Undead as a Doornail

by William F Aicher

  The man didn’t answer, but instead simply stared at us with his glassy eyes, apparently thinking this over. Deep in thought, he chewed at his lip---poking a hole right through with his exposed fang. I slow trickle of blood dripped from it and plopped onto the dusty porch.

  “What is the last thing you remember?” Sofi stepped forward, even with me but still on our side of the doorway. “I am told your daughter went missing.”

  At the mention of his daughter, the man’s eyes lit up and darted back and forth between Sofi and me. He absently wiped the trickle of blood from his chin and spoke, “Yes. Days ago. My princess. I try to find her. In cemetery. Then… then I do not remember. Then I am here.”

  “That was quite a while ago,” I replied. “Days for sure. What have you been eating? Where have you been sleeping?”

  He stared back at me with a blank and said, “I do not know.”

  I took a minute to think things over. Try to figure out our next move here, since obviously, this guy didn’t know a damn thing about where the other vampires were. He didn’t even think he was a vampire. Though I guess I couldn’t blame him. It can take a few days or even a few weeks for the whole vampire thing to take hold completely. Usually, when people are just turning, their body switches faster than their mind. Full comprehension of what you’ve become is a gradual process, and he was still in the midst of it.

  “Sofi, grab the keys. We’re going for a drive,” I said. “You, you’re going to take us back to the last place you can remember. Back to the cemetery.”

  “And if I do not?”

  “If you don’t…” I hefted the stake in my hand, feeling the weight of it, and pointed it at him. “If you don’t, I’m going to shove this chunk of wood right through your chest and laugh while I watch you die.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Less than five minutes later, we were back in the dead man’s car, me in the front driver’s seat and Sofi in the back with our vampire farmer. I considered asking him his name, then decided against it. No point in getting too personal. It’s a lot harder to stab someone when you have an emotional bond.

  “So, here’s the deal,” I said, over my shoulder. “We’re going to go back to the cemetery, and you’re not going to give us any trouble. Then you’re going to take us on a little tour. Show us anything that might seem familiar. Maybe someplace that calls to you. While we’re driving, you’re not going to give us any trouble, or my friend back there will take care of you.”

  Sofi, sitting to the man’s left, held a stake out a few inches in front of his chest. She brought it forward slowly and pressed it against his shirt, digging it through the fabric into his flesh. “You fuck with us, I will stake you,” she said, pulled the stake back, and wiggled it threateningly.

  “I tell you, I am no—”

  “Just shut the hell up,” I commanded. “You’ll talk when I tell you to talk.”

  “Yes. You listen. Otherwise…” This time she ground the stake harder against his chest. So hard, in fact, that tears of blood began to well up in his eyes.

  “You see that? You’re crying blood. And you say you’re not a vampire.” As we turned off the driveway onto the main road, I hit the accelerator. Although we appeared to have the upper hand here, I didn’t trust the situation. Any vampire with full faculties wouldn’t be so … understanding. Even if his afterlife was on the line, a fully-formed vampire would never do what we were asking. Victims of a hive mentality, where the one rule you don’t break is never put the leader in danger, you could never force a vampire to lead you where I wanted this one to go. For now, we were safe. But if he progressed any further, we’d have a bloody battle on our hands—one Sofi was very likely to lose.

  A few miles down the road, a pungent odor began to waft through the car into my nostrils. The only thing I’d ever smelled with such a terrible stink was a rotting corpse or a vampire’s breath. But the vampire in the back seat had followed our orders completely, not even opening his mouth to breathe. Just as I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, the vampire gagged and coughed.

  “Please, open the window,” he begged. Then he turned to Sofi and said, “And you think I am the dead one? You are sure nothing is dead inside of you?”

  Sofi blushed and rolled down her window with her free hand.

  “That was you?” I asked, choking on the air. “Jesus, Sofi. That’s disgusting.”

  “I am not good with beans.”

