheels. So he locked his doors and waited it out. They danced around the truck, oblivious to his presence—faces pallid and scratched, steaming with hot fever-sweat, eyes huge and wet. They spun about, falling down, getting up or getting crushed beneath the other dancers. They held hands and danced across the street like some insane conga line. If it hadn’t been so horrifying and insane, he supposed it might have been almost funny.

But it wasn
’t funny.

They were bumping into the truck and slapping their faces against the windows.
They all had the same shoebutton doll eyes with horribly dilated pupils like they were tripping their brains out on some real nasty shit.

The
y were not truly dangerous to anyone but themselves (outside of the plague burning hot and communicable within them), but scary all the same. Their faces—so mindless, so empty…like what they had once been was gone or retreating fast and they were waiting for something else to fill up the void.

Within ten or fifteen minutes, they were all down in the snow, shaking and chattering their teeth, puffing out big white clouds of
vapor.

Then the soldiers showed.

They must have been waiting.

A couple trucks rolled down the street and out came the collectors in their gore-streaked Hazmat suits. Like alien invaders harvesting human crops, they came charging out of the shadows and picked up the fallen and started th
rowing them in the back of the trucks…right on top of the others.

Luke jumped out and grabbed one of the soldiers.
“Hey! These people aren’t dead!”

He got shoved aside and two more troopers charged over, putting their M-4 rifles right in his face.

“Wait a minute now,” Luke said, putting his hands up. “I was just saying that—”

“
We heard what you were saying. Now move along. These bodies are contaminated.”

“
But they’re not dead…look, for chrissake! They’re breathing! They’re
moving!”

A rifle barrel was planted dead center of his chest.
“On your way! You don’t get the fuck out of here, you’re going in the truck with them!”

Luke started backing
off. There was nothing he could do. He knew these guys weren’t getting any kicks out of the job they were doing. As usual, it was the soldiers and the cops who had to clean up the mess. Nobody was going to be exactly sane after spending all day tossing corpses into trucks and dumping them into burning pits, but those people were still alive. But it was beyond him to help them.

When the others moved off, one of the soldiers came over.
“These bodies have to be burned,” he said. Even through the gas mask Luke could hear the voice of a kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen, whose world had not only been turned upside down and inside out, but had become some Medieval nightmare of plague pits and mass graves. An eighteen or nineteen year old voice fractured by stress and fragmented with horror. It was like listening to a dying old man trying to mock the voice of his seventeenth summer: “I’m sorry, mister, I really am. But they have to be burned right away. We can’t wait. Tomorrow night, the night after…they’ll…they’ll…”

“
They’ll what?”

“
You don’t wanna know. Just move along, okay?” he said, trying hard to muster some sympathy, some humanity. “These guys aren’t fucking around. Their own families have been going into the pits…please just get out of here.”

So Luke got in his truck and drove off and the way those masked soldiers had been watching him, he was surprised they let him go at all.

14

In his notebook, he wrote:

All the schools in
Wakefield have been closed for three weeks. Most of the state and government offices are shut down. People are afraid to gather together anywhere. They don’t even go to the mall to shop or to the bars to drink. Very few people even go to church on Sundays, from what I’ve been hearing. Things are breaking down on every conceivable level.