  Not wanting to risk breathing in any more rancid air, I didn’t answer. Instead, I held my breath, rolled down my window, and kept driving until we finally rolled into the cemetery parking lot. As the car pulled to a stop, tires crunching on the dusty gravel, I swung open the door and hopped out. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks, or maybe it was the ecstasy still swimming through my system, but I swear a green cloud of noxious gas poured out the open door behind me. Sofi climbed out of the car close behind, and I considered shutting slamming the car doors shut and leaving the vampire to stew in Sofi’s broth. A kind of chemical warfare torture device, if you will. But even I can’t stoop that low.

  In the full dark of night, lit only by a waning moon slipping in and out of clouds, the cemetery exuded a much ghastlier presence than when we’d first arrived here a few days earlier. In the dying light of a late summer’s day, even a graveyard can be beautiful. Perspectives change, however, when the ambiance switches to the silent death of night. Especially when your only company is a drugged-out aspiring model on a revenge mission and a dazed rookie vampire under the impression he’s still someone’s daddy. Thick tendrils of fog snaked between the worn gravestones, a wolf howled in the distance, and I swear the flutter of batwings surrounded us from above.

  “Where to, Hoss?” I jabbed my stake against the vampire’s back, figuring, at this stage, he would know the difference between the positioning of a fatal stab and a painful poke.

  “I… I do not know. You bring me. I only remember cemetery.”

  “How about you show us where they buried you?” Sofi cracked her stake against the poor fool’s head, the sound of wood on bone like a baseball cranked straight out of the park. Any man would have howled in pain, but it didn’t faze him. I think this might have been the point where he realized things were considerably different in his world than he previously imagined.

  “I wake up in box in dirt. But that is not where you want me to take you.”

  “Oh no?” Sofi wound back her stake again, preparing to land another blow to the guy’s noggin, but I grabbed it and took it from her.

  “Let’s stop beating the vampire, shall we?” I offered the stake back to Sofi but as she reached to take it, I pulled it away and raised my eyebrows at her. She let out a sigh and nodded, and I returned it gently to her outreached hand. “Now, take us where you think we want you to,” I said to the vampire.

  “I do not know who scares me more. Him, or you,” the vampire said to Sofi. She kicked him hard in the ass, and he started moving. He led us on a sure and direct path, through the stone markers announcing the dead beneath our feet, straight back to the crypt where we first arrived the other night.

  “When I wake, I am… drawn… to this place. I do not know why. I go in, but I find nothing. Just an empty crypt. And I feel I am brought here often. It is baffling.”

  In the light of Sofi’s cell phone, the place was as I remembered it the last time we’d been here. Just a crypt. Creepy as hell, since it’s a crypt and you know … dead bodies and all that shit. But still, really nothing more than a dirty old stone room. The parafairy corpses littering the floor were gone now, but since it had been a few days, it didn’t surprise me. Tasty little snacks like that tend to be gobbled up and disappear down the gullets of scavengers. A place like this, you expect a lot of those. Particularly rats. Nasty little fucking rats. I shuddered at the thought.

  “Search the room. There has to be a secret button or a hidden doorway or something.” Sofi handed me her phone and started rubbing her hands against the walls, franti
cally scraping nails through layers of dust and spiderwebs. Here and there she’d stop, rap her knuckles against the stone, shake her head, and move on. The vampire and I must have watched her for at least a minute before I decided to tell her to stop making such a fool of herself in front of our guest.

  “You watch too many American movies,” I said to her. Then to the vampire, “Just show me where the damn door is.”

  “I know nothing of door. This is empty room. Nothing to see here.”

  I took a few steps forward, dragging him behind me until we stood less than a foot from the back wall of the crypt, where a small iron cross hung from a hook in the stone. I reached forward, pinched the long side with my finger and thumb, and gave it a twist. As the metal scraped against rock, the cross swung on a pivot until completely inverted. It clicked into place and a tiny needle-like protrusion shot up from the center of the cross.

  “Prick,” I said.

  “Who is prick?” the vampire replied. But before he could say another word, I snatched his hand and slammed his palm against the needle. He stared at me with that shocked expression of “that should have hurt … but it didn’t … but I’m also still offended you did that” and pulled his hand away. A tiny drop of blood trickled from the needle, but before it hit the floor the wall began to rumble and move forward. I took a step back, dragging the vampire with me, the wall slid open to reveal a doorway. Beyond the door, an empty room appeared, its stark white walls blinding us as a series of fluorescent lights flickered on, one by one.

  “After you, my dear,” I said, bowing to Sofi.

  As she entered, she turned to face me and asked, “What about him?”

  In one swift move, I spun on my heel, tossed the stake in the air, and gave it a good, strong kick into the sad bastard’s chest. The whole thing was super graceful—and super badass. Like a ballet dancer fucking a ninja while a gas tanker explodes in the background.

  From the look on the vampire’s face before he popped, I could tell he was as impressed as I was.

  I wiped the spray of vampire guts from my face and flicked them to the ground with a sickening plop. Sofi rolled her eyes at me and continued her way down the secret corridor. I followed, each step leaving a bloody footprint in my wake on the white tile of the floor. As the door closed behind us with a heavy scrape as it dragged against the stone, I licked my lips, spit a coppery wad of red and yellow onto the wall, and didn’t say a word as we ventured onward.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The air from the sterilizer units whooshed past us with a pungent chemical blast, and a few parafairies dropped from my clothes onto the floor. Must have been attached to the vamp before I popped him and attached to me in the explosion. One of them near my foot wiggled a bit, twitching in the final throes of death, and I stamped his life out under the heavy heel of my boot. His little bones crunched easily under the weight, but I gave my boot a hard twist for good measure.

  “You didn’t have to kill him.” Sofi picked at her nails and squinted as she chastised me.

  “Was gonna die anyway.” I strode forward in her direction and the direction of the door from the makeshift clean room. Every other step, my foot threated to slip on the mashed parafairy guts marking the soles. But I kept my cool composure, careful not to slip, so as to retain my badass image.

  When I finally reached her, she gave me a hard kick in the shin and scowled. “He wasn’t hurting anyone. He only wanted to save his daughter.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t have tried to gas him to death,” I mumbled and pushed her aside.

  “Listen to me, Phoenix.” She stopped and spoke at me from behind in a stern, unwavering voice. I couldn’t help but be reminded of my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Spellman, and how she would scold us for passing notes in class. “You are a great hunter. But you cannot just go around stabbing and murdering any old monster you come across. Perhaps they are nice. Maybe they are misunderstood.”

  “Just shut up and follow me,” I replied, not breaking step. “They know we’re here. You don’t build something like this and not have any security.” Sofi didn’t reply, but from the footsteps behind me, I knew she heard me. I pressed a button on the whitewashed brick wall to the right of two gleaming steel doors, and they slid open, revealing an elevator. As soon as Sofi cleared the doors, I pushed the only button inside, and we began our descent.

  How far down into the depths of Bulgaria our little metal box took us, I have no idea, but the trip down took much longer than I expected. To break the silence, I hummed “The Girl from Ipanema,” while Sofi scowled at me. Just as I was about to apologize for stabbing her new buddy, the doors opened, revealing another blank white corridor—this one lined with doors.

  “Be on your guard.” I raised my stake and scanned the hallway—nowhere for anyone to hide, though we could easily be ambushed from any side doors. At the far end, at least thirty yards off, another set of doors mocked us, their inset windows staring like glazed-over eyeballs.

  “I will take left. You take right,” The stakes in Sofi’s bag clacked against one another like a sack of firewood as she swung them over her left shoulder. She raised the stake in her right hand and marched forward.

  One after another, we tried a door handle, only to find it locked, and we’d move on to the next. Two … four … six … whatever they were hiding down here, they appeared to have locked it up good. Either they knew we were coming, or they were paranoid. Perhaps a little of both. Still, with every rattle of a knob from Sofi’s side, I couldn’t help but cringe a little. I imagined her grasping one of those handles, twisting it, and the door opening to reveal a horde of bloodthirsty vampires, huddled in the darkness ready to swarm over us. Against a vampire or two, I could hold my own. Hell, after Paris, I figured I could easily handle a half dozen. But this was a nest. I was sure of it. And that meant there could be dozens or even hundreds of vampires down here. It all depended on what the hell they were cooking up in this underground hideaway. Whatever it was, it had to be something big. All roads thus far had led us here.

  But still, what I couldn’t understand was why not a single one bothered to come our way. They had to be here. The question was, where?

  At the final door on the right, the handle turned beneath my grip. Just as I was about to open it, I stopped myself, and whispered to Sofi, “Hey, come over here. Need you to back me up.”

  Sofi tested her last handle, found it also to be locked and scurried across the hallway to me.

  I put my finger to my lips and counted off silently. On three, I opened the door.

  In stark contrast to the hallway, this room was painted all in a cherry red—walls, floor, ceiling—the whole damn thing. A woman in a leather corset, biker hat and black stiletto heels turned to face us at the door opened. In her right hand, she held a riding crop, which she tapped in her left palm. She grinned at the two of us, revealing a set of fangs, then returned to what she was doing. Against the far wall, three naked men were bound and gagged, their wrists shackled and bound above their heads to sparkling chrome rings set into the wall. As one of them spied the two of us standing in the doorway behind his oncoming mistress, his eyes widened, bulging like a bullfrog’s throat.

  “This is not what we came here for.” Sofi shut the door and gave me a gentle shove. “Though from your pants, I think perhaps you may want to stop back here on our way out.”

  Aside from the weird vampire sex BDSM room, every door in the hallway was locked. All that remained was the set of double doors at the end, where we now found ourselves. I ran my hand through my hair and took a deep breath. Sofi shifted the bag on her shoulder and blinked a few times as if to clear her eyes. We opened the doors, and finally found what we’d been searching for.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  We found ourselves in an immensely cavernous space, lit from high above by rows and rows of dead-white fluorescent tubes. I was immediately reminded of a Costco, though instead of never-ending shelves of bulk food, discounted electronics,
and questionably fashionable clothing, this space held only one variety of goods—hundreds of glowing, liquid-filled pods. Each about four feet in circumference and about six feet high, the electric blue liquid inside bubbled as the room pulsed with electricity. A shiny metal ring circled the bottom and top of each pod, like tubular lava lamps. Only instead of melted and flowing colorful wax, these containers held something far more disturbing.

  People.

  As she realized what we’d come across, Sofi’s eyes widened, and her breath stopped—though only for a moment. Within seconds, her reaction shifted from one of terrified horror to one of desperate desire, and she darted forward to the closest container, cupping her hands between her eyes and the glass to get a better view of the prisoner inside.

  I didn’t need to move any closer. From where I stood, things were clear enough. Dozens or even hundreds of humans held in some sort of stasis. Possibly chemically-induced. Or maybe something worse still. It didn’t matter, though, because there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Not with Vampire Dave staring us down from the other end of the room.

  He sat quietly in a single metal folding chair, the type you’d usually find a cafeteria, and stared at us. As Sofi ran from one canister to the next, banging on the glass and shouting “Cami, Cami, where are you?” he lifted his right hand to his mouth, inhaled from his vape pen and began to laugh.

  “My, my… you two are rather resourceful.” A puff of smoke blew from his mouth, and he raised from his seat. “I must admit, I did not expect to see you again. Especially you, Mr. Bones. Not after your high-dive into the sidewalk.” He stepped forward, each footstep echoing in the once again silent room.

  “Where is my sister?” Sofi raised her stake high above her head and rushed in his direction. A scream tore from her lips as she closed the distance between her and the undead thing she now blamed for her sister’s disappearance.